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The truck careened across the dirt road and into the remnants of Karl Wilcox’s cotton field. When she was a teen, Mr. Wilcox owned a shotgun, which he filled with buckshot and was quite willing to use on anyone who messed with his land. She doubted that had changed in the years since then.
Elise honked her horn, trying to get the teens to pull over. It took a good five minutes, time Elise spent with her cell phone aimed out the window taking a video. She knew a picture was worth a thousand words, especially when parents wanted denial more than truth. Finally Elise cornered them when a dirt road they’d turned on dead-ended. She stepped out of her vehicle and waited, noting that a rainbow had already formed above the Superstition Mountains that towered over the landscape.
A tall brown-haired boy stepped from the vehicle. Her breath caught. Cooper ten years ago.
“Garrett,” she said. “I just took a video of your little adventure with my cell phone.”
He blinked as recognition set in. “Does Cooper know you’re here?”
“No, but we can talk about that later. I’m on my way to speak with Principal Beecher about a job opening. That makes it very convenient to just follow you four to school. That’s where you were heading, right?”
She worded it carefully, hoping they’d realize that a Yes answer might mean fewer consequences. From where Elise stood, she could see relief on the girls’ faces. The boy standing by the red truck never changed his angry expression. As for Garrett, he merely nodded his head, lips pressed together, and then marched back to his truck.
“Get in,” he told his friends. After a deliberate few seconds making a point, they crawled in the front seat.
Later, slightly late and a little damp from the rain, Elise sat at a conference table and studied the three men sitting across from her. The principal of Apache Creek High, David Beecher, still looked annoyed. Not at her, but at the four seniors who’d showed up right behind her late to school and with an escort. They were now with the vice principal.
She hoped that on their own the teens owned up to their responsibility, not just about ditching school but about where they’d been and what they’d done. Wilcox’s cotton field was pretty much destroyed.
She hadn’t shared with the principal the lack of respect shown by the two boys when she’d mentioned showing her video to their families. Not without knowing more about the situation.
Of the four teens, she only knew the background of one, and she remembered him at age seven or eight, building a tree house in the backyard, a place where he and his friends could play their handheld electronics without being disturbed. He’d had a slight crush on her, and oh how big brother Cooper liked to tease. She wanted to believe that sweet kid was still there inside that surly teen.
“Tell me again what you saw,” Mike Hamm asked.
“I recognized the trunk and knew Cooper wasn’t driving. It was easy enough to figure out they weren’t on their way to school,” Elise said. “I followed, managed to get them to pull over, and suggested a tardy would be better than an absence.”
“Good thinking. I hope there’s someone like you around when my children get to high school.” Mike had two children, both under the age of three. He had a while before he needed to worry. She, however, knew what he was doing. He was letting her know how very much she was needed here.
She knew she was right when he leaned forward, hands folded in front of him, a sincere expression on his face. “Situations like these are why we petitioned for funding to hire a guidance counselor.”
“We have a school counselor,” Beecher said, “but quite honestly, she knows more about getting kids on track for college than on getting them back on track for life.”
“Miss Sadie’s still here?” Elise asked.
“For three more years.” The principal smiled as if he’d heard the threat before. Miss Sadie had been advising students of future opportunities since Elise’s mom had been a student.
“Once the funding came through for a school counselor, Mike found your résumé online and we read about what you’ve been doing up in Two Mules.” This came from an imposing man who sat on Mike’s left, and the only one Elise didn’t know from her years growing up in the area. Mike had introduced him as the new chief of police, Ethan Fisher.
The principal nodded before adding, “Three new teen programs in under a year.”
That I’m still developing, she thought but didn’t say.
“Your résumé is impressive,” Mike said. “But we didn’t think we were looking for a social worker. Then we started looking at the successes happening where schools employ one.”
“Of course, those schools are a lot bigger and have more tax dollars and such. We would need you to wear a couple of hats,” Principal Beecher said. “You’d not only be a social worker dealing with crisis intervention within the school walls but also working outside the school with families and the communities.”
In Two Mules she’d had to make time for academic emphasis. Apache Creek was dictating the emphasis. On the table before her was her dream job. But why did it have to happen now, when her work in Two Mules—the work that was supposed to make up for her past—was still unfinished?
Principal Beecher opened a manila folder and withdrew some papers. “We’ve changed the job description a bit since Mike spoke to you. And we were able to raise the pay so it matches what you make now.”
Almost as if they were bidden, her fingers slid across the table and took the papers. She still wanted to say no—but her justifications were melting away. Yes, she’d be two hours away from Two Mules, but she could live at the Lost Dutchman and save on rent. She’d easily be able to afford gas back and forth to visit often. Once a week, she could manage that. She’d find the time. That had been her mantra since Cindy died. To always make time for someone who needed her.
“Jasmine Taylor ran away just over a month ago,” Principal Beecher said. “Three months into the school semester. It’s all the seniors can talk about. I hear from parents almost daily. They’re all worried that their sons and daughters might run away, too.”
Elise remembered Jasmine as a seven-year-old brown-haired girl who hated it when her big sister babysat. Elise had been over there a time or two, riding horses in their back field and playing. Jasmine would be sixteen or seventeen now. Close to Garrett’s age. She wasn’t one of the teens Elise had so diligently mentored in Two Mules...but she was still a girl in trouble. A girl Elise might be able to help. “Any word from her at all?” Elise asked. She tried to settle back in her black, hard plastic chair and looked at the photos and certificates on the wall. A college diploma or two. Photos of winning football teams, debate teams and cheerleaders. She recognized Cooper, bent on one knee, in the front row of the football photo just over the principal’s head.
Mike answered, “No, no sightings, no cryptic messages to her parents.”
Mike Hamm touched the screen of his iPad. “Also, David Cagnalia shoplifted at a convenience store near the interstate a month ago. They caught him on the outskirts of town.”
“Sounds like a call for help.” Elise rubbed her temples. She’d been told that David was the other young man in Garrett’s truck.
Above the principal’s head and slightly to the left was a photo of her and Cooper taken after they’d become the first Apache Creek students to win the Arizona High School Rodeo Team Roping Competition. “You still sending students to the rodeo competition?” Elise asked.
“Not since your little sister graduated and your dad no longer ran the program. There’s no one with time and rodeo experience to spearhead an after-school program now.”
Elise’s father had started the program when Elise’s older sister, Eva, was a freshman, hoping to get her involved and overcome her fear of horses. By the time he realized his ploy wasn’t going to work, he had twenty students counting on him. When Elise started her freshman year, Apache Creek High School was making a name for itself in the competition arena. When baby sister Emily entered, parents were filling out vouchers and driving their kids fifty miles to attend a school out of district just so they could be under her father’s tutelage. The saddle came easy to Emily but it wasn’t her calling. Still, she boasted a few buckles herself.
“The last three years the number of incidents involving teenagers in Apache Creek has increased two hundred percent,” Ethan Fisher said.
“It’s an epidemic, kids running away and skipping school, girls getting pregnant before they graduate, and boys,” the principal choked up, “boys making decisions that will go on their record. David is a senior, and he’s nineteen.”
It was the catch in the principal’s voice, the look in the police chief’s eyes and Mike Hamm’s hands folded in prayer that spurred Elise to say words she couldn’t possibly mean.
No way could she return to Apache Creek to live.
No way.
“I’ll know by next week if my job in Two Mules has been eliminated. Are you willing to wait that long?”
“That would be fine,” Principal Beecher said. “We can get busy with the paperwork.” The men talked a bit longer, about pay and hours and benefits.
Elise stared at the photo of her and Cooper on the wall, remembering a past that warred with the present and colored the future.
Chapter Two (#ulink_5228a51d-27e0-5bd0-b08d-066e19112bd6)
After she’d shaken hands with the chief of police and principal for the second time, she followed Mike out the door and into the hallway. It was almost Thanksgiving, but backpacks still looked new, maybe because no one took books home; jeans still looked purposely old, maybe because kids bought them that way; and no one looked exhausted. The hallway pulsed with teenage angst and smelled like a combination cafeteria and gym with a hint of perfume.
“You need to come home.” Mike led the way down the stairs to the exit and to the parking lot. Apache Creek High School hadn’t changed much since Elise had graduated, except maybe to be a bit smaller.
When they got to her truck, Elise closed her eyes as she leaned against the hood. “Mike, I appreciate you reaching out to me, but—”
“Think of it as a plea for help. You can make a difference, more than anyone I know.”
“I don’t think I’m strong enough,” Elise whispered.
“You’re stronger than any girl I know,” Mike said. “I know you don’t like talking about Cindy, but from the time you two were in kindergarten, you were a person that she always wanted to be with. You made a difference with her, just like you’ll do with the kids here at the high school. Believe me, I know how her death hurt you. But you couldn’t have prevented it. Don’t let it keep you from coming home. Apache Creek needs you.”
She’d successfully blocked the request to move back home a hundred times the last ten years. She had great reasons, too. The fact that maybe she could have prevented Cindy’s death being the main roadblock. She’d always thought she’d come back someday—a far off someday when she wasn’t weighed down by guilt; when she’d helped enough teens to feel like she’d made amends for not being there for her friend. That “someday” hadn’t come yet.
“In many ways,” Mike continued, “you’re an answer to our prayers.”
She’d had a hard time praying lately, for years really. Early on, right after Cindy’s funeral, Elise had prayed for forgiveness. It hadn’t, in her opinion, come. Maybe she didn’t deserve it.
She hadn’t done enough to help Cindy, hadn’t reacted fast enough to save her. Now, though, she was saving others. Just last month she’d found a local rancher in Two Mules who was willing to let kids come to his place and take riding lessons. Her goal was to get them into competitions, give them something to aim for. She was going to train them the way her father had trained her. She’d show them one walk, trot, canter at a time that they were important and they could shape their future, by taking charge of it.
When she didn’t say anything, he implored, “We sure need some help.”
Apache Creek needs you.
“The people of Two Mules need me, too,” she mentioned casually.
“I hear,” Mike said, “that the natural gas pipeline has been completed. You know what the Bible says, in Proverbs.”
Trust Mike to have a scripture.
“The heart of man plans his way, but the Lord establishes his steps.”
Elise frowned. How did he do that? Just pull a scripture from memory, one that was impossible to argue with. And it just figured he knew about the change in the economy. Two Mules, when she’d started working there, had enough money and cases to keep three social workers busy. Now that the pipeline workers and their families were moving on, Two Mules’s newly decreased budget barely had funds for two social workers although it still had a client list that called for four.
Fewer people did not equate to less need.
But the budget would win.
If Elise were let go, her coworkers could keep their jobs. Both were natives of Two Mules. Both had families: kids in school and grandparents to care for. Both were good at their jobs, dedicated, but neither focused on the needs of teens. They were mostly dealing with parolees, destitute families, and self-help programs.
Everything she’d worked for, finally coming to fruition this last year, could fade to nothingness. Even if she went back weekly to visit, would it be enough?
“Sometimes,” Mike said gently, “you’re most needed in the place that defined you.”
He, she knew, felt that way. Ten years ago, he’d been finishing med school. The only one from his family of ten kids to go to college. She’d been a high school senior talking to colleges about a rodeo scholarship. Cooper was doing the exact same thing.
Then Cindy, Mike’s little sister and Elise’s best friend, died in a car crash caused by Cindy’s drunken boyfriend.
Mike had transferred to a Bible college.
Elise had changed her dreams.
* * *
A royal blue truck with the Lost Dutchman Ranch logo drove by AJ’s Outfitters, slowed down, and then sped up. Cooper Smith stopped listening to the sales pitch coming from his cell phone and watched the truck. He wondered if it were Jacob Hubrecht wanting to stop by and see how Garrett was getting along, if this were a good time.
There was no such thing as a good time anymore. His mother had had a hard time rousing herself from bed to come in this morning to watch the store while Cooper was out looking for his brother.
Luckily, just an hour into the search, the school had called. They were handling it. Garrett wasn’t getting suspended. The vice-principal used words like intervention and group meetings during the phone call, but he hadn’t been willing to share anything concrete about the school’s disciplinary plans. Cooper wasn’t the parent and privacy laws were more stringent than during Cooper’s tenure at Apache Creek High School.
There’d be a parent meeting next week. His mom needed to call the man back. He hoped she’d feel up to it.
He turned his attention back to the phone. “Really?” Cooper said. “You do realize that I’m located in Apache Creek, Arizona. We do have tourists, but honestly we cater to a more serious crowd.”
He truly questioned the knowledge of this particular supplier who had called with an offer.
A lame offer.
“Keep in mind,” the supplier said, “tourists like to take souvenirs back, and they want something affordable and easy to transport.”
“I just don’t think practice panning gravel is something that will go over well with my clients.” Cooper’s biggest complaint about being a storekeeper, aside from it taking time away from his being a guide, was dealing with frivolous details. “No, thanks.”
Before the man could continue, Cooper ended the call. Outdoors he could see the shrubs, cacti and an occasional Joshua tree or two that peppered the landscape. In the distance were the Superstition Mountains, looking regal and daring and glistening from the rain.
It seldom rained in November. But this was proving to be the wettest that Cooper could remember. The newspaper claimed Apache Creek was going through a ten-year cycle.
Cooper wanted to be outdoors!
His mother came from the back, slowly opening and closing the fingers of her right hand. “Who was that on the phone?”
He hadn’t told her about the call from school. He knew he’d have to eventually—she still needed to set up that parent meeting. But something about the pinched look on her face made him want to protect her for a little while longer. “Just a salesman trying to convince me we needed something we didn’t need. Did you hurt your hand?”
“Just some pain in the joints. I dropped a box I was trying to put away.”
His mother’s hands did look a little swollen and red. She’d been complaining that they felt stiff.
“You need to go to the doctor, Mom. Figure out what’s going on.”
“It’s just age. Speaking of which, I think I’ll go home and lie down for a while. We’re not busy.”
He watched as she headed out of the store and got in her car. She’d come in thirty minutes after he’d reopened the store.
“Excuse me, do you have a book that’s like a biography of someone who spent time mining in the Superstition Mountains?” It wasn’t the first time Cooper had heard this request. The man wanted to read about Jacob Waltz, the Lost Dutchman, who’d started the whole “There’s a treasure in them hills” mentality.
“Not really.”
The customer’s face fell. He spent a few minutes going through the books Cooper did have on display and then left, but not before saying, “You need to put out some Christmas decorations or something.”
Christmas?
Every time the holiday knocked on Cooper’s mind, he refused to open the door. Too busy.
Looking around the shop, he realized the customer was right. Cooper needed to start putting out his yuletide decorations. Dad had always claimed that Santa was a gold panner. He’d needed money to fund his shop and pay the elves, right? And, the North Pole had to have gold. It was in Alaska! Now that would be a reality show. Santa and his elves maneuvering an excavator and suffering make-or-break decisions.
Yes, Thanksgiving might be next week, but turkeys didn’t help sales much. But he knew that Christmas trumped every holiday, and the store needed to increase sales so that Cooper’s first year as co-owner wasn’t his last.
Somehow, he also needed to get Garrett through high school and into college. And then when he’d done all that, maybe he’d cure cancer or institute world peace. Those tasks couldn’t seem any more difficult than the ones ahead of him now.
Putting his phone in his shirt pocket, Cooper went back to work. He’d had goals for today before Garrett interrupted them. He started counting his supply of metal detectors. His most expensive kit was over two thousand; his cheapest came in at two hundred. That was on sale.
He hadn’t sold one in over two weeks. How many customers had he missed while out looking for Garrett?
