Digging Up Bones (Birdwell, Texas Mysteries Book 1)

by Aimee Gilchrist

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  DIGGING UP BONES

  by

  AIMEE GILCHRIST

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  Copyright © 2016 by Aimee Gilchrist

  Cover design by Estrella Designs

  Gemma Halliday Publishing

  http://www.gemmahallidaypublishing.com

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  FREE BOOK OFFER

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  BOOKS BY AIMEE GILCHRIST

  SNEAK PEEK

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  CHAPTER ONE

  I knew exactly two things about Texas. One, it was the last place on Earth I wanted to die. Two, it smelled like ass. Cow ass, if you want specifics. I didn't particularly want to live in Texas either, but dying there, well, that was seriously not on my list of things to do.

  But I didn't move to Birdwell, Texas, population five hundred and sixty-two, to hop on the death train. I moved there because of the police who stormed my apartment. Because of the day I began to suspect that my fourth, and believe me final, engagement might not work out after all.

  A life full of garden parties and tennis lessons had allowed me to grow into a woman capable of…nothing. I had no practical skills. I couldn't cook. I didn't clean, and I wasn't much of an organizer. I didn't like hosting parties, and I was too old for the pageant circuit. In shorthand, I was a big fat loser at life. I had exactly one thing I could be relied on to do right every single time.

  I would always be able to find the worst man in any room. If there were a class-A loser to be found in the crowd, my libido would lead me right to him.

  The last in a long line of freaks was Lenny De Carlo, the guy the police had come to haul away the day they ransacked my place.

  Lenny, who taught math at a private college-prep academy, had been having the raunchy sex that he wasn't having with me, with his nubile, blonde students. So Lenny was going to the lockup, and I was going to Texas.

  As it happened, I would regret the choice, but that's the story of my life—a lot of impulsively made choices that I lived to regret at leisure.

  I was done with men. Once and for all. No one who made choices as bad as I did should ever be allowed to marry, reproduce, or in fact, even risk it by having sex at all. A place like Birdwell was bound to be populated almost entirely by men with names like Dwight who needed extensive bridge work. I could hardly fall to temptation if there was no one to be tempted by. The icing on the cake was, as far as I knew, I had nary a single ex-boyfriend in all of the Lone Star State.

  So Birdwell, Texas, and the bosom of my aunt Penny, it was.

  Actually, Penny was my mother's cousin, but I'd been raised regarding her as an aunt, and she was the only extended family I had. She'd requested my presence in Texas, and here I was. My primary purpose was to escape the specter of Lenny, the statutory rapist, but I was also glad to see Penny again. It had been more than a dozen years since we'd really spoken, and it was time.

  I navigated a lonely stretch of desert highway, two lanes of wind and nothingness, leading into Birdwell, Texas. I'd purposely made a travel itinerary that allowed me to stop in Denver to visit my first fiancé, Eric. We'd loved and lost as teenagers, breaking up at nineteen when I discovered that, while we were both experiencing a burgeoning sexuality, we were also both burgeoning in the same direction.

  Because I'm the biggest idiot who ever lived when it came to the less fair sex, my first indication was when I came home early and found him prancing around my apartment in my lingerie singing "It's Raining Men" in exaggerated falsetto. That was the end of that wedding.

  I passed a few houses buried far from the road, but for the most part the cows and I were the only signs of life for miles around. Finally, a few buildings rose in the distance. There was no question what was ahead.

  Birdwell.

  My stomach dropped hard, like the first plummet on a roller coaster. I was really afraid. I was afraid of a strange little town full of strange people in big hats. I was afraid of seeing Penny after all these years.

  I also realized, as I got close enough to see what I was getting into, I was afraid to tell Penny that I definitely wouldn't be staying. Penny had written me a letter requesting my help with a problem, asking me to stay for an indeterminate amount of time. She'd offered few details, and I'd offered no resistance, but now that I was here, I could safely say there was no chance I would be doing that. A state-sanctioned sign just outside of town announced that I'd indeed entered Birdwell, Texas, pop. 562. A larger sign, painted by hand on a weathered piece of white wood, read, Birdwell, Texas. 562 born-and-bred Texans.

  Well, yee-haw.

  Sadly, Birdwell was nothing more that a dot on my GPS that offered no information except the location of the Birdwell Municipal Schools and the Birdwell Post Office. I figured once I got into town I'd just look for Penny's street, Lovers Lane. A town the size of Birdwell couldn't possibly have that many streets.

  It only took me a few seconds to realize where I'd gone wrong with my plan. The streets in Birdwell had no names. Or, at the very least, they had no street signs. I drove aimlessly past a hair salon, that apparently also contained the post office, a hardware store, a western-wear store that looked like it was made out of a Tuff Shed, and a library, before I pulled to a stop in front of a restaurant called the Home Cooking Café.

  I put the car in park and debated whether or not I wanted to know where I was badly enough to talk to strange people. But there was no point in sitting there all day, and there was nowhere for me to go until I asked. I threw open my door and got out, surveying the street. The Home Cooking Café was a little worse for the wear, the stucco bui
lding cracked and the paint faded. Liberal amounts of blackened smoke damage darkened the area near the roof.

  The neighborhood bar next door shared a building with a general store. The school, across the street, looked like something from Little House on the Prairie, complete with the rooftop bell. The last building in my line of sight was a motel, windows boarded.

  I was too intimidated to go inside Home Cooking Café, visions of Deliverance and Cabin Fever dancing in my head. I had no desire to be made into a sex toy or bitten by a weird pancake-obsessed kid with a pageboy. So, I like stupid B movies. Sue me.

  The West Texas air was hot, and the slightest hint of uncomfortable wetness clung to my skin like a desperate guy at a bar. Now that I was out, I had no idea what to do next. The bell above the door in the restaurant jangled, and two men strolled out, deep in conversation. The younger of the men mumbled something and headed back inside. The other man stopped on the broken concrete and stared at me, as though I was going to provide him with a reason for my sudden appearance in Birdwell. I was guessing they didn't get a lot of visitors.

  He looked middle-aged, maybe fiftyish, with a shaved head and a face like one of those ugly pug dogs. Smashed in, cocked to the side quizzically, with moist blue eyes bugging out of his head. We sized each other up for several seconds. He slapped a massive straw cowboy hat on his head and turned away from me.

  I blurted out, "Do you know where Lovers Lane is?" I hated my GPS. Hated it. It was useless, and it was making me talk to this weird man in front of a restaurant that smelled like Spam.

  "It's just past Gas."

  I took a moment to consider that before responding. Because really. What could I say? "Lovers Lane has a flatulence problem?" I requested carefully.

  His pug eyes blinked slowly, and he regarded me as though I was the one saying something ridiculous. Slowly, he said, "Lovers Lane is about two blocks up on the right. Just past the gas station." He pointed very slowly to the south.

  "Oh." Well, now I felt stupid. "Thanks."

  I still didn't quite understand the way he'd phrased it until I reached the gas station up the street and saw it was literally named Gas. When there was no competition, creativity probably wasn't a requirement.

  Mr. Pug had neglected to mention that just a few feet from the main drag, Lovers Lane ceased to be a paved road. Maybe that was just a given around here. Gritting my teeth, I jumped and jolted my way down the street until I found my aunt's address painted on a mailbox that was shaped like a can of beer, with the lid as the opening.

  Yeah, this was Penny's house.

  Penny had a way about her. She was different from Long Island ladies. When I was a preschooler, my parents had enrolled me in the kind of kindergarten that required your name to be on a waiting list while still in utero. One of the very first assignments we were given was about our extended family. I had none. Both of my parents were only children whose parents had long passed away. I had no aunts, uncles, or cousins.

  I was without resources for my very first big project. For years, I fancied that what happened next was born out of my parents' love for me. It was more likely that my mother was worried if I started making waves so early in the year, I might lose my coveted spot forever, and then what would she tell her friends?

  But for a while I thought it was love. Story of my life, am I right?

  At any rate, for the sake of the assignment my mother produced Penny. All I knew at the time was that Penny lived in some remote corner of the Texas wilds, which to me, born and raised on Long Island, might as well have been the moon.

  I doubted that my ultra-conservative parents, truly named Ward and June, approved of a woman who remained unmarried into her fifties, liked to arm wrestle strange men for money, and wore three-inch, cherry-red Lee Press-On Nails. But they had been stuck with her after the initial contact, because I was wild for her. She taught me to roll my own cigarettes, apply fake eyelashes, and use curse words as nouns, verbs, and adjectives.

  Every summer, my parents would bring her up to our summer home in Port Victoria, Canada, to stay for two weeks. There she would proceed to teach me a number of things they would spend the rest of the summer trying to break me of. But to me, she was a young girl's hero.

  Around middle school, she stopped coming to Port Victoria and rarely answered my letters. I wasn't sure if my parents had stopped inviting her for fear that I'd look to her for fashion tips, or if she'd just gotten bored, as she was wont to do. Either way, I hadn't seen her, and little heard from her, since I was twelve or thirteen. Until her letter came out of the blue. But if I had spent time picturing the house of the woman I had known, it would most certainly look like this.

  I drove up her little dirt driveway and came to a stop next to an aged green Gremlin. There was also a Ford Fairlane up on blocks near the side of the house. Charming.

  I pulled to a stop on the dirt patch that qualified as a driveway, deciding to leave everything in the car since I would not be staying long and certainly not indefinitely.

  Penny's house was short and squat, tilting sideways where it was sinking into the ground. Made of faded pinkish stucco, the exterior of the house was sun damaged and falling off in huge chunks. Underneath was an inexplicable layer of chicken wire. Then again, I knew nothing about stucco, having never seen it before this trip, so for all I knew, chicken wire came standard.

  The steps to the house had once been painted red but had faded like an old Coca-Cola sign. I raised my hand to knock and noticed the door was slightly ajar. Penny was clearly expecting me already, even though I was early. I knocked and pushed open the door at the same time.

  The place was a mess. There were papers and clothes thrown everywhere. No one came to greet me. "Hello." My voice seemed to echo off the walls. "Aunt Penny? It's me, Helen."

  Nothing.

  I'm a true-crime author. The perfect career for me, the person who had obtained and lost literally hundreds of jobs, because I had little call to deliver to anyone's expectations. I was great at interviews when the subject wasn't personal, and I was good at research. I covered historical crimes, and those skills were enough. People who were dead didn't mind if I had absolutely no life skills. My agent and editor weren't in love with me, but they were in love with the steady income my books provided, so I was tolerated, even with my sporadic behavior and constant missing of deadlines. I refused to believe that my father, author of numerous self-help tomes, had been any kind of influence on my publishing contract. However, my believing it didn't make it true. But I could still hope it was.

  My agent, Eleanor Goldman, was always trying to get me to write about a crime less than fifty years old. She swore I could be the next Ann Rule. She also steadfastly ignored my claims I didn't want to be. Overall, I enjoyed the job, especially the research. But reading about so many crimes had, over time, made me a little jumpy.

  Penny's house was seriously giving me the creeps. I made a cursory inspection of the two bedrooms and the bathroom. Each room had that same look of wild disarray. No one left a house like this on purpose. Where was Penny?

  Maybe out in the backyard or down the street at a neighbor's?

  I pushed open the kitchen door. If Penny were at a neighbor's, she surely would have heard me scream when a fat yellow cat jumped off the table and launched aggressively at my face. We had a short but violent argument, which I nearly lost, about who would retain possession of my head, before the cat dropped to the ground and ran from the kitchen. I was left stunned on the threshold of a circa 1960s kitchen, done up in rusted chrome and sea-green Formica.

  A few days' worth of dishes were scattered in the sink, but nothing else seemed amiss. The cat's empty bowl sat in the corner of the room. An empty cereal bowl, lightly crusted with old corn flakes, rested on the table next to Penny's newly opened pack of Lucky cigarettes and her red imitation-leather handbag.

  Now I was really starting to worry.

  I peeked into the backyard, but no one would go out there of her own voli
tion, as the weeds had grown up to the window. On the way back into the bedroom for another look around, I noticed Penny's desk. There in the corner sat an ancient black wall phone and an equally aged answering machine. It was blinking a red number two. I was stunned anyone still had an answering machine like that. But then dread set in, and I hit the button.

  The first message, left yesterday afternoon, was nothing but dead air, followed by a long beep. Then it was my message from the night before, sounding tired and stupid. Penny had not checked her messages in two days, and it was time to get some answers.

  I checked my phone, discovered I had no signal, and then crossed back to the desk. Gingerly, I picked up the phone and dialed 9-1-1, not at all sure if that was the right emergency number for backwoods Texas. My hands were shaking, and I needed to calm down or the person on the other end would never understand me. I snatched up a cigarette pack on the desk and held it up to my nose, taking in a deep breath, letting just the smell of nicotine roll over me. I'd stopped smoking last year, but that was before people started disappearing. I wasn't ready to start again, but the smell of a cigarette, even a bad one, calmed me.

  "Thelma Sue's." A heavily accented voice picked up on the other end. I was momentarily struck dumb, opening my mouth and then closing it again. "Hello?" She drawled.

  Okay, I would just simply call on the locals for advice. I slid the pack into the pocket of my jeans and took another steadying breath. "I'm sorry. I was looking for the police. Can you tell me how to reach them?"

  "Sure, honey, you got the right place. This is Thelma Sue's Hair Extravaganza, and I also run the emergency switchboard when the Tallatahola girls get them some lunch."

  The what at the what? I lost my train of thought for a moment, but it came barreling back when the cat hunkered into the living room and hissed at me. "I need a policeman here at my aunt's house. I think something's happened. Something bad."