Plains Crazy by J.M. Hayes Page B

through lawns, gardens, and alleys down to Main.
    Hailey did cut south before the motorcycle negotiated the corner. She was so smart it scared him sometimes.
    Mad Dog ducked beneath catalpas, dodged a row of evergreens, and listened hard to the note of the bike’s exhaust. He was waiting for the dramatic change in pitch that might indicate Hailey’s interception had succeeded.
    Mad Dog knew the quickest way through this neighborhood. He’d spent a lot of time here, back in the days when he was courting Janie Jorgenson. She’d lived just half a block north of Main on Jackson. He slid around familiar evergreens, bigger now, vaulted a fence he didn’t recall at all, discovered a new hole in the hedge that bordered the alley, and hit Jackson just short of Main. From the sound of it, his arrival there coincided with the moment the motorcycle cleared Main and Van Buren. To his surprise, the biker turned east, his direction. Mad Dog put on a burst, but the corner was just too far. The bike blasted past just as a silver-haired tundra wolf cleared a thick row of peonies in front of him. A middle-aged woman scuttled out of the flowerbed on hands and knees, frantically backing away from Hailey. Mad Dog lost his balance trying not to run over her, and, for the second time that day, went down hard on his left knee and the heels of his hands.
    He was calling on a different god than the one he favored when Hailey came back to apologize by slathering his face with kisses. He turned to the woman then.
    â€œAre you all right?” he asked. Hailey had transferred her tongue and attention to the woman’s face and she was trying to brush herself off and avoid the wettest of Hailey’s acts of contrition.
    â€œYes,” she said. “Nothing bruised but my pride, I think. And I apologize about the flowerbed. I thought you’d set your dog on me, though I see now that she isn’t so much angry as affectionate.”
    The woman looked familiar. Not surprising, since, sooner or later, locals could hardly avoid encounters at the limited venues available for shopping or socializing. He didn’t understand about the flowerbed, though. She seemed to think it was his.
    â€œAbout the flowers…” he began.
    â€œI’m terribly, terribly sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to hurt your peonies. It’s just that I think my mother planted those and they’re so healthy and so beautiful. I didn’t think I’d do them much harm if I dug up a bit of root to try to start a bush at home.”
    Hailey was back, checking out Mad Dog’s injuries. His jeans had a fresh, blood-stained hole in one knee. A wound on the heel of his hand was seeping again as well. He was a mess, and suddenly very conscious of it because he knew who she was.
    The house where the row of peonies stood on the edge of the street was the one in which Janie Jorgenson had lived. The woman he and Hailey had bowled over looked familiar because she was the spitting image of Janie’s mother, the woman who’d tried to persuade her daughter she could do a lot better than Harvey Edward “Mad Dog” Maddox.
    â€œJanie?” he said, throwing an arm around Hailey’s shoulder because he had a sudden, desperate need to hold on to something. “Janie Jorgenson? Is that really you?”
    God, she was old. Still pretty, but no longer the adolescent cheerleader he’d fallen in love with. Was he so changed as well?
    â€œDo I know you?” she said. Apparently he was.
    He looked at her face more closely. There were lines there. And more flesh and it sagged a little, but underneath all that was a face he knew. Not her mother’s after all. Hell, she must be almost twenty years older than her mother had been. And so was he. Her eyes, though, they were the proof. They still sparkled, even at this moment of uncertainty and embarrassment—intelligent, laughing, irreverent, and home to a soul