Her Colton P.I.

by Amelia Autin

  He drew a deep breath. “And I’ve been here a few times since I graduated from college. Not a lot, maybe once every two years, because—”

  “Because what?” she asked when he didn’t continue.

  “Don’t get me wrong, I don’t believe in ghosts. But every time I go there, I feel...I don’t know...sad, I guess. Thinking about my mother as a little girl there. Remembering the whole family visiting my grandparents there. They were good people, Holly, and my mother was their only child. It killed them—literally killed them—when she was murdered. I don’t know how anyone ever survives the loss of a—”

  When he broke off this time Holly knew what he’d been going to say. The loss of a child. Chris had lost a child. Not a child he’d held in his arms, but still...

  She tried to imagine losing Ian or Jamie, and couldn’t. She just couldn’t. Chris’s baby had died unborn, but that didn’t mean he hadn’t already loved it. She remembered how she’d felt when she’d been four months pregnant, and how Grant had felt, too. They’d already loved their baby-to-be—before they’d known there were two—but that was nothing compared to now. So she knew how devastated Chris’s grandparents had been at the loss of their only child.

  She reached across and placed a comforting hand on Chris’s arm, letting him know she understood. Not just how his grandparents had felt, but how he felt, too.

  * * *

  Just before Loving they turned south on TX-16—Loving Highway, the sign read. And Holly wondered where the name had come from. Loving Highway was obviously named after the town of Loving, but how had the town gotten its name? Must have been named after someone, she figured. She didn’t imagine Texas cattle barons being the sentimental kind.

  Her curiosity piqued, she asked Chris. “You’re right,” he said. “Nothing to do with loving.” He glanced at her and all of a sudden she couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t think. Could only remember how Chris had made her body sing last night. Her nipples reacted as if he’d caressed them, tightening until they ached. She crossed one arm over her breasts to hide her reaction from Chris, because she didn’t want him to know.

  Then he turned his eyes back to the road and said, “The town was named Loving because it was built on part of the Lost Valley Loving Ranch. And that was founded by a famous north Texas cattle drover, Oliver Loving.”

  “Thanks.” Her body still humming with need, Holly turned away and gazed out the window. Very, very sorry she’d asked.

  * * *

  Regina Willard surreptitiously slid the wallet she’d just stolen from a woman in the drugstore into her purse, then walked out as if she hadn’t a care in the world. Women are such fools, she thought contemptuously. Carrying their wallets in purses so full they couldn’t be zipped or snapped closed. Then placing their opened purses in the child seat of a shopping cart...and wandering away. She deserves to have her wallet stolen, Regina rationalized. She wasn’t a thief. She would cut up and discard the credit cards. And she would drop the money in the wallet into the collection box of the first church she came to.

  No, she wasn’t a thief. But she needed the driver’s license. Now that the FBI and the Granite Gulch Police Department had trumpeted her name and photo to the news media, she needed new identification so she could get a job. One middle-aged woman looked very like another in most people’s minds. And besides, driver’s license photos were notoriously bad, often looking nothing like the people they were supposed to represent. So she wasn’t worried about bearing only a vague resemblance to the photo on the driver’s license she’d just stolen. All she’d needed was new ID, so she was set now. Next step, finding a job...unless she spotted the woman who’d stolen her fiancé. Killing her would take precedence over anything else.

  * * *

  “This is it?” Holly asked as they drove up a long, winding drive to an older farmhouse perched on the top of a rise. “It’s beautiful. Oh, I love those tall trees planted all around the house.”

  “Folks did that a lot in the old days. Windbreaks, they’re called. Nowadays a lot of homeowners don’t want to be bothered with trees—too many leaves to rake.” He smiled as he parked the truck and they got out. “Back then the trees did more than act as windbreaks. They provided much-needed shade at a time when there was no air-conditioning. Which reminds me,” he told her with a slight grimace. “There’s no central air. My grandparents had window units installed, but...”

  “I’ll be fine. It’s hot, but it’s not that hot. When I was a little girl, before I started school, my parents used to take me on their missionary trips to South America. No AC in an Amazon rain-forest jungle hut. I think I’ll survive.”

  They crossed the deep front porch, and Holly looked around curiously. Two wooden rockers resided on one side, a porch swing on the other. Chris saw where her attention was focused and said, “My grandparents called it a courting swing. But we kids didn’t care about that.” A reminiscent smile curved his lips. “We all tried to squeeze onto it when we younger—Trevor, me, Annabel, Ridge, Ethan and Sam. Five squirming boys and one long-legged girl with sharp elbows.” He rubbed his ribs as if remembering all the times Annabel had dug her elbows into his ribs, but he was smiling, so Holly knew it was a good memory.

  “No Josie?”

  “She was just a baby.” He laughed. “No way Mama would have trusted us with her on the porch swing.” Then he seemed to recollect why he was here. He unlocked the door and pushed it open. “Come on. I want to see if I can find anything that might relate to Biff.”

  The curtains were drawn over all the windows in the front parlor, making the interior dim and gloomy even though the sun was shining brightly outside. So Chris flicked the switch, and the old-fashioned overhead light fixture came on. “We kept the electricity on,” he explained. “The water, too. But we disconnected the propane and sold the stove and the refrigerator because we figured we didn’t need them if no one was living here. Not that they were worth a lot—the fridge was almost twenty years old, and the stove was even older. But they were useful to someone, so...” He shrugged.

  Holly looked around. “Who keeps the place clean?”

  “The farmer who rents the land, his wife comes over once a month. She dusts—not that a lot of dust accumulates with no one living in the house—and she runs the vacuum over the floors. That’s one of the reasons we kept the electricity on. We let her pick whatever she wants off the peach tree in the back, too, because otherwise it would just go to waste. She makes her own preserves and she bakes one heck of a peach cobbler.”

  He was silent for a moment. Then he admitted, “We probably should sell the place, but...as I told you, none of us can bear to let it go.”

  Holly was wandering around the room, picking up a knickknack here, a hand-crocheted doily there, then carefully replacing them. “I can understand in one way, but...someone put a lot of love into making this house a home with all these little personal touches. You shouldn’t leave these things here where they can be stolen or vandalized.”

  Her eyes met his. “But it’s not just that. You—I don’t mean just you, but the rest of your family, too—should go through the furnishings and decide what you want for your own homes. These things should be used, Chris. Treasured...but used. Not left as some kind of shrine.” She reverently touched the afghan folded and placed across the back of the sofa, crocheted in a lightning pattern of royal blue and grass green, with a thin stripe of orange to add pizzazz. “If this were mine...”

  She sighed, remembering her home in Clear Lake City, which had contained similar handmade treasures she’d inherited from both her grandmothers. Including three patchwork quilts and a yo-yo quilt. Not to mention the old-fashioned foot-pedal sewing machine she’d never used but had proudly displayed, which had come to her from her great-grandmother. When she’d run, she’d called a moving company to pack up everything and put it in storage, because even though she’d be
en terrified, she couldn’t just abandon her heritage. Having money comes in handy, she thought. What would she have done if she hadn’t been able to afford to put her belongings in storage?

  You still would have run, she acknowledged. It might have broken your heart to abandon everything, but you still would have run.

  * * *

  An hour later, while Chris was searching the bedrooms, Holly came across a stack of old photo albums on a bookshelf in the corner of what she insisted on calling the parlor. Because that’s what it is, she’d stubbornly told Chris.

  She knelt in front of the bookcase and pulled out a half-dozen velour-covered photo albums. The deep blue velour was faded, but the silver lettering was still visible, and she figured she’d just uncovered a gold mine. “Look at this, Chris,” she called. When he joined her, she handed the photo albums to him and stood, wiping off the knees of her jeans even though the floor wasn’t really dusty.

  Chris was already sitting on the sofa, turning the leaves of the first album, when Holly sat next to him. “Look,” she exclaimed. “There are captions on the photos!”

  The books appeared to be in chronological order. They went through the first one, but it was mostly pictures of Chris’s mother as a baby, then as a toddler, all of them neatly labeled. There were a few pictures of a man and a woman Chris identified as his grandparents—which matched the first names in the spidery handwriting beneath the pictures—and some of people he admitted he had no idea who they were. “Todd and Nora,” he read. “Todd and Nora who?”

  “Doesn’t matter. Neither one is Biff.”

  Holly touched Chris’s arm to get his attention. “Would you explain about the clues? You said your clue was Biff, and Sam mentioned other clues that seemed to point here to your grandparents’ house. But why is your father doing this to you? Why won’t he just come right out and say where he buried your mother?”

  “Because he’s a twisted son of a bitch,” Chris said roughly. “I think he’s getting a kick out of torturing us. Like ‘Ha-ha-ha, you think you can find her?’” His right hand, the one he’d been using to turn the pages of the photo album, formed a fist.

  She didn’t know why she did it, but she curled her left hand around Chris’s fist, her fingers stroking gently until he unclenched his hand and twined his fingers with hers. “It hurts,” he whispered. “Not just that we can’t find her, but that he won’t tell us. Won’t tell me.”

  “Why does it hurt so much?”

  Chris released her hand abruptly, stood and strode restlessly around the room. “All these years I never wanted to see my—to see Matthew. Never visited him in prison the way Trevor did, even when he asked to see us. Not that Trevor was visiting because he wanted to,” he explained, “but because it was his job as an FBI profiler. He’s the only one who ever visited Matthew until Matthew began this...blackmail scheme.”

  He drew a ragged breath. “Until I went to see him yesterday, though, I always believed... I don’t know... I always believed that somewhere inside him was the father I remembered. Strict. Stern. Okay, yeah, harsh, too, sometimes. But a man who loved his children as best he could.”

  “But you don’t believe that anymore.”

  He shook his head. “Yesterday I realized the father I remember no longer exists. If he ever did.”

  Holly tried to think of something to say, but all she came up with was “No one is all good or all bad. Do I think he’s a twisted son of a bitch, as you called him? Maybe. And maybe he’s using these clues to torture you, the way you think. But you said he’s dying, and he knows it. You also said he asked to see you before—but that none of you did, except Trevor...and then only because it was his job. Isn’t it possible Matthew wanted to see all his children one last time before he died? And in his sick, twisted mind, this was the only way he could think of to compel you all to visit him?”

  She rose and walked to where Chris was, looking up at him, beseeching him to understand there was always another side to a story. “If he gave you halfway decent clues,” she said softly, “you might solve the riddle before he provides the last clue. Which means the children who haven’t yet visited him probably wouldn’t have to.”

  The arrested expression on Chris’s face told her he’d never considered this as a possibility. “You really think...?” he began.

  “I don’t know. But neither do you. Not for sure. Don’t assume you know his motive. And don’t erase what few good memories of him you have. Is he a serial killer? Yes. Did he murder your mother, who loved him? Yes. Am I glad he’s in prison and can’t do to anyone else what he did twenty years ago to all those other people? Of course. I despise what he did. But I also pity him from the bottom of my heart.”

  “You feel sorry for him?”

  Holly nodded slowly, hoping she could make Chris understand. “Because he’ll never know how wonderfully his children turned out. He’ll never see the man I see when I look at you.”

  * * *

  Chris didn’t know what to say. He never knew what to say when someone gave him a personal compliment. And why is that? he wondered now. Insecurity left over from his childhood?

  He was a damned good private investigator, he knew that. And he’d built Colton Investigations from nothing into the hugely successful business it was today with only his determination and willingness to work harder than anyone who worked for him—sometimes twelve-to fourteen-hour days. A thriving business with three—soon to be four—offices.

  Self-confidence in the business arena didn’t always translate into self-confidence in the personal arena, however. And he’d never quite convinced himself that his older brother hadn’t abandoned him...because he wasn’t worth hanging on to.

  Laura loved you, he reminded himself. But it had never erased that sliver of self-doubt from his psyche.

  Not that he’d dwelled on it a lot—he wasn’t the kind to waste time in fruitless self-analysis, as a general rule. But yesterday’s meeting with his father, the heart-to-heart with Ethan at the hospital and the conversation with Holly this morning about his issues with Trevor had all forced him to consider how the man he was had been impacted by everything that had happened in his life. Losing his mother and his family, not to mention Bouncer, his constant companion for five years. Growing up in a town where he could never escape the notoriety of being a serial killer’s son. Foster parents who’d never been invested in him, who’d taken him in not out of the goodness of their hearts but for the money. The deaths of his wife and unborn child.

  Pity party, Colton? he jeered mentally. Suck it up, old son, suck it up. Don’t dump this crap on Holly—she’s got enough to handle right now.

  So instead of (a) telling Holly how much it meant that she saw him as a wonderful man, (b) kissing her and telling her the same thing, (c) kissing her until the pleading expression in her eyes became a plea that he make love to her until neither of them could walk or (d) telling Holly what he was thinking, he settled for (e). “Let’s finish going through those photo albums,” he said curtly. “There’s got to be a Biff in one of them.”

  It was in the second photo album, containing pictures of Chris’s mother around the time she was starting kindergarten, with dark hair in two pigtails when she was wearing jeans, and hanging in loose curls when she was wearing her Sunday best, that they spotted it.

  “‘Saralee and Biff,’” Chris read, not quite believing what he was seeing. Then he said blankly, “Biff was her dog.”

  Chapter 15

  “She looks to be about five, wouldn’t you say?” Holly asked, a trace of excitement in her voice. “He’s just a puppy, but he kind of looks like Wally. Biff must be a golden retriever, too.”

  Chris turned the page, and there were more photos of his mother as a child, and the dog—no longer a puppy—who appeared to be her best friend. There were photos of Saralee with other girls, too, but Biff s
eemed to feature in most of them. Chris flipped through all the way to the end, then quickly opened the third photo album. There were fewer photos of Saralee here, as if she’d become self-conscious about having her picture taken when she grew into her teens. But there were still photos of her with Biff, and Chris felt a sudden ache in the region of his heart, an unexpected kinship with his long-dead mother he’d never felt before. “I never realized...”

  “Girls and dogs,” Holly reminded him. “I told you a strong bond can exist between a girl and her dog.” She went through several pages, one by one, Saralee maturing with each page. They were almost to the end before they realized there were no more photos of Biff. Holly turned back to the previous page, and there was a photo of Saralee all dressed up, with a young man at her side, obviously her date for the evening. There were other teenagers in the background, and the caption read “Saralee and Jeff—Sweet Sixteen Birthday Party.” Captured in the bottom right corner of the photo was Biff. Just one ear and his muzzle, but it was definitely him.

  But on the following page and all the subsequent pages, Biff was noticeably absent. One picture caught Chris’s attention, titled “Saralee and Luke—Junior Prom.” He touched it, thinking how much Annabel resembled their mother when they were both that age. Annabel was a blonde and Saralee was a brunette, but their faces were nearly identical.

  “Junior prom,” Holly said softly. “She would have been seventeen.” She was silent for a moment. “Biff must have died sometime between her sixteenth birthday and her junior prom. Seventeen.”