Carry Me Home (17 page)

THE DECISIVE PEOPLE

It was only a couple blocks, just as Cal had said. But then, the whole town of Fulton didn’t seem to be much bigger than that—what Zoe could see of it in the dark, at least.

Cal pulled the truck and trailer into a long driveway. “Hang on,” he told her as he hopped down. He was hustling around the front of the truck, pulling her door open. “Careful,” he said. “Snow, and you’re not dressed for it.” He took her hand to help her down, then reached inside for her laptop bag, slung it over his shoulder. “Okay. Watch your step.”

He led her across the plowed driveway, up concrete steps that had been shoveled once, were dusted again now by the still-falling snow, to the front door of a neat one-story ranch-style home, illuminated by a porch light that cast a yellow glow over a semicircle of brick siding. He knocked his snowy boots against the wall, gave them a scrape across the mat, then opened the front door and called out, “Hey, Mom!”

Zoe followed him into a tiny entryway. “Here,” he said, shutting the door behind them. “Give me your coat.”

She was pulling off the puffy jacket and handing it to him when a slim, dark-haired woman came into the hall.

She stopped at the sight of them. “Well, hi,” she said with a smile.

“Hey, Mom,” Cal said, hanging Zoe’s coat on a black iron hook, setting her laptop case and purse on the floor next to it. “I brought you a damsel in distress. This is Zoe Santangelo. Her car’s high-centered in the ditch. Zoe, this is my mom, Raylene.”

“Oh, no,” his mother said. “Poor you. What was it? An accident, or just skidded off in the storm? Is everybody all right?”

“Well,” Cal said, looking a little grim, “that’s what we need to figure out. Whether it was an accident.”

“My goodness,” Raylene said. “What does that mean?”

“Tell you later,” Cal said. “Zoe’s a little shook up. I’ve got the new Bobcat on the trailer, need to take it on back to my place before the snow gets any deeper. Got to feed Junior, too. I thought you could take care of Zoe for me for a little while, maybe give us dinner.”

“I couldn’t . . .” Zoe was totally off-balance now. “I don’t want to impose. Maybe you could just give me a ride home, Cal. But my car . . .”

“Yeah,” Cal said. “Your car, the sheriff, all that. Don’t worry, we’ll get it done. Give me twenty minutes.”

“It’s no imposition,” Raylene told her. “It’s just chicken pot pie. I’ll stick a couple more potatoes in the oven and we’ll be all set. You can’t go home by yourself, not after being in an accident. Come on in. You need a cup of tea, I’m sure, and maybe a hot bath, too. Dinner’s not for an hour. Plenty of time.”

Zoe caught Cal’s expressive glance and almost smiled. “A cup of tea would be great,” she said. “Please.”

“Twenty minutes,” Cal promised. “I’ll be back, and we’ll get all this figured out.”

He was out the door again just as a man who looked to be in his sixties came in from the back of the house, saw Zoe, and stopped.

“Well, hi,” he said, exactly as his wife had.

“My husband, Stan,” Raylene said. “This is Zoe, Stan. Cal brought her home to us.”

“Oh?” He lifted gray eyebrows.

Surely this was how Cal would look in thirty-five years or so. Tall and broad-shouldered, which she was beginning to recognize as a family trait. It was more than that, though. It was the way he stood, so upright. The way he took up space. And his face. The face of a man who’d spent his life outdoors, in all the elements. He was a little battered, a little weathered, but still nothing but strong. A little intimidating, and a lot tough. Yep. Exactly what she would have imagined.

“She’s been in an accident,” Raylene said. “Come on into the kitchen, Zoe. Much nicer than standing around here. Stan, would you go get me four baking potatoes from the root cellar while I make Zoe a cup of tea? You can give them a scrub for me, too, if you don’t mind.”

“I could do that,” Zoe said, trailing after the two of them into a compact kitchen, its yellow walls and cherry-patterned curtains cheerful after the stormy darkness outside. “I don’t know where the root cellar is, but I could scrub and . . . whatever.”

“No. You sit,” Raylene commanded, and Zoe sat.

“And everybody thinks Cal gets that nature of his from me,” Stan said. “Shows what they know.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Raylene said with a laugh. “Potatoes?”

“We live to serve.” He gave Zoe a smile, headed through a door at the far end of the room, and came back in a minute with four baking potatoes, dumped them into the sink and began to scrub.

“So,” he said again, twisting around to look at Zoe, who was accepting a cup of tea from Raylene. “What’s this accident about? Anybody else hurt?”

“No,” Zoe said, swishing her tea bag in her mug. “It was just me. My car’s in the ditch.”

“Ah,” Stan said. “Well, it happens. Cal pulled somebody else out just a month or so ago, I heard. Couldn’t get you out with that Bobcat on the trailer, I guess.”

“Well, actually,” Zoe said, concentrating hard on removing her tea bag and placing it carefully in a saucer, “that was me, too. Before.”

“Really.” Stan leaned against the counter, crossed his arms in his heavy flannel shirt, and looked at her. “Both times?”

“Quite the coincidence, I guess. Or I’m a bad driver,” she added with a self-conscious laugh. “I can hear you thinking it. It’s a little more complicated than that, though. At least I think it is.” She put a hand to her head, which was aching a little.

Raylene saw it. “Don’t go quizzing her right now, Stan,” she told her husband. “She’s not up to it. Time enough when Cal comes back. Not that much of a coincidence, either,” she told Zoe. “Cal’s driving that stretch a good ten times a day. Lucky for you he was there, that’s all.”

“He call about her car yet?” Stan asked, keeping to the point. “Or could be he’s pulling it out now.”

“No,” Zoe said. “I mean, he said he’d call once we got here. It’s . . . really stuck.”

Stan nodded. “I could make that call, anyway. Where did it happen?”

“Um . . .” Zoe shook her head in confusion. “I’m sorry. I don’t know. The . . . other way, I guess. I mean, I was coming back from Union City, and Cal was coming the other way, and he didn’t turn around, so . . .” She stopped, feeling like an idiot. “I’m sorry. I was a little shaken up.”

“North,” he decided. “About how many miles from here?”

“I don’t know that, either,” Zoe admitted. Because she didn’t. Had Cal driven for five minutes? Ten? More? She couldn’t have said. “I’m sorry. I don’t know. I should have called Triple A right away, but I was . . .”
Terrified
.

Raylene was rubbing olive oil over the potatoes, putting them on a cookie sheet, and sticking them into the oven. “Of course you were,” she said. “Never mind. Cal will know. He’ll take care of it. You just drink your tea and don’t worry about it. And nothing needs to happen now,” she told Stan, who had opened his mouth. “Nothing at all. You always want to do something, but you know, sometimes nothing at all has to happen right now.”

Which was why she was still sitting there when Cal showed up again. She heard the front door open and close, and a minute later, he’d breezed into the room in his stockinged feet.

“Well, hey, Professor,” he said. “You’re looking a little more stout.”

“Professor?” his mother asked.

“Yeah.” He pulled a chair out, sat down next to her, and she felt a little better, a little steadier to have him there. “Dr. Santangelo here is a bona fide professor, up there at the university. And not what you’d think, looking at her pretty face. Not Renaissance poetry or something. Geological sciences. She’s an expert in hydrogeology, in fact. She’s got plans to tell me all about the water table under the farm. With diagrams. In color, even, with labels and arrows and all that. And a laser pointer.”

“Only if the price is right,” she said. She was smiling, even though she could tell that this was exactly why he was teasing her. That he was trying to cheer her up, shake her out of it.

“Sounds like you know her from more than pulling her out of the ditch,” Stan said.

“Yeah,” Cal said with a martyred sigh. “Kinda couldn’t help it, once I met her, because she made a play for me right from the start. I had to practically pull her off of me, tell her I wasn’t that kind of guy. But I’ve warmed up to her some since then. She’s about sweet-talked me around to her way of thinking. I’ll admit, I’m about to go for it, shy as I normally am. She’s just too hard to resist.”

“Cal,” his mother warned, but she was smiling.

Zoe couldn’t help it. She was laughing. “I didn’t impress him,” she told his parents, “when he pulled me out of the ditch the first time.”

“Tried to pay me, for one thing,” Cal said. “That was pretty flattering.”

“It wasn’t that I thought you were
poor
,” she tried to explain. “It was just that you went to all that trouble. I thought it was the right thing to do.”

“Nope,” Cal said. “But then, it takes a while to learn the cultural mores of a new society.”

“Cal,” his mother warned again, “you’re
bad
. We’re honestly not all that backward,” she told Zoe.

“I know that,” she hastened to say. “I mean, of course I don’t think that.”

“We’re a little scary, though,” Cal said. “Because Zoe thinks that this time around, when she went into the ditch, it wasn’t so simple. First time, she just hit black ice, spun out. But this time . . .” He looked at Zoe.

“There was somebody behind me,” Zoe said, the playfulness gone. “And he was chasing me. That’s why I skidded.”

“
Chasing
you?” Raylene looked shocked, and Zoe couldn’t blame her. She knew it sounded crazy.

“We should back up,” Cal said. “Because it’s complicated.”

“First, though,” Zoe said, “my car? Shouldn’t I do something about that? Call Triple A?”

“I already called,” Cal said. “Vern over at Vern’s Auto will come get it as soon as he can. Probably wait till morning, once the storm blows over and it’s light out. He’ll give you the special friends-and-family rate on the whole deal, because we had a talk, so don’t you worry about that.”

“A . . .
talk
? What kind of talk?” she asked in alarm. “I’m grateful that you called,” she hurried on at the look on his face. “Don’t get me wrong. But I have Triple A. That’s what it’s for. I can’t pay extra for towing.”

He sighed. “That’s the point. You won’t pay extra for towing.”

“But . . .” she began, then stopped, put her hand to her aching head again. “Look. You didn’t want me to pay you before, and I get that. I do. But I don’t want you to pay for me. So we’re clear. You didn’t do that, did you?”

“I didn’t pay the bill, no,” he said. “If you don’t like what I did, you can go on and rip me a new one tomorrow. I’ll put on my flame-retardant suit and everything. Just not tonight, all right? You’re not up to your usual standard right now, and it’d wear you right out. Besides, that car’s in a little bit of a tough spot. I wanted somebody who knew what he was doing to get it out of there. So I called the best guy I know, and I got you the best deal.”

“He is the best,” Stan assured her. “Cal’s right. Easy to damage a car, towing it wrong. Then you’re in a world of hurt, all kinds of expense.”

“Yeah, Dad,” Cal said, glowering at him. “Thanks. She doesn’t need to hear that.”

Zoe sighed, rubbed her forehead. “I don’t mean to sound ungrateful. That you stopped . . . I’m so grateful. You don’t know how much. It’s just . . .” She scrubbed at a nonexistent spot on the old-fashioned Formica dinette table with her fist, tried not to let it overwhelm her. The fear, and now the money. More money. And she didn’t have a car.

“Yeah,” Cal said, his voice gentle now. “I know what it was. That’s why the friends-and-family rate. I promise that you don’t have to dance with me again, or anything else, either, in exchange. Just a friend helping a friend. All right?”

She felt the tears rising, blinked them back with an effort. “All right,” she said. “But please. Ask me first. I mean, explain it to me first. Please.” She did her best to ignore the glance Raylene and Stan exchanged.

“Ah,” Cal said. “Too bossy again?”

“Well . . .” she admitted.

“What did I say,” Stan muttered. “Gets it from his mother.”

“Yeah, Dad,” Cal said. “I don’t think that’s the only place. I think there was basically no hope for me.”

“So my car,” Zoe said. “Do you think it’s bad?”

“I’m afraid you could have some damage there, yeah,” he said. “Hard to tell in the dark, but the way you hit, how hard you hit? It’s possible. Vern said he’ll try driving it when he gets it back to the shop, give me a call and let me know what he thinks. I’m guessing you won’t know for sure until he can get under it on Monday and take a better look.”

“That’s what I was afraid of.” She tried to shake it off. Worrying wouldn’t help. But she knew why she was worrying about money. Because worrying about what had happened was too frightening.

“She hit the ditch mighty hard,” Cal told his parents. “I came around the curve near Johnson’s and saw it happen. She spun out, did a doughnut, and went right over the snowbank, bottomed out on it, front end slammed into the culvert. Not so good.”