honey.” With effort, Claire shifted gears to her mommy role. “You’ve worked hard to improve your skills and you definitely deserve it. Hey, I’m going to order pizza tonight and Owen’s picking a movie.”
“Okay. I’m going to go change and clean up. The field was super-muddy.”
In a rare show of affection, she slid her arms around Claire’s neck and hugged her, then bounced past Ruth in the doorway on her way out of the room.
“Thanks for the ride home, Grandma,” she said.
“You’re welcome, my dear,” Ruth answered. “Claire, good grief, who left such a mess out by the garbage can? They look like shingles. Is that Andy Harris here working on something? He needs to do a better job of cleaning up after himself.”
Riley stepped forward into her line of vision and Ruth’s mouth pursed like she’d just chomped into a peach pit.
“I left the mess, Mrs. Tatum. Claire lost a few shingles in the rains of the last few weeks, so I was replacing them. Don’t worry, I’m planning to take care of the garbage before I go.”
Her mother’s sharp-eyed gaze slid from Riley to Claire and then back again. Claire gave an inward cringe at the questions and suspicions she saw gathering there like an August afternoon thunderstorm over the mountains.
She braced herself, wishing she had some way to warn Riley of the cloudburst about to let loose.
“Chief McKnight. This is a surprise.” Ruth smiled with absolutely no warmth. “Isn’t there a teenager somewhere you can chase down at dangerously high speeds?”
Riley’s only reaction was the twitch of a muscle in his jaw. If this was the attitude he faced around town, no wonder he carried unnecessary guilt about the accident.
“Mom,” Claire chided quietly.
Ruth offered up a falsely innocent look. “What did I say?”
“You know that was unfair,” she began, but Owen’s “Hey, Grandma!” stalled the words.
“Hello, dear. What have you been up to?”
“Me and Riley fixed the roof on the shed and guess what? I got to use a nail gun.”
Oh, dear. Here we go. Now Ruth would accuse her of allowing Riley to put her son into danger. “Weren’t you two going to take a look at your bike?” she asked, a little desperately.
Riley raised an eyebrow at her sudden uncharacteristic eagerness to accept his help, but he only nodded. “We certainly were. That was our next project. Let’s go check out what we’re dealing with, kid.”
“I found just the show on the computer, Mom,” Owen informed her. “I put it at the top of the queue.”
“Excellent. I’ll order the pizza in a minute.”
When the two of them headed outside, Owen pacing his stride to Riley’s longer-legged gait, Claire turned to her mother.
“Mom, that was unkind. Riley was only doing his job. You know that.”
Ruth began fussing around the room, straightening magazines on the coffee table and picking up the granola bar wrapper Owen had left there after school. “I’m sorry, Claire, but I can’t forget that because of the way he did his job, you and my only grandchildren were nearly killed. Look at you. You can’t even walk and you haven’t been able to work for over two weeks. It’s not right.”
“If you’re going to blame anyone, blame the teenagers who decided to go on a crime spree for no discernible reason. Blame Charlie Beaumont. He’s the one who chose to run.”
Ruth made a dismissive sort of motion. “Charlie is a thoughtless boy who ran because he was afraid.”
“Right. Afraid of being caught. They robbed my store and a half-dozen others in town, not to mention that vacation home in the canyon. None of that is Riley’s fault.”
“I’m not defending what they did. It breaks my heart, that’s what it does, and I don’t understand it for a minute. I don’t see how anyone can. Children from good homes, robbing people, vandalizing things. Something’s wrong, I’ll grant you that. Personally, I think it’s all those video games you parents let them play.”
Because she allowed Owen only a couple hours a week of only rated-E-for-everyone games, she wasn’t sure how her mother could justify lumping her into that particular category. Anyway, that wasn’t the point.
“Whatever the reason, it was the choices Charlie—and, yes, the others—made that caused this tragedy. Not anything Riley McKnight did.”
“He should never have chased them,” her mother insisted. “Not with those snowy conditions. And now a girl is dead and another might as well be, if she has to live the rest of her life like a…like a rutabaga.”
“Riley did nothing wrong.”
“Believe what you want. I’ll do the same.”
Would that waxed cord be strong enough to make a noose? she wondered, although it was a toss-up whether she wanted to use it for her mother or for herself. Five minutes of conversation with Ruth and she wanted to bang her head on her worktable a couple dozen times.
“What would you have him do? Just let the kids drive away? Then you and J. D. Nyman and everyone else in town would be saying he’s too soft.”
Her mother turned her attention to the entertainment center, stacking loose DVDs and picking up the hundred or so remotes it seemed to take to run everything these days.
“I don’t know. He could have discreetly followed them long enough to get a license number and then picked Charlie up later at home. But personally, I think he wanted the big, flashy arrest so he could show off in his first few weeks on the job.”
“That’s not fair. You don’t even know him. Not anymore.”
“I know all I need to know. That boy is trouble, just like Charlie Beaumont. He always has been. You know what he was like. A wilder boy I never knew. Running around getting girls pregnant.”
“One girl, Mom. One girl.”
“That we know about. The city council made a huge mistake bringing him back and I for one am glad they’re reconsidering.”
Claire caught a flicker of movement and glanced toward the hallway and her stomach dropped. They had been so busy in one of their typical arguments that neither of them had heard Riley come back inside. How much of her mother’s ridiculous vitriol had he heard?
“I disagree,” she said, locking her gaze with his. “I think Riley is exactly what Hope’s Crossing needs.”
“A womanizer who acts first and thinks later?” Ruth scoffed.
“A decorated, dedicated police officer who cares about this town and the people in it,” she answered with quiet firmness and saw something warm and intense spark in his eyes.
“He’s trouble,” Ruth repeated. “You’ll see. I love Mary Ella, you know that.
