“Right. Cecily. Why don’t you sit Cecily—” she patted the top of the trunk— “right here and we’ll push her into your room?”
Avery needed no further urging. Gently, she sat Cecily on top of the trunk then joined Tresia at the back, placing her little hands beside hers.
“Ready?”
Avery nodded, her smile wide.
“Push!”
Avery let out a startling whoop as they pushed and slid the trunk into the other room. She even managed a giggle, which warmed Tresia’s heart.
“We did it,” Avery said quietly before she grabbed her doll from the top of the trunk and cuddled her in her arms, pride beaming on her little face.
A little shocked, but oh so pleased, Tresia responded in kind. “Yes, we did. Now we can unpack and hang everything up in the armoire.” She pointed to the bed she’d made earlier in the morning. “You can sit Cecily on the bed so she can watch.”
Avery did just that, placing the doll against the pillows before she started pulling clothing from the trunk.
It didn’t take long before the trunk was nearly empty, just a few more items that needed to be folded and placed in a drawer. Tresia pulled out a folded piece of cloth. It wasn’t an article of clothing, but something hard. Carefully, she unwrapped it, revealing a silver-framed photograph. The woman in it was beautiful with almost an ethereal quality, an angel among humans. She studied it, noticing the hint of a sweet smile, the wide eyes expressing kindness, the carefully coiffed dark hair and looked at Avery, who had stopped moving and simply stared at the photograph.
“Is this your mother?”
Avery nodded as she took the picture in her hand, holding it with a gentleness that belied her age. Her eyes grew big in her face, yet a slight smile curved her lips. She traced her finger over the glass protecting it.
“She was very beautiful.”
Again, Avery nodded and placed the picture on her bedside table. “I miss her,” she admitted, surprising Tresia with another full sentence.
She sat on the bed, her heart hurting for this little girl who’d lost her mother at such a young and impressionable age. Though she’d been much older when her own mother passed, she knew that the hurt didn’t just suddenly go away. “I lost my mother, too,” she said quietly, hoping to draw a few more words from her. “Do you want to talk about it?”
Avery shook her head, looked at the photograph one last time, and snatched up her doll before she ran back into thehallway, prepared it seemed, to push the other big trunk into her father’s room.
Tresia watched her go then rose from the bed and joined her in the hallway, reasoning that when she was ready, Avery would talk a little more than what she had.
It didn’t take long to empty the other trunks. The marshal didn’t have as much clothing as Avery did, and the smaller trunks were filled with incidentals, books, some personal papers and old letters, tied together with a pale yellow ribbon. They looked like love letters, the handwriting on the envelope elegant and definitely feminine. She resisted the urge to look closer. It wasn’t any of her business.
There was another photograph, again in an ornate frame, this one with a younger Hannah standing beside Devlin. She held a bouquet of flowers in her hand. He was in a dark suit. She paused and studied the photograph and couldn’t help smiling. They looked so happy, so in love. It must have been taken on their wedding day. She placed it on the bedside table so it was the first thing he’d see when he woke up in the morning.
Wiping the sweat from her brow, pleased with the progress she’d made, she glanced at her charge, who sat on the floor on a throw rug and put together a puzzle she’d found in one of the trunks, Cecily keeping close watch by her side.
“How would you like to go see my friend Lucy?”
Avery looked up from her puzzle, her big blue-gray eyes shadowed with—what was that? Anxiety? Fear? Both? She said nothing though. Didn’t nod or shake her head as was her usual way to answer a question. She didn’t look away either, those eyes of hers seeming to see into Tresia’s soul, as if looking for trust, for assurance.
Tresia understood shyness, but this seemed to be something more. Was it too soon to start introducing her to other people? She hadn’t appeared to be shy or uneasy around Elsie last nightwhen they stopped at the Wagon Wheel, but then Elsie was so friendly, no one could resist her.
She studied Avery then said, “You’ve met Lucy before. Yesterday, in fact, when your father picked up the key to the house. Do you remember?”
Avery still didn’t respond, oh, but those eyes of hers spoke volumes.
“Lucy’s a very nice lady. She’s been my friend for a long time. She might even have her niece or one of her nephews at the house. Would you like that?”
Avery blinked and the anxiety Tresia knew she saw seemed to disappear. “Okay,” Avery murmured, then rose from the floor, grabbed her doll, and clutched it to her chest.
“We’ll bring some of the cookies. What do you think?”
Avery nodded but didn’t move until Tresia held out her hand. Avery moved forward, then slipped her little hand in hers.
They left the marshal’s house in short order, the remaining gingerbread men they’d made earlier wrapped in a kitchen towel tied with a bow and leisurely walked to Lucy’s two-story house, one of the biggest in town, on the street behind the town hall. It had to be the biggest. Doctor Ben, Lucy’s husband, had his practice there with his office and examining rooms accessed by a separate entrance. One merely had to follow the arrow painted on the sign proclaiming, ‘Doctor.’ Lucy, as a photographer, took photographs here, too, in a room just off the formal parlor that she’d decorate for different occasions. There was a dark room, too, where she developed the photographs.
