Out of Bounds (8 page)

She called a dealer and set up an appointment for later that afternoon to get an estimate on the collections at her mom’s house. If he liked what he saw and he gave her any kind of decent offer, she’d ask for a check right there. At this point, she didn’t care about getting good value for any of her mom’s stuff. She just wanted to sell it, pay this money back and move forward.

As soon as her bank opened, she was on the phone with the mortgage department. Luckily, the loan officer who’d done her mortgage thought she would be able to qualify for an additional loan. Unfortunately, it would take more than a week for the paperwork to go through.

She was on her way to fixing things, but it wasn’t going to be soon enough. The Fallons wanted to include the fundraiser acknowledgment in their event on Sunday. She wasn’t going to be able to raise the whole amount in a day and a half.

She heard a soft thump from the laundry room and then she heard the tapping of Angel’s toenails on the hardwood floor. The dog stopped in the doorway to the kitchen, a long, black snake clutched in her jaws.

Posy jumped on top of her chair and pointed at the dog and snake. “Get that thing out of here, right now. Out! Go!”

As usual, Angel did the exact opposite of her command, walking farther into the kitchen, dragging the snake, which she now realized was actually not a snake, but the tail of something whose body lay out of view behind the dog in the other room.

“That better not be a dead animal,” Posy said. She sniffed the air. At least it wasn’t a skunk.

Angel opened her mouth and let the tail drop on the floor before crossing the room to drink out of her water bowl. Posy climbed off her chair and approached the dead thing carefully, prepared to run if it should twitch or moan or in any way offer evidence that it wasn’t actually dead. Within about three steps, though, she realized it wasn’t the tail of a dead thing. It was a strap. The purse was what was out of view in the other room.

Posy spun around and spotted the dog curled in her bed near the sliding doors. Angel’s white tail was tucked across her nose, but her shiny eyes were watching.

“You’re a very bad dog,” she muttered as she picked the purse up. “But your taste in handbags is exquisite.” Angel had brought home a gorgeous Burberry satchel-style purse—easily a five-hundred-dollar-plus purchase.

Posy dug inside and pulled out a matching Burberry wallet and found a driver’s license.
Chloe Chastain.

A quick flash of white and Angel was standing next to the cupboard where Trish kept her dog snacks.

Was it possible she was going mental? The dog definitely didn’t steal Chloe’s purse on purpose because she knew Posy needed money. People didn’t even carry money in their purses anymore, did they?

Chloe lived right across the street. Posy briefly wondered about that red bra but then shuddered. She had enough on her mind without adding Chloe’s taste in underwear to the mix.

She glanced in the dollar-bill section of the wallet and saw a thick sheaf of twenties. A few hundred dollars, at least. Chloe must have been on her way to poker night. Or a ransom drop.

She snapped the wallet shut and dropped it into the bag.

Angel scratched at the cupboard door.

“You’re selling yourself short, working for treats,” she said. “Next time bring me her ATM code, and I’ll take you out for a steak.”

She got a biscuit and handed it to Angel, who took it gently from her hand and then zipped back to her bed.

Posy sat at the counter, looking from her financial notes, to the purse to the wallet. She had to figure out how to return Chloe’s bag without seeing or being seen by the other woman.

CHAPTER SEVEN

“T
HAT
’
S
A
DAISY
,” Mrs. Meacham said. “Don’t pull it.”

Wes gave the green shoot a skeptical look. He was far from an expert gardener, but he did know what a daisy looked like. How did she know which of the green stems sticking up out of the ground was a weed and which was a daisy?

“I planted those daisies in 1973, a few days before my daughter was born,” Mrs. Meacham explained. “I was nine months pregnant, kneeling in the dirt. It took me ten minutes just to get down there and another ten to get back up.” She sniffed. “It’s a daisy.”

Mrs. Meacham knew what she was talking about, he figured, so he moved on and pulled up a clump of grass, carefully avoiding another green stem thing that looked like the one Mrs. M. just said was a daisy.

“Good job.”

He avoided another daisy.

“Don’t you have anything you need to do at your apartment?” she asked. “Seems like even if the place is furnished, you’d want to get settled.”

“I’m settled,” he said. “Everything looks great.”

Before he got to town, Deacon had asked Jay Meacham if he knew any furnished places for rent. Jay had connected them with his mother and Wes moved into the apartment over her garage.

He liked Mrs. M. and he was happy she was letting him help her with her weeding. Not because he was planning to take up gardening anytime soon, but because he’d seen how much effort it meant for her to walk up and down the three steps leading to her back door. She’d never have been able to bend over to do this job.

Wes had never lived alone before. In college, he’d lived with his buddy, Oliver, and then after he graduated, he’d shared a place with a group of his teammates. He’d never felt permanent in Madrid. He hadn’t expected to get cut necessarily, but he’d never committed to Europe by buying a place the way some of the other guys from the States did. He’d been happy enough to share an apartment with a couple guys and then spend his off-season with Deacon and Julia.

His brother and sister-in-law took in foster kids, mostly older teenagers who were pretty close to being independent, so the roster of people living with them was constantly changing anyway. They said they liked having him and had set aside a room that they kept empty for him. Well, mostly empty. Sometimes when a kid needed an emergency placement and the rest of the house was full, they used Wes’s room, but he didn’t mind sleeping on the couch. If he did get bothered, he could just go to a hotel. He never had gone to a hotel, though, because he actually liked being in the middle of Deacon and Julia’s hectic family life.

Being alone was the thing he didn’t really like.

He’d only been in Mrs. Meacham’s apartment for two days and he’d already figured out that the time around dinner really dragged if you lived alone in a small town. At least, it did for him.

And apparently for Mrs. M., as well. Neither of them had made any kind of formal statement, but the past two nights, they’d spent an hour or so working on her yard. To be technically accurate, he worked on her yard and she bossed him around. But she was eighty-seven years old. No one could have expected her to push a wheelbarrow or shovel mulch, let alone crawl around pulling weeds out of the daisy bed, could they? She was the one who knew what needed doing and he was the one who didn’t have arthritis, so their division of labor made sense.

“Do you know Posy Jones?” he asked.

He’d been thinking about Posy ever since she left the day before. He didn’t know what he’d expected, but she’d been a surprise start to finish. Top to very sexy bottom.

“Trish Jones’s daughter?” she asked.

He pulled another clump of grass and then scooped the pile he’d made into the mesh container she used to collect the waste. Later, he’d dump it in her compost pile. “That’s her.”

“I know her mother. Posy’s the tall one, right?”

“Right.” Tall and bossy. And a fan of hot-pink lacy bras.

“She moved away in high school sometime. Her parents were divorced and she went to live with her dad. I don’t think Trish ever forgave either of them for that.”

“Was she a bad mother?”

Mrs. M. sniffed. “Hard to say who’s a bad mother. Bad for Posy, maybe. Her dad died three years ago, but she still comes to see her mom. Couldn’t be all bad.”

Wes knew firsthand that you couldn’t tell from looking at someone what their childhood had been like. He didn’t exactly go around telling people that the year he he was born, his dad froze to death outside their trailer because he was too drunk to make it all the way to the door. He didn’t mention the foster homes he’d been put into and he certainly didn’t mention the ones he’d been kicked out of or the reasons why. When he talked about being a kid, he kept his stories strictly to the time after he turned eight when Deacon got drafted into the NBA and became his guardian. He had enough good stories from that part of his life—no need to get into the not-so-good ones from before.

“Her mom did a big fundraiser for the foundation,” he said. “I met Posy yesterday.”

“You liked her?”

Wes pulled another clump of weeds. “She seemed very competent.”

The earphones for his iPod fell out of his pocket and he tried to hook them over his finger so he could slide them back in without getting dirt all over his clothes.

Mrs. M. reached and pulled the whole thing, headphones and iPod, out.

“My grandson has one of these. He thinks I should get one.”

“Yeah? How old is your grandson?”

“Nine.” She held it up. “Show me how to turn this on. Maybe he’s right. I wouldn’t have to get up and down all the time to change the channel if I could carry my music around with me.”

“Um. Sure.” He stood, brushing off the knees of his jeans and then wiping his hands across his seat. “Let me find a song you’ll like.”

“Something safe for the old lady, Wes?” She looked at him over the top of her red-frame glasses. Sometimes it was tough to tell if she was kidding. “That’s censorship, son.”

“But—”

She held out her hand. He helped her settle the earphones, his fingers brushing against the soft, wiry curls over her ears. He’d never touched an older woman’s hair before and he was surprised by how thin it was. Everything about her was tiny—her little bird bones had concerned him earlier when he saw her coming down the back steps alone.

When the earphones were in, he pushed the play button and hoped none of the more explicit songs he used during warm-ups with his team came on. She smiled and nodded her head to the music. He craned his neck to see what was playing.

“My grandson likes Taylor Swift, too,” she said, a little louder than normal.

“The girl I was dating bought that,” he muttered. “It’s on there because she used my account.”

Mrs. M. kept nodding her head. “It’s too bad they didn’t think to include a delete button. People have to keep all this music they don’t listen to.” She winked at him. “How do you turn it up?”

He showed her how to work the controls and the volume and then went back to weeding. The yard wasn’t that big. Mrs. Meacham’s was an oddly shaped lot, so it had a large front yard, but back here was almost all taken up by a flagstone patio and the small garden. A chain-link fence bounded the garden on the four sides. The small gate was propped open by a stone statue of a dog.

“You want me to see if I can fix this gate?”

She didn’t seem to hear him, so he repeated himself a little louder.

“You don’t have to do things like that for me, Wes.”

She took the earphones out and wrapped them around the iPod before she handed it back to him.

“Maybe it’s not for you. Maybe I’m ashamed to live in a house with a shabby fence.” He stood up. Mrs. M. really was a tiny little thing, although she swore she’d been taller in her heyday.

“The gate doesn’t matter anymore. Molly is holding the gate open—she’s past the time when I have to worry about her making an escape.”

Wes looked at the stone dog more closely. It looked like a beagle and now he saw the inscription in the base: Molly. She’d died two years before.

“Molly was your dog?”

“The last in a long line.”

“You’re not getting another one?”

“No. I’m afraid I’m not up to the daily walks. I’d have to get some kind of horrible lapdog and the two of us would be old and fat together. That’s not the kind of dog I like.”

“I always wanted a dog,” Wes said.

She didn’t like to be coddled, but when she headed back on the short path to the house, he walked next to her. He took her right arm, folding it over his, and patted her hand. She wouldn’t turn down his arm if it was gallantry, she’d told him last night.

He waited while she got in the back door of the house. She turned to him and said through the screen, “I don’t mind if you want to have a dog out there in the apartment. As long as you clean up after it. I’d like to see a dog in the yard again. If you were serious.”

He’d tried to save that dog in Madrid. Would he have brought it home if he’d caught it? He flinched as he remembered the impact of the truck.

He
had
always wanted a dog. There were a lot of things he’d wished for when he was a kid. He’d wanted to live with Deacon. That wish finally came true. He’d wanted to make Deacon proud. He’d done his best with basketball and he was working as hard as he could on the Hand-to-Hand project. He’d wished for the kind of suburban house he’d seen on TV with a basketball hoop in the driveway and a wreath on the front door that his wife changed for every season. He’d wished for someone who’d want to be his wife. Someone to have kids with.

He scooped up the container and dumped it in the compost pile. He ran a hand over the top of his head. The buzz continued to feel unfamiliar, continued to bring him back to those last days in Madrid and the accident.

When he was a kid, he’d had big dreams. Now he was an adult and he wasn’t sure what he wanted.

He went up to his apartment. The place was so quiet, he’d started leaving the TV on for company. He turned on
SportsCenter
and then sat on the couch and opened his laptop. He pulled out the list of community groups they’d invited to the Equipment Day they were running on Sunday, and made sure he had a solid estimate of the number of kids each one was bringing. This was the first event the Hand-to-Hand program was holding in Kirkland and he was determined it would go off without a hitch.

Deacon and Julia were coming in on Sunday morning with a busload of kids from the Fallon center in Milton. They were bringing the bags of donated sports equipment to give away. Each bag included a soccer ball, a football, a jump rope, a box of sidewalk chalk and a pair of street-hockey sticks and pucks. They had cases of sneakers and cleats and a group of volunteers organized to help size the kids.

Deacon and Wes had put together a list of playground games they’d run throughout the day. Every kid who came and participated in at least one event got a bag of gear and a pair of sneaks or cleats. Jay had asked why they didn’t just give the stuff out, but Deacon was a big believer in investing kids in their own goals. He wanted them to feel as if they’d earned the equipment and that way he hoped they’d feel ownership and maybe get out and use it. He’d also seen enough trouble caused when grown-ups caught the scent of a free deal. Having the kids participate kept the adult interference to a minimum.

His phone rang, interrupting his thoughts.

“Wes,” Deacon said. “Everything okay there?”

The false heartiness in his tone made Wes wince. Hell, it probably made Deacon wince. His brother couldn’t help it. Deacon had spent so many years worrying about him, being his mother and father, that he couldn’t help being protective. Wes had done everything he could to convince his brother he hadn’t intentionally flung himself in the path of a beer truck, but the worry lingered like the last sensitive traces of a bruise whose color had faded.

“I’m not playing in traffic, Deacon. Promise.”

“Shut up.”

“You shut up.”

“Did you meet Trish Jones? She give you the check?”

A simple question, but Wes choked on the answer. He wouldn’t lie to Deacon, but he wasn’t going to accuse Posy or her mom of anything without more evidence.

“Trish is out of town,” Wes said. “I met her daughter.”

“Did she give you the check?”

“No. She says she has the money, but I haven’t seen it yet.”

“And you believe her?”

“I believe Posy.”

He wasn’t so sure about her mom, though. This whole “out of town with a relative” thing was just a bit too pat. That coupled with the fact that Posy hadn’t seemed thrilled to meet him and neither of them had turned over the money, he wasn’t going to say he was worry free.

“Wes—” Deacon said. But then he stopped.

“What?”

“Nothing. Forget it.”

“Deacon, what?”

“No. I promised Julia that I’d back off. You’re in charge. If you say things are under control, that’s good enough for me.”

For God’s sake, did Deacon have some psychic pipeline into his brain so he could say the exact thing that made him feel least like he was doing the right thing?

He wanted to believe Posy, but the situation stank. His college roommate once told him he and Deacon had a power differential in their relationship because of the way Deacon saved him when they were kids. He’d said it was an insurmountable debt, and Wes had agreed. Even though he was never going to pay it off, he took every chance he got to chisel away at it.

If there was something going on with this fundraiser that would put the Hand-to-Hand project in danger, then he had to find out about it.

* * *

T
HE
DEALER
TOOK
HIS
TIME
looking at her mom’s stuff. He tried to get her to agree to break up some of the sets, but she refused. He tried harder to make her keep the lighthouses and the set of limited-edition Hallmark plates with pictures of state flowers on them, but she stuck to her guidelines. He had to take it all and he had to pay her cash right then.