“Nice to meet you, Bruiser.”
Jack took me by the hand and led me toward his father, who had descended the porch steps by the time we reached him. Behind us, I heard Nell and my parents greeting each other. “An Easter basket of goodies, oh, you shouldn’t have,” Nell said. “And Johnny, I’ve heard so much about you. Nice to meet you.” The skunk image loomed large in my mind, and I tried to shoo it away.
“Son,” Mr. Holden said. His deep voice seemed to vibrate the air around him.
Jack grabbed his father’s upper arm and pulled him in. The two were spitting images of one another, save for twenty-five years and the golden eyes and dimple Jack got from Nell. Dark heads of hair, skin toasty golden brown and weathered by the outdoors, broad shoulders and lean, muscular bodies. They clapped each other’s backs, then Jack released his father and put his hand on the small of my back, gently pulling me forward.
“Dad, this is my fiancée, Emily Bernal.”
“Hello, Mr. Holden.” My lips barely moved as I spoke. He stared at me for a moment, and, without planning to, I curtsied, like Jack was presenting me to royalty or something. Heat surged to my cheeks. I hadn’t curtsied like that since the Junior Miss Rodeo Amarillo pageant when I was nine years old.
“Welcome, Emily.” He looked deep into my eyes with Jack-like intensity, the moment so solemn and earnest it felt ceremonial, like I’d made a commitment before the Holy Trinity or something, making my curtsy seem appropriate after all.
***
After we had settled Snowflake and changed, we all walked to the stables together for a midafternoon get-to-know-each-other ride, Bruiser running in circles ahead of us.
Jack’s father said, “Jack’s the better guide for us today, I’m afraid. I’m out of touch with what’s going on here at the ranch.”
Nell slipped her arm through his, her eyes a-twinkle. “For a good cause, right, Gordon?”
His olive cheeks creased. “Of course—the best.” He spoke to the rest of us without turning his head. “The horses and the land tied us here for years. I promised Nell we’d see the world when we first agreed to marry. I’ve had some making up to do.”
“We’re starting with the Americas, and then we’ll just have to see where our travels take us,” she said.
My phone buzzed and I snuck a look. A text from Nadine: A friend told me the police went to Phil’s this morning. I can’t get him to return my calls, and I’m at the Polo Club or I’d head over there. Do you know anything?
I closed my eyes for a moment, aching for my friend. I didn’t want to have to lie to her now or break my promise to Phil yet, and I’d have to do one or the other if I answered her text. I decided when I got back to Amarillo, I would tell her about the search at Phil’s, promise to him or not. Even though Jack would remind me that we had a duty to our clients, she was my friend first. But for now, well, I couldn’t be rude to the people I was with and text her, could I? I relaxed a bit at the thought. Thank the Lord for the excuse of good manners. Jack met my eyes as I slipped my phone into my jeans at the small of my back. He raised one brow, and I mouthed, “Nadine.” He nodded without saying anything and looked thoughtful—his normal response.
“Sounds wonderful,” my mother was saying. “I’d love to be able to travel.”
Dad’s eyes moistened and dropped. Good, my inner voice said. You should feel guilty that she hasn’t and may never get to.
We reached the large stable and found several stable hands waiting by the tie-down rack with our mounts, thanks to Jack calling ahead while I changed clothes. I looked around for Mickey, but no dice. I did see my favorite horse in the world, though: Jarhead. A champion racer, real quarter horse royalty. I rode him whenever I came to Wrong Turn Ranch, but I held back to see if one of Jack’s parents planned to ride him instead.
Nell said, “Bruiser, go to place.” The blue heeler trotted to a horse blanket on the ground next to a hay bale and dropped himself onto it.
“Where’s Mickey?” I asked Jack.
Jack swung a leg over Hopper, the thoroughbred he normally rode. Hopper had been his wife Lena’s horse. “He texted me a little while ago. Greg had a track meet today. We’ll see them later.”
Mickey and his wife Laura, a former jockey, had two teenage foster kids they were trying to adopt. Runaways who’d turned to me for help in Amarillo after witnessing a murder, and who I’d delivered to Mickey and Laura, with Jack’s help. Greg had just turned sixteen and Farrah wasn’t quite fifteen yet.
Jack wheeled Hopper and noticed me still flat-footed on the ground. “What are you waiting for?”
I saw that his mother and father had chosen their horses. “Jarhead’s for me?” I said, trying not to sound like a schoolgirl with a crush.
Jack grinned. “I told my parents you guys have a special relationship. They respect that. Plus, he’s a little much for Mom, and Dad has an old favorite.” He pointed, and I saw that Gordon sat astride a tall, gray-muzzled roan.
I ruffled Jarhead’s ears, and he nickered. “Hey, boy.” I vaulted to the saddle and Jarhead was off before I’d settled in and grabbed the reins. I laughed as I checked him in a little. “So that’s the way it’s going to be, is it, fella?” My fears started slipping away behind us with his every step.
Jack struck out toward the far northern edge of the property where it dropped off into an arroyo, and we rode in a staggered line behind him, me holding Jarhead to an exaggerated, barely restrained lope. We single-filed down the arroyo’s steep banks at a bend. Jack had told me once that the wash only filled with water a few times a year, and today a small stream trickled through the wide, flat bed. Rocks jutted from between the scraggly trees and the cactus clinging to the interior walls and reaching up for the sun. I leaned back slightly as Jarhead waddled and hopped his way to the bottom.
A scream rang out from behind me, quickly followed by Nell’s laugh.
“Sorry, I’ve been out of the country too long. I let a little rattlesnake startle me.” She pointed at the ground at the bottom of the arroyo, to the right of the trail.
Her words drew me back for a closer look. A rattler lay stretched out in the sun. I looked around for Jack. He was backing Hopper away from it. I cocked my head at him, my brows up.
“I hate snakes,” he said.
My dad rode up beside my mother. “Me, too, but not my Agatha. Aggie, show them what you can do with that thing.”
I groaned. When I was eleven, Mother impressed upon me the urgent need to pass along the legacy of my recently dearly departed grandfather. Gramps, it seemed, had been a pastor in a church with some rather extreme beliefs and practices back in the day. One of them was that the righteous man could handle and even be bitten by a rattler and survive it unscathed. It was bull hockey, of course. They milked the venom from the snakes before services, and handled them knowing full well that the nasty animals were no more harmful than a tomcat, at least temporarily. The worshippers ate it up. My sweet mother learned to catch and milk rattlesnakes at her father’s knee as a young child, with her bare hands. So guess what skill she lovingly passed on to her only child? Yeah. Whether I wanted to learn it or not. Which I sort of did, back then, but it still wasn’t something I bragged about to the other kids at school.
“Oh, Daddy, let’s not make a spectacle—” I said.
Mother interrupted me. The woman could cut diamonds with that voice if she had a mind to. “I’m too old and slow, but Emily can. She was always a better snake handler than me anyway.”
Heat burned the tips of my ears. This isn’t exactly what I had wanted the Holdens to learn about me. In my mind, a circus ringmaster crowed to cheers and hoots, “Hey, Nell and Gordon, step right up and witness your daughter-in-law-to-be coming from a long line of crazy that she’ll pass down to any grandchildren she might give you.”
I shuddered. Probably lucky for them that the chances of me getting pregnant were slim to none with only 1/1000th of an ovary left in my baby oven.
“What?” Ja
ck asked, his eyes wide.
“Don’t,” I said to my dad.
He ignored me. “Emily can catch a rattler with her bare hands. Want to see?”
“No!” Jack and I said at the same time as my mother shouted, “Yes!” and clapped her hands.
“Really?” Gordon asked.
“Are you sure it’s safe?” Nell didn’t look convinced.
My dad grinned. “It is the way she does it. Come on, Sweet Pea.”
“We’ve got antivenom back at the stables,” Gordon said, his eyebrows rising as he became more enamored of the idea.
I looked around me and even Jack’s face was expectant. My parents were right. I was good at this, even if it made me feel like a freak show almost equal to my crazy grandfather and my nearly crazy mother. And I already felt trailer parky compared to Jack’s family. So, I thought, if I’m going to be low rent, I should kick some booty at it.
“Fine.” I tossed my hair over my shoulder. “It’s really not that big a deal.” I hopped off Jarhead. “The trick is to find the right stick. Without it, or a special tool, I won’t touch a snake.” I walked back up the side of the ravine, looking at the stunted trees. I found a four-foot branch with a tight fork in it. I snapped it off and stomped the forks off to nubs. I tested it on the ground to make sure it was solid, then held it up to the Holdens and my parents. “Like this one. Now, I need a helper. I’m going to walk up behind the snake, and I need my helper to distract it so it doesn’t focus on me coming.”
“I gotcha, Sweet Pea.” Dad slipped off his horse and handed his reins to Mother.
As I positioned myself behind the snake outside its line of sight, Dad walked back and forth in front of it waving his arms and hollering, “Yah!” I took a deep breath and jammed the fork of my stick right behind the snake’s head. The Holdens gasped. My mother drew in a happy breath. The snake’s tail whipped but his head stayed planted to the ground under my stick.
“Now I walk my hands down a little until I’m in close enough to grasp its neck, but first I secure the tail with my foot.” Which I did. The snake’s body still struggled and I felt it pressing up under my foot, but the tail no longer whipped around. “They’ve got a lot of strength back there, so you’ve got to keep the snake’s back end still.”
“I think I’m going to be sick,” Jack said under his breath.
Adrenaline pulsed through my veins. “Now, I grasp the neck, and when I’m sure I have it good, I use my other hand to set the stick where I can get to it again in a moment.” I fitted my hand around the snake’s neck, near enough to the head that it wouldn’t be able to turn on me. The powdery cool texture of snakeskin against my own always set my teeth on edge. I gripped it tight and felt the muscles in its neck fight against my hold, but I didn’t budge, holding it firmly against the dirt. Then I set the stick on the ground leaning against a rock. “While I’m still holding the head on the ground, I get ahold of its tail and I slowly remove my foot.” I did it, and the body writhed between my hands on the ground.
Nell gasped. “Oh my God, Jack, she’s holding a rattlesnake. Get a picture.”
Jack pulled out his phone and pointed it at me. “Smile for some socialist medium.”
He was funny—especially since from Mother’s smile it seemed his witticism had blown right over her—but I was extremely occupied. I shot him a sour look and continued my narration. “You can lift the snake into the air, if you want.” As it left the ground, I absorbed its undulations, and I never took my eyes off its fangs. “And then I reverse the process to release it. Unless anyone wants to pet it first?” From a safe distance, I pointed the business end of the snake around the group to a chorus of “no thank yous” as it rattled its tail at us. Then I set the snake on the ground, put my foot on the tail, grabbed my stick and replaced it firmly on the snake’s neck, and released it with my other hand. Sweat dripped into my eyes and down the side of my nose. “When I let this snake go, it’s not going to be real happy, so why don’t y’all back up a few steps?”
Everyone took my advice.
“I’m going to move away very quickly and trust him to be a self preservationist and do the same thing in the other direction.” I took my foot off the tail, then checked behind me one last time to be sure the coast was clear. I backed up to the extent of the length of the stick, then I released it and sprinted away, stick still in my hand in case I needed to ward the snake off.
The angry snake first rose up to see what it could strike, but when it found itself alone, it slithered away to cover, rattling and hissing as it went.
Around me, everyone clapped.
“Well, I never,” Nell breathed. “How did you learn to do that?”
I laughed. “On garden snakes first, with big snake-handling gloves. Then I graduated to rat snakes. And finally Mother trained me on the real thing.”
“Way to go, Sweet Pea,” my proud father said. He turned to Gordon. “First time I saw her mama do that, I told myself right then, ‘That’s the woman I’m going to marry.’”
Gordon cracked his first real smile, and Nell laughed aloud. I sensed a little skunk spray in the air, but I laughed, too.
I walked up to my fiancé and said, “What did you think?”
“I think I’m going to have nightmares about this for a very long time,” he said, but he flashed me a killer lopsided smile.
Chapter Four
After my one-woman Wild West act, our parents were positively jovial with each other. They chatted amiably as we rode up the wash for an hour and then headed back to the ranch house. When we’d finished with the horses and cleaned ourselves up, Jack kissed me on the nose and told me he was running to his office.
“Is it about Phil?” I called after him, into the closing door. I hadn’t answered Nadine, and the couple and their woes were on my mind.
He didn’t answer.
I swallowed the urge to shout after him. Jack’s communications were limited, at best. I figured he would be back quickly, though, since he was leaving me here alone with the parents. He might even just be running downstairs to the home office instead of into Tularosa. I blow-dried my hair, thinking about Nadine and my promise to Phil and still not texting her back. No Jack. I examined my braces. Nothing I could do about them, so I put on makeup, and went back over the visit from the caseworker. No Jack. I changed into a three-quarter-length sleeve empire-waist dress with accordion pleats in the skirt, added silver and turquoise drop earrings, and fluffed my hair. I prayed that no one had told Jack’s parents my dad was a broken-beer-bottle-wielding bar fighter who’d killed a man and been in the New Mexico State Pen for ten years. No Jack. Twenty-five minutes had passed. Finally, I let myself think about the thing bothering me the most: why hadn’t Jack responded to my accidental “I love you”? And why the heck had he run out without telling me what he was up to? I flipped my hair and sprayed Aqua Net, then stood and decided I’d done all I could and I would do nothing but fret if I didn’t get out of there. Snowflake met me at the bathroom door, both paws on my shins.
“Hello, princess. I don’t suppose you know what Jack is up to, do you?” I leaned down and ruffled her ears but she didn’t cough up any information. I was suddenly feeling quite blue, and I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, knowing I had to bring my A game anyway. “Let’s see what smells so good, girl.”
We began walking down the stairs together. Nell’s voice reached me from the breakfast area. “Well, Lena was very different from Emily. Feminine. Reserved. She was from a hoity-toity family in Santa Fe. The only thing she liked doing out here was taking pictures.”
I froze on the stairs, out of their line of sight, mentally translating: Lena was Caroline Kennedy. I was Honey Boo Boo. Snowflake stopped and looked up at me, her head tilted. My eyes left her face and traveled upward. A poignant charcoal drawing Jack had done of his son, Jackson, hung on the wall. It hadn’t been there the last time I visited.
My mother answered. “Yes, that would be very different from my daughter.�
�� She lowered her voice and I couldn’t hear the rest of what she said.
“I’m not sure he’ll ever be completely over the loss. Those babies.” She paused, and I wiped my eyes and imagined she was, too. “I am glad to see him living again. He’s really found himself, in a way that he never had before.”
I waited several beats but neither continued. I flung myself the rest of the way down the stairs and through the entryway to the kitchen, Snowflake running past me and all the way to Nell. “Hello!” I said in a cheerful voice.
They stood on opposite sides of the gold, rusty brown, blue-gray, and tan granite-topped kitchen island, leaning on their elbows. Both looked at me intently, but I was determined not to reveal that I’d heard their conversation. Nell reached down and gave Snowflake a quick pat.
“Hello,” they each said.
With a cheek-burning smile, I marched to the breakfast bar. Immediately I noticed the open picture album. The page facing me showed a picture of a very young Jack standing in front of a small plane, holding a hand-lettered, torn piece of fabric—T-shirt material, it looked like. I picked the album up. May 13, 1991, the picture read.
“What’s this?” I asked, pointing at the picture of the young Jack.
Nell turned and peered under the lid of a simmering pot. “Jack, the day of his first solo flight.”
“That’s great.” I flipped a few pages. Jack in a football uniform, with a wavy mullet. Mickey and Jack in cap and gown. And then suddenly, Jack with his wife and two children, standing in front of the plane we’d flown in today. His deceased wife, Lena, and children, Julia and Jackson, the ones blown up in a car bomb meant for Jack, back when he worked as an ADA at the Alamogordo, New Mexico, District Attorney’s office. My heart froze in my chest. Lena really was beautiful. Maybe she was the reason he couldn’t love me. Because he had loved her and still did.
“Is that the plane we flew in today?” Mother asked.
“Yes. That was taken the day he got it. Lena wasn’t a good sport about it like you, Emily.” Nell reached over and patted my hand, then gently closed the album. “Anyway, I got this out to show your mama when she asked how Jack learned to fly airplanes.”
Hell to Pay (What Doesn’t Kill You, #7): An Emily Romantic Mystery Page 5