Painted by the Sun Page 11

  Once she'd begun to recover from her wounds, Cameron had taken to working at the kitchen table in the evenings. That's where Shea found him now, his books and papers spread beneath the golden glow of the kerosene lamp.

  With his head bent in concentration, lamplight threaded his crow black hair with veins of amber and highlighted the steadfast lines of his brow and jaw. He had such strong features, such an uncompromising face, that for a moment Shea lost her courage.

  If she had come here for her own sake, she might have quailed. But knowing she was doing this for Rand, so he'd have no doubts about where he belonged, held her steadfast. She curled her clammy fingers around the edge of the portfolio, and stepped across the threshold.

  "Shea," Cameron greeted her, one of his rare, slow smiles dawning through the drape of his mustache. "What are you doing up so late?"

  Shea had deliberately waited to talk to him until Lily and Rand were abed. She didn't want either of them overhearing. "I've brought something I'd like to show you," she said, "if you've a moment to spare."

  "I was just finishing up," he said and closed his books. "What is it you've got?"

  Shea perched on the chair beside him and opened the portfolio. "These are some photographs I took while we were traveling," she explained, hoping the images would speak more clearly than she could herself.

  The top picture showed a girl and slightly older boy seated on the steps of a neat, brick farmhouse. The girl's face was wreathed in smiles, and the boy's arm lay protectively across her shoulders. It could almost have been a photograph of Cameron and Lily in their younger days.

  "Paul and Susan are children I met near Nebraska City," Shea told him. "Their family was one of the first to homestead in the area."

  "I can see the farm is very prosperous." He indicated the rows of fruit trees visible at the side of the house. "But I thought itinerant photographers usually made pictures of the entire family."

  "And sometimes even the family cow," Shea confessed with a smile. "I did do that kind of photograph for these folks, too," she went on, her belly quivering, "but I also wanted a picture with just the children. All of these are pictures of children."

  She felt his regard slide over her, astute, curious. Her stomach rolled. She wasn't willing to own up to her reasons for taking these pictures if she could help it, but Cameron didn't question her.

  She turned to the next photograph, one of a boy of eight or nine clinging to the bridle of a spotted pony. "This is John," she said. "He's apprenticed to a blacksmith."

  She'd taken to John immediately, liking his brashness and his curiosity, seeing a bit of herself in his bright grin and curly hair. Until she'd talked to his parents, she'd all but convinced herself she'd found her son. But John had been placed out only the year before—far too late to be her Liam.

  Cam slid her another sidelong glance. "The boy looks like he enjoys his work."

  Shea had showed him half a dozen other photographs when he covered her hand with his. A shiver of his energy danced up her arm.

  "Shea," he began, "is there a particular reason you're showing me these photographs?"

  Her pulse rate surged. This was the question she'd been wanting him to ask, the very reason she'd showed him the children she'd photographed while she was searching for Liam. Still, the words came hard. "All these children were sent west on orphan trains."

  Shea felt his fingers flex on hers, quick, involuntarily.

  "Orphan trains?" he asked. Wariness darkened the blue of his eyes, as if he knew what she'd come to tell him and wanted to forestall her. "Is there some reason you thought I'd be interested in photographs of children from orphan trains?"

  She swallowed around the constriction in her throat. "Rand came to talk to me today."

  "What was it he wanted?"

  She turned her hand beneath his and clasped his fingers in her own. "Rand knows how he came to be your child," she said gently. "He knows you chose him from an orphan train."

  She saw a succession of emotions flicker across Cam's face: dread and resignation, confusion and concern. "Is Rand all right?" he asked her.

  Shea curled her opposite hand over his. "He's confused. He needs to have his questions answered."

  Cam's shoulders bunched defensively. "How did he find out?"

  "He overheard you and Lily talking."

  She could see the blame settle over him like fine dust, gathering in the creases at the corners of his eyes.

  "I've been wanting to tell him how he came to us for months," he said on a weary sigh, "but Lily keeps insisting he's too young."

  "She needs to hang on to him as long as she can."

  Shea knew now why Lily stood on the porch in the morning and watched Rand ride down the lane. She'd seen how carefully she smoothed her boy's clothes before putting them away, and knew that there were always molasses cookies in the cookie jar because they were Rand's favorites. Lily had wrapped her life around this child. Small wonder the idea of telling Rand he'd had another mother, another life threatened her.

  "But why would Rand go to you instead of coming to Lily or me?" Cameron asked her.

  She squeezed his hand, wishing she could dispel the raw note of disillusionment in his voice. "He came because I'm a stranger here, because I've got no part in this."

  He came because he trusted me.

  Shea treasured that trust, even if she'd risked losing it by telling all this to his father.

  She looked into Cameron's face. "Rand's whole world changed when he heard you and Lily talking. He isn't who he thought he was, and you aren't who he thought you were, either."

  But didn't she mean to change Liam's world just this way? Didn't she mean to reveal that he was someone else entirely when she finally found him? The insight appalled her, and she hastily shoved it away.

  She had to make sure Cam talked to his boy and got things settled. Shea leaned in close at Cameron's shoulder. "Rand discovered the truth without having anyone to tell him what it meant," she explained, "without having anyone to reassure him. He wants to talk to you, Cam, but he just doesn't know how."

  He dropped his head into his hands. His voice came ruffled on a sigh. "God knows, it seems like Rand's been ours forever."

  Though she knew she had no right to ask, the question was on her lips before she thought to hold it back. "How is it you came to adopt him?"

  Cam steepled his forefingers against his lips. "Do you know how Lily came to be scarred?" he asked.

  "Emmet told me."

  Desolation skimmed the surface of his eyes like scudding clouds reflected in a night blue lake. That resolute mouth lost its resolution, the strength in that strong jaw eroded. As ghastly as Lily's burns were, as devastating as losing her beauty must have been for her, this was worse. Whatever Cam was remembering ate at the very core of who he was.

  Yet when he finally spoke his voice was low and cool. "Our mother died not quite a year after the guerrillas came through Centralia, and it was then I realized what Lily had become. Though she'd physically recovered from her burns—" Cam pressed his lips together as if just speaking of this took unimaginable courage. "—She was barely alive. She wandered the house like a wraith. She rarely spoke. She never saw anyone. I moved my law practice into a room downstairs because I didn't want her to be alone there."

  Shea could imagine how Lily must have felt—disconnected from a world she'd once been part of, walled off, separate, terrified of how people would respond to her.

  "Once I was there every day, I began to notice she kept her own kind of schedule. I'd find her peering around the edges of the curtains every morning and every afternoon. She was watching the children going back and forth to school. She watched them with such intensity, with such longing, that I got it into my head that what Lily needed was a child."

  Shea nodded, encouraging him.

  "It was a good while later that I found an article in the newspaper announcing that orphan trains were coming to Missouri." His tone warmed, and Shea thought the
memories of that time must not be quite so bleak. "I made inquiries and when the next train was due, I bought Lily a bonnet and mourning veil and loaded her into the carriage. She cried for two whole days, all the way to St. Joe. I wasn't even sure she'd go and see the children once we arrived, but I didn't know what else to do for her."

  Shea's throat went dry. "You—you adopted Rand from a train that stopped in St. Joseph, Missouri?"

  Cam nodded. "There was a little frame church not too far from the St. Joe station. They'd already begun letting people select the orphans when Lily and I arrived. The children were lined up in chairs on a platform across the front of the sanctuary. They were a ragtag lot. Most of them looked scared to death; some of the younger ones were crying."

  Shea's stomach twisted. This was just what she had imagined—children put on display to be poked and prodded and haggled over. Liam must have gone through exactly what Cameron was describing.

  "The older children seemed to have been chosen first by folks who were looking for hands to work their farms, and a few of them managed to convince their new parents to foster their brothers and sisters, as well. But inevitably some of the younger children were left behind. Though the Children's Aid Society agents were busy making out the indenture papers of the foster parents to sign, they did their best to keep track of the families so the brothers and sisters could at least write to each other. But still, it was a sad thing to watch those boys and girls going to different families."

  Shea knew how it tore your heart to lose every tie you had, to see people you loved manacled and hauled away, to hold your mother's or your sister's hand as they lay dying, to wake from dreams of home with the smell of peat in your nostrils.

  Cam took up his story again. "Finally only a handful of children were left. There were three boys and two girls about six or seven, and four or five toddlers not much over two years old.

  "One of the agents told us it was unusual for the Society to place out children so young, but because there were so many older girls on this particular train, they'd sent the little ones west to find new homes."

  "But, Cam, how did you choose?" she whispered. "How could you look into all those little faces and pick just one?"

  Shea had never been sure which would have been worse—to sit on that platform waiting to be chosen or to have to choose a single child.

  "In the end," he said, "it was Rand who chose Lily and me."

  "How?" she asked him. "How did he choose you?"

  Cameron smiled with the memory. "As the crowd thinned, we went and sat at the edge of the platform. At first Lily refused to uncover her face, but I said whichever child we took had a right to see who we were and decide if he wanted to go with us."

  Shea could imagine how difficult saying that must have been for Cam, how horrifying it must have been for Lily to lift her veil and reveal her scars to strangers. "What happened?"

  "Two of the children cried and ran away. But one boy—he wasn't much more than a toddler, really—came toward us. He looked us up and down"-—Cam's voice deepened—"and then he reached right out and pressed his fingers against Lily's withered cheek.

  "When that baby touched her, Lily came alive for the first time since she'd been burned. She reached out and pulled him into her arms. 'I think this one picked me to be his mother,' was all she said. And that's how Rand came home with us."

  Shea swallowed around the knot in her throat. "It's a wonderful story," she told him, imagining the joy in Lily's eyes, a joy that echoed in them today. "It's exactly what Rand needs to hear from you. He needs to know that from the first you belonged to him. That he belonged to you. That he's the one that made you a family. You need to tell him as soon as you can."

  Now that she'd come to know the Gallimores and seen how they loved their boy, how could she think about interfering with another family to reclaim her son? Yet how could she turn away after searching all this time?

  Shea shook her head and pushed away those unanswerable questions. She couldn't consider them here or now. She couldn't consider them when every day brought proof of how happy their adopted child had made Lily and Cam. And what wonderful parents they'd been to him.

  Hastily she pushed to her feet and began gathering her pictures—pictures of the more than three dozen orphans she'd managed to find. They were pictures of children whose lives she'd have disrupted in an instant if she'd thought they were Liam.

  Cam rose and stood over her. "I know this can't have been easy for you to tell me. I can see how affected you are by the orphan train stories. But I want to tell you how much I appreciate your letting me know what's on Rand's mind."

  Shea's fingers fumbled on the photographs and all at once she realized that in exchange for the truth about Rand's concerns, Cam had given her a few more bits of information to add to the store she'd been collecting.

  Then it struck her that if she asked exactly the right questions, perhaps he could tell her even more.

  "Do you remember the name of the church where they'd taken the orphans?" she asked carefully, averting her eyes lest he see more in them than she wanted him to see. If he could tell her that, maybe she could write the pastor. Maybe he would remember one particular child and know what had become of him.

  "It was a Baptist church." Cam narrowed his eyes as if that would bring the past into clearer focus. "First Baptist Church, perhaps?"

  "And just when was it you got Rand in St. Joe?"

  "It was the year before we came here. 1866."

  Shea straightened abruptly, but she dared not look at him. "What month exactly?"

  "November."

  Around her the world took on a particular brittle clarity. She became unaccountably aware of the coals hissing in the stove, and the screen door creaking in the rising wind. She became unbearably aware how the blacks and whites in her photographs shaded to gray.

  This couldn't be happening.

  "November of 1866." Her words came on a shuddering breath.

  Because so few rail lines had gone west nine years ago, many of the orphan trains had passed through St. Joe. Only the winter before had Shea finally learned when Liam had been placed out. It was when he was almost two years old, in November of 1866.

  In the space of a heartbeat, a dozen coincidences converged: that Rand's hair had the same reddish sheen as hers, that he cocked his head in a way that reminded her so much of her mother, that he handled horses with her brother Sean's innate skill. And his father's gentleness.

  It wasn't possible.

  After these years of searching, of tracing dozens of children, of writing letters and ferreting out the tiniest shreds of information on Liam's placement, how could she have found her son by purest chance?

  Fate couldn't be so cruel.

  Certainly it wouldn't have led her here, to these people and this boy. To this family she'd come to care for so deeply. Rand wasn't the son she'd searched so long to find—was he?

  Her mind raced. Even if Rand was her son, how could she think of taking him away? How could she destroy the Gallimores? How could she deny Lily the single thing that kept her alive? And Mary, Mother of God! How could she make a better home for Liam than this fine place, or be a better parent than Cam or Lily?

  But if she refused to acknowledge this boy was her son, she'd be giving up the only dream she'd ever allowed herself.

  Shea closed her hands around the photographs, pictures of children who weren't her boy, and struggled with her need to claim the child who was. She clutched the papers tighter, as the future she'd imagined for herself disintegrated around her.

  A tear plopped unexpectedly into the center of the photograph she'd made of Paul and Susan. Another rolled down the edge of the portfolio. A third spattered onto the back of her hand. Shea stared at the drops, hardly realizing what they were.

  Cam must have seen the tears, because he tucked a finger beneath her chin and raised her face to his. "Shea, what is it? What's the matter? Why are you crying?"

  Misery closed her throat
, and Shea couldn't think of a way to answer him.

  "Oh, Shea," Cam murmured, tenderness rife in that soul-deep voice. He wrapped his arms around her.

  Though she knew she had no right to accept what he was offering, Shea leaned into him. She nestled against the bulk of him, pressing her nose into the rough-woven poplin of his Saturday shirt. He smelled of fresh air and sunshine and hard work.

  She wanted desperately to absorb the comfort he was offering. But how could she accept succor from this man when only moments before she'd realized that his son was her own lost boy? When she could, only hours and days from now, be telling him she wanted her son back?

  Unaware of how she could destroy his world, Cam bent over her, smoothing his palms from her shoulders to her waist, conforming her body to his.

  He felt so good against her, so sure, so safe. So comfortable and welcoming. A sob worked its way up her throat.

  "Oh, Shea," he whispered and tipped her face up to his. There was such tenderness in his fingertips as he swiped the tears from her cheeks. There was such sweetness in his eyes.

  "You mustn't cry," he murmured. "You mustn't cry."

  And when she couldn't seem to stop, he bent his head and kissed her.

  It was a kiss that began with the most gentle graze of lips, a slide of warmth and texture. It became a consoling skim of his mouth on hers, a pure and gentle intimacy. It grew on a mingled breath and flourished with the brush of their tongues. Then all at once, that tender touch of solace transformed itself into something else.

  It was as if one moment they were standing barefoot on a beach, the breakers foaming gently around them, and the next they were swept out to sea.

  They floundered amidst a swirl of sensations neither of them had anticipated or was ready for. Just that quickly the world of consolation and consequences liquefied. Their breath raged rough and ragged in their throats. Their hands clutched, hers charting the bow of his back and the breadth of his shoulders. His palms slid down to the soft, full curve of her derriere, and he drew her against him.

  Shea shivered as all that was female in her melted into him, going fluid and soft and welcoming. He raised his hand to her breast, cupped his palm to the shape of her.