LITMIR.BIZ

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stood in the middle of the office floor for a few moments, flustered. Then, because she was nothing if not professional, she walked over, gave her door a firm shove with one palm to shut it and marched back to her desk.

      She didn’t have many cases to prosecute; things had been pretty quiet around Stone Creek since Byron Cahill got himself sent up, but there were a few, and she always had reports to make, files to review, emails to read and respond to. If she’d been smart, she thought to herself, she’d have gone fishing with J.P.

      At midmorning, Andrea rapped on the office door and stuck her head in to say that she needed to go home because she had cramps and there was nothing to do around that place anyway.

      Peering at the girl over the tops of her reading glasses, Melissa mouthed the word go and logged on to her computer. Andrea might or might not have been suffering from cramps, but there was no arguing with the fact that both of them were, for today at least, underworked.

      Melissa, grateful to be putting in eight-hour days, like normal people, didn’t miss the high stress levels and double workweeks of her previous jobs. She liked having the time to paint the rooms of her little house evenings and weekends, read stacks of books, enjoy her growing gaggle of nieces and nephews and even garden a little.

      Okay, so she’d been through a romantic—not to mention sexual—dry spell since her breakup with Dan Guthrie, several long and eventful years before. Nobody had everything, did they?

      Something sagged inside Melissa when she asked herself that question. Her sisters had everything a person could reasonably want, it seemed to her—babies, hunky husbands who adored them, work they loved—and it went without saying that Brad had caught the brass ring. During his amazing career, he’d collected more than a dozen awards from the Country Music Association, along with a few Grammys for good measure, his marriage to Meg McKettrick was beyond happy, and they were building a beautiful family together.

      Melissa sighed. Time to put away the tiny violin, stop comparing herself to her brother and sisters. Sure, she was a little lonely from time to time, but so what? She was healthy. She had kin, people who loved her. Stone Creek Ranch, with its long and colorful history, was still home. She had a fine education, no mortgage, a jazzy car custom-built to look just like a 1954 MG Roadster, and enough money socked away to retire at forty if she wanted to.

      Which she probably wouldn’t, but that wasn’t the point, was it?

      For Melissa, success meant having options. It meant freedom.

      If she had a notion to pull up stakes and throw herself body and soul into a job in a more exciting place—say, L.A. or New York—she could do that. There was nothing to tie her down: she could simply resign from her present position, rent out her house or even sell it, say another goodbye to Stone Creek and boogie.

      She loved her sisters and her brother. She had lots of friends, people she’d known all her life. But it was the idea of leaving her nieces and nephews, not being there, in person, to see them grow up but instead settling for digital photos, phone calls, rare visits and emails that made a hard knot form in her throat.

      And why was she even thinking these thoughts, anyway? Because Tom had been right, that was why.

      Steven Creed and his little boy had appeared in her office and, at some point, the earth had moved. Shifted right off its axis. Gravity was suspended. Up was down and down was up, and the proof of that could be stated in one short, simple sentence: She’d agreed to head the Parade Committee.

      Melissa drew in a breath, huffed it out hard enough to make her bangs flutter, and scanned the list of new messages on her computer screen.

      Tom Parker, sitting three doors down at his own keyboard, IMed her to say that time was wasting and she really ought to schedule a meeting so she could get on the same page with everybody on the Parade Committee.

      The response she sent was not something one would normally say to a police officer, face-to-face or via email. But this was Tom, the guy she’d grown up with, the man who’d named his dog Elvis, for Pete’s sake.

      Tom replied with a smiley-face icon wearing big sunglasses and displaying a raised middle finger.

      Melissa laughed at that—she couldn’t help it—and went back to the official stuff.

      Eustace Blake, who was ninety if he was a day and nonetheless managed to navigate the public computer over at the library just fine, thank you very much, had hunted-and-pecked his way through a complaint he’d made many times before, with subtle variations. Visitors from some faraway planet had landed in his cornfield—again—and scared his chickens so badly that the hens wouldn’t lay eggs anymore, and for all he knew, they’d contaminated his stretch of the creek, too, and by God he wanted something done about it.

      Smiling to herself, wishing mightily for a fresh cup of coffee, Melissa wrote back, politely inquiring as to whether or not Eustace had reported the most recent incident to Sheriff Parker. Because, she assured the old man, he was absolutely right. Something had to be done. She even included Tom’s cell number.

      The next half-dozen messages were advertisements—find love, get rich quick, clear up her skin, enlarge her penis. She deleted those.

      Then there was the one from Velda Cahill—Melissa would have known that email address anywhere, since she’d practically been barraged with communiqués since Byron’s arrest. This time, the subject line was in caps. FROM A TAX PAYING CITIZEN, it read.

      Melissa sighed. For a moment, her finger hovered over the delete key, but in the end, she couldn’t make herself do that. Velda might be a crank—make that a royal pain in the posterior—but she was a citizen and a taxpayer. As such, she had the inalienable right to harangue public officials, up to a point. She’d written:

      My boy will be coming home today, on the afternoon bus. Not that I’d expect you to be happy about it, like I am. Byron and me, we’re just ordinary people—we don’t have anybody famous in our family, like you do, or rich, neither. What little we’ve got, we’ve had to work for. Nobody ever gave us nothing and we never asked. But I’m asking now. Don’t be sending Sheriff Parker or one of his deputies by our place every five minutes to see if Byron’s behaving himself. And don’t come knocking at our door whenever somebody runs a red light or smashes a row of mailboxes with a baseball bat. It won’t be Byron that done it, I can promise you that. Just please leave us alone and let my son and me get on with things.

      Sincerely, Velda.

      Sincerely, Velda. Melissa sighed again, then clicked on Reply. She wrote:

      Hello, Velda. Thank you for getting in touch. I can assure you that as long as Byron doesn’t break the law, neither Sheriff Parker nor I will bother him. Best wishes, Melissa O’Ballivan.

      After that, she plunked her elbows on the edge of her desk and rubbed her temples with the fingertips of both hands.

      She really should have gone fishing with J.P.

      * * *

      “IT’S ALL OURS,” Steven told Matt, as they made the turn off the road and onto their dirt driveway. “Downed fences, rusty nails, weeds and all.”

      Matt, firmly fastened into his safety seat, looked over at him and grinned. “Can we go to the shelter and get a dog now?” he asked.

      Steven laughed and downshifted. The tires of the old truck thumped across the cattle guard. Now to buy cattle, he thought, trying to remember when he’d last felt so hopeful about the future. Since Zack and Jillie’s death—hell, long before that, if he was honest with him-self—he’d concentrated on putting one foot in front of the other. Doing the next logical thing, large or small.

      What was different about today?

      It wasn’t just the ranch; he could admit that in the privacy of his own mind, if not out loud. Today, he’d met Melissa O’Ballivan. And he knew that making her acquaintance would turn out to be either one of the best—or one of the worst—things that had ever happened to him. Thanks to Cindy, he figured, the odds

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