A Creed in Stone Creek Read online

  “Not another traffic citation, Alice,” Melissa protested. “I was only gone for two seconds—just long enough to pick up my breakfast!” She held up her sandwich bag as evidence. “Two seconds,” she repeated.

  Alice bristled. “This is a no parking zone,” she pointed out firmly. “Two seconds or two hours, it makes no never-mind to me. A violation is a violation.” She made a little huffing sound and tore off the ticket, leaning to snap it in under one of the windshield wipers, even though Melissa was standing close enough to reach out and take the bit of paper directly from the woman’s hand. “You’re the county prosecutor,” Alice finished, still affronted. “You should know better.” She shook her head. “Leaving your car running like that, too. One of these days, it’s bound to get stolen and then you’ll be piping a different tune, young lady.”

  Melissa sighed, retrieved the ticket from her windshield, and stuffed it unceremoniously into the pocket of her blazer. “This is Stone Creek, Arizona,” she said, knowing this was an argument she couldn’t possibly win but unable to avoid trying. She was, after all, a lawyer—and a card-carrying O’Ballivan. “Not the inner city.”

  “Crime is everywhere,” Alice remarked, with a sniff. “If you ask me, the whole world’s going to hell in a handbasket. I shouldn’t have to tell you that, of all people.”

  Melissa gave up, climbed into the sports car and set her bagged breakfast on the other seat, on top of her briefcase. She drove to the single-story courthouse, a brick building that also served as the local DMV, town jail and sheriff’s office, parked in her customary spot in the shade of a venerable old oak tree and hurried inside, juggling her purse, the briefcase, and her rapidly cooling sandwich.

  Melissa’s official headquarters, barely larger than her assistant Andrea’s cubicle, opened off the same corridor as the single courtroom and the two small cells reserved for the rare prisoner.

  Andrea, at nineteen, wore too much eye makeup and constantly chewed gum, but she could take messages and field phone calls well enough. Because those things comprised her entire job description, Melissa kept her opinions to herself.

  Dashing past Andrea’s desk, Melissa elbowed open her office door, since both hands were full and her assistant showed no sign of coming to her aid, set the bag from the café-bakery on her desk and dropped her purse and briefcase onto the seat of the short couch under her framed diplomas and a whole slew of family photos. She ducked into her tiny private restroom to wash her hands and quickly returned, stomach grumbling, to consume the sandwich.

  Andrea, popping her gum, slouched in the office doorway, a sheaf of pink message forms in one hand. Her fingernails were long and decorated with what looked, from a distance, like tiny skulls and crossbones. A sparkle indicated that the design might include itty-bitty rhinestones.

  The girl wore her abundant reddish-brown hair short, with little spikes sticking straight up from her crown, and her outfit consisted of black jeans and a T-shirt with a motorcycle logo on the front.

  Melissa sighed. “We really should talk about the way you dress, Andrea,” she said, plunking into her chair and rummaging in the paper bag for her wrapped sandwich and the accompanying wad of paper napkins.

  “It’s Casual Friday,” Andrea reminded her, with a faintly petulant note in her voice, fanning herself with the messages and frowning. Her gaze moved over Melissa’s expensive slacks, blouse and blazer, and she shook her head once. “Remember?”

  The sandwich, though nearly cold, still tasted like the best thing ever. “Is there coffee?” Melissa chanced to inquire, once she’d chewed and swallowed the first mouthful.

  Andrea arched one pierced eyebrow, still fluttering the messages. “How should I know?” she asked. “When you hired me, you said it wasn’t my job to make coffee—just to file and answer the phone and make sure you got all your messages.”

  Melissa rolled her eyes. “Speaking of messages?” she prompted.

  Andrea sashayed across the span of floor between the door and the desk and laid the little pink sheets on Melissa’s blotter. “Just the usual boring stuff,” she said.

  Melissa glanced at the messages, chewing.

  There was one from her twin sister, Ashley. Ashley and her husband, Jack, were in Chicago, showing off their adorable two-year-old daughter at a family reunion.

  Olivia, Ashley and Melissa’s older sister, was looking after Ashley’s cat, Mrs. Wiggins, but there were long-term guests—a group of elderly pals—staying at the B&B, and Ashley, who owned the establishment, was counting on her twin to stop by once a day to make sure the wild bunch were still kicking. Since one of them was a retired chef, they cooked for themselves.

  The second message was from her dentist’s receptionist. She was due for a six-month checkup and a cleaning.

  The third: the biography she’d ordered last week was waiting at the bookstore over in Indian Rock.

  “Sometimes,” she joked dryly, losing her appetite halfway through the sandwich and dropping it back into the paper bag, which she promptly crumpled and tossed into the trash, “I wonder how I stand all the pressures of this job.”

  Andrea looked blank. “Pressures?”

  “Never mind,” Melissa said, resigned.

  Just then, Judge Carpenter appeared behind Andrea, wearing a nifty summer suit some thirty years out of style and a wide grin. His hair was a wild gray nimbus around his face, and his blue eyes danced.

  He’d always reminded Melissa of Hal Holbrook, doing his Mark Twain impersonation.

  Andrea moseyed on out, and Melissa saw that J.P. was holding a steaming cup of coffee in each hand.

  “God bless you,” Melissa said.

  J.P. chuckled and advanced into the room, pushing the door shut with a jaunty thrust of one heel. He set a cup before Melissa and sipped from his own after pulling up a chair facing her desk.

  “He’s here,” J.P. announced. He wasn’t much for preambles.

  Melissa frowned, confused. “Who?” she asked, watching the judge over the rim of her cup.

  J.P. leaned forward a little way, and dropped his voice to a confidential tone. “Steven Creed,” he said.

  Melissa’s mind flashed on the drop-dead gorgeous man she’d encountered at the Sunflower that morning. He and the little boy were probably the only people in town she didn’t know, since she’d grown up on a ranch just outside of Stone Creek.

  Except for college and law school, and then a stint in Phoenix, working for the Maricopa County prosecutor, she’d lived in the community all her life. So, by process of elimination…

  “Oh,” she said. “Right. Steven Creed.”

  Word had it that Creed was a distant cousin of the McKettrick clan, over at Indian Rock, and he was in the process of buying the old Emerson place, bordered by Stone Creek Ranch, the sprawling cattle operation that had been in Melissa’s own family for better than a century. Her brother, Brad, lived there now, with his wife, Meg, herself a McKettrick, and their rapidly growing family.

  “He rented that space next door to the dry cleaners,” J.P. went on. “He’s a lawyer, you know. He’ll be hanging out a shingle any day now, I’m told.”

  “Stone Creek could use a good attorney,” Melissa said, largely uninterested. Was this the reason J.P. had asked for a Friday morning meeting—because he wanted to shoot the breeze about Steven Creed? “Since Lou Spencer retired, folks have had to have their legal work done in Flagstaff or Indian Rock.”

  J.P. took a loud sip from his coffee cup. “I hear Mr. Creed plans on working pro bono,” he added. “Championing the downtrodden, and all that.”

  That caught Melissa’s full attention. Stone Creek wasn’t exactly a hotbed of litigation, but it had its share of potential plaintiffs as well as defendants, that was for sure. There were disputes over property lines and water rights, Sheriff Parker hauled in the occasional drunk driver, and some of the kids in town seemed to gravitate toward trouble.

  “That’s interesting,” Melissa said, vaguely unsettled as some per
tinent recollection niggled at the back of her brain, just out of reach. As for Mr. Creed, well, she tended to be suspicious of do-gooders—they usually had hidden agendas, in her experience—but she was also intrigued. Even a little pleased to learn that Steven Creed wasn’t just passing through town on his way to somewhere more fashionable, like Scottsdale or Sedona.

  She remembered the child, his ebony hair a gleaming contrast to Creed’s light-caramel locks. “The boy must take after his mother,” she mused.

  “Boy?” J.P. echoed, sounding puzzled. Then a light seemed to go on inside his head. “Oh, yes, the boy,” he said, shifting around on his chair. “His name’s Matthew. He’s five years old, and he’s adopted.”

  Melissa blinked, a little taken aback by the extent of his knowledge until she recalled that J.P.’s youngest daughter, Elaine, had moved back to Stone Creek after a divorce two years before, and opened a private, year-round preschool called Creekside Academy.

  Of course. Creed must have enrolled the child in advance—and Elaine had passed the juicy details on to her father.

  J.P. finished up with a flourish. “And there’s no Mrs. Creed, either,” he said.

  According to Elaine—she and Melissa had gone through school together—from the day she’d jettisoned the loser husband and returned to the old hometown to make a fresh start, her dad had been after her to “get out more, meet people, kick up your heels a little… As if Stone Creek were overrun with single men,” Elaine had grumbled, the last time Melissa had run into her, a few days before, over at the drugstore.

  Melissa, who hadn’t had a date in over a year herself, had sympathized. Between her sisters, Ashley and Olivia, and her big brother, Brad, somebody was always after her to go on out there and find True Love. Easy for them to say. Brad had Meg. Olivia had Tanner. And Ashley had Jack. The unspoken question seemed to be, So what’s your problem, Melissa? When are you going to get with the program and corral yourself a husband?

  Melissa frowned.

  J.P. either missed the expression or ignored it. Rising to his feet, he lobbed his empty coffee cup into the circular file with the grace of a much younger man. Back in the day, during high school and college, Judge Carpenter had been a basketball star, but in the end, he’d chosen to pursue a career in the law. “Well,” he said cheerfully, “I hereby declare this meeting over.”

  “That was a meeting?” Melissa asked, arching one eyebrow. The subtext was: I wolfed down the one turkey- sausage biscuit I allow myself per week just so you could tell me Steven Creed is single?

  “Yes,” J.P. said. “Now, I think I’ll go fishing.”

  Melissa laughed and shook her head.

  J.P. had just left when Sheriff Tom Parker peeked in from the doorway. Tom was a hometown boy, a tall, lean man with dark hair and, usually, a serious look on his face.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “Hey.” Melissa smiled. She and Tom were old friends. Nothing more than that, though—he was attractive, in a rustic sort of way, if shy, and he’d been divorced from his high school sweetheart, Shirleen, for years. Everybody in Stone Creek knew he’d fallen head over heels for Tessa Quinn the day she opened the Sunflower Bakery and Café—everybody, that is, except Tessa.

  “Just wanted to remind you that Byron Cahill gets out of jail today,” Tom said, looking spiffy in his summer uniform of brown khaki.

  Melissa felt a mild shiver trip down her spine. Two years ago, when Cahill was still a teenager, he’d gotten high one Saturday afternoon, compounded the problem with copious amounts of alcohol, swiped his mother’s car keys and gone on a joyride. The joy was short-lived, as it turned out, and so was fifteen-year-old Chavonne Rowan, who was riding shotgun.

  When the “borrowed” car blew a tire on a sharp curve outside of town, it shot through a guardrail, plunged down a steep cliff into Stone Creek, teetered on its nose, according to witnesses, and went under. Two fishermen had rescued Byron; he came out of the wreck with a few cuts and bruises and a really bad attitude. Chavonne, it turned out, had died on impact.

  Byron was arrested as he left the hospital in Flagstaff, where he’d been taken by ambulance, as a precaution. Although uninjured, he’d been admitted for a week of detox.

  Melissa had successfully petitioned the Court to have young Cahill tried as an adult, over his mother’s frantic protests that he was a good boy, just a little high-spirited, that was all, and then Melissa had thrown the proverbial book at him.

  It was a slam dunk. Byron was convicted of second-degree manslaughter and dispatched to a correctional facility near Phoenix to serve his sentence—just over eighteen months, as it turned out.

  Velda Cahill, his mother, who cleaned motel rooms and served cocktails to make ends meet, rarely missed a chance to corner Melissa and tell her about all the things poor Byron was missing out on, all because she, Melissa, “a high-and-mighty O’Ballivan,” had wanted to show off. Let everybody know that the new county prosecutor was nobody to mess with.

  Melissa felt sorry for Velda. Never reminded her that Chavonne Rowan was missing out on plenty—the rest of her life—and so were her devastated parents.

  Tom Parker knotted one hand into a loose fist and tapped his knuckles against the framework of the door to get Melissa’s attention, bring her back to the present moment.

  “You be careful now,” he said. “If Cahill so much as looks cross-eyed at you, call me. Right away.”

  Melissa blinked a couple of times, dredged up a smile. “You don’t think he’d come back to Stone Creek, do you?” she asked. “It’s not as if the town would throw a parade to welcome him home, you know.”

  Tom tried to smile back, but the light didn’t spark in his eyes. “I think Cahill’s the type to move back in with his mother and mooch for as long as she’ll let him. And you know Velda—she won’t turn her baby boy out into the cold, cruel world.” He paused, rapped at the door-frame again, for emphasis. “Be careful,” he repeated.

  “I will,” Melissa said. She wasn’t afraid of Byron Cahill or anybody else.

  Tom hesitated. “And speaking of parades—”

  Melissa, who had turned her attention to a file by then, looked up. She was getting a headache.

  “That was a figure of speech, Tom,” she said patiently.

  “We’ve got Stone Creek Rodeo Days coming up next month,” Tom persisted. “And Aunt Ona had to resign from the Parade Committee because of gallbladder problems. She’s been heading it up for thirty years, you know. Since you and I were just babies.”

  Melissa saw it coming then. Yes, sir, the light at the end of the tunnel was actually a train. And it was bearing down on her, fast.

  “Listen, Tom,” she said earnestly, leaning forward and folding her hands on her desktop. “I’m a good citizen, an elected official. I vote in every election. I pay my taxes. On top of all that, I fulfill my civic duty by keeping the town—and the county—safe for democracy. Believe me when I tell you, I feel as much sympathy for Ona and her gallbladder as anyone else does.” She paused, sucked in a deep breath. “But that doesn’t mean I’m going to join the Parade Committee.”

  Tom blushed a little. “Actually,” he said, after clearing his throat, “we were hoping you’d take over, sort of spearhead the thing.”

  Again, Melissa thought of her siblings.

  Olivia, a veterinarian and a regular Dr. Doolittle to boot, apparently able to converse with critters of all species, through some weird form of telepathy, oversaw the operation of the local state-of-the-art animal shelter, and directed the corresponding foundation.

  Ashley, too, was almost continually involved in one fundraising event or another—and their brother, Brad? He was a country-music superstar, even though he’d technically retired around the time he and Meg McKettrick got married. His specialty was writing whopping checks for pretty much any worthy cause—and doing the occasional benefit performance.

  “You have the wrong O’Ballivan,” she told Tom, feeling like a slacker. They were overachievers, her
sibs, with a tendency to make her look bad. “Talk to Olivia—or Ashley. Better yet, have Brad buy you a parade.”

  Tom grinned faintly and then gave his head a sad little shake. “Olivia’s too busy,” he said. “Ashley is out of town. And Brad has his hands full running Stone Creek Ranch—”

  “No,” Melissa broke in, to stop the flow. “Really. I wouldn’t be any good at organizing a parade. I’ve watched a lot of them, on TV and right here in Stone Creek. I’ve seen Miracle on 34th Street four million times. But that’s the whole scope of my experience—I wouldn’t know the first thing about putting something like that together.”

  The sheriff colored up a little, under the jaw and around his ears. “You think Aunt Ona was an expert on parades, back when she took over? No, ma’am. She just pushed up her sleeves and plunged right in. Learned on the job.”

  “There must be someone else who could do this,” Melissa said weakly.

  But Tom shook his head again, harder this time. “We got the Food Concession Committee, and the Arts and Crafts Show Committee, and the committee to deal with the carnival folks. Everybody’s either already volunteering, doing something else or out of town.”

  Melissa set her jaw. By then, she was starting to feel downright guilty, but that didn’t mean she was going to give in.

  Out front, Andrea chirped a sunny greeting to someone. Melissa felt an odd little zip in the air, like the charge before a summer thunderstorm.

  “Then I guess you’ll have to cancel the parade this year,” Melissa said.

  And that was when the little boy she’d seen at the café that morning, eating pancakes at the counter, popped into her office.

  He looked up at Tom, then over at Melissa, his dark violet eyes troubled. His lower lip began to wobble.

  “There isn’t going to be a parade?” he asked.

  CHAPTER TWO

  QUICKLY—BUT NOT QUITE quickly enough, as it turned out—Steven pursued Matt through the open doorway, scooped him up from behind and immediately locked eyeballs with the certifiably hot woman he’d checked out while he and the boy were having breakfast earlier that morning, over at the café.