Kelton's Rules. Peggy Nicholson

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      Sedona. He should’ve guessed. Sedona, Arizona, where all the hippies and mystics and misfits and tofu-eaters and New Age scam artists congregated, drawn by power vortexes and drumming circles and too many juice bars. Well, that explains a lot.

      “I have a friend out there, a Feng Shui consultant, who owns some land. She was going to let us park our bus on her property. We were going to live in it for the summer while we built something permanent. An adobe, I was thinking.”

      Ah, yes, he’d seen this so many times before. A clear case of the Divorce Crazies. “Have you, um, ever built a house before?”

      “Well, no, but how hard can it be?”

      Jack turned with relief to Whitey, who’d been unhitching the bus and now stumped over to join them, his moth-eaten Pekinese waddling at his worn-down boot heels. “You tell her what I said?” He leaned aside to spit a stream of brown tobacco juice, then pulled out a yellow bandanna to dab primly at his mouth. “Gettin’ the parts is gonna be the hardest thing. Might take some fancy scrounging. There’s a yard over on the reservation. Seems t’me they had an ol’ bus or two.”

      “Do you…have any idea how many hours it would take…to fix her?” Abby asked.

      How much it would cost, she meant. Jack wondered what kind of settlement she’d gotten. Whether she’d had a competent lawyer. Dithering soft women like this one always seemed to hire kindly bumblers, while their husbands hired sharks.

      “There’s no telling. I’d put one foot in front of t’other till she’s done or till you say ‘whoa.’”

      She stood, arms clasped tightly around her middle. “Could you tell what caused the brake to fail in the first place?” she said at last. “Or how it popped out of first gear?”

      Whitey and Jack exchanged a quick, wry glance, then the old man shrugged. “Driver error.”

      “But I wasn’t—” Her eyes widened. “You mean, Skyler? Sky did this? I know he tried to stop it, but you think he—”

      “He’s a boy, ain’t he? When I was his age, anything on wheels was fair game. How else is he s’posed t’learn?”

      “Driver’s Ed when he’s of legal age!”

      “Pshaw! Most ranch kids’re driving by the time they can see over the steerin’ wheel.”

      “But he’s not—” Abby swiped a lock of hair behind her ear and blew out her breath. “Okay. What’s done is done. About fixing it, though. Whitey, you really can’t give me an estimate?”

      “None that I’d care to stand by.” Whitey shifted from his good leg to his bad and back again. “You know, you might want t’chew it over, Miz Lake. I’m in no hurry. Can’t work on her anyways, ’cept Saturdays and Sundays. We’re pretty hard-pressed out at the Circle C, since Kaley dropped her twins this spring, smack in the middle of calving season. Been up to our ears in puke and diapers ever since, ain’t we, Chang?” He looked down at his feet, then quickly around when he didn’t see the dog.

      A feline screech and a flurry of barks dragged everyone’s eyes across the yard. DC shot out from under the truck with the Pekinese snapping toothlessly at his heels, bellowing blue murder.

      “Dadblast you, Chang!” Whitey yelled, “Get on back here!”

      The tomcat swarmed up the swing oak and disappeared beyond the leaves. Chang hopped twice, scrabbling frantically at the bark—then collapsed in a wheezing heap at the base of the tree.

      “Gonna give yourself a stroke someday,” Whitey scolded, though Jack could tell this was for Abby’s benefit. The old man’s face was pink with pride. “I’m mighty sorry, ma’am. If a cat looks at him sideways, he can’t control himself.”

      The kids had hopped out of the bus at the first sound of mayhem. Sky leaned against the trunk, staring upward. “DC? DC! What if he falls, Mom?”

      “He’s not an outside cat,” Abby explained to Jack. “I don’t think he’s ever been up a tree before. Certainly not a high one.”

      He was an hour late for work already and his ladder was across town at the building site. Jack clamped a lid on his instinct to ride to the rescue. For Abby, anytime, but not for a cowardly hairball. “Not bad for a beginner.” And what goes up must eventually come down. No use breaking his own neck speeding the process along. “Once Chang goes away…”

      “He’s leavin’ now. We gotta get a move on.” Whitey whisked his snarling companion into the truck, clambered up, then poked his head out the window. “You sleep on it, Miz Lake, and give me a call, okay?” With a wave to the children, he rolled off toward the street.

      “I can get him,” Kat declared, peering up into the branches. “If I had spiked boots like a lumberjack it’d be easier, but if somebody’d boost me up to that first limb…”

      “Uh-uh.” Jack tugged on her ponytail. “You’re grounded, kiddo, and that means what it says. Both feet strictly on the ground.”

      She gave him a disdainful look, or it would have been, except for those funhouse eyebrows. “Aren’t you supposed to be at the office?”

      He showed his teeth. “I am. Soon as I set you up. Go get the extension cord out of the Jeep and plug it into the carport plug. You’ve got some sanding to do. Lots of sanding.”

      Kat made a terrible face, but she knew when to stop arguing. Off she trotted.

      Sky looked from the tree to the departing girl squeezing through the gap in the pickets. “Don’t you try and climb this, either,” Jack warned him. “He’ll come down when he’s hungry.”

      “DC’s always hungry.”

      “Then we’ll see him soon.”

      Sky nodded doubtfully, then brightened. “Can I help Kat, Mr. Kelton?”

      “Not for a minute. I suppose you can watch, but don’t let me hear that you helped, Skyler. Kat earned every inch and splinter of this job and now she pays up.”

      They watched the boy hurry down to the gate, then through. “There was a fire?” Abby inquired after a pause.

      “Mmm.” Jack hooked his thumbs in the pockets of his jeans and braced his back against the tree trunk. “She snuck out on her baby-sitter last night, then went over to where I’m building a house, across town. Played with my butane torch and somehow set a can of kerosene on my workbench—and then the bench itself—on fire. Luckily Sheriff Noonan happened by while she was trying to beat out the flames.” And if Noonan hadn’t? His shoulders jerked in a shudder. “At this rate I’ll have white hair before I’m forty. I had a pet raccoon when I was a kid that could open any drawer, any cabinet, any package a human could, but Bandit wasn’t half this much trouble.”

      “She is rather…high-energy.” Abby laughed softly. “What’s her punishment?”

      “I stopped by my site and collected enough rough lumber to build a new bench. But it all needs sanding, then painting. Her eyebrows will grow in before she’s done with the eighty grit.

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