“Darn.”
“Josh...” Taylor murmured warningly.
“Sorry.”
Steve admired her equanimity and wished he could steal a measure of it. An hour in the company of these boys would have him joining in their arguments, coming up with wild, improbable schemes, plotting some new mystery as if he were one of them. They had the same incredible magnetism Doug had possessed, and Steve knew himself to be a sucker for a good story.
Of all times to rely on his cynical side, this was the one. He didn’t want to explore the reasons why he felt simultaneously ill at ease and completely comfortable around Doug’s family; they were many and varied and, at the moment, all vaguely threatening.
Taylor turned her head and her eyebrows lifted slightly. He realized he’d been sitting in the driver’s seat, his hand halfway to the ignition, doing nothing more than staring at her.
“Something wrong?” she asked, her contralto voice sending a shiver down his spine.
“What? No. Nothing,” he said, lying through his teeth. She was pretty enough to turn any man’s head, and he’d always fancied himself every inch a man, but there was something about her that made him want to know more about her, just listen to her talk.
And that kind of thinking was dangerous. Passion was one thing. Even friendship. But Taylor’s fresh-apple-pie smile and just-picked-peaches voice made him acutely uncomfortable. She was too real, too down-home. And he’d been down that aisle a couple of times already.
And even as he turned the engine of the rental, he understood why she made him nervous. She seemed the exact opposite of the women he’d married. As beautiful as they’d been, but in a different way. A quieter, deeper way. And something about that quieter, deeper way made him acutely conscious of how long it had been since he’d been with a family, with a woman.
What was it Doris always said? Good thinking, Steve. You can’t get burned if you’re out of the kitchen.
And Taylor Smithton was the epitome of “kitchen.”
“You just go straight and take a left at the big green house on the edge of town,” Taylor said softly, West Texas blurring her words, the accent somehow making them a near caress.
Her sons added their instructions.
“The road curves right before Mr. Hampton’s place.”
“You’ll see a gigantic clump of bamboo.”
“Yeah, we use that for swords and stuff.”
“Mr. Hampton said we could,” one added, as if Steve had questioned their right to play with the bamboo.
“Should we have called you from his house, Mom?”
“You did fine, Jonah,” Taylor said without turning around to see which of her three sons had asked the question. Steve supposed that in a generation or two he might be able to distinguish the difference between their voices. Not that he’d be there to find out, of course.
“Texas Ranger Steve Kessler?” one of them asked.
“Yes?” he asked back, hiding a grin at the combination of job description and name. And yet, strangely, he found himself straightening his shoulders.
“Who do you suppose the guy is?”
“You’ve never seen him before?” Steve asked, before he could wonder why he was going along with their gag.
Three chorused negatives came from the back seat, then one of them added, “He didn’t look like anybody around here. He had fancy clothes on.”
“Yeah, like out of a movie or something.”
“And he had funny fingernails.”
“Funny fingernails?” Steve asked. He again suffered that feeling of being in quicksand. This was a little more detail than a kid’s misguided game should allow.
“They were all shiny. Like he painted them or something. Aunt Carolyn sometimes puts clear gunk on hers, you know, to make them sparkle.”
“She’s our uncle Craig’s wife.”
“Widow. But she’s married to Uncle Pete now.”
“Not sparkle, exactly, but to look shiny.”
“She’s from Dallas,” one added, as if that explained her strange behavior.
“It looked real goofy on a guy.”
“And his shoes were pointy-toed—”
“But they weren’t cowboy boots. They looked like Uncle Cactus’s lizard skins. But made into shoes.”
“This is where you turn,” Taylor said quietly, pointing to the weather-beaten green house on the left-hand side of the highway cutting through Almost. The Hampton place appeared to be the last house in the small town.
Steve signaled and guided the car onto a deeply rutted, clay-and-gravel dirt road, which forked some thirty yards from the highway. The right fork led to the green house, where an elderly man leaned against the thick pillars of the front porch. The man lifted a hand and Steve returned the courtesy.
“If you stay to the left, you’ll go around the back of Mr. Hampton’s house and on to the barn. Otherwise you’ll have to go all the way around the maize.”
“It’s sorghum, Mom. Remember?”
“Mr. Hampton’s trying sorghum instead of maize.”
It was obvious to Steve that the Mr. Hampton in question wanted them to stop and explain why they were on his property. But on the very, very slender chance that the boys were telling anything remotely like the truth, he decided they’d better check the barn before exchanging pleasantries.
It seemed Taylor understood his thinking without his needing to explain anything, for she waved at Mr. Hampton, pointed to the left fork of the road and held her thumb up in question. The older man nodded and waved his hand at the barn.
As Steve took the left bend, he saw the older man carefully step down from his porch and walk slowly to the edge of the house. He shaded his eyes and followed their progress around the back of his home and down the narrow, one-car dirt road leading to the large barn, stained a dark gray by weather and age.
Whether it was because someone else seemed to be taking the boys seriously, or because the boys had fallen preternaturally silent, Steve suddenly didn’t want to guide this family around the final bend leading to the barn. He was unexpectedly, inexplicably convinced the boys were telling the truth.
Taylor’s nerves were tightened to a painful jangle. She was inordinately grateful Steve Kessler had shown up that afternoon, of all days. She was aware that he held doubts about her sons’ story and didn’t blame him. She, on the other hand, was wholly convinced of her sons’ encounter with the dying man. Her conviction had come the moment her boys had burst in the front door screaming for her as if they were five again, not eleven.
She’d seen what she knew the Texas Ranger hadn’t. Her boys were flushed from exertion and heat, but their lips had been pinched and lined with telltale white, a sure indication of shock.
And once they were in the Texas Ranger’s car, she’d been aware of the precise moment the boys had crossed the precipice between hysteric babbling and stunned, frightened silence. They had been talking forty miles to the minute until Steve had turned the car onto the Hampton place. They hadn’t made a sound since, except for Jonah’s slightly labored breathing. She slipped a hand into her pocket to make sure she’d remembered the ever ready, if seldom used, inhaler. It was there.
She knew without a single doubt that her sons weren’t lying about finding a man behind Mr. Hampton’s barn. And they weren’t lying about his being shot or nearly dead. They’d been raised in West Texas in a small farming and ranching community. They’d seen animals shot and killed.
Before Doug had been shot, they’d been taught the rudiments of gun handling and like most West Texas kids, had gone quail hunting many a time. They’d also been hunting with their Uncle Cactus Jack. Her sons knew what a bullet wound looked like. And if that wasn’t enough to convince her, she knew they watched enough television to permanently imprint the knowledge on their brains.
While there might be gaps in her comprehension of what was going on, she knew her sons. She’d known they’d been up to something—well pointed out in the bizarre letter to St
eve Kessler—but she was also aware that whatever their motives had been for the letter, whatever their plotting and scheming had hoped to accomplish, her sons hadn’t counted on seeing a wounded man out behind Mr. Hampton’s barn on this particular afternoon. Taylor would swear to that by everything she held dear.
The Hampton barn was laid out, like many barns in the Panhandle area of West Texas, on what her father had called “annigoglin” lines, or catercorner to the remainder of the usually squared property. The reasons for this unusual diagonal were as varied as winds in the spring, but the most sound suggested that during tornado season—late summer to midautumn—a catercorner barn withstood a tomadic onslaught much better than one presenting a flat side to the high-velocity winds.
To Taylor, the fact that the barn was annigoglin meant only one thing: they couldn’t see the very back of the barn from either the main road or the bam road, or from their present location.
“Stop!” Jason yelled.
As if his foot were linked to Jason’s voice, Steve stomped on the brake pedal, causing the car to slide a bit in the dust. “What?” he all but yelled.
“H-he’s just around the corner of the barn. In the back back.”
“It’s okay, Jason,” Taylor said gently, translating for Steve. “Officer Kessler won’t make you look at the man again.”
On the edge of her peripheral vision she saw Steve’s frown of irritation shift to enlightenment and then to a somewhat rueful expression.
“You guys wait here,” he said, putting the car in Park and opening the door.
“Aren’t you going to get out your gun?”
“Yeah. What if the guy who shot him is still around?”
Steve reached a hand inside his suit jacket and withdrew his Smith & Wesson .9mm. He couldn’t hide his grin this time when all three boys’ eyes widened at the awesome weapon.
“Way cool,” one of them said.
Before Steve softly shut the door, he heard Taylor say, in her calm contralto, “I’ll have your hides for dinner if this is some kind of joke.”
He approached the barn with caution, on the very faroff chance that the boys were telling some version of the truth. He hesitated at the corner of the bam, resting his shoulder against the side and glancing back at the car filled with the Smithton family.
Taylor was leaning forward slightly, her eyes on him. She still appeared calm and collected, but something instinctively told him she was anything but. He’d been observed going into a potentially dangerous situation before by bystanders, by fellow officers. But Taylor’s regard made him feel different somehow, not heroic necessarily, but taller maybe, or perhaps stronger.
He dragged his gaze from her face, telling himself he was being an idiot.
He studied the dusty ground beyond his safe corner. Because it was midafternoon and the sun hung in the west, his body cast no shadow on this northeastern side of the barn. Nor would a shadow be cast by anyone hiding just around the edge.
Steve drew a deep breath and gripped the gun with both hands up and slightly to the right of his face. He swung his body around the corner and lowered the gun simultaneously.
And aimed directly at a half-grown sorghum field.
Taylor’s breath caught in her throat as Steve Kessler held up his .9mm and then disappeared around the corner of the barn. She didn’t realize she’d cocked her head the better to hear the thunderous report of a gun until she heard her own whispered “Don’t, don’t...”
She wasn’t afraid that Steve might shoot someone; she was afraid he would be shot. And killed. The way Doug had been taken from her.
This notion made her frown. Doug had been her husband. Her partner of more than fourteen years. She couldn’t lump Steve Kessler and Doug into the same equation. She’d known the Ranger less than an hour.
She told herself the connection was simply that Steve and Doug were both in law enforcement. Peace officers putting themselves on the line for the protection of others. And perhaps because it was her children who had drawn him to Almost, she’d found another, less tenuous correlation between the two men.
She didn’t want to consider the more obvious reason she might have inadvertently linked the two men in her mind, the real reason her heart beat a little too rapidly and her hands trembled slightly. From the moment she’d pushed the dust-laden screen door open to see him better, she’d felt as if every nerve ending in her body were shouting an awareness of him to her brain.
And he knew Doug, a voice in her mind whispered. They were connected because of that knowledge.
“He’s been gone an awful long time,” Jason said.
“Only a couple of minutes or so,” Taylor replied.
“What if something happened to him?”
“Yeah, what if the bad guy who shot that dude was lying in wait for him?”
“I don’t think that happened,” Taylor said, never taking her eyes from the corner of the barn. “Steve Kessler looks pretty capable.”
“Yeah, but whoever shot that guy is capable of murder. Like killing somebody.”
Taylor didn’t admit it out loud, but inwardly she acknowledged. her son’s point.
“Maybe we should go check it but,” Josh suggested, fumbling with the door handle.
“Maybe we should just stay exactly where we are. Just like Texas Ranger Steve Kessler told us to do,” Taylor said, pointedly looking at her son’s grubby hand around the door handle. She waited until he withdrew it before turning her gaze back to the barn.
Another tense minute passed before Steve came back around the edge of the old structure. His gun was out of sight and his expression was grim. He strode to the car with the air of a man barely keeping his temper in check.
He didn’t go for the driver’s door, reaching instead for the back door. He all but wrenched it open, glaring down at her sons.
“Okay, what kind of game are you three playing?”
The boys stared up at him in seeming shock, then Josh said, “We’re not playing any game!”
“No?”
“No way!” Jason said earnestly.
“Was the guy dead?” Jonah asked.
“Let’s cut the crap, shall we?” Kessler snapped. “Why don’t you tell me what’s really going on?”
He held up his left hand for them to see. His fingertips were covered with what seemed to Taylor to be rust.
“What’s this?” Steve asked her boys.
To Taylor’s horror, her sons exchanged guilty looks, then stared at the floor of the car. She’d been ready to swear in court that her boys were telling the truth. Studying them now, taking in their triplicate expressions of “busted cold,” she wanted to throttle them.
“That’s what I thought,” Steve said. “You guys want to come clean?”
Then Taylor saw a tear snaking down Jonah’s cheek.
Whatever they’d done, why ever they might have done it, she should be the one to dole out the punishment, the embarrassment. Some tinhorn cop from the big city, old college roommate of Doug’s or not, wasn’t going to put her sons through anything. They’d been through enough pain and anguish for an army of delinquents.
“What’s on your fingers?” she asked Steve coldly.
Steve flicked her a hard glance. “Something from a fifty-dollar chemistry set,” he said.
She resisted the urge to flick an equally hard glance in the direction of her errant sons. Instead, she raised her eyes to meet Steve’s. “If you knew that, why did you ask?”
His features seemed to melt slightly as his expression shifted from anger to surprise. “What?”
“If they’ve done something wrong, tell me. I’ll take care of it. There’s no need to berate them.”
“I wasn’t berating them—”
“No. You were swearing at them and asking questions you already knew the answers to.”
“Swearing? I wasn’t—”
She didn’t wait for whatever he’d been about to say. She opened the car door and exited his rental as if it we
re repellent to her. She was relatively certain her inner trembling didn’t show as she marched across the expanse of ground leading to the barn. She didn’t pause at the corner to raise a weapon, but rounded it with the full intention of discovering whatever he had.
At first she couldn’t see anything that might make a grown man angry at three children, cop or not. Then she realized it was precisely what she couldn’t see that might have tipped him over the edge. Despite her sons’ nearly hysterical account of a man dying back there, no dead or wounded man lay sprawled in the dust. No shiny fingernails, no pointy-toed shoes, no bullet hole in a fancily clothed chest.
“We were telling the truth, Mom!” Jason pleaded.
She hadn’t realized her sons had followed her.
“Honest, Mr. Kessler,” Jonah asserted.
Taylor wondered if Steve knew he’d been demoted, and risked a glance at him. He was leaning against the edge of the barn near the narrow tack-room door. His expression was anything but inviting. He didn’t say anything but looked pointedly at several rust-colored marks halfway up the doorjamb.
Taylor knew her entire family followed his gaze and could tell that at least three Smithtons knew what the stains meant. Jonah, the boys’ conscience, nearly tripped over himself as he lunged forward with an explanation.
“We did that. W-we know it was wrong. But we had to get you here. But we didn’t know there would be a real nearly dead guy.”
Jason, unwilling to let his “younger” brother suffer any consequences alone, stepped into the fray. “You were right. We used our chemistry set to make the fake blood, but we weren’t faking about the guy we saw. And his blood was real!”
Josh pushed through his brothers. “Yeah, like, there was a guy dying right here!” He pointed at the ground. “He said, ‘Cold dray horse,’ and then he gagged or something and blood came out of his mouth.”
“And a fly landed on him.”
“You gotta believe us!”
“Why is that, exactly?” Steve asked, as if they were only having a mildly interesting conversation.
“Well...’cause it’s true!”
“Yeah. It’s a fact!”
Almost A Family Page 5
