The Big 5-Oh! (11 page)

“Whoa! Go, Dad!”

A moment like that is never interrupted without a screeching, shattering jolt, and Jared felt it all the way to his waterlogged toes. Liv flushed with embarrassment, and Jared glared at Rand and his companion where they stood facing them from the other end of the pool.

“I didn’t know you had it in you, old man,” Rand teased, and the young woman with him jabbed him in the ribs with her elbow.

“Is there something I can do for you, son?”

“No, I didn’t know you were home,” Rand said, leading his friend by the hand around the curve of the pool. “This is Shelby. We met at a singles mixer at church last week, and then we ran into each other again last night at the movie. Shelby, this is my dad, Jared Hunt. And our friend, Olivia Wallace.”

“Nice to meet you,” the petite blonde offered.

“We were thinking of hanging poolside,” Rand told them. “But I think we’ll leave you to the pool and we’ll go inside. Challenge you to a game of Scrabble, Shelby?”

“I love Scrabble!” she exclaimed.

“Me too. Let's go. Good to see you again, Liv. G’night, Dad.”

Just before the sliding door slipped shut behind them, Jared heard Rand speak ever so softly.

“What do you know! My dad kissed a girl.”

Jared glanced toward Liv and she grinned.

“I guess his old man surprised him,” he remarked.

“He called me a ‘girl’!” Liv added with excitement.

“Why are you so sad?” Horatio asked Prudence as they counted the ripples in the water from the edge of the pond.

“Because,” she replied. “Everything's going so well here in the valley.”

“You’re sad because you’re so happy?” her friend asked.

“Well, yes. I’m sad because I know the happy is sure to end soon.”

“That makes no sense at all. Aren’t you, after all, already a brand new Pru, just like I promised you would be?”

“This kind of happy never lasts,” Prudence explained. “We can’t stay here forever. One day soon, we’ll have to set out again for home and go back to the meadow, leaving the valley far behind us.”

“And that will be a sad day?”

“A very sad day,” Prudence admitted. “I think it will be the saddest day of all.”

T
he evening ended on a high note, but dawn brought with it an old and familiar frustration: old being the operative word in this particular instance.

Liv checked the clock. 5:52 a.m. This was outrageous, even for Clayton Clydesdale!

Liv's teeth were clenched so hard that her jaw ached. She pulled on sweatpants beneath the long sleepshirt she’d worn to bed and stalked toward the back door amidst a peal of barks and growls and snarls.

“Boofer! Quiet!”

With all of the unexpected strength that anger affords, she flipped on the patio lights and threw back the sliding glass door. Stomping out to the patio, she searched the water for any sign of Clayton or bright neon chartreuse swim trunks, or some equally shocking apparel.

Shocked is what Liv got, times ten. But not because of the color of any ensemble Clayton was wearing. In fact, Clayton was nowhere to be found.

Instead, moving steadily across the patio from the open screen door was an alligator. Destination: swimming pool.

Liv shrieked, and the five-foot reptile paused, turning its head full of teeth toward her. She tried to gasp, but her lungs were completely devoid of anything resembling air, and the world began to spin. She was locked in a cyclone of teeth, scales, and black eyes.

The ringing in her ears evolved into high-pitched barks, and she realized that Boofer had passed her by and was heading straight for the creature at the other end of the patio.

“N-nooooo,” she cried, finding her feet just in time to rush forward and pull the dog from the ground by the rim of her lampshade collar.

“Eeeeeeeeeyy-yyyeeeeeee,” she screamed, running on sharp tiptoe straight into the house.

Liv slammed shut the door and locked it before ever looking back. But when she did, the gator had transported itself completely across the patio and was no more than five feet away. She shot a quick and generic prayer of thanks upward for the wall of glass that separated them as she fumbled with the phone.

“Y-yes, hello? I n-need some h-help, please. There's an in-intruder.”

Liv could hear her heartbeat pounding in her own ears, but the 911 operator was calm as she asked for Liv's name and location and the whereabouts of the trespasser.

“Well, he was on the patio,” she said, wide-eyed, as she peered out through the glass. “But now he-he's in the pool.”

“I’m sorry, ma’am. Did you say the intruder has gone for a swim?”

“Y-yes. I just saw his tail disappear into the water!”

“His … I’m sorry. Did you say
his tail
?”

“Dad, you better get up.”

“Hmm? Why? What time is it? It's Sunday.”

“Well, it's only seven, but you’re going to want to see this.”

Jared stretched and then opened his eyes with reluctance. “Rand, what are you talking about?”

“Something happened next door. To Olivia.”

An inner spring he didn’t know he had launched Jared straight out of bed and to his feet.

“Don’t panic. She's all right. But there are rescue workers and news crews jammed around her house. It seems there's a gator in Josie's pool.”

“A what?”

Jared didn’t wait for further explanation. He hurried into the bathroom and was dressed and out the back door in under five minutes.

Rand wasn’t joking about the hordes of people, and Jared pushed his way through onlookers and reporters and cameramen until he reached the sidewalk. Rounding the house, he headed toward the front door but was stopped by a gathered crowd there as well.

“I didn’t know what to think, really,” Liv said, bright lights illuminating her, and several microphones placed in front of her. With her hair disheveled the way it was and wearing sweats, Liv looked just about as cute as Jared could stand. “I mean, the dog was going crazy, and the sun wasn’t even up yet. At first, I thought it was the elderly neighbor who uses the pool to do laps a couple of times a week. But then I found myself face to face with something much more frightening than Clayton Clydesdale!”

The reporters laughed as Jared caught Liv's eye.

“Jared!” she called, and then she thanked the news crews and excused herself.

Peeling herself away from them, she headed straight for him, deliberate and full speed ahead. She almost jumped into him, encircled his neck with her arms, and cried, “You won’t believe what's been going on here!”

“I heard. Are you all right?”

“I think so. I’m still shaking in my boots.” Jared looked down at her bare feet, and she wiggled her painted toes and added, “So to speak.”

“The dog?”

“Boofer is a moron. Ran straight for the big old thing like there was something she could actually do. But I grabbed her and ran inside and then called 911. One of the reporters told me that alligators shy away from humans, but this one ran
right after us, Jared. I think Boofer looked a little too much like breakfast.”

Jared's heart squeezed. His brain knew that the woman before him was an intelligent, captivating, adult woman. But something about her just then, in her “Sleep Is Good” T-shirt and her pinkish toenails and orange-tinted feet, with her chin-length spiral curls waving in all directions, made him almost believe she was just a teenager home from a weekend sleepover and telling the tales of her many adventures.

He placed an arm around her shoulder and directed her toward the house. “Let's go inside.”

She allowed him to lead her past the swarm, chattering all the way about the gator's black eyes and scaly skin and massive pointed tail.

“Thanks, guys,” Jared said with a wave before closing the door on the reporters and neighbors gathered outside.

“Let's see if they got him,” she cried, scampering through the length of the house and stopping next to Boofer at the patio door. “Oooh, Jared, look!”

He stepped up beside her and watched as two workers in dark olive uniforms used a contraption with two large wooden pegs connected by a thick, looped nylon rope to restrain the creature.

“I should be taking pictures,” Liv said through the fingers clamped over her mouth. “Josie and Hallie will never believe this.”

“With all those reporters out there, I don’t think you’ll have any trouble getting your hands on a visual or two for them.”

“This is so surreal,” she said and looked up at him with wide, curious eyes. “I’ve never seen anything like this before. One time, a deer got locked in someone's screened-in porch up in Ohio, but all they had to do was open the door and let it out.”

Jared chuckled. “You’ll want to make sure you keep that screen door shut, going forward.”

“I was sure it was shut,” Liv replied. “Clayton tore the screen to unlock it the other morning. Maybe the latch needs to be fixed.”

Jared turned serious and pressed her around to face him. “What do you mean?”

“Oh, Josie lets the old guy across the street use her pool to do laps a couple of times a week. I asked him not to come while I was here because he was setting Boofer off and it would wake me up. So I locked the screen door, but he just tore a little piece of the screen so he could unlock it and let himself in.”

“Are you joking?”

“I wish.”

Jared put his arm around Liv's shoulder, turning their attention back to the gator and its captors out on the patio.

“I’ll speak to Clayton.”

“Yeah? Good luck with that.”

She hadn’t really meant to accept Jared's invitation to attend church with him, but there she was anyway, sitting beside him in the fourth pew on the right side of the crowded little chapel.

The last time Liv had set foot inside a church was the day of Robert's funeral. All of the events and sensations of that day were still so intermingled, in fact, that even now she could almost taste the permeating scent of the roses cascading over the top of his casket.

She hadn’t realized when she left the church that morning that she was leaving more behind than her life with Robert,
or that she was embarking on such a lonely and isolated journey as she staggered through the large mahogany doors. She’d left her faith behind her on that pew along with the hymnal and the folded bulletin with Rob's picture on the front. She’d meandered outside into a crisp November morning, leaving behind her unwavering belief in God's good intentions toward her. Her trust in Him evolved that day into just an unnoticed, stagnant entity hanging heavy in the air with the fragrance of those flowers on Robert's casket. From that very day to this one, she still avoided both God and roses.