A Little Town in Texas

by Bethany Campbell

  But Nora and Ken Slattery didn’t seem like wheeler-dealers or hustlers. They didn’t ask sly questions; they didn’t smirk and gossip; they didn’t try to impress him or curry his favor. They spoke well of the people they respected. They spoke ill of no one.

  The four of them sat round the oak table in the tidy kitchen. Mel couldn’t remember the last time he’d eaten in anybody’s kitchen except his mother’s. His mother had ended up living in a fancy condo in Atlanta, but she could never get used to its dining room. When her boys came home, they got fed in the kitchen, and for some reason, Mel liked that.

  Nora wasn’t Italian like Minnie Belyle, and she didn’t look like her in the least, but she reminded Mel of a younger version of his mother. It was partly because of the books. Her living room was lined with books, and so was the hallway, floor to ceiling—all sorts of books, from classics to best-sellers. It was like she lived in her own well-loved little library.

  Minnie had worshipped education, yet never had a chance to get one. She’d married young, as soon as she’d finished high school. First she was a young wife with a baby coming every year, and then she was a young widow struggling to support three sons.

  But she’d loved books, and she passed her passion for learning on to her boys. That, along with her irresistible cheer and fierce loyalty, had won her what many people coveted, but few earned: Brian Fabian’s respect—and his affection.

  The comparison gave Mel an eerie feeling. It was as if he understood, for the first time, how a solitary and complex man like Fabian might hunger for simplicity and lack of pretense.

  There was nothing formal about Nora’s house. For a centerpiece, she’d stuck a humble bouquet of wildflowers in a blue earthenware vase. A black and white border collie wandered in and out of the kitchen at its leisure. Sometimes it flopped beside Ken’s chair and gazed up at him worshipfully.

  Nora was a pretty woman, Mel thought, the kind who grew prettier the longer you looked at her. And she was smart. She tried to keep the conversation on neutral and pleasant ground.

  “—and so that’s why we have a carousel on the lawn of the courthouse,” she said, finishing the story.

  “It’s a beautiful thing,” Mel said, but he looked at Kitt when he said it.

  Ken pushed away his emptied plate. “Great meal, honey. Did you make spumoni?”

  “Of course,” Nora answered. “You’d feel downright persecuted if you didn’t get your spumoni. Everybody ready for dessert?”

  “Sounds great,” Mel said. He still felt the same weird contentment. The sky outside had darkened, and the overhead light in the kitchen cast the room in a warm, golden light.

  The Slatterys were nice people, genuine, generous and intelligent. And they were clearly in love. He tried to imagine them marrying for cold calculation, the way Trina Gilroy had accused. He couldn’t.

  Nor could Mel picture them conspiring to cover up a crime. No. These were not people who lived a lie—for Cal McKinney or anyone else. Any rumors about them, he suspected, sprang from jealousy of them.

  AS SOON AS the last bite of spumoni was eaten, Nora rose and briskly began to clear the table.

  “Let me help,” Kitt offered, but Nora gestured for her to stay seated.

  “Nope. You’re company,” she said firmly.

  “I’m family,” Kitt argued.

  “You’re both,” Nora said. She nodded at Ken. “And I’ve got well-trained help here. Make us some coffee, handsome?”

  “She’s got me well-trained all right,” Ken said, pushing back his chair and hoisting up his long body.

  Nora was putting the ice-cream bowls in the sink when the phone rang. “Rory,” Nora said, breaking into a smile of pure joy. “I’ll take it in the living room. Ken, you take the bedroom extension. Excuse us a minute, please?”

  She raced for the living room, and Ken ambled down the hall, the border collie following, slowly wagging its plumy tail. Kitt and Mel sat alone at the table. Kitt felt atypically self-conscious.

  To do something, anything, she stood, went to the sink and began to rinse off the dishes. But Mel, too, got up. He came to her side and started to help by scouring the pizza pan. This gesture both surprised and oddly touched her.

  She gave him a startled look. “I—didn’t think you knew how to do things like that.”

  “I didn’t grow up rich,” he muttered. “I’ve scrubbed pots and pans before.”

  Kitt turned her gaze to her work and kept it there. “The phone call—it’s Rory. He’s her son. Their son. Ken adopted him.”

  “I know,” Mel said.

  “He’s a very bright kid. They did a fine job raising him.”

  “I can see that they would. They’re good folks.”

  It felt strange to be doing such a humble task side by side with him. It gave her an almost pleasurable pang in her chest. But she was too aware of his physicality, of his height, of the play of muscles that the T-shirt showed, the bareness of his arm so close to hers.

  Defensively she said, “Why did you want to come here tonight?”

  “Curiosity,” he said. “That’s all.”

  “Professional curiosity?” she asked, still not looking at him.

  “Partly.” He reached for a sponge, and his hand brushed hers. They both jumped a bit and edged slightly farther apart. Her little finger tingled where he had touched her.

  Kitt took a deep breath to steel herself. There was a subject she didn’t want to bring up, but she feared she must. She said, “If you’ve heard rumors about Ken and Nora, I know what they are. And you can forget them.”

  She wondered how he would answer. He kept scouring the pan as if it was more interesting than their conversation. He said, “If you’re talking about the death of Gordon Jones, I know I can forget it. I’ve seen the medical examiner’s report.”

  Suspicion flared through her. Her head snapped up, and she stared at him, her eyes flashing. “Gordon’s death was an accident,” she said from between her teeth.

  “I know,” he said as calmly. “I told you. I saw the report.”

  “Why did you see it?” she demanded. “What’s it possibly got to do with Bluebonnet Meadows? Or have you descended to collecting rumors for Fabian?”

  His face hardened, and the deep blue eyes grew colder. “If I hear a rumor once, I ignore it. If I hear it twice, I start to wonder. I checked it out. You’d have done the same.”

  She dried her hands and put one fist on her hip. “Is that why you came here tonight? To see if Ken and Nora act like MacBeth and Lady MacBeth?”

  For a split second, displeasure registered on his face, and she thought she’d hit a nerve. But his expression became impenetrable, and his eyes more unreadable than before. He said, “The person most seriously implicated wasn’t Ken or Nora. It was Cal McKinney.”

  Kitt felt suddenly chilled. If he’d heard that rumor, he might have heard others…including the one about her…

  “This is a small town,” she said defensively. “People talk. And some people gossip. And some people just flat make up things.”

  “It also happens in New York,” he said, “which is a big town.”

  Her thoughts raced. “You mean Fabian. All the stories about Fabian.”

  “Yeah. That’s what I mean.” He laid aside the cleaned pan, and put the scouring pad in its dish. He dried his hands. He leaned one elbow against the cabinets, but all the sense of domesticity, of homey intimacy, had fled the room.

  His eyes flicked her up and down. “You wouldn’t be on this story if Fabian wasn’t in it. If it was just some ordinary corporation coming here, doing what he’s doing, Exclusive wouldn’t give a damn—would it?”

  She set her jaw, uneasily remembering Heywood Cronin’s words: “Brian Fabian. He’s always news. He sells magazines, by God.”

  She said, “Fabian’s different. He’s famous, a national figure, not like Ken and Nora. They’re ordinary people. They shouldn’t be subjected to—to low snooping.”

  “But C
al McKinney might enter the fray. Is he an ordinary person?”

  She looked away, offended and not knowing what to answer.

  Mel persisted. “When you write your story, how will you describe him? Mr. Average Guy? Will you check out his background? List his virtues? And his sins, great and small?”

  Ignoring the hammering of her heart, she gave him her coolest look. “No comment,” she said.

  From the living room, she heard Nora laugh, then say, “No, Rory, that’s the point. They fall in love, but they both know they should never, ever get together. If they do, nothing but disaster can come from it.”

  Ken came into the kitchen. If he sensed the tension between Mel and Kitt, he hid it well.

  “Nora’s talking to Rory about his paper on the Knights of the Round Table—or something. I’m out of that conversation. Once a teacher, always a teacher, I reckon,” he said. “Lord, she loves to rattle on about that stuff.”

  He looked at the two of them and said, “Ready for coffee?”

  THE RAIN HAD STARTED again, and both Nora and Ken cautioned Mel to be careful driving back to Crystal Creek. The water drummed on the car’s roof and streamed down the windows. The windshield wipers thumped hard and monotonously.

  Mel had to squint to see the highway. “It’s like being on the edge of a hurricane,” he muttered, remembering Beaumont.

  Lightning slashed the sky to a blinding blue white. At the same instant thunder roared so loudly that he felt it vibrate his breastbone. He swore under his breath.

  Kitt twisted in her seat nervously. “So,” she said. “Did you enjoy having pizza in a plain old kitchen?” She tried to sound flippant, but he heard the anxiety in her voice.

  His fingers tightened on the steering wheel. “Yes. I told you. They’re nice people.”

  “Yes,” she said. “They are. And there’s no scandal about them. None.”

  The lightning flared again with even more punishing brightness. Mel held his hand up to shield his eyes. The rain poured down with a force that had turned violent.

  “Maybe you should pull off the road until it slows down,” Kitt said, her voice even tighter with worry.

  He gritted his teeth, not wanting to agree. But he could barely see the road through the flood of water washing over the windshield. He felt the tires tugged at by the greedy pull of rain gushing in rivulets down the road.

  He wasn’t a coward or a quitter, but he wasn’t a fool, either, and she was clearly nervous. He slowed, pulling to the side of the road by a deer crossing sign.

  She gave a tense sigh. “I forgot how hard it can rain here.”

  He kept the motor on, the lights and windshield running. “What do they call this? A gully washer?”

  She nodded, her profile outlined by the dashboard lights. “Or a toad strangler. It’s enough to drown a fish.”

  He unfastened his seat belt. “I remember a hurricane once in Beaumont… Unbelievable…”

  He and his mother and Jack had taken refuge in the upstairs bedroom. Minnie had sat on the bed, hugging the two younger boys to her, fearing the rising water and roaring rain.

  But Nick, always fearless, had stood at the window, fascinated by the storm’s rage. Mel had resented him doing that like very hell. It had upset Minnie, who kept saying, “Come away from the window. Get away from the glass. Nick—Nick—do you hear me?”

  Kitt seemed lost in her own memories. “There was a flash flood on the old Hammerschmidt spread,” she said softly. “The next day, after the water went down, we found a dead steer—in a tree. In the top branches of an oak tree. A big oak tree. He’d been swept there by the high water and drowned….”

  She shivered and wrapped her arms around herself.

  “Cold?” he asked, leaning nearer.

  She shook her head. “It’s just I can still see it. My little brothers laughed—a steer in a tree. But I was horrified. The vultures circling…the sky was dark with them—” She shuddered again.

  He bent nearer. He could smell the sweet, summery scent of her hair. “Your brothers,” he said, “you and Nora never mentioned them. Not once.”

  She turned her face to his. “You never mentioned yours, either.”

  “That’s different,” he said. The rain drummed down harder. He and she seemed isolated in their own shadowy, safe little world.

  “My little brothers had each other,” she murmured. “And Nora and I had each other. We were one unit, and they were another. We had nothing in common.”

  She gave him a smile that hinted at her usual mischief. “They were boys,” she said with mock repulsion.

  He looked at her lips. By the dim light they looked soft as velvet.

  “You must have missed Nora when she got married. She got married young, didn’t she?”

  The smile fled from her face. She turned her gaze to the windshield. It was as if she were gazing out at a dark sea. “I suppose Gloria Wall told you all about that,” she said, her contempt barely veiled.

  The steady beat of the windshield wipers thumped like his heart. He said, “She didn’t tell me anything I can’t see. Nora’s not much older than you. Still, she has a son in college.”

  Kitt tilted her chin up, but didn’t meet his eyes. “He’s the light of her life. He’s a wonderful kid.”

  “But he was an accident—wasn’t he?”

  Her head whipped back to face him again. Even in the subdued light he could see the flash of her eyes. “You don’t answer questions about your family,” she countered. “And I won’t answer questions about mine. Is that really why you invited yourself tonight? To pry into Nora’s life?”

  That was part of it, of course, and he had to lie about it. But he didn’t have to lie about everything.

  “I wanted to know more about you,” he said, and that was true.

  “Why?” she demanded. “Is that your strategy? If I check up on you, you check up on me? Is this supposed to drive me away?”

  The rain hammered on the roof; it covered the windows, sealing them in waves of darkness. “No,” he whispered, touching her hair, “it’s supposed to bring you closer.”

  He kissed her. Her mouth was as velvety soft as it had looked. It was warm and sweet. But it was reluctant. She did not want to respond to him, he knew.

  His hand moved from her hair to her cheek, then the smoothness of her throat. Her old-fashioned perfume made him dizzy with the oldest fashion of yearning.

  “I liked being with you,” he said against her lips. “I liked sitting across the table from you in a real home. I liked being alone with you in a kitchen. I liked looking at you, listening to you, seeing you with someone you love.”

  She put her hand to his chest, pushing him away, but without conviction. She shook her head, and her hair brushed his face like the faintest, most beguiling touch of silk.

  “We can’t do this,” she said, her breath uneven. “I can’t do this.”

  She undid her seat belt and slid as far from him as she could. Her back was against the door, and she kept her hand braced against his chest to ward him off.

  He could see the conflict in her face, the unhappy resolve in her eyes. He wondered if she could feel how hard his heart beat beneath the touch of her hand.

  “We can’t do this now,” he said, taking her hand in his. He smiled in sad irony. “And we can’t do it here. Not like this, like two teenagers in a car. But I promise you something.”

  She looked at him, her eyes wary and questioning.

  “When this is over, and we’re back in New York,” he said, “I’m coming for you.” He lifted her hand to his mouth and kissed her smooth knuckle. “I promise you that,” he said.

  The rain, mercifully, was slowing. She turned and laid her forehead against the glass of the window on the passenger side. “You aren’t what you seem,” she said.

  There was a surprising weariness in her voice.

  “No,” he said. “I’m not.”

  “Why are you so loyal to Fabian?” she asked, as if she were
asking the night. “So loyal that you’d even go against your own brother? Why do you think you owe him so much?”

  “We’ll talk about that in New York,” he said.

  She did not move. For a moment the only sound was the rain, not as fierce now. She said, “You hide your feelings most of the time. Very well.”

  “So do you,” he said.

  She was silent again, for the space of half a dozen heartbeats. He stared at the faint glitter of her fiery hair. He wanted to touch it again but did not.

  “The rain’s easing up,” she said. “Please take me back.”

  The thunder rumbled, but more softly and farther in the distance.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  BACK IN HIS HOTEL ROOM, Mel tried to forget that only a wall separated him from Kitt Mitchell.

  He had a job to do, and he couldn’t afford to think of how she would view that job. He dialed Bubba Gibson’s number. Gibson would be waiting for the call, he knew. Just as he had been ready to meet him in Fredericksburg, before Kitt sidetracked him.

  Lord, she was a woman designed to throw a man offtrack, to highjack his thoughts, scramble his plans, confuse his priorities. And his first priority was to get Brian Fabian land.

  If Bubba took Fabian’s offer, J.T. would be sold out by one of his oldest friends. Bubba might not cave in immediately. But he was itching to hear Fabian’s new offer. He couldn’t disguise that curiosity, no matter how hard he’d tried.

  The phone rang a strangely long time before Bubba answered, and when he did, he was terse as the crack of a whip. “I don’t want to see you, after all,” he snapped. “I told my wife you were after me. She said don’t even talk to you—you’re leadin’ me into temptation.”

  Mel scowled. “All I’m doing is trying to make you rich. You haven’t heard our offer yet, and—”

  “And I don’t want to,” Bubba said combatively. “I’m a weak man, but God gave me a good wife. She sees through you like you were a pane of window glass. I was born on this land, and I will by God die on it.”

  Mel swore inwardly. The wife, of course. Mel had always known Mary Gibson would be a problem. It was child’s play to tempt Bubba, but Mary was made of sterner stuff.