Arrowpoint. Suzanne Ellison

ahead to make sure she’d be home when he got there. He had a hunch she’d be more flattered than distressed. But Michael Youngthunder was not a foolish man, and he knew trouble when it bit him on the kneecap. He’d been clever enough to crawl out of a shack and drag himself through college; he’d been clever enough to get three promotions in the past two years. He was certainly clever enough to remember how painfully he’d learned that he should never, ever, get romantically involved with a white woman.

      He’d loved one once—surrendered himself body and soul—and he’d believed, with every ounce of his heart, that she had truly lived for him. When he’d proposed marriage, Sheila had accepted with what seemed like true joy. When she’d taken him home to meet her parents, she had seemed proud of him. But when he’d introduced Sheila to his grandfather and asked that her parents meet him, she’d told Michael gently, “Maybe some other time.” She’d been so gentle, in fact—so loving and ashamed—that it had taken Michael three full weeks to get the message.

      But he’d learned his lesson in the end, and it was not one he could ever forget. He’d mail back those old clothes or leave them with Brick Bauer. He could not deny that he was drawn to Renata Meyer, but that only meant he’d move heaven and earth to make sure he never came face-to-face with her again.

      * * *

      BY THE TIME the two Indians left and Renata started into town, it was almost eleven, the hour the crafts-fair meeting was set to begin at Alyssa’s house. It was the first time Alyssa had ever asked her to serve on a committee, and Renata wasn’t sure whether to feel flattered or put out. The fact that Alyssa wanted her artistic expertise meant that she didn’t see her as a child anymore, and that was good. But since she had plenty of multipurpose volunteers in Tyler, Alyssa most likely planned to turn to Renata for advice that nobody else could offer. Advice that was probably going to translate into boring civic duties that took a lot of time.

      As Renata pulled up on the familiar street, she remembered that she had always thought the Ingallses’ old house was magnificent. It had trim white columns on the front porch and clusters of wisteria trailing from trellises below the windows. As a little girl Renata had read books about children who dreamed of living in a palace. She’d always dreamed of living like the Ingallses.

      “Renata! How nice to see you,” Alyssa greeted her when she knocked on the door.

      Alyssa was a willowy, elegant blonde in her late fifties who looked a good ten years younger. Today she was dressed as casually as Renata had ever seen her—in jeans and a T-shirt. But the jeans were spanking new with a designer label, and the T-shirt had shoulder pads and some sort of hand-painted design that would have gone for fifty or sixty dollars in Milwaukee. Renata hadn’t made a fraction of that when she’d painted some herself.

      “You remember everybody, don’t you?” Alyssa asked.

      I certainly hope so, Renata thought, knowing that all her parents’ friends would be offended if she forgot their names. As she glanced around the room, old faces pricked her memory. Dear Anna Kelsey, aging some but looking just as pragmatic as ever. Alyssa’s daughter Liza, the hellion, glowingly pregnant and—lo and behold!—proudly sporting a wedding ring. Nora Gates, whose name Renata had recently heard linked with Liza’s husband’s brother; she’d either married him or was planning to soon. And last but not least, Elise Ferguson, Tyler’s beloved spinster librarian.

      Nobody ever thought of Elise and marriage in the same breath. Not that she wasn’t nice looking—she was tall and slender with a subtle, almost ethereal sort of beauty. Her smile was as sweet as her spirit. But she carried too many burdens on her slim shoulders to indulge herself in romantic fancy. Her sister, Bea, wheelchair-bound for years, demanded a great deal of care and even more attention. And Elise treated the library itself almost as though it were a living thing. It had become her child. For this Renata, along with the rest of the town, would always be grateful. She’d spent more happy hours than she could count poring over art books that Elise had special-ordered for her back in the days when nobody else had thought she had a lick of talent.

      Proof of Alyssa’s father’s faith in Renata was that one of her first paintings, a product of her cubist phase, now hung on a wall in the Ingalles’ living room. It was a crush of blues and greens, with no discernible subject matter, though Renata recalled believing at the time that it represented heaven’s relationship with earth. Now it represented the fact that crusty Judson Ingalls had been the first person in the world to pay actual money for a Renata Meyer painting. For that reason alone she would always cut Alyssa’s dad a lot of slack, no matter what Tyler’s rumor mill had to say about him.

      “It’s good to see you all,” said Renata, suddenly enveloped by a sense of warmth for each of them. After the unsettling events of the morning, it was good to feel that she was really back home among people who were always kind and predictable.

      “So what have you been doing lately, Renata?” asked Elise with a sparkling smile.

      “I’m still trying to make a living from my paintings,” she replied, opting not to mention that most of her income came from drawing newspaper ads free-lance. “It’s a bit of a challenge out there.”

      “Tell me about it,” said Liza, not with rancor but with genuine, shared frustration. “Oz isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.”

      Renata grinned. That was as close as Liza was likely to come to admitting that even for a rebel like herself, there really was no place like home.

      For fifteen minutes everybody munched on Alyssa’s croissants and swapped tales about who had said what last week at the Hair Affair. Renata listened with one ear while her thoughts drifted back to Michael. He’d said he was going to take his father home first, then report to work as soon as he could. He’d mumbled something about his usual unpaid overtime equaling this morning off, but he’d never gotten around to telling her just what his job was. Brick Bauer surely knew and would tell her if she asked, but she couldn’t think of a good excuse to pose the question. Renata had no reason to think she’d ever see Michael Youngthunder again; he’d certainly given her no indication that he was interested in getting to know her. And yet, for reasons that weren’t entirely clear to Renata, the man seemed to have implanted himself in her subconscious. Despite the cheery laughter all around her, she couldn’t quite seem to join in. She wasn’t a woman who normally spent much time worrying about men, but she somehow couldn’t get this one off her mind.

      “As most of you know, we’re in the middle of a fund-raising event to replace our library,” Alyssa declared when the meeting finally got under way. “As I understand it, the matching funds we expected to receive have been held up, maybe for years. Elise is going to contact the architect who drew up the plans to see if he can scale them down considerably and still meet our needs, but we’re going to need a massive infusion of cash anyway. It is our hope—” her eyes turned to Renata “—that this wonderful crafts fair will help meet that need.”

      Renata didn’t comment, but she couldn’t help thinking that Alyssa was dreaming. No crafts fair could produce the kind of revenue the town was seeking, even if the artists paid a hefty commission or made a generous donations from their profits.

      “Uh, excuse me,” she said apologetically, “but this is the first I’ve heard about replacing the library. I’m all for raising funds for books, but to be honest with you, I don’t think we can get all that much money from a crafts fair. Not on the scale of building a new library.” She turned to Elise. “Frankly, I don’t see the point. I love the old place.”

      Elise shook her head. Her lips tightened in distress. “So do I, Renata, but Tyler has grown since you were a little girl! We simply don’t have enough room anymore. Not for books, not for people, not for meetings that could be held in the public gathering rooms.” Her voice grew low and impassioned. A hint of desperation darkened her normally cheerful eyes. “Besides, the building is so old it’s likely to be condemned as unsafe at any time, or we could have a disaster that would cost us thousands of dollars in books or even threaten the safety of our patrons. The library needs massive restoration—electrical work, plumbing, plaster, everything.” There was a tremor of despair