Read Online Tamera Alexander - [Timber Ridge Reflections 01] by From a Distance - Free Book Online Page B

Timber Ridge Reporter was a leaflet compared to the Washington Daily Chronicle.
    Her gaze fell to a placard in the window she hadn’t noticed before. On it was listed the hours of business. She read it and smiled. Closed on Fridays? How could a newspaper office be closed on Fridays? No matter the day, the Chronicle ’s multi-office, four-story building was always abuzz. Even on Sundays—though she normally didn’t adhere to working that day, unless she was far behind.
    Taken by the quaintness of this little town, she continued on to the general store and was almost to the back counter when she would have sworn she was staring at an apparition.
    Standing there transfixed in the middle of the aisle, draped from head to toe in black, the woman resembled a portrait of a Southern belle Elizabeth remembered seeing hung in Mathew Brady’s art gallery. An invisible hedge encircled the dark-haired woman, and people in the store went out of their way not to brush the ebony lace of her full-tiered skirt or interrupt in any way the air that seemed to lay in quiet folds about her.
    Elizabeth attempted to do the same. But when she glanced at the woman’s face, she found herself unable to look away.
    The woman was stunning, but it wasn’t her beauty that so commanded Elizabeth’s attention. It was the grief veiling her features that Elizabeth found so hard to turn away from.
    Until the woman met her stare.
    Elizabeth forced her gaze elsewhere, embarrassed at having intruded upon something that felt so intimate, while not understanding what it was she’d intruded upon. “I’m here to see if my medicine has been delivered.” She heard the explanation coming from her mouth but didn’t remember granting the words permission. “It should have been here days ago.” What was this overwhelming need to explain herself to this lady? She looked back.
    The woman’s eyes were wide set and watchful, and Elizabeth found herself imagining them as they’d surely once been—a luminous sparkling blue, instead of dull and near gray.
    “We have a doctor newly arrived to Timber Ridge.” The woman’s voice came out soft, like a petal opened prematurely before the final frost. Yet Elizabeth understood every word. “He hails from New York, I’m told.”
    Elizabeth found herself nodding. “I didn’t know that. I’m . . . new to town.”
    “I know.” Something surfaced in the woman’s expression and removed a layer of grief, if only for an instant. “I’ve heard about you.”
    Elizabeth didn’t have a response for that.
    The woman’s arms rested gracefully at her sides, skimming the delicate fabric of her skirt while leaving no impression on the folds. Were Southern women taken aside at a young age, to a hidden parlor, perhaps, and taught how to stand with such a regal air that it appeared as though they were not so much supporting their own weight as they were being held aloft by invisible strings? Everything about this woman was graceful, yet she exuded a tension that was nearly palpable.
    Perhaps the other patrons in the store felt it as unmistakably as Elizabeth did and that was why they kept their distance. Perhaps Elizabeth should’ve done the same. She was searching for something else to say when she heard the woman take in a sharp breath.
    “Forgive my boldness, but . . . would you agree to come to my home and photograph my sons?”
    It took a moment for the unexpected request to register, and for its subtle desperation to sink in.
    Elizabeth had photographed only one child before, and that endeavor had not ended with success. The child wouldn’t cooperate, refused to remain still. Other photographers were able to talk to children in singsong voices or cajole them with entertaining noises that bewitched them as the seconds passed, so the glass plate could be fully exposed. But not her.
    It was absurd, really, but she wasn’t at all at ease in the company of children. They made her nervous. She never knew what to say to them