had tightened. “Good work,” she said, then turned to the sheriff. “Who wouldn’t want to do this if they had the opportunity?”
As he lifted the last piece of baggage from the ground, the glance he gave her said he knew she was being deliberately evasive. But he didn’t pursue the issue.
She took the pack from his hands and headed for Percy as the sound of the Rockbrook Camp van floated up the road. Good. She didn’t need any more questions from Sheriff McQuire. Nor any more looks. If her father was a steamroller in a tux, and her ex-almost-fiancé a fox in the henhouse, she suspected this man was a walking, talking lie detector. She preferred staying off his register.
“It seems like you have things under control,” he said, his manner brusque. “Son, see you at supper.”
“Okay.” Rory eyed the giggling girls piling out of the van with as much trepidation as Samantha felt for his father’s questions. “I’m gonna clean up that garbage in the pasture near the road.” And before the lead camper could reach him, he bolted.
Samantha didn’t see the sheriff leave. She made herself busy settling the girls and giving them the basic instructions that would lead to a happy trail experience. As she talked, as she demonstrated what to do, over the girls’ questions and the llamas’ gentle humming, she began to feel at ease. Despite the possibility that her parents or the paparazzi could invade her sanctuary at any moment or that Rory’s father could reveal her as a fraud, she refused to be driven from her new life. These campers didn’t care that she was an heiress. This land didn’t care that she was a recovering alcoholic. Her llamas didn’t care about her background as a deb. They cared about her present behavior. A kind word. A gentle touch. Those were things that Samantha could offer from the heart. It was an authentic start. She would not let others spoil it.
THOUGHTS OF NOELLE AND RORY and the perplexing new owner of Whistling Meadows weighing on his mind, Garrett eased his cruiser up the rutted trail on the Whittaker property—one of many old logging roads that crisscrossed the area. Lily Whittaker had called him to say her son Mack had taken his shotgun and a full bottle of Jack Daniel’s and had left the house without a word. She was worried. It wasn’t hunting season.
Garrett was worried, too.
Mack Whittaker had been his best deputy. And his best friend. Hired because of his army training, Mack had successfully juggled work for the Sheriff’s Department with a continued Armed Forces commitment in the reserves. He had seen active duty in the reserves in a call-up to Iraq. Garrett had promised him his position when he got back. Trouble was, Stateside again, Mack didn’t seem to want the job anymore. Or Garrett’s friendship. Or any part of his previous life. He’d broken up with his longtime girlfriend. His mama said he was a bear to live with. His daddy said his eyes looked like those of a dead man. After one nasty brawl in town, he shunned old friends and acquaintances entirely. People reported seeing him in odd places, on foot tramping the side of the roads, sometimes crossing fields, sometimes lying way up on Lookout Rock, motionless, a bottle in his hand. He rarely drove. He never spoke.
Garrett approached their boyhood hideout with caution. He knew what worried Lily most, but if Mack had taken a full bottle of whiskey, he wasn’t planning on doing away with himself before he did away with the contents of that bottle. Drunk, however, Mack might turn the shotgun on an intruder.
Garrett didn’t feel like an intruder here. The big old cave had been Mack’s and his fortress as boys. Garrett’s refuge. His foster parents had been conscientious enough, sometimes even kind, but Garrett had never felt he fit in anywhere until the first day of school in third grade when Mack had come to his defense on the playground. Even at eight, Mack had had an inordinate sense of fair play. After that the two had been like brothers.
The man staggering on the ledge in front of the cave, however, didn’t look like Garrett’s brother or his friend. Unshaven, hair wild, dirty clothes in disarray, Mack looked like a vagrant ready for a sober-up stay in jail.
“Get out of here!” he shouted as Garrett stepped out of the cruiser. “Don’t want your sermons. Or your pity.”
“When did I ever preach to you?” Garrett stood not ten feet away. He could see the half-empty bottle of booze and the shotgun lying on the pebble-strewn ground. He wasn’t leaving without either his friend or the gun. “But you’ve been back a month now. Don’t you think it’s time you let someone know what’s gnawing at your gut?”
Mack sank against the mossy embankment near the cave entrance. “Even if I told you, you couldn’t begin to understand.”
“Try me.” Garrett suspected part of Mack’s despair was that he’d returned from war while one of his unit—one of their high school classmates, Nate Dona-hue—had not.
“Sheriff—” the word was spoken with uncustomary contempt “—you live in a mighty small world. In little ol’ Applegate you think you have a handle on right and wrong, black and white, up and down. But I’m here to tell you you’re one misinformed sombitch.”
“Sounds like you’re the one offering up the sermon.”
Mack said nothing.
“Rory’s home,” Garrett said, trying to break through to his friend. From the minute of Rory’s birth, Mack had embraced the role of uncle. “He’s been asking after you.”
“What’d you tell him?”
“I don’t know what to tell him. Do you want to see him?”
“No.”
“Okay. I get your point. You look like hell. Why don’t you come back to the barracks with me? Have a shower and shave. It’s McMillan’s turn to cook. Chili. Everybody would be glad to see you.” He kept talking even though it was obvious Mack was tuning him out. If Mack wanted to wall himself off after what he’d been through, who was Garrett to judge? But he was determined not to give up on his buddy. “Come on.”
Mack shook his head.
“Suit yourself. I’ll leave you the bottle, but your daddy needs the shotgun to take care of a woodchuck that’s been raiding your mama’s garden.”
Mack narrowed bleary eyes. “His case of hunting rifles isn’t enough?”
“Apparently not.” Garrett picked up the weapon.
Mack didn’t resist. Instead, he closed his eyes and leaned his head back against the embankment. When he spoke, his words were low and menacing. “There are a thousand and one ways to destroy life, and none of ’em needs a shotgun.”
The satisfaction Garrett had felt at retrieving the gun drained right out of him. “Sure you couldn’t use some chili?”
“What I could use, friend, you can’t supply.”
“I’ll be back, anyway.”
“Don’t bother.”
“You know me better than that.”
“I know nothing anymore.”
This statement—from a guy who had always been confident in who he was and his place in the world—made Garrett’s blood run cold. He wouldn’t argue now, but he’d keep returning until Mack showed signs of the man he’d once been.
With
