Learning to Trust Page 5

  Yup. Boss in training.

  Christa bit back a smile and kept her tone serious. “I know a lot of children who would love that kind of attention.”

  “We do.” Vangie stopped, but she didn’t let go of Christa’s hand, and when she said the next words, she worked her way further into Christa’s heart. “He loves us so much. He tucks us in every single night. He says our prayers with us. Then he kisses Nathan good-night. Then me. And then—” her tone hitched slightly “—he gets up and walks away. Down the hall. Just him. I hear his footsteps, Ms. Alero, and they’re always alone. So sometimes I wish he had someone else to talk to. To be with. To laugh with. Instead of being all alone every single night.”

  Vangie’s compassion didn’t just grab Christa’s heart. It wrenched it open. She wasn’t just trying to set her dad up for dates.

  The precocious child was trying to set him up for a joyful life. The unselfishness of Evangeline’s ploy made Christa realize the girl had gotten more than the killer smile and good looks from her father.

  She inherited his passion to make things right in the world. To fix things. To look out for others. What a wonderful combination it was. “You’ve got a loving and giving heart, Evangeline Moyer.”

  “Well, thank you.” Vangie moved toward her desk, musing. “Now I just have to figure out the long division I’ve been practicing with Dad at home, memorize the states and get Dad on a date. Maybe even by this weekend.”

  Tug had called Vangie an overachiever.

  He was correct, but Christa hoped he saw the reasoning behind her actions.

  All she really wanted was for her daddy to not be alone.

  Chapter Five

  The local TV station wanted to do an on-air introduction between Tug and a single nurse who worked at Central Washington Hospital. They’d emailed him a time frame and a picture of the very pretty woman, and let him know the whole thing would be paid in full by a local car dealership whose tagline was “Have We Got a Match for You!”

  Evangeline thought it was amazingly romantic.

  Maybe it was by an eight-year-old’s standards. Thirty extra years changed that perspective.

  He refused the offer graciously, citing the campaign, time restrictions and a conflict of interest because the family that owned the dealership were contributing supporters of his campaign. That wouldn’t look right to anyone and he knew his opponent would be watching closely, so why give him ammunition?

  Tug slipped into the middle school halfway between lunch and dismissal.

  This was the “dead” time in schools. The most rigorous and weighted courses were the morning focus at Golden Grove Middle School, following the premise that kids learned better before lunch, but that left the afternoon more lax.

  He saw a few kids hanging around a side hallway. They scattered as soon as they spotted him.

  Bad sign.

  He moved their way. Called to them in a soft voice.

  One stopped.

  The others ducked into classrooms.

  He motioned to the girl who’d stopped to wait, then followed his instincts into the boys’ bathroom.

  The smell of weed smoke hit him when he opened the door. The bathroom was empty. Time was short, because the buses would arrive in less than ninety minutes.

  He keyed his radio and called Renzo for backup. His first instinct was to call for a search. Courts had ruled that suspicion of drug use wasn’t enough cause for a full school search, but that wasn’t why he scratched the idea. For the moment, he wanted those boys to think they’d gotten away with something. Once they thought they had the upper hand, he’d go for the jugular.

  The principal wouldn’t like it. She’d throw a fuss, but if they were going to solve this school’s problems before they grew worse, they needed to jump on this. Better to have the kids understand expectations in September than be surprised by a school-wide search in November.

  He didn’t take the seventh-grade girl to his office. No way was he going to interview a kid without witnesses. He escorted her to the main office, sat her in a chair, then squatted in front of her.

  She looked scared.

  Good. She should be afraid. Kids that smoked pot or dealt drugs should fear cops because they were breaking the law. On purpose.

  “What’s your name?”

  She stared at him, then turned her face away.

  “I can tell you her name,” cut in the assistant principal. “It’s—”

  “I’d prefer to hear it from her,” Tug told the woman. “But thank you.”

  The girl set her jaw hard.

  Tug pretended he didn’t have a care in the world. He slid out a chair from alongside the assistant principal’s desk and took a seat. “I’ve got all day,” he assured the girl and he used his most nonchalant voice. “My kids can take the bus, there’s someone there to watch them, and it wouldn’t be the first time I’ve had to stay all night on a job. Don’t expect it will be the last, either.” He settled back, stretched, then yawned. The stretch was for effect. The yawn was quite real. Thoughts of Christa and those two orphaned boys had interrupted his sleep the night before.

  “You can’t keep me here all night.” The girl’s eyes widened in indignation, then narrowed. “You’re just trying to scare me. Like they do on cop shows. I’m not scared.” False bravado darkened her expression. “When those buses come, you have to let me get on.”

  Tug held her gaze for a few long beats, then quirked his jaw. “Wrong answer. First, it would be easier to talk to you here, rather than at the station, but that can be arranged.” He paused as another deputy sheriff came into the room. “Renzo, thanks for coming right over.”

  “No problem.” Lorenzo Calloway didn’t sit. He folded his arms across his chest and loomed. Also on purpose. “Drugs in schools bring me on the run. We taking her in?”

  “That’s up to her.” Tug hunched forward. “We can do that or just call her parents to come hear what she has to say.”

  Her face paled.

  She darted a glance around as if looking for help. The assistant principal surprised Tug by saying, “Tillie, you know you don’t do the things they’re talking about. Tell them who you are and what you know.”

  “And get beat on by my brother tonight? I don’t think so.” The girl—Tillie—made a face and shook her head. “You know Hayward, Miss Spencer. If he ever had a nice bone in his body, it’s long gone.”

  “Your brother hits you?” Tug kept his voice deliberately soft. “I’m sorry, Tillie.”

  “So now you’re going to go all nice on me because you think I’m a poor kid who doesn’t know better. I know better, and Miss Spencer is right. I don’t do any of the stuff those boys are into, but if I don’t play by my brother’s rules, someone gets hurt, and that someone is usually me. And I don’t like getting hurt.”

  That was a game changer.

  Tug couldn’t send the girl into a situation where she might get beaten up by her brother. “Listen.” He reached into his pocket and gave her his card. “I hear you. I don’t want you to get hurt, either, and I want to say thank you to you for stopping when I told you to. You did the right thing.”

  “When school’s over, the right thing often turns out to be the stupidest thing because those boys are going to tell Hayward,” she told him in a frank voice. “He’ll know by suppertime, and if I’m very lucky, he might be too wasted to do anything about it.”

  “Do you want to go into foster care, Tillie?” The assistant principal’s face stayed compassionate as she asked a very difficult question.

  “No, ma’am. That would just about kill my mama. My little brother needs someone around to make sure he’s taken care of after school. He’s got me and I’ve got him.”

  With a miserable older brother running the show. Tug handed her the card. “Are your mom and dad around at all?”

  The
question made her squirm, or maybe it was how to phrase the answer that unnerved her. Finally she said, “There’s no dad. Mom works at the nursing home. But she has the afternoon shift. That’s the only one they had open when she got to be a nurse last year.”

  Tug read her expression. She was caught in a tough spot. Hardworking mother, no father, an older brother on the road to nowhere good and a little brother. “All right, Tillie. I won’t say anything more, and don’t take the card home. Memorize my number. Leave the card at school. I don’t want your brother finding it, okay?”

  She held his gaze, then nodded. Her expression softened. “Thank you.” She stood, started for the door, then stopped. “Tillie Anderson.” She looked over her shoulder at Tug. “That’s my name, sir. Tillie Anderson.”

  “It’s nice to meet you, Tillie.”

  Her wince indicated it might not have been all that nice for her to meet him, but she went back to class.

  Tug spoke with the assistant principal, left a message for the principal, thanked Renzo for a quick backup, then went over to the elementary school, a few hundred yards away.

  He paused by Nathan’s classroom door. Peeked in. The first-grade class was thoroughly engaged in a story. Twenty-three kids, so young and innocent. In a few years, Vangie would be attending the middle school. Then the high school. Nathan would soon follow. Which meant he needed to do whatever he could to fix the troubled school now.

  His phone buzzed.

  It was a call from that local reporter, the one he’d spoken to yesterday morning, requesting an interview in place of the on-air date.

  Aunt Grace’s words came back to him. This could help spread your teen ministry.

  Was it right for him to capitalize on something Vangie shouldn’t have done? Or was he foolish not to jump on board because he could use his fifteen minutes of fame to reach more teens?

  He took the call, agreed to an after-school interview at his home, then hung up the phone. When the buses had pulled out of the drive, he brought Nathan over to Christa’s room to pick up Evangeline. “Any calls from the home front?” he asked Christa when he came in the door.

  Bemused, she nodded. That cute worry line re-formed, and the urge to smooth it away didn’t seem quite so surprising today. “Not from, but to. I called your mom three times, which makes me a nervous new surrogate mother who probably knows next to nothing about caring for little boys and my ineptitude is showing.”

  “I’d go with caring and concerned,” he corrected her. He smiled at her, and when she glanced up, she held his gaze.

  He wanted to keep on smiling like this. Just like this. “My mom’s worked with new parents before. She knows the drill. And I don’t think there’s such a thing as too much caring, is there?”

  “Can we go to Grandma’s and see the boys?” Vangie pleaded. “I can play with them and we can get my ponies and stuff out of the attic.”

  “Mom kept some old toys in storage in case they did foster care again,” he explained to Christa. To Vangie, he said, “We’re not going to Grandma’s. We’re meeting with a reporter to talk about your video.”

  “For real?” she squealed. “About the lady they want you to date?” She stopped packing her always-laden backpack and tossed her hands in the air, deliberately dramatic. “Dad, I am so proud of you right now!”

  He rolled his eyes. “No date. Stop trying to run my life, Vangie.”

  She frowned, but it wasn’t a full-on frown. More like a biding-her-time expression.

  He tapped his watch. “We’ve got to be there in twenty minutes, and that will probably spur another round of interest in my love life, but it will give me a chance to talk on-air about kids with problems. Which is the only reason I’m doing this,” he told his daughter. “Nathan, you ready, buddy?”

  “Yup, and I get to see my friend CeeCee this weekend, because we’re living in her old house. That will be so much fun!”

  CeeCee was Libby Creighton-McClaren’s daughter. She and Nathan shared a love for growing things. Nathan had inherited the Moyer farming gene.

  Not Tug. He’d become a cop , leaving no one to take over the Moyer family farm. When Hadley passed away, his parents had sold the farm so they would have more time to help him with the kids.

  The kids headed toward the door.

  He turned to follow them, but not before Christa saw his expression. “Is seeing that little girl a bad thing?” she asked softly.

  “No, it’s fine.” He let the kids get a little bit farther ahead before he said more. “She’s a great kid, but I just realized we’re in the heart of apple season and this weekend will be crazy busy at the O’Laughlin barn up the road. A barn my father sold to them. If we’re staying in their house, there’s no way to keep folks from realizing it on a big apple weekend because they park right outside the old house.”

  “That’s a problem, all right, but maybe one with an obvious solution,” she told him. “Maybe your kids would just like to go home. To their own house. Home is always best, isn’t it? Face the dragons and send them on their way?”

  She was right.

  Maybe by giving this reporter a quick exclusive, the rest of the pack would go away. “You’re right. I’ll move home this weekend and get things back to normal.”

  “A kind family, a decent home, clothes to wear and food on the table. The best kind of normal there is,” she agreed. She slung her bag over her shoulder and walked down the hall with him, and it wasn’t her expression that set him wondering.

  It was the poignancy in her voice. The hint of longing, as if the simple normal she’d described didn’t exist.

  It didn’t for Tillie. It didn’t for a lot of the kids who messaged him and shared his stuff online. But hearing that wistful note in her voice made him want to make it her reality. “You appreciate the everyday things we tend to take for granted.”

  “Yes.” Her quick smile was his reward. “Why yearn for riches when enough is as good as a feast?”

  “You guys are kinda slow.” Nathan and Vangie had already reached the door. Miss Ivy had gone home, and there was no longer a bank of reporters at the school’s edge. Tug was real glad to see that.

  He reached out and pushed the door open, then held it for Christa and the kids to walk through. When Nathan tried to do the same with the outer door, Tug had to hold himself back from intervening. The heavy door wasn’t cooperating, and when the little guy finally had it open and tucked behind his back, Tug high-fived him. “Thank you, my man.”

  Nathan beamed up at him, the gaping spot of two missing teeth a reminder that time was marching on. Nathan was still getting baby teeth when he had lost his mother. He was growing by leaps and bounds these days.

  “Can we go to Grandma’s for supper, Dad? After we talk with the lady? I really want to see the little boys again. We barely saw them yesterday.”

  “When things are back to normal you’ll be going to Grandma’s every day again, which means you’ll see Jeremy and Jonah regularly.”

  “It is pasta night.” Nathan didn’t beg. He never begged, but he was quite adept at pointing out the obvious. They all loved Glenn Moyer’s red sauce and pasta. Nathan shrugged his little shoulders as he began climbing into Tug’s SUV.

  “Although your grandma might have been too busy with the little guys to make dinner tonight,” said Christa.

  Nathan, Vangie and Tug exchanged grins. “Mom’s great at baking, but when it comes to cooking, that’s Dad’s wheelhouse. He starts his sauce early in the day and it’s like a work of art. Sausage, meatballs, pork.”

  “Vegetarian special, hmm?” Christa mused.

  Tug scrubbed a hand to the back of his neck. “There are two kinds of Westerners in Central Washington, ma’am.”

  He’d hoped the ma’am would make her smile again, like it did yesterday.

  Success!

  “The real ones who
like or grow meat as a regular part of their daily diet—”

  “I did notice that lots of people who don’t even have farms or acreage seem to have a cow or a pig or something penned up in their yard. So that’s the norm?” she asked.

  “There’s been a fair amount of people who have come in from other areas that don’t quite get it,” he admitted. “Some folks think the whole world should be one big fruit orchard, and their ideas don’t jibe with the true locals. I like apples real well,” he finished with a wink. “Alongside a nice steak or some barbecued chicken.”

  “Dad, we have to hurry.” Vangie tapped a nonexistent watch on her slim wrist. “You don’t want to be late.”

  “Shall I tell your mom you’re coming by, then?” Christa asked as she crossed to her parking spot.

  How could he say no? Nathan loved his grandpa’s sauce and the kid could pack away an amazing amount of rigatoni, another thing he had in common with his grandpa. “Yes. Thank you.”

  “Will do.” She tucked her bag into the back seat and climbed into the worn black hatchback, a car that had seen better days a long time ago. Not exactly the best choice for a Central Washington winter with two kids. He waited until the car started and she’d pulled away before he headed to the old O’Laughlin house.

  He parked behind the new barn Libby had built after a storm took their old one down. He was ushering the kids to the house when the reporter drove in and followed his directions by pulling around back.

  She and her cameraman followed them in.

  He’d dreaded this interview since saying yes, but thirty minutes later, it was done, it hadn’t been bad at all, and she’d given him time to talk about why he already had an online presence for Vangie to access, a perfect segue into talking about his Fire Within ministry.

  Once the crew left, he got the kids into the car and swung around his end of town to scope things out.