Holiday Homecoming (17 page)

In Two Mules she'd had to make time for academic emphasis. Apache Creek was dictating the emphasis. On the table before her was her dream job. But why did it have to happen now, when her work in Two Mules—the work that was supposed to make up for her past—was still unfinished?

Principal Beecher opened a manila folder and withdrew some papers. “We've changed the job description a bit since Mike spoke to you. And we were able to raise the pay so it matches what you make now.”

Almost as if they were bidden, her fingers slid across the table and took the papers. She still wanted to say no—but her justifications were melting away. Yes, she'd be two hours away from Two Mules, but she could live at the Lost Dutchman and save on rent. She'd easily be able to afford gas back and forth to visit often. Once a week, she could manage that. She'd find the time. That had been her mantra since Cindy died. To always make time for someone who needed her.

“Jasmine Taylor ran away just over a month ago,” Principal Beecher said. “Three months into the school semester. It's all the seniors can talk about. I hear from parents almost daily. They're all worried that their sons and daughters might run away, too.”

Elise remembered Jasmine as a seven-year-old brown-haired girl who hated it when her big sister babysat. Elise had been over there a time or two, riding horses in their back field and playing. Jasmine would be sixteen or seventeen now. Close to Garrett's age. She wasn't one of the teens Elise had so diligently mentored in Two Mules...but she was still a girl in trouble. A girl Elise might be able to help. “Any word from her at all?” Elise asked. She tried to settle back in her black, hard plastic chair and looked at the photos and certificates on the wall. A college diploma or two. Photos of winning football teams, debate teams and cheerleaders. She recognized Cooper, bent on one knee, in the front row of the football photo just over the principal's head.

Mike answered, “No, no sightings, no cryptic messages to her parents.”

Mike Hamm touched the screen of his iPad. “Also, David Cagnalia shoplifted at a convenience store near the interstate a month ago. They caught him on the outskirts of town.”

“Sounds like a call for help.” Elise rubbed her temples. She'd been told that David was the other young man in Garrett's truck.

Above the principal's head and slightly to the left was a photo of her and Cooper taken after they'd become the first Apache Creek students to win the Arizona High School Rodeo Team Roping Competition. “You still sending students to the rodeo competition?” Elise asked.

“Not since your little sister graduated and your dad no longer ran the program. There's no one with time and rodeo experience to spearhead an after-school program now.”

Elise's father had started the program when Elise's older sister, Eva, was a freshman, hoping to get her involved and overcome her fear of horses. By the time he realized his ploy wasn't going to work, he had twenty students counting on him. When Elise started her freshman year, Apache Creek High School was making a name for itself in the competition arena. When baby sister Emily entered, parents were filling out vouchers and driving their kids fifty miles to attend a school out of district just so they could be under her father's tutelage. The saddle came easy to Emily but it wasn't her calling. Still, she boasted a few buckles herself.

“The last three years the number of incidents involving teenagers in Apache Creek has increased two hundred percent,” Ethan Fisher said.

“It's an epidemic, kids running away and skipping school, girls getting pregnant before they graduate, and boys,” the principal choked up, “boys making decisions that will go on their record. David is a senior, and he's nineteen.”

It was the catch in the principal's voice, the look in the police chief's eyes and Mike Hamm's hands folded in prayer that spurred Elise to say words she couldn't possibly mean.

No way could she return to Apache Creek to live.

No way.

“I'll know by next week if my job in Two Mules has been eliminated. Are you willing to wait that long?”

“That would be fine,” Principal Beecher said. “We can get busy with the paperwork.” The men talked a bit longer, about pay and hours and benefits.

Elise stared at the photo of her and Cooper on the wall, remembering a past that warred with the present and colored the future.

Copyright © 2015 by Pamela Tracy Osback