Perfect Touch

by Elizabeth Lowell

  “This is Mr. Satler of the Jackson Gazette. I would like to talk with you about the unfortunate death of—”

  She hit the delete button. Noting that the charge was low, she plugged the phone in before she opened another carton. This one held Custer’s field studies. Though she longed to spread them out on her bed and see them in good light, she didn’t. She folded the box top and put the carton aside. Once she got started on the paintings themselves, she wouldn’t surface for weeks.

  When will we get the rest of them from Fish Camp?

  The thought of all those Custer paintings in such an insecure storage place haunted her.

  They lasted there for decades. They’ll hold until Jay and I pick them up tomorrow.

  Jay’s phone buzzed in his pocket. Cursing under his breath, he hauled it out and got ready to ignore one more message from the media. Then he saw the number and punched the answer button.

  “What’s up, Reg?”

  “Barton says the ranch will pay me to pick him up. Since you’re within reach, I thought I’d ask the man who signs the checks.”

  “My sweet, sainted brother can pay for any ride he can afford.”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  “Thanks for checking. I owe you.”

  “No, you don’t. This is my way of thanking your sweet, sainted brother for grabbing my thigh—way up—every time the chopper changed course or altitude.”

  “He groped you with the sheriff aboard?”

  “Not quite groping, but enough that I’ll enjoy leaving him stranded. Thanks, Jay. You’re one of the good guys.”

  “Because I don’t grope my pilot?”

  “That, too. I’ve had three requests for a flyby of Fish Camp. I turned them down.”

  “Media?”

  “Yes.”

  “Take them for a ride,” Jay said. “Charge them double. Triple. Then go buy something you’ve wanted but couldn’t afford.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yeah. Someone’s going to make a potful from the city boys and girls. Might as well be someone I like.”

  “Thanks, Jay. You really are one of the good ones.”

  “So are you.”

  He punched out and pocketed his phone. I like hearing a smile in Reg’s voice again. Her ex is a real dick. Thank God there weren’t any kids to rip up.

  Jay went to his horse and swung up to the saddle, then wove through the scattered range cattle, looking for any that might need a round with his medical kit. He missed Amble’s easy gait and on-your-toes personality, but the big, rawboned bay mare he was riding had good cow sense and an amiable nature. Very quickly the beef cattle in the area had been looked over and he was on his way back to the ranch.

  And Sara.

  Ease down, cowboy, he told himself. You know there’s nothing you can do to keep her here, any more than you could pray your mother better. Life is what it is and fair has nothing to do with it.

  As if to underline the point, his phone vibrated again.

  “Judas Priest, you’d think aliens had landed here,” he muttered, dragging out his phone.

  It was Barton.

  Sighing, Jay took the call. Before he could say a word, Barton was talking.

  “The pilot said she was booked for the next three days.”

  “Hire someone else,” Jay said. “There are a lot of helo operations between Jackson and Yellowstone.”

  “Do you know what a helicopter costs?” Barton asked in rising tones.

  “To the penny. If you don’t want to pay, catch a ride with the deputies.”

  “They laughed at my clothes.”

  “Lose the cream jacket and you’ll do fine.”

  “But—”

  Jay punched out.

  Even as he told himself that he should be patient with his younger brother, part of Jay was just plain fed to the teeth with the spoiled child’s demands. And yet, Jay’s conscience still nagged.

  It’s not Barton’s fault he’s Liza’s son.

  So what’s Liza’s excuse? Was she born to lousy parents? And what’s her parents’ excuse? They were born to lousy parents? And so on and on all the way back to the Garden of Eden?

  Where does the buck stop?

  Look at Sara. Nothing she’s said makes me believe she had a soft childhood, yet she pitches in and doesn’t whine about life.

  Reg was left holding the filthy end of more than one stick, but she’s not complaining about how unfair life is.

  I’ve had a gut full of excuses, Barton’s most of all.

  Jay trotted the mare back to the corral where the horses that would be ridden the next day were kept. Automatically he cared for the mare, then turned her loose in the corral and carried the tack to the barn before he headed to the house.

  Sara is here.

  He gave up trying to talk himself out of caring. Life was unexpected. Death was the same and utterly final. Sara was here and he would enjoy her for as long as it lasted. If it got under Henry’s skin, he could take his meals in the bunkhouse the way he had when Liza lived on the ranch.

  Within minutes, Jay was climbing the stairs to Sara’s room. The door was ajar, so he pushed it open. She was sitting cross-legged on the bed, reading one of the papers from the carton open beside her. Other papers fanned across the bed in a pattern only she could make sense of.

  “Can I help?” he asked.

  “You know anything about Custer’s shorthand?”

  “As in old-fashioned bound steno notebooks?”

  She picked up a paper. “As in ‘GP. G’s bad.’”

  Jay held out his hand. Without hesitation, she turned over the paper. Frowning, he stared at the enigmatic letters. The date put the notes in the last months of his mother’s long illness.

  “Does GP appear in other papers?” he asked.

  “Frequently. Often preceded by ‘GDJD!!!’”

  Jay closed his eyes, remembering his mother. Tall, dark, striking, with a laugh that lit up the world. Warm and gentle, yet demanding good manners and better grades, smiling as she checked his cheek for the stubble only a kid on the roller coaster of early puberty would long for.

  He missed her still, an ache that would never leave because it had become a part of him.

  “Let me see some more from around this date,” he said, “and some from years earlier, if you have any.”

  Sara reached for one of the piles she had clipped together. “These are from before you were born to about five years after.”

  “How do you know when I was born?”

  “It’s in the papers you’re holding.”

  He read through the papers quickly, efficiently, letting the words ignite memories long buried beneath passing years. He paused for the words that announced his birth. “‘GDJD over moon. LGDJD at last.’” He laughed. “That one is easy enough. JD was happy that they finally had a child.”

  “Really?” She leaned forward until she could read over his arm. “I didn’t see that.” She looked at the paper, frowned, and looked at Jay. “Translation, please.”

  “Remember that JD and Custer fought a lot.”

  She nodded.

  “As a kid I often wondered why Custer muttered ‘GDJD’ all the time. I asked Mom what it meant and she laughed. She said Custer was calling on God to help him with JD.”

  “As in God damning JD?” Sara asked wryly.

  “Like I said, they fought like two dogs over a bone, except that nobody ever figured out what the bone was.”

  “So LGDJD is . . . ?”

  “Little GDJD.”

  “No wonder Custer used shorthand. So your mom and dad had trouble having children?”

  “They never talked about it. From some of the things JD let drop, I figured that the problem was on her side. The fact that Barton was born so quick cinched it.”

  “Yet still Liza and JD had only one child,” Sara said.

  “It was the only thing Liza and JD argued about. He wanted more. She didn’t.”

  “She’d
already landed him. What did she need with more kids?” Sara heard her own words and winced. “That sounded awful. What I mean is—”

  “You nailed it the first time,” Jay said over her words. “She had a rich man bagged, tagged, and mounted on the bedroom wall. Now it was time for her to enjoy the results of all her hard work.”

  The ice and distance in his voice sent a chill down Sara’s back. “You really don’t like her at all, do you?”

  “JD did. That’s all that mattered.”

  “Was she a good wife to him?”

  “She never got caught with another man, if that’s what you mean. No surprise, really. She didn’t have much use for the male of the species.”

  “Or the female, either,” Sara said.

  “Point to the pretty lady. All Liza ever needed was money and admirers. But that won’t help us with these papers. Move over, would you?”

  She scooted to the side, making room for him on the old double bed. Then she read over his arm, trying to see what he did with the papers covered with caricatures and a sprawling kind of writing revealing Custer’s equally sprawling thoughts.

  “So G is God,” she said.

  “Depends on the context. G also stands for Ginny, my mother, Virginia. Custer used to call her Saint Ginny for living with JD.”

  “He said that in front of your father?”

  “Repeatedly, now that you mention it.” He shook his head. “The things I have stored in my memory that I didn’t know. G’mom, Mother’s mother, called Custer and JD Mutt and Jeff. It fit. Custer certainly could have come from an insane asylum. JD was a lot smarter than Jeff, except when he lost his temper. Then he was as dumb as any man.”

  Sara picked up her tablet and started entering in notes. “So SG can mean Saint Ginny. Any idea about GP?”

  “Could be Gone Painting.”

  “Beats Going Postal, which was my best guess.”

  Jay smiled. “I think your slang is years out of date.”

  “Details.” She leaned over his arm. “What’s this about buying a kid?”

  “Mother wanted to adopt. JD flatly refused. There’s an old Vermilion saying, so old that it must have come over on the boat with the first Vermilions. ‘Better one chicken than ten cuckoos.’”

  “Meaning?”

  “Better one child of your own blood than ten of another man’s get.”

  “Good old patriarchy,” she said. “Blood, not the child, is what matters.”

  “When property is tied to blood,” he said, reaching for another paper, “things get real sticky. Apparently my great-great-great-grandfather found that two of his five children weren’t actually his.”

  “Oops.”

  “He was furious. He wrote the first Vermilion will. Disowned his wife and her two kids. Every Vermilion male after that put the ‘only blood inherits’ clause into their wills. Of course, until genetic testing, no one was really sure either way.”

  “Were you tested?”

  “Before I inherited, yes.”

  “Harsh,” she said. “So a child only counts when it’s your blood. Was JD into chastity belts?”

  “Mom would have put it on him.”

  Sara laughed. “I would have liked your mother.”

  “She would have loved you. She always wanted a daughter to teach how to barrel race and cook and sing the old songs about love and broken hearts and death.”

  “Lots of new songs have those themes.”

  “People don’t change much,” he said. “That’s the good and the bad news in one.”

  “I take it you don’t believe in the perfectibility of man.”

  “If it could be done, it would have been done. It hasn’t, so it can’t.” He set another paper down.

  “No wonder you don’t like cities,” she said, reading over his shoulder. “People in cities tend to have a lot of rules designed to make everyone better than they would be otherwise.”

  “How’s that working out?”

  She laughed. “About like you’d expect.”

  “If it works at all, it’s a tribute to the people, not to the rules. I’ve been in places where the only rule was survival. There were good people in those places. Rules had nothing to do with it.”

  “Did JD think like that?”

  “No. Mom was the pragmatist. JD was JD. He was educated, but he wasn’t bookish. Yet he read Mother poetry every day as she lay dying.”

  “Just when I think I understand the man,” Sara grumbled, “I discover something that throws everything out the window.”

  Smiling, Jay stole a kiss. “My parents were people, sweetheart. They made mistakes, learned from them, fought, laughed, cried, made love—the whole human experience. Just because they were my parents didn’t mean that they lived only for me. They had lives separate from their child. I didn’t see it that way at the time, but that doesn’t make it any less true.”

  Sara thought about her own parents, just people living each day as it came, coping as best they could.

  Like her.

  Except I made choices my mother never could, because the single choice of marrying a poor dairy farmer left her with too few choices after that.

  Good for me. Now, am I going to let her choices continue to rule my life?

  Motionless, Sara stared at the papers she was holding without seeing them, her mind playing Ping-Pong with the subject of choices.

  “Yo?” Jay tugged gently at the papers in her hand. “Anybody home?”

  “Sorry,” she said absently, releasing the papers. “I was thinking.”

  “Nothing happy, from your expression.”

  “Not really unhappy, either. Just unexpected.”

  He stood and pulled her up with him. Before she could get her balance, he fitted her to his body and kissed her like she was water in the middle of a desert. By the time he lifted his head, she was clinging to him, taking from him, giving him her breath and her hunger.

  “Come on,” he said huskily. “Enough poking around in the past. It’s been a long day. I don’t know about you, but I’d like to take a nap before dinner.”

  “A nap?” She smiled. “I never heard it called that.”

  “Wait until you hear me snore.”

  “Remember how you didn’t want your ribs counted?”

  “Still don’t.”

  “Then don’t snore.”

  Sara didn’t know when she had fallen asleep. She only knew that Jay’s arms and warm male scent were wrapped around her. Or she was wrapped around him. Maybe they were just like the sheets, tangled together and warm. She was boneless, sated, utterly relaxed in the aftermath of slow, intense loving. Because she could, she licked the bulge of his bicep, enjoying the heat and salt on his skin.

  Then she realized that his bicep was flexed, hard, as if his hand was fisted.

  “Jay?”

  “Go back to sleep, sweetheart. It’s at least an hour until dinner.”

  “Is something else wrong?”

  He knew she meant if anything other than the murders was bothering him. He hesitated, then showed her the text message that had just come in on his phone from Liza.

  URGENT. MEET ME AT ROTH’S OUTSIDE JACKSON TOMORROW 9AM. YOU WANT TO HEAR WHAT I HAVE TO SAY BEFORE YOUR LAWYER DOES. BRING YOUR ‘GUEST.’

  “I thought the art community gossiped more than anyone else,” Sara said. “Looks like the Wyoming grapevine is faster. Of course, Liza had an inside source. Is Barton getting even with you for the helicopter?”

  Jay flicked the phone off and set it on the end table. “I’ll know tomorrow.”

  “We’ll know. She included me in the command performance.”

  “That doesn’t mean I have to expose you to more of her poisonous tongue. Her choice of the meeting place tells me it’s going to be a bad one.”

  “Why?”

  “Roth’s is a roadhouse Custer used to tear up with JD on a regular basis. The kind of place someone with Liza’s mouth belongs in, quite frankly.”

  “I�
�m a big girl,” Sara said. “I can do bitch with the best of them. But why the text? Why didn’t she just call you?”

  “She didn’t want to hear what I had to say.”

  “That’s what lawyers are for. Oh, right, now that she’s paying, she may be doing a lot more of the legwork herself.”

  He smiled rather grimly. “A minimum of two thousand dollars a week for her lawyers will cut into her pocket change.”

  “Two big ones per week? Whew. No wonder she’s doing the meeting on her own.”

  Jay stretched, trying to release some of the tension Liza’s text had caused.

  Surprisingly strong fingers began massaging his shoulders as Sara said, “I could hate Liza just for the grief she causes you.”

  “Don’t waste your energy,” he said, flexing and turning beneath her probing fingers.

  “Face down, soldier.”

  She worked her way down his back, admiring the line of his spine and the muscular bunch of his buttocks. Slowly his body loosened until she no longer felt like she was massaging rock. Smiling, she whispered a finger down his spine to the coccyx, then gently bit one of his cheeks.

  “What was that for?”

  “Just keeping you awake,” she said.

  He moved and suddenly she was on her back, knees spread, and he was teasing her so hotly that she could barely ask a question.

  “What—about dinner?” she managed.

  “In the flyover states, we eat dessert first.”

  CHAPTER 19

  ROTH’S 24-HOUR ROADHOUSE was crammed with hot-rod remnants, the debris of a hundred races gone wrong, pieces recovered and polished to a hard shine. A tangle of chromed exhaust pipes hung like a mass of silver snakes over the register, brilliant in the reflected light of morning. The waitresses were dressed like last night’s party. Unlike the chromed wreckage, the daylight didn’t do the people any favors. Televisions featuring various sports blared from every corner. Only the early—or late—drinkers at the long bar watched them.

  “I bet there’s a card room or two in the back,” Sara said, fiddling with her coffee mug with one hand. The other was held by Jay.

  “You win,” he said.

  “Are they legal?”

  From the back of the main dining room came the clack of pool balls and the loud cursing of the loser. From the sound of her voice, she hadn’t been home since yesterday.