“Doctor like Bethany?”
“Absolutely. Or a lawyer like me.”
S.G. shrugged and wrinkled her nose, making Kate laugh.
“I saw that face. I’ll remember that if you ever need a lawyer.”
She rose to her feet and took a deep breath of the pure air, which was saturated with the rich scent of spring soil and a tinge of isopropyl alcohol.
“Hey, kid, since you’re already skipping school, would you like another job for the day?”
“What job?”
“I could use a hand moving my stuff into my new house.”
S.G. frowned in confusion. “You don’t have hands?”
“It’s a phrase. It means to help someone.”
Since S.G. had been raised in the wilderness, her vocabulary and understanding of the world could be very sketchy. She knew everything about hunting and nothing about math, for instance. The trapper, who’d turned out to be a criminal on the run, hadn’t bothered to give her an education, so now she was making up for lost time. She was being fostered by Denaina, who owned the property next door, which was how Emma first came to know her.
Kate had clicked with S.G. right away; she’d always connected to teenagers and their troubles. She’d even spent some time helping her with her schoolwork. S.G. was learning fast, but every once in a while a gap in her education would surface—and it could be something completely unexpected. Like the phrase “give me a hand.”
“You want my help moving? Why are you moving?”
“So Emma and I don’t kill each other before the peony harvest. That’s a bad joke, by the way.” S.G. didn’t always get sarcasm. “I’ll pay you the same as you’re getting here and I’ll even throw in lunch.”
“Okay.” S.G. shrugged and stood up, wiping her hands on her overalls. “Cheeseburgers?”
“Cheeseburgers. Sure.”
“Do you want to go now?”
“I still have some packing to do. I should be ready by lunchtime. Thanks, kid.”
On her way back to the farmhouse, she stopped to admire Emma’s newest plot. She’d planted it three autumns ago, and this would be its first year to produce sellable blooms. Even though Kate had seen photos of their enormous brilliant pink blossoms, she couldn’t wait to see one—and smell their intoxicating rose-like fragrance—for herself.
With a laugh at her own excitement—what self-respecting cynical lawyer would get so carried away over a Mon Jules Elie—she hurried back to the farmhouse.
Chapter Seven
Emma had thrown open the door to the barnlike structure next to the house. It was more of a warehouse than a barn, since she didn’t keep farm animals.
“I got all the furniture you could ever want in here,” she called to Kate. “Things I’ve been collecting here and there. You can take what you need.”
“Seriously?” Kate joined her and gazed into the crammed space. “That’s amazing. You could probably furnish ten houses with all that. Is there a brand-new mattress in there, by chance?”
“Couple of them.”
That was just one of the reasons Kate loved her grandmother. She knew how to offer the right kind of support at the exact moment it was needed.
Kate slung an arm over her grandmother’s shoulder and pulled her in for a hug. “You’re the best, Emma.” She dropped a kiss on her gray-streaked black hair. “Where would I be without you?”
“Women’s Correctional Institute?”
“Very likely. I’ll go through this stuff later. I’m going to keep it simple for this first trip. Boxes and suitcases.”
After she’d loaded Emma’s pickup, she called out to S.G.. The girl came dashing up the slope from the peony field, shooing away geese as she ran. Kate tried to imagine another teenage girl who would work nonstop from morning to lunch without a single break or complaint, and failed. One more bit of proof that S.G. was no ordinary girl.
“Can I try driving?” she asked as soon as she’d hopped in the passenger seat.
Okay, maybe she had some normal teenage tendencies.
“Some other time. My load’s a little too precarious.”
As she pulled out of the turnaround, she sent nervous glances in the rearview mirror toward the pile of boxes in the bed of the truck. She’d run a strap over the load, but something told her she hadn’t done it right. The boxes were already shifting around and they hadn’t even hit the muddy part yet.
“Should have let me do it,” said S.G. matter-of-factly. “I’m good with loads.”
“That doesn’t surprise me,” Kate murmured. “You’re a true Alaska chick.”
“I’m a chicken?”
“It means girl. Sorry. Actually, forget I said that. You don’t need to know all the words.”
They reached the road that led into town. The snow had melted enough to reveal patches of green, which grew more frequent the closer they came to town. Spring took its sweet time coming to Lost Harbor, but it was worth the wait. The wistful call of a varied thrush floating through the morning air could make a grown woman cry.
“I found a boy,” S.G. said as they took one of the hairpin curves in the road.
“Uh oh. That sounds like trouble.”
“He might be in trouble. I don’t know.”
Kate frowned, her attention divided between S.G. and a box that was now threatening to tumble off the truck. “What’s his name?”
“He doesn’t want to tell me.”
“That’s not a good sign.”
“I think he’s afraid.”
Kate could well imagine that S.G., with her unusual history, could be intimidating to the boys around here. To any boys, really.
“Because he knows how good you are with knives?”
“No. I mean, he doesn’t know that. I don’t carry my knife anymore, the school won’t let me.”
“Seems like a reasonable policy.”
S.G. shrugged. She was very attached to her hunting knife and unnervingly skilled with it.
“So this boy…do you know him from school?”
S.G. didn’t answer that question, instead posing one of her own. “Can he work at the farm too? He needs a job.”
“Maybe. We’d need to know his name, though. Bring him by and we’ll talk to him. Okay, this is the street. Fairview Court. Pretty, isn’t it?” The street took a slow, lazy curve just above town. Between homes she got peeks of the sparkling blue waters of Misty Bay. Birch trees and spruce offered some privacy, but this was a much more populated neighborhood than the ridge where the farm was located.
“So many houses.” S.G. gave a little shudder.
“Yeah, well, I grew up in the suburbs, so this is normal to me. You might not know what a suburb is, but this neighborhood is as close as Lost Harbor gets. There, that’s the one!” She pointed to a fairly new split-level house with oyster-pink siding. A staircase painted blue marched along the outer wall to the upstairs. It was going to be a pain in the ass to move her stuff in. On the upside, the upstairs had a huge front deck and sliding glass doors with a view of the ocean.
The downstairs, on the other hand, had all the other good stuff—a deluxe master bedroom and a fully modernized kitchen. More importantly, it had a security system. That alone made it worth fighting for.