After You Were Gone

by Alexis Harrington

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events, is purely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2017 by Alexis Harrington

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Montlake Romance, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Montlake Romance are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781503941755

  ISBN-10: 1503941752

  Cover design by Laura Klynstra

  Writing is a solitary job, but I have a support crew, each of whom helps me in countless ways they might not even be aware of.

  Thanks, in no particular order, for the love, the cheering, and the laughs, to Margaret Vajdos, Lisa Jackson, Penny Lainus, Jim Midzalkowski, Ali Bosco, and Jean Nielsen. To Charlotte Herscher, my fabulous developmental editor, I’m grateful for your laser eyes, patience, and inspiration.

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  EPILOGUE

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  PROLOGUE

  PRESIDIO COUNTY COURTHOUSE

  MARFA, TEXAS

  Violence begets violence.

  It was an old saying—maybe it was from the Bible. Maybe not. Julianne Emerson couldn’t remember. But she knew what it meant. More than that, she knew how it felt, because it was in her now. That hot, insistent desire for revenge.

  She sat in the front row of the witness chairs, the ones right behind the railing, sensing the eyes of the other spectators ping-ponging between her, the judge, and him. Tension and anticipation filled the courtroom like a sickening green vapor.

  Up front at a table off to her left sat the man who had been found guilty of killing her husband, Wes. The days of testimony, of watching the prosecution re-create the horrible event in excruciating detail, of sitting on the witness stand and facing him—she could barely think his name, much less say it to herself—had all come down to this moment. Julianne’s heart beat nearly as fast as the child’s she carried in her womb. The indecent irony of wanting to see a life ended while carrying another was not lost on her.

  But she maintained her gaze on the partial profile of the man whose punishment was about to be announced. She wished she were sitting up there on the bench, instead of the Honorable Carlos Schmidt. She would sentence that guilty man to old-fashioned Texas justice. She’d do the same thing to him that he had done to Wes. She’d shut him in a tinder-dry barn, set it on fire, and watch the flames engulf him. The only mercy she would show him would be to make sure he was dead, and to not let him linger for two days of hell in an ICU, as charred as a hickory log in a barbecue pit.

  The judge shuffled some papers, then looked over his black-rimmed reading glasses at the condemned man.

  “The defendant will rise.”

  The defendant pushed back his chair and stood there in his cheap, go-to-trial suit, probably the only one he’d ever worn in his life. His court-appointed lawyer rose with him. Deputies stood close by, as if expecting an eruption of chaos. They’d probably watched too many judicial dramas on Law & Order.

  “In accordance with the laws of the State of Texas, you have asked that the court rather than the jury impose your sentence. You committed a grievous act, Mitchell Brett Tucker. You took a life. You might not have meant to, but you did. You deprived a woman of her husband, their unborn child of its daddy, and the town of Gila Rock of an upstanding citizen.” He paused and glanced at the rest of the Tucker clan across the aisle from Julianne. Everyone in Presidio County knew the Tuckers could be called a lot of things. Upstanding wasn’t one of them. “We just don’t tolerate that kind of business here.” Judge Schmidt tapped the edges of his papers on the desk. “But I am also taking into consideration the circumstances of your crime and your youth, although I’d expect a nineteen-year-old to know better. During testimony, you repeatedly stated that you had no idea Mr. Emerson was in the barn when you started that fire, and I believe you.”

  The silence in the courtroom was a palpable thing, as if the world itself held its breath.

  “In light of that, I’m sentencing you to seven years in the state prison in Amarillo. That should give you some time to think about how you want to lead the rest of your life. For your sake, and society’s, I hope you come to the right decision.”

  Julianne let out an involuntary cry, and for a moment her vision seemed to narrow and darken like the picture tube in an old TV set. She felt as if she’d been punched in the head. Seven years? Seven? For killing a man? For burning down the barn? Drug dealers got worse for selling cocaine from the trunks of their cars.

  The rest of the Tucker men lurched out of their chairs, voicing loud complaints. A buzz erupted among the onlookers and continued until the judge banged his gavel on its sound block, demanding order and threatening to clear the courtroom.

  Only Mitchell was quiet. His jaw was clenched, and he said nothing.

  She had seen that stony look just one other time: the day she’d told him she was marrying Wes.

  CHAPTER ONE

  BIG BEND COUNTRY

  GILA ROCK, TEXAS

  EIGHT YEARS LATER

  WELCOME TO GILA ROCK. The trucker nodded at a tourist-grabbing sign. “Looks like this is the place.”

  “Thanks, man, I appreciate it.” Yeah, this was the place. Mitchell Tucker jumped down from the air-conditioned, long-nose Peterbilt that had brought him to the outskirts of a town he’d once known as well as he knew his own name. Dragging his duffel bag after him, he slammed the cranberry-red cab door, gave it a slap with his hand, and waved to the driver hauling a load of cattle feed. The man had picked him up about forty miles south of here, and not a moment too soon—he’d been walking and trying to hitch a ride since morning.

  The driver gave a short blast of his horn and pulled out. The sound of crunching gravel and shifting gears faded slowly as the truck left Mitchell in a hot cloud of dust and diesel exhaust. When the air cleared, he looked around, through shimmering heat waves across the two-lane asphalt and to the emptiness beyond.

  West Texas. Mitchell had once heard an old fart at Lupe’s Roadhouse say that it was so flat out here, a body could stand on a case of beer and see all the way to the next county. To prove his point, the guy had even gotten Lupe Mendoza herself to give him a case of Lone Star empties, which he lugged out to the bare dirt parking lot. With a group of the tavern’s noontime regulars tagging after him to watch, he climbed onto the cardboard and glass. Yup, he claimed, there was Jeff Davis County up there to the north. He added that he’d probably have been able to see past it to Culberson County if the bottles had been full. Mitchell almost believed it.

  This was still the real West, a wild place where scrubs of creosote, sage, cactus, and an occasional patch of fading bluebonnets were all that relieved the endless vista of Big Bend Country. The far-off hills seemed so remote they might as well have been on the moon. Between here and those hills, it was flat, hot, and desolate, the kind of place that was
only right for him to have come from. Given the events of his life, it was also the kind of place he had to come back to.

  In the near distance, Gila Rock waited for him under a chrome-blue sky. Except for a few old brick buildings like the high school and the library that stood out, the main structures looked as bleached and weather-beaten as their surroundings. He could still picture most of them. After all, there wasn’t much more than a couple of silos, some taverns, and two churches, bracketed by sorghum fields, a hog farm or two, and miles of cattle range. This was the vast area where the movie Giant had been filmed back in the fifties, and rain was damn near a miracle. There was no Walmart here, no Kmart, no Valero gas station or H-E-B grocery store—none of the big chain businesses that Mitchell had seen in the past year, knocking around the state. Gila Rock probably hadn’t changed at all.

  But Mitchell Tucker had.

  Seven years in prison could do that to a man. It changed the way he walked and talked, how he looked at other people and the world in general. He had a whole new vocabulary that he’d acquired over time, one that most people on the outside heard as a foreign language. And he was about as different as he could be from the scared, angry . . . kid who’d been sent off to the state penitentiary eight years before.

  Originally, he’d planned never to come back—there was nothing for him here but that crappy single-wide he’d shared with his brothers and his old man down by the slow, muddy creek. At least that’s what he’d thought.

  There was more, though, something he needed to take care of. Some unfinished business that had nagged at him for more than two thousand days and nights.

  He could still see her sitting in the Presidio County Courthouse during his trial, flinging daggers at him with her ice-cold stares. He could hear her voice as she’d testified against him on the witness stand, tear-choked and accusing. It still made his gut twist to think about it, even after all these years. Mitchell had taken his chances by letting the judge decide his sentence, and he’d lost.

  Seven years.

  Under the glare of the afternoon sun, sweat popped out on his forehead, and he rubbed at it with the sleeve of his T-shirt. Then he picked up his duffel bag and started walking toward town. His boot heels made a dull, rhythmic thud on the hot asphalt.

  Julianne.

  Julianne.

  Julianne.

  Oh yeah, he had business here, all right. He would finish that business, then move on again.

  “I’ll be goddamn-go-to-hell! Mitch? Is that really you?” Mitchell’s younger brother, Darcy Tucker, stared at him from the doorway of the mobile home they’d grown up in. It stood beside an arroyo that saw water about two months out of the year. The screen door was just a useless aluminum frame with shreds of old netting hanging from it.

  “Yeah. It’s me.”

  Darcy turned and called over his shoulder, “Hey, old man, look who’s here! The prodigal has come home.”

  Mitchell winced at the announcement, and at the smells of stale beer, dirty ashtrays, and cooking grease that wafted over him from the dark interior of the mobile home. Within, he heard the clattering of a window air conditioner that sounded as if it were trying to breathe its last, and the low drone of a television.

  Darcy pushed open the screenless screen door. “Well, come on in, come on in. You know we don’t stand on no ceremony around here.”

  Mitchell stepped inside, dropped his duffel bag, and waited for his eyes to adjust to the gloom. Darcy slapped him on the back in welcome. “By God, we’ve been wondering if we’d ever see you again.”

  From down the narrow hall came the gurgle of a flushing toilet; then his father shuffled into the living room, zipping his fly.

  “Mitchell? By God, Mitchell! You back?” His old Dickies pants, shapeless blue twills, were held up with suspenders, under which he wore a dingy gray tank top.

  “Yeah, Earl. For a while, anyway.” Earl Tucker shook Mitchell’s hand and squeezed his arm. He saw a brief glimmer of emotion replace the usual anger in his father’s faded eyes. God, the old man looked as if he’d aged thirty years. He was nearly bald, shriveled, and shorter, and his grin revealed a few missing teeth, too. Even Darcy was skinny, leathery, and hard-looking, especially around the mouth, where deep lines had begun to form. Up the length of one arm ran an old-style tattoo that rivaled those Mitchell had seen in prison. It was an image of a snake wound around a sword. In its fangs, the viper held a banner with the inscription BORN TO RAISE HELL. His other arm featured an equally sinuous naked woman that strongly resembled Marilyn Monroe’s famous calendar photo.

  “Sorry we didn’t get up to see you in Amarillo very often,” his father said.

  “You came twice in seven years.” It was a sore point with Mitchell. He’d taken all the blame for the crime—the least his family could have done was visit now and then.

  “Twice—naw, that can’t be right.” For a moment, Earl Tucker couldn’t meet Mitchell’s gaze.

  “It is.”

  “Huh, I’ll be. It seems like the time just flew by,” Darcy commented.

  Mitchell supposed that depended upon which side of the razor wire a person lived on.

  “When did you get out?” his father asked.

  “About a year ago.”

  “That long? Where have you been?”

  Mitchell shrugged, noncommittal. “I bounced around the state, doing jobs here and there.”

  “Legal ones?” his brother asked with a smoker’s harsh chuckle that dissolved into a cough. Darcy had always been full of jittery, restless energy that he’d never managed to channel into something productive.

  “Don’t devil him, Darcy. We all know that Mitchell got a poor man’s justice, what with that lousy court-appointed lawyer. He never shoulda been found guilty.”

  “That’s a true fact,” his brother put in. “It’s a damned shame, a pure damned, dirt-eatin’ shame you got that rotten sentence. I thought they’d at least parole you.”

  Almost unconsciously, Mitchell rubbed at one of the burn scars on his arms. “It came up a couple of years ago. I didn’t want to be paroled.”

  “Why not? Jesus, I’d have flown that coop as soon as I could.” Darcy put one foot on a plastic milk crate that stood next to the TV.

  Mitchell hedged. “I just wanted to do the time and not have to report to someone. On parole, you’ve got someone expecting to hear about everything you do, and you have to tell them.”

  His father nodded, then flopped into a rocker-recliner with an audible grunt. “Then why didn’t you come home when you were released?”

  “Hell, Earl, after everything that happened . . .”

  The old man leaned forward suddenly, jabbing a rough finger in Mitchell’s direction, his face red and animated with the quick anger that Mitchell remembered so well. “Those damned Boyces made plenty of trouble for us over the years, and don’t you forget it. They got their pound of flesh from us on this one. You’re a Tucker, by God, and you belong with your kin, right here in Gila Rock.”

  You’re-a-Tucker-by-God. How many times had Mitchell heard that in his life? As if the Tuckers were blue-blooded royalty.

  “Anyway, you’re home now, aintcha, son?” Darcy chimed in, slapping him on the back again. “Boy howdy, we’ve got some lost time to make up for! James will get the surprise of his young life when he comes home from work and sees you. Have a seat.” He went to the kitchen and opened the refrigerator to pull out three beers.

  The same shabby furniture that had stood in this room when Mitchell had left was still here, now in worse shape. Yellowed foam padding erupted through the torn upholstery, and every surface was covered with clothes, newspapers, nudie magazines, empty beer bottles, and cans of engine spray paint and primer.

  He had forgotten how much he detested this place. And now it was worse than ever. From the fly-specked side window he saw six cars in various stages of decay parked next to the mobile home. A dead refrigerator stood among them, its door hanging open like an old hag’s tooth
less mouth. A skinny mutt wandered over to it and stuck its head inside, as if trying to decide on a snack. Mitchell pushed aside a heap of dirty clothes and sat on the sofa.

  “I guess the tables got turned on that Boyce bitch,” Darcy said. He whacked the beer bottles on the chipped edge of the kitchen counter with an expertise that suggested lots of practice. The caps somersaulted around the kitchen and stayed where they fell.

  At the mention of Julianne, Mitchell froze, then gave his brother a sharp look. “Why? What happened?”

  “That hog farm of hers is for sale. She couldn’t make it.” Darcy gave his father a beer, then handed one to Mitchell and sat next to him.

  “She’d be near broke if Joe Bickham hadn’t left her his dime store.” There was a note of disgusted disappointment in his father’s voice. “Damn it all, somebody is always helping that family. Over to Lupe’s, they say she’s gonna move into town and take over that store.”

  “Is there a husband?”

  Darcy downed half the beer in one gulp and let out a belch that might have registered on the Richter scale. “Nope, she never remarried. She won’t let no man even get close enough to ask the time of day, except for that hired hand she’s got. Cal, Carl—something or other.”

  “It would be just Julianne and her kid, who would be what, seven? Eight?” Mitchell asked.

  “I don’t remember any kid,” Earl said, squinting at the label on his beer bottle.

  Darcy stretched his spine, which produced a series of cracking sounds. “Oh yeah. I think someone or other said she lost a baby after the trial. Anyway, she doesn’t have one now.” He shrugged. “Just one less of the Boyce family to worry about.”

  Mitchell stared at his brother. Even for Darcy this attitude seemed pretty callous. “It sounds like there really isn’t much family anymore.”

  “There’s enough.” Darcy’s hand clenched into a fist on his knee, and the viper tattooed on his arm flexed. “She always thought she was better than everyone else, anyway.”

  Mitchell remembered that once, a long time ago and after downing most of a six-pack, Darcy had admitted to wanting to “get into that snippy blonde’s jeans.” If he’d ever approached Julianne, Mitchell didn’t know about it. In any case, the Boyce-Tucker feud was apparently still alive and well. The entire topic ate at him, so he changed the subject. “What about you, Darce? What have you been up to?”