“Because he never learned the alphabet.”
Chapter Two
Alex had spent all last summer driving around the Willamette Valley’s storybook farm towns in search of the ideal spot to relocate.
He wasn’t interested in any of the shiny new housing developments sprouting up as a result of the wine boom. Alex was old school, and he didn’t care who knew it. He’d take substance over gloss every time.
He’d explored the back roads of McMinnville, Silverton, Troutdale, and Dundee, eating at their restaurants, drinking in their tasting rooms. One Saturday morning on his drive past farm stands selling honey and vegetables on the honor system, he found a seat in the corner of Newberry’s Java coffee shop and pretended to read his copy of Wine Spectator. But after a half hour he found he was merely flipping the pages. He’d become caught up in watching the stream of young families waiting patiently in line for to-go cups to take to their ball games and the respectful students from the small, liberal arts college . . . listening to the low-key conversations of the workers from the medical center and the Rustical Furniture Company and the weather prognostications of dairy farmers and grape growers.
He became cautiously excited. But Newberry still had to pass the final test. It had to have the ideal watering hole: unpretentious, but with a decent wine list. As far as that requirement went, most of the drinking establishments in the Willamette qualified. But it also had to have a staff that was friendly but not intrusive. And it had to be popular enough so that Alex wouldn’t look conspicuous for being the only patron sitting at the bar by himself night after night. He had nothing against company, as long as they kept their distance. You couldn’t get rejected if you kept people safely at arm’s length.
Then he discovered the Turning Point, and everything clicked.
“Women. Can’t live with ’em, can’t shoot ’em.” A man slid onto the stool recently vacated by Kerry.
Alex looked up at a grizzled face with bloodshot eyes. Just what he needed . . . some old coot about to chew his ear off.
“Kerry O’Hearn always was a piece of work. Smart, sassy, and easy on the eyes.”
“You know her?”
“Know her? We went to school together.”
How could that be . . . even if this guy were a few classes ahead of her? He had to be fifty if he was a day.
“That right?” It took all kinds. His curiosity got the better of him. Who knew? Maybe he’d learn something.
“She was always quick with a comeback. Hell, I just ran into Danny at the Thrifty Market and her name came up. You know, on account of that trial everybody’s been talking about.
“Danny Wilson?” the man clarified at Alex’s confused expression. “They were a couple all through junior and senior year. She broke up with him right before she went off to college. Ended up staying in Portland after she graduated and made a name for herself as a big-time lawyer. Wasn’t so lucky in the love department, or so I hear tell. But then, that’s life. No one has it all. Not even Kerry O’Hearn.” He swigged his beer thoughtfully. “Danny said that after all these years, he still dreams about her.”
“What’s this Danny guy doing now?” Alex harbored a warped hope he was tethered to a demanding wife on a short leash, with a passel of kids and a time-sucking fixer-upper mortgaged to the hilt.
“Danny done pretty good for himself, too. Worked his way up to new head vineyard manager at the Sweet Spot. Kerry’s cousin’s place. The Friestatts and the O’Hearns run rampant in this valley. Can’t move without bumping into one of them.”
The guy had neglected the most important part—Danny’s relationship status. But Alex had interrogated enough people to know all he had to do was bide his time. The man was a talker.
Of course, a little encouragement never hurt. “Alex Walker,” he said, extending his hand.
The man grinned, revealing a missing incisor in his lower jaw. “Everyone knows you’re the new cop in Newberry. Curtis Wallace. I don’t come to town much. Prefer to keep to myself. Got a little place on the river south of here. Real private. Don’t take much to keep me content.”
“Sounds ideal to me. So, what’s your beef with women?”
“No beef. Just better off without them. You know how it goes. All rosy when it starts out, but it never ends well.”
“I hear you.” Alex raised his glass in a toast.
“You, too?”
“Like you said. You don’t get through life without a few battle scars.”
“Amen to that. But you don’t have to lay back down and keep letting yourself get run over, do you?”
“What brings you to town?”
“Monthly supply run. This is my last stop before I head home.”
The door opened to the slanting rays of afternoon sunlight and four more chattering patrons. Someone cranked up the music.
“Time for me to head out,” Alex said.
“I’m right behind you,” said Curtis, guzzling what was left in his glass and digging for his wallet. “I’m too old for any place where you have to yell to have a conversation. Same time next month?”
“We’ll see.”
Alex paid his tab and drove slowly through peaceful streets, past Craftsman-style bungalows with board siding and distinctive, four-over-one windows and boxy colonials. The green smell of the first lawn mowing of spring lingered in the air.
Once he’d settled on Newberry, the next step was finding a quiet place to rent. It didn’t have to be big, but it had to be a house, not an apartment. A single-family house, not some duplex with the potential for screaming kids and barking dogs and all that commotion. Someplace secluded, where he could get away from the crazy, feed the birds, and hunt and peck on his newly acquired laptop for his budding blog on Willamette Valley wines.
His probe unearthed a sixties-era cottage on North Valley Road. Space was at a premium, but all he really needed were two small bedrooms—one for sleeping, the other for his writing desk—and a place to sit outside with a view of the woods.
But in his zeal to find the perfect spot, there was one thing he’d forgotten. He hadn’t skimmed down the short list of his enemies to make sure he wouldn’t be running into one of them every time he turned a corner.
He kicked himself for his rookie mistake.
Now, every time he was called to testify against an offender, there was a chance he’d have to face Kerry O’Hearn again.
He drove on, past the library to the edge of town where the elementary and middle schools sat adjacent to each other and shared a block-long expanse of athletic fields.
But this evening, the long shadows of the goalposts barely registered. He couldn’t get his mind off her.
Across the soccer field, he thought he saw something or someone disappear around an outbuilding of the type used to store athletic equipment.
Much as he wanted to get home to his hobbies, his sense of duty had him detouring. By the time he’d circled the block, whatever he’d thought he’d seen was long gone. His hand reached for his radio to warn patrol to keep an eye out around the school tonight, but then he changed his mind. In this neighborhood? Probably just a couple of kids dragging ass on their way home from soccer practice. No reason to put the fear of God into them by getting them stopped by the cops. They’d be sorry enough for being late for supper when their parents got through with them. At least, they would be if they were his kids.
Kids. Who needed the heartache?
At the next intersection he turned onto the road that wound through farmland and vineyards, eventually leading to his rental.
He had tried time and again over the years to banish Kerry O’Hearn from his memory, but how could he forget her when her perennially serious expression, the way her glossed lips formed around her well-chosen words, the rounded corners of her small, white teeth were still a regular feature of his dreams?
And according to Curtis Wallace, he wasn’t the only one.
Alex pulled his county-issued Taurus under the carport, shut
off the ignition, and started his day in reverse. Shoes off outside—he never tracked into his home what he’d walked through in the course of doing his job. Then he went in, unloaded and locked up his Glock 22, and took a quick shower.
After he’d changed into clean jeans and a fresh shirt he opened the cupboard and plucked a wineglass from the neat row. When his hand fell on the half-empty bottle sitting on the kitchen counter, he stopped before he poured and held it up by the neck to eye level, to get a better look at its label.
Friestatt Estate. Willamette Valley, Oregon Estate Reserve pinot noir.
So, Kerry O’Hearn was also a Friestatt. Well, whoop de freakin’ do. It wasn’t enough that she had destroyed the case he and his team had worked so hard to prosecute. Now it seemed she had infiltrated his fledgling wine blog, too.
He’d been struggling for days to find the perfect descriptors for this particular pinot noir, made, ironically, from grapes grown not five miles from his new house. But it was just like the joke she’d told not an hour earlier. Whenever he sat down to write something that wasn’t a police report, it was as if he couldn’t put together the simplest sentence without it sounding like drivel when he read it back.
He poured an inch of wine into the glass and carried it out back, hoping if he stood still and was patient enough, he might see a robin, or even a rose-colored house finch, another sure harbinger of spring. He stood there for a minute, swirling the liquid in his glass and scanning the trees lining his yard. But apparently, it was still too early in the year for the songbirds to have migrated north.
He shivered in the chilly May evening and went inside and opened the fridge to see what he could throw together to eat. With the best of intentions, he pulled out a wilted head of lettuce and some rubbery carrots from the crisper drawer. Both went straight into the trash.
Then he spread peanut butter on white bread, topped it with sliced dill pickles, a recipe he’d carried over from his childhood. There’d been months when he’d eaten that meal every night, alone in front of the TV, when his mother was out with clients and his dad was at his store. When he was really young, Dad used to take him along with him. But that didn’t last.
“Play with me,” Alex begged his dad as he followed him back and forth across the showroom.
“Don’t you have anything to do?” It was Dad’s trademark response.
Alex knew he was a nag. But he was five years old. What was he supposed to do—play a board game with himself ? Sit looking at the merchandise catalogs clogging Dad’s desk? He wanted to do something important. Whatever his dad was doing, like using a box cutter to slit open the packing tape on big cardboard boxes and pulling out shiny new table lamps and brass drawer pulls, heavy in his palm. Or decipher the mysterious forms on the computer screen.
Dad must have been the last retailer in America to still use handwritten price tags. One Saturday when Alex was in first grade, he’d followed him around the store as usual, watching him hang red sale tags. “Can I help?” he pleaded, mesmerized by the tag dancing from a low-hanging ceiling fan, out of his reach.
“Don’t touch that! Get out of here. Go on. Find something to do so you’re not in the way.”
Alex had wandered back to Dad’s desk, where he spotted a neat stack of special sale tickets, white with a red stripe, the size of Dad’s cell phone. Next to the pile lay some fat black markers.
Alex looked over at Dad, but he was busy talking to a customer. Alex knew better than to interrupt. He uncapped a marker, smelled its fuzzy tip and wrinkled up his nose. They were learning to write their numbers in school. He got an idea for how he could help Dad.
The sale had brought in more people than usual. Dad didn’t notice Alex slinking around the perimeter of the room, replacing the sale tags he could reach with his new ones. Wouldn’t Dad be surprised when he saw how good Alex could write his numbers!
“Is this really only eighty dollars?” asked a man examining the tag of a fancy floor lamp with what Alex now knew was a Tiffany-style shade.
“What the—” Dad’s head whipped around the showroom. Far from being proud, he was scowling. “Alex!”
Alex stepped out from behind a multitiered display platform. “Here.”
“What the hell are you doing?” He turned to the customer. “Heh heh, sorry about that. He thinks he’s helping, but all he does is make my job harder.”
“The tag says eighty.”
Dad’s fake smile melted. “Like I said, it’s the kid’s fault. He took off the real tag and replaced it with one he made.” He turned to Alex again, his face mottled purple and white, and growled, “Where’d you put the good tags, the ones you took off?”
Alex froze. He had torn them in half, the way Dad tore papers in half when he was working at his desk.
“Where’d you put them?”
Alex’s heart was about to pound out of his chest. His cheeks burned like fire. Mutely, he pointed to the trash basket.
“Never mind,” said the customer with a wave of his hand as he drifted away.
“Obviously it’s a mistake. It’s one twenty,” said Dad, trailing after him. “Marked down from two thirty-nine.”
“I’ll think about it.”
The customer walked out the door, and so did the other two browsers, but not before giving Dad a scornful, parting look. That left Alex alone to face his punishment.
“Can’t you find anything constructive to do?” Dad repeated in yet another variation of what would become the theme of Alex’s life. “Tell you what. Here’s what you’re going to do.” In a flash of inspiration, he strode over to the stockroom and held open the door.
Head bowed, Alex dragged himself into the dim, musty room and watched as Dad wheeled a cobweb-infested desk chair out of a dark corner and spun it around to face him. “You’re going to sit in this chair and not touch anything and think about what you did until I say you can get up. Do you understand?”
Slowly, Alex climbed onto the chair and folded his hands between his legs.
“Do you understand?”
Alex nodded, fighting back tears.
“Yes, sir.”
“Yessir.”
Four hours was a long time for a rambunctious five-year-old boy to sit still. Dad had to know that. In his defense, he must have forgotten about him, because he didn’t come back until almost closing time.
Alex couldn’t just up and move yet again. Moving was a huge hassle. Besides, he’d signed a six-month lease. Changing jobs again was definitely not an option. What other department was going to hire him when they saw he’d only lasted two months in Newberry?
He would just have to avoid Kerry O’Hearn the best he could. Find a new watering hole. Try doubly hard to wring confessions out of as many of his perps as possible so they didn’t have to go to court. And for the ones that lawyered up, hope they didn’t hire her to defend them.
He reclined his chair, took a bite out of his sandwich, and started flipping through the channels, trying to look on the bright side.
He had peanut butter, pickles, and pinot. A fresh start. A quiet place of his own within walking distance of world-class vineyards. Using his own two hands, he’d built bird feeders and bluebird houses and installed them out back, and he had a shiny new laptop. He could make this work. What other choice did he have?
And then Kerry’s face came onto the screen in the night’s top story about her latest legal victory, and he couldn’t turn away.
Chapter Three
Kerry was fuming as she left the Turning Point. The nerve of that guy! Given the nature of their work, cops and defense attorneys often butted heads. But that didn’t mean they couldn’t get along. What had she ever done to him?
But a scant five minutes later, when she reached the Community Center, she was forced to put her anger aside. That was one of the beautiful things about kids. They were a reminder of what was really important and what wasn’t.
“Shay. Can you maybe give me a hand back here? I’m trying to keep hold o
f Ella without dropping her backpack and these drawings Mrs. Marshall thrust into my hand as we were walking out the door. Ella, stop pulling.”
Shay strode well ahead of her mother and little sisters on legs that seemed to grow longer every day. She whirled around and stood there in the middle of the road in front of the Community Center, planted her feet, and waited for them to catch up.
At the sight of Shay’s furrowed brow, her jaw set in a blend of even greater anger and hurt than usual, a fresh wave of dread washed over Kerry. “Shay? What’s wrong?”
“Nothing!”
Kerry tried not to take offense.
“I’m hungry,” wailed Ella.
At that, Kerry’s stomach rumbled. All she’d had to eat that day was a protein bar on the drive from her office to the courthouse for this morning’s nine o’clock proceedings. During any trial, skipping lunch was routine. If it weren’t for trying to get some vegetables into her kids at least a few times week, she could go for days at a time grabbing whatever tempting junk was displayed closest to the register at the front of the Thrifty Market.
“Shay got in a fight,” said Chloé, shoulders hunched forward with the weight of her own crammed-to-bursting backpack. Chloé was one of those rare kids who adored school. She was also the quintessential middle child who tried never to rock the boat. For that she paid a price. Kerry hated to remember all the times when she’d been in the midst of drama with Ella or Shay, only to spot Chloé standing off to the side, looking down, stubbing her toe on the sidewalk or the linoleum or the grass, depending on where they were and what the latest disaster was they were dealing with.
“You tattletale!” Shay sneered at her sister.
Chloé flinched and Kerry blinked, feeling the sting of Shay’s words right along with Chloé. How could middle schoolers be so mean?
Kerry waited for Chloé to catch up, Ella’s backpack sliding down her arm. Boosting it back up over her shoulder, she put her arm around Chloé, who reached up to move Ella’s primitive drawings out of her eyes.
First Comes Love Page 2
