The Salt Maiden (Leisure Romantic Suspense)

by Colleen Thompson

  With a start Dana recognized the small brown eyes and the nose, which clued her in that she had just met the she-male version of this woman at the Broken Spur. The one with the Clark Kent glasses, the gray hair, and what had turned out to be one foul mouth. There was no question that the two must be related, but talk about flip sides of the same coin.

  “We’re out of paper clips again, Jay. How on earth do people expect a tax office to run without a decent supply budget—Oh.” Her expression closed as she noticed Dana. “You must be that other Vanover girl that Jay said would be coming.”

  “Dana Vanover.” Smiling, she offered her hand, ridiculously eager to win over one person in this county. Especially someone clever enough to manage that feat of hairstyle engineering without a salon for miles around. Dana’s own strategically messy blond hair had long since fallen limp around her shoulders.

  Estelle didn’t take her hand. “Miss Vanover?”

  “Actually, it’s Doctor, but Dana’s fine,” she said.

  “Around here, Dr. Vanover, we’re not so fast and loose with first-name privileges. I’m Mrs. Hooks, the county tax collector.”

  “And the judge’s wife?”

  “I am.”

  All hope of an ally fizzled. For all Dana knew, Abe Hooks had already phoned the woman since their run-in. Or perhaps in a town this small, gossip traveled by osmosis.

  “Do you…do you have a sister?” Dana asked, grasping at one last straw.

  The woman nodded stiffly and excused herself, but not before giving Eversole a look as pointed as her husband’s. As she closed the door behind her, Dana noticed that her right foot dragged.

  “Sore subject.” Eversole tossed his hat onto the desktop, where a small mushroom cloud of dust rose. “They may’ve shared a womb once, but Estelle and Dorothy haven’t spoken for a lot of years.”

  The two were twins? Stranger and stranger…“Seems like that could get pretty inconvenient in a town this small.”

  “You’d be surprised at how much feuding we pack in per capita. Same old grudges I remember from when I was a kid.” With that, Eversole gestured toward a straight-backed chair, then went to a peeling, square refrigerator wedged between two four-drawer file cabinets behind his desk. He pulled out a Coke for Dana before filling an aluminum pie pan with water and setting it on the floor beside the dog.

  “There you go, Max,” the sheriff said. As the animal lapped and splashed, his stub tail wagging, Eversole filled a huge plastic cup with more water from the gallon jug.

  Because she liked a man who tended his animal before himself, Dana didn’t ask him where Abe Hooks kept his puppet’s strings. Instead she thanked him for the soda and savored each sweetly carbonated swallow while she watched the way his throat worked as he drained his cup. When he went for a second, her gaze lingered on the fit of his Levi’s as he bent over.

  Not half-bad for a marionette. He definitely had the whole cowboy thing working for him. She ought to take pictures for Lynette, since her partner—who had worked with equines until a fractious filly kicked her hard enough to shatter her knee—followed the pro rodeo riders’ circuit with a devotion most often reserved for cult religions. Dana had always preferred a little more polish in her men, though considering Alex and his damned text message, she had decided that Ben and Jerry were male company enough for the foreseeable future.

  Eversole sat in the wooden roller chair behind a beat-up desk. She lowered herself into the chair he’d indicated to her and took another sip of blessed cola. “The gallery owners who handled Angie’s weavings haven’t heard from her in months. The friends and former lovers I was able to track down haven’t either. She hasn’t contacted our mom to ask for money, and with her car out of commission, I would have expected that for sure. Angie’s never liked to be tied down.”

  Eversole nodded, then pulled a bandanna from the pocket of his jeans, wet it with more water, and wiped some of the dirt from his face before he spoke. “I’ve made some more calls since we last talked, to law enforcement in surrounding counties and over in New Mexico. She hasn’t been arrested in any of them, and no unidentified…uh…remains match her description.”

  “Which means she’s still here,” Dana insisted.

  “Search hasn’t turned up one sign, not even the plane.”

  “It’s a big desert,” she said. “And with all the shadows from those rills and washes I saw on the way here—”

  “They’re arroyos. They drain rainwater off the foothills. Funnel flash floods, too, on occasion.”

  Dana’s heart sank. “Should we search downstream, then? Have there been any hard rains since she vanished?”

  “No, and there is no we in this search, not out on the desert. It’d kill you fast this time of year—kill anybody who doesn’t know what times of day to look and what to stay away from.”

  Though it rankled, she suspected he was right. Her nature experience mostly consisted of jogs along carefully manicured park trails. “I understand, but what if I offered to bring in an investigator and a couple more planes, with private pilots? My family will gladly pay for—”

  The blue eyes narrowed. “While you’ve been sitting back in Houston dreaming up ways to throw around your money, my deputy, a few volunteers, and I have thoroughly searched all around the place where she was living. And I’m telling you we haven’t found a single thing to indicate—”

  “Why don’t you just say it?” Dana asked him. “You want me gone from here, the same as Angie. You’d just as soon forget about my sister and that little girl in Houston.”

  When his jaw clenched, attraction stirred inside her, as annoying as it was disconcerting. But Dana knew relief, too, that she still had the capacity to feel it, though both the man and the timing were nonstarters.

  “I want your sister found as much as you do.” His eyes held a quiet sincerity that looked real.

  But so did the mirages that shimmered in the afternoon heat. Thinking of what the Clark Kent woman had said as she was leaving the café, Dana decided it was time to let him know that she might be a long way from Houston, but she was even farther from being a gullible mouth-breather.

  “Really?” She leaned toward him to ask. “Even if Angie was about to stop this county’s latest salt-dome scheme?”

  Chapter Three

  Throughout history, salt has meant many things to many people. Some cultures considered it wealth, while others believed it an essential component of religious and magical ceremonies. People worshiped it, fought for it, died for it. And in some civilizations it became a weapon, best remembered in ancient Rome’s legendary destruction of Carthage by the salting of its fields.

  So with such a rich and varied history, why shouldn’t the same salt that’s deprived this community of so much for so long end up being its salvation?

  —Miriam Piper-Gold,

  Spokeswoman for Haz-Vestment,

  from the transcripts of community meeting 1A,

  Devil’s Claw, Texas

  Jay had dreaded this moment, had braced himself for the explosion the way he’d once braced himself for incoming mortar fire. Yet in spite of her narrowed green eyes and angry tone, he realized that Dana Vanover—Dr. Vanover, he mentally corrected—had yet to connect the last dots of the ugly picture that had cost him so much sleep of late.

  She still had not allowed herself to understand that while she’d been looking for her sister, he’d been searching for a corpse—and praying like hell his suspicion would prove false. Inconvenient as it would be if Angie Vanover—or Angelina Morningstar, as she had called herself here—turned up dead, he had made a thorough search. Far too thorough to please his new constituents, many of whom had been showing up most evenings to help with the restoration of Uncle R.C.’s charred home. Over the past few nights their collective disapproval had taken on the bitterness of ash.

  “Don’t know if I’d call the waste-disposal plan a ‘scheme,’” he said cautiously. “I’ve looked over the specs, read up on the science. Haz-Ve
stment, Inc.’s got no record of complaints. No accidents, no leaks, and a history of positive community involvement. And Lord knows this county’s about due for a little taste of progress.”

  Jay could have said more but didn’t. He needed to find out what Dana Vanover knew already and who had been her source. For sure it hadn’t been any of those who had complained he was squandering county resources on a troublemaking drifter. All week they’d been reminding him of how his deputy, Wallace Hooks, had found “Angelina” passed out in the middle of the road outside of town. The theory was, she’d gotten plastered because no one would sign that fool petition she’d been shoving under every nose in the county. Jay found it easy to imagine she’d moved on after that humiliation and rejection—if someone hadn’t taken a notion to kill her.

  “Waste disposal? What kind?”

  “Low-level radiation. From what I hear it’s mostly medical waste. About as safe as you can get.”

  Dana was shaking her head. “Angie wouldn’t have been won over by any corporate propaganda. About sixteen, seventeen years back, she was wrapped up in some environmental protest group, picked up a few arrests for being part of human chains across the entrances of public buildings and busy intersections, mostly nuisance stuff.”

  “Nuisance stuff,” he echoed flatly, chilled to the bone by the memory of a lone Iraqi woman whose idea of protest involved strapping explosives beneath her traditional black abaya and begging American soldiers to help the horribly burned child she held in her arms.

  And just that quickly, Jay was back there, breathing the bitter smoke stench of that other desert, his stomach cramping as Angie Vanover’s kohled eyes glared out at him from behind a thick, dark veil. Run, he tried to shout at his men, but the word caught in his throat, and the woman was reaching for the detonator, and—

  “Are you listening?” Dana’s gaze had zeroed in on him. A hunting cat’s eyes, with a patient stillness masking predatory instinct.

  Careful there. His muscles tensing, Jay sucked in a breath to clear his head, reminded himself he was back in the Texas desert and that he had seen Angie Vanover only in mug shots and outdated family photos of an unsmiling girl with long, ash-blond hair.

  “Sorry,” he said. “Little too much sun today, and anyway, it surprised me to hear that your sister was mixed up with radicals.” Slowly and deliberately he drank from a plastic cup as damp with condensation as he was with sweat.

  From outside he heard a car door slam, followed by the rumbling rev of an engine. Estelle leaving, he guessed, though she’d neglected to turn off the building’s air-conditioning.

  “It was mostly in the Northwest,” Dana said, “and they weren’t radicals, just a bunch of college dropouts trying to be heard. I managed to track down one of her old friends from those days. Trent said Angie called a few months back, trying to drum up interest in a lawsuit. He told her he’d left his rabble-rousing days behind him. Sells insurance now in Portland. But Angie barely listened, she was so wound up about some plan she had for getting word out to the media to cover demonstrations.”

  A new chill shook him. Protestors here, and reporters from the outside. What the hell would he do if that happened? If they started digging into his recent history—including the reasons his own police force had declined to welcome him back?

  He shifted in his seat before shrugging. “Rimrock County might be small in terms of population, but we’re big enough to handle a little difference of opinion.”

  Dana looked skeptical. “What are you, the president of the chamber of commerce, too?”

  He tried for a smile. “If we ever get one, I’ll be sure to put my hat in the ring for the position.”

  She didn’t smile back. “I’m not leaving without her.”

  “Then you could be here a long stretch.” Her stubbornness reminded him of the few women who made their homes in Rimrock County, the kind who hunkered down, teeth gritted, and toughed out this tough land. But that was where the similarity ended. Everything else about Dana Vanover, from the silk and linen she wore, to the high-dollar convertible she drove, to the shoulder-length, salon-highlighted hairstyle, bespoke the kind of privilege those born to it took for granted. That sense of entitlement didn’t sit too well with people around here, and, fair or not, they especially didn’t appreciate it in a woman.

  The building’s AC shuddered to a stop, and in the silence that followed Jay caught the tap-slide, tap-slide of Estelle’s retreating footsteps. Must not have been her car he’d heard before. This close to dinnertime it was more likely a couple of oilfield workers or a rancher heading to the café than someone coming in to see him. At least, he hoped that was the case, for with the thought of food his stomach rumbled loudly.

  Dana’s expression eased a little. “Am I keeping you from dinner?”

  “Missed lunch earlier,” he said. “Went out to have a look around the Apache Mesa pour-off.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s one of those spots where rain runs down from the mountains, about a forty-minute drive down some pretty bumpy dirt roads.”

  “You mean there’s another kind here?”

  He ignored the comment and the smile that went with it. He might have to deal with the woman for now, but he didn’t have to—and didn’t want to—like her. Didn’t want to notice the way she was put together, either, or that pretty face.

  “Whenever there’s a storm up in the higher elevations,” he said, “the water ends up drizzling off the flat top of the mesa. When I was a kid we used to drive out and splash around in the little freshwater pool that forms down at the bottom from time to time.”

  “You thought my sister might’ve gone there?”

  He shrugged. “People do, and it was a place to look, somewhere I haven’t been all over ten times. So I took a shot.”

  It had been a wasted trip. The rocky bowl at the pour-off had been bone dry, and the cave punched into the mesa just above it held no sign of life but ten thousand restless dreamers—Mexican free-tailed bats that rose like smoke each summer night to scour the skies for insects. Jay had clambered atop a van-sized rock and shone his flashlight back into the darkness, then sighed in relief at the realization that he wouldn’t have to crawl inside. The thick layer of guano appeared undisturbed; there was no sign that anyone had wormed his or her way into the cave’s dark recesses. No sign that anybody had shoved a body back there either.

  “Thank you,” Dana told him as she rose from her chair. “For giving up your lunch to go there. And for looking for my sister all this week. I’d offer to buy you some dinner for your trouble, but I’m afraid I’ve already gotten crosswise with the cook.”

  Enticing as her smile was, he couldn’t let it get to him. “That’s all right. I’m too filthy, anyway. And besides that, my trouble’s not for sale. It’s already bought and paid for by the people of this county. If your sister was still one of ’em, I’d have already found her by this time.”

  Dana cut a swath through the heat, her strides long and swift, her mind seething with frustration. Still, the image of Jay Eversole stayed with her, an image that sparked and crackled along her nerve endings. She had to get clear of this one-horse hell pit—and that meant finding Angie and hauling her straight back to Houston to have her marrow tested. Dana had brought her own car, despite the long drive, in case simple persuasion wasn’t enough to convince her sister to cooperate. She had headaches enough without allowing one of Angie’s fits to get them both escorted off a plane—and Dana refused to take no for an answer.

  But the Angie situation wasn’t the only thing under Dana’s skin. As much as she hated to admit it, Eversole’s body had reminded hers that she was still female, whatever the surgeons had removed.

  Idiot, she told herself. Leave the Marlboro men to Lynette. Jay Eversole was just another roadblock between her and what she needed. He was simply humoring her, going through the motions of looking for her sister so she wouldn’t pull some family strings to drag in the Texas Rangers. Wouldn�
��t look good for the big, bad, new sheriff if outsiders barged in and elbowed him aside.

  She opened her car door and slid inside, only to wince as the leather seat seared her thighs. Jamming the key in the ignition, she started up the engine and turned the air-conditioning somewhere between arctic and subzero…

  And felt a rough brush scrape past her left ankle. Adrenaline pulled its ripcord, jerking her attention downward. But before her eyes could make sense of the slide of scales, raw instinct kicked in at the rattling.

  At the sound her muscles exploded into reflex, flinging the door open and sending her bursting from the car—or, rather, falling.

  She hit the hard-baked dirt with both knees and felt flesh tear with the bruising impact. Yet it wasn’t pain but horror that had her shrieking as she scrabbled several yards away.

  Rattlesnake. In her car. A damned big one, from what she’d seen. And chances were it hadn’t gotten inside on its own.

  Chapter Four

  Hey, sis,

  I’m afraid there’s more bad news from the doctor today. It’s a relapse, as we feared, which has left no choice except to wipe out Nikki’s marrow to keep the cancer cells from spreading. Which means her immune system will be history, totally destroyed. So John and I have to wear masks when we see her. We’ll scrub with antibacterial soap and wear paper gowns over our clothing and pray to God that this hug or that kiss won’t be the one to kill her.

  I’m not sure how much more I can handle. I feel so damned helpless, I can’t stop crying and lashing out at John. He can’t seem to cry, so he keeps lashing back—and storming out. God help us if we can’t find the right donor before it all comes crashing down.