Taylor literally felt the impact of Steve’s gaze when he lifted his eyes to hers. “Do you mind if I ask a few questions now?” he asked her, his sarcasm making her long to swipe his arrogant smirk right from his face.
Whatever he saw in her face was nearly as effective as a slap might have been. His grin faded abruptly and he nodded as if he understood.
He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and carefully wiped the “blood” from his fingers before looking at the boys again. He folded the handkerchief back to its original square and slid it into his trouser pocket. He then withdrew the letter that had brought him to Almost.
“Which of you would like to explain this?” he asked, holding out the letter.
Taylor watched as her sons exchanged questioning looks. Jason the Brave cleared his throat. “We didn’t mean to cause any trouble or anything. We just wanted to get you to Almost.” .
“And why is that?” Steve asked.
The boys, in unison, looked from Steve to their mom.
Taylor, suddenly and with absolute conviction, didn’t want to hear their answer.
“We saw you on TV,” Josh said irrelevantly. “At school.”
“And?” Steve prompted.
“We really did see a guy dying right here,” Jason interjected.
“Let’s save old Shiny Fingernails for a minute. I’m still trying to figure out this letter.”
“Well, see...”
“It was like this...”
“We were thinking that maybe...”
To Taylor’s wonder, Steve Kessler swiftly caught his lower lip between his teeth as if capturing a grin about to get away.
“You were thinking that maybe...?” Steve prompted.
It was Jonah who took a huge gulp of air and let out the whole truth in a breathless whoosh. “We thought that maybe if you came to Almost, you’d see our mom, like, she’s real pretty and cool and everything, and you’d like her—”
“And, like, you’d fall in love with her—”
“And you’d marry her—”
“And you’d be our new dad.”
Chapter 4
Taylor knew if the ground opened up at her feet she would sink gratefully into oblivion. She fleetingly wished the days of women swooning weren’t lost to the past. It would be wonderful to wake up hours later asking where she was. The one thing she wouldn’t ask was what happened.
Her sons, blood of her blood, flesh of her own, dismissed their duplicity with youthful abandon. Jason pushed past her numb body and pointed at the scuffed ground some three yards from her.
“This is right where the guy was. Right here!”
Jonah followed him and also pointed down. “See? You can tell where he was.”
Josh ran to the edge of the sorghum field and slapped a cloud of dust up from the ground between a clump of weeds growing at the flank. “And here’s where we were. See? Our bamboo poles are still here.”
“I guess we dropped ’em when we ran to get Mom.”
“And then a fly landed on the guy’s face. It was grossa-mosso!”
They were telling the truth now, and yet all Taylor could think about was the fact that her boys had written a letter to Steve Kessler spinning a tale of murder and mayhem so that he would come to Almost and fall in love with her. Because they wanted a new dad. Correction: they wanted him for a new dad.
She couldn’t look at Steve. Every fiber of her being, every synapse in her brain told her this would be a colossal mistake. Even when he cleared his throat, she wouldn’t risk a glance in his direction. While the day had seemed hot before, it now seemed aflame.
Over her sons’ protestations of honesty, Taylor heard the drone of a car heading toward the highway, footsteps scuffing through the powdered dust, locusts graveling in Mr. Hampton’s huge elm trees up by his house, and Steve Kessler’s soft voice murmuring something too near her ear for any degree of comfort.
“I don’t know them. How much of this should I swallow?”
His words sparked a live wire deep inside of Taylor. She watched her triplets brandishing their bamboo poles over their heads as if they’d fought a dragon and won. But she wouldn’t look at Texas Ranger Steve Kessler, would-be new dad to her sons.
“My boys may appear a lot of things to you, Mr. Kessler, and maybe for good reason, but take it from me...Smithton boys don’t lie.”
Steve realized he’d asked her the question just to see her motherly defenses rise to the surface. When her boys had blurted out their plan for her—and his—future, she’d turned deathly pale. And then, almost as swiftly as her color had drained, her whole face had bloomed a bright, painful-looking red.
To tell the truth, his own cheeks were a little on the warm side. The boys’ incredible plan seemed to underscore the feelings of unease he’d felt from the moment Taylor opened her door, only to slam it in his face.
“I swear we’re telling the truth!” one of the boys asserted. Since they were as alike as one summer day from the next, he couldn’t have begun to guess which one it was—except it wasn’t the one who seemed to have trouble breathing.
“And what truth is that?” he asked, knowing he was fanning the flames of Taylor’s mother anger. He fleetingly apologized to his own mom for all the times she’d had to come to his defense. Unjustifiably.
He hadn’t forgotten what it was like to be eleven years old. He wondered if any man ever did. At heart, perhaps all men were one step away from those days when they ran untamed and carefree through tall, dry grasses, hunting mysteries that seemed to be born on a summer’s dawn, tracking down elusive signs of Peter Pan, seeking proof that youth was as stable as favorite dinners and television programs that made a child stay awake late into the night questioning the rightness of things.
But one thing he knew for certain about eleven-year-old boys was that they all lied. He didn’t know if it was a sex-linked chromosome or something that all boys discovered just after learning to speak, but he knew from personal experience that lying was endemic to the male population. And these three boys had admitted to at least one whopper already.
However, too many things about this situation—least of all Taylor Smithton’s undeniable attractiveness—didn’t add up. He hadn’t become a Texas Ranger because there had been a vacancy in the ranks and he’d happened along on the right day. He was one of the elite Rangers because he was good at what he did. And what he often did was simply weigh possibility against probability.
And however improbable it might seem, given the circumstances of three Almost engaging and conniving eleven-year-olds with Doug Smithton’s genes floating around in their young bodies, Steve couldn’t shake the feeling that at least one element of the boys’ story was true. Unless they were the greatest creative geniuses of their time, they’d offered far too much detail about the wounded man not to be telling the truth about seeing him.
And, he had to admit, the dropped bamboo sticks, not to mention three perfect sets of sneaker prints that ended right before the strangely scuffed area, an area that sported a very large and very pointy-toed shoe print and darkened muddy spots, tended to add heavy credence to their tale.
But there wasn’t enough tea in China or fish in the ocean to make him admit this belief aloud. Especially in front of Taylor, who apparently still couldn’t bring herself to look at him. As long as she was angry, she might not think about her sons’ bid for him as their new dad. And she might not notice that he half believed her kids. And as long as she didn’t know that, she might not consider the notion that a potential killer could be running loose in the peaceful little town of Almost, Texas.
He suggested the boys walk the perimeter of the area and head back to the rental car. He’d spoken reasonably. Calmly. Perhaps patronizingly. He hadn’t counted on four sets of Smithton eyes gazing at him in varying degrees of accusation.
“I’ll come back and check it out alone,” he offered lamely.
“Will you mark it off with crime tape?” one of the triplets asked. One of the ones withou
t the labored breathing. Jason? Joshua?
“Yeah, like they do on TV? Crime Scene. Do Not Disturb.”
“That’d be way cool.”
Steve’s suspicions almost returned. These boys seemed almost too eager for drama. Then he remembered. All the talk and speculation about the trauma to children was only half-right. Kids could get traumatized, all right, desperately, horribly, and he agreed with all the data spewed out by countless shrinks and talk-show hosts who claimed that hurting a kid was the worst crime possible. At the same time, kids were like rubber balls, bouncing up and leaping toward life, toward second chances and new thought.
These three kids had had a rough time of it; their father had been killed, murdered, and here they were, smackdab in the middle of a possible mystery while blatantly searching for a new dad. He had to admire their guts. If not their methods.
“You can see right wh-where he was,” the one with the rough breathing said, pointing at the scuffed area.
“What’s your name, son?”
The boy looked up in surprise, a half-pleased grin—or perhaps a nervous one—creasing his face. “Jonah, sir.”
Steve loved West Texas. In Houston, few children ever gave him the courtesy of calling him “sir.”
“Well, Jonah, in case your man got up and walked away, we’d better not trample the area, don’t you think?”
The look of vast relief that crossed the boy’s face set Steve’s inner alarm bells jangling again. Whatever they’d lied about before, whatever schemes they’d dreamed up, that look of relief told him there had been a wounded, possibly dying man lying right there in the dusty center of the barnyard. He’d have staked his entire reputation as a Ranger on that particular gut feeling.
The three boys joined him at the “crime scene.”
“I told you he was the best.”
“Yeah, but I don’t think he believes us. Not about everything, anyway.”
“Well, we did lie in the letter. I told you we shouldn’t.”
“Mom’s gonna kill us.”
“I wish Dad was here.”
“Doofus. If Dad was here, we wouldn’t have written the letter.”
“Who’re you calling a doofus?”
“Still mad at me?” Steve asked Taylor, hoping she hadn’t heard the boys’ conversation as they rounded out of sight.
His question sparked her first glance in his direction since the boys had dropped their bombshell. Whatever she glimpsed on his face seemed to capture her attention and made her issue a chagrined smile.
“Did I come off like Mama Bear?”
Her smile reminded him of a summer evening, soft and quiet, filled with promise. The boys were right; she was, like, real pretty and cool and everything. “A little,” he said.
She cocked an eyebrow at him. “If it was only a little, I wasn’t doing my job.”
He held up both hands in surrender. “Okay. A lot. You had me shaking. In fact, I think it’s safe to say, you literally had me tongue-tied. I haven’t felt that way since my own mom yelled at me in the sixth grade.”
“If she didn’t yell at you after that, you had her thoroughly snowed,” she said.
He chuckled, and when she joined him, he momentarily forgot his vow to hold her at arm’s length.
Plunging her hands into tepid dishwater, Taylor smiled anew as she remembered the moment when Steve chuckled with her. One minute he’d made her mad enough to drop a wasp’s nest on his head and the next he’d made her laugh.
Only four people in the world had ever had that unique ability with her, and of those, only three were still living.
The smile slowly faded from her lips. Steve Kessler wasn’t Doug.
But like Steve, Doug would have enjoyed what the boys had done—not condoned, perhaps, but he would have laughed over it. With her. Late at night, spooned together in their bed, he would have recounted the story, his warm chest rumbling against her back. And she would have laughed with him, savoring the feel of his muscled arms around her, holding her close.
Steve Kessler wasn’t a bit like Doug. Steve was taller, for one thing. He was darker complected, not much, but some. He had brown eyes. And he had a distance in him that Doug had never seemed to manage. Of course, she’d met Doug in grade school, when both of them had been mere babies, younger than the triplets were now.
And Steve was a grown man.
Her hands stilled on the pot she wasn’t scrubbing. What on earth was she thinking? She didn’t want another relationship in her life. She had Doug’s three sons to raise. That was handful enough. Steve lived in Houston, for heaven’s sake. And capping everything, the man was a Texas Ranger, a law enforcement official who might as well wear a target on his chest and back marking the exact spot where bad guys could shoot him dead.
She was only thinking about him because her sons had tapped him as a new father. It was only natural she think about him once they’d planted the thought in her mind.
Taylor resumed her pot scrubbing, scraping the pan with a fervor usually lacking in her dish washing. She rinsed the pan with scalding hot water and swore under her breath as her fingers felt the bite. She all but slammed the pan onto the counter, then stilled as the sound of Joshua’s delighted laughter rose even above the sound of running water.
She turned the hot water handle, stemming the flow, only to hear Steve’s answering chuckle. She turned toward the laughter as a plant swayed toward the sun.
In the half hour since they’d left the Hampton place, Steve had been talking to the boys separately, taking them one at a time in the living room, hearing their stories on an individual basis, something almost impossible for her triplets to accomplish.
She’d been half-inclined to take umbrage at the implied insult, but her sons had been only too eager to comply. Not just because it was SOP—standard operating procedure when investigating a possible crime, they’d informed her importantly—but, she suspected, because they wanted to be close to Steve Kessler, hero Texas Ranger, the man they had selected out of the hundreds of thousands of men on the planet to be their new dad.
Staring at the closed door separating the kitchen from the hall leading to the living room, Taylor fought the urge to lean her ear against it to hear what was causing Josh to laugh so unaffectedly, so openly with a total stranger.
She remembered a long-ago new-wives orientation she’d endured at the Texas Highway Patrol office in Lubbock. Some unctuous, patronizing psychologist had stood up before the group of brides of all ages and sizes and told them, “When you marry a cop, you don’t just marry the man, you marry the badge, you marry the uniform, you marry the scuzzbag on the street who wants to take down your man. And, girls, you marry control.”
That weaselly little psychologist had been as wrong as the sun shining at midnight. Doug had been about as controlling as a typewriter waiting for a typist. He was considerate, affectionate, passionate...
What was that man saying to Josh to make him laugh so, laugh the way he had with Doug?
And why did she feel so strange, so isolated and connected simultaneously, upon hearing the laughter?
She drew a deep breath of decision and shoved the connecting door to the hallway open.
“And then, one time, Mom got so mad at Dad that she stood in the kitchen, all in one spot, like she was hooked to that part of the floor, you know, and then she jumped up and down and called him a meanie. She really did. ‘You’re such a meanie, sometimes. Just a meanie.’ That’s what she said. Honest.”
“You’re kidding,” Steve said, chuckling.
“No, really. I mean, yes, she did. And Dad laughed so hard he had to run to the bathroom so he wouldn’t wet his pants. Seriously.”
All Steve knew for certain was that Houston was some seven hundred miles to the southeast. Everything beyond that truth seemed in abeyance.
He’d interviewed the three Leary-Smithton children. He’d interrogated them. And all he’d come up with thus far was that their mother was beautiful, a good cook—“s
he makes the best spaghetti this side of the Pecos.” She was fun, she was great, and sometimes she cried at night alone in her bedroom.
They’d thrown out tidbits about the afternoon nearly as an afterthought. The wounded man had worn fancy clothes and pointy-toed lizard shoes and groaned, “Cold dray horse,” before gurgling horribly.
But inevitably, each of the boys had returned to praise of their mother. And, as if the memories were intertwined with their perceptions of their mother, the three boys had told him of their father. According to them, Doug Smithton had been perfect; the best dad, the best husband, the best cop, the quintessential father. He’d been the kind of man who worked all day and still wanted to play catch with his sons, the god who knew everything in each boy’s mind, who knew by some psychic awareness how each of the triplets was different and how each was similar.
And knowing Doug as he had, Steve didn’t have much trouble accepting this version of his old college chum. Doug was a big kid himself.
Despite the loss of their godlike father, according to the boys, their lives were joyful, easy and fun. Until that afternoon, when they’d seen a guy dying on the other side of Mr. Hampton’s barn.
All three of the boys had described the “nearly dead guy” as wearing a “fancy” watch. Individually, all three had placed said watch on the guy’s right wrist. Yet all three Smithton triplets were left-handed. Steve knew from long, hard experience that people tended to describe what they were most familiar with.
Individually and collectively, they had described the man as a dude. Steve wallowed through several possible meanings of the word before he finally realized the boys weren’t using the current vernacular to mean any male figure they couldn’t give a name to. They were using dude in the context of West Texas slang: the guy was dressed differently from anyone they’d seen before—outside of television—and looked “goofy” because he was so out of place.
After talking to each of the boys, hoping their stories jibed completely because they’d rehearsed their responses earlier, Steve felt conscious of that hunch feeling that prickled his spine. Their stories were similar but not quite the same. Each of them seemed to notice something slightly different about the wounded man. And very slight discrepancies in their collective recounting of events only lent weight to its veracity.
Almost A Family Page 6