Lone Star Lonely

by Maggie Shayne

  “Yeah. One with a temper. Now talk!”

  “Honey, maybe if we just asked nicely?” Taylor suggested, easing the frightened man from Wes’s grip, smoothing his shirt down, smiling up at him with huge dark eyes. “It is asking a lot.”

  “Dern right it is,” the bartender said. “Cowan’s dead, Hawkins is dead, and now young Kirsten’s gone missing. I could be next.”

  “You’re damn straight you could,” Wes growled. “Might be sooner than you think.”

  The guy swallowed with a loud gulping sound. “Okay, but you didn’t hear this from me. That driver of Cowan’s…Carr’s his name…well, Nora—you know Nora? My best waitress?”

  “I know her.”

  “Her boy Joey works over at the drugstore part-time, and he told her that Carr came in the other day and bought himself three bottles of sleepin’ pills. Now, I thought that was kinda odd. Don’t you?”

  “Where’s this Carr live?”

  “Out at the Cowan estate, far as I know.”

  Wes nodded once, turned to his wife. “Stay here.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “Right. You know darn well I’m gonna do just that, hon.”

  He scowled at her. She smiled at him. “That legendary temper of yours doesn’t scare me one bit, Wes.”

  His scowl died. “Never did. Stay beside me, then, okay? There could be trouble.”

  She nodded and stayed close beside him as they headed out the door.

  Jessi handed Lash the baby as she scanned the mess inside her house. Her eyes wide and round, she cussed a blue streak, then turned and walked right back outside again. “Something’s happened here. And ten to one it all has to do with my brother Adam and the woman he never should have let get away. Dang, Lash, come out here and look at this!”

  Lash followed, with little Maria Michele snuggling happily in his arms. He looked down at the ground. Saw grass. Dirt. A couple of stones. And knew darned well his wife saw far more.

  “Someone was dragged outta here kicking and screaming. A woman.” Jessi thrust a forefinger toward the ground. “Small feet.”

  “Obviously,” Lash said, still seeing nothing. He wondered if his gun was still in the house, or if the intruder had stolen it, whoever he was. He didn’t even think to doubt his wife’s words about what she saw in that ordinary-looking patch of lawn and sidewalk.

  He hurried inside, located his gun and badge safe and sound in the closet, took them out and headed back outside, baby still bouncing merrily on his hip, wearing her Mickey Mouse ears proudly on her head.

  By now Jessi was hunkered down, examining the road. Lash trotted to catch up. When he reached her, she was squatting over a set of tire tracks that he could at least see.

  “He pulled, dragged or carried her this far. The car was here.” Her fingers touched the marks on the road. “Shoot, honey, he was driving a limo.”

  “But nobody around here has a limo…except Cowan, and he’s—” With a glance at his daughter, Lash censored himself.

  “We’d better get over there,” Jessi said. “We’ll drop Maria Michele at Mrs. Plunkwell’s on the way.” She glanced at the gun he carried. “Did you bring one for me?”

  Great, Lash thought. It was going to be another shoot-out, another one of those insane episodes that were only supposed to happen in old movies and Louis L’Amour novels. He’d married into the most trouble-prone bunch of Texans in the entire Lone Star state.

  “Never mind,” Jessi said. “I’ll go get it.” She ruffled the baby’s hair and hurried back to the house for her cannon—with which she was fully capable of shooting the eye out of a mosquito at fifty yards.

  Hell of a woman. Hell of a family. Lash didn’t regret getting involved with either of them.

  The baby cooed. Lash looked over to see Mrs. Plunkwell standing on her lawn, watching him. He waved, she waved back and he carried the baby over.

  Penny Lane Brand was one hell of a private eye, even at six months pregnant. But when there was nothing to find, there was nothing to find. And Ben could feel her disappointment coming at him in waves.

  They’d searched Madden Hawkins’ house, his office, his car, his attic, even his back lawn and basement. They’d turned over cushions, lifted up carpets, checked above the ceiling panels and in the soil of the houseplants. Nothing. No sign of Cowan’s will.

  Time to move on, time to think of some other way to help Penny’s best friend, Kirsten.

  Ben slipped his arm around Penny’s shoulders and squeezed. “We’ll come up with something, hon. I know we will.”

  “I know,” she said. “But will it be in time? This is frustrating! Why wouldn’t Hawkins have that will here? It’s like he hid it deliberately.”

  Ben shook his head. “Garrett thinks the killer took it.”

  “No.” Penny paced, head down, deep in thought. “No. And that’s just what’s bugging me about this. If the killer had taken the will, there would still be something here. The rest of Cowan’s file. An empty folder. Another copy. A file on the computer. There’s nothing. Nothing, Ben.”

  “And you think that means…?” he prompted, then awaited a reply. She was thinking something. She was always thinking something.

  “What if Hawkins hid it himself?’’

  “Why would he?”

  Penny shrugged. “Won’t know that until we find it. The police wanted it to use as evidence against Kirsten. The will would have given her a motive…so what if Hawkins hid it to buy Kirsten some more time? What if he was trying to help her?”

  She paced some more, thought some more. “Or maybe he wasn’t hiding it from the police. Maybe he was hiding it from the killer for some reason.”

  Ben shrugged. “Like you said, when we find it, we’ll probably know. That will must hold all the answers.” He opened Hawkins’ front door, and the two of them stepped out and walked toward Ben’s truck. A small white bulldog stood in the front seat, forepaws on the window glass, staring out at them. Olive went just about everywhere they did. Her pups might rule the roost at home, but Olive was queen of the pickup truck.

  Ben stopped walking when a small car with a U.S. Mail emblem on it slowed down, veered over, then stopped right in front of Madden Hawkins’ old-fashioned rural mailbox. An arm emerged from the car window, dumping a manila envelope into the mailbox. Then the car moved away.

  Ben and Penny looked at each other. Penny smiled. “Of course,” she whispered. “That’s it, Ben.”

  Ben ran to the mailbox, yanked the envelope out and stared at the label. The “from” address was the same as the “to.” “He mailed it to himself?” Ben asked.

  “I should have figured. Best way in the world to buy time. A couple of days, at least. No one’s gonna find something once it’s in the mail. Not until it gets where it’s going, at least.” Penny took the envelope from him and ripped it open. She pulled the last will and testament of Joseph Cowan out of its envelope and began flipping pages, her eyes moving rapidly over line upon line of text. Until finally she sighed and shook her head slowly.

  “My God, that man was evil.”

  “What is it, Penny?” Ben asked, moving closer.

  She looked up, meeting her husband’s eyes. “He left everything to Kirsten with the provision that should anything happen to her before his wishes could be carried out, then everything would go instead to one Phillip Carr.” She lifted her head. “He might as well have paid Carr to kill her. So long as it doesn’t look like a murder, and it’s done before she inherits, he gets everything.”

  “But then, if this Carr was supposed to kill Kirsten anyway, why bother making it look like she’d killed Cowan?”

  “I don’t know,” Penny said. “To make sure she’d never get a thing, even if Carr failed? To stall her getting her inheritance long enough for him to have the chance to kill her? To make sure Carr wouldn’t end up taking the rap for Cowan’s murder himself, allowing Kirsten to go free and inherit the money? Maybe all of the above,” Penny said. “Who the hell is this guy, anyway?
Phillip Carr…why does that name sound so familiar?”

  “Carr,” Ben repeated. “Wait a minute, isn’t that the name of Cowan’s driver? Yeah, that’s right,” he said with barely a pause, answering his own question. “I always thought it was strange that he had a driver named Carr. Doesn’t he live—”

  “At the estate. Come on!” Penny grabbed her husband’s hand, clutching the will in her other one, and raced to the truck.

  The Brands gathered beyond the gates of the Cowan estate, a few at a time. Adam, Garrett and Elliot had been the first to arrive. They’d stopped when they’d seen the limo parked in front of the garage. It hadn’t been there before. So they left the pickup a safe distance away, out of sight, and then crouched in the bushes, whispering their plan of attack.

  Chelsea arrived on their heels. They hadn’t heard her pull up, because she’d left her car near where they’d left the truck, and walked in the rest of the way.

  “It’s gotta be that Phillip Carr,” she whispered, crouching beside them.

  Adam was so startled he damn near fell over.

  “She’s right,” Penny said.

  Adam swung his head around to see Penny and Ben creeping nearer, and, behind them, Wes and Taylor bringing up the rear. “How did you all know we were here?” he asked.

  “We didn’t,” Ben said. “We came looking for Carr. We found the will, Adam, and it’s set up so that if something happens to Kirsten, Carr inherits the works.”

  Wes nodded. “So that’s why. I figured it was him when I found out he’d been stockpiling sleeping pills. So what’s the game plan?”

  “He’s got Kirsten in there,” Adam said slowly. He looked at his family members, one by one.

  “Then let’s go in and get her out!” Jessi said.

  “No, wait. There’s something you need to know first.” Adam licked his lips, swallowed hard. “Jessi, Wes, Ben…Kirsten told me why she married Cowan in the first place. And it’s…it’s liable to change your minds about her, once you know the truth.”

  “He was holding something over her,” Ben said. “She confided that much to me a long time ago, but she would never say what.”

  Adam nodded. “She told me. And I have to tell you. It’s…about the accident that killed our parents….”

  Ben, Jessi and Wes exchanged stunned looks. But they all stayed silent and listened intently while Adam spoke. He told them everything Kirsten had told him. He told them his reaction. And he told them that he wouldn’t blame them if they wanted to walk away from this rescue now that they knew the truth.

  No one said a word for a long moment, and it was Jessi who finally spoke up. “Do you think our mama would have held any of this against Kirsten? Something she did at fourteen?”

  “No,” Ben said softly. “And our daddy wouldn’t have turned his back on a girl in trouble, either. She was a kid, Adam. She was a kid and she made a stupid mistake. We all did dumb things when we were kids.”

  Adam nodded and met Wes’s eyes. “What about you?”

  Wes drew a slow breath. “I’m resisting the urge to knock you on your backside, Adam. For walking out on her.”

  “Amen to that,” Jessi said.

  “What are we waiting for?” Garrett asked finally. “That girl in there is family.”

  Jessi lifted her brows and looked from Garrett to Adam. “Is she?”

  “Yeah,” Adam said. “Yeah, she is.”

  “Hot damn,” Jessi said. “Then let’s get our butts in there and get her out.”

  Everyone spoke in agreement. Adam choked back tears. “Thanks, you guys.”

  “Enough, already,” Wes said. “What’s the plan?”

  Kirsten’s hand moved a half beat behind Phillip’s commands. His harshly spoken words seemed to go directly from his lips to the pen in her hand, without bothering to make a pit stop at her brain. She didn’t know what she scrawled across the page, or even if it would be legible when she finished. She didn’t care. Her body was still shuddering with residual electricity. Tremors worked up her spine and slammed into the base of her skull every once in a while. The discomfort had eased up a whole lot, though, once those sleeping pills had decided to kick in full force. Their effect was numbing. And she was grateful for it at this point.

  Her head felt like lead. Her limbs heavy, the pen like a log in her hand.

  “Sign it.”

  She blinked up at Phillip, then shook herself and stared down at the uneven words dancing drunkenly across the page. Her vision was none too clear. “I killed my husband and I can’t live without him. The guilt of what I have done is driving me insane. There’s only one way out. One way to atone. And that is by following Joseph to the grave.”

  Narrowing her eyes on the sloppy words, she felt her lips pull into a grimace. “I wouldn’t follow that bastard inside if it was raining out.” But her words sounded funny. The vowels slurred, and the consonants didn’t make the trip to her ears or feel as if they were happening on her lips. Her s-words were lisped, as if she had gaps in her teeth.

  “Sign it, Kirsten.”

  She threw the pen down on the table.

  Phillip picked up his stun gun and flicked the switch, and Kirsten cried out automatically, flinching back into her chair so hard it tipped over. She crashed to the floor and lay there, closing her eyes, wishing for a miracle.

  Phillip didn’t pick her up. He came closer, leaned over her with the crackling little torture device, and her eyes flew open when she heard it. The ropes binding her upper arms and waist to the back of the chair pulled tighter as she tried to move away. They cut into her ankles as she pulled against them. He leaned closer, closer, the nose of that horrible device hovering a millimeters from her shoulder. Tears streamed, and sobs wrenched at her sternum. “P-please…I’ll sign it. J-just give me the pen.”

  Smiling, Phillip backed off. He gave the chair a kick, so it tipped to the side. Then he knelt, shoving the paper onto the floor near her hand, sticking the pen between her thumb and forefinger. Barely able to see through her tears, she scratched her name onto the bottom of the sheet. Phillip yanked the paper away so fast she barely saw it move.

  He turned away from her. The pen was still in her hand. Kirsten maneuvered it into her sleeve, pushing it up farther and farther until it was out of sight. Then she thought it might not have mattered. He was paying very little attention to her now. Instead, he was pacing. Pacing, with the note in his hand, reading it over, and thinking.

  Of how he would kill her, she supposed.

  Then he stopped. “More pills would be simplest, of course, but it would take too long. They’ll be looking for you soon.” Again he began pacing. “And they can’t find you here.”

  Then suddenly he came to where she and the chair lay toppled on the floor, reached down and yanked her upright. The tugging hurt her arm, but she was beyond caring about that. Phillip crouched behind her to untie the ropes. “The house,” he told her. “The very room where Joseph died. Using the same gun would be nice. Dramatic, you know? But of course, the police have that. Still, this will be almost as good. We’ll make it…poetic.”

  He freed the ropes from around her ankles, jerked her to her feet and pulled her with him to the door. She staggered, feet feeling oversized and clumsy as the blood rushed back into them. They prickled and stung. She tripped. And still he kept her moving through the door and toward the outside stairway. Frantically, she searched the driveway. Why wasn’t anyone coming for her?

  Because she had no one. No one who cared, anyway. Adam hated her, and if he’d told his family what she’d done, then they all must feel the same by now. Even big, sweet Ben. Even Penny, who’d been her best friend. Odd that she’d once thought of them, all of them, as the next best thing to her own family. Odd that she’d kept that feeling alive all this time, even though she’d been estranged from them.

  This time it would be permanent.

  “You know, in some primitive cultures it was common to send a man’s wife to the grave with him. I d
on’t imagine they always went without…assistance, either.” Phillip grinned at her, and she knew he was insane. But not with any true mental illness. Just with greed. A greed she still didn’t understand.

  Surrounding his second-floor garage apartment was a catwalk. A narrow redwood deck that bordered Phillip’s living quarters on all four sides. It was connected to an outside staircase that led to the ground. There were indoor stairs, as well, so he could go directly from his apartment to the spacious four-car garage below if need be.

  They stood now on the catwalk, Kirsten clinging to the rail and battling dizziness, Phillip clinging to Kirsten.

  And all of a sudden a voice came from below.

  “You’d best stop right where you are, Carr. And let the lady go.”

  Phillip clenched her tighter, reflexively pulling her flush to his chest like a shield as he searched for the owner of that voice.

  “Adam?” Kirsten cried. “Adam! Be careful, he has a gun!” She tried to see him on the ground below but barely caught a glimpse of his strong body before Phillip tugged her away from the railing.

  His hand clapped over her mouth, silencing her. He pressed his back to the wall and eased toward the door. But when he did it was flung open, and Wes Brand stood there looking dark and menacing. He’d come up from the garage, Kirsten realized.

  “Do what my brother says, pal,” Wes said softly. He had a bowie knife in his hand and a steely glint in his eyes. “Let her go.”

  Phillip jerked backward, tugging her around a corner. The outside stairs came into view. But at the bottom of them stood another Brand. Big, blond Ben, coming slowly upward.

  Trapped. Phillip had to let her go now. There was no way out for him. He was trapped.

  Or was he?

  Phillip pulled her with him again, rounding another corner. She glimpsed more people on the ground. Lash and Jessi and Penny. And before anyone could guess what Phillip was going to do, he yanked open a window and dived back inside, carrying her with him. They hit the floor hard and rolled. She heard Garrett’s voice from outside shouting, “They’re back in the apartment!” She heard the door crash open as someone, probably Wes, charged inside. But Phillip was already springing to his feet, tugging her through a door, locking it behind him and then hauling her up a steep, dark set of stairs that led to the A-shaped attic above the apartment.