But he rather liked the way her back stiffened a little and her chin lifted. Her lips compressed slightly.
“A bid for attention, maybe?” he asked, and hated himself when she flinched.
“I don’t know their reasons for writing you this,” she said coolly. He had the fleeting thought that the boys were lucky to have a mom like this on their side. She wasn’t giving anything, away that might get them deeper in trouble.
“Maybe they could tell me?” he asked.
“They’re certainly the only ones who could,” she said, her voice dipping into the arctic zone. Not only would she not get them deeper in trouble, but he felt sorry for anyone who might try.
He smiled then, knowing it was time for a grin, hoping it didn’t look as practiced as it felt. “Are they home?”
She shook her head, her blue eyes twin ice cubes. “They’re out playing.”
He couldn’t help the glance out the front window at the empty yard.
“In town somewhere,” she elaborated, her stance colder than either her voice or her eyes.
Again he was struck by the differences between small town and city living. In a city, a mother generally knew within a park bench or two exactly where her children were; it was a matter of survival. In a small town, kids could roam anywhere with relative impunity.
“Do you think you could call them?” he asked politely. “While seemingly a harmless enough prank, it really could have serious consequences. False reports and alarms can carry felony charges. I’d like to hear the explanation for that from them.” He held his hand out for the letter.
It seemed to Steve that she looked down at his hand as if he’d shoved it inside a sewer pipe before holding it out to her. She glanced from his broad palm to her sons’ epistle with an expression defying classification. She placed the letter in his fingers as if it burned her own.
Without saying another word, she turned her back on him and again opened the front door before stepping outside. He grinned as she called out for her sons in a voice strong enough to stop a train at full running speed.
His mother had called him to supper in just such a voice, tone clear and filled with motherly love. Stee-eve. Steve Kessler. He was suddenly taken straight through time to his childhood. Easier times, lazier times. Hot sunny days hung before him like a mirage, memories of romping through lawns that needed mowing and hedges that needed trimming.
Taylor stepped inside and Steve noted that she seemed far too fragile to have such a big voice. Too delicate to have three eleven-year-old boys. Triplets. Involuntarily he glanced at her slender waist, then, as he realized his solecism, jerked his eyes back to her face.
“If they’re too far away to have heard me,” she said, “someone will spread the word that I’m looking for them.” She flipped the tea towel over her shoulder and let it rest there against her cotton blouse. Her legs were slightly parted and she dug her fingers into her jeans pockets. The stance seemed slightly confrontational.
Steve smiled, though he wasn’t quite sure at what.
“Would you care for that tea or lemonade now? You could have a wait.”
His grin broadened and he was relieved to see one side of her full lips curve upward. “Sounds good.” At her look of inquiry, he added, “Lemonade.”
It was her turn to look relieved, and he understood she was glad to have something to do to fill the time until her boys showed up.
Completely ignoring Western etiquette, he followed her down the hallway to her kitchen. But Taylor didn’t seem to notice or object.
The kitchen felt much larger than it actually was due to its creamy sand-colored walls and equally pale tiled countertops.
The cabinets were all open-faced, with no doors hiding foodstuffs or dishes. A jar of peanut butter was nestled between a crystal goblet and a bottle of soy sauce. A tidy row of antique jars filled with assorted ingredients interrupted a jumble of Star Wars action figures.
Steve had a feeling of “what you see is what you get” that both intrigued and disturbed him. He was used to women who masked their private lives. Hell, for all he knew, some of the women he didn’t-quite-date didn’t even have kitchens, let alone kitchens where everything showed right up front.
He found himself wondering what her bedroom looked like.
“Here you go,” she said.
Like her kitchen, her frosty smile didn’t hide anything.
The boys raced the last fifteen yards to the Hampton bam, arguing loudly about who actually won. After some discussion and mapping out of footprints, two of the brothers acclaimed Jonah the winner by a shoelace.
Giggling and good-naturedly roughhousing one another, they rounded the Hampton barn at quarter speed and ran into each other in their abrupt halts.
Everything was exactly as they had left it four days before—footprints, fake blood on the waits—but for one glaring difference: a dead guy lay in the dust.
Jonah smashed into Jason, who slammed into Josh. None of them breathed for a long moment, then Jason whispered a swear word.
And the dead guy moaned.
All three boys jumped at least a foot in the air and yiped a little.
The not-quite-dead guy turned his head in their direction. His mouth moved and a trickle of blood snaked down onto his chin.
“Holy moly,” Josh breathed.
“Sh. He’s trying to talk or something.”
“I—I think w-we should go get some h-help,” Jonah stammered, turning his body as if to leave. But his feet stayed where they were and his gaze remained riveted on the dying man.
“Cold,” the man rasped, then coughed a ghastly chortle.
“He’s cold,” Jason translated.
“Shut up! He’s still talking.”
“Cold ”
“See...I told you! He’s cold. He must be in shock or something. We heard about that in school, remember?”
“Shut up! Listen!”
“Cold ... dray ... horse.
“What did he say?”
“He said ‘cold dray horse.”’
“What’s a dray horse?”
“What does that mean?”
“How should I know?”
“I don’t see a horse.”
The dying man issued a gurgling moan and stared at them fixedly. Hungrily. He stretched out a long, pale hand. All three boys backed up a full step without even being conscious of it.
The man seemed to wave his hand at the barn, and all three boys turned wide, terrified eyes in that direction.
“Cold...”
Their eyes jerked back to the man.
“Cold...”
“Here we go again,” Jason muttered, then giggled in a fear-induced hysteria.
“Shut up, Jason,” Jonah and Josh both whispered, then Josh asked in a falsetto that would have embarrassed him dreadfully, had he been aware of it, “Are you okay, misster?”
“’Course he ain’t okay, doofus. He’s bleeding. Like he’s been shot or something.”
Then the man waved his arm at the sun and they saw what had been hidden moments before: a bloody hole roughly the size of a quarter just above the pocket on the man’s shiny shirt. The guy looked as if someone had thrown about a gallon of water at him, darkening the left side of his shirt and sport jacket, but the boys instinctively knew it was blood that created that effect.
“Yeah, he’s bleeding, all right.”
“You think we should go get Mr. Hampton?”
“M-Mom. I—I think we should get Mom.”
Just then the man jerked all his limbs at once and let loose a horrible rattling moan before plopping back onto the ground with a thud hard enough to raise a small cloud of dust. A fly buzzed around his head for a moment and landed on his bloodied chin.
“Gross.”
“Is he dead?”
“I dunno. I’m not going to touch him.”
“Me, either.”
“What do we do?”
The man on the ground moaned then, making the three b
rothers jump. Jonah let out a squeak, and as if that were a spell breaker, all of them yelled out loud in unison and seemed to turn in a midair leap. They raced back across the sorghum field, all screaming “Mom!” at the top of their lungs.
Steve waited as Taylor hung up the telephone and turned back to her unexpected guest with a frown. “That was Mr. Hampton. He said the boys just ran past his place hell-bent for leather and screaming bloody murder.”
Since, in Steve’s opinion, all eleven-year-olds made far too much noise, he didn’t speculate aloud as to possible reasons for their screaming.
“That’s not really like them, you know,” she said.
Beyond a letter written with poor grammar and worse spelling, and probably packed with enough lies to fill the Grand Canyon, he didn’t feel qualified to comment on what they might be like.
As if reading his mind, she gave him a look that seemed to say, Don’t judge a book by its cover. The simple severity of her expression made him chuckle and raise his hands in mock surrender.
He lowered his hands slowly as he watched the obvious struggle on her face. God, but she was a fine-looking woman.
“I’m not saying I’m condoning what they did,” she said, looking away from him. “At the same time...”
“At the same time?”
She gave him a quick, nearly anguished—or perhaps it was embarrassed—glance. “I don’t know. You see, part of what they said in the letter was true.”
“About Doug?”
She nodded, then said with a tinge of what might have been resentment, “You’re right up there with Spider-Man and the Power Rangers.”
He nodded, too aware of her, too conscious that his coming personally was precisely what he shouldn’t have done. This woman was just made for a pedestal.
She nodded again, as though he’d said something, then shot him another glance, this one unreadable. “They had a really hard time after Doug was killed.”
Steve again didn’t say anything. He couldn’t. He was cursing himself for not trusting his first instinct and just pitching the letter in the trash can. Or his second instinct and merely calling her on the phone. This was Doug’s wife—widow—he was talking to, and Doug’s sons they were talking about.
“It’s only been in the last few months that they’ve seemed to get some of their zip back.”
He thought of the implications in their letter—murder and mayhem in their hometown—and tried to fit “zip” into that concept. He remembered some of Doug’s wilder pranks in college and hid a grin.
Before he could say anything, the dogs outside in the backyard started a cacophony of barking that would have drowned out an orchestra tuning up. There seemed to be at least twenty of the animals all barking and howling at once. And over that boisterous clamor came the sound of three boys yelling their lungs out.
“Mom! Mom!”
Steve followed as Taylor rushed down the hallway to the living room. He stopped just behind her when the front door crashed open and three identical eleven-year-olds burst into the room.
He’d known they were triplets. He’d seen them at Doug’s funeral, and this spring, but seeing them now, flushed from the outdoors, smelling of summer dust and sorghum, he was struck utterly speechless at the incredible likenesses.
They all seemed slightly tall for their age—though Steve wasn’t any expert. They all sported Taylor’s blond hair and blue eyes, though he could easily see Doug’s determined chin and wide mouth. And each of their faces was bright red from exertion and shiny with sweat. Each was gasping desperately for breath. And all of them had wide-eyed expressions of terror on their young faces.
“What on earth—” Taylor began.
All three boys spoke at once.
“D-dead guy...”
“Nearly dead...”
“Dying anyway...”
“Mr. Ham—Hampton’s barn...”
“C-cold dray horse...”
“Fly on his chin.”
“Shot. Blood everywhere.”
“Not everywhere. Just on him.”
“Yeah, just on him.”
“But probably in the dirt, too.”
“Yeah, in the dirt.”
Taylor held up her hand. “Whoa. Calm down. One at a time.”
Steve frowned a little, noting that they hadn’t so much as looked his way. If this game was staged for his benefit, they were some actors, these kids. He decided to remain silent awhile longer.
One of the boys bent over and planted his hands on his knees. He dragged at the air like a fish out of water. Taylor went over and dropped her apparently ever present tea towel on the back of his neck. “Don’t try so hard, Jonah. Just relax, honey. Breathe shallowly. Slowly. Okay?”
He did as she suggested. “Better?” she asked after a few seconds.
“Y-yeah.”
The other two boys had waited patiently and somewhat indifferently at their brother’s seeming attack. It was obviously an oft-repeated scenario. When it was equally obvious that their brother was going to be all right, one of them spoke up. “Really, Mom. Honest. You gotta believe us. There’s a nearly dead guy out behind Mr. Hampton’s barn.”
“He’s not dead yet. But I’ll betcha a billion dollars he’s gonna be.”
“Yeah. We s-saw him.”
“Yeah, and like, he was mumbling and bleeding from his mouth, and then he jerked like this—” one of the boys dropped to the floor, demonstrated the man’s apparent death throes, then scrambled to his feet “—and then he didn’t move anymore.”
“Did you touch him?” Taylor asked. Steve thought her question had the “you don’t know where it’s been” intonation and almost laughed aloud.
“Ee-yuck. No way.”
The brother who had apparently suffered an asthma attack spied Steve and straightened slowly, suspicion all over his face.
Steve stepped out of the shadowed hallway into the light. He expected the boys to recognize him immediately. After all, they’d written specifically to him, apparently having been subjected to his McUnbelievable the Crime Armadillo routine on video. But he hadn’t anticipated the boy who spied him to nudge his brothers, and what appeared to be profound relief seemed to cross each of the three faces staring up at him.
“Wow!”
“How did you know?”
They looked at one another in awe.
“Now everything will be okay.”
“Yeah, Texas Ranger Steve Kessler’s here.”
“Shut up, doofus. He’ll think you’re a dork.”
“He’ll know what to do about a nearly dead guy.”
“Like, he sees dead guys all the time.”
One of the identical trio spoke to him at last. “The nearly dead guy is out behind Mr. Hampton’s barn.”
“Yeah, with flies on him.”
“Yeah. Like, he’s real gross.”
“He’s wearing a gold watch.”
Steve raised his eyes to meet Taylor’s. Her expression was a combination of defiance and apprehension. She seemed to have the same uncertainties about this particular story as he did, and that troubled him. She knew her sons, and if she had doubts...
“Why don’t we go have a look?” he asked slowly, cautiously, not wanting to voice his disbelief outright. Or at least not right away.
“I’m not looking at that guy again. No way.”
“No way, José!”
“Too scary.”
With the feeling he was walking right into a setup, Steve nonetheless suggested they direct him to the Hampton barn.
“I can do that,” Taylor said, her voice devoid of expression.
“Let’s go then,” Steve said.
“You’re not going to leave us here?” one of the triplets asked in a near panicked voice.
“I thought you didn’t want to go,” Taylor said dryly.
“Not to see the dying guy again, but I’m not going to stay here. What if the killer’s around somewhere?”
“Yeah. Somebody shot that guy.
What if he followed us home?”
“Holy moly. He might know where we live!”
All three boys pushed a little closer to their mother.
Steve had the feeling he’d stepped in quicksand. “Okay. We’ll all go.” He raised a hand as the boys all began to talk at once. “And I’ll have a look at this supposed ‘dying guy.”’
The relief on three faces did nothing to soothe him. And the trusting look on Taylor’s face only exacerbated his sense of impending doom.
“Don’t lock the door,” Taylor said, stopping him in the act. “I think we lost the key a couple of years ago.”
Steve released the handle, aware the “gullible cynic” was in deep, deep trouble.
Chapter 3
By the time the boys had argued about which one of them got to sit in the window seats of his rental car, how many times the man had said, “Cold dray horse,” and who saw the man first, Steve felt prepared to sign an affidavit that he was being had. If they hadn’t been Doug’s kids, and their mother Doug’s widow, he would have acknowledged a good prank, read them a stern lecture and headed back for Houston.
Taylor slid into the passenger’s seat in the front and pulled the door behind her without appearing the slightest bit perturbed by her boys’ arguments. Beyond an admonition to fasten their seat belts, she looked as if they were embarking on a Sunday afternoon picnic rather than going on a search for a “nearly dead guy.”
Though the rental car was a moderate luxury model with a broad, curved dash and seats set far enough apart for a large man to feel comfortable, Steve nonetheless felt confined. He dimly understood the sensation had nothing to do with the size of the car; it was his proximity to Taylor Smithton. As if they really were on that Sunday picnic, her aura of calm good humor seemed to radiate out from her, enveloping all of them in the car, including one Texas Ranger who invariably fell for the wrong women.
“Wow. We’re really riding in a car with Texas Ranger Steve Kessler,” one of the triplets said.
“Way cool!”
“Aren’t you going to put your portable lights on the roof?”
“It’s a rental,” Steve said.
Almost A Family Page 4
