“She just finished going through this with me, Emily. I don’t want to humiliate her or drag her through it again. Promise me you won’t tell her.”
My mind conjured a picture of my own father, and I got a jolt of the humiliation I tried to pretend I didn’t feel about his jail stint. I put my hand on Phil’s shoulder and gentled my voice. “I promise, but if it goes any further, you know you can’t keep her from finding out.”
“I know that, but it won’t. I didn’t do anything wrong.”
Well, that and sixteen quarters would buy him a small coffee at Starbucks, but the Lord knows things don’t always go the way we want them to, even when we haven’t messed up. Before I could think of a way to explain that to him and coax him into calling Nadine, a painfully thin brunette rounded the corner and nearly ran into Phil and me.
“Excuse m—” she started to say, then bit her words off. “Emily. Mr. Escalante.”
Phil’s eyes flashed like a lightning storm. “What the hell is this bitch doing here?” His chest rose and he seemed to swell toward her.
I put an arm in front of his body. “Melinda.” To Phil I said, “Just ignore her.”
“How’s that adoption going, Emily?” she asked. “Probably not impressive that your ex-con dad is back in town to play grandpappy.”
Melinda Stafford—Assistant District Attorney and chopper of my ponytail when we were eight years old—wrinkled her nose and picked her way around us on four-inch heels like she was stepping through a field of cow patties. I’d socked her in the jaw once, and for a brief, irrational moment, I wanted to do it again. Instead, I took my own advice, for once, and ignored her.
“But what is she doing here?” Phil growled again.
Melinda spun back around, flaring the bells of her pants legs but not a hair on her chestnut head moved. Too much product, I thought.
“My case, Mr. Escalante. I can be here if I choose to.” She whirled and marched to a silver Jaguar parked at the curb.
Great. Melinda was the ADA assigned to the case. I was only slightly less unhappy about it than Phil.
His eyes shot death rays at her back. She lowered herself into the car, and as she started it, she shot a glance back in my direction. Her face didn’t look as haughty as it had moments before. More like something was eating her. Maybe literally, as skinny as she’d gotten.
I kept a just-in-case hand on Phil’s arm but turned my ears back to John. He’d started talking again. Jack looked up from the search warrant. Melinda’s Jaguar pulled away from the curb.
“We’re about done. Everyone is packing up to leave now.” John pointed at a cruiser as the driver’s side door slammed shut and it roared to life.
Jack handed the paper back to him. “So I don’t get it. How’d Stafford get the judge to probable cause on this one? I got the impression last night this was going to be ruled an accident.”
John shrugged. “A witness places Phil with Dennis in the parking lot before the murder, arguing and scuffling.”
“That’s not true,” Phil shouted, leaping toward John.
“Whoa.” John put his hands up as if to fend Phil off.
Phil stopped but balled his fists. “I never talked to Dennis out here. There was no argument. The witness is lying.”
“Why would a witness lie to me?”
Jack stepped between them. “Phil, if they’d found what they were looking for, you’d be under arrest. You’re not.”
I said, “Plus, there’s the guy that the sketch artist drew for us last night. He’s a real suspect.” I wished I had remembered to bring a copy of the sketch with me so I could show it to Phil, but we’d left in such a hurry that morning I’d forgotten it on the kitchen counter.
“But what are they looking for? I don’t get it.” Phil’s face was redder than I’d ever seen it, even in the worst days of his burglary charge and trial.
“Reading between the lines on the warrant, I think they’re looking for a weapon.”
John didn’t flinch, just watched Phil.
“A weapon? That still doesn’t make sense. Dennis hit his head.”
“They think Dennis was struck on the back of his head before he fell.”
Phil’s jaw fell. “Oh God. Poor Dennis.” His shoulders slumped, and he put a hand over his face.
My eyes searched John’s face, hoping he could see Phil’s sincerity, but if he had any favorable thoughts about Phil, his stone face didn’t give them away.
Chapter Three
An hour later, Jack and I pulled away from the curb, leaving a caffeinated but still morose and mourning client with a trashed apartment. I’d begged Phil one last time to open up to Nadine. He’d refused. On the bright side, the police hadn’t found their smoking gun. Jack advised Phil to carry on normally and to hope for the best, so he’d bid us good-bye and opened Get Your Kicks.
Jack sped down I-40 back to Shangri-La. Our home was only twenty minutes from Phil’s place—and our downtown offices—and the commute boasted a drive-by view of Cadillac Ranch. Even better, if you grew up horsey like me, our lot was five acres with an empty stable—which we planned to fill someday—in our backyard. The house itself was a farm-style white “clapboard” nee HardiePlank two-story with a wraparound porch. I loved it second only to the giant log cabin on Jack’s family’s southern New Mexico horse ranch. That’s where we were headed as soon as we picked up our bags and my parents, to meet his for the first time. Nell and Gordon Holden hadn’t been at Wrong Turn Ranch on any of my previous trips since they’d spent most of their time on the road in their RV in the last few years.
As we pulled into the garage, I groaned.
“What?” Jack turned off the engine.
“I promised my mother I’d pick up a flock of roaster chickens. She’s cooking them for a church event on Monday.” No hot yoga for me today. I’d hoped to squeeze it in before we left.
“Can’t you buy them when we get back?”
I raised an eyebrow at him, then opened the door and sidled out of the car. “Have you met my mother? It’s all she’ll talk about this weekend if I don’t do this one simple little thing like she asked.” I walked to the other side of the garage to my Mustang.
Jack tapped his wrist.
“I know. I’ll be back in twenty minutes.”
I hustled at the grocery store, then wrestled a dozen frozen birds into the trunk. They were heavier than they looked, and my hands were like ice afterwards on the steering wheel. I blew on them as I whipped the car out of the United Supermarket parking lot.
I pulled back into the garage twenty-five minutes after I’d left it, feeling pressure to make up time I’d lost against my estimate to Jack. I lifted the lid on our chest-style garage freezer. We’d thrown groceries in randomly so it was full without being full. I leaned in and frantically rearranged, then popped the car’s trunk and started chunking the birds into storage. I banged my head on the trunk as I came out with number eleven.
“Ow,” I yelled, rubbing my crown. I slammed the offending lid shut and offloaded the chicken. I shut the freezer and trotted inside. “I’m home,” I called.
Jack was in the office. I stepped into the doorway and with great relish tapped a finger to my wrist. He made a noise somewhere between acknowledgement and raspberry and held up one finger on his left hand while his right continued typing.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Judith.” His secretary in New Mexico. “One sec.”
“I’m going to pack, then.”
I grabbed a small rolling suitcase from the hall closet and threw it on our unmade bed. Before I had it half-filled, Jack appeared with a duffel bag. Five minutes later, we were both ready. Jack’s cell phone rang. Snowflake lost her mind, growling and snapping at the air.
“Jack Holden,” he said, grabbing his bag and walking toward the kitchen.
I followed with mine, Snowflake between us, still fired up.
He stopped inside the door to the garage. “Uh-huh.” Pause. �
��Okay.” Pause. “All right.” Pause. “Yep.” He hung up.
“What was that about?” I asked.
He tucked his phone back in his front pocket. “Potter County accepted our second settlement offer.” We’d filed suit on Betsy’s behalf for the wrongful death of her mother Sofia, who’d been killed while she was incarcerated at Potter County Detention Center. We’d been negotiating with the county for the last week.
I clapped my hands together. “That’s wonderful news.” Betsy now had the money she’d need to secure her future. “And so fast.”
“Yep.” He grabbed a bag in each hand and headed for the garage.
“Anything interesting from Judith?”
It sounded like he mumbled something before the door slammed shut behind him and Snowflake, but it was unintelligible.
“Grrr,” I breathed. Well, I’d ask him again later. “I forgot my purse,” I said, louder. I dashed back to our bedroom for it. Finally, we departed, only fifteen minutes behind schedule.
By noon, we were tucked with my parents into Jack’s Cessna 172. The little SkyHawk sat four comfortably, or four-plus-one-Pomeranian-in-her-carrying-kennel uncomfortably. I yielded my normal spot in the shotgun seat to Dad, who insisted on holding Snowflake. His tall frame more than filled the front seat, and his gray felt cowboy hat grazed the ceiling. Jack was over six feet tall, but my daddy was a good six four. He seemed only half the size he was in his heyday as a muscle-bound steer wrestler on the pro rodeo circuit. That’s what a decade in jail does to a man, I guess. He looked good, though, and Johnny Phelps clearly wasn’t a man to hold grudges; Jack was the prosecutor who had put him away, but Dad was grinning ear to ear at Jack as we taxied to the runway.
My mother leaned so close to me in the backseat that her head was on my shoulder. “I know you trust Jack as a pilot, Emily, but this is my first time in one of these tiny planes.”
I reached over the Easter basket mother was bringing as a thank-you gift to Jack’s parents. I sure hoped they liked needlepoint, religious tomes, and Easter decorations. “You’ll be fine. Say a prayer and don’t think about it. I made sure there are lots of barf bags in the seat-back pocket in front of you.” I patted her exposed knee. Mother’s knees were always exposed. She’d never admitted that she’d been a Vegas showgirl when she met my dad there years ago, but I’d bet my life on it. If she had been, she’d more than made up for it since, working as a church secretary for various congregations as far back as I could remember, currently the Panhandle Believers Church. Her breathing sounded shallow so I smoothed her baby-fine blonde hair behind one of her ears and then pulled her hand into both of mine. “So do you want to go shopping for a mother-of-the-bride dress when we get back to Amarillo?”
A wide smile lifted almost to the corners of her pale blue eyes. “Oh yes! And for a dress for you, and bridesmaids, and a certain flower girl.”
Launching into her favorite topic proved to be sufficiently distracting to keep her mind off the tiny plane and the giant sky around us. After an hour, she fell asleep. Dad and Jack kept up a steady conversation in front of me. The noise of the plane drowned out their voices, and I was alone in the backseat, watching them like a silent movie.
It was amazing to me, really, that Jack could just forget that my father had killed a man in cold blood and befriend him like he was doing, although he’d had far more interaction with him than I had in the last ten years. It’s funny, because I had forgiven my mother for hiding his letters, now that he was back, as long as I didn’t let myself think about it. But I hadn’t really forgiven him. I couldn’t forget what he’d done, either—me and everybody else, if people like Margaret and Melinda were any indication. I indulged my urge to worry it over in my mind now. I’d shot a man in self-defense—well, two men, really, but neither of them died, so who was counting? Maybe I wasn’t in a position to judge, but the shame of my father’s actions stuck with me like skunk spray, no matter how hard I tried to scrub it off. And who wanted to smell like a skunk when she met her future in-laws for the first time?
I sighed and rubbed my eyes. My dad’s transgressions weren’t something to obsess about right before I took him to meet Jack’s parents, so of course that was what I was doing. It was slightly better than obsessing about adopting Betsy or about Jack not responding to me when I told him I loved him that morning, but only very slightly.
The jolt of our touchdown on the high desert runway at Wrong Turn Ranch broke me out of my destructive train of thought and woke my mother.
“Oh!” she squeaked. She lifted her head from the side of the plane where she’d rested it. Red creases marked her face and her eyes were unfocused. She shook her head a little and sat up straighter.
I smiled at her. “Look at the view, Mother.” I squeezed her hand as I drank in the vista. The yuccas were in bloom—bell-shaped white blossoms on long stalks—as were the red-flowering cacti and some yellow stunners I wasn’t familiar with. Behind and above the desert floor rose the Sacramento Mountains, and in the distance the Sierra Blancas towered. Between them and us lay the ranch as well as the Mescalero Apache Reservation. Behind us was the road to Tularosa, New Mexico, where Judith manned the Western front of Jack’s law practice.
We bounced and hopped over the semi-smooth taxiway of dirt and grass to the tan metal hangar. Mother and I trundled her basket, our bags, and Snowflake to the Suburban garaged there, then I moved it so that Jack and my dad could park the plane after they’d refueled it. When we were all in the car and headed toward the Wrong Turn Ranch headquarters, bumblebees took flight in my tummy. Jack’s parents were waiting for us at the ranch house. I wondered what Jack had told them about me, about my dad’s shady past, about us. An image of a rodent with black hair and a thick white stripe lodged in my brain.
“You’re right, Johnny. It’s just beautiful here,” my mother was saying.
Again I’d deferred to my dad on the front seat, and I sat behind Jack. Dad turned to Mother and beamed. “I love the wide open spaces.”
The skunk raised its tail at me again as I automatically responded to Dad in my head. Of course you do since you’ve been locked in a prison cell for ten years. I closed my eyes for a moment and told my inner voice to buzz off.
Jack steered the Suburban left at a fork in the road. “You guys are welcome here anytime. With my parents on the road and me working mostly in Amarillo, the house sits empty. You’d have the run of the place. Although Mickey’s likely to put you back to work, Johnny.”
Jack’s first cousin, Mickey Begay, was the Wrong Turn Ranch manager. When my father first got out of jail, Jack got him a job with Mickey.
“How about it, Agatha? Think you could get some vacation time from that new boss of yours and come out here with me?” Dad asked.
Mother snorted. “Don’t get me started about her again. She’s got me doing the socialist medium for the church now.”
“What?” I stared at her.
“Like mother like daughter,” Jack said to my dad.
Dad nodded.
Mother waved a hand in the air. “You know. Twittering and all that.”
I shook my head. “Social media, Mother.”
“Your father’s helping me.”
I laughed out loud. “Let me know how it goes.”
Dad turned to me. “You’d be surprised. I learned all about technology and email and stuff last year in . . . last year.”
I winced.
“Just feel free to visit,” Jack broke in, drumming his thumbs on the steering wheel. “Anytime.”
“There’s the house.” Grateful for the redirect, I pointed in the distance for my mother’s benefit.
She drew a sharp breath. “Oh my.”
Oh my was right. The log house was an old beauty, weathered-enough looking for its surroundings yet perfectly preserved. It held court over white-railed pastures of glossy, thick-muscled quarter horses and an array of outbuildings anchored by a large tan metal stable that almost blended into the landscape. I’d d
reamed of places like this all my life and pinched myself that the ranch came with Jack as a package deal.
By the time Jack parked the ancient Suburban in front of the house, a man and a woman stood on the deep front porch, her just in front of him waving at us, him with his hand on her shoulder. I recognized them from the wall of family pictures I’d seen in the house: Jack’s Apache father and his Anglo mother. They looked like they were the same age as my parents, and she was blonde like Mother and he was dark like Dad, but the similarities ended there; her legs were covered, and he didn’t look like he’d ever spent a day in the slammer. Beside them wiggled the dog of my dreams, a blue heeler.
“Oh,” I gasped.
“What?” Jack asked.
“The dog.”
He grinned, then took his sweet time unfolding his lanky body from the Suburban. I fumbled with my door, stalling to take longer than him. Jack’s mother—Nell—gave up on Jack and ran toward the vehicle.
“Jack!” She careened around the front of the Suburban and threw her arms around him, nearly knocking him over.
“Whoa, Mom.” Jack laughed and twirled his mother in a circle.
I had exited the car and stood behind them. The dog came up to greet me and I let him sniff me, then gave him a vigorous ear rub. When Jack set his mother down, I got my first really good look at her. She was beautiful. About my height, she had graying dark blonde hair and magnificent golden eyes, like her son. And dimples. Dimples that put a double exclamation point at the end of her smile.
“Emily?” she said, with the smile attached.
Trying not to blind her with a full-on flash of the metal on my teeth, I stuck my hand out toward her. “Mrs. Holden?” Ugh, did my voice sound as quavery as I thought it did?
“Call me Nell,” she said, and moved past my outstretched hand to pull me into a hug. “You’re family.” She rocked me back and forth. “So good to have you here.”
“So good to be here.”
“This is Bruiser,” she said as the blue heeler leaped in the air around Jack. “Down, Bruiser.”
Hell to Pay (What Doesn’t Kill You, #7): An Emily Romantic Mystery Page 4