Jeremiah by Kris Michaels

Chapter 7

Jeremiah ran as fast as he could. He could hear someone calling for him, begging for help. The halls he ran through were deserted. “Where are you?” He screamed the same thing over and over, trying to find the person who was calling him. He entered a room with hundreds of doors. The terrorized scream for help echoed from everywhere. He raced to a door and threw it open. There was nothing. Again and again, he pulled the doors open. At the last door, he paused. The screaming was louder. He reached for the door and hesitated before he opened it. The voice—he knew the voice. It was Ellen. She screamed again. Jeremiah backed up and swung around. The room had disappeared, there was only a small hallway with another door. He jogged to it and threw it open. Cyrus Macmillan was behind the door and lifted a knife…

He woke in a wash of sweat. The nightmare—hell, night terror—put any thoughts of sleep out of his mind. The spike of adrenaline from the dream tingled under his skin and had his heart pumping way too fast. He whipped the thin blanket off him and got out of bed. He ran his fingers through his hair. There was no going back to sleep tonight. Not after that. Hell, he wanted to go check on his sister. Wasn’t that stupid? It was a dream. He rolled his shoulders. Wow, he needed to get out of the bedroom. It was too small and suddenly reminded him of a holding point at the prison.

Not wanting to wake Gen, he quietly padded into the kitchen. He jumped. “Shit!”

Gen spun around and dropped her shoes. “Did I wake you up? I’m so sorry!”

“Ah, no, but where are you going?” He blinked when she turned on the light.

“I have cinnamon rolls and biscuits to bake, coffee to brew, and breakfast to start.” Gen sat down on one of the kitchen chairs and shoved her feet into her shoes.

He looked at the clock. “At four in the morning?”

She chuckled. “Every morning except Sunday. Go back to sleep, come down when you wake up, and I’ll feed you.”

“I’m wide awake. Let me grab a shower and I’ll come down and help you.” He would not sleep again tonight.

“Sure, I’m a one-person show, but you can keep me company.” She stood up and headed to the back door, talking as she went, “I’ll start the coffee first, it should be done by the time you —” A loud crack shattered the nighttime silence and Gen went to her knees.

Jeremiah bolted to the door, unsure of what happened. “Gen?”

She looked up at him and grimaced. “So maybe we need to move the stairs to a priority?”

He bent down. One of her feet had gone through the wooden slats. He held out a hand and she grabbed it. She extracted her leg from the hole. “Are you hurt?”

“I bruised my pride for sure. That wasn’t exactly graceful.” She lifted her jean leg and hissed at the scrape along her shin. “I’ll go clean that up downstairs.”

“All right. I’ll be down in just a minute.” He watched her walk down the stairs and waited until he heard the cafe door shut before he examined the hole in the landing. It had been forever since he’d repaired anything, but he was up for the challenge. All he needed was lumber, nails, a power saw, and a measuring tape. How hard could that be?

* * *

Obviously, pretty damn hard. “I have to go where?”

“To Belle Fourche at a minimum. If the lumber yard there doesn’t have the size you need for those steps, then you might have to drive into Rapid. I can sell you the nails, hammer, saw, and tape measure, but we don’t stock lumber,” Carson Schmidt, the manager of Hollister Hardware, explained. The man had introduced himself as soon as Jeremiah stepped through the door.

“All right, hook me up with that and a couple sawhorses, too.” He rubbed his face and stared at the rows of tools and hardware. He could borrow Gen’s truck to go get the stuff, but damn it, he didn’t want to leave that hole she made when she dropped through the porch the way it was while he was gone. “You wouldn’t have a sheet of plywood, would you? It’s a safety issue.”

Carson put the carton containing the circular saw on the counter. “I have a half a sheet left over from a project I’ve been working on.”

“Man, I’ll pay you double what you paid for it. Gen damn near fell through that landing this morning.” Relief swamped him. He’d joked about that stairway being a death trap waiting to happen, but the cold, hard fact was the landing was now deadly.

“Gen Wheeler?” The man lifted his eyebrows.

“Yeah, she’s my sister.”

“Damn, you must be the guy that broke up the bar fight and saved Declan’s bacon.” The man shook his head. “You were the talk of the town yesterday. There was a heated debate about the motorcycle hellion who claimed to be a doctor and spent the night at Eden’s place. The ladies of the church circles were burning up the telephones.” Carson chuckled and started writing up a sales slip. “Gen is going to be very busy until everyone gets a good look at you.”

Jeremiah blinked at the man. “Why?”

“Because they are going to want to see you for themselves.”

He shifted and cocked his head. “Because?”

“Lordy, mister, if you don’t know, you’ll figure it out.” Carson told him the total for his purchases, and he handed over his credit card. He gathered his new collection of repair materials on top of the four-by-four-foot sheet of plywood and walked them back to Gen’s cafe. After he nailed the plywood over the hole in the landing, he made his way back into the cafe.

Eden was sitting in a booth and he smiled at her. She raised her coffee cup in his direction before Gen skittered to a stop in front of him. “What can I get you for breakfast?”

“Nothing, thanks. I’m going to need to borrow your truck to go get some lumber.”

“Sure, keys are in the truck.” She poured a cup of coffee and handed it to him. “But it’s a long drive to wherever you’re going, so sit down and I’ll get you a sausage biscuit.”

He took the cup and shook his head. “You left the keys in the truck?”

“Always. Everyone up here does.” She shrugged. “You get used to it.”

He shook his head and meandered over to Eden’s booth. He leaned down and whispered, “If I sit down here will Zeke piss all over my leg?”

She rolled her eyes. “No. I took care of that once and for all yesterday.”

Jeremiah sat down across from her. “Ouch.”

She nodded. “For both of us. He’s a good friend.”

“Who wanted to be more.” Jeremiah took a sip of the coffee and glanced around the small cafe. Every stool and booth had people in them which, considering the size of the town, was surprising. “Is this crowd usual?”

Eden glanced around. “For this time of the morning, no. It would seem you caused a ripple in the community. They’re probably here to check you out.” She nodded discretely to the back table. “Father Murphy and Reverend Olsen are regulars on Monday morning. Doc Macy is the vet and he’s here most mornings. The ranchers come and go, but the older ladies are here to check you out. I haven’t gotten the latest gossip from Allison, but something is making their tongues wag.”

Gen did a drive-by and popped a plate with two sausage biscuits, jelly, and a small thermal pot of coffee on their table. “Eden, you need anything else?”

“No, I’m fine, go worry about them.” She nodded to the women congregated a few booths down.

Gen plastered a fake smile on her face and headed that direction. Jeremiah watched his sister for several seconds before Eden spoke again. “What is on your agenda for today?”

He picked up a biscuit and spoke before he bit into it. “Measuring Gen’s stairs and landing for lumber. She about fell through the landing this morning. If you want me to, I can get lumber for your stairway as well.”

Eden leaned forward. “You have a thing about steps, don’t you?” He hummed an affirmative and nodded, his mouth too full to state the obvious about deadly dry rot.

“It would be nice to get them fixed. Then maybe I could work on my yard and put in a little barbeque and some paver stones.” She chuckled. “Maybe even some flowers that I couldn’t kill.”

Jeremiah swallowed his food. “You mean your weed and gravel patch?”

Eden tossed a crumpled-up paper napkin at him. “Tell me how much I owe for lumber and your time.”

Jeremiah took another bite and closed one eye, squinting at her. “You couldn’t afford me, so let’s call it repayment for the kindness you showed a stranger.”

She snorted into her coffee and muttered, “Right.”

He leaned back and picked up his cup. “I was serious.”

“You realize it is going to cost hundreds of dollars for the lumber and your time to build them, right?”

He nodded. Not like he had much else to do while he was here. Gen wasn’t joking when she said she was a one-person show. Her processes were economical and timed to the minute. Getting in her way only threw her off her game plan. That’s why he’d been at the hardware store the second it opened at eight. Before that, they visited as she waited on the people who wandered in at six in the morning.

“Well, I’ll pay for the lumber and your time or you can’t work on them.” Eden emptied her coffee cup and sighed. “I have a patient due in ten minutes. Do we have a deal?” She extended a hand to him.

He grasped her small hand and flicked his eyes to hers. Her soft but hurried pull of air told him she felt it too, the connection between their skin. He tightened his grip when she moved to pull away. Her face flushed a dark pink and she glanced around the small cafe. “Let’s make it a trade. I love my sister, but I don’t want to get in her way. Show me the Black Hills, introduce me to your town, make me eggs fried in bacon grease, or sit on your front porch with me and tell me stories about the people who walk down the street.”

Eden tugged at her hand again and he released it. “Why?”

He shrugged. “I told you, I want to stay out of Gen’s hair, especially since I’ll be staying longer than a week.”

She stopped her slide to the edge of the bench. “When did you decide that?”

Just now. When I held your hand. “I’m not sure.” He wasn’t sure of anything at the moment except that her blue eyes were beautiful, and he had nowhere to go. They were reason enough to stay. For now.

She stared at him for a moment before she smiled. “I’ll take that deal, but only if you allow me to pay for the lumber. Not negotiable.”

“I can work with that. I’ll be over to measure the stairs and landing before I head to Belle Fourche.”

She stood and tugged down her scrub top. “Thank you. Beers on me tonight. That bench, about sundown.” She nodded to the wooden bench outside her clinic.

“I’ll be there.” He watched her walk away, turning a bit to see how the scrubs clung to her pretty little ass. As he turned back to his biscuit, he met the stare of at least eight women who’d made no pretense at watching the interaction. He gave them a rakish smile and winked. Instantly, several huffed and turned around, but one with graying red hair and green eyes smiled at him and winked back. The lady sitting beside her placed a hand on his new friend’s forearm and pulled her back into the hushed conversation.

He downed the biscuit in four bites, chased it with coffee, and took his dishes back to the wash station in the kitchen. Gen darted through to plate up an order, and he took the opportunity to let her know he was heading out.

Setting the GPS on his phone, he put it in a cup holder and headed south. A smile spread as he realized he had a date tonight. A beer with a pretty lady. The day was looking up.