by Cindy Myers
“Hey, Rick,” the woman called.
“I’m here, Grace.” A slight man with a tonsure of dark hair and a tattoo of an eagle on his shoulder waded toward the woman. “What is it?”
“I just heard on the scanner there’s been a rock slide over near Hereford Pass. Couple of tourists got caught in it. Highway’s closed.”
“So much for my afternoon off.” Rick started for the steps leading out of the pool.
“When are you gonna hire another reporter to help you out?” Reg asked.
“When I can find someone to work for the piss-poor salary I can afford.” He hauled himself out of the pool and began toweling off.
“Cute ass,” Barb whispered in Maggie’s ear. “I wonder if he’s single.”
Maggie didn’t care if the man was single. She didn’t even care that he was naked. “Did you say you were looking for a reporter?” she asked.
He stopped with the towel around one thigh. “Who are you?”
“Jake’s daughter,” Bob and Reg chorused.
“Maggie Stevens,” she said, a beat behind.
Rick narrowed his eyes at her. He had bushy eyebrows, like a melodrama villain. “Can you write?”
“She’s a wonderful writer,” Barb said. “And she’s organized and reliable. She ran her ex-husband’s business for years.”
Rick glanced at Barb, then back at Maggie. “Can you talk for yourself?”
“Yes, I can talk.” She frowned at Barb. “And I can write. I’ve never been professionally published, but I’d like the chance to try.”
“And you’re willing to work for twenty-three hundred dollars a month?”
“Yes.” With the money her father had left her, she’d do all right. At least for a while.
“I’ll give you a try.” He draped the towel around his shoulders. “Get dressed and come with me.”
“Now?”
“Yes, now. If you want the job.”
“Go on.” Barb patted her shoulder. “I’ll be fine here.”
Maggie hurried from the pool and into her clothes, marveling at the strange turn of events. She’d just interviewed for a job while stark naked. And been hired. Her heart raced and her hands shook as she zipped her jeans. But this time the sensations weren’t caused by fear. Not entirely by fear, at least. After twenty years of putting her dreams on hold for other people, she’d impulsively done something solely for herself, just because it was what she wanted to do. The sensation was exhilarating.
“Come on,” Rick said when they met outside the dressing rooms. “You can ride with me. Do you have a camera?”
“Just a small digital one. And not with me.”
“You’ll need a better one. And always carry it with you. Today you can borrow mine.”
She’d buy a camera. And a printer for her laptop. And maybe one of those little handheld recorders for taping interviews.
“What are you grinning about?” Rick asked.
She forced her mouth into a somber expression. “I’m looking forward to the job,” she said.
“It’s a job.” He jerked open the driver’s door of a weather-beaten Land Rover. “Lots of grunt work for little reward.”
As if working for Carter all those years had been particularly rewarding. At least now she was doing what she wanted, not what she was obligated to do for her marriage. She buckled her seat belt. “You won’t be sorry you hired me.”
“If you’re anything like your old man, I won’t be.” Gears grinding, he threw the Rover into reverse and backed out of the parking lot.
“What do you mean?” she asked, raising her voice to be heard over the clatter of gravel against the bottom of the vehicle.
“Hardheadedness is a good trait for a reporter, and Jake was the stubbornest old mule I ever knew.”
Maggie didn’t think she was particularly stubborn but saw no need to point this out to her new boss. Everything she’d heard about her father led her to believe she’d inherited very little from him beyond his material possessions. But he had passed on one thing more valuable than an empty mine and mountaintop views: he’d given her the opportunity to start over, in a very different kind of life. She hoped she’d make the right choices this time and find some of the happiness she’d missed the first time around.
“I’m calling a family meeting tonight and I expect you to be there, with Lucas.” Lucille was waiting for Olivia when the young woman emerged from her room shortly before noon on a Monday after school let out in mid-June.
Olivia blinked owlishly, and Lucille was struck by the resemblance to Lucas. Yet, what was awkward in the boy was beautiful in the woman. “What are you talking about?” Olivia said, and moved past her mother to the stairs.
Lucille followed her to the kitchen, where she’d put on coffee to brew. She let Olivia pour a cup before she spoke again. “I’ve hardly seen anything of you these past few weeks,” she said. “I want us to all have dinner together and talk.”
“I have a date.” Olivia stirred two spoonfuls of sugar into her coffee, the spoon rattling against the side of the mug.
“Then cancel it. It’s not as if you aren’t out every night anyway.”
“I’m not some kid you can order around.”
“You will always be my daughter, and since you’re living here now I think I deserve a little consideration.”
“Don’t talk to me about what you deserve.” Olivia glared at her.
Lucille bit back her own angry retort. She took a deep breath, which she’d read somewhere was calming, but it only made her feel like the big bad wolf gearing up to blow a house down. “I want the three of us to have dinner as a family.”
Olivia blew on the coffee, then took a sip. “We’re not really the family dinner type.”
“We all have to eat. I don’t see why we can’t do it together occasionally.”
“Fine. I’ll cancel my date. Though if you have something you want to talk about, why not tell me now?”
“There is something I want to ask you while Lucas isn’t around. I want to know what really happened with you and D. J.”
“That’s none of your business.”
“It is if his stolen car is parked in my driveway.”
“The car isn’t stolen.”
“Does he know you have it?”
“I told you he does.”
“Then what aren’t you telling me?”
Olivia stared into the coffee mug, fingers white-knuckled on the handle. Lucille wondered if she’d hurl the coffee at her. She took a step back, recalling an incident when Olivia was sixteen and she’d launched a bowl of tomato soup across the room.
“He left us,” Olivia said. “I asked him not to go, but he left anyway, so I took his car. He owed me that much.”
She bit her lip, and Lucille could almost taste the metallic sting of blood in her own mouth. She stared at her daughter, but saw herself, not much older than Olivia was now. Mitch had just announced that he was leaving her for his secretary, a woman Lucille had considered her friend. The hurt and rage had washed over her in waves. She’d felt like a piece of trash tossed to the side of the road. She’d hated him for making her feel that way, and she’d hated herself for still loving him so much. After he left the house, to meet with his new lover, she’d gone into his room, to the top dresser drawer where he kept his cuff links and tie pins, and she’d taken out the box where he kept his father’s watch. It was a gold pocket watch, engraved with the figure of an elk. He’d told her it was worth a lot of money. She took the watch to the pawn shop and pocketed the money and the ticket, planning to taunt him with it when he asked. Imagining the moment gave her a little relief from the pain that bore down so hard.
But he’d never asked about the watch. Whether he really hadn’t noticed it was missing or he hadn’t wanted to give her the satisfaction of acknowledging her revenge, she didn’t know.
She’d spent the money long ago, and lost the pawn ticket, but that bitter ache of rejection was still buried somewhere i
nside her. “He was stupid to leave,” she said. She meant D. J., but Mitch, too. She looked Olivia in the eye. “You deserve a man who will stay.”
Olivia blinked again, the mask sliding away for half a second to reveal the vulnerable girl behind the tough façade. “Yeah, well, instead I got a new ride. That’s something anyway.” She turned and poured the rest of her coffee down the sink. “See you at dinner.”
She took the stairs two at a time and in a minute Lucille heard the shower. She wondered if Olivia was crying in there, hiding her tears in the flow of hot water. Lucille had done that, standing naked under the spray until the water grew cold, trying to wash away the grief that bloomed anew every day like a cactus flower.
Other mothers gave their daughters family recipes and advice on raising children. The only thing she seemed to have passed on to Olivia was an inability to find the love she wanted, and the twisted belief that it was possible to steal happiness.
Chapter 15
Maggie survived the race to the rock slide in Rick’s Land Rover. She took a few pictures of the scene and conducted her first interview, with an irate tourist whose car had been half buried by the avalanche of boulders and debris. He threatened to sue the county and the State of Colorado for not making the mountains safer.
Rick, listening in, had interrupted at this point. “Does your wife do what you tell her?” he asked.
“My wife? What the hell does my wife have to do with this?”
“I just want to know if she always does what you tell her.”
“I’m not dumb enough to try to tell my wife what to do.” The man glared at Rick.
“That’s kind of how it is with Mother Nature,” Rick said.
“She’s a real bitch, and we gave up trying to tell her what to do a long time ago.”
Maggie had tried to use that line in her article, but Rick had edited it out. But he liked her writing enough to keep her on, and now she spent her days at a scarred wooden desk at the newspaper office or covering various meetings and the occasional auto accident. She loved the job, and as a bonus, it kept her too busy to think about Carter or her father.
“Hey, Maggie.”
She hadn’t thought much about Jameso in her first ten days on the job either, but now here he was, standing beside her desk, dressed in motorcycle leathers, his hair ruffled where he’d removed his helmet, tiny lines radiating from his chocolate brown eyes. How had she forgotten how impossibly sexy he was?
“Jameso!” The word came out in a squeak, so she modulated her voice. “What brings you here?”
“I hadn’t seen you in a while. I wanted to know how you were doing.” He sat on the edge of her desk, leather creaking with the movement.
“I’m doing great.” She straightened a stack of press releases he’d shoved aside. “The job is great.”
“Everything okay up at the cabin?”
“Everything’s great.”
“Probate go okay?”
“Great.” What was wrong with her? Why couldn’t she think of anything else to say? And why wouldn’t he stop staring at her? Was her mascara smeared? Was her hair a mess? She put one hand up to check.
“You look good.” He grinned. “Great.”
“Now you’re making fun of me.” The old annoyance at his attitude crowded out some of her nervousness.
“No, I’m not.” He shifted, leather creaking again. He wore jeans under the chaps, dark denim stretched across muscular thighs . . . Don’t go there, Maggie.
“Barb make it back to Houston?”
“Yes.” Maggie had driven her to the airport four days ago. She’d carried with her a chunk of rock from Maggie’s front yard, a bag of Janelle’s Linzer torte, and an all-over tan from her days spent at Living Water. “I’m sure she’ll be back to visit. She loved it here.” Though Maggie knew her friend was looking forward to getting back to her steam shower, satellite TV, paved roads, and, of course, her husband, Jimmy.
“What about you?” Jameso asked. “Do you love it here?”
“Love might be too strong a word, but you could say Eureka is growing on me.” On chilly mornings she could start a fire in the wood stove in under a minute and she negotiated the winding road down from the mountain with hardly a qualm, and she was proud of that. There was something to be said for living in a place where the simple act of getting up and coming to work every day was worthy of self-congratulations.
“I won the bet,” he said.
“The bet?”
“About how long you’d stay in town. I had my money on you deciding to stick around permanent.”
How had he determined that when she hadn’t even known it herself until she asked Rick to give her a job? “Permanent is a long time,” she said.
“If you were only visiting, you wouldn’t have taken the job.”
“I guess not.” She glanced at her laptop screen. She was writing a piece about a proposal to put solar panels on the city office building. Not exactly breaking news, but she did need to finish before she left the office today.
“Want to have dinner with me tomorrow night?” Jameso asked.
“Oh, well . . .” Was he asking her out? On a date? She put a hand to her chest, feeling the lump the rings made under her shirt, then jerked it away. “I don’t think so. Thank you, but no.”
The lines around his eyes deepened. “Why won’t you go out with me?” he asked.
Because you’re too sexy and too good looking and I can’t think straight when I’m with you. “I’m not interested in dating anyone right now.”
“What are you afraid of?”
“I’m not afraid!” But of course she was. She was afraid of losing herself in some man’s orbit again, the way she had with Carter. She’d spent so many years doing what he wanted, she was just now figuring out what she really liked and disliked and thought and felt. She wasn’t ready to give that up. “I don’t want to date anyone right now,” she said again.
She didn’t want to look at him, but she couldn’t help it. She’d expected annoyance or disappointment, or maybe even a little embarrassment, but the anger that flashed in his eyes when his gaze met hers made her catch her breath. Had her answer really mattered so much to him?
“Jameso, quit distracting the help.”
Rick burst into the office with his usual bluster, papers flying in his wake. He shrugged out of his fleece jacket and tossed a stack of mail onto Maggie’s desk. More press releases, probably, plus a few bills and some junk. Her job was to deal with the releases, toss the junk, and funnel the bills back to him.
Jameso slid off the desk. “I was just leaving,” he said.
Rick turned to Maggie. “I need you to set up an interview with Cassie Wynock.”
“The librarian?” Maggie had avoided the library since her last confrontation with Cassie.
“You know any other Cassie Wynocks? She’s written a play about the town founders. The drama society’s going to put it on as part of Hard Rock Days. Go ask her about it, then talk to a couple of drama club people. We’ll run it as promo for the festival.”
“All right.”
“Cassie still got it in for you?” Jameso asked.
“She’s upset about a book my father took.”
“She’s upset because she was crazy about Jake and he didn’t return her feelings,” Rick said. “The book’s only part of it.”
So Maggie’s suspicions were true. “My dad and Cassie were . . . involved?”
“He took her out a couple of times,” Rick said. “I don’t think he was ever serious, but I guess Cassie fell pretty hard.”
Maggie turned to Jameso. He’d known her father better than anyone. “Is that true?”
“Jake was never serious about women,” he said. “But he let them believe what they wanted if it got him what he was after.”
“What was he after from Cassie?” Maggie asked.
“I don’t know,” Jameso said. His face was grim, the way it often was when he spoke of her father. “It was one
of the things we argued about.”
Maggie felt sick to her stomach. It shouldn’t matter to her what a man she’d never known had done, but Jake was her father. The man she’d spent too many years imagining as perfect.
“I’ll talk to Cassie,” she said. Maybe she’d find out what had happened with her father. Or maybe she’d decide to avoid the subject, to avoid being disappointed by him again.
Lucille’s eyes kept straying to the envelope lying on the kitchen table. Made of the slender blue paper used for airmail letters, it was addressed to Lucas, from Daniel Gruber, with a return address in Iraq.
Was Daniel Gruber D. J.? And why was he writing to Lucas, and not Olivia? Lucille couldn’t decide if this was a good thing or not. Was the man trying to get back at Olivia through her son? Was this unexpected communication going to upset Lucas, who had clearly thought a lot of the man? If Olivia and D. J. had truly severed their relationship, wasn’t it a bad idea to put Lucas in the middle?
If Olivia had been there, Lucille might have asked her all these things. But having arrived safely at her mother’s house, Olivia was acting more like a teenager than a responsible single parent, staying out all hours, showing up only long enough to bathe or sleep or eat. She seemed to have gladly relinquished all but a token responsibility for her son to Lucille.
I should talk to her about that, Lucille thought, still staring at the envelope, which she’d laid at Lucas’s place at the table. The boy needs his mother.
But the truth was, Lucas didn’t seem to need anyone much. Since school had let out last week, he’d spent his days roaming the town on his bicycle. When he was home, he read books he’d checked out of the library about Indians or mining, or researched these subjects online. He ate the meals Lucille cooked and, when prodded, talked to her about what he’d done that day. He wasn’t unfriendly, just terribly self-contained.
More than once Lucille had formulated lectures about how she wasn’t running a hotel here and she wouldn’t let Olivia take advantage. But when the opportunity presented itself, the words eluded her. She was so grateful to have Olivia and her grandson back in her life, she was reluctant to say anything that might drive the young woman away.
