Skye Read online

  Now she stared at the front door of the house she’d once shared with her mom. Her grandparents had owned it, and Sky had come across the deed and other paperwork in their belongings. The home must have been their way of controlling the environment in which their granddaughter grew up. It hadn’t worked out as they’d hoped, though. The building might not have been in the middle of a drug-infested neighborhood, but that hadn’t stopped the dealers from coming by whenever her mom had called them.

  Had the neighbors ever realized what went on in the quaint, middle-class home so close to their own? Or had the fact that it looked just like theirs blinded them to the terrible things happening within its walls?

  Why?

  Why had her grandparents kept the house all these years? It made no sense.

  Once her mom died, they should have sold it and put that chapter of their lives behind them. They hadn’t, though. They’d kept it and paid someone to care for the yard. Receipts indicated a handyman had been hired on occasion to make exterior repairs, too. As far as she could tell, though, no one had stepped one foot inside the house since the police technicians cleared the scene after the discovery of her mother’s body.

  Wait. Someone must have been in the house at some point. Otherwise there would be fingerprint dust somewhere under the layers of regular dust. The house had been cleaned up after the police, but that was probably the last time. It didn’t look like anyone had been in there since.

  Today would be no different. Skye turned back to the car sitting at the curb, the one she’d loaded down with luggage and memories before driving it up through the mountains from Boise to Rainbow Falls.

  Thirty minutes later, she parked at the curb of another house. This one displayed a Just Sold sign in its front yard.

  When she’d bought that plane ticket and run away to Rainbow Falls, she had never expected it to turn into a permanent situation. Here she was, though, and her entire world was different. Hopefully, it wasn’t insanity that had brought her to this place.

  A smile forced its way out even though Skye’s heart stuttered as she studied the front of her new home.

  She was broken. She was too smart to deny it but too tired to do anything about it.

  She carried deep wounds, and changing her zip code wouldn’t change who she was. Removing herself from the suffocating cloud of her grandparents’ memory, though… getting far enough away to breathe… If she could accomplish that, she might find a way to be okay someday.

  Skye made the trek to the front door, key in hand. The sun was warm enough to make winter a memory but not so hot that summer felt close. And for the first time in more than a decade, her heart wasn’t a heavy rock in her chest. Instead, it felt almost light.

  Was that what peace felt like?

  “I realize the transition is going to create more work for you in the short term, but I don’t believe your long-term duties will change much. You’re being compensated for the time, too.” Skye sucked in a lungful of air. She shouldn’t have to convince her assistant to do her job.

  Charlotte sighed. “It’s not the extra hours. You said you’d pay me, and that’s all the thanks I need. The thing is, there are a lot of rumblings around the office that you’re going to sell the company, and it’s making people uneasy.”

  Skye chewed on her bottom lip. At least she was on a phone call and not a video call. Moving her personal office to Montana, while leaving the corporate headquarters in Idaho, had created more strife than anticipated. Of course people didn’t like it. Change made people antsy. Her Board of Directors was in an uproar, though, and their attitude was spilling over to the rest of the employees. Yet everything in her screamed that this was the right move.

  She released her bottom lip and used her commander-of-the-boardroom voice on her assistant. “I can send out memos until the Internet takes over the world, and nobody will believe me. They’ll believe you, though. So I’m telling you. I have no imminent plans to sell. I needed a change of scenery, and the company practically runs itself. Nobody needs me to tell them what to do. All my duties can be accomplished long-distance, and I trust you to keep me informed of anything requiring my attention. I will be back quarterly to check in with everyone and show my face. In the interim…”

  Charlotte sighed again. “I’ll try to make sure I’m getting my coffee while Jimmy Malone is in there.”

  Jimmy was the office’s biggest gossip. A casual mention in his presence guaranteed the entire company would hear it by day’s end.

  “Thank you, and if that’s not enough, do let me know. But I think all the fuss will die down within a week or two.”

  “I hope you find what you’re looking for. I can’t imagine leaving the city for some tiny little town out in the wilds of Montana, but I’ve seen how much your grandparents’ legacy weighs on you. I want you to know…” Charlotte’s voice trailed off, and she cleared her throat. “I want you to know that nobody here blames you for wanting to distance yourself from them or their memory. People get scared when they think their jobs are in trouble, but there’s not a soul in this company that doesn’t want you to be happy.”

  “Thank you.” The two words weren’t nearly enough, but they were all she could force out through the tears clogging the back of her throat.

  Once Skye hung up from her call with Charlotte, she glanced around her living space. The furnishings were sparse. In fact, her office consisted of a barstool left by the previous owner and the peninsula separating the kitchen from the living room. It wasn’t much, but there were people in the world with a lot less.

  She snatched her keys off the pegboard where she’d left them and pulled her purse from the front closet. She should furnish her new home. She needed a dining room table, not to mention a desk, television, and couch. New curtains wouldn’t be a bad idea, either. The ones hanging in the house now didn’t do justice to her new life of freedom.

  Buying furniture wasn’t supposed to be so difficult. A couch shouldn’t be such an impossible decision. Skye didn’t have a lot of rules. No sectionals and nothing white. Simple, right? Yet in the whole world of non-sectional, non-white couches available in Rainbow Falls, not a single one held any appeal.

  Gah.

  There was something wrong with a woman who couldn’t decide on something as simple as a couch. Wasn’t there? She left the store empty-handed and headed home.

  She spent so much energy mulling over her couch-buying failure that she missed her turn… and the next four turns she could have taken. Which landed her smack-dab in the middle of the old part of town. Not the historic-and-preserved section, either. She was in the used-and-abused part of Rainbow Falls. She spotted a place to make a U-turn in front of a sagging sign for the Silver Heart Motel.

  The Silver Heart Motel.

  Definitely not where she wanted to be.

  Skye pulled over to the side of the road.

  What was she thinking?

  She climbed out of her car.

  Forget thinking. What was she doing?

  On the sidewalk now, there wasn’t much choice. What if she’d been seen? Getting back in her car would be insulting. With a touch of cowardly. And cowardice was something she’d determined to leave behind in her old life.

  The partially blocked-off driveway up into the motel’s courtyard was steep. Skye climbed it in her strappy sandals. Hiking boots would have been better. The climb itself didn’t warrant boots. They would have delivered a much-needed boost to her confidence, though. Hiking boots were like battle armor to someone accustomed to wearing heels all the time.

  “Uh…hello there.” A sandpaper voice came from her right.

  Skye turned to a man with yellow teeth and straggly brown hair that pointed in every direction as though it were trying to escape his head. He waved to someone on her left. Another man walked toward her across the former parking lot with its worn expanse of faded asphalt broken up by grass and weeds sticking haphazardly through its cracks.

  The new man on the scene spor
ted trim hair with a scraggly beard, a worn shirt, pants with a patch over one knee, and wire-rimmed spectacles. He took one look at her and hollered. “Boss! You’re needed in the courtyard!”

  A door to Skye’s left squeaked open, and a voice she recognized from the airplane greeted her. “Skye, right? This is a nice surprise.”

  “You said I could stop in sometime.”

  “Indeed I did. I didn’t expect you to still be in town.”

  “I haven’t been. At least, not this whole time. I went back and tidied up a few things so I could make the move permanent. I, uh…” She stared at her feet. “I live here now.”

  “Rainbow Falls is lucky to have you. And if I’m being honest, I’ll tell you I’m surprised you took me up on the offer of a tour — but I’m glad you did.”

  “Me, too.”

  His eyes crinkled at the corner. “Which? Surprised or glad?”

  She took in his earring, bald head, and faded goatee. Then her eyes wandered to the scar by his left ear, and from there to the tattoos covering his arms. She hadn’t seen those on the plane. “I’m not sure.”

  CHAPTER 6

  Sam kept his distance. Skye looked like she might bolt at any minute. Whatever had brought her to the Samaritan’s Reach, she definitely wasn’t there because she’d decided hanging out at a homeless shelter would be a fun afternoon outing. The vein in her neck pulsed at breakneck speed, giving away more than she likely realized. Her mile-wide eyes were another clue.

  “Would you like to tour the facility?”

  She looked from him to the ragtag group of men who’d gathered around. Then she took a step toward him.

  Sam waved the men away. “Go back to what you were doing, gentlemen. No need to crowd our visitor.”

  In any other situation, he would put his hand on the woman’s back and guide her in the direction he wanted to go, but Skye still had the shell-shocked look of someone fresh from the battlefield. There was no telling what she’d do if he touched her. So instead, he walked ahead to the office and opened the door for her. She slid through with a demure thank you before coming to a stop in the small thirteen-foot by four-foot space.

  “Being an old motel has some advantages and some disadvantages.” He pointed to the half-door that led behind the front counter. “The office is through here. It’s small, and there’s not much to see, but at least you can get an idea of the scope of what we’re doing.”

  She leaned over the counter without touching the surface and took in the clutter covering every square inch of the office. “Did you talk to your attorney about your business license and the City Council?”

  On a normal day, Sam would sit down and try to have a casual conversation. That was how he connected with people. Nothing about Skye said casual, though. Not the stiff way she held herself, nor the orderly fall of nearly black hair over her shoulders. “I did. The day our plane landed. You were right. The terms of my original agreement with the City Council allow them to not renew my business license if I fail to comply with any new regulations they implement.”

  “Did they make it impossible for you?”

  He tried not to scowl, he really did. His failure was etched into her ever-widening eyes, though, and accompanied by her quick intake of breath as she backed away from the counter.

  “I… I should go.”

  The problem finally registered. There were plenty of problems, but one in particular he’d been too dense to catch right away. She hadn’t made eye contact with him even once since she’d arrived. Every time she looked at him, her eyes went straight to his arms.

  Sam reached for a wrinkled long-sleeved t-shirt draped over the back of his desk chair. He yanked it over his head. “Is that better?”

  He was so used to living in his own skin and being around men, that he’d forgotten his tattoos weren’t exactly genteel. Not to mention, there was a segment of the population who disapproved of tattoos no matter what the ink depicted.

  Her gaze lifted to his, and the air left his lungs. My word. Her eyes were even more beautiful than he remembered, but they still had the look of delicate porcelain, as if they might shatter with one wrong move.

  “You scare me.” She covered her mouth with a hand as soon as the words escaped, and color climbed her cheeks faster than a desert wildfire. “I didn’t mean…”

  “You meant it. You just didn’t mean to say it.”

  She gave a single nod, and her gaze flitted from him to the front door.

  He wouldn’t let her escape that easily, though. He needed to say something first. “I was in the Marines for several years. I did a lot of living in that time. I’m not proud of some of the things I did back then.” Sam took a breath and ran a hand over his bald head. “I’m not proud of most of the things I did, at least in my personal life. But then one day I met this guy, and everything changed.”

  She wasn’t running away. That had to be a good sign, right?

  “His name is Jesus. The guy I met. I didn’t literally meet him.” Sam stared out the window to where the men were still all gathered together and trying to act like they weren’t staring at the office. He turned back to Skye. “I’m doing a bad job of this. Sorry. It’s just that the tattoos are who I used to be, but I met Jesus and He showed me something better. I wanted what He showed me, and here I am.”

  Skye held her purse in a death grip. “I’d like the rest of that tour now.”

  Women.

  Could they be any more confusing?

  Sam slipped out from behind the counter and again pushed the office door open for the enigma that was Skye Blue.

  She followed as he showed her the storage room, then the motel room they’d converted to a kitchen. “We provide lunch and dinner here.”

  “What about breakfast?”

  Sam pointed to a corkboard with some information pinned to it. “We have an arrangement with the local food bank. The men are given vouchers they can exchange for a week’s worth of breakfast items plus a few extra snacks. Control over their food, even if it’s limited, gives the men a sense of security.”

  “I’ve heard people who live on the street start to hoard things like food. Is that ever a problem?”

  Sam shrugged. “Like I said, the food bank is valuable. The men crave control, enough to give them a sense of security at first. Then, as they learn to trust us to give them two meals every day, they begin to relax, and soon they’re rationing their food wisely. To make it in life, these men need to develop the ability to be frugal with their money and to make their funds last until the next paycheck. What we do with the food bank is a microcosm of that. It helps them develop some foundational skills they can draw on later down the road in much bigger ways.”

  Skye didn’t argue the point, which she could have. His approach to dealing with these men — growing them, really — was somewhat nontraditional. It worked, though, and he would defend it if called upon to do so.

  Next, he led his guest out of the kitchen and into the laundry room with its one working washer. Thank goodness they had two dryers. Today was laundry day, and each of the men had their basket of clothes lined up against the wall in there. Strips of masking tape with names scrawled on them marked each basket. The men were responsible for doing their own laundry, but they had the whole day, so nobody worried about it too much. One basket sat there waiting for its owner to claim it and fold his clothes. A load of clothing was in the dryer, and another was in the washer waiting for the dryer to be emptied.

  After the laundry room, he showed her the motel room they’d transformed into a learning center. “We’re working on getting more computers, and hopefully a higher-bandwidth internet connection. We have good service as long as only three of four people use it at a time. But anyway — the men can take online college and vocational courses here. The goal is to help them get the education they need so they can find sustainable employment.”

  The computers were so old that one still had a monochrome monitor. Not exactly impressive, but she didn’t
comment on it.

  “Do all the men take classes?”

  Sam shook his head. “Anyone in our leadership program is required to work toward a degree or certification of some sort. Outside of the leadership program, though, it’s optional. We try to get a feel for what will work best for each man and help point him in the right direction.”

  “Sounds like a lot of effort.” Her eyebrows rose, but was it admiration or skepticism?

  “A high school guidance counselor from Waschak Falls comes over once a month to work with any of the guys that are interested. He helps them fill out the paperwork, secure scholarships and other funding, gives them aptitude tests, and stuff like that. He’s skilled at narrowing down the options and helping the men figure out where they’re most likely to excel. No point in working on an accounting degree if you hate numbers, right? But if you were trained by the Air Force to handle payroll and loved what you did…” It sounded easy enough when he said it, but there were a lot of complex moving parts involved in getting the men into the right classes, let alone finding the funds to pay for it.

  From the learning center, Sam led Skye to the outdoor picnic bench that sat in a back corner between the two segments of the motel. “I’d say the property is U-shaped, but since this one corner doesn’t connect, that description doesn’t quite do it justice. We’ve managed to make use of all the space we have, though, so I can’t complain. The men hang out and relax at the table here, and the courtyard — what used to be the parking lot — is where we do everything from daily Bible study to exercise classes, depending on the weather.”

  “What about during the winter?”

  “We move everything out of one of the empty rooms and use it. Eventually I’d like to build a gym that could double as our main meeting room.”

  “Why a gym?”

  It was an easy enough answer, but it might not be one she was comfortable with. “The men who end up at Samaritan’s Reach are here for a reason. They each come with their own set of issues. For some, it’s anger. For others, it’s fear, or PTSD, or even something like insomnia. A gym would give them a safe and controlled environment to work out some of those issues. Or just make them tired enough to sleep.”