CHAPTER EIGHT
BOONE HAD PICKED up his clean shirts over at the cleaner’s, and when he and Scamp got to the office, he ducked into the men’s restroom to change into one of them. He’d barely begun scrolling through his email—the day deputies were already out patrolling the county and the receptionist/dispatcher was supposedly sick at home—when a skinny girl no older than twelve or thirteen burst in, breathless and pale.
Before Boone could place her, she blurted out, “Come quick! My brother just now fell off the water tower and his eyes are closed and he’s not moving!”
Boone’s blood ran cold as the image crystalized in his mind. He bolted toward the now-trembling child, speaking rapidly into the microphone of the small radio attached to his shoulder, summoning an ambulance and any available deputy, on or off duty, steering the girl out into the corridor by the nape of her neck.
“Stay here,” he ordered gruffly, when Scamp tried to follow.
The dog obeyed, dropping to his belly and resting his muzzle on outstretched forelegs; evidently, this was a command he knew.
Once Boone and the girl were both inside the squad car, he flipped on the lights and siren and laid plenty of rubber pulling away from the curb.
Folks gawked from the sidewalks and other cars pulled to the side of the road as the cruiser streaked past.
“What’s your name?” Boone snapped, instantly regretting the sharpness of his tone. The ambulance fell in behind him, siren shrieking, and various private vehicles trailed after, ordinary men who wanted to do whatever they could to help.
Parable was that kind of town.
The little girl, clad in a faded sundress and barefoot, shivered inside the passenger-side seat belt, her stick-thin arms wrapped around her upper body. She was sniffling now, and her freckles stood out against the waxen pallor of her cheeks. “Angie McCullough,” she said. “Maybe I should have gone to get Mama, but she’s way down at the Bide-A-Night Motel, cleaning rooms.” She paused, swallowed visibly. “My brother—Dawson—is he going to get in trouble?”
Boone shook his head. “You did the right thing, coming to me,” he said evenly, taking care to keep his voice gentle as he made a hard left onto the road leading to the water tower. He didn’t slow down for the ruts, deepened by decades of hard rains and wicked winters, and wondered briefly if the shocks on his squad car would hold up to the strain. “Nobody’s getting in trouble,” he reiterated. At the moment, this was all the reassurance he could offer.
The water tower loomed up ahead in the middle of a large, meadowlike clearing, a part of the town and yet separate from it, too, hidden among towering pine trees that had probably been mere seedlings when it was built.
A group of kids clustered in a circle, looking down. One of them, a gawky boy, all knees and elbows, turned to vomit into the tall grass.
“Stay in the car,” Boone told Angie McCullough, who nodded, her ears poking between strands of long, stringy brown hair. He shut off the siren, put the cruiser in Park and leaped out, leaving the rig running as he sprinted toward the kids.
They backed away as he approached, revealing a still form sprawled on the ground, arms and legs akimbo, eyes closed. The boy didn’t stir, either when Boone spoke his name or when he crouched beside him, feeling at the hollow of his throat for a pulse. He found one, but it was faint and dangerously irregular.
The EMTs broke through the small crowd just then, carrying their gear, kneeling on either side of Dawson McCullough’s unmoving body. Boone moved out of their way, herded the horrified teenagers back a few steps. His gaze sliced from one face to another.
He knew every kid in town, by sight if not by name, and he’d had to chase this crew away from the water tower more than once in the past.
“Exactly what happened here?” he prompted, when nobody spoke.
“He fell,” offered one of the girls, in a tremulous voice. Boone focused on her.
“It’s not like he jumped or anything,” added the boy who’d lost his breakfast a few moments before.
Boone drew in a deep, slow breath, to steady himself, and rested his hands on his hips. A glance toward the cruiser showed Angie’s face floating behind the windshield, an oval moon, white as milk.
“Is Dawson—is he—dead?” someone else asked.
“No,” Boone said, aware that the EMTs were working fast, one talking to the unconscious boy as he rigged him up to an IV line, the other racing back to the ambulance for more equipment. “Not yet, anyway,” he added glumly, sweeping off his hat to run the splayed fingers of his right hand through his hair in frustration. “What part of stay away from this place did you people not understand?” he asked, addressing the first girl, because she seemed the most composed.
The kids, cocky during previous encounters, exchanged meek glances.
The girl answered. “Dawson was being stupid, that’s all,” she said, a sly note creeping into her voice. “Nobody dared him to climb up there or anything like that.”
Boone knew a lie when he heard one, but he didn’t call her on it.
This wasn’t the time or the place, he told himself. But for a moment, he didn’t dare speak or move, because he was red-zone pissed. A human being, one of their friends, was badly hurt, maybe already dying, and the whole sorry situation could have been avoided if they’d only listened.
Did you listen? challenged a voice in the back of his mind. You and Hutch and Slade?
He became aware of the pickups and cars that had followed him and the ambulance to the scene. Men got out of them, stood at a distance, with their arms folded and their hats low over their eyes, watching, waiting.
That was when Deputy McQuillan roared up in his county car, stopped with a lurch and bounded out. A few more pieces fell into place in Boone’s mind when Patsy McCullough, mother of Angie and the still-unresponsive Dawson, leaped from the passenger seat and shot past the deputy.
She was a thin, bedraggled woman, no older than Boone himself—he’d gone to high school with her—and, like Nancy Winchell, she looked hard-done-by and heart-bruised as she ran toward them. Her clothes, her face, her hair—all were colorless, as though she’d been slowly fading into invisibility from the day she was born.
The EMTs put a neck brace on the boy, and one of them called to the onlookers to bring the board and a gurney.
Boone stepped in front of Patsy, just when she would have flung herself on her son, screaming his name over and over, and took her firmly by the shoulders.
“Let the paramedics do their job, Patsy,” Boone told her quietly.
“I told him to stay away from this place,” Patsy sobbed, every word hitching in her throat, raw and hoarse, painful to hear. “I told him—” Then she paused, watching in bleak disbelief as the EMTs carefully eased Dawson onto the board that would, they hoped, keep his spine stable, and strapped him in place.
With help from several of the other men, they hoisted the board onto the gurney, secured it. McQuillan, meanwhile, gathered the kids into a scared, sullen bunch and started grilling them.
Boone was pretty sure no crime had been committed, but he didn’t interrupt the process. He was still holding Patsy upright, though he let her go when she turned, every nerve gravitating toward her injured son as he was carried past. By then Angie had bolted from the squad car and, once Dawson was loaded into the back of the ambulance, she and Patsy both scrambled in behind him.
“Charlie told me to tell you that they’re calling for a helicopter,” a familiar voice said, from just behind Boone’s left elbow. “They’re going to airlift the kid to Missoula, or maybe Helena—whichever they can get to faster.”
Boone turned his head, saw Hutch Carmody standing there, and felt a twinge of relief at the sight of his closest friend. He hadn’t noticed him before.
“It’s bad then,” Boone muttered rhetorically. He hadn’t had a chance to ask about the boy’s condition, but part of him, he knew now, had been hoping for a miracle.
Hutch’s gaze moved from the departing ambulance to the water tower. “It’s bad,” he confirmed, frowning at the structure standing tall against an innocent blue sky. “That thing should have been torn down years ago,” he finished. Some of the other men, standing nearby now that they’d done what they could to help the EMTs, nodded in solemn agreement.
“Yeah,” Boone said, the word riding a raspy sigh. “Tell it to the town council and the mayor. Every time the subject comes up, some die-hard history buff backs them down.”
“Maybe they’ll listen now,” said Art Farrington, a middle-aged rancher with a face as weather-beaten as the water tower itself. He adjusted his hat, a move that conveyed his agitation.
“There’s been enough talk,” Hutch replied grimly. “It’s time to do something.”
Art and the others did some more nodding.
The ambulance screeched away, headed toward the town’s single airstrip, which was used mostly by the Hollywood types who came and went in private jets.
Hutch was rolling up his shirtsleeves as he strode toward his rig, parked with the others at the edge of the clearing. “I’ve got a winch on my truck,” he called over one shoulder without bothering to look back. “Who’s with me?”
To a man, the other locals trooped after him, rolling up their own sleeves as they went.
A protest rose in Boone’s throat—he knew what they meant to do, of course—but he gulped it back. The water tower was town property and, since there was no municipal police force in Parable, it was his job to step in.
Never, not once, had he looked the other way when somebody took the law into their own hands, not when he was a deputy and certainly not since he’d been elected sheriff, but the inevitable had finally happened. A kid had been critically injured, taking a fall from the damned thing. Dawson McCullough might be breathing his last at that very moment, and for what?
“Get these kids out of here,” Boone told Treat McQuillan. “Take them home and tell their parents what happened, and that I’ll be stopping in for a word later on.”
For once, McQuillan didn’t argue or drag his feet. “You heard the sheriff,” he said, addressing the teenagers, who looked even more badly shaken than before. “Let’s go.”
The kids straggled over to the deputy’s car and squeezed themselves in, heads down and evidently at a loss for the back talk that normally came so easily to them.
Hutch backed his rig to within fifty yards of the tower and, at the flip of a switch on his dashboard, steel cable rolled off the cog beneath the bed of his truck. Moving purposefully, without one glance at Boone and no visible hesitation, he got out of the rig again, picked up the cable and strung it to the base of the tower. There he fastened it around one of the four unsteady poles that supported the structure and fastened a hook to lock it in place.
Two other men did the same with cables unspooled from their own trucks. Normally, the winches would have been used to pull a rig out of a ditch or haul a cow from a mud hole. Today, they were being used for a very different purpose.
Once again, Boone considered putting a stop to the proceedings, but he couldn’t make himself do it. He’d climbed that tower many times as a youth, and so had Hutch and Slade and practically everybody they knew—girls included. In a few years, his own boys would probably think it was smart to shinny up that rickety ladder, just as he had back in the day, on a dare or to impress some girl.
He closed his eyes for a moment, but the image of young Dawson McCullough might as well have been branded on the insides of his lids, it was so vivid. In his mind, the deathly still face became Griffin’s, and then Fletcher’s.
Bile scalded the back of Boone’s throat.
“You might want to move to safer ground, Sheriff,” Hutch suggested mildly, as he walked past Boone on the way back to his truck.
Boone hesitated for another moment, then shook his head and walked to his squad car, slipping behind the wheel but keeping one foot on the ground as he watched, as though he might spring out again, at the last moment, and put a stop to it all.
But he didn’t.
There were three separate winch lines attached to the legs of the tower now, and a loud, grinding sound filled the muggy air as the cables grew taut. The tower swayed, timbers creaking, swayed again. The winches roared as their operators ratcheted up the power. The tower swung wildly from side to side, the word Parable painted in fading letters across the face of the massive, rust-trimmed tank, and then it toppled, the whole works, striking the ground hard enough to cause a noticeable tremor.
At last, the monstrosity lay on its side in the grass, splintered poles and boards scattered around it like giant toothpicks. Dust roiled for long moments after the collapse, and Hutch shut off his truck, burrowed through the wreckage to unfasten the hook so his winch-line could be wound back into place. As before, the others followed his lead.
Finally, Hutch approached the squad car, dust covered and grinning wanly at Boone, though his whole countenance was sad as he gazed briefly in the direction of the airstrip outside of town, where a helicopter would be landing soon—if they were lucky. Both Missoula and Helena were miles away, and it wasn’t as if there were a lot of choppers waiting to lift off. Furthermore, nobody knew if the boy was going to make it or not and, even if he managed to survive, there was no way things would ever be the same for young Dawson, or any of the McCulloughs.
“I’ll send a crew over to clear away the debris,” Hutch said presently, meeting Boone’s eyes again and holding his gaze. “If the mayor wants somebody’s head for this, offer him mine.”
With that, Hutch turned to walk away.
“Wait a damn minute,” Boone nearly barked, getting out of his car and walking fast to catch up with Hutch, who barely slowed his stride. “You and Kendra have a baby on the way, damn it. You can’t take the blame for this, Hutch—not all of it, anyhow—I won’t let you.”
Hutch sighed. He waved to the last of his partners-in-crime as they drove away, then rested that same hand on Boone’s shoulder. “Whatever happens,” he answered, “we know one thing for sure. The McCullough kid was the first kid to fall from that water tower, and by God, he’ll be the last one, too.”
Boone surveyed the remains of a town landmark, nodded glumly. It looked like something out of a disaster movie, that pile of boards and metal and grime, and some folks around Parable weren’t going to be happy about what had happened, but what was done was done.
And he was glad.
“I guess I’d better go break the news to the appropriate authorities,” Boone said finally, dreading the prospect. Because he was an elected county official, he didn’t have to answer to the town, but that didn’t mean he wouldn’t catch three kinds of hell from old Hannibal Hale, Parable’s crusty mayor.
Hale’s great-great-grandfather had been one of the first settlers in that part of Montana, and he and some other businessmen had overseen the construction of the water tower, a ploy to bring the railroad through Parable, thus putting the place on the map. The bold move had worked, too, though the tracks, lost in grass and the rubble of time, hadn’t borne the weight of a train in fifty years.
Hutch nodded again, as though he’d read Boone’s thoughts, lifted his hand from his shoulder, and continued toward his waiting truck. His cell phone played a few bars of a country love song as he moved, and Boone saw him stop dead in his tracks as he listened to whatever the caller was saying.
“I’ll be right there,” Boone heard Hutch say. “Hold on.”
“The baby?” Boone asked.
“On its way,” Hutch replied, looking both panicked and pleased. An instant later, he was in his truck, starting the engine, backing up to turn around the rig, and speeding away.
Boone silently wished Hutch and Kendra the best possible luck, climbed into his squad car and headed for the mayor’s house on River Bend Road. Hannibal was a caustic old SOB, but he wasn’t heartless. He’d be as sorry about Dawson McCullough’s accident as anybody else, though of course the town’s potential liability would come quickly to mind.
Once he’d spoken with the mayor, Boone meant to return to the office and dig in for the duration. Folks would be calling and showing up in person, most of them asking about Patsy’s boy, but there were bound to be a few bent on reading him the riot act over the destruction of the water tower.
He glanced in his rearview mirror, taking in what remained of the monument one more time before turning his full attention to the road, and the tasks, ahead.
“Good riddance,” he said in parting.
* * *
A SLEEK SILVER jet raced along the short runway just outside of Parable and lifted off, flashing against the blue sky. Knowing the plane belonged to Casey Elder, and having spotted the ambulance parked near the one and only hangar, Tara had pulled over her SUV to the side of the highway and stopped.
Elle was in the front seat this time, having won the coin toss before they left the mall over in Three Trees, while Erin rode in the back.
“That looks just like Dad’s jet,” Erin remarked.
Tara frowned, but, alarmed as she was by the sight of the ambulance driving slowly toward the highway, she didn’t pursue the matter.
“He’s only part owner,” Elle said matter-of-factly. She glanced over at Tara, already wearing the lavender overalls she’d chosen when they’d gone shopping for chicken-tending clothes. “Why are we stopped?”
“Something’s wrong,” Tara said distractedly. Private planes came and went, but Casey, a famous singer and the new owner of the mansion Kendra had once owned, was a friend, and Tara knew she’d just wrapped up a long stretch on the road. Upon her return, she’d invited Tara, Kendra and Joslyn to lunch at her place, remarking wearily that it would take a bomb to blast her away from Parable in general and her children in particular.
The ambulance reached the road and Charlie, sitting on the passenger side, waved at Tara as they passed.
Still parked, she grabbed her purse, rummaged for her cell phone, and speed-dialed Casey’s landline.
It was a relief when Casey answered with a low-energy “Hello, Tara.” If one of Casey’s children had been injured or ill, in need of emergency medical care, she’d have been onboard that jet with them.
“I just saw your jet taking off,” Tara began, feeling awkward now. “The ambulance was there—”
“A teenage boy fell from the water tower today,” Casey explained. “They were going to send for a helicopter, but my jet was right there on the runway, and the situation was urgent, so I called my pilot and asked him to make the flight.”
Tara’s stomach did a slow backward roll, then lurched forward again. “Oh, God,” she whispered. “Who— How badly was the boy hurt?”
“He’s critical,” Casey said. “I didn’t catch his name.”
Tara thanked her friend and hung up. She was shaking as she put the SUV back in gear and pulled carefully onto the highway.
“What’s going on?” Elle asked, her voice small, her eyes big.
“There’s been an accident,” Tara answered, her tone wooden.
“Did something happen to Dad?” Erin whispered, from the backseat.
“No, honey,” Tara replied quickly, trying to smile but not quite succeeding. “I’m sure your dad is fine. Once we’re home, I’ll find out the details and let you know, okay?”
“Okay,” the twins chorused, still worried.
At home, the chickens greeted Tara and the girls with hungry squawks and flapping wings. The distraction was welcome, at least from Tara’s viewpoint. For a few brief, shining moments, she didn’t think about the terrible accident Casey had mentioned on the phone.
Elle, already clad in overalls, wanted to get right down to business and start feeding chickens, gathering eggs and mucking out the chicken coop with a pitchfork. Erin, shopping bags in hand, hurried inside the house to change into the very ordinary, no-name jeans she’d chosen on the shopping expedition.
Lucy, shut up in the house while they were away from home, bounded down the steps and rushed Tara, barking for joy. The way that dog acted, a person would have thought they’d been apart for days instead of mere hours.
As always, Lucy’s enthusiastic presence and unquestioning adoration lifted Tara’s spirits. She smiled and bent to ruffle those golden silky ears in greeting. “Hello, girl,” she said fondly. “It’s good to see you again, too.”
Tara spent the next half hour showing Elle and Erin how to gather eggs—even though she’d done that first thing that same morning, there were more now, some speckled and some brown, and a few that were almost white.
“They don’t look like the ones our housekeeper buys,” Erin remarked seriously.
Elle, meanwhile, looked around at the floor of the temporarily vacant coop, nose twitching. Clearly, her interest in shoveling manure was already waning.
“What are we supposed to do with all this poop?” she asked Tara. She looked a sight, standing there in her pastel overalls, face solemn with second thoughts.
Tara grinned at her stepdaughter. “I load it into a wheelbarrow and haul it around back—way back—behind the tractor shed. This fall, and again in the spring, I’ll till it under to season. The flower beds and the vegetable garden love the stuff.” She paused for dramatic effect, enjoying Elle’s obvious consternation. “All of which, as it happens, are in constant need of weeding and watering and lots of loving encouragement.”
The flower beds, burgeoning with colorful zinnias, gerbera daisies, fat roses dopey on sunshine and numerous other horticultural delights, would have been impossible to miss, even in the excitement of arrival and the process of settling in. It was obvious, though, that Elle hadn’t spotted the vegetable garden, a fenced area behind the rickety old barn Tara had been meaning to tear down since she’d moved onto the farm. She probably spent more of her time there than anywhere else on her property, happy to kneel in good Montana dirt and tend the rows of lettuce and beans, corn and various herbs.
“Where did you think those lovely sliced tomatoes we had at supper last night, drizzled with olive oil and buffalo cheese, came from?”
“The supermarket?” Elle asked tentatively.
Erin laughed and shook her head and went in search of the wheelbarrow, Lucy swinging her plumed tail as she followed.
“Gardening is hard work, isn’t it?” Elle asked Tara. She hadn’t moved an inch, and she was still holding the none-too-clean egg she’d taken from one of the rows of straw-filled nests lining the walls of the coop.
“Yes,” Tara replied frankly, “but it’s also good for the soul. You’ll see.”
With that, she patted her stepdaughter’s shoulder reassuringly, smiled again and went off to change into work clothes of her own—jeans, a T-shirt and the pair of ugly, hopelessly filthy boots she kept on the back porch.
Joslyn called just as she was heading back outside.
Tara grabbed her cell phone from the kitchen counter, where she’d left it on the way in, and greeted her friend with a subdued “Hello,” remembering that there had been an accident earlier that day—no doubt Joslyn was calling to tell her about that.
“Did you hear?” Joslyn asked immediately.
“About what happened at the water tower, you mean?” Tara said, as she descended the back steps and started around the side of the large farmhouse to rejoin the twins at the chicken coop.
“That, too,” Joslyn said.
“‘Too’?” Tara echoed. Good heavens, what else could have happened in or around Parable so quickly?
“Let’s talk about the happy news first,” Joslyn responded.
Tara’s heart lifted a little, and she smiled to see Elle up ahead, diligently shoveling chicken manure into the waiting wheelbarrow while Erin scattered feed on the ground for the hens and rooster to peck at. “Happy news?” she repeated, confused. “What—?”
“Kendra’s in labor,” Joslyn said. “She’s at Parable General Hospital even as we speak—Slade went over to lend Hutch some moral support, and he just called to say everything’s going well. Hutch was suiting up to go into the delivery room with her as of five minutes ago.”
Tara’s eyes misted over; she knew how excited Hutch and Kendra were over the coming of this child. They both adored their adopted daughter, Madison, regarding her as their own, but they’d traveled a long and broken road to find each other again, after bitter years apart. The new baby, conceived in the passion of renewed love, would be born—and raised—within the vast reaches of their joined hearts.
“That’s wonderful,” she whispered, feeling, and acknowledging, the tiniest twinge of jealousy. What could be better, she wondered sadly, than to love and be loved by a good man, as Kendra loved and was loved by Hutch, and to produce a child by that union?
Once, she’d fully expected to live out her life as a wife and a mother and possibly even a grandmother someday. Instead, she had married Mr. Wrong and, in the end, lost everything. She slowed her pace and instinctively gazed at her stepdaughters.
Straighten up, she told herself sternly. This isn’t about you.
“So,” Joslyn went on, “once the baby actually gets here, Slade will call me with the news and I’ll pass it on to you.”
“I’ll be waiting to hear,” Tara said softly. She’d go shopping again, as soon as she knew whether the new arrival was a boy or a girl, and buy tons of baby presents.
Joslyn sighed. “The other thing,” she began, before her voice fell away.
Between her husband Slade’s tenure as former sheriff and the fact that Opal Dennison kept house for them, Joslyn usually knew about everything that went on in Parable County.
“Casey said a teenage boy fell from the water tower?” Tara prompted, after gulping hard and stopping before she reached the twins. “She didn’t know who he was, though.”
“Dawson McCullough,” Joslyn replied sadly. “It’s touch and go, from what I’ve heard. Opal is already talking about raising money to help out with the costs—Patsy, Dawson’s mom, is a single mother, barely making ends meet.”
“No father in the picture?” Tara asked.
The twins, probably reading her expression, had stopped doing their chores to stand staring at her, their faces worried and earnest and so incredibly young.
“He’s doing time, out of state,” Joslyn said without judgment. Her own stepfather, Elliott Rossiter, had died in prison, and she knew how hard incarceration was on families.
“Let me know if I can do anything, anything at all,” Tara said, feeling ineffectual. Sure, she could write a check, say a few prayers, gather vegetables from her garden to take to the McCulloughs, but that didn’t seem like much in the face of such a tragedy.
“Of course,” Joslyn told her gently. “I’d better get off the phone—Shea and Opal just pulled in, and Boone’s boys are with them—probably means Boone’s going to be working all night, poor guy.”
Tara felt another twinge, this time of guilt, rather than envy. Boone might be obnoxious, but he was her neighbor. Just the night before, he’d brought his children to her for safekeeping, after old Zeb Winchell was found dead. Rather than ask for her help again, he must have turned to Opal this time.
For some reason that hurt.
“Talk to you soon,” she told Joslyn, ending the call and tucking the cell into the pocket of her jeans.
“You said you’d tell us what happened,” Erin reminded her, standing a little closer to Elle. “In town, I mean.”
Tara nodded. Then, as best she could, she explained about the water tower, and how teenagers and even younger kids were forever climbing the thing, and now a boy had fallen. His name was Dawson, she told them, and she didn’t know how badly he was hurt.
“Badly enough to need a jet to get him to a hospital,” Elle said. As doctor’s daughters, both girls knew how serious the situation was.
Erin nodded, her hands gripping the handles of the brimming wheelbarrow, then frowned. “Isn’t there a hospital in Parable?” she asked. “I thought we passed one today, on our way out of town.”
“There’s a hospital,” Tara confirmed, remembering that Kendra and Hutch’s baby was being born there, right then. “But it’s not equipped for the kind of care Dawson will need.”
“Oh,” said Elle.
After that, all three of them went back to work, thinking their own thoughts.