An ancient, multicolored Jeep Wrangler with a lift kit was parked in front when I got to the house. It was a vehicle I hadn’t seen before. I loaded my arms with grocery bags and headed in. The sound of my mother’s laughter from the den greeted me. She had Wednesdays off.
“Mother? I’m home. I have your groceries.”
“Thanks, dear. When you’re through, join us in the den.”
Join us? Who was us? “Okay.”
The inside of the house/Madame Tussauds had last been updated in my early teens. Red cedar paneling—Dad’s stylistic input—made me feel like I was in a cheap ski lodge. The kitchen cabinets were also red cedar, clashing violently with busy floral wallpaper in blue and purple hues. Those had been Mother’s contribution. All of this and gold Formica, too, which they’d chosen as a joint project. No wonder I had issues. I dropped the bags on the counter and made a second trip in from the car.
Mother’s bright voice burbled one wall away, along with the occasional resonance of a deep male voice. A gentleman caller? When Hell froze over. Maybe it was church business. I put the groceries away, washed my hands, and went to the den. Mother sat on the red brick hearth with an array of photo albums at her feet. Beside her perched my omnipresent new friend Jack with one of the albums splayed across his knees. They both looked up when I came in.
I didn’t bother to sit, just stood in the doorway. “What are you doing here?” I asked.
“Background check.”
“I didn’t say I’d take the job.”
He shrugged. “Formalities.”
“And you don’t need to do it in person. With my mother.” I glared at her, to make sure she knew this was not okay with me.
“Mother knows best,” he said. Mine beamed. “Besides, when I saw you lived halfway to Heaven, I couldn’t resist.”
“Halfway to Heaven?”
“Nearer to the Land of Enchantment anyway.”
I gaped, still uncomprehending.
“New Mexico,” he continued. “My home state.”
Heaven. Well, it kind of fit this place, in a completely opposite way.
He tapped his index finger against a page. “And look what I learned: Miss Rodeo Texas. I couldn’t have gotten that by calling to verify your employment.”
My jaw dropped.
“And you still have that cute little thing with your teeth.” He pointed at his mouth, his lips curled back showing his teeth and altering his voice. Then he made an up and down motion above the crown of his head. “Your hair was even . . .” he trailed off, blinking, then said, “taller.”
I stepped in front of him, hand out. “Give that to me.”
My mother sighed and clasped her hands in front of her. “My baby girl has always been so beautiful.”
An urge to throttle my mother came over me. I turned to face her, then stopped and sighed. It was undeniably my past.
“First runner-up,” I corrected.
“Very impressive. It’s sure to come in handy in our line of work.”
I didn’t want to imagine how. “Our?”
“I’m being optimistic.”
“Sounds more like presumptuous.”
He didn’t comment, and flipped a page backward in time.
“Sit down, dear.” Mother patted the hearth.
I lowered myself to the bricks. I hadn’t looked at this album in years. I didn’t want to now, with Jack, but I did want easy access to snatch the offending memory book away if necessary.
Jack held up a picture of a masked and caped woman riding a black horse around the track at Texas Tech’s Jones Stadium in Lubbock, her long blonde hair trailing behind her in the wind. “What were you doing here?” he asked.
“I was the Masked Rider.”
“Ah.” His dimple appeared, digging deep in his cheek. “The Masked Rider of the Red Raiders. At New Mexico State we called you guys the Red Rodents.”
I couldn’t help laughing, a little.
My mother chirped in. “You should have seen her flying around that stadium, Jack. I was so proud of her.”
He winked at Mother and flipped back another page. His face cracked into a lopsided smile. The page was filled with pictures of me riding an Appaloosa. Balancing my weight as she turned around a barrel, low over her neck with my hands on the reins as I yah’ed in her ear, rubbing her behind her ears with her nostrils wide as she heaved for air after a race. I wanted to trace my finger over every spot on her rump. I’d loved Flibbertigibbet, or Jib, as I’d called her, more than I’d loved any other horse, before or since. We were Southwest Region champs my senior year.
“You really did do rodeo,” Jack said. “Not just the pageants, I mean.”
“Scholarshipped and all.”
He looked at me, past my mother. “Now I’m really impressed. Why barrel racing?”
I smiled wide. I loved it when I got this question. “Because girls weren’t allowed to compete in bull riding. But I did goat tying, and I was a heeler and breakaway roper, too.”
Mother grabbed my hand and squeezed it. “And she was a rodeo clown. You know, the ones who protect the riders from the bulls.”
Gordon, one of the bull riders on the rodeo team at Tech—a guy who was a real mentor and friend to me—had been gored by a bull and died when I was a sophomore. It hit me harder than anything had in my life since my dad left. Gordon was the reason I had taken up rodeo clowning. But that was personal, so I kept quiet.
“That’s something I never would have guessed.” Jack made an exaggerated stretchy face with his eyebrows high, then nodded and flipped back a few more pages.
One photo took up the entire left-facing page. Me, with braces and two long braids tied off with little pink bows, only fourteen years old, holding an enormous trophy. Class IV All Around Champ, XIT Rodeo. Standing beside me, looking every inch the rodeo cowboy and proud papa, was my father. Incandescent in my eyes, at least back then. His big, scratchy hand had gripped my shoulder, and I could still remember its warmth through my pink snap-front Western shirt.
I reached past my mother, pulled the album to my knees, and shut it firmly. “Enough about me.”
Mother put her hand on my arm. “We hadn’t gotten to your kindergarten album yet.”
Jack stood. “Another time, Agatha.” I gave him a few Brownie points for letting the subject of my Wonder Years drop, for now at least. And then he said, “Emily, we have a meeting at the Potter County Detention Center at nine with Sofia. Can you be in the office by eight tomorrow so we can ride out there together?”
I shot a glance at the wall clock. It was four. Nearly end of the day. I pressed my palm against my abdomen, fingers splayed slightly over the cranberry bean-sized embryo inside. I’d told myself I wasn’t going to work with Jack. I didn’t like criminal law. But something about him knocked me off balance. And the thought of that woman and her child, the promise of getting out of my mother’s cloying house each day, and the possibility of distracting myself from my messed up life? All good stuff, and I could keep looking and snag a more suitable job when it came along, if I wasn’t so obviously pregnant by then that no one would hire me. Besides, beggars couldn’t afford to be choosers and, as Jack had pointed out when we met, I was flat ass broke.
“See you then,” I said.
Chapter Three
Snowflake greeted me as soon as I entered the office the next morning. I reached down to let her lick my hand and she jumped on her hind legs around me, dancing like a circus poodle.
“Good girl,” I said. “Tomorrow I’ll bring you a treat.” My abdomen cramped and I pressed a hand into it, then stood back up. “Jack?”
I started walking down the hall toward his office. He appeared in the doorway, his dark brown hair wet, tucking a dress shirt into a pair of slacks. He held his hand up to stop me.
“Let’s meet in the kitchen.” He said. Then he disappeared.
I spoke under my breath and made a sharp right-hand turn. “Okay . . .”
Jack joined me momen
ts later. We sat in hard-backed chairs at opposite sides of the rectangular wood-topped table. The smell of something cheesy and spicy hung in the air. Chorizo? I’d loved the Mexican sausage until I gave up meat five years earlier. My traitorous stomach growled, then lurched toward morning sickness. Clearly white toast with Mother wasn’t going to cut it if I had to face the aroma of Jack’s desayuno every morning.
Jack buttoned the cuffs on his shirt. “How was the drive in from Heaven?”
It took me only a split second to get his meaning. “It will be much nicer when I have my car here and don’t have to ride with Mother.”
“Ah, so it’s like being dropped off in front of school.”
“Yeah, pretty much.” Only worse.
Jack tugged on his shirtfront with both hands then used them to smooth it. “So if you don’t mind, I’m going to have you work at the desk out front. I set a computer up on it last night, and it’s networked with my server.”
I hadn’t noticed. “And your secretary?”
“Works offsite.”
“Uh huh.” I wasn’t in love with the idea, but this was basically a temp job. And it was better than officing in the kitchen, I supposed, since I hadn’t noticed any other rooms in the office space.
“Also, when you come in each morning, if you could ring the bell on the front desk before you come down the hall, that would be great.”
I stared at him a few beats then burst into laughter. Obviously he was kidding. I winked. “Okay.”
“Thanks, and, really, do it any time you come down the hallway. Just give it a few good rings.”
“You’re serious? Why?”
“Why what?”
My mouth worked a little, but no words came out.
He threw his hands up. “I like my privacy. Just ring the bell, okay?”
I opened my eyes wide and raised my brows. “If you think that will be sufficient to save you from a sexual harassment lawsuit when you’re back there doing,” I waved my hand in the air, “you know, pervy stuff, it won’t.”
He rolled his eyes at me. “If that’s all the commentary you have, it’s time to leave for the jail.”
He unfolded his long body, and I tried not to imagine the kinds of things I wasn’t supposed to catch him doing in his office.
“I’ll meet you at your desk in five,” he said. “It’s booted up. Username is Emily. Password is RodeoQueen, no space.”
I performed the mother of all eye rolls back at him, but he’d already left.
***
The Potter County Detention Center was a twenty-minute drive from the office out to the middle of nowhere on Highway 60, past the International Airport, near the defunct Air Force Base, and halfway to the metropolis of Panhandle, as in the town of Panhandle, and not the general geographic area. Today was my first visit to the jail, despite my mother’s warnings of delinquency and nights in the pokey when I’d come home tipsy three or four times in high school. A spooky, abandoned building loomed on the left side of the highway.
“That’s the old jail,” Jack said.
It looked like a set for The Walking Dead. Gunshots echoed, and I gripped the armrests as cramps hit me again.
Jack saw me tense up. “Shooting range.”
We were passing a huge earthen berm. I relaxed, a little. How vulnerable Sofia must have felt on this long, scary drive. Not only was she caught dead-to-rights shooting some guy, but she wasn’t even a citizen of this country. If I’d been her I’d have died of a coronary before ever reaching the jail.
Finally, on our right, we approached a large brown sheet-metal building that could have been a warehouse, or a furniture store, or a church—but was none of those. It was the jail. Jack pulled into the parking lot. The building was new-ish, and from the outside it looked like a giant cow poop had fallen from the sky and gone splat. Around it stood nothing but prairie, tumbleweeds, railroad tracks, boxcars, and cattle.
Jack led me through the glass doors into a foyer with linoleum tile squares, brown walls, and a plastic brown “rope” about eight feet long that separated a walkway along one side of the room from chairs on the other. At the end of the walkway was a brown-uniformed deputy behind glass. Jack moved to a line of tape on the floor in front of the deputy. Ahead of us was a sign on the glass that read “Wait behind the line until called.”
I shivered and wrapped my arms around myself. The county was paying to keep this place subarctic, but they weren’t wasting any money on air fresheners. It smelled like sweat, body odor, and overfull Pampers.
The deputy waved us forward. Jack put his driver’s license in a drive-up bank teller drawer. I added mine, and the deputy slid them in.
Without looking up, she said, “What’s the purpose of your visit?”
Jack cleared his throat and adjusted his tie, because that’s what he had on. A tie. And a sports coat with his slacks. He still rocked his lived-in boots, but otherwise, he looked ready to go to church.
“I’m an attorney,” he said, then pointed his thumb at me. “She’s my paralegal, and we’re here to see a client.”
The woman squinted at him under her gray hair, so short it was practically a crew cut. Her eyes were lost in a maze of squinty wrinkles. She nodded. “Yeah, I recognize you. You represented me and my husband when they repo’d our mobile home.”
This wasn’t the reception I was used to getting when going to meet a client, after years in my shishi Dallas firm.
“Of course. I thought you looked familiar. How are you?” Gone was his almost-Texas accent, and in its place was a sho’nuff Amarillo drawl.
“Yeah, well, not so good. After you lost our case, my husband left me.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
She made a noise somewhere between a snort and a raspberry, picked up a pen, and looked down again. “Bar number?”
He leaned in and lowered his voice. “Double-oh-seven, 855198, license to litigate.”
I held my breath for her response, cringing, but laughing on the inside. She looked up so slowly that I almost turned blue.
Her voice dripped acid as she said, “Client name?”
Jack gave it to her, and she typed a few keys before directing us to Attorney Room A3. We left the foyer and walked past some lockers and a bank of visitation phones where another deputy met us. Behind him yet another deputy escorted an officious-looking man with a clipboard. That deputy spoke into his radio, and, a few seconds later, there was a loud buzzing noise as the cage clanked open, literally shaking the floor and sending vibrations through my body. The deputy and clipboard guy entered the cage, and it clanked shut behind them. Another loud buzz sounded, followed by a clank of the interior door. More vibrations. They disappeared into the bowels of the prison, and the inner door clanked again, but not before a loud scream from within pierced my eardrums. More vibrations from the floor coursed through my body.
I started to sweat. All I had on under my jacket was a white tank that looked much more boobalicious than it had two months ago. I hadn’t planned to take my jacket off, but the sudden surge of heat made it imperative. I slipped the jacket from my shoulders quickly and crossed my arms over my chest.
Our deputy, a heavyset fifty-something man with a gray buzz cut, introduced himself as Walker. He immediately noted what I was hiding behind my crossed arms with a nod and a smirk, and I scooched my arms further up. As he walked, his keys swung and jangled in counterpoint to his oddly graceful steps. He reached overhead to slap the hallway doorframe as we went through it—for God knew what reason—exposing the lower quarter of his gut, which wobbled like he was an overweight belly dancer. Or one of the hippos in Fantasia. I was transfixed.
“Emily.” Jack spoke under his breath.
“What?”
“Keep your eyes in your head. He’s married.”
I sputtered.
He half-grinned.
The guard stopped at the first of two heavy blue doors that had A3 stenciled in white on them. “Here you go,” he said. �
��The good room. You must be royalty or something.”
“Thank you, Deputy Walker.” Jack reached for the handle on the door nearest us, twisted it and opened the door. He gestured for me to enter first and whispered, “I think he likes you.”
I accidentally whacked him with my handbag as I passed through.
Jack shut the door behind us, and we were alone. A single table dominated the attorney end of the room, running its full length from the doors on either side of it to the chain link fence separating us from the inmate area. There were two chairs on our side of the table, luckily, because I couldn’t have gotten to the other side of it unless I went out and entered through the separate door.
“This is—”
“Twice as big as the other rooms,” Jack said, interrupting my thought and turning it on its head. “It’s bigger because it doubles as the Parole Hearing Room. In the other rooms, we’re separated from the clients by plexiglass and have to talk with them on one of those visitation phones. It’s a Hepatitis C nightmare waiting to happen.”
“That’s awful!”
Jack took the chair nearest the chain link barrier and I sat beside him, putting my yellow legal pad on the table in front of me, and my pen to its right.
“It has its upsides,” Jack said. “The graffiti on the walls in there is pretty entertaining.” He shook his head. “They call it an Attorney Room, but I can’t imagine the attorneys are the ones writing ‘Railroaded by dirty cop’ on the walls.”
“Yeah, they’d be more like ‘4th Amendment rocks,’” I said.
He laughed. “I called ahead to reserve this room so we could bond a little with Sofia. That’s hard to do on one of those phones through plexiglass. We need her to open up to us. The only downside is that after we’re done talking, she’ll be strip-searched.” He gestured at the chain link fence. “Since we could pass her a shank or drugs or anything we wanted to for that matter.”
Heaven to Betsy (Emily #1) Page 4
