“Ha!” It had been a whole lot of years since she’d seen herself as sexy. She met his gaze. “What is it that you see in me, really? I mean, you are this incredibly attractive man who could be dating fashion models, or at least women who are a lot younger and are built like fashion models. Why me?”
He reached over and squeezed her hand. “I love your smile, the way you laugh so easily, your energy. I’ve dated enough empty-headed, self-centered, beautiful women to know that they are a waste of my time.”
“Really?” She’d never met a man like Beau who felt that way.
“The kiss the other night at the gorge was really nice . . .”
Now she knew she was blushing furiously. She glanced around at the other cars but no one seemed to be noticing them. And she had to agree; his kisses were the kind that sent lusty surges through her.
“So . . . could we go to your place?” he said.
All her common sense talk rushed at her. It’s too soon in the relationship. Is he genuine or is he using me? Am I really attracted to him? The thoughts lasted a good five seconds. It wasn’t as if she hadn’t had casual sex before—just not in a whole lot of years. And maybe with Beau it would be more than casual. What would it hurt?
“Let’s go,” she said.
He got out of the truck and followed her through town, parking on the street. Sam pulled into her driveway, feeling the flush of desire and anticipation.
Then she noticed something else.
Parked in the wide turnaround spot at the back of her drive was a car. A shiny new Mustang convertible. Kelly.
Her daughter.
Chapter 13
Beau came walking up, just as she cut the truck’s engine and got out. She waved helplessly at the red car. His face collapsed into the same oh shit expression that Sam imagined on her own.
“I have no idea what she’s doing here,” she said. “She lives in L.A. and only visits me when—”
“When there’s trouble,” he finished. “I’ll go. You sort it out and call me later. Let me know if you need any help.”
He gave her a lingering kiss and walked down the driveway.
Sam knew she should have expected this. Kelly had borrowed her bank balance a few weeks ago. That was the warning, the clue that should have let her know that her daughter would show up on her doorstep.
She walked to the back door, dreading the conversation that was about to take place.
Kelly, the girl who alternately charms my heart and wrenches my guts, Sam thought. The young woman who should be out on her own—she’s thirty-four years old, after all—but who shows up uninvited at the worst possible times.
She paused at the door, the past flooding back. Thirty-five years ago Samantha Sweet had been this dumb girl just out of high school in small town Texas, seeing no future whatsoever in her job at the Dairy Queen. Billy Roy Farmer, from a long line of cotton-farming Farmers, was sniffing around like a horny dog. They’d lost their virginity together but truthfully Sam just couldn’t see herself settling into a life of Tupperware parties, Friday night football games, Wednesdays and Sundays at the Baptist church, and forever looking out a kitchen window at miles of flat. Cause that’s what a cotton farm in Texas was—flat.
Her life would become her mother’s, and at night in the room Sam shared with her sister Rayleen, she’d nearly scream out loud at the thought of it. To keep from going entirely insane she thought of other places she might go, but truthfully, nobody she’d ever known had ever traveled any farther than Dallas so she didn’t have much to compare to. In the 1970s a trip to Six Flags Over Texas was every local kid’s idea of a dream come true.
Then one day she’d just taken her paycheck—$52.47 after taxes—and put half of it into her precious little savings account, which totaled nearly three hundred bucks after two summers and about a million Saturdays of making chocolate sundaes. She was on her way to the library to return a Kathleen Woodiwiss romance novel (that sort of reading was going to get her into trouble with Billy Roy, she just knew it). She knew there was such a thing as birth control, but Kathleen’s characters never bothered with it and Sam was a little fuzzy on the details of how it worked anyway—they didn’t discuss it much in the Baptist church.
Anyway, walking down Main Street, she passed Bobbie Jo Hudson’s Travel Agency and a shiny new poster in the window caught her eye. Alaska. Everything in that picture was blue and green, with snow on top. And nothing about that landscape was flat. And she fell in love right then and there. Sam must have stared for ten minutes because Bobbie Jo Hudson came out and asked if there was something she could help her with. And Sam just blurted out that it sure would be great to see Alaska some day, and Bobbie Jo laughed and said, “Well, a ticket to get you there would cost almost four hundred dollars.” That’s how she said it: four hundred in a big italicized voice. It was pretty clear that she’d never sold a ticket that pricey before, and as Sam thought about it on her way to the library she kind of wondered how on earth anyone made a living out of a travel agency in this town anyway. Nobody ever went anywhere.
She turned in Kathleen Woodiwiss and found herself wandering to the Jack London novels and before she knew it she was back in her room at home, blazing her way through The Call of the Wild.
Scraping up every cent she could, including her birthday money and busting open her childhood piggy bank, she took the bus to Seattle, a long series of boat ferries (now that’s an amazing thing to a Texas kid), and eventually found her way to the employment office for the new pipeline they were building. When asked what her job skills were she couldn’t think of a single thing so she blurted out that she could bake brownies and grill hamburgers and she made a heck of an ice cream sundae. And that got her a job as a camp cook.
Sam made more money than she could have ever dreamed of, and she met a blue-eyed charmer named Jake Calendar. By that October, when it became obvious that it was going to stay nighttime for the next five months and when she got her fill of trudging out in the snowy dark of the line camp to puke into a latrine every morning, Sam decided that another change was in order. She never told Jake about the baby that would arrive the next summer. She just took the company shuttle to Anchorage and spent a little of her earnings on a plane ticket. She still couldn’t face the idea of heading back to flat, Baptist Texas so she landed in Denver. Longer days, but not a whole lot warmer. She bought a used Jeep and headed south, determined not to let the mountains out of her sight. When she landed in Taos, New Mexico, she stopped.
Kelly arrived on a beautiful May morning and it was scary to see that the child had the same brilliant blue eyes, curly brown hair and charm-you-out-of-anything ways as her father.
Those blue eyes fixed on Sam now, as she walked into the kitchen.
“Mom! Hi! Surprise!”
“Kelly. What are you doing here?”
She’d made herself right at home. Dishes were piled in the sink, smeared in red sauce from the spaghetti Sam had left in the fridge a few days earlier. Through the door to the hall, she saw a large black suitcase on the bed in the guest room. A guest room now. At one time it was Kelly’s and she still obviously felt entitled.
“You look great, Mom. Have you lost weight?”
Hardly. But that’s the kind of charmer Kelly was. She had an amazing ability to ignore criticism and just plow forward with a sunny outlook and a batch of compliments. That cheery disposition got them through her teen years without a death in the house.
Sam plopped her pack on the counter and washed her hands at the sink.
“What time did you get in?” she asked. “You should have told me you were coming. I would have made dinner.”
“Oh that’s okay,” Kelly said. “I found something.” As an afterthought she asked if Sam had eaten anything and offered to warm the rest of the pasta. The tea kettle was hot and so Sam pulled mugs from the cabinet and dunked teabags for both of them.
“So, you got a few days off?” she asked, once they were settled at the table.
>
“Well, that’s the thing.”
I’m in trouble, Sam thought. “What ‘thing’?”
“You know how I’ve been stressing over Deborah lately.”
Kelly’s supervisor truly did sound like the office witch at the mid-sized corporation where she’d been working her way up the ladder.
“This week was the pits. She’s been on my ass for two weeks, but it got to be more than her usual PMS or whatever. She has it in for me, Mom. I can’t handle her anymore.”
They’d had this discussion by phone quite a few times. Kelly swore she’d discussed Deborah’s behavior with company management, that everyone else in the department agreed with her, but that nothing ever changed. Sam had been sympathetic but was getting the uneasy feeling that tea and sympathy wasn’t what Kelly was after now.
“I’ve quit,” she said.
“Quit? A seventy-thousand a year job, and you’ve just quit?”
“It’s not like there aren’t better jobs, Mom. I’m getting my résumé out there.”
How many places could have possibly received her résumé since, what, Friday? All sorts of thoughts went through Sam’s head—mainly, how was Kelly going to pay back the cash she’d taken. Unemployment money wasn’t an option if she’d just walked out. And there certainly wouldn’t be any golden parachute.
Kelly got up and went to the cookie jar, helping herself to the last of the butter cookies. “Don’t stress over this, Mom. Something great is going to come through.”
Sam rinsed her mug and put the dirty dishes into the dishwasher, refusing to guess at why Kelly left Los Angeles on a moment’s notice, or to dwell on the fact that she’d never find a job of that caliber here in Taos.
“I’m tired,” Sam said. “We’ll talk about this tomorrow.”
She closed her bedroom door and put on her nightshirt. A quick call to Beau to let him know there was no emergency and that they could talk more tomorrow. From the living room a reality show began blaring on television. The smell of microwave popcorn drifted through the house. This was too much like the last time Kelly’d shown up, right after her college graduation. Sam pulled the pillow over her head and tried not to think.
Chapter 14
Sam woke early, with an uneasy mix of images running through her head. Beau’s kiss last night came back to her, creating an ache inside. Then she remembered that Kelly was in the next room and suspected that she’d only heard half the story about her quick exit from L.A. and her job.
The phone was ringing in the kitchen when she stepped out of the shower. When it became apparent that Kelly wasn’t going to get herself out of bed to answer it Sam threw on a robe and dashed for it. A female voice was leaving a message about a cake. She grabbed up the receiver before the answering machine cut off. At this moment, any business was good business.
“I know this is short notice, but is there any way you could do a wedding cake by Thursday?” the female voice inquired, once she realized she was speaking to a real person.
Sam got the details on size and colors and quoted a price, with a little added premium for the fact that she would once again have to drive to Santa Fe for delivery. Sam’s own inclination, if she were the customer, would have been to look for the nearest local bakery but as the baker she was more than happy to accept an order. It wasn’t as if she were swamped with extra business right now. If Sweet’s Sweets was ever going to get off the ground Sam had to jump through a few hoops to get that necessary can-do reputation.
The minute she hung up she made a quick inventory of supplies and calculated a schedule. The three cakes for the tiers would have to be baked the night before assembly and delivery. But she could get busy on the flowers and trim pieces right away. She whipped up a batch of buttercream frosting, tinted part of it in the bride’s chosen mauve and started making roses and buds. A darker tint for some of the flowers would add dimension. Even with a traditional cake like this customer wanted, Sam liked to add special touches. She’d no sooner slipped the baking sheet full of roses, on their small paper squares, into the fridge than Beau called.
“How did it go last night?” he asked.
“Same song, next verse. I don’t think I’m getting the whole story.” She glanced toward Kelly’s room. The door remained closed. Some job hunt.
“Thought you might be interested in knowing that some kind of plant toxin showed up in Riley Anderson—uh, Pierre Cantone’s system. The M.I. said there was fluid in the lungs, maybe pneumonia, so I don’t know if the two are related.”
“Odd. Maybe he was having an allergic reaction to something and that caused the fluid.” Sam realized that she was merely making wild guesses. “I’m still wondering where the roommate went, too. How weird is it that he just vanished. Do you think someone might have harmed him?”
“No real evidence of that. Maybe with Cantone’s death, he simply had no reason to stick around.”
That was certainly possible.
“Sam . . . I’d really like to see you again.” His voice held that familiar ache.
She glanced again at Kelly’s closed door and lowered her voice. “Me too. But it’s awkward right now. Your place?”
“Well, that’s awkward too. My mother is here.”
He’d mentioned his mother before. “Visiting?” she asked, daring to hope.
“No, and that’s the thing. She’s getting fragile and I’ve been debating what to do. Nursing homes are just so depressing.”
Sam could only imagine. Her own parents were still going pretty strong, and her sister Rayleen lived less than ten miles from them. Whenever Sam talked to friends who were dealing with the elderly and frail, it made her appreciate her situation.
They ended the call without really making any plans.
She was brooding over it when the phone rang again. Delbert Crow. He had another house for her to take care of, this one between town and the Taos Ski Valley. Not exactly a convenient drive, but hey, income was income. She wrote down the details and asked whether there was a key or if she’d need to break in. She knew what the answer would be. Luckily, her tool box was still out in the truck. She told him she could get on it that afternoon.
With another glare at Kelly’s closed bedroom door, Sam made herself a sandwich for lunch, knowing she still had to talk to her daughter about repaying the money. Dreading it.
Sam went out to her truck to be sure her tools and lawn equipment were loaded. She doubted that a property on the ski basin road would have an actual, formal lawn but she never knew. Best to be prepared.
Back in the kitchen she grabbed an apple and chips to go with her sandwich and noticed that Kelly’s bedroom door stood halfway open. A flush from the bathroom, and she meandered out wearing an oversize T-shirt and loose silk kimono.
“Morning, Mom,” she said with a yawn, coming into the kitchen and touching the side of the coffee carafe to see if it was warm.
“It’s nearly noon,” Sam said. “Coffee went cold hours ago.”
Kelly hmmm’d and filled a mug with the cold leftover brew, sticking it into the microwave.
“I’ve got a property to attend to this afternoon. Do not get into those roses in the fridge. They’re for a customer.” One of Kelly’s favorite things as a teen had been to pop a whole frosting rose into her mouth and just let it melt. “What are your plans today?”
She shot Sam a look that said she’d hoped not to do anything at all.
“We need to talk. Later.” Sam gathered her pack and left.
She reached the ski valley property quickly enough. Posted the requisite signage that USDA provides, notifying the world that the property was now under their jurisdiction. The place was high enough in elevation to be largely covered in trees, mostly piñon but with a few taller pines as well. Aside from a summer’s worth of mountain wildflowers and grasses to be leveled with the weed trimmer, the outdoor work would be minimal.
The house was a charmer, a picturesque log cabin with a wide porch across the front and a large redwo
od deck at the back. Wooden planters once held lush annuals, but crisp brown stalks provided the only evidence of them now. Overall, the place was well maintained and Sam wondered what had caused the owner to abandon it.
Inside, it was clear that they’d taken their time moving out. No furniture remained, the kitchen was neat, the refrigerator empty. Utilities had been cut off, apparently, but she checked the breakers anyway and made sure the hot water heater was shut off. This place wouldn’t need much at all in the way of cleanup, just some routine maintenance to keep it in showable condition until it sold. She guessed that a sale would come along soon—the property had that kind of curb appeal.
She spent an hour or so inside, sweeping up the few bits of mouse evidence and swiping at some corner cobwebs with a duster, draining the pipes and pouring a little antifreeze into each drain. With freezing temperatures approaching in the next month or so, and no heat in the cabin, frozen pipes would be the biggest potential problem. That done, she replaced the locks and turned her attention to the outdoors.
A split-rail fence surrounded an area that was probably two or three acres. Of that, most had been left natural with just a perimeter of twenty feet or so immediately around the house trimmed, either for appearance or as a firebreak. Sam cranked up her gas weed trimmer and set to work on it, concentrating on the drive and walkways first. The drone of the engine and monotony of cutting neat swathes gave her peace from dwelling on her daughter’s messed-up situation. Instead, she found herself thinking of the artist Cantone, imagining that he might have found inspiration in an idyllic mountain setting like this.
The sun had gone behind the surrounding mountains by the time she finished, darkening the property and narrow lane with shade. She packed up her gear, rechecked the locks and headed out.
As long as she was at this end of town, Sam decided she might as well dash by the Cantone property and give things there a quick check-over. It wasn’t more than ten minutes out of the way and there was still daylight once she got away from the steep hills surrounding the ski valley.
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