Doing It Over (A Most Likely to Novel Book 1) (8 page)

Pole vault? What the . . .
“Yeah, so?”

“We haven’t had a good pole vault coach since I moved here.”

“Pole vault.” Seriously?

His muscles worked in perfect unison as he pulled the ladder free. He leaned on it for a minute and posed. At least it looked like he posed. Like one of those guys in the calendars pretending to be carpenters. Only those men didn’t wear shirts. The thought of what Wyatt looked like shirtless had Melanie biting her lip again.

“You still remember the basics, right?”

“Of course.”

“So you’ll consider it?”

“I . . .” Pole vault. He was interested in her track talents. Not that they did anything for her. “I guess.”

Wyatt sent her a full dimpled smile, shook his hair out of his eyes.

She muttered
pole vault
under her breath and turned away.

Wyatt’s laugh followed her back into the house.

CHAPTER SEVEN

All small towns across the country had a few fundamental things in common. Gossip ran like water in a stream, most teenagers left as soon as they learned to drive or graduated from high school, and they honored their heroes on the appropriate holidays and the anniversaries of their passing.

Sheriff Ward had been a River Bend hero.

So much so that the town endorsed his sometimes delinquent daughter when she finished the academy and returned home.

Jo didn’t need this day as a reminder of her father, but the town did. So when her deputy lowered the flag to half-staff, she didn’t suggest he not. She accepted the handshakes and pats on the back when she passed people in town without having to ask why they stopped her. This had been going on every year since his death; this year wasn’t any different. Except, of course, the fact that many of the kids she grew up with were home to partake in the ritual.

Jo found herself scowling through a mental Rolodex of names. Who went out of their way to find her on this seventh anniversary of her father’s death, who avoided her. Even Grant, the town drunk who spent a few nights in her lockup like that man from Mayberry, removed his hat and shook her hand.

What the town didn’t know was how keenly she categorized everyone and everything on this day. Not for the desire of wallowing in her loss, but in an attempt to find her dad’s killer.

The town may not remember all the details of her father’s death . . . but she did. It helped that upon her return from the academy, she opened her father’s files and studied the report of his death to the point of memorizing nearly every word.

Her father was murdered. She knew it, the Feds suspected it, the local townspeople thought his death was accidental.

Problem was, the FBI didn’t find his case dirty enough to investigate once they found a satisfactory nonhomicidal angle.

Jo knew better.

Her daddy had been murdered. And she would, one day, find his killer and bring them to justice.

At quarter to noon, the door to the station opened. Zoe walked in beside Melanie. It was good to see her friends. She missed them both, terribly. Having them there sparked all kinds of memories.

“What are you guys doing here?”

“Miss Gina says you go to the cemetery at noon. We thought you might want company.”

The world stopped in that second and emotion swam in. Emotion that Jo worked damn hard to keep away. Her eyes swelled with unshed tears and she couldn’t form the words needed to tread past them.

“Uhm . . .” Damn it, she didn’t cry. It wasn’t something she did. Not then, not now. She blinked a few times, pushed away from her inner girl.

“I can drive,” Melanie offered. “I have the van.”

Jo gave a quick shake of her head. “How about you follow me. In case I get a call.”

Her friends saw past her excuse and didn’t press.

Zoe pressed two fingers to her forehead in a mock salute. “After you, Sheriff.”

Jo pushed her friend toward the door. “Get out of here.”

Before sliding behind the wheel of the squad car, Jo removed her baton and tossed it on the seat beside her. Next came her hat. She pulled out of the small parking lot, Miss Gina’s flower child van following close behind. The cemetery was just outside town. Far enough to require a daily drive but close enough to see in passing several times a week. Jo always thought it was poetic that the route to R&B’s passed by the cemetery, reminding people not to drink and drive. It did for her, in any event.

It was a clear summer day with only a few white clouds dotting the sky. Nothing like the day she learned of her father’s death.

She shook the painful memories aside and concentrated on the familiar route to her father’s final resting place.

The cemetery was maintained by the little white church, aptly named the Little White Church.

Jo left her baton in the squad car and carried her hat.

Zoe and Mel fell in step beside her. Like in a library, their voices didn’t raise above soft whispers. Funny how walking among the dead made one quiet. Almost as if yelling invited a spirit to come out and play.

“I’m sorry I wasn’t here for his funeral,” Mel said for the hundredth time.

“Let it go, Mel.”

“I just feel so bad.”

Jo wrapped an arm around Mel’s shoulders. “I know you do. If it makes you feel any better, I promise not to go to yours.”

Mel started to laugh and the mood lifted.

They walked along the moist graves, avoiding walking right on top of them. Small town cemeteries didn’t have city ordinances keeping the markers on the ground level, and here in River Bend’s only resting place, the markers rose to the heavens in varying heights. The more prominent or rich the member of the community had been, the larger the stone.

Sheriff Joseph Ward’s stone was somewhere in the middle. He hadn’t been a rich man—no servant of the state was unless they were dipping dirty fingers into pockets they had no business being in.

The three of them stopped at the foot of his grave and Jo took in the memorized words on his stone.

Beloved Father

Honored Public Servant

Sheriff Joseph Allen Ward

The date of his birth sat beside the early date of his death. Jo accepted Zoe’s arm as it snaked around her waist. She hadn’t heard her father’s laugh, seen her father’s smile, in seven years.

“He always thought I’d end up here before him,” Jo told them.

“You did give him hell.” Zoe was right, she had.

They were silent for a moment.

“Do you think he sees us here?”

“He damn well better.” Jo forced a laugh. “He put this badge on my chest, he better appreciate it.”

“I’m sure he does.”

Before Zoe and Mel could pull her anywhere close to tears again, she looked beyond the headstones. “Remember summer of our sophomore year?”

Both women followed her gaze and slow smiles started to spread. “Miss Gina’s lemonade and old Mrs. Greely’s grave. We got so drunk.”

Jo started to laugh. “I thought we were incredibly clever drinking in a cemetery.”

Zoe nudged her. “Until we swore we heard voices.”

“That was you, Zoe,” Mel reminded her.

“Running through the cemetery in the dark. Never a good idea.”

“Nearly busted my ankle,” Jo remembered.

“I ended up with poison oak,” Melanie said.

“I got away with a nasty hangover and nightmares for the summer.”

“Good times.” Jo smiled into the memory.

“Isn’t that the time your dad called you out for drinking?”

“He sure did. Said someone complained about a disturbance in the cemetery, came out the next day while I slept it off and found my school ID next to the leftover lemonade. He left my ID next to the mason jars we’d left behind on the kitchen counter. Signed me up for the summer cross-country team the next day.”

“That was awful. Five miles every day in the summer.”

“Smart bastard. I didn’t have time or energy to drink that summer.”

Zoe lifted her eyebrows. “Not much anyway.”

Jo knelt down and pulled a weed that didn’t need to be pulled. “I miss him,” she said in a low voice. “I swear I can feel him at the strangest times. Like he’s there looking over me.”

Mel knelt beside her. “Sounds like a normal thing. I know if there was a way to watch over Hope if something happened to me, I’d do it.”

Zoe walked along the back of the stone and paused. She lifted a single white lily from the ground and placed it on top. “Must have fallen off.”

Jo narrowed her brow, a memory tried to surface but didn’t make it. “That’s nice.”

Silence filled the space between them before Jo voiced something to her best friends she hadn’t shared with anyone else. “He was murdered.”

Zoe sucked in a breath.

“What? I thought it was an accident,” Mel said, dumfounded.

“I know what everyone thinks. I also know what I know.”

“But everyone said—”

“Accidental shooting. I know. That’s what I was told. No one was more careful with his firearms than my dad.”

“Jo?” Zoe held doubt in her tone.

“What are the chances of you placing your palm in a vat of hot oil, Zoe? Or you pushing Hope off a cliff?” she asked Melanie.

Both women held their breath and stared.

“I know what I know. I read the reports. I have little memories that come back to me every once in a while. They started surfacing after his death. I remember this time of year always being difficult for him.”

“Kids graduating, lots of parties.”

“The annual high school reunion followed by the Fourth of July and everything surrounding it. I know. But it was more than that,” Jo insisted.

“Are you sure?”

Jo nodded. “Yeah. I’m sure. One of the things I learned in the academy is that criminals often return to the scene of the crime.”

“And that’s why you’re still here. To find your dad’s killer.”

Jo met Zoe’s gaze and moved to Mel’s. “Yeah. I’ll find him. Eventually.”

She took in her father’s tombstone and offered her pledge in silence.

I’ll find him, Daddy.

“Did it shrink?”

“The gym?”

Melanie looked up into the eves of the high school gym and could have sworn the room had shrunk. “Wasn’t it bigger?”

“I don’t think so,” Zoe muttered.

“The whole town feels smaller than when we lived here.” It didn’t help that a few staple storefronts had closed down because of the poor economy.

“I hear ya. My old room feels like a shoe box.” Zoe had spent the first night at her mom’s and then decided to bunk up with Jo.

“I’m pretty sure none of us exploded . . . how is it possible everything feels smaller?”

Zoe led Melanie toward the purple and gold decorated registration table. The official reunion party wasn’t for another day, but today they were asked to help sort out the list of names of attendees who were coming to the event into the clubs and activities they knew the alumni had participated in.

“I think our minds expanded, making everything else feel smaller.”

Melanie could buy that. “You know what’s funny . . . the inn doesn’t feel smaller. Everything else . . . yeah. Even the gas station looks tiny. I know it hasn’t changed. It hasn’t, right?”

Zoe fell silent, her eyes locked across the room.

Melanie followed her friend’s gaze and sighed.

Luke stood talking to a couple of guys who looked familiar but she couldn’t place names to.

And Zoe stared.

Melanie stood beside her, silent with her own thoughts.

“Why does he have to look so damn good?” Zoe quietly asked.

“He always looked good.” But he only had eyes for Zoe. Once the two of them hooked up, the town instantly assumed there would be li’l Zoes and li’l Lukes following behind in no time.

The town had been wrong.

“Just the women I’ve been searching for.”

Melanie cringed.

“Margie.”

Full of her fake bubbly self, Margie approached them with a yearbook in one hand, a pom-pom in the other. “If it isn’t Zoe Brown, River Bend’s claim to fame.” The compliment brushed hands with sarcasm.

“Well if it isn’t Margie Taylor.” Zoe matched her sarcasm and added a smirk. “Still motivating the football team?” Zoe wiggled her fingers under the dangling plastic strings of their school colors.

“Once a cheerleader always a cheerleader.”

“Is that so?”

Margie kept her fake grin in place as she spoke. “How is that cooking thing you’re doing?”

Zoe’s jaw tightened and Melanie stood back.

In the past, Zoe would light into Melanie with a snarky zinger that put the other woman back for a week.

The tight jaw lasted two breaths and Zoe shook her head. “It’s doing very well, thank you. I’m happy to say my pastime in high school afforded me a living.” The words she didn’t say hung between them, but God help Margie, she didn’t hear them.

Margie’s pastime was hooking up with everyone else’s boyfriend.

“That’s wonderful for you.”

An awkward moment of silence followed before Margie glanced at her feet, and then the yearbook in her hands. “Oh, I almost forgot. There are a few people I was hoping the two of you could identify.”

The three of them moved to a table and peered at the yearbook.

Looking at the pictures of a decade past had Melanie wondering where her old yearbook ended up. She’d left it with her mom when she went off to college, but then some of her belongings went with her dad to Texas.

The pages of the track team splayed out and some of the happier times in her life surfaced.

“I’m going to break out in a sweat just looking at these pictures,” Zoe said.

“Remember Coach Reynolds’s punishment for showing up late to practice?”

Zoe cringed. “Running Lob Hill . . . that sucked.”

Lob Hill sat beyond the track and football field on the far north of the school. There wasn’t a street or anything to it other than a forty percent incline that made running up it grueling. Whenever the team had shown out or arrived late, or simply pissed off the coach by not paying attention, Lob Hill was mentioned and they all took off running.

Reynolds held a stopwatch in his hand and if you didn’t return in fifteen minutes you were told to run the hill again.