Looking for Trouble (15 page)

The only solution she could come up with in that moment was to lie there and feel sorry for herself, so that was what she did. She sniffled. She clenched her eyes shut. She cried a little more. When that got boring, she reached out and swiped some frosting off the plate and licked her fingers.

It turned out that wallowing in self-pity was kind of boring. And there were so many people who had bigger problems than she did. Real problems. Sick kids. Foreclosed mortgages. Terrible injuries from wars. Really, she was just being a big baby.

She sat up and stared blindly at the paper sitting in front of her. As her energy returned, she slipped the next section free of the paper to read the local advice column.
Dear Veronica
was her favorite part of the paper. It was selfish, maybe, but Sophie liked knowing that other people in town had secrets and problems, too.

Still, she stared blindly for a moment at the advice section, too tired to even focus. Then her swollen eyes cleared, and unfortunately she wasn’t staring blindly anymore. Her eyes had focused right on the bolded headline: Vixen Has Her Claws in My Son.

“Nope,” Sophie said aloud. It wasn’t about her. It was some other vixen with her claws in some woman’s poor, unsuspecting son. Sophie wasn’t the only slut in town, surely.

Dear Veronica,

My son just came back to town after many years away. As you can imagine, I’m overjoyed to be reconciled with him.

Jackson has a fairly fluid population, Sophie told herself. People come and go.

The problem is that as soon as he set foot in town, the neighborhood floozy set her sights on him.

There were several neighborhoods in the Jackson area. And probably several floozies. It absolutely wasn’t her.

He’s a man, so I can’t expect him to see past her harmless facade when she’s offering free sex.

Harmless facade. She glanced down at her cardigan.

How do I get rid of her? I just got him back and I don’t want to cause another rift, but this little tramp will ruin his life!

Signed,

There’s a Strumpet on My Street

Yeah. Shit. It was definitely about Sophie.

This crazy old woman was never going to leave Sophie alone.

Maybe she should move back in with her dad. And maybe dye her hair. Sophie’s resemblance to her mom was just too much for Rose Bishop to deal with. It probably didn’t help that she actually was sleeping with the woman’s son.

At least she hadn’t been named. Sure, people might be able to figure out that Alex was the prodigal son described in the letter, but no one knew he was hooking up with anyone, much less that it was Sophie. So this was more of a private jab than a public taunt. All right, it was both.

Out of curiosity, Sophie read the answer, and it made her want to whoop with triumph.

Dear Strumpet on My Street,

First of all, men are fully capable of resisting free sex, no matter how it’s disguised, so please don’t excuse your son for his actions. Now, as far as I can tell, the transgression here is sex between two willing participants, so my advice to you is to get over it. People like sex. In fact, our bodies are designed to like it very much indeed, so if this so-called floozy has a merry sex life, then more power to her. Your slut shaming is far more embarrassing than anything she could ever do in the privacy of her home.

If your son is actually in danger of throwing his life away for the sake of free sex with a stranger, then maybe you should’ve raised him to be a better man. Yet I somehow suspect you’re overreacting and he will emerge from this trap with nothing more than a few scratches for his trouble.

If you want any chance of making this reconciliation with your son work, keep your mouth shut, look the other way and stop shaming women and coddling men.

Well. That wrapped Rose up in a nutshell. But somehow Sophie didn’t think the woman would take the advice to heart.

The outrage Rose was going to feel as she read that actually cheered Sophie up. She wasn’t the malicious one here. She didn’t have anything to be ashamed of.

Okay, she had some things to be ashamed of, but not nearly as much as the woman wanted to pin on her. Sophie couldn’t spend her days hiding from every little rumor. If she were that much of a coward, she’d never have seen sunlight.

She’d go to work and volunteer to deal with all of the kids’ programs today. She’d interact with the parents and sign people up for future programs and she’d look everyone straight in the eyes as she did it. This scandal wasn’t going to defeat her. Not that she’d let anyone know, at least.

But first, she’d have one more cinnamon roll.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

T
HE SIGN SAID
Providence—2 miles, but Alex wasn’t exactly hopeful that he’d find good fortune there. They were meeting to walk through the final plans for tomorrow’s dedication, and Alex couldn’t help but think it was an appropriate site for the ceremony. Dead buildings, dead town, all to commemorate their dead family.

His dad’s disappearance had been the original injury, but it hadn’t been definitively fatal. They could have recovered. They could have survived.

His mom had always been difficult. She’d always been dramatic. She’d been fond of declaring people her enemies and making sure they knew it. She’d collected friends easily and just as easily turned on them. Life had been chaotic, but it had been life.

Their dad had been the calmer one. The steady one. But the less stable their mom had gotten, the more likely he’d been to walk away. To calm things down, maybe, but he hadn’t taken his sons with him. He’d just say, “I’ll be back,” and he’d leave them behind with a crying, raging mother. But he had always come back. An hour later. A day. He’d always come back until he hadn’t.

But dads walked out all the time. In small towns and big towns, in Wyoming or anywhere else in the world. People lost parents to death or divorce or abandonment. Alex could’ve dealt with that as well as anyone else did. A little damage, a few dings, but he could’ve gotten up and ridden on.

But he hadn’t lost his dad, he’d lost his entire family. First his father, and then, within days, his mother had lost whatever balance she’d had. There was no way her husband would’ve left, and anyone who said otherwise was the enemy. They were evil, cruel, idiotic. Maybe they were even in on his disappearance. At first, she’d said he must have been hurt or killed, but that idea had quickly become too awful to tolerate. If he was dead, he was gone forever, and Rose Bishop
knew
he was coming back.

He had to come back.

For Alex, the worst loss of all had been his older brother. After all, his mother had always been unstable, and his dad had always been working. But Shane... He’d always been
there
. The smart, strong brother who was only one year older but had seemed so much bigger.

Shane had been his friend, his brother, his protector, his hero. And then he’d been lost, too, sucked into their mother’s delusions.
He’s coming back, Alex. Mom thinks she found him in New Mexico. He’s been living on an Indian reservation. We’re all driving down tomorrow.

I don’t want him back,
Alex had started thinking. Who wanted a dad who didn’t want you?

It hadn’t taken him long to start saying exactly that out loud. And then worse things. That he hated his mom. That he hated Shane. That he hoped Dad was dead because that was what he deserved.

His anger had only grown as he’d gotten older. As their mom had lost job after job. As they’d moved from house to duplex to cabin to apartment.

Shane had been perpetually sympathetic, echoing things he’d heard from their mom.
We have to help her. She can’t do it on her own. We have to be the men of the house.

By fifteen, Alex had been determined not to be anything to anyone. At eighteen, he’d made sure of it by disappearing just like his dad had. It had felt cruel and empowering. It had felt right.

He didn’t know if it had been right anymore. On one hand, their mom hadn’t gotten any better. He’d avoided years of dealing with whatever was wrong with her, be it mental illness or self-absorption.

On the other hand, maybe he and Shane could’ve had a relationship if Alex had stayed in touch. Maybe they’d have been brothers again.

Shit. Who could say? There was no changing anything now, and no point wasting more time thinking about it.

He pulled into the parking lot of the ghost town and parked the bike next to his brother’s truck. The place wasn’t quite as dead as it had been, but Alex refused to see that as any sort of metaphor.

This was where the Bishop money had gone. The place had been forced alive with cash.

He’d been here long ago with his brother and dad, but there’d been no parking area and no big glossy sign to mark the place. The road that ran through Providence had been nothing more than a wide expanse of tamped ground broken liberally by sagebrush and grass and an occasional scrub oak. All the vegetation had been cleared away now and the road smoothed until it looked like a wagon full of hay could come rolling down it at any moment. The buildings looked better, too, from what he could see.

Alex walked down the road.

Yes, the buildings definitely looked better. The Bishop money had been put to good use. Nothing had been painted or buffed to a shine, but the fallen boards and collapsed roofs had been repaired. Signs that had long ago been buried in the dirt had been resurrected and rehung. The saloon and mercantile had their identities again. A couple of the small houses even looked almost livable. And almost all the buildings had a placard set in front of them with text and sometimes pictures identifying the buildings and who had used them.

Alex heard voices ahead just before Merry Kade stepped into the road at the farthest end of the town and waved at him. He raised a hand and took a deep breath to try to gather some patience before seeing his mom.

“Hi,” he said to Merry when she met him halfway through town. “It’s quiet out here.”

“Yeah, weekdays during the slow season aren’t exactly our busy time. But this summer was pretty exciting! And we’ve set up a few field trips for the elementary school later this month. I can’t wait. They’re going to love it.”

“Absolutely,” he said, wondering how many kids she knew who got that excited about history, but he kept that thought to himself. If anyone could inspire school-age kids to love history, it would be Merry.

“Come on,” she urged. “I have something so great to show you. The signs were installed yesterday. Your family is the first to see them!”

Apparently he was moving too slowly, because Merry grabbed his hand and pulled him forward, her feet sending up tiny puffs of dust as she dug in.

Alex shook his head at her enthusiasm, but he picked up the pace, raising a hand to his brother as Shane turned around to watch.

“You weren’t trying to resist her, I hope?” Shane drawled as they drew closer.

“I could see it was futile.”

“Alex!” their mother gushed, and rushed over—an awkward, limping kind of rush—to give him a hug.

“You okay?” he asked.

“Oh, you know. I’m old. The cold doesn’t help.”

He frowned at her weary sigh, but gave up. If there was something seriously wrong, she’d make a big deal out of it.

“Well?” Merry finally asked. “What do you think?” She gestured toward a tall sign, which stood next to a foot trail angling through the grass ahead. A narrow creek flowed next to it, though it was nearly dry at this time of the year.

Their mom moved back toward the sign with a satisfied nod. “‘The Wyatt Bishop Memorial Trail,’” she read in a booming voice. “Look at that. Shane, Alex, your father is finally getting the recognition he deserves.”

Below the name of the trail was a picture of the town of Providence taken just after the flood had destroyed most of it.
The Fox Creek, which this trail follows, was the lifeblood of the Providence community, providing clean drinking water and irrigation for crops. However, a series of environmental catastrophes led to the destruction of most of the town when the creek flooded in 1899.

There was a description of a landslide and then the eventual burst of that natural dam along with some other historical details, but Merry was waving them forward along the trail. “There’s more,” she said excitedly.

They all followed her down the trail another fifty feet or so and there it was, a metal plaque set on a stake overlooking the creek bed. A picture of his father was etched into the silvery metal.

Wyatt E. Bishop

1948–1989

Beloved husband and father, and cherished

member of the Bishop family,

one of the founding families of

Providence, Wyoming.

This trail is dedicated to his life and memory.

“Oh, boys,” their mother
whispered. “Oh, it’s so beautiful. Look at that.”

Alex looked, but all he saw was hypocrisy. They’d left off the part about him being the beloved lover of a married woman, not to mention that the Bishop family had turned its back on his young sons. But Shane seemed to like it just fine. He put his arm around their mom and they both stared at the plaque.

Alex just cleared his throat. “It’s nice. Thank you, Merry.”

She was grinning but had to wipe away a tear. “Your mom helped me come up with the inscription. We couldn’t fit everything she wanted, but I hope it’s all right.”

His mom had likely written three paragraphs.

Shane turned to pull Merry into a hug. “It’s beautiful,” he said. “And I’m so glad there’s something here to remember him after he spent so many years in that canyon.”

Alex looked up the trail to where it disappeared into a slash of broken rock and climbing trees.

“So awful,” their mom murmured. “Here all this time. Right here with us. I knew he’d never leave.”

Shane glanced over Merry’s head and met Alex’s eyes. “Have you been up there yet?”

“No,” Alex said. His skin prickled. He wanted to turn and leave.

“Come on. We’ll walk a little ways up.”

“We’d better not,” Alex said. “Mom doesn’t look up for it.”

“I’ll stay with her,” Merry volunteered. “The office has a space heater. We’ll sit and have a coffee and work out the last-minute details for tomorrow. You two go on.”

Well, shit.

He glanced toward the trail. “We should really help,” he insisted.

“Oh, sure,” Merry answered. “Because you boys will contribute a lot to how the chairs should be set out.”

Shane nudged his shoulder. “Come on. Let’s get out while the getting is good.”

Alex didn’t have any better arguments at that point. He supposed he could have just offered the truth, but he wasn’t sure what that was. Why didn’t he want to walk up the trail with his brother? His father’s body was long gone and Alex didn’t believe in ghosts.

So he shook off his hesitation and stepped onto the Wyatt Bishop Memorial Trail. It felt like any other trail, so he walked on.

After a few moments, he glanced back to see his mom and Merry walking through the town. “I wouldn’t think Mom would support any of this. Shouldn’t she be raging about how the money should belong to us? About how Gideon Bishop left this money to a ghost town just to spite her and shut her up and cover up the truth?”

Shane chuckled. “Yeah, there was plenty of that for a while. When I filed my lawsuit against the estate, she was over the moon. She wanted me to teach them a lesson. Shit, I guess that’s what I wanted, too, but I got over it. And she did, too.”

“Really?” he asked, shocked.

Shane flashed a smile. “Okay, she had a little trouble getting over it.”

“A little?” Alex asked.

This time Shane burst into full-out laughter. “Yeah. A little. The same amount of ‘little’ trouble she has getting over everything.”

“Yeah. She’s stubborn. I’ll give her that.”

“When her psychiatrist suggested that we have a funeral or a memorial or something, Merry offered this trail, the plaque, and Mom jumped on it. I don’t know. It was like she wanted to let it go if someone would just acknowledge
something
.”

Alex watched the canyon coming closer as they walked. “Doesn’t seem like she wants to let it go too much.”

“I’m hoping that it’s just coming to a head. It’s almost over. She’s panicking a little at the thought, but once it’s done... I don’t know. If it’s not over after tomorrow? Shit. If she won’t help herself, there’s nothing I can do anymore.”

Alex rolled his eyes, but Shane watched him without a hint of anger.

“Let’s just get through this and see. You’re already here. What’s the harm?”

“Fuck, man. When did you become the personification of patience? You got kicked out of school for fistfights a half dozen times.”

“The truth?” Shane asked.

“That’d be a first in this family.”

Shane shrugged. “All right. The truth is that I was just as angry as you for a long time. After you left, I was pissed as hell. I wanted to make people pay. That’s why I tried to take my pound of flesh after Granddad died. And then I met Merry.”

“Really? Love of a good woman?”

“No. It’s not that. She’s had a rough life, she’s had challenges and pain, but she sees the good. And that shamed me.”

Alex felt his whole body tighten at that. With shame or something like it. For mocking his brother. For thinking he knew anything about it. After all, Alex had been in love, too, and he hadn’t been able to do a damn thing with it. He’d fumbled it and dropped it and walked away from the mess he’d made. What the fuck did he know?

He swallowed the thickness in his throat and nodded. “All right.”

He noticed then how far they’d walked. How narrow the trail had gotten. Grass bent over the dirt. Their legs brushed it aside. The smell of aspen touched him, and then it was inside him. Every time he smelled that scent, he was home again. He never wanted to be. It just hit him. Home. Hiding from his brother during a game of tag. Running from the house after an argument. Sitting at a campfire with a girl, hoping to lose himself in her body for a few minutes.

His leg brushed sagebrush and that bright menthol scent broke over him, too. That was an earlier memory. Of being here. With his dad, with Shane.

“You found him,” he said as they reached the mouth of the canyon.

“Yes.”

The shade swallowed them and the air was suddenly cold. “Here?”

“About thirty minutes up the trail. I was on horseback.”

“Happenstance?”

Shane barked a dry laugh. “No. Merry again. I’d taken her up a higher trail to show her something, and I spotted a flash of white. I didn’t think it had anything to do with Dad. I only rode up out of curiosity.”

Alex stopped and looked up the narrow canyon. The tumbled rocks looked like they were frozen, just waiting for a signal to start rolling down again, straight toward Alex.