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“Okay, hold on. Let me carry you across this yucky floor first.” The second Alexi opened the back door, Callie shot outside. The paint fumes must be near lethal for her to leave Alexi. A good thing for once that Callie wasn’t able to tell stories. Alexi didn’t want the kids, namely Bryn, alerted to the state of the house until she got the water running.
Alexi called to Matt to watch Callie, who was already toddling toward the others. Bryn was now holding the stick, an unusual one, smooth and tapered like a baseball bat. Bryn examined it, and then squatted to rummage through the pile of firewood. Good, that should buy her time. She headed for the basement stairs, placing a call that switched to voice mail as she started down the stairs.
“Connie, this is Alexi Docker. Your tenant. I just arrived at the house, and it’s—it’s unacceptable.” She resisted saying more. The situation demanded a face-to-face meeting. “Please call me. Immediately.”
In the split second she glanced from the steps to the phone to end the call, she slipped and stumbled down the last steps onto the concrete floor, the phone skittering across the cement, screen down.
No, no, no. Not the phone, not the phone. It held everything.
She scrambled after it on hands and knees, turned it over and—yes! A smooth screen wallpapered with a shot of the kids on monkey bars. She kissed it in relief.
She stood and nearly screamed from the sudden pain in her left ankle. Great, a sprain. All she needed. She limped around the basement until she found the furnace room with the copper water pipes.
Now, which valve and where? She tapped her phone against her chin and then realized a better use for it. After a quick internet search, she reached over and twisted a likely valve. There was a sucking pull and then—water.
She’d done it. Only when she stepped out of the furnace room did she hear exactly what she’d done. Water gushed and slapped against the upstairs floor. The other valves were already open. Alexi rushed back into the furnace room and cranked the main valve shut again.
She leaned her sweat-damp back against the concrete wall. This. Was. Insane. She’d moved to a place with a lake and didn’t have a drop to drink. She ran her tongue inside her dry mouth. Okay. Think. Figure out which pipe went where. She traced the looping paths of the hoses and pipes. Right. Another internet search.
First, time to check on the kids.
She hopped upstairs into the kitchen in time to see Bryn climb the deck stairs to the back door, stick in hand. He would flip out if he saw the inside of the house. She needed to prepare him.
Alexi intercepted him on the back deck.
“That’s a great stick.”
“Yes, I’m going to put it in my room.” He stepped to get around her.
Who knew what shape the bedrooms were in? She stepped with him. “How about I do that for you and you can look for more sticks?”
He shook his head. “I’m thirsty.” He shifted the other way. She followed.
“How about I bring out a pitcher of water while you get more sticks?” An offer she had no idea how to fulfill.
He frowned and ducked, caught her wide-open on her weak side and darted inside. When she joined him, he was standing stock-still, his feet glued to the floor...and perhaps, considering the condition of the plywood, that was actually true. He was doing a slow scan of the place, eyes wide, jaw dropped.
Alexi held her breath. It was a disaster for Bryn if the toaster was not square to the coffeemaker. She’d spent the past week showing him pics of the place (before it was gutted), explaining over and over how it would be the same. “We have a kitchen sink. The new place has a kitchen sink. We have a fridge. It has a fridge. You have a bedroom. It has a bedroom.”
Behind her, she heard the thumping of the other kids’ footsteps on the wooden deck stairs, and then they, too, were inside.
There was a collective, shocked silence. Callie clutched Alexi’s jeans, and Alexi automatically picked her up.
“What happened?” said Matt.
“I don’t know,” Alexi said. “I’ve left a message with the landlady.”
“The place stinks,” Amy commented. “It’s giving me a headache.”
“What are we going to do?” So like Matt to quickly move to solving the problem. Except she didn’t have an answer.
What was she going to do? She couldn’t cook, couldn’t keep food cold. Could hardly breathe. She couldn’t return to Calgary. New tenants were moving into their old place even as she stood in this disaster. What had she done?
At that moment, Bryn broke free of his trance and screamed, “I want to go home!” He shot out the back door, stick raised.
“Bryn! Stop feet!” she called after him and moved to follow, Callie’s legs banded tight around Alexi’s waist. Pain tore through her ankle. “Matt! Get the back gate.”
Matt was already on it. Bryn dropped his stick and stripped off his shirt. Matt darted past him to get to the gate first, flattening himself against it. Bryn registered that, grabbed his stick and swerved in the opposite direction to the front of the house.
“I’ll open the van for you,” Alexi called to Bryn from the back door. “Then we’ll go home.” If she could get him in the van, lock the doors, then she could talk him down.
If she could open the van before he got there.
She set down Callie and did a limping run to the front door, opening it, just as Bryn, now completely nude, stick in hand, reached the van. Where were her keys? There, in the box. She double clicked on the remote and threw open the front door. Too late. She watched Bryn reach the corner of the block, turn a sharp left and disappear from sight.
“Matt!”
He was there.
“My ankle is twisted. You go. Stay with him. I’ll get Amy and Callie, and follow in the van.” A real nuisance with the U-Haul still attached and a bum tire to boot. She was snapping Callie into her car seat when Matt came tearing back, fear stark on his face.
“Mom! A man stopped his truck and Bryn got in. Then he drove off!”
* * *
SETH GREENE HADN’T lived his entire life in a lakeside tourist town not to have seen his share of young sidewalk streakers with mortified mothers in pursuit. Usually it was closer to the lake, or right on the beach. This was the first time one veered across the street in front of his truck. He slammed on his brakes, and the kid took advantage of the stoppage to dive into the cab.
“Drive! Let’s go for a drive!” the boy ordered, waving about a long stick that Seth snagged inches before it hit the windshield. It looked familiar, and then he remembered. It was his, a baseball bat he and his dad had chiseled from an old fencepost when he’d been about the size of this kid. Which meant this boy lived in his old childhood house not three blocks away.
His sister had said she was going to rent it out, her second plan after first deciding she was going to move in.
His foot hard on the brake, Seth angled the stick toward the truck floor, the boy gripping the other end. “Here. Keep it down. How about I drive you home?”
The boy squirmed, easing his butt cheeks off the hot leather seat. Seth looked fully away, because he didn’t want the kid worrying that—
Crap. There, standing frozen on the sidewalk, was another boy, taller and older, staring wide-eyed at them.
Without looking at his naked passenger, Seth pointed. “Hey, that your brother?”
“Where?”
“There on—” But the boy was gone. Probably tore back to tell his mom about the abduction of his brother. Seth edged his truck to the curb and threw it into Park, before he reached into the back of the crew cab for the only piece of extra clothing he had.
“Look at this.” He held it up for the boy. “My team jersey. Brand-new.”
The boy’s brown eyes locked on to the bright blue-and-white jersey, emblazoned with the Lakers name, the bottom stroke of the L in a sweeping Nike-like check. “Put it on,” Seth said. “You can’t be naked in my truck.”
“Is that the way it works?”
“Yep.”
The boy took the jersey and examined the back of it. “Fifty-three. Why fifty-three?”
Not getting into that. “It’s my age,” Seth said, seventeen years off the mark.
That seemed reasonable to the boy, who nodded and wiggled into the jersey, tucking it under his butt. “To the lake!”
Seth saw an opening. “Good idea. We can get your brother and you two can play together.”
“Okay! But we have to include my sisters, too. And Mom. We can’t go to the playground without her. That’s the rule.”
Fine by him. The boy glanced from one side of the street to the other. “Wait! Where are they?”
Probably calling the police. “I know where they are.”
Seth pressed the child lock button—a feature he’d never used before—then lost no time turning the corners to pull up behind a U-Haul trailer. On the paved driveway were clustered the kids, and the mom on the phone. He could only hope she was talking to the dad who was looking for the boy.
The second Seth hit the release on the lock, the boy hopped out, and for a wild moment Seth considered driving off. He’d brought back her kid, nothing wrong had happened, case closed.
But if the mom had involved the police, Seth was known to them and doing a kind of drop-and-run wouldn’t look good.
This was his one chance to clear himself. He picked up the old bat the boy had abandoned and prepared himself for whatever might come out of left field.
CHAPTER TWO (#u2f1dd2b2-3011-5f2c-ac7f-2306b161c122)
AS SETH WALKED toward the family, the boy announced, “Come on, guys. We’re going to the lake!”
None of them moved. Then the boy who had been on the sidewalk earlier strode over and slapped his brother upside the head.
“Ow! What was that for?”
“For running off. Go tell Mom you’re sorry.” Attaboy. Any brother worth his salt kept his siblings in line.
A little girl with Asian features was the next to break from the bunch, doing a kind of hop-run with her right leg in a brace. She was hands-on with her runaway brother, too, except with a hug so hard it nearly knocked them both to the cement. The mom was close behind, a black girl with thick glasses riding on her hip, the phone still at her ear. “It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay...”
She slipped the girl down and reached for her lost boy, gathering him to her, his face mashed against her flat stomach. “It’s okay, it’s okay.”
Seth couldn’t tell if she was talking to the person on the phone or the boy. Or, from the way her voice shook, herself.
She lowered the phone and bent her head, her hair—a big, dark, squiggly tangle—tumbling onto her runaway’s head. She kissed his spiky hair long and hard.
“Bryn,” she said, her voice steady now, “glad you’re back home.”
He mumbled something and she pressed him tighter against her. “It’s okay.” This time it sounded as if she believed it. “We’ll work something out. How about you go with Matt and Amy to the garden right there? While I finish up with this call? Matt has your shorts.”
Bryn followed the other kids, while the smallest stayed glued to the mom’s leg, her brown eyes behind the smudged lens monitoring Seth’s every move. The mom brought her phone back to her ear to resume her conversation.
No way. His turn. He stepped forward. “Hello there. Bryn’s your boy, I take it.”
She held up one long finger as if he were a number at a bureaucracy and spoke into the phone. “We found him. A...man brought him back.” She paused, and her eyes lifted to his. Her deep blue eyes. The color of the lake at the far shore. “The police want to know your name.”
Just what he didn’t want. “Seth Greene.”
Those blue eyes pinned him as she silently mouthed his name, the tip of her tongue flicking against her front teeth to form the th, her full lips puckering on the opening of his last name.
She repeated his name aloud into the phone. She listened, frowned and passed him the phone. “The officer wants a word with you.” She drew the girl against her leg even closer. This was rich. He’d brought back the kid she’d lost, and she doubted his integrity.
“Careful,” she said, “with my phone.”
And his ability to hold her phone. Seth switched hands with the bat to take it, and walked over to the semiprivacy of his truck before identifying himself.
“Hello there. This is Corporal Paul Grayson. I have a few questions.” Suppressed laughter made the words come out choked.
Seth blew out his breath in relief. And then, because it was Paul, again in annoyance. “I’ve got to get to a store before it closes in twenty minutes and then I’ve got to get back up on a roof and finish there so I can make it to the game. You remember the game, right? Do we really need to do this?”
Seth watched the mom edge to the front garden with a limp-swing to accommodate the child still stuck to her leg. Her very long leg. The other three kids were pulling out weeds up to their chests—couldn’t Connie pick up a hoe for once?—and whipping each other with them. The youngest broke free of her mom to pull up her own weapon.
Paul cleared his throat. “I have to confirm your identity. Not like you to offer rides to boys.”
Kid-free, the mom banded one of her arms across her middle and tapped her fingers against her mouth. Long fingers. Long legs. Long hair. And from the looks of it, having a long day.
“I didn’t,” Seth told Paul. “He crossed in front of my truck. I hit the brakes and he got in. Wanted me to take him to the lake.” Seth left out the part about the boy being naked. It would bring up a whole bunch of questions he didn’t have time for. He checked his own phone. Twenty-three minutes before Tim-Br-Mart closed.
“You were hijacked?” Again the choked-back laughter.
Seth clamped down on his back teeth. “Am I free to go, Officer?”
“How does the mother know Connie?”
“How should I know?” Seth knew what Paul was getting at, and made a decision. “She looks legit to me. She has four kids and—” he dropped his voice and turned his back to the mom, even though she was probably out of earshot “—all of them except for the oldest have one sort of disability or another. I think she’s flat-out busy with them.”
“Is a dad there?”
Something he’d like to know, too. The woman clearly needed help. “Don’t see one.”
Paul made a noncommittal sound, one that had gotten him through a few tense situations with Seth’s sister.
“Okay, then. Could you put the mom back on, please?”
Seth walked over and passed her the phone, trying to check for a wedding ring but she took it with her right hand, her left slotted into the front pocket of her jeans. As if it was any of his business, anyway. If he hurried, he might yet make it to the store. He turned to go.
Then, on his bare arm, the feather touch of her fingertips. Her left hand. No ring.
“Don’t leave, Seth.”
* * *
WHAT HAD SHE DONE? She’d reached for this near stranger as if she’d done it a hundred million times, as if he were— She snatched her hand away, snapped her attention back to the cop.
