A Creed in Stone Creek. Linda Miller Lael

he looked up and saw Zeke standing with his nose to the door crack, wanting to go outside.

      Steven left the laptop on the table and accompanied Zeke out into the yard.

      It wasn’t quite dark, but a few stars had begun to pop out here and there, and the ghost of a three-quarter moon peeked over the horizon, like a performer waiting in the wings.

      Zeke sniffed around for a while, did his business and went back to the door, ready to go in.

      Steven opened the door and the dog mounted the steps, then went directly back to Matt’s room.

      Wide-awake, already bored with the internet and in no mood to watch TV, Steven sat on the fold-down metal steps in front of the threshold and looked out over what he could see of his ranch.

      Some ranch, he thought. Most of the fences are down, the barn probably collapsed ten years ago and the house is a disaster.

      He sighed and combed the fingers of his right hand through his hair, something he always did when he was questioning his own decisions.

      His dad and Conner had both tried to persuade him to stay in Colorado and raise Matt on the family’s spread. Set up a law practice in Lonesome Bend.

      He wasn’t sure they understood, his father and his cousin, why he’d needed to strike out on his own, create something new for himself and Matt and any generations that might follow.

      He wasn’t sure he understood, either.

      The Creed ranch was rightfully Conner’s, Steven figured, Conner’s and Brody’s. Their dad, dead since the brothers were hardly more than babies, had been Davis’s older brother and, therefore, the heir to the kingdom.

      Not that anybody knew exactly where Conner’s identical twin brother was keeping himself these days. He’d had some kind of knock-down-drag-out with Conner, Brody had, and except for a Christmas card every few years, with a terse message scrawled somewhere inside, the family hadn’t heard from him in a decade.

      Conner, like the good elder brother in the parable of the Prodigal Son, had worked shoulder to shoulder with Davis to make the ranch prosper, and it had. Even with the ups and downs of the economy and the ever-changing beef prices, it was a profitable operation.

      When he was younger, shuttling back and forth between his mother’s place back East, where he lived fall, winter and spring, and the ranch, which he’d thought of as home, Steven had been more than a little jealous of his cousins. Two years younger than he was, the twins got to live on the land year-round, and Davis was a substitute father to them, the kind he couldn’t be to Steven, for the better part of every year, because of the distance between Lonesome Bend and Boston.

      So, Steven had essentially lived a double life. Summers, he’d been a ranch kid, a cowboy. He’d herded cattle on horseback, mended fences, skinny-dipped in the lake, brawled with his cousins like a wolf cub in a litter, competed in rodeos.

      All too soon, though, fall would roll around, and he’d find himself on an airplane, wearing preppy clothes instead of jeans and a T-shirt and old boots, with his hair cut short and brushed shiny.

      In Boston, Steven played tennis and held a spot on the rowing team. He dated girls with trust funds. Even as a relatively little kid, he had his own suite of rooms in his grandfather’s sprawling mansion, and it was generally agreed—make that, assumed—that he would one day join the prestigious law firm, founded well before the Civil War broke out, where his mother, two uncles and, of course, Granddad, carried on the family business.

      School was difficult for Steven, at least in the beginning, a fact that troubled his mother to no end, but he’d worked hard, gotten the grades, made it through college and law school, and joined the company as a junior clerk, just like any other newbie.

      Within a year, both Steven’s mother and his grandfather were gone, his mother having died of pneumonia, which had started out as an ordinary case of the flu, Granddad of a heart attack.

      Steven had soon realized he couldn’t work for his uncles.

      They resented the fact that he’d inherited his mother’s share of the family fortune, as well as a chunk that had been set aside for him at birth and gathering interest ever since. His uncles had never understood what had possessed their sister to hook up with a cowboy in some shithole town out West during a summer road trip with her college roommates, get herself pregnant and compound the everlasting disgrace by keeping the baby.

      But there were other reasons for the break, too; Michael and Edward Fletcher had never shared their father’s commitment to excellence, not to mention integrity, and his death hadn’t changed that. Nor could they match their sister’s keen intelligence.

      A few months after the second funeral, his grandfather’s, Steven had called his best friend from school, Zack St. John, and Zack had recommended him for a position at the Denver firm where he worked.

      The rest, as they say, was history.

      In Boston, in the operation his mother had referred to as the “store,” Steven had practiced corporate law. As soon as he’d made the move to Denver, however, he’d switched to criminal defense.

      And he’d loved it.

      He and Zack had worked together a lot, and they made a crack team. Steven was proud of their record, not just the wins, but the losses, too.

      In every case, they’d done their absolute best.

      Just then, Steven’s cell phone rang in his pocket, and the sound jolted him. For the briefest fraction of a moment, he’d forgotten that Zack was dead and gone, expected to hear his voice.

      “Hello?” he said, still sitting in the doorway of the tour bus, realizing that the night was turning chilly.

      “Why didn’t you call?” Kim asked, with a smile in her voice.

      Steven went inside, shut the door, kept his reply low because he didn’t want Matt waking up. The boy needed his rest, especially since he’d be starting day camp on Monday morning.

      “Because I sent an email instead,” he answered. His dad and stepmother had never had any children of their own, which was a pity, because they both had a real way with kids. They were good people, decent and responsible, and he loved them.

      “So tell me all about Stone Creek,” Kim said.

      MELISSA PLUCKED her formerly frozen diet dinner out of the microwave and plunked it on the kitchen counter to cool, getting a mild steam-burn in the process. With her other hand, she held the cordless phone to her ear.

      “I tell you that there are eighty-plus-year-old nudists cavorting on your property, Ashley O’Ballivan, and all you can do is laugh?”

      “The name is McKenzie,” Ashley replied cheerfully. “What did you expect me to do, Melissa? Call out the National Guard to restore order?”

      “I didn’t think you’d laugh, that’s all,” Melissa said, miffed and not entirely sure why.

      “Why wouldn’t I laugh?” Ashley asked reasonably. “It’s funny.”

      “Not to mention illegal.” A belated giggle escaped Melissa. “I guess you’re right,” she admitted, eyeing her food warily. The microwaved dish looked more like a plastic replica of lasagna than the real thing, the kind that might be sold in a joke shop—assuming there was even a market for stuff like that. “But trust me, it was also a shock. You haven’t lived, my dear, until you’ve seen a pack of bare-ass naked senior citizens engaged in a lively game of croquet.”

      “And you without a fire hose,” Ashley quipped.

      “Ha-ha,” Melissa said, carefully peeling the cellophane cover from her lasagna. Ashley was the one with the cooking talent; Julia Child was her patron saint. Melissa had never really caught the culinary bug; in fact, she’d all but had herself vaccinated against it. “When are you coming home? I miss the pity suppers.”

      Ashley laughed