Sawyer watched Ryan who was deliberately avoiding acknowledging him. There was nothing in the revised plan that was illegal. And he had no proof that Ryan was behind the anonymous tips to the Gazette. In fact, Sawyer wasn’t sure anymore that the tips were false. Someone at McIntyre Construction wanted eyes on the construction site. The best Sawyer could do was tell Shelby about it tonight and do his damndest to remain neutral when she blew up.
He wasn’t relishing having that conversation.
Ryan turned slightly in his seat to see his brother standing at the back of the room, lost in thought. From his expression, Ryan could tell Sawyer was on the hunt and there could be only one reason: Shelby filled him in on the anonymous source and Sawyer was here to confront him. Brother or no brother, Sawyer wouldn’t hesitate to have Ryan arrested for public mischief for feeding false leads to the press. It wasn’t the charge that worried Ryan, but the fall from grace would be disastrous. The Gazette would run the story for weeks.
His brother met his eyes, a hard stare that scared the hell out of Ryan. But Sawyer only turned to the door and left the room as quietly as he had come in. Ryan exhaled with relief, glancing at the councilors to see if anyone else had noticed the sheriff’s exit. They were all absorbed in discussing items for next week’s agenda.
A light sweat had broken out under his white collar. A lot of money was at stake. If Sawyer knew—if Ryan had a bit more time to explain the situation he was in—make him understand—
Council met to vote on the project’s expansion on Wednesday. A few days, that’s all he needed. Ryan moved to a corner of the room, pulled out his cell phone and punched in the number he kept for emergencies just like this one. If there was one thing he’d learned in business it was that no one was clean. And people in glass houses really shouldn’t throw stones. There had to be something in Shelby’s past that he could use. Maybe something from her university days. She seemed like the type of girl who’d land in trouble.
He didn’t want tree hugging, peace marches or hunger strikes he instructed the man on the other end of the line. There was very little to go on but if anyone could find a skeleton it was this guy. He was the best private investigator in New York City. Ryan had a twinge of conscience when he thought of how this would hurt Dolly, but what was the alternative? Telling Dolly that Shelby and his brother had lied to her?
Discrediting Shelby was the only card he had left. She’d left him no choice.
Chapter Nine: The Ties That Bind
SHELBY TUCKED the comforter around Dolly’s shoulders and the older woman immediately pushed it away. “Stop fussing over me and go get ready for your date.”
Shelby raised an eyebrow. “I am ready.” She tucked the comforter back into place, “I’m going like this.”
Dolly took in the blue jeans and plaid shirt Shelby was wearing and choked, “You can’t meet Sawyer dressed like that! You look like a lumberjack.”
“He likes plaid.” Shelby gathered together the remote control and television guide, setting them on the night table. She wanted Dolly to have everything near at hand for the evening to prevent her wandering about the dark house. All she needed was to come home to find her aunt crippled with a broken hip to put the final straw on her camel of guilt.
“You could put in a little effort. Sawyer is going to ask you to marry him tonight. Don’t you think you should dress for it?”
“No.”
“He’ll take one look at you in that get-up and run in the opposite direction.”
“Then he’s not the man for me.” Shelby flicked on the television. “Now be quiet, your show is starting. Your cocoa on the nightstand and the phone is right beside it. My cell phone number is on speed dial one. The doctor is two and 911 is—”
“Three. I know. I’ll be fine.” Dolly took her hand and chafed it in her own. She giggled happily. “Now that you and Sawyer are together, everything is wonderful.”
“Then it was worth it,” Shelby said softly, thinking back to the council meeting. Betraying her community and her ethics was worth it to see the pink radiance in her aunt’s face. The health and vitality that Shelby remembered was back.
The doorbell rang downstairs. A rush of anticipation quivered through her. Sawyer.
“Shelby, the door! Don’t keep him waiting.”
“He’s not royalty for God’s sake. He can wait five minutes.” Shelby shook her head with disgust but tripped down the stairs faster than usual.
She flung open the door with a terse “Hello” and her breath stopped in her chest.
Sawyer was wearing a blue turtleneck sweater that commanded attention to his indigo eyes. And his shoulders. Her eyes dropped further. Oh my. To the blue jeans he was wearing. They gave him a shape Shelby couldn’t recall him having earlier in the day. Not in his uniform at any rate and he had looked pretty great in his uniform.
“Good evening Miss Porter. Are you ready for this?”
She tucked in the hem of her shirt. “I should have changed earlier. If you want to wait....”
“I like plaid.” He grinned. “Not many women can pull it off.”
A knot of anxiety Shelby wasn’t even aware she had, melted. “You’re the first man I’ve ever heard that from. I’ll grab my coat.” Reaching into the cupboard under the stairs, Shelby called up to Dolly, “We’re going now. I won’t be late.”
Her aunt’s thin cheerful voice wafted down to them. “Take your time. Take all night if you have to.”
Sawyer made a choking sound like he had something caught in his throat.
Mortified, Shelby slammed the door behind them before Dolly could say anything else. “She has no filter, that woman. Sorry.”
“Must have been fun being a teenager in that house.”
“You have no idea. She’s been trying to marry me off since high school graduation. Every male that walked through the front door was considered a candidate. As long as they were employed and breathing, they were fine with Dolly. After a while, she even gave up on the employed part.”
Sawyer laughed. “Doesn’t sound like the Dolly I know. She wasn’t in a hurry for you to marry Roger. She wouldn’t say what she had against him, just that she couldn’t get comfortable. I said, ‘Dolly you aren’t the one who has to be comfortable with the man.’ But she didn’t like Janice either. I think Dolly was working her agenda for you and me from the beginning.”
He had driven his truck. Shelby had never seen Sawyer in his truck, only in the sheriff’s cruiser. He opened the door and she hopped up onto the passenger seat. She fastened the seat belt watching him as he came around the front to the driver’s side door. She’d been both jittery and daydreaming all afternoon and now that she was out with him, just when she thought her nerves would be the worst, she was calm! Being with Sawyer felt strangely similar to when she first moved to Mandrake Falls—safe. Not a word she would have used to describe the sheriff a week ago, she pondered in amazement.
“Where to?” Sawyer said, climbing into the truck and slamming the door. “If we pick a restaurant in town, it’ll be all over Mandrake Falls by breakfast that we’re together. If we want to keep this thing quiet we’ll have to stay out of sight.”
“Your place?” Shelby nibbled self-consciously on her thumb. Her suggestion seemed to hang in the air. It didn’t help that he was silent. “We’re only stuck with each other for a few hours. We can’t go far.”
“Right.”
Sawyer swung the car away from town, the headlights sweeping over the dark fields that surrounded Mandrake Falls. Yellow lights winked from the farmhouses set back in the gray-black mountains, farms that were generations old in a countryside that had changed little.
“By the way, I found out why Ryan wanted to keep you out of the council meeting this afternoon.”
Her back straightened, suddenly alert. So much for feeling safe.
“I was late but I caught the end of it,” Sawyer was saying. “They were introducing new business into the agenda for next week.”
“Calm down. It’s not that. Just go easy on the messenger, okay? He’s put forward a proposal to expand on the original plan for the Country Barn to an entertainment complex: cinemas, an arcade and a casino.”
Shelby sucked in a breath. “I see. I’m calm. I am calm. I am calmly accepting the fact that your brother blackmailed me into selling out my town! A casino? A cinema?” Her voice rose an octave. “We have a movie theater, we don’t need another one! And the people of this county don’t need a casino to take their hard-earned money. What was Mayor Cooper’s reaction?”
“He wasn’t opposed and neither was council. We’re fresh out of ideas to create jobs in this town. An entertainment complex opens up opportunities.”
Shelby hunched her shoulders defensively. “So you’re in agreement with your brother and the mayor about this change they have planned for Mandrake Falls. Is that why you didn’t tell me about this earlier? Don’t look like you don’t know what I’m talking about. You waited until it was all over—until it was too late to stop it!”
“Don’t go there, Shelby,” he warned. “I’m not in league with Ryan but his proposal isn’t illegal, and I’m not convinced it would be bad for Mandrake Falls. Jobs make a real difference in peoples’ lives, sometimes the difference between life and death. Maybe this project will be a good thing in the long run. I don’t know yet and neither do you. We don’t have all the facts.”
“Oh come on. You make it sound Saint Ryan has everyone’s best interests at heart. Ryan is going to make a killing and suck the local economy dry in the process. He’s in it for the profit margin, not to help people.”
“You could be right but I doubt Mrs. Gurney will care about Ryan’s motives. Her grandson, Eddy has had run-ins with the law on two occasions. I’ve managed to keep him out of the worst of it, but if that kid doesn’t find work soon, he’ll become a resident of the state prison. He has his high school diploma but Eddy isn’t the sort who goes on to college. Some kids aren’t. An entry-level job would give him experience and help him develop discipline, but who’s going to hire him—the Gazette? Small businesses can’t afford to hire an unskilled young man. This new project could be his best bet. What he does with the opportunity is up to him but we owe him a chance.”
Shelby turned her eyes to the landscape flying past her window. Mrs. Gurney was the organist at All Souls Church. She never let on that her grandson was in trouble. They never do. Mrs. Gurney’s generation kept their troubles to themselves. Maybe no one was filthy rich but they all got by somehow. Didn’t they?
Shelby had made a lot of assumptions about the Mandrake Fall’s prosperity. Money wasn’t everything but it paid the mortgage. How did people get by? Was there a decent living in selling antiques? Scout Rutherford seemed to do okay but her husband was a forest ranger for the State. They weren’t depending on the tourist trade for the grocery money. What about the rest of the townspeople—Darlene, the hairdresser and her husband, Hank who owned the garage? What about the youth? Were there jobs here for them?
“What are you thinking about?” he asked.
“Unemployment.”
“Are you for or against?”
“Seriously, Sawyer. Do you see a lot of poverty in Mandrake Falls? Are people struggling to make ends meet?”
“Some people are, yes. But by the time I meet them they’ve given up the struggle and resorted to crime to survive.”
“That’s not an excuse.” Shelby reddened and turned away. “Joblessness doesn’t excuse stealing or addiction or hurting people.”
“No and that’s why they get arrested, but you don’t see the whole picture the same way law enforcement officers do. Chronic unemployment beats the spirit down. For the guy out of work, making the right moral choice gets harder and harder. Most people can rise to a challenge if there’s a light at the end of the tunnel. But if there’s no way out, no reason to get up in the morning ... unemployment is the root cause of a lot of the calls we get.”
Shelby thought if Mrs. Gurney was suffering in silence, who else in Mandrake Falls was waiting for a light at the end of the tunnel? “But a thing like that will change everything around here,” she said softly. “Too much.”
“Not necessarily. Try to be positive about something for once in your life. The project is only in the proposal stage. Ryan has a long way to go before the shovels go in. Don’t worry, there’s still time for the Gazette to rock the boat. Ryan hasn’t got away with anything yet.” Sawyer turned left and the headlights illuminated a darkened gravel lane. “We’re here.”
Shelby recognized the driveway that led to Sawyer’s family home, a white clapboard farmhouse with green shutters at every window and an ancient apple tree in the backyard. “I’ve always loved your house. Dolly brought me here once not long after the adoption. Do you remember that? There used to be a tire swing in the back yard.”
“It’s still there.”
Shelby tried to keep the squeal out of her voice. “Can I see?”
Sawyer grinned. “There’s not much to see. It’s a tire hanging from a rope.”
“I wanted a swing like that so bad when I was a kid. I saw it from the kitchen window on that visit. I kept staring at it, hoping Dolly or your dad would send me outside to try it out.”
“You could have asked. No one would have said no. We weren’t ogres, Porter.”
Shelby tilted her head back against the seat as Sawyer parked the car. “Sawyer, this is going to come as a shock to you but you were an ogre when we first met. I couldn’t believe you were the godson Dolly was always bragging about. She was looking forward to that visit so much, to introducing me to you, and you were horrible! You were rude to her and you looked right through me. There was no way in hell I was going to ask you if I could swing on the tire.”
“Cut me some slack. You were a juvenile delinquent out of nowhere, taking over Dolly’s life. You’d been before a judge, Dolly wouldn’t say what you were convicted of, but we thought she was in over her head. You obviously outgrew your shady past and I’m glad, but when you arrived here I had no way of knowing you’d straighten out. I wasn’t trying to be rude or hurt you or Dolly. I was being vigilant.”
His face was so beautiful in the misty light coming from the front porch. Shelby could see, though she didn’t want to, that what made Sawyer handsome was his integrity. The fact that he had her story wrong didn’t mean he was being deliberately cruel. He just didn’t know any better. Dolly had gone to great lengths to make sure no one found out. But all of a sudden, Shelby wanted him to know the truth. He’d made he made her see the hidden poverty in Mandrake Falls, and his compassion. She wanted his good opinion. Whatever happened between them, Shelby wanted Sawyer McIntyre to know the real story of how she came to live with Dolly.
Shelby took a deep breath.
“Sawyer. I have something to tell you. No one but Dolly and Social Services knows and it’s really important to me that we keep it that way. Can I trust you with this?”
His eyes glittered in the half-light when he looked at her. “Yes.”
“Okay. You asked me at lunch today how my parents died and the truth is, I don’t know if they are dead. I just tell people that. My dad was one of those chronically unemployed you were talking about. I’m not sure what he did for a living. Petty theft, drug-dealing—we bounced from one cheap flophouse to another, with me landing in foster care whenever the money got tight, which it frequently did. And then one day they went out to buy food and didn’t come back.”
Sawyer’s jaw muscles twitched. “What happened to them?”
“I don’t know. I never did find out. They said they’d be back in an hour and left. I stayed in the motel room for five days living on leftover pizza, waiting. I thought I could stay as long as I wante
d until the manager came to collect the rent and the jig was up. I was placed in foster care and my parents were charged with child abandonment. At their trial, the judge asked me where I’d like to live if I could live anywhere and Vermont was the first place that came to mind. The motel room had a picture of a town in Vermont hanging on the wall—one of those tourism posters, with the white steeple church and fall color, that kind of thing. I spent a lot of time staring at that poster waiting for my parents to come back. It was like the town was reassuring me everything was going to be all right.”
Sawyer shook his head. “Dolly never told me. She never explained.”
“She didn’t think she had to, and she had an obligation to protect a minor child. Where I came from didn’t seem to matter. Everyone in Mandrake Falls accepted me as Dolly’s niece without explanation.” Except you, Shelby thought.
“Why were you placed with Dolly of all people?”
Shelby grinned wryly. “I was a barely literate twelve-year old picked up for vagrancy. There wasn’t a big line-up outside my door to adopt me if you know what I mean. Dolly was the only candidate Social Services could find in the database ready and willing to adopt a kid my age. And she lived in Vermont and I wanted to live in Vermont.”
“So you weren’t the one arrested. It was your parents.” Sawyer rubbed a hand through his hair. “The judge you went before was advocating for you. Not convicting you.”
Lie For Me: Autumn (Mandrake Falls Series Romance Book 2) Page 10
