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  “You think someone broke in?” she said, her voice dropping to a whisper.

  “I think we’ll be careful until we know.” He reached for the door handle.

  “The sheriff,” she began, reaching for the cell phone in her purse.

  “Is a half hour away, as usual,” Larry said as he pressed the release lever.

  She knew the old joke was true out here; when seconds counted, the police were only minutes away. It was why people here were generally self-reliant. They had to be.

  “Alden?” she asked.

  “Perhaps.” He glanced at the cell phone. “That thing have a camera on it?” “Of course.”

  “Might be good to have a record.”

  “And a weapon,” she said grimly.

  She darted over to one of the outside racks and grabbed up two of the big garden stakes that were sharpened for pushing into the ground; in a pinch they could be lethal. And she was getting mad now. Whichever possibility was true, she wasn’t going to let it go unchallenged.

  Larry read her expression, gave her a quick nod of approval that was like a salute. He took one of the stakes.

  “Let’s find out what’s going on here,” she whispered.

  Chapter 16

  There was a light on in the office. She could see it from back here, in the section of the store that held the candles and lamp oil they carried for when the power went out. Cedar was on the outer edge of the grid, and often the last to be restored, so that self-reliance wasn’t just useful, it was necessary.

  She knew she hadn’t left that light on, just as she knew she hadn’t failed to lock the back door.

  They moved quietly through aisles they both knew well, avoiding the decorative wind chimes and sticking to the concrete floor rather than the wood section of the older side. Larry paused just outside the open office door. Jessa held her breath. She could hear faint tapping noises from inside. Then they stopped. “Breathe.”

  The word came from inside and was as much command as comment, but for an instant Jessa couldn’t. But she felt Larry relax, and finally managed to draw in that needed air. St. John.

  “I should have known,” she muttered.

  “Car’s parked.” The tapping resumed.

  “We came from the other direction, not past the parking lot,” Larry said mildly, stepping into the office, Jessa on his heels. And once she was inside, she almost forgot to breathe all over again.

  “What,” she said, staring, “are you doing?”

  “Finishing.”

  He was staring at a computer monitor, his fingers flying over a keyboard. Neither of which belonged here, or had been here when she’d closed last night.

  But of even more concern was the fact that it seemed nearly all of the stores files were piled all over the office. And all thought of asking him how he’d gotten in here vanished.

  He made a half dozen more keystrokes, entered a save command, then stood up and gestured at the chair he’d vacated. “Sit.”

  “I am not Maui,” she snapped.

  He blinked, as if startled. “Please,” he added, as if that was all that was bothering her. When she didn’t move, he reached out and took her arm, as if to guide her, as if she didn’t understand what he wanted her to do. The contact seared through her, making her resent this, and him, all the more. Why couldn’t she keep her head straight around this guy?

  Because you never could, she reminded herself. She made an effort to pull herself together.

  “What. Are. You. Doing?”

  He looked puzzled by her careful enunciation. He glanced at Larry as if her uncle held the answer to her odd behavior. But Larry was simply watching, an oddly amused expression on his face. Clearly he wasn’t suspecting St. John of anything nefarious, even if he did have the guts of Hill’s spread all over the room.

  “Inputting,” he said, indicating the piles with a hand gesture that silently added the words, “Of course.” As if she should have realized.

  “What into what? And if you can indeed speak in full sentences,” Jessa added, “this would be a very good time to demonstrate.”

  “Your data. Software’s ready.”

  For all its terseness, that was, for him, two complete sentences. It probably would normally have been “Data. Software.” Two whole extra words.

  “Software,” she repeated. She looked at the equipment now on her desk. There was no brand name on it, but it was obviously new. “How about the hardware?”

  “This, for now. More, if you like it.”

  “I—we—can’t afford this.”

  “Later. Look,” he said, again gesturing at the chair, and this time adding more quickly, “please.”

  “I’ll run along and check on your mother, girl. You two children play nice.”

  Her uncle’s teasing words sent a flash of memory shooting through her, of one of those long-ago summer days by the river, when she had realized Adam didn’t play. At anything. He didn’t even fantasize about the future. It was only later that she’d understood that the sweetness of childhood play was something he’d never been allowed to learn, and you couldn’t fantasize about a future you didn’t think you were ever going to see.

  Slowly, she sat in the chair.

  Within minutes she realized several things. First, the computer she was sitting at was fast, powerful and high-end. Second, the software it was running was a dream come true; it did every last thing she’d wanted and a few more she hadn’t even thought of. Third, and perhaps most startling, it appeared that every bit of the store’s information had already been entered.

  This time when she spoke, she was looking at him with more than a little awe. “What have you done? Have you been working on this all night?”

  “Most,” he said.

  He didn’t look or act particularly tired, certainly not like she would be if she had done a marathon like this. The only sign at all was his stubbled jaw, a bit more than the day he’d first arrived here. The look had never appealed to her that much. Until now.

  She stared at him. “I don’t know what to say. How to…thank you.”

  He shrugged. “Thank Barton.”

  “I will, whoever and wherever he is. But all the work you did—”

  The shrug again. “Grunt work.”

  “It would have taken me forever,” she said. “Because I would have been…”

  This time, when she almost wished he would interrupt her, he didn’t. But after a moment of her silence he said softly, “Hurting.”

  Her eyes widened. And for the third time this morning she nearly forgot to breathe.

  “You knew,” she said, her voice tiny. “You knew how much it would hurt, because of all the disagreements my father and I had over this.”

  And for the third time he shrugged. “Done.”

  “Why?” she asked, still watching him intently. “Needed it.”

  “So you just decided to break in here in the middle of the night like some good little elf and take care of it all?” “Goblin.”

  “What?”

  “More goblin than elf.”

  She blinked. Had he just made a joke? Before she could react, a scratching came at the back door. Uncle Larry must have let Maui out, and he’d come over to check on her. That the dog felt able to leave her mother again this morning was a good sign, she told herself.

  She started to get up, but St. John stopped her, indicating with a gesture that he’d get the door for Maui. With another gesture at the computer monitor, he conveyed perfectly well, if silently, that he wanted her to continue to explore the new setup.

  Which, to be honest, was exactly what she wanted to do. She couldn’t quite believe it was all here, everything she’d wanted, as if it had truly been custom tailored for her and for Hill’s. Which, apparently, it had.

  She heard Maui’s happy bark of greeting; the big golden had no reservations about St. John. That comforted her, as did the whimsical notion that somehow the dog knew his grandfather had once adored this man, as well.
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br />   To her amazement, she heard St. John greet the dog in turn, using nearly complete sentences.

  “Morning, Maui. Come to check on her? Good. She needs you, too, now.”

  She paused in her explorations to greet the sweet-hearted animal, then went back to the computer. She was aware—very aware—of St. John standing in the office doorway, but he seemed content enough to simply watch as she marveled over each new facet she discovered. When she found she could not only cross-reference the customer list with inventory, but the inventory with any number of possible suppliers she wanted, she couldn’t help exclaiming about it.

  “Bot,” St. John said.

  She glanced at him. “What?”

  “A bot. Checks supplier Web sites periodically. Specials, deals.”

  Her gaze whipped back to the screen. “It will do that?”

  “Slowly,” he said, with a grimace. “Working on that.”

  She looked back at him. “Going to personally run high-speed fiber optics all the way out here?” Somehow it didn’t seem at all unbelievable.

  “Settle for DSL.”

  “I’d be delighted with DSL. I—” “Jessa!”

  Her mother’s voice startled her out of whatever she’d been going to say. Naomi Hill hadn’t set foot in the store of her own volition in weeks, and Jessa didn’t know whether the fact that she had now was good or bad. Judging by the urgent tone of her voice, she was leaning toward the latter.

  “Jessa! Are you all right?”

  Her mother appeared in the office doorway. She gave St. John a curious look, but her focus was on her daughter. Jessa crossed the office quickly.

  “I’m fine, Mom. What’s wrong?”

  “Larry told me that you had a run-in with Al Alden this morning.”

  Jessa didn’t look at St. John, but then she didn’t have to; she sensed his sudden tension, felt his newly sharpened gaze on her as if it were a physical connection between them.

  “It was nothing, really, Mom.”

  “That’s not what Larry said. He said the man accused you of some kind of conspiracy against him.”

  She managed to get out a credible laugh. “And you can imagine how crazy that made him sound. It was nothing, Mom. In fact, it just made him look bad in front of Mrs. Walker and a few others.”

  Seemingly reassured now that her daughter was intact and relatively unscathed, Naomi let out a compressed breath that actually sounded angry.

  “That man,” she said, with a fierceness that warmed Jessa, both for the love it implied, and the simple fact of it’s reappearance after so long. “I never quite trusted him, no matter how well he charmed everyone else in this town.”

  Jessa chose her next words with care, as much for the man listening so intently as for her mother. “I know. I remember you saying so when I was a kid.”

  St. John went even more still, seeming to barely breathe now.

  Naomi was patting her arm now. “But Larry said you were brilliant. That you made a fool of him, pointing out that he couldn’t spread lies about you being not smart enough to be mayor and then turn around and say you were clever enough to engineer whatever all his problems are.”

  “He opened the door for that one himself,” Jessa said with a smile and a hug for the woman who had apparently rediscovered at least some bit of life outside her own horrible grief. “Yes. Well.”

  Her mother suddenly seemed to recall they were not alone. She turned to look at the man in the doorway, who hadn’t spoken a word. Not that that fooled Jessa; she knew he’d taken in every bit of what had been said.

  “You must be our mysterious benefactor,” her mother was saying to St. John. “I don’t believe I’ve heard your name, just that you appeared one day.”

  There was no real accusation in her tone, but she still had a bit of the demeanor of a mother protecting her child. Something St. John had never known, Jessa realized. And yet he responded to it just the same.

  To her amazement, he introduced himself with an old-world kind of grace and civility—and full, elegant sentences—she wouldn’t have thought the brusque, taciturn man he’d become capable of.

  “Dameron St. John, Mrs. Hill.” He took her hand gently, with the slightest of bows over it. “It’s a true honor. And my deepest condolences, heartfelt.”

  Jessa gaped at him, while her mother gave him a startled smile. Then, as the older woman looked up at the dark, younger man, something odd came into her eyes, something puzzled.

  “You remind me of someone,” she murmured.

  Jessa saw him go very still. He straightened and backed up a step. But he said nothing more, as if those three complete sentences had drained him of any words at all. And only then did she notice Uncle Larry was standing in the doorway, watching this odd little tableau with that fey sort of interest that made her wonder anew just what he was seeing.

  “You can see the girl’s fine, now, Naomi. Let’s be going. It will be good for you—and for Jessa—if you’re seen out and about. And your friends miss you.”

  Her mother didn’t look happy about whatever he’d persuaded her to do. “I don’t know—”

  “One small step, Mom,” Jessa said. “Just a start. Then come home. Stay inside for a week, if you want.”

  She gave in at last, and let Larry lead the way out the door. Maui watched them, then looked at Jessa. “Go,” she said. “It will distract her to watch out for you.”

  The dog trotted after them as if he’d understood every word. And Jessa wasn’t at all sure he hadn’t.

  “Who’s watching who?”

  She looked at him, then saw, as usual, nothing she could read in his face. But his eyes held a wary, edgy look.

  “I’m not sure it matters,” she said.

  They spent the rest of the morning going over the computer program in detail, interrupted occasionally by a customer.

  “Need help,” he said as, unasked, he helped her load several bags of garden soil into the back of a pickup.

  “I have Greg Walker around in the afternoons, after school. He’s a good worker.”

  “More.”

  “I like working.” Although she had to admit the twelve-hour days and frequent nights spent on paperwork were beginning to wear on her. Although that, she thought, might just change, thanks to the amazing computer system he’d installed, and that she still didn’t quite know how to thank him for. “Distraction.”

  “Yes. Problem?”

  He stopped for a moment, whether at her tone or her mimicking of his speech pattern, she wasn’t sure. But before either of them could speak, another customer called out from inside the store.

  “I’ll finish,” he said.

  She hesitated, then nodded; there were only two bags left anyway. “You’re all set, Mr. Cardenas,” she told the pickup’s owner, an elderly gentleman with gardening gloves sticking out of his back pocket. “Will Matt be home to help you unload?”

  “I’ll wait until he is,” the man said with a grin. “No point in breaking my back when my grandson’s trying to beef up for the football team.”

  Jessa laughed. “Give him my best, and good luck to him,” she said, then headed inside.

  She found Catherine Parker, a teacher from North Side Elementary, at the counter with a stack of cans of the expensive cat food Jessa always stocked for her. She was the only one who bought the stuff, but she bought enough of it every week—Jessa didn’t want to know how many cats the woman actually had—so that they actually broke even on it.

  “They’re making cat treats now,” Jessa said as she wrote up the sale, thinking how much easier it would be to simply enter it in that amazing new software. The software with the bot that had found out that bit of information about the treats in its first perusal of the company’s Web site.

  “Really? The furry kids would love that. Could you order some?”

  “Of course,” she said, smiling inwardly, thinking that the fancy system had already begun to pay for itself. She would order the treats this afternoon, wh
en she reordered the food, and then—

  “—busy morning, what with Tyler Alden and all.”

  Jessa suddenly tuned back in to Catherine’s chatter. “What?”

  “You didn’t hear? Poor kid, showed up at school today with a broken arm. Fell out of that old maple tree in their yard. Must have landed on his face, too, school nurse says he’s going to have a black eye.”

  Reckless kid, that Adam Alden. Always falling and hurting himself.

  Another black eye? That boy’s always fighting.

  He’s bruised up again? Wonder what he ran into this time?

  The words from long ago beat at her, and as she had then, she wanted to scream at those long-ago voices, “Can’t you see? He’s not clumsy, he’s not fighting, at least not like you mean.”

  “Jessa? Are you all right?”

  “Fine,” she said mechanically. “You just reminded me of something I need to do.”

  The woman left with a promise to stop by and pick up the cat treats as soon as they came in. Jessa just stood there for a moment, staring at nothing. “Jess?”

  She didn’t even jump at his quiet voice behind her. Didn’t react to his use of the nickname that he, who noticed everything, didn’t seem to realize betrayed him. She was too enveloped by an old, aching pain. But this time, she wasn’t a child who could be convinced to remain quiet, this time she wasn’t a child who knew what she should do but didn’t know how to do it without causing even more pain to someone she cared about so much.

  She turned to look at him. “Tyler Alden arrived at school today with a broken arm and a black eye. He said he fell. Out of that old maple tree.”

  She knew how it would hit him, because she remembered too well that he’d used that story once himself, one among many. And it did hit him; he didn’t just go quiet and still, he went rigid.

  “I made his father angry this morning, and he took it out on the most defenseless person under his control. You know how it works.”

  He swore under his breath.

  “He took it out on Tyler,” she said, and then, before she’d even realized she’d decided it was time, she added the words that would change everything.