bikes back down again. Maybe we could do that this time, if you like riding bikes.”
Danny got out of the Jeep and stretched. He looked over in time to see Riggs doing the same next to the open door of his van.
“What do you figure,” he asked Danny as he approached, “another ten, fifteen minutes?”
“A little more than that. Maybe twenty to get as far as town. Another ten to the cabin.”
Riggs looked after the girls and one corner of his mouth lifted into a fragmented smile. “She can hardly wait to get out on the lake. She’s been chattering about it all the way up the mountain. You think Jessie will give it a try?”
“No idea.”
“Anything else from the scumbag?” As long as Danny had known Riggs, he switched gears like that. Still, even after so many years, the change in conversation tripped him up at times.
“Stanton? Not that I know of. Rafe helped push through a restraining order.”
“Those things never really stop someone intent on harassment.”
“No. But it gives him something else to lose.” Danny pinned his hope on that. “Might make him think twice.”
Allie’s laughter jingled like silver bells on Christmas morning, drawing Danny’s attention to the inside of the turnout where she and Jessie had stopped; Allie on a large boulder, and Jessie standing behind her. A large bouquet of cuttings—honeysuckle stems mixed in with bluish-purple lupine—lay casually on the ground next to them while Jessie braided the girl’s glossy dark hair, inserting tiny yellow blossoms as she went.
The afternoon sun peeked through the branches of trees behind them, and one long-armed beam reached straight through shimmying leaves and landed on the slope of Jessie’s shoulder, igniting her dark hair with gold and copper. She glanced at Danny just then and smiled—seemingly so carefree and happy. A sharp jolt of electricity ran straight through him. He couldn’t help hoping that it lasted, that it wasn’t just a fleeting moment of peace for her.
“Do you like my hair?” Allie asked as she ran toward her father.
“It suits you,” he said, kissing the top of her head. “You’ve always been my little flower child. Jessie, can you do mine next?”
“Don’t mind him, Jessie,” Allie said over a rolling giggle. “He just likes to be silly. Can we get something to eat soon? I’m hungry.”
“Let’s get on our way up the mountain then,” Danny suggested.
“Jessie, you want to ride with us? Ooh, or I could ride with—”
“Jessie’s going to ride with Danny,” Riggs interrupted with a quick wink. “C’mon. Keep me company the rest of the way.”
“But we’ll get something to eat soon, right?”
“We’ll stop in town,” Danny promised.
Once they buckled into the Jeep, Danny circled around and pulled out onto the mountain road behind Riggs’s van.
“Mind if I put on some music?” Jessie asked.
“Sure.”
She chuckled as she seemed to decide on one of the CDs in the case, and he waited to hear what she’d chosen. On the first few notes, he recognized James Taylor.
“What’s this remind you of?” she asked, cranking up “Shower the People.” He didn’t need time to think it over, but she didn’t wait to find that out. “It played that afternoon when my car broke down and you picked me up. Remember, I met Steph for the first time that day.”
“I do remember.”
“Speaking of . . . She sent me an invitation to her wedding.”
“You mentioned. That’s good.”
“So you still don’t mind if I go.”
“Mind?” he said with a grimace. “Why would I mind?”
“I don’t want you to feel like I’m intruding.”
“Jessie.” He sighed. Didn’t she know by now that she hadn’t insinuated herself into his life? He’d drawn her there with ease and enthusiasm. There was only one individual in that Jeep with any reservations about the future at all, and he wasn’t that person.
“Okay. Well, I’d like to go,” she said.
He’d thought it had been established the day she told him she received the invitation, but he asked her anyway. “Do you want to go together?”
She hesitated before replying, “Sure. That might be fun.”
Jessie softly sang along with the music for the next few minutes up the mountain, and Danny lounged in the sound of it. When “Carolina on My Mind” came up on the queue, he grinned, remembering what she’d once told him about that song.
She sang along a few moments, then she glanced over at him and giggled. He allowed the recollection of their time together that afternoon to skitter through his mind. The way she’d accepted the band for her hair and joked about their “matching ponies,” and how she told him about her love for James Taylor’s music, and especially how she’d taken to changing his Carolina lyric to California instead.
“I always knew I wanted to get out of Slidell, and Southern California was just this pie-in-the-sky sort of Nirvana of glitz and movie stars, so I started dreaming about coming here long before it was even a real possibility. So I had California on my mind.”
Danny sighed. “So how do you feel about it now? Cali still on your mind?”
“Well. My personal glitz is now otherwise engaged,” she joked.
More and more all the time, he reckoned.
For him, though, it was another song that had taken root in his memory since that day. Every word, every note of one old song by James Taylor whispered Jessie’s name every time he happened upon it, transporting him back to that very afternoon when, for possibly the first time, he’d realized he’d found the other part of himself. A part that had been missing or damaged—or broken entirely—until she happened upon his door.
Something in the Way She Moves. And at that very moment, there went Taylor on the Jeep’s sound system again, digging it all up in him one more time.
“She has the power to go where no one else can find me . . .”
“Such a pretty song,” Jessie commented, and Danny nodded.
“Very.”
* * *
My little Jessie growed up so fast after her Mama left us. She went from checkered dresses with petticoats and frilly little socks to skirts so short I near ’bout had a heart attack. For a few years there, I became like one o’ them guards with the big hats standin’ watch at the gate to the Queen’s palace overseas. Pointin’ my finger at her like a musket. She knew just by lookin’
