Jilted

by Varina Denman

  The demon I had managed to shove from my life now snickered in triumph. Hector was separating me from Clyde, and I could only imagine it was because he thought I was guilty. Guilty of murdering my husband. I took a deep breath, trying to fill my lungs, but the effort seemed too great.

  A sudden pressure caused my gaze to fall to the seat, where Clyde still held my hand in his. My fingers were so tightly clamped around his thumb that my knuckles were white. He slid his other hand over mine and drew them to his lips. He didn’t kiss my fingers, only brushed them against his cheek, but the action—so bold of him right in front of Hector—gave me the strength to press through one more trial.

  I slipped my hand from his, and Hector met me at the back bumper. The sheriff shuffled his feet, wiped a fist across his lips, then squinted at me as though he had just bitten a lemon. “Lynda, I don’t want to be saying this to you, but”—his gaze swept the sky—“you have the right to remain silent.”

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  I expected Hector to lock me in the back of his cruiser like a regular criminal, so when he ushered me to the front passenger seat, confusion filled my mind. Maybe I wasn’t about to be arrested for murder. Good Lord. That sounded insane.

  As we drove to the turnaround that would allow us to head back to Trapp, the windmills crept past the passenger window. I cut my gaze to the speedometer to verify the sheriff was driving as slowly as it seemed. Did he dread having to lock me up once we made it back to his office?

  Clyde’s sedan passed us, and our eyes met briefly before he went ahead of the cruiser.

  “Lynda?” Hector took off his cowboy hat and set it on the seat between us. “I figure if I drive slow enough, you and I may have this thing settled before we get back to town.” He shrugged. “Not that I have anything against the Rangers. They’re a regular bunch of guys.”

  I uncrossed my arms and let them wilt into my lap. “You just read me my rights, Hector.”

  “Had to. Otherwise your comments wouldn’t be admissible in court.” He sighed. “For what it’s worth, I’m sorry. I know this has got to be hard on you, dredging up memories of Hoby and all.”

  “It was a long time ago.”

  He nodded. “It’s like this …” His voice rose to a confident volume, but when he faltered, I remembered that he had memories of Hoby, too. He swallowed. “The rest of the skeleton has been found on my daddy’s property.” He shook his head. “What are the odds of—”

  “Was it Hoby?”

  Hector sighed. “They won’t know for sure until the DNA tests are completed—probably sometime Monday—but even then, they’re going to need a sample to match in order to determine if it’s him.”

  “If you mean something like a hair out of a hairbrush, it’ll be impossible.”

  His eyebrows quivered for a moment, and I imagined he almost smiled. “They can just match it to Ruthie since she’s his daughter.”

  It felt like ice water piercing my heart. The last time I saw Hoby, he had questioned me about whether or not Ruthie was his daughter. Nothing I could say would convince him, and now it was the only thing that could identify him all these years later. We crawled past a herd of Angus cattle, solid-black animals scattered among the mesquite trees, but in the midst of them, one red-and-white Hereford cow munched quietly on grass, oblivious to her differences. “So … this is Saturday. That’s two more days of not knowing?”

  Hector tilted his head and scratched the side of his neck with his thumb. “That’s when they’ll know something with a hundred percent certainty, but really, I think we can be safe to say it’s him, Lynda.”

  “Why?” A flash of indignation flared in my gut. “Your daddy’s place is nowhere near where they found Hoby’s truck, so it could be a horrible coincidence the two things happened at the same time. If the truck hadn’t been found, you never would have considered the possibility of that skeleton belonging to Hoby.”

  Hector slowly raised his palm to silence me, and I hushed. “Actually …” He peered across at me before returning his eyes to the road, and I figured that was another reason he wanted to talk to me while he was driving—so he wouldn’t have to look me in the eye. “Even from the first two bones, they could tell it was a tall, athletic male in his late twenties … slightly bow-legged.”

  At Hector’s description, a memory picture surfaced in my mind. Hoby, dressed in boots and Wranglers, walking up the sidewalk to the church building. He held Ruthie’s baby hand, and as he bent to smile down at her, his bowed legs looked even more curved.

  “Not only that,” Hector continued, “but the thigh bone had been broken at some point and healed.” He paused as though he were admitting a great sin. “I had the Rangers checking on Hoby right from the start.”

  He didn’t look at me again, and I was glad of it. He knew as well as I did that Hoby broke his leg the spring of his freshman year of high school, riding on the back of Eldon Simpson’s dirt bike. He sat out of track that year and spent all summer building up strength so he could play football in the fall.

  “Dental records?”

  “They’re working on that.” He shivered, then shook it off, seemingly embarrassed. “I’ve seen the skull, and …” He swallowed, then turned his head as far away from me as he could while still being able to see the road.

  It didn’t matter if he finished his sentence, because I knew what he was trying to tell me. The skull had a gap between its front teeth, and that detail combined with all the other forensic markers positively identified the corpse, at least to Hector and me and anyone else who knew Hoby.

  The indignation in my gut dwindled to indifference. “I don’t understand how the body got that far away from the truck, though. That’s what? Ten miles? No animal would … you know.”

  Hector didn’t answer me right away. “When did you last see him, Lynda?”

  We passed the city-limit sign, and as Hector slowed the car, his cowboy hat shifted toward my thigh. I fingered the edge of the gray felt. “The day he left town. I don’t remember the date. It was a weekday, I think, because he was headed to the garage.”

  “Around Thanksgiving?”

  “I guess so. Why?”

  “And you never saw him again after that, right?”

  “No …” I squinted at him. “But I heard from him once.”

  “He called you?”

  “Sent me a letter.”

  “Do you still have it?”

  “Why do you want to know?” I snapped. “What are you not telling me?”

  His shoulders drooped. “I’m sorry, Lynda. I don’t know what I’m asking. I’m just fishing for some nugget of information that will clear you.”

  I turned in the seat and glared at him. “Clear me?”

  He flashed his palm in front of my face again, then stated firmly, “Work with me, Lynda. I’m trying to help you.”

  So I really was being accused of killing my husband. I slumped against the seat. There were a few years, way back, when I felt like killing Hoby, but that rage had long since been replaced by bitterness, and finally apathy when he had left and never returned to me and his daughter. “I have the letter.”

  He stopped at the flashing red light in the middle of town, waited for traffic to pass, then continued down Main Street. “What does it say?”

  “Hoby said he was sorry, and that he’d had time to think about it, and he wanted to talk things over.”

  Hector’s face wadded like a crumpled piece of aluminum foil, but still he didn’t seem to have the nugget he was looking for. “That all?”

  “He said he would be home soon, and that he’d make it up to me.”

  “Did he mention Neil Blaylock?”

  I huffed. “Of course he did. How could he not?”

  Hector’s eyes widened in exasperation. “Well, what did he say about him?”

  “He called him a few
creative names and said he had a thing or two he wanted to say to him.”

  “Is that all?”

  “Basically, but the letter is a full two pages.”

  “Do you have the envelope with the postmark?”

  I shrugged. “I’m a bit of a hoarder.”

  “Thank God for that.”

  He turned onto my street, and I realized he wanted the letter immediately.

  “So is that the nugget you needed?” I asked.

  “That’s the nugget we both needed.”

  He pulled to a stop at the curb, but before I went in the house for the letter, I turned to look at him straight on, now that he couldn’t avoid me. “There’s something more, isn’t there?”

  He slid the car into park and reached for his hat. “What do you mean?”

  “I’ve known you since kindergarten, Hector. I was there when Mrs. Sanchez asked you if any of the other boys were naughty when she was out of the room, and you said I don’t think so, ma’am.”

  Hector shifted. “I don’t see where you’re headed.”

  “You had the same look on your face back then. You didn’t mention to her that three of your friends stuck gum under their desks. There was more to it, just like there’s more that you’re not telling me right now.”

  “Aw, Lynda, come on, now. Can’t we just get the letter and be done here?”

  I crossed my arms.

  “You are so—” The sigh that crossed his lips sounded hollow and exhausted, and I almost felt sorry for pushing him. But not quite. “All right. I didn’t want to be the one to tell you. Then again I didn’t want to be the one to handle this case at all.”

  I bit my lip. “Thank you for that, Hector. I do appreciate it.”

  He squinted at two joggers, waiting till they had passed. “When they found the rest of the skeleton?” His gaze cut to me, then away again. “There was a bullet in the skull.”

  Chapter Forty

  When Hector finally left, I stood in the middle of my living room. Alone and empty. But the solitude no longer refreshed me, and my emotions slunk through my heart like the wispy clouds of an early morning fog. Gray and silent, they obscured all that was real in my world, and the details of my life blended together into a haze of uncertainty.

  I blinked, chiding myself for being melodramatic, and then I padded into the kitchen and opened a bag of pretzels. My shift at the diner started in an hour, and Dixie was running out of options. So what if I was suspected of killing my husband? More than likely he was murdered by my ex-boyfriend. But either way, I still had to go to work. I snickered at the absurdity of it and shoved a pretzel in my mouth. I chewed, but the salt had little or no taste, and the gummy texture on my tongue repulsed me. Spitting the pretzel in the sink, I cupped my hand and drank a swallow of water to wash it away.

  I stomped to my bedroom, sick and tired of feeling sorry for myself, fed up with wallowing in pity, and past ready to get on with life. I jerked the remaining letters from the drawer of the nightstand, then fell to my knees and reached far under the bed for the metal firebox, whose contents I dumped on the rug. I shuffled through papers and trinkets. A tiny card that had come on a delivery of flowers from Neil when we were dating in high school. A newspaper blurb from the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal about a little-known citizen of Trapp who had been convicted of rape and sent away to prison. A paper lunch sack on which Hoby had scrawled a love note one morning before he left for work. The bulletin from that Sunday morning, the week the church asked me to worship someplace else. And one more item that I fingered carefully. The program from my parents’ funeral.

  When I had it all piled in front of me, I realized I was breathing hard. I settled back against the side of the bed and stuck out my tongue at the pile. Clyde was right. I had been holding on to this junk too long—psychological tokens, as he called them—to keep myself locked away from the world. I nudged the papers with my tennis shoe. Maybe I didn’t deserve better … but maybe I did.

  Pushing the box back under the bed, I lifted each of the papers, one at a time, and laid them across my palm. Then I stood, walked to the kitchen, and dug through a drawer for a lighter. Such an obvious thing to do, and I wondered why it had taken me so long to think of it. It wasn’t as if destroying these tokens would erase my past, but in a crazy way, it might release my future. Or at least open my mind and my heart.

  I stepped onto the back porch, closed the door behind me, and eased down to lean against it with my bottom on the cement. Stretching my legs out in front of me and crossing my ankles, I peered at the sky. Cotton-ball clouds dotted a blue background, but I knew it wouldn’t last long. Clyde had said another storm would be blowing in tomorrow, but that was Texas weather for you. Calm one day, wild the next.

  Sort of like my life.

  I reached for the paper sack and held it by its bottom edge, and then I cranked the lighter until a flame leaped forward and nicked at the bag. Soon the rich gold ate away at Hoby’s words, leaving a line of black ash that gradually gobbled the memory and dropped it in pieces to the ground. I released the last corner to the porch before the heat touched my fingertips. And Hoby’s love note was gone.

  Seven years of my life—rocky, beautiful, married years—were now placed in a closet in my heart. A closet I could visit occasionally, but not one I would ever want to hang out in. It wasn’t warm or welcoming, not a home, merely a functional storage space for items I no longer needed. I reached for the funeral program.

  That one was harder. A part of me felt as if I was denying my feelings for my parents, rejecting them. But a bigger part of me—a healthier part—knew I would never forget them, never completely let them go, and my mind would be cleansed by this simple action. That’s all it was. An action. An exercise. A way to grieve and heal and move on. More ashes fluttered away on the breeze.

  Already I felt release, but the feelings of liberty were so foreign, they frightened me. I pulled my knees up to my chest and wrapped my arms around my shins. That felt better. Safer. And I knew if I rolled tightly into a ball, it wouldn’t seem as though I were about to crack. But I had more work to do.

  As I watched Neil’s letter disappear, I heard a muffled knock in the house, and then the doorbell. It would be Clyde wanting to know what had happened with Hector, wondering why I had never made it to the sheriff’s office. I started to boost myself up but changed my mind. I didn’t need him right then. I needed to finish this once and for all, a personal funeral for all my regrets.

  As the front door opened, the back door rattled from the suction, and I heard Clyde’s heavy footsteps creaking through my house as I held his burning newspaper article in my hand. It sounded as though he opened and closed a few doors during the time I calmly destroyed a short note Neil had written, and by the time I held the last corner of the florist’s card, the door rattled again, and Clyde had gone.

  My gaze returned to the sky, where the cotton balls had shifted to the right, constantly moving, floating, changing, and I wondered if I would ever feel normal again. Whole.

  Without looking, I reached for the last item in my stash. The bulletin from the church. My fingers automatically worked to open the fold, as they had done so often in the past, but I stopped myself before my eyes scanned the words. I had read that blurb too many times already. Good grief, the wording and the font would be etched in my brain until the end of time. The folks at church had turned their backs on me when I needed them most. They had hurt me almost beyond comprehension, but maybe … just maybe … I could forget.

  Ruthie forgave them, and she had read that stinking bulletin more than I had. She used to keep it in her room, but she threw it away after she married Dodd. When I found it there, what once had been her token then became mine.

  I cranked the lighter again. For all I knew, this was the last remaining copy. The last physical proof that those people had done such a hurtful thing. The last evidenc
e justifying my bitterness toward them. But wasn’t that what all these papers had been?

  I waved the bulletin slightly, and the flames flared up, engulfing the folds of paper, then dwindled down into nothingness. Along with the words. They were nothing now.

  My head thunked against the door behind me, and I tapped it twice, a gentle reminder of the sturdy things in my life. Like Clyde. Clyde Felton was solid.

  I considered the men I had loved in my lifetime. All three called themselves Christians, yet each was so very different from the others. And each had treated me differently, too. Neil and Hoby had hurt me. Would Clyde eventually do the same?

  I didn’t want to think so, and I shoved the thought high above my head toward the cotton-ball clouds. Clyde was a good man, and he loved me. He wanted to make something better of himself, and he said he wanted me to tag along while he did it. But even if he never changed a thing, even if he worked at the Dairy Queen for the rest of his life, even if someday he hurt me … even then … I would want to be with him.

  I shook my head and smiled. He was such a fool about that old shack of his. The thing was worthless, but he hung on to it because it reminded him of Fawn and his grandpappy. But mostly Fawn. It was silly, because the girl had lived there less than a year and never fully moved back up there after Nathan was born, but Land sakes, the place must have been nice in its day. Even though the house was small, the views from the front windows would have kept anyone from caring about the cramped living quarters.

  I found it ironic that Neil, one of the wealthiest men in Garza County, had clearly been envious of my boyfriend’s real estate. Then again, Neil Blaylock had always scorned anything he couldn’t get his hands on. In fact, Clyde had said he was surprised Neil hadn’t torn the place down already. I squinted, remembering Neil leaning against the porch railing on the other side of the screen door, and then my mood faltered.

  Neil had called Clyde’s old shack a love nest. He had said Clyde and I should be hiding out there. That seemed strange. The house had been abandoned for a year, and Clyde and I had only been up there one time in the past two weeks.