Big Sky River

by Linda Lael Miller

  The boys waited, too. Expectantly.

  “If you want to pray, pray,” Boone said.

  “You’re supposed to do it,” Griffin informed him. “Because you’re the grown-up.”

  Boone hesitated, cleared his throat, closed his eyes and improvised. “Thanks, God, for this fine food and for good friends and for letting us be here together.” A pause, followed by a gruff afterthought of an “amen.”

  “Amen,” the kids repeated in unison.

  Boone suppressed a sigh. Back when Corrie was alive, she’d insisted on offering up a simple prayer before every meal, prevailing on Boone to do the honors once in a while, at Thanksgiving or Christmas, say, but most of the time, she’d been the one to say grace. They’d gone to church most Sundays, and she’d had both their children baptized by the time they were six weeks old.

  Since the day Corrie had died, though, Boone doubted he’d said a single word to God, civil or otherwise. He neither believed nor disbelieved—some folks obviously took comfort from their faith, like Opal, for instance, and that was their own business—but now he sensed that he was being painted into yet another corner. This time, it was a spiritual one.

  “I suppose your aunt and uncle took you guys to Sunday school pretty regular,” Boone ventured, remembering the previous night when the little guys had said their prayers before bed.

  Griffin and Fletcher nodded simultaneously, their eyes big with concern, and picked at their food.

  “We went almost every week,” Griffin said. His chin wobbled slightly. “The whole family.”

  Fletcher brightened a little. “And Uncle Bob always made pancakes when we got home,” he added. “Waffles, too, sometimes.”

  Boone felt a sinking sensation in the pit of his stomach. While he was more than grateful to Bob and Molly for all the things they’d done for his boys, it seemed to him that they’d set the bar pretty high.

  Pancakes and waffles. Sunday school. Grace before meals and prayers before bed. It was a lot to live up to.

  Molly must have told him about all of it—she’d always kept him in the loop where the boys were concerned and sent pictures almost every day from her smartphone—but the embarrassing truth was, though he’d practically memorized those snapshots, he hadn’t always listened all that closely. It wasn’t that he hadn’t cared—every mosquito bite, bad dream, skinned knee and wobbly tooth had mattered to him—but sometimes caring hurt so badly that he had to dial down his emotions a few notches just to stay in one piece.

  If churchgoing and pancake breakfasts were part of his sons’ routine, though, Boone decided, he’d honor the tradition as best he could. Before he got a chance to say so aloud, though, his cell phone rang.

  He tipped back his chair on two legs and stretched to grab the device from the counter, where it had been charging.

  “Sorry,” he said to his sons, frowning at the caller-ID number. Deputy Treat McQuillan was on the line.

  Not his favorite person, but he was the duty officer for the night, so Boone had to take the call.

  “Boone Taylor,” he said into the receiver, as he always did when he knew the call had to do with his job.

  “Evening, Boone,” Treat said, his tone slow and a little on the oily side. “Sorry to interrupt whatever you’re doing at the moment, but we’ve got ourselves a situation.”

  “What kind of situation?” Boone asked, frowning. He had that instinctual prickling sensation at his nape, and he didn’t try to hide his impatience to know what was up. In addition to his other faults, McQuillan had a flair for drama, liked to savor bad news almost as much as he liked to pass it on.

  “Zeb Winchell’s daughter called the office twenty minutes ago—she’s up in Great Falls—and said she couldn’t reach the old man on the telephone all day. She asked me to stop by his place and make sure he was okay,” McQuillan continued in his own good time. “So I did.”

  “McQuillan,” Boone prompted, making a warning of the name.

  “When I got here, I found Zeb lying in the middle of his kitchen floor,” McQuillan said lightly. He might as well have been recounting the details of a routine traffic stop, he sounded so casual. “Been dead a while. Probably a heart attack.”

  Boone closed his eyes, swore silently. Zeb Winchell had been a crotchety old coot, a prime candidate for one of those reality shows about hoarders, but damn it, he’d been a human being, a person with a life and a history. He’d loved his dog and his remarkably tidy vegetable garden and never bothered anybody, so far as Boone knew.

  “Did you call the coroner?” he asked. Doc Halpern, a retired general practitioner, served as the county medical examiner.

  “Yeah, but he’s way over in Three Trees at some kind of a family shindig and he can’t get here for at least an hour,” McQuillan replied. “You’d better hurry on into town, Sheriff.” He put a slight emphasis on that last word, probably still smarting because he’d lost the election last November.

  “I’ll be there as soon as possible,” Boone replied, looking across the table at his sons, his mind clicking through the few options open to him. He couldn’t take a couple kids on a death call, and he wasn’t going to ask Opal to pinch-hit, either, since she’d put in a long and tiring day as it was. Hutch’s bride, Kendra, would have helped out, but she was pregnant, due any minute, and Slade’s wife, Joslyn, had a little one to look after, too.

  Which left his next-door neighbor, Tara Kendall.

  He finished the call with McQuillan, instructing the deputy to make sure Zeb’s neighbors didn’t wander into the house, and quietly explained to Griffin and Fletcher that he had to go into Parable for a while.

  He consulted the tattered list of near neighbors he’d taped to the inside of a cupboard door in case of sudden emergencies like fires and floods. He’d never programmed Tara’s information into his cell phone, since he hadn’t had any reason to call her, but he had scrawled her number at the bottom of the page once, after she’d given him a ring to ask when he planned to clean up his property.

  Now, after choking down a chunk of his pride, he keyed in the digits.

  “Hello?” she said on the third ring.

  “There’s a problem,” Boone said bluntly, following up with a quick explanation and the necessary request that she look after Griffin and Fletcher until he’d finished up in town.

  “Of course,” Tara told him briskly. While she obviously had less than no use at all for him, she liked the boys, and she was willing to do the neighborly thing.

  Thank God.

  Fifteen minutes later, after wrestling both car seats into the back of the cruiser and loading up his sons and bumping over dirt roads, Boone pulled into Tara’s driveway. At least the chickens had turned in for the night, so there was no squawking committee to greet him.

  Tara came outside, still wearing the sundress she’d had on earlier, the half-grown golden retriever trotting at her side. With efficient goodwill, she rounded up the boys and sent them toward the open front door, where the twins hovered, clad in flannel pajama bottoms and T-shirts.

  In a hurry, Boone thanked Tara for helping out on short notice and moved to slide behind the wheel again.

  But Tara stood too close to the car, so he couldn’t back up without running over her feet. “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  Boone saw no reason to sugarcoat his answer. “A man is dead,” he told her.

  She put a hand to the hollow of her throat, and her eyes widened. “Oh, no,” she said. “What—?”

  “I’m not sure what happened,” Boone said, ready to be gone, “but I’m betting on natural causes.”

  At that, Tara stepped back, lowered her hand from her throat, nodded in farewell.

  Boone nodded back, shifted the cruiser into gear and drove off.

  He didn’t use the siren—there was no point in that, since poor old Zeb was already gone—but he flipped on the blue lights when he reached the main road and pushed the speed limit all the way into Parable.

  Every bare bulb
in Zeb’s tar-paper-shingled house was blazing when Boone pulled up behind Deputy McQuillan’s rig, and neighbors lined the chicken-wire fence.

  Boone acknowledged them with a wave of one hand as he passed, sprinting up the front walk and then the porch steps, entering through the open door.

  The distinctive smell of death hit him the moment he crossed the threshold, then wended his way along a trail between towering stacks of old magazines, empty boxes and God-knew-what-else to reach the back of the house.

  McQuillan leaned idly against a counter stacked with junk mail, dirty paper plates, tin cans and other detritus, scrolling through various windows on his cell phone.

  Zeb’s spindly little frame lay sprawled on the filthy floor, facedown, hands extended over his head, as though he’d reached out at the last moment, trying to break his fall—or maybe just surrender.

  Boone ached, saddened by the loneliness and the squalor and the body of the helpless old man on the floor.

  He’d seen plenty of dead bodies in his time—there wasn’t any violent crime in Parable County to speak of, but folks died of old age right along, like Zeb probably had, and there was the occasional farm accident or car crash, of course—but he never got used to the experience.

  This one was all the more poignant, to his mind anyway, because of the small, shivering dog sitting patiently at Zeb’s side, ears perked at a hopeful slant, keeping a vigil.

  Boone crouched, checked Zeb’s neck for a pulse even though he knew there wouldn’t be one. “Get this dog some water,” he told McQuillan brusquely.

  “Like there’s anything to put it in,” McQuillan replied, barely looking up from his cell phone.

  What was he doing? Checking his playlist? Updating his status on some social media site?

  Disgust curled in the back of Boone’s throat and soured there. Zeb, a good man, was dead, but McQuillan didn’t seem to give a damn. “Find something,” he said in a raspy undertone.

  McQuillan finally put away the phone, shrugged his narrow shoulders, and, looking put-upon, started scouting around for something that would hold water.

  Boone, still crouched, reached across the mortal remains of Zeb Winchell to pat the dog’s head. It was some kind of terrier, he supposed, small and brindled and remarkably clean, considering the surroundings. The critter wore a spiffy red collar that looked fairly new, and there were the usual tags suspended from the little metal ring, license, proof of vaccination, etc. The one shaped like a bone was etched with a name and Zeb’s phone number.

  “Hello, Scamp,” Boone said gently.

  CHAPTER SIX

  GRIFFIN AND FLETCHER looked small and scruffy and a little bereft, standing there in Tara’s entryway in their shorts and sneakers and striped T-shirts. They both sported a faint milk mustache, and their chins were speckled with remnants of their supper—something with tomato sauce.

  Her heart went out to them, and she thought how ironic it was, this tendency of hers to mother nearly every child she met, when she’d never given birth herself. Did the loving count, the fierce, ferocious loving? Or was she a potential case study for a team of dedicated psychologists exploring obsession?

  Earlier when Boone’s call came in, Erin and Elle had been getting ready for bed, finally willing to admit they were tuckered out from a long travel day. Now they stood nearby, sleepy but curious.

  “Are we spending the night?” Griffin asked point-blank, looking up at Tara with wide-eyed concern. He groped for his brother’s hand and grasped it tightly, though whether he was trying to reassure himself or Fletcher was anybody’s guess.

  Most likely, it was both.

  “That’s a possibility, I suppose,” Tara answered quietly, resisting the urge to gather both children into her arms and hold them close for a moment, promise to keep them safe, swear an oath that everything would be all right, they’d see.

  They’d visited earlier, with Opal, so the place and the people weren’t entirely strange to them, but there was a world of difference between playing in a sunlit backyard and drinking lemonade on the porch and being dropped off at night, with little or no preparation. “Would that be a problem?”

  Griffin looked down at his brother, then back at Tara. “It might be,” he said, with an air of grave confidentiality.

  “We don’t have pajamas,” Fletcher put in staunchly.

  Griffin blushed. “We have pajamas,” he clarified, raising his chin slightly. No doubt he was remembering the exchange with Elle that afternoon, concerning the double-wide trailer that was suddenly home. “It’s just that we didn’t bring them with us and—” The little boy paused, glanced at Fletcher again. Swallowed whatever else he’d meant to say.

  “I’m sure we can come up with something you can borrow, if the need arises,” Tara said, eager to put the children at ease. There was no way to know how late Boone would get back.

  Griffin slanted a wary glance toward the twins. “We don’t want anything a girl would wear,” he specified firmly. He was clearly more amenable than his younger sibling, but the statement was a line in the sand, nonetheless. These boys had pride, like their father, and it was inborn, probably woven into their very DNA, like an extra helix.

  Tara hid a grin. “I have some old T-shirts that might do,” she said, ready to dismiss the subject of sleepwear. “I don’t suppose you’re hungry?”

  They shook their heads.

  “We had dinner,” Griffin said.

  “It’s all over your face,” Elle confirmed, though not unkindly.

  Tara tossed the girl a look.

  “Oops,” Elle said.

  “We could sit on the back porch for a while,” Erin hastened to suggest, playing her usual role: the peacemaker. “It’s warm out, and the stars are amazing. In New York we hardly ever see them because of light pollution.”

  Fletcher, somewhat to Tara’s surprise, agreed to the plan with a circumspect little nod. “Okay,” he said, and followed Erin and Elle through the house, toward the kitchen and the back door.

  Tara felt another pang of love for her lively stepdaughters, wished for the millionth time that they were her own flesh and blood, so James would at least have to share them with her. Because of that moment’s woolgathering, she didn’t immediately notice that Griffin had stayed behind when the other kids went out, standing with his spine very straight.

  She rested a hand on his shoulder, but lightly, much as she would have gathered up a stray chick, frightened and fragile. “Was there something more you wanted to say, Griffin?” she asked, knowing there was.

  Griffin nodded earnestly and dropped his voice to a whisper. “Sometimes,” he confided, “Fletcher wets the bed. It’s because he’s little, I guess. He did it last night, and Dad had to wash the sheets and sleep on the couch.”

  “Oh,” Tara said thoughtfully, steering the child gently toward the kitchen, touched by his concern for his younger brother. “Well, you’re perfectly right, of course. It’s only happening because Fletcher’s so young.” Because he’s scared and disoriented, after being wrenched from one home and summarily plunked right down in another. “It’s not his fault.”

  Griffin looked vastly relieved. “Do you have a washing machine?” he wanted to know, hedging his bets. “And a dryer, too?”

  Again, Tara suppressed a smile, though this time, it was a sad one. They’d reached the kitchen by then, and sweet Lucy, who had been standing at the back door, inadvertently left behind when the others went outside, turned to wander over and give Griffin’s cheek a welcoming lap of her tongue.

  “I certainly do,” Tara replied, indicating the doorway leading into the nearby laundry room. “Right in there.” Then, because she couldn’t help herself, she bent over and placed a light kiss on the bristly top of the boy’s head. His dark hair was buzz-cut, like his brother’s, but it was so thick she couldn’t see his scalp. “Don’t worry about anything, okay? Whatever happens, we’ll deal.”

  Griffin blinked, offered up a tentative smile in response to her word
s. “That’s what Dad says,” he told her. “That we can deal with stuff, I mean. Kind of figure things out as we go along.”

  Tara’s oft-bruised heart softened even further. She had her reservations about Boone Taylor, to put it mildly, but for good or ill, she was falling in love with his boys, just as she had fallen permanently, irrevocably in love with Erin and Elle.

  It was her destiny, she guessed. To pinch-hit for missing mothers.

  Be careful, she warned herself, too late like always.

  “That’s very wise,” she said aloud.

  Griffin nodded again. Now that he’d gotten the bed-wetting issue out of the way, he seemed to relax.

  “Don’t you want to go outside and look at the stars?” Tara asked presently, in order to break the small silence that followed.

  “I’d rather stay here with you, if that’s all right,” Griffin answered. “You kind of remind me of my aunt Molly, and I miss her a whole bunch. So does Fletcher.”

  Tara’s eyes burned, and she swallowed the lump that rose in her throat. “It’s definitely all right if you stay with me,” she managed to say.

  Then she settled the boy in a chair at the kitchen table, washed her hands at the sink, took a plate from one of the glass-fronted cupboards and filled it with freshly baked snickerdoodles from her vintage ceramic cookie jar.

  Using a moistened paper towel, she wiped off Griffin’s supper-smudged face, a matter-of-fact gesture, very casual.

  “Your house is really nice,” Griffin commented after Tara stepped away and tossed the damp paper towel into the trash. He eyed the plate of cookies, resting at the center of the table, and shyly reached for one. “Everything is pretty.”

  “Thank you,” Tara said, thinking of the decrepit double-wide trailer across the narrow outlet of the river and wondering what it was like on the inside. Opal had spent most of the day there, taking care of the boys, so the place must be reasonably clean, but that didn’t mean it was comfortable, let alone cozy. It probably looked like what it was—bachelor’s quarters, a man cave, a place to crash between long shifts of keeping Parable County safe for truth, justice and the American way.