Jaded (7 page)

I’m sending pics in return. We’re a couple of weeks out of San Diego. I’ll be in touch soon.

Marissa

No. Not yet. She was due to leave in less than two weeks, and Mayor Turner and the council still hadn’t agreed on a candidate. Mrs. Battle could run the library, but with her macular degeneration she wouldn’t be able to for much longer. She had trouble seeing titles or author names on the spines of books, much less the various screens for the online catalog and check-out system.

She scrolled through the pictures and thought about hot breezes, the restless waves, and time to do nothing for weeks on end. Initially Marissa’s e-mails had been full of sailing details, but after a while they grew shorter and shorter while including more pictures. It was as if time and space, wind and water and love, soothed something edgy inside her, and a calm spaciousness opened up in its place. The last picture was of Adam, tanned to a deep brown, wearing cargo shorts and flip-flops, his feet braced on the captain’s chair, a bottle of beer in one hand, a smile full of love and laughter and contentment on his face.

This trip had been good for both of them.

The next e-mail was from her sister.

Lannie,

1. Did you get the docs I sent?

2. We’re having fun in Sao Paulo and by fun I mean we haven’t left the hotel room in two days. After Israel-Palestine style negotiations between Mother and Toby it looks like London is the wedding location. See attached list of location possibilities. Mother prefers Westminster Abbey. Ignore contacts on websites; list of real contacts (aka people who would like to have Mother owe them a Really Big Favor) also attached. Please research availability and get back to me.

3. Stay out of snares.

4. Pics!

Love, Freddie

The list of real contacts included two members of Parliament, an undersecretary in the Home Office, and a bishop in the Church of England. Alana scrolled through the pictures. Her sister looked beautifully content, her hair a wreck around her face, snuggled under Toby’s muscular, tattooed arm. She shifted her grocery basket to the crook of her elbow, hit Reply, and went to work with both thumbs.

Freddie,

1. Docs received. Am working on proposal.

2. Need at least three days to pull together information. No wedding in the rose garden?

3. AM NOT GETTING ENSNARED.

4. Is the tattoo of Thor’s hammer on Toby’s neck new? Mother will not be pleased.

Love, Lannie

A shopping cart bumped into her heel as she clicked Send. She looked up to see it steered by a small boy. “Apologize to Miss Wentworth,” his mother said firmly. The boy ducked behind hair that hung in his eyes, but repeated the words before zigzagging the cart after his mother.

“I’ll get out of the way,” Alana said with a smile, then stepped to the side. What a metaphor for her life, getting in the way of elementary-school-age kids who steered a shopping cart with more purpose and passion than she lived.

Her game plan hadn’t changed. Get under Lucas Ridgeway. She hadn’t done it last night, but she’d do it tonight. She’d put off returning to Chicago for as long as possible, and she wasn’t going home the same person she was when she’d left. That would make this nothing more than wound-licking hibernation, not a tactical reinvention.

She would go home different. She would.

She plucked pasta from the shelf before heading for the produce department. There she sniffed and squeezed tomatoes, then added a cucumber, cherry tomatoes, a red onion, spicy sausage, and feta cheese to her basket. She had the spices she needed at home. The meal she intended to cook wasn’t very fancy. Pasta with homemade Bolognese sauce, a loaf of French bread slathered with butter and garlic, and a salad. She already had ice cream and fudge sauce for dessert. The next time she had him over for dinner she’d make a trip into Brookings and pick up something more interesting.

Think optimistically. There will be a next time. With that in mind, she added a box of dog biscuits to her basket.

The checkout clerk rang up the groceries while Alana bagged them into her reusable sacks for the walk home. Freddie’s reply arrived when she got home.

2. No wedding in the rose garden.

4. Tattoo is new. Mother will shit a brick, but see #2.

3 DAYS???!!!! Tomorrow? Pretty please?

She debated leaving her work clothes on, but the tweed and wool felt too warm for the warm spring air. She started the sauce simmering, e-mailed the contacts on Freddie’s list, then changed into a pair of dark jeans and a fitted long-sleeve V-neck T-shirt in a periwinkle her mother assured her matched her eyes. Back in the kitchen, she stirred the sausage, added it to the sauce, and turned down the heat to let it simmer while she went outside to examine the rose bed in the dwindling light.

Green stalks emerged from the dirt, straining toward the white trellis, but weren’t quite long enough yet to need the support. Something in the wild tangles of thorny stems and canes worried at her soul, so the previous fall she’d read up on winterizing roses, then carefully pruned the bushes, sprayed them with dormant oil spray, dug trenches in all the beds, tipped the canes into the trenches, then covered them with soil and pine needles. A few weeks ago, she had removed the blankets and bags of leaves and replanted the bushes, then fertilized and mulched the bushes. New growth emerged nearly every day, but she wouldn’t be around to see the first bloom.

Lucas pulled into the driveway. Alana felt her cheeks heat, but threw him a smile over her shoulder.

“Hey,” he said.

Duke hustled down the steps, his tail spinning like a propeller. Once again, Alana watched the reunion, the muted play of emotion on Lucas’s face, Duke’s adoringly upturned muzzle. Lucas looked tired, but not physically tired. Bone-weary, the kind of exhaustion that came from deep inside, not from whatever Walkers Ford was throwing at him. A shiver of sympathy resonated inside her. She knew that feeling. Knew it well.

Emboldened, she rose from her crouched position and stretched until her back popped. “I’ve got spaghetti sauce simmering,” she said. “We can eat in an hour or so.”

He straightened his shoulders. “Great. I’m looking forward to it.”

She continued to redistribute the mulch. The downspout emerging from the back of the roof needed to be reconnected; the spring rains pushed the mulch away from the foundation. Lucas emerged from his house, Duke on his black leash at his side. Somehow putting the leash on Duke changed his entire demeanor, as if the old dog remembered his former work, how important it was. He trotted with more purpose beside Lucas, who was now dressed in jeans and a navy blue T-shirt that made his brown eyes even more vivid.

“Do you know what these are?”

He strolled over to stand beside her, then unclipped Duke’s leash. “Country Dancers. Gram planted them on this side of the house because they don’t need as much sun as other hybrids. You didn’t have gardens growing up?”

“Of course we did. We also had gardeners.”

In invitation she opened the screen door to the kitchen. He reached over her head to hold the door for her and she stepped inside. With a click of his tongue, he told Duke to clamber up the two cement steps, then waited for the dog to hoist himself inside. He sniffed desultorily at the cabinets, then the baseboards, then slumped down on the floor under Lucas’s chair.

“Smells good,” Lucas said as he eased into one of the two chairs at the kitchen table.

“Nothing fancy,” she replied. “Pasta with homemade Bolognese sauce. I hope you like sausage.”

“I like anything I don’t have to cook,” he said.

She got a beer from the fridge and handed it to him, then poured herself a glass of wine and sipped it while water ran into the stockpot to boil.

“I didn’t think you’d want Italian again after having that big lasagna for lunch.”

Alana felt her cheeks heat beyond what could be explained by a warm stove. “I didn’t eat the lasagna,” she admitted.

“You gave it to Cody.”

She nodded. “The only people I’ve seen with cheekbones like that are the models working in the fashion industry,” she said. “I want to feed them, too.”

One corner of Lucas’s mouth lifted, but otherwise, the regular rise and fall of his chest under the blue T-shirt was his only response.

“What exactly did he do to earn a hundred hours of community service at the library?”

“Shoplifting,” Lucas said.

“What did he take?”

“Three boxes of cereal bars and a bag of M&Ms.”

Alana felt her jaw drop open. “What?”

Lucas just shrugged. “Ron Pinter wanted to press charges,” he said. “He thinks Cody had been doing it for a while and getting away with it.”

“I would think the correct response would be twenty hours of community service and perhaps some contacts with social services. Food insecurity is a very real problem—”

“Pinter talked to the judge.”

“And you didn’t make a different recommendation?”

His expression closed off even more. “Sometimes the only way people learn is to face serious consequences.”

“I get the M&Ms, but why would he steal cereal bars?”

He shifted on the chair, then took another swallow of beer. “The dad took off before I came back to Walkers Ford. He’s got three younger brothers under the age of five. They’re actually half sibs, and their father left after three kids in three years. They’ve been on and off welfare until their mother got a second-shift job at the plant. His older brother Colt is heading down the petty loser path. He’s on parole. The cereal bars are probably easy for the kids to eat while he’s at school and his mom’s asleep.”

She made a little sound to indicate she’d heard him, and continued stirring the sauce. Small bubbles were forming at the bottom of the stockpot, and Lucas was silent, still. She’d seen this in volunteers or staff at nonprofit organizations all over the world. The world’s deep needs attracted people with an incredible capacity for compassion, but if they weren’t properly nurtured and rested, they cycled from enthusiasm through anger and frustration into emptiness.
Compassion fatigue
was the term psychologists used. They exhausted themselves caring so much about systemic problems that were inherently difficult to solve. A sabbatical could help, but that wasn’t an option for a small-town police chief. What did Lucas do to rejuvenate?

This was basic research, figuring out what questions to ask.

And you’re curious.

“How long have you been back in Walkers Ford?”

“About three years.”

“And you were in Denver before that?”

“I grew up there. My dad moved out of Walkers Ford to go to college and never came home. Met my mom at the Rocky Mountain Music Festival and that was that. He played drums in a really bad band, and she fronted a much better one.”

Okay, she could do music. “What do you play?”

“My iPod.” He didn’t smile, but his brown eyes held a touch of humor. “I’m tone deaf.”

She laughed. “Me, too. Well, not quite tone deaf, but I can’t sing. My mother finally gave up on the piano lessons when I was fifteen.”

“You didn’t like them?”

“I wasn’t good at it, so there wasn’t any point in continuing.”

His gaze narrowed. “But did you like it?”

She shrugged. “I enjoyed it when I could play for myself. My sister’s brilliant at the piano, though. She won a national music competition when she was seventeen. A cell phone rang when she sat down to play, and rather than Chopin’s Tarantella Op. 43, she riffed from the ring tone through Chopin into Lionel Hampton’s
Flying Home
. She got a standing ovation from the judges.”

“Older or younger sister?”

The sheer novelty of meeting someone who didn’t know all about Freddie made her smile. “Two years older. Her name’s Freddie.”

“Alana and Freddie?”

“Frederica.”

He lifted his eyebrows.

“Mother chose the names from her most distinguished ancestors. As women really didn’t play big roles in public service until the last couple of decades, we got feminized versions of male names. Freddie calls me Lannie, but she’s the only person who does.” She smiled wryly as she dropped a thick handful of spaghetti into the boiling water. After a not-so-covert glance at the span of his shoulders, she added a second handful and stirred the water.

He smiled, but didn’t add anything. “The sauce smells good.”

“Thanks.” Okay. They’d covered when he returned to Walkers Ford. The next logical question was why.

“Tell me about you, Alana Wentworth.”

His asking about her wasn’t in her plan. She blinked, then moved to the sink to run water in a bowl for Duke. “Surely you did a background check before I moved in,” she said.

“Actually, I didn’t,” he said. “Women who move to small towns to work as librarians and drive Audis are usually pretty safe risks.”

“Especially when they’re living next to the town’s chief of police.”

He tipped back his beer. “It’s not like on television, where one quick search performed by a quirky genius gives me your entire history down to your shoe size in third grade. I could get your criminal record from the national database, but that’s it.”

He wouldn’t find what brought her here in a criminal history check anyway, and not even in Google search results, unless he knew how to dig. She didn’t expect cops to be hyperparanoid, but somehow Lucas’s remote bearing struck her as odd. “I’d figure you for the curious type,” she said.

“Why’s that?”

“Cops are like librarians,” she said. “We know things other people don’t know. I know, for example, that as we increase microfunding for women’s businesses, their standards of living increase, birthrates drop, and their children are more likely to attend school. You know things about people they may not want other people to know. Like Cody’s family history.”