Digging Up Bones (Birdwell, Texas Mysteries Book 1)

by Aimee Gilchrist

  A few minutes later, he hobbled in and sat in his chair. The bruises and swelling had faded. He was himself again, sans stitches. He took my breath away. There was something so sexy about seeing him rumpled and warm, his hair sticking up, and his smile lopsided and sleepy. I needed to go so badly. It shored up my resolve to get out of town.

  "I saw you outside, talking to Junior." His voice was sleep-roughened and low, sending a shiver through me.

  "He wanted to ask me something."

  He turned intense eyes in my direction, and my heart leapt against my ribcage. I examined my nails critically, so I wouldn't have to look at him.

  "I need to talk to you too." He drummed his fingers on the arm of the chair. "Look, I know that maybe this isn't the best time for this, you know, with everything that's happened, but I was just wondering if maybe you would…"

  "Take Marian shopping. I know. I've heard it from three people already. No problem. It's under control."

  He raised his eyebrows, his mouth cocking up, slightly mocking. "I wasn't actually going to ask that, but it's good to know that it's all under control."

  I smiled back, because my mouth had a mind of its own. But it faded when he spoke again.

  "Really, I wanted to see if you wanted to go out sometime. You know, have a cup of coffee and see a movie or something." From the tone of his voice, it was impossible to tell whether he really wanted to go out with me or was just looking for a way to kill some time. After earlier, I didn't want to make assumptions.

  The idea of sharing coffee with him, sharing anything with him sounded really, really good to me. That's why I had to say, "I'm sorry, Aodhagan. I'd like to, but I…can't."

  "Sure," he shrugged. I couldn't tell if he was disappointed, relieved, or maybe just indifferent. "But I think that you should know that I'm only going to ask you out about a hundred more times before I just give up." His smile was unbelievably sweet, and I really, really wanted to kiss him. The urge was almost uncontrollable. He was close enough that I could just bend forward and press my mouth to his warm lips. I got up and started to walk around the room.

  "I would, but I can't. I mean, I don't date men anymore."

  His expression slowly changed as my words sunk in, and he developed his own ideas about my meaning. "I see," he said slowly.

  I held up a hand. "No, no. I don't date girls either. I just… I don't date. Even if I did, I'm leaving tomorrow."

  I really didn't mean to just spit it out like that. I'd meant to find some easy way to say it. Something that wasn't abrupt. But I couldn't tell how he felt about my words because his tone was emotionless and his face unreadable. "Tomorrow? But you never said anything. What about Penny's house?"

  "I don't know. I… Can I ask you to take care of it until I decide?" Like he needed another job to do or another person asking him to step up when it wasn't his responsibility. "I'll call you in a few weeks. Let you know what to do."

  "I guess I could." He hesitated, an expression of disgust crossing his features before he schooled it. He didn't have to tell me I had let someone else down. His body language was enough. It wasn't the first time I'd seen it. "I'd hoped that you would stay and see it fixed to sell or something."

  "I can't, I…" I didn't know what to say, how to justify my running one more time. There was no good excuse. I just couldn't do it. I couldn't stay. I had to run while I could.

  Outside, a horn honked. I was a coward, and I would use the distraction as a way out. "I have to go. That's Marian."

  Aodhagan met my eyes for a long moment. Mouth set, he turned away, like he'd lost interest in me or in my excuses.

  Would I ever get used to letting people down? Would I ever stop?

  I left the house without ever looking back. It was easier that way.

  Lubbock turned into an all-day expedition from which Marian emerged looking lovely and ethereal with the weird macramé and polyester clothing gone, replaced with sun dresses and faded cotton. There was nothing I could do about her doll eyes, with their wide, disconcerting stare, but even that was starting to look not so strange after a couple of weeks.

  I returned to Birdwell late, and Aodhagan was already upstairs. Clearly, he had no more interest in my shortcomings. He was done with me, and I couldn't really blame him. Penny would have done the same, if she were still alive. Penny never liked a coward.

  In the morning, I loaded up my car. To my surprise, he made me breakfast and was polite, if not friendly. It was hard to know if he was disgusted with me or protecting himself. It didn't matter really, either way. The end result was the same. We exchanged email addresses and telephone numbers, though I had the distinct impression he had no intention of using it unless something was wrong with the house. I had no intention of calling him either. I knew better. Penny was right. The real Aodhagan would be too easy to love.

  Standing outside my car, I nodded to him. Good-bye was too hard. Another thing I wasn't good at. "I guess…I'll see you when I come back. For the house."

  He cocked his head to the side. If he knew I was lying, he didn't say so. His expression was unreadable, so I couldn't tell. "Good-bye, Helen. It was an…adventure."

  That was one word for it. Swallowing hard at the lump in my throat, I managed a smile. "Yeah. It was."

  I couldn't say his name. Or good-bye. He was better than me. Stronger. Or he didn't care as much. Not that I was surprised. He was stronger than anyone I'd ever met. I nodded one more time and got in the car without glancing at him again. I pulled out without looking to see if he was watching me go.

  On Main Street, I kept my eyes forward, looking at anything but the library, the café, Thelma Sue's place. Instead, I looked at the white lines, on the road, the line of trees on the median, the clock on the dash. It was exactly 10:01 AM when I left Birdwell, Texas, for good.

  There weren't that many other travelers on 84, but the ones that I saw reflected the same despair I felt. Maybe there was nowhere good you could be traveling at ten in the morning on a dead highway like 84.

  How could I be unhappy to leave Birdwell? It was a town I hadn't liked from the minute I'd driven inside it. It simply didn't make any sense. By the time that I got to Muleshoe, Texas, home of the world's biggest mule shoe, I had a theory. One that gave me some of my illusion of sanity back.

  Penny's final request was that I do something good for Birdwell. What I felt was guilt. And if I wanted this sick feeling to go away, I would need to alleviate my guilt. So what could I do to help a nowhere Texas town? They had no sense of industry. Without businesses and residents, they would never last.

  Businesses. Residents. Industry. It was the first idea that I'd ever had designed entirely to help someone else. The sense of purpose it gave was drugging. I would build a newer, bigger, better house on the spot where Penny's house currently stood with money from my trust fund. It would be easy to justify. Remodeling was definitely something that the executor would believe was trivial, just for fun.

  Then, I would take the money that Penny had left me and start a foundation in her name. Something to encourage and teach people in the Birdwell area how to involve themselves in commerce. It would give people money to start businesses, to open stores and restaurants. And after the house sold, I would add that money to the pot.

  Maybe that would do something for Birdwell after all. Problem solved. But the feeling didn't go away. I pulled off to the side of the road, next to the famous mule shoe itself, and put it in park. How could I start and run Penny's foundation from so far away? Someone would need to oversee the building of the house. Aodhagan could do that. Someone would need to make sure that the business plans were financially sound and dole out the money. Jamie could probably be convinced to do that. But I would have to go back and explain myself. We would have to formulate a game plan. Things like this took time.

  Did I have another six months to devote to a project like this? Of course I did. I had nothing to do in the next six months that I would get more purpose out of than this. I real
ly had nothing at all. Purpose driven or otherwise. I wasn't even sure where I was going right now. The real question was in Birdwell itself. Would staying there make me crazy? Surely I could handle anything for six months. Couldn't I?

  And what about Aodhagan?

  My emotions could be trained. I wasn't so useless that I didn't have the ability to tell when I was crossing the line. Staying in Birdwell didn't mean giving up my resolve to stay single. But, it might mean I had to be stronger.

  I put the car in drive and turned into the wrong lane to head toward Clovis. Without even thinking, I was headed back to Birdwell.

  I could do this. I was heady with my new position in life as a person with a goal. I considered my plans all the way back to Birdwell. I didn't even notice the cows. I didn't notice the farms.

  It was just by a random stroke of luck that I happened to look up and notice the changes that someone had made to the wooden sign on the outskirts of town. If I had seen it on my way out, it would have stopped me in my tracks.

  562 born and bred Texans. Underneath, someone had taken a paintbrush and added, And one New Yorker.

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  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Aimee Gilchrist lives in New Mexico with her husband and three children. She writes mysteries for both teens and adults. She calls her lifetime of jumping from one job to another 'experience' for her books and not an inability to settle down. Aimee loves mysteries and a good, happy romance. She also loves to laugh. Sometimes she likes all of them together.

  A fan of quirky movies and indie books, Aimee likes to be with her family, is socially inept, and fears strangers and small yippy dogs. She alternates between writing and being a mom and wife. She tries to do both at the same time, but her kids don't appreciate being served lunch and told, "This is the hot dog of your discontent." So mostly she writes when everyone else is in bed.

  Aimee also writes YA and Inspirational Romantic Comedies under the name Amber Gilchrist.

  To learn more about Aimee, visit her online at: http://www.aimeegilchrist.com

  * * * * *

  BOOKS BY AIMEE GILCHRIST

  Birdwell, Texas Mysteries:

  Digging Up Bones

  Other works:

  The Tell-Tale Con

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  SNEAK PEEK

  If you enjoyed this series name, check out this sneak peek of another exciting novel from Gemma Halliday Publishing:

  MOTION FOR MADNESS

  by

  KELLY REY

  CHAPTER ONE

  Howard Dennis sprinted into the secretarial area, heaved his trial bag in my direction, and gasped, "I could kill her" before hustling toward the kitchen.

  Thanks to my recent promotion to first executive assistant at the law firm of Parker, Dennis, a personal injury mill in southern New Jersey, I was unfazed. The thing about first executive assistants is that they hear things the same way hairstylists and priests hear things. I'd heard Howard say that before, usually in reference to judges who didn't recognize his brilliance. He'd never meant it then, and I was pretty sure he didn't mean it now. But I couldn't be positive, since Howard had changed in the fifteen hours since I'd last seen him. For one thing, he'd started an exercise program. I'd never seen him do anything more strenuous than lifting a legal pad, and here he was throwing Hail Marys and doing wind sprints.

  "Howard Dennis, don't you dare walk away from me!" a female voice screeched.

  Howard froze with his hand on the kitchen door.

  I froze with his trial bag in my lap. "Is that—"

  "Who else would it be?" Howard's face had gone red, and his lips were white from holding in all that blue language.

  Kay Culverson slashed into the room in full-on hissy fit mode. Kay was six feet of obnoxiousness in a five-foot body, notorious in the legal community after being featured in a New Jersey law journal article about plaintiffs to avoid, complete with bullet points and commentary by a local psychologist. She was the host of Dishing with Kay, a cable show with local distribution—local meaning approximately twelve households with a viewership of half that—which didn't stop Kay from seeing herself as bound for a daytime Emmy.

  "Why did you let that judge dismiss my case?" she demanded. "That no-talent Ginger Holt assaulted me!"

  Howard stood there, panting and sweating and probably wishing he'd been fast enough to escape to his office. "She didn't assault you, Kay. She tripped over your feet walking off the set."

  I sneaked a peek at her feet. They looked like paddles on her anorexic frame.

  "Well, what about the stage manager? He knew my mark was wet. I could have slipped and broken my neck during the open!"

  A glimmer of hope lit Howard's eyes. "But you didn't," he said, a little sadly.

  Kay propped her spindly hands on her bony hips. "Still," she said. "I deserve more respect. I am the star of Dishing. At least until my agent finds me a project suited to my talent in live theater." She flung her arms out, knocking the out-box off my desk, which didn't matter since it was empty anyway. "I think you killed Jenna Sue Bonnie Ann, and I can prove it," she declared with a dramatic eyelash flutter and the worst Southern accent north of the Mason-Dixon Line. "I had your grits tested by—"

  I scrabbled across the floor to retrieve my out-box, smothering laughter in my collar while being careful to avoid her paddle-feet.

  "That's enough," Howard cut in. His cheeks had moved beyond red to purple. He was a color wheel on the verge of cardiac arrest. "You need to accept that I can't guarantee favorable verdicts."

  Kay's arms snapped back to her sides. That did it for me. The out-box was on its own. I fled to the safety of the kitchen, where I distanced myself from the fracas by pressing my ear to the door so I could hear it more clearly. "I'm still waiting for the first favorable verdict," she snapped. "Despite what your wife claims, you're not a very good lawyer."

  Howard's wife was the former Ellen Shaughnessy, sorority sister to Kay Culverson, present yin to Howard's yang, locking Howard and Kay in an inexorable litigious dance. Also, Howard was terrified of the fallout if Kay decided to use her show to bad-mouth the firm.

  "Then I suggest," Howard suggested, "that you find someone else, and we'll go our separate ways."

  "I would," Kay said, "except the world is full of bloodsuckers hiding behind law degrees. You're awful, but at least you're honest."

  "Fine." Howard's voice was thin and tight, much like I'd always envisioned my thighs. I had the thin part down. I was built like a twelve-year-old boy, without the shape. I also had the muscle tone of a jellyfish, despite tens of hours of yoga annually. "I have to get back to work then."

  "Good. Settled. I'll expect you for tomorrow's taping."

  That was another thing. Although my personal brush with the law had brought in so much new business that Howard and Wally were now forced to work eight-hour days, there could never be enough torts in Howard's trial bag. So when Kay insisted on dragging Howard to her tapings at Butternut Studio to protect her constitutional right to short-sighted ignorance, Howard went to assure himself that his legal prowess glowed sufficiently in the eyes of any potential new clients. Also to add three more billable hours to Kay's ledger. But he insisted on taking along a witness, and that was usually me.

  As bad as it was to have to listen to Kay, it was worse to go to Butternut Studio to do it. The studio was in Pine Run, another of the neighboring nugget-sized towns that effective policing had passed by, on the second story of a two-story building that had once housed an off-track betting operation on the ground floor until a disgruntled and newly impoverished client set fire to the place. The grounds were well tended, and the building did the best it could in a low-rent district. It had even once offered valet parking, until the valets had b
egun stealing the cars, so now visitors and tenants took their chances with self-parking and naive optimism.

  "One more thing," Kay said. "I need your team of investigators to look into my makeup girl, Cindy. I have headaches and fatigue every time she does my face. I think she's adding something to my foundation."

  I shook my head. Howard didn't have a team of investigators. He had one paralegal, Donna Warren, who was as intrepid as a baby rabbit. And I'd spent enough time at Butternut to know that Cindy Waterford Hanson was a gem in the box of rocks that was Kay's staff. She was a single mom who'd been with the show since the start despite the impossible task of making Kay look like a human being.

  "Maybe it's lead poisoning," Howard said cheerfully. "That can happen when you chew scenery."

  "Aren't you amusing." Kay remained stone-faced.

  The back door opened, and Missy Clark came in, looking perfect as always in a pencil skirt and silk shirt, an oversized bag hanging from an arm already weighed down by a sparkling diamond tennis bracelet. Missy was my opposite in secretarial skills and in every other way. Where I was clumsy, she was graceful. Where I was clueless, she was savvy. Where I was frizzy, she was smooth.

  When she saw me crouching at the door, her expression didn't change. "Who is it this time?"

  I scrunched up my nose. "Kay Culverson."

  She put her bag on the table and joined me. "What's her problem now?"

  "Plain nastiness." I nodded at the diamond bracelet. "New?"

  She smiled. "Braxton gave it to me last night."

  "You two are back together?" Braxton Malloy was a pharmacist Missy had been dating circa the death of one of the firm's founding partners. For a while I'd suspected her because of that relationship, but then Braxton had faded into Dean and Dean into Shawn, and I'd realized Missy didn't have the attention span to plan a murder.