Wild Iris Ridge (Hope's Crossing) (8 page)

“It’s about Crystal.”

Okay, that was unexpected. She loved her sister, but the girl was a
teenager.
They texted and occasionally talked on Skype, but that was about the extent of their relationship.

“Yes. The situation between your sister and Pam is...difficult. Your stepmother’s health is not good. You know that.”

“No. I didn’t know. I’m sorry. Last I heard, her multiple sclerosis was in remission.”

“She’s relapsed,” he said, with a slight note of censure in his voice, as if his second wife could control her medical condition by sheer will. “The last few months have been difficult on all of us. She’s struggling right now and doesn’t have the strength and energy she had even in February. Our stress and worry over Crystal isn’t helping the situation.”

She knew Crystal had been in a few scrapes here and there. For some incomprehensible reason, her half sister seemed to delight in flaunting her misdeeds to Lucy, as if she thought they would earn her points with her.

Whenever she confided something to her, Lucy had done her best to steer Crystal toward a different direction, one that wouldn’t leave her drunk or stoned or stuck with a teen pregnancy like something on an MTV reality show.

“Pam needs peace and quiet right now to recover her strength, and Crystal just can’t seem to understand that, no matter how many times we both explain it to her.”

Crystal probably understood exactly what her parents wanted of her. And like Lucy, she was probably just as determined to do the opposite.

“I’m sorry,” she murmured. “This must be a difficult situation for all of you.”

“Two days ago, she was expelled from school for having marijuana on the school grounds.”

For a defense attorney who made a very good living off the dregs of society, Robert took a very dim view toward such things, as she remembered all too acutely.

“Well, that was stupid of her, wasn’t it? Everybody knows you keep your stash under your mattress.”

He frowned at her. “She claims she was only holding it for someone else. A boy she won’t name.”

“Ah. The old
I swear it’s not mine
defense.”

“Something like that. Criminal charges are pending, as well, though the school trustees and the juvenile court authorities are taking their time, considering, well, my standing in the legal community.”

Given his shark reputation, she could imagine they weren’t keen to charge Robert Drake’s daughter with a crime unless they had an ironclad case against Crystal.

“My point is, this is just the latest in a string of poor decisions on your sister’s part. Sneaking out to go drinking, cutting classes, hanging out with a disreputable crowd.”

Like the sorts of people who paid her private school tuition through their attorney fees? she wondered.

“She’s on a difficult path, and something needs to be done quickly to steer her back onto the straight and narrow.”

“So let me guess. You want me to talk to her. Give her the benefit of my thirty-something years on the planet and explain to her that she’s trying to get attention in all the wrong ways. That I’ve walked in her shoes and know the dangers of that particular path. That keeping her grades up and her nose clean is really the only way she’ll be able to get into a good college, and a good college is the only way she’ll make something of her life. I’ll talk to her but I can’t guarantee it will have any results.”

“I appreciate the offer,” Robert said, with another surreptitious glance at his watch. “Actually, I had something else in mind.”

“Oh?”

He looked around the spacious room. “This is quite a large house. How many bedrooms?”

“Ten,” she answered, suddenly wary.

“Plenty of room, then, for one fifteen-year-old girl.”

She stared at him. “What?”

“It’s really the perfect solution, don’t you agree?”

“Perfect? Perfect for whom?”

She could feel the beginnings of a panic attack fluttering in the wings, trying to get her attention. No. Please no. She couldn’t show that weakness to her father, too, and have him tell her she was as crazy as her mother.

“This would be perfect for everyone. Crystal adores you. You know she does. She’s always talking about that weekend she flew up to Seattle and stayed at your condo with you and about the awards you’ve won and the exciting trips you take. She wants to be just like you someday, you know.”

Her father was
very
good at what he did, weaving suggestion and flattery into an inescapable silken web.

“I care for Crystal, too,” she began.

She had wanted to hate Crystal, once upon a time, for having everything Lucy didn’t. The doting mother, the father who hadn’t walked out on her. A steady home.

Her existence had changed Lucy’s life, and she should have despised her for it, but from the very beginning, Crystal’s dimpled smile and sweet auburn curls had worked their way into her heart.

“That doesn’t mean she should come stay in Hope’s Crossing with me,” she said.

“What do you want me to do, Lucy? She can’t stay in our home. It’s too much for us right now. Pam needs to focus on regaining her health, and she certainly can’t do that when she’s stressing every moment over another wild mistake your sister makes. This is a critical time in your sister’s life. Surely you, of all people, understand that.”

Her face burned and she felt as if her father were throwing every one of her past mistakes in her face. Yes, she had been a troubled teenager. Who could blame her, for heaven’s sake? Betsy had been a mess, unstable even before Robert walked out on them to find his true love with his second wife, and completely out of control afterward. Robert seemed to have no problem leaving his child with a mentally unstable alcoholic so he could build a new life. How could she
not
resent that?

She had engaged in all sorts of risky behavior in a pointless effort to get her father to notice her.

After her mother’s death, Lucy had gone overboard on the rebellion. Drinking hard, partying with the wrong people. She had even run away a time or two. She had made life horribly difficult for Pam, so resentful of this young woman her father had chosen and their efforts to start a new family when he couldn’t be bothered with the one he had.

Remembering her past sins, that wild-child past, mostly left her feeling embarrassed—and deeply grateful that somehow sheer luck had kept her from ending up dead or in jail.

“Crystal has been expelled because of the pending charges,” Robert said. “With only another month left in the school year, we decided it wouldn’t make sense to start her in a new private school. We’re giving her through the summer to try to shape up on her own. If she doesn’t, military school may be the only option left to us.”

She tried to imagine her creative, artistic, dramatic sister in military school and couldn’t make the picture fit. It would crush her. Why couldn’t Robert see that?

She supposed she shouldn’t be surprised. Apparently he couldn’t be bothered to truly look at either of his daughters.

“And you think
I
can be some kind of substitute for military school?”

He shrugged. “Why not? You can put her to work here. She can help you with this place. By the looks of it, you have plenty to do around here. A little elbow grease will be good for her. You’ll see. You two will have a great time together.”

And once more, Robert could wash his hands of a particular problem and feel as if he had done his duty. Just as he had done when he left Lucy with Annabelle, he wanted to drop Crystal off to become someone else’s problem.

Instead of a kindly old aunt, he was dropping Crystal off with her not-nearly-as-kindly older sister.

That panic attack fluttered a little harder. “Dad—”

“I know it’s a great deal to ask of you.”

No kidding. Apparently she had managed to achieve some tiny measure of maturity over the years because she somehow managed to refrain, barely, from rolling her eyes.

“I will, of course, be happy to cover the cost of her food and lodging while she’s staying with you,” Robert went on.

“I haven’t agreed to let her stay with me,” she said, still somehow offended that Robert didn’t think she had the wherewithal to cover her sister’s care. Okay, she might have just been fired but for the past three years, her salary, including her stock options, had probably exceeded his.

“How could you possibly refuse?” he said. “This is really the best outcome for everyone involved.”

She could see how it was certainly the ideal solution for her father—which was always his first and last priority.

As for Lucy, she did
not
need another complication in an already-tangled life. She was scraping bottom, at a personal low point. What could she possibly have to offer a troubled fifteen-year-old girl right now?

She gazed around the parlor with its ornate moldings and the Tiffany chandelier that had been imported from Paris, so familiar and beloved to her now—in contrast to the first few weeks after she had been sent here to live with Annabelle.

She had hated it here, had felt as if she were being exiled to the deepest, darkest wilderness.

Iris House had been a convenient dumping ground then, too. One of her mother’s frequent halfhearted suicide attempts had actually worked a few months earlier—probably by accident, Lucy always suspected. She expected no one was more surprised than Betsy that that particular pill combination had worked so effectively. Robert was busy with Pam and their efforts to conceive and didn’t have time or energy for her petty rebellions.

Annabelle had opened her home and her heart to Lucy. With astonishing patience and endless compassion, she had taken a wounded, angry teenager and turned her into a fairly tolerable young woman.

If not for her aunt, she didn’t know where she would have ended up. Probably on the streets somewhere. She probably wouldn’t have gone on to graduate with top marks from Hope’s Crossing High School and summa cum laude from college.

Lucy knew her strengths. She wasn’t Annabelle, not by a long stretch. She had none of her aunt’s patience or quiet faith.

In Lucy’s favor, she
did
love her sister. If she could help Crystal straighten her path a little and perhaps avoid some of her own painful mistakes, didn’t she owe it to the girl to try?

“Did you talk to her?” she asked, wavering. “Does she want to come to Hope’s Crossing?”

“This isn’t about what she wants anymore,” Robert said in that same unbending voice she remembered loathing so much as a teenager. “For the last year she has made choice after choice that has led her to this point. Now she will have to understand this is her
last
choice. It’s you or military school.”

She sighed. She couldn’t consign her sister to that, not if she had any chance of helping her. “Two weeks. She can stay for two weeks. At the end of that time, we can reassess the situation. Maybe a few weeks without the stress will be enough to give Pam the rest she needs to rediscover her coping skills.”

“Excellent.”

Robert didn’t try to argue with her. Maybe a two-week reprieve had been his goal all along. “You won’t be sorry.”

She was
already
sorry. With each passing second, she wanted to tell her father she had changed her mind, but fickleness was another sign of weakness she wouldn’t reveal to him.

“I can have her here tomorrow.” He rose from the sofa. “I have meetings all day but I’ll arrange for someone to bring her out—unless you’re going into Denver for some reason and can save me the trouble.”

He couldn’t even be bothered to dump off his own child? She supposed she should be grateful he made the effort to drive out to speak with her about it today, instead of asking this huge favor via his Bluetooth.

She rose, as well, not willing to let him own that position of power. “I’m sure you can clear your schedule for a few hours so you can bring her out yourself.”

A muscle tightened in his jaw at her unstated rebuke. He looked as if he wanted to argue, and she made a little mental wager with herself at what excuse he would use.
I’m a busy man. My time is valuable. I’m doing the best I can.

Instead, he managed to surprise her. “Perhaps I can rearrange some things.”

“Good. I’m sure that would mean a great deal to Crystal.”

“I doubt that. I’m not exactly on her list of favorite people right now.”

He seemed completely baffled by the admission, as if he didn’t understand how either of his daughters could be so difficult and contrary as to actually mind years of his distance and disapproval.

“It’s a ninety-minute drive from Denver. Perhaps you can find a little common ground on the way,” she said, though she doubted it. Robert would probably spend the whole time on his phone.

She walked him out and said goodbye with a dutiful kiss on the cheek.

“Don’t waste too much time away from your career here,” he warned when they reached his Mercedes. “You start to lose credibility if you spend too long out of the game.”

“Thank you for the advice,” she said.

“Oh, and put Crystal to work mowing the lawn. It needs a trim.”

He waved and backed out of the driveway. She watched until his taillights disappeared around the corner, wondering what in the world she had just done.

CHAPTER SEVEN

S
TUPID
,
LOUSY
LAWN
MOWER
.

With a vow to work out her triceps a little more diligently in the future, Lucy pulled the ignition cord on Annabelle’s mower. The dumb thing chugged a couple of times, but that was it.

“Come on,” she growled, trying again with the same results.

Next order of business, she was definitely going to hire a lawn service.

She had started out with such high expectations, too. That was the greatest frustration.

Forty minutes ago when she had pulled the mower out of the garage, it had started on the first try. She had been filled with a ridiculous sense of accomplishment—which had quickly faded when the mower coughed and sputtered and eventually died after only two passes along the front yard.

For the past half hour, she had been wrestling with the thing, trying to start it up again with no success.

She was apparently going to have to hire a lawn service sooner, rather than later. Worse, she would have to leave the lawn half-mowed and looking horrible when her father and sister arrived the next day.

It was her own fault for letting Robert’s gibes pinch at her. Yes, the lawn needed a trim but it could have waited. Now, because of one offhand comment he made, she was stuck with this mess of her own creation.

And yes, thank you. She fully understood the symbolism in regards to the rest of her life.

One more time. She would try the stupid mower one last time before throwing in the towel and hunting through the phone book to find someone to take care of it for her, which was probably what she should have done in the first place.

The one pull turned into two then five then ten, all with the same results. The only things she got out of it were aching muscles and a new appreciation for lawn mowers that had push-button starters.

She slumped in the grass, disheartened and tired, trying to figure out what to do next. Maybe she could borrow a mower from the neighbors to mow the front yard or hire a small engine repair technician to make an evening house call.

She was mulling her options when an SUV pulled into the driveway.

Brendan.

As if her father’s visit and unexpected request wasn’t enough, her wonderful day just needed this, another interaction with the surly and difficult fire chief of Hope’s Crossing.

“Having trouble?”

No. She and her lawn mower were simply sitting out on the grass together, enjoying the lovely evening.

“I can’t get the stupid thing to start.”

“Yeah, that’s sort of what I figured when I saw you sitting here.” He sauntered over with the typical male confidence that he could rev up anything with an engine. “You check the gas?”

She frowned. “Yes, I checked the gas. It might be a few years since I’ve mowed a lawn but I do know enough to check the gas level. It was low but I filled it out of a can clearly marked
lawn mower gas.
I figured that was a safe bet.”

He nodded and crouched down beside the mower, fiddling with a couple of things she didn’t even know
could
be fiddled with as one of the back doors of his SUV opened. A moment later, Faith slid out and skipped over to them.

“Hey, Aunt Lucy! Guess what? I finished
Anne of Green Gables
today. I loved it
so much.
I’m going to read
Anne of Avonlea
next.”

“It’s a good one.”

“Thank you for bringing over all the books,” she said. “I didn’t even know my mom had all those books. Dad and Carter are starting one of the Hardy Boys books. Dad said he read that one when he was a kid! Didn’t you?”

“I did,” he answered, not looking up from monkeying with the lawn mower.

He got up with that inherent grace so surprising in a man of his size.

“Let’s try it now,” he said.

He grabbed the pull crank, gave it a good hard yank and the mower growled to life.

Seriously? She had just spent thirty minutes trying to start the dumb thing, and he had it purring to life inside of five?

She wanted to growl, too.

“How did you do that?”

“I know this mower well,” he called over the engine. “I’ve been taking care of Annabelle’s lawn for years. It’s a little temperamental and sometimes needs a little persuading, especially in springtime at the start of a new mowing season. You should be good now.”

“Thank you.”

She wasn’t sure how she felt to learn he had been helping Annabelle with her yard care all this time. If she had given it any thought at all, she would have just assumed her aunt would hire somebody to take care of it for her, but as a child of the Depression, Annabelle could be funny about some things.

She had artwork in the house worth tens of thousands of dollars at the same time she clipped every single coupon out of the newspaper and drove a twenty-five-year-old sedan.

It made sense that Brendan would have stepped up to take care of his wife’s elderly aunt. Jessica and Annabelle had been very close, since Jessie and her mother had lived at Iris House for three years longer than Lucy had.

In Hope’s Crossing, people reached out to help each other. Since she had been back, she was beginning to remember that about the town—and when it came to family, that help was only magnified.

She and Faith watched Brendan make one trip to the end of the grass, then turn around and head back in their direction. She waited for him to give her the mower, but he turned around again for another pass, looking as if he had absolutely nothing better to do but mow her lawn on a lovely spring evening.

After a moment, she walked across the new-cut grass and stood beside him, hands on hips.

“Okay,” she yelled over the mower’s noise. “You can stop now. I’ve got this.”

“So do I.”

“Caine. I mean it. Stop.” In another minute, she was going to be stomping her foot like Carter in the middle of a tantrum.

“This will take me fifteen minutes, tops,” he called.

She wanted to argue with him but (a) he was bigger than she was, and (b) she hadn’t wanted to mow the lawn, anyway, and (c) it was a little tough to make a clear point in an argument over a growling lawn mower engine.

Not knowing what else to do, she finally threw her hands up—both literally and figuratively—and headed back to Faith.

“Are you late for something?”

She shook her head. “We were just going to grab some dinner at Grandpop’s place. We can wait.”

“I need to pull some weeds. Want to come talk to me while I do it?”

“Sure,” she answered, looking thrilled. “What about Carter? He’s still in the car.”

“We’ll take care of that.” She headed to Brendan’s SUV and opened the rear passenger door. If he could help himself to her lawn mower, she could help herself to his son.

“Hey, kid.” She grinned at Carter in his booster seat.

“Let me out,” he demanded.

She grinned as she unhooked the complicated straps. “Want to help me dig in the dirt?”

“Yeah!” he exclaimed.

They headed to the flower garden that circled the house and the porch.

“Since you’re going to dinner later, you better not get dirty or your dad will be mad at all of us. Just a second. Wait here.”

She hurried into the house and found a couple of old work shirts of Annabelle’s. In a drawer in the mudroom/washroom cabinet, she retrieved several pairs of gardening gloves she had seen there earlier.

When she returned to the children, Carter was bent with his nose almost to the sidewalk, watching a bug inch its way across the pavement.

“Look. It’s a roly-poly,” he said. “If you pick it up, it rolls into a ball. Watch.”

He picked up the bug with a careful concentration she found adorable and laid it out in the palm of his other hand. The bug lived up to its billing and rolled up, tail to head.

“Isn’t that cool?” he exclaimed.

“Very.” She smiled as she helped him set the bug back in the grass then pulled his arms through the sleeves of Annabelle’s denim work shirt and rolled up the cuffs. The shirt was cavernous on him but did a pretty good job of covering up his clothes from neck to knee.

“Now gloves,” she said, and helped him get his fingers in the right spots.

When she finished helping Carter, she turned to do the same with Faith but found the independent miss had already covered her clothes with one of the work shirts and found some gloves on her own.

“Which are the flowers and which are the weeds?” Faith asked, studying the garden with a frown of concentration.

“That, my dear, is an excellent question.” She pointed to a prevalent plant. “I know for sure that’s a weed, at least when you find it in your flower garden. It’s an elm seedling that sprouts from seeds that blow off the trees.”

“You mean if we left the little thing alone, it would grow into a big tree like that one?” Faith asked.

“Eventually. Let’s start with pulling all the elm seedlings you can see. It’s kind of like a treasure hunt.”

The children both jumped into the spirit of the thing and for the next fifteen minutes she and Faith worked together to the accompaniment of Carter yelling, “There’s one! There’s another one. Hey, I found another one!”

In between, they talked about Carter’s kindergarten teacher—super pretty; about a problem Faith was having with a schoolmate—aka, mean girl in training; and about which park in town had the fastest slide, which Lucy vowed to test at the earliest opportunity.

This was exactly what she needed, she thought. Listening to the children chatter seemed to miraculously lift her worries about the next day and her sister’s arrival. She felt far more centered than she would have from mowing the lawn.

They had made it around the front of the house when she heard the mower shut off. A few moments later—long enough, apparently, for Brendan to return it to the shed behind the garage—he walked around the side of the house, looking big and masculine in the early-evening light.

He caught sight of them kneeling in the dirt together and paused, an odd expression on his features that made her insides do a long, slow shiver.

After a moment, he moved closer, and she rose and pulled off her gardening gloves.

“Lawn’s all done.”

“You didn’t need to do that,” she said.

“It took me all of fifteen minutes. I told you it would. No big deal. It’s not a very big lawn, in case you didn’t notice.”

She suddenly realized she must sound surly and unappreciative, not her intention. “Thank you. It’s been a...rough day. This was an unexpected kindness.”

“You’re welcome. And I’m sorry about your rough day.”

She shrugged. “They happen.”

“Yeah. I’ve had a few of those myself.” He didn’t quite smile but it was a close thing. For a moment, she was overwhelmed by how gorgeous he looked there in the warm golden evening light and she couldn’t help remembering the last time she had seen him, a few nights earlier when he had walked her home and they had talked in the rain-soaked moonlight.

“I’m starving,” Carter said with grand dramatic fervor, as if he were going to expire any moment now from malnutrition.

“I know, I know,” Brendan said, tousling his son’s head. “But what are a few hunger pangs compared to helping our neighbor? Now we can enjoy our dinner even more knowing we’ve done something nice for someone else.”

Maybe it was the general turmoil of the day or her emotions that were already on edge, but the sweetness of the life lesson between father and son there in Annabelle’s spring-wild garden touched a deep chord inside her.

“Hey, Dad. Can Lucy come have dinner with us?” Faith asked suddenly.

“Oh. I don’t...” Lucy started, but Carter cut her off.

“Yay! I want to sit by Lucy!” he exclaimed. “Grandpop is gonna make me my own pizza. I bet you can have one, too. He puts a smiley face on it with the pepperonis!”

She smiled, crazy about this boy who found joy in roly-poly bugs and pepperoni smiley faces.

“That sounds delish. Dinner would be great, but I’m pretty messy here.”

“We can wait for you to wash up,” Faith said eagerly. “Can’t we, Dad?”

He gazed down at his daughter with a helpless sort of expression, the look of a man who didn’t know how to undo a situation his children had just created.

The awkwardness of the situation might have made her laugh a little if his reluctance to spend any time with her didn’t sting so badly.

The polite thing would be to make up some excuse to the children for why she couldn’t eat with them. She was busy. She had an entire garden to weed. She was in the middle of a load of laundry.

She certainly didn’t want to go where she was plainly not wanted.

At the same time, she didn’t
want
to say those things. She loved being with Carter and Faith, and the idea of a solitary dinner was depressing, especially in light of her difficult afternoon.

“We’ll be happy to wait,” Brendan finally said. He even managed to make the lie sound believable to her. “Carter won’t mind a few more minutes, will you, bud?”

Carter looked like he minded very much, but he finally shrugged. “I guess not.”

All three of them looked at her with varying degrees of expectation. Again, she thought of all the excuses she could make. Brendan would prefer if she did, she knew, but she suddenly didn’t want to give him that convenient way out.

She had gone along with the program when it came to her father and what he wanted from her. She wasn’t at all in the mood to give Brendan his way on this, too.

“I can hurry,” she said. “You won’t starve in five minutes, will you?”

Carter did his best to put on a brave face. “I guess not. I hope Grandpop still has pepperonis when we get there.”

“He will,” Brendan assured his son.

“You’re welcome to come in and wash up, as well,” she said. “I did my best to keep them clean.”

“We’ll do that. Thanks,” he answered, as Lucy flew up the stairs and rushed into the house.

A little defiance could be good for the soul sometimes, but she couldn’t help wondering just what she had accomplished by pushing Brendan outside his comfort zone. He was like one of Carter’s bugs. She had a feeling he was only going to curl in tighter to protect himself.