Cold Springs(121)

“I hear you're a natural with horses,” he tried. “Star pupil.”

“I'm doing my best, sir.”

“Your father would be proud.”

A shadow crossed over her face. “You blame me for not seeing my mom?”

“No. You have time for that. Your mother does, too.”

Mallory stared at the horse, and Chadwick realized, with uncomfortable certainty, that Mallory didn't need anything else from him. She wanted him to leave. He was complicating matters, making her uncomfortable.

“I'll be going to see her next week,” Chadwick said. “Laurel Heights is having the ground-breaking ceremony. In case you want me to tell her something.”

“Yes, sir. Tell her that gun in Race's locker? It wasn't his. It was mine. He was protecting me. He didn't know a thing about it.”

She wouldn't meet his eyes.

He knew she was lying about the gun. She hadn't put it in that locker. But he also knew why she was doing it—taking the heat for her friend, giving the school someone else to blame.

“You sure you want me to tell your mother that?” he asked.

She nodded. “I'm the one she needed to expel. Not Race. Tell her that.”

“Anything else?”

“No. But, Miss Olsen?”

“Yes?”

“Apples are bad for them.”

“What?”

“Apples. For horses. They like them, but there's too much sugar, traces of cyanide in the seeds. They eat too much, they'll get poisoned. In case you wanted to know, for next time.”

Mallory went back to combing her wounded horse, as if Olsen and Chadwick were spectators who had seen the whole show, and now—surely—they must have reassembly work to get back to, like everybody else.

Chadwick wanted more—closure, closeness, that time he'd never gotten with his daughter. But Mallory was farther away from him now than she'd been a month ago, at the Rockridge café.

Teens defined themselves by separating from adults. Chadwick knew that. But he'd fought the process with Katherine, and the battle had never been resolved. Now Mallory was done with him, the same way she'd accused Olsen of being done with her. He had ridden to her rescue, but he'd failed to save her. And maybe, he realized—that was the whole point. Maybe his failure had given her exactly what she needed.

Hunter shook hands with Joey Allbritton, then came to rejoin them.

They walked back to the lodge in silence, Olsen's hand tight on Chadwick's shoulder, Hunter's bald scalp reflecting the winter sun like candlelight in chocolate.

“You get better fast,” he told them. “We got a lot of business coming in. A lot of pickups.”

“The price of notoriety,” Chadwick said.

When they got to the door, Hunter put his arm out to block Chadwick's entry. “You're gonna take care of this girl, I hope. 'Cause if you lose her again, I'm gonna start assigning you only the jobs that come from New Jersey.”

“I'll consider myself terrified.”

Olsen gave him a wan smile. “Hunter's driving me into Fredericksburg this morning for physical therapy. You want to come along?”

“On Christmas Day?”

“I have an atheist boss and a Jewish physical therapist. Come on. We can find someplace open for lunch afterward, go over the case files for next week.”

“Sure,” Hunter griped. “Make it a business lunch, so I have to pay for it.”

Chadwick felt a lump in his throat—grateful that he had friends, grateful that Olsen had given escorting—and him—a second chance. But he also knew his facade was about to crumble, the intricate patchwork of shock and adrenaline and false composure he'd relied on the last few weeks—hell, the last nine years. Now that he was out of danger, now that Mallory was safe, he felt that shell breaking up at last, and he wasn't quite sure what was underneath.

“You go ahead,” he told them. “I'd better elevate my foot, maybe catch up on my reading.”

Chadwick went inside, focusing his eyes on the cactus petal wreath that hung over the lodge fireplace, telling himself he could make it a few more steps, just to the stairs that led to his apartment.

Olsen and Hunter stood in the entry hall, watching Chadwick walk away. He moved up the stairs as if the pain he was worried about was in his chest rather than his leg.

“It's still hard for him,” Hunter told her. “All that guilt over Katherine, stirred up again. I hope to hell that'll pass now.”

“I wish I understood him,” Olsen said.

“I've been working on that thirty years. It's a good hobby, but don't quit your day job.”

Hunter held the door for her, let in a gust of Christmas morning air that smelled of wood smoke.

Olsen stepped outside, thinking about her own family—her little sister, her mother, her former stepfather in prison. She was ready to trust Chadwick. She had put aside her fear of leaving Mallory, her fear of believing a man could actually be a good and caring person, even if he did remind her of the father figure who had betrayed her. She was willing to believe, for the first time in her life, that there might be good men in the world, and she had stumbled across two of them in Hunter and Chadwick.

“I don't understand why he kept sabotaging himself,” she told Hunter. “Even at the end, he couldn't fire on Kindra.”