Kelton's Rules

Maybe he’d forgotten his offer? Went off to work, wherever and whatever that was? He seemed to be a short-attention-span kind of guy, superb in a crisis, too restless to be good with the follow-through.

Or possibly he’d sensed her discomfort last night and had left her to handle her own affairs.

“Careful what you wish for,” she told herself wryly. Without his help, how would she get out to the crash site? A town with no doctor would hardly have a taxi service. And then how to contact this Whitey person, the mechanic?

“Coffee first,” she decided, then she’d cope. Somehow.

“Arrrr…” Skyler trudged into the kitchen, DC tiptoeing hopefully at his heels.

“Morning, love.” She smoothed his pillow-tossed hair, the same pale ash-blond shade as her own. “Sleep well?”

“Mmmph.” He took after her in appearance, and in most other ways, as well. But unlike her, Sky was no morning person. He sat heavily at the table, his glasses wobbling on the end of his nose, the cat winding around his bare shins. “What’sferbreakfast?”

Abby tried for a note of enthusiasm. Think of this as an adventure, will you? “Tuna fish sandwiches.” All that was left. She’d meant to replenish their traveling snacks when they reached Cortez last night.

“Yech-hh! Why can’t we have oatmeal?”

As she usually gave him back home, was the unspoken accusation, but if Sky mentioned New Jersey one more time, she’d throw something. “When we get to Sedona I’ll buy some, sweetie, but this morning—”

Knock knocka knock knock! A cheery rap sounded on the back screen door, which Abby had opened to air out the kitchen.

Relief surged through her chest, mixed with an odd sense of wariness. She hobbled across the room, wondering: Could the man have half the impact in daylight that he’d had on her last night? Or had the shock and disorientation of the bus crash made her unusually—and temporarily—vulnerable?

She’d have to wait to find out. Their visitor was a child—a girl roughly Skyler’s age—all long spindly legs and reed-thin golden arms. She stood on the back stoop, fist lifted to knock again. “Um, hi.”

“Good morning.” Her ponytail was two shades lighter than the wheat color it would probably be when she was grown. Still, Abby knew who’d bequeathed her that tiny cleft in the chin. And those enormous gray eyes. She opened the screen door with a smile—and blinked. The child had Jack Kelton’s eyes, but how to explain her lack of eyelashes? Her eyebrows frizzled to kinky ash? The crinkled hair along her forehead that had obviously come too close to a flame?

“Dad said to bring you these.” The girl clutched a pile of bright packages to her skinny chest with a clumsily bandaged hand. “He said you’d want breakfast.”

“He didn’t need to do that, but please, come in.” Abby stepped aside and had to smile as the two children spotted each other. The girl stopped short and scowled. Skyler looked up—and whipped off his glasses, which rendered him utterly blind. He turned them nervously in his hands, torn between seeing and being seen, squinting up at her.

“Waffles,” announced Jack’s daughter, dumping her packages at Sky’s elbow. “Dad said you have the blueberries to go with ’em already. And these are burritos.” She placed another frozen package on top of the first. “And a pizza.”

This was Jack’s idea of breakfast?

“And coffee.” A package of ground coffee—now here at last was something useful—was added to the stack of offerings. Jack’s daughter made a rueful face as she turned toward Abby and pulled a crumpled envelope from the pocket of her ragged blue jeans cutoffs. “And this is for you.”

As her name, printed in a bold, slashing script, attested. Abby leaned back against the counter, opened the envelope and read.

Hi, neighbor!

Whitey and I are checking out your bus. Meanwhile, this surly outlaw is grounded from here to eternity and I’m down one baby-sitter. Mind keeping half an eye on her, just for the next hour? There’s a fire extinguisher next to your stove.

Thanks.

Jack

Surely that last line was a joke? Had to be. And asking Abby to pinch-hit for his baby-sitter was certainly reasonable, given all he’d done for her. Now Jack was doing even more, taking time out from his own day to look over her bus with the mechanic. Still, she wished he’d taken her along. She hoped he didn’t intend to commit her to a course of action without consulting her first.

At the table, curiosity had overcome Sky’s vanity and he’d put on his glasses. Studying his counterpart, he demanded, “What happened to your eyebrows?”

“Burned ’em off, welding.” Apparently some decision had been reached. The girl pulled out a chair and sat, scooping up the tomcat to drape him over her lap. “I never saw a cat with one green eye and one blue before. What’s his name?”

“DC-3.”

“Huh!” She nodded gravely. “I’m a Kat, too—Kat Kelton. Who are you?”

Kat. So this was Kat? Abby sucked in a breath, suddenly feeling that the walls had flexed inward half a foot or so. She limped to the screen door and stood there, seeing not the house beyond the fence but a big, blunt fingertip gliding down her ankle. She felt something oddly akin to panic….

Good grief, what was this, a goose waddling across her grave? Or caffeine withdrawal—what time was it, anyway?

Gradually the sensation faded; her eyes refocused on the house next door, her ears on the halting conversation behind her.

There might be a Kat Senior, as well, she told herself with a surge of relief.

Which dropped as swiftly as it had spiked. No. There couldn’t be. Had there been a mother in residence, she’d already have trimmed that fire-frizzled hair. And Kat’s bandage needed redoing. Coffee first, then I’ll see to it.

So Abby lit the oven, put the water on to boil, washed three plates, three glasses, three sets of silverware. Picked up one of the packages and wrinkled her nose as she read the directions. Frozen pizza for breakfast; that should’ve told her everything she needed to know.

One week, she reminded herself. No more than a week.

CHAPTER FOUR

PIZZA FOR BREAKFAST wasn’t such a bad idea, after all—if you ate it outside on a blanket, on a glorious sunny morning in southwestern Colorado.

Picnic completed except for a last cup of coffee, Abby limped along the weed-choked perennial border between her cottage and Jack’s. Once upon a time an ardent gardener must have lived here. The remnants still bloomed: several sprawling rambler roses, a late lilac of an exceptionally gorgeous shade of violet, a clump of daisies splashed white against the rioting green. Blue flag irises unfurled their petals to the sun, while at their feet, ruby and white alyssum duked it out with the dandelions. A bit of unkempt heaven just begging her to reach for pen and ink and watercolors.

Kat and Skyler had insisted that DC-3 should join their feast, and now Sky lay on the blanket with the tomcat crouched on his chest like a rampant lion. Abby cut another branch of blowsy pink roses, arranged it in a chipped blue stoneware pitcher she’d filled with water, then glanced around. “Where’s Kat?” Just a minute before, the girl had been perched on the old swing that hung from the branch of the gigantic oak tree shading the back of their house.

“Went to get something at her place,” Sky said as he stroked a knuckle down DC’s outstretched throat.

How close an eye was she supposed to be keeping on this girl? Normally, Abby wouldn’t have thought twice about allowing a visiting neighbor’s child to wander back home, back in suburban New Jersey. But here in Trueheart she didn’t know the rules or the dangers.

As far as she’d been able to see last night, the town was safe as could be, near idyllic. Small enough that strangers, good-intentioned or otherwise, would be instantly noticed. So small that any adult would know all the children—and more to the point, their parents. Her cottage was on a narrow road serving perhaps twenty nineteenth-century houses set on deep, old-fashioned lots that had been laid out at a time when each family probably tended a vegetable garden or kept chickens and a milk cow out back.

“Maybe you should go find her,” Abby suggested. She wouldn’t have dreamed of entering Jack’s domain uninvited, but somehow Sky wouldn’t seem quite such an intruder.

“Don’t need to.” Her son nodded at the fence, where Kat was just now wriggling between two missing pickets. Abby swallowed a laugh. The girl hadn’t bothered to deviate thirty feet out of her path toward the street, to where a garden gate stood ajar under an arching, rose-smothered trellis. Kat was a straight shooter in every sense of the word, Abby was finding. Another trait she’d inherited from her blunt-spoken father.

And where is her mother? Abby had wondered that several times already this morning. Not that it was any of her business. “Oh…Kat,” she murmured helplessly as the girl arrived beside her to offer a pair of garden shears.

“Do you want to use these? They were in our junk drawer.”

“Much better than this old knife,” Abby agreed, accepting them. “Thank you. And I see you…fixed your eyebrows.”

Kat’s brows had been scorched to ash in whatever fire had burned her poor little hands in several places. Abby had attempted to question her while she’d smoothed antiseptic cream on her burns then rebandaged them. But beyond claiming that she’d been welding last night, Kat had scowled and refused to elaborate.

“They were so icky I figured I’d shave ’em,” Kat confided now.