by Loretta Ross
“Josiah Halftree?”
“Josiah Halftree. She took them to him and he told her they were too modern to be from the 1800s. That’s when she realized where they had to have come from and what they had to mean—that her nephew wasn’t just an embezzler, he was a murderer.”
“But she didn’t turn them in or tell anybody?”
“He was still her nephew, and Missouri is a capital punishment state. She probably didn’t want him to get the death penalty, at least not because of her”
“So what do you think she did?”
“I think she hid them again.”
eight
Death’s hunch had to wait. For the rest of the week, Wren was busy with a heavy schedule of auctions. On Friday, the one day she finished early, it was Death who was gone. He left early in the morning, not saying where he was going, but promising to be back as soon as he could.
He returned just as the sun was going down. Wren had been catching up on housework and she paused in the act of cleaning the new glass in her front window to watch him climb down from his Jeep. He moved slowly and stiffly. Unaware of her scrutiny, his face was shadowed by pain and fatigue. A bead of window cleaner ran down, distorting his figure, and Wren quickly swiped it away and went to meet him at the door.
Seeing her, he put on a bright smile and injected a hint of a swagger in his step.
“Honey, I’m home,” he called out, voice light with irony.
“Oh, good,” she said, following him to the sofa and perching on the arm beside him. “I wish you’d speak to the Beaver. I think something happened at school today.”
That earned her a genuine laugh.
“Now I feel under dressed,” she continued. “When June Cleaver cleaned house, she always wore heels and a pearl choker.”
“I don’t know,” Death said. He reached up to tug at a red curl that was escaping from the kerchief she’d tied over her hair. “I think you’re rocking the Lucy Ricardo look.”
She leaned away and laughed. “So, how was your day?” She was dying to know where he’d gone and what he’d done, but she wouldn’t ask. If he wanted her to know, he’d tell her.
“Driving,” he said. “Nothing but driving.”
“Did you have to go very far?”
His green eyes took on a hint of mischief. “Actually, I just went across town, but I got stuck behind someone who drives like you do and it took me all day.”
She swatted him with her dust rag and stuck out her tongue, then hopped up. “What would you like for dinner?” she asked, moving away. She was halfway to the kitchen when she realized he wasn’t going to answer her. She turned back to find him staring at her seriously. “What?”
“You know, you don’t have to feed me.” There was something in his voice she couldn’t readily identify. Pride? Embarrassment?
She shrugged. “You don’t have to protect me from gun-wielding maniacs either. I was thinking lasagne.”
He hesitated a moment; gave in. “Lasagne’s good.”
Twenty minutes later she was sliding the lasagne into the oven and wishing she’d baked bread earlier, when she had time. Death had gone into the back yard. She had a small vegetable plot there and he was picking the ingredients for a salad by the light of his flashlight. Wren hadn’t heard a car pull up, so she jumped at the loud, imperious rapping on her front door.
She leaned into the living room with a certain level of trepidation, but the figure silhouetted against the street lights was small and feminine so she crossed the room and opened the door.
“Where’s Death? I saw his Jeep out front.”
The woman on the porch was small and dainty and stunningly beautiful. She looked like a starlet, fresh off the pages of a fashion magazine. Her dress was dark red, short and tight in all the right places. Her shoes, lips, nails, and handbag were all coordinated. She wore her dark hair in an elegant French knot at the back of her head and a filigreed gold locket on a delicate chain accentuated the curve of her bare neck and the perfect rise of her cleavage.
Wren stood next to her, in faded jeans and a ragged old tee shirt. She tucked an errant strand of hair back up under her kerchief and felt like a mutt at a dog show.
“Death’s out back.”
“Tell him Madeline’s here.”
Madeline. His ex-wife. Lovely.
Even as she bridled at the other woman’s commanding tone, she forced her face into a pleasant smile.
“He’ll be in in a minute.” She stepped back and held the door wider. “Would you like to come in and wait?”
Madeline sighed deeply, as if horribly put upon, picked up an infant carrier that Wren hadn’t noticed by her feet, and came inside. She stopped just inside the door and stood looking around.
“You can sit down if you like.”
Madeline frowned suspiciously at the sofa and gave Wren a tight, insincere little smile. “I’ll stand, thanks.”
For two or three minutes the women stood there in an awkward silence. “So, I hear you cheated on your husband,” seemed a poor conversation starter, and Wren suspected that whatever Madeline wasn’t saying was just as bad. It was a relief to hear the back screen door slam.
Madeline set the infant carrier down and deftly removed the baby, pointing him at the doorway as Death’s voice preceded him into the room.
“Wren? Did you know the handle on this bucket is cracked? You need to be careful not to pinch your fingers. Hey! Do you know I picked three different tomatoes and something had taken a single bite out of the bottom of each one. I think maybe you got a tiny little Goldilocks infestation.”
He came through the door into the living room and stopped.
“Madeline.”
Madeline waved the baby’s fist at him and gave him a smile that was a lot brighter than the one she’d given Wren, though to Wren’s discerning eye it still looked phony. “Look who wanted to come spend some time with the big guy!”
Death’s face hardened. He crossed the room in quick strides and took the baby, tucking him up against his left shoulder. “No,” he said shortly. He picked up the infant carrier and thrust it into Madeline’s arms, slipped his gun out of the back of his waistband and herded her, protesting, toward the door.
“Death! What the hell?”
He backed Madeline up against the door frame, opened the door and peered at the yard suspiciously for several seconds. Then he pushed her through. “S’cuse us,” he said over his shoulder to Wren, before following Madeline outside.
Wren stood for a minute staring at the closed door. Well, she thought, that went well. Eaten up with curiosity but too proud to eavesdrop, she hesitated for a moment. She had an urge to pull off her kerchief and go for a comb, but there was nothing she could do with her hair that would ever let her compete with someone like Madeline in the beauty department.
Not that she was, of course. Competing, or anything. She and Death were just acquaintances, friends. Cohorts, maybe. And there was nothing to suggest that he even thought of her that way. In fact, if Madeline was an example of what he looked for in a woman, then it was highly unlikely.
But she was the one who was feeding him tonight.
With a frustrated huff, she blew the loose curl off her forehead and headed for the kitchen to make a salad. Turtles, she thought, exasperated and amused. A tiny little Goldilocks infestation indeed!
_____
Death backed Madeline up against the door frame and kept the baby carefully shielded between their bodies as he peered around the darkened yard. In times of deep exhaustion or high stress, he still sometimes saw the shadowy figures of armed insurgents flickering among the trees and cars at the corners of his vision. The ghosts of snipers and suicide bombers had followed him home. He knew they were only hallucinations, but they were unsettling, especially when there was a very real gunman out there somewhere who might be targeting him.
“S’cuse us,” he said over his shoulder to Wren, sparing a second to regret her having to see this freak show tha
t was his failed marriage. He hustled Madeline out the door and toward her car.
“What the hell?” she said again, as he opened the back passenger door and motioned for her to strap in the baby’s car seat.
“What the hell?” he echoed. “What the hell are you doing here? Don’t you listen to the news? There was a man shooting at us less than a week ago.” The baby curled Death’s shirt into his tiny fist and nuzzled his shoulder. Death tightened his hold on him and scanned the shadows again, gun at the ready.
Madeline snorted. “That was almost a week ago. He’s long gone.”
“That doesn’t mean he won’t come back. You don’t put your baby in the path of a gunman!”
She finished fixing the car seat and stood to study him critically. “You know, paranoia is one of the symptoms of PTSD.”
“I don’t have PTSD.”
“Sure you don’t.”
She took Benji and put him in his carrier, and the loss of the baby’s warmth left Death with a cold spot over his heart too sharp for the mild night to account for.
“Come on, sweetie. I thought Death might want to play with you for awhile, but I guess he doesn’t love you after all.”
Death grabbed her arm and growled at her, voice low and rough.
“Don’t you do that Madeline! Don’t you use your baby that way. It isn’t fair. It isn’t fair to him and it isn’t fair to me.”
“Life isn’t fair,” she shot back.
“That’s just a cliché people use to justify doing something they know is wrong.”
She jerked her arm away and slammed the car door. “You know what? I get that you’re pissed at me. I do. But I tried, Death. I tried to take care of you. I tried to be there for you. I did my best.”
“Really?” His voice rose half an octave in disbelief. “That’s how you remember it? Really? Because the way I remember it, you wrote me a Dear John letter while I was in a coma. And knowing what was already waiting for me when I woke up.”
“If you woke up. Some of the doctors didn’t think you would.”
“So that’s your rationale? You figured it was okay to screw me over because I might not live to find out?”
“It wasn’t like that. I just hit a wall. Everything that happened, I was the one who had to be strong. I’d been trying for years to hold you together. You’re just too broken. There’s not enough glue in the universe to put you back together. I realized that and I just couldn’t do it anymore.”
“You were all I had left and you abandoned me.” The guy in the next bed over in Germany had a girlfriend who was afraid to fly. She spent sixteen hours on a plane to be with him. Everyone there had someone, in person or in spirit. Everyone got phone calls or letters or care packages. Everyone but Death.
“I came back,” she said.
“Only because you needed something. You always come back when you need something.”
“I’m here now.”
“You have a date. You’re looking for a babysitter. Do you think I don’t know what it means when you dress that way?”
She had the grace to drop her eyes as she moved away and circled the car. She paused by the driver’s door.
“It doesn’t mean anything. It’s just a guy I know from work. He asked me to dinner.” Her voice turned plaintive. “I don’t get to go out much anymore, Death. Money’s been tight.”
She looked at him expectantly, as if she thought he’d reach for his wallet to make it better. It wasn’t an unreasonable assumption: for years he’d done just that. But times had changed. He’d changed.
He’d had no new paying jobs since he captured Tyrone Blount. That bounty was almost gone. It had taken more than half of what he had left to put gas in the Jeep for the long drive up to Columbia. He’d left the VA with his disability paperwork still caught in a bureaucratic backlog, a disappointing lack of progress in the condition of his lungs, and a prescription for pain pills he desperately needed and couldn’t afford to actually buy.
He was facing the prospect of being destitute—again. Of skipped meals and hocking his belongings and collecting cans on the highway to buy gas. Only this time it would be worse, because there were people who had taken an interest in him and who would realize he was in dire straights. He thought of Chief Reynolds, of the Keystones and Wren Morgan.
These people had been kind to him. He did not want to be piteous in their eyes.
“You took almost everything I had,” he told Madeline, his voice so defeated his soldiers would have never recognized it. “I gave you everything I had left. You can’t keep asking for more.”
“You could come home,” she said softly.
He didn’t look at her. “You know I don’t have a home anymore.”
“Just …” she sighed and didn’t finish the sentence. Presently he heard her car door close. The car engine purred quietly to life, and then she was gone.
_____
When Death went back inside, the house smelled like tomatoes and garlic and oregano. He paused in the living room and put some classic rock on the stereo, hoping Credence and Kansas would drown out his stomach growling. He hadn’t eaten anything but a bowl of cold cereal almost sixteen hours earlier. His mouth was watering and the cooking scents made him lightheaded.
The lasagne and salad were already on the table, sitting between two place settings of Wren’s eclectic collection of mismatched Depression glass. She’d found the flowers he’d put on top of the vegetables in the plastic bucket. They were really only weeds, he supposed —black-eyed Susan and Queen Anne’s lace—but Wren had arranged them in a blue glass vase in the center of the table, giving them pride of place as surely as if they were hothouse orchids from a pricey florist.
She was working on the cracked plastic handle that was supposed to protect one’s hand from the metal bail on the bucket. Death leaned against the refrigerator and cocked an eyebrow at her.
“You’re fixing it with duct tape?”
“Sure. Why not? You can fix anything with duct tape!”
“Anything? Really? Is it better than glue?”
“Yeah, maybe.” She considered. “What did you have that needed fixing?”
He quirked one corner of his mouth up in a humorless smile. “Nothing important.”
She gave him a puzzled frown but let it pass. “Come sit down,” she said, putting away the bucket and the tape. “Dinner’s about ready. There’s garlic toast in the oven, but it should be done now.”
He sat down and served out the lasagne and salad and she got the toast out of the oven and arranged it in a napkin-lined basket. She offered it to him as she took her seat.
“There aren’t any auctions on the schedule for tomorrow. The Keystones have a family wedding to go to, so we can spend the whole day looking for the jewels if you want.”
“You’re pretty close to the Keystones. Don’t you want to go to the wedding too?”
“I’d rather go treasure hunting with you.”
Death smiled at her, warmed by her simple honesty. A little voice in his head was wondering if she’d want to spend time with him if there were no jewels involved. Rather than dwell on that, he toasted her with his coffee.
“Tomorrow, then.”
She smiled and clinked her soda can against his cup.
“Tomorrow,” she echoed.
nine
“Catching anything?”
“Not yet.”
“Maybe you’re not using the right kind of bait.”
“Maybe not. What do you suggest?”
Roy Keystone leaned out over the well housing to peer down the deep, dark hole. Death had removed the cover—a terra cotta disc the size of a dinner plate with holes in it to admit the pipes and wiring—and dropped a fishing line with a three-pronged hook on the end.
One of the older grandsons, a skinny boy in his late teens, piped up. “Tie my girlfriend to it and drop her down there. If there’s any jewels, I guarantee she’ll find them. I swear I can’t go anywhere without that woman dragg
ing me into a jewelry store.”
“She wants you to buy her an engagement ring,” Sam informed his grandson.
“Engagement ring!” the kid squawked. “I don’t wanna marry her!”
“Then what are you dating her for?”
“I’m just … you know … test driving her. Didn’t you ever test drive a car you didn’t really want to buy?”
All the men gathered around watching Death’s fishing expedition snickered but, he noted with amusement, they also all looked over their shoulders to see if any of the women were close.
“Kid,” Death said, “do yourself a favor and don’t ever say a thing like that where one of the ladies can hear you.”
“I might want to marry her someday,” he defended himself. “Maybe. It could happen. Probably not, but you never know, you know?”
“What do the women in the family think of her? Your mom and grandma and whatnot?”
“Aw, they don’t like her very much. But that doesn’t necessarily mean anything.”
“No, maybe not, but it’s something to think about. You know, the women in my family, my mom and grandma and great-grandma, they all hated my wife. They thought she’d take me for everything I owned and cheat on me the minute my back was turned.”
Death sensed a sudden cooling in the atmosphere.
“You’re married?” Roy asked.
“Not anymore.”
“What happened?”
“She took me for everything I owned and cheated on me the minute my back was turned.”
That drew a laugh, and for the first time since his divorce Death found himself laughing along, albeit ruefully.
“Hardly an auspicious topic of conversation,” Sam noted, “today of all days.”
“Oh, don’t be a prude,” Roy scolded.
The Keystones were all in their Sunday best, with the women in dresses and hats and heels and all the men except Roy in suits. Even he had foregone his usual overalls for slacks and a dress shirt with a tie.
“Besides,” Roy continued, “everything worked out okay for Death. He’s seeing Wren now, after all.” He shot the younger man a sharp look. “You are seeing Wren, right?”