“Guilty.”
“Jace is my best friend. We’re in the same class at school.”
“So I’m guessing that means you’ve probably got a part in tonight’s Spring Fling.”
“Yep. This year the third grade is doing a patriotic show. I get to be Abraham Lincoln.”
“You should see his dorky hat.”
Owen glared at his sister. “Shut it. You’re just jealous. Abraham Lincoln was the Great Emancipator. When your class did the Spring Fling, you had to be a stupid pansy.”
Here we go. Claire sighed. The two of them bickered about everything from which row of the minivan they each would claim to whose turn it was to feed Chester.
She fought back her stress headache and opted for diversion, her favorite fight-avoidance technique. Divide and conquer, the time-proven strategy. “Macy, go ask Evie what you can do to help sort the beads.”
As soon as her daughter left, she turned to Owen. “When you finish your homework, you can play the Lego Star Wars video game your dad bought you this weekend, before we have to go home and get you in your costume for the pageant.”
“Can we go to McDonald’s for dinner?”
He always knew how to hit her up when she was tired and stressed, when the challenge of cooking a healthy, satisfying meal for her family seemed completely beyond her capabilities. “We’ll see how well you do with your homework first.”
In an instant, he reached to whip his homework folder from his backpack at the same time Riley rose to give him space on the desk for the ream of papers he always seemed to bring home.
“I’ve got to run. Let me know if you think of anything else that might help the investigation. No matter how small or insignificant the information might seem to you, it could provide the break we need.”
“I will. Thank you again for all you’ve done.”
“You can wait and thank me after I catch the ba—” He caught himself with a quick, apologetic look to Owen. “The bad dudes. Good luck tonight, Abe. You were always my favorite president.”
Owen grinned as he spread his homework on the desk and reached for a pencil. Claire followed Riley back to the workroom, where he took time to say good-bye to his mother and sisters and the other women still sorting away.
“Wow. This looks like a big mess,” he said.
“You let us worry about the beads,” his mother said. “You just get back out there and catch whoever did this to our Claire.”
“No pressure, right? On my way, Ma.” He kissed his mother’s salt-and-pepper curls, then headed for the door.
Three
The more things change, the more they stayed the same, and all that.
Riley sat in the auditorium at Hope’s Crossing Elementary School, feeling a little like he’d traveled back in time. The place looked just as it had when he was here twenty-five years ago. Same creaky folding chairs, same red-velvet curtains on the stage.
The third-grade class of Hope’s Crossing Elementary School had been presenting a Spring Fling Spectacular for more than thirty years. Riley could vividly recall his own stint in their play, which his year had been a salute to the original miners who staked claims in the area. Despite old Mrs. Appleton’s stern warnings to the contrary all through their rehearsals, he had been overwhelmed by the crowd and the excitement and had stupidly locked his knees right in the middle of a rousing song about turning silver into gold.
His spectacular dive off the stage as he passed out into the lap of the grumpy fourth-grade teacher holding the cue cards was probably still legendary in the hallowed halls of Hope’s Crossing Elementary School.
He smiled at the memory as he sat beside Angie, his second-oldest sister. Angie’s son Jace—Owen Bradford’s best friend—was starring as the narrator of tonight’s pageant.
He had been away from town for a long time, since he left an angry, troubled punk who couldn’t wait to get out. When he was a kid, he had loathed these rituals, these prescribed, hallowed traditions that beat out the quiet rhythm of life in a small town. Now, fifteen years later, he was astonished at the comfort he found in the steadfast continuity of it all.