Last Dance for Cadence Read online

  Last Dance for Cadence

  (Corbin's Bend #8)

  by

  Maren Smith

  Copyright 2014 Lazy Day, LLC and Maren Smith

  www.lazydaypub.com

  Last Dance for Cadence: Corbin's Bend #8

  ISBN: 978-1-62750-4805

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  Copyright © 2014 Maren Smith

  Cover art by ABCD Graphics and Design

  This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or places, any events or locales is purely coincidental. The names, characters, places and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.

  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission from the publisher LazyDay, with the exception of quotes used in reviews and critical articles.

  Table of contents:

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  EPILOGUE

  Maren Smith

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  PROLOGUE

  The phone rang for the seventh time as Jason Rolson helped his sick and elderly wife across what was (according to the housing developers) his formal living room but which was, in fact (according to his working needs), his patients’ waiting area. Once again, Doctor Marcus Devon had forgotten to switch his phones over to the answering service. Refusing to interrupt a patient examination to answer the phone, he held open the door to his office, listening as Rose wheezed and coughed, and her loving husband worriedly recounted her summer cold symptoms. Every few words and coughs and wheezes, that blasted phone shrilled out another ring.

  Eight now. Damn it. It must be important.

  “Do you need to get that?” Rose asked, her rheumy eyes worried and wide.

  “Not at all,” Marcus lied, ushering her to take a seat and settling his stethoscope into his ears. He politely parted the collar of her shirt to listen to her heart first, and then her labored breathing, and then the thumping cacophony three young boys made as they ran from one end of the second floor to the other, passing directly over their heads. A herd of elephants, that’s what it sounded like. A herd of shouting, squabbling elephants, the youngest of which was already on the verge of dramatic tears.

  “It’s my turn now! You said I could play too!”

  “We’re not done, Buddy! You can have it when we’re done!”

  “Ow! My hand!”

  “I’m telling Dad!”

  Followed by the slam of a door, a scream of hurt feelings, the sound of breaking glass, and the inevitable sobbing wails of sibling exclusion.

  “Do you need to get that?” Rose asked again, a slightly sympathetic smile beginning to tug at her lips.

  “Nope,” Marcus said, as calm as he was resolute. He kept his expression schooled into one of polite professionalism. He was determined to keep it that way too, even if it killed him, something his gradually rising blood pressure might just do if some part of this drastically deteriorating situation didn’t change.

  Out of the blue, that old familiar sense of longing zipped in to bite at him. God, he missed his wife. Five years with Stacy just hadn’t been enough. The three years following the accident that had taken her and his unborn baby girl had been an eternity of hell that he’d only crawled out of with the numbing help of passing time and a truly gifted housekeeper, Libby, who having married last year, gave her two-week notice seventeen days ago. These last three days without her had been like those first few days after Stacy’s death all over again. Marcus was once more lost, alone, and overwhelmed.

  Writing out a prescription for antibiotics and cough syrup, Marcus handed it to Jason. “If that cough isn’t better in ten days, I want to see you both back in here.”

  “You got it, Doc.” Pocketing the prescription, the elderly man turned his attention to helping Rose put her coat back on.

  Upstairs, a small fist was beating steadily on a bedroom door, rattling it in its frame.

  “Knock it off, Buddy! We’re busy!” Michael, his eldest, shouted.

  “I’m telling Dad!” the youngest wailed again, and then there was a loud ‘whump’ as he flopped down on the floor and simply cried instead.

  Frowning at the ceiling, Marcus didn’t notice the look the elderly couple exchanged until the old man patted him on the shoulder.

  “One day,” Jason said sagely, “when the boys are grown and have moved on to live their own lives, you are going to look back on this moment, son, and I promise, you are going to miss it.”

  Not if he killed his children first. Marcus knew better than to say that out loud. He also knew better than to argue with patients, and so he simply held his office door open for them once more. With Rose leaning heavily on her cane, Jason moved out ahead of her, nudging a path through the toys scattered through the formal living room (where toys were never allowed because no one was ever supposed to play here, damn it). Marcus got the front door for them too.

  “Drive safe,” he said, offering Rose a steady hand to hold onto as she negotiated her way down the three stone porch steps.

  “Be patient, calm and wise,” Jason replied, and this time there was no mistaking the telltale glance that passed between the old man and his wife as they no doubt recalled a similar moment, perhaps in their own younger lives.

  Back in his office, his work phone began to ring again. Marcus watched to make sure Rose was safely back in the Rolson’s car before he headed inside. Upstairs, Buddy was now kicking the door until Michael suddenly shouted, “Fine! Here, you big baby!” The subsequent slam as the door shut again only made the youngest wail louder.

  Closing his eyes, Marcus plugged his other ear as he reached for the phone. After this call, he’d head upstairs to referee the fight, soothe away the tears, and mend what hurt feelings there surely were as best he could. And maybe after that, if there were no patients waiting to be seen in his office, he’d do what he should have done almost three weeks ago when Libby first let him know she was leaving to have a family of her own—he was going to draft an advertisement for a nanny and a housekeeper, and he was going to post it on the community center bulletin board. He needed help. Hopefully, someone from Corbin’s Bend would respond, because he really didn’t want to go all the way to Denver to get it.

  CHAPTER ONE

  The sun was setting. It was about even with her bedroom window ledge now, casting the whole room in a blinding orange glow. That was good, in a way. Just before five, the electric company had finally made good on a month’s worth of threats and cut the power. The fading sun was providing all the light she had to see by, and when it was gone… Being Friday, that pretty much guaranteed there would be no reconnect until Monday.

  Sitting at the foot of her bed with her bills and jewelry box spread out before her and her bank statement lying limp in her lap, Cadence knew there would be no reconnect on Monday either. According to her bank, she was $33.27 in the hole. According to her landlord, that was ninety days and $2,133.27 too little, too lat
e. Any minute now, she expected the Sheriff to come knocking at her door with a court-ordered eviction in his hand.

  She had failed.

  Folding up her bills, she bent to tuck them neatly into the side pocket of the only duffel bag she’d bothered to pack. If she left now, she’d be able to take it with her. If she waited for that inevitable knock, everything but the clothes on her back would go to pay her back rent, which still left her mountain of medical and rehabilitation bills, her credit card debts which she’d never had a lot of and which she’d never ever been late paying…until it had happened. Unwittingly, Cadence stretched out her right leg, idly rubbing just below her knee where the pins that held it together had once breathed life into the hope that at least she’d be able to walk again, while at the same time breathing death into her career.

  Shifting through the contents of her mother’s jewelry box, she found again the programme for her last ballet. It had been the greatest night of her life. Her first starring role and a raving success, as critics had proclaimed. Sometimes when she closed her eyes, she could still hear the cheers and applause that had lasted more than eleven minutes at the end. Eleven! No one else in her troupe could claim better than that. But then, without exception, that night had also been her worst.

  “I’m fine I said,” Sebastian had laughed, dangling her car keys just out of her reach. “This is your night, princess. Let’s not kill the mood with a fight. You should be celebrating. You’re a star! I’m perfectly fine to drive.”

  Sitting on the edge of her bed, Cadence felt her fingers twitch as she remembered once again trying to grab the keys.

  “You’ve had too much,” she’d said then, trying to coax her then-boyfriend and leading man to give in. “Come on. Hand them over. I’m serious now. Give me the keys or I’m walking.”

  Sometimes, like now, she could still hear the way he’d laughed at her. Sometimes she heard it so loudly that it felt as if he were laughing right there beside her.

  “So walk then,” he’d said, and turned away.

  And there she’d stood, with that old brick bar house at her back, watching from the front bumper as he climbed in behind the wheel, put the car into gear and stomped the gas to prove just how well he could drive. Except that instead of backing out of the parking space, the car lurched forward, directly into both her and the building. There had been no time at all for her to get out of the way. Pinned between crumbling brick and metal, her legs had been crushed.

  They’d talked amputation for a while. In the end, four surgeries and two massive infections later, the doctors managed to salvage both her legs with pins, but her career was over. One night of revelry and one accident had robbed her of everything—her job, her savings, her boyfriend, and her ability to walk without pain and falling.

  A lesser woman might have curled up on her bed, folded her arms over her head and wept.

  Cadence was made of sterner stuff, and she never cried. Opening up her mother’s jewelry box, she picked through the few pieces she had left. Everything worth something had been sold already. All but the most sentimental pieces: her father’s watch, and a necklace she’d been given the very first night she’d danced. She’d only been a minor extra, working for a very minor paycheck, but it had been in front of a very real audience. For days afterwards she had walked on clouds. Now, there was nothing in this jewelry box but bits and baubles. Pretty trinkets, but made of cheap metal and cut glass. Everything except her mother’s wedding ring, white gold with an opal stone surrounded with alternating diamonds and sapphires all the way around. Those sapphires really brought out the swirling blue, pink and red fire-like patterns in the opal. Her father had made it with his own hands. To a pawn shop, it wasn’t worth anything like what it was worth to her.

  She hugged it to her chest but only for a moment.

  Cadence never cried, but her hand shook when she picked up the cellphone and dialed the only person she could think of. The only family she had left—Venia Varner, her mother’s best friend back when they had all lived in Florida and her mother had been alive. Mama Venia, her Other Mother, as Cadence had called her for all the years that she’d spent growing up alongside Mama Venia’s own daughter, Cecily. For all the years she’d spent playing on Venia’s backyard swing, learning how to cook in her kitchen. Being held, tucked up so tight and hard against Venia’s side in that awful moment while the cancer that had ravaged her mother’s once vibrant body took its final toll. Spending those last few teenaged years before she graduated living in Venia’s spare room, at first grieving, and then bitterly angry, and finally grateful that Venia had stuck by her through those really bad teenage years and had wanted her fiercely enough to fight first Children’s Services and then the courts to keep her.

  It was Mama Venia who’d paid for her to continue her dancing lessons. Mama Venia who’d sat through recital after recital, clapping and cheering with all the other parents, even when her performance sucked. Mama Venia who had chipped in what Cadence was short so she could buy her first car and drive all the way from their home in Florida to Denver, Colorado where she joined her first dancing company.

  And it was to Mama Venia now that Cadence reached out when everything else in her life felt at its worst, and the failure of her first foray into the big wide world of adult responsibility weighed in crushing tatters all around her.

  She covered her eyes when she heard the phone pick up and Mama Venia’s voice came through warmly from the other end. “Well, hello, stranger! Cady baby, you’d best have one hell of a good reason for why I haven’t heard from you since Christmas.”

  Cadence never cried. She had to bite her bottom lip to stop the traitorous trembling and squeezed in hard at her eyes to keep the burning of tears at bay. She drew in a shaky breath, one that Venia either heard or perhaps it was all those mothering instincts kicking into overdrive because all hint of cheerfulness abruptly abandoned her tone.

  “What is it?” she said. “What’s happened?”

  “Mama Venia,” Cadence at last made herself whisper. “Can I please come home?”

  It didn’t matter that Venia no longer lived in the same house, or even in the same state, in which Cadence had grown up. It didn’t even matter that Cadence had never been to the new house, which wasn’t more than an hour or so from Denver, up over the mountains in a small community called Corbin’s Bend. Home was wherever her Other Mother was, and there was no place right now that Cadence wished more that she could be.

  “Do you need me to come get you?” was Venia’s immediate response. “I can be there in an hour…” She must have checked her watch. “…hour and a half, depending on traffic.”

  For the first time in what felt like months, Cadence heard herself laugh. It was soft and breathy, and the smile it forced her face to adopt felt much too brittle to pass for real. “No. No, I’m pretty sure my car can make it over the pass.”

  “Do you have enough money for gas?”

  Hugging her mother’s ring so tightly that she could feel the tiny stones biting into the soft flesh of her palm, Cadence nodded until she remembered Venia couldn’t hear that. “Yes.” Pawning this ring was going to hurt more than the pins in her legs, but there were times when adult responsibilities had to take precedence over childish wants. “Yes, I do.”

  “Call me every half hour on the half hour until you get here, or I’ll go crazy thinking about your old car chugging up all those mountain curves. When are you leaving?”

  “Right now,” Cadence whispered. Just as soon as she exchanged her beloved mother’s ring for a full tank of gas. She reached for her duffel bag, slipping her meager jewelry box into the side pocket and pulling the roadmap out onto her lap. After saying her goodbyes and scrubbing her wrist across eyes she refused to acknowledge were wet, she folded it to show the route from here to there.

  Corbin’s Bend.

  It felt like home already.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Her car overheated twice. What should have only been a one hour
trip from Denver, over the mountains to the quiet community of Corbin’s Bend, had instead taken three. Most of which had been spent on the side of the road with the hood up while she waited for the car to cool down enough to add more water to the steaming radiator. Eventually though, she did make it and right from the start, as she pulled off the mountain highway onto the winding, high-country road that connected the quiet co-op community of Corbin’s Bend to the rest of the world, it looked like a nice place to live.

  Thirty-thousand wooded mountain acres surrounded a small community, with a population sign on the outskirts boasting just over four hundred people. It was freakishly clean, nothing like Denver, although it took a slow drive through the looping main road for her to recognize exactly how neat and tidy a city could be. She passed the school, the market, the community center and parks, and, oh, the houses…Stepford Wives came immediately to mind, with all those well-manicured yards, neatly cut lawns, and paint-by-number houses, of which there appeared to be only seven design variations. How the people of Corbin’s Bend managed to find their way back to their own homes each night was a mystery. At first glance, all the houses looked alike.

  That was grossly unfair, and Cadence knew it the minute that uncharitable thought crossed her mind. Many of the houses did look identical, but only if one failed to look beyond all the extra finishing touches that individualized each and every residence. Purple and blue rhododendrons here, plaster garden gnomes among white roses there, a short picket fence surrounding a house on the corner with a sign that read “Beware of Dog” with a picture of the most non-threatening pug underneath.

  In every neighborhood she’d ever lived in, there was always at least one house determined to “slum it up” for everybody else. But as Cadence drove slowly from one residential street to the next (incredibly conscientious of the potential of children at play, as the cautionary signs proclaimed) she couldn’t find a single ill-maintained home. Nor was any one house grander than its neighbors. Every single residence in this place could have pictured on the front cover of Better Homes and Gardens.