Stef Ann Holm Read online

  The sheriff cocked his hat. “I’m thinking a Hummer.”

  “Drew Tolman drives a Hummer,” the deputy mused. “I haven’t see it in town today.”

  “Too early.” Sheriff Lewis gazed at the sun. “Tolman doesn’t roll into Opal’s for breakfast until noon.”

  “Unless it’s Little League season. Then he gets there about nine. Orders the same thing every day. Steak and eggs.”

  “Sometimes he swaps out the steak for six sausage links. I saw him do that a few times.”

  At that, Matt said, “Mom, I’m hungry.”

  They’d been snacking on crackers and fruit in the car, and now that food had been mentioned, Lucy’s stomach growled. She could all but taste her special roasted pepper omelet with seasoned potatoes.

  “We’ll get something as soon as we find the house.” To the sheriff she queried, “If the road is washed out, how am I supposed to get there?”

  “Cooper’ll draw you a map on how get in the back way. What’s the address?”

  “346 Lost River Road.”

  Sheriff Lewis gave them each another long, skeptical glance. “That’s Bud Tremore’s teardown.”

  Lucy cringed, not wanting to have to explain that to the boys in mixed company.

  “What’s a teardown?” Jason asked, slipping away from her once more. While it was a physical distance, she’d been feeling the emotional distance as well. He wasn’t her baby anymore, and she hoped this move would help their relationship retain some of the closeness they’d once had. Relocating would allow him to make new friends, boys who were boys and not young men who thought they were tough and knew everything.

  The sheriff didn’t give her the opportunity to elaborate. “A teardown is just what you think it is. A building that’s going to be torn down. Real estate in Red Duck is so pricey you just can’t buy good land anymore. You take what’s a pile of junk, demo it and build new.” Looking at Lucy, he arched his brows. “I didn’t think Bud was renting out that place anymore.”

  He wasn’t. Or wasn’t going to until she’d convinced him otherwise.

  On her scouting trip, she’d been quickly disillusioned. She’d learned through a Realtor that the people who worked here most likely didn’t live here. They lived in Twin Falls or Shoshone and rode a bus to and from town.

  Bud Tremore owned the Salmon Creek RV Park, and when she’d been at her rope’s end, unable to find a place to live, she’d stopped in to use the restroom and put a dollar in the vending machine for a bottle of Coke. She’d got to talking to Bud, and ended up telling him her hard luck story—something unlike her. But it had been a long day of disappointment, and he mentioned having a vacant house he used to rent out before the foundation resettled and knocked off the right side of the porch.

  She’d begged him to show it to her, and she’d made a deal on the spot for $1,500 a month. Dirt cheap. Rent in Red Duck was obscene. She couldn’t even think about buying, not even with the proceeds from the sale of her Boise house. And Timberline? You couldn’t touch a home for less than two million.

  “We have to live in a piece of junk?” Jason’s question broke through Lucy’s thoughts.

  “No. It’s not bad at all. I really liked it and there’s a view of the ski mountain.”

  Well, sort of. The trees blocked it off. But they could fix up the house and make it a home. It was the best she could do and still live in Red Duck.

  “I never wanted to move here,” Jason grumbled, flipping the key of her Passat open and closed like a switchblade. “Why can’t we go back to Boise? All my friends are there.”

  She kept an assurance in her voice she hoped would convince him. “You’ll make friends here.”

  Matt rubbed his belly. “I’m hungry.”

  “We’ll get something to eat soon.”

  The deputy returned with a map. She followed his finger as he traced a road, showed her how to get to the house.

  “Just what is your business in town?” the sheriff asked, puffing out his chest like a rooster.

  Lucy stared at him a long moment. “My business.” Then she thanked the two for their time, put the boys back in their respective vehicles and began traveling on Honeysuckle Road.

  Her hands gripped the wheel of the moving van, her stomach pitching. Not from hunger this time, but from trepidation. She hoped she wasn’t making a mistake.

  She’d spent hours, days…several weeks planning for this move and contemplating every angle of what could or would go wrong. The positives outweighed the negatives. She could work up here, make a nice living as a personal chef. She’d gotten that part covered and knew the business could be stable. But a piece of her was riddled with guilt. She’d taken the boys away from the only home they’d ever known. She’d sold the house she’d won in the divorce—a modest four-bedroom with a big yard, basketball hoop, skateboard ramp in front where all the neighborhood boys congregated.

  Things would be different for them up here. But it would be a good different. She had to remind herself that this was for the best.

  But as the house came into view, with its gray-weathered sides, a magpie squawking on the roof, the porch sloping and in need of repair, and a discarded truck tailgate in the front yard, she bit the inside of her lip.

  Matt rolled down the window and stuck his head out as she let the truck engine idle. “Cool! This place looks like a junky fort.”

  Jason had gotten out of the Passat, stood next to his brother at the open window. He gave Lucy a pathetic glare, then muttered, “I wish you and Dad never got a divorce.”

  Lucy wished the same thing, but her marriage bed could sleep only two people comfortably, and Gary had decided he liked his office secretary taking dictation in between the sheets. Her ex suffered from classic male menopause and had bailed to Mexico on an extended holiday.

  “Well, we did get a divorce,” Lucy all but snapped. “So now it’s the three of us and we’re going to make the best of it.”

  She spoke more to reassure herself than the two boys, whose gazes had slid back to the house just as the magpie dropped a present on the front steps before flying away.

  Before the day was over, Jason knew he could find someone in Red Duck to hit him up with a bag of pot. His mom was dumb to think that this potato-land town didn’t have drugs for sale. If a dude had some money, anything was for sale.

  Buying weed and keeping a joint in his hall locker had been effing stupid. The Special Resource Officer at his old high school was like a canine. He had a nose that could sniff out a stale P & J sandwich locked tight in a binder. Getting busted had reeked. Jason had really screwed up. That had been the first time he’d smoked weed, and he’d paid a penalty for it, but he’d done alcohol and never got caught.

  When Gary left them, Jason got drunk on purpose to make the hurt go away—a pain he didn’t talk about, not even with Matt. His mom never found out about the drinking. He told her he was going to the skateboard park with his friends, but they ended up at Brian’s house instead. Brian’s parents had a wet bar stocked with any liquor you could think of. Brian put water in the vodka bottle to make up for what he and his friends drank. They took some Smirnoff Ice, too, since there were a couple cases of it in the garage refrigerator. Five or six missing bottles—it was nothing noticeable.

  Thinking back, Jason remembered how he’d puked his guts up and had a headache all the next day. He’d lied, told his mom he had the flu. After that, he swore, no more alcohol. Just grass. But not regularly. Only when he needed to forget his troubles.

  He didn’t hate his mom. She was trying. And he knew that he was a shit to her sometimes. But he couldn’t help himself. He had a lot of anger in him. Sometimes he just wanted to hit something. Like maybe Gary for running off to Mexico.

  Gary was an effing bastard.

  He only called on Sunday nights, and stayed on the phone for ten minutes before he said he had to go. And he always called at exactly 8:00 p.m. because that’s when the rates went down calling from Meh-he-co.
r />   Jason didn’t know his dad anymore. Now he only thought of him as Gary. He couldn’t call him Dad because a dad was someone who didn’t walk out on his kids.

  “Can we go inside, Mom?” Matt asked.

  “Sure. I’ve got the key.”

  Jason held back, not eager to go in. He was thinking about not having a cell phone to call Brian and his buddies. This really stunk. If they’d stayed in Boise, his mom would have likely got him a phone, since he was driving. Well, that was before he’d totaled his truck. Eventually he would have gotten a flip phone. Now he had nothing.

  “Jason, aren’t you coming in?” she asked.

  She stood on the porch, sunlight shining off her brown hair with red shades that were natural. She had full lips and brown eyes. The boys at school called her hot, and it pissed him off ’cause she was his mom. Awkward hearing a couple of the football players say his mom was someone they’d like to make out with. He was glad he didn’t have an ugly mom. But still. He’d once hit a kid at an assembly for saying something about her.

  His mom was forty-five. Jason always thought she was beautiful, even when he was a little kid. The other kids always commented he had one of the prettiest moms.

  Now she looked sad a lot.

  Sun played across her face and she looked tired. He knew Gary had caused a lot of the tired stuff. But so did he. Jason took the blame for being a screwup as a son. He felt bad.

  Life sucked.

  “Yeah, Mom. Sure.”

  He didn’t want to give her a ration of crap anymore. He was going to try and be nicer to his mom. But looking at this place where they had to live, he thought about firing up a joint and forgetting where he was.

  Drew Tolman could drive left-handed even though he batted right-handed. It was one of those skills he’d perfected when he’d first gotten his driver’s license—keeping his right arm free. In those days he’d always had a soft shoulder or breast to lay his palm on.

  Bad Company’s signature song blared from the Hummer’s CD deck as Drew headed toward Opal’s for breakfast. Hot air pumped through the space-age-looking heating and air vents, yet he kept the window rolled down. He hated to be closed in.

  He drank coffee from an insulated cup, tapping his fingers on the leather steering wheel to the beat of the music.

  An L.A. Dodgers ball cap rode backward on his head. His jaw hadn’t been shaved for the past forty-eight hours, though he’d run his razor up his neck. Neck stubble was an annoyance. He felt comfortable in a pair of athletic sweats and a thick pullover shirt that had holes in the hem. It was his Sunday look, even though today was Tuesday.

  The default ring on his cell chimed and he snagged it, and just like he did each time, he made a mental note to change that stupid ringer.

  “Tolman.”

  “Hey, babe.”

  “Hey, Jacquie.”

  “Are you at Opal’s?”

  “Heading there now.”

  “I’m in between clients. I’ll meet you.”

  The line disconnected. Drew tossed the cell onto the black leather seat, the charger still plugged into it.

  When Jacquie said she’d do something, she acted and it was a done deal. She was one of Red Duck’s top producing real estate agents, and had been his on again-off again girlfriend for three years.

  Right now, they were on again.

  Jacquie Santini was an ethnic mix of Native American and Italian. Thin enough to fit sideways in a gym locker, she was five foot ten, with a thick mane of black hair that fell down her back and brushed the swell of her butt. What had gotten his attention when he first met her were her brown-black eyes and the dark brows above. They had this definitive arch to them as if she was raising them in a no-bullshit expression.

  Appearancewise, she was more plastic than a Visa card, but she refused to have her boobs done since her nipples were her most sensitive body part and she didn’t want to risk losing sensation for a pair of DD silicones. Her breasts weren’t all that big, but he was okay with that. She loved sex, loved having sex with him. That worked.

  When they broke up for short spans of time, it was because he usually did something to make her mad. Which he was known to do, and hell, it didn’t take much. All he had to do was say something that set her off, and she was done. Yet somehow when they got around to talking it through, the talking part was mostly a facade and it was all about making up in bed.

  He’d questioned himself why he’d kept her around for so long. He wasn’t in love with her anymore. He had been at one time. He loved her now, but he wasn’t in love with her. She was comfortable and they had good times. Both were from larger cities on the West Coast, he from L.A. and she from the Bay area.

  Lately she’d been pushing to move in together. He’d been putting her off, changing the subject, but Jacquie could only be held off for so long before she knocked the hell out of his bachelorhood with an emotional curve ball. She’d start bawling.

  Jacquie didn’t cry very much, but when she did she might as well take a hunting knife to him. God, he hated when she cried. But it wasn’t enough to make him change his mind and let her move in, or worse yet, get married.

  Not now, not with Mackenzie being without her mother.

  His seventeen-year-old daughter hated his guts, and he didn’t blame her. Up until six months ago, at her mother’s funeral, he’d only seen Mackenzie a few times in her life.

  He’d been back to Florida this past February for the Dodgers spring training camp—a combination business and personal trip, one he’d hoped would begin to change Mackenzie’s mind about him. She’d let him take her to the ballpark, but Mackenzie had wanted nothing to do with him outside of nine innings worth of his company.

  Cleaning up his forty-six-year old past, with one major screwup, was complicated.

  Over the years, he had always kept that phone call from Caroline and the possibility of having a daughter in the back of his mind. He hadn’t actually believed he was the father of her child, and he hadn’t wanted to be trapped into something like that when his baseball career had just started to go places. He’d had phone calls like Caroline’s before, so hers had been no different.

  But Caroline Taylor had been different….

  Not that he’d thought about that phone call very often, but some nights, when he’d been on the road with the team and lying in a hotel room, the possibility of him being a father had crossed his mind. Sometimes he’d pick up the phone to call Caroline, then cradle the receiver without ever dialing. He guessed he’d been afraid that it could be true. And if it had been, what was he supposed to do about it?

  Caroline and her family lived in Kissimmee, Florida, and he’d lived in Los Angeles during the off-season. How could he be a long-distance dad?

  And then there were the years when his judgment had been clouded and he could barely take care of himself, much less a kid. In a selfish way, it had been easier to deny parentage rather than confront possible truths.

  But today he was able to look at that rationale with sober clarity. Disgust filled his chest. What an ass he’d been.

  Caroline had sent him pictures throughout the years, but Drew hadn’t seen any resemblance. Yet he’d never thrown the photos away. He’d kept them all. In fact, several had been in his locker when he’d been with the Dodgers.

  Memories surfaced and the coffee cup in Drew’s hand felt cold. He didn’t want to think about the call he’d gotten from Caroline when she told him Mackenzie saw his name on her birth certificate.

  Pulling into the parking lot of Opal’s Diner, Drew looked for an available spot, didn’t see one, so cut a sharp turn and did what he usually did. He drove the Hummer up and over the curb, four-wheeled through the field and parked out back of Claws and Paws grooming.

  Ada, the plump owner, walked a terrier who was doing its business on a fireweed bush.

  Puckering her lips, she frowned. “Andrew Tolman, I told you I was going to call Sheriff Lewis the next time you illegally parked on my property.” />
  “Only be a few minutes, Ada,” he said, aiming the touch pad at the Hummer and locking it with a chirp. “When I’m done, I’ll bring you over some of Opal’s hot biscuits.”

  “I don’t want any hot biscuits. I’m doing the South Beach diet and those carbs kill me.”

  “Sugar, you do not look like you need to lose a single pound.”

  Ada blushed, smiled shyly, then wrinkled her nose. “No, I’m not going to let you talk me out of it, Andrew. I’m calling the sheriff to have you towed as soon as Buster’s done with his potty.”

  Buster had been leaving a little potty all along the back brush. The terrier was going to be awhile.