Jaded (19 page)

“Thank you. That’s very kind.” They declined cookies for the road and got back in the truck.

“Where to next?”

“The Burtons. Colt and Cody both have curfews, Colt because he’s on parole and Cody because he’s doing community service.” He backed down the driveway to the road. “Generally speaking, I don’t send suspects back to the scene of the crime.”

“Cody didn’t break into that man’s house and steal his wife’s engagement ring. He’s got no way to get it to Brookings to pawn it.”

“He’s got friends with cars. His brother has a car.”

“He wouldn’t do that. He’s not that kind of kid.”

“He’s working for you because he was convicted of theft.”

“Not from someone he cares about, and if he’s helping Gunther on his own time, he cares about him.”

Steel lay under the pale skin that blushed so easily. “So he’s not giving you any trouble?”

She didn’t answer right away. “No,” she said finally.

“You had to think about that,” he said.

“Sometimes trouble is just people being people,” she replied.

They bumped up the ruts to the trailer sheltered by budding trees. Music blasted from the bedroom end of the trailer, competing with the dialogue from a kids’ show coming from the open living room window. He took the steps to the door and knocked. The door was wide open, and the smell of macaroni and cheese drifted through the open door. Three little boys sat in a row on the sofa, absently eating mac and cheese from mismatched bowls. One of them looked up at the sound of Lucas’s knock on the door frame.

“Colt! Run!” the kid screamed.

Adrenaline spiked in Lucas’s brain, and before he registered movement, his hand was on his weapon. “Get behind the truck,” he barked at Alana.

Wearing jeans and a muscle T-shirt with the armholes cut to the hem, Colt emerged from the back of the trailer. “What the fuck, little man?”

“Hands!” Lucas barked, keeping the door open with his left hand as he flipped the snap off his holster with his right. “
Hands!
”

Colt’s eyes widened, and Cody emerged from the kitchen, the mac-and-cheese pot in one hand and an incongruous blue plastic serving spoon in the other.

“Whoa,” Colt said, raising his hands. “Hey, he was just joking. It’s a game. It’s just a game!”

“Lucas.”

Alana’s voice, soft and yet commanding, flexed into the air, slicing open space for him to hear the little boy giggling. No danger. No threat here. He lifted his hand from his weapon and watched the tension ease from the situation.

“Not funny,” he said to Colt as he stepped into the trailer. “Not fucking funny. That’s what you’re teaching your little brother? To run from the police?”

Colt’s sullen face was his only answer. Cody set the pot on the crate doubling as an end table. “Go into Mom’s room,” he said to the little kids. “You can watch the rest of the show in there.”

“Mom doesn’t like it when we get food in her bed,” the budding comedian said.

“Sit on the floor,” he said with far more patience than Lucas would have shown.

It took a minute to relocate the three imps, but Lucas didn’t move. “You stay here,” he said, when Colt turned toward the hallway. He glared at Lucas while Cody situated the kids, shut off the music, and came back down the hallway. He pointed the remote at the television and turned off the dancing sponge.

“You said you weren’t—”

“Hello, Cody,” Alana said with a cheerful edge that cut Cody short. His mouth snapped shut. “This must be your brother. Alana Wentworth. So nice to meet you.” She held out her hand to Colt, who stared at her, then at Cody, with an astonishment all too familiar to Lucas, before giving her hand one firm shake.

“What are you doing here?”

Time to get this situation under control. “You both have curfew,” Lucas said.

“And we’re both home,” Cody said.

“Have a seat,” Lucas said to Colt.

Colt rolled his eyes. “Jesus fuck,” he said, slumping into the sofa hard enough to rock the trailer. “It was just a goddamn game.”

Until he found something. Lucas pulled on a pair of latex gloves and searched the trailer from top to bottom, starting with the bedrooms. The three younger boys were lined up on the floor at the foot of their mother’s unmade bed, gazes avidly fixed on the television. They ignored Lucas entirely as he methodically took the trailer apart, room by room.

When he shifted his search to the living room, Cody and Alana stood beside the door. Alana held a large sketch pad. Cody’s shoulders were hunched over, his attention obviously split between this invasion of what little privacy he had, and Alana’s careful examination of the pad’s contents.

“You drew pictures,” she said.

“I don’t think in words.”

Both Lucas and Alana looked around at that. “You don’t think in words,” she repeated.

He shook his head impatiently. “I don’t. I think in images, sketches, colors. Lines.”

“He always has,” Colt added from the couch, without taking his attention from the television. “He learned to draw before he learned to write.”

“How do you do in school?” Alana asked.

This forced a laugh from Cody. “How do you think I do?”

The blush flared on her cheekbones. “Stupid question,” she said. “I like these.”

Lucas peered over her shoulder, blinked, then refocused. The page was rough, like Cody had erased a drawing to make room for this one. The colored-pencil rendition on the page was obviously the library building, but yet vastly different. Where the interior now was an institutional green relieved only by wooden shelves in the front and taller metal stacks at the back, Cody had drawn seating areas, some clustered around tables, others just chairs and pillows on the floor. The industrial carpet covering everything except the entryway was gone, and hardwood floors gleamed in the light pouring down from the Reference balcony. The drawing was as precise as any architectural rendering Lucas had ever seen, but with an astonishing amount of feeling. It held beauty and possibility.

It held hope.

Alana flipped through the pages again, stopping on a picture of the storage room in the basement transformed into a technology center.

“You said it needed to be high tech,” Cody said. “I didn’t want to put all that stuff upstairs, where the sunlight would glare off the monitors. And once you sell all those books, you’ll have space downstairs again.”

“Cody, this is spectacular,” she said. The admiration in her voice was evident as she once again paged through. “It’s amazing. It’s exactly what we need for the final proposal.”

He shrugged, but even Lucas could see the effect her words had on the boy. He straightened ever so slightly, and tension eased from his shoulders. “It’s just a couple of drawings.”

“You should see what he can do with a story,” Colt said, arms folded across his chest. “He’s a word weaver. A dream spinner.”

Lucas shot him a look, then strode into the kitchen to finish his search.

“I have seen,” Alana said absently as she handed the pad back to Cody. “He does a great story hour at the library.”

Cody tossed the pad on the crate next to the mac-and-cheese pot. “Find anything?”

Lucas stripped off his gloves and turned to Colt, who, unlike his brother, had the good sense to keep his mouth shut. “Found a job yet?”

A muscle jumped under the precisely shaved sideburn. “Like I told my parole officer, I’ve put in applications.”

“Where’s your mom?” he asked Cody.

Lucas knew the answer to that question, but he still had to ask. Cody knew he knew, so the boy struggled to keep a lid on his temper. “Work. She gets home at eleven most nights.”

He nodded, then turned to leave. Alana stopped him with a hand on his arm. She pointed at the discarded sketch pad. “May I take this and scan the pictures?”

Cody blinked. “I’ll just tear them out,” he said.

“No, don’t do that. Your sketch pad is a record of your growth as an artist. I’ll give it back to you.”

Cody flipped the pad open, sectioned off pages, then ripped them from the spiral binding. “Just take them.”

“All right,” she said. “Thank you. Bring your notebook with you tomorrow, and we’ll tape the pictures back in.”

“Forget about it.”

Alana looked ready to argue with Cody until daybreak. Lucas put his hand firmly between her shoulder blades and turned her toward the door. “’Night,” he said.

The door slammed behind them. They crossed the dirt yard, their breath hanging in the air in glittering clouds until they climbed into the truck. Lucas turned over the engine and shoved the heat to high.

Blond hair with the dull sheen of gold slid free from its mooring behind her ear when Alana bent over the sketches. “I asked him for input on what teens would like from the library,” she said distantly. “I thought he’d give me a list of bullet points. A few ideas. Not these.” She looked up at the trailer, then down at the sketches again before lifting the pages to the dimming overhead light. “He erased drawings. I can make out the lines . . . it looks like one of his younger brothers. He erased drawings to do this because this is the only sketch pad he has. And I stopped him—oh, God.”

The light dimmed to black. “Stopped him from what?”

“Never mind,” she said, and lowered the picture. “I’ll fix it.”

He backed down the dirt ruts to the road. “You’re not hearing what I’m saying. Don’t get too involved with a kid like Cody.”

“Why not? Because he’ll fail and let me down?”

“No. Because you’re leaving.”
Because he’ll start to hope. He’ll start to need you, and you’ll be gone.

She blinked. “But that’s not a surprise. Everyone knows I’m here temporarily.”

She really had no idea. She had no idea whatsoever of the impact she had on people. It took a former senator, a political hostess, and her sister the genius to make her unremarkable. In the everyday world inhabited by lesser mortals, she went off like a nuclear bomb.

“That’s what you do, isn’t it? You come in, you do your thing, and you leave. Do you ever think about what happens after you leave?”

She bristled slightly. “Of course we do! The foundation underwrites and supports local organizations to carry out the day-to-day management of whatever programs we implement,” she said.

“What does that mean?” he asked. “It means you leave.”

“But other people are there. People from the communities,” she said. “I can’t be there. I can’t be in one place and do what I do.”

“Never mind,” he said.

“Don’t do that. I want to understand.”

He shook his head. “I can’t explain this.”

“Fine,” she said. “Where’s the nearest art supply store?”

Lucas shook his head. “Don’t make Cody hope for something that’s not likely to happen.”

“Why do you think he doesn’t have a chance? Have you seen his work? He’s talented enough to get a full-ride scholarship to art school.”

“Cody’s got ties here. Family. People he’s responsible for. You understand that. Trust me on this one. Keep him busy for a hundred hours, then send him on his way.”

She went back to flipping through the pages, even though he knew she couldn’t see very well by the dim dashboard lighting. He watched her, that hair, her hands, the soft curve of her lips, and very nearly missed the figure stumbling along the dirt road.

“Christ!” he barked, slamming on the brakes at the same time he flung his arm across Alana’s chest. Both seat-belt harnesses locked as the truck skidded to a stop, angled across the road. Behind him, Duke scrabbled to his feet on the floorboards.

“Who on earth?” Alana started, but he was out of the truck and running.

Tanya.

He caught her by the shoulders and spun her around, her head tracking a good two seconds after her body. “Christ,” he said again, and this time the word was half prayer, half curse. He clapped his hand to her cheek, then looked at her fingers. Her skin was ice under his palm, her fingernails purple in the garish light. She wore a flannel shirt, jeans, and flip-flops. Dirt and blood smeared her feet. She’d been walking for hours.

He tipped her head back, using the Blazer’s headlights to get a read on her pupils. “What is it this time?”

“Fuck off,” she said. A little shake got her attention, and his. He smelled enough beer to stage a party for the entire football team.

“Are you just intoxicated, or did you take something else?” he demanded.

An angry laugh was her answer, then she sagged in his grip. “Get Duke into the back of the Blazer.”

Alana ran around to the passenger door and called Duke out. “Up,” she said as she swung open the hatch. The dog’s tail had barely cleared the frame before she slammed the door again. She reappeared beside the Blazer with the blanket from the emergency kit. “Do you want my boots?” she said.

She must not have seen the dirt and blood smeared on Tanya’s feet. “Her feet are filthy,” he said.

“It doesn’t—”

“No,” he said tersely, manhandling Tanya to the rear passenger door, then into the truck. Once she was inside, the fight went out of her. Alana held out the blanket, and he tucked it around her torso, then her calves and her bare feet.

Duke whined, then clambered over the seat back separating him from Tanya. He sniffed her from her bare feet to her face, then licked her cheek. “Good boy,” she murmured. Her reflexes dulled, her hand patting the air where the dog was the moment before. Duke lay down by her feet, and she burrowed her toes into his thick coat.

At the intersection Lucas turned towards town and the hospital. “No,” Tanya said. “Take me home.”

“Where were you?”

No answer.

“Who let you walk home like that?” As the silence stretched, he snapped, “Goddammit, Tanya.”

“I just want to go home, Lucas.”

They were three-quarters of a mile from the cabin. She might have made it on her own. Then again, she might not have. “These new friends of yours sure do care about you if they’ll let you walk yourself home in your condition. You could have passed out and died of hypothermia.”

He saw her fingers tighten in Duke’s fur. “Like you care,” she slurred.

“I do care,” he said. “I would have come to get you. You know that.”