When Night Falls by Cait London Read Free Book Online Page B

she share the intimate details of seventeen-year-old Roman begging her to go with him? Of her choice to remain in Madrid, the safety she’d always known?
    She wiped away her tears and studied her broad workinghands. They were rough now, despite hand creams and plastic gloves, the veins pronounced. She would do anything to protect her daughter, and Roman’s name would only launch Dani’s search for him.
    He hadn’t been safe back then, and he’d already been sexually skilled and “fast with women.” He probably wasn’t safe now, either, and Shelly didn’t want her daughter hurt.
    Dani was like Roman—rebellious, passionate, and headstrong. If the two should ever meet, they’d either clash or bond. Either way, Shelly would be the loser.
    If they ever met, she wondered how long it would be before either one of them added times and birth dates together and discovered the truth .

THREE
    D ozer’s gnarled fingers shook as he tried to open the lock on the chain tethering the old Warren garage on Maloney Street. “Locked it because no one was watching it, and the owner who bought it at auction lives away from here. He didn’t care what happened to it. I keep my lawn mowers in here, the sprays and fertilizers and what-not. I’m going to sell my business pretty soon, so you don’t have to worry about this junk bein’ here no more.”
    Mitchell scanned the street, remembering the cars and trucks that once stood outside the old garage, waiting for Fred Warren’s healing touch. He glanced up at the second-story window, a jagged, broken pane mirroring the golden sunlight. That was where, as a boy, he’d taken Grace’s place in managing the garage’s books and discovered he liked business better than ranching. But then, he didn’t like ranching at all, not on a tiny forty-acre ranch where hard work got nothing from the dirt.
    At eleven o’clock in the morning, Madrid was quiet; spears of sunlight cut through the shadows of Maloney Street. The city beautification club had not seen fit to treat the street, and the old oaks shading it had littered the groundwith leaves and broken limbs. The drugstore had moved to Main Street, and the old two-story buildings were boarded, the sunlight catching broken windows. An elderly woman carrying her black purse and a small bag of groceries hobbled on thick ankles into a building that had once been the town’s seamstress. His rocking chair braced against the front porch of what used to be the candy shop, a tiny, ancient Native American man smoked a hand-rolled cigarette and watched life move around him.
    Just around the corner, where Maloney met Main Street, the buildings were still old, but updated with neon signs and flower boxes. Mitchell inhaled slowly—some of the past was worth keeping, and the rest had been shoved away. What was worth keeping in his life?
    “That’s Rosy with Kitty and Bernard Ferris,” Dozer was saying, nodding toward the pot-bellied pig crossing the Main Street intersection. There in the middle of the street, while drivers of trucks and cars waited patiently, the elderly couple stopped to allow a little girl to feed the pig a treat. Rosy was obviously treasured by the tiny woman in a flowing dress and a huge straw hat whose gloved hand rested on the elderly man’s bent arm. Once fed and admired, Rosy swayed to the other side of the street on the leash held by the elderly couple, and traffic began moving slowly.
    Mitchell noted the friendly waves between the townspeople. There had been few of those when he was growing up. “Leave your lawn care things as long as you like. I don’t have any plans for the building just now.”
    “What about that old place? Heard you bought it, too.”
    “No plans for that, either.”
    “Well, family things are hard to give up, especially land. Seems strange—you coming back here without a job in sight. People are already talking. Talk is that you might be in the mafia, setting up our town for a hideout. They’re