Becca's Baby

CHAPTER THREE

THE NAYLOR WOMEN, Becca’s sisters and mother, met at the Valley Diner for lunch the following Wednesday. Without Becca.

“What’s up with her, Ma?” Betty, the oldest, asked when Sari delivered Becca’s apologies.

Smiling to herself, Sari listened while her mother assured her two eldest sisters that Becca was extremely busy with her new city-council position. In a flowered circa-1945 dress, cinched in tight at the waist, Rose Naylor held court—as charming and as self-involved as usual. It hardly mattered that she didn’t know what she was talking about. After years of not being heard, Becca had stopped telling her mother any details about her life, and Rose, being Rose, didn’t realize that.

Becca was in Phoenix. But she’d rather skillfully avoided telling Sari why she was there.

“Is Mayor Smith still giving her a hard time about the money for Save the Youth?” Janice asked, frowning.

“I’m sure he is,” Rose said. Shoulders back and chest held high, showing off beautifully the vintage cameo brooch she wore, Rose sounded like quite the authority. “You know, that boy never did have a thought for himself. His old granddad leads him around by the nose. Always has.”

Sari could have told them that Becca had left George Smith, Jr., in the dust two weeks ago, that she’d already located two possible funding sources. But she didn’t. She was the baby in the family. Nobody had ever listened to her. Except Becca.

Betty and Janice nodded in unison. At forty-five and forty-six, the women were both striking to look at, with the big brown eyes and chocolate-colored hair all four Naylor girls had been born with. Sari had always thought Betty and Janice were more like twins than merely sisters. Each seemed to know what the other was thinking. They had the long Naylor legs, too, though Janice had never lost the weight she’d gained with her third child.

Taking a notebook from her purse, Betty looked around the table expectantly. “We might as well go ahead, even though Becca isn’t here,” she said. “We have a schedule to keep if we’re to get this finished in time for Becca’s Fourth of July celebration. So, what did everyone find out?”

“Samuel Montford never actually earned a college degree,” Janice reported, pulling a folded sheaf of papers from her purse.

“Sure he did,” Rose interjected. “He had several of them. They’re still hanging in the student-union building at the university.”

“That’s what I thought, too,” Janice said, leaning forward as she met each of their gazes in turn, her eyes wide with surprise. “But they were all honorary. He was a student at Harvard, some say he wanted to be a professor, but then his father died and he had to take over managing the family fortune.”

“How old was he?” Sari asked. She couldn’t explain her unusual interest in this project they’d all taken on for Becca, researching Shelter Valley’s founder for the dedication ceremony of Samuel Montford’s statue in the town square on the Fourth of July.

“He’d just turned twenty.”

Everyone knew that Samuel Montford had settled Shelter Valley in the early 1870s, and they knew a few other facts—for instance, that Montford Un

iversity’s famous code of ethics was the result of values he’d learned while living with various Southwestern tribes. But much of the man’s life had been kept private until now, a hundred and fifty years later.

Becca, who loved Shelter Valley more than just about anyone did, was setting out to fix that. She’d lobbied for the monument made in Montford’s likeness, and held fund-raisers for almost five years to commission the statue. She was also chairing the committee in charge of this year’s Independence Day celebration.

Becca believed that by preserving the town’s heritage, they could preserve the town’s character, even though the world was growing so much smaller—and Shelter Valley so much bigger—with the advent of all the new communication technology over the past ten years.

As usual, the rest of the Naylor women were right beside her.

“He was originally from Boston, as we all know,” Janice continued. Her assignment had been the early years of Montford’s life. She’d found much of her information in the newly released journals, but had been corresponding with some descendants she’d located in Boston, as well.

“He moved to the Arizona territories in the late 1860s,” Sari said. “He was only twenty-four at the time.” Her assignment had been the later years.

“He had several offspring,” Rose piped up. “And he was married when he settled in Shelter Valley. Did he bring his wife with him from the East?” She was in charge of the descendants. She’d visited a family history center in Phoenix and discovered a lot of information in their archives.

“No.” Janice frowned. “That part’s really sad.”

“He came out here alone with kids?” Betty asked. Sari couldn’t tell if her eldest sister was impressed by that possibility or thought the man was out of his mind.

Shaking her head, Janice was solemn. “He fell in love with a black woman who was the housekeeper for one of his scholarly acquaintances from Harvard. He married her, too.”

“White men usually didn’t do that in those days,” Rose told them, as if they didn’t all know that segregation was alive and well in the mid-1800s.

“Well, he did,” Janice said. “Although from one of the journals I got from the Montfords, she wasn’t all that eager for the wedding.”

“She didn’t love him?” Sari was unhappy to hear that. She’d grown quite fond of the man during the weeks she’d been putting together the pieces of his life in Shelter Valley.

“She loved him,” Janice said. “She just knew that the marriage wouldn’t be accepted, especially not in his society. The Montfords were one of the big Boston families. They were quite prominent and very wealthy.”