A Family Kind of Gal

“Bunches and bunches of times,” Christina said, then struggled out of her mother’s arms and chased Charcoal outside.

  “She’s a goer, that one,” Ellie said, chuckling and watching through the mesh as Christina found an old tin pie plate on the back porch and toddled down the yard. “She’ll be tired tonight.”

  “Good.” Maybe then she would sleep through without the nightmares that had plagued her since Philip’s death. “Taking her to the park was above and beyond the call of duty.”

  “Any time. She’s a joy, that one.” Then, as if realizing they were alone for the first time, Ellie asked, “Isn’t Stephen back yet?” Before Tiffany could answer, she added, “That’s odd. Octavia called and asked him to come over to mow the lawn. Said it would only take an hour. That was, when?” She checked her watch again. “Nearly three hours ago.”

  “Figures,” Tiffany said. “I didn’t find any note from him, but this was lying open.” She pointed to the invitation on the counter.

  “Was it?” Ellie’s face puckered thoughtfully. “I didn’t see it.”

  “Stephen must have found it and left it here.” Tiffany checked for another note, found none, and told herself not to worry, that Stephen was probably just with his friends fishing or swimming or hanging out.… But where? “Well, I suppose I’ll hear from him before too long,” she said. “Now, how about a glass of iced tea or lemonade?”

  Ellie reached for a tissue from the box on the counter and dabbed at her forehead. “I could use a drink, believe me. A vodka collins sounds nice, but it’s a little early. Besides, I’ve got a date.”

  “A date?” Tiffany repeated, surprised. “Who’s the lucky guy?”

  The older woman positively beamed. “Stan Brinkman. Retired. Once owned a roofing company that he sold to his sons. He’s widowed, too, and spends his summers up here and drives a fifth wheeler down to Arizona each winter.”

  This was news to Tiffany. “How long have you known him?”

  “Long enough.” Ellie gave an exaggerated wink and walked to the door. “I’ll tell you all about it later.” With a wave she was out the door, pausing long enough to say a few words to Christina who was feverishly plucking blades of grass and dropping them into the pie tin.

  The phone rang. Tiffany grabbed the receiver on the second ring and, still watching her daughter through the screen, said, “Hello?”

  “Mom?” Stephen’s voice cracked.

  “Oh, hi, kid.” She rested her hip against the counter. “All done with Grandma’s lawn?”

  “Uh…a long time ago.”

  There was an edginess in his voice, and she realized something was wrong. Very wrong. She froze. “So where are you?” she asked.

  He hesitated.

  “Stephen?”

  “I’m at the police station, Mom, and…and someone wants to talk to you.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  “You’re where?” Tiffany sagged against the kitchen wall for support. Dear God, this couldn’t be happening.

  “I said I’m down at the—”

  “I know what you said, but how did you get there? Are you all right? What happened?” A jillion thoughts raced through her mind, none of them good, when she considered her thirteen-year-old son and his recent knack for getting into trouble.

  “Yeah. I’m okay.”

  “You’re sure?” She wasn’t convinced.

  “Yeah. The officer wants to talk to you.”

  “Wait, Stephen, should I come get you—”

  “Mrs. Santini?” an older male voice inquired. “I’m Sergeant Pearson.”

  Tiffany’s throat was dry, her heart a beating drum. “What’s going on? Is my son okay?”

  “Aside from a shiner and a sore jaw, I think he’ll be fine.” The sergeant’s voice was kind but did little to soothe her jangled nerves.

  “What happened?”

  “He and another kid, Miles Dean, got into a scuffle down at the Mini Mart”

  “A scuffle?” she repeated, anxious sweat causing the back of her blouse to cling to her skin. The older boy’s father, Ray Dean, had been in and out of jail, and it looked as though Miles was following in his old man’s footsteps. What in the world was Stephen doing with him this time?

  “The boys got into a quarrel. One thing led to another, and a couple of punches were thrown. The clerk gave us a call, and we picked ’em up. All in all, your boy’s fine.”

  Relief caused her shoulders to droop, but she rubbed at the headache pounding in her forehead. “And Miles?”

  The officer hesitated, and Tiffany felt a niggle of dread. “Miles always manages to get himself out of trouble.”

  Nervously she twisted the telephone cord in her fingers. “Are there any charges filed against Stephen?” she asked. Despite a breeze gently lifting the curtains as it slipped in through the open window over the sink, the temperature in the kitchen seemed to have elevated to over a hundred degrees.

  Tiffany stretched the cord and looked outside to see that her daughter was still busily making mud pies in the dirt.

  “None against your son.”

  “And Miles?”

  “That remains to be seen.”

  “Can I come and get him now?”

  “Actually, an officer will bring him home. They should be there in about ten minutes.”

  “I don’t have to sign anything?”

  “No—but just a minute.” Pearson’s voice was muffled as he spoke to someone else. “Yeah, she’s waiting for him. Now listen, Steve, no more horsing around, right?”

  “I won’t,” her son mumbled as if from a great distance.

  “I mean it. The next time it could be real trouble. And I’m gonna have to report this to your juvenile counselor.”

  There was another muffled response that Tiffany couldn’t discern. A second later Sergeant Pearson was on the phone again. “Okay, he’s on his way.”

  “Good.” Or was it?

  “Look, Mrs. Santini, this incident at the Mini Mart, well, it doesn’t amount to much more than a couple of kids getting into a difference of opinion and taking a swing or two on a hot afternoon. However, the way things are today, we tend to worry. If either of the boys had pulled a weapon—a gun or a knife—this could have turned out bad.”

  Her thoughts exactly. A chill slid through her despite the heat. Guns. Knives. Weapons. She had moved to the small town of Bittersweet to get away from the gangs and violence of the city, but it seemed that no community was immune. Not even a little burg in southern Oregon. In this part of rural America, boys were given hunting knives and rifles routinely about the time they hit the age of ten or twelve, as if the owning of a weapon was a rite of passage from childhood to becoming a man. “I’ll talk to Stephen.”

  “Do that,” Pearson advised. “I think a ride in the squad car and having to come down to the station probably gave him a scare.”

  “Let’s hope so.”

  She was ready to hang up, to wait for Stephen and see that he was okay, then read him the riot act if necessary, but Sergeant Pearson wasn’t finished.

  “There is something more, Mrs. Santini,” he said, and there was a solemnity in his voice she hadn’t heard before. She was instantly wary, her fingers tightening around the receiver.

  “Yes?”

  “As I said, the boys were fighting about something—who knows what, maybe even a girl. At least that’s what the clerk at the Mini Mart thought she heard, but there was some discussion about Isaac Wells.”

  Tiffany froze. “Pardon me?”

  “The man who disappeared. Owned a place on the county road just out of town.”

  “I know who he is,” she said, trying to keep the irritation and, well, the fear, from her voice. Deep inside she began to tremble. “I just don’t see what he has to do with Stephen.”

  “Probably nothing. But when we emptied your son’s pockets—just part of procedure, you know—he had a set of keys on him.”

  “Keys?” she repeated, having trouble finding her voice. “To my h
ouse,” she said, but knew she was only hoping against hope. Stephen had one key. Only one. No set.

  The sergeant hesitated. “Maybe. But the chain is unique and engraved.” She closed her eyes because she knew what was coming. “Initials I.X.W. I’m thinkin’ it could be for Isaac Xavier Wells.”

  “I see.”

  “Talk to your boy.”

  “I will,” she promised as she hung up and felt as if the weight of the world had just been dumped upon her shoulders. None of this was making any sense. Why was Stephen still hanging out with Miles Dean? What was he doing with that set of keys? What was the fight about? And, what could Stephen have to do with the old man whom he’d worked for, the man who’d disappeared?

  She walked to the back door and noticed John Cawthorne’s wedding invitation on the counter. By the end of the week her father—well, if that’s what you could call the snake-in-the-grass John Cawthome—would be getting married. But Tiffany couldn’t think of that now. Suddenly she had more important dungs to consider.

  “Mommy!” Christina shouted from the backyard.

  Tiffany managed a tight smile as she opened the window over the sink. “What’s up kiddo?”

  All smudges and bright eyes, Christina, standing beneath a shade tree, proudly showed off her latest creation of mud and grass piled high in the tinfoil plate that had once held a chicken potpie. A clump of pansies had been thrown on to the top for color. “Lookie!”

  “It’s beautiful,” Tiffany said as Charcoal mewed loudly at the back door.

  “You want a bite?”

  “You bet,” she lied, trying to push her worries about her son far to the back of her mind. She’d deal with Stephen when he arrived home. “A big bite.” She pushed open the screen door. Charcoal slunk into the kitchen.

  Christina, holding out her prize, started to run up the back steps.

  “Watch out!”

  Too late. With a shriek Christina stumbled over one of Stephen’s in-line skates and pitched headlong on to the porch. Tin pie plate, grass and clumps of mud flew into the air.

  Tiffany was through the door in a second, picking up her daughter just as Christina took in a huge breath and let out another wail guaranteed to wake the dead in the entire Rogue River Valley. Tears streamed and blood began to trickle from a raspberry-like scratch on Christina’s knee.

  “Mom-meeee!” Christina sobbed as Tiffany held her.

  “Shh, baby, you’ll be fine.” Tiffany hauled her daughter into the house to the small bathroom off the kitchen.

  “It hurts!”

  “I know, I know, but Mommy will fix it.”

  In the medicine cabinet she found antiseptic and a clean washcloth. As Christina, seated on the edge of the counter, wriggled and sucked in her breath, Tiffany washed each scratch and cut on her knee and chin.

  The doorbell rang.

  Probably the officer with Stephen in tow. “I’ll be right there!” she called out over Christina’s whispers. Balancing her daughter, she reached into the medicine cabinet for a package of bandages.

  The bell chimed sharply again.

  “Just hold your horses,” Tiffany muttered, placing a bandage over the biggest area of Christina’s wounds. “Come on, sweetie, we’d better answer the door.” She tossed the washcloth into the sink, picked up her sniffling daughter and carried her to the front door. Expecting to have to apologize to a police officer and Stephen, she yanked on the knob and found herself face-to-face with J.D.

  “You were going to get me a key,” he reminded her.

  “Right.” His key had been the last thing on her mind. He shot a look at Christina, and his brows drew into a single, condemning line. “I didn’t think about it. The back door was unlocked.” She shuffled her daughter from one hip to the other while Christina blinked back tears.

  “What happened here?” J.D. asked.

  “I falled down!” Christina said with more than a little pride. All of a sudden she was like a soldier home from battle, showing off her war wounds.

  “That you did.” Tiffany pressed her lips to Christina’s curly crown. “Well, come on in—” She waved to the back of the house and then stopped short as she looked over his shoulder toward the street. “Oh, no.”

  J.D. turned in time to see a police cruiser easing up to the curb. His gut coiled, an automatic reaction from too many conflicts with the law when he was a kid. In the house, Tiffany paled, and J.D. realized that for a beautiful woman, she looked like hell. Her normally cool facade had slipped, her hair was falling out of a makeshift ponytail, and her clothes—faded jeans and a sleeveless blouse—wrinkled and smudged with dirt, were a far cry from her usually neat and tidy, no-nonsense appearance.

  “Excuse me.” Like a brush fire devouring dry grass, she was past him in an instant. Holding her daughter to her, she dashed down the two steps of the porch to the edge of the lawn, where shade trees lined the narrow street.

  J.D. followed, his eyes narrowing as the rear door of the police car opened and Stephen sheepishly crawled out. All of J.D.’s worst fears congealed right then and there, and he wondered if Tiffany was at the end of her rope as far as the kids were concerned.

  Christina was dirty and bleeding, like a refugee from a war zone. Stephen didn’t look much better. Most of his usual bravado had evaporated, and his face was bruised, one eye nearly swollen shut. Scarcely a teenager and yet, it seemed, on the brink of big trouble with the law.

  Not good. Not good at all.

  But then J.D. had suspected as much.

  “Mrs. Santini?” The officer who had driven the car, a short man with thick, wavy brown hair and wire-rimmed glasses, approached.

  “Yes.”

  “Officer Talbot, Bittersweet Police.”

  “Hi.”

  He glanced at J.D. “Mr. Santini?”

  “Yes, but I’m not the boy’s father.”

  Brown eyebrows sprang upward, over the tops of the policeman’s glasses. J.D. thrust out his hand. “J.D.,” he said. “I’m Stephen’s uncle.”

  Stephen shot J.D. a suspicious glance that spoke volumes, then reached into the back seat of the patrol car for his battered skateboard.

  “You might want to have his eye looked at,” the officer said to Tiffany. “Helluva shiner, if you ask me.”

  “I will,” Tiffany promised as Christina buried her face into the crook of her mother’s neck, smearing blood and dirt on the long column of Tiffany’s throat.

  “I’m okay,” Stephen mumbled, a hank of black hair tumbling over his forehead and partially hiding the eye in question.

  “I still think it should be checked,” Tiffany said, her nervous gaze skating over Stephen’s injuries. Then she asked, “How’s the other boy?”

  “Looks about like this one here.” The officer touched Stephen on the shoulder. “Let’s hope this is the last of it.”

  Sullenly Stephen studied the ground.

  “It will be,” Tiffany promised as Talbot offered a patient smile, then turned back to his car just as the interior radio crackled to life. Talbot’s pace increased, and he climbed behind the wheel of the cruiser. He snapped up the handset of the radio.

  “What happened?” J.D. asked Stephen. The cruiser took off.

  “Nothin’.”

  “Black eyes like that don’t appear by themselves.”

  With a disinterested lift of his shoulder, Stephen carried his skateboard and sauntered toward the house.

  “Wait,” Tiffany commanded. “I think we should have your eye checked at the clinic or the emergency room.”

  “I already told you it’s okay.”

  Christina, as if sensing all of the attention was focused on her brother, sniffed loudly. “My chin hurts.”

  “I know it does, honey.” Tenderly Tiffany placed a kiss upon her daughter’s temple. “We’ll fix it while we take care of your brother,” she assured her daughter.

  Stephen snorted. “I don’t need you to take care of me.”

  “Sure you do,” she quipped back
and followed him inside. J.D. didn’t hesitate but walked past a fading Apartment for Rent sign and up the two steps to the front porch.

  “Gosh, Mom, just get off my case, okay?” He rolled his one good eye, and with as much attitude as he could manage, he dashed up the stairs. An instant later a door on the second floor slammed, and within seconds the sound of angry guitar chords filtered down the stairway.

  Tiffany hesitated as if she wanted to chase after him, but finally shook her head. “I’ll just be a minute,” she said to J.D., and he noticed the worry in her amber eyes, as if some of the fight had left her.

  His heart twisted stupidly. “You need some help?”

  She looked at him straight on, those intense gold eyes holding his for a second. He saw the beat of her pulse at the base of her throat, and some of his suspicion melted. Maybe she was just an overworked single parent. “Thanks, but I can manage,” she said coolly as she carried Christina to the little bathroom tucked beneath the stairs. “I have the extra key. If you just give me a minute, I’ll get it for you. It’s in my purse, in the kitchen. Why don’t you wait for me there—have some iced tea or…whatever in the refrigerator.”

  “Fair enough.” The scent of her perfume teased his nostrils as she closed the door behind her, and his groin tightened at a sharp, poignant and oh-so-sensual memory. Don’t go there, Santini. Silently he called himself a blind fool, then strode to the kitchen. He nearly banged his head on one of the pots suspended over the cooking island and resisted temptation upon spying a plate of home-baked cookies that rested on the edge of the counter.

  Christina let out a yelp. “Stop it, Mommy!” she cried, then he heard Tiffany’s voice, hushed and soothing, though he couldn’t make out the words.

  Gritting his teeth, he opened the refrigerator, found a couple of bottles of beer tucked inside the door and pulled one of them out. What the hell was going on here? One kid was banged up and the other beaten to a pulp before being escorted home by the police. Despite all her intentions, good or not, Tiffany seemed to be sliding in the motherhood department.

  He twisted off the cap and tossed it into the wastebasket under the sink.

  “Owww, Mommy, that hurts!” Christina was admonishing, her voice trembling.