With his dog trailing at his heels, he headed to the meeting center and tackled the yard work while Ace plopped down to guard the door and supervise his owner’s work.
Zach mowed and ran the Weed Eater and leaf blower and wondered why he didn’t hire a teenager to do this for him. It was stubborn of him, really, to continue to do this himself, but he enjoyed the physical labor. It helped him clear his mind.
It needed clearing after dealing with the Georgia peach.
Sweaty, he ducked into his house for a quick shower, and if he lingered for a moment trying to decide which shirt to wear, he chalked it up to having an overflowing laundry hamper rather than any desire to look nice.
“I wish you would learn to do laundry,” he said to Ace, who displayed his lack of interest in the idea by padding to his bed and settling down for a nap.
Back at the meeting center, Zach taped a note on the door instructing Savannah to come on in, then he made his way to the small storage room, where he prepared to make copies on what he guessed might be the only ditto machine still in use in America.
As the first few printed pages rolled out, Zach absently brought a sheet up to his nose and inhaled the scent of the purple ink. He forgot all about Savannah Moore and his SARE to-do list as the fragrance catapulted him back to third grade and math tests. His mom used to wonder why he scored so poorly when he was a whiz at numbers. He’d never confessed that he spent too much time sniffing the paper and too little time doing the work.
The machine, ink, and paper had been one of the treasures stored in the basement at Angel’s Rest, and when Celeste offered to donate it to the meeting center, he’d been happy to take it, primarily for nostalgia’s sake. The center did have a state-of-the-art copier, but as luck would have it, it was currently out of service until a replacement part arrived, so the ditto machine was coming in handy.
As the machine produced pages for his packets, memories of grade school drifted through his mind: reading groups, dodgeball at recess, cursive writing. Did they still teach handwriting in schools? He wondered if teachers still used that tool with five sticks of chalk to draw equidistant lines on the chalkboard. For that matter, he wondered if they still used chalkboards.
That thought led him to recall his after-school punishment in the fourth grade—writing “I will not fight” on the board one hundred times. It had been a fair price to pay for the joy of pounding on Barry Hill after he’d taunted Zach because “your real mother hated you so much she gave you away.” His adoptive parents had agreed with the punishment—then they’d taken him out for pizza, a real treat.
When the last of the purple-inked pages rolled from the machine, he gathered up the stack and exited the room just in time to see Savannah Moore’s car pull to a stop in front of the center. Zach drew in a deep, lung-clearing breath. It wouldn’t do to have the drug dealer walk into the room and accuse him of being high on the solvents used in spirit duplicators.
He walked through the front door to the porch and gazed out at the old Ford sedan she drove. Bet that ride is a big step down for a drug dealer. She switched off the engine and opened her door. His gaze fastened on the bright red polish on toes slipped into heeled red patent leather sandals. Sexy. Thin ankles, long, tanned legs, and a flirty skirt on a yellow sundress. Very sexy.
Zach set his teeth and watched her walk toward him.
Very felonious.
He tried to smile, but when her eyes widened, then went narrow, he suspected it came off more like a snarl. But dammit, he’d spent five years of his life working undercover to help disrupt the flow of drugs into schools and parks and lives. He didn’t care how hot she was—the woman was drug-dealing scum.
After he’d finally read her rap sheet, he’d made some phone calls to Georgia. He’d yet to hear back from the messages he’d left at the department that had made her arrest, but a cop in the small rural town where she’d been born had remembered her well. He’d been downright chatty relaying information about her youth. Apparently Savannah