A Creed in Stone Creek (7 page)

Maybe they
wouldn’t
plant a garden, he decided.

Zeke, meanwhile, having finished his kibble, curled up on the rug in front of the door with a big canine sigh, rested his muzzle on his forelegs and closed his eyes for a snooze.

Matt eyed the animal fondly. “Thanks,” he said, when he was facing Steven again. “I really wanted a dog.”

“I think I knew that,” Steven teased. “And you’re welcome.”

Matt finished his ravioli and pushed his plate away.

Steven added
milk
to a mental grocery list.

“Can Zeke go to day camp with me?” Matt asked, a few minutes later, when Steven was washing off their plates at the sink.

“No,” Steven answered. “Probably not.”

Matt looked worried. “What will he
do
all day?”

“He can come to the office with me,” Steven heard himself say.

Fatherhood. Maybe, in spite of the ravioli supper, he was getting the hang of it.

V
ELDA RELAYED THE
parole officer’s remarks to Melissa, after saying goodbye and shutting the phone.

“Byron got out this morning,” she said, the cell resting on her lap now, her gaze fixed on something well beyond the windshield of Melissa’s quirky little car. “Just like he was supposed to. He had a ticket back to Stone Creek, and somebody dropped him off at the bus station, right on schedule.”

Parked at a stop sign, Melissa didn’t move until the driver behind her honked impatiently. Then she made a right, pulled up to the curb and stopped the car. “Maybe he decided to get off in Flagstaff or somewhere,” she said. With permission from the authorities, Byron could settle anyplace in the state, after all—except that he would have needed his parole officer’s permission to do that.

Color flared in Velda’s otherwise pale cheeks. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” she snapped, glaring over at Melissa. “If Byron didn’t come back to Stone Creek, I mean? That way, you wouldn’t have to think about him, now would you? You or anybody else in this crappy town!”

Melissa sighed. “Velda, calm down. I’m only trying to help you figure out what’s going on here and find Byron.”

But Velda shoved her door open and practically leaped out of the car. “If you
really
wanted to help,” she accused, “you wouldn’t have pushed so hard for my boy to do time!”

“A girl died,” Melissa said quietly.

The reminder fell on deaf ears, apparently. Maybe it was just too much for Velda to face, the reality that her only child had caused someone’s death.

“Do you know what he did while he was in jail, Melissa?” Velda ranted on, standing on the shady sidewalk and trembling even though it was warm out. “Do you know what Byron Cahill, the horrible criminal,
did
every day, while he was locked up?”

Melissa swallowed, shook her head, braced for some dreadful prison story.

“He helped train dogs from the shelters to be service animals. Search-and-rescue, seeing-eye dogs, dogs to help deaf people, too. He’s a
good boy,
dammit!”

“Velda,” Melissa said, after nodding to acknowledge that Byron Cahill might actually have an admirable side, like just about everybody else on the planet, “let me take you home. Maybe Byron’s there. Maybe he caught a ride with somebody instead of getting on the bus, or something like that.”

But Velda shook her head. A tear slipped down her right cheek. Then she pivoted on the worn heel of one flip-flop and marched off down the sidewalk, probably headed toward the trailer park where she rented a single-wide, but maybe not.

Melissa, feeling as though she’d aged a decade in the last half hour, watched as Velda’s thin frame disappeared into a copse of trees. She hoped Byron would
be at home when his mother arrived but, at that point, nothing would have surprised her.

After checking to make sure the way was clear, Melissa pulled back out onto the road, executed a U-turn, and headed for Ashley’s B&B.

Mentally, she reviewed her original impressions of young Mr. Cahill. He’d been sixteen when he was convicted and sentenced. Against the advice of his duly appointed public defender, but apparently with his mother’s encouragement, Byron had waived a jury trial.

Melissa, in her capacity as prosecutor, and the public defender, a newly minted attorney imported from Flagstaff, had tried to negotiate some kind of deal, but in the end, they couldn’t come to an agreement.

The defense wanted probation, with no jail time, and comprehensive substance-abuse treatment in return for a guilty plea. After all, the argument ran, Byron was very young, and he’d never been in any real trouble before.

Melissa had been in favor of the treatment program, but probation wasn’t enough. Chavonne Rowan had been young, too. And thanks to Byron Cahill’s reckless actions, she wasn’t going to get any older. She would never go to college, have a career, fall in love, get married, have children. Naturally, the girl’s family was devastated.

Not that Byron’s going to jail would bring Chavonne back.

Secretly, Melissa had agonized over the case, but she’d presented a strong, confident face to the public, and even to her own family and close friends. She’d examined her conscience repeatedly, taken her responsibilities to heart, and she had the reputation as a ruthless legal commando to prove it.

Except for those few who knew her through and through—Brad, Olivia, Ashley and one or two close girlfriends—most people probably thought she was a real hard-ass. Even a ballbuster.

And when Melissa allowed herself to think about that, it grieved her.

Sure, she’d wanted an education and a career. She loved the law, complicated as it was, and she loved justice even more. Justice, of course, was an elusive thing, very subjective in some ways, too often more of a concept than a reality, but without the
pursuit
of that ideal, where would humanity be?

She thrust out a sigh. Shifted the car
and
her mood. She’d done the best she could with the Cahill case. And that had to be good enough.

With no reason to hurry home, Melissa decided she might as well stop by the B&B—the octogenarian guests were due in the night before—thereby fulfilling her promise to Ashley. She’d look in on the old folks, make sure they were having a good time. And still breathing, of course.

Five minutes later, she bumped up the driveway next to the spacious two-story Victorian house Ashley had turned into the Mountain View Bed and Breakfast several years before.

Ashley.

Melissa felt a stab, missing her twin sister sorely. Although they were different in many ways, Ashley domestic, Melissa anything but; Ashley blond, with a love of cotton print dresses and gossamer skirts, Melissa dark-haired, fond of tailored suits and slacks—they had always been close.

Hurry home, Ash,
Melissa thought, as she parked and got out of the car.

A shrill wolf whistle from the front yard of the B&B stopped her in her tracks.

She shaded her eyes with one hand, since the sun was still bright, and spotted an elderly gentleman standing just inside the fence, in the shadow of Ashley’s prized lilac bush, wearing white Bermuda shorts, a white polo shirt, white shoes and white knee socks.

“Now that,” the old man said, gazing past Melissa to the roadster, “is
some
car.” He shook his leonine head of snowy hair. “Beautiful. Simply beautiful.”

Melissa smiled. At least he wasn’t a masher. “Thank you,” she said, pausing to look back at the car with undiminished admiration. “I like it, too.”

“You must be Mrs. McKenzie’s sister,” the man said, shifting his focus from the car to Melissa.

Mrs. McKenzie,
of course, was Ashley.

Melissa was still getting used to that—Ashley married, and a mother. Sometimes, it seemed incredible.

“You must be one of the current guests,” she replied, smiling, extending a hand across the picket fence. “Melissa O’Ballivan,” she said.

“I’m John P. Winthrop IV,” the man replied, with a nod and a very wide—and very white—smile. “But you can call me John.”

“How’s it going, John?” Melissa asked, thinking she might be able to wrap up this interview quickly and dash off an honest email to Ashley when she got home, assuring her that the B&B was still standing. “Is there anything you or any of the other guests need?”

He beamed. “Well, we can always use another croquet player,” he said, making a grand gesture toward
the nearby side gate, which led into Ashley’s beautifully kept garden of specially cultivated wildflowers.

A teenage boy from the neighborhood did the watering and mowed the lawn, so the flowers, a profusion of reds and blues and pinks and oranges, looked good, if a little weedy here and there.

“I wouldn’t be an asset to any self-respecting croquet team,” Melissa smiled. She ran two miles every morning, but that was the extent of her athletic efforts. “But I would like to meet your friends.”

John P. Winthrop IV rushed to work the latch and swing the gate open. “You look like you could use an ice-cold glass of lemonade,” he said.

Try a shot of whiskey,
Melissa thought wryly, recalling the Velda debacle. She hoped Byron Cahill
had
been waiting when his mother got home. If he’d taken off for parts unknown, he was in all sorts of trouble.

“Thanks,” she said aloud, bringing herself back to the moment. “Lemonade sounds good.”

Mr. Winthrop closed the gate and sprinted to catch up to Melissa on the flagstone walk. He seemed pretty agile for a man of advancing years.

Maybe it was the croquet playing.

“There is one thing,” he said hastily.

Something in his tone, a sort of mild urgency, made Melissa stop and look up into his kindly and somewhat abashed face.

“We’re a little—different, my friends and I,” Mr. Winthrop said.

“Different?” Melissa asked, while inside her head, a voice warned,
Here we go.

Mr. Winthrop cleared his throat. “Mabel should have told your sister in advance, when we booked the rooms,”
he said. “But we were all counting so on this little getaway and when it turned out we were going to have the whole place to ourselves, well, it all just seemed meant to be—”

Melissa squinted, still several beats behind. “Mabel?”

“Mabel Elliott,” Mr. Winthrop said helpfully. “We’re all retired, living in the same community, and relatively comfortable financially, and we take a lot of these little jaunts. Mabel knows how to use the internet, so she’s in charge of arranging accommodations.”

“I see,” Melissa said, still mystified, and beginning to wish she hadn’t agreed to that glass of lemonade. She could be home in a couple of minutes, taking a cool shower, donning shorts and a tank top and sandals, puttering around in her struggling vegetable garden and generally minding her own business.

Mr. Winthrop took her elbow, in a courtly way. “And with all the foliage surrounding the backyard,” he added, dropping his voice, “there’s really no harm done anyway, now is there?”

He still sounded nervous, though. And Melissa could relate, because she was feeling downright jittery by now. What could possibly be going on?

They rounded the back corner of the house, and Melissa froze, her mouth open.

Five people, three women and two men, all having a grand old time, were playing croquet in the green, well-shaded grass.

And every last one of them was stark naked.

T
HE PICTURE OF
J
ILLIE AND
Z
ACK
, taken on their honeymoon, showed them parachuting in tandem, somewhere
in Mexico, their faces alight with celebration as they mugged for the skydiving photographer jumping with them.

There were lots of photos of the St. Johns, but this one was Matt’s favorite.

“Tell me again about when this picture was taken,” Matt said, snuggling down into his sleeping bag, while Steven perched on the edge of the lower bunk and Zeke made himself comfortable on an improvised dog bed nearby.

Holding the framed photograph in his hands, Steven smiled, taking in those familiar faces. Even now, it seemed impossible that two people with so much life in them could be gone.

“Well,” Steven began, as he had a hundred times before, since he’d become Matt’s legal guardian and then his adoptive father, “we all went to school together, your mom, your dad and me, and right from the first, they were a real pair—”

“Tell me about the wedding,” Matt prompted, with a yawn. It was all part of the pattern—he would fight sleep for a while, then lose the battle. “You were the best man, right?”

“I was the best man,” Steven confirmed huskily.

“And you and my daddy had to wear
penguin suits.
”

Steven chuckled, wondering if the kid was picturing him and Zack dressed up like short, squat birds from the Frozen North.

But, no—he knew what a tuxedo looked like. Matt had seen the wedding pictures a million times—usually, he asked why he wasn’t in them.

The answer—
you weren’t born yet
—never seemed to sink in.

“Yeah,” Steven said belatedly. “We had to wear penguin suits.”

“Mommy had on a pretty white dress, though,” Matt chimed in.

“Yep.”

“And out of all three of you, she was the best-looking.”

“A rose between two thorns,” Steven said, playing the game.

“A petunia in an onion patch,” Matt responded, on cue.

They laughed, the man and the boy. There was a ragged quality to the sound.

“Tell me more about my mommy and daddy,” Matt said.

Steven talked, his heart in his throat much of the time, until the boy finally nodded off. When he was sure Matt was asleep, he left the room, stepping carefully around the dog.

Out in the living room/kitchen area, Steven opened his laptop, booted it up and logged on. He hadn’t checked his email in a few days.

Once he’d weeded out the junk, and the stuff he didn’t feel like dealing with at the moment, he opened a recent message from his stepmother, Kim. It was dated that afternoon.

“Are you there yet?” she’d written. “Let us know when you get settled in Stone Creek, and your dad and I will come for a visit.”

Smiling, Steven tapped out a brief reply. Kim had always treated him with warmth and good humor during
those growing-up summers, never trying to take his mother’s place. “We’re here,” he wrote, “and living the high life in a country-music star’s tour bus. There are bunk beds in Matt’s room, so you and Dad could sleep there.”

The thought of that made his grin widen.

He added a description of Zeke, the sheepdog, recounting the pet-adoption saga, assured Kim that he and Matt were both fine, and signed off with love.

A second message came from Conner. “I’ll be in Stone Creek for the rodeo next month,” it read. “Save me a bed.”

And that was the whole thing.

Steven chuckled. His cousin was definitely a man of few words.

He hit Reply and told Conner he was always welcome and there would be a bed waiting when the time came. Compared to his cousin’s email, Steven’s was downright verbose.