The Last Honest Man. Lynnette Kent

Sunday afternoons, a family might wander down with their dog and their baby in a stroller, just to take in the fine weather and the view of downtown New Skye.

      Adam could enjoy that view from where he stood now—not at the edge of the slope on the back of the lot, but on the street side—because the trees were gone. To his right, Main Street descended the Hill, as they called it, to the green circle of lawn that separated the grand old Victorian courthouse from traffic. Beyond the courthouse, the street with its new brick pavers stretched between tall crepe myrtle trees and giant planters filled with colorful flowers, which stood in front of renovated shops and offices. Anchoring downtown at the far end of Main were the new town hall and police department buildings.

      There the trouble lay. Being in the construction business himself, Adam closely followed the rezoning notices for New Skye and the county. This case, though, had flown in under his radar. He’d missed the motion, the discussion and the vote that changed the use of the Brewer land from residential to commercial, forcing the owners to sell. Had he been sloppy? Or had the whole transaction been camouflaged to avoid public notice? A number of powerful people in town would have protested the conversion of this property…if they’d been informed.

      “I s-spent an hour in the r-records office yesterday afternoon,” Adam told his best friends during breakfast the next morning. After a couple of hard and fast hours of basketball, they were settling in for a decent meal at Charlie’s Carolina Diner, where they’d been coming for more Saturdays than they wanted to remember. “M-Mayor T-Tate slipped the m-motion into a city c-c-council m-meeting with no prior notification to the p-public.”

      “The council went along without a whimper, no doubt, ’cause they’re his buddies.” Tommy Crawford shook his head. “I bet L. T. LaRue sat there the whole time, just grinning. He got what he wanted out of the deal—another building site.”

      “Kachink, kachink,” Dixon Bell added. “All that scumbag ever thinks about is money.”

      They all stared glumly at their plates. “It’d be nice if they mayor and the city council gave some thought to the ordinary people in this town,” Pete Mitchell said after a minute, “especially when there are real problems to be addressed.” As a highway patrolman, Pete ran an after school program for juvenile offenders; he knew the hardships imposed by funding cuts. “I suppose that gas station will increase the tax base, but if it makes the town a less desirable place to live, then people won’t move here and the tax base’ll go down…” He shook his head. “I’m not sure there’s a solution.”

      “We could murder the incumbents,” Dixon suggested, with a wicked lift of his eyebrow.

      Pete shook his head. “I don’t want to go to prison on account of Curtis Tate and L. T. LaRue.”

      “The solution,” Tommy said, pointing with his knife, “is to get some honorable people in the government, men and women who’ll care about what’s right, not what’ll make them rich.”

      This was the very conclusion Adam had drawn late last night, when he made his big decision.

      Tommy glanced around the table. “This is an election year, gentlemen. We’ve got the chance to make a change. So which of us is gonna run for mayor?”

      Amidst the muttering of the other guys, Adam took his stand. “I w-w-will. I’ll r-run f-for m-mayor.”

      Tommy looked at him with raised eyebrows. “DeVries?”

      In the silence, Adam looked at each man in turn—the boys he’d gone to school with, the friends he counted on when he needed help. “Wh-what d-do you th-think?”

      Their hesitation lasted for a blink of an eye. Then they were all over the plan, giving advice, predicting success. Mounting a campaign would require money—they’d be sure he had enough—and time, which they offered freely. To hear them talk, the votes had already been tallied, the outcome secured.

      Only when the others had left the diner and Adam sat alone with Tommy did the real impediment to their plan come up.

      “So…” Tommy rolled his iced tea glass between his palms. “You’re gonna run for mayor. You don’t have a wife or kids to worry about. That’s convenient. And you’re the perfect candidate—good looks, good reputation, good family, everything we could want.”

      “B-but…” Adam didn’t have to ask what Tommy was thinking. He had no problem putting every aspect of his life on the line in order to be the mayor of New Skye.

      Every aspect but one.

      Before he could eject Tate from the mayor’s chair, Adam would have to abandon his closest companion of more than two decades.

      He would have to learn to speak without the stutter.

      CHAPTER ONE

      “MR. DEVRIES?”

      At the sound of his name, Adam looked up from the news magazine he’d been pretending to read.

      Across the waiting room, a woman whose long hair was the color of natural ash wood smiled at him. “Good morning. I’m Phoebe Moss.”

      His heart began to pound against his ribs. He put the journal aside and got to his feet, pretending his palms weren’t sweaty, his throat hadn’t closed down completely. The receptionist, a grandmotherly woman with unlikely red hair, smiled at him as he passed by. Though he tried to return the favor, he doubted he’d been successful.

      Phoebe Moss looked up at him when he got close—she was almost a foot shorter than he—and tilted her head toward the hallway behind her. “This way, please.”

      With every step, Adam’s resistance mounted. He didn’t want to be here, would rather have been just about anywhere else on the planet besides this place, this morning. Walking down the hall felt like pushing against an incoming tide. In the middle of a hurricane.

      “Come in and have a seat.” She ushered him into a north-facing office with a couch and an armchair, a desk positioned in the corner between two windows, and an assortment of assessment machines with which Adam was all too familiar, thanks to past experience. His strongest impulse was to run…as far and as fast as he possibly could.

      But when Phoebe Moss sat in the chair in front of her desk and turned to face him with a clipboard in her lap, Adam lowered himself into the armchair.

      She pushed her gold-rimmed glasses up on her nose and settled down to business. “What can I do for you, Mr. DeVries?”

      “Y-you’re a s-s-speech th-therapist.” He clenched his fist, hitting it against his leg. Bad enough to be here, without having to explain why.

      “Yes.” The word definitely held a question. Waiting for his answer, she wrote briefly on the paper held by the clipboard.

      “A-as y-you c-c-can hear, I s-s-stutter.”

      Nodding, Phoebe Moss scribbled something else. “Fairly badly.”

      “I w-w-want to s-stop.”

      Her gaze lifted to his face. “Why?”

      This was even worse than he’d expected. “W-why do you think? Talking this w-w-w-way s-s-sucks.”

      Another notation. “I understand. Have you tried therapy before?”

      He nodded, his lips pressed tightly together.

      “Did it work?”

      “Obv-v-viously n-n-not.”

      “Not even for a brief time?”

      Adam shrugged. “If I c-concentrate,” he said, very slowly, “I can g-get th-through short s-sentences. But that’s n-not e-enough.”

      “Has something changed in your life to prompt this new attempt?”

      He gripped his hands together, studying his thumbs. The answer to her question was straightforward enough. Yet he dreaded her reaction.

      When