Hideaway

by Hannah Alexander

  Bertie raised an eyebrow. “You got something against God-fearing men?”

  Cheyenne hesitated. She didn’t know Bertie well enough to expound on her religious views—or lack thereof. “I’m not sure I know what a ‘God-fearing man’ is.”

  Bertie grunted, nodding with sad understanding as she slid her chair away from the table. “I hear you there. Don’t seem to be many of them left around these days, specially the younger ones. But mark my words, Dane Gideon knows the Lord and lives a life that tries to honor Him.”

  Cheyenne said nothing. She didn’t want to argue with this kind, elderly lady.

  “Got something to show you,” Bertie said as she got up. She went to the back door and opened it. “Just sit tight a minute, I’ll be right back.”

  Cheyenne took another sip of her tea. It tasted good, and if it was toxic, why did Red and Bertie look so healthy?

  She thought about Bertie’s description of Dane Gideon. What was a good, God-fearing man?

  Cheyenne’s parents had been strictly holiday church attenders when she and Susan were growing up. But they had sent Cheyenne and Susan to Sunday school—it made a good baby-sitter on Sunday mornings while the couple went out to brunch at one of their favorite restaurants. But even though Cheyenne quickly memorized the books of the Bible and all the Bible stories, she couldn’t help looking at the lives of some of the people who called themselves Christians and becoming skeptical when she observed how little they practiced what they preached. Down deep, she rejected Christianity on that basis.

  There were churchgoers who made her wonder if she’d made a hasty decision—Jim Brillhart for one, and Ardis Dunaway, who had loaned her this house at no cost. And then there was Susan, who had “found Christ” during college, just before she met Kirk.

  On the other end of the scales was Kirk, her brother-in-law, who certainly didn’t “love her in the Lord.” There was also the nurse on the second floor at the hospital whose car had a Jesus Reigns bumper sticker, yet she was having an affair with her supervisor.

  These people claimed to walk with God? Something was wrong with that picture, and Cheyenne couldn’t reconcile the irregularity. Something had always been wrong with it.

  Bertie came bursting back into the house, allowing the screen door to slam behind her. She held two half-grown cats in her arms—one was dark gray and the other black and white.

  “You sure you don’t want a kitten or two?” Bertie plopped them onto the kitchen linoleum. “They take good care of themselves and they’re already decent mousers. Be good company for you, all alone over there.”

  The gray kitten shook himself, glanced around the kitchen, then strolled over to Cheyenne and sniffed her feet. He then curled around her right foot and lay down, purring loudly enough that Cheyenne could hear it over the motor of Bertie’s ancient refrigerator.

  “Looks like you’ve been adopted.”

  Cheyenne reached down and rubbed the kitten behind the ears. The vibration of the animal’s purr tingled through her fingertips. “My apartment complex has a no-pets policy. I couldn’t take him home with me when I leave here.”

  “Then consider him a foster cat,” Bertie said. “Name’s Blue. We’ll take him back if you ever decide to leave.”

  “If? Bertie, I plan to leave, of course.”

  “How long you here for?”

  “A couple of months.” Maybe. If she decided to stay.

  “You’ll be needing some cleaning supplies to get that place in order. Why don’t you let me gather some up for you?”

  Cheyenne smiled. Seemed like she’d been adopted not just by the kitten.

  The aroma of breakfast lingered in the ranch kitchen and drifted out onto the front porch, where Dane stood watching across the lake. He heard the familiar grumble of Red Meyer’s ancient fishing boat as it putted across the lake toward the ranch dock. As the boat came into view through the trees, Dane had no trouble recognizing his wandering teenager, in spite of that silly brown knit cap Blaze had pulled down over his outrageous hair.

  What was he up to now?

  Dane continued to watch as Red and Blaze pulled up to the dock and tied up. Blaze stepped off the boat with a package under his arm, but Red didn’t pull away. Hmm. Interesting.

  Blaze walked slowly up the hill, past the barn lot to the house. The package turned out to be a couple of bags of beans. The shirt he wore wasn’t his. Neither was the cap.

  “Sorry I’m late,” Blaze said, avoiding eye contact as he reached Dane. “I lost the canoe, and Red is going to help me find it.”

  “In exchange for a couple of hours of fishing, no doubt.”

  Blaze gave him a brief grin, nodded and continued toward the house.

  Dane fell into step behind him. Blaze was moving slower than his usual dancing, cocky gait. “How did you lose the canoe?”

  “Prank.”

  “Did this prankster take your shirt, too?”

  Blaze took the porch steps slowly. “Got it dirty.”

  “With what?”

  Blaze pulled open the screen door and stepped inside the house. “Cook here? I got his beans for him.”

  “He went to town looking for you.” Dane saw the small crust of dried blood just below Blaze’s jaw line. “Are you going to tell me what else happened?”

  For once the house was quiet. Willy and Jinx were down in the barn cleaning stalls. The other boys had gone on a float trip with a group from their church in Blue Eye.

  Blaze carried the beans into the kitchen, then returned to the foot of the stairs, where Dane waited for him with arms crossed over his chest.

  “I can handle it myself, okay? I can’t go running to you with every little spat I have at school.”

  “You weren’t at school this morning—you went to take some eggs to town, last I heard. What happened, Blaze?”

  The kid hesitated, glancing up the stairs. Gavin Farmer had very dark-brown, expressive eyes, which often betrayed the emotions he tried so hard to conceal. Right now they expressed anxiety.

  “Go on up and take your shot,” Dane said, following him up the stairs.

  “I got in a fight,” Blaze said admitted. “No big deal. You know how Short’s always hammering us about something. Now he’s decided I did that stuff Friday night.”

  “He doesn’t have a say. The sheriff checked out the cat, the Coast Guard checked the boat, and no one pointed a finger at you. Just because some people want to make us look like criminals doesn’t make it so.”

  When they entered the quiet room Blaze and Willy shared, Dane waited while Blaze assembled his medication, gave himself the injection and sat down on the bottom bunk for a moment.

  “Now will you show me what Short did?” Dane asked.

  Blaze sighed and pulled off the knit cap to reveal the bandaging. Someone had rounded the circumference of his head several times with surgical gauze. “Cut my head when I fell at the dock, and it bled too much.”

  “We need to have a doctor take a look at it.”

  “It’s already been seen to,” Blaze said.

  “I mean a real doctor. I know Bertie’s good with herbs, but I don’t want to take any chance—”

  “Come on, Dane, I’ve been hurt worse than this before and didn’t have to see a doctor. Give it a few days.”

  “You might need sutures.”

  “Got ’em. Sort of.”

  Dane sat down beside him. “How do you ‘sort of’ get sutures, and since when is Bertie doing that?”

  “Didn’t say Bertie did it.”

  Dane sighed. Why was Blaze being so cagey all of a sudden. “Who, then?”

  Blaze hesitated. “The mad macer.”

  “You’re kidding. Cheyenne Allison?”

  “She’s the one who broke up the fight—got a black eye for her troubles. Then she drove me to Red and Bertie’s and pulled a honker of a first aid kit out of the trunk of her car. Did some kind of weird, twisty thing with my hair and closed up the gash in my head with glue. You see any b
lood up there?”

  “A little seepage, but not much.”

  “So why would I need to see a doctor? I know how to see to myself.”

  “We’ll keep an eye on things for a day or so, but I’ll make an appointment for you, just in case. And I have to call the sheriff, Blaze. I have no choice.”

  Blaze winced. “See there? That’s why I didn’t want to tell you about this. It’ll just cause more trouble. Red’s waiting for me down at the dock, Dane. Can’t I go fishing with him for a couple of hours? He’ll be disappointed if I don’t.”

  Dane rubbed his face, suddenly weary. And it was only Monday morning. He needed additional help here on the ranch, especially if he planned to take on more boys, and that was a definite possibility. There were a lot of discarded kids in this world. Far too many. He wished he could take them all.

  “Go ahead, son, but be back by noon, okay? If you haven’t found the canoe by then, you and I can go out looking for it later. I need to contact Cheyenne and thank her.”

  Blaze shook his head. “Maybe you should wait awhile for that. After last night and this morning, I get the feeling she just wants to be left alone.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Cheyenne walked along a cool hospital corridor. Silence took on substance, as close and watchful as a cemetery at night. She couldn’t hear the sound of her own footsteps. There were none of the typical smells of antibacterial cleaners or iodine, or even the more human smells of waste. She saw only the broad white hallway.

  At the end of the corridor she turned a corner, then tripped over an unseen object. She crashed to the floor and landed without pain beside another prone body.

  She found herself staring into the lifeless eyes of her sister.

  She screamed, but no sound came from her throat. She closed her eyes and forced the sound. At last it broke through, spiraling around her in a soft moan.

  “No…No!”

  Plunging from the dream, she shoved the comforter away from her as if it were a shroud. She heard the loud protest of a flying kitten as she rolled from the sofa and hit the hardwood floor.

  Blue’s growling cry continued. The dream slithered back into the darkness. For a few seconds Cheyenne allowed herself the exquisite rush of relief that always came after awakening from a nightmare.

  The kitten emerged from the folds of the lavender comforter.

  He leaped to her side, meowing loudly as he plunged his head beneath her arm. She nuzzled her face in his fur. It was as if Bertie had instinctively known how well this little living being could provide contact with reality after the nightmares.

  “I’m sorry, Blue.”

  His purr-motor kicked into high gear.

  Again, she felt soothing relief. As the sky turned from indigo to denim blue outside, she embraced the strangeness of this room, this house. Gone were the reminders of Susan that had hovered around her in Columbia. Later, she would cherish those reminders. First, however, she needed to recover from the violent reality of her sister’s death.

  If recovery was possible.

  She’d been here in Hideaway a week now. The only neighbors she had spoken with were Red and Bertie Meyer, and Dane, Blaze and that blond kid who had attacked Blaze. A person could get used to the solitude…after a while…probably.

  The house was clean, the pantry and refrigerator well stocked with food after a drive into Kimberling City—Cheyenne had been reluctant to revisit the place where she’d witnessed Blaze being assaulted.

  She carried Blue out to the front porch and inhaled the mingling of rain-washed earth and the familiar scent of the lake. This afternoon she planned to try the general store again. She’d used her car phone to call Ardis, and overriding her friend’s protests had insisted on trying her hand at painting some of the rooms where the walls were faded and the paint cracked. After all, she needed something to keep her occupied for seven more weeks, and there were only so many novels she could read without getting eyestrain. Maybe the general store would have paint.

  With Blue trotting alongside, Cheyenne strolled down a steep, grassy path that led from the side of the house through scattered elm trees, ending at the weathered wooden boat dock on the shore of the lake. According to Ardis, this land bordered the east side of the sheltered cove, from which the tops of trees poked from the water’s surface—trees long buried beneath this manmade lake.

  In the center of the lake, several hundred yards east of the cove, was an island, light green with budding trees, and red rocky cliffs along one edge. Islands had always intrigued Cheyenne. As a child she had dreamed of living on a deserted island in the Pacific Ocean where no one could find her. She could forget the whole world then.

  That wouldn’t be practical now, but this retreat might do the trick. It had occurred to Cheyenne this past week that she didn’t have to stay in Columbia. She had no family there now.

  There was something about Hideaway that felt right to her, in spite of her inauspicious beginnings in the place. It almost felt as if she’d lived here before, if only in a dream. A silly thing to be thinking after only a week, but it forced her to pose an interesting question to herself.

  What was she going to do with the rest of her life?

  Dane was carrying a sack of calf starter from the general store to the back of Mrs. Reeves’s pickup truck down the street when he saw a vaguely familiar forest-green Chevy Lumina sedan pull up to the curb. Familiar because he’d glimpsed it in the distance across the lake every time he looked that direction.

  Though he had only seen Cheyenne Allison in the dim glow of a flashlight, he had no trouble recognizing that shaggy cut of shoulder-length black hair, the athletic build.

  He placed the sack beside a bale of hay and dusted off his hands. “See you next week, Mrs. Reeves,” he called, stepping out of the way so the retired schoolteacher could pull her truck out.

  When Cheyenne left her car, he waved to her and strolled down the boardwalk in front of the store. As he drew closer, he realized she was older than she’d seemed the other night—perhaps in her midthirties. She also had a black eye, though the chartreuse and muted blue that outlined the socket suggested it was partially healed.

  She nodded to him in greeting. No smile, but she didn’t appear unfriendly. She just seemed to have something on her mind.

  “Hello. I’m glad to see we haven’t chased you away yet,” he said.

  “That’s right, I plan to stay to the bitter end. Besides, I’ve got free rent for two months. It’ll take a bulldozer to drag me away from paradise in springtime.”

  He nudged an old sleeping hound dog away from the entrance of the general store with the toe of his boot, then held one of the old-fashioned glass double doors open for her. “Thank you for helping Blaze last week.” He examined her left eye more carefully. “Looks like he wasn’t the only one who took a hit.”

  She tipped her head away from him as she entered the antique-style store and paused to look around. “So he told you about it, after all?” she said as she reached for a shopping cart.

  “With a little encouragement,” Dane replied dryly.

  “How’s he healing?”

  “Very well. I took him to the clinic in Kimberling City to have him checked over, and the doctor said it looked like you’d done everything right. That was quite a trick with the hair twisted over the wound.”

  She gave a noncommittal shrug as she pushed her cart down the first aisle to their right. “This is some store. Looks like it has everything a person could ever need.”

  He continued to walk beside her. “The proprietor likes to think so.” He decided not to try to take the cart for her. She seemed kind of independent—or at least a little wary of him. How could he blame her, after he and Blaze frightened her half to death her first night here?

  She selected some nails, a hammer and a screwdriver and placed them in her cart.

  “Interesting how you stopped the bleeding like that,” Dane persisted, unable to contain his curiosity. “I never would hav
e considered using Super Glue and hair.”

  She reached for a paintbrush. “I read about it somewhere.”

  “Blaze seemed to be under the impression you might be familiar with the medical profession.”

  She selected some lightbulbs and turned down the next aisle. “This is a big place for such a small town. Do they get much business here?”

  Hmm. So she wasn’t going to answer the question he hadn’t asked. “You’d be surprised how much,” he said. “Kimberling City is the next closest place with any selection, and a lot of people don’t want to drive that far. It’s at least a twenty-minute drive from here.”

  She glanced at him. “At least?”

  “For us at the ranch it’s twenty, because we’re on the south side of the lake. But for those who live on this side it’s farther, because they either have to take the long way around the lake and hit Highway 76, or they take the bridge and circle back on Highway 86.”

  She nodded and put a spray bottle of window cleaner and some towels in her cart.

  Okay, he was boring her to tears. “Before long you’ll notice a lot more people in town. The bed-and-breakfast stays booked from May through October, and we’re hoping with the new boat dock we’ll draw a lot more tourism. We have a library, three seasonal restaurants, a nature trail and bike rentals. I don’t suppose, being medical, you’d know of any doctors who’d be interested in building a new practice in paradise.” He watched her closely.

  She turned her cart down another aisle. “If I hear of one, I’ll be sure to send him your way.” She selected some canned corn, sardines and a box of crackers and put them in the cart.

  Dane hesitated. She suddenly seemed uninterested in conversation. That might be an indication for him to leave. Disappointed, he straightened some packages of canned ham and turned to wander back the way he had come.

  “They wouldn’t happen to carry house paint here, would they?” she asked.

  He turned back with embarrassing eagerness. “Several shades. I’ll be glad to show you.” He fell into step beside her again as he directed her two aisles down. “You don’t get out much, do you? Bertie told me she’s only seen you drive through your gate once since the day of the fight.”