“No way, Mom. We don’t know him.”

“It’s all right, Gabe.”

“Mo-om.”

“Gabriel, if I tell you it’s all right, then it’s all right. Now kindly get back to the house and attend to your chores. The old Spartans back of the pumpkin patch need pruning. There’s still plenty of corn to husk, and the pumpkin vines need tying.”

He grunted, gave me the evil eye.

“Go, Gabey,” she said.

He removed his hand from her arm, shot me another glare, then pulled out his key ring and stomped out, muttering.

“Thank you, honey,” she called out just before the door closed.

When he was gone, she said, “We lost Mr. Leidecker last spring. Since then, Gabe’s been trying to replace his dad and I’m afraid he’s grown overly protective.”

“A good son,” I said.

“A wonderful one. But he’s still just a child. The first time people meet him, they’re overwhelmed by his size. They don’t realize that he’s only sixteen. I didn’t hear his bike start. Did you?”

“No.”

She walked to a window and yelled down: “I said back home, Gabriel Leidecker. Get those vines propped up by the time I get back or it’s curtains for you, kid.”

Protest noises floated up from below. She stood in the window, hands on hips. “Such a baby,” she said with affection. “Probably my fault- I was much harder on his brothers.”

“How many children do you have?”

“Five. Five boys. All married and gone except for Gabey. Subconsciously I probably want to keep him immature.”

She shouted, “Scoot!” and waved out the window. The rumble of the Triumph filtered up to us.

When the silence returned, she shook my hand and said, “I’m Helen Leidecker. Forgive me for not greeting you properly. Gabe didn’t tell me who you were or what you were about. Just that some city stranger was snooping around the Ransoms’ place and wanting to talk to me.” She pointed to the school desks. “If you don’t mind one of those, please sit down.”

“Brings back memories,” I said, squeezing behind a front-row seat.

“Oh, really? Did you attend a school like this?”

“We had more than one room, but the setting was similar.”

“Where was that, Dr. Delaware?”

Dr. Delaware. I hadn’t given her my title. “Missouri.”

“A midwesterner,” she said. “I’m originally from New York. If someone had told me I’d end up in a sleepy little hamlet like Willow Glen, I’d have thought it hilarious.”

“Where in New York?”

“Long Island. The Hamptons- not the wealthy part. My people serviced the idle rich.”

She went back behind her desk and sat.

“If you’re thirsty,” she said, “there’s a cooler full of drinks around back, but I’m afraid all we’ve got is milk, chocolate milk, or orange drink.” She smiled, got younger again. “I’ve repeated that so many times it’s etched indelibly into my brain.”

“No thanks,” I said. “I had a big lunch.”

“Wendy’s a wonderful cook, isn’t she?”

“Wonderful early warning system too.”

“As I said, Dr. Delaware, this is a sleepy little hamlet. Everyone knows everything about everybody.”

“Does that include knowledge of Shirlee and Jasper Ransom?”

“Especially them. They need special kindness.”

“Especially now,” I said.

Her face collapsed, as if suddenly filleted. “Oh, gosh,” she said, and opened a desk drawer. Taking out an embroidered handkerchief, she dabbed at her eyes. When she turned them on me again, grief had made them even larger.

“They don’t read the papers,” she said, “can barely read a primer. How am I going to tell them?”

I had no answer for that. I was weary of searching for answers. “Do they have other family?”

She shook her head. “She was all they had. And me. I’ve become their mother. I know I’m going to have to deal with it.”

She pressed the handkerchief to her face like a poultice.

“Please excuse me,” she said. “I’m as shaky as the day I read about it-that was a horror. I just can’t believe it. She was so beautiful, so alive.”

“Yes, she was.”

“For all intents and purposes I was the one who raised her. And now she’s gone, blotted out. As if she never existed in the first place. Such a damned, ugly waste. Thinking about it makes me angry at her. Which is unfair. It was her life. She never asked for what I gave her, never… Oh, I don’t know!”

She averted her face. Her makeup had started to run. She reminded me of a parade float the morning after.

I said, “It was her life. But she left a lot of people grieving.”

“This is more than grief,” she said. “I’ve just been through that. This is worse. I thought I knew her like a daughter, but all these years she must have been carrying around so much pain. I had no idea- she never expressed it.”

“No one knew,” I said. “She never really showed herself.”

She threw up her hands and let them drop like dead weights. “What could have been so terrible that she lost all hope?”

“I don’t know. That’s why I’m up here, Mrs. Leidecker.”

“Helen.”

“Alex.”

“Alex,” she said. “Alex Delaware. How strange to meet you after all these years. In a way I feel I know you. She told me all about you- how much she loved you. She considered you the one true love of her life, even though she knew it could never work out because of your sister. Despite that, she admired you so deeply for the way you devoted yourself to Joan.”

She must have read the shock on my face as pain and gave me a look rich with sympathy.

“Joan,” I said.

“The poor thing. How’s she doing?”

“About the same.”

She nodded sadly. “Sharon knew her condition would never really improve. But even though your commitment to Joan meant you could never commit fully to anyone else, she admired you for it. If anything, I’d say it intensified her love for you. She talked about you as if you were a saint. She felt that kind of family loyalty was so rare nowadays.”

“I’m hardly a saint,” I said.

“But you are a good man. And that old cliché remains valid as ever: They’re hard to find.” A faraway look came onto her face. “Mr. Leidecker was one. Taciturn, a stubborn Dutchman, but a heart of gold. Gabe has some of that goodness- he’s a kind boy. I only hope losing his dad so young doesn’t harden him.”

She stood up, walked over to one of the blackboards, and made a few cursory swipes with a rag. The effort seemed to exhaust her. She returned to her seat, straightened papers, and said, “It’s been a year for losses. Poor Shirlee and Jasper. I so dread telling them. It’s my own doing. I changed their lives; now the change has wrought tragedy.”

“There’s no reason to blame you-”

“Please,” she said gently. “I know it’s not rational, but I can’t help the way I feel. If I hadn’t gotten involved in their lives, things would have been different.”

“But not necessarily better.”

“Who knows,” she said. Her eyes had filled with tears. “Who knows.”

She looked at the clock on the wall. “I’ve been cooped up in here all afternoon grading papers. I could really use a stretch.”

“Me too.”

As we descended the schoolhouse steps I pointed to the wooden sign.

“The Blalock Ranch. Weren’t they into shipping, or something?”

“Steel and railroads. It was never really a ranch. Back in the twenties, they were competing with Southern Pacific for the rail lines connecting California with the rest of the country. They surveyed San Bernardino and Riverside for an inland route and bought up a good chunk of both counties- entire villages at a time. They paid top dollar to get Willow Glen land away from the apple farmers who’d homesteaded it since the Civil War. The result was a huge spread that they called a ranch. But they never grew or raised anything on it, just fenced it in and posted guards. And the railroad was never built- the Depression. After World War Two, they started selling some of the smaller parcels back to private people. But several of the big tracts were snapped up by another corporation.”