She pulled onto the deserted road that led to the airport. She would find long-term parking and catch a few hours of sleep, then wash up as well as she could, maybe even catch a shower at a nearby truck stop.
Tomorrow she could place the mantle of worry back over her shoulders.
THREE
On Saturday morning Sarah craved a shower. After a few hours of sleep at the far edge of the Springfield/Branson airport parking lot, she’d tried uncountable times to call Emma, but of course she was diverted to voice mail. The line for a shower at the truck stop in Mount Vernon was too long for her to wait.
At least she’d had a chance to brush her teeth and wash her face and grab a fast-food breakfast, so her stomach was full, but it rumbled with nerves. Last night, despite her fatigue, she’d struggled to fall asleep because she couldn’t stop thinking about Nick. After all these years, she wouldn’t have believed his voice would have the power to affect her. But it was more than just his voice—it was the sense of caring he’d related over the phone, the words of kindness. He’d brought back so many memories, and she caught herself wondering how their lives would have gone if they’d made different choices.
How often she’d longed to crawl back into the past and never leave town.
She pulled into Jolly Mill thirty-five minutes after finishing her breakfast and felt blasted by memories she’d believed had settled into the dust along the surrounding country roads. She admired the modest, three-bedroom brick house when she pulled into the Tyler drive. Someone had done a fine job of landscaping, with trimmed hedges, a freshly mown lawn and real grass—not the mowed weeds she’d always managed to grow on her own lawn.
She parked behind an old brown Ford pickup. Edward’s truck. It had been nearly new when her family moved away. Okay, this set of recollections was hitting a little too hard.
She glimpsed a flash of bright red peeking out from behind a juniper tree at the corner of the house, and felt a quick squeeze of her chest. It was Mom’s beloved VW Beetle, which Mom had been generous enough to share after Emma got her driver’s license. Soon it would belong to Emma, though the title wouldn’t be in her name until Sarah was convinced Emma could handle the responsibility. Maybe by the time she was twenty-one...
Lowering her squeaky driver-side window, Sarah sniffed the air. Bacon and other smoked meat scents combined with a sweetness of maple, reaching her from the restaurant a couple of blocks away, across the street from the big old wooden grain mill from which Jolly Mill had gotten its name. No telling who owned the restaurant now. Nick’s uncle, Will Parker, had once made the place the most popular hangout around for local high-schoolers—therefore, Shelby had loved the place, and Sarah had seldom gone there. Nick and his cousin, Billy, Will’s son, had never run in the same circles at school. Nick was more scholastically minded, and Billy hung out with the hard-partying crowd. Where Nick went, Sarah went. Why hadn’t it occurred to her during those years of innocence that there might have been a reason why she and Nick stuck so closely together?
She continued to admire the neatly trimmed shrubs, the bricks surrounding the flower beds, the trees, nicely mulched, that shaded the yard with spring green. Nick had begun earning money for college and med school in eighth grade by doing lawn care...and working on a wonderful tan and beautiful muscles that she was sure would’ve had most of the girls in their class following him around like hungry kittens if he’d ever gone without a shirt.
It was difficult for Sarah to decide if she felt more relieved or worried that Emma had spent the night under the Tyler roof—likely with her own father and grandfather, both oblivious. Family and old friends would surround Sarah and Emma here in Jolly Mill...if they stayed.
A dog barked from down the street, and a lawnmower fired up a few blocks away—actually, in a town of eight hundred twelve people, there were only a few blocks in any direction. Sarah had loved growing up here. How she’d missed this place.
Focusing to keep her breaths steady, she marched to the front door and pressed the doorbell. The deep, soothing sounds of Westminster Abbey chimed through the house. She recalled those chimes from her earliest memories, and that soothed a little of her tension. Today was Saturday. Maybe everyone but Emma was sleeping in. Emma never slept in.
The door opened a crack, and dark brown, sleepy eyes peered out.
“Emma?”
The eyes widened and Emma gave a soft gasp as she pulled the door open. “Um, hi, sis. Wow, what’re you doing here so early?”
Sarah stepped past the threshold. She grabbed Emma in a tight hug that obviously surprised Emma as much as it did her. “If you ever do anything like this again I’ll ground you for the rest of your life. Do you know how scared I was?”
Emma held still for a moment, breathing slowly, as if soaking in the hug. They’d been close all of Emma’s life, but because Mom and Dad were the disciplinarians, Sarah had always taken advantage of the opportunity to just enjoy time with her. She would need to start relying on her instincts as a kindergarten teacher when it came to discipline from now on. She could only imagine how Emma would respond to that.
Too soon for Sarah, her daughter wriggled free. “I told you where I was coming.” She folded her arms across her underdeveloped chest. “Don’t you think I’m old enough to take care of myself a few miles from home?”
“You drove across the whole lower state of Missouri! And don’t think you’re going to get away with this.”
Emma sighed. “I know,” she said in a singsong voice, “I’ll have my cousin John to answer to when we get home.”
“You’ll have me to answer to, but the Tylers have been through too much already. They don’t need two feuding sisters on their hands.” It was a little late to start being the boss in Emma’s life, but too often these past weeks she’d depended on John to step in as a father figure.
“According to Nick,” Emma said, “when you and Shelby were together you were always feuding.”
“Nick said that?”
“He even told me he had a crush on Shelby that lasted maybe a couple of weeks.”
Sarah forgot to breathe for a moment. “He said that?” A couple of weeks?
“Okay, then he admitted maybe it lasted a little longer than that, but he wasn’t in her league. He was a nerd, you know, not one of the jocks Shelby went for.” She grinned up at Sarah. “Edward said you were Nick’s true love, and everybody knew it.”
Sarah tried not to react to that, but oh, it felt good to hear those words, whether or not they were true. And then she wondered why she felt so strongly about it after all these years.
“Y’all must’ve talked a lot last night.” Sarah glanced up at the set of family photos to their left in the vestibule. One showed Nick at sixteen, standing above his seated parents. After all these years the memories tied knots around her heart. But before she could get maudlin she caught sight of a photo of Aunt Peg and Edward on their wedding day. Peg was what, twenty-four? Had Emma caught sight of herself in her grandmother’s photo?
Emma closed her eyes with a sigh, and when she opened them again, they were slightly moist. “I’m sorry I scared you, sis, really. I couldn’t stop thinking about that all the way here. I kept imagining how hurt you’d be, and I wanted to call you before I left, but really? Don’t you want to know what happened to Mom and Dad?” Her typically soft, girlish voice tapered to a tiny tremble.
Sarah strolled past a padded foyer bench surrounded by a bentwood hall tree and an umbrella stand. She entered an open kitchen and living area that surely provided a pleasant great room for entertaining. She sank onto a pale green plush chair that faced an unobstructed view of the carefully tended backyard.
“I do want to know what happened to Mom and Dad,” she said. “I also want to keep you safe. Nick’s told me what he and his friend, the ex-cop, are doing, and