“I’m glad I was driving by.” Doc handed Mike the ice pack, who settled it onto his mother’s ankle. She winced.
“Me too.” Mike reached into his pocket for his cell phone. He’d missed his visit to Sienna’s class by almost an hour. “Damn.” He realized a moment later he’d left his phone charging in his office at the gym. He’d run out the front door the minute he’d gotten the call from Doc.
The doctor helped Loretta up. “Can you put any weight on the foot?”
She tried but shook her head. “And my…” She put a hand on her lower back. “I think I might have tweaked a muscle. I’ll lie down on the couch and ice that too.”
“Absolutely not.” Mike put his arm around her waist. “We’re going straight to the Med Center. And, no,” he said before she could interrupt. “This is not negotiable.”
Doc followed them outside. “Do you want to take my car? It’d be more comfortable.”
Mike took one look at his own truck and nodded. “That’d be great. Thank you.”
“No problem.” Doc helped Loretta into the front seat and handed Mike the keys.
“Take my truck,” Mike said.
Doc shook his head and ambled down the driveway. “I was on my way home.” He tilted his face back to look at the sky. “It’s a beautiful day for walking.”
“Well, thanks again.” Mike climbed into the sleek leather interior of the Mercedes and adjusted the seat and the mirrors. “How are you feeling?”
“Like an idiot.” She rested her head against the seat and closed her eyes. “I’m sorry to pull you away from work.”
“Don’t be. Hans and the trainers have it under control.”
“What about Sienna’s class?” she asked as they drove toward the Med Center. “Weren’t you supposed to visit them today?”
He checked the dashboard clock. Three-fifteen. “Yes, but she’ll understand.” Angst itched inside him at not being able to tell Sienna what had happened. His mother didn’t have a cell phone, but he’d call Sienna from the Med Center as soon as he got Ma checked in. He patted her leg. “Stop worrying about everyone else. Let people take care of you for once.”
They rode a few minutes in silence. As they neared the Med Center, Mike glanced over. “So was Doc really just driving by?”
“Of course.” She narrowed her eyes. “What are you suggesting?”
“Nothing.” He hid his smile at the blush that colored her cheeks. “Just glad he was there so fast after it happened, that’s all.” He slowed and put on his blinker. Traffic, heavy for Pine Point, stretched in the opposite direction. Friday afternoon rush hour, he thought as he drummed his thumbs on the steering wheel. Nothing compared to Los Angeles though. Thank God, not much here compared to Los Angeles, including the people and the women and his life now.
A gap appeared in the traffic, and he stepped on the gas ahead of a red sports car—Sienna’s, he realized too late to beep or wave hello. Damn. He went to tap the horn, to get her attention somehow, but she followed the curve of road and was gone before he could.
Frustrated, he pulled into the Emergency entrance and left the car running. He hurried around and helped Loretta hobble inside. “Sit,” he said as he found her a vacant seat. He gathered the required clipboard of paperwork from the receptionist, gave it to his mom, and then parked the car.
“You can go back to work,” Loretta said as he joined her a minute later.
“Absolutely not. Let me just call Hans and let him know what’s going on. I’ll be right back.” Funny how not having a cell phone could hamstring a person these days. The receptionist wouldn’t let him use the desk phone, and the Med Center didn’t seem to have a public one anywhere he could see. Finally, he found a gym member waiting with her sick daughter who let him use hers. He checked in with Hans, went to call Sienna, and realized he didn’t know her number by heart. Another damn consequence of cell phones. He thought about calling Hans back and asking him to send Sienna a text from his phone, but that seemed awkward, especially since he’d spent the last month telling the kid not to get overly attached to a woman.
He dropped back next to Ma and folded his hands between his legs.
“Did you get ahold of Sienna?”
He shook his head. “It’s okay. I will.”
Loretta patted his leg. “She’s a nice girl. Turned into a beautiful woman. I’m glad you’re spending time with her.”
Mike’s cheeks flushed as he stared at the floor between his feet. I’m glad too. Yet he hadn’t stopped thinking about Al’s ugly accusations from almost a week ago. “All I’m sayin’ is, ask Sienna what was in her mother’s system the day they brought her in…”
“Honey?” Loretta stroked his back. “You’re awfully quiet. Everything okay?”
He looked up. “You were with Sienna’s mother the day she died, right?”
She blinked in surprise. “Well, yes, but where did that question come from?”
He cracked his knuckles. “I heard something the other day.”
“You’ll have to be a little more specific than that. Heard something about what? Elenita?”
He looked around the room. Most other people waiting were staring at their phones or slouched down in their chairs, eyes closed.
He lowered his voice. “Was there anything odd about her death?”
Loretta’s eyes bored into him. She didn’t answer.
Fingers of dread climbed up the back of Mike’s neck. “Al Halloran told me the other night—I ran into him outside Jimmy’s—he told me she had something in her system, drugs or something…” He couldn’t stop himself from babbling. “Can’t be right. Can it? Sienna’s mom? She would’ve told me.”
Or not. How quickly had Mike confessed his own dark past?
“You worked with her that summer,” he went on. “You saw her almost every day, right?” He’d been out in California by then, so all he’d heard were a few words through the grapevine. Never drugs. Never the hint of any kind of wrongdoing.
After an interminable silence, her expression changed to sadness. “Elenita had terrible back pain that spring,” she said. “Doc prescribed OxyContin for it.”
He nodded. “Sienna told me that much. But she said it made her sick. She said her mom hated taking it.”
“At first, yes. But it helped her pain, and after a while, she couldn’t work without it.”
Understanding dawned on him in slow degrees.
“She collapsed one afternoon when we were working together at one of the summer homes halfway to Silver Valley.” Tears rose to her eyes. “I didn’t know what had happened. I was upstairs, and she was in the kitchen. By the time I found her, by the time we got here, she hadn’t been breathing for almost thirty minutes.” Her gaze moved to the reception desk and the curtained room behind it. “Doc asked me to stay with Sienna when she arrived. She didn’t have anyone else, no relatives close by.” She pressed Mike’s leg. “I was never going to tell that girl her mother had died of a drug overdose.” She shook her head. “Besides, I don’t know if that was the official cause. Elenita did have a heart attack on the table as they were trying to revive her. Doc told me that much. He said that would be recorded as the official cause of death.”
Loretta took Mike’s hand in hers. “I don’t know how Al would have found out about the drugs, or why he’d be cruel enough to mention it to you.”
He spent enough time sneaking through his father’s office every time he came back east, Mike wanted to answer. Didn’t surprise him at all. Drugs, confidential patient records, eavesdropped phone calls, whatever Al could put his hands on, he would have. As far as the cruelty, well, Mike had seen enough of Al’s true colors to know the guy didn’t have a decent bone in his body.
“Don’t bring it up to her,” Loretta said as a nurse came to help her into one of the treatment rooms. “There’s no reason.” She pinned him with
the no-nonsense look he recalled from his childhood. “Michael Anthony, you keep that firmly in your head. Maybe Sienna knows, and maybe she doesn’t. If she didn’t tell you, she had her reasons. Some secrets need to be kept.”
Chapter Thirty
Sienna stopped by Springer Fitness long enough for Hans to tell her Mike had rushed home because his mother had fallen and hurt herself. Then she jumped back into her car and headed to Cornwall Road as fast as she could. Hope it’s nothing serious. She scanned the road for his truck as she drove, but she didn’t pass it in the ten short miles out of town. When she pulled into the Springer driveway, it sat in front of the garage.
Thank God. They’re still here. If it had been serious, he would have taken Loretta to the Med Center. She ran up the front steps and knocked.
No one answered. Sienna frowned, cupped her hands around her eyes, and peered through the window beside the door. Inside looked neat and tidy. She knocked again, but no one came to the door. She checked her phone. Still no response to the three texts and two voicemail messages she’d left. If I were paranoid, I’d start to think he is avoiding me. She stepped back and crossed her arms. Maybe they’d called an ambulance? New anxiety built inside her. He would have left his truck in that case. She pulled at her bottom lip.
“You looking for Mike?” An unfamiliar male voice came from behind her.
She turned. A white pickup, salt-stained and rusted around the wheels, idled at the bottom of the driveway. An arm waved from the window. She couldn’t see the man’s face. Sienna gave the Springer house one more look and then walked to the truck.
“I am, actually. You know where I could find him?”
The window rolled all the way down, and Sienna recognized the grizzled face of the man who’d come into the diner a few weeks earlier. She didn’t recall his name. He stuck out his hand. “Al Halloran. Nice to meet you.”
“Hi. Sienna Cruz.”
He nodded. “You’re teaching over at the school, right? Lucy Foster’s class?”
“Yes.” She hadn’t thought of them as Lucy’s class in a long time. They’re my class now. “Anyway, it’s no big deal. I can catch up with Mike later on.”
“You’re doin’ research, right?” Al went on. “Heard that at Jimmy’s the other night. You’re studying Pine Point and the people who live here.”
Sienna scraped one toe along the muddy ground. When he put it like that, it sounded as if she had a giant microscope up in the sky, and everyone down on the ground was an insignificant ant. “Kind of.”
Al’s gaze shifted over her shoulder. “You picked a good person to study.”
Sienna frowned. “I don’t follow.”
“Most of the people who live here don’t do much. Grow up here, go to school, get a job, have kids, die and get buried here.”
She put on what she hoped was a gracious smile and took a step toward her car. The last thing she needed was to listen to a stranger babble on.
“At least people like Mike leave.” He ran his tongue over his bottom lip. “’Course, then they make decisions that might not turn out to be the smartest. He tell you about his time living in L.A.?”
“Yes.”
“And his ex-wife?”
She hated that word. She hated the darkness on Mike’s face whenever he said it. “Yes, but—”
Al shook his head. “Can’t believe someone as smart as you are would be spending time with Mike Springer, to be honest.”
Sienna’s hackles rose. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You know he spent time in prison, right?”
All the blood left her body. She felt it run through her stomach, down her legs, and out her feet. “No.” I asked him to be honest with me.
“Felony theft,” Al added. “That’s a pretty serious crime. Not like he ran a stop sign or forgot to pay a few parking tickets. Seems to me you could do a lot better than someone like that.”
Sienna’s throat closed. She hadn’t studied law, but she was pretty sure felony theft meant Mike had stolen a large amount of money. Not a wallet. Not a hundred dollars. Thousands and maybe tens of thousands of dollars or property. Why would he do that? Could he have done that? Al could be lying, Sienna thought through her fog, but for what reason?
“Anyway,” he went on, “I think I saw him driving my dad’s car in the direction of the Med Center. Looked like his mom was in the passenger seat, so I’m thinking you might want to head over there.”
He said something else, but Sienna didn’t hear the rest of his words. “Thank you.” On stiff legs, she walked to her car as Al rolled up his window and drove away.
You wanted secrets, a voice inside her whispered. She got into her car and sat there without moving. You came here to prove this town had all kinds of darkness on the inside. Sienna bent her head over the steering wheel and fought to keep her lunch where it belonged. Yes, but I didn’t think those secrets would belong to people I love.
She mashed her lips together and turned the key in the ignition. No. She absolutely, positively, did not love Mike Springer. Tears rose in her eyes. Apparently, she didn’t even know him.
An hour later, maybe more, maybe less, she had no idea, Sienna parked outside Zeb’s Diner. She’d driven past the Pine Point Med Center three times. Each time, she’d broken out in a cold sweat. Last time I was here was the day my mother died. She didn’t care that Mike and Loretta might be inside. She couldn’t go in. She couldn’t even stop in the parking lot. Finally, she drove toward Silver Valley just to get out of town. As her car climbed the mountain, the sun set, a ribbon of orange that lasted forever. At the peak, she pulled to an open spot marked with a blue Scenic Overlook sign and got out.
With the sun went the day’s warmth, and she shivered and rubbed her hands together. She turned over Al’s words, Mike’s tight-lipped mention of his time in L.A., the last two months. A breeze lifted her hair from her neck, and she closed her eyes and breathed it in. The lights of Silver Valley twinkled in the valley below her. How many secrets did that town hold? How many people woke up, worked, went to bed, fell in love, and always kept their deepest thoughts and desires held tight to the chest? You wanted to know, came the voice again. Yes. She had. She stared into the dark for a long time. When she finally returned to the warmth of her car, three text messages waited for her.
“I’m so sorry. Mom fell at home & I had to take her to Med Ctr.”
“Call me when you get these. Left my phone at work & couldn’t text earlier.”
“R u mad? Please don’t be. Call me.”
She wasn’t mad. Or rather, she wasn’t only mad. Sienna turned the car around and drove back to Pine Point. She was confused. Hurt. Worried too, because she liked Loretta. Mad was only part of it. She climbed out of her car and looked into the diner’s brightly lit interior. Josie stood behind the counter. A handful of familiar faces filled the booths and tables, and Sienna knew if she walked inside, they’d greet her with smiles and hellos and stories about their day.
She didn’t want to talk about her day. She didn’t want to think about her day. Sienna locked her car and climbed the dark stairs to her apartment. She poured a glass of red wine, drank most of it, and dug out a box of microwave popcorn for dinner. Her phone buzzed with an incoming call, but she turned it off without looking at it. Instead, she refilled her glass, dumped the popcorn into a bowl, and carried it and the wine bottle into the living room with her.
“I’ll call him tomorrow,” she said aloud. She didn’t want to talk to him tonight. She didn’t want to talk to anyone.
Chapter Thirty-One
Mike slept on the couch downstairs, waking every few hours when the blanket slipped off or his mother rolled over in her squeaky bed down the hall.
Broken ankle and sprained wrist, revealed the X-rays. Crutches for a week, a walking boot for four more weeks after that, and a splint on her arm. The ER doctor
gave her prescriptions for two different painkillers, but she folded them into tiny squares and threw them out when she got home. “Plain old ibuprofen will be just fine,” she said.
Sometime around dawn, Mike gave up on sleep. He sat up and checked his phone for the hundredth time. Sienna hadn’t called or texted. He ran one thumb over the screen. Was she mad? Or had something else happened? Maybe she’d left her phone at work. Maybe it had died and she’d misplaced the charger. He hated not hearing from her. It hadn’t felt right, going to bed without the sound of her voice in his ear. Shit, I’ve got it bad. He set the phone aside. His mother’s words echoed in his head, and he wondered what Sienna did know about her mother’s death. Had she kept the truth a secret?
He scrubbed the sleep from his eyes. He’d tried to avoid falling for her, but in the end, it seemed stupid to deny the facts. She made him laugh. She turned him on. She listened, didn’t judge, and trusted him with her students. He watched the sun rise over the mountain in the distance, a smudge of yellow over brown. She made him want to be a better person.
He got up and made a pot of coffee, then looked in the fridge. Fifteen minutes later, pancake mix sat in a bowl next to a plate of bacon and a dish of scrambled eggs.
“Are we feeding an army this morning?” Loretta said from the doorway. She wore a sweater and pajamas bottoms with cats printed on them.
“Ma! Why didn’t you call me? I would’ve helped you get up.”
“I am still capable of dressing myself, thank you very much.” She hopped to a seat at the kitchen table and leaned her crutches against the wall.
Mike swirled pancake batter on the hot skillet and poured two cups of coffee. “How are you feeling?”
“Like I fell off a ladder and broke a few things.” She shook her head. “You’re right. I shouldn’t have tried to do it by myself.” She sighed and pushed her hair from her face. “I hate getting old, Mikey.”
“Happens to all of us,” he said as he flipped the pancakes. He added one to a plate of bacon and eggs and set it on the table. “What did Uncle Henry used to say? ‘It’s better than the alternative.’”
Spring Secrets: Pine Point, Book 3 Page 18
