their sons and daughters might run away, too.”
Elise remembered Jasmine as a seven-year-old brown-haired girl who hated it when her big sister babysat. Elise had been over there a time or two, riding horses in their back field and playing. Jasmine would be sixteen or seventeen now. Close to Garrett’s age. She wasn’t one of the teens Elise had so diligently mentored in Two Mules...but she was still a girl in trouble. A girl Elise might be able to help. “Any word from her at all?” Elise asked. She tried to settle back in her black, hard plastic chair and looked at the photos and certificates on the wall. A college diploma or two. Photos of winning football teams, debate teams and cheerleaders. She recognized Cooper, bent on one knee, in the front row of the football photo just over the principal’s head.
Mike answered, “No, no sightings, no cryptic messages to her parents.”
Mike Hamm touched the screen of his iPad. “Also, David Cagnalia shoplifted at a convenience store near the interstate a month ago. They caught him on the outskirts of town.”
“Sounds like a call for help.” Elise rubbed her temples. She’d been told that David was the other young man in Garrett’s truck.
Above the principal’s head and slightly to the left was a photo of her and Cooper taken after they’d become the first Apache Creek students to win the Arizona High School Rodeo Team Roping Competition. “You still sending students to the rodeo competition?” Elise asked.
“Not since your little sister graduated and your dad no longer ran the program. There’s no one with time and rodeo experience to spearhead an after-school program now.”
Elise’s father had started the program when Elise’s older sister, Eva, was a freshman, hoping to get her involved and overcome her fear of horses. By the time he realized his ploy wasn’t going to work, he had twenty students counting on him. When Elise started her freshman year, Apache Creek High School was making a name for itself in the competition arena. When baby sister Emily entered, parents were filling out vouchers and driving their kids fifty miles to attend a school out of district just so they could be under her father’s tutelage. The saddle came easy to Emily but it wasn’t her calling. Still, she boasted a few buckles herself.
“The last three years the number of incidents involving teenagers in Apache Creek has increased two hundred percent,” Ethan Fisher said.
“It’s an epidemic, kids running away and skipping school, girls getting pregnant before they graduate, and boys,” the principal choked up, “boys making decisions that will go on their record. David is a senior, and he’s nineteen.”
It was the catch in the principal’s voice, the look in the police chief’s eyes and Mike Hamm’s hands folded in prayer that spurred Elise to say words she couldn’t possibly mean.
No way could she return to Apache Creek to live.
No way.
“I’ll know by next week if my job in Two Mules has been eliminated. Are you willing to wait that long?”
“That would be fine,” Principal Beecher said. “We can get busy with the paperwork.” The men talked a bit longer, about pay and hours and benefits.
Elise stared at the photo of her and Cooper on the wall, remembering a past that warred with the present and colored the future.
After she’d shaken hands with the chief of police and principal for the second time, she followed Mike out the door and into the hallway. It was almost Thanksgiving, but backpacks still looked new, maybe because no one took books home; jeans still looked purposely old, maybe because kids bought them that way; and no one looked exhausted. The hallway pulsed with teenage angst and smelled like a combination cafeteria and gym with a hint of perfume.
“You need to come home.” Mike led the way down the stairs to the exit and to the parking lot. Apache Creek High School hadn’t changed much since Elise had graduated, except maybe to be a bit smaller.
When they got to her truck, Elise closed her eyes as she leaned against the hood. “Mike, I appreciate you reaching out to me, but—”
“Think of it as a plea for help. You can make a difference, more than anyone I know.”
“I don’t think I’m strong enough,” Elise whispered.
“You’re stronger than any girl I know,” Mike said. “I know you don’t like talking about Cindy, but from the time you two were in kindergarten, you were a person that she always wanted to be with. You made a difference with her, just like you’ll do with the kids here at the high school. Believe me, I know how her death hurt you. But you couldn’t have prevented it. Don’t let it keep you from coming home. Apache Creek needs you.”
She’d successfully blocked the request to move back home a hundred times the last ten years. She had great reasons, too. The fact that maybe she could have prevented Cindy’s death being the main roadblock. She’d always thought she’d come back someday—a far off someday when she wasn’t weighed down by guilt; when she’d helped enough teens to feel like she’d made amends for not being there for her friend. That “someday” hadn’t come yet.
“In many ways,” Mike continued, “you’re an answer to our prayers.”
She’d had a hard time praying lately, for years really. Early on, right after Cindy’s funeral, Elise had prayed for forgiveness. It hadn’t, in her opinion, come. Maybe she didn’t deserve it.
She hadn’t done enough to help Cindy, hadn’t reacted fast enough to save her. Now, though, she was saving others. Just last month she’d found a local rancher in Two Mules who was willing to let kids come to his place and take riding lessons. Her goal was to get them into competitions, give them something to aim for. She was going to train them the way her father had trained her. She’d show them one walk, trot, canter at a time that they were important and they could shape their future, by taking charge of it.
When she didn’t say anything, he implored, “We sure need some help.”
Apache Creek needs you.
“The people of Two Mules need me, too,” she mentioned casually.
“I hear,” Mike said, “that the natural gas pipeline has been completed. You know what the Bible says, in Proverbs.”
Trust Mike to have a scripture.
“The heart of man plans his way, but the Lord establishes his steps.”
Elise frowned. How did he do that? Just pull a scripture from memory, one that was impossible to argue with. And it just figured he knew about the change in the economy. Two Mules, when she’d started working there, had enough money and cases to keep three social workers busy. Now that the pipeline workers and their families were moving on, Two Mules’s newly decreased budget barely had funds for two social workers although it still had a client list that called for four.
Fewer people did not equate to less need.
But the budget would win.
If Elise were let go, her coworkers could keep their jobs. Both were natives of Two Mules. Both had families: kids in school and grandparents
