A tall brown-haired boy stepped from the vehicle. Her breath caught. Cooper ten years ago.
“Garrett,” she said. “I just took a video of your little adventure with my cell phone.”
He blinked as recognition set in. “Does Cooper know you’re here?”
“No, but we can talk about that later. I’m on my way to speak with Principal Beecher about a job opening. That makes it very convenient to just follow you four to school. That’s where you were heading, right?”
She worded it carefully, hoping they’d realize that a Yes answer might mean fewer consequences. From where Elise stood, she could see relief on the girls’ faces. The boy standing by the red truck never changed his angry expression. As for Garrett, he merely nodded his head, lips pressed together, and then marched back to his truck.
“Get in,” he told his friends. After a deliberate few seconds making a point, they crawled in the front seat.
Later, slightly late and a little damp from the rain, Elise sat at a conference table and studied the three men sitting across from her. The principal of Apache Creek High, David Beecher, still looked annoyed. Not at her, but at the four seniors who’d showed up right behind her late to school and with an escort. They were now with the vice principal.
She hoped that on their own the teens owned up to their responsibility, not just about ditching school but about where they’d been and what they’d done. Wilcox’s cotton field was pretty much destroyed.
She hadn’t shared with the principal the lack of respect shown by the two boys when she’d mentioned showing her video to their families. Not without knowing more about the situation.
Of the four teens, she only knew the background of one, and she remembered him at age seven or eight, building a tree house in the backyard, a place where he and his friends could play their handheld electronics without being disturbed. He’d had a slight crush on her, and oh how big brother Cooper liked to tease. She wanted to believe that sweet kid was still there inside that surly teen.
“Tell me again what you saw,” Mike Hamm asked.
“I recognized the trunk and knew Cooper wasn’t driving. It was easy enough to figure out they weren’t on their way to school,” Elise said. “I followed, managed to get them to pull over, and suggested a tardy would be better than an absence.”
“Good thinking. I hope there’s someone like you around when my children get to high school.” Mike had two children, both under the age of three. He had a while before he needed to worry. She, however, knew what he was doing. He was letting her know how very much she was needed here.
She knew she was right when he leaned forward, hands folded in front of him, a sincere expression on his face. “Situations like these are why we petitioned for funding to hire a guidance counselor.”
“We have a school counselor,” Beecher said, “but quite honestly, she knows more about getting kids on track for college than on getting them back on track for life.”
“Miss Sadie’s still here?” Elise asked.
“For three more years.” The principal smiled as if he’d heard the threat before. Miss Sadie had been advising students of future opportunities since Elise’s mom had been a student.
“Once the funding came through for a school counselor, Mike found your résumé online and we read about what you’ve been doing up in Two Mules.” This came from an imposing man who sat on Mike’s left, and the only one Elise didn’t know from her years growing up in the area. Mike had introduced him as the new chief of police, Ethan Fisher.
The principal nodded before adding, “Three new teen programs in under a year.”
That I’m still developing, she thought but didn’t say.
“Your résumé is impressive,” Mike said. “But we didn’t think we were looking for a social worker. Then we started looking at the successes happening where schools employ one.”
“Of course, those schools are a lot bigger and have more tax dollars and such. We would need you to wear a couple of hats,” Principal Beecher said. “You’d not only be a social worker dealing with crisis intervention within the school walls but also working outside the school with families and the communities.”
In Two Mules she’d had to make time for academic emphasis. Apache Creek was dictating the emphasis. On the table before her was her dream job. But why did it have to happen now, when her work in Two Mules—the work that was supposed to make up for her past—was still unfinished?
Principal Beecher opened a manila folder and withdrew some papers. “We’ve changed the job description a bit since Mike spoke to you. And we were able to raise the pay so it matches what you make now.”
Almost as if they were bidden, her fingers slid across the table and took the papers. She still wanted to say no—but her justifications were melting away. Yes, she’d be two hours away from Two Mules, but she could live at the Lost Dutchman and save on rent. She’d easily be able to afford gas back and forth to visit often. Once a week, she could manage that. She’d find the time. That had been her mantra since Cindy died. To always make time for someone who needed her.
“Jasmine Taylor ran away just over a month ago,” Principal Beecher said. “Three months into the school semester. It’s all the seniors can talk about. I hear from parents almost daily. They’re all worried that their sons and daughters might run away, too.”
Elise remembered Jasmine as a seven-year-old brown-haired girl who hated it when her big sister babysat. Elise had been over there a time or two, riding horses in their back field and playing. Jasmine would be sixteen or seventeen now. Close to Garrett’s age. She wasn’t one of the teens Elise had so diligently mentored in Two Mules...but she was still a girl in trouble. A girl Elise might be able to help. “Any word from her at all?” Elise asked. She tried to settle back in her black, hard plastic chair and looked at the photos and certificates on the wall. A college diploma or two. Photos of winning football teams, debate teams and cheerleaders. She recognized Cooper, bent on one knee, in the front row of the football photo just over the principal’s head.
Mike answered, “No, no sightings, no cryptic messages to her parents.”
Mike Hamm touched the screen of his iPad. “Also, David Cagnalia shoplifted at a convenience store near the interstate a month ago. They caught him on the outskirts of town.”
“Sounds like a call for help.” Elise rubbed her temples. She’d been told that David was the other young man in Garrett’s truck.
Above the principal’s head and slightly to the left was a photo of her and Cooper taken after they’d become the first Apache Creek students to win the Arizona High School Rodeo Team Roping Competition. “You still sending students to the rodeo competition?” Elise asked.
“Not since your little sister graduated and your dad no longer ran the program. There’s no one with time and rodeo experience to spearhead an after-school program now.”
Elise’s father had started the program when Elise’s older sister, Eva, was a freshman, hoping to get her involved and overcome her fear of horses. By the time he realized his ploy wasn’t going to work, he had twenty students counting on him. When Elise started her freshman year, Apache Creek High School was making a name for itself in the competition arena. When baby sister Emily entered, parents were filling out vouchers and driving their kids fifty miles to attend a school out of district just so they could be under her father’s tutelage. The saddle came easy to Emily but it wasn’t her calling. Still, she boasted a few buckles herself.
“The last three years the number of incidents involving teenagers in Apache Creek has increased two hundred percent,” Ethan Fisher said.
“It’s an epidemic,