by Ann Charles
As Willie’s song came to an end, Kate leaned forward. “Claire, I need to ask you something.”
There was one thing she wanted to confirm, something that shouldn’t raise any hairs on her sister’s neck.
Claire turned down the radio.
“What is Butch the bartender’s last name?”
Her sister took her eyes off the road long enough to shoot Kate a questioning frown. “Carter. Butch Carter. Didn’t you get his name when you traded paint?”
“I was too busy panicking, remember?”
“And lying,” Deborah added, her lips pinched.
Kate contemplated guiding her mother firmly by the arm right off the nearest cliff.
She looked back out her window, staring at the glittering bits of broken glass that littered the ditch.
“Butch Carter” was also the name typed on the copy of the police report she’d picked up today, as well as written on one of the clipboards hanging in Buck the mechanic’s office, along with Butch’s address and phone number. Lucky for her there was only one body shop in all of Yuccaville.
So who was Valentine? Was Butch carrying a fake I.D.? More importantly, why would Butch be carrying a fake I.D.?
Did it have something to do with the Copper Snake Mining Company? An alias he used when performing crooked business deals?
She should have followed Butch yesterday afternoon and eavesdropped on his phone call with his lawyer.
“What’s with your sudden interest in Butch?” Claire’s question jarred Kate out of her Miss Marple fantasy.
Now was not the time to explain. “I was just curious.”
“I call bullshit.”
Deborah slapped Claire’s hand. “Watch your mouth. That’s the exact type of filthy talk I was speaking to you about in the dressing room. Gentlemen don’t like potty mouths.”
“How do you know what men like, Mom?” Claire downshifted as they approached the bridge into the R.V. park. “You’ve been out of the circuit for almost forty years now. For all you know, guys like women who cuss like crab fishermen and braid their armpit hair. Look at that guy Kate was dating last year.”
“Let’s not,” Kate said.
“He wanted Kate to—”
“Claire!”
“Didn’t you tell Mom?”
“I most certainly did not.” There were some things mothers should never know. Kate caught sight of Porter’s shiny blue truck in front of the General Store.
“Chicken.” Claire grinned at Kate before turning back to Deborah. “Anyway, my point is that maybe instead of working so hard on changing us, you should consider changing yourself.”
“Now you’re talking nonsense.” Deborah collected her purse from the floor as Claire slowed to a stop. “Men haven’t changed that much. I’m not a complete recluse, you know. I’m hip with the times. I watch television.”
“Golden Girls went off the air in the nineties, Mom, and Antiques Roadshow doesn’t count.” Switching off the engine, Claire stared at Kate. “Now what’s the deal with you and Butch?”
“Nothing.” Sweat broke out on Kate’s upper lip. “I just ran into him outside the restroom yesterday at the bar.”
“And?”
“There is no ‘and.’”
Claire’s brown eyes narrowed, searching Kate’s face. “You like him, don’t you?”
“What? No, of course not.” Kate unbuckled her seat belt and shoved open her door. “No, absolutely not.”
Well, maybe just the way he filled out his jeans and T-shirt, but that was all. Oh, and his eyes.
“Why would Kathryn be interested in a bartender when she has Porter, a handsome gentleman and successful writer, asking her out to dinner?”
Butch’s forearms and biceps weren’t so bad either, Kate thought, as she stepped to the ground.
“Butch isn’t just a bartender, Mom.” Claire pushed open her door. “He owns The Shaft.”
He what? Kate eyed Claire. That explained how a bartender in a flea-bitten town could afford a brand new pickup. It also shed new light on Butch’s potential as a prime suspect.
“Besides, Kate’s never been into handsome and successful men. She’s usually drawn to the dark side of the force.”
Kate shot Claire a shut-your-big-mouth glare. “Leave it alone, Claire.”
“And Butch isn’t exactly ‘dark,’ unless you consider that he works nights most of the time in a shadow-filled bar.”
“Now is not the time to discuss this,” Kate sang in a sing-song voice, helping her mother out of the pickup cab.
Claire leaned against the steering wheel, chewing on her thumb, watching Kate as if Hydra’s nine heads were sprouting from her neck. “You must think Butch is into something shady, otherwise, you wouldn’t have been daydreaming about him all of the way home.”
“I wasn’t daydreaming, I was pondering.”
“Pondering what?” Deborah asked, both feet now on the ground.
“Just something I saw yesterday.”
Claire climbed from the truck and walked around the front fender. “Keep talking.”
“Something I noticed in his wallet.”
Claire’s brows drew together. “Why were you digging in Butch’s wallet?”
“I wasn’t. He was.”
A drop of sweat ran down Kate’s back. She shaded her eyes. Her sunglasses were merely a fashion accessory in this sunshine.
“When he was fishing out my insurance card, which he’d forgotten to return, I saw a fake I.D. with the name ‘Valentine’ on it.”
“Why would Butch have a fake I.D.?”
The disbelief in Claire’s voice didn’t surprise Kate. She’d been right to hesitate. Clearly, she’d need to find more proof before Claire would jump on board with her theory about the bar owner’s part in Ruby’s dilemma.
The screen door opened and Porter walked out. He touched the brim of his hat in their direction. “Good evening, ladies. Is that you, Mrs. Morgan? I swear, in this light, y’all look like sisters.”
Deborah giggled, tee-heed, and tittered all at once.
Kate glanced at Claire, who rolled her eyes so hard she looked possessed for a split second.
Facing Porter, Kate pasted a smile on her lips as he descended the steps. In his ostrich-skin boots, black jeans, tan shirt, and white hat, he looked good enough to dip in chocolate sauce and lick clean.
So why wasn’t she feeling hungry anymore?
* * *
Claire crept barefoot down the basement steps, carrying the two books Kate had checked out for her at the library while their mother had chewed Claire’s ass raw in the pickup. She skipped the third step from the bottom, which usually creaked under her weight.
With one foot hovering over the bottom step, she froze at the sound of Gramps’s voice, loud and close. “I think she went to bed.”
Standing there with only her eyeballs moving, she held her breath. If the boys knew she was still awake, they’d drag her upstairs kicking and scratching, plop her in a chair next to her mother, and make her play another game of Euchre.
The tension between Gramps and Deborah crackled and sparked, just like old times. Ruby had gone to bed early, claiming a migraine, but Claire suspected it had more to do with bobbing and weaving Deborah’s passive-aggressive jabs all evening.
Gramps’s footsteps thumped past the top of the stair and headed down the hall. The bathroom door slammed shut.
Claire gasped for air. Straining her ears, she heard the faucet running in the bathroom and made her break. She pushed into Joe’s office without hitting the lights and shut the door quickly, quietly.
A flashlight beam nailed her in the face.
She flattened against the door with a squeak of surprise. It took her a handful of seconds to extract her tongue from the back of her throat.
“Who’s there?” she whispered, and then realized what a stupid thing that was to ask.
Squinting, her heart still galloping down the backstretch, she blocked the light with he
r hand.
“It’s me,” Jess whispered back.
Claire’s peeled herself off the door. “What are you doing down here?”
The last she’d seen Jess, the girl had been watching Friends reruns in her bedroom.
“Do you promise not to tell Mom?”
“Only if you remove that damned light from my face.”
“Oh, sorry.” Jess dropped the beam to the tops of her pink slippers. “I’m looking for my money.”
She should have known. Jess had the determination of a beaver with a dam to build, especially when it came to money.
Walking over to the desk, she set the library books down. “What makes you think Ruby would hide it in here?”
“Well … umm … I don’t know. Why wouldn’t she?”
“Think about it, Jess.” Claire dropped into Ruby’s cushy chair and pulled her own mini-flashlight out of her pocket. “Not only is this the room where we found the money, but it’s the one room in the house where Gramps found evidence of the burglar. Don’t you think your mom would be smart enough to hide the money somewhere less busy?”
“Yeah, I guess.” Jess sidled up next to her, sniffing.
“Are you smelling my hair?”
“I’m smelling all of you for skunk. You finally don’t stink anymore.” She peered over Claire’s shoulder as she flipped open the cover of History of the Southwest: A Keyhole View. “What are you doing?”
“Trying to figure out how old that mummy hand is.”
“Coolio. How are you going to do that?”
Claire turned to the index. “Find out which cultures used to bury their dead instead of cremate them.”
“Why are you reading down here in the dark?”
Because it was the only place she had thought she’d find peace and quiet in the house. “Mom’s in the spare room, the boys are in the rec room, and I thought you were in your room.” She scanned the “B” page.
Jess leaned closer. “What word are you looking for?”
“Burial.”
“It’s right there.” Jess pointed at the word on the page.
Claire glanced at the girl, who seemed oblivious that she was about to get her finger bitten off.
“Do you want me to write down the page numbers for you?”
“No, thanks.” Claire flipped to the first page number listed. “Aren’t you tired? It’s past eleven, and you were up late last night talking.”
Talking to Claire that was, about everything from how to tell a boy gecko from a girl gecko to why pink lemonade was her all-time favorite lip gloss flavor. Not even two feather pillows had muffled Jess’s voice.
“Nope. I drank one of Mom’s energy drinks at supper. I’m good to go until after midnight probably.”
Ruby needed to stop stocking energy drinks in the fridge.
“Here.” Claire handed Jess Ancient Southwestern Cultures in a Nutshell and nodded toward the floor. “See what you can find in there about burials.”
Jess dropped to the floor and started fanning pages. “What if there’s more than one group of people who buried their dead?”
“Then I’ll start comparing basket designs, or see if that twig figurine is unique to a certain culture.”
For the next minute or two, the only sound was paper rustling. Claire scanned the pages about the Anasazi death rituals, all of which involved cremation.
“Claire?”
“Hmm?” She turned back to the index, looking for the page number on the Mogollon culture burial practices.
“How old were you the first time you had sex?”
Claire’s thoughts screeched to a stop, her finger hovering over Metate, the ground beneath her feet suddenly slippery. “Probably too young.”
“Was it fun?”
She stared down at the top of Jess’s head. The girl was looking at the color pictures in the center of the book.
“I wouldn’t exactly use the word ‘fun’ to describe it. Why?”
Jess shrugged. “Last spring, Tammy Mapes was talking about sex in the bathroom. She’s done it six times now.”
“And how old is Tammy?”
“I don’t know. I think she just turned sixteen.”
Ah ha! With her sixteenth birthday on the horizon, Jess must be dealing with peer pressure.
“What’s sex like?”
“Well—” Uncertain how Ruby would feel about Claire and Jess analyzing Chapter Five of The Season of Jess’s Deflowering without her permission, Claire hesitated.
On the other hand, better Jess come to Claire than Tammy Mapes, the little tramp.
“I mean, I don’t want to know what sex is like with Mac, because he’s my cousin and it’s pretty disgusting that you’re exchanging any bodily fluids with him, especially that kind.”
Claire opened her mouth only to shut it again.
“What was it like your first time?” Jess blinked up at Claire. “In those romance books Manny reads, the woman sometimes cries afterward because she’s happy. Did you cry?”
“Uh …”
“Did it hurt?”
“I …”
“Was it smelly?”
“Smelly?” Claire sat back in the chair, fighting a grin.
“Yeah, you know, like the boys’ locker room.”
“What were you doing in the boys’ locker room?”
“Helping Tammy find her kiwi-flavored lip gloss.”
“Maybe you should stop hanging around Tammy.”
“Yeah, that’s what Kevin says.”
Claire frowned. “Who’s Kevin?”
“He was my lab partner in Chemistry last year.”
“Is he cute?”
“He’s a total hottie. Without his glasses, I’d give him an 8.5 on the hot-ilicious scale.”
“Is he your boyfriend?”
“I wish! I think he’s going with some senior girl. Do you think Kate and Porter are having sex tonight?”
Knowing Kate, Claire doubted it. Porter’s credentials were too clean—no visible scars, no prison tattoos on his arms. Although, there was something slick about the guy that Claire didn’t quite trust, but it was probably something to do with Deborah and her instant approval.
“Kevin is a major hunk, especially when he smiles, even though he has braces, but they are the clear kind, so you can hardly tell he’s wearing them. Do you think after Mom marries Harley she’ll be able to afford to buy me braces? Have you ever kissed a boy with braces?”
Claire crossed her arms, watching Jess, waiting for the girl’s head to pop and shower confetti throughout the room.
“Mac wore braces in school, did you know that? His teeth are almost as straight as Porter’s. Mac smells better, though.”
And they were back to smells again.
“But Porter’s glasses are cooler.”
Glasses? “How do you know Porter wears glasses?” Claire hadn’t even seen him in sunglasses.
“He was wearing them tonight.”
“When?” She’d been forced to sit and listen to her mother fawn all over the man while Kate changed her clothes and fixed her already perfect hair and makeup.
“Before you got home. But he only wears them to read.”
“How do you know?”
“Because he was wearing them when he was reading one of Joe’s old books.” Jess nudged her head toward the bookcase filled with Joe’s pricey first editions.
“Jess, you know you’re not supposed to take those books out of this office.” Ruby had found the first edition copy of Pride and Prejudice in Jess’s room being used as a coaster.
“I didn’t. Porter was reading it down here.”
The chair squeaked as Claire sat forward. “You brought him down here?”
“No, silly. I found him in here.”
Chapter Eleven
Tuesday, August 17th
“What’s that?” Chester leaned over the counter and frowned down at the cell phone in Claire’s hand. “One of those electronic blueberries?”
�
��You mean a BlackBerry.” Manny corrected him from where he stood in front of the magazine rack, skimming through the latest edition of Cosmopolitan. “You need to get with the times, old man.”
From her stool behind the counter, Claire did her best to ignore her two sidekicks, who’d been hanging out inside the cool, air conditioned General Store with her for the last half hour—ever since they’d finished devouring the omelets Gramps had made for them. She scrolled through the list of contact names on Kate’s cell phone.
Gramps swished through the green curtain and sidled up next to Chester at the counter, pointing at Kate’s phone. “Did you call Mac back last night?”
“What do you mean ‘back’? Nobody told me he called.”
“Oops,” Gramps said. “Oh well, you’re supposed to call him back, and when you do, ask him if he got my package.”
“What package?”
“None of your business.” He glanced at her hand again, his brows knitted. “That’s a fancy-looking phone.”
Claire knew a diversionary tactic when she heard one. She’d just have to ask Mac about Gramps’s mysterious package.
Taking the phone from Claire’s hand, Gramps inspected it at arm’s length. He must have left his reading glasses in the kitchen. “When did you get that?”
He handed it back to her.
“Umm, not very long ago.” Just this morning, as a matter of fact.
“You think Ruby would like one?”
“Would Ruby like what?” Deborah stepped through the curtain, her bright red lipstick matching the shiny red cowboy boots she’d purchased yesterday in Yuccaville. Her boot heels clomped against the wood floor as she approached the counter. Manny and Chester fell back, as if she carried the Black Death with her. A rogue wave of Channel No. 5 slammed into Claire, drowning her still-tender sinuses.
Deborah wrinkled her brow. “What are you doing with Kate’s phone?”
“Nothing.” Claire avoided Gramps’s squint. “I was just checking it out, that’s all.”
“Then why is Porter’s name highlighted?”
“Is it? Oh, hmmm. Would you look at that?” Claire hit the button that turned off the screen and smiled at Deborah. “You look nice this morning, Mother. Where are you off to?”
“Well, I was hoping I could convince Ruby to take me back to Yuccaville. I broke a nail.”