Always On My Mind Read online

  “Oh no, I can do it. I don’t want you to have to get dressed, or—”

  “Or know that you were sneaking out?” Leah asked.

  Elsie grimaced. “What clued you in?”

  “Well, you’re about as clandestine as a bull in a china shop.”

  There’d been a few crazy teenage years when Leah had done her fair share of sneaking out. Her dad had always kept an extremely tight leash on her, so tight that she’d lived in perpetual danger of strangulation. It’d been painful. Beyond painful. She’d had to do all her homework immediately after school, then show it to him. And if she’d gotten anything wrong, he’d rip it up and she’d have to start over. “You can’t get anything right,” he’d snap. “Do it again. Do it perfect or don’t bother at all.” After homework, she had to put in three hours minimum at his dental office, helping with the filing and housekeeping, or whatever was needed.

  That had been the worst part.

  Spending time with him. She’d never been able to do anything right, and her self-esteem had suffered. This had all been made worse by the fact that she’d not really fit in at school either. She’d never been the girlie-girl, or the athlete, or particularly social, and then there’d been her ruthless 9:00 p.m. curfew, no exceptions.

  So she’d sneaked out.

  A lot.

  She’d sneak out to walk the beach alone. Or go to Jack’s. But if the water was rough and Jack was out somewhere with Ben raising trouble, she’d gone to her grandma’s.

  Elsie had always seemed to expect her. She’d greet Leah with a warm hug and then they’d go into the kitchen and bake something. Elsie always let Leah take the lead there, allowing her come up with whatever concoction she wanted, no matter how crazy it sounded.

  It’d soothed Leah’s aching heart and fueled her creative soul. There’d been no recriminations, no judging, and blessedly, no yelling. Elsie had never questioned her need to run away, had never so much as hinted at the worry she surely must have felt knowing that Leah had walked two miles in the dark to get to her.

  And now it was Leah’s turn to swallow her urge to ask the questions, to express the worry, and there was a lot of both. What the hell was her grandma planning to do out there in the middle of the night? “What if your knee gives out?” Leah asked her. “What if you get tired?”

  “Well goodness, honey, I’m not that old.”

  “Of course not,” Leah said. “But it’s not safe.”

  “I’ve got my smartphone and a backup battery, along with my tablet and a can of hairspray. If anyone comes at me, all I have to do is swing my purse at them and I’ll knock the perp right on his ass.” She demonstrated by giving her purse a broad swing and knocked the lamp off the foyer table. “See?” she asked.

  Leah picked up the lamp and righted it. Elsie was the most calm, rational, logical person in her life. In fact, Leah had counted on that calm, rational logic more times than she could count.

  But this didn’t seem calm or rational. Could it be the start of dementia? Alzheimer’s? Is that why Elsie had mentioned giving up the bakery? Leah’s heart clutched at the thought of losing the most important person in the world to her. “Where do you really need to go? I’ll take you.”

  Elsie sighed. “I really thought you’d be sleeping.”

  This was not an answer and didn’t assuage Leah’s worry in the slightest. “Okay, what’s going on?”

  “I didn’t want to tell you, but I…have a date.”

  Leah just stared at her. Years ago, her grandma had been married for only a short time before her husband had died of lung cancer, leaving Elsie pregnant and alone. She’d never remarried. Nor, as far as Leah knew—and despite Elsie’s claims to having had a “wild streak”—had she appeared to ever date. “A date,” she repeated.

  Elsie smiled. “I know. Hard to believe, right?”

  “No,” Leah said, shaking her head. “You’re fun, and sweet, and smart. And pretty.”

  Elsie laughed now, the sound light and musical. She was pleased. “Oh, aren’t you the one. And the same goes. Leah…” Her smile was warm. Caring. And utterly without judgment. “I’m fine. My life is exactly what I want it to be. Can you believe that?”

  “Well…sure.”

  “Can you say the same about your life?”

  Leah opened her mouth and then closed it.

  Elsie gently patted Leah’s cheeks. “Don’t ever wait around for your life. Go get what you want. Because believe me, no one’s going to give it to you. You should know that by now.” She moved to the door. “Don’t wait up, honey.”

  And then she was gone.

  Leah watched out the front window as Elsie got into her car and drove off.

  “What the hell just happened?” she asked the quiet living room. But she already knew. Her grandma had proven that she had better social life than Leah did.

  Chapter 15

  It’s your day off,” Ronald said the next day when Jack walked into his office. “What the hell are you doing here?”

  “You get anything back from forensics on the convenience store or auto shop fires?”

  Ronald studied Jack for a long beat. “Not yet. Why?”

  “I’ve been thinking.”

  “Uh-huh. With head number two, I hear. You’ve caught yourself a girl.”

  Jack didn’t bother to sigh. “Whatever you’ve heard, it’s greatly exaggerated.”

  “Well, that’s a damn shame,” Ronald said. “I was hoping it was true.” He paused. “Your daddy wouldn’t have wanted you to be the job, Jack. And you are. You’re working full-time firefighting and taking up the slack for me.”

  “About the forensics—”

  “Saw your baseball game, you know.” Ronald leaned back, hands behind his head, sighing with pleasure as he put his feet up. “You sucked ass.”

  “I had an off week. Listen, about the—”

  “You couldn’t hit worth shit. And you lost that fly ball. I’ve never seen you choke like that before.”

  Jack leaned forward and thunked his head on Ronald’s desk.

  Ronald laughed. “Son, go home. Go take that girl of yours out. Have some fun.”

  Fun. If fun was having Leah beneath him, panting out his name in that breathy way she had of making him feel superhuman, then yeah. He could use some more fun. He lifted his head. “In the report for the convenience store, we recorded that footprint in the mud along the west wall. Men’s size thirteen. Sneaker.”

  “Yes. The one the vagrant claimed was his.”

  Jack opened his mouth, but Ronald cut in. “I know, he was barefoot when we found him, but he admitted that he’d been wearing sneakers earlier, remember? He’d gotten hot and kicked them off.”

  “We never located the shoes,” Jack said, knowing if they matched that print to the actual footwear the vagrant had been wearing, he was as good as sunk in court. But it wasn’t the right direction. Jack could feel it. “You were working on the tread to name the brand. Did you get that?”

  Ronald frowned. “Not yet. I had it sent out. That could take a few weeks. We don’t have it on urgent, since we’re not sure we have arson here.”

  “A size thirteen isn’t a standard size,” Jack mused.

  “No.”

  “And the vagrant’s foot is size ten.”

  Ronald was already shaking his head. “You know as well as I do that he doesn’t have his own shoes. He wears whatever he took out of someone’s trash or what someone gave him. He claimed to not remember where he’d left the shoes.”

  “Did you ask him if they were too big for him?”

  Annoyance crossed Ronald’s face. “Before or after he said he saw Santa on the roof smoking crack, Jack? We both know those shoes weren’t his. The question is, was there an arsonist and was the print his?”

  “The print showed heavy tread loss,” Jack said. “Especially on the outside of the shoe.”

  “Yeah? So our guy is a runner. So what?”

  “So that’s also an unusual wear. It