The Daydream Cabin Read online

  He noticed that Jayden had sat back down and crossed one long leg over the other. How on earth could that striking woman be Skyler’s sister? Skyler was cute after a fashion, but Jayden would make any man turn and take a second glance.

  He glanced over at Novalene. “I’m sure glad you didn’t retire like you said you were going to do when the session ended last year.”

  “Retirement ain’t all it’s cracked up to be.” She settled a floppy hat onto her head. “I need some drama in my life.” She was around Diana’s height, but forty pounds lighter, and she kept her hair dyed stovepipe black. Her blue eyes could bore holes into a misbehaving kid, but by the end of the summer the year before, all three of her charges had cried when they had to say goodbye. “Jayden was just telling us that Skyler is going on a trip to Europe with her students from Glory Bound, but I guess you already knew that.”

  Elijah nodded. “Yes, I did. Did y’all welcome Jayden to eight of the toughest and most rewarding weeks of her life?”

  Jayden stood up again. “They’ve been telling me all kinds of stories. I can take tough if there’s a reward at the end of the line.”

  “She sure doesn’t look anything like Skyler, does she?” Novalene said.

  “Nope,” Elijah said.

  “We get that a lot.” Jayden’s voice had a lot of gravel in it, like a long-term smoker, but her eyes looked sad at the mention of Skyler’s name. “She looks like our mother. I’m tall like my grandmother, and I’m a lot tougher than my sister.”

  “That’s a good thing to be.” Elijah chuckled. “I’m going to make a bathroom run, grab a cup of coffee, and then we’ll be on our way. It’s about an hour and a half to Alpine, so get ready to settle in . . .”

  “And listen to some country music, right?” Novalene grinned.

  “You got it.” Elijah gave her a thumbs-up and disappeared down a hallway.

  He gave Jayden a sideways look one more time as he left the room. He hadn’t seen a woman who would make him want to throw his own set of camp rules—number one was never get involved with a counselor—in the fire before then, and he sure wished he’d met Jayden in a bar or even a church social instead.

  And then what? the annoying voice in his head asked. So you can bring bad luck into her life?

  He washed his hands and dried them, then went back out to the office to pour himself a cup of what passed for coffee but tasted more like road tar. He took a few sips and then poured the rest down the sink. “Okay, ladies, let’s load it up and get on the way. Mary is planning on us being back by lunchtime, and since she’s the cook, I try to never make her mad.”

  Jayden pulled her black suitcase out to the plane and parked it beside a red one and one that looked like it had been dragged through a flower garden. If a person could be judged by their suitcases, Jayden was as solid as a rock. Once everyone was buckled in, he took his place in the pilot’s seat.

  “So, are you excited about this?” Novalene asked Jayden as Elijah taxied out to the runway.

  “Not particularly,” Jayden answered as the plane started ascending.

  “Then why are you doing it?” Novalene asked.

  “Because my sister cried, and because she’s always wanted to go to Europe, and if I didn’t take her place, that would be just one more thing she’ll hold over my head the rest of my life,” Jayden replied.

  Elijah could hear aggravation in her voice. She and Skyler weren’t only different in looks—evidently they didn’t get along. He had never cared about the counselors’ lives outside of camp, but he found himself wondering about the sisters.

  “I can see where she would do that,” Diana said. “Skyler could get pretty emotional, but that’s the way she controlled her girls. Sometimes tears work better than a tongue-lashing. I didn’t even know she had a sister until you showed up. I knew her mama was gone and her father lived back east, but she never mentioned a sibling. Do you have more brothers and sisters?”

  The other counselors were good people—that was what Skyler had said. She forgot to mention that they were nosy as well, but Jayden was adept at deflecting questions.

  “Just me and Skyler,” Jayden answered. “How about you, Diana? Do you have brothers and sisters?”

  “Three brothers,” Diana replied.

  Novalene chimed in about her siblings without being asked, and soon both of the other ladies were telling family stories. Jayden listened with one ear as she stared out the window. Elijah chuckled, and Jayden wondered if something in the lyrics of one of the songs filling the small plane brought him a good memory. She began to listen, and soon her head was bobbing in time with the music as Travis Tritt sang “It’s a Great Day to Be Alive.”

  “We’re coming in for a landing, and sometimes it’s a little rough,” Elijah yelled back over his shoulder.

  Jayden had been so lost in the music and the memories that each song stirred up that she didn’t realize they’d been in the air for more than an hour. The landing was rough enough that her head touched the ceiling of the plane at one time, but then they were on the tarmac and coming to a rolling stop. Elijah was the first one out and waited at the bottom of the stairs to help each of the ladies.

  Jayden was the last one out of the plane, and when she stepped into the scorching hot day, blistering wind blew her dark hair across her face. She squinted against the blazing sun, but there wasn’t much to see between her and the mountains out there in the distance other than yucca plants and cow’s tongue cacti. Holy smokin’ hell! What had she gotten herself into? She fumbled around in her purse for her sunglasses and put them on. That helped a little, but it didn’t stop the heat from trying to cook her skin.

  Elijah unloaded the suitcases as if each of them weighed less than a bag of marshmallows. His ham-size arms and broad chest stretched the knit shirt that was monogrammed with the PWA logo above his heart.

  “Welcome to Alpine,” a deep voice said to her left. “I’m Henry, and this is my wife, Mary. You sure don’t look like Skyler’s sister.” A short man in bib overalls and a bright-green T-shirt with PWA embroidered on the sleeve, Henry was tanned to a light brown with dark-brown eyes and a big smile. He turned his green cap around backward over his ring of gray hair and hurried over to help Elijah unload the baggage.

  Not looking like Skyler was something that dug deep into Jayden’s heart. One pretty sister, one plain one was the message that she got every time.

  “I’m Mary.” A lady even shorter than Henry stepped away from the other two women. “I’m right glad you are here with us. Your principal at the Dallas school spoke highly of you, and I’m sure you’re going to fit right in with all of us.”

  “Thank you,” Jayden said. “I’ll do my best, but I’m very different from my sister.”

  “That might be a good thing in some ways.” Novalene looped her arm through Jayden’s and pulled her toward the white van waiting a few feet away. “Not to say ill of someone who isn’t here, or your sister, for sure, but sometimes Skyler’s heart was too soft for this job.”

  Skyler with a soft heart? These women didn’t know Jayden’s sister at all.

  Chapter Three

  Henry loaded all the luggage into an old van whose air-conditioning worked just fine. He drove north from the small airport for a few miles, then turned down a dirt road toward the mountains. “We’ll be home pretty soon. The camp is only a few miles from here. Mary’s done got dinner all planned out for y’all, and like always, we’ll go over the rule book. It’ll be a refresher course for you two,” he told Diana and Novalene, “but Jayden will need to know how we run things. We’ve got two girls with shoplifting problems and one who’s had three DUIs that I’m going to put in Daydream Cabin. Novalene, you’ll get the ones with drug issues, and Diana is going to take care of the girls who have struggled with physical violence this time around.”

  Jayden had dealt with all the above in her counseling job, but she wasn’t arguing with Henry. If they wanted her to take on shoplifting and driving under
the influence, she wouldn’t complain.

  “Sounds fair to me,” Novalene said.

  “Between y’all and us, we’re hoping to turn these girls’ lives around. Once a week Karen Daily will come in from town and have a one-on-one session with each of them. She’s our certified therapist, Jayden, and has done wonders with the girls in the past. She’ll be giving y’all guidance on how to handle your group sessions. You’ll have those with your girls an hour each day, as usual,” Mary said.

  Skyler must have had contact with Karen if the woman visited with her girls every single week, so she should have remembered her last name, but then that was her sister—if it didn’t pertain to her, then it couldn’t be important.

  Mary and Novalene chatted in the seat right behind Henry. Diana joined in from across the aisle. Elijah and Jayden each had a seat to themselves with the aisle separating them. He didn’t seem interested in talking, so she just kept silent and watched the van kick up a dust storm on the dirt road. Every now and then she chanced a sideways look at Elijah and wondered what his story was, how old he might be, and why he’d chosen to work in a camp like this.

  The farther Henry drove, the more her heart dropped. She hadn’t known what to expect, but as they passed occasional trailer houses and adobe or stucco dwellings in the desolate beauty, she figured she wouldn’t be finding a cute little cabin with lace curtains in the windows at the end of the journey.

  The whole place was so very different from the small farm her grandfather had, and even the landscape around Boyd, Texas, where she grew up. In those places the grass was green, and from spring until midsummer folks would be out mowing at least once a week. Here, she recognized several varieties of cacti putting on a show with their yellow and purple flowers. Yucca plants had huge white blooms standing straight and tall, and wild daisies dotted the flat countryside with spots of yellow. She wouldn’t want to give up her green grass, but this place was beautiful in its own right.

  Henry drove through a gap between two mountains, and she noticed a slight change. There were more orange and red flowers that looked like they’d been stuck down in cactus plants to make the plants less ugly.

  She saw a lone cactus towering above the others. It stands out in this country, kind of like I do in a crowd.

  Henry made a left-hand turn, crossed a cattle guard with a sign above it that read PINEY WOOD ACADEMY, and headed down a long lane toward a cluster of buildings, most of which were the same color as the earth, speckled only by the brightly colored Adirondack chairs on the porches of a few. The front of each of the three cabins was covered with clapboard siding. The other three sides were stucco like everything else, other than a big red barn out in the distance. The cabins didn’t have lace curtains, but they did look a little more inviting than the other places around the compound.

  “We’re home,” Henry announced as he parked the van. “We’ll unload y’all’s stuff after we have something to eat and visit a little.”

  Elijah and Jayden were the last ones out of the van. Everyone else hurried inside, probably to get out of the heat, but Jayden took a moment to look around at all the various buildings. Each one had a sign hanging between two of its porch posts, and the noise of them swinging back and forth reminded her of the squeaky swing on the front porch of the house that Skyler sold.

  DINING HALL was written on the stucco building where Elijah had headed. She squinted across the dusty yard at the three brightly colored cabins. She could just make out their names on the swinging signs. The first one read DAYDREAM CABIN and was painted a light green with pretty red chairs on the porch. The second, MOONBEAM CABIN, was pale blue with hot-pink chairs. The third one in the row was SUNSHINE CABIN, appropriately painted yellow with orange chairs. Each cabin had a flower bed full of petunias, lantana, and marigolds.

  “You comin’ in or are you about to steal the van and go back home?” Elijah had a deep Texas drawl that, evidently, he hadn’t gotten away from in the air force.

  “The jury is still out,” she told him. “But I am hungry, so I think I’ll eat before I decide.”

  The aroma of something spicy wafted out to greet her when Elijah held the door open. “Mary’s cookin’ makes all the work worthwhile.”

  “Something sure smells good. What else is on the agenda?” she asked.

  “We’ll go over that in the briefing,” he answered.

  “Is this the only one of these eight-week classes you have a year?” she asked as she entered the building. A buffet bar divided the room in half—kitchen to the left, dining area on the right. The walls were painted seafoam green. Three tables’ name cards were already arranged on them. A fourth table for six was set a few feet away.

  “Nope,” Elijah answered. “We have four a year. One during each season, but the summer one is the only one when the girls don’t actually have school classes in addition to everything else. During the other three, they have to keep up with their schoolwork as well as get their lives back on track.”

  “So, you do these thirty-two weeks out of the year?” She frowned.

  Henry was standing right inside the door and evidently had heard her question. “Yes, there’s a camp in January and February, one in March and April, and then we close down in May. We reopen for one in June and July, and then close down in August and have one in September and October,” he explained. “We don’t have anything during November and December. There’s just too many holidays during that time. Mary and I are planning a couple of long cruises this year in November and December to celebrate our retirement, and then we’re going to settle down in one of those old folks’ villages.”

  “What?” Novalene threw a hand over her heart. “You’re retiring? Are you going to close down the academy?”

  “No, Elijah is taking over,” Mary told them. “Don’t worry, we’re leaving the place in good hands. Now, if Henry will say grace, we will dish up all the fixin’s for tacos and enchiladas and have sopaipillas for dessert.”

  Jayden had been running late that morning, and she hadn’t taken time to eat breakfast. Besides, she hadn’t wanted to leave dirty dishes in the sink or take the time to wash them. Now it was noon, and she didn’t have a bashful bone in her body. As soon as Henry finished saying grace, she was the first in the buffet line. She loaded up her plate with rice, beans, and enchiladas, and then poured herself a glass of sweet tea.

  “Why are the cabins so bright, and everything else kind of dull looking?” she asked Mary when she reached the end of the line.

  “These girls need to learn how to behave, but they also need a bright spot in their lives. Once they get here, they’ll be given jobs, a schedule, and a regimen that they’ll hate, but they’ll like going home to their cabins, to that one bright spot, at the end of every day. Henry has been working hard to make the flowers grow, but tomorrow the girls will take over. Their flower beds will become a matter of pride for them. We hope their other jobs will, too. The girls tend to get competitive in their jobs after they get settled in. None of them will want to listen to the girls in the other cabins razz them if they can’t even grow a petunia,” Mary answered, following behind her.

  “We are a private camp, and their parents’ money will buy them eight weeks here, but it is their last chance before juvenile detention. For most of them, it’s their third strike at anything from car theft to shoplifting, drug problems, abuse issues, hot checks, cyberbullying, driving under the influence, or anything else you can name short of murder. We do our best to put them on the right track in the eight weeks they are here, through schedule, physical training, discipline, and counseling. They hate us at first, but by the end of their time, we usually turn out a batch of happier, healthier girls. We don’t depend on state financing, but we do have guidelines.”

  “How long have you been doing this?” Jayden sat down.

  “Twenty years,” Mary answered. “When Henry retired from the army, we wanted to do something to help others. Henry’s father left us this property. Back fifty years
ago, it was a little hideaway for the snowbirds, but we decided to put it to better use. We could never have children of our own, and Henry had seen the service turn many a young person around. So, we put our heads together and came up with this place.”

  “Why just girls?” Jayden bit into an enchilada and rolled her eyes. “This is delicious. You should have a restaurant.”

  Mary laughed down deep in her chest. “Honey, no one would drive out here for tacos, not when they can drive up to a window in just about any town and pick some up. To answer your question, we thought about having camps for boys, too, but we just don’t have the time and space. It’s really sad how little support some of these girls have gotten with their struggles.”

  By then everyone had filled their trays and taken places at the table. “In that twenty years, have you ever had less than a full house?” Jayden asked between bites.

  “Nope,” Elijah answered for Mary. “We’re a pretty exclusive private camp, and our success record is well known. Therapists and judges alike recommend us.”

  Novalene joined in the conversation. “These girls know when they get here that this isn’t a party.”

  “If they don’t, it doesn’t take them long to figure it out,” Diana added.

  “Yep.” Mary nodded. “It’s tougher on the ones who think that they’re coming to a summer camp to lay out in the sun and work on their tans.”

  Henry passed out booklets from the end of the table. “They change every year according to state regulations, so y’all will all need to go over them.”

  Jayden opened the small notebook to the first page and almost groaned when she read that every single day, Sunday included, everyone would be up and ready for exercise at five thirty in the morning. If she could have gotten her hands around her sister’s throat right then, there would have been one fewer person on that airplane leaving for Europe on Monday. She was used to getting up early and going to the gym, even in the summertime, but not on weekends.