Riverbend Road

by RaeAnne Thayne

  “I’ve had it. Do you hear me? I told him the next time would be the last time. I told him if he can’t keep his sorry ass off a bar stool, there’s no freaking way I was going to bail it out of jail again.”

  “DUI?” he guessed, though it didn’t take any particular detective skills.

  “What else? Third one in four months.” She swore again. “It’s like he’s been on one long bender since he lost his job.”

  Marcus was the brother just younger than he was, with barely two years between them. He was also the Emmett brother who seemed determined to follow in their father’s wobbly, drunk-off-his-ass footsteps.

  Until a few months earlier, things had been going well for Marcus. Though his brother had only graduated high school by the skin of his teeth, he immediately moved to Boise and went to work in construction and eventually made a good living driving a cement truck.

  He and Christy had a rocky start, marrying young after she got pregnant, but seemed to be making things work and had even added a few more kids to the mix.

  Earlier in the year, Marcus’s company had run into financial trouble and he was laid off and everything seemed to implode.

  “I can’t do this anymore, Cade. I just can’t,” Christy said. Her voice wavered and he could hear the tears just below the surface. “When he’s here, he just mopes around doing nothing but snapping at me and the kids.”

  “Being unemployed is tough on a guy like Marc, who’s used to taking care of his family.”

  “I get that. Believe me, I get it. But instead of going out to find another job, he goes out and buys more booze. What is wrong with him?”

  Cade didn’t know how to answer. Christy wanted him to fix his brother. He felt as if he’d spent his entire life trying to duct-tape together the jagged pieces of his broken family in one way or another. Hell of a lot of good that had done over the years. He hadn’t been able to prevent his mom from getting sick when he was eleven and he couldn’t keep anybody else out of the hot mess of trouble they always seemed to land in.

  “What do you need from me?” he asked.

  “How about a phone number for a good divorce attorney?” she countered.

  That would be a disaster for their three kids, who adored their father. On the other hand, living with an unreliable, unstable, angry drunk wasn’t a great alternative.

  “I can’t help you there, Christy. He might be an ass but he’s still my brother. He would be devastated to lose his family. You know he loves you.”

  “Does he? Really? He’s losing his family right now. He’s just too plastered to notice!”

  Was she only calling to complain or did she really think he had some power to change his brother’s behavior? He couldn’t decades ago when they were kids. He certainly couldn’t now.

  “I’m not bailing him out this time,” Christy went on. “I’m dead serious. I’m working my fingers to the bone, trying to keep food in my kids’ mouths and shoes on their feet. I’m not going to use my hard-earned money to bail him out of jail one more time. As far as I’m concerned, he can rot in there.”

  Maybe that would be the wake-up call his brother needed, the stimulus to get off his butt and make a change. Or maybe Marcus would perceive Christy’s inaction as proof she didn’t love him, which might send him slipping further into the depression that seemed to have caught hold.

  “I understand where you’re coming from.”

  “Do you?”

  Yes. Hell, yes. After his mother died, Cade had tried his best to help his father but had finally had to accept his father loved Johnnie Walker far more than he could ever love his sons.

  Marcus wasn’t Walter. He was a good man going through a rough stretch.

  “I can try to talk to him, see if I can convince him to go into rehab.”

  Christy paused and he heard more sniffling on the line. “Don’t you think I’ve tried that? Only about a thousand times. He won’t listen.”

  “It’s worth a shot.”

  “Maybe you’ll have better luck. He respects you more than any other man he knows.”

  “I can’t make any promises,” he warned. “Any change has to come from him.”

  “I appreciate the effort anyway. You’ve been a good brother to him.”

  He would beg to disagree. A good brother would have been better at keeping his siblings out of trouble.

  “It might be a few days before I can get over there. I’ve got to work double shifts for a while since I’m short an officer this week.” He grimaced at the reminder of Wynona Bailey and her foolhardy stubbornness.

  “That’s fine with me. Let him stay in there and stew about the mess he’s created.”

  “I should be able to squeeze out a few hours toward the middle of the week to drive to Boise.”

  “I hope you can talk sense into his hard head.”

  “So do I.”

  She was silent for a moment and he heard more sniffling on the line and a muffled sob. “Why does he have to make it so hard to love him?” she finally burst out.

  If his brother had been there, Cade would have had no problem pounding him, badge or no badge. Idiot. He had a good thing going. A wife who loved him, kids who needed him. Why would he throw all that away?

  Cade’s own beer—the bottle from the single six-pack he allowed himself per week—suddenly tasted flat and bitter.

  None of them had been given much of a chance, with an abusive drunk for a father and a weak mother who didn’t take care of herself and ended up with liver disease because of it.

  With such a screwed-up childhood, it was a wonder Marcus had been able to maintain a good relationship with Christy all these years.

  “You take good care of yourself and those kids.”

  “That’s what I’m trying to do. But you know Marcus won’t see it that way.”

  He feared she was right. “Do you need help with bills?” he finally asked quietly.

  Christy was silent for a long, awkward moment. “You’ve done more than enough, Cade.”

  He didn’t mention to her that Marcus had come to him asking for help paying the mortgage the last few months. He had a feeling she knew and was too proud and stubborn to ask for more.

  He would send a check anyway and hope she accepted it, for the kids’ sake. Losing their home wouldn’t help the situation right now.

  “I’ll talk to you later in the week to see how things are going,” he said.

  “Thanks, Cade. I didn’t know what else to do but to call you. I needed to vent to someone else who loves that idiot as much as I do.”

  “I’ll do what I can,” he promised.

  After they said goodbye, he leaned his head back against the wall and closed his eyes, exhausted suddenly from the crazy day. Marcus and his latest DUI seemed like just one more thing he couldn’t fix.

  The world was filled with problems he couldn’t solve, which sometimes seriously sucked.

  The doorbell rang while he was still trying to figure out how he could slip Christy the extra money for her mortgage—which happened to be the one problem he could remedy.

  He might get to that steak at some point that evening, but he was beginning to wonder.

  “Coming,” he called out.

  He headed to the front door and pulled it open. All thoughts of Marcus and Christy, DUIs and mortgages, flew completely out of his head.

  Wynona Bailey stood on his doorstep with her wheat-colored hair pulled back into a thick braid and tan shorts revealing a surprisingly long stretch of tawny legs.

  Yeah. The world was really good at throwing unsolvable problems at him.

  His mind snapped back to that nightmarish moment when he had pulled up to the fire at Darwin Twitchell’s barn and found her patrol vehicle empty and no sign of Wyn, and then an instant later she
burst through the doors of the barn with a kid in each arm and flames exploding behind them.

  He had run through that moment in his head dozens of times in the last few hours and still couldn’t figure out the emotion he’d experienced, when he knew she was safe and unharmed.

  Something had changed. That’s all he knew. Or maybe it had been there forever but was only now growling to life.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked, then realized how rude the words sounded when her hesitant smile slid away.

  But what was he supposed to say? Though she lived at the other end of the street, they didn’t socialize at each other’s homes outside of work. He could count on one hand the times he’d been to her place, usually to drop off paperwork. She stopped here just as seldom.

  Why was that?

  He didn’t know the answer and it seemed odd now. They were friends and had been for years, even before she came to work for him after her father’s injury. Her brother was his best friend.

  He had been to all his other officers’ homes several times. Barbecues. Birthday parties. It had never been a big deal to socialize outside of work, especially in a small police department like Haven Point. But something about Wyn Bailey was...different.

  Maybe he could blame the same something that had sent him rushing to the scene of a fire after she stopped responding to the radio, with his heart hammering and his foot pushing hard on the gas pedal.

  “I’ll tell you why I’m here but I’d rather not do it standing on the porch,” she said. “May I come in?”

  He had no choice but to step back and open the door wider for her.

  A familiar canine followed her in and he couldn’t help a smile, despite the tension that popped and sparked between them like a bad wire.

  “Hey there, Young Pete.”

  The dog’s ears perked up at his name and he sat at Cade’s feet with his tail brushing the wood plank floor of his entryway. Cade reached down and scratched Pete in the spot he remembered the dog liked, just under its left ear.

  “How are you, buddy?”

  He and Young Pete went way back, to the days when the dog used to be John Bailey’s constant companion. The former chief had adored the puppy, the latest in a string of dogs he always named Pete.

  He wasn’t a puppy anymore. Gray peppered his muzzle and he walked with the same ginger care of an old man on the cusp of needing artificial knees.

  “How are the lungs?” he finally asked when Wyn showed no inclination to let him know what she was doing at his house.

  At her blank look he arched an eyebrow. “Smoke inhalation, remember? A few hours ago you were being examined by two of Haven Point’s finest EMTs. Ring a bell?”

  “Oh. Right. The lungs.” She shrugged. “If I breathe too deeply, they ache a little but nothing I didn’t expect.”

  The reality of her close call seemed to reach out and grab him by the throat all over again. He couldn’t even contemplate what might have happened to her.

  Yeah, he knew the risks of the job. Every day when he sent his officers out, he knew they were risking injury and even death. People thought Haven Point was a nice, quiet town where nothing much happened but those in his department knew better. The town had its share of drug abuse, domestic disturbances, assaults.

  He had been standing just a few feet away when her father took a bullet to the head that should have killed him—and in a roundabout way, eventually did just that two years later.

  If Wynona had joined the ranks of the fallen that included her father and her twin brother, Cade wouldn’t have been able to live with himself.

  Her mom was probably out of her head with worry.

  “That was a really stupid thing you did,” he said sternly.

  “Yes, I believe you mentioned that when you were yelling at me in front of the entire fire department.”

  For a guy with a reputation for a cool head under pressure, he had done a miserable job of handling the whole situation. He could admit that now, after the fact. He should have taken her aside and reprimanded her in private. The whole public-safety community didn’t need to watch him lose his temper.

  Too late now. It was done and he wouldn’t back down or change his mind.

  “Did you come here thinking you could talk me out of the suspension? If you did, don’t bother.”

  “You are ridiculously stubborn, Cade Emmett. Did anybody ever tell you that?”

  “You. About a thousand and sixteen times.”

  Of all his officers, he trusted her judgment most. She wasn’t afraid to call him out when he became dogmatic or unreasonable, whether during an investigation or in personnel issues. He wasn’t afraid to admit when he was wrong but he knew he wasn’t on this one.

  “Would you at least consider reducing the number of days I’m suspended?”

  “No.”

  She narrowed her gaze at him. “This is the worst time of year for the department to be shorthanded, with all the tourists starting to trickle in before Lake Haven Days in a few weeks.”

  “I know that.”

  She sighed. “You’re hanging me out to dry as an example to the rest of the guys, aren’t you?”

  Yeah, that was partly true. When it counted, he needed his officers to follow the chain of command. If he ordered an officer to stand down, he needed to know the order would be heeded.

  “It’s not easy having to be the one who makes the tough calls.”

  Sometimes he was really tired of being the responsible one. Between the phone call from Christy about his brother and Wynona calling him out because of her suspension, the burden had never felt so heavy.

  “I get it. You did what you had to do. A week just seems excessive to me.”

  “A week. No more, no less. You scared the hell out of me, Wyn.”

  He shouldn’t have said that last part, especially not in that rough, intense tone. She gazed at him, her eyes wide and he thought he saw something there, a little flicker of awareness, before she shifted her gaze down to her dog, who was now stretching out on the floor at his feet.

  “Fine. Your decision. I guess we’ll all have to live with it. That wasn’t really why I stopped anyway,” she went on. “You have new neighbors across the street.”

  “Yeah, I saw a vehicle in the driveway this morning and a moving van unloading things when I came home around lunchtime.”

  “Do you know anything about them?”

  He shook his head. “Not a thing, except what I saw earlier. They must have kids because I saw a couple of bikes out on the lawn when I came home—a boy and a girl, judging by the stereotypical bike colors. The pink bike was bigger. They drive a minivan with Oregon plates and listen to NPR, according to a bumper sticker.”

  She laughed. “For not knowing anything about them, you seemed to have picked up quite a bit.”

  It would probably sound too much like bragging to recite the license plate he’d memorized or the county in Oregon where the vehicle was registered last. “It’s my job to notice what’s going on in front of me.”

  She made a funny little sound in her throat that morphed into a cough. “Of course it is.”

  Did her dry tone imply there was something significant he hadn’t noticed?

  He frowned. “Why are you so interested in our new neighbors?”

  “It’s also my job to notice what’s going on around me and something there is off. I don’t know what it is but it’s got my nose itching.”

  Her instincts were usually right on the money.

  Once she called him in for backup on a routine traffic stop of a gray-haired couple driving a sedan with Ohio plates. None of his other officers would have found anything unusual about them but Wyn had caught a subtle vibe about the pair and ended up asking their permission to search the vehicle. When the couple refused
, he brought in Rusty, the drug-sniffing dog from the Lake Haven Sheriff’s Department, who found a quarter million dollars’ worth of heroin sewn into the hollowed-out seats.

  He would have said she had her father’s cop instincts—except for the last few weeks he had served under her father.

  “Have you met them already?”

  “Yes. Well, the mom and the kids. Andrea Montgomery and two kids, Chloe and Will. I don’t know if there’s a dad in the picture. I didn’t see any evidence of one but that doesn’t mean anything. I said hello to them on my way to the trailhead. When I was coming down, I found her sprawled out on the trail with a sprained ankle. I helped her back to her house.”

  “You’re on a roll. How many more people will you rescue today?”

  She made a face. “I couldn’t just leave her there.”

  No, she wouldn’t. Wynona was like her father in many ways, full of compassion and concern.

  “What makes you think something’s off?”

  “She doesn’t seem very crazy about police officers. When I told her I worked for the local police department, you would have thought I told her I drowned kittens for a living.”

  “Plenty of people don’t like the police. That doesn’t make them criminals.”

  “I know that. This was something beyond dislike. More like...fear.”

  Perhaps she was exaggerating or had misunderstood the woman’s reactions but, again, he trusted her gut. He had guys in the department who could shoot the hell out of a bull’s-eye at the shooting range and one who could bench-press three-hundred-fifty pounds. None of them had Wynona’s instincts with people.

  “You think she’s on the run?”

  “Maybe. Maybe she’s got an abusive ex in the background. Or maybe it’s a custody case. Who knows?”

  “Maybe she’s witness protection.” He couldn’t resist teasing her a little. “Maybe she testified in a mob hit back in Oregon and now she’s got a new identity here in Haven Point. Or maybe she’s a superhero and her secret identity is a suburban mom.”