Hell to Pay (What Doesn’t Kill You, #7): An Emily Romantic Mystery

by Pamela Fagan Hutchins

  The man and woman looked around and caught sight of me. She smiled and he waved. Beside me, Jack grunted. “Let’s go say hello,” I said to him.

  “Okay.” Jack shouted, “Hey,” to the Freemans.

  We walked over to the family. Alan shook Jack’s hand and Janelle hugged us both. Their tween didn’t show any sign she realized other humans inhabited her air space, but the two younger girls grinned and said, “Hello.”

  “Y’all remember my attorney, Jack, and his fiancée, Emily?” Alan asked them. Jack had represented Alan against a bogus assaulting-an-officer charge.

  “Yes, Daddy,” the older one said. Her huge eyes dominated her thin face.

  “Hi,” the littlest one said, and she kicked the ground, then ducked behind her mother’s legs.

  “Happy Easter, you guys,” I said. “How are you?”

  “Great,” Janelle responded. “When’d you get braces?”

  I raised my hand to hold in front of my mouth, then dropped it when I realized what I’d done. “A month or two ago.”

  “And when’s the wedding?”

  “Uh—”

  Jack took over. “One month, in New Mexico. We’re doing a backyard family ceremony.”

  “Will you have Betsy by then?”

  I looked around for her. She was the reason we were there, after all, but there was still no sign of her or Wallace.

  “Hope so.” Jack put his arm around my shoulders.

  “Mommy, it’s time for the pony rides. You promised,” their youngest daughter said, tugging on Janelle’s skirt.

  I laughed. “Pony rides? Sounds fun!” To Janelle and Alan I added, “Good to see you. Take care, you two.”

  After our good-byes, Jack and I stood childless in the crowd. Past the edge of the gathering was the playground. “Want to go swing while we wait?” I asked him.

  The left side of his face slid upward a notch. “Let’s do it.”

  A minute later, Jack and I were swinging side by side, but out of sync. I kicked my legs out and flew forward as he tucked his and pumped back. Back and forth we went, missing each other coming, then missing each other going.

  “Whatcha thinkin’ ’bout?” I said as I kicked my legs out again.

  He whizzed past me. “Nothing. You?”

  About what the heck is going on with you. “Betsy. She’s missed the egg hunt.”

  “Those people.”

  Those people, as in the Hodges. It gave us something to have solidarity over. “Yeah, they’re definitely not on my favorites list.” I changed the subject. “Oh, I forgot to tell you. John gave me the name of the guy from Phil’s party. Burt Wilde.”

  Jack dropped his feet and pushed his heels into the ground. They dragged, but he still swung forward. I caught up with him and for a short moment we were synchronized, then he dug his heels in again and stopped.

  “Did you hear me?”

  “Yeah. Did they talk to him?”

  “I don’t know. Who is he?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean who is he to you? Why would he mention you to me?”

  “Oh. A guy I put away in my old life.”

  “For what?”

  “Kidnapping and pimping teenagers.”

  A shudder ran through me. “Oh. That’s awful.”

  “Yeah. He’s not a nice guy.”

  “What do you think he meant when he told me he didn’t do it?”

  Jack turned to me, and his face looked tight. “I don’t know.”

  He was already upset, so I figured there was no harm in pushing a little harder. “Does he have anything to do with that old case you’re working on?”

  His voice was like a steel door slamming shut. “No.” He looked at his feet, then dug a toe in the sand.

  “Okay.” I kept swinging, thinking. Jack had put a lot of defendants in jail during his time as an ADA. More than he’d represented as a defense attorney since. This wouldn’t be the last time we’d run across one. But then I thought of something. “But you didn’t recognize him in the drawing or on the video?”

  “It’s been a long time. People change.”

  “True.”

  On a whim and a memory, I launched myself off the front of the swing as it neared its apex on my next pass. Luckily, I wasn’t too high. I stuck the landing, or, I almost did. I picked myself up off the grass and wiped the knees of my jeans.

  Jack surprised me by clapping. “Nice.”

  I curtsied, but my ringing phone interrupted me. I’d left it in my purse beside the swing set. I trotted over and fished it out. Wallace. “Hey, where are you and Betsy?”

  “Just me, I’m afraid. I waited at the Hodges’ house for thirty minutes. They weren’t there. I’ve called every number I have for them, and I’m not getting a response. I’m sorry, Emily.”

  “Son of a biscuit!”

  “Yeah, I’m with you on that.”

  “Is there nothing we can do?”

  “Short of kidnapping Betsy—which I cannot stress enough is the wrong move— no. You’re not Betsy’s parent. I can’t force them to let her interact with you. This is all voluntary on their part.”

  “Or not.” Tears smarted in the corners of my eyes. “Thanks for trying, Wallace. Oh, and tell Ethan ‘Hey’ for us.”

  I ended the call.

  Jack had moved to stand behind me. “I’m sorry.” He put a hand on my shoulder.

  The feelings raging inside me about Betsy were grayish green, like bruises and cyclone weather. It didn’t take much for them to get tangled up with my black and blue feelings about Jack. The resulting swirl was dark and ugly. I stood in the center of the storm as happy children ran into the arms of waiting parents all around us.

  ***

  My emotions simmered in me all afternoon like I was a pressure cooker on a stove, threatening to blow my lid off. My father called to see if I wanted to go shoot skeet with him. Mother invited us to dinner. Jack offered to take me to a movie. I spat a no out at all of them, and Jack wisely left for a workout and to run errands.

  I hid in the home office for a few hours, the wood-paneled darkness of the interior room a good match for my mood as I tried to find dirt on the Hodges. I didn’t dig up anything new, but I got an email from Michele: See you in three days.

  How could I keep forgetting she was coming to Amarillo and staying with us? I looked forward to seeing her, but the timing was really, really bad. I would have to rise above. Company was company, and my mother didn’t raise me to show my dirty bloomers.

  There was also an email from my ex-husband:

  Stormy and I went to Santa Fe last weekend and got married. Is it too much to hope for that you will wish us well?

  A tear welled up in one eye and I swiped at it. Of course I wished him well, in addition to a lot of other stuff. I wished he hadn’t cheated on me. I wished he hadn’t found happiness faster than me. I wished I hadn’t married a guy who wasn’t madly in love with me, and I wished I hadn’t miscarried his baby, my baby. But now that six months had passed, I harbored no grudge against him; I cared enough about him to hurt for him that he had been trapped, living a life untrue to himself.

  I didn’t want to do it again, though. To end up five, ten, fifteen years later looking back on a failure that I could have seen coming, because a man wanted to marry me for a reason other than the one right reason. Was I about to doom myself to that fate with Jack? A framed picture of the two of us smiling, laughing, riding out at Wrong Turn Ranch taunted me. He was everything I wanted, but only if I was everything to him.

  Which reminded me what I’d learned on the swings that morning. I had another issue to look into: Burt Wilde. Unlike with the Hodges, Google served up a veritable smorgasbord of information on him. As I scanned articles and read about the crimes he’d been convicted of, my skin crawled. This man—this thing who preyed on disenfranchised youth, lured them into his clutches then forced them to sell their bodies and souls ten times a night, seven days a week—had stood next t
o me, touched my arm, spoken to me. Unfortunately, not everything he was accused of could be proved. I thought of Jack facing him in a courtroom, knowing that a decade inside was the best he was going to be able to do with the evidence he had, but knowing that at least he could get him off the streets for that long. One article called Jack “a rising star in the New Mexico legal community” and “impassioned” and “brilliant.” A warmth spread through me. I wished I could have watched him as a prosecutor. I continued flipping virtually through articles, finding nothing new, nothing that would explain why Wilde would appear out of the blue in Amarillo asking me to tell Jack he didn’t do something. I went faster and faster until I got to articles about his release from prison. They were dated just a few months ago. I perused a few, and that’s when I found a new and different mention of Jack.

  Former Alamogordo ADA Jack Holden appeared before the Parole Board to argue against Wilde’s release when he first came up for consideration. Holden, whose wife and children died in a car bombing, has long said that he believes Wilde was involved in their deaths. Wilde denies this.

  My hand flew over my mouth. Wilde killed Jack’s family? I spent the next half hour reading and rereading everything I could find about the bombing and the ensuing investigation. Jack claimed Wilde had made threats against his family during the investigation, which Wilde denied, and the bombing occurred days after Wilde’s verdict. Jack didn’t suggest Wilde had done it himself—that would have been impossible since he was already in jail—but that he had been behind it.

  My troubled mind struggled to put the pieces together. Wilde wanted me to tell Jack he didn’t do it. Did he mean he didn’t kill Dennis, or he didn’t kill Jack’s family? Both? Neither? And Jack didn’t say a word about Wilde looking familiar when he saw the sketch. He denied that the old case he was looking into involved Wilde. None of it made sense, just like Jack’s recent behavior made no sense. Yes, he’d had a terrible tragedy, but that didn’t give him a free pass now.

  I hated to, but I had to call John.

  He picked up on the first ring. “Yo, CJ, what’s up?”

  “CJ?”

  “Calamity Jane.”

  “Very funny. Hey, I forgot to ask you the other day, was Wilde IDed from the sketch or the video or what?”

  John was silent on the other end.

  I got up and walked to look out the windows in the backyard, giving John a second. Snowflake was snoozing in the sun. I squinted, trying to determine what the brownish red thing in front of her was. Ah, Snowflake was napping with the little red fox. I couldn’t help but smile at our own version of The Fox and the Hound.

  I broke the silence. “John?”

  “Do you really not know?”

  “Not know what?”

  “Jack told us who he was the night you worked with the sketch artist. Came in the next week and gave us an old file he had on the guy, too.”

  Now it was my end of the phone with no sound.

  “I would’ve thought you knew.”

  “Yeah, me, too.” I stuck my left thumbnail in my mouth where the edge was frayed, and I chomped down hard, taking off all the excess nail and more. It hurt, but not as bad as Jack’s lies and secrets. “So, how do I get ahold of Wilde?”

  “Emily . . .”

  “You talked to Wilde, didn’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “So you could make me work really hard to find him, or just give me a few hints.”

  Burrows made a funny noise, like he was blowing air through loose lips, vibrating them. Like a horse. “Yeah, fine, I guess I can save you a little time. But he’s a convicted felon, Emily, and you’ve gotta treat that like it matters. Because it does.”

  So was my father. That made me more than qualified. “I will.”

  “No you won’t. And I’m going to be sorry. But here’s his number.” John recited it for me. “I’m only telling you because Jack’s the one that gave it to me.”

  As many hits to the gut as I’d received today, you’d think I’d be tensed and ready to absorb the blows, but I wasn’t, and each revelation was another sucker punch. “All right, then. Thank you, John.”

  I was about to hang up when I heard him say, “Emily?”

  “Yes?”

  “Um, I was wondering if you might want to grab dinner with me this weekend?”

  All those times I’d thought John was flirting with me, I’d been right. “Oh, I, um, well, huh. Jack and I, um, we, well, we have plans so I can’t and did you know we’re engaged?”

  The silence yawned and creaked, then broke. “Yeah, I knew. But if things don’t work out with the two of you or you change your mind, you know where to find me.”

  “I’m really sorry.”

  “No sweat. A guy’s gotta try, after all. Swing for the fences.”

  A child’s voice in the background, high and sweet, said, “Daddy, are you coming? It’s time to leave.”

  I waited.

  John’s voice grew muffled. “Just a second, slugger.”

  “But you said.”

  “I know. I’m coming.” His voice resumed normal volume. “Gotta go. T-ball game. Be safe, Calamity Jane. Keep me on speed dial.”

  “I will. Good luck in the game, and thanks again.”

  We ended the call.

  “Jack?” I shouted. “You here?” I wanted to call Wilde, but I wasn’t going to do it if Jack was standing in the kitchen listening. “Jack?”

  “In the garage.”

  No calling Wilde now, then, since Jack was in earshot.

  I grabbed my keys and bolted through the door to the garage.

  Jack was digging around in a large cardboard box at the base of the pull-down ladder to the attic. I hadn’t seen the box since we moved in, when he’d put a bunch of them up there. He jumped when I shut the door.

  “What are you doing?” I stood on the other side of the boxes from him and tried to read the contents notations he’d made in Sharpie.

  He put his hand on the box, closing one of the flaps and moving his hand over the writing, but not quickly enough to keep me from seeing the word Lena. It was probably a box of information on his secret investigation that he’d lied to me about six ways to Sunday. “Nothing.”

  I pointed at the box. “What kind of nothing?”

  “Organization project.”

  I made a hrmph noise as I clicked the fob to unlock the Mustang.

  “Where are you headed?”

  “Nowhere.”

  His hands rose to his hips, fisted there. “Doing what?”

  “Nothing.”

  I slammed the door to the Mustang and peeled out in reverse.

  Chapter Fifteen

  As I raced down our road, I pounded the steering wheel. I knew I was making things worse, but I didn’t know how not to be upset at Jack about his lies, and about the fact that I’d been right all along. He was still obsessed with what happened to Lena and their kids, and maybe rightly so, but that didn’t leave much room for me. I wanted Jack to love me, for me to be the one he had chosen, not the sensible partner after he’d lost what he wanted, not the woman he lied to while he chased down ghosts.

  I burned with need to be “the one” for him, like he was for me. Because he was that for me—the one. My high school boyfriend, Scott—now, there was a catch; married repeatedly and right now with a too-young wife and a brand new baby—had been the good-looking jock type. He was just someone to date. Rich? I had loved Rich, but never crazily, never with passion. He was security and affection and friendship. And now a deep sadness and regret.

  Then there was Jack. There was the drumbeat of desire that throbbed in me when my eyes caught sight of him, when I heard his voice, caught scent of him, thought of him. The aching to be near him that never went away. The way he stirred me up, brought out the entire range of my emotions, from peaks to valleys. How he made me laugh. How I loved watching him in court, his mind in motion. On a horse. In a car. Over breakfast. In our bed.

  But then there
was the jealousy and distrust, yes, my stupid, destructive jealousy and distrust that was ripping me apart.

  I realized I had driven to my parents’ house, and I laughed aloud at my not-so-subtle subconscious.

  I knocked before I entered—it wasn’t my house anymore—but opened the door before I got a response. I stuck my head in to hear Fox News blaring. “Hello, anyone here?”

  “Sweet Pea.” My dad’s voice came from the kitchen.

  I followed it. “Hi, Pops,” I said, feeling punchy and edgy and different.

  He laughed, setting down the want ads section of the paper. “Pops, huh?”

  “Would you prefer Daddy-o?”

  “I think I’ll stick with Pops.”

  Mother came through the laundry room door, wiping her hands on one of her frilly white June Cleaver aprons. “Where’s Jack?”

  I crossed my fingers behind my back. “Working in the garage.”

  She nodded. “Is he getting things ready?”

  “Ready for what?”

  She and Dad shared a look of panic. She said, “Oh, nothing.”

  “What is it?”

  “Um, I was just thinking about the wedding, and whether he was doing anything related to that.”

  “In the garage?”

  Dad pulled my attention to him. “Thought you didn’t want to go shoot.”

  “I don’t.” On a whim, I said, “I wanted to see if you’d take a drive with me instead.”

  Without hesitation, he stood, pushing down on his pant legs. He might be nearing sixty, but he still wore his close-fitting, straight-legged jeans and the high-heeled riding boots of a cowboy every day. He didn’t bother answering me, just beelined for the front door.

  “Dinner’s at six,” Mother called after him.

  “I’ll have him back before then.” I turned and followed him to my car.

  “Where are we going?”

  I clicked the key fob and the rental Mustang beep-beeped at us. “Just driving.”

  “Yours is a different color, ain’t it?”

  “In the shop. This one’s temporary.”

  He folded his body into the Mustang’s passenger seat, his knees jutting up, his head sticking out over where the soft roof would have been. He moved the seat back as far as it would go, his long legs extending into something more comfortable as he did. “Looks good to me.”