Blackberry Summer Page 4

  “You’re welcome.” He leaned back farther in the chair. “How about an information trade, then. Are you going to tell me what everyone was saying about me when I walked in?”

  She could feel her face heat, for some completely ridiculous reason. “Um, what a good police officer you are,” she finally improvised.

  He smiled. “Hmm. Now why don’t I believe you?”

  “Because you happen to have a suspicious mind?”

  “Comes in handy when you’re a cop. Never mind. I only hope it was juicy.”

  Before she could respond, she heard the bells jangle loudly out in the store as someone yanked the door open and an instant later, her eight-year-old son raced into her office.

  One of the best things about owning a store just a few blocks from both the elementary school and middle school was that her children could come hang out at the store once the afternoon bell rang on those days when their dad didn’t pick them up or Claire’s mother wasn’t available.

  Macy loved to bead, creating bracelets and earrings for her friends, and she had a burgeoning sense of style. Claire let her work off the cost of the beads she used by sorting inventory and doing light filing for her.

  Owen wasn’t much interested in beading, but after he finished his homework under her watchful eye, she allowed him an hour of Nintendo on the console in her office—which the thieves must not have discovered in the cabinet. Because she didn’t let him play video games at home, coming to String Fever was usually a genuine treat for him.

  She loved having a few extra hours with them when they weren’t bickering. This didn’t look like one of those times.

  “Macy has a boyfriend, Macy has a boyfriend,” Owen sang out, his wool beanie covering his dishwater blond hair and his narrow shoulders swamped in the bulky snowboarder parka he insisted on wearing.

  “Shut up!” Macy followed closely behind with a harsh glare at her brother, somehow managing to look both outraged and a little apprehensive of her mother’s reaction at the same time. “You don’t know anything.”

  “I know you were walking after school with Toby Kingston and you were laughing and looking all goofy.” Owen crossed his eyes and let his mouth sag open in what Claire assumed was his interpretation of a lovesick twelve-year-old.

  “I was not.” Macy’s color rose and she looked mortified, especially when she saw Riley sitting in the visitor’s chair. “Mom, make him stop!”

  “Owen, stop teasing,” she said automatically.

  “I wasn’t teasing! I’m telling the complete and total truth. You should have seen her! Macy and Toby sitting in a tree. K-I-S-S…” His voice trailed off when he finally focused on something besides tormenting his sister and realized she had company in her office. “Sorry. Hi.”

  Riley looked amused at the sibling interchange. Big surprise there because he’d written the playbook on teasing one’s older sister. Or in his case, five older sisters. “Hey.”

  “Owen, Macy, this is Chief McKnight.”

  Macy dropped her messenger bag next to the desk. “Anna Kramer said a bunch of stores in Hope’s Crossing were robbed last night and String Fever was one of them. Is it true?”

  Even though she didn’t want to unduly alarm her children, Claire couldn’t figure out a way to evade the truth. “Yes. They took my computer and a little money out of the till. They also yanked out all the displays and dumped them on the floor. That’s what Grandma and the others are doing in the workroom, helping me sort the beads that were spilled.”

  “Why didn’t you call me?” Macy turned the glare she was perfecting these days in her mother’s direction. “I had to hear about the store being robbed from Anna, the biggest know-it-all at school.”

  “I asked your mom not to tell too many people about the robbery yet while we’re still trying to figure things out,” Riley said.

  Macy looked impressed. “Wow, like a real police investigation?”

  His dimple flashed. “Just like.”

  “You’re Jace’s uncle, huh?” Owen said. Jace was Riley’s sister Angie’s youngest kid and he and Owen were inseparable.

  “Guilty.”

  “Jace is my best friend. We’re in the same class at school.”

  “So I’m guessing that means you’ve probably got a part in tonight’s Spring Fling.”

  “Yep. This year the third grade is doing a patriotic show. I get to be Abraham Lincoln.”

  “You should see his dorky hat.”

  Owen glared at his sister. “Shut it. You’re just jealous. Abraham Lincoln was the Great Emancipator. When your class did the Spring Fling, you had to be a stupid pansy.”

  Here we go. Claire sighed. The two of them bickered about everything from which row of the minivan they each would claim to whose turn it was to feed Chester.

  She fought back her stress headache and opted for diversion, her favorite fight-avoidance technique. Divide and conquer, the time-proven strategy. “Macy, go ask Evie what you can do to help sort the beads.”

  As soon as her daughter left, she turned to Owen. “When you finish your homework, you can play the Lego Star Wars video game your dad bought you this weekend, before we have to go home and get you in your costume for the pageant.”

  “Can we go to McDonald’s for dinner?”

  He always knew how to hit her up when she was tired and stressed, when the challenge of cooking a healthy, satisfying meal for her family seemed completely beyond her capabilities. “We’ll see how well you do with your homework first.”

  In an instant, he reached to whip his homework folder from his backpack at the same time Riley rose to give him space on the desk for the ream of papers he always seemed to bring home.

  “I’ve got to run. Let me know if you think of anything else that might help the investigation. No matter how small or insignificant the information might seem to you, it could provide the break we need.”

  “I will. Thank you again for all you’ve done.”

  “You can wait and thank me after I catch the ba—” He caught himself with a quick, apologetic look to Owen. “The bad dudes. Good luck tonight, Abe. You were always my favorite president.”

  Owen grinned as he spread his homework on the desk and reached for a pencil. Claire followed Riley back to the workroom, where he took time to say goodbye to his mother and sisters and the other women still sorting away.

  “Wow. This looks like a big mess,” he said.

  “You let us worry about the beads,” his mother said. “You just get back out there and catch whoever did this to our Claire.”

  “No pressure, right? On my way, Ma.” He kissed his mother’s salt-and-pepper curls, then headed for the door.

  CHAPTER THREE

  THE MORE THINGS CHANGE, the more they stayed the same, and all that.

  Riley sat in the auditorium at Hope’s Crossing Elementary School, feeling a little like he’d traveled back in time. The place looked just as it had when he was here twenty-five years ago. Same creaky folding chairs, same red-velvet curtains on the stage.

  The third-grade class of Hope’s Crossing Elementary School had been presenting a Spring Fling Spectacular for more than thirty years. Riley could vividly recall his own stint in their play, which his year had been a salute to the original miners who staked claims in the area. Despite old Mrs. Appleton’s stern warnings to the contrary all through their rehearsals, he had been overwhelmed by the crowd and the excitement and had stupidly locked his knees right in the middle of a rousing song about turning silver into gold.

  His spectacular dive off the stage as he passed out into the lap of the grumpy fourth-grade teacher holding the cue cards was probably still legendary in the hallowed halls of Hope’s Crossing Elementary School.

  He smiled at the memory as he sat beside Angie, his second-oldest sister. Angie’s son Jace—Owen Bradford’s best friend—was starring as the narrator of tonight’s pageant.

  He had been away from town for a long time, since he left an angry, troubled punk who cou
ldn’t wait to get out. When he was a kid, he had loathed these rituals, these prescribed, hallowed traditions that beat out the quiet rhythm of life in a small town. Now, fifteen years later, he was astonished at the comfort he found in the steadfast continuity of it all.

  He might have changed drastically in those intervening years and the town likely had, as well. But certain things remained constant. The hash browns at Center of Hope Café still held the distinction of the best he’d ever tasted, the mountains cupping the town soared just as dramatically imposing as they’d been the day he left, and the elementary school Spring Fling still drew the biggest crowd in town.

  Some part of him had dreaded coming home as much as he craved it. His years as a cop in the harsh world of Oakland had shaped him as much as his youth here. A cop couldn’t work gang violence task forces, multiple homicides, serial rapes, without some of the ugliness brushing against his own soul. When the former chief of police of Hope’s Crossing approached him about replacing him when he retired, Riley had worried those bruises inside him would somehow render him unfit for the quieter, easier pace here.

  But that worry seemed far away now as he sat comfortably with his family. The audience applauded energetically when Owen Bradford finished a moving speech about brother fighting brother and Riley slanted his gaze from the stage to the spot across the gymnasium where he’d seen Claire sitting next to her idiot of an ex-husband and the flashy eye candy who’d been in Claire’s store earlier. Her daughter sat next to the new wife, not next to Claire, he noted. Awkward.

  How could Claire sit there with them and still wear that look of calm indifference in her eyes? Was it a mask or did she really not care that Jeff had moved on, traded her in for a newer, younger model?

  None of his business. She could have a half-dozen ex-husbands all arrayed around her like those shiny beads at her store and it shouldn’t be any of Riley’s concern.

  He found it more than a little unsettling that Claire Tatum Bradford still fascinated him like she did when he was just a stupid kid mooning over his older sister’s smart, pretty best friend. What would Claire think if she knew he used to fantasize about her?

  He shifted his attention back to the stage, where his nephew as narrator was introducing Betsy Ross. What any of this had to do with celebrating spring, he had no idea. He imagined it grew tough after thirty years to come up with something original for the third-grade pageant.

  The crowd ate it up, jumping to its collective feet as soon as the last words had been spoken and clapping with broad enthusiasm for the young performers, who beamed as the curtain opened for them to bow once more.

  “Thanks for making time to come, Riley.” Angie smiled at him as the applause finally died away and people began to gather their coats and belongings. “I know it means the world to Jace that you showed up.”

  “I’ve missed a few of these over the years. It’s good to be back.”

  She touched his arm in that Angie way of hers, her eyes sympathetic. His sister had been the little mother to the rest of them. He loved all his sisters and was probably closest to Alex, the next oldest sibling to him, but he would always have a tender place in his heart for Angie. During the dark days after his dad walked out, she had been the one he turned to for comfort when his mom had been too distraught herself to offer any.

  “You’re staying for refreshments, aren’t you? Ang made her famous snickerdoodles,” her husband, Jim, said.

  Angie and Jim were two of the most sane people he’d ever had the fortune to know. After twenty years of marriage, they still held hands and plainly adored each other.

  “And you didn’t bring along a few dozen just for your favorite officer of the law?” he teased his sister.

  She made a face. “Didn’t think about it. Sorry. I’m still not used to having you home for me to spoil again with cookies. I always make a triple batch, though, so I can probably find you a few crumbs lying around. I’ll bring them by tomorrow.”

  “I was kidding, Ang. You don’t have to feed me.”

  “I can if I want. And I want. I’m just glad you’re home to give me a chance.”

  He was still reserving judgment on whether he shared her sentiment. Coming back to Colorado had been a tough decision, one he hadn’t yet convinced himself had been right. But being an undercover cop had become intolerable. He had been on the verge of handing in his badge and hanging up his service revolver for good—if not for Chief Coleman’s phone call, Riley might be working construction somewhere in Alaska, because that’s about all he felt qualified to do besides police work.

  Alaska was still an option. He wasn’t ruling anything out yet. When he took the job, he’d insisted on a three-month probation to see how he could adapt to the quieter pace in Hope’s Crossing. At the end of that time, if he didn’t feel the life of a small-town cop was any more comfortable to his psyche than the urban warfare of inner-city Oakland, he might be spending next winter on the tundra.

  “Hey, McKnight! Town must be really scraping the bottom of the barrel to drag your sorry ass back.”

  He turned at the familiar voice and grinned as he recognized an old friend. Monte Richardson had once been the star quarterback of the Hope’s Crossing High football team. Now he was balding with a bit of a paunch, a thick brushy dark mustache and the well-fed look of a contented husband and father, at least judging by the sleeping baby in his arms.

  “Hey, Monte.” Somehow they managed to shake hands around the sleeping baby. “I figured next time I ran into you, it would be when I hauled you in for a drunk and disorderly.”

  Monte laughed. “Not me, man. I’ve reformed. Only drinking I do anymore is maybe a beer or two while I’m watching Monday Night Football in my man cave. You’re welcome anytime.”

  He shook his head. “How the mighty have fallen. Whatever happened to party till you drop?”

  “Life, man. Kids, family. It’s a hell of a ride. You ought to climb on.”

  That world wasn’t for him. He had figured that out a long time ago. Family was chaos and uncertainty, craziness and pain. In his experience, life handed out enough of that without volunteering for more.

  He would have stayed to talk longer but the two of them were interrupted by Mayor Beaumont, who greeted Monte with a polite if dismissive smile and then proceeded to corner Riley for the next ten minutes about the progress of the investigation into what for him condensed to only the most pressing issue, the desecration of his daughter’s wedding gown.

  “You’ve got to find the buggers and fast,” the mayor finally said, his tone implacable. “Gennie and my wife are out for blood. We all better hope they’re not the first ones who find whoever did this or you just might have a murder investigation on your hands.”

  He took the words to heart. Finally the mayor was distracted by one of the city council members approaching and Riley took blatant advantage of the chance to escape with a wave for the men.

  His progress through the crowd was slow and laborious. He supposed that was another one of those curse-and-blessing things about returning to his hometown. Everybody wanted to talk to him, to relive old times, to catch up on the years and distance between them. Add to that the unaccustomed excitement of the day with four—count ’em four—robberies in town, and everyone gathered at the elementary school for the pageant seemed to want to put in his or her two cents.

  Wearing the title of chief on his badge in a small town wasn’t much different than being an undercover cop whose entire goal had been blending in. The only difference was instead of hanging with drug dealers and pimps, here he was required to be polite, to make conversation, to play the public relations game, something that didn’t sit completely comfortably inside his skin.

  He did have one uneasy moment when he encountered J. D. Nyman, one of his officers who had also applied for the position of police chief. The man had made no secret that he thought Riley wasn’t qualified for the job, which made for some awkward staff meetings.

  “Officer Nyman,”
he said. “Any word from the crime lab on those fingerprints?”

  “No,” the other man said with blunt rudeness and turned his back to talk to someone else.

  Riley almost called him on it, but then decided this wasn’t the venue, so he headed out of the gymnasium to the hallway, where he almost literally bumped into Claire Bradford at the coatrack, pulling a charcoal wool coat from a hanger.

  She looked tired, he thought. The big blue eyes he used to dream about were smudged with shadows and tiny lines of exhaustion radiated from her mouth. She smiled. “Hello, Chief McKnight.”

  Her warmth was refreshing, especially after Nyman’s rudeness. “Looks like you finally ditched the good doctor.”

  He gently tugged her coat away to help her into it. Her mouth tightened, at him or at the doctor, he didn’t know. “Holly was tired, so they made an early night of it,” she answered.

  She had always been enamored with Jeff Bradford. He hated the guy for that, alone, especially because from the moment Jeff had noticed her, too, Claire had seemed completely smitten.

  Even early on, she had talked about living in one of the town’s historic old brick houses, settling down and raising a family here in Hope’s Crossing.

  Things hadn’t quite worked out as she planned and Riley knew a moment’s sadness for unrealized dreams. If anyone deserved the life she wanted, Claire Tatum Bradford would have topped his personal list. She’d been through hell as a kid and ought to be first in line for a happy ending.

  Was she completely devastated that Bradford had moved on? Riley didn’t want to think so. He had been fourteen when his own mother disintegrated for a while after his old man walked out. He could still remember the nights he would wake up to her sobbing in the living room as they all tried to make sense of James McKnight’s sudden abandonment of his wife and six children.

  Another problem he should have anticipated about moving home. Things he hadn’t thought about in years—and didn’t want to waste another moment of his life dwelling on—had a way of pushing themselves to the front of his brain. He quickly turned his attention to Claire’s son.