Autumn Blue Read online

  “Are you sure? Did you fall?” She reached out to brush something from his cheek.

  “No.” Confound it. Couldn’t a man lie down on his lawn without some female assuming it was because he couldn’t stand on his own two feet? He pushed the shovel out from under him. “I’ve got a mole,” he stated, as if that explained everything.

  His neighbor seemed confused at first; then her eyes fell on the pile of dirt near Millard’s head. She sighed in relief. “Too bad. Your yard usually looks like a picture right out of Sunset magazine. Makes me feel so embarrassed about mine. I keep meaning to do something about it, but it seems my days get all used up, what with work and the kids and all.”

  He suddenly remembered the sheriff standing on her porch a couple of evenings ago. He was not one to pry, but he might just lift up a loose board and take a peek under it. “What about that boy of yours? What is he, fourteen? Fifteen?”

  She averted her eyes to a pile of white clouds beyond his roof. “Fifteen.”

  “Well, why don’t you get him out there on that yard? A boy that age ought to be helping his mother. A woman was never meant to do all those outdoor chores. She’s got enough to do cleaning house, sewing, cooking, and the like.”

  She smiled a little, as if he had said something amusing. “Well, I can’t say that I do much sewing.” She toyed with the zipper-tassel on her blue cardigan. “Anyway, we don’t own a lawn mower.”

  Well, that complicated things. Millard glanced across the street, but from his vantage point there on the lawn, the view of her scraggly yard was blocked by the peonies along his fence. He still saw the hanging downspout, though. He could offer his lawn mower. But he had just sharpened the blades a couple of weeks ago. If the kid hit any hidden rocks or debris, which surely lurked behind every tuft of grass, it would definitely ruin them. On the other hand, it would be nice to look out his window without the annoyance of that tainted scene. He still couldn’t get over the fact that somebody knocked out all the alder and vine maples (which would be going red by now) to stick a boxy old trailer-house there. “You tell him to come on over here and borrow my mower. I’ll show him how to use it, but make sure all the sticks and rocks are picked out of the yard first.”

  Sidney dropped her head and let out a slow, steady breath. “Well, that’s very nice of you to offer, Mr. Bradbury. But the truth is, I’m having a little trouble with Tyson right now.”

  Aha. It figured. Even from a distance a guy could see the kid had rebellion written all over him. “You just send him over here. I’ll tell him where the hogs eat corn.”

  She sighed again, her angular but pretty face losing what he now realized had been a pleasant, almost cheery facade. “My son isn’t home right now. He, uh, ran away recently.”

  “So, that’s why the sheriff was there the other night?”

  She clamped her lips between her teeth momentarily as she seemed to study his face. “Mr. Bradbury, I’m going to be honest with you. You’re a nice neighbor, and living right across the street from us the way you do, it’s just a matter of time anyway until you know the truth. You know that so-called attempted robbery at Graber’s this summer?” He nodded. “Well, that was my Ty.” Her stunning green eyes fell away for a moment before returning to his.

  He tried not to seem shocked, though he was. First the mole and now this. He had been living across the street from an armed criminal—and to think that he rarely remembered to lock up his house when he went to bed at night. It had never seemed necessary before. According to Red, the barber, the kid had almost shot the proprietor—would have killed a guy with a wife and two kids over a bottle of booze if he hadn’t tripped and smashed the bottle tucked into his jacket. “But I’ve seen him around since then, haven’t I?”

  “The judge let him out to await his trial. Being a juvenile and the fact that it was his first offense, plus that he turned himself in, he let Ty come home until his hearing. But he had a curfew and was supposed to be in school every day and no place but home after that.” She looked away. “Now he’s messed that all up. Got in a fight at school and ran away. I guess he thought they’d slap him right in jail for getting suspended.” Her eyes watered up. “He’s really not such a bad boy, Mr. Bradbury. It’s just that something’s got him by the heart and it’s squeezing the life out of him. I see this dull pain in his eyes but I don’t know what it is. I don’t know how to fix his hurts anymore.”

  A mole, a criminal for a neighbor, and now a crying woman. If this wasn’t a day to beat all. It was half-past nine and he hadn’t even touched the newspaper yet. His whole neat world, it seemed, was being cracked open like a walnut. He should do something but he didn’t know what. His hand reached out to pat her knee, but he thought better of it and grabbed the shovel, using it as a crutch to stand to his feet, leaning heavily on it as he stretched his stiff knees.

  Sidney stood also, dabbing her face with the underside of her sleeve. That was the way Molly did when she cried over old movies or sad telephone conversations so as not to smear her makeup. Molly wore rouge and a little mascara right up until she took sick and even then sometimes pinked up her cheeks when someone came to call. “Sorry to lay my troubles on you, Mr. Bradbury.” She chuckled through her tears. “I don’t know why I did that.” She glanced at her watch. “Well, it looks like I’ll be working past five tonight to make up for it.” She offered a brave smile. “Anyway, I’m glad you were just hunting down a mole and not having an aneurysm or something.”

  “You lay your troubles on me anytime you need an ear,” he heard himself say, immediately wondering where that came from. If he could have sucked the words back, he would have. But the thing about words: once spoken, they’re poker chips on a table, there for the taking. Odds are somebody’s going to cash them in.

  She tipped her head, smiling softly. “Thank you, Mr. Bradbury.” She reached out and hugged him, just like that, letting her cheek brush against his, then turned and strode quickly back down his driveway and across the road. He stood there while she tried to start her banged-up little Ford, which finally kicked in with a rattle-roar on the third try. Feebly returning her wave, he watched as the car chugged away.

  6

  SIDNEY’S BOSS leaned over her shoulder, perusing one of her files for some information he needed before returning a client’s phone call. Leon Schuman was an intensely serious man, no good at small talk, with a deeply lined face that was hard to read. She prayed he wouldn’t notice the stack of insurance quote requests piled to the left of her computer as she casually covered it with a notebook, breathing a sigh of relief when he closed the file and returned to his glassed-in office. Pushing the notebook aside, she covered a yawn and began to enter data into her computer. Her eyes watered from the yawn. It had been a long and sleepless night.

  As far as she knew, Micki was the only other employee at the Leon Schuman Insurance office that knew Sidney’s son was on the run. Sure, the others knew about Ty’s initial arrest, even though the paper had not stated his name because he was a juvenile. Word, distorted as it was, got around in Ham Bone, long before the weekly paper hit the porch steps. But her coworkers seemed to assume that Ty was either still at home or at school per the judge’s mandate, awaiting his fact-finding hearing. Most of them politely avoided the topic, sensing that Sidney was a little sensitive about it, though surely her private family business was being discussed in whispers between donuts and sips of coffee in the break room when she wasn’t there.

  She remembered ruefully how Ty’s court-appointed attorney, a pale, pregnant woman in her early thirties, had warned him of the absolute urgency of adhering to every rule set by the judge who had mercifully released him into his mother’s custody after the incident—without bail. She warned him that the consequences of breaking the court orders would be severe. Ty had nodded gravely without taking his eyes off her face.

  Sidney contemplated the framed photo on her desk, one that Jack Mellon had taken of a twelve-year-old Ty holding a remote control and gazing
with wonder into the sky. The red model biplane, which Jack had painstakingly built and painted, was out of the picture. The very fact that the man had focused the camera on Tyson rather than on his masterpiece should have been a sign to her. Where had her head been back then? Where would Ty be today if she had married Jack? Certainly not on the streets or in the tangled woods living on blackberries and tree roots. She pictured Ty the way he could have been if he had a strong man to guide him—safe and content, flourishing in school, proudly displaying his own model airplane at the science fair. She forced her eyes back to the computer screen.

  Micki finally saved her from the pandemonium in her mind. “Hey.” Her friend’s blond head appeared at the top of her cubicle. “Let’s do lunch.”

  Sidney blinked. She hadn’t accomplished a complete task all morning that she could remember. She saved the work on her computer with a click. “Okay. Good idea.”

  It had been a beautiful September so far, but today autumn hovered in a chilly fog. The usual view of evergreen-covered foothills and the Cascade Mountains was shrouded with gray. They grabbed their jackets and walked to the little Mexican restaurant next door to their office—like many of the businesses in town, a home remodeled into retail space when commercial zoning was extended to the end of Center Street, the main drag through town. They sat by the window and looked out at the sidewalk and the Hair Place salon across the street. Micki ordered chicken enchiladas; Sidney, as usual, a veggie burrito.

  “I miss you,” Micki said.

  “What are you talking about? You see me every day, like it or not.”

  “But it’s not the real you. I miss your famous laugh.”

  Sidney’s mouth spread into a heartless smile. “Got any good jokes?”

  Micki took a sip of iced tea and lowered her glass to the table. “Knock, knock.”

  “Who’s there?”

  “Interrupting cow.”

  “Inter—”

  “MOO!”

  They both giggled. “Okay, I’ve got another one,” Micki said. “Knock, knock.”

  “Who’s there?”

  “Interrupting starfish.”

  “Interrup—”

  Micki’s open hand shot across the table, spreading across Sidney’s face, her palm firmly plastered against Sidney’s mouth. She couldn’t speak. Micki pulled her arm back, laughing at her own joke. “Get it?”

  Sidney rubbed her nose. “That hurt! For Pete’s sake! Starfish move like glaciers—not torpedoes.”

  “Sorry.” Micki reached for Sidney’s glass. “Water?”

  She nodded. “And an ice pack.”

  “I was just trying to get your mind off Tyson.”

  “Well, it worked until just now. Now I’m thinking about him all over again. Here I am devouring mounds of good food and he’s out there somewhere eating . . . I don’t know, maybe tree bark or something.” A horrible thought occurred to her. “Do we have anything poisonous growing around here?”

  Micki shook her head, causing her silver dangling earrings to swing. Her hair was cropped in the latest style, her tangerine blouse a little trendy—something a teenager might wear, but she could pull it off. Micki had the body of an athlete. Sidney reminded herself to work out more, put a little muscle on her slender arms. “About the worst he could do around here is cascara bark. They make laxatives out of it.”

  “Oh, great. Runs on the run.”

  Micki sighed. “You’ve got to stop worrying about him. He’s Nature Boy; you know that. He’s spent more hours roaming the forests around here than a lone wolf. And he’s smart. If anyone can survive out there, Ty can.”

  “Did I mention that he didn’t have a jacket when he took off?”

  “A few times.” Micki raised her eyebrows. “I’ll bet you anything he has one now.”

  Sidney didn’t want to go there. She couldn’t bear to think that her son made stealing a habit. That Deputy Estrada might be on to something by suspecting Ty as the culprit of that burglary in town. The attempted robbery at Graber’s Market may not have been just a crazy, stupid, spontaneous, onetime event. She had found empty beer bottles in the back of his closet after he ran away, plus a full six-pack under the bed, and there was no way that her baby-faced son could pass for twenty-one even if he had fake ID.

  “I finally called my mother last night.”

  Micki’s eyebrows rose. “And?”

  “I woke her up. I tried to sleep until 2:00 A.M., lying there worrying about whether that deputy was going to come back with a search warrant, imagining Ty in every possible scenario under the moon. Finally I just reached over and punched in her number. Good old Mom. She wasn’t even mad.

  “I told her everything this time. Right down to the gory details. All about the arrest, the charges, and that Ty ran away.” Sidney pursed her lips and sighed. “I guess I should have told her what was going on sooner, starting with those black moods he falls into. At least then it wouldn’t have been such a shock to her. She still sees him as the sweet-faced little boy that used to bring her jars of centipedes and potato bugs. She, of course, always oohed and aahed like he had just bestowed jewels from Tiffany on her.”

  “She didn’t freak out on you when you told her, did she?”

  “No. That’s not her style. She was annoyingly calm and rational. She said Ty is going to come through this just fine. That someday we’ll look back and thank God for the wonderful man he’s become.”

  “Wow. At least she’s positive. Why didn’t you tell her before? I go crying to my mom about things like the toilet backing up.”

  Sidney stared at the chunk of burrito on her fork and shrugged. “I don’t know. Mom has this family-portrait image of my world in her head—everything’s fine; the kids are always squeaky-clean and smiling. I used to clean for days before her visits, trying to make my house look as perfect and organized as hers. We weren’t rich growing up, but you wouldn’t know it by the way she kept the house. She served tea in bone china cups and saucers, poured it out of a silver teapot on a silver tray. She dressed my sister and me in matching dresses—the kind you have to iron! I’m lucky if I can get two matching socks on Sissy before I push the girls out the door in the morning, let alone iron anything. And of course, she always had her hair done and lipstick on when Dad came home at night. She managed to stay happily married too, by the way.”

  “How many years?”

  “Dad died just before their fortieth anniversary. The funeral was on the actual day. August 12.”

  “Oh, how sad.”

  Sidney tipped her head and smiled. “Yes, it was. But for once Dad was there with flowers—enough to make up for all the anniversaries he forgot. He never was very good with dates.”

  Micki leaned back and crossed her arms, looking at Sidney like her fifth-grade teacher used to when she couldn’t diagram a simple sentence. “So you’re comparing yourself to your perfect mother, who—correct me if I’m wrong—had a husband to pay the bills and help raise the kids, and she never worked an outside job a day of your childhood.”

  “Not comparing, exactly,” Sidney said. “Just trying to live up to. Please pass the salsa.”

  “Too bad she lives so far away. I think you could use some mothering right now.”

  Sidney stared at a papier mâché parrot that seemed to be eavesdropping from its perch above Micki’s shoulder. Her mother lived in a suburb of Cleveland with Sidney’s aunts, Clair and Aggie. The three now-single middle-aged women were crazy best friends. Sometimes Sidney couldn’t carry on an intelligent phone conversation with her mother for all the laughter and commotion going on in the background. She wouldn’t do anything to break up that happy trio, no matter how bad things got for her there in Ham Bone.

  “My sister needs her worse than I do.” Sidney shook her head, still disbelieving that her younger sister, the one who once claimed she didn’t have a maternal bone in her body, had somehow ended up with five kids under the age of ten. She and her husband were in a standoff, both refusing to have the
ir bodies permanently altered to prevent any future surprises. “Mom watches the little ones in the mornings while Alana works.”

  She glanced at her watch. The school bus would drop Rebecca and Sissy off at their driveway at about 3:45. With Ty gone, the girls would be home alone until she got home after 5:00. But maybe it was actually better that way for now. Lately, she had worried more about them being with their brother than without him.

  A green sheriff’s car sped past the restaurant window, lights flashing. Sidney was surprised when it jerked to a stop abruptly in front of the insurance office next door.

  “What’s going on?” Micki stood, dropping her napkin to the floor. Another patrol car appeared from the other direction and braked, and an officer stormed from the car. Both women bolted for the door of the restaurant, leaving their half-eaten lunches behind.

  “We’ll be right back,” Sidney called over her shoulder to the waitress.

  The officers ran, shouting, toward the gravel alley behind the Leon Schuman Insurance building where another deputy was wrestling someone facedown to the ground. A guy in a big brown jacket. He wasn’t going down easy. Adrenaline shot through Sidney’s bloodstream. “It’s Tyson!”

  Micki reached out and held her arm. “No, Sidney. I don’t think so.” They stopped a safe distance away in the middle of the small parking lot between the two buildings. Leon Schuman and several coworkers spilled out of their office to observe the incident from the side porch. A dark-haired officer with a broad back and shoulders—unmistakably Deputy Estrada—jerked the captive’s arms behind his back to be cuffed, causing his face to drag on the gravel. The body on the ground let out a plaintive cry.

  Tyson! It was her son lying there, pressed to the ground. She ran toward him on legs like ribbon, but just before she reached him another deputy caught her, firmly holding her back. Estrada yanked the boy roughly to his feet. Tyson’s eyes were wild and fevered, his hair a shaggy mess. “Ty!” He looked directly at her, blinked, and dropped his head. His cheek was bleeding. Estrada thrust him past, pushing and dragging him across the parking lot. She had never seen that brown canvas jacket. The sleeves were too long; thick rolls of fabric were bunched at Ty’s wrists. Just before they reached the awaiting patrol car, Ty defiantly jerked his arm away. Estrada grabbed it again, roughly shoving him forward and then pushing her son’s head down into the backseat.