bicycle, which he’d left in front of the hardware store, back out to the small farm he lived on with his widowed father. Who, as best they could figure out from Elijah’s grudging explanation, had been on disability for some time. He also told them he was home schooled, since his father needed him around to “help.” Help with what, was the question, since neither the small, drab house with its peeling paint and missing shutters, nor the bare dirt yard littered with junk and a couple of old pickups, indicated that any attention had been given to either for a very long time. Granted, Cal had seen worse, but the bleakness of the place turned his stomach. No kid should ever have to live like this.
“Mind if we come in for a minute?” Dawn asked, but the kid said no before the words were all the way out of her mouth.
“We won’t say anything about the candy bar,” Cal added.
“It ain’t that,” Elijah said, pushing open the back door of Cal’s extended cab truck. “It’s just…uh, Daddy’s usually asleep this time of day. An’ he don’t like bein’ disturbed.”
With that, he bolted out of the truck and across the yard, stopping for a second to pet a large mongrel dog tied up to the lone tree in front of the house before bounding onto the porch and on through the screen door.
Dawn kept her eyes on the house as they drove back down the dirt road leading to the highway. “I hate seeing kids left to their own devices like that.”
“Oh, I imagine he’s all right,” Cal said, briefly meeting her gaze when she finally brought it around. She blew out a sigh, then faced front, her brow knit, as the truck meandered over the gently rolling, lush green hills that Cal couldn’t imagine giving up for skyscrapers and concrete and rush hour traffic.
“Still,” she said, holding her hair with one hand so it wouldn’t blow to kingdom come. “Somebody should check up on him. From the county, I mean.”
“There’s no real cause, far as I can tell. I didn’t get the feeling he’d been abused. And he has to take tests or something if he’s being home schooled. If he doesn’t pass, they’d catch it.”
“But he’s so thin! A stiff breeze would blow the poor kid away!”
A smile inched across Cal’s face. “You’re obviously forgettin’ how skinny I was as a kid then. Just because he’s all bones doesn’t mean he’s not eating.”
“He stole, Cal.”
“A candy bar. Because he’s twelve and it was there and he saw what looked like a golden opportunity.” He glanced over.
“Didn’t you ever take something just to see if you could?”
“No! Never!”
“You were never even tempted?”
“Well…maybe. But I didn’t act on it.” She sucked in a breath. “Did you?”
“Yeah, once.”
“Oh, God.”
“Oh, unknot your panties. I was nine, for cryin’ out loud. It was maybe a few months after my mother died. I snitched a pack of gum from the supermarket checkout, pretty much like what Elijah did.”
“What happened?”
“Well, at first I felt like hot stuff because I pulled it off without Ethel catching me. But somehow the gum didn’t taste near as good as I figured it would. And I couldn’t sleep that night. So I finally confessed to Daddy.”
“Ouch. I can imagine how well that went over.”
“All he did was look at me. Like I’d let him down. Well, and march me back to the store to ’fess up to the manager, which was humiliating as hell. I was never even tempted to filch anything after that.”
“Never?” He heard the smile in her voice.
“Almost never, anyway.”
She laughed, but it didn’t last long. “Still,” she said, “it worries me. About Elijah.” He could feel her gaze on the side of his face. “I’d call Family Services myself, but I wouldn’t be around to follow up….”
He didn’t know which irked him more, her leaving or her pushing him to do something he didn’t think needed doing.
“Dawn, I hear what you’re saying, I really do. But I’m not gonna embarrass that kid, or his father, by calling the authorities on ’em when I don’t see any reason to. Looks to me like they’ve got enough to deal with without people sticking their noses in where they don’t belong.”
She pushed herself back against the truck door, as if needing to distance herself from him. “Problems aren’t always obvious, you know—”
“And living in the city for so long has made you see spooks lurking in every shadow. This isn’t New York—”
“Neglect is neglect, Cal. No matter where it happens.”
“You know what? If you’re so hot about this, why don’t you stick around and take care of it yourself?”
“Because I can’t, which you know. And how dare you try to blackmail me!”
Cal let out a nice, ripe cussword, to which Dawn spit back, “My sentiments exactly.”
Nobody said anything for another mile or two. Then she said, “I suppose I can at least make the initial call before I go back.”
Cal sighed. “You really feel that strongly about this?”
She turned to him, and he could hear her voice shake. “If you’d heard what I have, seen the effects of people looking the other way, you would, too. Working with these women and children hasn’t made me delusional, it’s made me think twice about taking things at face value. And I couldn’t live with myself if something happened that could’ve been prevented by a single phone call.”
He glanced over to see her mouth all set like it used to get when she was a kid. Aw, hell. “Tell you what. If I promise to personally check up on the boy, and his father, would that be enough to keep you from making that call?”
“Are you serious?”
“Are you out to see just how far you can try my patience before I lose what’s left of my mind? I wouldn’t’ve said it if I didn’t mean it…hey!”
She’d flown across the seat to hug him, nearly sending the truck off the road. “Thank you,” she murmured into his neck, her breath far too soft and far too warm for anybody’s good right now.
“Honey? Not that I’m not enjoying this, but I think that’s Didi Meyerhauser’s Bronco closing in on us, so you might want to—”
She was instantly on the other side of the seat like nothing had happened.
Not that anything had happened.
Exactly.
The preacher’s wife passed, waving. Cal and Dawn waved back, Cal suddenly remembering that Dawn used to be friends with Didi’s
