She opted for a mild cold war.
“It’s not that bad.”
“Right. Who wouldn’t want to live in a ghost town that’s been painted every gross shade of neon ever invented?”
Ignoring him, she exited Interstate 40, which went on to Albuquerque, and eyed their destination nestled at the base of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. Kyle was right; these days Redoubt, New Mexico, was like a surprise streak of paint on an otherwise no-nonsense canvas. The salmon pink, canary yellow, peacock blue and electric white buildings that she could see so far were startling against tree-covered cliffs. After driving for hours along the flat, then rolling, prairie tempered with spotty vegetation, this shocking splash of color was unexpected, despite her father’s warning that the town was attempting once again to reinvent itself. Aside from the fresh coat of paint, though, there was no missing that most of the structures were a half-century old and spare. No Frank Lloyd Wright or Taj Mahal creations here. On the other hand, glamour and grandeur weren’t what she and her son needed at this stage in their lives. The challenge was to make Kyle understand that.
“Forget aesthetics for the moment, okay? Your grandfather’s counting on us.” She hoped the reminder would trigger his conscience. “Once you get a chance to stretch your legs and take a better look around, I bet you’ll see things aren’t so bad.”
“Compared to what?”
“Reform school for one.”
“Not funny.”
She wasn’t trying to be; she was thinking about what he could have—probably would have—had to look forward to if they’d stayed much longer in the urban hotbed they had previously called home. “Sorry, dear heart. You leaned straight into that one.”
The young teen slouched lower in his seat and crossed his legs, further exposing a bony knee sticking through his torn and fraying jeans. Her only child was at a difficult stage in more ways than one. While physically sprouting into a man, emotionally he was light-years away from adulthood. As a result, when he wasn’t bumping his long legs or those clodhopper feet into walls and furniture, he was pining after girls aeons ahead of his maturity and experience, or else hanging out with boys too reckless and angry for any parent’s peace of mind. A month ago, when her fellow officers on the Detroit police force brought him home for the second time for offenses almost worthy of arrest, she’d begun giving serious thought to returning to the land of her birth. A few days later, a call from her father had convinced her to follow through with the idea.
Despite the dark lenses on her sunglasses, Taylor had to squint against the late-June sun, which was nearing its midpoint in the cerulean sky. But her eyes stung for another reason, too: having been away from the state for fourteen years with few visits between—and brief ones at that—the emotions rushing through her were as painful as they were sweet. As a girl, she’d ridden bareback across this land, slept under the canopy of this incredible sky, made love for the first time in this relentless heat. Once she’d made up her mind to come back, she’d understood she would have to deal with those memories, the old feelings... many things. But she’d hoped that she would be too busy to be susceptible to the “what if...” demons. Apparently those gremlins were more resilient than she’d anticipated.
“I sure hope Gramps has indoor plumbing,” Kyle muttered, twisting in his seat as they passed a weather-beaten shack with an even shakier-looking outhouse behind it.
Taylor felt her lips twitch. “You know he does. You’re just having withdrawal pangs because there’s no mall.” Thank goodness, she added silently.
“Yeah, and now that you brought it up, what do you expect me to do all day while you’re working?”
“Count grains of sand and dodge rattlesnakes.”
“I’m serious.”
“All right, so this ground is more clay than sand. I’ll still expect you to be careful about rattlers.”
Her son tugged his Detroit Tigers baseball cap lower over his eyes. “Maybe I’ll hitch a ride back home. Al Deaton said I could move in with him if I wanted.”
Despite a sinking sensation in her abdomen, Taylor kept her gaze on the row of stores coming up. “What a delightful thought. Considering how infrequently he practices any form of personal hygiene, being his roommate would be a genuine treat.”
“You know what, Mom? I live for the day you don’t have a wise-guy answer for everything.”
“No doubt you do. But you’ll be an old, old man before it happens, compadre. Even your grandfather said that the only thing faster than my draw was my mouth. Deal with it.”
Usually that would have earned her a reluctant smile from Kyle, but he was locked in too stubborn a mood to let her see it—a little trait he’d inherited from his father. To hide his feelings, he turned to look out the passenger window. Taylor didn’t mind the break in the conversation, though. She wanted a minute to take in the view herself.
The town of Redoubt hadn’t been “discovered” per se. It had evolved quite by accident when in the early 1880s Murdock Marsden’s great-grandfather camped in the area as part of a wagon train heading for California. The topography of the land had reminded this ancestor of the area in Africa an uncle had described to him. A member of the small British contingent that in 1879 held Rork’s Drift from the onslaught of thousands of Zulus, the uncle, through his letters, had made a lasting impression on Murdock’s other ancestor. Enough of one to stay behind when the rest of the wagon train moved on. Enough to carve not only a town but a prosperous ranch out of the territory, which Murdock now ruled.
Today the sign at the outskirts of town announced Redoubt’s population as 914, about double what it had been when she’d lived here. It would be 916 if the residents showed a fraction of the enthusiasm for her and Kyle’s return that her father did. He thought she was worrying for no reason, but she had legitimate ones. In the past she’d made her biggest mistakes by assuming too much, falling in love too hard, planning too quickly, racing toward tomorrow with an energy that had bubbled up from some bottomless well inside her. No more. She wasn’t the eighteen-year-old spitfire who’d raced out of Redoubt all those years ago with a broken heart and shattered dreams. She was a thirty-two-year-old mother of a troubled teenager. A divorcée who’d walked away from a challenging but promising career. And although she still had more energy than most people her age, she no longer took any of it, anything at all, for granted.
“Hold me back. Is that supposed to be a burger biggie joint? I don’t remember that being there before.”
At Kyle’s mocking query, she eyed the yellow frame building with the green-and-white lettering on the window announcing Boo’s Biggest Burgers. “Me, neither. But now you know you won’t starve to death. And there’s the public library,” she added, pointing to the narrow red brick building next door. “While you’re feeding your stomach, you might think about feeding your brain.”
“It all depends on how long the line is to check out the book.”
She groaned at the joke that had been corny even when she’d been a kid, and scanned the rest of stores that made up Main Street. Many of the businesses had been handed down from one generation to the next, and she could easily recall the names of their proprietors—Graham, Redburn, Yancy and Montez; however, there were a number of new businesses—mostly antique shops and art galleries—that were part of the town’s turn toward becoming a miniartist’s colony. She hoped those newer residents would also be openminded about having a female law enforcement
