“We’re a little—different, my friends and I,” Mr. Winthrop said.
“Different?” Melissa asked, while inside her head, a voice warned, Here we go.
Mr. Winthrop cleared his throat. “Mabel should have told your sister in advance, when we booked the rooms,” he said. “But we were all counting so on this little getaway and when it turned out we were going to have the whole place to ourselves, well, it all just seemed meant to be—”
Melissa squinted, still several beats behind. “Mabel?”
“Mabel Elliott,” Mr. Winthrop said helpfully. “We’re all retired, living in the same community, and relatively comfortable financially, and we take a lot of these little jaunts. Mabel knows how to use the internet, so she’s in charge of arranging accommodations.”
“I see,” Melissa said, still mystified, and beginning to wish she hadn’t agreed to that glass of lemonade. She could be home in a couple of minutes, taking a cool shower, donning shorts and a tank top and sandals, puttering around in her struggling vegetable garden and generally minding her own business.
Mr. Winthrop took her elbow, in a courtly way. “And with all the foliage surrounding the backyard,” he added, dropping his voice, “there’s really no harm done anyway, now is there?”
He still sounded nervous, though. And Melissa could relate, because she was feeling downright jittery by now. What could possibly be going on?
They rounded the back corner of the house, and Melissa froze, her mouth open.
Five people, three women and two men, all having a grand old time, were playing croquet in the green, well-shaded grass.
And every last one of them was stark naked.
* * *
THE PICTURE OF JILLIE and Zack, taken on their honeymoon, showed them parachuting in tandem, somewhere in Mexico, their faces alight with celebration as they mugged for the skydiving photographer jumping with them.
There were lots of photos of the St. Johns, but this one was Matt’s favorite.
“Tell me again about when this picture was taken,” Matt said, snuggling down into his sleeping bag, while Steven perched on the edge of the lower bunk and Zeke made himself comfortable on an improvised dog bed nearby.
Holding the framed photograph in his hands, Steven smiled, taking in those familiar faces. Even now, it seemed impossible that two people with so much life in them could be gone.
“Well,” Steven began, as he had a hundred times before, since he’d become Matt’s legal guardian and then his adoptive father, “we all went to school together, your mom, your dad and me, and right from the first, they were a real pair—”
“Tell me about the wedding,” Matt prompted, with a yawn. It was all part of the pattern—he would fight sleep for a while, then lose the battle. “You were the best man, right?”
“I was the best man,” Steven confirmed huskily.
“And you and my daddy had to wear penguin suits.”
Steven chuckled, wondering if the kid was picturing him and Zack dressed up like short, squat birds from the Frozen North.
But, no—he knew what a tuxedo looked like. Matt had seen the wedding pictures a million times—usually, he asked why he wasn’t in them.
The answer—you weren’t born yet—never seemed to sink in.
“Yeah,” Steven said belatedly. “We had to wear penguin suits.”
“Mommy had on a pretty white dress, though,” Matt chimed in.
“Yep.”
“And out of all three of you, she was the best-looking.”
“A rose between two thorns,” Steven said, playing the game.
“A petunia in an onion patch,” Matt responded, on cue.
They laughed, the man and the boy. There was a ragged quality to the sound.
“Tell me more about my mommy and daddy,” Matt said.
Steven talked, his heart in his throat much of the time, until the boy finally nodded off. When he was sure Matt was asleep, he left the room, stepping carefully around the dog.
Out in the living room/kitchen area, Steven opened his laptop, booted it up and logged on. He hadn’t checked his email in a few days.
Once he’d weeded out the junk, and the stuff he didn’t feel like dealing with at the moment, he opened a recent message from his stepmother, Kim. It was dated that afternoon.
“Are you there yet?” she’d written. “Let us know when you get settled in Stone Creek, and your dad and I will come for a visit.”
Smiling, Steven tapped out a brief reply. Kim had always treated him with warmth and good humor during those growing-up summers, never trying to take his mother’s place. “We’re here,” he wrote, “and living the high life in a country-music star’s tour bus. There are bunk beds in Matt’s room, so you and Dad could sleep there.”
The thought of that made his grin widen.
He added a description of Zeke, the sheepdog, recounting the pet-adoption saga, assured Kim that he and Matt were both fine, and signed off with love.
A second message came from Conner. “I’ll be in Stone Creek for the rodeo next month,” it read. “Save me a bed.”
And that was the whole thing.
Steven chuckled. His cousin was definitely a man of few words.
He hit Reply and told Conner he was always welcome and there would be a bed waiting when the time came. Compared to his cousin’s email, Steven’s was downright verbose.
A low whimper distracted him from the computer; he looked up and saw Zeke standing with his nose to the door crack, wanting to go outside.
Steven left the laptop on the table and accompanied Zeke out into the yard.
It wasn’t quite dark, but a few stars had begun to pop out here and there, and the ghost of a three-quarter moon peeked over the horizon, like a performer waiting in the wings.
Zeke sniffed around for a while, did his business and went back to the door, ready to go in.
Steven opened the door and the dog mounted the steps, then went directly back to Matt’s room.
Wide-awake, already bored with the internet and in no mood to watch TV, Steven sat on the fold-down metal steps in front of the threshold and looked out over what he could see of his ranch.
Some ranch, he thought. Most of the fences are down, the barn probably collapsed ten years ago and the house is a disaster.
He sighed and combed the fingers of his right hand through his hair, something he always did when he was questioning his own decisions.
His dad and Conner had both tried to persuade him to stay in Colorado and raise Matt on the family’s spread. Set up a law practice in Lonesome Bend.
He wasn’t sure they understood, his father and his cousin, why he’d needed to strike out on his own, create something new for himself and Matt and any generations that might follow.
He wasn’t sure he understood, either.
The Creed ranch was rightfully Conner’s, Steven figured, Conner’s and Brody’s. Their dad, dead since the brothers were hardly more than babies, had been Davis’s older brother and, therefore, the heir to the kingdom.
Not that anybody knew exactly where Conner’s identical twin brother was keeping himself these days. He’d had some kind of knock-down-drag-out with Conner, Brody had, and except for a Christmas card every few years, with a terse message scrawled somewhere inside,