Something Davie had said recently snagged in his mind—the boy had been telling him about past stepfathers and boyfriends, and he’d said one of them had some kind of fit at supper one night and died right there at the table.
Boo-hoo. That had been the extent of Davie’s sympathy.
“Ty?” Jim prompted, when the silence stretched on too long. “You still there?”
Davie’s eyes were the size of the lids on the chicken buckets.
“I’m here,” Tyler confirmed. Then, for Davie’s benefit, he added, “Doreen’s all right.”
“Is that a personal endorsement,” Jim asked, conveying a little amusement and a lot of controlled frustration, “or are you telling me you’ve seen her after all?”
“I haven’t seen her,” Tyler reiterated, with an edge in his voice now. “I presume you tried the casino already?”
“Gee,” Jim retorted, “why didn’t I think of that, since I used to manage the place and hired her myself, so I know that’s where she works?”
“Maybe she lit out early,” Tyler said, tired of the bickering, good-natured or otherwise. “She was planning to start over someplace else, that’s all I know.”
“And the boy is staying with you, according to Roy.”
“Yeah,” Tyler answered, bristling a little and spacing his words out wide. “The boy is staying with me.”
“I’ll need to have a word with him,” Jim said wearily. “He might know where she’s gone.”
“And he might or might not tell you,” Tyler pointed out, watching Davie closely. The kid had gotten the gist by now, knew Jim hadn’t called to say Doreen had been hurt, or worse. “Shall I bring him to town, or are you coming out here?”
Davie had been busy looking disinterested until then; now, he was gaping at Tyler and pale again.
“I’ll come out there,” Jim decided, after a moment’s thought. “I could use a little of that fresh country air.”
“We’ll be here,” Tyler said.
Jim gave his ETA as fifteen minutes and hung up.
“Why does the sheriff want to talk to me?” Davie immediately demanded.
Tyler drew back his chair, sat down at the table again. Pushed his plate away. “Roy’s at the clinic, Davie. They pumped his stomach a little while ago. He claims your mother poisoned him, and evidently, she’s nowhere to be found. Jim figures you might know where she went.”
“Why can’t they just let her go?”
There was no way to sugarcoat the situation. “Worst-case scenario? Because if she did poison Roy, she could be charged with attempted murder,”
“And that jerk sheriff thinks I’d tell him where to find her—if I knew—so he could throw her in jail for the rest of her life?”
“That ‘jerk sheriff’ is one of my best friends,” Tyler said quietly. “When you refer to him around me, I’ll thank you to remember that.”
Davie drew in his horns a little. “I don’t know where she is,” he said, almost in a whisper.
“Any wild guesses?”
Davie flushed, and the ghost of the spider on his neck glowed pink. “No,” he said, a little too quickly. His eyes blazed. “Next thing, you’ll be saying this whole thing was a scam, that Mom and I planned it this way from the first—”
“Was it a scam, Davie? Were you supposed to call your mother at six so the two of you could meet up somewhere later and take off, say at the end of that road right out there?” He cocked his thumb toward the long, winding driveway. “After I was asleep, maybe?”
“No!” Davie yelled. He seemed about to surge up out of his chair in a fit of rage, but in the end, he either didn’t have the energy or the courage.
“Tell me more about that poor bastard who croaked at the supper table,” Tyler pressed quietly. “I think you called him Marty. What was his last name, Davie?”
Tears welled in Davie’s eyes. “You think Mom killed him? Maybe that we both did?”
“I didn’t say that. I just want his name.”
To Tyler’s surprise, and considerable relief, Davie reeled it off, along with a rural address outside of San Antonio. Then he got to his feet, started gathering up his few belongings, like he was planning on hitting the road.
Tyler didn’t move from his chair, didn’t speak.
“Aren’t you going to ask me where the hell I think I’m going?” Davie finally demanded, running an angry arm across his face.
“Okay,” Tyler said easily. “Where the hell do you think you’re going?”
“Well, I’m going someplace!”
Tyler suppressed a humorless chuckle. He’d never seen a kid in so much pain, and with his background, that was a wonder. “Like where?”
Apparently stumped, Davie sagged onto the edge of his cot, sat there with his head hanging. Kit Carson got up off his blanket-pile and ambled over to lick the kid’s face.
“I’m probably not your kid anyway,” Davie sniffled, after a long time.
Tyler gave a sigh. “You’ve got all the signs,” he said.
Davie looked up. “Of what?”
“Of being a Creed. You’ve got a temper like a woodstove burning nuclear waste, and you’re ready to rush off half-cocked to no place in particular.” Tyler sighed again. “I’m not accusing you of anything, Davie. But if you know where your mother is, you need to tell Jim when he gets here.”
“It’s not like she has anyplace to go,” Davie said, and the words stuck in Tyler’s heart like a barrage of tiny needles, hitting all the bruised places and quivering there. “You think we’d have stayed with Roy Fifer, or any of the others, if we’d had a choice?”
“Your mother’s always had a choice,” Tyler answered. “You didn’t.”
Davie ducked his head again, and his shoulders stooped. “She always said if she could live anywhere she wanted, she’d pick Vegas,” he said, his voice so small Tyler could barely hear it. “We tried to make it there once, but things were too expensive. Mom said a person had to have a lot of money to live in Vegas. It was too depressing if you were broke, like us.”
Tyler heard a car pull up outside, knew it was Jim. Left his friend to let himself in, since he knew the way. “Did you have friends there?” he asked. “Family, maybe?”
Davie shook his head. “Just another of her crap boyfriends,” he said. Then, with a bitter laugh, he met Tyler’s gaze again. “That lasted about five minutes. Mom was crazy about him, but he didn’t want to get involved with a woman who had kids. As in, me.”
Las Vegas, Tyler thought, hearing Jim step up onto the porch, tap at the door frame before entering. It would be a depressing place for a single mother running her feet off for a paycheck. But Doreen wasn’t broke anymore, was she? And she didn’t have to worry about Davie now, either.
Which probably meant she’d be looking up the kid-free boyfriend.
Jim walked in, drew back a chair at the table and sat himself down. After a nod to Tyler, he turned to Davie.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hey,” Davie said, albeit reluctantly.
Jim was tall and lean, a good man in a fight, as Tyler had ample cause to know, having grown up with him. Jim Huntinghorse had been as wild as all three of the Creed brothers put together once upon a time, but now he was the pride of the tribal council.
“How are Sam and Caroline?” Tyler asked.
Sam was Jim’s son, four or five years old, and the light of the man’s life. “Sam’s growing up fast,” Jim answered. “And Caroline—well, she’s still Caroline.”
Tyler gave a partial grin at that. Jim and Caroline Huntinghorse went all the way back to elementary school, and it had been a tempestuous relationship from day one. They’d divorced but reconciled later on. Tyler would have bet his brand-new-and-shiny-blue pickup that when they weren’t fighting, Jim and Caroline, they were tearing each other’s clothes off.
“Things have a way of working out,” Tyler said easily, for Davie’s benefit as much as Jim’s.
“If you say so.” Jim sighed. “I hear you and L
ily are back together.”
“Word does get around,” Tyler confirmed. “She’s in Chicago and I’m here, so ‘together’ isn’t the operative word.”
Jim threw his own words back at him. “Things have a way of working out,” he said, watching Davie. Sizing him up. After years of managing a casino, Jim was real good at reading people. Now, his face softened a little. “Where’s your mother, Davie?” he asked.
“Probably on her way to Las Vegas,” Davie said.
Tyler felt a surge of hope.
Jim gave a slight nod, doing his inscrutable routine. He’d played the noble savage to the hilt, all his life. “You planning on meeting up with her later?”
Davie flushed, flung a rebellious glance at Tyler. “I’d rather go to a foster home,” he snapped.
Jim raised his eyebrows. “I see,” he said.
“You’re not going anywhere,” Tyler told Davie.
Jim took a little memo book, the kind that comes with its own pencil, from the pocket of his spiffy uniform shirt. “If I were your mother, and I was on my way to Vegas,” he mused thoughtfully, “where would I light when I got there?”
“The guy might have moved by now,” Davie said, looking at Tyler again, but without so much defiance this time.
“Or not,” Jim said mildly.
Davie, it turned out, had a remarkable memory for names and addresses.
Jim wrote down the lead the kid gave up.
“Marty,” Tyler prompted, when Davie didn’t volunteer the story about the boo-hoo guy.
Davie looked furious again, but he spilled that, too.
“Is Roy gonna die?” he asked Jim, looking as though he expected to be slapped into a pair of handcuffs when the sheriff closed the notebook and stood to go.
“No,” Jim answered.
“Too bad,” Davie said.
Jim and Tyler exchanged weary glances.
“I was young once,” Jim said, with a philosophical sigh.
“Me, too,” Tyler answered.
“What was that supposed to mean?” Davie asked carefully, the minute Jim had gotten into his squad car and started backing down the dirt driveway. Until then, he’d stayed stubbornly silent. “All that stuff about being young once, I mean?”
“It meant,” Tyler said, rising from his chair to gather up the remains of the chicken dinner, shaking his head once when Kit Carson gave him a hopeful muzzle-nudge to the knee, “that we both understand what it means to be a thirteen-year-old smart-ass and are therefore willing to cut you a little slack by not assuming you think watching a man die at the supper table is funny.”
“It wasn’t funny,” Davie said. “It was awful.” After a few beats, though, a grin quirked up a corner of the kid’s mouth, so familiar that it gave Tyler a pang. He grinned like that, and so did his brothers. “Can we talk about an allowance now?” he asked.
“Sure,” Tyler replied. “I’ll even write the script for you. You say, ‘Can I have one?’ and I say, ‘Hell, no, not until you find the lawn.’ There. Conversation over. Wasn’t that easy?”
“Are you always such a hard-ass?”
“Pretty much. Today, I happen to be having one of my cordial days.”
Davie didn’t grin this time. “Did you mean it when you said I’m not going anywhere?”
“I meant it,” Tyler confirmed.
Davie was almost giddy with relief, but some of the glow faded as he watched Tyler wedge the pair of chicken buckets into a fridge meant to hold bait and a six-pack and not much else. “What’s going to happen to my mom?” he asked. There was no bravado now, no tough guy with piercings and a major attitude.
Tyler knew Davie was asking if Doreen would be going to jail and, upon further reflection, that seemed unlikely, especially if Roy made a full recovery and became his normal whiskey-drinking, woman-beating self again. On the other hand, if rat poison, for example, turned up in the lab results after the tests the folks down at the clinic would inevitably run, the attempted-murder rap might stick.
Tyler shoved a hand through his hair. “The truth is, Davie, I don’t know.”
As far as it went, that was the truth, but Davie had asked what was going to happen to his mother, and the answer to that was a whole lot more complicated and a whole lot less encouraging.
Given her history, Doreen would probably run through all the money Tyler had given her, with the help of a bad boyfriend or two, and end up either dead or shacked up with some new version of Roy Fifer.
“I don’t want to be like her,” Davie murmured, and then looked startled, as though he hadn’t meant to voice the thought at all.
Tyler’s mind shifted to Jake. He remembered one of the many occasions when the old man had come home stinking drunk, long after supper was over and the dishes were washed, and demanded a meal. Tyler’s mother had filled a plate for him earlier, kept it warm in the oven, carefully covered with foil, even brought it to him at the table. Anxious to avoid a fight that Tyler and Dylan and Logan had all known couldn’t be avoided, she’d said something like, “It’s your favorite, Jake. Pork chops.”
Jake had lifted the foil off the plate, gingerly, like he expected something to jump out at him, then bellowed that a man shouldn’t be expected to eat shriveled-up food after a hard day felling trees in the woods to support his family, and flung the whole works, plate, food and silverware, all over the kitchen.
Then he’d scraped his chair back so hard it tipped over, Jake had, and stood. He’d started toward Angela, now cowering against a counter, but Logan, barely older than Davie was now—had stepped square in front of him, fists clenched at his sides.
“No,” he’d said, and his voice had been the voice of a man, not a boy. He’d looked straight into Jake’s eyes, like he’d have a prayer against him in a fight, and repeated, “No.”
Dylan and Tyler, huddled in the doorway, had been terrified.
Miraculously, after a long interval of heart-stopping suspense, Jake had suddenly laughed, turned on one heel and said he was going somewhere where people appreciated him.
Where was that, old man? Tyler asked silently, back in the present again. Skivvie’s, maybe? Some whore’s bed? Was that where people “appreciated” you, you evil old son of a bitch?
His throat shut tight against the recollection of that night and so many others, so tight it hurt. He closed his eyes, dealing with it, opened them again.
I don’t want to be like her, Davie had said.
Now, belatedly, Tyler answered him. Answered himself. “You don’t have to be like your mother,” he said. And he didn’t have to be like Jake. “All you have to do is make the best choices you can, and your life can be anything you want it to.”
Davie looked so hopeful that Tyler wanted to go out and clear a path through the world for the kid. He supposed that made him a father, and DNA be damned.
He waited until Davie had gone outside with Kit Carson to sit at the end of the dock with a fishing pole, gathered his composure a little and got out his cell phone.
Lily answered on the first ring. “Tyler?” she said, instead of hello.
It was one word, but it poured over his spirit like a warm, soothing balm. “Yeah,” he said, wishing he could bounce up to the satellite, along with the signal from his phone, and bounce down again in Chicago, stand face-to-face with her. “It’s me.”
“I miss you,” she said softly.
Tyler closed his eyes, let the tenderness of that statement penetrate every part of him. It felt like healing light, slipping through some crack between heaven and earth. “Two weeks is too long,” he told her.
“Don’t I know it,” she replied. “I’ll start packing things up tomorrow, and the real estate agent will be by in the afternoon—probably armed with a list of things I’ll have to do to the place.” She paused. “Did you choose a trailer?”
He smiled at the word trailer—it didn’t accurately describe the structure, but it was the easiest word, the one country folks used most readily. “Sure did,” he
said. “Dan’s going to bulldoze the cabin day after tomorrow, and set up some kind of temporary foundation, so Davie and I will be moving into the Holiday Inn for a couple of days.”
When Lily didn’t ask if he’d had the bedroom soundproofed, he knew for sure she was with her dad and Tess.
Sure enough, she said, “Wait a second,” and Tyler listened as she asked Doc some question, her voice just hushed enough that he couldn’t catch the words.
“Dad says to stay at his place. The key’s under the pot with the dead flowers in it, on the back porch.”
Tyler knew he couldn’t accept, any more than he could move in with Dylan and Kristy, or Logan and Briana, but the offer meant a lot. He and Doc hadn’t always been on the best terms. “Thanks,” he said, “but we’ll be okay at the hotel.”
“I want you to be more than just okay, Tyler.”
“Not possible, with you in another state,” he said. Then he smiled to himself. Another state? Hell, another room would have been too far away.
“Is Davie all right?” Lily asked. “And Kit Carson?”
“They’re okay, too.” There was no point in telling her about Doreen’s shenanigan—she’d only worry that they were all going to wind up on an episode of Forensic Files. “Right now, they’re down on the dock, fishing.”
That sounded normal, didn’t it? A dog and a boy with a fishing pole, braving the mosquitoes to sit out under a blanket of stars splashed across a navy sky?
“Just okay,” Lily repeated fretfully.
Tyler chuckled. “Lily?”
“What?”
“We’re fabulous. We’re so happy, Davie and Kit Carson and me, we can’t contain ourselves. Is that better?”
She laughed. “No,” she said. “I want you to miss me a little.”
“No problem there,” Tyler answered, and his voice sounded gruff again. “Come home soon, okay?”
“It can’t be soon enough to suit me,” she answered.
“Of course I’m going to take you down, or bend you over something and screw your socks off, the minute we’re alone.”
“No fair,” she said sunnily.
He could just see her squirming, maybe blushing a little.
The image did a lot to cheer him up.
Linda Lael Miller Montana Creeds Series Volume 1: Montana Creeds: LoganMontana Creeds: DylanMontana Creeds: Tyler Page 83
