“Fine.” Lucy gathered the papers from the desk and stuffed them into her black satchel.
• • •
ROSALITA’S SAT ON the very edge of Dobbs Hollow proper, and as they drove up Lucy examined the giant shed that housed her mother’s home away from home. What had drawn her to the place? Was it just the booze? Or had there been a particular patron, or employee, she’d followed there? Perhaps it was simply a place where she could be one person among many who were all there for the same purpose, rather than a marked pariah.
Inside, the cool, dark room had been divided into sections. In the back, Lucy saw pool tables and a small area for darts. In the front, the scarred and stained bar ran along the right, tables filled the center, and booths lined the left wall. The yeasty smell of beer hung in the air along with the faint odor of cigarettes, probably soaked into the wood from all the years before Texas had banned smoking in public places.
A couple sat in one of the booths, eating food from red plastic baskets. A single man with gray, frizzy hair sat at the far end of the bar staring down into his glass as if it were a crystal ball. A woman stood behind the bar polishing glasses, smacking chewing gum in the way of one who’d far rather be smoking. She looked to be in her early fifties, and Lucy immediately began formulating questions about whether she’d known Cecile. Ethan put a hand on her shoulder, however, and held her back.
“Hey, Charlene,” he said easily.
“Ethan! What brings you out this way?” Her eyes shifted to Lucy and her smile disappeared. “And what are you doing with her?”
“Charlene Davies, this is Lucy Sadler. Lucy, Charlene.” He walked steadily toward the bar as he made the introductions, his fingers digging into Lucy’s shoulder so she would keep pace and keep quiet. “I’m sure by now you’ve heard that Lucy is here trying to find out about her mom.”
“That’s nothing to do with me.”
They’d reached the bar, but Ethan didn’t allow Lucy to sit.
“Come on, Charlene,” Ethan coaxed. “You had to have known Cecile.”
“Oh, I knew her.” The woman turned pale green eyes on Lucy. “She looked just like you. And she figured that was all she needed. Wave her little ass around, get whatever she wanted. She was a first-class bitch.”
Lucy recoiled from the venom in the woman’s words. “I’m terribly sorry if she hurt you,” Lucy offered. “I’m under no illusions about her. She was an alcoholic, and alcoholics don’t make great friends.”
The woman leaned over the bar. “Maybe you’re not understanding me. She wasn’t my friend. She didn’t have the power to hurt me.”
But she had; Lucy was certain of it. So she switched gears. “Have you worked at Rosalita’s for long?”
“Damn near thirty years,” Charlene answered.
“Has it changed much? Or has it stayed pretty much the same? Pool tables, darts, same kind of look and feel?”
Charlene laughed. “The day this place changes is the day they start serving iced tea in hell.”
“And back then, Cecile was a regular?” Charlene nodded grudgingly. “Did she have a regular spot?”
Charlene gave her an incredulous glare. “That’s what you want to ask? Where she fucking sat?”
“For starters. I’d like to see the place through her eyes, you know? Try to understand what she felt. Besides, I thought it might be the only question you were willing to answer.”
Lucy waited while the other woman mulled over the question. Eventually, she nodded.
“She sat in the back corner booth. Don’t know why. Not as easy to pick up men there as it would have been here at the bar. Guess she liked her privacy.” Lucy waited, hoping for more. It came. “Of course, men found her anyway. Woman looks like her . . .like you . . .men always do.” This came with a glance at Ethan that inexplicably made Lucy’s face heat. She forced herself to ignore the innuendo. “Any particular men that you remember?”
“A few. But you want to know what I really remember? I remember she didn’t care who they might have belonged to.”
“I’m sorry,” Lucy said.
Charlene continued to glare for a minute, then glanced down. “Shit.” She shrugged. “I don’t guess it’s your fault. Not like I coulda kept him for long, anyway.”
“Kept who?”
Charlene’s eyes slid away. “Chief Pike.”
Lucy felt her legs weaken and practically give way. Al Pike. Al fucking Pike? How was it even possible? Her stomach revolted, and the room spun slowly as black spots began to impede her vision.
“Lucy?” Ethan pushed her onto a barstool. “Hey, Lucy! Pour her a soda, will you, Charlene? I think that came as a bit of a shock.”
A minute later, a cold drink was placed in front of her, and Lucy sipped at it. The sugar fizzed through her bloodstream. She steadied her breathing, and her stomach settled.
“Wow. Color me officially surprised,” she said, trying for a light tone. “Al Pike and my mother were involved?”
“His wife died when Billy was still little. He tried a lot of women on for size after that, but he always came back to me. I really thought he might marry me one day, even if it was only to take care of his kid. Until he started seeing Cecile.”
“People knew? They knew he was . . .and they let him investigate her murder?”
“Oh, it was over between them long before that.”
Al Pike. Lucy couldn’t get her head around it. It was like she had taken a step back in time, with the Pike family and the Dobbs family haunting her every footstep.
“Look,” Charlene suggested, obviously uncomfortable with the subject, “why don’t y’all go sit in the booth and get a sense of what she saw, like you said.”
“Yeah, okay.” Lucy still felt dazed and a bit sick.
“Is Ron around?” Ethan asked.
“He’s in the back. But he sure as hell isn’t going to want to talk about Cecile.”
“Why not?”
This time, it was Charlene who flushed. “Ron’s wife took off when she caught him in the back room with Cecile. That whole ‘takes two to tango’ thing didn’t seem to occur to Ron, and he tossed Cecile out and told her never to come back. That was about six months before the murder, so Chief Pike dragged him over the coals pretty good.”
But Ron hadn’t been charged. Because he was innocent? Despite Charlene’s assertion that he’d been extensively questioned, the notes on his interview said only “alibied.”
“Could you ask him to come out and talk to us anyway?”
“Your funeral. Go on and sit in the booth. I’ll get him.”
“Can you bring two orders of wings and a black coffee, too?”
“Sure thing.”
“Thanks.” Ethan winked at Charlene and led Lucy back to the corner booth.
The couple in the other booth watched them with unconcealed curiosity. Lucy recognized neither of them.
While they waited for either Ron or the food to show up, Lucy pulled the files from her bag and began to make notes on what she’d learned. A few minutes later, the front door to the bar opened, and Lucy leaned around the corner of the booth to see the dark silhouette of a man in the entryway.
He paused there for a few seconds before heading straight for their table. A few steps away, Lucy recognized Billy Pike, and her stomach went back into freefall. She bit down on her tongue until the coppery taste of blood filled her mouth. Swallowing, she picked up her soda and gazed down into it as if she had no idea of the coming confrontation.
“Afternoon, Sheriff,” Ethan said as the man reached the table.
“Donovan. Miz Sadler.”
“Billy.”
Pike seemed to take her greeting as an invitation. He pushed his way into the booth beside her and picked up a piece of paper from the table—the very one on which she’d written his father’s name. He tapped it
against his chin several times before speaking.
“I understand you’re looking for your mother’s killer.”
“That’s right.” Lucy stiffened her spine, waiting for his reaction. But he remained surprisingly polite.
“You don’t think my father did enough?”
“I don’t think he did a damned thing. And since he wasn’t overburdened by an abundance of other criminal activity, I’d love to know why.”
From the corner of her eye, she saw Ethan’s attention shift from her to Pike. He’d read the file. He had to be curious about the shoddy work, too.
Pike’s eyes narrowed. “You were just a kid, and you didn’t stick around long enough to watch the investigation. There was nothing to go on. Not then, certainly not now. You should have come to see me.” He jerked his head in Ethan’s direction. “He wasn’t even in town back then. He can’t tell you anything.”
She looked away from Pike, directly at Ethan, whose eyes met hers calmly, steadily. Deep curiosity lurked there, but he was letting her control the conversation.
“I don’t consider a person’s usefulness before spending time with them.”
Ethan’s gaze grounded her. Why, after all these years, did Billy Pike and Drew Dobbs still make her skin cold and her stomach queasy? She wasn’t a kid any longer; she could—and would—destroy either of them should they lay a hand on her. But she couldn’t control her instinctive, shrinking reaction.
Pike rose. “I have to get going. You won’t believe me, but I’d like to see Cecile’s murder solved, too. If the department can be of any help, you give us a call.” He nodded abruptly and left, pausing to joke with Charlene on the way out. Lucy wished she could tell the woman the truth, that she hadn’t missed out on a thing not being Billy Pike’s stepmother. Of course, if Charlene had gotten her wish, maybe Billy would have turned out better.
The minute Pike was out the door, Charlene came by and dropped off the wings and the coffee.
“Guess Ron asked the sheriff to do his talking for him,” she said. “I hate to say I told you so, but . . .”
“Yeah, you did.”
When Charlene left, Ethan finally loosed his curiosity. “So, you want to tell me what that was really about?”
Amazingly, she did. But she wouldn’t.
“It’s old business. Maybe some other time.” She stuffed a chicken wing in her mouth to keep from having to say anything more.
For a hungry man, Ethan ate slowly. He kept slanting long looks up at her until she could bear the silence no longer.
“What?” she burst out. “Do I have hot sauce on my cheek or something?”
Ethan grinned, the expression turning her insides liquid and warm, but the grin gradually faded as his eyes fixed on her mouth. “Or something,” he said, the words deep and husky. Then he shook his head and smiled. “So you won’t talk about Billy. Tell me about your foster father.”
“Todd?”
“Sure. His partner said he adopted the two of you off the books.”
“At first. After a few months, we had to make it official so I could go to school and we could get on his insurance.”
“Must have been tough to do.”
“Not so much.” She shifted in her seat, unused to having to discuss her past. “Todd’s position helped. He knew a lot of people in social services and in the court system. I’d given him a fake last name—Simmons—when we first met him, so we stuck with that story.”
“But there had to be things like social security numbers, birth records . . .”
Lucy shrugged off his comment, though the old pain of denying her whole life ate away at her. “We lied a lot. I told them I didn’t know where I’d been born, didn’t know my social. I was only fifteen, so I didn’t have a driver’s license or anything. All the lies, the denials, being put back a grade so I could pretend I’d never been to a proper school—it was all worth it to see Karen with Timmy. She loved him. He was finally safe.”
“And you?” The intensity of the velvet darkness of his voice caught her attention, pulled her from her memories.
“What about me?”
“Tim was a kid. He didn’t understand the cost. He got a safe, comfortable home with people who loved and cared for him. What did you get?”
“The same.”
“You got that for him. What about for yourself?” When she didn’t answer, he changed tacks. “They were good to you, Todd and Karen?”
“They were the best. When Karen died, I thought . . .Karen had been the driving force behind the adoption. She’d wanted a baby so badly, and Timmy clung to her right away.”
“You thought once she died, Todd would kick you out?”
“No!” But she had. She went hot with shame, cold with fear all over again.
“Okay.” He quirked a gentle smile at her. “It would have been natural if you had, you know.”
“I’ve had plenty of therapy. I know it was natural.” She shrugged. “So, yeah. I did worry that we would be out on the streets. But I was old enough to support us. Twenty. I told Todd he didn’t need to take care of us, that I would quit college and get a job.”
“He had other plans.”
“Oh, yeah.” She remembered how offended Todd had been. “He said we were his kids, and a man didn’t abandon his kids.”
“He was right.” Ethan pushed away his empty basket of chicken wings and rose. “I’m going to wash up before we look through the information you have. Don’t want to get hot sauce all over your research.”
As he walked away, Lucy guzzled her soda and tried not to stare. Ethan Donovan looked as good going as he did coming, and he had a smile that could make a woman forget her entire purpose. He also had a way of getting her to talk about things she shouldn’t, of tugging on her emotions. And she couldn’t afford that. Not now. She wiped her hands with the little towelette that had come with the wings and began once again to make notes.
• • •
ETHAN STARED AT his reflection in the cracked and spotted bathroom mirror. He needed to get hold of himself. He didn’t understand his reaction to Lucy. He’d met her only two days before, and in that time he’d taken her to lunch twice, and he planned to be at her house for dinner that evening. Of course, she hadn’t invited him, her brother had, but still. He couldn’t remember sitting down to so many meals with a woman since his marriage.
On the other hand, watching her eat those chicken wings accounted for a lot. The way her delicate fingers had pulled the meat from the bones, then slid each morsel between plump lips, had made him uncomfortable in more ways than one. And the sight of those lips sucking the last bits from both bones and fingers . . .
Christ. This wasn’t a date. Something was coming—his every instinct screamed it—and she was at the heart. If nothing else, her reaction to the sheriff convinced him of that. She’d turned pale, and her features had gone slack, as if the essence of woman had simply faded out from inside her skin. She’d recovered nicely, but whatever lay between her and Pike had deep and disturbing roots, and it looked like it was still growing, sending out poisonous tendrils. Still, Pike had been a kid when Lucy’s mother had been murdered, so perhaps he should ignore the antagonism between them and assume it was irrelevant to her investigation and his own.
After splashing water on his face to clear his head, Ethan returned to the table. Charlene had removed the baskets, and Lucy’s papers were spread over the surface in small piles. He picked up one pile, leaned back in the booth, and began to read. Within minutes, he found the first clue.
“Check it out. Under the PTA news.” He passed the page over the table. A small blurb mentioned that the grade school would be instituting a children’s fingerprinting program on the suggestion of new PTA member Cecile Sadler, whose daughter had just entered the first grade. Ms. Sadler had gotten the idea from the schools in her hometown of Palo Pinto.
“Do you know where that is?” Lucy’s eyes were shining, and her whole body vibrated with excitement.
“Nope. But let me pay for lunch and we can go find out.” He winked. “Want to stop by the library and ask Eulie for a Texas map?”
“Not hardly.” Lucy flashed him a conspiratorial smile, and he drank the last of his coffee to quench a sudden thirst. He’d just laid cash on the table when his cell rang. He ignored it.
“Shouldn’t you answer that?”
“It can wait. I’m off duty.” But no sooner had the call gone to voice mail than the phone began to ring again. The display showed the station’s number. “Dammit.”
“Go ahead. You forget, I’ve lived law enforcement almost twenty years. If you have to go, Tim can pick me up.”
“Thanks.” He didn’t like leaving her at Rosalita’s, especially after the incident with the sheriff, but the phone buzzed insistently, reminding him of his duty. He touched the back of Lucy’s hand lightly before he stood and walked outside to take the call.
“Thank God I found you,” Marge said when he answered. “TJ and Keith are out at Miller’s Lake. A couple of kids were out grubbing around, and they found a body.”
“A what?”
“You heard me. A body. Keith says she was murdered. And not long ago. Maybe yesterday.”
“Fuck. Okay. Tell Keith I want a twenty-foot perimeter, unless he thinks it needs to be even bigger. Outside that, they can start looking for evidence once the kids are gone, but inside nothing gets touched. And I mean touched, Marge. Call Scott and have him pick up the kids and bring them to the station. I don’t want them scared more than necessary, but I want them separated. Call the parents and get them over to the station, too. Keith’s already called Bobby O?” Bob O’Reilly served as medical examiner for all of Adams County. The hospital—and the morgue—were in the county seat at Prattville, thirty-five miles away, but O’Reilly himself could be anywhere.
“It’s his day off. He was fishing over to Bardwell Lake, but I got hold of him because I didn’t think you’d want an assistant on this one. He’ll be a while, but he’s on the way.”
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