by Diane Capri
Flint thought about that for a second. “Who was the scrawny guy with the baseball bat?”
Drake shrugged, looking in the mirror to remove the blood and dirt from his face. “He was behind the counter. I heard somebody call him Steve.”
“Why did he come after you like that?”
“I’m not sure he was after me. Maybe he just wanted to break up the fight.” Drake had used half a dozen antiseptic wipes to clean himself up. Most of the blood and grime was gone, but he’d have some dandy bruises tomorrow. “Did you see Steve after he fell? Was he okay?”
Flint had been thinking about the fight. “He hit his head and didn’t get up again.”
“That’s just terrific.” Drake scowled and ran his hands through his hair. “I didn’t even grab the bat. That other guy wrenched it out of his hand and threw him off stride or something.”
“Nothing we can do about it now. We’ll check on him when things calm down back there.” The whole thing was odd, though. Why would those two truckers just jump on Drake for no reason?
“Swell.” Drake slumped deeper into the passenger seat.
The stop had been a success as far as Flint was concerned. Drake was fine. Steve was probably okay, but even if he wasn’t, Drake wasn’t the one who had taken him down.
The better news was that Flint had identified solid leads. Larry, the trucker who located runaways. The possible cult connection. And whatever made those truckers attack Drake simply for mentioning Laura Oakwood’s name.
Any one of which could point to Oakwood if he had unlimited time to do the job. Which he didn’t.
Still, he was farther ahead than he had been two hours ago. Something would turn up. It always did. He’d absorb as much as he could of Laura Oakwood’s experience. He’d add that to what he’d learned from the cold data. From there, all he had to do was keep unraveling the mess. Fast. He had a few more quick stops to make before he went back to Houston.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Flint covered the fifteen miles of dusty road from Mildred’s Corner to the old Maxwell place in less than twenty minutes. Drake didn’t ask any questions and Flint didn’t offer any answers.
He was already late for his promised check-in call with Scarlett, but she could wait. If she had anything helpful to report, she’d have called him.
The Navigator passed under the Lazy M’s rusted iron archway at the entrance and rolled easily up to park in the driveway in front of the ranch-style house.
Blinding sunlight bounced off the metal roof of the dilapidated building, flooding Flint’s retinas even inside the air-cooled vehicle. He peered through the glare from behind his sunglasses, immediately absorbed by the bubble of desperation that surrounded the place and everything in it, as if he’d never left.
There was nothing wrong with the house that a good fire wouldn’t cure. What had been white paint a couple of decades ago was faded and chipped and stripped from the weathered clapboard building’s exterior. The wood screen door had been attacked by termites and hung crookedly from its bottom hinge.
Flint assumed the inside was at least as rundown as the outside, but he hoped to avoid the experience. When his vision cleared, he saw the porch was occupied.
“Well, I’ll be damned.” Flint shook his head. He figured she’d died long ago, but all these years later, she was still here.
A tiny old woman sat on the porch in a rocking chair, shelling peas. A basket of purple pods rested at her feet and a plastic dishpan in her lap collected the peas as she shelled them. No doubt some well-meaning farmer had given her the peas. The Lazy M’s sunburnt land hadn’t been fertile enough to grow anything much for decades, although one of his jobs when he’d lived here had been to make the effort. His fingers curled to touch the remembered callouses on his palms caused by hours of hoeing weeds in the unrelenting sun.
Bette Maxwell had been worn down by life long before eight-year-old Michael Flint arrived at her foster home and boarding school—abandoned and broke and damn near crushed by her husband’s betrayal. The bastard had bailed ten years earlier and their two sons had gone with him.
Bette had shriveled to bones and sinew held together with leathery wrinkles as her enthusiasm for life evaporated, but she was a kind soul. The type of woman who’d been kicked around and beaten down and never seemed to find the tiniest seed of anger to fuel her comeback.
But she kept going somehow, and Flint had admired her perseverance. The woman was amazing. She’d filled her home with foster kids out of necessity. She survived on the state funds she collected by caring for the kids. And thank God for that, for where would he and Scarlett be otherwise?
She’d been the closest thing to a mother Flint had ever known. He winced. He should have come back to see her long before now.
Flint opened the door of the SUV. “Let me have a couple of minutes alone with her, okay?”
“No problem. I’ll just stretch my legs a bit while we wait for the helo.” Drake glanced at the dashboard clock. “Should be here in thirty minutes or less.”
“Roger that.” Flint stepped out and closed the door before he called out to her. “Mrs. Maxwell?”
Her thumbs paused inside the pea shell she was working on. She looked up. Watery eyes blinked a few times, as if she had difficulty focusing across the distance of the dusty front yard. “Yes?”
He closed the gap between them in a dozen long strides and climbed the three steps to the porch.
“How can I help you, sir?” Her voice was weak but friendly. She slid her thumb the rest of the way down the pea shell and dropped the peas into the dishpan.
He knelt down to her eye level. “Don’t you recognize me? It’s Michael Flint, ma’am.”
She tilted her head slightly and squeezed her eyes shut. She opened them again and a tear leaked from each outside corner. When her lips widened into the broad, kind smile he remembered from childhood, her gold front tooth gleamed and pierced his heart.
She put the peas down and jumped up to hug him, knocking him slightly off balance—physically as well as mentally. No one had been that happy to see him since his dog had died two years ago.
“Whoa!” he said, as he plopped onto his ass on the porch, the old woman still in his arms, careful not to drop her. She felt light and bony. No weight to her at all.
Bette Maxwell laughed like a child when she squeezed him, burying her head in the side of his neck. “When you left, I was sure you’d be dead in a month. That day, I thought I’d never see you alive again, Michael.”
He felt the lump in his throat. He had never, for a single instant, considered that she might worry about him. When he’d lived here, she’d always seemed stretched paper-thin by all the responsibilities of running the boarding school and keeping the two-legged wolves away from the door. She’d paid him no more attention than any of the others. He’d assumed she’d forgotten him long ago, even if he’d never forgotten her.
She cleared her throat and pushed herself upright. She wiped her tears and smiled again. “Well, come on. Get up. I’ve got sweet tea brewed and shortbread made.” She glanced toward the Navigator and waved. “Bring your friend, too. Dust settles in your throat out here. He’s got to be thirsty.”
“Thanks, but he needs to stay with the vehicle,” Flint said.
Bette pulled the screen door aside and walked through into the dark interior of the house. Flint lifted the door and replaced its top hinge. It wouldn’t stay there because the termites had damaged the wood and the hinge pin was missing.
He followed Bette inside, leaving Drake.
Flint crossed the threshold, removed his sunglasses, and waited a moment as his pupils widened to absorb light in the cooler darkness.
He blinked and shook his head to clear the strange images.
The outside of the house hadn’t changed, but the inside had been transformed. Gone were the battered pine floors, sagging couches, and broken chairs he remembered. This traditional Texas ranch decor could have graced the pages of Moder
n Texas Interiors Magazine’s most recent issue.
Also missing were the three-dozen noisy, ragged kids running through the house, fighting, screaming, and tearing the place apart faster than Bette could put it right.
And the smell. His nose wrinkled and he inhaled. No more grimy shoes, sweaty clothes, and faint whiffs of urine mixed into the locker-room odors of his childhood.
Bette Maxwell’s place had been gentrified. How the hell had that happened?
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Flint joined Bette in the kitchen, which was as new and improved as the rest of the interior. She had poured iced tea into glass tumblers and placed a china plate laden with shortbread cookies between the glasses on the table.
She gestured toward the chair opposite hers. “Have a seat. Enjoy the cookies I made this morning and tell me why you’re here.”
Flint settled into the chair. “This place looks great, Bette. Where are all the kids?”
“We closed the boarding school two years ago, when the last group finished high school and our teachers retired.” She grinned and sipped tea, which, if memory served, was so sweet her teeth would rot before she swallowed. “And you’re wondering where the money came from to do all of this, aren’t you?”
“Frankly, yes.” He leaned forward, elbows on the table.
“I know, I used to barely have two pennies scraped together.” She wiped a tear from her eye. Her lip trembled and her voice was weak. “We really lived hand-to-mouth when you were here, Michael, and I’m sorry about that. I did the best I could, but it was never enough, was it?”
“Of course it was.” He placed his hand on her arm and squeezed. “I would have died without you, Bette. You know that. Katie Scarlett, too. You kept us fed and clothed and educated for ten years. No one else in my life has ever done that much for me. I want you to know how grateful I am to you.”
“Thank you for saying so, even if it’s not true.” Bette covered his hand with hers. “And Katie Scarlett. How is she?”
“She’s fine. Fiery as ever.” But he wondered why Scarlett hadn’t already been here ahead of him. Maybe she’d thought Bette was long gone after the school closed. Sloppy work not to have checked. Unlike Scarlett. Yet he’d been no better.
“So. The money.” Bette swallowed and nodded and coughed to clear her throat. “Turns out part of the ranch sits on some natural gas deposits. I didn’t know that I still owned any mineral rights. Lots of folks around here sold off rights years ago. I figured my ex had done the same.”
“No doubt he would have stolen them from you in the divorce if he’d known.” Flint had met Bette’s husband only once, when Flint was still a kid. He would have unloaded on the bastard if he’d come around when Flint was older.
She shrugged and patted his hand again. “When the oil company found out about the gas and did their title research, they had to go back about four generations. Hired heir hunters and everything. Took ʼem a good long time to get to the bottom of it. Eventually, they discovered my granddaddy never sold the mineral rights and I owned everything.”
“But that’s great news. You can finally get a little rest. Fix up the outside of the place, too.” He leaned back and stretched his legs out to cross at the ankles. “I’m really glad to hear all of this. No one deserves a good life more than you.”
She cocked her head and chewed her cookie thoughtfully, waiting for him to come to the point, probably. Which he needed to do. Time was running short and he had two more stops to make.
He cleared his throat. Twice.
“I’m a private investigator now, Bette.” Not the whole truth but close enough.
“I heard something like that a while back, when I found out you weren’t dead.” She grinned. “Got a girlfriend? A wife, maybe?”
“No wife.” Flint raised his left hand to show his empty ring finger. He thought briefly about Ginger. She was fun. She traveled as much as he did, so they weren’t together often. He cared about her, certainly, but was she a girlfriend? More like a friend of the moment, which was all either one of them wanted.
“You’re not getting any younger, Michael. Don’t wait too long.” She flashed her gold tooth again. “You get too set in your ways and no decent woman will have you.”
He smiled by way of transition. “I’m looking for a missing woman. The last time anyone saw her, she was down at Mildred’s Corner.” He watched Bette carefully. She’d probably heard more about him that was less flattering, but there was nothing he could do about that now. “You’ve been here a long time and this isn’t a place where news stays secret for long. I thought maybe you’d heard something that might help me find her.”
“I’m not much of a gossip.” Bette nodded, thinking about the question, maybe. “Don’t see many people since we closed the school.”
“Well, this would have been a few years ago. When your school was still open. Long before I came here, actually.”
“What’s her name?”
“Laura Oakwood. Went missing back in 1989.”
A cackle erupted from Bette’s throat. “Nineteen eighty-nine? Honey, I can barely remember last week.”
Flint nodded as if he believed her. “That’s the problem, all right. She’s been missing quite a while.”
“I’d like to help you, but 1989? That’s a long, long time ago.” She cupped her chin in her palm as if she might think more clearly that way. She shook her head. “I didn’t know anyone by that name as far as I can recall. What did she look like?”
Flint showed her the old cheerleader photo from the Wolf Bend, Texas, high school yearbook he’d found in Scarlett’s files. Bette squinted at the grainy image for a while.
“She looks like a lot of other girls would have looked back then, I guess. Long brown hair. Cute. Young. I had more than a dozen just like that here over the years.” Bette shook her head and pushed the photo back toward him on the table. “She wasn’t one of my students, if that’s what you were hoping. I remember each and every one of my kids.”
“I’d hoped she might have been one of yours.” His lips pressed into a grimace. “Apparently she had no family around here. She wasn’t a student at the closest public school either.”
“Sometimes the state would park kids here for a few days. They weren’t really enrolled in my school and I don’t remember all of them. I guess she could have been one of those.” Bette shook her head slowly, still staring at the photo. “Anything at all unusual about her?”
For the briefest of moments, he considered how to answer the question. He didn’t want to believe Bette would lie or that she might have been involved in the robbery at Mildred’s Corner. Or that she’d harbored the fugitive responsible for the killing.
But he’d be a fool to ignore the possibility and let sentiment cloud his judgment. He was a kid when he’d lived here. A kid with a warped perspective. His knowledge of Bette Maxwell and what went on at the Lazy M was necessarily limited to that kid’s-eye view.
Still, Oakwood must have had help from someone, and the Lazy M was the closest possible hideout from Mildred’s Corner. She’d been wounded. Maybe hauling the baby. On her own. Her boyfriend dead. Surely, she’d been in shock, at the very least.
If Oakwood hadn’t come here, where had she gone? If he told Bette any more, if she realized he knew about the baby, would she find a way to warn Oakwood? Or would Paxton and Trevor come here and hurt Bette to get whatever she knew? That was more than possible.
Bette pushed the photo a little farther away. “Why are you trying to find her after all these years?”
“Why now, you mean?” He nodded, a decision made. “She’s kind of in the same situation you were. She’s entitled to a lot of oil and gas money, and she doesn’t know about it. If I find her before the time runs out, she could be a very wealthy woman.”
If Bette knew where Oakwood was now, maybe she’d get word to her about the money. Maybe Oakwood would show up to collect it. It was a long shot, but long shots were all he had. He drained the las
t of the syrupy tea without heaving and glanced at the clock on the stove.
“What happens to the money if you don’t find her?” Bette folded her paper napkin like a fan and then pressed out the folds with her index finger.
“She’ll lose out forever. Someone else gets the money.” He pushed back his chair and stood. “Seems a shame. She could probably use the cash. I mean, who couldn’t use fifty million dollars, you know?”
“Wow! That is a lot of money.” Bette peered up from her chair. “I can ask around, if you’d like. I knew Mildred. And she knew everybody.”
“Mildred died about ten years back, didn’t she?”
“Her son’s still running the store, though. Steve Tuttle. He’s about the same age as that Oakwood girl, too, if my memory’s right. Midforties? He might have known her.” She pushed herself up and stood on wobbly knees. “Let me give him a call right now. You can go talk to him, if he knows anything.”
Flint heard the blades of Drake’s helicopter in the distance. “I’m short on time today. Where does Steve live?”
She rested her body down into the chair again. “He lives behind the store. He hardly ever leaves the place. Says too much trouble can get started if he’s not there to stop it.”
“What kind of trouble?” Flint couldn’t go back to Mildred’s Corner without a whole boatload of problems arising. And he figured Mildred’s son was probably lying in a hospital somewhere being treated for that concussion he got when his head hit the concrete.
“The usual kind. Fights, mostly. But they’ve had a few robberies over the years, too. One time, two people were shot and killed. But that was a long time ago.”
“Was Steve in the store at the time?” The helicopter came closer.
She shook her head. “He and Mildred were sleeping. They lived in a trailer on the back lot at the time. Her husband was working the store like Steve does now.” Bette’s nose wrinkled. She grimaced. “Those two might still be alive if Mildred or Steve had been working that night instead of Oscar. He was a good shot but trigger-happy, if you ask me.”