LITMIR.BIZ

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used to being called on the carpet by anyone, especially not a sixteen-year-old thief. But he simply acknowledged her comment and nodded. “Sorry.”

      Her annoyed expression softened slightly. “Yeah, me, too. You probably just picked up on it from me. I wasn’t fair to her then, or you now. So I guess I’m the one who’s sorry.”

      Sawyer liked to think he was a quick character study. That he could assess people in short order, but he was stymied by Willow Jones.

      A thief—for sure. But also someone who admitted when she’d made a mistake. And a hard worker. And someone who wasn’t afraid to call an adult out when they were in the wrong.

      “You sure you want to do this the whole summer? Even with the pool eating into it, I’ve got a lot of yard.”

      Sawyer had fallen in love with the house the first time he’d walked through it with his real estate agent. He loved the hardwood floors and the open concept downstairs, but he’d almost turned it down because the yard was so big, and he thought a pool in Erie was really a waste of money and space. There were maybe three months out of the year that you could use it unless you heated it.

      “I consider what you did today enough to balance your karma,” he added, and immediately hoped that he hadn’t put his foot in his mouth with the comment.

      Willow shook her head, then took a long drink before saying, “No, Audrey’s right. She normally is. Don’t tell her I said that,” she added. “But I’ve thought about it and I do owe you.”

      “I got all my stuff back.”

      He’d been working the day Willow and her friends had broken into the house. He’d taken his car into the shop and their shuttle service had dropped him off at home. He assumed that was why the kids thought he wasn’t there.

      He’d heard voices and a commotion downstairs, realized what was happening and called 9-1-1. Then he’d simply waited upstairs in his office for the cops to come.

      A couple of his buddies had ribbed him about not playing Rambo, and if he’d known the thief was a teenage girl, he might have considered it. But there was nothing in his house he was willing to risk his life over. He’d just thrown the lock on the office door and waited.

      Because he lived in Harborcreek, just outside of Erie proper, the state police were the responding officers. There was a barracks nearby and they were on the scene in five minutes.

      They’d caught Willow red-handed.

      She denied that she’d had accomplices, but Sawyer knew what he’d heard. And he really doubted that she was able to move his flat-screen TV on her own.

      The cops had found that the trunk of his 1966 Pontiac GTO red convertible in the garage was loaded with other valuables. The fact that the miscreants had been planning to steal his car had made him the angriest. It was originally his father’s car and had languished in the barn out back until Sawyer fixed it up when he was sixteen. He’d worked for two summers to pay to rebuild it.

      Willow hadn’t ever given the cops the names of the other thieves. She insisted that she’d been the only one.

      When Sawyer said he’d heard conversations downstairs, she’d retorted, “I talk to myself. Most days, it’s the best conversation I’m likely to get.”

      He added smart-ass to his mental list of things he knew about Willow. Thief, hard worker, loyal to her friends...and smart-ass.

      She shook her head. “No, mowing your yard today isn’t enough. Maybe you got all your stuff back, but it’s the sense of violation. Bea got into my stuff the other day. She went in my room looking for paper and found a picture of mine. She took it and showed it to Audrey. I was so pissed—I mean, upset.”

      “Audrey doesn’t like swearwords?” he asked.

      “She says English is an amazingly complex language and I’m smart enough to find other words to use. Then she gave me a thesaurus.”

      Sawyer found himself chuckling.

      “It gets worse. She went through the thing and highlighted alternatives.”

      “She sounds interesting.”

      “Yeah, she’d say that interesting is a nicer word than crazy, so I’ll politely agree.” She finished her water in one long gulp. The ice tinkled against the glass as she set it down. “I’m just about done. I’ll be back next week. She’s coming to get me so I can clean up before we go out to dinner to celebrate.”

      “Someone’s birthday?”

      “Nah. Audrey’s always looking for a reason to celebrate. When you said I could come mow, it was the last day of school for the kids, so we celebrated...by watching a sunset on the peninsula and listening for the hiss.”

      “Hiss?”

      “Yeah, Bea has some dumb story about if you sit quiet enough and wait for it, you might hear the sun hiss when it hits the water. It’s some stupid fairy tale some stupid woman Audrey knows told them. She should teach the kid to face reality, not live in some fantasy world where kids use rainbows for slides, and wishes do come true.”

      Sawyer didn’t know what to say to that, so he settled for asking, “What are you celebrating tonight?”

      “Her firm got some educational building job that she really wanted.”

      “What does she do? What sort of project?” he asked before he could stop himself. He thought he might have asked too much, but Willow didn’t seem to mind.

      “She’s an architect and does all this funky green crap, uh...stuff. She’s all LEED certified—and before you ask, that means she makes the houses environmentally friendly—and this is some city project with the school district.” Willow shrugged. “I don’t know much about it, but she and the kids are majorly excited, so we’re going out to celebrate. I don’t know why you celebrate getting awarded a job that doesn’t pay you anything.”

      Willow’s phone pinged and she scanned the message. “She’ll be here in a few minutes. I gotta run.”

      She pushed the lawn mower to the front of the house, then came back and moved the barrels to the garbage bin. He grabbed one and followed.

      “Hey, you don’t have to...” she started to protest.

      “I’m just carrying a barrel, Willow. Your karma’s intact.”

      She shrugged and went back for the third barrel while he grabbed the fourth.

      A horn sounded out front. “That’s her,” she said.

      Sawyer found himself following her out to the red SUV. The driver’s door opened and a woman got out.

      He wasn’t sure what he expected in Audrey Smith. Willow had told him that her guardian was only a dozen years older than her, but this woman looked too young to be pushing thirty. She had dark, curly hair, caramel-colored skin and a quick smile. “Mr. Williams?”

      He nodded. “Ms. Smith?”

      “The one and only. Call me Audrey,” she added. She turned to her charge and asked, “How’d it go Willow?”

      “Fine from my perspective.” She jerked her finger at Sawyer. “You’d have to ask him to see if he’s of the same opinion. I think he’d count it a success since I didn’t steal anything this time.”

      Sawyer ignored Willow’s snarky comment. “She did great work,” he assured her guardian.

      “I’m going to get the rest of my stuff,” Willow said, and bolted to the back, leaving them alone.

      “Thank you for giving her a chance,” Audrey said. “I thought about talking to you myself, but I decided that it was more important for Willow to make it work on her own.”

      “She was insistent. I’m pretty

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