Cora's Heart: A Cypress Hollow Yarn Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Praise

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Chapter Fifty

  About the Author

  Other Kindle Books by Rachael

  Cora’s Heart

  A Cypress Hollow Yarn

  by

  Rachael Herron

  Copyright © 2013 by Rachael Herron.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Locales and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to businesses, companies, events, institutions, or locales is completely coincidental.

  Cora’s Heart / Rachael Herron. -- 1st ed.

  ISBN-13: 978-1-940785-00-4

  Praise for

  Rachael Herron’s

  Work

  "A celebration of the power of love to heal even the most broken of hearts." - NYT Bestselling Author Susan Wiggs

  "A superlative architect of story, Herron never steers away from wrenching events, and yet even moments of deepest despair are laced with threads of hope." - Sophie Littlefield, author of A Bad Day for Sorry

  "Rachael Herron tells the kinds of stories that make you want to lean in closer.” - Erin Bried, author of How to Sew a Button

  For my sisters Christy Herron and Bethany Herron,

  who inspire me with their bravery, always.

  Thanks to A.J. Larrieu for knowing before I did who Cora was supposed to be, and to Cari Luna for her belief, which gets me through the hard days. Thanks to Sophie Littlefield and Juliet Blackwell for the plotting lunches and inappropriate gossip, and to all my PensFatales, without whom I couldn’t imagine my writing life. Thanks to Todd Thomas for his wealth of rodeo info, and Mel Vassey for checking my veterinarian facts. Any error belongs entirely to me. Thanks to Martha Flynn who always, always knows where the emergency exits are located, and to Kira Dulaney who saved the day again. And as always, thanks and love to Lala Hulse for plotting the original idea with me while in line for chicken sandwiches at Bakesale Betty’s in Oakland, the city we both adore.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Danger lurks in every ball of cashmere. – Eliza Carpenter

  Cora sat on an overturned apple basket in front of her storage shed, her legs splayed out, the heels of her old blue cowboy boots resting in the dirt. The fire engine had driven away minutes before, Jake Keller waving his arm cheerfully out the window as they went. Of course he was cheerful. They’d gotten to fight a fire and isn’t that what firefighters lived for?

  The worst part was that it was a ridiculous fire. It was a teeny-tiny blaze, entirely the result of her own stupidity. Cora couldn’t begin to imagine how people in town would talk. Or, more appropriately, how they would laugh. When Cade MacArthur’s old shack burned down a few years ago, the valley had rocked with explosions as propane bottles blew through the outer walls, which in turn ignited a grass fire that blazed up the hill. It had been the lead story in the Cypress Hollow Independent, with color pictures on the front page. And when Phyllis Gill’s chimney caught on fire and spread into her attic and then down into her yarn room, the whole town had taken up a collection to replenish her stash. Skeins from almost every family had flooded in until Phyllis begged them to stop, saying that she’d reached the limit of the amount of yarn she’d be able to knit before she died.

  Compared to those, the little fire at Cora’s shed hadn’t rated more than one engine using the water it carried on board. She herself had missed it all. She had been across the yard in the house, making a sandwich. She’d heard a siren but it had shut off so abruptly that Cora had assumed Buddy Hansen was practicing on the engine again – all the volunteer firefighters loved whooping the siren as often as they could get away with it.

  After she’d finished pressing her sandwich together, using tomatoes from the garden and her homemade mozzarella, and cutting it diagonally with her sharpest knife, Cora had put it onto a chipped china plate and had wandered out of the house into the sunshine. She would eat it in the storage shed, as she often did. Fall was finally settling into the valley – leaves bursting into scarlet, the scent of wood fires in the air. It was her favorite time of year. Although the smoke smelled stronger now than it had when she’d gone inside…

  It had taken a moment for her eyes to register the fire engine parked, lights flashing, in front of the shed. Water. They were streaming water. Into her shed.

  She dropped the sandwich, the plate shattering on a flagstone, and ran.

  It was over when she got there.

  In the time it took to make lunch, everything she’d worked toward for the last three years was gone.

  It was a tiny fire, comparably. The entire shed wasn’t more than a hundred square feet total. But it had been chock-full – lower shelves held whatever she was growing that was in season (recently figs and small persimmons), the higher ones stacked three jars deep with her canned goods – cucumbers and chilies and apricot jams. Heck, she’d even made the shelves that had held her washed and carded merino fiber. She had learned to use the electric saw without cutting off any fingers, learned just how many thwacks it took with the hammer to get the nails in and flush to the board. The shed was more than storage – it was her workshop. Her larder. She did most of her spinning and dyeing inside it. It held everything she sold at her stand at the Cypress Hollow weekly farmers market. All her soap and candles. All the seeds, the dried herbs…

  The walls hadn’t burned. They were only blackened. But everything else she’d had inside the shed was either burned or ruined by smoke or water.

  “We were on our way to the training tower
up the valley,” said Jake Keller. “Saw the smoke. It was just dumb luck we were here. Coulda been worse.”

  “But how… ?” Cora wasn’t able to finish the sentence.

  “Best guess, one of those candles,” one of the firefighters said.

  “Oh,” she said in a small voice. Earlier, while she’d been sorting heirloom squash seeds, she’d lit one of last year’s rosemary-lemon candles, wanting the scent to mix with the wood smoke coming from up the valley.

  It was all her fault.

  “Accidents happen,” Jake said. He had a piece of paper for her to sign, and then asked if he could call anyone for her or take her anywhere. The men wanted to help. She could see it in their eyes. But she shook her head, unable to say anything else. Then they were gone, leaving Cora sitting on the apple basket, staring across the road, over the low dune, out to the ocean.

  The waves continued beating the shore as if nothing had happened. A thin white plume of smoke showed from up in the valley, rising to meet the lazy clouds that drifted east. She should have heard the siren. Maybe she could have done something…

  Oh. Her heart dropped. Her favorite spinning wheel, the one Logan had bought her the year before he died, had been in the shed. Slowly, she turned. If she stood at the edge, in the wide puddle of mud the firefighters had left behind, she could peer over the charred table. There it was, the Ashford Joy tipped flat in the dirt. One treadle was destroyed, burnt through, and the other was separated from the body as if a firefighter in heavy boots had kicked it out of his way.

  Gone. How quickly things were taken. She’d almost forgotten that.

  A black Mercedes rolled smoothly over the ruts in the dirt road. Of course. This was exactly what she needed now; a visit from Louisa, her mother-in-law’s twin. Cora looked up to see if any clouds were gathering overhead, because the next thing in line was, of course, to be hit by lightning.

  “Valentine called me.” Louisa climbed out of the car, the door thunking solidly behind her. “She said she got a text about a fire and I was on my way back home. She wanted me to check on you.” She looked over Cora’s shoulder to gaze at the wreckage behind her. “I see she wasn’t exaggerating. Well, at least you’re insured.”

  Insurance. Yet another thing Cora hadn’t gotten around to. The house, of course, was insured. But the shed… A sudden mix of nausea and grief rolled through her and she was glad she’d stayed seated. But she’d be damned if she let Louisa read the emotion on her face. “Of course. Insurance. Yes.”

  Why couldn’t her mother-in-law, Valentine, have been the one to come check on her? Valentine would have pressed her hands and then kissed her cheek while smoothing her hair. She would have come equipped with a dog or two, good for hugging, and she would have let Cora cry into one of her huge handkerchiefs embroidered with watering cans that Valentine always had tucked into a pocket, fresh, ready to be used. Valentine believed in really giving a good blow into a handkerchief. “That’s why God made washing machines, sweet cheeks.” Valentine was the best thing she’d gotten from being married to Logan.

  And in the stack of presents Cora had received from her marriage, Louisa was the one gift she wished she could give back. She was all prickles and sharp points, the polar opposite of her short, blonde, plump, happy twin. Black-haired and vain about it, Louisa bragged she’d never had a grey hair in her life, but once, Cora had surprised her with her hair up in the dye cap, and she’d never been forgiven for it. Today, Louisa wore a silver embroidered T-shirt (that probably cost more than all of Cora’s clothes put together) and skinny black jeans. Louisa had only ever been good at one thing; spending money, first her father’s, then her husband’s.

  Louisa sniffed. “So it’s not really a big deal, then. You’ll file, and then you’ll have the money, and you’ll be free of all this… stuff you do out here.”

  Stuff? There was nothing better in the whole world than sitting on her handcrafted wooden stool that she’d bought from one of the old ranchers in the valley who’d taken up woodwork when he’d sold off his cattle. Pete still sat in his barn, same as he always had, but now instead of yelling at cows, he hollered at the jigsaw when it didn’t act right. On that perfectly crafted solid seat that curved in the same places she did, Cora would spin the yarn she knitted for herself and the yarn she sold. There’d never been a sense of hurry out here. Never had she been stressed out, trying to get everything done. She was as proud of her workspace as she was of her booth at the farmers market.

  Oh, God. The farmers market was tomorrow. Well, she’d have ten skeins of cashmere yarn that were up in the house, maybe a couple more if she spun what was left with her other wheel and soaked the skeins tonight. She could light a fire and dry them overnight… She had everything that was in the trunk of her car, and because last week she’d been too tired to unpack it, thankfully, that was almost a full booth’s worth of candles and canned vegetables. And there were stores in the old bomb shelter, of course, but… no. That was for her. Not for sale. That was for worst-case scenario territory.

  Cora looked at her hands. They were still shaking.

  On second thought, maybe tonight wouldn’t be the best night for spinning. And no, it might not be a night for a fire, either. She might never light one on purpose again. It would be a great night to pull the covers up to her nose and cry, maybe. It had been so long since she’d gone through a night like that – she’d hoped that those nights were behind her.

  How could she have been so careless? She even had a page devoted to fire safety in her What If book – she’d written “Never leave a candle unattended” right underneath “Never leave the stove while cooking.” Candles were the sixth leading cause of house fires, she knew from her late-night semi-obsessive internet research. And now, she was a statistic.

  Cora sucked in a deep breath in an attempt to appear calm. “Well, at least no one was hurt,” she said.

  “No.” Louisa looked her up and down. “No one was.”

  Cora could almost read the thought bubble above Louisa’s head. Maybe now you’ll get a real job.

  And Louisa didn’t disappoint. “Maybe now you’ll get a real job. Instead of all these… little side projects.” She raised her thin chin and smiled, probably thinking that was enough to offset the sting.

  Cora raised her own chin, very aware that hers was softly rounded. She waved a hand at the shed. As Eliza Carpenter had always said, Knitting is tougher than we think. You’d be surprised at how often that fine sweater you made can be dragged through the dirt. “This? Oh, I can fix all this up. Not much damage done. I’m a pretty good woodworker now.”

  “Oh, my dear. This is destroyed. Have you looked at it?”

  “I can fix anything.” Cora planted her feet more firmly in the mud, feeling it squish beneath her boots.

  “Never mind, then. You’re fine,” said Louisa, fingering her key ring. It was covered in small stones of cubic zirconia, and flashes of light flew from it, dancing on the puddles at their feet. “Valentine also wanted me to say you should come to the house tonight for dinner.”

  “I’ll be fine, really, Louisa.” As soon as she was in bed, covers over her head. “It’s nice of you to ask, though.”

  “Oh, not because of this. Don’t be silly. We’re celebrating the prodigal son’s return.”

  Of course it wasn’t for Cora. How could she have thought for a moment that it was about her? “Pardon?”

  “Mac is back.” Pride lit Louisa’s voice and made her sound almost human. “He’s home.” She opened her car door and spoke over the roof. “And can you bake some bread? You’ll have time, right? Since you don’t have to do anything out here in your… workspace?”

  Louisa’s son. Logan’s cousin. Mac.

  Lightning. Cora had expected it from the sky, but it had come from her mother-in-law instead.

  CHAPTER TWO

  It’s old-fashioned what we do. Fiber to yarn? Yarn to clothing? Yes, old-fashioned and, to my mind, always, always in style. – E.C.

/>   Mac rested his palm flat against the door of the biggest bedroom in the old house. Behind that door, his grandfather had died, years ago. He’d died with his boots on, literally, his cracked leather Ariats kicked up, a thin paperback Western lying on the bed next to him, as if it had fallen out of his hand when he fell asleep. Only he hadn’t woken up again.

  It didn’t feel right that the house was Mac’s. What was he supposed to do with it? He’d never lived in it, had never wanted to. Mac didn’t believe in ghosts, but if anyone had a spirit big enough to come back and haunt someone, it would be his grandfather. That man had had a pair of lungs unrivaled by an angry bull trying to avoid castration.

  Mac had been in this house hundreds of times. Maybe thousands. But even though he’d owned it for years, it had never really been his. The dark wood-paneled walls and lighter colored slat floors still smelled of the Pine-Sol his grandfather cleaned everything with, and faintly, as if it were almost just a memory, Mac caught the scent of cigar smoke, bittersweet and ghostly.

  The smaller bedroom’s door stood halfway open as his aunt worked. The way she worked – enthusiastically, cheerily – made the guilt even worse.

  “The thing about you, Aunt Valentine, is that you’re too nice,” said Mac. He watched her take down another curtain. She flapped it as the late afternoon sun sent a shaft of light bouncing across the wooden floor. “You don’t have to do all this.”

  “I did a good clean a few months ago, but these are dirty. You can’t have dusty curtains on your first night back in the house.”

  It was so Valentine. She had practically made a religion of taking care of other people, and now it was pathological. She couldn’t have stopped if she wanted to. If the curtains hadn’t been dusty, his aunt would have found something else to do for him: mopping under the bed, maybe, or replacing the contact paper in the pantry. Mac knew she came in at least once a year to clear away the dust and spiders in the old place – she sent him an email every time she did it. Your grandfather’s house is spit-shiny, ready for you to move back anytime you want. Don’t even bother calling! Just show up!