Woodrose Mountain

by RaeAnne Thayne

  “He’ll behave,” Evie assured her. “If he doesn’t, Chester can keep him in line, right, buddy?”

  Claire’s dog gave his morose grin and waddled to the door. Evie was relieved to see all of Taryn’s unease seemed to have drifted away like seed puffs on the morning breeze. The girl was even smiling as Evie propped open the back door and pushed her through.

  “There you are,” Katherine exclaimed. “We were beginning to worry you wouldn’t come.”

  “Oh, yay! We’ve been waiting forever!” Claire exclaimed. She was so genuinely sweet it was hard not to like Claire, though in her smaller moments Evie had to admit all that warmth and kindness sometimes exhausted Evie, who would definitely win any snarky contest between the two of them.

  “Sorry we’re late,” she said. “It’s been a crazy morning.”

  “No worries. You’re here now. Hi, Taryn.” Alex McKnight, Claire’s best friend since childhood, smiled at the girl and Evie hoped the addition of one more person to their little party wouldn’t throw Taryn for a curve.

  The girl maintained a hold on Jacques as if she didn’t dare release him. The dog remained motionless, apparently content. Evie blinked a little. Jacques was usually a calm creature but this was unusual serenity, even for him.

  “Roll up to the table here, darling,” Katherine said to her granddaughter. Evie pushed Taryn forward and was amused when Jacques trotted right along with her.

  “Hannah’s not here yet?”

  Claire shook her head. “It’s probably not that easy for her to get away from home. If she said she would be here, I’m sure she will show up.”

  Sometimes Evie wondered how Claire could have such unshakable faith in the goodness of everyone around her, especially when she had seen ample evidence to the contrary.

  “What are you three working on?” Evie asked.

  “Katherine has decided to teach another class on wire wrapping. We’re trying to come up with a pattern for her.”

  “Ooh. Fun. My favorite thing. While you’re busy with that and while we wait for Hannah, Taryn and I are going to work on a bracelet. I thought we should use some beads that aren’t too heavy but big enough for her to handle easily. I’m also thinking smooth and soft so they feel good when she wears them. Maybe polymer clay? What do you think?”

  Claire’s expression brightened. “I’ve got the perfect beads! They just came in yesterday and I haven’t even had time to unpack them.”

  She jumped up from the table and headed toward her office, where deliveries were sometimes stacked until they could be dealt with later.

  “While she’s looking for that, I’ll find some cord,” Evie said. “I’m thinking elastic to make it easier for you to put on and take off. Does that work for you?”

  “Yes,” Taryn said, enunciating carefully. “Thank…you.”

  Katherine’s mouth trembled a little and Evie was afraid she would cry. The older woman gazed at her granddaughter with a mix of love and pride. On her way to the rolls of cording, Evie pressed a hand to Katherine’s shoulder as she passed and her friend reached up to squeeze her fingers.

  “Thank you,” she murmured.

  She smiled. “Anybody else need anything while I’m up?”

  “How about something tall, dark and gorgeous?” Alex asked. Immediately, an image of Brodie flashed in Evie’s mind and that stunning kiss of the night before that she hadn’t been able to get out of her head. Her stomach fluttered and she could feel hot color crawl up her cheeks.

  “Can’t help you there, unless Claire got a delivery of those too yesterday.”

  “Why would I?” Claire called from the office. “Riley is all the tall, dark and gorgeous I can handle.”

  “Ew. Stop. Don’t want to hear about it,” Alex said, rolling her eyes at Taryn, who giggled.

  Evie smiled as she headed toward the rolled cord. Alex might protest that the idea of her best friend and her younger brother together was just too weird for her but Evie didn’t doubt for a minute that she was secretly thrilled for both of them.

  She quickly selected the right cord weight and was looking over spacers when the chimes on the door gave a slow peal, as if whoever was pushing the door open wasn’t quite sure whether to come in.

  A moment later, it opened farther and Charlie Beaumont stepped through. He had changed from his biking clothes into khaki shorts and a polo shirt and looked as if he’d rather be anywhere else on earth.

  Nerves fluttered in Evie’s stomach. Okay, this had been a really stupid idea. What had she been thinking? Right now she wished she could send him right back out the door but she had no idea how to go about doing that.

  “Hi,” she said calmly. “I wasn’t sure you’d come.”

  “I shouldn’t have. This is stupid.” He glanced at the front door again, then back at her. Though outwardly he looked defiant, his eyes looked haunted. She knew she had no business feeling that dratted compassion for him again but she couldn’t seem to help herself.

  “I should go,” he muttered.

  “Running away is what’s stupid. But I don’t have to tell you that, do I?”

  His mouth tightened—Charlie had been trying to escape a police pursuit when he’d spun out of control on a snow-slicked roadway—but he said nothing. Nor did he whirl around and head back out the door. She supposed that was an encouraging sign.

  “Taryn is back in the workroom. Come with me.”

  She had to give him credit for guts. He released a long breath but followed her toward the back of the store and the worktable.

  Oops. Perhaps she should have warned the others he was coming. Evie winced. Too late for that now. If she had thought of it, Charlie’s sudden appearance in the workroom of String Fever might not have reverberated around the room as if she’d just sprayed everybody down with a fire hose.

  Claire was just coming out of her office, holding a package. Her mouth sagged open and she nearly stumbled. Alex knocked over a cup of seed beads she’d been working with, while Katherine just stared.

  “Look who’s here, everyone.” Evie tried for a cheery tone. “I ran into Charlie this morning on the Woodrose Mountain trail above town. He was asking about Taryn and I happened to mention we were coming to the bead store this morning. He wanted to stop by and say hello.”

  Alex’s green eyes sizzled with sudden anger and Katherine’s features were set in the same stony, hard look Evie was beginning to recognize in her son.

  Okay. This had been a monumentally crazy idea. Sometimes Evie let her compassion and good intentions override common sense. It was a fatal flaw, really, probably stemming from her innate desire to fix everything.

  She had always been that way, from the time she was a little girl always charged with watching over her sister, two years younger. Keep an eye on Elizabeth, Evaline. You’re the oldest. Don’t let her go too far out in the water. She’s your responsibility.

  In the end, she had failed. She hadn’t been around to watch out for Lizzie and hadn’t been able to do anything but watch helplessly from beside her sister’s hospital bed while Lizzie suffered excruciating pain from her second- and third-degree burns—nor could Evie hold back the infection that had eventually killed her sister.

  And Cassie. Despite all the love and care she had given her child, she hadn’t been able to save her either.

  Maybe someday she would finally learn the lesson to just stop trying.

  Now what, though? She had to muddle through this latest mess she had created somehow. She was trying to figure out how to smooth over the tension of the moment when help arrived from an unexpected source.

  “Char—lie. Hi.” Taryn spoke the words slowly but clearly. To Evie’s shock, Taryn raised her hand from Jacques’s fur and held it out for the boy. Her smile was wide, genuine.

  The teenager looked at Taryn’s hand and then back at Evie as if seeking direction. Not knowing what else to do, she gestured him forward. After an awkward pause, Charlie reached out for Taryn’s hand.

  “H
ey, Tare. Um, how are things?”

  “Been better,” Taryn said.

  Charlie tensed and looked ready to flee again until Taryn’s mouth lifted in a teasing grin. “You?” she asked.

  “Um, okay.”

  Okay. So far, so good. Nobody was throwing things at him, even if Alex did look ready to poke out his eyes with her split-ring pliers.

  “I found the elastic cord,” Evie said when the silence dragged on a little too long. “Claire, where are those gorgeous polymer beads you were talking about?”

  That seemed to ease the tension a little more. Beading had a way of doing that, she had discovered.

  “Here you go,” Claire said, rather stiffly. “Just in from that supplier we like in Oregon.”

  Evie admired the boxful of beads in a variety of shapes, from rounds to ovals to flowers in all different colors. “Wow. You’re right. They are beautiful. I think they’ll go well with these new spacers.”

  The beads clacked softly as Claire shifted the box and set it down rather abruptly on the table.

  “Which ones do you like, Taryn?”

  Evie poured a handful onto the table, Taryn began to sift through them. After a minute, she laboriously separated a colorful pink-daisy bead from the pile and then a green tube-shaped bead with pink polka dots.

  “Oh, perfect,” Evie said. On impulse, she pulled a chair from the perimeter of the room and set it next to Taryn. “Here, Charlie. Maybe you could help Taryn make a bracelet.”

  “Wha—at?” He jolted as if she’d instructed him to go outside and stomp on a couple of baby bunnies. “I don’t know anything about beads.”

  “I’ll show you what to do. First you need to sort through this box and find more just like those two. Start with about ten each, though we might not need that many. I think a basic A-B-C-B pattern here, don’t you, Taryn? Daisy, spacer, green-tube bead, spacer, daisy, spacer, and so on. Here, I’ll get you started.”

  She knotted the cord and quickly strung enough beads to show the pattern twice before she handed it over to him. “Your turn. Taryn, your job is to pick up the bead or the spacer you want—with your left hand—and hold it steady so Charlie can thread the cord through. Got it?”

  “Yes,” Taryn said. She actually looked excited about it, something Evie would never have anticipated.

  After an awkward moment, everyone returned to her own project at the table, though Evie didn’t miss the frequent narrowed gazes as Charlie and Taryn worked together on her bracelet. The boy didn’t say anything for several moments but soon he was telling Taryn about a movie he had seen the weekend before and about a waterfall he had discovered back on one of the mountain-bike trails surrounding Silver Strike Reservoir.

  Taryn floundered with the fine-motor skills necessary to pick up just the correct bead but she didn’t give up. With her brow furrowed in concentration, she would painstakingly struggle until she was able to clasp the requisite bead between her thumb and forefinger and then she and Charlie would work in tandem to thread it on the cord.

  It was actually a little sweet, but Evie was quite certain she was the only one at the table who thought so.

  “I left a project upstairs last night, that crimped crystal necklace I’ve been working on. I’m going to run up to my apartment and grab it, since Hannah’s not here yet.”

  No one answered her, everyone either ignoring her or concentrating on what she was doing. Evie really hoped it was the latter, that she hadn’t just destroyed these cherished friendships. She headed for the back door and had just started to close it behind her when Claire pushed it from the other side.

  “What are you doing, Evie?” Claire murmured after she closed the door behind her.

  “Grabbing my project.”

  “You know what I mean. With Charlie Beaumont.” Claire gestured through the back window and from here Evie could see the two young dark heads bent together.

  She sighed. “He’s just a kid himself, Claire. Everyone in town has turned him into the Antichrist.”

  “Have you forgotten Layla? She’s dead because of him. My children nearly were!”

  Claire was moving around so well these days it was sometimes hard to remember she had also been involved in the accident that night and had spent months in multiple casts from her injuries.

  In his rush to escape police pursuit, Charlie had forced Claire’s vehicle off the road during a late-spring snowstorm and she had ended up driving into the icy reservoir. If not for Riley’s heroic efforts, she and her children might have died from exposure to the bitterly cold water.

  “Of course I haven’t forgotten Layla or anything else about that terrible night! Charlie Beaumont made some really stupid choices, especially to drink and drive. As a result, people’s lives have been altered forever. I understand that.”

  “So why encourage him? He should be in jail, not out walking around as if nothing has happened.”

  “He’s not untouched by this, Claire.”

  “Big deal. So he might have to spend some time in juvenile detention.”

  Apparently Claire didn’t always see the good in people. Evie supposed it was refreshing to know her friend was capable of anger against someone who deserved it.

  How could she argue with Claire’s distress? She had been physically and emotionally injured because of Charlie’s actions. Beading was still difficult for her because of her injured wrist but she managed to work through the pain to create beautiful work.

  “I’m sorry,” Evie said quietly. “I shouldn’t have invited him. I thought it might be good for Taryn. I get the feeling she misses her social life more than she misses all the other things she can’t do yet.”

  Claire looked slightly mollified by that. She looked back inside the store, where Taryn was now smiling at something Charlie had said to her.

  “I can see how hard it must be for a fifteen-year-old girl to lose her social network along with everything else.”

  “It’s my fault he’s here. Do you want me to ask him to leave?”

  Claire seemed to consider. After a moment, she sighed. “If he’s really helping Taryn, I suppose it’s okay, for now.”

  “I should have asked permission from you first. I’m sorry for that.”

  To her vast relief, Claire stepped forward and hugged her. Tears swelled in Evie’s throat and the tension she hadn’t realized had a tight grip on her shoulders seemed to ease. “You don’t have to ask me for permission to invite people to the store. Good grief, am I that much of a tyrant?”

  “Yes. Working for you is worse than a highway chain gang. I go home every night wondering how I’ll possibly make it through another day.”

  Claire laughed and hugged her again. “You have a soft heart, Evie. If you’re not careful, one of these days it might lead you into trouble.”

  Like compelling her to take on a job she didn’t want so she didn’t hurt Katherine? “Thanks for the warning.” Somehow she managed to hide her dry tone.

  “That’s what friends are for, right?” Claire smiled, then gave her a careful look. “Are you doing something different with your makeup these days?”

  Evie grimaced. In the chaos of her morning, she had completely forgotten what she must look like. “I let Taryn go all Mary Kay on me. We made a deal and I had to keep my end. It was occupational therapy, right?”

  Claire’s features softened and she hugged Evie again. “You’re going to make me cry now. You’re a wonderful person, Evie, and I’m honored to call you my friend.”

  Evie rolled her eyes. “You know better than that, honey. But thank you.”

  She hurried up the stairs to her apartment and quickly found the box containing the project she’d been working on the night before, mostly as therapy to help her calm her troubled mind after that kiss with Brodie.

  A quick side trip took her into the bathroom with its old-fashioned fixtures for a good look in the round, slightly wavy mirror that she liked to think was original to the old building.

  Really, it w
asn’t as bad as she’d feared, just a few eye shadow smears around the corners of her eyes and a little bright on the blush, something she rarely used anyway. She did her best to fix it as best she could, then grabbed her project box and hurried back down the stairs to the store.

  To her vast relief, the mood seemed a little warmer when she returned—maybe just a degree or two above freezing. It was still uncomfortably nippy but at least seemed out of the frostbite zone.

  Katherine and Alex were even laughing about a story Claire was telling about how Riley and her son Owen were trying to build a tree house behind her graceful old brick house on Blackberry Lane.

  Charlie stayed about ten minutes longer, until he and Taryn had finished stringing enough beads to make a bracelet.

  “I can finish it,” Evie said, when Charlie looked to her for guidance. She took the bracelet and quickly knotted the ends together.

  “Great job, you two. It’s wonderful.” She snipped the ends and helped Taryn slide her wrist through the loop.

  “I’d better go,” Charlie said abruptly.

  “Thank…you,” Taryn said, holding up the arm adorned with the flirty new bracelet.

  “You’re welcome. It was, uh, fun. See you around.”

  He hurried out of the store, his face tight and set, before Evie could even say anything. Sludge-thick silence filled the room after his hasty exit.

  “Don’t start on me yet, before I can even apologize,” Evie said to Katherine and Alex, when they turned toward her in tandem. “I invited him completely on impulse. I never really expected him to stop by, I swear.”

  “Why…not?”

  She blinked at Taryn’s question, unsure how to answer.

  Katherine grabbed her granddaughter’s hand. “Because he hurt you, darling.”

  Taryn frowned. “How?”

  The four women looked at each other. Evie was finally the one who spoke. “He was driving the pickup when you were injured. You remember that, don’t you?”

  The girl’s frown deepened. “It wasn’t…his fault.”

  Evie didn’t quite know how to answer her. No one—not even Charlie’s father or any of the other attorneys in his firm—disputed that Charlie had been driving the pickup that fateful night. Riley McKnight had seen him behind the wheel when he’d tried to pull over the truck on suspicion that the teens inside had been involved in a series of robberies in town and at vacation homes in Silver Strike Canyon.