by Stacy Finz
Lina’s bottom lip started to tremble. Griffin figured it was more from stress than Rhys’s complaining. He got the sense that big brother was having his own issues with Lina leaving the nest. Rhys wanted his sister to go to college, but the two were tight.
Griffin was about to offer to take some of the stuff to the Bay Area, but Rhys swooped in and gave Lina a squeeze.
“I’ll fit it in,” he said.
“So we’ll meet you at USF, help you unload and set up, as soon as Nate picks Sam and me up at the airport,” Maddy said.
Lina’s face turned shell-shocked, like suddenly she realized Shit, this is really happening. Griffin held his arms at his sides, wanting like crazy to hug her. But that wouldn’t go over too big with Officer Krupke. She looked at him, silently trying to convey that she wanted a few minutes alone. With him.
And somehow he was supposed to make that happen.
Griffin cleared his throat. “Hey, Lina, I got you a little gift. You wanna walk with me to my truck?” He’d parked the Range Rover around the other side of the house, which might afford them a little privacy—for maybe two minutes.
Now he was thinking that this had been a stupid move. He should’ve come back earlier so they could have had a last night together. Or not have come home at all. Because not being able to say a proper goodbye was torturing him. Lina followed him to his SUV. Rhys, busy bickering with Maddy about how the strain of lugging bags could be bad for the baby, didn’t notice.
He opened the door of his vehicle and handed her a long, narrow box. “Go ahead,” Griff told her.
Lina pulled off the ribbon, lifted the lid, and let out a squeal. Griffin thought it meant she liked the gold charm bracelet.
“That’s the Lumber Baron,” he said, pointing to a charm of a miniature Victorian. “The log cabin represents Nugget. And that’s our promise to wait a year.” He touched the calendar that hung from the center of the bracelet. “You’ll get your next charm for Christmas.”
She went up on her toes and kissed him. “I love this bracelet and I love you.”
“Shush,” he said. “Remember our deal.”
“I do.” But she continued to hang her arms around his neck, clinging to him with all her might.
“Come on now. Part of you is just scared. But you’ll see, school’s gonna be awesome.”
“I’ll call you as soon as I get to San Francisco,” she promised. He’d rather she just made a clean break, but nodded. “We’ll both be moving into our new places at the same time.”
Griffin’s stuff was due to arrive anytime. As excited as he was to have permanent digs, once Lina left, Nugget wouldn’t be the same. It would be lonely as hell. At least the old dudes had offered to come over and break in the new pad with a game of cards. Whoopee!
“What about your dad?” Lina asked. “Did you make any decisions about him?”
“I called him from LA. Told him I wanted to take it slow. No promises, but I’d at least try. He and his wife are thinking of visiting Nugget. I want him to wait until I get the Gas and Go tricked out.”
“That’s good, Griffin. I don’t think you’ll regret getting to know him.”
How’d she get to be so smart?
“We’ll see.” Griffin grabbed Lina and kissed her hard and long, hoping to convey all the words he couldn’t say. I love you. Hurry up and grow up, so you can be mine.
“Lina, where the hell are you? It’s time to go,” Rhys bellowed, and Griff and Lina instantly pulled apart.
“I’ll be right there,” Lina called, and kissed him again.
Griffin walked her back to Rhys’s truck. Lina showed Maddy the bracelet.
“It’s lovely, Griffin,” she said, examining the charms. “What’s the significance of the calendar?”
Griff covered a cough and Lina said, “It’s to mark my future.”
“Can we get going, please?” Rhys said, tapping his toe with impatience. Griffin got the feeling that Rhys had been on to them from the start but hoped Lina’s going off to college would stick a fork in their relationship.
Lina was the last to get inside Rhys’s truck, taking one last look at her home, and at Griffin. Rhys started the engine and they nosed out of the driveway onto McCreedy Road, the Ram’s wheels sputtering on the gravel road.
Griffin watched her go, waving and smiling, acting like seeing her go off to college was the happiest day ever. But as the truck disappeared into the distance, he broke inside.
September came, and with it shorter days and chilly nights. Emily had gone on another shopping trip in Reno to stock up on winter clothes, heeding Maddy’s warning that by October Nugget could be snowed in. Last week, a man had come to sweep her chimney, and one day recently, a neatly stacked cord of wood miraculously showed up outside the door.
But it wasn’t so much the subtle fluctuation in temperature that marked the change of seasons as it was the kids going back to school. Cody still made periodic milk and egg deliveries. However, he no longer dallied, letting her feed him. The boys’ days were much more regimented now. Mostly when she saw them, they were rushing off somewhere, backpacks strapped to them like permanent appendages.
Emily marveled at how Clay could juggle it all. Running the ranch, shuttling the boys to and from school, and attending their sporting events and assorted activities. Neighbors and friends pitched in with carpooling, but he always reciprocated. It was clear that he wanted to be fully engaged in everything his sons did. She knew he was trying to make up for lost time.
After dropping them off at school, Clay would stop by the barn for a cup of coffee and breakfast. Often they would spend the later part of the morning making love until Clay had to get back to ranch business and Emily to her cookbooks.
Good old Marge had snagged her another deal. This time, editing a compilation of recipes by Napa Valley chefs, spotlighting wine country cuisine. The project didn’t pay as well as the Della James assignment, but she didn’t have to kiss up to a narcissistic country-music diva, either. And the generous deadline left her time to spend with Clay, which they snuck in whenever they could.
For the sake of the boys, they’d decided to keep their relationship on the down low. Emily still wasn’t prepared to commit to anything permanent, and Clay didn’t want to rock his tenuous truce with Justin. The boys needed stability, and Emily didn’t have it to offer. She loved Clay, but her family was Hope. Members of her victims group argued that new people moving into her life didn’t mean she was displacing her daughter. But to Emily it felt disloyal, like she was giving up.
So she and Clay mostly rendezvoused while the boys were at school. Sometimes, after Justin and Cody went to bed, Clay would trudge down the trail in the darkness to kiss her good night. To help relieve his load, she made and froze enough dinner entrées to feed them for a week at a time.
The oven timer dinged and Emily pulled out two cake pans to cool. It was for back-to-school night at the middle school. The parents were supposed to bring desserts to share for the refreshment hour. Clay had made the mistake of telling Emily that he intended to bring packaged cookies from the market.
Instead, she’d pulled out her favorite devil’s food cake recipe. The one with canned beets as the secret ingredient. It had been developed by a good friend of Emily’s, a contemporary of Julia Child. Back in the day, the two women used to cook together at Julia’s home in Santa Barbara. But even Julia hadn’t been able to guess the secret ingredient.
In a saucepan, Emily began heating the cream for chocolate frosting. Outside her kitchen window, she spied Justin at the Hot Spot, sitting on a log, smoking a cigarette.
“Oh boy,” she said aloud, and checked the kitchen clock, relieved to see that Nugget High had gotten out an hour ago. At least, as far as she could tell, he wasn’t ditching.
Emily shut off the stove, removed her apron, and slid open the sliding door to the back deck. “That’ll give you lung cancer, you know.”
Justin just shrugged and blew smoke rings in the air. He
’d apparently been practicing, because his technique had much improved since the last time she’d seen him do it.
“You know your days are numbered here?” he called up. “My dad will eventually remarry, and the new wife will want your ass out of here.”
Emily took a bracing breath and descended the stairs to the beach. She figured he’d found out about her and Clay and wanted to lash out. Even though they’d been careful, kids were perceptive.
“You gonna tell my dad?” He snuffed out the cigarette with the toe of his boot.
“About the smoking? I’m sure he already knows. Can’t hide the smell. Girls hate it because it’s like kissing an ashtray.”
To that, he showed mild interest. “My mom used to smoke. When she thought we didn’t know, she’d sneak one behind our house in San Diego.”
“Why do you think she snuck them?”
“How would I know?”
“Perhaps she knew it was a terrible habit and didn’t want you and Cody to think it was okay to do.” Emily joined him on the log.
“Or maybe she just wanted to get away from us and have a smoke.”
“There’s that,” she agreed.
“I guess we’ll never know since she’s dead and all. She got drunk with some guy she was cheating on my dad with and smashed her SUV into a tree.”
“I’m very sorry, Justin.”
He looked at her, his eyes red rimmed. “Why? You get to live in her barn.”
“I’d trade the barn for her to still be alive. For you and for Cody.”
“She didn’t care about us. The whole town knows she was taking off with that Sierra Heights guy before he sold the place . . . before she died. She was just going to leave us flat. Make a new life with him.”
“Kids at school tell you that?”
He lifted his shoulders. “Sean’s father did the electrical at Sierra Heights. He told everyone that he saw my mother screwing that asshole in one of the models. That she planned to jack my dad up for half the ranch so he could have custody of us. Basically, she wanted to sell us for a shitload of money.”
“Justin, that’s just not true.”
“How the hell would you know? You didn’t even live here then.”
“Because your dad told me the truth. And he’ll tell you too, if you ask him. What I do know is that you can’t believe what other people say. They’ll lie and twist the truth just because it makes them feel important to do so. You have to ignore it.”
“Why would I? Sean’s dad saw it with his own eyes.”
“Maybe he did, maybe he didn’t.” Many people had claimed to have seen Hope with Emily after she’d been reported missing. There were reports that they’d been at a Target store in Peoria. At a playground, fifteen minutes away from their house in Palo Alto. Someone even went as far as to call the FBI hotline and report that Emily had stowed her in a trailer park outside of Kansas City—that the caller had pictures to prove it.
The memories still made her angry. All that time wasted as the police focused on crackpots and red herrings, while the real culprit got away.
“I’m going to tell you a secret,” she said, making a split-second decision. “I’ve been the subject of a good many lies. That’s partly why I moved here. I couldn’t take it anymore.”
She told him the story of Hope—everything but how it had happened that day. She told him about the media frenzy, about the tabloids, about the cable television stations.
“They thought you had your own daughter kidnapped?” he asked, his eyes growing wide with disbelief.
“Mm-hmm. They said I did it because I wanted to run off with my boyfriend. Sound familiar?” Although in her case, said boyfriend was a sixty-five-year-old restaurant critic, who Emily had been accompanying on reviews for years. His longtime partner had health issues that prevented him from eating out, so Michael had needed a fellow foodie to take to restaurants and help him graze through the menus. But according to the tabloids, they’d been having a torrid affair and needed to get Hope out of the picture. Now it seemed more ridiculous than hurtful. But at the time . . .
“But you didn’t have a boyfriend, right?”
“Nope,” she said, “which is exactly my point. Justin, there were so many terrible things said about me that I’m sure I don’t know half of them.”
“Did the police try to arrest you?”
When Emily failed the polygraph, she surely thought they would. Instead, detectives had leaked the information to the press so they could crucify her with every accusation under the sun. She killed Hope in a jealous rage over her daughter’s beauty. She sold her to buy OxyContin. She hired a kidnapper to get even with her workaholic husband.
Her lawyer had told her that the lie detector test wasn’t admissible in court and that the police had used the media in hopes of flushing her out. Eventually, investigators cleared Emily and determined that Hope had been abducted by a stranger or a casual acquaintance.
“The police knew I would never hurt my daughter.”
“Do you think you’ll ever get her back?” He asked it so sadly that Emily wondered if she’d made a mistake by telling him.
It was a lot to lay on a fifteen-year-old. But by the same token, today’s kids knew how scary the world could be. Heck, it had been drummed into their heads. If not by their parents, by television, movies, and video games.
“It’s my greatest hope,” she answered. “But I don’t know.”
“I think you will,” he said so earnestly that Emily reached out to touch his hand. “Maybe someone desperate for a kid took her and is really nice. Well, obviously not that nice, because they stole her from you. But you know what I mean?”
“I know what you mean.” She smiled at him. “And I hope you’re right. But the reason I told you this is because I want you to stop listening to the rumors about your mom.”
“Some of them are true, though. Even you can’t deny it.”
“A fraction of it is true, but that’s for your dad to tell you about. What’s important is deep down in your heart you know how much your mother loved you. How she would never in a million years leave you. That’s all that matters. Not what anyone says.”
“You think I should ask my dad about her?”
“If you need answers, then you should talk to him. Absolutely.”
“Does my dad know about Hope?”
“Yes,” she said.
He moved closer to her on the log, awkwardly drawing her in for a hug. And in that moment she knew that her heart had made a space for him, whether she wanted it to or not.
Chapter 22
The third Saturday in September always marked the last farmers’ market of the year in Nugget. Soon it would be too cold for vendors to set up their booths in the square. Emily had been told that as a way to usher out summer and welcome fall, the townsfolk turned the event into a party, which she’d been looking forward to all week.
Clay and the boys had spun by the barn earlier to pick her up, intending to make a day of the market. Later, they had plans to meet up with Rhys, Maddy, and Sam for an early supper at the Ponderosa.
Secretly, Emily wanted to use the market for research for her Sierra Mountains Cookbook idea. She’d been giving the project a lot of thought lately, enthusiastic over the notion of doing her own book for once. And who would know more about the regional cuisine of the Sierra Nevada than the local farmers? For now, she intended to collect information and store it in her long-term memory. In her spare time, she’d play around with recipes.
She still wanted the project to be a fund-raiser for the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. The organization had been there for her during her darkest hours and she’d like to give back.
When they got to the square, lots of people had set up lawn chairs to soak up the remainder of the summer sun and people watch. Others strolled the rows of tables, buying up the last of the tomatoes and the season’s squash for canning.
She, Clay, and the boys also roamed, admiring arrays o
f produce, handmade goods, or to snag a free sample from one of the stands. Clay knew everyone, often stopping to introduce Emily to this one or that, inquiring after their families and talking cattle. Plumas and Sierra counties probably had more cows per capita than anywhere else in the state. It was clear that even though ranches in these parts were spread out, the community was tight-knit. She could tell from Clay’s conversations that they helped each other out, and something about that rural neighborly spirit felt very reassuring to Emily.
“That corn looks good.” Clay gently nudged her in the direction of an iron barbecue where a dozen ears were grilling over red oak wood next to strips of tri-tip. “You want some?”
“Sure.” Despite their efforts to keep their budding romance under wraps, Clay couldn’t seem to keep his hands from skimming over her back and bottom or wrapping his arm around her shoulders. Either the boys pretended not to notice, or they thought it was nothing more than friendly affection. The rest of the town wasn’t so fooled, though.
Curious looks followed them wherever they went. After all, Clay was Nugget’s most sought-after bachelor.
“Hey, Emily.” Griffin tried to wave as he hauled one of Colin’s rocking chairs across the square. He parked it over at Owen’s and jogged over. “How’s it going?”
“Great. You must be busy. How’s the Gas and Go coming along?”
Griffin nodded a greeting at Clay, who kept his arm firmly around Emily. “It’s a lot of work, but so far I’m happy with the results. I’m racing to open by winter. In the meantime, if you know of anyone who wants a custom bike or a home in Sierra Heights, you let me know.”
Rumor had it that Griffin had come into more than a small inheritance. Word on the street: He was richer than a Fortune 500 company. Of course, Emily did her best to ignore the talk. People in Nugget liked their gossip, but at least in the circles she ran in, it never got mean-spirited. Unless, of course, Della James was involved.
“I hear you’re living there now,” she said, flashing him a bright smile. He was such a darling young man.