Somewhere Between Luck and Trust (21 page)

Cristy looked up. “Nobody’s going to set me back. Nothing’s going to set me back. Not ever again.”

Georgia nodded. “Thatta girl.”

“There’s tuna fish in the cupboard.”

“I’d like nothing better.”

Georgia kept her arm around Cristy, who told herself not to get used to this, although maybe it was all right to enjoy a little comfort, just this once. Maybe she even
deserved
a little. The thought was new, but almost as welcome as the comfort itself.

Chapter Twenty-Two

ON SUNDAY CRISTY
worked harder and faster than usual, and Lorna, who understood her employee’s desire to plant her newly tilled garden, said she would take care of advance preparations for tomorrow’s breakfast herself so Cristy could leave early. Only one couple were staying over anyway.

Before Cristy left, Lorna presented her with half a dozen sweet pepper plants and half a dozen hot ones, advising her to put them on different ends of the garden so they wouldn’t cross-pollinate. Lorna had purchased bulk packages of several varieties of bean and corn seeds, so she had plenty of those to share, and she also donated four kinds of basil seeds for Cristy to start in pots on a sunny windowsill. Then she took Cristy out to her herb garden and dug up divisions of lemon thyme and regular thyme, marjoram, and a good-size rosemary plant to put in right away.

That morning Zettie had given Cristy envelopes with watermelon and cantaloupe seeds, zucchini, summer and pattypan squash, and three kinds of winter squash seeds. Then she had handed her a small box filled with flower seeds, a few of this, a few of that, not all well marked except for an unopened package of sunflower seeds.

“Just mix ’em up and toss them in a bed. You won’t be sorry you did it that way.”

“How will I know the weeds from the flowers?”

“You invite me for a viewing when they start to sprout, and I can tell you for sure.”

Now Cristy was ready to get to work. She put on her oldest jeans and T-shirt, anchored her hair on top of her head with a rubber band, rubbed sunscreen on her arms and neck and went outside to plant her garden.

An hour later she was surprised by how little she had accomplished. She had paced the rows trying to gauge how much room each variety of vegetable needed. Lorna had told her all she needed to remember was that a seed should be planted three times deeper than its size. Tiny seeds should just be patted into the soil and barely covered.

The problem was that Cristy couldn’t read the packages, or Zettie’s instructions scrawled in pencil across each envelope, to know how far apart to space the plants. And while she was worrying, she also wondered who was going to eat all these beans. She didn’t know of any markets nearby that might want them. And six kinds of squash? Even if only half the seeds survived to bear, the goddesses and their friends couldn’t begin to absorb all the produce.

She was still staring at the rows trying to figure out what to do when she heard a car. She had left the house without the stun gun, but she picked up the shovel at her feet and walked up the hill to see who had arrived.

She heard a door slam, then a dog barking excitedly. She thought of Jackson’s coonhounds and their ability to track almost anything.

Or anyone.

“Cristy?”

The voice was familiar. Relieved, she steadied herself. “I’m in the garden, Sully.”

The dog’s barking drew closer, and in a moment she saw dog and man coming over the hill. Although to be accurate, the dog might actually be a pony.

“Is that thing friendly?” she called.

“Don’t tell the bad guys, but yeah.”

The dog, huge, with a shaggy brown-black mottled coat, came loping toward her, tongue nearly dragging the ground. Its head was large enough to house a good-size brain, but judging from the silly expression on the dog’s face, the space was being used for something else.

She held out her hand, but the dog wanted more. He jumped up, extending front legs against her chest, and she toppled backward to the ground. Then she covered her face as the dog tried to lick her.

“Get this thing off me!”

Sully caught up and grabbed his collar. He gazed down at her and struggled not to smile. “Well, he usually has better manners.”

“Than what, a garbage truck?” Cristy managed to sit up.

“You okay?”

Nothing felt broken. She brushed off her arms. “My, isn’t it nice to see you both?”

Sully gave in and laughed. “Let me help you.” He held out his bare arm, still holding the dog.

She eyed the dog and the arm suspiciously. “If I get up, is he going to knock me down again?”

“You’ll have to ask him, but if you say ‘down’ really loudly, the chances are he’ll listen. Right, Beau?”

“Beau?” She grabbed Sully’s arm and let him help her to her feet. “He answers to Beau? Why not Godzilla, or Kong?”

“Name came with the dog. It’s all I know about him. He showed up on my doorstep one morning a couple of years ago with Beau etched on his collar, but somebody had taken off his tags, if he ever had any. I hated to deprive him of his name when he’d just been deprived of his owners.”

The deputy was a softy. She couldn’t believe it. “Nobody came looking for him?”

He cocked his head, as if he wondered how sensible she was.

Abandoning dogs in the country was a national pastime. She imagined Beau’s original owners hadn’t realized how large their new puppy would turn out to be. Maybe they hadn’t been able to feed him, or maybe they just hadn’t wanted to. But Sully had taken him on, Sully, whose salary from the sheriff’s department would buy enough food for dogs like this one only if Sully himself dined on beans and cornbread a couple of nights a week.

“Come here, you,” she said, holding out her hand again. This time Beau nuzzled it—before he leaped on her. She couldn’t be fooled twice. She had braced herself, and now she pushed him away and shouted, “Down!” He obeyed instantly, then he brushed up against her affectionately, but with all four paws on the ground.

“Well, he sure took to you,” Sully said.

“I guess he’ll do,” she said, rubbing her hand through his fur.

“What are you doing in there?” He nodded to the garden.

She studied Sully’s face and decided she liked what she saw today. He was more relaxed, less worried. The sun was shining for a change, and the air smelled of apple blossoms on somebody’s hillside, maybe Zettie’s.

“Well, we had the plot tilled yesterday and old manure spread, and now I need to plant it, only to be honest, I don’t know how to go about doing it.”

“I gather you haven’t done this before.”

“No, sir, I have not.”

“Did you try reading the seed packets?”

And there it was, her chance to show what an accomplished liar she was. She could say the packets were Greek to a garden novice like her, and she needed help making sense of them, or she was just no good figuring out numbers, or she hadn’t gotten around to reading them yet and maybe he could read them out loud to her while she did the work. Only she didn’t want to lie to this man. How would Sully ever trust a thing she said if she lied to him now?

Not that he had trusted her all that much the afternoon he’d handcuffed her for felony shoplifting.

“About that.” She cleared her throat. “Very few people know this, but I’m going to tell you the truth. I don’t read. I
can’t,
as a matter of fact. I’m what they call dyslexic or learning disabled, and I never learned how, though I hide it pretty well. I’m learning now, though. One of the women here is tutoring me, and I believe I’m really going to be a reader at last. But right now the seed packets are just a jumble of letters.”

He whistled softly, and that made her think about Dawson Nedley and how embarrassed he had made her feel yesterday.

“That must have been tough,” Sully said. “You see letters backward or something like that?”

“No. They just don’t make sense to me. It’s hard to explain. But they don’t have to anymore, because I’m learning rules that help me sound them out. I should have learned that a long time ago, but between hiding the problem and nobody being all that interested in helping, I just never did.”

“I know that doesn’t mean a thing about how smart you are. It just means you learn better in a different way.”

She was glad he knew that. “I’m smart,” she said. “At least I’m beginning to think I am. It takes a certain amount of brains to hide my problem as well as I did.”

“Why did you tell me?”

“I figured if I lied about it, then you might wonder what else I was lying about. And I’ve never been anything but a hundred percent truthful with you.”

Their gazes locked, then he gave a small nod, and a short lock of brown hair bounced against his tanned forehead. “Do you want some help with the garden?”

“It would be a big help if you’d read the instructions for me.”

“I will, but I’ve planted a lot of gardens. Experience is the best teacher.”

“You’re going to help me do the actual work?”

“I’m going to try, but don’t you let me get in your way. If this is your very first garden, you’ll want to have all the say in what happens here. I’ll just be your helper.”

“What do you think Beau would like to help with?”

“He can scare off anything that moves.”

“Then Beau’s got a job, too.”

* * *

More than an hour later they were both mopping their foreheads when they made it to the porch. The whole time she had been with Sully, Cristy hadn’t even considered how dirty and unkempt she was. Gardens could do that to you.

“I’ve got a little garden at my place,” Sully said, flopping down on the glider and wiping his forehead on the hem of his T-shirt.

She tried not to stare at the expanse of tanned, taut midriff. When he was relaxed and wasn’t scowling, the gangly boy she remembered from high school turned into an attractive young man. And apparently she was not immune.

Flustered, she looked away and watched Beau cavorting in the patch of grass in front of the house.

“What do you grow?” she asked.

“Tomatoes, a few beans, some squash. Lots of basil. I like fresh basil in everything. Mine’s not as grand as this one, that’s for sure.”

“I think I’m being silly. What am I going to do with all that stuff when it comes in? I hate seeing anything go to waste. I really wanted to just plant flowers. I thought I could make bouquets and sell them.”

“You still have lots of room.”

He was right and that had surprised Cristy. All those seeds, and she still had two long rows empty, plus Maddie and Edna’s little garden and the larger area where the blackberry bushes had taken root before Dawson disposed of them.

“I don’t have the money to buy a lot of different seeds,” she said. “I’ll make do with what Zettie gave me. I’ll have my hands full as it is.”

“My mother has a flower garden you would love. I’ll see if she has extras.”

She thought Sully was being awfully nice, and she decided it was time to ask why. “I don’t think you drove all the way here so your dog could run around. Why’d you come, Sully?”

He answered quickly, and she thought he had rehearsed this. “I have four dogs, all strays that got left off near my house. Beau’s the biggest. I figure he’ll give anybody who’s prowling around here something to think about.”

“You’re going to leave him?” She couldn’t imagine how she would feed a monster like Beau. “I’m sorry, but I don’t think I can afford him.”

“Look, he’ll cost me the same amount of dog food if I keep him with
me.
I brought a fifty-pound sack today, and I’ll bring more. But I don’t like you being here alone, and I wish I’d thought of it earlier.”

“Why didn’t you?”

He was quiet for so long she didn’t think he was going to answer. Then he turned so he was looking at her. “I like you. I think you got a bad deal back in Berle. It’s taken me a while to figure that out.”

“Are you saying you think Jackson put the ring in my bag the way I’ve said he did?”

He didn’t answer directly. “I still work for Sheriff Carter.”

“In other words you can’t come right out and say that?”

“I can say I like you, and I do. And I’d like to help if I can.”

She thought she heard all the things he wasn’t saying, but she couldn’t be sure. She turned to watch the dog. “You think Beau will stay? He might try to follow you home.”

“Not if his food’s here and you keep him inside for a few nights. We know he likes you. If you treat him like he’s a good thing in your life, he won’t go looking for me.”

She realized she
would
feel safer with Beau in residence. Just having another living thing she could talk to sounded good. She wondered if the goddesses would mind, but she thought probably not. Harmony had brought her dog the first time she came, and Maddie had said she planned to bring hers.

She had another question. “What’ll he do if somebody comes prowling around?”

“I don’t really know,” Sully said. “I just hope his size is intimidating enough to make anybody think twice.”

“Thank you. I think he’s more likely to please me than the stun gun did.”

He laughed. She thought about his words. He liked her. She wondered how many men ever had. She was pretty, curvy in the right places, smart about what she looked good in and what she didn’t. Men had been interested in her from the moment she’d hit adolescence, but how many of them had simply liked her? Sully’s comment had lodged somewhere pleasant inside her, and she enjoyed it a moment.

Then he spoke. “This is none of my business, and I know it. But have you been to see your baby yet?”

The smile disappeared. “No,” she said, because that was the shortest possible answer.

“I could go with you. I would like to, as a matter of fact. I think you’ve been left to do too many things alone.”

She thought about Georgia’s offer, which she had turned down immediately. Even so, Georgia was a woman who had a child of her own. Her offer was in character.

This was different, because it didn’t make sense. After all, Sully had just been doing his job when he’d hauled her off to jail that day. Now for some reason he wanted to help, and so far, he’d done everything he could. He had scared Jackson away, brought her the stun gun, the dog... And suddenly she understood why.

“You really
weren’t
sure I was guilty the day you arrested me, were you? Even then you thought something was wrong. Maybe you knew Jackson too well to think the whole thing was on the up-and-up. Now you feel guilty because you took me to jail anyway. That’s why you’re being so helpful.”

He put his hand on hers, just a light, quick touch before he withdrew it. “Maybe that’s a part of it—I just can’t say. But I already told you the other part.”