The cruiser’s radio crackled. Chloe didn’t understand the entire message, delivered in clipped jargon, but she caught the words cat, tree and Sarah Culpepper. When she turned to the deputy for explanation, he concentrated on his driving as if it were his first time behind the wheel. To Chloe’s surprise, the tips of his ears were a deep shade of pink.
He cut her a glance. “I have a stop to make before I drop you off. You can stay in the car.”
“Is it a dangerous situation?”
“No.”
“What is it, then?”
He remained silent.
Chloe suspected he had an amazing capacity to stonewall. Well, she had an amazing capacity to persist. “You don’t get to pick and choose what I see this week, Deputy. I’m here to record the good, the bad and the ugly.” She reached in her backpack for her Nikon.
“Put that thing away and I’ll explain.”
She did as he ordered, telling herself he hadn’t specified for how long.
“It all began,” he said, clearly exasperated, “when Bonita Culpepper bought her granny a cell phone after a talk given at the seniors’ center. On personal safety.”
“Cell phones for the elderly. That sounds like a good suggestion.” She heard a click in her pocket. “Wait! Wait!” Quickly she removed the finished tape from the tiny recorder, then rummaged in her other pocket for a spare.
“Sarah Culpepper makes good use of her phone,” he continued, ignoring her. He certainly didn’t follow instructions very well. “No matter what her trouble is, she thinks she has a direct line to me.”
“Who can you turn to if you can’t turn to the sheriff?” she asked as she found a spare tape and jammed it in the recorder.
“Miss Sarah and I go back a long way. To when I was a boy. I’m not sure she sees me as a cop. As an adult, even. To her, I’m the neighbor’s kid Mack, and I’m the one who always shinnied up her tree to rescue her cats.”
“She had a cell phone when you were a boy?”
“No. She lives on a slip of property that abuts my family’s homestead. She used to blow an old conch shell when she needed something.”
“It’s amazing that sound didn’t scare the cats right out of the tree.” Things were looking up. Chloe sat back in her seat and waited for events to unfold. She was about to see where Whittaker grew up and meet a woman who knew him as a boy. Now this might be a human-interest story in the making.
Mack sensed the smug satisfaction oozing from Chloe’s side of the car, but there wasn’t much he could do about it. Miss Sarah’s house was coming up. He couldn’t waste time or gas ferrying the reporter to town and driving back out here. For a cat. He pulled into the swept dirt front yard of the shotgun house. It sat in a grove of trees alongside the road to the Whittaker property.
He could hope the kid stayed in the cruiser. He could hope that, today, Miss Sarah’s cat was easy to reach, giving the elderly woman less time to fill the reporter’s head with tales of his youth. Hey, he could always hope he won the lottery while he was at it.
He pulled on the emergency brake. “This won’t take long.” His passenger had already cracked open her door. “You don’t have to get out.”
“All part of the story.”
That was what he’d been afraid of.
“I hear meowing,” she said.
“It’ll be coming from the sweet-gum tree right over there. It usually is.” He walked in the direction of the sound without checking to see if his shadow followed.
She did. “Is this the same cat you rescued as a boy?”
“Hardly.” There’d been a succession of cats. All squirrel hunters. All with an uncanny inability to get down from a tree once they’d chased their prey up it. “All with the same name, though. Buster.”
“Same tree?”
“Mostly.” Mack looked toward the leafy canopy to discover not only Miss Sarah’s cat stranded in the sweet gum, but Miss Sarah herself.
Her apron in a bunch around her middle, she clutched the tree trunk with one hand and her cell phone with the other. “You sure took your sweet time, Mack Whittaker.”
He spotted the overturned kitchen chair at the base of the tree. “Now, why didn’t you wait for me, Miss Sarah? Don’t I always come?”
“Sooner or later.” She hugged the tree trunk more tightly. “These days it’s more often later than sooner.”
“Deputy Whittaker had an emergency meeting at the high school,” the kid piped up.
Miss Sarah squinted down from her precarious seat. “Who are you?”
“I’m Chloe Atherton, ma’am. From the Western Carolina Sun. I’m doing a story on the Colum County Sheriff’s Department.”
“Will I be in it?”
“Well, it sure looks as if you’re part of the job.” And right then and there, Kid Atherton had the nerve to take a picture of the old woman up a tree.
He grabbed the Nikon.
“Hey! Give that back!”
“Have a sense of decency,” he muttered through clenched teeth.
“Give her back the camera, Mack,” Miss Sarah ordered. “It’s not often an old woman gets herself some attention.”
When he handed it over, the reporter examined it carefully. “Ms. Culpepper,” she said, with a none-too-happy glance in his direction, “this is a digital camera, so you can preview the photos. I’ll erase any you’re not happy with.”
“Suits me fine,” Miss Sarah retorted. Now she sent Mack a disapproving look.
He couldn’t win.
“Ladies, if you’ll excuse me.” When he stepped under the low branch Miss Sarah sat on, his head reached her knees. “You can chat when both of you are on the ground.” He held up his arms. “Push off, and I’ll catch you.”
Miss Sarah ignored him and concentrated, instead, on Chloe. “I’d like you to take a picture of Buster.”
As if seconding that suggestion, a plaintive meow wafted from the upper branches.
Mack had endured enough of the niceties. “Ma’am, with all due respect, if you don’t hop down—now—I’m going to leave and let the next big wind blow you and Buster out of this tree.”
“You won’t and you know it.” Despite her assumption, she slid off the branch, anyway, and into his outstretched arms in a puff of nutmeg-scented flour. Flour and all, she must have weighed no more than ninety-five pounds.
“I declare,” she said, dusting off her clothing with one hand and shaking her cell phone next to her ear with the other. “While you get Buster, Mack, let me see about hermit bars and sweet tea. Made ’em myself, you know.”
“Thank you, but we won’t be staying,” he countered.
“Yes, you will.” Miss Sarah beckoned to Chloe. “Girl, you can help me.”
Reluctant to leave the two alone, he nonetheless swung himself up onto the lowest branch.
Once his footing was secure, he surveyed the surrounding landscape from his new perspective. Nothing adjusted your attitude faster than climbing a tree. Maybe that was why he didn’t foist these cat-rescue missions off on one of the other deputies. For a few minutes every so often he got to feel like an innocent kid again in the branches of the Culpepper sweet gum.
He