Out of Bounds (18 page)

Wes was peering into the back of the van.

“This is the dog you picked up?”

“Yep. He’s a mutt. Got a lot of German shepherd in him,” Travis answered.

Posy edged up behind them and saw a large dog standing stock-still, staring out of a cage at them. At Wes, really.

“He’s a stray?”

“Nope. I picked him up from a family. Said they couldn’t keep him anymore. Sometimes we get the reason, but they didn’t give me details.” Travis slung the metal pole and net into the back of the van. The dog didn’t flinch at the bang.

She wondered if he was deaf.

“What’s his name?” Wes asked.

“Bubba.”

“That is exactly the kind of dog I want,” Wes said. “He looks noble, don’t you think?”

Posy thought he looked as if he might be sleepwalking. Or stuffed. But she didn’t say that.

“He’s going to be in quarantine for a couple days and then you can come see about adoption.”

Travis shut the back door of the van.

“If you catch your dog, you keep her on a leash from now on.”

Posy nodded.

As the animal control van pulled out, Chloe Chastain came out of her house and crossed the street toward them. Posy recognized her right away, but Wes didn’t realize who it was until she was starting up the driveway. When he did pick her out, he said, “She’s your neighbor?”

“My mother’s neighbor,” Posy muttered.

Chloe’s outfit, a turquoise-and-white sundress with a sweet white wrap sweater on top, was fresh and sunny. Posy glanced down at her own track pants and Nikes and then straightened her shoulders.

“Wes, what a surprise to see you here,” Chloe said. “Or maybe not such a surprise since you’re duet partners?”

Posy felt a blush run up her neck.

He tightened his lips in what might have passed for the tiniest of smiles.

Chloe tucked a piece of hair behind her ear. “Well, this is awkward, but I saw the animal control van here, so I guess you already know most of it.”

“Most of what?” Posy asked.

“I called them for Angel. I had hoped to speak to your mother about this, but if she’s not here...”

Posy ignored the implied question about her mother. “You called the dogcatcher on my dog?”

“I thought Angel was your mom’s dog,” Wes said quietly.

“Not now,” she answered.

“Your mother’s dog has eaten two of my rosebushes,” Chloe said. “And items have gone missing from our clothesline. She also stole my paper.”

Wes coughed. “We saw the photo.”

“Angel ate a rosebush?” Posy asked. “Don’t they have thorns?”

“Well, I don’t know for certain that she ate them. She dug them up and stole them. I saw her dragging one off behind the house. Then she must have come back in the night,” she said. “That’s when she got the other one.”

Posy was proud that she didn’t smile and she didn’t look over at Chloe’s house. Later she’d check out the damage and gloat that Angel had mucked up their landscaped perfection, but for now, it was important to look like a responsible citizen.

“Okay. Well, I’ll write you a check to cover them...?”

Between her mom and Angel, she was going to be broke.

Chloe put her hand to her mouth. “Oh, no, Posy. I don’t want to be
paid.
I just wanted your mother to know that Angel’s been up to mischief.”

Of course, Posy thought. That was what people always wanted. Step out of line in this neighborhood and you were marked.

“Okay,” Posy said. “Now I know.”

“Well, okay,” Chloe said. Posy hoped she was disappointed that she hadn’t gotten more of a response.

“Hey, Chloe, I meant to ask, did you get your purse back?”

“My purse?”

“I found it on the street. Must have fallen off the roof of your car or something. I put it on the porch and then forgot to tell you.”

“I can’t believe I left it on the roof of the car. That’s not like me.”

Posy shrugged. “I wouldn’t know about that.”

“Thank you,” Chloe said.

An awkward silence fell on them.

“Well,” she said. “Good to see you, Wes. Hope things work out with your dog. Nice to see you, too, Chloe. I have a lot to do inside. So...”

She wasn’t sure what to say next. She spun and walked into her mom’s house.

* * *

C
HLOE
’
S
SMILE
SPARKLED
. He couldn’t afford to antagonize her, but man, did her sparkle rub him the wrong way.

“Posy was always prickly,” she said. “So difficult.”

“She’s had a rough couple of days.”

“Well,” Chloe said, “I think with me, it’s more than that. We’ve never gotten along. Posy never wanted to do the things the rest of our group did, but her mother insisted we include her and then Posy would try to take over or she’d sabotage plans. It’s just how she is.”

Wes was uncomfortable having this conversation with Chloe on Posy’s front walk. Actually, he was uncomfortable having this conversation anywhere with Chloe.

“Probably makes sense to keep out of each other’s way, then,” he said.

Chloe pursed her lips. “The problem is that I put my reputation on the line with this fundraiser. I used my network to raise a lot of money and I’m absolutely certain something happened that Trish and Posy aren’t telling us.” Her eyes narrowed and for the first time, Wes thought he might be seeing the real Chloe, who was both smarter and less cheery than the persona she’d been wearing. “You’ve never had to work for a living, have you?”

“I work,” he said.

“You work, but you don’t have to. Your brother could and would take care of you,” she said. “He gave you the job you have now, right?”

Wes nodded.

“I married my high school sweetheart. I sold real estate for two years, but knew as soon as I got pregnant that I was going to quit and be a stay-at-home mom.” She glanced over her shoulder at the house across the street. “We bought that house from my parents. When my husband left me, I almost lost the house because I couldn’t make the mortgage.”

“Chloe, I—”

“My blog shouldn’t work. Most of them don’t. It’s very, very hard to make a living as a blogger, but I do it because I work harder than anyone I know. The internet is vicious, Wes.” She touched his arm. “If my readers or a rival blogger or one of the hundreds of sites that make money by mocking other sites catches a whiff of impropriety about that money, I could be finished. And then my job, and my income, and the life I’ve made for my girls is gone faster than you can say viral. You and your brother want to have your community program here in Kirkland. You should remember who lives here and who’s running back to Rochester as fast as she can.”

“I’m not sure where you’re going with this, Chloe,” he said.

“I’m going back to my house. But if I see the slightest chance that my reputation is going to be damaged by whatever Trish got up to with that money, I’m going to the police. You might be able to afford to hope she doesn’t get caught, but I can’t.”

“My brother has the money from the fundraiser,” he said. “He has the records of the donors and our lawyer is going to double-check all the documentation, starting today.”

“That’s great, Wes,” Chloe said. “I’m glad you guys got your money. But Posy wrote that check and you and I both know she shouldn’t have had to. There was a fundraising account and that’s not where the money came from.”

She went back to her house and Wes let her get a head start before he walked to his truck. The threat was clear and, God help him, he could understand where she was coming from. He was going to have to talk to Deacon again. As much as he wanted to discount Chloe, she had a point. She’d gone out of her way to raise money for their project and they couldn’t leave her dangling in the wind. He just wished there was some way to protect Chloe’s reputation that didn’t involve turning Posy’s mom in to the police.

He was about to open the door to his truck when he noticed the dog. He didn’t see where she came from but there she was, sitting in the grass a few feet away from him. He didn’t want to spook her, so he lowered himself carefully to one knee and held a hand out.

“Hey, Angel,” he said.

The dog cocked her head. She had one ear that flopped forward like a regular dog and the other stuck straight out from her head. The stuck-out ear twitched when he talked to her, circling the air as if looking for better reception. “You ever been to Madrid?”

She gave one sharp bark and then took off across
Posy’s lawn and disappeared under the neighbor’s shed. He thought he saw Posy inside her mom’s house and looked up, but the window was empty. He shook his head. He needed to talk to Deacon.

* * *

A
FTER
HIS
TRUCK
PULLED
AWAY
, Posy peeked out from behind her mom’s brocade drapes and surveyed Chloe’s yard. Now that she knew to look, the messy holes were obvious, one beside the mailbox at the end of the driveway and the other right next to the front steps.

She went into the kitchen and dug out the box of dog biscuits. The instructions said a dog Angel’s size should have no more than two a day. Opening the sliding glass door, she lined three biscuits up on the porch. Two was enough for domesticated dogs, but Angel was wild now. She probably needed more calories for all her landscaping work. She spotted Angel crouched under the Nickersons’ shed. Posy pointed at the biscuits and said, “Dessert. No strings attached.”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

“W
HERE
ARE
YOU
?” Deacon asked into the phone. “Is that barking?”

“I’m at the animal shelter,” Wes said. “I’m getting a dog.”

“You’re getting a dog?” Wes heard a rustling and then Deacon’s muffled voice shouting to Julia, “He’s getting a dog!”

Bubba would be in quarantine for another week, but they’d let him sign the papers that morning. As long as Bubba didn’t develop a disease or bite anyone before his time was up, Wes would be allowed to take him home. The shelter had a small, fenced exercise area and he’d taken Bubba out there to get to know him.

The dog had been sitting up in the grass next to Wes’s legs, but his front legs slid gradually out until he flopped onto his side. The woman at the desk had said there might be an adjustment period when Bubba felt anxious around Wes because he’d had so much change in his life. If this was anxiety, Wes wondered what relaxed would look like. He scratched Bubba’s ears and the dog’s eyes closed.

“Why are you so excited about the dog?” Wes asked.

“No reason,” Deacon said. “Just happy you’re settling down.”

Just happy you’re probably not going to walk in front of a truck again today.
He needed Deacon to let that go.

“I called you because I’m worried about Chloe Chastain.”

He told his brother about the conversation he’d had with Chloe the day before. The shelter was a few miles outside Kirkland. When he turned onto Main Street earlier that morning, the sun was in his face and lit the street, making it look even more like a movie set than ever. It reminded him of something Posy had said: “Don’t believe everything you hear.” That was true about Kirkland and about a lot of other things.

“As much as I don’t want to see her point, I do,” Wes said. “Her reputation is on the line just as much as the Fallon Foundation’s.”

“So what should we do?”

He’d brought a tennis ball with him and he bounced it off the cinder-block wall of the shelter and caught it in one hand. The irony of having this conversation about jail while he was locked in a small chain-link pen was not lost on him.

“I’m supposed to say that we need to press charges against Trish,” he said. “But she’s Posy’s mom. I just—”

He sat on the grass with his hand on Bubba’s head. The dog sighed and stretched his neck so his nose was buried against Wes’s hip.

Moms weren’t something he and Deacon talked about much. He didn’t remember anything about their mother—he’d been barely two years old when she died in a fire at a nightclub on a night when she’d called in sick to work. There’d been a time when he pressured Deacon to tell him stories, to share his memories, but he’d realized after a while that Deacon wasn’t keeping the stories from him. There weren’t any stories.

Their mom had been too young, too caught up in her troubled marriage, too selfish. And toward the end of her life, too broken to really be a mother.

“What?”

“I know they don’t have the best relationship. There’s friction. But they’re hanging on to each other somehow. Am I really going to have her mom arrested?”

“I don’t like it any more than you do, but we might not have a choice. Vic’s supposed to call later today. I’ll get him to conference the lawyer in and see where things stand.”

Wes hung up and then threw the ball against the wall again. Bubba’s ears twitched but he didn’t move. The shelter didn’t know why the previous owners had surrendered the dog. The woman at the desk told him that usually when the owners wouldn’t give a reason that meant there was a behavior problem.

He dropped the ball and scratched deep under Bubba’s chin, digging into the thick ruff around his neck. “They must have been a pack of idiots to give up on a guy like you.” Bubba rolled onto his back. “That’s right. You relax. We’re going to figure this out.”

* * *

H
E
TOOK
B
UBBA
BACK
INSIDE
and then went home for a quick shower before the meeting he had that afternoon with Hamilton Crane, the president of the Teaching and Interaction Center at Robinson University. Hamilton held the purse strings for the grant they wanted for the Hand-to-Hand centers.

He’d expected that a guy with a name like Hamilton would be stuffy or at the least formal, but he adjusted his expectations fast when he walked into Hamilton’s office and was faced with a thickly muscled guy juggling three apples and a cantaloupe. A college-age girl with her hair in low ponytails under a newsboy cap held a flip camera on the guy as she circled him.

“Wes Fallon, right?” the juggler asked.

“Right.”

“Hamilton Crane. Lauren is almost finished. I’ll be right with you.”

“Stop talking,” Lauren said. “I can edit sound out, but your lips will still be moving.”

Hamilton reversed the direction of the juggling and then tossed each piece of fruit to Wes, ending with the cantaloupe. Lauren closed the camera, and Wes clapped as she excused herself.

“Thanks,” Hamilton said. “It’s for a video Lauren is making for her math tutorial.”

Hamilton’s private office had a wall of windows facing out into the main room of the center where clusters of computers and white boards were grouped with low seating, creating mobile, agile classroom spaces.

“So, Wes, we’re impressed with the work the Fallon centers do, but as I told your brother, we want to be sure it’s the right fit for our resources. Deacon said you can tell us more about the impact of the centers.” Hamilton took a bottle of water out of a small fridge next to his desk and passed it to Wes before opening one for himself. “You’re the ambassador. So let’s hear it.”

Wes was ready. He’d memorized the statistics and he had a brochure, an annual report and a book of case studies all set to give to Hamilton. As he passed each one over, he could see Hamilton’s interest wavering. He’d probably seen literature exactly like that a million times.

Wes stood and said, “My brother built the first center in our hometown. I was eighteen, cocky, lost, stupid and about to get kicked off my college team and probably out of school. Deacon didn’t know how to help me. He took me back to Milton where we coached the girls basketball team.” He leaned over and flipped the case-study book to the back page. “That’s them, right there.”

Hamilton nodded. “I knew about the team, but not the part about you.”

“When we went there, Deacon was trying to fix me. He thought if I saw what life looked like for people without my advantages, I’d go back to school and settle down.”

That had been the winter when Deacon met Julia and almost lost her because he was too proud to admit he couldn’t read. And Wes almost lost his chance at playing college ball because he was too afraid to tell Deacon he felt like a failure. Nothing had been working until they were honest with each other.

“And did it work?” Hamilton raised the bottle of water. “Did you go back to school and settle down?”

“Going back there was the best thing we ever did. By the time the season was over, it had changed our lives. People look at places like Milton—no jobs, no stability, no culture, none of the stuff you’ve got on Main Street here in Kirkland—and they see a place with nothing to offer. My brother looks at towns like Milton and Kirkland and sees all the ways they can help each other.”

Wes gestured through the window to the common area.

“You’ve got all these resources here, and I’ve seen your results. The tutoring services you offer are top-notch. Deacon’s vision is the same as it’s been since we spent that season in Milton. Everybody has something to offer and everybody needs a hand sometimes. You give us a hand, partner with us to provide these remote-tutoring resources, and I guarantee your life is going to be changed. You’ll never look back.”

Hamilton stood and shook his hand. “Your brother knows how to pick his ambassadors,” he said. “Tell Deacon I’ll call him tomorrow afternoon.”

“Call him with a yes?”

“My board is meeting in the morning. If I have anything to say about the decision, it will be a yes. For sure.”

He waited until he was in the parking structure before he let himself yell.
He’d done it.

He wanted to celebrate.

He wanted to see Posy.

* * *

W
ITH
THE
COLLECTIONS
gone from the house, Posy had interviewed several Realtors and made her choice. Sandy, the woman she picked, was relatively new to Kirkland. There was a slight chance she might miss out on some potential buyers because she wasn’t as well connected as the more established brokers, but on the other hand, she was far less likely to gossip about Posy and Trish in the course of the sale.

Sandy took the signed contracts with her and left a list of suggestions for improvements Posy might want to make to maximize the house’s appeal. Posy was in the basement, sorting through her mom’s clutter when the doorbell rang.

Angel zipped up the stairs and stuck her nose in the crack under the door, her tail wagging fast. Posy looked out the window and saw Wes’s tall frame silhouetted by the porch light.

He had a white take-out bag in his left hand and was balancing a six-pack of Coke and a bakery box in his right. He didn’t notice that she was at the window, so she let herself look a bit longer than was necessary. Angel panted at the door and Posy thought she knew exactly how the dog felt. She wanted more of Wes. As much as she could get.

She picked the dog up and clamped one firm hand on her collar. “You’re not getting out tonight,” she said as she opened the door. “The dogcatcher’s coming for you if you’re not careful.”

“I don’t think Travis would like to be called a dogcatcher, Posy.”

“Hi,” she said.

He smiled. “I brought sandwiches and cheesecake from the Lemon Drop. Can I bribe my way in for dinner?”

She stepped back and held the door. “I’m cleaning the basement. If you’d called—”

“If I’d called you’d have had a chance to explain why we shouldn’t have dinner together and I didn’t want to give you that chance. I got good news today about the Hand-to-Hand program and I want to celebrate.” He tilted his head toward her. “With you.”

She didn’t think he did that head-tilting thing on purpose, but good Lord, it made her knees weak. She closed the door and flipped the lock before putting Angel down, but the dog hadn’t shown the slightest interest in escape. Instead, she sniffed Wes’s shoes and the bottoms of his jeans.

“I was at the shelter,” he said. “I’ve adopted Bubba.”

It took her a second to remember the big shepherd mutt from Travis’s van. “Congratulations.”

She should be happy for both of them, she knew, but the dog seemed like just one more root he was digging into the soil of Kirkland. Before he knew it, Wes would be as much a piece of the town as the Lemon Drop. The one place in the world she was least herself.

She led him up the few stairs into the living room. The curtains were wide open and the late-evening sun streamed in, making the creamy woodwork and newly polished floors shine.

“Your mom’s place is beautiful,” Wes said. “It’s different than the store, though. I thought there’d be more...stuff.”

“There was. I’m clearing it out so we can put it on the market.” She ran her hands down the sides of her jeans. “Um, I’m really busy. You wouldn’t believe how much work this is and I have to get back to my job tomorrow. So I—”

“I’ll help,” Wes said.

“What? Help?”

“Yeah. I don’t have anything to do. Come on, I’m strong. Put me to work.” He tried to pose, flexing the biceps on the side where he was balancing the bakery box, but the box slid forward and started toward the floor.

She jumped and grabbed the box, righting it quickly. She ended up closer to him than she’d meant to be, and his gaze met hers.

“I don’t know what we’re doing, Posy.”

She shut her eyes.

“Let me help.”

She couldn’t tell him to go.