It Takes a Family. Victoria Pade

her own car.

      “I was hoping I’d left a door unlocked so I could pop the trunk from the inside,” she said truthfully.

      His only response was to roll up his window and go the rest of the way to the driveway.

      He’d been called into work for an impromptu meeting when they’d arrived back at his house after visiting the Pratts that afternoon. He’d left Karis alone with Amy and with no clue when he’d return.

      Not only had he scrambled eggs for their breakfast, he’d also made sandwiches for them all for lunch—again with Karis making it clear that he didn’t need to provide her meals and him ignoring it. But the dinner hour had come and gone, and since she didn’t feel comfortable raiding his cupboards or refrigerator, she’d dug into the food supplies she’d packed with Amy’s things and fixed the baby an individual serving of macaroni and cheese and opened a toddler-size jar of plums.

      Karis hadn’t eaten anything then, but that had been over two hours ago and as it drew near eight o’clock she was hungry herself. And, in response to the stress of the day, she was also craving chocolate like crazy. Which was why she’d decided to see if she could get into her own stockpile of foodstuff in the trunk.

      Once he’d parked, Luke got out of his SUV and joined her where she waited on the sidewalk beside her car.

      “You need something out of the trunk?” he said.

      “Food.”

      “You have food in the trunk?”

      “Some canned goods, some crackers and peanut butter, some stuff I could microwave at a convenience store.” And chocolate.

      “Field rations for living in your car?”

      “Yes.”

      He held up a fast-food bag she hadn’t noticed. “How about burgers instead?”

      “How about burgers first and then a chocolate bar?” she countered enticingly, nodding toward the sedan.

      “You only have twelve dollars to your name, you were going to sleep in your car and eat out of your trunk, but you brought chocolate?”

      “That’s my addiction,” she confessed.

      He shook his head as if the idea was lost on him. But he reached into his jean pocket, produced her keys and opened the trunk.

      Karis wasted no time dragging the box of food to the front and retrieving the bag of miniature chocolate bars she’d hoped she could make last longer than full-size bars it would have been impossible to eat only portions of. Then it occurred to her that if she didn’t want to eat her host’s food, she needed her own and she picked up the box.

      “Is the whole thing full of chocolate?” he asked.

      “No, but I feel funny eating your food.”

      “We’ll trade food for services, if it’ll make you feel better. Just bring your chocolate and leave your field rations.”

      Services?

      She didn’t know much about the man but she knew he wasn’t alluding to sexual services. So why did she have sex on the brain the minute he’d said that?

      She curbed it in a hurry, replaced the box in the trunk and, as he closed it, said, “What kind of services?”

      “Tomorrow we’ll hit the store, and I’ll buy some groceries. You can cook and do the cleanup. Can you cook?”

      “Pretty well, actually.”

      “Great. It’s not my favorite thing. And maybe vacuum or dust or something, too.”

      As long as she didn’t have to clean his bathroom, that seemed like a fair trade.

      “Deal,” she said, even though he was already headed for the house and hadn’t waited for her agreement.

      Karis followed him, watching the play of bodacious butt behind denim and again she had to pull her thoughts into line.

      What am I doing? she asked herself, wondering if her subconscious was on a quest for another kind of stress relief.

      “I bought Amy a burger, too,” Luke said, as she closed the door and he took off his coat to hang on the hall tree.

      Karis had to work at recalling what he was talking about.

      Amy…

      Burgers…

      “Too late,” she answered when she’d put two and two together. “Amy ate, had a bath and is sound asleep.”

      “What did you feed her—leaves and berries you foraged in the backyard?”

      As they went to the kitchen, Karis explained that she’d supplied Amy with some field rations, too, and that was what the baby had eaten.

      “I don’t know how you were raised,” he said when she’d finished, “but in a Walker house, food is never off-limits to anybody, whether they were invited, not invited, expected or unexpected. From now on, just help yourself, whether it’s for you or for Amy.”

      It still didn’t seem quite right, but Karis thought that if she could do a chore here and there it might make her feel as if things were evened out a little.

      “You can start to earn your keep by getting us a couple of sodas,” Luke said then.

      Karis wasn’t sure, but there almost seemed to be an edge of humor to his tone. Was it possible that he was going to lighten up? She might even consider cleaning his bachelor bathroom to accomplish that.

      She took two cans of cola out of his refrigerator and brought them to the table where he was setting out burgers and fries.

      Deciding to test the water and see if they might actually be able to have a normal conversation, she said, “Was your meeting some kind of emergency?”

      “No, no emergency,” he answered as they sat down to eat. “We’re in the process of opening a new investigation of an old case. The state police consented to send in a search team to help us, but they weren’t supposed to be here until Monday. For some reason they showed up this afternoon to work through the weekend. Everyone had to be briefed and updated and shown around—that kind of thing.”

      He’d offered that information civilly and it encouraged Karis to ask more.

      “What are you searching for?”

      “The body of a man who robbed the bank in 1960.”

      “He robbed the bank and died and you just started looking for him?”

      Luke had taken a bite of his hamburger and, while he chewed and swallowed, he shook his head. “Two men—itinerant farm hands—robbed the bank. Until a few weeks ago we thought they’d both gotten away with it. And with the wife of the man who was our Reverend at the time—”

      “Ooh, a little soap opera.”

      “Afraid so. It seems the Reverend’s wife got restless and hooked up with one of these two guys, purportedly not knowing that they had any intention of pulling a bank job. But once they had, it looked as if the Reverend’s wife and the robbers had gotten away.”

      “But they hadn’t?”

      “The town is named for an old bridge that’s being refurbished. In the process, one of the workmen came across a duffel bag in the rafters. Inside the duffel bag were the belongings of one of the men and there were bloodstains on the outside of it, which prompted our looking into things again. When we did, we discovered that the FBI—which has jurisdiction in bank robberies—had actually caught one of the robbers, the one the Reverend’s wife was involved with. He’d claimed that the Reverend’s wife didn’t know ahead of time that they were going to pull the bank job, and the other robber had taken his share of the money and gone his separate way. But since there was never another sign of the second robber—”

      “And