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It could have been any of a thousand women calling. A relative. A citizen. An ex-girlfriend. Or maybe Mila.
“Okay,” Morwenna said in much too cheerful a voice. “That was Mr. Akins. Said his cat’s up the tree again.”
Sam grinned. Police work in Cedar Creek had its highs and its lows. “Did you tell him Simpson’s brother would come and get it for him?”
“Chief, his cat died three weeks ago. He’s having a little trouble dealing with his grief. However, Tank Simpson is going over to talk to the old man. All right, so back to the call for you. I think it was personal, not professional. She didn’t sound upset or distraught or anything, and she was very polite, very quiet spoken. However, maybe she speaks softly because she has a big dog.”
Hot damn, maybe it was Mila. “A dog?”
“With a great big bark. You know, the kind that startles you because you didn’t know a dog could sound that big?” Her tone turned teasing. “You know someone with a dog matching that description, Chief?”
“As it happens, I do.” He looked back over at the lanes, where his buddies were still hanging around, drinking and waiting for their turns. “Listen, call Ben and tell him just this and nothing else—I got a call I had to take. You don’t know from who, you don’t know what about, you don’t know how long it’ll take.”
She scoffed. “Jeez, I don’t know any of that. You want to at least give me a hint in case you need backup?”
“See you tomorrow, Morwenna.”
Odds were the call hadn’t come from Mila, he told himself as he found his truck in the crowded lot. Plenty of women had dogs. But the call was the excuse he needed to stop by her house. To see her even if for just a few minutes.
When he parked in front of her house, he wondered idly if she had a car, if there was a garage at the back of the property where she kept it out of sight. It was hard to imagine someone her age not having a vehicle. Cedar Creek was small, but not so small that walking all over town in the weather extremes they were accustomed to was easy. Granted, she lived only a few blocks from a grocery store, a post office, a bank, a pharmacy, a liquor store and Braum’s. Most people would say that covered all of life’s necessities right there.
Somewhere down the street, kids laughed and called. Playing outside on a summer’s evening…that had become rare in his lifetime. If he ever had kids, he wanted to teach them to catch lightning bugs, to lie in the warm, damp grass and watch a caterpillar make its laborious journey, to count the colors in the sunset and listen for cicadas and tree frogs and lonesome train whistles.
If he and their mother weren’t too tired at the end of the day to do those things. If they didn’t find it easier to park the kids in front of the TV or the computer.
If he ever found a woman he wanted to have kids with who wanted to have them with him. There were so many ifs involved that it really was remarkable how many millions of times it had happened.
His foot was in midair, two inches above the first porch step, when frenzied barking started inside the house. He climbed the steps, grinning, and called, “Hey, Poppy, it’s just me. Don’t tear the door down.” He hoped the words would assure Mila, too.
The porch light clicked on, then the door cracked open. Mila smiled at him shyly, partially, through the space, then stepped back to let him slink inside. One of these days, she was really going to smile at him—one of those giant, spontaneous ear-to-ear smiles when the happiness inside was just too much to contain—and when she did, either his heart was going to break for her or it was going to be put back together.
One of these days.
For this day, he greeted her with a serious smile. “Hi. I’m returning your call.”
* * *
“I didn’t expect her to bother you.” Mila leaned against the dining room door frame, arms folded across her chest while Sam gave Poppy a vigorous greeting. She was inexplicably pleased that he’d come by just to see if she might be the one who’d called.
“Morwenna passes on everything. I prefer to know when people call me when I’m out.”
“Even when they don’t leave their name and number?”
