The House Near the River by Barbara Bartholomew Page A

“Mommy?”
    That hurt. She would leave that to her father to explain.
    Amanda took them to her pickup without further argument. The vehicle had an extended cab with luxurious back and front seats, but Angie placed David between them on the front seat, fastening seat belts self-consciously.
    “Zoom, zoom,” the little boy said with a grin.
    “You bet,” Amanda agreed, starting the pickup with an unnecessarily loud roar that make the child laugh. “He sure looks like David,” she said.
    “He is.”
    Ama nda roared down the drive and to the paved highway. “Angie, my two little girls are older than this child.”
    Angie just looked at her, her mouth set in a firm line.
    It was late in the day, approximately the same time of day in which she’d gotten out of the Nash she’d rode home from the refuge in and, though she wasn’t certain, she felt that the amount of time she’d been missing according to Amanda might be the actual time she’d spent with the Harper family in 1946.
    But David was still three after being missing all those years. Things didn’t fit together.
    Amanda took them to her home on an attractive residential street in nearby Elk City, a town both girls had frequently visited as children. Angie didn’t pay much attention until they climbed from the pickup and she saw her father and other people waiting in the doorway.
    “Dad,” she said, running to him, but still holding on to David’s hand. She threw herself into his arms for a fierce hug, then stepped back, making no introductions as she watched David’s  face.
    She had to remind herself that for her brother only days had passed while once again he faced a relative unaccountably aged. Clarence Ward looked more like this child’s grandfather than his father.
    Tears rolled silently down his face as he waited for the boy to make the first move.
    It didn’t take David long. “Daddy,” he said and stepped up to be lifted and hugged. His small arms twined around the man’s neck.
    “David,” his father whispered hoarsely.
    For long moments only the three of them stood within that circle. Then when a man’s voice said, “Are you saying this child is your son, Mr. Ward?” she stepped back to take stock.
    She wasn’t well acquainted  with her cousin’s husband, a nice looking man in glasses, and she hardly knew her two small daughters, who looked close in age, perhaps four and six. Two other men, both of them in uniform, were present. One wore  the uniform of a state trooper, the other’s badge marked him as sheriff. He was a slim, aging man who looked nothing like Clemmie’s friend Tobe, who had been sheriff last she noticed.
    The sheriff was the one who had spoken. “Sir,” he said again, “You claim this child is your son.”
    Angie looked accusingly at Amanda, who must have been texting these officials even as she drove them in.
    Dad looked at Angie. She shrugged and he smiled ever so slightly. “I will swear anywhere you like, Sheriff, that this boy is my son and this young woman is my daughter who has been missing. I will even take a polygraph test if you wish. “
    “That might be necessary,” the sheriff was unbending. “In the meantime, I will need to take the boy into custody and place  him in temporary foster care.”
    “No!” Angie and Clarence Ward said the word together.
    “My attorney,” Clarence Ward asserted, “is on his way right  now. You will take no action until he arrives.”
    For an instant, Angie wondered who he was talking about, then recalled that both her parents had grown up out here and their contacts  went deep. No doubt some lawyer who was also a boyhood friend had been  summoned.
    She just hoped it did some good. David didn’t need the trauma of being sent to strangers.  The boy seemed oddly comfortable now that he was back in  his father’s arms. “Daddy,” he said now. “ I’m hungry.”
    Clarence grinned. “How about a peanut butter sandwich with raspberry jam,” he