Melissa was thinking all these thoughts as she left the courthouse, head bent, rummaging through her purse for her car keys as she crossed the gravel lot.
“Did you get my email?”
The question jolted Melissa and she came to an abrupt halt, her heart scrabbling in her throat.
“Velda,” Melissa said, when she had regained enough breath to speak. “You scared me.”
Byron’s mother, probably in her early fifties and emaciated almost to the point of anorexia, stood near the roadster, dappled in the leaf shadows of the oak tree. Velda wore an old cotton blouse without sleeves, plastic flip-flops and jeans so well-worn that the fabric couldn’t have been described as blue, but only as a hint of that color.
“Sorry,” Velda said, her voice scratchy from several decades of smoking unfiltered cigarettes and half again that much regret, probably, her expression insincere. Lines spiked out around her mouth, giving her lips a pursed look. “I wouldn’t want to do that. Scare anybody, I mean.”
“Good,” Melissa said, steady enough by then to be annoyed instead of frightened.
Velda stood between Melissa and the driver’s-side door of the car, her skinny arms folded. Her hair was iron-gray, with faint streaks of yellow, and fell well past her shoulders. Pink plastic barrettes, shaped like little hearts, held the locks back at the sides of her head, creating an unfortunate effect of attempted girlishness.
“Did you get my email?” Velda asked again.
“Yes,” Melissa replied, holding her keys in her right hand. “And I answered it. The situation is really pretty simple, Velda. As long as Byron stays out of trouble, he won’t have to worry about my office or the police.”
Velda smiled wanly, shrugged her bony shoulders. She sidled out of Melissa’s way, rather than stepping, as if it would be too much trouble to lift her feet. Clearly, there was more she wanted to say.
Melissa got behind the wheel of her car and turned the key in the ignition, but she didn’t drive away. She waited.
“It’s hard enough for him,” Velda went on, at last, as if Melissa hadn’t said anything at all, “knowing that poor young girl died because of what he did. Byron’s got to live with that for the rest of his life. But he’s not some hardened criminal, that’s all I’m saying. He’s not some monster everybody ought to be afraid of.”
As she’d spoken, Velda had curled her fingers along the edge of the car window, so the knuckles whitened.
Melissa sighed, something softening inside her, and patted Velda’s hand. “Byron is your son,” she said quietly, looking straight up into the faded-denim blue of the other woman’s eyes, “and you love him. I understand that. But, Velda, the best thing you can probably do to help Byron right now is to lighten up a little. Give him some time—and some space—to adjust to being back on the outside.”
Tears welled up in Velda’s eyes; she sniffled once and stared off into some invisible distance for a long moment before looking back at Melissa. Her voice was very small when she spoke.
“Byron wasn’t on the bus,” she said slowly. “He was supposed to be on that bus, and he wasn’t.”
Melissa felt a mild charge of something that might have been alarm. “Maybe there was some kind of delay on the other end—didn’t he call you?”
Velda’s expression was rueful. The bitterness was back. “Call me? Not everybody can afford a cell phone, you know.”
Melissa looked around. Except for Tom’s cruiser, the roadster was the only vehicle in the lot. “Where’s your car?”
“It’s broken down,” Velda said, still with that tinge of resentful irony. “That’s why I was late getting over to the station to meet the bus. It was gone when I got there, and there was no sign of Byron. I asked inside the station, and Al told me he didn’t see my boy get off.”
“Get in,” Melissa said, nodding to indicate the passenger seat, leaning to move her purse to the floorboards so Velda would have room to sit down.
Velda hesitated, then rounded the hood of the car and opened the door. Once she’d settled in and snapped on her seat belt, she met Melissa’s gaze.
“What are we going to do now?” she asked.
Melissa leaned to dig her cell out of her purse and handed it to Velda. “Call Byron’s parole officer,” she said, by way of an answer, certain that Velda would know the number, even if she couldn’t afford a mobile phone of her own. “He—or she—will know if there was some sort of hitch with his release.”
Velda hesitated, then took the phone from Melissa. She studied the keypad for a few moments, while Melissa shifted into First and gave the roadster some gas, but soon, Byron’s mom was punching in a sequence of numbers, biting her lower lip as she waited to ring through.
BRAD O’BALLIVAN’S TOUR BUS, it turned out, was equipped with solar panels, satellite TV, and high-speed internet service. It boasted two large bedrooms, a full bath and a kitchen with full-size appliances.
“Must have been tough,” Steven joked as Brad showed him and Matt through the place, “having to rough it like this while you were on the road.”
Outside, a couple of workers from Brad and Meg’s ranch were already hooking up the water supply and installing the secondary generator. That would serve as backup to the solar gear.
Brad grinned modestly, shrugged, slid his hands into the front pockets of his jeans in a way that was characteristic of him. “The band used it, mostly,” he admitted. “I traveled by plane.”
“Right,” Steven said, amused. “More like a private jet, I think.”
Brad shrugged again and looked away for a moment, the grin still tugging at the corner of his mouth.
Steven had never met a famous person before—not one from the entertainment world, anyway—and he was pleasantly surprised by this one. O’Ballivan was not only a down-to-earth guy, he was generous. He clearly loved his wife and kids more than he’d ever loved bright lights and ticket sales.
“I appreciate this,” Steven said.
“Just being neighborly,” Brad answered, his tone easy. No big deal, was the unspoken part of the message. He turned, paused beside the door to scrawl a couple of numbers onto the small blackboard above the desk. “Let us know if you need anything,” he said.
Steven nodded. “Thanks,” he replied.
He stood in the doorway and watched as Meg and Brad drove away in their truck. Matt was so excited, he was practically bouncing off the walls.
“This is amazing,” he marveled. “Can I have the room with the bunk beds?”
With a chuckle, Steven turned to look down at Matt. The kid’s face was joy-polished; his eyes glowed with excitement.
“Sure,” Steven replied.
“Can we go back to town and get a dog now that we don’t have to live in a tent while our house gets fixed up?” The question itself was luminous, like the boy.
Steven felt like a heartless bastard, but he had to refuse. “Probably not a good idea, Tex,” he said gently. “This bus is borrowed, remember? And it’s pretty darn fancy, too. A dog might do some damage, and that would not be cool.”
Matt’s face worked as he processed Steven’s response. “Even if we were really, really careful to pick a really, really good dog?”
“Good has nothing to do with it, Bud,” Steven said, sitting down on the leather-upholstered bench that doubled as a couch so he’d be at eye level with the child. “Dogs are dogs. They do what they do, at least until they’ve been trained.”
Matt