manager, who would keep close watch and disperse employees out to the arduous but artful task, as needed.
For Tanner Malone, it meant that even though his little sister had a day off school on Tuesday for teacher in-service meetings, he had to be out in the groves all day—leaving her to get into whatever trouble she could manage with too much time on her hands and the house all to herself.
He hired a couple of seasonal helpers during harvest, but the rest of the work he did himself to save money for Tatum’s college expenses.
Letting himself in the back door of their sizable but very old farmhouse, as the early April sun was setting, Tanner prepared himself for make-up, tight jeans and blonde hair styled to perfection. There’d be attitude for sure.
But maybe there’d be some dinner on the table. Even boxed macaroni and cheese would be welcome to his empty stomach.
“Tatum?” he called as, walking through the spotless untouched kitchen, he headed into the equally undisturbed living room.
His sister was good about picking up after herself, but the couch pillows were just as he’d tossed them that morning on his way out the door. He knew because one had fallen sideways and it still lay there, cock-eyed.
With a hand on the banister leading upstairs, he leaned over to see the landing at the top and called, “Sis?”
Could it be that she was in her room studying? Getting ready for the intensive college entrance exams she had coming up the following fall? Tanner and Tatum’s brother, Thomas, had spent a good six months in preparation for his SATs, resulting in a full scholarship to an Ivy League school back east.
And he hadn’t come back to California since he left. That was ten years ago. Tatum had been five. Talia sixteen. And Tanner? The big brother who’d managed somehow to keep his family together after their mother, Tammy, had finally done them a favor and skipped out on them, had been a mere twenty-three.
Was he only thirty-three now? He’d felt forty ten years ago.
But then he’d been the unofficial guardian and sole supporter of his younger siblings for a couple of years by then.
Thankfully there’d been enough money left from his father’s life insurance policy to buy this farm with an ancient house that still needed a lot of work, but enough land to grow grapes that partially supplied a couple of California’s premier wineries.
He was a moderate vintner himself now, too. Which was another reason why getting the pruning done was so important. He had a shipment of recoopered oak barrels arriving in a couple of days and had to prepare the framework upon which they were going to sit.
Tatum wasn’t answering his calls.
Which wasn’t all that unusual these days.
But she wasn’t on her phone, either. He hadn’t heard that sweet laugh of hers. Or the irritated tone she took on when someone said or did something that she deemed stupid.
Del Harcourt...
If the asshole was here...
Taking the steps two at a time, Tanner was upstairs, bursting through his sister’s bedroom door before he’d finished the thought.
He stopped short. Tatum’s bed was made. Her desk neat. The books he’d brought her, study guides for the big test, lay neatly stacked in front of her computer screen.
The room had one purple wall while the others were painted off white, just as his sister had wanted. The quilted bedspread covering her queen-size bed was bedecked with butterflies. The furniture was old, but she’d had her pick of anything she wanted in the barn filled with who knew how many decades of discarded antiques they’d inherited when he bought the place.
One of the jobs on Tatum’s list for the summer, other than preparing for her October test, was to look up the pieces in the barn on the internet, catalog what they had and see if they could make some money on them. Which meant he’d have to get an entire barn’s worth of furniture unstacked so she could begin going through it....
“Tatum?” He couldn’t hold the panic at bay any longer. Tatum’s bedroom, like the rest of the house, was empty.
In one stride he was at her closet, hand on the antique glass doorknob, pulling with such force the knob came off in his hand. It had been loose for a while.
Another jerk on the door, with his fingers through the hole left by the fallen knob, and the small, wood-floored space where Tatum’s relatively meager but expensive wardrobe hung came into view.
He’d been fearing emptiness. Empty hangers at least. Instead, his sister’s clothes hung in order, just as they’d been the last time he’d seen them. Shirts with shirts. Pants with pants. And dresses on the far right.
What happened to the days when she was a little sprite too busy exploring anything she could get into to pick her clothes up off the floor? Too busy even to put them in the laundry hamper he’d placed right in the middle of her floor to make it easy for her?
Spinning, he took in the rest of the room. Opened some drawers to satisfy him that they weren’t empty, and then moved on to the bathroom he shared with her.
The drawers, split three to one in her favor, were neatly filled, and the bathroom with its pedestal sink and claw-footed iron tub looked just as it had that morning. Tatum’s wire rack hanging from the shower head was still filled with her salon-purchased shampoo, conditioners and lotion-dispensing razor.
Back downstairs, he checked every room. The little library, the formal dining room he used as an office, the mudroom that doubled as a laundry room. The huge kitchen. The only thing missing, other than his recalcitrant fifteen-year-old sister, seemed to be the tie-dyed hippie bag she called a purse.
Tatum wasn’t old enough to drive. For the past three months, he’d been keeping all vehicle keys on his person, in any case.
But she had friends with mothers who drove—who’d been known to help him out when he couldn’t be two places at once.
Grabbing his cell phone off the holster on his belt, Tanner dialed his sister’s cell number. Not surprisingly, it went straight to voice mail. And then he dialed first one and then another of the girls Tatum hung out with.
Only to find that she hadn’t been hanging out with them.
Not since Harcourt. The girls didn’t sound any happier about the asshole’s advent into his sister’s life than he was.
Taking deep steady breaths, Tanner walked, very deliberately, out to the far barn—the one that they never used because half of it was missing. In the standing half was a small tack room—the only room inside, enclosed with drywall, as though someone had once used the place as a getaway. A hideout. Maybe yesterday’s version of a man cave.
An old round wooden table, with one rotted leg, stood in the middle of the room. On the walls hung several framed photos—or a rendition thereof. The frames were falling apart at the seams. The glass was broken.
And there was one unframed poster hanging there. A newer poster. One he’d hung as a reminder of why he worked and sacrificed every day. The anti-drug poster depicted a meth addict. A woman with stringy, dirt-blond hair and black gaps where her teeth should be. There were sores all
