Deadly Texas Summer

by Colleen Thompson

  “What’s wrong?” Lucie asked him. “You didn’t accidentally grab a meat one, did you?” Josh was always trying to convince anyone who’d listen of the benefits of a vegetarian diet.

  Walking past her, he ignored River’s attempt to greet him. “A bad scare is what I got. When I was getting out of the shower, I heard this thump from underneath the sink. I ended up pulling out drawers to look, and this is what I found.”

  He opened the bag and showed them the pistol inside: black and rather small, partially wrapped up in a piece of silver duct tape, along with one of the motel’s cheap white hand towels, which Josh had used to cushion it.

  “What the—where did that come from?” asked Lucie, her eyes widening. “Should we call the police or something?”

  “I don’t know where it’s from, but I thought—I thought maybe...” His gaze dialed in on Emma. “That room was Russell’s, wasn’t it? Did he ever mention anything to you about a weapon?”

  Emma shook her head, shivering at the sight. So much for the sheriff’s thorough search of the room earlier. “For all we know, it could’ve belonged to a different guest,” she told the two, though the more she thought of it, the more she doubted that was true. It seemed unlikely that someone would care enough about the gun to secure it out of sight, only to simply check out and forget it.

  She found it easier to believe that Russell had known those records he’d been keeping might prove dangerous in the long run. Perhaps he hadn’t felt he was in immediate danger, but maybe he’d liked the idea of having it close at hand just in case someone figured out what he was up to.

  But if she told Josh and Lucie what she suspected, Emma knew they would insist on staying, and she wasn’t about to risk drawing the pair into a clearly dangerous situation. After a moment’s thought, she asked for the bag and tucked it inside her day pack, explaining, “I’ll just take it with me to the sheriff’s office when I give my statement later. I’m sure they’ll know how to handle it, and it’ll be a lot faster than calling someone over here to hold you up with a hundred questions.” She cast a meaningful look toward Josh, who would soon be graduating. “You really have to be back in Austin for your interview this afternoon. It’s at four thirty, isn’t it?”

  “I could probably reschedule,” he said uncertainly before stroking River’s golden head. “You know what, I’ll cancel it. Another job will come along.”

  “This isn’t just a job. You know that.” She frowned, reminded of the strings she’d pulled to get Josh a face-to-face with the conservation nonprofit that would be the perfect match for his interests and talents. “You deserve to be there after all your hard work. I absolutely insist on it. Just give me a lift back to my Jeep and both of you can be on the road within an hour. Then I won’t have to rush getting my business taken care of.”

  “But you will leave Pinto Creek before nightfall?” asked Lucie, who needed to get back, too, to the part-time bartending job that allowed her to stay in school. “You can’t think of staying here another night alone, not after what happened.”

  “Definitely,” Emma told them, infusing her voice with every atom of sincerity she could muster. “That’s one thing you don’t have to worry about, I promise.”

  And holding their gazes long enough to watch them weaken, unable to imagine that the professor who’d expanded their dreams, nurtured their ambitions, and taught them to be honest and critical researchers would look straight into their faces and tell an outright lie, even to protect them.

  * * *

  Beau knew as he caught his first glimpse of the foreman he’d promoted to ranch manager cresting the hilltop in his pickup a little after noon that whatever had brought Fernando Galvez here had to be important. Before heading over with the boys this morning to this tiny slice of heaven Beau had known since childhood as the frog pond, he’d left strict instructions that he and his sons were not to be disturbed. Not for any emergencies involving cattle, the vaqueros—the cowboys of Mexican descent who had worked for his family for generations—and most especially not a damned thing to do with the bankers or the lawyers that had lately kept Beau from Cort and Leland far too often.

  Their summer vacation was nearly over, passing in a blaze of abandoned ideas and glossed-over promises. Time and time again, Beau had been forced to shuffle his sons off to his aunt with some excuse about how he couldn’t go with them to the beach or take them fishing on the family boat, which had remained docked every damned day of the season, despite his promises before his father’s death.

  Maybe it was the attack on Emma Copley, or more likely, the memorial service for her young assistant, that had reminded Beau so painfully of how quickly, how irrevocably, life could change forever. This morning, he’d awakened to thoughts of his own father: all the promises broken, all the priorities his disregard had branded into the hearts of his two sons. Two sons he’d eventually lost: Beau, for many years, and Beau’s older half brother, Jake Jr., forever, after he’d turned away from this ranch, and his whole family, years before. After living abroad for years, J.J., as he’d been known, had been killed in a motorcycle accident—a loss that had almost certainly contributed to his father’s eventual decision to welcome Beau and his two sons back to the ranch.

  Though Beau had never really connected with the man who’d always kept him at emotional arm’s length, his father’s grief for the lost chance of a ninth-inning reconciliation with his namesake had for years clung like an unwelcome shadow. Maybe that awareness, and not the ranch he’d never meant to go to Beau, had been his true legacy: the lesson of how neither land nor cattle nor the money and power that came with the Kingston name were enough to keep a man from dying broken and, for all intents and purposes, alone.

  That ends here, with this generation, Beau swore as he watched the freckled Cort, who for once wasn’t off hiding in the pages of one of his books, but instead grinned ear to ear as his younger brother raced close to the water’s edge to catch the soft toy football his father had just lobbed his way. Skinny Leland’s tennis shoes squelched along the muddy edge, where the weeds grew thick from the runoff between two grassy hillsides.

  “Watch out,” Cort warned Leland when Maverick, the dopey, half-grown mongrel Beau had found wandering, nothing but flopping ears, jutting bones and every parasite known to dog-kind, in a remote draw months before, ran leaping after the toy. Planting huge paws on Leland’s chest, the bluetick Maverick, a mix of hound, cattle dog and possibly elephant, given the way that he was growing, twisted skyward. In a single acrobatic moment, the oversize pup snatched away his prize and sent the squealing six-year-old splashing down into water dappled green-gold by the sun.

  Beau ran to help up his laughing younger boy, only to have the already-excited Maverick grab on to his own arm and yank him, too, off-balance. His boot slipping in a patch of muck, Beau ended up going down with an even bigger splash, but it was worth the mess—and maybe a bruise or two—to look up to see Cort snapping picture after picture on the little digital camera he’d been given as a birthday gift last spring but had never used before today.

  “Blackmail ammunition!” the eight-year-old crowed. “If you don’t let us stay up late on school nights, I’m gonna show everybody how you were taken down by Doofus Dog!”

  At the sound of the truck door closing above them, Beau stopped laughing. Glancing upward, he saw Fernando standing in front of his truck. His dark brown eyes were shaded by his fine Panama hat, but his impressive black-and-silver mustache twitched as he shook his head in mock disapproval. But then, even before his most recent promotion, the solidly built ranch manager had always maintained an unflappable dignity as he trod the middle path between the common hands from whom he’d risen and the position of authority he’d held for decades. Though Fernando avoided behaving in an overly familiar manner, Beau remembered from his childhood the man’s simple kindnesses, from his subtle warnings on days it would be best for Beau to stay out of his fat
her’s path to the times Fernando had quietly passed along some skill that Big Jake had grumbled that any Kingston worth a damn would know how to do already.

  As such, Fernando had been the one to teach Beau, with a steady patience and the occasional word of praise that meant everything to a boy starved for a man’s approval, to put a polish on his boots, to treat a horse’s cracked hoof and to cinch up his own saddle—when he’d been so young, he’d had to climb up onto a block to reach it.

  “Careful of your manners now, my young friends,” Fernando advised, the subtle cadence of his first language making a form of music of his words. “We have a lady among us.”

  As he crossed the front of his truck, Beau stood, chagrined, and helped his younger son out of the slime.

  “What’s Aunt Alicia doing out here?” whispered a dripping Leland as Maverick bounded triumphantly around them with the football in his jaws.

  “Grown-up business, I expect,” Beau said as all of them stared uphill toward the frail woman on Fernando’s arm. Bad business, Beau imagined, that would bring her across the rough track leading to an area she’d so often dismissed as a “muddy hole in the ground good for nothing more than dirtying clothes and getting boys in trouble.” This, of course, along with the general lack of adult supervision, was exactly why generations of Kingston kids had all loved the place so much.

  “Don’t try to climb down here, Aunt Alicia,” he called, worried about the arthritis that had limited her mobility. “I’ll come up and talk.”

  “I had no intention, but thank you for the offer,” his aunt said from beneath the wide straw sun hat shading her face. The frailty of her voice and way she was leaning on Fernando’s strength made Beau more anxious than ever.

  What the hell’s gone wrong now?

  As Beau approached, Fernando nodded his approval. “And you will perhaps allow me to go down and show the two young gentleman my secret spot for catching the biggest ranas toros?”

  Beau smiled and told his sons, “He’s talkin’ bullfrogs, boys. You’d better let him show you—and take Maverick along, too. I imagine he’s going to turn out to be one champion froggin’ hound.”

  Beau kept his voice deliberately cheerful, watching as his boys eagerly followed to see what mysteries Fernando would reveal along the weed-choked shoreline. When the three were out of earshot, Beau headed up, his gaze catching a glimpse of the top of one of the turbines in the distance. The turbines that might be a relatively new addition to the Kingston enterprise but now stood sentry over a past he was committed to preserving.

  He reached his aunt, offering his arm.

  “Oh, don’t you dare,” she said, casting an appalled look at his muddy clothing. “My goodness, but one would’ve thought you’d outgrown that sort of hooliganism by now.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said, wishing she’d just tell him what had drawn her from the comfort of the home they shared. “One would’ve figured. But how about we head back to my truck? I’ve got a few folding chairs set up off the tailgate in the shade there.”

  When she agreed, he picked the smoothest way back to lead her to the spot where he and the boys had eaten sandwiches beneath the interlocking boughs of several cottonwoods that grew only in this relatively damp spot. After showing her to a seat and handing her a paper cup of lemonade, by now somewhat watered down by melting ice, he lowered himself to the chair opposite and waited for the other shoe to drop.

  Instead, she plucked a slimy green strand of some water plant off the side of his face. “Bad influence aside,” she said, “you’re a good father to those boys of yours. A far sight better than your father ever was either of his.”

  “I figure my paltry attempts are the least I owe ’em.” The pang of remorse that hit him was like a spike driven through his sternum. They might not come quite as often these days, with the day-to-day demands of fatherhood and ranch management keeping him so busy, but the pain still had the power to hit hard, triggered by things as simple as a glimpse of the hummingbirds Melissa had always loved—or a compliment on his so-called parental efforts. “Since I cost them a damned fine mother.”

  “You know that wasn’t your fault. The state police out in Colorado said as much.”

  He only looked at her in answer, unwilling to debate it.

  “It’s pointless, you know, punishing yourself forever. You could be happy again, Beau, and I’d be so happy for you, if you’d only find a way to—”

  Stomach souring, he cut her off before she could broach a subject that they both knew was going nowhere. “I know you didn’t come to watch the boys and Maverick and me roll around in the mud, and I pray you’re not about to mention another single daughter of a friend of yours. So tell me, was there something else?”

  Frowning, she smoothed nonexistent wrinkles from the slacks of today’s pantsuit, a match for the light peach-colored cane she’d laid across her knees. “Impatient as your father, aren’t you?” she asked irritably before sighing and producing a folded white envelope from a pocket. “All right, then.”

  As she straightened it, he saw the words AUNT ALICIA scrawled hastily across the front. She gingerly pulled a page from inside the neatly slitted top, explaining, “After I went to town this morning for my weekly wash-and-set—” she lightly patted the freshly fluffed and hair-sprayed champagne-colored curls she’d worn for as long as Beau could recall “—I found this tucked beneath the windshield wiper of the Caddy.”

  Beau scowled. “Wallace, sucking up again?”

  Her forehead furrowed as she considered, “Wallace, reminding me that his mama Lynnie was my baby sister—mine and your daddy’s—”

  “Oh, for crying out—”

  “He never got over it, you know, the hurt of his own father leaving. The shame of learning that he’d started a new family a few towns down the coast.”

  “So he latched onto the richest substitute the family had to offer. And set out to make my life a living—”

  “I’m not excusing what he did. What he’s done. I’m only saying that what we should all be worried over is keeping the family together.”

  Beau spoke through gritted teeth. “He only wants to remind you that he’s real family and I’m not. I imagine he included photos of his daughters, didn’t he?” Because that was what it was all about to Wallace: the fair skin and hair and blue eyes he and his girls had inherited through his Kingston mother, a birthright that would allow him to play the big man around these parts and to rule over the Hispanic employees without taxing his brain by respecting those whose stock-handling skills and unparalleled knowledge of the land had so long played a crucial role in the ranch’s success. Even if he had to prove Beau a bastard to do it.

  “He was only reminding me that none of this misunderstanding is the fault of Sara Ann or Marlie,” Aunt Alicia said, her own blue eyes welling with unshed tears at the thought of the grandnieces the family feud had kept her away from, “and if you’d just go ahead and have the DNA test like he’s asking, we could settle all these questions and put this ugliness behind us.”

  “Absolutely not,” he said, angry that she would suggest it. “I’ve got the Kingston name, and I’m listed on the damned will. Not him, whether or not I look like some Sicilian ancestor or what that idiot thinks of as poor Mexican labor—as if every one of our vaqueros isn’t worth a dozen of his useless ass.”

  “There’s no need to be coarse, Beau,” Aunt Alicia scolded. “And I don’t think that it’s that your cousin’s prejudiced, exactly...”

  Beau gritted his teeth and let it pass, thinking of all the times Wallace had just so happened to mutter words like mongrel and bastard in his hearing, along with the ugly slurs he’d applied to those of Mexican descent.

  “It’s just that he’s a little confused,” Aunt Alicia went on, attempting to play the role of family peacemaker as she had so many times before. “You see, while you were away, you and your bro
ther both, he spent quite a bit of time here, talking to your father, taking an interest in the ranch. He had his dreams, I think, ideas for how he might—”

  “I’ve heard all about his grand ideas,” Beau said, recalling his father’s impatience with what he’d once referred to as Wallace’s “fool notions.” “But that doesn’t mean I’m going to allow Wallace to pretend that my coloring and my sons’ makes us one bit less worthy. And besides, he’s barking up the wrong tree with this idea about some DNA test. Ed tells me,” he said, referring to Ed Franklin, his father’s longtime friend and attorney, “it wouldn’t even matter, since I was born when my mother and father were married to each other, and since the old man was too proud or stubborn to renounce me. I’m legally a Kingston, just like it says on my birth certificate.”

  Closing her eyes, she sighed again, the loving aunt who’d raised him at war with her role as family peacemaker. “Of course you are, in every way that matters. I’ve always believed it. It’s just that Wallace says—”

  “I don’t give a damn about anything that ass says. I thought I’d made that very clear.”

  “It’s not his words I’m worried about, Beau,” Aunt Alicia told him, trembling as she leaned forward. “It’s what he has that had me asking Fernando to drive me straight out to this godforsaken mudhole. Wallace says he’s found your father’s actual attorney of record, a Houston lawyer named J. Armstrong Pinckney—”

  “Why would my father hire some pompous-sounding lawyer out of Houston?”

  “Jake did used to fly out there quite a lot on business in the years before you came home,” his aunt explained. “They must’ve connected somehow, because this Pinckney’s shown Wallace another will, one signed and notarized—and dated after the one we filed with the county.”

  “Another will?” Beau shook his head, struggling to read the looming disaster written in the creases on her forehead. “My father’s, you mean?”