Out of the Ashes

OUT OF THE ASHES

A Shelby Belgarden Mystery

Valerie Sherrard

Copyright © Valerie Sherrard 2002

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or
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Copy Editor: Andrea Pruss
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Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data

Sherrard, Valerie

Out of the ashes

ISBN 1-55002-382-9

I. Title.

PS8587.H3867O98 2002   C813'.6   C2002-901071-3   PZ7.S54588Ou 2002

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This book is dedicated with love, admiration, and
pride to my daughter, Pamela Sarah.

“For the last time, I'm not interested!” I guess I sounded pretty rude, but I just couldn't help it. It must have been, as my mom would say, the umpteenth dozen time I'd told Betts that I just plain didn't care how often Greg told his friends he thought I was special.

After all, Greg wasn't my type. He would never be my type. This is not to say I knew for sure what my type was at that point in my life, but I was one hundred percent certain he wasn't it.

We were walking home from class, and Betts was making yet another attempt to help me see that Greg was the Man of My Dreams. This is one of her favourite expressions this year, and I can tell you it was starting to wear on my nerves. Betts herself proclaimed that she'd found the Man of Her Dreams at least four times a week, and each time it was a new fellow. If that wasn't
bad enough, she'd decided she was best qualified to pick out the Man of My Dreams for me. Even that might not have been so bad if she'd picked someone other than Greg. He'd been nothing but a source of humiliation to me almost from the first time I'd met him.

I guess I'm making Betts sound pretty boy crazy. Well, she does tend to be that way. But Betts has been my best friend since the fourth grade, and she's got oodles of other good qualities. I do my best to overlook her crazy notions because I think she invents all this romance in order to spice things up here in Little River.

I have to admit, this isn't the most exciting place to live. It's the kind of town where nothing much ever seems to happen, and sometimes you get the impression that the whole place is half asleep. The inhabitants, all five thousand of them, go about their business in a sort of mechanical way, as if they're characters in a movie where the same scenes are played over and over.

Not that it isn't a nice place. It is. My mom says it's the kind of town that picture postcards are made of, with a lot of big old homes that were built around the turn of the century. The streets are wide and clean, except for in the autumn, when the leaves float down from all the trees. We have so many trees that in the fall the whole place takes on the mottled colours of a yellow-orange cat. Then the residents come out with garbage bags that look like
pumpkins, and before you know it there are grinning orange faces everywhere.

Our only sources of entertainment are the bowling alley and a movie theatre where, unlike big theatres, there's only one show playing at a time. With so little to do, the kids in town mostly hang out at each other's places or spend time at the soda shop.

There's a river running along the outskirts of the north side of town, and it's just about as lazy as the town itself. Most of the time there's hardly a ripple on the water, which is probably why canoes are the most popular of the boats that you see drifting along during the summer. Betts likes to talk about how romantic canoes are too!

Anyway, this whole story really started about four months ago. It seems only fair to go back to the beginning.

The funny thing about the beginning of a story is that it can be pretty hard to find. It might have been the first day of school in September, when I vaguely noticed a new guy in the cafeteria at school. In a small town like Little River, that's news. But in all honesty, I hadn't paid much attention to Greg Taylor at the time.

I can tell you though, if I'd known what kind of mess lay ahead, I would have taken greater notice.

He was a grade ahead of me, so he wasn't in any of my classes, which turned out to be a blessing. The way
events shaped themselves over the school year, I'd have hated having to sit next to him in a classroom. It was hard enough avoiding him in the hallway when things started getting weird.

I'd been really excited about school this year. It was my first year in the high school, which was a big deal in itself. Also, I'd gotten my braces off during the summer and had finally, as Mom said, blossomed a little. I'd been waiting for both of those events for years!

I'm no Marilyn Monroe, don't get me wrong. But at least there are a few curves on the landscape now, which took their good old time in arriving.

I figured that with these new developments, this would be the best year I'd had so far. I'd been sweet on Nick Jarvis for a couple of years and thought maybe he'd finally notice that I existed. Actually, he already knew, but not in a good way, thanks to Betts. I'd made the mistake of confiding in her, and the next thing I knew, every time he passed me in the halls his friends would nudge him with their elbows, and he'd roll his eyes and pull a few faces.

I'd burn with shame when that happened, but I couldn't really blame him. After all, Nick is a jock, and a darned good looking one at that. He can pretty much take his pick of the girls, and that's what he's done. It always encouraged me to see that he never stuck with any one girl in particular but dated loads of them. In my
heart I knew that when the Breast Fairy, as Betts puts it, finally visited me, he was going to realize that he'd been waiting for me all along.

Then the romance of the century would be ignited, and the rest would be history, a story that ended with “Happily Ever After.” At least, that's what kept me going and helped me get past all the jeers from Nick and his friends in the junior high years.

So there we all were at the start of tenth grade, and there I was, Shelby Belgarden, who had never had one single date, ever. I was ready. Romance was sure to come calling, and I was going to be right there to let it in.

My mom gave me lots and lots of the parent talk thing, those long lectures on nice girls and not chasing boys and so on. Some of what she said made pretty good sense, and the rest was, I figured, part of her job as a mother. Sometimes Dad joined in the conversations, but in an embarrassed way that made it hard not to giggle right in front of him.

One of the things that really sunk in from all those “mother-daughter talks” was that if you let a boy know you like him, it might just scare him away. I'd seen the proof of that in action when Betts got the word out that I was into Nick. It had taken some doing to persuade her that I'd lost interest in him, but I'd managed it. Now, I figured that if I just played it cool, he'd come around.

I clearly remember Betts and me sitting in the cafeteria that first day of school. She noticed Greg right away. Betts notices everything!

“Who's that?” she whispered, pointing across the room at him.

I grabbed her hand and hauled it back down onto the table. Looking in the direction she'd indicated, I saw that she was pointing to the new guy. There was nothing particularly remarkable about him. He had dark hair and appeared to be of average height.

“Beats me,” I said, noticing that Nick had just walked into the cafeteria and was sitting down beside Jane Goodfellow. She was tossing her head back and laughing in what I couldn't help but see was a pretty phony way. Jane is nothing if not phony, so this came as no surprise.

“He must be the son of that weird guy who moved into the old Carter house,” Betts was speculating. “The only other new people in town are the couple who bought the drugstore from Jake's dad, and they're too young to have a kid in high school.”

“Who?” I asked, distracted by the sight of Nick leaning over close to Jane. His smile was all over her, and it made my stomach hurt.

“The guy. The new guy.” Betts' voice was exasperated. “Where's your brain gone off to anyway? What else were we talking about?”

“Oh, yeah, I guess so.” I vaguely resurrected what she'd just said. “What makes you say his dad is weird?”

“Everyone knows about that,” she half groaned. “How is it that you never hear anything that's happening in town?”

“I dunno. I guess I have better things to do than listening to gossip.”