would have dried up in an angry burst. But this was Levi, and those were the same five words he’d been saying to her since that night twenty years before when Hazel and Bennett had brought her home to Walters Ranch.
“I remember,” she said, but the words were barely a whisper.
Levi nodded and turned toward the staircase. He paused at the door. “Last one in, remember?” he asked, and Savannah could only nod.
In a moment, he’d disappeared up the stairs, and she was alone in the familiar living room with Mama Hazel’s rocker and the porch light shining through the windows.
Slowly, Savannah made her way to the front door. She looked out, seeing vague shapes in the darkness beyond the porch. It was barely nine o’clock at night, and if she were in Nashville, she would just be going out for the night. But this was small-town Missouri, where farmers hit the fields before dawn and went to bed soon after sundown. Her fingers rested lightly on the porch light switch.
The emotion she’d held back when Levi was still in the room tore through her like a planter tore the ground during spring seeding. Her fingers shook and she tried to blink back the tears.
They’d left the porch light on for more than two years. For her.
Savannah depressed the switch, and the light flicked off in an instant.
Maybe this time, she really was home.
COLLIN GLANCED AT the clock on the dash as he accelerated the truck on the highway. He should have kept driving when he realized it was Savannah Walters on the side of the road playing at being a damsel in distress. Ignoring the red check-engine light. Running her car out of gas.
He didn’t need her kind of drama right now.
Although why she was still driving that old beater of a car when she had a fat record deal in Nashville was curious.
Curiosity—and a penchant for drama, he’d always been certain—killed the cat. And he had no intention of going down just now.
Collin pulled into a parking spot on main drag of town, just a couple of blocks from the marina and the lake. He’d left his window rolled down and could hear a few gulls calling out in the evening air.
James Calhoun, one of his best friends and a deputy sheriff, waited on the steps to the sheriff’s office. He wore the county uniform of khaki pants and shirt, the dark utility belt holding his gun and other cop paraphernalia around his waist, and he’d pushed his aviator sunglasses to the top of his head.
Seeing Collin, he started down the walk.
“She’s inside. A little scared, I think, but she’s hiding the scared pretty far under the usual teenage attitude.”
Collin stepped out of the truck and met James on the sidewalk. “Damages?”
“She swears she wasn’t in on it, and I tend to believe her. From what I’ve been able to get from the others, she was walking by when the fire started in the parking lot, and ran over to try to help put it out.”
Well, that was a new one. Usually when the sheriff’s department called about his little sister, the call was to come bail her out for some minor offence or another. At least this time she’d been trying to do the right thing.
“Thanks for calling my cell instead of the house. The last thing Gran needs is more Amanda worries.” He grabbed the bill of his ball cap from his back pocket and shoved it over his head.
“No worries. How’s Gladys doing?”
“Physical therapy three times a week, simple exercises every day to build up her strength. The doctor says she’ll be getting around without the walker before long.” Collin wasn’t so sure. He’d seen his grandmother’s post–hip replacement progress for himself, but there was something not quite right about her. He’d caught her staring into the distance a few times as if she didn’t quite understand what she was seeing, and he’d had to remind her of dates and events several times over the past few weeks.
“I kept her out of the main holding area, since she wasn’t actually involved in starting the fire,” James said, motioning Collin up the sidewalk. “I have to tell you, though, I’m pretty much alone in my belief in her innocence. She’s been involved in too many other incidents lately. A few of the officers think all eight of those kids should have the book thrown at them.”
“And you’re stuck in the middle.”
“Call me Switzerland.” James opened the door to the office and they stepped inside. There was no hectic movement, no scanners chattering in the growing gloom. The Slippery Rock sheriff’s office at seven thirty on a Friday night was as quiet as a church on Monday morning. The receptionist had gone home and the 9-1-1 center in the next county took care of most dispatch calls.
God, but he loved his small town. He just loved it a little more when his sister wasn’t doing her best to become a criminal.
“You shouldn’t have to play peacemaker between my little sister and your squad room.”
“Stuck in the middle is no place I haven’t been a time or two, and since the other kids cleared her, there’s no reason to add another asterisk to her record.” He put his hand on Collin’s arm. “But, Col, you’re gonna have to talk to her at some point about the mischief calls, the skipping curfew. She’s headed down a dangerous road.”
James flipped on the fluorescent lights as he led Collin behind the bulletproof glass protecting the reception area. Collin knew from a school field trip that the holding cells were in the basement along with a storm shelter, the deputy’s cubicles in the back half of the first floor, and that their workout room shared space with the department’s small armory on the second floor. He followed James through the maze of cubicles.
Collin sighed. “Yeah. I know.” He just didn’t know how to have the conversation that Amanda obviously needed. He wasn’t her father or even a guardian.
Since Gladys’s fall just before the holidays, Amanda had been on a tear. Skipping curfew, getting speeding tickets as if she were trying to make the Guinness Book of World Records. She’d even been caught defacing the fountain in the square by filling it with laundry detergent. Amanda needed parents and he didn’t have a clue how to fill that role for her.
“She’s not a bad kid.”
“I know that, too.” She was just messed up, the way they’d all been messed up by their parents. Samson and Maddie Tyler had been absentee parents for half of Collin’s life, and nearly all of Amanda’s. There would be the occasional birthday card, and one year they showed up at Christmas, but for the most part the people who were supposed to parent Collin, Amanda and their sister, Mara, had simply not.
“I can get you guys into family counseling, if you think it would help.”
Sitting in a stuffy office talking about their lack of parental supervision sounded like the fifth circle of hell to Collin. But maybe it wasn’t such a bad idea. Something had to have set Amanda off and, despite all his efforts to talk to his baby sister, he hadn’t been able to figure out what it was.
“I’ll
