Free Between Two Promises by Shelter Somerset Page B

face, in the middle of the Montana backcountry, both realized neither could go back as if they had never met. God had placed them together.
    Did God have something more in store for them?
    Despite the snow, his old, tiny bungalow looked like how he remembered, other than that someone had removed the “for sale” sign and a sedan was parked in the driveway. His former landlady must’ve finally found a buyer. His small garden, the one in which he’d planted black-eyed Susans to remind him a little bit of his home state, still had the thick flowerless stalks sticking out of the snow. Above the garden was where someone had chucked a pumpkin at his house a few weeks before Halloween. A wreath hung on the front door, the same door on which someone had spray painted “GET OUT OF TOWN” about the same time they’d hurled the pumpkin at his house. Shaking his head, he still wondered if a man like Reverend Yoder could have had any connection to such childish pranks.
    He had promised Daniel before leaving Montana he’d refrain from investigating anymore into Kyle’s death, and he meant to keep that promise. But seeing the old house, with the rush of memories from when he’d lived there—the threats, that moment when Daniel had attempted to kiss him on the sofa after Daniel had revealed his secret about him and Kyle Yoder—he found suppressing his journalistic cravings difficult.
    Farther up Ivy Street, the town’s main thoroughfare, local shop owners had fully decked out Henry for Christmas. Wreaths and red bows hung from the streetlamps. Garlands had been strung on the awnings over most businesses. Windows charmed passersby with artificial snowflakes and stringer lights.
    He saw the Schrocks’ old furniture shop. Like a handful of other shops, it sat vacant, without the cheery trimmings. The awning, once having borne the shop’s name, “Schrock Furniture,” had been removed. Shrugging inwardly, he supposed closing the shop last spring was for the best. Orders for furniture had been increasing since summer, and they’d pocket more profits rather than sink so much into costly rent.
    The Henry Blade office was decorated too. A cardboard Santa waved from the door. Yellow glow illuminated the frosty window. His former boss, Kevin Hassler, always an early bird, must have already been hard at work. Aiden parked the truck alongside the curb out front.
    Computers and overhead fluorescent lights hummed when he walked in, the same greeting he’d received each time he’d stepped inside the small utilitarian office the five months he’d worked there.
    Kevin looked up from his desk.
    “Aiden Cermak. What do you know? Fancy seeing you walk in.” He stood, wiped his hands on his slacks, approached Aiden with an extended hand.
    “Yeah, I guess you can’t keep me away.” Aiden clasped his hand, grinning widely. His old boss looked much the same: short stature, small, dark eyes behind thick glasses, perhaps a bit grayer along the temples of his thinning hair. Aiden glanced over Kevin’s shoulder at a woman typing at his old desk.
    “Got a new employee, I see.”
    “I hired Carolyn a few months after you resigned,” Kevin said. “She’s a graduate student studying communications at the university down near Mattoon. Carolyn, this is Aiden Cermak, one of my former reporters. Aiden, this is Carolyn Bates.” Aiden offered his hand, but she remained at her desk, where she only glanced up with a quick nod and turned back to the computer.
    Aiden inwardly chuckled that a communications major would seem fairly uncommunicative. “Good learning experience working here, I bet.”
    “More for me,” Kevin said. “Carolyn teaches me a lot. She’s very bright, more than I am. I never had the chance to go to school myself. I was one of those old-fashioned, self-made guys, learned by the ropes. You young folks are lucky these days. You get a good jumpstart before diving in.”
    “I always thought about going to grad school,” Aiden