by Nancy Bush
Liz added reasonably, “Or you could just unload on me. It might help.”
He shook his head.
“Is there anything else you’d like to talk about?” she tried.
“No.”
She waited, watching the play of emotions across Brad’s guileless face. The kid was an open book.
After a protracted silence, he said slowly, “If something happened that wasn’t your fault, but you knew about it, and then you didn’t tell . . .” He struggled to pick through the right words. “Well, could you be responsible? I mean, when it all came out?”
“In what context are we talking?” Liz eyed him closely. “Something with one of your friends?”
“No.” He jumped to his feet, moving restlessly. “Let’s say you found something you shouldn’t have, and you didn’t report it to the police.”
“The police?” Liz’s radar swung into high gear.
“Yeah.”
“Give me a for instance.”
He blinked rapidly, thinking hard, apparently unable to come up with something.
“Like you discovered one of your friends was selling drugs,” Liz suggested.
“Yeah!” he exhaled eagerly.
Scratch that off as a possibility. He’s too quick to jump to the bait.
Brad persisted. “So, if you didn’t tell, what would happen?”
“To you?” He nodded rapidly. “As long as you weren’t involved, nothing. Except a whole lot of guilt if your friend should get in over his head, and maybe even die.”
Brad swallowed and looked past Liz to a blank spot on the wall. Inordinately thoughtful behavior for him. Something wasn’t right.
“Could you tell me what the problem is? In total confidentiality,” she added.
“There is no problem. I’m just thinking.”
Try as she would, Liz couldn’t get much more out of Brad about whatever was preoccupying him. She attempted a change of subject to keep him talking, but he wasn’t interested in any way, shape, or form. Eventually, faced with defeat, she told him she’d see him the following week and, after a quick good-bye to Gina, raced back through the depressingly purposeful drizzle to the Miata. Yep. The rain had managed to flood the driveway.
Liz made her two o’clock appointment with Carrie Lister, a young girl who wore a perpetual snarl on her face and whose mother was even more impatient than Deanne Martin. Carrie was less communicative than Brad, and by the time Liz picked up the pizza and arrived at her friend Kristy’s house, a small bungalow with a clematis-ensnared carport—Guy’s one gift to his ex-wife—she was more than a little depressed. She sloshed through another flooded driveway, ruining any hope of salvaging her suede shoes, and concentrated on shaking off her mood. She had to be upbeat for Kristy, who may or may not have finally learned what her mysterious illness was, and she just plain looked forward to seeing Tawny.
Tawny. The perfect child. If Liz could have a daughter half as wonderful, she’d sign herself up for a dozen. She hoped her own son had turned out as well.
Soon, she reminded herself. Very soon. And with that last thought, she headed for the front door of Kristy’s riverside cabin.
Chapter Three
The lady holding her purse strap with both hands could have been scripted out of a movie. Dowdily dressed, with sensible shoes, a small dark brown hat, and a grim mouth, she was a nightmare for an adventurous spirit—the absolute antidote for fun.
Detective Hawthorne “Hawk” Hart watched her step across the threshold of the Woodside Police Department’s front door and thanked the heavens he wasn’t on duty. He’d just stopped in to check with his buddy, Chief of Police Perry Dortner, who, unfortunately for him, was on duty when the lady appeared.
“Can I help you, ma’am?” Perry asked, grinning affably beneath a dusting of freckles and a shock of blondish red hair. Half the staff called him Opie behind his back, but as chief of police in this dusty one-horse town, he had enough of an iron will to keep them from saying it to his face.
Hawthorne’s lips twisted in amusement as he accepted the cup of plain black coffee Perry, who’d just made a run across town to the Coffee Spot, handed him. Hawthorne narrowed his eyes against the rising steam, snorted at the frothy latte Perry’d gotten for himself, then glanced at the dried-up prune of a woman in front of them both.
“They took them all. My yews,” she declared, biting off each syllable.
Perry blinked. “My-yoos?”
“My yew trees! A whole row alongside my drive. Both sides!” She turned on Hawthorne, glaring at him as if he’d voiced his thoughts, which were less than sympathetic to say the least. “Those hooligans ripped them right out of the ground and took off with them!”
Hawthorne eyed her steadily and silently. Not his problem. The issue had neighborhood yard war written all over it, and it bored him to his back teeth.
A far cry from what you left behind, he thought grimly. A shudder ran somewhere beneath his skin, reminding him of his own wretched fallibility. As a diversion from his own torment, he asked, “How many trees?”
“Twenty-two.”
“Twenty-two?” Perry repeated. “Someone stole twenty-two trees out of your yard?”
The prim lady lifted her chin and nodded sharply twice. Hawthorne suffered a sudden vision of his ninth-grade English teacher. This time he didn’t bother to disguise the shudder. “Twenty-two,” she repeated precisely.
“You say they were ripped out of the ground?” Perry asked. “How big were they?”
“About eight inches in diameter. Not that big yet.”
Her shoulders abruptly sagged and she looked as if she were about to cry. Hawthorne inwardly sighed. He had neither time nor patience for womanly histrionics. “Sounds like a prank. You’ll find out who did it and they’ll bring them back.”
“I know who did it!” she reacted furiously. “It’s those truants. Those boys! Brad Barlow and his other long-haired friend! They should be locked up like the criminals they are!”
Perry coughed into his fist and shot Hawthorne a sideways glance.
The woman glared from Perry to Hawthorne, sensing she’d hit a hot button but not caring what it was. “I want you to go arrest them. Right now! I want them locked away and I want my trees back!”
Brad Barlow and his other long-haired friend . . . With difficulty, Hawthorne fought the desire to defend his son because the boy sure as hell knew how to find trouble. But to steal twenty-two trees? That just didn’t sound like Jesse.
“How do you know who the culprits are?” he asked.
She sniffed audibly. “I’m Mrs. Anita Brindamoor and I’ve known Brad Barlow all his life. That boy’s been trouble since he was five, and his friend’s even worse.”
Perry stifled a choked laugh. Hawthorne’s lips flattened. “We’ll look into it,” Perry told her, his shoulders shaking with suppressed laughter.
Anita Brindamoor glared at him. “Well, I want to see some action or you can expect me in here every day until those two hooligans are arrested!”
As if on cue, Jesse himself suddenly strolled through the front door, setting off the buzzer. Mrs. Brindamoor turned her whole body around to see the new arrival, then flushed burgundy with rage. Instinctively, Hawthorne moved forward to protect his son, but Anita Brindamoor got there first, shaking one small fist in front of Jesse’s nose. “You thieving boy!” she cried. “I won’t stand for it. This community won’t stand for it!”
Jesse threw a baffled look at his father. There wasn’t a lot of heavy-duty communication going on between father and son these days, but Hawthorne had no trouble reading him. With casual disdain, Jesse flipped his hair out of his eyes, then scowled down at the tiny woman with a supremely ugly face. She gasped in shock and Hawthorne inwardly groaned.
“Jesse,” he bit out, but Anita Brindamoor showed her starch.
“You frightening young thief !” she sputtered. “You should be locked away forever!”
Jesse glanced at Perry and Hawthorne throu
gh strands of hair. “What did I do?”
“You talk to me, young man! Those were my trees. My property.” She bristled with fury. “I’ve lodged a formal complaint and you won’t get away with it!”
This time the look on Jesse’s face was comical. He stared at her as if she’d lost her mind.
Relief flooded through Hawthorne. Jesse wasn’t involved. At some level, he’d worried Anita Brindamoor might be right, but Jesse wasn’t that good of an actor. His son could lie like a rug when forced, but he was clearly completely at sea over this one.
Anita Brindamoor wasn’t nearly as convinced. She balled her hands into fists and shook from head to toe, as if the ground beneath her feet actually vibrated. Jesse, whose insouciance knew no bounds, watched this transformation with growing amusement—although Hawthorne had to admit his son’s smile could be labeled maniacal for someone who didn’t understand Jesse’s twisted humor. Now the good lady’s voice became a rising crescendo of indignation. “I plan to sue your family, young man! This won’t be the end of it!”
“I’m so scared,” Jesse drawled.
“Jesse,” Hawthorne warned through his teeth.
“Well, I am. I’m scared shitless.”
It was all Hawthorne could do not to grab his son by the scruff of his neck and boot him out the door. But that sort of action invariably backfired. The last time he’d grabbed his son, Jesse had simply disappeared for five days, so instead Hawthorne barked, “Sit down and keep quiet!” and kicked a chair in Jesse’s direction. With a shrug, Jesse did as bidden.
With Jesse in a chair, and therefore below eye level, Anita Brindamoor unwound a bit, her ruffled feathers somewhat soothed. She even managed to momentarily unpurse her lips; Hawthorne could almost hear her jaw hinge creak, the movement so completely alien.
A bit of foil stuck out of Jesse’s jean’s pocket. A cigarette pack. The sting of betrayal ran through Hawthorne’s veins; a familiar sensation. Everything Jesse did these days was an act of rebellion. Hawthorne, who’d hunted down and dealt with criminals for most of his adult life, knew the bitter taste of failure over this one half-formed adult. God’s punishment? Probably.
It seemed to finally occur to Mrs. Brindamoor how odd it was for the object of her contempt to wander into the police station. Brow furrowed, she snapped at Hawthorne. “You already suspected him, didn’t you?”
“No.”
“Then why is he here?” She clasped her hands in front of her and waited, chin tilted.
Perry glanced toward the ceiling. His amusement irritated Hawthorne to his bones. The fact that Jesse had picked up on his father’s annoyance only increased the sensation. Hell if he was going to explain that Jesse was his son.
“Jesse’s father works with the Woodside police force,” Perry enlightened her.
Mrs. Brindamoor’s lips retightened. In a voice that could curdle milk, she declared, “The state of our country is even worse than I imagined. That young man has no respect for anything. I hope you all prove to be better lawmen than parents.”
With that, she regally lifted her head and swept through the doors, her exit marred only by the last withering glare she tossed around the station as a whole.
“That went well,” Perry said, grinning.
Hawthorne swore silently to himself.
Jesse asked in disbelief, “She thinks I stole some trees?”
“Did you?” Hawthorne bit out. It was bait, pure and simple.
Rebellion flashed in his eyes like blue heat. “Oh, yeah. I took ’em all. Thought I’d start my own little tree farm.”
“Okay, okay,” Perry attempted to appease, but once on a track Jesse wasn’t easy to derail.
“They’re in the backyard at home,” he went on. “A whole goddamn orchard. But I won’t stop at trees. Oh, no. I plan to move onto shrubs and flowers. I really like rhododendrons. Plan to take a dozen or two of those. Then maybe later I’ll go roll up some sod. Yeah, and smoke it, too!”
Hawthorne reached out and yanked the cigarette pack from Jesse’s pocket. He crushed it in one hand, his face granite. He’d had it with Jesse. His son’s insolence and constant profanity were enough to turn Hawthorne violent. But memories always circled in the cauldron of his mind and his anger and frustration were swept into the spiral, losing power. He felt frozen, incapable, and downright helpless sometimes. “Was there a reason you stopped by?”
For the first time, Jesse showed some indecision. A crack in the armor. A tiny view to the boy within his hard adolescent shell. He swallowed once and shook his head, clearly wanting to say something but unable, apparently, to frame the words. “Nope,” he muttered, turning away.
“That right?” Hawthorne pressed, knowing it would do no good.
“Yep.”
“Then why’d you come here?”
Jesse hesitated, then glanced at the crunched-up cigarette pack in his father’s fist. A new scowl darkened his brow as he got to his feet and sauntered toward the door.
“Be home by six,” Hawthorne ordered. “I want to talk to you.”
Jesse lifted one shoulder.
“Be there,” Hawthorne demanded.
For an answer, he received the nagging sound of the buzzer as Jesse strode through the door into the late-afternoon gray skies.
“You’ve really got a way with people, don’t you?” Perry said, clapping Hawthorne on the back. “It’s a gift.”
“Shut up.”
Perry grinned. “I wouldn’t plan on seeing him at six, or anytime soon after.”
“He’d better come home.”
“What’re you going to do when he doesn’t?”
Hawthorne’s jaw tightened.
“Yesiree, you’ve got your hands full with Hawthorne Jesse Hart, Jr.” Perry’s smile faded. “The kid needs a mom.”
“Laura’s dead.” Hawk was terse. Whenever he thought back to that time, guilt took over. The only good thing to come from all the tragedy was Jesse . . . and based on his behavior lately, even that was debatable.
“Laura’s car accident was a long, long time ago,” Perry reminded Hawk. A moment of tension followed. Drawing a breath, Perry added, “It wasn’t your fault. Just like that other business. It wasn’t your fault, pal.”
Then whose was it?
Like a familiar, unwanted relative, memories came back uninvited. Laura, his wife, pushed off wet, slick roads by a drunken driver.
But she’d been drinking herself, remember?
“Let me drive,” he’d told her, holding out a hand for the keys, but she’d laughed and kept them out of reach. He’d let her climb behind the wheel, not wanting the fight. At the bend in the road he’d braced himself, watching in that eerie, slow-motion state while the car swung wide to the right and Laura, making up for her error, yanked it back and overcorrected into the path of another slightly inebriated driver.
Both drivers were killed outright, both passengers unhurt. He remembered standing in the purple twilight of a beautiful summer evening listening to the whimpers of the dead man’s wife as she shook in his arms, the two survivors embraced in grief, while they waited for help.
Hawk surfaced from his reverie to find Perry eyeing him with compassion. Hawthorne rarely thought about Laura anymore, but “that other business” was very much his fault and thinking about it was far worse. “That other business” was why he’d come back to Woodside. “That other business” had separated him from his LAPD job, slicing through the umbilical cord of his work to set him spinning into space like some severed capsule.
“I think we both know where to put the blame,” Hawk muttered.
“On circumstance, pal. On the perp. The one that used that kid as a hostage.”
“I pulled the trigger.”
“Your SWAT team did their job,” he reminded him. “You damn well know it.”
Because he couldn’t stop himself, Hawthorne thought back now. The kid’s name had been Joey and he was twelve, asleep in bed when a burglar stole into his room, running scared aft
er bungling a job three doors away. Police were dispatched. The perp held Joey hostage on an upstairs landing, a gun to the boy’s head. Hawk’s team of sharpshooters crouched along the stairs. Everyone was screaming except Joey, who waited with huge, trusting eyes. The burglar cocked his pistol and a thunk, thunk, thunk of sharpshooter bullets hit him.
But one bullet hit Joey in the neck and he died. Not from the burglar’s gun. Hawk knew it was his. Knew it. Though the department preferred to keep just whose bullet it was an internal secret.
“That’s why I came back here,” Hawk muttered hoarsely. “Need to put it behind me.”
“For God’s sake . . .” Perry clamped his jaw.
Hawk said, “Let me check out the yew story. I oughtta get through that one without killing an innocent victim.”
“You’re full of guilt-ridden bullshit.”
“You just don’t know humor when you hear it,” Hawk said lightly.
“Yeah, well, I know when somebody oughtta seek therapy. Surprised it wasn’t ordered.”
“Just point me in the direction of Mrs. Brindamoor’s yew estate.”
“Okay, fine. Get outta here.” Perry gave him a look. “And let me know how it works out with Jesse.”
Hawk waited while Perry handed him the address. That was one reckoning he wasn’t looking forward to.
* * *
Jesse slogged through rain puddles big enough to swallow Montana, fighting both the urge to ram his fist into the side of a tree and the equally strong need to break through the dam on his emotions and just plain cry. He did neither as he beelined his way to Brad’s house, six miles away. He half-hoped he’d run across someone’s bike so he could borrow a ride. Stealing wasn’t really stealing if you meant to bring it back.
Halfway to Brad’s he crossed the small bridge right before the loopy, tree-shrouded drive that led to Tawny’s house. His steps slowed and he thought random thoughts, mostly about what he wanted and couldn’t have. He walked to the first curve and glimpsed a car at the end of the drive. A sweet-looking black Miata convertible.
Black Miata convertible. Brad’s goddamn shrink drove a black Miata. Brad had raved about the car so many times Jesse felt he knew every aspect of the vehicle.