Redemption Road: Jackson Falls Book 5 (Jackson Falls Series) Read online

  Her response to that was a resounding snort.

  She spent the rest of the morning stewing, didn’t calm down until a heavy load of carbohydrates disguised as lunch mellowed her mood. She took a few calls, passed most of them on to Rob. Scheduled time for a local band to come in and tour the studio. Spent a few minutes playing with Emma while Casey held a closed-door summit with her husband. She sorted today’s mail, sat down with Rob to go over the various piles and clarify what he expected her to do with them.

  Then she tried to make sense of the filing system Ali had set up.

  She was leaning over an open file drawer when the outer door opened and closed. “Be with you in a minute,” she said.

  “No rush,” said a familiar voice. “I’m not going anywhere.”

  She spun around, the filing forgotten. “Bill,” she whispered, and her eyes filled with tears. “Oh, my God, Bill!”

  “Hey, kid. What’s shaking?”

  She met him halfway, this brother she adored, the one person who made coming home worth the hassle. Ever since she’d arrived, she’d struggled to maintain a brave front, but when his arms went around her, she lost it completely. A total blubbering mess, she clung to him until the storm passed and there was nothing left but hiccups and red, swollen eyes. Only then was she able to compose herself enough to say, “What’s with the gray hair?”

  “Just wait. Your turn will come.”

  “Are you kidding? I’ve been dyeing my hair for two years now. God, what a sniveling wretch I am. Now you’ll go home and Trish will give you the third degree about who blubbered all over your shirt.”

  “She knew I was coming.”

  “And she let you out anyway?”

  “Come on, Coll, it’s not that bad. She was mad at you for a while, but she got over it.”

  “She never liked me.”

  “That’s not true, and you know it.”

  “Okay. Maybe it’s not true. But she never thought I was good enough for her baby brother. Ten years Jesse and I were married, and she barely spoke to me for the entire decade.”

  He shrugged amiably. Said, “So are you staying? For the long haul?”

  “You know I can’t do that. This town and I mix like oil and water. It’s always been that way.”

  “It’s never too late to change.”

  “It’s way too late to change. And I can’t believe you’d even ask such a thing. Especially considering that your wife would be the one holding the bucket of tar while the rest of the town feathered me.”

  “I think you’re wrong. And why should it matter what Trish thinks? I want you to stay. Casey wants you to stay.”

  “Two lone voices,” she said, “crying in the wilderness.”

  “Hon, I don’t know if I’m the one who should tell you this, but since I’m your big brother, it’s probably my duty to take a shot at it. You have to dislodge that chip on your shoulder. It’s weighing you down. Preventing you from moving ahead. Drop that heavy load and open your eyes. You might see something really special.”

  Patting his face fondly, she said, “You’re such a dreamer. You always were.”

  Harley

  Since he already had business at the Cooperative Extension Service office, Harley decided he’d do what he could to help out a friend. “You folks have any information on raising sheep?” he asked the young woman at the reception desk. “I have a friend who’s considering going into the wool business.”

  The woman peered at him through Coke-bottle lenses. “Well, now. Sheep? Let me see what I can find.”

  It took her a while, but after scrounging around, she hit pay dirt. He left with a half-dozen pamphlets and the names of several local sheep farmers who, she said, would be more than willing to talk to his friend. Rob would probably throttle him, but he felt like he owed it to Casey, especially after the mayhem his dog had created at her dinner table the other night.

  With January thaw over, the Northeast had been plunged into a deep freeze, and every one of those little slushy ridges created by countless snow treads had frozen as hard as Gibraltar. The twenty-mile trip home almost jarred the teeth out of his head. After ten years in Manhattan, he’d thought he knew what winter was all about. But driving through this arctic mess that shook the bejesus out of his suspension and was probably destroying his alignment was a far cry from walking out of his midtown office wearing a cashmere coat and dress shoes and hailing a cab to take him uptown.

  His dashboard clock told him he had some free time before the afternoon milking, so he passed Meadowbrook Road and took Ridge Road instead. He wasn’t dropping by Two Dreamers in the hopes of running into the Widow again; he was simply doing Casey MacKenzie a favor. His visit had nothing to do with the evening he’d recently spent with her younger sister.

  “You keep telling yourself that, son,” he muttered under his breath. Scowling, he clicked his blinker and pulled into the driveway of the MacKenzie house. Pamphlets in hand, he knocked vigorously on the front door. Somewhere inside the house, Leroy started barking, but nobody came to the door. The Explorer was missing from the driveway. Maybe Casey was out running errands.

  For about ten seconds, he debated the advisability of coming back on a different day, but what was the point when he was already here and Colleen was undoubtedly sitting at the reception desk in the studio? He ran a hand through his hair, in case it looked worse than he remembered, then cursed himself for being a fool. It didn’t make one whit of difference whether or not he looked presentable to the Widow Berkowitz. Oh, she was nice to look at. And she smelled heavenly. That edge of hers, razor sharp and intriguing, was an enticing challenge. And, as embarrassing as this was to admit, it had been fifteen months, two weeks, and three days since he’d last been laid. He was as jumpy as a canary in a room full of tomcats.

  But the ice princess was still off-limits.

  She was on the phone when he came in. She glanced up, rolled her eyes, and said into the phone, “Is that so? That’s quite impressive.”

  Hands tucked into the pockets of his coat, Harley wandered the room, examined the gold records that lined the walls, the Grammy Awards in a glass-fronted case. Behind him, Colleen said, “I’ll be sure to pass that information on to Mr. MacKenzie when he comes back. Right. Thanks so much for calling.”

  She disconnected the phone, swiveled in her chair, and said to him, “Where are these people coming from? Did an alien space ship land out back of the IGA?”

  “I take it that wasn’t a personal call?”

  “Hardly. Just one more third-rate Karaoke singer who’s heard that my brother-in-law built a real, live studio here in the puckerbrush and thinks Rob can make him into the next Elvis Presley.”

  He hid a smile. “Elvis Presley?”

  “Okay, so that dates me. How about the next Michael Jackson?”

  “Old Michael or new Michael?”

  She tapped her Papermate on the edge of her desk. Clicked it a couple of times. “Jesus, Atkins, you’re taking this way too seriously. What can I do for you?”

  “Your sister around? I knocked on the door, but nobody answered.”

  “She’s at the doctor’s office. Emma has an ear infection. They both went with her.”

  “That’s sweet, that whole family thing.”

  “That’s a kid who’s going to end up spoiled rotten. What did you want with Casey?”

  He waved the pamphlets in the air. “I picked these up for her while I was at the Cooperative Extension office.”

  She took them from him, skimmed a few lines of text. “Sheep,” she said dryly. “They’re about raising sheep. I’m sure my brother-in-law will be thrilled.”

  “Just tryin’ to be neighborly.”

  “And you do it so well.”

  “Will you please give these to her?”

  Her smile was cool and professional. Smoothly, she said, “I’ll be happy to pass them on to her.”

  “Thank you.”

  Blue eyes gazed boldly into blue eyes, until fina
lly she cleared her throat and said, “Was there anything else?”

  “That was it. And I have to skedaddle. There’s an eager group of females waiting on me.”

  “The afternoon milking?”

  “Score one for the little lady.”

  “Little lady? It’s a good thing I lived in the South long enough to know that term isn’t meant in a derogatory manner.”

  “I would never refer to you in a derogatory manner.”

  “You’d better—what was the word you used? Skedaddle. Before all your adoring females turn on you. Have you ever seen a herd of Holsteins carrying pitchforks? It’s not a pretty sight.”

  He snorted. “Now that would be something to see.”

  “Goodbye, Harley.”

  He tipped his hat and let himself out the door. As he walked to his truck, he realized there was a spring to his step that hadn’t been there in a long time. Not since he discovered Amy’s long lunches were being spent in Peter Swinson’s king-size bed. Damned if Colleen Berkowitz, with her defiant attitude and her sassy mouth, didn’t make him feel better than he’d felt in ages.

  Which, now that he thought about it, was a very bad thing.

  Colleen

  Payday.

  The sweetest word in the English language. On Friday night at precisely five o’clock, Rob handed her a check imprinted with the Two Dreamers logo, and she just held it in her hands, studying it with reverence. Her name, printed in crooked block letters, at the top. Her brother-in-law’s loopy and illegible signature on the bottom. A dollar amount that was exceedingly generous in light of her meager contribution to answering phones, sorting mail, and filing. Never in her life had a sum of money held such significance for her. In years past, payday had meant nothing more than sitting down with her checkbook to pay the bills, then trying to subsist on what was left over. During her marriage to Irv, she hadn’t held a job, so payday had been a meaningless term. But this payday, her first since starting her job at Two Dreamers Records, was her gateway to the future. With her goal firmly in place, each payday would bring her a little closer to reaching it. She couldn’t have been more pleased if her brother-in-law had handed her a ticket to the moon.

  First thing Saturday morning, she deposited it into her checking account and withdrew the cash she’d need for gas and groceries and pocket money to get her through the next seven days. After writing a check to Rob for rent and another to Casey as payment on the loan her sister had given her, she transferred the balance into a savings account. This was her escape fund, the little stockpile she intended to watch grow, inch by inch, so that when Ali returned, she could blow this town and start over fresh, someplace where she owed nothing to anybody and where nobody would be able to judge her based on her past. Hell, if she wanted to, she could invent a completely new past. A completely new Colleen. People reinvented themselves every day. And who would know the difference?

  She still had a couple hundred dollars left from Casey’s loan. She used that to put snow tires on the Vega. If she was going to spend the winter here in the frozen north, she couldn’t continue to drive around on summer tires as smooth as a baby’s butt. Four new tires with treads deep enough to take a bite out of snow and slush pretty much cleaned out her checking account, but there was nothing she needed before next payday. She had a roof over her head, a warm bed, food in the cupboard, and the means to earn her keep. It might not be quite the lifestyle she’d lived in Palm Beach, but then, she’d never been greedy. She’d fallen in love with Irv not because of his wealth, but in spite of it. As she’d reminded him often, she would have loved him even if he’d been a ditch digger.

  Halfway home, she saw the sign for Quarry Road, and without making a conscious decision, Colleen clicked on her blinker, made a sharp right turn, and took a journey into her past. Down a narrow paved road coated in black ice, past a couple of ramshackle farms, to a nondescript trail, little more than the width of a car, that led into the woods beneath old leaves and new snow. She parked the Vega at the edge of the blacktop, thought about getting out of the car and walking in. But at this time of year, even wearing boots, she’d have to be suicidal to attempt the two-hundred-yard walk to the quarry. Instead, she sat behind the steering wheel and watched the memories play like a movie reel behind her eyes.

  A steamy summer night. The two of them, she and Jesse, stretched out on the hood of his old red F-150, leaning against the cracked windshield, sharing a can of warm Pepsi while they gazed at the canopy of stars overhead. She’d been sixteen years old that summer, the summer her sister left Jesse at the altar, the summer she was waiting to catch him when he fell.

  And fall he had, right into her waiting arms. She’d wooed him with kisses and sympathy, this wonderful, amazing man, so kind, so handsome, with that silver-blond hair, those cheekbones carved from granite, those dark eyes that saw everything. How could her sister have walked away from him? It astounded her. It elated her. And it terrified her, because she’d loved him for so long, and now that this opportunity she’d never expected to see had fallen into her lap, she had no idea what to do with it.

  This had been their place. They’d spent hours at the quarry, parked beneath the stars, just the two of them. Here, he’d introduced her to alcohol. Here, they’d gone skinny-dipping. Here, they’d lost their virginity together, one hot August night after she’d pushed him, for weeks, until he reached the breaking point. At sixteen, she’d thought she was an adult, thought she knew everything. But she’d been woefully naïve to the ways of the adult world. All she could think about was being with him forever. Waking up next to him every morning for the rest of her life. She hadn’t thought about the consequences, hadn’t thought about what he might want, hadn’t thought beyond her own selfish desires.

  It was here, at the quarry, where Mikey had been conceived. And it was here, on a cool night in fall, where she’d told Jesse she was pregnant.

  The marriage had been a disaster right from the start. At seventeen, she’d been too young to settle down with a husband and a baby, too young to have given any thought to what kind of life she wanted. In her naïveté, she’d somehow believed she would get married, and that would be it. She would have achieved her life’s goal at the age of seventeen.

  Looking back, it seemed ludicrous. But she knew she wasn’t the only girl her age who’d felt that way, who couldn’t see beyond the wedding to what might follow. Wasn’t getting married the be-all and end-all to existence? In small-town Maine, that was what young girls of her generation, whose role models had been their stay-at-home mothers, had thought. By the time she realized it wasn’t—that life continued after marriage—it was too late. She had a husband and a baby and a noose around her neck.

  The marriage had lasted for a decade, but by the time of its official dissolution, it had unofficially been over for a very long time.

  Now, parked by the side of an icy winter road, thirty-five-year-old Colleen tried to muster some kind of empathy for her sixteen-year-old self. After all, she’d only done what women had been doing since the beginning of time: she’d tricked the boy she loved into marrying her. Occasionally, that kind of marriage worked out. More often, it didn’t. Especially when the feelings were all one-sided. It had taken time and distance to clarify the truth in her mind: While she’d loved him with the kind of obsessive love only a young girl can feel, Jesse had never truly loved her. If she hadn’t gotten pregnant, he never would have married her.

  And what on God’s green earth was the purpose of this little trip down Memory Lane? Her marriage to Jesse had ended a long time ago. They’d both moved on with their lives. As far as she knew, he was happy now, with a new wife and a new little girl. Their son was eighteen years old, a grown man, older now than she’d been when she delivered him. Those years, that young girl she’d been, were long behind her. So why the sudden nostalgia for the good old days? Which, if you looked at them closely, hadn’t been all that good.

  It was this place. This damnable town that she couldn’t e
scape from quickly enough. A shiver ran down her spine, and Colleen cranked the heater, which was no match for this frigid winter day. She released her emergency brake and pulled away from the shoulder, found a driveway a half-mile down. There, she wheeled the car around, and pointed it back in the direction of her apartment, her only sanctuary. The only place where, if she was very lucky, the ghosts of the past couldn’t follow her.

  ***

  She spent the afternoon cleaning house. After five days of working 8 to 5 and coming home, exhausted, to flop into an easy chair in front of the television with a frozen TV dinner, there was plenty to keep her busy: laundry, dusting, washing the floors, scrubbing the toilet. She borrowed Casey’s Electrolux and cleaned the carpets, took the small area rugs onto the landing outside her kitchen door, hung them over the railing, and beat the crap out of them with a broom, the way Mama had done when she was a little girl. When she was finished, the small apartment gleamed, and Colleen felt a sense of pride way out of proportion to what she’d actually done. For the first time, this place felt like hers. Home. But she steamrolled over those useless feelings until they were nothing but roadkill. She couldn’t allow herself to grow attached to anyone or anything; she’d be moving on soon, and she didn’t want any regrets when the time came.

  At dusk, as she was sipping tea and listening to oldies on the radio, Jackson Browne rocking her on the water, there was a tap on her door. She opened it to find Paige, Rob’s teenage daughter, on the other side. Like her father, the girl was tall, slender, a little gawky. All knees and elbows and awkward charm, with a cascade of wheat-colored curls that tumbled down her back. “Casey sent me over to invite you to the get-together,” Paige said. “At six-thirty, at Trish and Bill’s house.”

  “Come in,” she said. “It’s cold outside. What get-together?”

  Paige stepped into the kitchen and Colleen closed the door. “It’s a family thing,” the girl said, stamping snow off her boots. “We get together on Saturday nights, a couple times a month. Sometimes here, sometimes at Aunt Trish and Uncle Bill’s house, sometimes at Aunt Rose and Uncle Jesse’s.”