by B. J Daniels
Slowly, he turned back to the last story and reread it, finding nothing new of interest except that the baby had been found a quarter mile down the road from the old Duncan place.
He made copies of the stories with a growing uneasiness as he recalled his parents’ reluctance to even talk about the night they’d found him beside that road. And their repeated concerns that he not dig in the past.
Aimee Carruthers was on the phone when they came out of the newspaper morgue. She stopped talking and gave them a nervous smile as she held her hand over the mouthpiece until they were out the door. When Jesse looked back she was hunched over the phone, talking hurriedly. He wondered how long it would take for everyone in town to know.
He cut across the street with Amanda keeping stride beside him. She didn’t ask and he was grateful, but as he opened the door of city hall for her, he saw her look of concern and remembered her dislike for cops and her fear that he’d turn the ledger over to the police.
“Trust me,” he whispered.
Her look was half plea, half warning.
He’d hate to ever cross this woman.
The police station was an anteroom off city hall, just large enough for two desks. A skinny redheaded young man stood behind the short counter, his freckles seeming to leap off his pallid face. A pair of red-rimmed pale-blue eyes peered at them with obvious interest as they entered. He wore a deputy’s uniform and his name tag read: Deputy Lane Waller.
Lane Waller had just hung up the phone. Jesse suspected that Aimee Carruthers had called him. Now why would she do that, he wondered with a growing uneasiness.
“I’m looking for Sheriff Art Tucker?” Jesse said stepping up to the counter, hoping that the sheriff might still be around after all these years.
“Well, he shouldn’t be hard to find.” On closer inspection, the young man didn’t look old enough to drive, let alone carry the loaded weapon at his hip. “You can find him where he always is this time of day.”
“And where might that be?” Jesse asked when the deputy didn’t go on.
“Oak Rest Cemetery on the edge of town,” Lane said and chuckled heartily at his own joke.
Funny. Jesse tried to squash his disappointment in the sheriff’s demise, but after all it had been thirty years. “How about the coroner?” Jesse recalled his name from the newspaper article. “Gene Wells?”
Again Lane shook his head. “Pushing up daisies as well.”
“I suppose there isn’t anyone around still who worked in this office thirty years ago?” Jesse asked, feeling like he’d hit a dead end already.
Lane Waller chuckled. “Not unless you count Hubert Owens.”
“Who is he?” Jesse asked.
“Tucker’s former deputy but he’s—”
“If he’s still alive, where can I find him?” Jesse asked, before he could be assaulted by another of Lane Waller’s bad jokes.
He glanced at his watch. “He should be having his third beer by now over at the Corral Bar. He might even be half sober. Or awake.”
The Corral was wedged between the local garage and the drugstore. Rough-hewn cedar covered the front in a western-looking log fence design. Beer signs glowed in the dusty window, illuminating a handful of spiky cactus plants covered with cobwebs and red Texas dust.
The bar was empty except for an elderly man on a stool, hunched over a glass of draft and a younger man washing glasses behind the bar. At the back, an old Patsy Cline tune played on the jukebox.
“Hubert Owens?” Jesse asked as he took the stool next to the man and Amanda pulled up one on the other side. Of course Amanda drew the man’s attention.
Owens gave her a blurry, near toothless smile. “Most people just call me Huey,” he said brightly and sat up a little straighter. He hadn’t shaved in days and reeked of stale beer, sweat and tobacco.
“Mr. Owens, I understand you were a deputy in town thirty years ago,” Jesse said.
Owens reluctantly turned to squint at Jesse, his look instantly suspicious. “What of it?”
“We’re trying to find out about that little baby that was left near the old Duncan place thirty years ago,” Amanda said turning on the charm, which was considerable. “Out on Woodland Lake Road?”
Hubert Owens swiveled his head back around to her. “Sure, sweetie, but what would a young thing like you care about that for?”
“I think that little baby might be someone I know,” she said, her brown eyes turning to gaze at Jesse challengingly. “You probably don’t remember much about the case….”
“The heck I don’t, little lady. ’Member it like it was yesterday. Strangest damn—’scuse me—strangest darned thing to happen around here.”
Jesse sat back on his stool and watched Amanda in the mirror with a mixture of irritation, amusement and gratitude. She was smart enough to have put two and two together and figure out what he was looking for. His admiration of her grew.
“What was so strange about it?” she asked conspiratorially.
Owens leaned toward her. Jesse could smell his beer-soaked breath from where he sat and knew Amanda was getting the full force of it. Well, she’d asked for it.
“Who’d leave a little baby like that in a box beside the road?” the old man asked. “Didn’t make no sense at all.” He leaned closer to her.
“And the note—” He shook his head.
“What note?” Jesse mouthed to Amanda in the mirror.
“There was a note?” she asked in a hushed, sexy voice.
The old man nodded smugly. “That part never got into the paper. Ya know ya always got to keep one piece of evidence back. That way when someone comes forward, wanting the baby, ya got something secret. If they can tell ya what’s in the note, then—”
“What was in the note?” she asked trying to steer him back on track.
He glanced down the bar at the bartender. He didn’t seem to be paying any attention but Jesse knew he was listening to every word.
“Guess after all these years it don’t make no difference,” Owens said. “And you seem like a nice enough girl.” The old man seemed to zone out for a moment.
“Was the note handwritten?” Amanda prompted.
He blinked, then nodded. “Handwritten and kinda scrawled like the person writing it had been in a hurry. Said—and I’ll never forget this—‘Take care of my precious baby. I will go to my grave loving him.”’
The words squeezed at Jesse’s heart.
“You probably had your suspicions about whose baby it was,” Amanda said. “I mean, it would be hard in a town this size to hide being pregnant.”
Jesse watched her work in the mirror, admiring how easily deception came to her. Must be something in the genes. The thought brought him up short as he wondered about his own genes.
Owens stared down into his beer. “Weren’t no local gal, I can tell you that.” Owens glanced over at Amanda. “You know, you’re the second person who’s asked about that baby. Couple weeks ago—” He seemed to catch himself. He reached for his beer and drained it.
“Who else was asking about the baby?” Jesse asked.
Owens didn’t answer. He looked around the empty bar. The bartender was busy washing glasses and didn’t look up.
Amanda laid a hand on the old man’s arm. “Who else was asking?” she whispered.
“That’s just it,” Owens said, dropping his voice. “What’s a guy like that coming around here asking a lot of questions after all these years about some baby? Makes people nervous, you know. Ain’t like we all ain’t seen him in the paper.”
“A guy like what?” Amanda asked.
Owens fidgeted on his stool for a moment, then looked over at her. Jesse watched in the mirror behind the bar as the old man whispered one word, “Mobster.”
Jesse’s eyes met Amanda’s in the mirror. He’d seen her tense at the word, some of the color draining from her face.
“Which mobster?” she asked in a small strained voice.
“That Crowe fella, but you
didn’t hear that from me,” Owens said and pounded on the bar with his empty glass. “If that couple was willing to take the baby, I don’t see no reason to tell anyone about ’em. ’Specially someone like him.”
“You’re sure it was J. B. Crowe?” Amanda persisted.
“The one that’s in the paper today,” Owens said, sounding scared. “You think I don’t know who I talked to? You think I don’t know about that underworld stuff?”
“What did you tell him?” Amanda asked, a tremor in her voice.
“Don’t know nothin’,” the old man muttered, swaying a little on the stool. “Nothin’ ’bout that couple that found the baby. Nothin’ ’bout no baby. Nothin’ at all.” He winked at her, then his head dropped to the bar and he began to snore loudly.
The bartender came down to take Owens’s glass. He didn’t say a word but Jesse noticed how he also didn’t meet his eyes as if he didn’t want to get involved.
Behind them the door banged open. A man in a sheriff’s uniform filled the door frame. He was large, his expression displeased. “I heard there might be a problem over here?” he said eyeing them.
The bartender shook his head. “No problem here, Sheriff Wilson.”
Sheriff Wilson let his gaze run over Jesse, then slowed as it took in Amanda. The only sound in the room was Hubert “Huey” Owens’s loud snoring.
Jesse got to his feet, figuring now was as good as any time to talk to the sheriff. But the man’s wide face closed over. He tipped his hat to Amanda, then turned around and left as if in a hurry.
“What was that about?” she asked after the door had banged shut behind the sheriff.
“Beats me.” Nor did Jesse plan to take it up with the sheriff. At least not now. He followed Amanda out of the bar. “Thanks for your help in there. You were good,” he admitted grudgingly.
“No problem,” she said and walked over to the curb. “Wanna tell me about it?”
“Not really,” he said. “Not yet.”
She nodded.
“Also I wouldn’t take too much of what the guy said to heart,” he told her, knowing all that mobster talk had upset her. “The baby was only a few hours old. Of course it was a local girl’s. And that stuff about him recognizing the mobster from the paper—”
“Jesse.”
Something in her tone stopped him. He joined her at the curb and saw that she was staring down at one of the newspaper racks. The Dallas Morning News.
Looking out from the front page was J. B. Crowe. He’d just been given some humanitarian award in Dallas.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
An icy chill ran up his spine. Could J. B. Crowe have been in Red River? Asking about the baby? Asking about Jesse? But why?
He grabbed Amanda’s arm and ushered her quickly across the street to the van. It wasn’t until they were both inside that he said, “Right after I went to work for your father, he made a business trip.” He heard the fear in his voice. “Do you know where he went?”
She shook her head. “I just know he was upset when he got back. What’s going on?”
Jesse started the van. “I wish I knew.”
At the town’s only gas station, he called Dylan from the pay phone outside. He’d forgotten that Dylan said he would be on another case and out for a while. Dylan’s sister Lily gave him the news, though. The fingerprints had come back on the photocopy of the newspaper article Jesse had given Dylan. There was a second set of prints on the paper. J. B. Crowe’s.
Jesse stood for a moment in the phone booth, his heart pounding. J. B. Crowe had been up here two weeks ago asking about a baby left by the road thirty years before. Then he put the photocopy of the newspaper article under Jesse’s door. Why?
Inside the classic old filling station, Jesse asked directions to Woodland Lake Road and the old Duncan place. The attendant eyed them warily as he pointed east, seemingly glad when the van pulled away from his pumps.
They quickly left the small town behind, the road running red to the horizon. Not far out, they picked up a creek. It twisted and turned its way through the brush beside the road, the day already growing hot and no shade except for a small puddle beneath the occasional tree they passed. Behind the van, dust boiled up into the faded blue of the Texas sky, the landscape as bleak as his reason for driving out here.
He tried to steel himself at the thought of seeing the spot where he’d been abandoned. A building appeared ahead. The old farmhouse sat on the hill, weathered and gray, a faint sign on the fence, Duncan. The old Duncan place.
He drove past it, wanting to see the curve in the road beside the creek a quarter mile farther where, according to the newspaper article, the baby had been found.
A golden Texas sun beat down on the red earth and van as he coasted down the hill. Crickets chirped from the bushes beside the creek and in the distance a hawk cried as it circled overhead.
He could see the bend in the road ahead, the wide spot next to it and the creek.
He slowed the van, trying to imagine what had happened in the hours, the days, the years before he was left in this lonely, desolate spot.
Braking, he brought the van to a stop, killed the engine and slowly opened his door. He could feel Amanda’s gaze on him. She had said little since they’d left the bar. As he walked toward where he imagined he’d been left that night, he heard her open her door and get out.
There was a low spot beside the creek and road the width of a car. He stepped into the shade of the largest of the trees, his heart hammering in his ears. This had to be the place. He could see it, the darkness, the car coming up the road, stopping and the door opening as someone lowered the cardboard box to the earth. The door of the car closing quickly. The sound of the engine dying away in the distance.
It sickened him, frightened him and made him angry and grief-stricken all at the same time. Why? Why would his mother have done such a thing? If she hadn’t wanted him, why not leave him on someone’s doorstep?
Because she hadn’t wanted anyone to know she’d given birth to him. She hadn’t expected him to survive. She hadn’t expected someone to find him. Then why the note? And the gold chain with the odd-shaped heart?
He closed his eyes, breathing in the unfamiliar scents, listening to the sounds of water and rustling leaves and birds high in the branches. Anger and pain and a horrible sense of betrayal filled his heart to bursting. And fear. There was more to the story. He could feel it. A woman who didn’t want her child didn’t write a hurried note, didn’t put a gold heart in the baby’s blanket.
And now J. B. Crowe had been asking about the baby. Knew Jesse was the baby. Why else had J.B. given him the copy of the newspaper article?
“This baby we’re looking for,” Amanda said, dragging him from his thoughts. “It’s you, isn’t it?”
He opened his eyes. She was standing in front of him.
He blinked, fighting emotions that threatened to drop him to his knees. And he’d had the nerve to berate her for her genes. “Yeah.” He told her about the McCalls, and how they had found him and raised him, about the copy of the newspaper clipping and the news that he was adopted.
“I’m sorry. You didn’t know until yesterday?”
He shook his head.
“Oh, that must have been a terrible shock.”
“You could say that.” He was still reeling from it. And now to find out that J. B. Crowe put the copy of the newspaper article under his door. Worse, that J.B. had been in Red River asking questions about the baby.
“I don’t know what to say.” She reached over to squeeze his hand.
He didn’t want her pity, but almost at once he realized that wasn’t what she was offering.
“You and I have more in common than I would have ever thought,” she said, looking at him as though seeing him differently now. “Only, I’d love to find out I was adopted.”
She seemed to hesitate. “What does it have to do with my father?”
“I don’t know.” He met her gaze. “But I intend to
find out.”
He turned back to the van. That’s when he saw the old Duncan place perched on the hill, caught the flash of the sun off one of the windows. He stopped and stared up at the house. “They could have seen it,” he said. “Whoever lived there.”
She followed his gaze and hugged herself as if suddenly cold. “It was at night, right? They could have seen the lights from the car. Maybe even seen the interior light come on.”
He looked over at her, glad she was there with him. “I think I know who might have been living up there thirty years ago.”
* * *
THE HOUSE had seen better days and the yard was filled with falling-down outbuildings and broken-down equipment and vehicles.
Jesse slowed the van, his heart a hammer in his chest. His parents had warned him not to dig in the past. Obviously something had frightened them.
He pulled off onto the dirt track, the bumper of the van slapping down the tall weeds, and drove up to the house. Turning off the engine, he sat for a moment, listening. Crickets chirped in the tall grass, a hawk screeched overhead and, closer, he could hear a bee droning just outside the window.
The house was empty and looked as if it had been for some time. He opened his door. He didn’t know why, but he needed to go inside the old rambling farmhouse. He needed to know how Marie and Pete McCall had found him. He had a pretty good idea that he was right about one thing at least.
“You might want to wait here.” He’d half expected Amanda to argue.
“All right,” she agreed, her gaze on the creepy old place.
Like him, she seemed to feel wary of the place. Just something in the air. A disquiet. A feeling of foreboding. As if some presence remained, a memory of something awful that had happened.
Jesse tried to shake off the feeling as he stared at the blank darkness where windows should have been on the second floor. Most of the glass was gone, leaving yawning openings and the dusty woven webs of spiders in the window frames.
He pushed open the already ajar door and was hit with the cold putrid breath of the house. He hesitated, telling himself there was nothing to be learned here. Dust and debris coated the worn wooden floor. A scurrying sound came from a distant room.
