Heaven to Betsy (Emily #1)

by Pamela Fagan Hutchins

  She looked at me again, then pointedly at Collin. “See you later, Emily.”

  “Bye,” I called after her.

  “Brrrr,” Collin said. “Is it just me or is it freezing in here?”

  I ignored him, my stomach churning. Laura hadn’t liked seeing me here with Collin, and it was her version of the tale that was headed straight back to Jack.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  I dropped Collin off at Tamara’s place in Alamogordo and navigated my way back to Wrong Turn Ranch by noon. I’d canned my hopes for a quick trip to Roswell to see what I could find out about Harvey and Spike. Laura’s censorious face had worried me since she’d left the Old Road House. I’d all but jackhammered Collin out of his seat when he’d wanted to linger over coffee and reminisce about the old days in Dallas. I tried not to panic. I hadn’t done anything wrong, even if, apparently, it had looked bad to Laura. It was still okay to feel hopeful. I parked the Suburban out front and hurried into the house.

  Sucking in a deep breath for courage, I opened the tall, wooden front door. “Hello? Anyone home?”

  No answer except the sprinting feet and jingling tags of a little white dog.

  I stepped inside and pulled the door shut behind me. Snowflake appeared, acting as excited to see me as if we’d been parted for years. I knelt and rubbed her ears, then straightened. Since Jack wasn’t there, I decided to snag some apples or carrots or whatever I could find and head down to the stables. I was in the kitchen filling a brown paper bag with horse treats when I heard someone on the stairs. My heart pounded, and I watched the foot until a man appeared. He was a dark-haired man, but darker than Jack. Mickey, not looking any fresher than when I’d seen him that morning.

  “Hello,” I said to let him know I was there.

  He looked at me in a way that said Laura had given him an earful. Mouth set, eyes flat and cold. His voice matched. “Emily. You’ve had a busy time since you got here.”

  His words cut me like razor wire, and I wanted to lash out. He didn’t have to be so presumptuous. But Jack was his cousin; I was just some woman Mickey hardly knew.

  I nodded. “Yes, it’s been a busy morning. I had to run Collin home, and we grabbed breakfast on the way.”

  As I spoke, the apples started rolling off the cabinet and dropping to the floor, one by one. Bounce, thud, roll. Bounce, thud, roll. I crouched and grabbed one in each hand, but still they kept rolling away in all directions.

  “Mickey, Collin is my best friend’s brother, and—”

  He held up a hand. “I don’t need the details. There’s only one thing I need, and that’s for you not to fuck with Jack. He’s had a really bad time of it, and you’re the first smile I’ve seen on his face in five years.”

  I stood up in the middle of the green mess at my feet. “I promise, I didn’t. I’m not. I won’t.” I spluttered in my protestations.

  Before I could ask Mickey to enlighten me, he grunted and broke in.

  “Make sure it stays that way.”

  He continued on the path I’d interrupted—his exit. The door to the garage slammed behind him, and the kitchen windows in the kitchen rattled with the force.

  “Hey,” I yelled after him, remembering too late that I had no idea what had happened with the dead man they’d found, or where Jack was. But Mickey was gone.

  I crawled around on the kitchen floor, picking up the rest of the apples. I finished filling my bag with produce and started toward the barn. It felt crisp and clean outside. Jack had been right about the weather changes over the weekend. Last night’s snow had already melted, and the temperature had soared. The sun shone directly overhead, warming me even more than the air did.

  I needed that sun, I needed to overcome the cold water lapping waist-high around me again. Laura’s and Mickey’s reactions to me had knocked me back, and that precarious hold I had on a hope for happiness seemed to be slipping from my grasp. As the water rose, I felt vulnerable, to thoughts of losing my baby, of losing my chance at any babies, ever, of losing Valentina. A drowning Emily was no good to anyone, not to Valentina, who was still out there (I hoped) and not to Jack, who—it appeared—faced his own troubles, ones I knew little to nothing about. Which was a problem, too. He knew my problems, or most of them, and I knew none of his. So I turned my face up to the sun and soaked it in, greedy and desperate for its warmth.

  It was a short walk to the horse barn. The huge doors on either end stood wide open, creating a tunnel down the center. A strong breeze bordering on a wind whisked through it. It blew much of the sweet odor of bedding, feed, and horse away, but I still got a whiff, and it comforted me some. I walked from stall to stall, stroking necks and scratching heads. I wanted to find Jarhead, to see if he remembered me, and let him have first dibs at the treats, as was the due of a champion. He was near the end on the left, as he’d been the weekend before.

  Just past his stall I noticed something I hadn’t last time. A half glass interior door. I walked past Jarhead to take a look. A sign on the door read Mickey Begay, Ranch Manager. Inside was a large, modern office. What I wouldn’t give for an office in a barn full of horses. I admired it for a few moments, then walked back to Jarhead.

  “Hi, boy.” I held my hand out, palm up, to let him get a good sniff of me. He did, and he snorted and tossed his head. “Hey.” I rubbed his neck, giving his muscles a quick massage. He nuzzled my arm roughly, as if asking me to take him out to play. I laughed and dug into my bag for a carrot.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” Jack snapped.

  His voice jolted me like an electric cattle prod, and I jumped back, the bag dropping to the ground, the same apples rolling around the barn as had rolled across the kitchen floor. There was no sign of a dimple on Jack’s glowering face; I ignored the spilled fruit.

  I bumbled my words. “Carrot . . . Jarhead . . . looking for you . . .”

  “We have him off food and water. He has colic.” He had his hands on his hips, but he was looking at the horse, not me.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t know. I could walk him for you, if you’d like.”

  “I’ve got him.” Jack snapped a lead line onto Jarhead’s halter.

  “Okay.” My eyes strayed to the apples, some of them still rolling. “How did it go with the police and the dead guy this morning?”

  “We’re done.” His voice clipped the word.

  “Thank you for letting me borrow your car. I took Collin home. We stopped for breakfast first and I saw Laura.”

  “I heard.” He led Jarhead from the stall and shut it.

  “Jack, whatever you heard, whatever is making you act this way toward me, I just want you to know I didn’t do anything, and nothing has changed. About me, I mean about me and you. How I feel about you, about last night.”

  “Good to know.” He started walking Jarhead away from me.

  “Jack.”

  He kept walking.

  I’d tried as hard as I could. I didn’t know what else to do, so I raised my voice. “JACK ASS. Listen to me, please.”

  He stopped, shook his head, and looked back at me. “Too much, too soon, for both of us. Let’s rewind. Start over where we were yesterday, before last night.”

  I stood there, slack-jawed.

  Jack and Jarhead walked out of the barn into the sunshine together. I sank onto a bale of hay, apples at my feet in the half-light of the barn, by myself.

  ***

  My black skirt for the Johnson housewarming cut into my waist, giving me a muffin top where I’d tucked in my red silk blouse. I’d packed without considering the lingering impact of my former pregnancy on my midsection. I’d only gained a few pounds, but apparently they were all around my middle. Luckily I’d brought a black fleecy vest, so I put it on, and checked in the bathroom mirror. It hid the bulge, but did nothing for the bags under my eyes. A crying binge in the bathtub had seemed like a good idea two hours ago. Now, not so much. Good grief, my moods these days were as up and down as the Dallas Cowboys. I did on
e more pass under my eyes with concealer.

  “Get it together,” I told the woman in the mirror, then headed downstairs.

  Jack and Snowflake waited for me in the great room. He was staring out the picture window and didn’t seem to notice that I’d entered. It gave me a chance to study him.

  When Mickey told me that Jack was part Apache, I hadn’t seen it. But with him standing in the natural light beside a wall of family photographs, I did. His Apache grandmother wasn’t hard to identify, not just because she looked Apache, but because in one black and white picture she was dressed traditionally, in a flowing hide skirt, a blouse with metal work at the neckline, and beads around her neck. Her features foreshadowed those on Jack’s face: the stony set of his jaw, his thick dark hair, the intensity of his expression. All of these he got from her. But where did his tawny eyes come from?

  My own eyes skipped from face to face in the photographs until I found the source. A tall, blonde woman whose light eyes glowed like a cat’s, holding the hand of a light-eyed young Jack on one side and the hand of a Jack-lookalike husband with dark eyes on the other, a man with Jack’s same lopsided grin punctuated by the same killer dimple. My eyes traveled further, to a picture of Jack with his wife and kids on horseback—Lena on Hopper, it looked like, and his daughter on the spotted pony—and further still to his daughter holding a tiny Snowflake with a giant red bow around the puppy’s neck. I stood silently and breathed until I had myself under control.

  “I’m ready when you are,” I said.

  He faced me, and it took a few seconds for his eyes to refocus from wherever they’d been. “Let’s go then.” He sent Snowflake to her bed, and she snorted and huffed to show her displeasure at being left, but settled into it anyway.

  In the car, I broke the long, tense silence first. “Are things all finished up with the dead guy?”

  Jack turned onto the highway and the tires hummed against the pavement as pine trees rushed past us on both sides. “The police haven’t been able to identify him.”

  “Do they know how he died?”

  “He looked Mexican.”

  Asking Jack questions was like a game of tetherball, with only one person hitting it. Me. I tried one last time. “No tattoos, nothing at all to identify him?”

  “Brown from Alamogordo PD told me they’re going to run prints.” He added in a mutter, “After he made himself at home in my living room and drank a pot of my coffee.”

  I wanted to scream, “Give a straight answer to just one goddamned question, Jack Ass,” but it wouldn’t do any good. Plus, I’d go to Hell for taking the Lord’s name in vain. If Jack was trying to irritate me into being happy that he’d dumped me before we’d ever gotten started, his non-answers were a good way to do it.

  I stared out the window for a while until I had calmed down. Without turning back to Jack, I said, “He’s like a ghost.”

  “He’s like an illegal.”

  How had I lived so isolated from the desperate world of undocumented immigrants for so long? I’d known that people of Mexican heritage came from Mexico, that there were immigration laws and that employers had to follow them. I watched the news and the vitriolic debate on the issue. I heard my mother’s complaints about it from time to time. Yet, somehow, it had existed separate and apart from my real life. I hadn’t known the people that risked their lives to get here. I hadn’t imagined what was worse than living here, poor, on the fringes. I’d never bothered to think past how awful I believed it was to be the teenage daughter of a sad, penniless mother and a runaway cowboy.

  We drove in silence, and my thoughts focused not on the irritatingly sexy man beside me, but on the dead man with no identity and maybe no country, about Sofia and what she had done—why she might have done it—and Valentina alone, or worse. It put my troubles in perspective. I had lost a baby that was never born and a percentage of a chance of a future baby that God might never have intended for me anyway. Sofia and Valentina were together for six years, and had lost each other. Valentina hadn’t just lost her mama—she was without a father, too. What would happen if no one found her? Would she die? Would she be sold by Harvey—or whoever had her—to the highest bidder? Or simply used up by whoever was around? Hell, what would happen if she was found? She could be sent back to Mexico where she didn’t know a soul—something her mother had gambled and lost her own life to prevent.

  I chuffed and put my hand to my mouth. Jack glanced at me, then back at the road. My mind zeroed in on those huge brown eyes and pigtails, the threadbare jammies with pink pills of fabric and a giant Barbie smile across a tummy. The blue-shirted doll with the lace shawl, just one more thing the girl had lost. It was time for me to quit feeling sorry for me. I was letting myself get jammed up with an emotionally unavailable man that I didn’t need, risking a job I did, and focusing on things that I couldn’t have, while forgetting about what was real and right in front of me. Suddenly, I felt the scratch of flint deep inside, once, twice, three times, and then a flame that spread like wildfire.

  I didn’t know how, but I knew that I had to find her, that we were each other’s second chance. Here I was giving up on myself, like some nag ready for the glue factory when Valentina needed me. I had more than enough clues pointing me to information in southern New Mexico, and I was here. I would figure out what those clues meant, one way or the other.

  A sick feeling came over me, and I realized I had to speak to Jack.

  “I forgot to tell you something important,” I said.

  His jaw flexed. “What?”

  “When I was looking for information about Sofia, and I found Valentina, only I didn’t know it, and then she was taken by the bald guy, there was something I learned about the kidnapper from Victoria, something I forgot to tell you because we were cut short by Melinda telling us Sofia had died.”

  He shot a glance at me. “Go on.”

  I searched my handbag for paper and a pen. No paper, but I found a pen, so I drew the ΣSL on my hand.

  “He had a tattoo on the inside of his upper arm. His left arm. Like this one.” I held my hand out beside the steering wheel. “Victoria saw it. Harvey has one. Last night Tamara told me it stands for East Side Lobos in Las Cruces. Have you seen it before?”

  He turned his eyes to it, and they widened. He looked back at the road, then again at my hand. “Yes. Yesterday. On Spike Howard’s autopsy photos.”

  Chapter Twenty-four

  “You look beautiful, as always.” Paul kissed my hand and then tugged me through the front door into a hug. His sheer size made me feel Lilliputian. “And how’s my attorney?” He released me and clasped Jack’s hand in a bro shake to his chest, clapping him on the back at the same time. “Can’t tell you how glad I am to have the two of you here. The bar’s out on the back patio.” He winked. “A little hair of the dog.”

  “Thanks, Paul,” I said.

  I moved far enough away to keep him out of my personal space. His effusive greeting was just too familiar for me, especially after the weird last twenty-four hours.

  Galvanized by the newly rekindled fire to find Valentina, I decided I was done feeling guilty. I saw Jack’s stern jaw from the corner of my eye. He looked like a man who’d eaten a mess of bad eggs. Well, good. He deserved to feel bad. He’d overreacted and shut me out when I’d tried to explain. I ignored him and turned for the bar.

  The entry hall emptied into a room with an amazing ceiling that pulled my eyes upward, and I marveled at the octagonal cupola lined with rafters across intricate tongue-in-groove boarding. Inset windows alternated levels on each of the cupola’s sides. Below it was a sitting area of oversized leather and cowhide couches and armchairs. An enormous rug in caramel brown and white spots with darker brown sections every few feet anchored the furniture. It was one of the most uniquely beautiful floor coverings I had ever seen. The chandelier of two metal hoops, one suspended three feet above and within the circumference of the other, hung from fifteen-foot chains. An immense stone fireplace domi
nated one wall and its opposite wall opened onto a bustling kitchen. Huge wood-framed glass doors and windows covered the back wall and opened onto a patio. The doors were propped open, and a brisk breeze coursed through the space carrying the dry smell of pine and sage.

  I wanted to find a quiet place where Jack and I could continue our conversation about Spike’s tattoo. I walked ahead of Jack through the room toward the back patio, where a few on-time guests like us milled about. When I got outside, I stopped, mesmerized by the view. Paul’s backyard ended in a high, rock-faced hillside with trees hugging the edge of its summit, their coniferous branches bouncing and swaying in the wind. It was pure, rugged drama, and I stared at it for long seconds before I turned back to Jack, but he’d disappeared.

  I started to look for him, but was interrupted by a teenage boy.

  “Drink, ma’am?”

  A tattoo of a snake wound around his neck, but his real attention grabber was a nose ring. Where I came from, you used those things to clip a lead to an animal that needed a little extra motivation to behave. And the tattoo? I wanted to tell him that he didn’t need to brand himself like a steer, but I held my tongue.

  I almost ordered wine, but last night had left me tired and dehydrated, which more alcohol would only make worse. “Sparkling water with lime, please.”

  “No problem.”

  Round metal tables and chairs dotted the patio with centerpieces of stone and cactus weighting down each table. Movement to my right caught my eye, and I saw Paul’s daughter Stella leaning against the far back edge of the house smoking a cigarette. She looked angry, and incredibly alone.

  “Thanks for your note,” a woman’s voice said, from my left.

  I followed the voice and saw Jack’s secretary, Judith. With makeup on, she was strikingly beautiful. Jack had told me all of his employees were invited, and I’d hoped she’d be here, that I’d get another chance with her.