“Who are you talking about?” Freddy says. “I’m talking about Sara Beth.”
“Sara Beth and I are just friends,” I say, and feel an unexpected pang of sadness at the statement. “Where did you hear that rumor?”
“Nowhere,” he admits. “I just saw your truck parked in front of her place this morning on my way to work. I drive right by there.”
“It’s a long story,” I say.
“I’ve always thought Sara Beth was sexy as hell,” Freddy confesses.
Thinking of my brother Jake, I say, “You and everyone else, apparently. Sorry to disappoint you. She and I are just friends.”
“That Willow Dawes is a real beauty, too,” he says.
“Look, I need a favor,” I say to him, changing the subject back to the investigation.
“That’s all I’ve been doing for you lately,” he says. “Favor, favor, favor.”
I say nothing, waiting for him. Again, silence is sometimes a cop’s best friend.
“Okay,” he says, exhaling exaggeratedly. “What do you need?”
“I need to know the names of the two people in Amarillo who gave Cal his alibi.”
“I don’t know that kind of information,” Freddy says. “I’m just an ME.”
“No you’re not. You’re also a smart guy. And I need you to find out.”
“I’ll try,” he says. “Give me a couple days.”
“I need you to do more than try,” I say. “And you don’t have a couple days. You’ve got seven hours.”
“Why seven hours?”
I pull onto the interstate and tell Freddy, “Because I’m on my way to Amarillo. And that’s how long it’s going to take me to get there.”
Chapter 63
DRIVING FROM WACO to Amarillo is like driving from one planet to another. The geography changes from lush farmland to rocky burnt-red earth. The climate changes from humid to dry. The skin on your body goes from clammy to scaly, and every pore gets thirsty for moisture.
It’s close to three o’clock when I push through the door into the diner. The bell over the door signals my arrival. It’s halfway between lunch and dinner, so the place is nearly empty. A few heads turn, consider my Ranger getup and pistol, and then they go back to their meals.
I sit in a booth away from the other customers. A waitress comes to take my order, and I see that her name is Emily.
Just the person I’m looking for.
I order steak and eggs—I haven’t had lunch—and wait.
While I’m eating, the few remaining customers depart, leaving Emily and me alone in the dining room.
When she comes over to give me my bill, I ask to see the manager. She asks if everything was okay.
“The meal was fine,” I say, leaving my face expressionless to keep her wondering.
A minute later, a man walks out with a short-sleeved shirt and a tag over his breast that says Paul.
This is my lucky day: the two people I need to talk to.
“Sit down,” I say, and then I call to Emily, who is wiping the counter of the bar and pretending not to notice us. “Come join us for a minute, would ya?”
She does.
The thing about being a cop—and especially a Texas Ranger—is that the position itself intimidates people. Paul has sweat beading on his brow, and Emily can’t hide her discomfort.
“What’s this all about?” Paul says.
I look back and forth between them, squinting just enough to look cold. Ordinarily, it’s a good idea to separate the witnesses, see if you can trip them up because one won’t know what the other is saying. But my gut tells me to try a different tactic with these two.
“You know why I’m here,” I say.
I say it like a statement, not a question.
“No,” Paul says, wiping sweat from his forehead. “Actually, we don’t.”
“Cal Richards,” I say.
“What about him?” Paul says.
I lean forward and glare at them both. Emily looks like she’s ready to cry.
“The night his girlfriend was murdered,” I say. “He was not here.”
Paul opens his mouth to speak, and I put a hand up to silence him.
“Texas penal code 38.15,” I say.
“What’s that?” Emily says.
“Interference with public duties,” I say. “Six months in jail and a two-thousand-dollar fine. And I’ll see to it that you get the maximum.” I add, “Unless you start telling the truth.”
“I don’t understand,” Paul says.
“Yes you do,” I say. “I want you to admit that you lied about Cal being here. And I want you to tell me where he was.”
“But we don’t know where he was,” Emily blurts out.
I grin. I can’t help myself. She walked right into the trap.
She clamps her mouth shut and Paul glares at her.
“Did I mention that you’d get the interference-with-public-duties charge if you were lucky?” I ask wryly. “You could get accessory to murder. And if that happens, you might spend the rest of your lives in prison.”
That does the trick.
Emily tells me that Cal was at the truck stop the previous night, but not the night of the murder. He called Emily and Paul after he found out about the murder and begged them to corroborate his story.
“He was so upset,” Emily says. “He was crying. There’s no way he killed her.”
“What did he say he was doing?”
“He wouldn’t say,” Paul says. “He just said he was doing something he wasn’t supposed to. He was north in Oklahoma, on his route, nowhere near y’all’s hometown.”
“And you believed him?”
“I did,” Paul says. Then he sits up straighter. “I do.”
“Me too,” Emily says quickly. “He loved her. He would never hurt her. She’s pretty much all he ever talked about when he was in here.”
I rise from my seat and throw a twenty on the table for my meal.
“The next time the detective on this case calls you, you tell him what you just told me,” I say.
“Mister,” Emily says, “if you’d known Cal as long as we have, you’d know he isn’t capable of murdering anyone.”
“I’ve known him a lot longer than you have,” I tell them.
I tip my hat to them and walk back out into the dry air of the Texas panhandle.
If my doubts about Cal being the murderer were fading, now I’m back up to 90 percent sure. Maybe 95.
Chapter 64
I CALL SARA Beth on the drive back, and she goes over what she discussed with DeAndre Purvis. She says Purvis promised to have a regular patrol swing by and keep watch on her.
I know I should offer to come over, but instead I tell her to keep all her doors and windows locked and to call me if anything suspicious happens. I’ve gotta see Willow tonight.
When I get to the Pale Horse, Willow is onstage singing Ronnie Dunn’s “Ain’t No Trucks in Texas”—a song about heartbreak, about missing the one you love.
It makes me think of Anne. In the aftermath of the divorce, I could have been the narrator of the song. I wonder if Cal could just as easily have narrated it after his breakup with Anne. Did he respond to his heartbreak by killing her?
My gut tells me yes, and the fake alibi suggests I’m right.
I’m lost in my thoughts, turning the case over and over in my head, when Willow walks up and says, “I expected you about twenty-four hours ago.”
She is smiling, but there’s something else behind it. She’s probably hurt because I didn’t show up yesterday as I promised. She seems guarded.
“I’m sorry,” I tell her. “Something came up.”
I tell her I spent the night at Sara Beth’s.
“Nothing happened,” I explain. “I slept on the couch.”
“You don’t have to explain anything to me,” she says. “We’re not engaged.”
Her tone tells me that she means the opposite of what she’s saying. Sure, we’ve only shared
a kiss, but there is something between us, and we both know it.
“I think I do owe you an explanation,” I say. “I don’t just kiss women in parking lots. I really like you, Willow. I don’t want to jeopardize that.”
I expect this to make her smile, but it doesn’t. She stares at me without speaking, and I feel like I can see a new side to her. She comes across as witty and fun most of the time, but there’s another Willow underneath. This girl has been hurt before.
I like seeing this other side of her. The vulnerable Willow. It shows me that Willow has a deep well of emotions and that I’ve only dipped past the surface of them so far. Ultimately, that’s what makes me like her more.
And also makes it harder for me to ask her some questions.
“Will you sit down a minute?” I say.
She says she has one more set to play, but she’ll sit for a few minutes.
“I’m sorry to ask this,” I say, “but I need to know what happened between you and Cal.”
“What do you mean what happened?”
“Did you sleep with him?”
She huffs.
“You know, Rory, I really like you, too. But you’re questioning me about my past already and that doesn’t make me feel good about where this is headed. I just met you, you know. Whatever I did last month isn’t really any of your business.”
“It’s for the investigation,” I say.
“The investigation you’re not supposed to be involved in?”
“I don’t care if I’ve been told to stay out,” I say. “I’m the only one who is going to figure this out.”
“I never thought you had such a big ego,” she says.
“You told me that a lot of people do this job for the wrong reasons,” I say, pointing to the star on my chest. “I’m doing this for the right reasons.”
Willow takes a deep breath and then answers my original question.
“No,” she says, “nothing happened between Cal and me.”
“Nothing?”
“Nothing.”
“But you know him?”
She shrugs. “He comes into the bar. I noticed one day that he didn’t drink and I made a comment about him getting a buzz off seltzer water. We struck up a conversation. We talked from time to time after that. That’s all.”
“Did you like him?”
“What do you want me to say, Rory? He’s cute. He was nice. He didn’t seem like every other horny drunk dumbass in this bar. I would have dated him. But he never asked.”
Hearing her talk about Cal this way makes my stomach turn. Why can’t women see that this guy is such a dirtbag?
“In fact,” Willow adds, “all he ever did was talk about Anne. He was head over heels for that girl. I liked him, yeah, but he never liked me. Not in that way.”
I say nothing. I look around the bar, imagining a time not long ago when Willow would talk to Cal during her breaks instead of me.
“Since you’re asking about this,” Willow adds, “your ex-wife did confront me and tell me to stay the hell away from her boyfriend. She and the other one—Patty.”
“In the parking lot?” I ask.
“Yes.” She gives me a look that says, How did you know that?
“Why didn’t you tell me before?” I ask.
“Because I didn’t want to speak ill of the dead,” Willow says. “To tell you the truth, she was a real bitch about it. And every time I saw those girls afterward—your little trio of exes—they always seemed to be talking about me and sending me these evil looks.”
Anne had a heart the size of Texas, but she was a no-nonsense, take-no-shit kind of girl. If she thought another woman was trying to steal her man, she probably would have confronted her.
“If I’m being honest,” Willow says, “I talked about them—Anne, Patty, Sara Beth—behind their backs, too. I called them the Macbeth witches to my bandmates.”
“Macbeth witches?”
“You know,” she says. “From Shakespeare. The three witches who sit around their cauldron, plotting evil. I feel bad about it now. I never would have wished anything bad would happen to them.”
“I didn’t know you read Shakespeare.”
“There’s a lot you don’t know about me, Rory.”
With that, she rises from her stool.
“I’m sorry I had to ask you these questions,” I say.
She looks at me with sad eyes.
“I like you, Rory, but maybe you and I should cool things down for a while. Maybe in a few weeks, when you’ve got all this figured out, we can pick up where we left off. I don’t think you’re in the right frame of mind to start dating. And I don’t need the drama.”
As much as I don’t want to, I tell her that she’s probably right.
I watch her walk back to the stage, and I hope that she’s not walking out of my life for good.
Chapter 65
I TOSS AND turn all night. I’m hot with the covers on, cold without them. There are no drapes on the windows in my little casita, and the harsh, bright moon shines through them. Coyotes howl in the distance, yipping a melody that’s unnerving.
Before dawn, I rise and sit on the porch and stare out at the ranch. The house is dark. Mom spent the night at the hospital. Dad is supposed to come home today.
I get dressed and walk down to the house to make myself some breakfast. There is a stove and a refrigerator in my casita but no food.
I make myself an omelet, but I only pick at it. The house is too quiet.
I walk around, studying the hallways and rooms, remembering when I was a kid running around with my brothers. There is the window I broke with an errant baseball. Here is the living room where Chris and I used to play cowboys and Indians. Here is the couch where Sara Beth and I used to make out when my parents were gone—where later I did the same with Anne.
In my father’s study, the head of the first deer I shot is mounted on the wall, a six-point that Dad talked me through field dressing. My football trophies are on a bookshelf. Pictures of my brothers and me are on display on every available surface.
One picture catches my eye: it’s a photo of Anne, all by herself, smiling one afternoon at a family cookout.
She looks so beautiful and happy that my heart aches.
I realize that there’s one avenue of the investigation that I still need to pursue. One that I’ve been avoiding.
I get into my truck, and with the orange glow of the sun just beginning to ignite the blue-gray sky to the east, I drive away.
Anne’s mom, Carol, answers the door. Seeing me, her face transforms into a smile.
When she hugs me, she holds me in a vise grip.
“I’m sorry to be here so early in the morning,” I say, “but I thought I’d take a chance and see if you were up.”
“Hal’s asleep,” she says. “But I can’t get more than a couple hours a night. I just lay there with my eyes open, staring into the darkness.”
We sit in the living room, which is spotless. It seems as if she’s been spending all of her time cleaning the house. She’s probably doing anything to stay busy and keep from dwelling on Anne’s murder.
We exchange small talk for a few minutes, and then I ask her if she can tell me anything that might help me figure out who killed Anne. Was anyone mad at her? Was she getting into any kind of trouble? What connections did she have to Patty besides just being friends? Did she ever talk about Cal being violent?
Carol has very little to say. She tells me everything she told the police, but it’s obvious she doesn’t know anything. Anne was a doting daughter and a good person. She had no enemies. The one bit of controversy in her life was her divorce from me, but we managed to resurrect a friendship in the aftermath.
I’m beginning to think this is a waste of time, but then I notice that Carol seems to be thinking about something, really considering whether she wants to say what’s on her mind.
“Carol, please: if there’s anything you can tell me, even if you think it’s not import
ant, it could be.”
“Follow me,” she says.
We walk down the hall to Anne’s old room. Her mom has put a desk and a sewing machine in there, as well as some storage boxes in the corner, but otherwise the room is the same as when Anne and I used to hang out here seventeen years ago.
There’s a twin bed with pink checkered sheets, a vanity with photographs taped around the arch of the mirror, a big poster of Garth Brooks on one wall. I think for a moment that the room might still smell like Anne, but there’s no hint of her scent, just the musty odor of an unused storage closet.
Carol reaches into a drawer of the sewing desk and pulls out three leather-bound ledgers.
“These were her diaries,” Anne’s mom tells me. “The police let me go into her house and pick up a few things. I took these. I told myself if I found anything that would be important to the investigation, I would give them back to the police. But…” She hesitates, her chin quivering and her eyes threatening to spill over. “I couldn’t bring myself to read them.”
She hands the diaries to me.
“Maybe you can find something useful,” she says.
Chapter 66
ANNE’S MOM LEAVES me alone, and I sit down on the edge of the bed with the diaries in my hands. Each has a spot on the cover where the year is written. The bottom one is the oldest, dating back to when Anne and I were married. The middle one is fairly recent. And the top one is the newest, dating from only last year and with no end date. I flip through the book and see that only about half of the pages are filled.
The handwriting is distinctly Anne’s—sweeping cursive that is both legible and pretty to look at.
I find the last entry, dated about a week and a half before Anne was killed.
I miss Cal. It’s only been a few days since he broke up with me. There were times when he was on the road for longer than this. But it feels much longer without him calling me every hundred miles, just like our song. I wonder if he’s missing me as bad as I’m missing him.
It’s even worse because I’ve started getting these awful prank calls. Some weird computer-distorted voice keeps calling from different numbers and telling me I’m a dirty whore. If the calls don’t stop, I’m going to tell the police.
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