Cross My Heart

by Kris Jayne

  “Yeah. You sound like her biggest fan.” I snickered.

  “I do! But I don’t have to date her. And I wouldn’t suggest it. Honesty is the best policy, man.”

  “Understood. That doesn’t mean I’m not going to hit her up for dinner or whatever.” My gaze wandered back through the kitchen window. She tossed her head back in laughter and did a little shimmy on her kitchen barstool. Yep. I was glad to have her number.

  “You want to go chasing ‘whatever,’ have at it, but don’t call it a hookup from me. I take my matchmaking seriously. I’m a connoisseur.” James kissed the tips of his expanding fingers.

  I lost some of my beer with a sharp chuckle and drew the back of my hand across my mouth. “Like that Renee girl.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with Renee. She’s beautiful and sweet and practical and pays her own bills. That girl will never be broke at the end of the month because she bought a $500 handbag. That fixup was top top-notch.”

  “She didn’t believe in having sex until marriage,” I grumbled in a low voice, not wanting to draw any newcomers to our wildly inappropriate party conversation.

  “She’s a Christian girl. What’s wrong with that?” James raised an eyebrow.

  “Nothing wrong with being Christian. Nothing wrong with waiting. But she needs to find a guy who wants that. I’m not getting married without knowing everything about a woman. Especially the important things,” I declared. “You didn’t do her any favors fixing her up with me.”

  “Sex isn’t everything.”

  “Sex is important.”

  “You,” James shook his finger at me, “said you were tired of trifling women dating you for rent money and wanted to settle down. Renee is a woman to settle down with. She has class and style. Your kids would be literate.”

  I snorted. “My dick would shrivel up from non-use and fall off before we got that far.”

  “Not if you were really ready to settle down like you said,” he countered. “The whole thing might do you some good. Learn some discipline.”

  I raised a brow. “When have I ever lacked discipline?”

  “Never. Look at you.” He twisted up his face in disgust and rubbed his stomach. “Vic has me on a keto diet. I get a break today for the party, and then she’s back to hiding the bread.”

  James had gotten a little softer around the middle since the wedding. But he looked happier. Victoria was probably striving for a happy medium. “They say that’s why straight men live longer if they’re married. Women nag them,” I said.

  “Yes. They keep us in line. You need one of those. Someone like Angela.”

  “I’m not marrying a Renee.”

  “Don’t write them off, man. Sometimes those church girls cut loose and whew!” James jumped back and threw his arms up before doubling over.

  I hooted. “You’re a fool.”

  I darted a look at the door. Nisha stepped out and slid her sunglasses onto her heart-shaped face. She glanced my way with a warming grin.

  Cold? Ice? I didn’t see it.

  The party filled out. Music wafted over James and Victoria’s pool and the screams and splashes of an impromptu volleyball game. James was killing it from the deep end of the pool. He might have put on some pounds, but his vertical was almost as impressive as it had been when we played basketball together in high school.

  Nisha turned down an invitation to join a team, so she and I sprawled over a couple of poolside chairs, enjoying the strawberry margaritas she’d made.

  “Vic was saying you’re moving back here,” she said, tugging the brim of her sun hat lower and stretching her shapely legs.

  I reflexively pushed the bridge of my sunglasses to my nose, ensuring how often my gaze drifted to her body stayed my secret. Hadn’t I just told James about my famed discipline? Gaping at a woman like a piece of meat wasn’t discipline.

  “Yes. I have a new job opportunity.”

  “Really? What?”

  I cleared my throat. “I can’t really talk about it yet. I need to wrap up my last job and notify some people. It’s a delicate situation.”

  “Sounds like a big deal. Congratulations.” She raised her glass and flashed that plump, sexy smile of hers at me again, which made me smile.

  “Thanks. I’m still not sure I’m making the right choice.”

  “Are you unhappy where you are?”

  “No.”

  “So why leave?” she asked.

  I sighed. “That’s the complicated part. It’s a tremendous opportunity.”

  “A promotion?”

  “A bigger job for sure.”

  My vague reply beat back her line of questions.

  “Oh, well, you must be excited to move back. Does your family still live here?”

  “Yes. Well, my mother and my brother do. My sister lives all over. She’s quite the nomad.”

  Nisha tilted her head with a grin. “What does that mean? You sound suspicious.”

  I laughed. “Of Jazz? No. My brother, Nate, maybe, but not Jazz. It’s just that she majored in biology, went to medical school, and practiced family medicine for a few years. Then she had this big change of heart. She sold her practice and ran off to an ashram.”

  Nisha’s brows shot up to the space between the edges of her sunglasses and her hat. “Like in India?”

  “Eventually, but first California. She studied yoga and all this mystical…” I swallowed the word “nonsense” before continuing. “Mystical stuff. Now, she travels around doing holistic health workshops and life coaching. I don’t get the 180.”

  “Is is such a big difference? She shifted from wanting to be one kind of healer to another.”

  The simplicity of Nisha’s comment made sense, but I didn’t get how Jasmine had gone from relying on peer-reviewed medicine to having a tarot card collection.

  “You’re right. And she’s built a great business for herself,” I admitted.

  “Unlike Nate.”

  I peered at Nisha over top of my sunglasses. “What makes you say that?”

  “You said you’re not suspicious about Jasmine and implied you are suspicious of your brother.”

  I shuffled my feet on my pool lounger. “Man, your journalist brain catches everything.”

  She sat up straighter, then fiddled again with her hat.

  I continued, “Nate’s a good kid.”

  “How old is he?”

  A crack of laughter erupted from my throat before I could answer. “Thirty-two.”

  “So not a kid.” She smirked.

  “No.”

  “He’s the youngest?”

  “Yes, and plays that role to a T.”

  “Hey,” Nisha shot back. “I’m the youngest.”

  “Ahh, and you’re the responsible one.”

  A shadow of emotion crossed her face before it brightened back up again. “I am.”

  That must be why her niece lived with her, but given her reaction to being called out as the responsible one, I didn’t broach the subject.

  “So am I,” I said. “Cheers!”

  “Cheers,” she giggled, and we bumped margaritas. “I never got an answer to my question. Are you glad to be coming back?”

  “I am. It’ll be good. Mom is getting older. Nate could probably use some oversight—”

  “You know, I have a feeling he’s not going to see it that way. He’s going to hate having his square peg brother up in his grill.”

  Square peg? The term needled me. “Is that what I look like to you?”

  Nisha took off her dark glasses and glared at me with an intensely serious look that was only partly playful. “Absolutely not. Someone has keep shit together. I’d just bet that he’s not going to see it that way. The—I won’t say irresponsible. I don’t know Nate,” she laughed. “And I’m probably projecting. But the less-than-totally-responsible ones never see it that way.”

  “You’re right again.”

  “That’s what it means to be the responsible one.” The mirth disappeared
from her laughter this time. She had troubles. Maybe something that James didn’t understand—or know about.

  Nisha Donovan wasn’t cold. She was circumspect and kept a tight circle. She made sure someone was worth her time because she had so much life to manage.

  I had no problem with that. Maybe because I was cocky. Sweeping another eye over her taut shape, I grinned. Being worth a woman’s time was my right in my wheelhouse.

  18

  Nisha

  Cocktails with Carter proved useful even though he essentially said nothing.

  I ignored the grime coating my psyche and focused on the notes I jotted down after the barbecue. His new job had to be at J.P. Star Energy. Only a family obligation would make a man like that leave a position he’d fought for alongside his beloved mentor.

  I called Libby and, after chatting for a few minutes, transitioned to a few questions to get confirmation.

  “Hey, my friend wanted me to ask you: the guy who was at that family meeting, have you seen him again?”

  Since she was at work, her tone shifted. “Umm, I’m setting up an office for our new exec.”

  “I thought that meeting was about the family estate? Are you sure it wasn’t just an interview?” I was ninety percent sure of the answer, but I had to make sure.

  “Definitely the former, not the latter,” she insisted.

  “But he came out of it with a job?”

  “Yes. It seems past leadership set that in motion.”

  “J.P. Star? In his will?”

  “Yes. That’s the speculation.”

  The anxious words clipped over the phone line, echoing my own nerves. Why? How the family was reacting? What the mood was around the office?

  More and more questions pulsed in my mind, but Libby wasn’t supposed to know I was the reporter. I also didn’t want to push her. She’d given me a gold mine already.

  “I don’t want you to get in trouble,” I said. “I’ll tell Cindy I’m not going to pass information back and forth anymore. I know the money is nice, but I hope that’s okay with you.”

  “Good.” A whoosh of relief flooded Libby’s voice. “I can’t repeat the exchange I had with your…er…resource. I’m getting things in order for my new boss.”

  “You’re going to be his assistant.”

  Her chipper attitude returned. “I’ve never run an exec’s desk before. Executive assistant is a big promotion. I’ll be working one on one, not just doing all the overflow admin work.”

  “Congratulations!”

  “Thanks.” She lowered her voice. “I need this job, and I’d like to keep it.”

  “I get it.” I pulled a napkin from the takeout bag on my desk and wiped my hands, uneasy about tricking her and stressing her out.

  “Let’s catch up over drinks sometime and talk about anything but work,” she suggested.

  “Sounds good. I need to go anyway. I have a meeting.”

  We said our goodbyes, and I walked down the hall to my boss’ office. Danny wanted a rundown of the stories I was working. Or story. Other than the few local community assignments that justified my having an office at the paper, the Stars were the only thing I had at the moment. At least the puzzle pieces were sliding together.

  I knocked on the partially open door before entering. He waved me in and pointed to the chair opposite the desk. His boisterous laugh reverberated off the towers of bookshelves behind him. Then, he barked a goodbye and hung up, barely taking a breath before lobbing his first question.

  “Are you still working angles on the Star family?” His eyes focused on me like green laser beams. Their protruding roundness emphasized by rapid blinking that stretched and refolded the saggy skin behind his glasses.

  He had the look of every weathered beat reporter I knew. Too many nights drinking and smoking with colleagues and sources at watering holes downtown etched crags into their faces. Then, the local paper downsized half of its staff twenty years ago and sent its reporters scrambling for work, Danny included. That’s how he ended up at the tabloid.

  He rustled piles of paper on his desk, awaiting my answer. I pulled out my iPad and opened my notes.

  “Yes, I’m still working the Star story.”

  “I saw an expense for a tip. What was it?” he asked.

  “Someone I met last year works at the company. They had some info that I hoped would turn into a lead,” I explained, trying not to get more specific.

  I definitely didn’t want Danny or, God forbid, Shayna knowing about Libby and exposing her, even accidentally. Our sources were our own, but that didn’t mean Danny wouldn’t press. As he loved to say: if one of us got hit by a bus, the paper needed to survive.

  “Did you get the lead? Come on. Two grand is a lot of dough,” he grumbled.

  “There was someone unexpected at a meeting about J.P. Star’s estate, but I haven’t found a connection,” I lied.

  Besides talking to Libby, I spent the morning going through mid-century news clippings, tracing the dead man’s life and career back to the beginning. He bought his first stretch of land and mineral rights from the widow of his old boss. That same widow, Lucinda Canfield, later started an interior design business in Dallas.

  Interestingly, those tidbits came from The Dallas Post’s own archives. The paper started as a society and leisure publication after the war. We did a profile on Lucinda and featured photos of her designs in fashionable homes around town. One of her hallmarks was high-quality linens with custom needlework.

  “I’ve had the pleasure of meeting wonderful artisans all over the world,” she told the paper.

  All over the world or from her childhood? Lucinda Canfield was born Lucinda Love in Gypsy, Oklahoma, which is a few miles from Bristow, Oklahoma—the birthplace of Etta Cross, née Williams. Superstar needlepointer.

  Etta appeared in a photograph with Lucinda in the early ‘60s, identified only as “a seamstress at Canfield Designs.” You could only see half her shadowed face in the background of the grainy black-and-white image, but if you knew her profile as I now did, recognizing her was easy.

  Lucinda closed her interior design studio when she remarried in the mid-1960s, but a new design business popped up in the same location, fronted by a Frenchman and Grandma Etta. An antique shop still operated there in a strip of buildings that, according to city records, belonged to Carter’s mother.

  Love’s Crossing, the ranching property deeded from Lucinda’s father to her husband after her first marriage, now belonged to the J.P. Star estate. Etta probably worked there in the Canfields’ house, which wasn’t in west Texas. The New York-based sports reporter got that detail wrong. Love’s Crossing was in central Texas, near Llano.

  At every turn, the story around J.P. Star and Etta Cross wound together. One piece of information I hadn’t found was evidence of Etta’s marriage to a Mr. Cross, and I was beginning to think he was a phantom.

  I told Danny none of this, and I didn’t want to.

  “You’re holding out on me.” His eyes narrowed.

  I opened my mouth to object, but he cut me off.

  “That’s a good thing,” he barked. “Otherwise, I’d be pissed at you for wasting money, but I need a story. A big one. If I don’t get one in the next two weeks, guess who’s reimbursing the paper?”

  As if I could afford that right now.

  “You’ll get your story this week,” I promised and swallowed hard. “I’m close to something explosive.”

  Danny spun in his chair and whooped. “I knew it. Shayna’s chasing Anthony Star-Fucker or whatever his name is, but you’re getting the goods. I can tell.”

  “Star-Hunter. His father is Ken Hunter. Married to Theresa Star hyphen Hunter,” I explained.

  Did he do any footwork on stories anymore? At least Shayna had made contact with the family. We fed the filth to this fucking beast, and he sat on his narrow ass all day, throwing us pennies in return.

  I clutched the arm of my chair and tried to calm down. This wasn’t Danny’s
fault. I signed up for this mess, and now, I had to find my way out of it.

  Trailing back through the years of news and public records, I found bits and pieces of the Cross family’s lives, and salacious as they were, they didn’t deserve to be reduced to gossip. The heady fun of unraveling the mystery pushed me forward, but I couldn’t publish most of it. I didn’t want to.

  That grimy feeling came back again.

  I hated this job. I hated myself in this job. And I was stuck because I needed to finish it. Carter made his choices because he cared about his family, and I had to do the same.

  Two or three front-page pieces. I’d keep them as focused on the Stars as possible. That’s it. That would give me enough financial leeway to say goodbye.

  James had offered me some work before, and maybe Carter really knew some people who could use a freelance writer. I’d text both of them as soon as I got back to the office.

  “Whatever their names are, I need details. Soon. We can’t afford to let this story go cold. Sales—on the newsstand, online subscribers, web traffic and ads—are insane. J.P. Star’s death is our hottest story in years. We need to keep interest going with something fresh.” He buggy green eyes flashed with excitement.

  I took a deep breath. “I’ll have something for you by the end of next week to run the following Monday.”

  “Good. I’d hate to have to fire you,” he sneered.

  I grimaced.

  “Kidding. Have a sense of humor, Donovan.”

  “Sure.” I scooped up my tablet and hurried out.

  19

  Carter

  John Peter Star died trussed up like a Christmas goose and with a ball gag in his mouth.

  He was 90.

  Waves of news crews descended on Dallas to cover the ignominious death of the oil billionaire turned magnate of international business. His death dropped him precipitously from the Forbes list, bumping up friends and some rivals–which would have made John Peter grumble curses through quick puffs on one of his favorite Cuban cigars.