Jaded (20 page)

Then Alana’s quiet voice. “Lucas.”

He tightened his grip on the steering wheel and swung the Blazer around, then white-knuckled it the rest of the way to the cabin. “The door’s usually open,” he said to Alana. She opened it wide as he jockeyed the unresisting Tanya out of the backseat. A light shone dimly from the open front door. Her knees gave way when he put her on her feet, so he slipped his shoulder under her arm and gripped her waist to walk her through the glazed air, into the cabin.

“I couldn’t get the overhead light to work, and it’s freezing in here,” Alana said. “I think she left the windows open when she went out. I closed them, but—”

“Start a fire,” he said as he dumped his cousin on the sofa.

“You do that,” she replied. “I’ll take care of her.”

A simmering cauldron of emotions seethed inside him, so he took the prudent step back. “She needs to be on her side in case she vomits.”

“I’m aware of the protocol,” she replied. She went on her knees next to Tanya and turned her. Tanya’s hand grazed Alana’s shoulder before flopping to the floor. While Lucas crumpled newspaper for tinder and built up logs and kindling, Alana gathered the blanket from Tanya’s unmade bed and a knitted throw from the back of the rocking chair.

“This looks like your grandmother’s work,” she said as she laid the blankets over Tanya’s unconscious form.

“It is,” he said.

Alana eased the flip-flops from Tanya’s bare feet and considered them for a moment, then went to the kitchen and turned on the water. While it warmed, she went into the bedroom again and returned with two pairs of socks and a tube of antibacterial ointment. After searching the cupboards for a stainless steel bowl, she found a clean cloth and sat on the end of the sofa by Tanya’s feet. She immersed the rag, wrung it out, then started cleaning the dirt from Tanya’s ravaged feet.

Fear trapped him on his knees by the fire. “I’m sorry you had to see her like this,” he said.

“It’s fine,” she replied softly.

“She used to be amazing. Now I’m afraid someone’s going to find her frozen to death in a ditch, and I’ll have to zip her into a body bag.”

Water dripped into the bowl. “Maybe she will be amazing again someday,” Alana said as she drew the cloth between Tanya’s toes. The unconscious woman stirred slightly, and Alana stopped. When she settled, Alana continued, that bright shiny hair slipping forward again. “Is she an alcoholic?”

“She’s a drug addict. Started with pot and moved on to Vicodin. Percocet. Anything else that dulls the pain. She’s been to recovery twice, tried to quit on her own I don’t know how many times. Drinking is usually the first sign she’s slipping. Drugs come next. Then another trip to recovery.” He left out the long, slow trip through the hell of using. “The whole process takes a couple of years because she’s tough. Each time she swears she’s got it beaten.”

Alana made another one of those soft noises. For a stretch of time, the fire cracked and popped, and Alana removed blood and dirt from Tanya’s skin. Washing finished, she gently patted Tanya’s feet dry, then began dabbing ointment on the cuts. That task done, she pulled the cotton socks over defenseless toes, then worked the wool socks up over those, finally tucking the blanket around her feet.

She carried the bowl to the kitchen, where she carefully rinsed it out. Lucas pushed to his feet, gathered the towels and tossed them in the overflowing laundry basket. “Should we stay with her?”

“No,” he said without elaborating. He turned off the kitchen light and closed the door behind them. They rode in silence back to Walkers Ford. The town was eerily quiet, streets empty.

“Do you do this much?”

“Depends.”

“On what?”

He thought about that as he drove, trying to figure out how to distill over a decade as a cop into phrases that would make sense to someone who lived and died by research. “Instinct, mostly. Years of experience gone gut deep.”

“And tonight?”

“Tonight I wanted you to see the other side of Walkers Ford.” He thought about how to say this. “I have to assume you’ve failed, that the family, the schools, programs, library, mentors, everything has failed. I can’t afford to be a Pollyanna about this. Small-town life is supposedly Mayberry, but there’s no cushion when things go wrong. We all know Gunther. We knew his wife, how she wore that ring with pride. Some of us were there when he took it off her finger at the hospital. We were there when he buried her. Now it’s gone, probably forever.”

“Like your grandmother’s.”

“That’s different.”

“But the same, because you lost it and you promised her you’d find it. You were eight years old when you made that promise.”

“And now I’m thirty-two, and I still haven’t found it.”

“Why do you keep looking?”

“Because I made a promise.”

“I’d ask you to come in and sit for a while, but something tells me you’re going back out to Tanya’s.”

He looked at her sharply, although perhaps the fact that he’d pulled into her driveway, not his, and left the Blazer running was clue enough.

“She shouldn’t be alone,” was all he said.

Alana nodded and opened the passenger door. “Do you want me to come with you? You shouldn’t be alone, either.”

Air huffed from his lungs, although whether from the direct hit to his sternum or her matter-of-fact statement, he couldn’t tell. Both, probably. Alana Wentworth packed a punch behind that sleek reserve. He desperately wanted to go inside with her, to lose the day in her quirking smile and soft body. “You’ve got a big day tomorrow.”

She hummed something quick and soft, then stepped back. Duke peered over the backseat and whined, upset that the humans were separating. “It’s okay,” she reassured him. “I’ll see you tomorrow. And you,” she said with a quick glance at Lucas.

9

T
HE DAY OF
the presentation to the town council passed in a frantic blur. The library was open and nearly everyone in town seemed to want to take a look around before the presentation, so Alana and Mrs. Battle were busier than usual. Cody was still suspended so Alana put him to work scanning his pictures into her laptop and typing her notes into the PowerPoint presentation. As he worked he downloaded an art application and cleaned up the drawings, teaching himself the software as he worked. Between a constant stream of citizens and Cody’s absorption in his work, Alana forgot about her nerves until the last-minute strategy session with Mrs. Battle over supper at her house. Alana flipped open her laptop, then chewed a hasty bite of beef stroganoff while she paged through the presentation.

“You’re ready,” Mrs. Battle said. “Just remember to slow down and make eye contact.”

“I don’t talk faster when I’m nervous,” Alana said.

“Yes, you do,” the old lady said serenely. “And you talk fast anyway, with your city ways. Slow down. Build a picture of what could be.”

“Cody’s drawings are all they need,” she said.

“Cody is a Burton, one step away from juvenile detention or the state penitentiary. His drawings are very, very good, but they’re not going to sell the proposal, not like you will.”

Alana ate another mouthful of stroganoff and tabbed from the _Final version to the _Rough version. Standing behind her with a pot of steaming corn in her hands, Mrs. Battle watched the slides flicker past. “Slow down,” she said. “My eyes don’t work that fast.”

“What do you think of this?” Alana asked, stopping on the slide that troubled her.

“Well, I don’t really know what to make of it.”

“Cody drew it.”

The whimsical, wistful version of Walkers Ford was visible in the picture to anyone who knew the town. Main Street’s brick buildings leaped from the page, flanked by the school, the Y, the restaurant district housing the Heirloom. Houses spread out from the center then lapsed into the surrounding prairie. Brookhaven’s sharp edges and gleaming glass marked the farthest edge of town, but what really captured the town’s essence was the artfully rendered people. Some were recognizable, like the high school principal, Mr. Walker, and his wife; the town’s attorneys, Keith Herndon and his father; police officers gathered around the distinctive Blazer Lucas drove. Gina stood outside her café, and several people strolling on the Main Street carried Heirloom coffee cups. But all motion swirled subtly to the center of the drawing: the library. Alana’s heart had seized when she saw the picture, realized the story Cody was using art and passion and feeling to tell.
This is the center of our town. Not the restaurants or the shops or the administrative buildings. This place we need to commit to, or we’ll lose our center.

“The mural’s growing on me,” Mrs. Battle said grudgingly.

“It’s really good,” Alana said. “He should have formal training, an opportunity for more exposure. He’s a junior, right? I wonder if he’s planning to go to art school.”

“I’m sure he isn’t,” Mrs. Battle said.

“He should.”

Decisively she dragged the slide into her presentation. She knew exactly where it should go and what it should be. The space between the wood shelves lining the east wall and the windows at the top was bare plaster, occasionally adorned with children’s art. Bare plaster, repaired and repainted, would be a perfect canvas for Cody’s drawing, reworked into a mural.

“We should go,” Alana said as she closed down all her windows except PowerPoint. One embarrassing mistake with a chat program had taught her that the safest bet was to have nothing open on her computer she didn’t want shown to a room full of people. “I need to set up the laptop and the projector before people start arriving.”

She helped Mrs. Battle tidy the kitchen, then drove them both to the high school. Cars already crowded the parking spaces closest to the auditorium doors. “I’ll just stop and chat a little,” Mrs. Battle said.

Alana left her to whatever last-minute campaigning she felt necessary and made her way to the front of the auditorium. The technology coordinator had left the projector and a dizzying array of connecting cables, but in a few minutes she had her laptop connected and projecting onto the screen. When she looked up from the keyboard, every seat was taken. People stood in the aisles, with more crowding in the doors at the rear and beside the stage. Mrs. Battle claimed a seat in the front row.

She scanned the sea of faces until an all-too-familiar one caught her attention. Lucas stood at the back of the room. He wore a blazer and jeans, and had his weight braced evenly on both feet, his thumbs stuck in his belt in a universal street-cop stance she found ridiculously endearing. The fire chief, Jackson Marshall, stood at the front of the room in much the same pose. Both men were obviously counting noses, so Alana wasn’t surprised when they met in the middle of the packed staircase. A moment of discussion, then Lucas hopped onto the stage.

“Microphone?”

She unclipped it from the edge of her blouse and handed it to him, sat down on the edge of the stage, and turned on the battery pack at her waist.

“Folks, Chief Marshall asks that anyone who doesn’t have their backside in a seat needs to move into the classrooms down the hall. We’ll broadcast Ms. Wentworth’s presentation to the rooms.”

The tide of humanity ebbed back out into the hallway. Lucas handed her the microphone. “Good luck,” he said quietly.

You’ve done the research. You’ve developed a plan based on that research. Mrs. Battle worked her connections. You will be fine.

Her heart was racing. She cleared her throat as the lights dimmed, then launched into her presentation.

Research, research, research. She laid out the damning statistics on library budget cuts around the country, the complex transition into the digital age. She cited the rising number of visits to libraries on a national, state, and local level, contrasted that with the number of libraries closing or slashing hours.

“But the library is crucial to your community,” she said, then cleared her throat again. A shift of movement at the edge of the stage caught her eye. Lucas braced his shoulder against the wall next to the door leading to the parking lot. Her brain raced as she sipped from the glass of water; probably the position was strategic. Near the exit in case an emergency call came in. In a split second between drinking and swallowing, his expression when he found Tanya freezing and bleeding on the side of a dirt road a mile from home flashed into her brain. He cared. On the surface he was as remote as Chicago or Denver, but that distance only served to wall off how deeply he cared about Walkers Ford.

She’d made a huge mistake, getting involved with Lucas Ridgeway.

But then his lips quirked up in a small smile, and he nodded.

Keep going. You’re doing fine.

“But the library is crucial to your community,” she said again. “We can talk about what Walkers Ford lacks: a movie theater, a bookstore, a hospital. Twenty percent of Chatham County’s residents live below the poverty line and lack access to computers, high-speed Internet, and information. I’d rather talk about what you have, and how to make the most of it. The library already arranges and provides space for free health screenings, but this service could easily be expanded, making the library a vibrant town square. A small investment in e-readers preloaded with books both introduces the technology to residents and reduces the investment in large-print books, as the fonts on e-readers can be adjusted to each reader’s preferences. Additionally, adding movie nights, reading groups, and more services for children of all ages will help even more.” She clicked through the bullet-point slides to Cody’s illustrations. “We can upgrade the computers, and renovate the unused rooms in the basement into meeting rooms that could be booked for business meetings or online classes. Universities around the world are making their classes available via the Internet. Information is now digital and accessible all over the world, but sorting through that information to separate fact from fiction requires a new learning process. The library can work with the school to develop and host technology training programs of all kinds.”

She clicked through to the last slide, Cody’s drawing of the library as the center of the town. A murmur ran through the crowd. “Cody Burton drew the illustrations and this mural. Young people see the library as vital to the community, as do I.”