After You Were Gone

by Alexis Harrington

  “Can you keep Knucklehead for me? I, uh, decided to move out of the trailer and I don’t think I’ll be able to find a place to live that will let me keep him. If I left him behind, Darcy would probably kill him.” He walked over to the vacuum pot and poured coffee for himself.

  “Dear God, kill him! Why?”

  “Well, you know, Darcy’s got a mean streak in him. I just don’t want to live there anymore. It isn’t working out and I need to do something different.” She wasn’t sure she was getting the whole story. “I spent the night in the car out here. I need to find a cheap apartment, but they won’t usually let you keep dogs. Besides, I think it would be good for you to have him around.”

  “But—”

  “Julianne, will you please take in Knucklehead? I brought his food.”

  She looked down at the dog, whose tail was thumping against the door as he smiled up at her, and her heart melted. That Darcy was a stupid man with a taste for cruelty. She wasn’t surprised that he’d abuse animals, too. She’d like to kick him from here to the county line. “Yes, on one condition.”

  Mitchell rolled his eyes. “What?”

  “I refuse to call him that dreadful name. He’s Jack.”

  “Fine, fine,” he replied, surrendering. “He’s Jack. I’ll be back after I find a place.”

  Over the next few days Julianne began receiving the inventory she wanted to add to the store, including a new cash register that networked with the computer. Mitchell returned. He’d found a rent-by-the-week motel room down the highway a mile or two, and they did allow dogs, but he didn’t ask to take Jack with him. He said he thought it would be better for both her and the dog if he stayed here. She agreed. Having Jack around made her feel better, and it didn’t take long for her to get attached to the happy mutt.

  They were able to get the display shelving arranged the way she wanted it. Cade cleaned the Glass Wax off the front window, and she put a decorative OPEN sign in the corner. The terra cotta planter boxes lined up under the window, overflowing with red geraniums and white alyssum, really dressed things up.

  She officially opened for business, although there was still work to do. Waiting any longer wasn’t an option. A sign painter had repainted BICKHAM’S over the door, in an old-fashioned script she’d chosen that reminded her a lot of the Coca-Cola logo. Black-and-taupe-striped awnings had been installed the day before. At the back of the showroom, she and Cade replaced the ugly brown curtains with drapes that matched the awnings. Though still nervous about her situation, Julianne was proud of how things had turned out so far. She’d had the hardwood floors refinished, and they gleamed softly beneath all-new, fashionable lighting.

  The local paper, the biweekly Gila Rock Viewpoint, sent someone around from its business section to take a photo and interview her. After the story appeared, she cut it out of the paper, framed it along with the first dollar bill she took in, and hung the picture behind the counter.

  “I tell you what, this place sure looks a lot better than it did when your uncle had it.” Mary Diller had stopped in one morning to look around. “You’ve made everything look wonderful, Julianne.”

  “I hope so. It’s been a lot of hard work, but I wanted to stock nicer things than laxative and motor oil. I’ve got some gift items, too—a few porcelain teapots, handmade soaps, jewelry, bird feeders—things like that.” She pointed to the section that featured what she thought of as “fun stuff.” She’d put out a couple of demilune tables Mitchell had made from particle board with dowels for legs. Covering them with small, lace tablecloths, she’d created a pretty, feminine shopping nook.

  “Well, it’s great,” Mary said, looking around at the new paint and decor. “You did a bang-up job. Since the chamber of commerce put up that sign on the highway, tourist traffic has picked up in Gila Rock. I’ve been trying to convince Leonard that we should spruce up the drugstore, too. We have our own share of laxative and oil. But he’s as set in his ways as Joe was.”

  Julianne lifted her brows. “I didn’t know about a sign.”

  “Lord, girl, with all you’ve had to handle I’m not surprised. It went up about three months ago. It wouldn’t have made any difference to you when you were still on the farm, but I thought that was why you moved into town. Since we’re close to one of the highways going to Marfa, I guess the chamber figured they could detour some of the traffic for a visit. It’s about time.”

  “That’s wonderful news!” For a change, she thought but didn’t add. Her mind was already turning over ideas and possibilities.

  “There’s even talk about some targeted advertising, whatever that means. Maybe in Texas Highways and Southern Living, I think. And a massage therapist is opening a studio down the block from us.”

  It was difficult to imagine. Gila Rock had always been a quiet, simple outpost, seemingly on the way to nowhere. Just about everyone knew everyone else by name or, at least, by reputation. Keeping a secret was hard work. Now they were getting tourists and a massage studio?

  Julianne caught a glimpse of Mitchell coming in through the back door and prayed he’d stay out of sight. She didn’t want to have to explain his presence to Mary. Or anyone else, for that matter. He’d taken Jack outside, and the dog trotted right through the curtains to say hello.

  “Hey, who’s this doll?” Mary asked. She extended her hand to let him sniff.

  “This is Jack. He belonged to someone who did some work for me, and he couldn’t own a dog anymore. He’s a sweet dog, but I’m going to have to find a way to keep him out of the store. Not everyone would appreciate a big galoot like him wandering the aisles.”

  Mary petted him with a sun-speckled hand. “He looks familiar, but I don’t know where I’ve seen him.”

  Julianne sidestepped. “I think he was a stray for a while.”

  They moved on to another subject, and Mitchell abandoned his eavesdropping to pour himself a cup of coffee from a big insulated airpot that sat on a rickety corner table. Julianne didn’t want the smell of brewing coffee floating out into the store, so she made enough to fill this thing every morning.

  Mitchell let his memory wander back to the days when he’d still had some hope for getting out of Gila Rock and taking her with him. He wasn’t stupid, but he’d been a lousy student. The only thing that had kept him in school and out of jail was baseball. It was supposed to have been his ticket out of here. Scouts had come to watch him play. His coach had ridden herd on him to squeak out enough passing grades to let him stay on the team. He’d been so close . . . he might have gone to the show . . . he might have been a success. Then it all had gone to hell, and he’d ended up playing catch in the exercise yard in Amarillo. Shit.

  Julianne appeared in the doorway between the curtains with Jack trotting in behind her. She looked a little less anxious than she had the past few days. “Hey, Mitchell. Thanks for sending Jack to the front.”

  “Sorry about that. As soon as he saw you, he headed right in.” He paused. “‘Jack’ . . . well, I guess it is better than Knucklehead.”

  “Of course it is. Who gave him that name, anyway?”

  “James did, and Darcy said it fits.”

  “It fits Darcy and his opinion.”

  Mitchell chuckled. “That’s the truth.”

  The bell on the front door rang, and she ducked back through the curtains. He heard a man’s voice this time.

  “Heck—”

  “Julianne, I have your mail for you here. But the Domestic Mail Manual states that, ‘Other than as permitted by 2.10 or 2.11, no part of a mail receptacle may be used to deliver any matter not bearing postage, including items or matter placed upon, supported by, attached to, hung from, or inserted into a mail receptacle.’”

  Mitchell peered through the small break in the two panels to see retirement-age postal carrier Heck McKinnon. He’d been delivering mail around here for as long as Mitch could remember. The man’s impressive ability to quote mail regulations like a fire-breathing preacher quoting scripture had alw
ays amazed him. He sure as hell was in a lather. Out front, he’d left his mail truck idling.

  “What?” she demanded. “Heck, what are you talking about?”

  “I’ll deliver inside this time, but only as a courtesy, beings that you’re Joe’s niece and all. It puts a knot in my schedule if I have to get out of that truck more than once or twice a day for signatures and such. If that mailbox isn’t cleaned up, your mail will be piling up at the post office.”

  He stormed out again, leaving Julianne looking baffled, her hands full of catalogs and envelopes. “What was that about?” she muttered.

  As Heck was pulling away from the curb, she put the mail on a counter and went outside. Mitchell turned his attention back to stacking the paint cans.

  Then he heard her shriek.

  He raced through the store and out the front door. He found Julianne standing in front of the mailbox, her hands pressed to her open mouth, her eyes wide with horror. “What—?” When he stepped off the curb to learn what had her upset, he saw a dead chicken in the box, its throat cut. Congealed blood pooled around the bird, drenched its buff-colored feathers, and dripped off the edge of the opening. Its head, hanging by a thread of flesh, dangled. “Julianne—”

  She transferred her horrified gaze to him with her hands still pressed to her mouth, and she backed away as if he were El Chupacabra, sprung straight out of the ground.

  “You know I wouldn’t do this!” he protested.

  Just then Cade pulled up in his blue Dodge, back from an errand. Great. He stopped in front of the store, his bumper within a foot of Mitchell. He looked at the hen hanging out of the mailbox, then at Julianne, then climbed out of the truck.

  “Julianne? What the hell is this?” he demanded, putting himself between Mitch and her.

  “I-I don’t know. Heck McKinnon came in and told me there was something wrong with the box. He said he wouldn’t deliver my mail if I didn’t clean it up. I didn’t know what he was talking about, so I came out to look. And . . . and . . .” She gestured at the mess.

  He rounded on Mitch. “Is this one of your stunts?”

  Mitch gave him an even stare. “No, Lindgren. I don’t perform stunts. I don’t know when it happened.” Neither of them looked convinced.

  Cade put his arm around Julianne’s shoulders. “Come back inside. I’ll clean this up.” She let him escort her back into the store. He glanced over his shoulder to throw a look at Mitchell that was both triumphant and haughty.

  Mitchell swore a blue streak under his breath.

  Mitch sat alone in a windowless interrogation room at the sheriff’s office, studying the painted cinder block—pale green, like every institution he’d seen—and very aware of the camera lens up in the corner of the room. The floor was covered with a dizzying checkerboard of green-and-white asphalt tiles. It had a stuffy, closed-up smell of fear, time, and stale coffee.

  No more than ten minutes after he’d heard Julianne scream, she’d gone back inside with Lindgren. He’d still been outside hooking up the hose to the front faucet when Dale Gunter and a deputy had appeared in a cruiser with the light bar flashing blue and red. She’d called them, as she’d threatened. Mitchell was put in the backseat and driven over here for questioning.

  He didn’t know who’d put that chicken in Julianne’s mailbox, but he had strong suspicions. So where did that leave him? Was he still bound by family loyalty to keep his mouth shut about those suspicions? He knew he wasn’t about to take the blame for this, even though he was almost certain that Darcy or James was guilty. Apparently they didn’t care that he’d be the first suspect. Trouble was, he couldn’t prove their guilt or his own innocence. And unless the county wanted to put a lot of time and money into forensics over a dead chicken, there was no way to identify the true culprit.

  Finally, after sitting alone with his grim thoughts for what felt like hours, the door opened, and he recognized Detective Jimmy Ortiz, the same detective he’d faced all those years ago after the barn fire. His dark hair was now flecked with gray, and his body looked a little more lived in—he had a paunch around the middle and probably a bigger pants size.

  He threw a yellow legal tablet on the table opposite Mitchell and sat in a metal chair. “So. First you burned down the Emersons’ barn and killed Wesley. You went to prison and got out about a year ago. Now, you come back to town and Julianne Emerson begins calling in complaints of harassment and problems with vandalism. Today she finds a chicken in her mailbox with its throat cut, bleeding all over the damned place.” He leaned forward in his chair. “What do you know about this, Tucker?”

  Mitch was tempted to put his elbows on the table and lean forward, too, but he knew better than to antagonize the man. He did look him straight in the eye when he answered. “Not one thing.”

  “You can see why you look like the prime suspect.”

  “Yeah, but I don’t have anything to do with the problems she’s been having.”

  “Mrs. Emerson said that you came to her and asked to help her out with her new store. For free.”

  “That’s true. She posted flyers all over town.”

  “No one works for no pay unless they’re volunteering or kids on an internship. What were you planning to get out of this deal?”

  “Just like I told her, I saw it as community service. A small repayment for the past.”

  “Wow, aren’t you the humanitarian,” he said with great skepticism.

  “Julianne agreed to it and everything has been going fine.”

  “Until now.”

  “I’ve seen some of the vandalism. She’s had her electricity cut, there were the flaming dog-poop bags, now this chicken. But I’ve had nothing to do with any of it.”

  “You were already on our shit list, y’know.”

  That was no big surprise.

  “What about your brothers? Sheriff Gunter told me he paid a visit to the old homestead and things got pretty heated. Even Earl got into the act.”

  “You’ll have to talk to them. I don’t know what they do.”

  “You’re living there, aren’t you?”

  Mitch sighed. “I moved out a few days ago. I realized I like my own company better.”

  Ortiz leaned back in his chair and studied Mitchell like he was trying to see into his brain. Mitch knew he was really trying to psych him out. But he’d been worked over by better psychologists than Ortiz.

  “I really want to believe you, Mitch.”

  Spare me, he thought. That sympathetic routine wouldn’t fly, either. “I’m staying at the Satellite Motel. You can confirm that. The county has nothing on me and you know it. I’d like to leave now.”

  After a few moments of tense silence, Ortiz threw his pen on the legal tablet, like an opponent laying down his sword in defeat. “I’ll check out your story about the Satellite Motel.”

  “Fine.” Mitchell pushed back his chair, and Ortiz followed. “I’ll be around.”

  He waited for Ortiz to open the door to the interrogation room, then strode down the hall to the front.

  Back outside in the glaring late-afternoon sun, he faced a three-mile hike to Julianne’s to get his car, since there was no one to call for a ride. He reconsidered for a moment . . . he supposed he could call Cherry . . . No, he really didn’t want to get into that again. She’d be after him, asking nosy questions, trying to hook up—it didn’t sound like fun. He checked the time on his cell phone. Damn it, he had to be in Alpine in an hour for his paying job.

  Deciding he’d just have to suck it up, he turned west and started walking, double-quick.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  “Julianne, I hate to leave you alone, but I’ve got to go to El Paso on business for the family store,” Cade said, leaning over her as she sat at the computer on the desk, inputting the new merchandise she’d just received. She didn’t feel like working—she was still unnerved by the mailbox episode two days earlier—but she also knew it was the best way to keep her mind busy. It seemed to her that Cade’s family
had found a lot more for him to do now that she no longer operated the farming operation. But she wasn’t paying him, either, so that might have been part of the reason.

  She peered at a packing list, trying to decipher its tiny font. “It’s all right. I’ll be fine. I’ve got the dog with me.” Jack had given her a sense of security. He was a smart, alert dog, and friendly. But he also barked at strange noises and some people. She’d bought him a bed but learned quickly that he was much happier sharing hers. Lucky for her, she had a queen-size mattress. “And he’s good company.”

  “I just don’t feel right about it,” Cade continued down the same track, “considering what happened the other day. You need a male presence around here, a show of strength. I know it sounds old-fashioned, and I know you’re a smart, capable woman. But some things don’t change much.”

  Obviously, he was agonizing over this trip more than she was. She looked up at him. “Cade, just go ahead. It will be all right.” She wasn’t sure about that, but she was determined to not let the Tuckers scare her off. “It’s not like before when I was out on the farm. It was more isolated out there. I live in town now. The police are close by.” And Sheriff Gunter had made good on his promise to send a patrol car around more often. She’d seen it at night from her upstairs window, rolling slowly down the street.

  Cade picked up her pen from the desk and fiddled with the click button until she had to take it out of his hand. “Please?”

  “Sorry. Julianne, while I’m gone would you give some thought to, well, my marriage proposal? I know you’ve been busy, but I hope you’ll have an answer for me when I get back in a week.”

  She put aside the packing list. “You asked a sincere, honest question of me and you deserve an answer. Maybe with some quiet time now, I’ll be able to give it the attention it deserves.” To her own ears, it sounded like they were talking about a job application or buying a car. She’d already refused him, but he wasn’t getting it. Now wasn’t the time to get into it, though.