Grounds to Believe (11 page)

By lunchtime, everyone would know that Derrick Wilkinson’s intended had gone riding with that biker in the middle of the night.

S
he was listed in the phone book as J. McNeill, with no address, a thin disguise for a woman living alone. Ross dialed Julia’s number and she answered on the first ring.

“Hey. It’s Ross.”

“Hi!” No doubt about his welcome there.

“How was your night?”

“Fine.”

“What did you dream about?” he teased.

“None of your business. Besides, I prayed for forgiveness.”

Somehow he knew she wasn’t teasing anymore. “Because I kissed you?”

“No. Because I kissed you back.”

He was losing her. If she was praying for forgiveness already, he had to do something fast. He couldn’t wait until Sunday night. “Let me make up for it. Let’s go for a ride.”

“Oh, Ross.” Dismay weighted both words.

“I promise I won’t kiss you again. I won’t even touch you.
We’ll just go for a ride and leave it at that. Okay?”
Let her say yes. Let me not have damaged the investigation so soon.

After a long hesitation in which he saw himself being posted, not to drug enforcement, but to a desk job for the rest of his career, she said, “All right.”

She was waiting on the steps when he cornered into the driveway and killed the engine. She was wearing a day pack and that same skirt.

“Julia, we’re going to have to do something about your clothes.”

She looked down and spread her hands. “But this is all I have.”

“Come on. We’ll go into town and buy you a pair of jeans.”

“I couldn’t!”

“Yes, you can. That skirt isn’t safe. If something happened and I dumped the bike, you’d scrape everything off those legs, right down to the bone.” She fiddled with the helmet straps as though she’d forgotten how they worked. “I mean it, Julia. Either we buy you a pair of jeans for safety or you don’t ride with me anymore.”

Her eyes were big and blue and beseeching, and her teeth dented her lower lip as upbringing battled with the desire to ride. He let her take her time.

“Okay,” she said at last. “There’s a Denim Depot on the corner of Second and Lake.”

“Good choice,” he said gruffly, and straightened the bike. “Get on.”

She hiked up her skirt and mounted a little more gracefully this time. A few more rides and she’d be a pro.

When they got to the store, Julia entered with criminal caution, after checking both sides of the street. She grabbed a couple of items and hid in the fitting room.

“Ross!” she hissed from behind the door.

“What?” he whispered back, leaning on the cubicle frame.

“If anyone comes in, tell me, okay?”

“I don’t know any of them, Julia.”

“You’ll know.”

He probably would, at that. The clerk with the stud in his nose and the two teenagers with ball caps on backward and low-slung pants definitely didn’t fit the Elect mold. Other than that, the store was empty.

“What do you think?” Behind him, the dressing-room door opened, and Julia modeled in front of the mirror.

“Wow.” Her cheeks flamed red. She had curvy hips that made her waist look even smaller, and for the first time, she wore color—a teal-green T-shirt. It brought out the fire in her hair and the creamy texture of her skin.

“The T-shirt should be black, but I figured, in for a penny, in for a pound. If I’m caught wearing jeans it won’t matter if I’m wearing color, will it?”

There wasn’t much of an answer he could make to that. “You look great, and what’s more, you’ll be safer. Now, let’s get out of here.” She paid for her purchase, and Stud Nose pushed her skirt into a plastic bag and handed it to her. “Want me to case the street before we go out?” Ross asked at the door. She looked down at the bag in her hands and blushed again. “Anyone else would have thought you were going to rob the till, not buy a pair of jeans. Can this much guilt be worth it?”

She lifted her chin as they walked out onto the sidewalk, and slid onto the passenger seat behind him. “Don’t laugh at me. These jeans are a safety precaution. You said so yourself.”

He rolled up the shopping bag and stuffed it into one of the saddlebags. Mounting the bike, he revved the engine and leaned back. “Yes, I did. You are definitely safe with me.”

This time, instead of going around the lake, he took a cutoff that directed them to the top of Mount Ayres. The road wound higher and higher, offering them views out over the lake and down the long valley in which Hamilton Falls lay. The sun fell hot on his back, Julia’s knees gripped him tightly, and the wind in his face smelled of green hay and wild roses.

There were days when he loved his job.

At the trailhead, he offered her his hand and they set off. Despite the sun, the wind at this altitude was cool. Julia pulled on the black sweater she had tied around her waist as they hiked through a meadow blooming with lupine and Indian paintbrush. At the spring, they sat on a grassy bank and Ross pretended to take in the view down the mountain-side. Water bubbled up out of the rocks to their right and rushed down the slope with a sound like wind in the pines. He glanced at her.

“Nice place to grow up,” he said. “I suppose you’ve hiked all over these mountains.”

Julia nodded. “Over the mountains, around the lake, you name it. Eating and team sports seem to be our principal forms of entertainment.”

“You don’t sound very happy about it.” Would she respond? Or were negative comments about her religion forbidden, too?

“I don’t know what it is with me lately. I’m seeing things differently. Having doubts. Finding fault. I’ve always thought our fellowship was the most wonderful thing in the world. Now it’s getting on my nerves.”

“So what’s really wrong?”

“Oh, I don’t know.” She sighed. “I guess I’m just disappointed. Claire—my best friend—called me this morning to organize a baseball game. I suggested we go down to the food bank and help out, and she just closed up.”

“You can’t do charitable works all the time, Julia.”

“Once would be nice. They say faith without works is dead, but I don’t know what my works are supposed to be, if it isn’t helping other people out. Then again, we’re supposed to keep our works secret, so how do I know what people are really doing? All I know is what I’m not doing.”

“What about your sister and her husband? Isn’t he the top of the heap around here?” Nice segue. He had to get her talking about the children.

“Yes. They do things, though. They have the poorer members of the Elect over for dinner. Melchizedek is there a lot. And of course, when Phinehas—he’s the senior Shepherd for the state—is in town, he stays with them or with my parents.”

Ross bit back a cynical comment and said instead, “I liked Owen. Nice guy.”

Julia smiled fondly. “He’s the nicest man in the world. He met Madeleine when she moved to Spokane to start nurses’ training. Naturally she couldn’t have a career once she was married, so she only had a year there.”

Ross chose his words carefully. “It must be hard on them, with their little boy so sick.”

Julia’s shoulders slumped. “It’s hard on all of us. I feel guilty any time I’m not at the hospital. Madeleine is the world’s best mother and it just kills her that she’s powerless to do anything.”

“Have they figured out what went wrong?” Rita had said the test results were inconclusive. It wasn’t likely Julia would know any more.

“They say it’s gastrointestinal bleeding, but they’ve never been able to tell us exactly
why
he’s bleeding. He’s been sick for years, poor little kid. Practically since he was a baby. No one has ever known.”

Unresolved sorrow and love trembled in her voice. Ross hated himself for pushing this line of questioning, but he had to. Everett was going to want answers. “Have you ever seen any kind of pattern in his illnesses?”

“What do you mean?” She swallowed. She didn’t seem to think the question was odd, but maybe she was just focused on controlling her voice.

“I mean, has it always been the same thing, or did it start out mild when he was a baby and continually get worse, or what?”

The pending tears seemed to abate as she thought about it. “I never noticed any pattern, but then, we’re so scared
and so close to it, it’s never occurred to me to look for one. He’s such a fragile kid. But like most kids with illnesses, he always seems to get sick at the worst times. When I graduated from junior college was one. It took me four years to do a two-year degree because my parents wouldn’t help with the tuition. They were pretty upset that I didn’t get married right after high school. I didn’t go to the ceremony anyhow because it just celebrates pride, but Rebecca was going to have a hymn sing for me. Needless to say, none of the family got there. We were all at the hospital. Then, a couple of weeks after Hannah was born—same thing. When Owen got the principal’s job. That was horrible. Owen’s first day of term was a mess because he wanted to be at the hospital so badly he couldn’t keep his mind on his work.”

The sixth sense that Ross had developed over the years began to tingle. Patterns. Patterns were always a place to start. Was Ryan being used somehow to placate an angry God at important times in their lives? Was there some kind of weird rite being performed in secret? He hadn’t been able to find such a pattern in the other kids’ deaths; in fact, the families had been so forthcoming with the investigators that he’d pretty much written them off as tragic accidents and left it at that.

But Ryan’s case was different. It wasn’t a onetime accident, but a series of episodes. He couldn’t very well ask Julia point-blank about the placation theory, and risk upsetting her to the point where she refused to talk at all.

He changed the subject. “What made you stay in Hamilton Falls instead of moving away like your sister?”

She tilted her head. “Not everyone moves to the big city, you know.”

“I know. Look at me. Still in Hamilton Falls after a week.”

“My family is here. I wanted to be near the kids. And the job at the bookstore is enough for me to live on until—” She stopped, then went on quickly, “Rebecca charges me hardly anything to rent the suite. Everything was so easy that at the time I was convinced it was God’s will that I stay.”

“And of course there was Derrick.” He hadn’t missed that little hesitation. Enough for her to live on until she got married? And women gave up their careers anyway after the ring was on their finger? How archaic could you get?

If she detected any sarcasm in his tone, she didn’t show it. “There has always been Derrick. Loyal guy that he is.”
Unlike me
, he read in the unhappy downturn of her mouth.

He shrugged out of his jacket and laid it on the grass. The sun was hot up here. He stretched out and put his hands behind his head. “Tell me about him.”

She pulled up a stem of lupine and began to pull the flowers off one by one. “I’ve known him all my life, so it’s hard to know what to tell.”

“Start with the important thing. Do you love the guy?”

She fumbled with the flower stem and it fell to the ground. “I care about him. He’s been proposing to me since I was eighteen.”

Ross blinked. “What do you tell him that keeps him coming back?”

“I’ve managed not to tell him anything so far.”

“The poor guy. I’d have cut you loose after the first time.”

The dimple in her cheek deepened briefly and he watched it, fascinated. “You have to understand about Derrick, though. He’s been preparing all his life to be Deacon some day.”

“What’s that got to do with proposing to you?” The social customs of this group confounded him. Being a teenager was hard enough without having to navigate through a labyrinth like this. How did any of them survive it?

“A hundred years ago, when the first Shepherd came to Washington, only certain families showed him any kindness. They gave him a place to stay and became what we call the Firstfruits. That means the men in those families—ours, the Traynells out east of town, and a family on the other side of the lake—were made Elders. Permanently.”

“You mean it’s a hereditary title?”

“Yes. My great-grandfather, grandpa, dad, they were all Elders. Then when Dad got older, his health wasn’t so good. We don’t have any brothers to pass the title to, so when Madeleine married, Dad asked that the title be passed to Owen. Meantime, there’s always a backup from a lesser family or younger sibling, called the Deacon. My husband. Derrick.”

Ross lay back on the jacket, taking this in. “What happens if you fall in love with someone else?”

“Well, I haven’t, have I? Derrick’s been living for this all his life. It’s just a matter of us setting the date now.”

“Which you haven’t done. Mostly because you haven’t said yes, yet. Julia, something tells me you’re not exactly committed to being Derrick’s ticket to the big time.”

“I’m not a ticket to anything. He loves me.”

“I’m sure he does.” She gave him a narrow-eyed glare. “I mean it. But how has he managed to chase everyone else off and keep you to himself?”

“What do you mean, everyone else?”

He gestured at the valley below them as if it were teeming with men. “All the other guys who wanted to take you out.”

She made a derisive noise. “What guys? You obviously don’t know what it’s like to be the sister of Madeleine McNeill.”

“I spent an entire evening with her and didn’t fall in love with her once.”

“Would you be serious?” She leaned back on her elbows and gave him an exasperated look.

“I am serious. In fact, I’m so serious I’m considering giving old Derrick Wilkinson a run for his money.”

“What?”

“Who says I can’t be the next Deacon?”

“Are you crazy?” She sat bolt upright.

“Why not? I cut my hair. After that, anything’s possible. You’re not in love with Derrick, so maybe you’ll fall in love with me.”

Wickedly, he grinned up at her. So he’d promised he wouldn’t kiss her again. That didn’t mean he couldn’t tease her a little. Open body language and his patented lady-killer grin worked on ninety-nine percent of the women he knew.

Then again, ninety-nine percent of the women he knew didn’t have a lifetime of training in self-denial.

She turned her nose up at him. “I have no intention of falling in love with anyone as conceited as you. I don’t know anything about you. What are you doing in Hamilton Falls, anyway?”