Almost A Family

by Marilyn Tracy

  It was as if Taylor, with her honesty, her warmth, her serenity, was the very heart of their little town, the best of all of them.

  And because he was a stranger, summoned by her children and wearing no wedding ring, speculative eyes followed his every gesture and watched his every move around “our girl.”

  As if aware of his regard, Taylor looked up suddenly and met his eyes in a nearly electric connection. The high color seemed to fade from her face for a moment. Her lips curved in an uncertain smile and she raised her hand to her chest in what Steve knew as an unconscious gesture of protection.

  Steve became conscious of several heads turning in his direction. Eyes ping-ponged from Taylor to him and back again. An equal number of smiles and frowns appeared on faces. And still he couldn’t take his gaze from hers.

  They might as well have kissed.

  Steve heard a screech of tires and dragged his gaze to a battered pickup sending up a cloud of dust to obscure the road. A tall, exceedingly thin man slipped through a cracked-open door and hitched his way to Taylor’s house, bending forward slightly, as if afraid the light breeze might blow him from the ground. He stopped at the front gate as if confused by the mechanism.

  The impromptu party grew silent in waves of awareness as people became alert to something unusual going on.

  “That’s Delbert Franklin.”

  “He never comes to town.”

  “With Delbert, it’s all work, no play.”

  “Sh. He’s looking all business now.”

  Unerringly, the skinny man’s gaze zeroed in on Steve. He pushed the gate open, using it as a prop for a moment, then moved on toward Steve.

  “You the Texas Ranger Doc and the boys were telling me about?”

  Steve nodded and held out his hand.

  The man looked at it for a moment as if he’d never seen a hand before. He rubbed his own work-stained palm on his trousers, then took Steve’s hand in a bony, single-pump grip.

  “After Doc left this morning, I got to thinking about a car I saw yesterday afternoon. White Chevy. Swerved right into the highway side of my maize field. Don’t have a fence up in that stretch of the field. Never needed one before. I thought the guy was drunk or something. Never saw the car before.” He paused for a deep breath and glanced at the silent, listening crowd on the porch. He nodded at a few of them, murmured a few of their names. They nodded back, mouthing his name in return.

  “Anyhow, after Doc came by this morning, I got to thinking about the way that car swerved into the field, and decided to go have me a look.” He paused again, this time to shake hands with Charlie Hampton, who had apparently finished his chew and had come up behind Steve to join the two men.

  “Delbert,” Charlie said, nodding and pushing his hat back a notch.

  “Charlie.” Delbert’s eyes flicked toward Charlie and back to Steve. “Anyways, so I went out there and poked around. At first I didn’t find nothing, just a couple of deep tire treads. Some white paint on a fence post—he’s gonna have one heck of a scrape on his front left fender. Didn’t see the tracks right off, ‘cause it’s so dry, you know. Anyways, I was steaming mad ’cause the blamed fool had broken a good dozen or more plants.”

  “But you found something?” Steve interrupted finally.

  “Well, yes, sir. I hope to tell you I did.”

  Steve resisted the urge to shake the information out of the scrawny farmer.

  “I think I found that fella you’re looking for,” he said in a wheezy, gravelly voice. “And there ain’t no doubt...he’s deader than a doornail this time around.”

  Chapter 10

  Steve half expected the entire party to rush for their cars and follow Delbert Franklin and him out to where the farmer found the body. Instead, they drew together in small clusters, talking softly, speculating, nodding sagely and lifting hands in unison as he drove off behind Franklin’s dirt-encrusted pickup.

  Some ten miles south of Almost, the whipcord-thin farmer pulled his pickup off the road, perching it at a precarious angle on the side of a weed-filled ditch. If Steve had been late arriving on the scene, he would have been able to spot the location by the huge cloud of red dust obscuring Franklin’s vehicle and field.

  “Come on,” Franklin said, not looking at Steve as he stomped into the field, “He’s right back in here.”

  Steve was struck by Franklin’s thoughtfulness in avoiding the tire treads that had damaged the man’s maize crop. Unlikely as it might seem, Steve had secured plaster of paris imprints of tire tracks before and had locked in a case or two because of them. He was doubly glad the boys had spotted those tire marks in front of Charlie Hampton’s barn. He was no expert, but these looked like a perfect match.

  “Thanks for avoiding the treads,” Steve called out, having to walk quickly to catch up with the man.

  “I watch TV,” Franklin said, stopping abruptly beside a semierect plant. Steve thought the man could have hidden behind the shoot and been overlooked. Franklin pointed downward. “There’s your man.”

  Steve stepped forward and caught his first sight of the “too fancily dressed nearly dead guy.”

  It didn’t take a quantum leap of intelligence to see that the man hadn’t come to this location on his own. Aside from the tire tracks, nobody could have thrown himself into such an awkward position.

  “Want me to call the coroner on my cell phone?” Franklin asked.

  Steve dragged his gaze from the sprawled, spent body and looked at the thin farmer. He, better than most, should have known that farmers, ranchers, housewives—people with Southern drawls and laconic speech patterns—were as intelligent and as up-to-date as any city dweller, but somehow he’d forgotten this truism. And yet who more likely to possess a cell phone than a farmer, sitting alone all day in his combine, needing to call home, call the shop or perhaps phone his multimillion-dollar partner to remind him of the state dinner later that night?

  “Please,” Steve said, remembering his words to Doris about a one-horse town, words he hadn’t meant, words that Taylor had shown the decency not to call him on.

  Even as he inspected the site, careful not to mar any possible footprints—though he didn’t see any—he thought of how he’d treated Taylor’s sons the day before. He’d disbelieved them, he’d sworn at them—according to Taylor—and he’d only half accepted the scuffle concept as true.

  But here, crushing five or six stalks of maize, lay a man dressed in Armani casual wear, and who was, as Delbert Franklin had phrased it, deader than a doornail.

  Sure, out behind the Hampton barn, Steve had seen the footprints, the darkened patch of ground that could have been—or not been—bloodstains. And he’d heard Jason’s nightmare and seen and felt Taylor’s heartfelt response to it. And he’d driven all the way to Levelland with three precocious preteens with a nickel-plated .45 in a plastic bag. And still, despite everything, the cynical side of him had refused to completely accept the truth of the evidence. He’d accepted that something had happened, but not really the full weight that the boys had witnessed the death throes of a man wounded by a bullet.

  He tried not to think of what the boys might have felt upon seeing this man sprawled out on the dust behind Charlie Hampton’s barn. No wonder Jason had had a nightmare. The boys would be lucky not to be having nightmares for the rest of their lives.

  And no wonder they’d barreled into the house screaming for their mother. No kid should ever have to see such a sight. And following this thought came another: especially not those kids. They’d been through enough with the loss of their father. They’d already paid whatever dues kids had to pay to grow up too early. They hadn’t needed the vision of this man dying before their eyes.

  He had to wrestle with a surge of anger at the unknown assailant, the person who had shot this man and allowed three young boys to stumble across his remains.

  Steve wrapped his handkerchief around his fingers before sliding his hand into the dead man’s dusty and bloodstained Armani sport jack
et to feel for a wallet, something to reveal the man’s identity. And as he did so, he tried picturing what kind of apology he would offer the boys.

  He withdrew a slender, leather folder and wondered if he could just play the coward and not say a word about his disbelief to the boys. Aside from one comment among themselves—and calling him mister yesterday, in a subtle and momentary revocation of his hero status—they hadn’t seemed to take offense at his words, actions or patent distrust.

  He flipped the folder open. Ordinarily, he would have left this evidentiary gathering to the homicide detectives that would be on the scene within the hour, but he was positive this was no ordinary case; this wasn’t the original crime scene. The dead man had obviously been tossed here.

  Steve’s eyes didn’t see the cards inside the folder he was holding. Instead, he pictured three mischievous boys whooping and hollering, waving bamboo poles at imaginary snakes and rounding the back side of the Hampton barn.

  He could too easily see the wounded man lying in the dusty barnyard, holding his manicured hand toward them for help, saying “Cold dray horse” and expelling blood from his mouth.

  And as he felt the blood in his own veins seem to freeze, he could all too easily picture the killer hiding nearby, in the field perhaps, or maybe back in the barn, listening, watching the boys as they tried making sense of a man dying before their young eyes.

  And he could picture the man wondering if the boys had known he was hiding inside that barn, right behind the tack-room door, hoping they hadn’t seen him shoot his victim and wondering what he should do about them.

  If those kids had rounded the backside of the barn five minutes earlier... would they have witnessed the actual shooting? Would they have been the next victims?

  Steve’s hand tightened around the folder, bending it like a cheap deck of cards, picturing Taylor’s griefstricken face as she learned her sons had met their fate at the hands of an unknown murderer.

  Steve’s gaze crystallized on the folder. If he had anything to say about it, the boys would never know how close they’d come to life-threatening danger. And their mother, try to pry it from him as she might, would never hear such a thing from his lips.

  The folder was filled with various business cards, different names, different towns, even different states and countries. The only one that caught Steve’s eye was one with the name Richard DuFraunt, designating him as a salesman for a company out of Canada...ChemCon.

  Sam and Charlie’s fancy-clothed fertilizer salesman made the rounds for ChemCon. The same guy? It seemed likely.

  Unfortunately, when Steve patted down the man’s bloodstained jacket, he found another hidden pocket containing something, and when he tore the lining, he discovered four different passports. All four pictured the man lying in the dirt. All four bore different names. Two last names were Richards, the other two were DuFraunts. All were from Canada.

  Steve didn’t know of too many fertilizer salesmen who needed even one passport, let alone three more with identical pictures and subtly altered aliases. Everything about the man, from the bullet hole in his chest to his taste in clothes and jewelry, screamed a connection to money. And because of what had happened in Almost last Spring, money screamed a connection to drugs.

  “Mr. Franklin?” Steve asked, swiveling a little on his boot heels.

  “Delbert,” the farmer suggested.

  Steve nodded, accepting the friendly gesture. “Delbert, would you do me a favor and use your cell phone to call Tom Adams. He’s with the FBI in Lubbock. I think he should be here.”

  “Done it already,” Franklin said.

  Steve turned to squint up at the beanpole faintly resembling a man. “You what?”

  Delbert Franklin shrugged. “Told you. I watch TV. Figured this here fancy pants must’ve had something to do with what went on at the Leary place a piece back. So I called the FBI while I was coming to get you. He’s on his way already.”

  Steve looked back down at the dead man and smiled. If he could have witnesses and bystanders like Delbert—and Taylor’s rambunctious triplets—he’d never have to worry about making a case again. They would all be made for him.

  Taylor watched as shadows stretched across her front yard, underscoring the length of time that Steve had been gone. Still, while she could see the tips of several cigarettes and cigars glowing in the darker regions of the porch, the day was far from over. In high summer, with a goodly portion of the country adhering to daylight saving time, nightfall wouldn’t come for another couple of hours.

  Yet it seemed Steve had been gone for days.

  “When will Steve be coming home?” Jonah asked. Doc had dropped the boys off at least an hour earlier and would be returning to join the party as soon as he fed the animals recuperating at his clinic.

  Jonah lifted his arm and wrapped it around her waist. Like her, he’d come to the front lawn to stare hopefully at the empty road leading south of Almost.

  His question struck Taylor on at least three different levels. On the most basic level, she was wondering the same thing herself. Delbert must have really found the dead man out in his maize field.

  They’d all seen at least four state trooper units pass by in the course of the afternoon. And the entire impromptu party had offered directions to the Lubbock coroner after he’d driven past the house going both north and south at least three times.

  And Taylor had seen Tom Adams, the FBI agent in Lubbock, the man who’d helped Steve and Pete with the trouble at Carolyn’s last spring, drive by. He’d been either talking animatedly to himself or singing along with the radio.

  But it wasn’t the troopers, the coroner or even the arrival of the FBI that made Taylor ponder Jonah’s question on a second level. It was Jonah’s frown of worry. She knew he was sincerely concerned that something terrible had happened to Steve. Her son had good reason to worry; he’d been down that sad road before.

  Since Taylor didn’t believe Delbert Franklin to be the kind of closet psychopath who might do away with a Texas Ranger, especially in front of a host of state troopers and an FBI agent, she wasn’t concerned that Steve had come to harm. And Delbert had made it perfectly clear to one and all that the man was truly dead this finding.

  No, she thought, Steve wasn’t hurt, but she was more than half-convinced that he might seize this opportunity to turn his full attention to duty and use duty as an excuse to escape this one-horse town in the middle of the high plains.

  But the level most disturbing to Taylor, the third level, was the subtle nuance in Jonah’s innocent question, “When will Steve be coming home?” Home. As if Steve lived with them. As if he were already the father the boys wished him to be. As if he belonged with them. The notion made her shiver despite the still-boiling hundred-degree temperature. Was that because it too neatly fit her own feelings about Steve?

  “I don’t know, honey,” she said. “Soon.”

  “I hope so. I’m dying of curiosity.”

  “We all are,” she said truthfully. But her curiosity extended a good deal beyond the discovery of a dead man in a maize field. Would Steve be staying now? Would he bolt? And which did she want him to do?

  “Think it’s the same guy?” Jonah asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said again. He and his two brothers and half the population of Almost spending the day at her home had asked the same question at least thirty different times in the past few hours.

  She made up an errand for Jonah and his brothers and watched them coerce their cousins into assistance before they all headed to Sammie Jo’s store to fetch more unneeded paper plates.

  Carolyn waved her over and patted an empty chair someone had carried out to the shade beneath the large elm. When Taylor joined her, Carolyn was smiling fondly at the backs of their disappearing children. “I wish they could stay this age forever.”

  Taylor smiled, though she didn’t agree. Each year seemed to reveal some delightful new trait in her sons. She’d loved every minute and looked forward t
o the next phase with quiet anticipation mixed liberally with trepidation.

  “You like him, don’t you?” Carolyn asked softly.

  “Yes,” Taylor said simply. She knew who Carolyn referred to and didn’t bother trying to play guessing games.

  “I thought you’d sworn to never so much as look at another law enforcement type.”

  “I did.” Her use of the past tense seemed to say it all.

  “Ah. The boys like him, too.”

  “Yes.”

  “I wonder how long he’ll be staying, now that they’ve found the man.”

  “I don’t know,” Taylor said for what must have been the thousandth time.

  “I wish...” Carolyn fell silent, but the space between the two women seemed filled with unspoken wishes.

  Taylor turned to look at her sister-in-law, and was sorry she had when she met Carolyn’s sympathetic gaze. Then she admitted, “He’s made it very clear he doesn’t want anything to do with families and commitments. And he’s not crazy about one-horse towns in the middle of nowhere.”

  Carolyn smiled, her eyes crinkling a little at the corners. “He’s lying.”

  “I don’t think so,” Taylor said slowly, remembering. Remembering too much...the feel of his strong arms around her, the warmth of his lips, the passion imperfectly checked.

  “Deep down, there isn’t a man alive—or a woman, for that matter—who doesn’t want the whole enchilada.”

  “Steve Kessler may be the exception to that rule,” Taylor said.

  Carolyn shook her head. “It would be nice to think so. Saves everyone trouble.”

  Taylor didn’t ask what her sister-in-law meant, because she knew, and she had the feeling Carolyn was right. If she believed Steve’s rejection of all the homier sides of life and he went back to Houston without a backward glance, his going wouldn’t be her fault. The rolling stone simply would have rolled on.

  “He says he’s been married twice.”