Promise Me Picket Fences
Janice Kay Johnson
Other Elk Springs books by Janice Kay Johnson
HARLEQUIN SUPERROMANCE
854—THE WOMAN IN BLUE
860—THE BABY AND THE BADGE
866—A MESSAGE FOR ABBY
913—JACK MURRAY, SHERIFF
ELK SPRINGS, OREGON
Have you ever been to Elk Springs? You won’t find it on a map, but it’s out there in Central Oregon, a once old-fashioned town surrounded by high desert ranching country. These past ten years, Elk Springs has been transformed by a new ski resort on Juanita Butte outside town.
New and old met when Scott McNeil, a man who helped build that ski resort, married Meg Patton, who was born and grew up in Elk Springs, then brought her son back to raise him in her hometown. You’re about to meet Scott’s brother, by the way. Kevin McNeil has come to Elk Springs to live and work—although his restless nature has him assuming he won’t stay.
Oh, while you’re in town, stick your head in the new public safety building that houses the police department. If anything epitomizes change in this community, it’s the Elk Springs P.D., run for a quarter century by hard-nosed Chief Ed Patton, who didn’t know the meaning of mercy. Longtime residents are pretty sure he’s rolling over in his grave now that a woman, his own daughter, Renee Patton, wears the badge! Those same residents will tell you that, along with her two sisters—both also in law enforcement—Renee does a fine job of keeping the peace in Elk Springs.
So enjoy your visit and come again.
Janice Kay Johnson
Other Elk Springs books by Janice Kay Johnson
HARLEQUIN SUPERROMANCE
854—THE WOMAN IN BLUE
860—THE BABY AND THE BADGE
866—A MESSAGE FOR ABBY
913—JACK MURRAY, SHERIFF
CHAPTER ONE
THE CANNON BOOMED, white smoke puffing from its mouth. Blue-coated Yankee cavalry cantered through the forest, flashes of gleaming chestnut coat or gold braid glinting between branches. Closer, on the grassy hillside, Rebel and Yankee infantrymen maneuvered, making forays and being driven back by the sharp crack of rifle fire. Wounded fell as the watching crowd gasped. Bodies littered the landscape.
His stern gaze fixed on the hillside skirmish, a Confederate colonel strode past the split-rail fence where Melanie Parker leaned. His gray frock coat had a curved breast with two seven-button rows and elaborate gold braid on the sleeves and trim on collar and cuffs. Blue trim ran up his trouser legs. His graying head was covered by an officer’s kepi, a kind of slouch cap.
Melanie watched his progress with pardonable pride. She had made his uniform, from inner pockets to decorative braid. In fact, half the uniforms on this field had come from her sewing machine.
The Civil War reenactors were a passionate bunch, she’d discovered. Every tiny detail had to be right, for these men and women were out here to educate, as well as have fun. She had become something of an expert on Rebel and Yankee uniforms both, from the pullover white muslin shirt with removable collar to the Confederate rank insignia on the coat sleeves. She’d sewed many of the gowns worn by camp followers, too. Melanie had something of an obsession herself for historical accuracy.
Today’s reenactment of an obscure battle was being staged primarily for children. Scouting troops from all over central Oregon, both boys and girls, had gathered in the state park outside Elk Springs to watch, learn and participate. Melanie was here as leader of her daughter Angie’s troop.
Except for a few stolen moments of pleasure taken in her handiwork, she was too busy keeping tabs on the girls to follow the strategy on the battlefield. Somebody always had to go to the portable toilets a quarter of a mile away. The booths selling 1860s-era keepsakes, clothing and candy enticed eight-year-old girls with allowance money tucked in their pockets. Melanie had spent the entire day thinking, Now, where is Jennifer? Oh. Good. Well, then, what about Rainy? And Sarah. She’s missing, too, isn’t she? Melanie did not envy the troop leaders with younger children.
A buzz passed through the crowd, a ripple she scarcely noticed as she counted noses for the four hundred and eighty-eighth time.
“Melanie.” A regional Scout leader paused, her expression harassed and even a little anxious. “You haven’t seen a wandering four-year-old, have you? A boy in green corduroy overalls?”
“Are you kidding?” Melanie waved a hand and raised her voice. “Angie and Rachel, where do you think you’re going?” She switched her attention back to the leader. “Is this kid really lost?”
“Nobody has seen him in the past hour. Or more.” She shook her head. “His dad has a group of older boys.” She nodded vaguely toward the encampment. “He thought his son was with his wife, she thought he was with the dad. You know how that goes.”
No, actually, Melanie didn’t. Angie’s dad had never been interested in taking her places. In fact, she hadn’t even seen him in almost two years.
But Melanie nodded. “I’ll keep an eye out.”
“Right.”
No small boy in green overalls darted through the crowd or tried to duck under the split-rail fence to join the battle. Eventually Melanie and other Scout leaders organized their kids to hunt through the crowd and down by the lake.
The battle on the hillside dwindled in spirit, and the wounded rose to fight another day. Cavalry officers hunted through the fringe of the woods for the child.
Somebody pointed out the boy’s mother, who raced along the riverbank, calling his name frantically, voice rising to a near scream. “Brandon! Brandon, come to Mommy!”
“We need to send the kids home,” a senior Boy Scout leader decided, and the others concurred. Melanie corralled her girls by her Bronco, but Sarah’s mother hurried across the parking lot.
“Aren’t you in the volunteer search-and-rescue group? Let me take the girls. You might be needed here. Angie can come home with Sarah.”
As they piled into the Dodge Caravan, Melanie counted noses one last time and then hugged her daughter and thanked Sarah’s mother. “You’ll see that they all get home? Bless you. I’ll hope I’m not needed in the end.”
An ardent hiker, she had joined the search-and-rescue group this past summer and had only been called out once, when a hiker got separated from his party in the Deschutes National Forest. His cell phone saved the day, which had taken some of the romance out of the rescue of a man with a sprained ankle, in Melanie’s private opinion.
As the group gathered, she said, “We’re sure this little boy wasn’t…well…”
“Taken?” the ranger who headed the group finished for her, his jaw set grimly. “No. We can’t be. But there was virtually no automobile traffic out of here in the past few hours. Remember, pretty much the whole audience was Scout troops. Unless we have some sicko leader who dragged the kid off…”
Nobody wanted to think about that.
“The kid is a wanderer, apparently. Couple months ago, he got up before his parents one morning and set off down the street. They found him a mile away. So that’s the likeliest possibility.” He looked around. “Other questions? No? Okay. Tom, you take your group and do a sweep along the riverbank.” He continued to give orders, and groups of eight or ten split off to follow them.
Melanie had become aware of a man she didn’t know standing quietly nearby. He stood out from the crowd by virtue of his height, his lean powerful body and short-cropped but noticeably wavy auburn hair. In the late-afternoon sunlight, that hair was almost as red as the sweat-slick neck of the bay mare hitched to the nearby fence.
“Kevin, you handle the woods beyond the concession area. Go several miles, the kid has been missing for almost three hours now, but keep it slow. His mother says this is nap time, and he may have found a place to curl up.”
The big auburn-haired man in jeans and dusty hiking boots said in a deep easy voice, “You got it. Okay.” Clear gray eyes met Melanie’s for an oddly startling moment before moving on. “Yo
u eight—no, nine, are with me.”
As they hurried across the beaten-down grass that had formed the parking lot, he gave orders: Fan out, but stay within sight and shouting distance of one another. He took the center himself. Melanie had the impression no one else knew him, either, but his air of command was so natural no one argued. Somehow, as they entered the ponderosa pines, Melanie found herself beside him.
The woods weren’t dense, nothing like the Pacific Northwest coastal forests or the Florida Everglades. Here, reddish dust rose in tiny puffs with each footfall, and the scent of pine was sharp. If the ground had been level, finding one little boy would have been easy. As it was, however, the hill rising steeply from the Deschutes River was cut by narrow ravines with trickles of water that, in spring and early summer, would have been torrents. Every dip of ground had to be investigated, every clump of madrona or even long grass. Thank goodness this was late September and not August, when the heat would have had all of them dripping with sweat.
Melanie heaved herself up a clump of crumbling aged lava. Why couldn’t Brandon Marsh have been wearing red or even royal blue? Why green?
A big tanned hand was suddenly right under her nose. She blinked and looked up into those unnerving gray eyes.
“Oh. Thank you,” she said breathlessly, and let his hand engulf hers. Kevin, whose last name she didn’t know, hoisted her up the last rise. Discombobulated by sensations she hadn’t felt in a long time—the skitter of nerves in her palm, the warmth that traveled easily up her arm and down to her belly—she stumbled and bumped into him.
He was every bit as solid as he looked.
She jumped back and teetered on the brink. Steadying herself, Melanie mumbled, “I’m sorry. If I’d known what I was going to be doing today, I’d have worn my boots.”
“Your shoes look sturdy.” He still held her hand, as though he didn’t trust her not to tumble back the way she’d come.
She couldn’t imagine why.
“I almost wore canvas slip-ons,” she admitted. As if he would care.
A smile touched his sexy mouth. “We haven’t met. I’m Kevin McNeil.”
“Melanie Parker. I had a troop of girls here today. My daughter’s troop.”
“Ah.” He let go of her hand. After a small silence he asked, sounding overly casual, “Was your husband here to take her home?”
“Um? Oh, I don’t have…” Could it be? Was he hoping she didn’t have a husband? “I mean, I’m divorced. One of the other mothers took charge of the girls.”
He made a pleased sound that sent a pleasant frisson tiptoeing up her spine. “Well, Melanie, we’d better keep moving.”
“I can’t imagine a four-year-old boy climbed up here.”
“I can’t, either.” A grimace tugged his mouth.
“This kid sounds like an adventurer, though. Let’s hope…”
She knew what he hoped: that four-year-old Brandon had ventured into the woods and not onto a slippery rock in the river. She was glad not to be in the group that had followed the Deschutes downstream.
He headed toward a giant fallen ponderosa riddled with insect holes, Melanie toward a lava outcrop. No small boy snoozed in a cranny. Looking up, she spotted the man searching on her other side. They exchanged waves and a few shouted words.
The trees grew larger as the ground leveled, their rough boles sufficient to hide a child. She kept glancing to her left, where Kevin McNeil moved quietly through the woods, never a branch popping under his feet. He walked lightly, with a contained grace, no extraneous swing of the arms or bob of his head. A natural woodsman. It was easy to imagine him in buckskins and moccasins.
Several times, in the slow progress through the woods, Kevin came near enough for them to talk briefly.
“Not very many women in the search-and-rescue group,” he commented once.
“I don’t mountain-climb,” she said somewhat defensively, “but I’ve always loved hiking, so I thought I could help in this kind of search even if I’m not strong enough to carry an injured man.”
“I didn’t mean that as criticism.”
“But you did feel you needed to help me over a rough bit.”
She’d have sworn his eyes darkened even as his voice deepened. “Needed? No. It just seemed like a good excuse.”
He was flirting with her, the mother of an eight-year-old. She didn’t have the experience often.
“Oh,” she said inanely.
Obviously she didn’t have the experience often enough, Melanie thought ruefully.
She was immediately annoyed at herself for worrying about something so frivolous when a child was missing.
A brief smile touched Kevin McNeil’s eyes and mouth, but he turned away when a shout came from his left.
“Well, will you look at that?” he murmured.
She looked, and felt a burst of elation. John Clooney, who owned Elk Springs’s major furniture store and who had been part of the group, was striding toward them with a sleepy boy cradled in his arms.
Shaking his auburn head in wonderment, Kevin put his whistle to his mouth and blew three short sharp blasts, the signal to gather. Then he took the walkie-talkie from his belt and spoke briefly into it.
In the distance Melanie heard other whistles.
“Hello, Brandon,” Kevin said, when John had reached them. “Your mommy has been looking for you.”
The boy buried his face shyly in John’s chest. The adults laughed. When the whole party had gathered, they started down, taking turns carrying Brandon, who woke up and began to enjoy himself, bouncing on the men’s shoulders and chattering.
“That,” Kevin said to Melanie, “is one kid who needs to be kept on a leash. I’ve never approved of leading a child around like a dog, but there’s an exception to every rule.”
She had been very aware that he was right beside her in the descent. “Thank God my daughter’s timid!” she exclaimed. “The worst she ever did was hide inside a clothing rack at the Emporium.”
“What’s she like?” he asked, matching his steps to hers. “Does she look like her mother?”
“A little.” Angie’s hair was a shade darker, her brown eyes a shade lighter, but she had Melanie’s round face and snub nose. “Although she’s going to be taller. Like her father. Right now, she’s skinny, shy and sweet. Angie is the kind who stands up for a classmate when other kids are making fun of him. She has a good heart.”
“Something tells me she gets that from you, too.”
Flustered, Melanie stopped and let others pass on the narrow trail. “You’re flirting with me.”
“You noticed.” For the first time, his lean tanned face looked wary. “You’re not flirting back.”
“I’m a mom! I don’t know how.” Now she felt incredibly stupid.
“But you’re not married.”
Someone else brushed past them. Melanie shook her head.
“Engaged?” When she shook her head again, he said, “Seeing someone?”
“No.” Now she sounded as shy as her daughter.
“Ah.” He had a way of investing that drawn-out sound with a rumble of satisfaction that brought warmth to her cheeks. “Well, then, Melanie Parker, would you have dinner with me some night?”
“But…I don’t know you.”
“I was hoping to remedy that.” He took pity on her. “I’ve just started teaching at the community college. My brother is general manager at the Juanita Butte ski area. Scott McNeil?”
She’d read his name in the newspaper.
“I’m respectable,” he promised, in that velvet-deep voice he used when he was looking straight into her eyes.
She did sometimes dream of finding a man she could love, of remarrying, of perhaps even having another child. But the odds had never seemed very good, given that she was thirty now and the good men her age in Elk Springs were generally married.
And she was not leaving Elk Springs, no matter what. She’d decided that some time ago. She’d had a lifetime of wandering. This
was home. Angie would grow up in the rambling old house Melanie had inherited when Nana died. She would never have to tearfully leave her friends behind or walk into a new school midterm, facing a roomful of mocking strangers. Angie, Melanie had vowed four years ago when she’d come home to Elk Springs for good, would always know where she belonged.
But Kevin McNeil was apparently single, incredibly sexy and established right here in Elk Springs. Dreams did come true, a small inner voice whispered.
“Okay.” She sounded gruff rather than sultry, but her throat seemed to be constricting her vocal chords.
“Yes. I’d like to have dinner with you.”
“Good.” His smile was slightly crooked, almost tender and heart-stoppingly sexy. “Now that we have that out of the way, let’s go watch a reunion.”
CHAPTER TWO
“WELL, WELL, WELL.” Kevin rotated on his heels, gazing in wonder at the racks and heaps of fantastic, colorful costumes that filled the room like Aladdin’s cave.
“You didn’t ask what I did for a living.” Melanie watched him from the doorway.
When he’d seen the sign outside her old house, the one arching above the white picket fence that bounded her yard, he’d asked to see some of the costumes. Somehow, he hadn’t pictured such…profusion. Or the exquisite detail that made these garments light-years from the cheap Halloween costumes sold to kids for trick-or-treating.
“I couldn’t picture what you did for a living.” Something physical, he had guessed, despite her pale silky skin, a delicious contrast to her warm brown hair. But she was slim and fit and moved well. Besides, not that many women joined the search-and-rescue group. She might own a nursery or work for the county parks or make cabinets. “But I wouldn’t have guessed something so…”
She folded her arms. “Outlandish?”
“Unusual,” he corrected, eyeing an elaborate green velvet dress that might have been Elizabethan in style. With her smooth long hair and tall slender figure, Melanie would look gorgeous in it.
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