Annie's Neighborhood (Harlequin Heartwarming)

by Fox, Roz Denny

  “I knew some of that. Not that Gran Ida tracked down...my mother.” Annie looked blindly at rows of figures that blurred. Figures showing, among other things, that Gran had also invested every penny Annie had sent her over the years. “I never felt we lived frugally,” Annie murmured. “Gran Ida was lavish with her love and she convinced me I could do anything I set my mind to, although she didn’t really want me going away to college. Letting me go was generous—I understand that better now. Forgive me, Mr. Manchester, but this is too much for me to take in right now. I need to go back to the house, think about all of this, and I’ll contact you again in a day or so.”

  He stood at once. “By all means. If it matters, I do know Ida’s greatest hope was that you’d live here and use your many skills to help families in Briar Run rebuild this community she loved so much. I realize that’s a tall order,” he added.

  “I have a job. Gran is gone, and anyway, I’m not sure what she thought I could do...” Annie’s voice trailed off.

  “Well, I don’t blame you. I’m retiring in a few months, and will be moving to Florida. This fund Ida built up will allow you to enjoy a very comfortable life, Annie.”

  Something in his comment annoyed her. Was he suggesting she do nothing and live off her grandmother’s largess? The very notion grated all the way back to Ida’s house. Her house now. She pulled into the drive, stopped and rubbed at her temples, where a headache was starting. As she left the car, she realized there was a flurry of activity at the homes on either side of Gran’s. The Spurlocks, a young, newly married couple, and the Gilroys, longtime retired friends of Ida’s, had work vehicles parked in their driveways. Locksmiths, according to signs on a panel truck, and a glass company apparently replacing broken windows on her neighbors’ homes.

  The women saw her, and hurried over. That was when Annie saw her front door standing agape. By then her shoes had crunched broken glass on the porch. “What happened?” she asked Peggy Gilroy, who was first to reach the steps.

  “Break-ins,” Peggy announced. “When we were at Ida’s funeral. I’m glad you got home while the workmen are still here. You’ll need to arrange repairs before dark, Annie. We scared the intruders off when we pulled in. I should have told you not to list Ida’s funeral service in the paper. That was like an open invitation to gang members.”

  “We have gangs? I knew Louisville had problems, but Gran Ida never said a word about Briar Run. I suppose she didn’t want to worry me.” Annie glanced from one to the other of the women, and both nodded. Annie then turned to their husbands, who remained with the workmen. “Did you report this to the police for all of us?”

  The two women facing her exchanged worried frowns. “It might not be the best avenue,” Peggy said quickly. “The gang is run by bad elements out of Louisville. They’ve gained a foothold here over the past year. Our shrinking police force has enough trouble dealing with serious crime—worse things than broken windows and a few stolen electronics. Just do the repairs and lie low, Annie, so we don’t attract the gangs’ attention.”

  “Are you kidding? Three houses vandalized and the local cops can’t be bothered to do anything about it? I think not.” She hauled out her cell phone and punched in 9-1-1. As Peggy and Missy hurried away, still looking concerned, Annie paced back and forth on her porch, kicking at broken glass. She waved one hand in the air as she impressed on the dispatcher that they needed police intervention ASAP. Then she peered inside at all the things strewn around, but decided it was best not to touch anything.

  * * *

  THIRTY-FIVE-YEAR-OLD police chief Skylar Cordova took a call from his dispatcher about a series of daytime home break-ins. He stifled a weary sigh, took down the addresses, then asked the dispatcher to contact Lieutenant Koot Talmage, his second-in-command, to meet him at the scene. Talmage was a good, competent cop, even if he’d told Sky that he was only waiting it out until his retirement at the end of the year.

  This wasn’t Sky’s first job choice. He’d been an army reservist called up from his big-city police job in Baltimore to serve his country. By the time he’d finished two tours in Iraq and one in Afghanistan, with months between tours spent at a variety of military bases, his old job, out of necessity, had been filled, although his captain had tried to save it. Since Corrine, Sky’s wife, divorced him while he was gone and subsequently married a bigwig Kentucky racehorse breeder, this job put Sky as close to his five-year-old son, Zachary, as he’d been able to manage.

  He’d been chief of Briar Run less than a year, but it hadn’t taken him very long to see that his force couldn’t handle the escalating crime being directed from outside his legal reach in Louisville. Reciprocal help was a joke; it meant when Louisville cops had time, and they were up to their eyeballs, too.

  Out of self-interest, Sky had feelers out, hoping to turn up a job in a larger town, with a force that offered a bigger staff. However, in this slow economy police departments everywhere were cutting back, not expanding, as was the case here. His already minuscule force had been cut in half again in the last budgetary process, implemented by Aaron Loomis, the new city manager who’d been appointed by the governor to pull Briar Run out of debt.

  Sky pulled up to a trio of homes that had seen better days. In fact, this whole street, like many in the neighborhood—including his, a few blocks away—looked as tired as he felt.

  Koot drove in and parked behind him as Sky picked up his clipboard of report sheets. Shoving his sunglasses off the bridge of his nose into shaggy hair he hadn’t found time to get cut, Sky waited for his friend and coworker to join him.

  The older man came up, blotting sweat from his cocoa-brown face. “Enid called me from dispatch. She said three homes in a row were vandalized while the occupants attended a funeral. Whose work do you reckon it is?”

  “I don’t know. I just got here and haven’t interviewed anyone yet.” Sky started to say more, but broke off as a woman separated herself from a foursome watching workmen install a window. She came toward them, undoing her hair from a band that had confined it. Sky’s attention stalled on thick, black waves unraveling around her shoulders, hair that shone almost blue in the sunlight. She was tall, but not quite as tall as his five feet eleven, even though she wore heels. A no-nonsense navy suit didn’t hide her womanly shape. He couldn’t help staring as she approached. The closer she got, the more Sky was mesmerized by her flawless skin and smoke-gray eyes fringed by jet dark lashes. Obviously natural lashes. In this job he often dealt with women who achieved that look with stuff that came in a tube and tended to smear when they cried. Women he encountered in the course of a workday were always crying, it seemed.

  The woman stopped a few feet short of the men. “I’m Annie Emerson,” she said straightaway. “I called to report the fact that three homes were broken into and vandalized while we all attended my grandmother’s funeral.”

  “I’m sorry for your loss,” Sky muttered, unable to quit staring at her long enough to write her name on the report sheet, until Koot jabbed him none too gently in the ribs. “Ah, yes. We, uh, got the call. I’m Chief Sky Cordova. This is Lieutenant Talmage.”

  Annie lifted an eyebrow. His hasty condolence fell a bit flat. She knew his job probably had him mouthing the words on a regular basis, but his perfunctory tone got under her skin. “I didn’t expect such high-ranking officials to show up. Mrs. Gilroy—” Annie pointed to the older of the two other women at the scene “—felt you’d be too busy to come at all.”

  “Our department is small, and we’re stretched thin,” Koot explained. “We can see your exterior vandalism. Can you tell us what’s missing from inside? And did anyone see the perpetrators or their car, or get any kind of useful description?”

  Annie hesitated. “As I said, I was at my grandmother’s funeral, and the others left before me, arriving home first. The center house belongs to my grandmother, Ida Vance,” Annie said, then with trem
bling lips corrected and stammered, “N-no, that’s not true. It’s my home now.”

  Sky glanced up from the sheet on which he was scribbling. “Is it Miss or Mrs. Emerson?”

  “Ms.,” she said. Was he trying to learn her marital status? Why? None of his business in any case. “You should speak to Peggy and George Gilroy or Mike and Missy Spurlock. I didn’t go in because I didn’t want to disturb any evidence. I assume my neighbors came home straight from the cemetery.” Annie chewed on her lip. “That would’ve been a little before one o’clock. Instead of calling the police, they contacted repairmen.” Gazing directly at Sky, Annie added, “I gathered they thought contacting you was pointless.”

  Sky bristled, immediately going on the defensive. “At the moment, I and three officers cover all of Briar Run. Our open cases consist of two rapes, an unsolved drive-by shooting and a couple of gang-related drug deals,” he said, waving his pen. “Petty crimes do sometimes get wait-listed.”

  The woman facing him didn’t so much as flinch, which made Sky wonder about her. He thought most females would. “You call a bold, daytime break-in of three homes, with wanton destruction of property, a petty crime?”

  Koot grabbed Sky’s arm and tugged him toward the two couples who stood by the houses. “I’ll dust these places for fingerprints as soon as we collect a list of missing items, Chief.”

  Sky nodded, still gritting his teeth.

  George Gilroy leaned on his cane, and looked uncomfortable when the two cops joined him. After a bit of probing, he admitted, “We lost a TV, a DVD player and a pearl necklace Peggy had left out on her dresser. The thieves grabbed the easy stuff.”

  Peggy piped up. “But other things got broken. Some dishes seemed to be randomly swept off our sideboard.”

  “Ms. Emerson guessed you got home around one,” Sky said. “It’s three now. Were the perpetrators gone when you arrived?”

  “Hi, I’m Mike Spurlock.” The younger man barged into the group. “The thieves must’ve heard us drive in, or else they had a lookout posted. I noticed our broken windows and told Missy to stay in the car. I entered the house through a side door, and saw our back door swinging as if they’d just run out. After I made sure there was no one inside, I had my wife come in to make a note of what all they took.”

  “Our new flat-screen TV is gone, along with some wedding gifts I hadn’t even taken out of their boxes,” Missy said tearfully. “A vase, a duplicate coffeemaker I intended to return. We’re starting out our married life and don’t own much yet.” Missy Spurlock curled into her husband’s embrace.

  Sky, who was scribbling everything down, turned to Annie. “What was taken from your place?”

  “I told you I didn’t go inside. And even if I went from room to room, I might not know what’s missing.”

  “Why not?”

  “I’m visiting, or I have been for two weeks. This is the home where I grew up, but I, ah, have been living in California until I came to see about my grandmother’s health.”

  Sky tapped his pen impatiently on the clipboard again. “You can’t say what’s gone, yet you were most adamant about wanting us to solve this case. The truth is, Ms. Emerson, odds are everything stolen today has already been hocked and the money divvied up.”

  “It sounds as if you know who did this. So, can’t you round them up for questioning?”

  Pretty as she was, her barbs got Sky’s back up. “It’s an all-too-familiar pattern,” he admitted. “If I were a betting man, which I’m not, my money would go on poor, dumb, local kids acting as puppets controlled by drug-dealer puppeteers from Louisville. Oh, I’d like to knock some sense into these kids—tell them they’re lucky to have folks, whether or not the family has trouble making ends meet. They have a roof over their heads and food in their bellies, which is a lot more than kids I’ve seen in war-torn countries where families subsist on nothing. You, Ms. Emerson, would be wise to cut your losses here and hightail it back to your safe haven in California.”

  “Well, thank you for the three-minute lecture, Chief Cordova. I applaud you for serving our country, as you apparently did. May I point out that your current job is to serve the taxpayers of Briar Run? If these are local kids going down the wrong path, it seems to me part of your job should be to show them a better one...by example.”

  Koot Talmage, who’d returned from dusting around Annie’s door and windows, listened to their conversation—along with her neighbors. Talmage nudged his boss. “Why don’t you head out, Chief? I’ll wind up here, go to the office and type these reports. We can keep an ear to the ground. I doubt it’ll yield anything helpful, but the word will go out about who we suspect.”

  Sky shook off Koot’s hand. He continued to glare at the woman whose intelligent gray eyes remained locked on him. Sky had to say he found Annie Emerson irritating, although definitely attractive. He hadn’t taken such a long look at any woman in quite a while. Not since Corrine’s defection led to the outright lies she continued to tell the family court about him. Ms. Emerson’s dig, as well as Koot’s blasé attitude, and yes, also his own hostile one, woke a sleeping noble-mindedness in Sky—something he thought he’d lost. An innate sense of justice that first made him serve his fellow man in law enforcement and then in the military resurfaced now. It surprised him that the glimmer still existed inside him and burned hot enough to spark a response, considering the carnage he’d witnessed and lived through during two wars. Yet there it was.

  “I suggest, Ms. Emerson, that you make a list of missing goods and get it to us. Rest assured, I will find the culprit or culprits, retrieve your stolen property and bring the perpetrators to justice,” he promised, glancing at the other couples before he spun on his boot heel and strode back to his car.

  Koot, slower to react, muttered goodbye and rushed to catch up to his rapidly retreating boss. “Chief, have you lost your ever-lovin’ mind? Why on earth would you give our word that we’ll solve a crime that’s virtually impossible to solve?”

  “Because the lady’s right. It’s our job.” Sky opened his car and tossed the clipboard inside. Following it, he slammed his car door and drove off. He didn’t tell Koot he intended to dig into this case on his own, in his spare time. Anything he could find would give him a legitimate reason to go back and check on Annie Emerson. He was bothered by a look she had about her that suggested she might take matters into her own hands—making her a lamb in this den of jackals. She ought to return to California for her own good. And his. He’d growled at her for no good reason other than he found her attractive and that bugged him.

  Perhaps if he went back when he was in a calmer frame of mind, he could convince her that this community wasn’t safe for a woman like her, especially a woman who planned to live alone in that big, old ramshackle house. Presuming she lived alone. She hadn’t said so, but then he hadn’t asked, either. That bugged him, too. Although, of course—as she’d likely point out—it was none of his business.

  * * *

  ARMS CROSSED, ANNIE stared after the arrogant cop’s car until it disappeared around the corner.

  George Gilroy watched her. “I believe you hit a sore spot with Chief Cordova, Annie. He’s right, in one sense. This town’s gone to the dogs. Peggy and I could sell and move. Our son wants us to come to Dallas, but this is home. We have good memories of raising our boy here—well, he’s over forty now—and moving to a big city at our age is kind of frightening,” he lamented with a sad shake of his head.

  Annie commiserated with the couple who’d been good friends to Gran Ida and to her. Peggy Gilroy, younger than her husband by ten or so years, had taught Annie how to cook, and often looked after her until Gran Ida got home from work.

  Still in a bad mood, Annie negotiated with the locksmith and the glass company for her repairs. While they did them, she wandered along the sidewalk, studying the homes that had once looked so much nicer. All need
ed paint. Yards were weedy and several houses had tattered drapes in the windows. Annie remembered that Gran had mentioned neighbors losing their jobs when the glove factory closed.

  Walking back home, Annie saw a battered bike at one house, and a rusted wagon outside another. It struck her that her old neighborhood had become similar to the ones she served in L.A. Maybe Gran Ida was right to suggest she stay and try to help. Gran was gone, but Annie’s roots were sunk deep in this neighborhood.

  As Mr. Manchester had pointed out, Gran Ida was well past middle age when she’d taken on raising a baby alone. He’d said Gran had fended off Family Services in order to keep Annie. She imagined the trials and tribulations an older woman would have had to navigate. At fifty-six, Gran had stood at a crossroad, her choices either to give her errant daughter’s newborn up for adoption, or devote her later years to nurturing an energetic child. Gran Ida had chosen Annie.

  Back at the Victorian, Annie paid the workmen and went inside to meander through the rooms. She ran a hand over a scarred table where she’d done her homework, and where Gran set up a sewing machine to teach her to sew. Gran read to her by the light of the fireplace on wintry nights when Annie was frightened by ice storms that knocked out their power. She must have done that after coming home exhausted from tedious sewing all day on delicate lingerie fabrics.

  Going into the vintage kitchen, Annie filled the teakettle, and while water heated, she considered Gran’s legacy—a stately old house with worn contents, but a flush bank account...and dreams. Big dreams. Glancing out the window, as lights came on in houses along the street, Annie felt she, too, stood at a crossroad. She could abandon this house after donating its contents and use Gran’s money to enhance her life in L.A. Or, as Gran Ida had frequently stressed in her final days, Annie could stay and try to restore the neighborhood. Try to return it to the happy place it had once been.