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mattress?” Drew asked.
    “No. I can work it off. I can mow and split wood and do whatever you need me to. Please don’t make my mom pay. She’s trying to save up for new tires before winter and she just had to spend a bunch of it on school stuff for me and she works really hard....”
    Ryan forced himself to keep the stern look going when the kid’s words tapered off. He was obviously choked up, but there were going to be consequences one way or another. “After all the damage you’ve done, why would I want you on the property? I have expensive tools and trucks, and the supplies aren’t cheap.”
    “I’m sorry.”
    “Sorry you got caught. You didn’t think anybody was home and, if I hadn’t been, you’d have come back and trashed something else when you got bored.”
    Drew cleared his throat. “Nick, what’s your mother’s cell number?”
    He punched it into his cell phone as the kid mumbled the digits, then stepped away to make the call.
    “I’ll work it off,” the kid said again.
    Ryan shook his head. “You sneak around, destroying our property, and now you expect me to believe you have a work ethic? And the integrity to stick it out?”
    It was too bad, though. The kid was young, but looked fairly strong. And, if nothing else, he could pick up after he, Dill, Matt and Andy Miller—who was Drew’s dad and had been working around the place for a few weeks—were done for the day. Cheaper than paying his guys to pick up tools. But the kid was trouble and he didn’t need any more of that.
    Drew walked back over, putting his phone away. “Your mom’s on her way.”
    Nick’s shoulders slumped and he stared down at his feet. Ryan decided to leave him to his sulk and turned to Drew. “You have that list?”
    Drew handed him the paper and a pen. “He’s never done anything like this before. He’s always been a good kid.”
    Ryan went down the list, putting estimated dollar amounts to each incident. He wrote in the cost of the windows at the end, but a quick glance had shown him that only two were damaged. The total wasn’t huge, just a few dollars over nine hundred, but that wasn’t counting the aggravation, either.
    He handed the list back to Drew and, with nothing else to do until the kid’s mother showed up, decided on small talk. “How are things going?”
    “You probably heard Mallory and I split.” Ryan nodded. “Other than that, everything’s the same old shit. My dad said you run a tight ship over here.”
    Ryan let him get away with the swing in subject. Divorces sucked. “Dill and Matt are good guys, but if I didn’t have my thumb on them, they’d be on those damn phones all day.”
    “Did you ever find out what happened between Rosie and my old man?”
    Rose Davis hadn’t spoken to Andy Miller in almost thirty years and nobody knew why. She’d thrown a fit when Mitch and Josh had hired him to work around the lodge, but something had happened and she’d forgiven him, apparently. For what, none of them knew.
    “Nope. I’m not sure if anybody knows but them, and they don’t seem to be telling.”
    Drew went on to say something else, but Ryan’s attention turned back to the boy. His name was Nick. He looked to be about sixteen. He was kind of tall, with dark hair and light brown eyes and a nose just like Dean Carpenter’s. Oh, shit.
    “Tell me that’s not Lauren’s kid,” he said, interrupting Drew in midsentence.
    “You didn’t know that?”
    “I haven’t seen him since he was a baby.” When he’d tried to talk Nick’s mother into leaving Nick’s father and running away with him.
    Great. So much for keeping Lauren out of sight and mostly out of mind. She was pulling up the driveway.
    * * *
    Lauren pulled up behind the Whitford PD cruiser and unclenched her fingers from the steering wheel so she could put the car in park and shut it off. Of all the stupid crap Nick had ever pulled, this was the worst.
    Vandalism. Damages. Possible criminal charges. And of all the