Second Chance in Dry Creek

“I won’t be long,” Gracie whispered, and then slipped into her house still carrying the girl.

He closed the door after they were inside. He stood on the step a moment, rubbing his cold hands. Hopefully, Gracie and Tessie would take a minute to warm up while he and the sheriff got ready to go to Miles City.

A smile split his face then. He had kissed Gracie Stone. Well, sort of.

He walked back to the sheriff.

“You got a heater in your car?” Calen asked. The man had his flashlight shining around in Renee’s car still.

“Top of the line.” The sheriff nodded proudly as he looked up.

“I want to be sure my girls are warm enough.”

The sheriff grunted at that. “Gracie stopped being a girl some time ago.”

“Not to me.” Calen reached into the back of the car and unbuckled the car seat. Tyler opened the opposite door, and there was no missing the grin on his face. Gracie’s son must have heard him.

“We’ll have to go fishing again someday,” Tyler said. “I always did enjoy sitting on the creek bed with you.”

“I’ll be there the first warm day we have next spring. I haven’t been fishing the past year or two, and I miss it.”

Tyler nodded. “I think my old fishing pole is in the barn loft.”

Calen wished it was that easy to slip back into his early relationship with Gracie. Not that they’d exactly been friends in high school. She’d always been Buck Stone’s girl, and he’d been a little tongue-tied around her. He glanced over at the house. Why was it that a man like him couldn’t seem to get the words out of his mouth to impress a woman he cared about, when he could flirt with all of the others with ease?

He finished unbuckling the child’s seat and pulled it out.

“I guess this goes in the back?” Calen asked as the lawman opened the door to the county car.

The sheriff nodded to him. “You’ll sit up front with me.”

“Okay.” Calen figured that if he was in the front, he wouldn’t have to worry about impressing Gracie with his witty conversation during the trip into Miles City.

He felt his shirt pockets again. He wished he had one of those hard mints at least. But there was nothing there. In high school, he always had wrapped candies to give to the girls. He knew that was why they came around him so often, but he’d never told Buck that. He grinned just remembering it.

He glanced over at the porch again and his grin faded. He wondered what secret Buck had that had gotten him Gracie. Calen would have traded all the hard candy in his pockets back then to know what she had seen in his friend and not in him.

Chapter Four

Gracie sat in the back of the sheriff’s car and looked straight ahead. Tyler had gone home and the rest of them were headed to the hospital. It was bitter cold out, but the heat inside the vehicle was stifling, so she had removed her jacket. Now she wished she’d taken time to find a cotton blouse to go with her jeans instead of pulling on the first thing she had seen in her closet, a heavy black turtleneck. The waiting room at the hospital would be chilly, though, she reminded herself.

A few months ago, when her oldest son, Wade, had hurt his thumb, she’d dragged him there to see a doctor, and the automatic door in the reception area had seemed to open whenever anyone walked in front of it. The room got so much fresh air it was hard to heat or cool. She could still hear the incessant sliding of that door in her mind.

“Hold on,” the sheriff said as he turned off the gravel road, taking a shortcut to the highway. Bits of gravel pinged against the underside of the car, but Gracie hardly noticed. The darkness was thick except for the focused beam of the county car as the sheriff drove them down the dirt road, following the path that the Elkton Ranch trucks used every fall as they took their cattle to market.

The sheriff’s actions reminded Gracie of how important it was to get to the hospital quickly.

She suddenly felt apprehensive. Who knew what was happening with Renee? And it wasn’t just her wound that could be giving her trouble. When Gracie had taken Wade to the clinic, the receptionist had recognized the Stone family name. Gracie wondered if Renee would face the same kind of questions from the staff that she had fielded on that day. There were not many criminals around here, and they stood out.

Gracie didn’t know why people were so curious about her time in prison, but they were. Maybe it was all the cop shows that were on television. The news that she had been declared innocent had stirred up almost as much gossip as when she had been found guilty ten years ago. She frequently spoke about the Bible study group she’d belonged to in prison, but she never talked about the rest of her prison experience. She didn’t want to even call up those memories. Once she started, the hopeless faces all came back to her. Susie, who had the teenage sons that refused to come to visit her. Martha, who worried about her elderly mother. The woman from Idaho who longed for the ocean and had died of an overdose in her cell after someone had smuggled drugs in to her.

In an abrupt motion, Calen turned around to look at her, and she wondered if she had made some distressed sound without being aware of it. Just thinking about her days behind bars made her sad.

“You okay?” he asked.

She couldn’t see his eyes in the dark, so she couldn’t tell if they were full of pity. But then, he couldn’t see her face either, so he wouldn’t notice the tears that had sprung to her eyes. He probably thought the sheriff’s sudden turn with the car had startled her. He should know a rancher like her knew the usefulness of all the dirt roads around here.

“Everything’s fine,” Gracie said, forcing herself to be cheerful, as she glanced over at the dark shape beside her. Tessie was napping in her child seat.

“I know it’s late,” Calen muttered apologetically, still watching her. “You must be tired.”

“Don’t worry about it. I wasn’t sleeping anyway.”

“Something worrying you?”

“Just my sons. They—” Gracie caught herself in time. Calen didn’t need to know her sons were pressuring her to get married again. No one needed to know that particular fact. “They can be a little stubborn at times when they get an idea into their heads.”

Calen chuckled then, his voice suddenly warm and relaxed. “What is it this time? I remember Tyler laid out his plans once for how he was going to raise a llama on your place with no one knowing. He figured he’d build a shelter for it down in the coulee where we were fishing, and feed it with oats he’d sneak away from the barn.”

“I didn’t know.” Gracie felt exposed. How could this man know more about her youngest son than she did?

“I think it was supposed to be a Christmas surprise. Nothing ever came of it, though.”

“Ahh,” Gracie murmured. Her sons always had wanted a spectacular Christmas. Maybe that’s why Buck had been so set against the day. Her late husband had been jealous of anything that took attention away from him. All he ever allowed in the way of a holiday celebration was to have their closest neighbors, the Mitchells, over for dinner. And, since Gracie had found out he’d been having an affair with Tilly Mitchell, she didn’t suppose she could count his neighborliness as being selfless, even in that regard. Gracie had always used her best china, too, for those dinners. She shook her head at how naive she had been.

After a moment of silence, Calen turned to face the front again.

Before long, the sheriff drove the car onto the freeway. He cleared this throat almost at the same time and looked into the rearview mirror. “Did Tessie talk to you while you were in the house changing your clothes?”

“No,” Gracie conceded. She wasn’t sure, but she thought even a two-year-old should have a few dozen words in her vocabulary. Maybe Tessie couldn’t talk normally. The toddlers at church were always chattering away.

“Well, she’s been through a tough night,” the lawman said.

No one had anything to add to that.

After a few more miles, Gracie noticed the extra straps on the back of the front seats. She had expected the mesh division that separated the rear seat from the driver, but she hadn’t realized they’d also added new straps to these sheriff cars.

The county had gotten a new car for Sheriff Wall in the time since he had arrested her ten years ago. The vehicle still had the same smell to it, though. It wasn’t unpleasant exactly, but it did make her realize that fear had an odor all its own.

Tessie wasn’t the only one who had been through a lot tonight. Gracie figured the toddler’s mother was only at the beginning of her ordeal. Gracie knew what it felt like to be arrested, and she figured Renee would find out before long. Everything changed once a person was on the wrong side of the law. A prison was designed to make a person feel trapped and helpless. Even though Gracie had been innocent, that did not mean the same problems that the other inmates faced didn’t weigh on her mind.

“Renee’s going to be worried about her daughter,” Gracie said. “They probably won’t let us see her yet, but one of the nurses can give Renee a message.”

She wondered if that same receptionist would be on duty. If so, maybe the Stone family’s notoriety could be used for something positive. If the woman took a message, Gracie might even answer one or two of her personal questions.

Gracie didn’t know what would happen to Tessie if her mother went to prison, but armed robbery would carry a long sentence. She would not put that into words, but everyone in this car was probably thinking the same thing.

Gracie looked up at Calen. His shoulders were slumped a little as he sat in the front seat, his head bowed slightly. She wondered if he was praying. She hoped so. At least Renee and Tessie had him to take care of them.