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Too bad. Somebody had to make them do their jobs.
Tension rising as the miles passed with no sight of Yancey, Anna went south on 97 and continued through La Pine. She’d reached Little River when her phone rang. As she pulled into a gas-station parking lot, she answered crisply, “Anna Grant.”
“Ms. Grant, this is Sergeant Shroutt. We’ve picked up the boy. He’s currently at Juvenile Hall.”
She sagged with the rush of relief. “Oh, thank goodness.”
“No, thank Officer Cherney,” the sergeant said drily. “Can we assume you’ll be picking up young Yancey and taking responsibility for him?”
“You may,” she told him. “And please do thank Officer Cherney.” She hesitated only briefly. “And thank you. He’s...a sad boy. I was worried about him.”
“I do understand. It’s our preference to help, you know.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
They left it at that. She put on her signal and waited while a semi lumbered onto the highway, wondering if Sergeant Shroutt would be any more cooperative the next time she came to him. In one way, it was a pity that Captain Sawyer wasn’t in charge of the patrol officers, as he might conceivably have turned out to be a useful ally. She’d be more convinced of that, though, if he had displayed even a tiny hint of real emotion. Plus, she’d been hit by sexual attraction, which he’d shown no sign of reciprocating. No, it was just as well that she wouldn’t have to deal with him often.
Making up her mind, she made a call rather than starting back toward Angel Butte.
“Carol? Anna Grant. Listen, I know you wanted a longer break before you took another kid, but is there any chance you’d house a boy for a day or two until I can find another place for him?”
Carol Vogt was, hands down, Anna’s favorite among the foster parents associated with AHYS. A widow whose own two boys were in their thirties, she worked magic on troubled teenagers.
“A day or two.” Carol snorted. “What you mean is, ‘Will you take him just long enough so you decide you didn’t really want that break anyway?’”
Anna grinned. “Guilty as charged. But I promise, I’ll move him if you ask me to. Yancey is only thirteen, and he’s being tormented by the older boys in the home I had him living in. Which was his second since he came into the system. He ran away today and the police just picked him up. I’ve got receiving homes, but...”
She didn’t have to finish. This was a kid who needed stability, not another way station.
A sigh gusted into her ear. “Fine,” Carol said. “But you owe me one.”
“I already owe you a few thousand,” Anna admitted. “Bless you. We’ll be an hour or two.”
“I’ll have his bedroom ready.”
Anna was smiling when she finally made the turn out onto the highway.
* * *
CALEB HOVERED AT the head of the stairs where he knew he couldn’t be seen. Voices drifted up from the kitchen.
“I’m not sure where he is.” That was Paula Hale, who with her husband ran this place. “Caleb’s been spending a lot of time with Diego. They’re probably over in the cabin Diego shares with another boy.”
“I’ll take that coffee, then. Thanks.” This time, Reid’s voice came to Caleb clearly. He must be facing the stairs. “Sugar?”
“You always did have a sweet tooth. And you can’t tell me you’ve forgotten where I keep the sugar bowl.”
Caleb’s brother gave a low chuckle. “I was being polite.”
“You weren’t polite when you lived here. Why start now?”
This time they both laughed.
Caleb felt weird, an unseen third presence. He knew Roger, Paula’s husband, was outside working on Cabin Five. This place was an old resort that must have been shut down, like, a century ago. Most of the boys were paired up in the small cabins. The Hales’ room was on the main floor in the lodge, and Caleb and another guy were in bedrooms upstairs. If there were any girls in residence, Caleb had been told, they always had the rooms upstairs in the lodge so they were near the Hales. Otherwise, those bedrooms were used for new boys, until they had “settled in.” That was how Paula put it. Caleb wasn’t sure how he would ever prove he had, or even if he wanted to. He didn’t like it here—but nothing on earth would make him go back to his father’s.
“You know he doesn’t have to be here.” Paula’s voice came especially clearly.
What did that mean?
Stiffening, Caleb strained to hear Reid’s answer. It was brief, an indistinguishable rumble.
What you need isn’t anything I have in me. Remembering the expressionless way his brother had said that, Caleb sneered. Was that what Reid was telling Paula?
He couldn’t catch the beginning of what Paula said in response, but the tail end made his heart thud. “...you could prove abuse if you wanted to.”
“You refusing to keep him here?” Reid asked more clearly.
“You know that’s not what I’m saying.”
“Then what are you saying?”
“He needs to know you want him.”
Caleb quit breathing through the long silence that followed. And then his brother’s voice was so soft, he came close to missing it.
“I do.” Pause. “And I don’t.”
A skim of ice hardened in Caleb’s chest. The I do part was a joke. The only honest part of that was I don’t.
Paula said something, and then Reid did, but their voices were fading. They must have left the kitchen for what Paula called the great room.
He needs to know you want him.
I don’t.
His brother had found him, rescued him, but then palmed him off on someone else because he couldn’t be bothered.
Caleb eased down the stairs, then out the kitchen door without even pausing to grab a parka.
* * *
“YOU DON’T?” PAULA SAID. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
Reid made an impatient gesture. “Come on. You know what I mean. I’m not father material. I told Caleb I’m damaged, and it’s true.”
Paula didn’t take her gaze from his as she sat on one of the benches at the long tables where meals were served in the main room of the lodge.
Despite having stayed in touch and contributed financially, he hadn’t actually seen either of the Hales in something like ten years until the day he’d brought Caleb here. He had been shocked to see Paula’s long braid was turning gray. She’d always looked like an aging hippie to him, but that had been from the perspective of a boy. Now she really was aging. Roger’s dark hair and beard were shot with gray, too. That wasn’t supposed to happen. He’d imagined them, and this refuge they guarded, as eternally the same. Reid hated to think about the time when they couldn’t take in kids anymore.
“Damage heals,” Paula said calmly.
Straddling a bench across the table from her, he had the uneasy feeling she was seeing further below the surface than he wanted her to. He’d forgotten the way she could always do that.
“I think you’re underestimating yourself, Reid. You’ve changed your life for the sake of a boy you didn’t know a couple of months ago. What’s that but love?”
Love? He snorted. “I feel responsible.” So responsible, he’d started job hunting in central Oregon the minute he’d brought Caleb here. Left a job that satisfied him for one he wasn’t so sure he was going to like. Yeah, he’d gone out on a limb for this brother, but he’d rather call it guilt than love.
“Responsible? Why?”
He eyed her smile warily. “He’s my brother.”
“You’d never met him. It’s not as if you grew up with him.”
“I swore I’d know if that son of a bitch ever had another kid. Instead, I let it go. Caleb has gone through hell because I shut my eyes.”
“No,” she said, correcting him, “he’s gone through hell because your father is abusive. You have no responsibility for your father’s sins.”
He stared at her, baffled and frustrated by her refusal to understand what he was saying. “So I should have shrugged and gone on with my life?”
“Neither of us could have done that.”
“Then your point is?”
“Is this about Caleb at all, or are you trying to save yourself?”
Not reacting took an effort of will. “What kind of psychobabble is that?” he scoffed.
“Same kind I’ve always thrown at you.”
Reid gave a reluctant chuckle.
“Do you see yourself in Caleb?”
“Save the crap, Paula. I’m not a kid anymore.”
“You’ll always be one of my kids.” Her voice had descended a register, letting him hear the tenderness, tying and untying a knot in his chest.
Reid cleared his throat. It didn’t do anything for the lump centered beneath his breastbone. “I’m sorry I haven’t been back to visit in so long.”
“Caleb made you revisit your past.”
Oh, crap. Here we go again. “I’m giving him the same chance I had, that’s all.”
“You’re doing more than that, or you wouldn’t have moved to Angel Butte,” she pointed out. “You’re trying to be family, Reid.” She reached across the table and laid her hand over his. “He needs you and you need him.”
He bent his head and looked at her hand, which was getting knobby with the beginnings of arthritis. So much smaller than his hand. Still so unfailingly...loving.
Shit. Did that mean he knew what the word meant after all? He’d have told anyone who asked that all he felt for Paula and Roger was gratitude and admiration, but...now he wasn’t sure that was true. He’d just as soon the possibility hadn’t occurred to him. Love had never been a safe emotion for him.
“Maybe so,” he said, hearing his own gruffness. “And I’d better go hunt him down before he decides I’m not here to see him at all.”
“Yes, you should.” She let him come around the table to her and lean over to kiss her cheek, but she grabbed his hand before he could turn away and looked at him with those penetrating eyes. “You’re a good man, Reid Sawyer. Trust yourself.”
He felt about seventeen again, as if his feet were still too big, and his cheeks turned red at any compliment. “I may be a decent man,” he said finally. “But good? No. You’re a good woman, Paula Hale. I don’t measure up.”
He tore himself away then. Her voice followed him. “You will, Reid. I have enough faith for both of us.”
Faith. Out of her hearing, he grunted. There was a word more foreign to him than love.
So, okay, she could be right that on some subconscious level he was seeing himself in this younger brother, who looked so much like him. Why else the cauldron of emotions he’d been feeling, the ingredients of which he didn’t even want to identify? That kind of transference was probably inevitable. He’d needed to be saved; now it was his turn to do the saving. Paying it forward was what people called it these days. That’s all I’m doing.
He didn’t think about why he was looking forward to seeing Caleb. Or why he was so disappointed when, twenty minutes later, he conceded defeat.
The disappearing act was so good, it was clear his brother didn’t want to see him. Reid told himself that was okay. The two of them hardly knew each other. When Reid had first come here, he’d been like a feral animal in a trap, suspicious of anything that looked like affection. He didn’t know why he’d expected different of Caleb.
The Hales had a gift for healing wounded, fearful young men. Paula was wrong; Caleb didn’t need his brother, the stranger.
Which raised the question, why had he turned his own life upside down to be nearby when he’d already fulfilled his responsibility? He could have stayed in touch long-distance well enough.
He laughed, short and harsh, as he climbed into his Ford Expedition. Taking a last look at the ramshackle lodge that anchored a line of even more run-down cabins strung along the bank of Bear Creek, he breathed in the distinctive odor of ponderosa-pine forest, sharp despite the near-freezing temperature. Trust Paula to get him analyzing his choices. One of her more irritating characteristics.
But he was a big boy now, capable of resisting. A big boy who, for whatever idiotic reason, had taken on a new job with more scope than he’d anticipated. What he needed to do was concentrate on that job, not hanker for some elusive connection he’d lived his whole damn life without.
CHAPTER TWO (#ulink_0c711864-dce1-5ad8-bb4f-8e87b769ba6c)
“IT’S ARSON,” REID said flatly. He crouched and stared closely at the distinctive pattern of charring that climbed the interior wood-paneled wall of the cabin. He’d been lucky to find it, given the extent of the damage. “I’m no fire marshal,” he said, rising to his feet, “but I don’t have to be.”
Beside him, Roger Hale grunted. “I thought I smelled gasoline.”
“Hard to miss,” Reid agreed.
He hadn’t expected to hear from either of the Hales so soon after his Wednesday visit. On this fine Sunday morning, he’d been sprawled in bed trying to decide whether he could roll over and get some more sleep or was already too wide-awake when his phone had rung. Given his job, he kept the damn thing close, despite how often he cursed its existence. Hearing what Roger had to say had driven away any desire on his part to be lazy.
When he arrived half an hour ago, a cluster of boys had hovered on the front porch of the lodge. Caleb wasn’t among them.
Walking to greet Reid, Roger had seen where he was looking. “Probably his turn in the shower. We were all pretty filthy by the time we got the fire out.”
Paula had been the one to spot it, according to Roger. She’d gotten up to use the john and seen a strange orange glow out the small window. Roger had yanked on clothes and run outside to find the fire climbing the back wall of the last cabin in the row. Even as he’d hooked up hoses, he had yelled to awaken the boys.
“This wasn’t one of the occupied cabins,” Reid said, turning slowly to examine the interior. Frigid blue sky showed through a gaping hole in the roof. There hadn’t been much furniture in the cabin. No mattress—or at least no springs—but the wooden bed frame was so much half-burned firewood now. On instinct, he started picking through the debris.
“No, we haven’t put anyone in here in...oh, five or six years,” Roger replied. “I’d been thinking I either needed to raze it or do some serious work. But you know we never fill all the cabins.” His expression was troubled. “You’re saying our firebug didn’t want to hurt anyone.”
Yet. Reid didn’t like thinking that, but had to.
“No, this was done either for fun or to get some attention.”
He debated whether to say more, but suspected he didn’t have to. Roger was a smart, well-read man. He’d already been thinking hard, or he wouldn’t have summoned Reid to take a look.
