“Gina and Mike both told me there was a sister. She told me you all had problems after she married.” He eased her slightly away and tilted her chin. “You need to know two things, AJ. If I had known you hadn’t been told, I would have found a way. I had your mother’s number, if not yours.”
“And the other?” she prompted, when he just stared down at her, features tormented.
“I knew she and Mike weren’t happy. Mike told me she’d been unfaithful.” He silenced her by laying a finger across his lips. “He denies that Robbie is his son. I never have decided what I think. But I suppose he planned on using Robbie to keep Gina under control. As greedy as the man is, he probably wouldn’t have agreed to a divorce. But no matter what—if I had ever seen abuse—if I had seen him hit her, or if Gina had told me he wouldn’t let her call home—anything like that—I wouldn’t have put up with it. Please understand that. Believe me.”
She reached up and patted his cheek, and he hoped she couldn’t feel the shiver of heat her touch generated. Where had the simple desire to comfort and reassure her gone?
She stepped back and he suspected she’d felt the change between them. The charge, small but electric. Distance was good.
“I believe you,” she sighed. “It just doesn’t help. It doesn’t change what happened.”
She went over and sat down on the couch. “I’d offer you something to drink, but I doubt anything in the refrigerator would still be good. Not sure the tea I made is still drinkable.”
He checked his watch and swore softly. He’d probably covered his tracks with Mike even though María tried to cause problems. But they hadn’t dealt with the real issues yet. The problems were thorny as hell—and he didn’t have a solution. He thought of how easily he’d followed her here the first time. The mess she’d made going through the files in the stable office. He smiled. As bad as she was at being furtive, he doubted her plans for rescuing Rebel were solid.
“What’s funny?” she demanded, catching him grinning at her.
“Sorry, nothing. Look, why don’t we get an early lunch somewhere and bring something to drink back. We’ll talk—fast,” he warned, “and then we need to make stops at a mall and—well, there’s someone I need you to meet.”
“If Mike gave us permission to be here, then why are we hiding?”
“He doesn’t know we’re here in the middle of nowhere—and he can’t. He’s not spying, but it wouldn’t take that. Just a friend of a friend who knows me saying he saw us together at some secluded trailer. Besides, he’d have a whole different view of us spending the day together or spending the night together. Farfetched as it seems, we just need to hurry. And you have to buy something, because he assumed you were upset that you haven’t been shopping or going out anywhere pretty much since you met him.”
“Food would be nice,” she agreed, after a minute, “but you go. I need to hang with Goof as long as I can.”
She seemed to see his concern, because she waved off any protest. “I’m hardly in a position to flee, Chance,” she said, and he saw tears well up in her eyes. “You control the two most important things in my life right now.”
He didn’t want to see her cry and he couldn’t hold her again. He had to be able to watch out—now, not just for his interests, but for hers as well. As he shrugged and left, he knew that his interests could no longer come first—even though his aunt and uncle’s lives depended on him.
• • •
Chance seemed to take forever and AJ fought off her worries time and time again. She jogged Goof around for a while, then went to work scrubbing the table, counter, and sink in the old trailer clean.
Outside dogs barked and the barely cooled air grew colder around her. AJ ran her hands over goose-bumped skin, then covered her mouth to stop the scream trying to tear its way out of her throat.
A heartbeat! She’d heard a heartbeat, loud and frantic, in this tomb-like place. A touch, feather light, brushed a cross on her back and she locked her knees to keep from falling. No one—no one—ever did that to her except Gina.
I’ve lost it. This is impossible. I didn’t sleep much last night.
Casting away the fear, she bolted out the door into the sunshine and sanity.
The dogs weren’t barking now and Ed bent near a struggling garden, poking at the soil. She took a few hesitant steps toward him. Absorbed in his task, he never glanced her way.
Low and faint, she heard the plaintive wail she’d heard when she took Goof down to the river while considering her rescue plan.
Wind.
Leaves on the nearby foliage hung limply as the dogs began barking again.
Ed straightened with a groan, a hand going to his waist. He twisted, apparently trying to loosen the kinks from his yard work, and finally spotted her.
“Well, Miss Joanie! What brings you back out into the heat?” He squinted at her. “You look—I don’t know. Afraid?”
The plaintive wail grew slightly stronger and she jerked her head in the direction of the river. “Do you hear it?”
“What?” He cocked his head. “You mean that noise coming off the river?” He chuckled. “You can’t think it’s our old Llorona, can you?”
“No,” she lied, but waved her hand. “But there’s no wind—”
“It’s buffered here by all the stuff that grows along the river, and it eddies and dies real fast in this heat. Least, that’s what I’ve been told,” he assured her, smiling.
He made sense. There could be no Llorona wandering the riverbank. Gina’s spirit didn’t pursue her, seeking Robbie. Pleading with her to care for her lost son. AJ managed to smile back, but gestured at the dogs. “They kept barking—”
He snorted. “Worthless, the lot of ’em, but their families love them. They got no pastime but to bark.”
Chance pulled up just then, and slid out, loaded down with fast food bags.
“Hey,” he greeted them. “We were about to have lunch. Why don’t you join us, Ed?”
“Oh, I couldn’t do that,” the handyman demurred. “I’m hot and sweaty—”
“At least come get a plate,” AJ insisted, not welcoming going back into the trailer. Chance would be there, but that was almost as dangerous as the terrifying feelings playing with her mind.
Ed gave in to their insistence with some embarrassment, but left happily with a plate of chicken and trimmings and bottles of lemonade that he assured them his wife would appreciate. Before he went, AJ fished in her purse and presented him with a check to cover his past expenses plus another two weeks, aware that her savings from her Philadelphia job were virtually nonexistent.
She served herself and sat in the corner of the couch, balancing the food and soda, and waited to start eating until Chance sat down, too.
She bit into a piece of chicken, but her appetite seemed to have fled. She wanted to question Chance about Gina, about the pregnancy her sister told her had ended—but all she could think about were the times she’d felt a ghostly presence in her room, or Robbie’s nursery—or along the river. Chance would think she was certifiably insane, but she needed to ask. Standing, she put her plate down on the table and sat down again, twining her hands.
“Chance, while you were gone—I felt something. And I’ve felt it before this—this presence. Remember when you showed me Mike’s stables—we heard something.”
“A coyote,” Chance nodded.
“No,” AJ repeated. “Whatever we heard wasn’t a coyote.”
He sighed and stood up, putting his plate on the table, too, staring down at her. “What then, AJ? A ghost?” He shook his head. “I don’t believe that. Neither do you. Not really.”
“But,” AJ insisted, stubbornly, slowly, thinking out what she needed to explain, “what if there’s—something? La Llorona lost her children—”
“No. She killed her children. It isn’t the same thing.”
AJ sprang up, agitated, knowing that she sounded crazy, but needing him to listen. For her sanity’s sake. “Look, why d
id she kill them?”
“Vengeance,” he said immediately.
“Not in the version I heard. She was destitute—a rich man left her penniless and without any means to care for her kids. One was only a baby. She couldn’t stand to let them suffer slow, cruel deaths—”
“Dammit, stop, AJ! This is crazy talk, and we’ve got so many real problems—”
“Gina lost her baby,” AJ went on, refusing to be silenced, pacing the tiny area in a frenzy. “Not a miscarriage, the way she told me, but through death—” She had reached the counter, but whirled, walking up to him, and catching his arms. “Gina used to sneak up on me when we were little and trace a cross on my back. She never stopped doing it. While you were gone, I heard Gina’s heartbeat in this room. The air conditioner barely works, but everything turned cold. And I felt her fingers make the cross on my back.”
He lifted his arms, cupping her cheeks gently. “Your heart is broken over Gina. You’re clinging to the pain and the sorrow,” he said gently.
She felt the slow burn of tears trickling down her cheeks, and the slight friction of his fingers blot them away, and wished she could pull him close. That holding him would somehow unlock answers she might never have.
But holding him wasn’t an option when nothing was resolved. She pulled away and began gathering the mostly uneaten food and putting it back in bags. “I felt something in my room. And in Monterrey. And the night you told me about Robbie—so did he. He cried when I heard that wail. I’m not crazy, Chance.”
She didn’t look at him, and he didn’t answer, but she heard his sigh.
“What now?”
“Staying here isn’t working for us. Guess we can talk driving back into Laredo. Maybe hit a store and you can buy something—anything. Maybe get make-up or something—hell, I don’t know what you need.”
“That shouldn’t take long. I don’t really want anything.”
“I have the card Mike gave me for expenses. You need to put a couple of items on it. Look, Mike’s—controlling and he’s—paranoid. He told me to take you shopping.” He took the bags from her and passed over her purse. “He’s the kind of man who will check his card to see where you were, when.”
AJ opened the passenger door and stowed the bags of food on the floor behind her seat. “Yet you weren’t worried about how he treated Gina?” she asked neutrally, not wanting to annoy him.
He closed her door and went around to climb in. “No.” They passed Ed gathering mail from a cluster of boxes, and Chance honked while AJ waved.
Finally, with a glance around as he merged with traffic coming in off the interstate, “You need to understand, AJ. Besides not knowing your sister well, I told you I was married before, remember?” he asked. “Thought I was madly in love and didn’t want to let her go. I would check and see where she was. Drove by sometimes to look for her car.” He shot her a sideways glance. “I wasn’t abusive. I never considered myself a stalker, though she claimed in court that I was. Look, I don’t want to justify what I did or didn’t do because I’d seen it all before. Because I’d done some of it.”
He didn’t say anything else and she shifted to watch him. “So … who asked for the divorce?”
She didn’t think he was going to answer at first. “I did,” he said eventually. “The second time I came home and found her with someone. Someone different.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I’m not. Just bitter, and that’s stupid. She didn’t love me. Thinking back—” He let go briefly of the wheel and held his palms out. “I’m not sure I loved her the way I should have.”
He must have seen her surprise, because he laughed and immediately caught the steering wheel, lowering the knee he’d used to steady it. “Don’t tell me you’ve never used your knees for props,” he said, and made a show of stretching his leg as much as he could. “Knees are handy.”
And if you follow a leg from the knee up to the thigh … She shivered a little, aware that her overactive imagination couldn’t have had worse timing. It didn’t matter anyway. Days from now, she planned to be home with Rebel. And Robbie.
As long as he talked, she didn’t have to. “So, what attracted her to you in the first place? If you weren’t in love?”
His fingers tapped on the wheel as he maneuvered the narrower streets in central Laredo, sometimes peering at the street signs as if he hadn’t been on these roads very often. “I’d say she was pretty, but so many women are.” He shot her another sideways look, along with a smile. “Really, it wasn’t Linda’s looks, though. She—she seemed so fragile. So broken, when I met her. She’d been in a horrible situation. It started with taking her out to eat or just walking with her while she talked.” He flipped on his turn signal and maneuvered through a turn. “Just grew from there,” he concluded, and pulled up in front of a simple frame house with a sagging chain-link fence.
“I guess I’m not buying designer shoes here.” AJ grinned as they got out. “Where are we?”
He hesitated, his demeanor suddenly serious. And a little grim. “My aunt Emily’s house. She’s my aunt by marriage. Come meet her and then we need to do some actual problem solving.”
AJ nodded and let him open the gate for her, glancing around the yard. “Dobermans?”
He laughed at that. “No. But look out for her cat, Duchess. The beast can’t get enough attention.”
“Aunt Emily?” He called out as he reached over AJ’s shoulder to knock on the door. “Emily, it’s me, Chance!”
AJ heard steps on the wooden floor inside, then the screen door opened and a thin, middle-aged woman emerged, wrapping her arms around Chance’s middle and breaking into tears.
He soothed her as he might a child, holding her and rocking her gently, drying her tears. AJ watched in silence, thinking that more often than not, this was the Chance she’d seen. Loving and gentle. Could he have stood by and watched Gina kill herself that night she fled Towers estate in someone else’s car?
“I’m sorry,” the woman mumbled, flushing with embarrassment as she moved away from Chance. “I … I haven’t seen him in so long.” She patted Chance’s arm. “He comes when he can.”
“Emily, meet AJ Owens. She’s my friend.” He looked at her as if he wasn’t sure that’s what she was. After dabbing at her pale cheeks with the backs of her hands, the woman embraced AJ briefly.
“Come in, please.” She opened the door and waved at the sofa and armchairs taking up most of the living room. There were pictures on the wall, mostly of a middle-aged man with a kind face. There were also photos of two beautiful horses with tightly braided manes and the English-type tack of show jumpers.
“Sit down, y’all,” she encouraged, clucking and walking over to move a sleepy calico cat from the middle of the sofa. “You’d think only she lived here,” Emily clucked. “What can I bring you to drink? Did you eat?”
AJ smiled. “Yes. I’m fine, thanks.”
Chance refused anything, and his aunt wandered off carrying the cat. “She usually locks her up when she has visitors,” he explained. “I keep telling her she doesn’t have to.” He leaned close to her. “AJ, don’t bring up Robbie. Or children. She lost a baby, and sometimes … well, she still hurts.”
Emily came back, bringing a glass of tea and setting it down on an end table, then folding herself into a chair. “So, what brings you here with this pretty woman, Chance?”
Chance smiled at his aunt. “I’ve wanted to visit, I just couldn’t get away. You know how demanding Mike Towers is, Emily.”
Her face darkened when she heard Towers’s name. “That—that beast,” she muttered. “You should quit.”
“You know I can’t,” he answered softly.
“Give it up.” She looked down, then back at Chance, tears streaming down her face again. “You’ve done what you could.”
He crossed the floor, kneeling in front of her and shaking his head. “Never. I will not give up. I’ll get my uncle out. I’ll prove Uncle Robert didn’t kill the horses
,” he told her, his voice soft but fierce.
“You might lose too much. Robert and I have already lost everything.”
AJ’s heart squeezed at the pain in the woman’s voice, even as surprise jolted her. Chance was trying to prove his uncle’s innocence? Had she understood the undercurrent—that he was after Towers?
Suddenly Emily went still, then clutched feverishly at Chance’s shoulders, her fingers digging into his shoulders, her eyes wild.
“Do you hear it, hijo? Listen!”
“Emily, we’ve talked—you’re hearing the wind through cane. We’re two blocks from the river. You can’t—”
But she shoved against him, lunging past, almost knocking him over.
“You hear, don’t you, AJ?” Emily grasped her wrist, her fingernails digging in to the skin. “You hear her—La Llorona?”
The wailing woman. Faint but distinct, then rising before dying away. Yes, she heard. But across the room, Chance was shaking his head furiously at her, warning her in every way he could not to agree. Warning her to lie to this poor woman, who took her other wrist too, and whispered, “She took him, you know. Our little Beto.” She laughed wildly. “Roberto, but we called him Beto, you know. Such a good little boy—do you hear her?”
Dear God, what answer will help her more?
“Mi hijito! My baby boy!” Emily keened, then cast away AJ’s wrists as if they burned. “Why won’t you help me? Why won’t anyone help me?”
She fled. AJ took a step after her, but Chance cut her off. “She’ll be okay. She’s been much better, but sometimes it still gets her.”
“Beto—Roberto—”
“Miscarriage after my uncle went to prison. It was an unexpected pregnancy, at her age and—well, she couldn’t hold on to the baby. Almost destroyed her.”
“And your uncle?”
“He’s in prison in New Mexico. When Emily came back, her mother was still alive, but she passed away early this year.”
“Poor woman.”
“AJ, we don’t have much time. If anything happens, and Mike comes back—tomorrow, you and Rosa are getting Robbie out.”
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