Getting Caught in the Rain

by Barron, Melinda

  “Don’t,” he said.

  Not that she needed his directive. She hadn’t made a move toward the doorway, even after she’d announced her intentions to leave.

  Rachel took a tentative step toward him. He slumped forward in the chair and put his head in his hands. His shoulders moved ever so slightly, and she knew he was crying. And who could blame him? Agatha had lived with Dex and his parents for as long as Rachel could remember. When his parents had moved to Florida when Dex was twenty, Agatha had taken over as a parent, being there for everything that Dex needed.

  She took another step, and then another until she was standing right in front of him. She reached her hand out in an effort to touch him, to try and take away his pain. But she pulled it back, wondering if he would welcome her touch.

  Then from out of the blue he spread his legs, grabbed her by her waist and pulled her toward him. He put his head between her breasts as he wrapped his arms around her and held her tight. The slight movement of his shoulders was now almost like an earthquake, and his sobs filled the room.

  Rachel kept one hand on his shoulder and another on his head, gently running her fingers through his hair. He didn’t say a word, just continued to sob. She wanted to offer words of comfort, say something soothing, and probably stupid, like how Agatha had lived a long life and she’d loved him with all her heart. That wouldn’t do any good, she knew. She’d heard those words from friends of her parents when her father had passed away when she was fifteen years old.

  The only words of comfort she’d heard were from Agatha. The memory of it brought out the tears she’d been trying to hold back. She remembered that day as if it were yesterday. After the funeral she’d hid from everyone she could find, hiding not in her house but in the Bales’ house next door, sitting in Dex’s closet and crying her eyes out.

  Agatha had sat on the floor just outside the closet’s sliding door. At first she hadn’t said anything, just sitting there with her knitting in her hands, the needles clacking as Rachel had cried.

  “It’s okay to feel sad,” Agatha had said after a while. “It takes time to adjust to the loss of a person you love.”

  Rachel had turned away from her and stared at the wall, with Dex’s shoes and dirty jeans scattered around her.

  “Allow yourself to mourn, and don’t let anyone tell you the amount of time that you need,” Agatha had said. “That is up to you. But there is one thing you can’t do, and that is allow yourself to die with him. You are a vibrant, wonderful girl who will grow into a caring, wonderful woman. Everything that happens to you on your journey will mold you. It can make you better, or it can turn you bitter. Bitter is never good.”

  At the time, Rachel had listened, but she hadn’t really thought Agatha knew how she was feeling. That realization came years later, when she’d learned that Agatha had lost her mother when she was barely ten years old.

  Thinking about it now, she wished she had words of wisdom to impart to Dex.

  “I have to call my parents,” he said, when he finally quit crying, or at least she thought he had. He hadn’t let go of her, and she had made no movement away from him. He seemed to still be sniffling a little. “Dad will want to know that his sister is dead.”

  “You should call them before you meet with the police,” she said. “You might not have all the information they will want to know, but it will give them time to make travel arrangements. I’m sure your father is Agatha’s executor.”

  “Actually I am,” he said. “She wanted someone who lived near her.”

  “She wasn’t that old, was she?” Rachel tried to take a step back, but Dex held her close.

  “She was seven years older than Dad, and he’s sixty-five now,” Dex said. “She had heart troubles, you know.”

  “Yes, I had lunch with her once a week, and we talked about it.”

  Dex’s hold on her loosened and he lifted his gaze up to hers. “You did? She never told me that.”

  “We’d go for Thai food, either Wednesdays or Thursdays,” Rachel said. “She’d never let me pay. I told her once I was going to stop going if she didn’t let me treat once in a while. Her answer was a giggle and a promise that she would let me pay one day, but she never did. When I tried, she’d stare me down.”

  Dex laughed. “I’m going to miss that stare. I had dinner with her once a week, too, usually Friday or Saturday night. She never let me pay, either.”

  Rachel wanted to ask what Dex’s girlfriend thought about him having a standing date with his aunt on the weekend. Did she get angry about giving up a date night? Did Agatha like her? Agatha had never mentioned Carrie to Rachel. Rachel wished that she had, that at some point during their weekly dinners, Agatha had said, “Oh, by the way, Dex is dating someone.” And she could have added that she was comfortable in Dex’s house, that she cooked meals there and cleaned.

  Maybe Agatha had not wanted to hurt her feelings.

  “We didn’t eat Thai food,” Dex said. “We never ate at the same place. She wanted pizza, or Italian, or even Sushi. The few times I mentioned Thai food she told me it wasn’t her favorite.”

  “Little liar,” Rachel said with a laugh.

  “She knew how to play us,” Dex said. He finally let go of her and pushed the chair back. He went to the cabinet, took down a glass and filled it at the tap. He drank it in one fell swoop, and then refilled it. “You want something to drink? We have lemonade, beer, wine.”

  “I have to drive back into town, so no alcohol. Maybe some lemonade.”

  She watched as he poured her a glass. He set it on the table, then walked to the back door. “This wasn’t the way I expected this year to start.”

  “Me, either,” she said.

  There was a silence, and then he sighed. “Let’s eat a big bowl of caviar, and then I’ll call my parents. I feel like I need alcohol before I call my dad, but I also think it wouldn’t be a good thing to see the cops half-drunk.”

  Rachel looked around the kitchen. She remembered this place very well from when she and Dex were dating. She went to the cabinet and took down two bowls. After she filled them at the stove, she put a spoon in each one and set them on the table.

  While they ate their caviar he said, “Come with me to see my parents.”

  His words shocked her. She had to admit she wanted to. She wanted to support him, and, truthfully, she wanted to do it for Agatha, too. Agatha had always been there for her. Rachel knew she should be there for Agatha’s final chapter.

  “Okay,” she said. It was on the tip of her tongue to ask how Carrie would feel about Rachel going with him, or if he should ask his current girlfriend to go. But then she decided she wasn’t going to question him. She wanted to be with him at this time.

  “Call your parents,” she said. “Then get dressed and we’ll go.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said, with a mock salute. He took a step away from the door, and then said, “I don’t have my phone. And I don’t have a landline anymore.”

  She handed him her phone, and then said, “Where do you think you lost your phone?”

  “Not sure,” he said. “We ate dinner out, and then I came home. I’ll call the restaurant later and see if it’s there. In the meantime we need to get cracking. I told Officer Sterling we’d be there by three.”

  Sterling. So that was his name, or one of them anyway. She hadn’t even asked, she’d been so thrown off guard by him showing up on her doorstep.

  After she unlocked the phone, she watched Dex punch in a number.

  “I’m shocked you remember your parents’ number,” she said. “I have to just hit a name to call someone.”

  He just laughed. “I’m old school in some ways, you know that.”

  Yes, she did know that, and some of the ways that he was old school made her shiver with the memory.

  He had moved into the other room, and she heard him greet his father and say, “The new year hasn’t started out so good, Dad.”

  That, Rachel thought, was an understat
ement.

  Chapter 2

  The cab of the truck was silent except for road noises until Dex turned onto the main highway and headed toward Amarillo.

  “How’s your business going?” he asked, his voice tight.

  Rachel knew he had other things on his mind, and she wondered if he was trying to distract her, or himself, by bringing up a subject you generally did when you met someone you hadn’t seen in a while, and you were struggling to find a topic of conversation.

  “Fine,” she said. “Sometimes it’s hard going through someone’s house, knowing they’re facing financial difficulties, or have just died, but…” She took a deep breath. “Damn, I shouldn’t have said that.”

  Dex chuckled. It sounded a little forced, and she wondered if he was trying to make her feel better for putting her foot in her mouth and bringing up death, when he’d been trying to distract them both.

  “You run an auction house that does estate sales,” he said. “I imagine most of the people you deal with are relatives of people who have just died. It’s okay to say it.”

  “I do deal with death a lot, but it’s generally after the person’s been dead for at least six months,” she said. “The family has gone through it all, they’ve generally come to terms with the fact that their kin has died, and now it’s the hard part of disposing of the person’s belongings and… I’m digging a hole for myself. We need to change the topic. Have you sold any buffalo lately?”

  “Bison, darling, bison,” Dex said. “Bison live in North America, and buffalo live in Africa and Asia.”

  “Everyone calls them buffalo,” she said. “And your place is called Buffalo Gap. So are you selling bison, or buffalo?”

  “You got me there,” he said. “I thought Bison Gap sounded weird.”

  “You hadn’t named it the last time I was out there.” And with that statement she’d brought up the elephant in the room. They hadn’t seen each other in three years. At one point she’d thought they would get married, but they just sort of drifted apart. They hadn’t had a big fight, or gone with someone else and dumped the other. They’d just sort of drifted apart after he’d bought his farm. He’d always seemed busy, and that was about the time she’d opened her own business, and it was the same with her.

  Thinking back, she wasn’t even sure which one of them stopped calling the other. When Agatha had brought it up once, Rachel had just told her that if it was meant to be, they would find a way to work through their differences. Agatha had told her to ‘get the lead out’, and call Dex, but somehow, Rachel had never found the time.

  She wondered if Agatha had made the same plea to her nephew. If she had, it had fallen on deaf ears, just as it had with Rachel.

  Not that it mattered anymore. Dex had Carrie, although she and Tommy had been gone when Dex and Rachel had left the farm. Her car was there, along with Rachel’s, but the second truck that had been parked there, that she assumed was Tommy’s, was missing. Of course she assumed the car belonged to Carrie. Maybe it was Dex’s vehicle. Maybe he had a car and a truck.

  “Is the question too difficult?”

  Rachel, who had been looking out the side window at the passing fields, jerked her head toward him. “What?”

  “Did I overstep my bounds?” he asked, and she wondered once again if he were trying to take his mind off what was about to happen.

  “In what way?” she asked. Obviously she had missed something while she’d been gathering wool and staring out the window.

  “I asked if you’d ever found something illegal while you were getting ready for an auction,” he said. “Or anything—sexual.”

  “Well, there’s a question,” Rachel said. “And the answer is yes.”

  “Illegal? Or sexual?”

  “Both,” Rachel said. “All the items were gathered up and given to the family. I don’t want someone opening a drawer and finding a vibrator.”

  “They might pay extra for it,” he said.

  Rachel laughed so hard she started hiccupping, and then she felt guilty about enjoying the conversation.

  “We should respect the situation,” she finally said.

  “Oh please, Aunt Agatha is sitting in the back seat laughing with us.” He glanced at her for a second before turning his attention back to the road. “You know that, right? She loved a good joke, and didn’t take offense at anything off color.”

  “You’re right,” she said. “It still feels weird.” In an effort to change the topic of conversation she said, “Where are we meeting the cops?”

  “At Agatha’s,” he said. “He wants me to look around and see if anything is out of sorts. There was no forced entry, he said. The TV’s there, and so is the computer, so they don’t think there was any foul play.”

  “Okay,” she said. “I was in there a few times when I picked her up for lunch. Mostly she’d be outside waiting for me. Or she’d hear me drive up and rush out the door.”

  “Me, too,” he said. “That’s sort of odd when you think about it. I asked her once if everything was okay inside, if I needed to fix anything or change a light bulb. She always said things were fine. I wondered if she had a workman that came by and did things for her, and if so, why she wouldn’t let me help her.”

  “Because she was Agatha,” Rachel said. “She would never call on someone to help her, not even when we were kids.”

  “You’re right,” he said. “I was in there last night, though, because I showed up early with a bottle of champagne. We drank a glass, and then went to dinner. When I left, she said she was tired and ready to go to bed.”

  “Don’t feel guilty,” she said.

  “I didn’t say I was.” The defensive tone of his voice told her that was exactly what he’d been thinking, that if he’d stayed longer perhaps he would have been able to call the ambulance and save her.

  “I can hear it in your voice,” she said. “You know as well as I do that if it’s your time, it’s your time.”

  “I fucking hate that!”

  Rachel reeled back at his outburst. She looked at him, where his hand had tightened on the wheel.

  “That was wrong of me,” he said, his words rushed. “I shouldn’t have lost my temper. Forgive me. And don’t say it’s all right. It’s not.”

  “You’re forgiven,” she said. She glanced at his hands again. He was trembling just a bit, whether it was from anger or just the stress of the situation, she didn’t know. “You want me to drive?”

  At first, she thought he wouldn’t answer. They’d already made the turn at Canyon and were on the Interstate now, with about twenty minutes left in the journey. He didn’t answer her, but at the next exit he got off the highway and parked the truck on the side of the road.

  “That might be a good idea,” he said. “If Agatha was here right now she’d be slapping me upside the head and telling me to snap out of it.”

  Rachel hooked her thumb over her shoulder and pointed to the back of the extended cab. “I thought she was back there listening to you talk about vibrators.”

  They both burst into laughter. As they laughed, Rachel couldn’t help but think how much she’d missed being with Dex. They’d bantered with each other all their lives, the talk turning dirty as they’d started to date during their senior year.

  But in all their time together, she’d never heard Dex blow up like he just did. She had either said something really dumb, or his emotions about Agatha’s death were pushed to the surface by what she’d said.

  He’d loosened his grip on the steering wheel, which let her know he was getting control of himself. “I need to call the restaurant to see if they have my phone. Can you do that for me? I’ll keep driving.” He named off a local restaurant that specialized in barbeque. Then he put the truck in gear and headed for the on ramp.

  Rachel surfed the web and found the phone number for the restaurant. Once she’d confirmed they had his phone she told them they’d be by later that afternoon to pick it up.

  “Of all the nights to los
e my phone,” he said after she’d hung up.

  She wasn’t sure how to respond to that, so she kept her mouth closed as he drove into the city limits and made his way toward the college campus. Agatha had lived not far from there in a cottage-style house that had been built about the same year she’d been born. It was small, with two bedrooms and one bath. Right now there was a police unit sitting in front of it.

  As Dex pulled into the driveway, the officers exited the vehicle.

  “I’m Paul Sterling, and this is Josh Becker,” the unsmiling officer said. Dex shook their hands, and, to Rachel’s surprise they shook hers, too. Paul Sterling turned to Dex. “You have a key?”

  “I do.” Dex led the way to the house. He opened the door and the men stepped aside so that Rachel was the first one inside. She shivered as she crossed into the living room, which was spotless. That in itself wasn’t surprising. What was surprising was the absolutely enormous flat-screen TV mounted to the wall. It seemed so out of character for Agatha, who loved nothing more than reading a book or knitting.

  Rachel looked around the room. There was no sign of her basket of yarn, or whatever project she’d been working on.

  “Something wrong?” Officer Sterling asked.

  “No,” Rachel said. “It’s just sort of weird to be in here, knowing Agatha will never be back.” She didn’t mention the fact that Agatha’s knitting was missing. Rachel hadn’t been in the house in ages. For all she knew Agatha had set up the second bedroom as a den of sorts. But if she’d done that, she would have put the TV in there, too.

  “Look around and see if anything is missing,” Officer Becker said. “After that we’ll sign off on things. Her doctor said he told her at her last appointment that her heart condition was worsening. He suggested surgery. She declined.”

  “That sounds like Agatha,” Dex said. “She didn’t mention it to me.”

  “Or me,” Rachel said.

  There was a pregnant pause before Sterling said, “You should get started.”

  It didn’t take long to make an inspection. Dex said nothing was missing, but Rachel noticed once again that Agatha’s knitting was nowhere to be seen. But she didn’t mention it to the policemen. She would tell Dex about it later, but right now she didn’t want to say anything.