Her Heart's Promise Read online

  Nadine shifted her knapsack as she turned the corner to her apartment, willing the dark mood away. At least she could look forward to a quiet evening at home, with Grandma still at Sabrina’s.

  Whistling softly, she approached her house, then caught sight of a small, red car parked in front of the two-story, red brick walk-up, and her heart dropped.

  Grandma was back.

  Just to make sure, Nadine looked inside the car. Sure enough, only her grandmother would drive a car that had granny square car seat covers. “Bought on eBay for dirt cheap,” Grandma had told her.

  Nadine glanced upward—seeking patience—shook her head, and unlocked one of the double glass front doors of her apartment. She walked down the hall to her suite, opened the unlocked door, and stepped inside. The mouthwatering smells of peanut butter chocolate chip cookies baking and chicken cooking drifted down from the kitchen into the entrance, beginning an ominous growling in her stomach, which almost—but not quite—made up for her grandmother’s unexpected presence.

  Nadine dropped her knapsack on the table in the side entrance, toed her runners off her feet, took a deep breath, and then stepped around the corner into the kitchen.

  A tiny lady, no more than five feet tall, with soft, gray hair cropped short, was perched on a stool in the small, U-shaped kitchen area, singing softly as she rolled cookies, then laid them in precise rows on the baking sheet beside her.

  Nadine cleared her throat, announcing her entrance.

  Her grandmother whirled around, and the strains of “Nearer My God to Thee” faded away as Barbara beamed at her granddaughter. “Naddy! You’re home.” Grandma jumped down from the stool, walked over, and lifted her head for a kiss.

  “Hi, Grandma. I’m surprised to see you back so soon.”

  What are you doing back here, Grandma? How long are you staying here, Grandma?

  The silent questions unspooled through her mind.

  “Sabrina was doing just fine and didn’t really need help with the baby,” Grandma explained, “so I thought I would come back here.”

  Nadine’s heart sank as she stifled an unwelcome surge of frustration with her sister’s recuperative ability.

  “And from the look of the place, I’m not a moment too soon.” Grandma shook her head. “Really, Nadine. Cereal for supper?”

  Nadine ignored the reprimand and glanced around the kitchen for any changes her grandmother might have wrought. Sure enough, she had moved the kitchen table into the corner again. Barbara claimed it made the kitchen roomier, but Nadine liked the table directly under the chandelier. It shed a better light, with no shadows, which made reading the various newspapers she subscribed to easier.

  And she had rearranged the living room.

  Seriously.

  The timer rang, and Grandma went back to her cookies. She opened the oven door to take out the next batch. “When I saw all those piled-up cereal bowls in the sink, I knew I shouldn’t have left.”

  “Cold cereal is a well-balanced meal,” huffed Nadine, shoving the high-backed, wooden chairs back under the table with one knee. “It says so on all the commercials.”

  Barbara dropped the trays on the counter, and tossed the oven mitts aside. “Goodness girl, would it kill you to buy some new oven mitts? These are almost useless.”

  Ignore, Nadine thought. Do not engage.

  “Anyway, tonight I’m making you chicken and potatoes and carrots,” Grandma said, lifting the lid of the frying pan and releasing another wave of aromatic spices. “So go wash up. I’ll have supper on the table in a few winks.”

  “You’re only staying for a while longer, right?” Nadine asked, remembering past promises blithely broken by her grandma.

  Grandma gave her an innocent look. “I’ll stay as long as you need me.”

  Nadine held that guileless stare, trying to decipher what that meant, but Grandma only winked at her. Nadine straightened the last chair and headed to the bathroom.

  She glanced around the bathroom and wrinkled her nose. This morning, she had been rushed and had dropped her clothes and towels on the floor. Now, the bathroom taps sparkled, and clean, peach-colored towels hung on the towel bar, with a gray facecloth the same shade as the walls lying in a perfect triangle across them. The bathtub shone and a clean rug lay between the sink and the tub.

  As she tugged a brush through her thick hair, she thought about her dear, sweet, intrusive grandma. And how she needed to get her to move back home.

  When Nadine’s mother had been in the first stages of Lou Gehrig’s disease, Barbara Laidlaw moved when Nadine returned from Edmonton to take care of her mother—Nadine’s sisters were already married and unable to do much. But, when Brenda was transferred to the hospital, Grandma stayed on. Barbara was perfectly capable of living on her own but preferred to rent her house out and stay to help Nadine.

  Grandma “helped” Nadine by cleaning, baking, organizing, inviting “suitable” men over for supper, and regularly volunteering Nadine’s services at church or any other community event that caught Grandma’s fancy.

  Nadine got a break from Grandma only when an anxiously placed call to one of her sympathetic sisters would result in a sham mission for Grandma. From time to time, Barbara would promise Nadine that someday soon, she would move back home.

  But that day never came, as Grandma always insisted that poor Naddy still needed her. In Grandma’s eyes, the biggest problem was that “poor Naddy” was still single, which was something that needed rectifying before she moved back to her own place.

  Not that poor Naddy didn’t have a chance at love and romance. She’d been dating Jack when her mother got sick. He encouraged her to move back to help her mother. Whenever he could, he came to visit her, always telling her how much he respected her devotion to her mother. They dated for four years, visiting back and forth.

  Then, one afternoon, Nadine brought her mother to the city for an appointment and decided to drop in on Jack. Finding him with a tall, slender blond had been so much of a cliché, it still made her cringe. Then, discovering that this wasn’t the first woman he’d been with made her feel like a complete fool.

  Maybe if Nadine had been an alluring blond, he might have stuck around.

  And perhaps the tooth fairy and Santa Claus would visit someday. Jack was a cheater—clearly he hadn’t been faithful to any of the blondes he’d cheated on her with.

  But still...

  She checked herself in the mirror, analyzing. As always, she was critical of the tilt of her own brown eyes, the heaviness of her hair, the fullness of her jaw. It was, as her grandma would say when trying to console her, an interesting face.

  Nadine looked away, ran the tap, and washed that interesting face with plain old soap and water.

  When she was done, she stepped across the hall and checked the room that doubled as her bedroom and office and breathed a sigh of relief. The old roll top desk overflowed with papers, magazines lay in various piles around it. Grandma hadn’t invaded her domain.

  So far.

  After changing, she stepped out of the room and, with a furtive glance down the short hall, opened the door to the spare bedroom across. In “Grandma’s room,” the suitcases were put away and the Bible lay on the bedside table. Framed family pictures filled the top of the dresser.

  It looked as if Grandma was settling in for the long haul.

  Nadine squared her shoulders and walked determinedly down the hallway. She would step into the kitchen, take a deep breath, and say...

  “Sugar or honey in your tea?” Grandma set a steaming mug on the table just as Nadine marched into the kitchen. Her determined step faltered as Grandma caught her by the arm and led her toward a chair. “Supper’s ready.”

  Nadine opened her mouth to speak, but Grandma had already turned to put food on the plates. Nadine sighed as Grandma set them on the ironed tablecloth and settled into a chair, smiling. “It’s nice to be back again. I missed you, Naddy.” She held out her hand. “Do you want to pray, or s
hall I?”

  “You can.” Nadine was afraid that she would ask aloud, her own questions about how to politely ask her grandmother to leave.

  Barbara asked for peace and protection and a blessing on the food. When she was finished, she began eating with a vigor that never ceased to surprise Nadine. “So, what happened while I was gone?” Barbara asked.

  “Not much,” Nadine replied, thinking back over the quiet of the past few days. “Mark and Sheryl announced their wedding date. She asked me to be in the wedding party.”

  “Well, isn’t that nice. Maybe at the wedding you’ll meet someone nice.”

  “Grandma,” Nadine said, a warning tone in her voice.

  With a fatalistic shrug, Grandma plowed on: “I thought maybe that nice young man David might have called,” she said with a lilt on her tone. “I can’t remember his last name. We met him at the grocery store.”

  “David Branscome is unemployed by choice and lives at home. Hardly dating material.”

  Grandma appeared unfazed. “A good woman can make a huge difference to a man.”

  “David already has a good woman. His mother.” Nadine finished off the food on her plate and laid her utensils on it. “That was delicious, Grandma. Mind if I pass on dessert? I’ve got some work to do.”

  “You work all day—surely you don’t have to work all night?” Grandma asked.

  “It’s nothing really important. I just want to get it done before tomorrow,” Nadine said, vague purposefully. She rose and picked up her dishes.

  Nadine was hesitant to mention the letter. Sam was Barbara’s son, and she was loath to raise any false hope that they might finally solve the mystery surrounding his death.

  “I need to look over some information about Skyline,” she added carefully.

  Grandma turned to Nadine, her expression sorrowful. “Oh, honey, that always makes you so angry. Don’t you have anything better to do?”

  “They just received some government grants that are questionable,” she said, keeping her tone light. Nadine took her dishes to the counter and set them down. “It won’t take long.”

  She left the room before guilt over her evasive answers overwhelmed her. I could never fib well, she thought.

  Once inside her bedroom, she closed the door and leaned against it, thinking of the mysterious letter and all it portended.

  The letter promised some answers, possibly hard proof she could bring to Skyline. Once again, Nadine wondered at God’s will in all of this. Why had the letter come now, after all this time?

  With a shallow sigh, she walked to her desk and switched on the computer. While it booted up, she reread the letter.

  Dear Ms. Laidlaw,

  I’ve read your pieces about Skyline in the paper. I know you don’t have any love for Skyline. Neither do I. You are right. I need to talk to you about your father. In person. I have some information that I think you can use against Skyline. I’ll call.

  It wasn’t signed, and there was no return address.

  Nadine turned to her computer and opened Skyline’s file, where she kept copies of every letter she wrote to the company’s management, as well as to various government departments dealing with industrial safety. The correspondence netted her a few polite responses couched in the vague language of bureaucrats. These replies had been scanned into the computer and saved on file.

  Nadine opened them all and read each one in chronological order to refresh her memory. Rereading the letters reminded her once again of what she and her family had lost: A hardworking father who loved her unconditionally; a father who listened with a sympathetic ear to her dating woes, who fixed temperamental bicycles and vehicles for daughters too busy to realize how fortunate they were.

  Nadine leaned her elbow on her desk, recalling memories of Sam Laidlaw striding up the walk in the late evening, smelling of diesel and sawdust, swinging up each of his daughters in his strong arms and laughing at their squeals, and pulling Brenda away from the stove, only to spin her and envelop her in a tight, warm hug. Her father would whistle as he organized his tools, readying them for the next day’s work. She loved helping him whenever he had a project—a bookcase for the living room, a new kitchen table. He loved working with wood in many forms.

  Her parents never made a lot of money, but they had achieved a contentment that often eluded people with more. Sam was convinced of God’s ability to care for them. Unfortunately, that conviction created a measure of laissez-faire over his personal dealings with banks and insurance companies, who were not forgiving.

  Because her father was considered a contract worker, he had no company pension plan and no private life insurance. Neither was the loan against the house insured. The pittance paid out by workers’ compensation barely covered expenses. Brenda Laidlaw had worked for less than a year as a cashier in the local grocery store before her illness made her housebound. The house was sold, and the family moved into an apartment in the same building where Nadine now lived.

  Nadine pulled herself back to the present and looked around the room, hers since the time her father died. With her mother gone, the apartment was too large for a single woman. She had her eye on a smaller, newer apartment in a complex still under construction. But, moving away from this place would feel as if she was breaking the last tie with her mother.

  And you’ve got Grandma, she reminded herself with a sigh. Moving to a smaller place would probably be the best way to get Grandma to return home, but it seemed an unkind and disrespectful solution. When it came to facing down Barbara, too many memories intervened: Echoes of her grandmother reading devotions to her mother, singing while she carefully gave Brenda a sponge bath and fed her, and lovingly wiping her mother’s mouth as Brenda’s control decreased.

  Grandma’s service to her and her mother had been a blessing at the time, but now, seemed to suffocate her. Nadine didn’t know how to shake free from Grandma’s gentle grip of generosity without feeling ungrateful and unloving.

  Nadine rolled her shoulders, rubbed her eyes, and turned back to the computer screen. Grandma and a new apartment would have to wait.

  A gentle knock on the door interrupted her work.

  “What is it, Grandma?” she asked, frowning in concentration.

  “We have company,” Barbara announced loudly.

  Nadine glanced over her shoulder at her grandmother, who stood in the open doorway, smiling at her. “Who is it?” she whispered.

  “Don’t you want to do your hair?” Barbara whispered back.

  “No,” Nadine replied irritably. She would have preferred to stay in her room, but it wasn’t in her to be so rude to their unnamed visitor.

  Nadine followed Barbara into the living room. The pewter table lamps shed a soft light. Nadine felt a measure of pride in the fawn-colored leather couch with matching chairs. Burnished pine-and-brass coffee and end tables complemented the warm tones of the leather. She had sewn the plaid valances that hung from the pewter curtain rods and the matching throw pillows herself.

  A man stood with his back to her. He turned as they came into the room, and Nadine bit back a sigh.

  “Nadine, I’m sure you remember Patrick Quinn. Didn’t he live four houses down from us when we lived on 55th?”

  Nadine smiled at Patrick, praying her pasted expression masked her seething frustration. She tried to suppress memories of Patrick as a boy—selfish, overbearing, and constantly teasing her about her hair, her chubbiness as a young girl, and the fact that she preferred to spend time with her father over her sisters.

  “I remember you as a rough tomboy,” Patrick said with a wide grin. “And you’ve turned into quite the surprise.”

  Really?

  She had little choice but to sit down and try to make small talk. The talk turned out to be very small, with Grandma and Nadine asking Patrick polite questions about where he worked and lived. Patrick had changed little, or possibly had become even more boring.

  After a while, Nadine had to escape. Stretching her leg under
the coffee table, she nudged her grandmother.

  Barbara didn’t even flinch.

  “Our Nadine is quite the little cook,” Grandma continued, ignoring Nadine’s next push, delivered with a little more force.

  “I’m neither little nor a good cook,” interrupted Nadine. She gave her grandmother a warning look, then glanced back at Patrick. “Grandma would love me to be more domestic, but for me, ‘gourmet cooking’ means putting brown instead of white sugar on my cereal.”

  Grandma didn’t miss a beat. “She’s such a joker, our Nadine.”

  “She always was,” Patrick said, sending a wink her way.

  Oh brother.

  A painful half hour later, Patrick excused himself. He thanked Barbara and Nadine for a lovely visit and, with a playful smile at Nadine, left.

  Barbara turned to Nadine. “He’s such a nice boy. Don’t you think?”

  He wasn’t then and he isn’t now.

  “He’s not really my type,” Nadine said dryly.

  “He wanted to see you again. I can tell.” Barbara bent over to put the mugs on the tray and then, as the clock struck, straightened. “Goodness, Nadine. You had better get to bed. I’ll clean up. You need your sleep.”

  And with that, Barbara bustled to the kitchen.

  Nadine shook her head. She had to do something about Barbara, or her meddling grandmother would take over her life.

  She yawned a jaw-cracking yawn and glanced at her watch. But not tonight.

  Chapter 2

  It was still early morning when Clint Fletcher stepped inside his office. The large window occupying almost the full wall looked over the neat grid of streets, shielded by trees turned shades of yellow and orange.

  The sun had just risen over the mountains and lit the eastern sky outside his window, illuminating the office with a gentle light. His office, he thought with a proprietary air.

  During the years he’d worked in the city for one of the large newspapers, he had been grateful to have his own desk in a large, crowded newsroom. Even then, he would often come back from an assignment to find it appropriated by a colleague whose computer was down.