Home on Apple Blossom Road (Life in Icicle Falls) (10 page)

And then she heard it, a thrashing in the underbrush, and Colin calling her name.

“I’m here!” she cried.

He burst onto the scene like some sort of superhero. A superhero who was at least six inches shorter than Adrian. And there was only one of him.

He seemed oblivious to all that. “Let her go.”

“Who’s gonna make me?” Adrian retorted, tightening his hold on Mia.

His two friends advanced on Colin. Oh, they were both in trouble now. Mia’s tears came in a torrent. Sure enough, the two boys began pummeling him. She struggled to get free of Adrian so she could help Colin. He was fighting back but not successfully. She cried out and struggled even harder as he doubled over from a punch to the stomach.

Now there was more noise in the bushes. “Col!” somebody called. “Did you find her?”

“Let’s get out of here,” Adrian said to his friends. Then to Mia. “You tell anybody about this and you’re dead. So’s he.”

He ran off, melting into the darkness along with his pals, leaving Mia sobbing on the bench, hurrying to pull her pants back up and adjust her torn top.

Colin staggered over and put his arms around her. “Are you all right?”

She nodded and wiped her runny nose. “You saved me.” She couldn’t even say those three simple words without crying again.

“Saved you? I got the crap beaten out of me.”

“If you hadn’t come...” She couldn’t finish the sentence. All she could do was hang on to him and cry.

“I’m here now,” he said, and she felt the feather touch of his lips on her hair.

Now Bill Will, Neal and David arrived on the scene. “Are you guys okay?” Neal asked.

Mia clutched at her torn top and buried her face in Colin’s shoulder. She wanted to curl into a ball and roll away, become invisible.

“Yeah,” Colin said. “But when I find Adrian Malk, I’m gonna kill him.”

“We need to go to the cops,” David said.

“No!” No way was Mia going to tell anyone what had happened to her.

“Mia, you can’t let him get away with this,” Colin said sternly.

She shook her head violently.

“Okay, then. We’ll tell Aunt Beth. She’ll know what to do.”

She especially didn’t want to tell Aunt Beth. The idea of telling her was even more humiliating than telling the police.

“Colin’s right. You can’t let him get away with that shit,” said Neal. “He’ll turn around and do it to someone else. And she might not be so lucky.”

“Come on.” Colin stood and held out his hand to her. “I’ll take you home.”

She tried to stand, but her legs were rubbery.

He put an arm around her and helped her up. “Come on, Mia. It’s okay. I’m with you.”

“We’ll go, too,” said Bill Will. “In case those guys come back.”

Colin nodded, and they left the river, taking a path that would skirt the party scene and save Mia any embarrassment. “Don’t be telling anybody about this,” Colin warned them.

“What kind of shits do you think we are?” David demanded. “Don’t worry, Mia. We won’t tell anyone.”

But Colin did tell Aunt Beth, who told Grandma Justine, who called the police. Adrian Malk was taken away and logged into a juvenile detention center, and Mia lived in terror that he and his henchmen would somehow escape and kill both her and Colin. But his crime wasn’t treated lightly. He was soon bound over to Superior Court and tried as an adult for what he’d done. Having to recount everything that had happened to the prosecutor was mortifying and brought back the whole experience. The court appearances were scary and humiliating, but she got through them. Then it was all over and, as quickly as he’d crashed into their lives, Adrian Malk was gone, sent to prison. He was the last foster kid Grandma Justine ever took in.

And almost the last man Mia wasted time on.

* * *

“What else does it say?” Colin prompted.

Mia shook off the awful memories and gave their clue her full attention.

“‘Look and you’ll see where you need to go on the other side,’” she read.

“Seriously? And where at the river?”

“Let’s start with the park,” she suggested, and reminded herself that the river held more good memories than bad. She had enjoyed plenty of picnics down there with the Wrights. Colin’s grandpa had taken her and Colin fishing on this river, and they’d spent plenty of time fishing on their own, too. They’d skipped rocks and when the water was low, jumped from boulder to boulder, crossing to the other side to explore winding hiking trails.

Once at the riverbank, Colin didn’t turn toward the area where all the kids had partied. Instead, he went farther downstream to where they used to go fishing. The sun was doing its magic act on the water, making it sparkle as if it was covered with fairy dust.

He sat down on the bank and took in the view of evergreens and ferns and wildflowers crowding the opposite bank. “I remember fishing here with Gramps.”

“We had a great childhood,” Mia said, sitting down next to him.

“Yeah, we did,” he agreed.

She looked at their latest clue again.

“I wish Gram would just get to it,” he said, sounding disgusted.

“Maybe she wants us to think about our lives.”

“I don’t want to think about my life,” he muttered.

There were parts she didn’t want to remember, either, but these clues made it impossible to ignore the past. At least for her. “So, how many people have you wasted time on since...” Here she stumbled. When he tallied the numbers, did he include her? “Since I saw you last,” she amended.

“I don’t know.”

“Liar.”

“Everybody wastes time on the wrong person at some point. Look at my dad. He’s proof of that.”

“Thanks for not using me as an example,” she said, and gave him a shoulder bump.

He picked up a rock and threw it in the river.

She sat for a moment, watching him. Then she couldn’t resist asking, “Do you think you’ve got this relationship thing figured out?”

His only answer was a shrug. If all he could do was shrug, maybe he still wasn’t with the right person. And if Lorelei wasn’t the right person...
Oh, no. You’re going someplace you shouldn’t go
. But she kind of wanted to go there, anyway.

Why was it so hard to sort out your love life? The river had no answer.

But as she stared across it, she saw the answer to this latest riddle. “That’s it!”

December 26, 2002

Dear Emmaline,

Thank you for the lovely lavender soap. I will enjoy that so much! I was glad to hear that the gingerbread house we had shipped to you made it in one piece. Cass Wilkes is such a lovely young woman and I enjoy giving her business whenever I can. Of course, that’s no sacrifice, considering how much we all enjoy her gingerbread creations. She now ships those houses all over the world! I ordered her largest one this year, but it still didn’t last long, not with Colin and Mia nibbling away at it like mice. My Christmas cookies disappeared in a blink, too. Dylan devours the spritz, and Mark loves the gumdrop cookies. As for Colin, he never met a cookie he didn’t like.

Bethie and Mia are out today enjoying the after-Christmas sales in town, but I decided I’d rather stay home and relax with the new Vanessa Valentine novel Colin gave me, which I’m going to do as soon as I finish this letter. Christmas wore me out.

In fact, this year has worn me out. Between the horrible experience with our last foster child and our disappointing harvest, I’m ready to wipe the slate clean and start new. And to write a little less on that slate! Honestly, Emmaline, for the first time in my life, I’m actually starting to feel the years. I look in the mirror and see the gray hair and wrinkles and ask myself, who is that old woman?

Of course, by today’s standards seventy-two isn’t that old, and my friend Sarah White—you remember Sarah; she owns the Sleeping Lady Salon—keeps trying to talk me into coloring my hair. Maybe I will.

Well, dear, that’s all for now. I hope you and Joey have a happy New Year.

Love,

Justine

Chapter Eight

C
olin looked across the river, where Mia was pointing, and all he saw was a riverbank packed with trees. What was she seeing that he wasn’t? “What is it?”

“Don’t you remember?”

“Remember what?”

She shook her head. “The trail to the Indian petroglyphs. Part of it runs alongside the river. Remember Uncle Mark taking us up there and how cool we thought they were and how we tried to draw them on rocks around the orchard? I’ll bet Grandma Justine sent him there with our next clue.”

So far they’d found clues hanging from trees and inside hamburger buns. Why not in the crevice of those boulders with the petroglyphs? “You might be right,” he said and started down the bank.

“We could drive down the highway to the bridge, come at them that way,” she suggested.

“Where’s the fun in that? Anyway, it’ll take an extra twenty minutes. Look how low that spot in the river is. We can get across it in under five.”

“Okay,” she said, and kicked off her sandals.

Colin led the way, jumping from rock to rock. This was like being a kid again. So fun, so freeing, so...slippery. One minute he was flying along like a mountain goat, the next he was knee-deep in the river. And his shoe was floating off down the river. And Mia was doubled over laughing.

“Very funny,” he said, and waded off to get it, slipping on river rocks as he went. The shoe raced on ahead like a small canoe shooting rapids. He finally plunged in after it and caught the thing. Of course, now he was completely drenched. Oh, yeah, he was having fun now.

They made it to the other side, her perfectly dry, him dripping wet with his jeans stiff and his pride bruised. “If you say we should’ve driven over the bridge, I’m gonna throw you in the water,” he warned.

“I wouldn’t dream of it,” she said, and managed to keep a straight face for all of two seconds before she started giggling.

Then he had to smile. She laughed. He did, too. “I think I’ve lost my edge,” he said, and sat down to put on his runaway shoe.

“You’re going to squish all the way up the trail,” she said, giggling again.

He did.

It took them about forty minutes to get to the rock outcropping where the petroglyphs were. It was a narrow trail, a shelf high above the river. A sign warned hikers to watch their step in case they fell into the river and got swept away.

“There they are,” Mia said.

Walking up to their long-ago discovery, Colin could remember how seeing that primitive artwork had stirred a hardly recognizable yearning deep in his young-boy soul to create something equally lasting, to make his own mark on the world. So far he hadn’t made any mark at all. “I’m always surprised that these are still here,” Mia said.

He nodded agreement. How many hundreds of years had passed since someone made these stick-figure selfies?

“I think I see an envelope,” she said, peering into a tiny crevice.

He could see it, too, encased in a zippered plastic food storage bag and wedged in there. He reached in and pulled it out, disturbing a small lizard in the process.

The thing darted out, and Mia gave a yelp and jumped, nearly losing her footing.

Colin caught her and pulled her to him, leaning back against the rock to secure their balance. Mia in his arms again. It felt so right. So did the way she was looking up at him. Oh, man. Did temptation get any more appealing than this? Every nerve in his body was suddenly on high alert, and his blood was flowing south.

His cell phone rang. It wasn’t hard to guess who was calling.

“You’d better answer that,” Mia said, stepping away.

Yeah, he’d better. He’d better get his head on straight, too. He and Mia were history.

“How about a lunch break?” Lorelei said.

“Don’t tell me—she wants to meet you for lunch.”

Was Mia psychic? “How’d you know that?”

“It’s got to be past noon by now.”

“You go ahead and eat,” he told Lorelei. “I’ll catch up with you when I can.”

“I can wait,” she said.

At the rate they were going, she’d starve. “You could be waiting a long time. We’re in the middle of something.” They sure had been. He felt a guilty flush creep up his neck.

“We?” There was a whole sentence of ragging on him packed into that one word.

“Me and Mia. It’s going to take a while to get back.”

“Where are you? This town isn’t that big.”

“We’re not in town. We’re in the woods.”

“In the woods.” Lorelei would have made a great lawyer. She was really good at repeating innocuous testimony and twisting it to sound suspicious.
In the woods? A likely story. And what, pray tell, Mr. Wright, were you doing in the woods?

“For crying out loud, Lorelei, give me a break. It’s where one of our clues was.”
I never pulled the trigger, Judge. I’m innocent.

“This is all pretty dumb if you ask me,” Lorelei grumbled.

Nobody had. Fortunately, he stopped the words before they escaped his big mouth.

“If you don’t want to meet me for lunch, just say so,” she huffed.

Actually, he didn’t, not when he was busy trying to solve a very important puzzle.

That’s all? Look a little deeper
, said his conscience.

“I do,” he insisted to both her and his pesky conscience. “It’s just that I don’t know how long I’m gonna be.”

That was true. Man, all this wandering around town with Mia was making him crazy. They had to hurry up and finish their treasure hunt.

But part of him didn’t want it to end. The stupid part.
Don’t screw up
, he warned himself.
Don’t try to haul the past into the present
.

Yeah, right. It was impossible not to with all the places Gram was sending them.

“I guess I’ll do some more shopping,” Lorelei said. “Call me when you’re back in town.”

“Okay,” he said, resigned.

“You guys seem to fight a lot,” Mia observed as he ended the call.

“No, we don’t. Not usually. She’s having a hard time with this. So am I.” Okay, why had he said that?

“How?”

“It’s just weird, is all, you and me hanging out together again. And... Never mind. Read the clue,” he finished and shoved the envelope at her.

She took it from the plastic and read, “‘Run, run, as fast as you can. To the place you can buy a gingerbread man.’”

“Well, that one’s easy. Let’s stop by Gingerbread Haus on our way to the restaurant.”

Mia raised an eyebrow. “Oh. Am I invited?”

“We’re in this together,” he said, and started back down the trail, wondering if Lorelei would have read some hidden meaning in that remark.

They made it across the river without either of them falling in and drove to Gingerbread Haus to see if Cass Wilkes had a pink envelope kicking around.

“As a matter of fact, I do,” she said when they came in. “I’ve been waiting for you two to show up.” She took in Colin’s wet clothes. “You guys having fun with this treasure hunt?”

So far he’d been stung by wasps, fallen from a tree, soaked himself in the river, had some uncomfortable moments with his libido, and some equally uncomfortable moments with his girlfriend and his conscience.
Define fun
.

“We are,” Mia answered for both of them.

“Justine sure enjoyed putting it together for you. I’m surprised your dad went along with it, though,” Cass said to Colin.

“I don’t think he was happy about it.”

“He can be a stick in the mud sometimes,” Cass said, “but someday someone’s going to come along and unstick him.”

Colin doubted that. And he didn’t really want to stand around discussing his dad’s love life. “Uh, how about that clue?”

“Sure. It’ll take me a minute to put it together.”

Colin and Mia exchanged glances. “Put it together?”

“What do you suppose she meant by that?” Colin asked as Cass disappeared into the kitchen area.

“I have no idea,” Mia said. She drifted along the display case, eyeing the various offerings.

“I must’ve bought a hundred gingerbread boys in here,” Colin said.

“I always loved those cream-puff swans. I haven’t had one in years,” Mia added with a sigh.

“I’ll get you one.” He reached into his back pocket for his wallet.

“Oh, no. Those things are deadly. I think I already gained a pound just looking at them.”

“You don’t need to worry about that. You look great.”
Should you be saying that to your first love when you have a girlfriend?
scolded his conscience. Probably not, but it wasn’t a lie. She did. “Give us two of the swans,” he told the girl behind the counter.

“No, really, I’d better not.” Mia’s protest was halfhearted.

“You know you want one,” he teased as the girl boxed up two.

He handed over a ten-dollar bill and received change and the box with the cream puffs. He opened it and held one out to Mia.

“Get thee behind me, Satan,” she said, raising a hand and turning her head away.

That didn’t stop him. He brought it up to her mouth. “One bite. Just take one bite.”

She did, getting whipped cream on her upper lip and chin. He watched as she closed her eyes and gave a little groan, and he almost groaned, too.

“Mmm,” she said. “Delicious.”

And how delicious would it be to lick the whipped cream off her lip and then...

Stick with the cream puffs
, he told himself and took a bite. “Oh, man, that is good.” She reached for it and he moved it away from her. “You said you only wanted one bite.”

“I changed my mind.”

She reached for it and he turned, holding it high. “We’re gonna have lunch. You’ll spoil your appetite.”

“Life’s uncertain. Eat dessert first.”

“You’ll gain a pound,” he joked.

“I don’t care,” she said, jumping for it. “Give that to me.”

He held it higher. “Say
please
.”

“Give me that cream puff,” she growled. She was practically climbing up him now. Oh, yeah, this was fun.

She suddenly stopped, as if sensing how very close their bodies were. She frowned and stepped back.

Reality had set in and the fun was over. “Okay. Here you go,” he said and passed the rest to her.

“Thanks,” she murmured, pink cheeked, and took it.

He pulled out the other cream puff and chewed on that, a much wiser choice than nibbling Mia’s lip.

They were just finishing when Cass returned, carrying a large bakery box.

“Oh, yeah,” he said as she handed it to Mia. “She put our clue inside something to eat.”

“Not exactly.” Cass winked. “There
is
something edible in here, but it’s not your clue.”

“Not our clue,” he repeated.

“It’s what you have to do to get your clue,” Cass told him.

Now what sort of posthumous trick was Gram up to?

Mia opened the box and they looked inside. All it held was pieces of gingerbread.

“What’s that?” Colin asked.

“A gingerbread house,” Cass answered.

“It’s pieces of cookie.”

“Everything you need to assemble a house. No frosting, though.”

“Where’s that?” Colin asked.

“Your grandma wants you to make it yourself.”

“Seriously?” he said in frustration. This game of Gram’s was never ending.

“And she wants you to pick out the decorations, too,” Cass went on to say. “It shouldn’t take you more than an hour. When you get done, bring it back and I’ll give you your next clue.”

“Okay,” Colin said to Mia, “let’s get going.”

“What about Lorelei?”

“She’ll be fine.”

“You should call her.”

Probably good advice. He called Lorelei. “We’re out of the woods but we have one more thing to do.”

“What?”

“Just... I’ll tell you later, babe,” he said and pushed End before Lorelei could demand that he explain further. “Okay, we’re fine,” he lied.

“Sure you are.”

“Like Cass said, it shouldn’t take that long to put together a few pieces of cookie.”

“You go have lunch. I’ll do it,” Mia offered.

It was a sincere offer, not something born of one-upsmanship. And decorating gingerbread houses was sure more up her alley than his, but he realized he didn’t want to miss out on this.

“No, I’m in,” he said, and that made him think of Gram.

“In for a penny, in for a pound,” she used to say.

“What does that mean?” he’d asked her once.

“It means if you’re going to do something you may as well jump in and do it with your whole heart,” she’d replied. “I think you kids would say go big or go home,” she’d added with a grin.

Well, he wasn’t going home until he found what Gram had for him, no matter what. He was going for it—but only the treasure, not the woman. He already had a woman.

They stopped by his dad’s house and Mia waited in the car while he changed into dry clothes. Then they went to the grocery store to load up on gumdrops and peppermint discs. “And M&M’s,” Colin said. “You gotta have M&M’s.”

“Okay, that should do it, then.”

“What about frosting? That stuff comes in a can, doesn’t it?”

“Frosting in a can won’t hold everything together. We need to make royal icing.”

“What the heck is royal icing?”

“It’s this frosting you make that pretty much turns to cement once it dries.”

“Cement, that sounds good.”

“It’s not bad. Anyway, it doesn’t have to taste good since we’re not keeping the gingerbread house.”

“Oh. Yeah.” That was kind of disappointing. He’d been looking forward to eating a gingerbread wall lined with M&M’s.

Mia shook her head. “I swear you’ve got the worst sweet tooth. Why aren’t you fat?”

“Clean living.”

By unspoken consent, they went to Aunt Beth’s kitchen to work on their project. They could have gone to Dad’s, but he didn’t have much of a functioning kitchen. Other than making a sandwich or having a bowl of cereal, neither Dad nor Colin had spent much time in there. What was the point when there was always something good getting served up at Gram’s or Aunt Beth’s? Anyway, Colin knew Mia had never felt comfortable in Dad’s house, especially after the fiasco in the orchard.

Aunt Beth and Uncle Mark were nowhere to be seen when they got to the house. “They’re probably out running errands,” Mia said. “It is Saturday, after all.”