The Ex Who Wouldn't Die (Charley's Ghost Book 1)

by Sally Berneathy

  “Nice talk, Amanda.”

  A black Cadillac pulled into the mayor’s parking space.

  “There he is!” Amanda reached to grab Charley’s arm, but her fingers slid through the chilly space. She shook her hand to rid it of the eerie sensation, but that same chill stuck in the middle of her chest, an area that hadn’t even been close to Charley. She forced her gaze to remain focused on the car, forced herself to remain seated rather than follow her impulse to get on her bike and ride as fast as she could away from that car and the man she knew was driving it.

  The driver’s side door opened, and Roland Kimball emerged.

  Amanda swallowed, trying to push down the lump that had somehow crept into her throat.

  Now what?

  Amanda drew in a deep breath and stood.

  Left foot forward.

  Right foot forward.

  On shaky legs, she moved toward the courthouse.

  “What are you doing? Where are you going?” Charley called from behind her.

  The fear in his voice increased her determination and steadied her steps. Be damned if she’d let him know she was scared.

  “Amanda, come back here!”

  Her path intersected Kimball’s just as he reached the bottom of the courthouse steps.

  “Hi,” she said, the sound more a croak than a word.

  Sunglasses hid the man’s demon eyes, but the rest of his face revealed enough to make Amanda cringe and wish she’d followed Charley’s advice to go back. “Still here, Mrs. Randolph?”

  He moved to go past her, and suddenly anger gave her courage. She hadn’t come this far to be ignored. She moved with him, into his path.

  “Could we…uh…” Okay, she hadn’t thought this through. What was she going to ask him? Could we get together for drinks, and oh, by the way, if you have my gun, would you please bring it along?

  “Is there something I can do for you?” The mayor stood his ground, seeming to grow in size, blocking the sun.

  “Yes.” She lifted her chin. “We need to talk. About a gun.”

  His jaw firmed, and his lips thinned. “We have nothing to talk about, and you have no reason to be here. Good day, Mrs. Randolph.” He turned, dismissing her, and strode up the courthouse steps.

  Amanda stood for a moment, blinking in the sunlight. The man had walked away and left her. Ignored her as if she were nobody. She wanted to call after him, to demand he talk to her, demand he confess to stealing her gun, to killing Charley, to trying to kill her, maybe even to killing Jimmy Hoffa.

  She had accomplished one thing. Now she knew he had her gun. He hadn’t flinched when she’d mentioned it. An innocent person would have been astonished at the accusation.

  That gave credence to the possibility he had murdered Charley and tried to kill her.

  She walked slowly across the square, back to the bench where Charley waited.

  “That went well, Nancy Drew,” Charley said.

  “I found out for sure he’s got my gun.”

  “I told you that already.”

  “Yeah, and you also told me your mother was a dead prostitute.”

  “That was when I was alive. It doesn’t count.”

  Pointless to argue. She had more important things to think about than Charley, things like staying alive while she got her gun back so she could stay out of prison.

  Amanda picked up her helmet and jacket. As she started toward her motorcycle, a gleam of bright fire drew her attention back to the courthouse steps. A familiar figure moved upward, the morning sunlight spinning her red hair into flames.

  “There’s that woman from the funeral, Sunny something or other.”

  “Sunny Donovan.” Charley’s voice sounded choked.

  Amanda turned toward him. He looked as if someone was choking him.

  “What is it with this woman?” Amanda demanded. “You said you didn’t sleep with her.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “Then why do you act so strange every time she comes around?”

  Charley gazed into the distance, his lips tightly compressed.

  “Come to think of it, you never acted the least bit guilty when you slept with some bimbo.” She watched the tall, regal figure of Sunny Donovan disappear into the courthouse. “And that woman doesn’t look like any of your other bimbos. She’s dignified, not sleazy.”

  Charley said nothing. That meant something.

  “You said you can’t lie to me.”

  He looked at her, and this time she was certain she saw guilt and remorse in his gaze. “It’s true. I can’t lie.”

  Guilt and remorse. She would have sworn Charley couldn’t spell either of those emotions, let alone feel them.

  Had he hurt Sunny Donovan?

  He’d hurt her—his wife—and never shown the slightest signs of guilt or remorse.

  It was hard to imagine that elegant woman involved with Charley in any other capacity than as his lawyer, trying to keep his sorry ass out of jail.

  But something was going on, something she needed to know.

  “Then tell me the story about Sunny Donovan. Why do you freak out when she comes around? What’s going on between you two? And where do I know her from?”

  He said nothing.

  “So you can’t lie to me, but that’s not the same thing as refusing to answer. Is that the deal?”

  Charley shrugged, a remnant of his old, arrogant expression returning in his half-smile.

  “Fine.” She took a step forward. “I’ll go ask her myself.” After approaching Kimball, talking to this lady who seemed quite nice would be a snap.

  “Wait!” A chill wind passed through Amanda’s arm as Charley attempted to grab it and restrain her.

  “Why should I wait?”

  Charley opened his mouth as if to speak then closed it again. “You don’t understand.”

  “My point exactly. I don’t understand about Sunny Donovan, but I’m going to.”

  “No!”

  She leaned forward, invading his space. He took a step backward. Oh, yeah. Something was going on. Charley never backed away.

  “Then talk,” she ordered. “Tell me why you don’t want me to meet her. Tell me what’s going on with that woman.”

  Charley drew in a deep breath and squared his shoulders as if prepared for battle. “If I help you get your gun back from Kimball so you can prove you didn’t kill me with it, will you go home to Dallas, get out of Silver Creek?”

  Amanda folded her arms and studied him. This was a completely unexpected turn of events. Mild curiosity about the woman had just turned into a puzzle she was determined to solve.

  “Is that it?” she asked. “You help me get the gun, I go back to Dallas? That’s all I have to do in exchange for your services?”

  Charley’s features contorted, his lips twisting as if they wanted to speak but he was trying to keep them shut.

  “What else do you want from me, Charley? What’s the rest of the deal?”

  Charley opened his mouth then closed it. He rose a few inches off the sidewalk, straightened and met her gaze. “Forget about Sunny Donovan.”

  Wow. The Sunny Donovan story was big, so big Charley would do anything to keep her from finding out. “Okay, sure,” she said.

  Maybe Charley couldn’t lie, but she could.

  Chapter Twelve

  Only Irene and Amanda were home for lunch. The house was unusually but not uncomfortably quiet. All the windows stood open, and ceiling fans whirred in each room. A mockingbird chirped, tweeted, and trilled its diverse song from a nearby tree. Leaves on the dozens of large trees around the house stirred quietly in the faint breeze, their shade shielding the house from the midday heat. After her morning meeting with Kimball, Amanda had expected to feel stressed for at least the rest of her life, but Irene and this house had a calming effect.

  “I thought we could have some ham sandwiches, if that’s okay with you,” Irene said, taking a large platter from the refrigerator. “Allan Middleton smokes his
hams with mesquite instead of hickory. Some say he just does it because he has so much mesquite on his property. I say it’s the best ham I ever ate so who cares why he does it.”

  “I agree,” Amanda replied. There had been such a quantity of food the day before, she’d only eaten a few bites of the ham. However, those bites, unadorned with any of the fancy sauces her mother favored, had, indeed, been the best ham she’d ever eaten. “What can I do to help?”

  “Why don’t you look through the refrigerator and see if you can find that potato salad Alta Bernhart brought. And pick out anything else you see that looks good.”

  Amanda opened the refrigerator door and peered at the large quantity of food crammed inside. “It all looks good. If I stay here very long, I’ll gain so much weight, I won’t be able to get through the door of my shop.”

  “That’s a big door. You’ll have to eat a lot of ham and potato salad.”

  “I can do that.” Amanda located the large glass bowl of potato salad and put it on the table.

  “If you’ll get the plates and silverware, I’ll slice a tomato, pour some tea, and we should be ready to eat.”

  Amanda set the table while Irene added tomato, lettuce and pickles to the tray of ham then cut slices from a loaf of homemade bread and poured the translucent amber tea into ice-filled glasses.

  Finally they sat down at one end of the wooden table. Amanda built her sandwich, took a big bite and a drink of the cold, sweet tea.

  “This is wonderful.” She leaned back with a sigh. “Not just the food. You, your home, your family.” This place and these people were one-hundred-eighty degrees different from her home and family, but Amanda felt more comfortable, more at home here than she’d ever felt in that mausoleum in which her mother held court.

  Irene smiled, the lines around her eyes tilting upward. Beverly Caulfield would never have allowed those lines to appear on her face. Of course, her mother didn’t smile often enough to cause them. “We’re your family too,” Irene said. “I can’t tell you how much it means to me, to all of us, that you came down here, that we finally got to meet you and welcome you to the family.” The smile remained, but her blue eyes misted. “You’re all we have left of Charley.”

  If you only knew. Amanda’s gaze searched the corners of the room to see if he was lurking. His mother would have been thrilled to see him again. Amanda would have been thrilled to never see him again.

  For the moment, he was not in sight. She could relax and have a chat with this woman he’d kept hidden from her. “I don’t understand why he told me...” She stopped herself before telling Irene the horrible stories he’d fabricated about his family. “Why he never told me about you all. I never even knew he talked to you.”

  “He was trying to protect you.”

  Not likely. Protect himself, maybe. “Protect me? From what?”

  Irene sipped from her tea then set it on the table. “I don’t know. He said he was in trouble, and all he could say was that we couldn’t tell anybody where he was or who he was married to.”

  “So it was okay if people knew he was married, just as long as they didn’t know my name?”

  “That’s right,” Irene confirmed. “He told me your first name but not your last. He didn’t intend to say that much, but he talked about you so often, it just came out.”

  If Charley admitted he was married, that probably ruled out Charley’s hiding from an ex-girlfriend. Amanda chewed another bite of sandwich then decided to go for it. “How well did Charley know the mayor?”

  Irene’s gaze sharpened, and she frowned slightly. “Roland Kimball? Him and Charley didn’t exactly travel in the same circles.”

  “Maybe not, but they had some sort of connection, didn’t they?”

  Irene shook her head. “No, but after Charley left, the mayor came by looking for him. Said he needed to talk to him about a business deal he thought Charley might be interested in.”

  “What kind of business deal?”

  “He didn’t say. I couldn’t have told him anything even if I’d wanted to since Charley had left a few days before and hadn’t told me where he was going. Roland seemed upset. Like the deal was important. Like he didn’t believe me. When Charley finally called me, I told him about Roland’s visit. He said he didn’t know anything about a deal, and I shouldn’t tell the mayor or anybody else where he was.”

  “Because he was in danger.”

  Irene nodded.

  “From the mayor?”

  “He never said that.” Irene hesitated then continued. “I thought it probably had something to do with him. Otherwise, why would he have come around looking for Charley? I figured...” She bit her lip.

  “You figured Charley had run some kind of a scam on the mayor.”

  Irene sighed. “Charley had a good heart. But the things he did weren’t always good.”

  Amanda could attest to that. “He told you he was in Dallas?”

  “Oh, no. I figure it was Dallas because that’s where he’d always wanted to go. But I never told anybody what I thought. We didn’t know where he was living or anything until the police came down here to talk to us after he...” Her voice wavered, she blinked a couple of times, then cleared her throat. “After he was killed.”

  Amanda ate a couple more bites of sandwich and some potato salad while she considered the ramifications of what Irene had told her. Adding her mother-in-law’s information to what she’d learned about Kimball that morning, Charley’s crazy stories were beginning to sound a lot less crazy. If Charley had blackmailed then double-crossed Kimball, he would need to hide, and a big city like Dallas was a good place to do that. But Dallas was only an hour’s drive away. Silver Creek was practically a suburb of Dallas. It would have made more sense for him to go farther—Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston.

  There were still a lot of unanswered questions, and Charley, for all his new-found honesty, probably wouldn’t answer them. Perhaps she could verify the crime Charley claimed started all this mess.

  “Was there a murder just before Charley left town, Dianne somebody?”

  Irene nodded. “Why, yes. Dianne Carter. Charley told you about that? It was awful. They found her body in her car out by the lake. Shot and killed, her purse missing. Young mother, left a husband and two kids. Pecan pie?”

  Amanda blinked in surprise at the abrupt change of subject, but this was the way of Irene’s world. No matter what bad things happened, she kept her family fed. “Yes, please.” Amanda accepted a piece and took a bite before she continued. “They ever catch the killer?”

  “No. Had to be somebody passing through. She was the sweetest thing. Taught Sunday school at our church. Her and Greg—that’s her husband—were always helping people, working with kids to keep them off drugs, delivering Christmas baskets to poor people. Greg’s the coach at the high school. Penny and Paula have him for track, and they think he’s wonderful.”

  “Sounds like Dianne was a regular saint.” Too good to be true?

  “Nobody ever had a bad word to say about her. Everybody loved her.”

  “Everybody? How about Mayor Kimball?”

  Irene sat quietly for a few seconds, her blue gaze narrowed. Perhaps her mother-in-law wasn’t quite as naïve as she seemed. “Funny you ask that. Dianne and Roland were sweethearts in high school. Everybody assumed they’d get married after they got out of college.”

  “But they didn’t.”

  Irene wadded her paper napkin and put it on her empty plate. “People change. Nobody knows why they broke up, but they both came back and married different people.”

  “Did they stay friends? Or did they hate each other?”

  “Dianne didn’t hate anybody. But whatever happened with her and Roland, they kept their distance after that. Acted like strangers. Too bad. I think his mama and daddy were disappointed.”

  “They liked Dianne?”

  “Everybody liked Dianne. Her family wasn’t wealthy like the Kimballs. Her folks own a farm, raise soybeans, run a fe
w head of cattle. But she was a good influence on Roland. He was pretty wild in high school. Son of the richest man in town. Privileged. Arrogant even then. Samuel Kimball, his daddy, doesn’t want any taint on the family name. Mind you, that old man’s not perfect, but he’s always kept his sins under the table. He expected his only son to do the same. So when Roland started dating Dianne and settled down, Samuel was happy about it.” She grinned a little sheepishly. “In a small town, we mind each other’s business. It’s better than daytime television.”

  “Did the police find Dianne’s killer?”

  Irene stood and began tidying the kitchen. “For a while, they thought it might be Claude Dobyns. Leastwise, they acted like they suspected him. I think they just wanted to look like they were doing something. Claude’s different, so he gets picked on a lot.”

  “What do you mean, different?”

  “He never was quite right in the head. His mama died when he was born. His daddy was too stingy to pay a doctor, had a neighbor woman come over, so Miz Dobyns died, and they say the baby didn’t come out right.” Irene ran water into one side of the sink and squirted in dishwashing liquid.

  Amanda stood. “Where are your dishtowels?”

  “Second drawer, over there.”

  Amanda pulled a snowy white dishtowel from the designated drawer. “That’s sad,” she said, “what happened to Claude.”

  “And it just got worse. His daddy raised him on their little farm a few miles from town, kept him out of school and made him work. Some say he beat him. I’d believe that of old man Dobyns.”

  The summer breezes coming through the window over the kitchen sink brought scents of magnolia blossoms to mingle with the lemon scent of the dishwashing liquid. Irene set the glasses in the water and selected the first to wash.

  “Anyway,” she continued, “his daddy died a few years ago. Claude still stays at the farm, but I hear the place is bad run down. Claude drinks some, but that’s not what’s wrong with him. Mostly he’s just not right. Thinks everybody’s out to hurt him. Dianne used to take him food, and he tolerated her pretty good but then one day she brought out a doctor who wanted to put Claude on some medicine.” She rinsed the glass, set it on the rack and began washing the next one.