LITMIR.BIZ

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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 favored the latter.

      “I liked her a lot,” Matt said, as they jostled up the driveway, flinging out a cloud of red Arizona dust behind them.

      “Who?” Steven asked, though he knew.

      “The parade lady,” Matt told him, using a tone of exaggerated forbearance. “Miss O—Miss O—”

      “O’Ballivan,” Steven said. It wasn’t that she was anything special to him, or anything like that. He’d always had a knack for remembering names, that was all.

      “Is she anybody’s mommy?” Matt wanted to know.

      Steven swallowed. Just when he thought he had a handle on the single-dad thing, the kid would throw him a curve. “I don’t know, Tex,” he answered. “Why do you ask?”

      “I like her,” Matt said. Simple as that. I like her. “I like the way she smiles, and the way she smells.”

      Me, too, Steven thought. “She seems nice enough.”

      But, then, so had his live-in girlfriend/fiancée. With the face and body of an angel, Cindy had been sweetness itself—until Zack died and Steven told her that Matt would be moving in for good so he thought they ought to go ahead and get married. They’d planned to anyhow—someday.

      He’d never forgotten the scornful look she’d given him, or the way her lip had curled, let alone what she’d actually said.

      “The kid is a deal breaker,” she’d told Steven coolly. “It’s him or me.”

      Stunned—it wasn’t as if they’d never talked about the provision in his best friends’ wills, after all—and coldly furious, Steven had made his choice without hesitation.

      “Then I guess it has to be Matt,” he’d replied.

      Cindy had left right away, storming out of the condo, slamming the door behind her, the tires of her expensive car laying rubber as she screeched out of the driveway. She’d removed her stuff in stages, however, and even said she’d thought things over and she regretted flying off the handle the way she had. Was there a chance they could try again?

      Steven wished there had been, but it was too late. Some kind of line had been crossed, and it wasn’t that he wouldn’t go back. It was that he couldn’t.

      “So if she’s not already somebody’s mommy, she might want to be mine,” Matt speculated.

      Steven’s eyes burned. How was he supposed to answer that one?

      “And she’s going to make a parade,” Matt enthused.

      As they reached the ruin of a barn, Steven put the truck in park and shut off the motor. Off to the left, the house loomed like a benevolent ghost hoping for simple grace.

      They had camping gear, and the electricity had been turned on. The plumber Steven had sent ahead said the well pump was working fine, and there was water. Cold water, but, hey, the stuff was wet. They could drink it. Steven could make coffee. And if the stove worked, they could take baths the old-fashioned way, in a metal wash-tub in the kitchen, using water heated in big kettles.

      Shades of the old days.

      “Yeah,” Steven said in belated answer, getting out and rounding the truck to open the door and help Matt out of his safety gear. The pickup was too old to have a backseat, but Steven had a new rig on order, one with an extended cab and all the extras. “Ms. O’Ballivan is going to make a parade.”

      “And you offered to help her,” Matt said. That kind of confidence was hard to shoot down. In fact, it was impossible.

      The reminder made Steven sigh. “Right,” he said. Then he lifted Matt down out of the truck, and they started for the house.

      “This place is awesome,” Matt exclaimed, taking in the sagging screened porch, the peeling paint, the falling gutter spouts and the loose shingles sliding off the edges of the roof. “Maybe it’s even haunted!”

      Steven laughed and put out a hand, gratified when Matt took it. “Maybe,” he said. The boy would be too big for hand-holding pretty soon. “But I doubt it.”

      “Ghosts like old houses,” Matt said, as they mounted the back steps. Steven had paused to test them with his own weight before he allowed the child to follow. “Especially when there’s renovation going on. That stirs them up.”

      “Have you been watching those

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