The Secret Sin. Darlene Gardner

“Good seeing you, Annie. And a pleasure meeting you, Miss Lindsey.”

      “He was nice,” Lindsey said as he walked away.

      “Most people in Indigo Springs are,” Annie said.

      Lindsey looked unhappy. “Then why can’t I stay here?”

      So far three people who’d known Annie as a sixteen-year-old had seen her with Lindsey and none of them had put the pieces together. In all probability, nobody would, ensuring that Lindsey wouldn’t have her world inadvertently turned upside down.

      “I’ve been thinking about that,” Annie said slowly. “Maybe you don’t have to go back just yet.”

      “You mean I can stay?” Lindsey asked excitedly.

      The thought of letting the girl go without spending at least a little time with her was like a dagger through Annie’s heart. Staying in Indigo Springs was clearly what Lindsey wanted, too. Annie simply wasn’t strong enough to fight fate and what she so desperately wanted anyway.

      “Only if your parents say yes,” Annie said.

      “They’ll say yes.” Lindsey smiled and took a big bite of her sandwich, unaware she’d agreed to a visit with her birth mother.

      That was exactly the way Annie intended to keep it.

       M AYBE SHE’D messed up in coming to Indigo Springs, Lindsey thought.

      Uncle Frank had made it sound really cool, but the downtown was nothing but a bunch of old buildings. Once she and Annie had gotten back in her truck and headed out of town, all she’d seen was trees.

      The parking lot they’d pulled into wasn’t even paved, and the building they were approaching looked like a grungy warehouse. A couple of dozen sturdy-looking bikes were parked in neat rows off to one side. On the other were nine or ten faded picnic tables.

      Lindsey read the sign over the door: Indigo River Rafters.

      “ This is your father’s business?” she asked Annie.

      “This is it,” Annie said.

      Lindsey slowed down but didn’t dare stop. If she did, the gnats that were flying around her hair might attack her eyes. She supposed the setting was okay, although there weren’t a lot of trees close to this part of the river and the grass around the shop was trampled down dirt. The water was maybe fifty yards away, with a flatbed trailer blocking part of the view.

      “All our trips end here at base camp. That spot over by the flatbed trailer is the take-out point,” Annie said. “We load the boats so we can transport them to the put-in for the next trip.”

      “Boats?” Lindsey asked.

      “Rafts, kayaks, tubes.” She pointed to a pair of yellow school buses so old you couldn’t pay Lindsey to get in them. “We shuttle the customers in those.”

      Annie acted like it was really important to her that Lindsey like it here, which was totally different from her attitude at the train station. Earlier, Annie’s main goal had been sending Lindsey home.

      “Can’t you just drag a raft down to the river and go?” Lindsey asked, although there was no way she’d do that. The bugs wouldn’t be as bad out on the river, but she shuddered just thinking about the mud and the cold water.

      “You could,” Annie said, “except the river’s like a one-way street. It only flows in a single direction.”

       Whatever, Lindsey thought. That hadn’t been what sounded so cool when she’d heard about the business. “Uncle Frank said there was a store.”

      “It’s more like a gift shop,” Annie said. “We sell T-shirts, waterproof sandals, sunglasses—that kind of thing. It supplements the income from the river trips and the mountain-bike rentals.”

       Great, Lindsey thought with a sinking heart. Just great.

      “Where does your dad live?” Lindsey asked.

      Annie pointed to a tiny building behind the shop. “Back there. That’s where we’re going.”

      Lindsey stopped walking. “Are you serious?”

      “Why wouldn’t I be?”

      Lindsey thought of the big, five-bedroom, two-story house she’d woken up in that morning. “I guess I just expected something different when Uncle Frank talked about all this.”

      Lindsey made a face when she spotted the rocking chairs on the wooden porch, but the inside of the house turned out to be not so bad. A decent-sized room with a really old TV opened into a kitchen. The furniture was simple—a navy blue sofa and wood chairs. Beyond the kitchen was a smaller space with a washer and dryer.

      Annie indicated the left side of the house. “There are two bedrooms with separate baths over here. You can sleep in my dad’s room.”

      “Cool,” Lindsey said. She could stay here, she decided, which was a good thing because she had nowhere else to go.

      “I need to finish up a couple of things at the shop,” Annie said. “Will you be okay for an hour or so?”

      “Yeah, sure,” Lindsey said, but she ran out of things to do after putting her clothes in an empty drawer and checking her e-mail on the computer with an ancient modem.

      She was flipping through a magazine from a nearby rack when Annie showed up. No way was she going to read Field and Stream, Outdoor Life and Backpacker.

      “Don’t you have anything good?” Lindsey asked. “Like Vogue or Elle ?”

      “Afraid not,” Annie said.

      Lindsey held up an issue of something called Outdoor Women . On the cover was a picture of three women with fishing poles standing in river water up to their thighs, with mountains rising behind them.

      “Who reads this lame stuff?” Lindsey wrinkled her nose.

      “Enough people to keep me employed,” Annie said. Lindsey must have looked puzzled, because Annie added, “I wrote the cover story.”

      “Get out!” Lindsey eagerly turned the glossy pages until she found the article. It was about something called heli-fishing, where helicopters flew fishermen to remote areas that couldn’t be reached any other way. “Oh, my gosh. Your name’s on this story. That’s really awesome.”

      “Didn’t you just say the magazine was lame?”

      “Well, yeah. But getting your name in a magazine is cool.” Lindsey rethought her lukewarm opinion of Annie. “Maybe one day you can write about something better.”

      Annie looked doubtful. “The outdoors is pretty much my thing.”

      “Not mine.” Lindsey rolled her eyes. “I’d take a mall over a river any day.”

      Annie perched on the edge of the sofa near where Lindsey sat on the floor. “Then why did you come to visit my father? There aren’t any malls in Indigo Springs.”

      Lindsey stuffed the magazines back in the rack. “I didn’t know that. I thought there were malls everywhere.”

      “Is something wrong at home?” Annie seemed to be deciding what to say. “You can tell me if you don’t feel…safe.”

      Lindsey had sat through films in health class about the different types of abuse. She knew what Annie was really asking. Wow. Was she way off!

      “There’s nothing like that going on,” Lindsey said.

      Annie seemed to relax. “Something must have happened to make you leave home. Your parents will be calling back soon. It would help if I knew what it was.”

      Lindsey stood up. “I just needed to get away, that’s all.”

      “Away from what?” Annie asked.

      Lindsey