Page 6 of Back To Our Beginning

I hit my key fob and my Jeep unlocked. I got inside and shut the door. Beau stood at the bottom of my steps, hands on his hips, eyes narrowed. Not just pissed. Confused. Frustrated. Maybe even a little hurt. No; that last one I was just imagining.

Keep it together, Avery. Remember, we don’t give a shit.

Only Eli mattered.

Chapter Two

I gripped my steering wheel so tightly my fingers ached. My teeth ground together as I followed Maddie’s Jeep out of Jasper Creek, first on the highway, then through the back roads of Gatlinburg. She was driving too damn fast. Way too fast for these winding roads. I kept expecting her to lose control, for her tires to slide out on the gravel shoulders. That pissed me off even more.

What in the ever-loving hell had she been thinking, racing through town like that?

When she stopped in front of a house, I pulled up behind her, slammed my truck into park, and climbed out.

The house was just what I expected for this part of town. A shithole. Busted siding, sheets over the windows for drapes, dirt for a lawn, and two wooden steps missing from the front porch.

Maddie slammed out of her Jeep and stood in front of the house with her hands on her hips.

Silent.

Waiting.

She focused her entire attention on the house in front of her. How she’d missed my arrival was a mystery.

“Ms. Avery!”

We both turned our heads to look at the woman in the yard next door. She was holding a rifle. She was wearing a blue-and-gold Buccaneers jersey over pink-and-purple stretch pants. If I looked too long, I was afraid I might get dizzy. She started running toward us.

“Mrs. Owens, stay there,” Maddie called out. She jogged over to the woman’s yard with me following her. When I got close, I could hear Maddie talking.

“What’s happened since you called me?” she asked.

“I heard Colleen scream again, but not like she’d been hit, more like she was pissed. Then I heard something shatter. Glass, I mean. Ya know?” She squinted through her thick glasses at Maddie to see if she was tracking, then looked at me. “Who’s he?”

Maddie whirled around.

“What the fuck are you doing here?” Maddie demanded.

“We’re on a date, don’t you remember?”

“Beau, get the hell out of here. This is a volatile situation. I’ve got a six-year-old boy I’m worried about. I don’t need you here fucking things up.”

“How would he fuck things up?” Mrs. Owens asked as she eyed me up and down and smiled. “Looks to me like he might could do some good.”

“Mrs. Owens, when was the last time you saw Eli?”

“Is Eli the kid in trouble?” I asked.

“Cute little kid,” Mrs. Owens answered. “Kind of spindly. Might scared, but who could blame him with that bastard Bruce living there.”

“Why haven’t you called the cops?” I asked.

“Did. They left,” she answered.

“What?”

“They followed procedure,” Maddie sighed. “If Colleen, that’s the mother, said there wasn’t any problem, and they couldn’t find any reason to enter, there was nothing they could do.”

“But what about the boy?” I asked.