Killer Secrets
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Marilyn Pappano
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15,1K
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11
Chapter 1
October 15 was a Thursday, three days after my eleventh birthday. My father came home from work, smelling of cigarette smoke and booze, wearing that big goofy smile that was normally reserved for strangers. He kicked off his shoes, threw his Yankees cap at the hook next to the door and missed, then announced that he was taking me to the mall on Saturday to celebrate.
As with all of his grand pronouncements, he waited for me to show excitement at the prospect, maybe even a little joy, but my face remained in its usual dull set. The idea didn’t excite me. It made the hairs on my arms stand on end, churned in my stomach and sent sour little bubbles that burned into my throat. Malls were his favorite hunting grounds: all those shops, all those people, all those escapes. I would gladly give up birthdays and celebrations for the rest of my life if only I never had to set foot in a mall again.
He waited, and I tried to summon a smile, a hint of appreciation, any bit of emotion that would satisfy him, but nothing would come. I just felt sick. I couldn’t do it. Not again.
Of course he knew my thoughts. He always did. His jovial mood vanished in a heartbeat, his smile turning to a snarl. His right hand came up automatically, poised to strike my cheek the way he’d done a hundred times before, but with a muscle twitching in his jaw, another at the corner of his eye, he stilled the motion.
He wasn’t sparing me. I knew it, and the evil gleam in his eyes showed that he knew I knew. The punishment would come, just not before we went to the mall. He needed me to attract the kind of victim that excited him, and that attraction was always based on sympathy. Poor little waif, separated from her father, big brown eyes, trembling lower lip, fear in her voice—just the thing to kick maternal instincts into high gear. A bruised cheek, a split lip, a black eye—they earned sympathy, too, but not the kind he wanted. Needed.
Though I’d spent my entire life shrinking away from him, tonight I didn’t. Not this time. I stood tall and sullen and staring, but inside the shivers had started, and they wouldn’t stop for a long, long time. Saturday was only two days away. Some woman whose only fault in life was catching my father’s attention was going to suffer horribly and then she was going to die.
And then I would suffer, too, but I wouldn’t die. I didn’t know if that made me the lucky one.
Or the unlucky one.
—Excerpt, The Unlucky Ones by Jane Gama
Summer was a hell of a time to be in the lawn care business in Oklahoma.
With the air temperature hovering around ninety-five degrees and the humidity somewhere in the same range, Mila Ramirez was eager to escape the oppressive heat as soon as the battered pickup came to a stop. Opening the door required reaching through the window that wouldn’t roll up and grasping the outside handle, sizzling hot in the morning sun. She gave the door a shove with her foot, making it creak, then slid to the ground, her boots making solid clunks on the pavement. If the driveway had been blacktop instead, she was pretty sure they would have sunk into it.
You’re the one who wanted an outside job, remember? You should have become a lake ranger instead.
Alejandro and Mario tumbled out on her heels, bearing the smells of sweat, engine oil and unwashed bodies. If she didn’t smell just as bad, the odors might have overwhelmed her. As it was, she ignored their stink and her own and headed to the trailer.
Cheap plastic crinkled as Ruben handed out bottles of water from the cooler. He was a sour, taciturn man who worked hard, worked his crew hard and had little interest in chitchat. He had even less interest in Mila. None of the crews at Happy Grass Lawn Service did.
Which suited her fine. Hadn’t avoiding attention been one of her goals in life?
She slid the water bottle inside the insulated holder she wore bandolier-style, then grabbed the favorite of her trimmers and a garden trug filled with tools and headed around the corner of the house. Ruben didn’t bother to give them assignments; they’d worked together long enough to know their jobs. This customer was a regular, every Wednesday right after lunch.
The house was somewhere in the high six figures, but she paid it no mind. It was the yard she liked: spacious, more than five acres, with a sparkling blue pool and elaborate flower garden out back. She’d planted the garden herself back in the spring, coaxed the plants to grow from seedlings to strong lush specimens, full of color and fragrance and promise. The irrigation system took care of watering the rest of the week, but on Wednesdays, the plot got her personal attention as she watered and weeded and deadheaded, caring for it as if it were her own.
The silence of the neighborhood was broken by the sound of Ruben’s mower starting. He did the front yard, walking diagonally behind a push mower, per the owner’s preference. Alejandro used the stand-on mower to take care of both sides of the house, and he and Mario shared the jobs of raking, blowing, Weedwacking and edging.
Mila appreciated the relative silence of the backyard. After typing in the code to the gate, she shifted the trimmer so it didn’t damage the flowers on either side of the walkway and wished for a moment that the sun would disappear behind the clouds. Even the ball cap pulled low over her eyes couldn’t lessen the glare reflecting off the smooth surface of the pool.
Too bad she couldn’t take a dip in it. Even tepid water would feel good right now. At least it would wash away a few layers of grime and perspiration. But that would be a fireable offense. She wasn’t so skilled and personable that she could throw away a job, especially one that allowed her to work pretty much on her own. Her crew probably didn’t say twenty-five words a day to her, and that was the way she liked it.
Though, at the thought, something twinged inside her. Was that really the way she liked it? Or was it just the only way she knew?
Resolutely, she pushed the question away. A long time ago, she’d adopted her grandmother Jessica’s philosophy: it is what it is. You took what life gave you, and you made the best of it. That was exactly what they’d been doing for the last fifteen years.
Reaching the back corner of the house, she stopped and let her gaze slide slowly across the vista while contentment chased away the moment of discomfort. The house sat at the top of a hill, with a steep slope starting at the distant edge of the garden. Off to the east rose the slim spires of downtown Tulsa. Just beyond the lower hilltops to the northeast, the town of Cedar Creek sat, compact, a small space crammed with rooftops, power lines and the grid of neatly laid-out city blocks. The valley just past the garden was green with oaks, red cedars and hickories and dotted with gnarled deadfall that indicated too many years since the last cleansing wildfire.
It was a peaceful, quiet place. Until she noticed she wasn’t alone. The quiet remained, but the peace disappeared in an instant.
One of the half dozen lounges around the pool was occupied. From this angle, all she could see was tousled dark hair above the chair back. It wasn’t unusual to find some clients at home when they arrived, but she’d never seen this client before. His name was Carlyle. She’d taken care of his yard for three years, had planned and planted his garden, but she’d never met him or spoken to him. Like most of their well-heeled customers, he didn’t communicate directly with the help if he could avoid it.
Mila hesitated, then cleared her throat. He didn’t move. Rolling her eyes at her reluctance to leave her safe, unnoticed spot, she forced herself to put the equipment down, then crossed the stepping-stones to the patio. “Excuse me.”
No response.
“Lawn service, Mr. Carlyle.”
Still nothing. She rubbed her grubby palms on the legs of her jeans. The dampness of the denim reminded her that she’d started work at six this morning and hadn’t been dry since. She wasn’t in any condition to approach one of their wealthiest clients.
The deep breath she took was filled with the sweet fragrance of the flowers and a whiff of chlorine from the pool, both expected, plus something else. A tangy, bitter, familiar something that rose like a phantom from long-ago nightmares, that made her muscles go taut and a knot harden in her gut like stone.
The air was utterly still, without even a hint of a breeze to ruffle the dark hair. The oversize chair with its teak frame and plush cushions hid the rest of the person from view, but it couldn’t hide the puddle that had collected underneath the chaise. It was fresh and thick and so out of place on the imported rainbow stone, its vivid red hue an obscene contrast with the peaches, tans and purples.
As she stared, something plopped onto the surface of the blood. Her brain reacted to the ripples, making her aware of the humming of insects. Bees in the garden, she told herself, even as a fat fly lifted off the blood, circled a time or two, then landed again.
Her mind went blank. Her shoulders rounded, her chin drooping. A long time ago, she had believed that if she shrank into herself, if she physically made herself small enough, no one would see her, no one would notice her, but it had rarely actually worked. They had always seen her—her father, at least. Her mother, it seemed, had never noticed her.
The others had seen her. The victims. Even when they were dead, they’d still seen her. Admonished her. Pleaded with her. Blamed her.
She forced a shaky breath. She wasn’t a kid anymore, and they were all dead. There was nothing they could do to her now, nothing here she couldn’t handle. Probably nothing she hadn’t seen before.
Alejandro’s mower roared louder as he drove toward the fence on her side of the house, then after a rumble that vibrated the ground beneath her feet, he made a tight turn and headed back. He wouldn’t hear her if she called. No one ever had. Not even when she screamed.
Nausea rising inside her, Mila forced herself to take a step, another, another, angling off to the left side, the side closest to the gate in case she needed to make a sudden exit. Each step brought the person in the chair into better view, until she could see his feet, his bare legs, the khaki of his shorts. A man, yes. Maybe Mr. Carlyle, maybe not.
Definitely a dead man. The gaping wound that stretched across his throat from one ear to the other left no doubt about that. Neither did the terror in his open eyes. Terror that she’d seen before, on the victims, on her grandmother, on herself.
Oh, God.
Dear God, not again.
* * *
Ninety percent of the city of Cedar Creek fell within the rectangular boundaries plotted by its founders over 125 years ago, making it a neat little box that was easy to navigate. Sam Douglas had been born and raised in those twenty-five square miles, gone off for a stint in the army, then come back to work for the Cedar Creek Police Department. He knew every block like the back of his hand, except for the neighborhood he was turning into.
It was a forty-acre section of high-dollar houses on big lots that overlooked the town while security guards and tall iron fences kept out the common folk. The area had fallen under county jurisdiction until five years ago, when the city council got wind that it was being acquired by some luxury developer. The council had moved fast, extending town limits to incorporate the former ranch and getting a nice increase in tax dollars from it. Even though incorporation meant police and fire protection, this was the first call Sam could remember requesting police presence within the hallowed compound.
“Hawk’s Aerie.” Cullen Simpson, the department’s newest hire, snorted. “Who comes up with these names?”
“People who make more money than you and me, bud.”
Simpson snorted again. “I’d rather have a nice little house in Texas than a big fancy one looking down on Cedar Creek. They could’ve at least built in Tulsa, where there’s more to do.”
“Easier to be a big fish in a little pond.”
“Huh?”
“Never mind.” Sam showed his credentials to the guard at the gate, then drove slowly down the street. Simpson was from a wide spot in the road in north Texas, so he should have understood the fish comment. Maybe he was just too damn young. The more time Sam spent on this job, the older he felt. He was pretty sure he was going to feel ancient tonight.
There was only one street in the development, splitting five hundred feet in to form a loop with four houses in the middle and six on the outside. The middle houses were just as large as the outer ones, but the lots were smaller, only two or three acres. Even on the lofty premises of Hawk’s Aerie, there was best, and then there was best of the best.
“That must be it there.” Simpson pointed ahead, where two police cars, a fire engine and an ambulance were parked. There was also a decrepit pickup truck towing a trailer and bearing a sign saying Happy Grass Lawn Service on its side.
The only happy grass Sam had ever come across was the weed he’d smoked back in his younger days. Who did come up with these names?
He pulled his pickup to the curb, shut off the engine and climbed out as he looked at the lawn service crew idling by their truck: three men gathered together, one woman a dozen feet away. Two of the men were smoking, but none of them were talking. The woman leaned against the faded fender, her feet spread wide, her spine rounded so she stared at the ground. Though there were plenty of people around, she looked alone, with no one to stand with, no one to lean on.
His gut said she was the one who’d found the body, stirring his sympathies. He’d spent two years in combat in Iraq, where he’d seen things no one should ever see, but he still got a jolt at crime scenes. How could someone who probably had zero experience with violence handle getting a view up close and personal?
“Chief.” Lois Gideon, the first female officer in Cedar Creek, removed her cap, dragged her fingers through her wet gray hair, then set it back. She wasn’t a detective and had no desire to be, but she still pretty much controlled the crime scenes. She was good at it.
“The victim is Evan Carlyle, owner of the house. He’s forty-eight, works for a pipeline company in Tulsa, lives here with his wife and two kids. They’re out of the country on vacation. Little Bear’s out back making a list with locating them at the top.” She quirked one eyebrow; Ben Little Bear was a compulsive list maker. People teased him about it, but while things might slip his mind, they never slipped his list.
“The body’s out back by the pool,” Lois continued. “No sign of a break-in, alarms on the house and the fence, security guard says no one’s been in besides those folks—” she gestured toward the lawn service “—and a plumber making a call at a house over there.”
“Who found Mr. Carlyle?”
“The woman.” Lois checked her notes. “Milagro Ramirez. The 911 call came from the older guy, Ruben Carrasco.”
Sam’s gaze went to Milagro again. She remained in the same position, as if the clunky boots she wore were the most intriguing thing in her world at the moment...or, at least, the safest thing. How long would it be before she could close her eyes without picturing Evan Carlyle’s lifeless body? How many nightmares would she have, and would there be someone to help her through them?
Not technically his worry, but the Cedar Creek Police Department had a reputation for going above and beyond. To protect and serve, their vehicles said, and he believed strongly in doing both.
“Let’s see the body.”
Lois crossed the fresh-cut grass to the driveway, then took a stone path that led around the side of the house. The gate there stood open, offering a glimpse of a flower garden that would make Sam’s father proud. Given that Samuel Douglas had spent the last thirty years running his own nursery, that was saying something. Of course, a man who could afford a ten-thousand-square-foot house for his family of four could also afford to pay someone to create garden magic for him.
Two more of his officers waited in the backyard, along with paramedics, a couple of firemen, the department’s senior evidence technician and, at a patio table as far from the scene as he could get, Ben, on his computer. He was the only one doing anything. The victim was beyond help, and the tech knew Sam would want to look over the scene before she started collecting evidence. Though none of them was within ten feet of the body, they all retreated a few steps when he approached.
Sam had seen enough death for twenty people. Sometimes it had been sweet, welcomed, a last breath before peacefully slipping away. That was the way his granddaddy had died, with Sam holding one hand and his cousin Mike holding the other. Sometimes it came as a surprise, just an instant to think It isn’t supposed to happen this way before it was over. Some people didn’t even get that much—just poof! Gone, like a light snuffed out.
Evan Carlyle had had more than enough time to understand that he was going to die. He’d seen it. Felt it. Feared it.
Sam looked a long time, his focus tight, not hearing anything but the buzz of insects, the distant wail of a siren and a muffled dispatch issuing from a radio. Nausea rose inside him, the way it always did, but he forced it down again, the way he always did, and walked away before taking a deep breath. As soon as he cleared that ten-foot mark, the evidence tech moved forward to continue with her tasks.
Sam detoured to the table where his detective worked, sunlight glaring on him. “You need any help, Ben?”
“Not yet. Unless you want to interview the yard service people.”
Ben was damn good in the interview situation when it was suspects across the table from him. He was tough, driven, could intimidate the worst of the bad guys and often did without so much as rising from his chair. But when it came to witnesses, the victims, the friends and families, he had trouble finding his stride. “Lois and I will take care of it.”
Without looking up from his computer—where the screen showed another list in the making—Ben grunted, and Sam headed back to the gate.
“What now, Chief?”
Simpson fell in step with him at the corner of the house. The newbie had stayed hell and gone from the body. He’d confessed on the way out that he’d never seen a dead person before, had never even been to a funeral, and he wasn’t looking forward to the experience. “But I’ll get through it,” he’d hastened to assure Sam. “I’ll get used to it.”
“I hope not,” Sam had replied. No one but medical examiners and embalmers should ever get used to the sights of violent death, and even they couldn’t allow themselves to totally get used to it. They had to retain some of their horror, or what purpose was there in living?
“Sit in with Lois while she interviews the men on the yard crew. I’ll talk to the woman.” As he said it, he looked around. The Hawk’s Aerie bulldozers hadn’t left a single tree on the property big enough to provide shade to anything more than a cricket. The stoop fronting Carlyle’s house was small, and its most notable feature was the sun that shone fully on the three stone steps. “I’m going to the truck. At least we can get some air there. Send her down to me—and make sure she comes.”
There weren’t so many people on scene that Ms. Ramirez could easily slip off and evade him, but he wouldn’t take any chances. If he were a sensitive kind of guy, he could find it downright insulting how many people didn’t want to talk to him when a crime was involved—even self-proclaimed honest citizens.
Striding back to the truck, he started the engine, turned the AC on high and watched as Simpson pointed out the pickup to Milagro. With a tiny nod, she pushed away from the pickup and started Sam’s way, her head still down, her manner submissive. She was average height, slender, and the hair that hung messily beneath her ball cap was black. Her choice of clothes looked unbearable for working in the heat: jeans, long-sleeved shirt with a T-shirt underneath, work boots that reached above her ankles, a bandanna wrapped around her throat to cover the back of her neck and the ball cap pulled low. The men on the crew were dressed the same. Protection from the sun.
The passenger door opened and, after a hesitation so brief he might have imagined it, she stepped up into the truck. Accompanying her was the overripe scent of hard work. Sam had smelled worse. Hell, he smelled worse after every steamy summer run.
As soon as she closed the door, Sam directed most of the air vents to the passenger side. Milagro looked like a rag wrung out then dropped to the ground, with grass clippings clinging to her clothes and what little exposed skin they’d found and coated with layers of dirt. The strongest scent coming from her was that fresh, sharp, not-always pleasant smell of whacked weeds. Smelled like Johnson grass, the invasive weed he’d spent three miserable summers banishing from the farm.
“I’m Chief Douglas.” He removed his hat and laid it crown down on the dashboard. “And you are...”
“Milagro Ramirez.”
The name alone made him expect to hear an accent and sounds meticulously pronounced. He didn’t hear either. She said it exactly the way he would have, her accent indistinguishable, as if she might have been from anywhere but south of the border.
“I understand you found Mr. Carlyle’s body.”
“Yes.” She sat rigid, her spine not touching the seat, and stared at some point in front of the vehicle. The air rushing from the vents blew fine tendrils of her hair and was slowly chasing away the pink that spread across her cheeks.
Was she here illegally? Rumor had it that the guy who owned Happy Grass Lawn Service was too cheap to pay decent wages so he relied on immigrants who had no status and no one to complain to. Or she could have all her papers in order but be in trouble for something totally unrelated. She could be a perfectly law-abiding born-in-the-USA citizen who’d never had contact with the police, or she could distrust cops just for being cops. There was no shortage of that sentiment these days.
And yet he and all the others who did it stuck it out. They were the protectors, the investigators, the defenders, the justice seekers and, sometimes, given the nature of criminals and the extent of the things bad people could do to other people, they were just plain insane.
Though Sam had started the day feeling all law and order, truth, justice and the American way, about now he was thinking he just might be insane.
* * *
It didn’t take long for Mila’s body temperature to drop from borderline heatstroke to shivering like winter in her wet clothing. Her arms had goose bumps and her hands were shaking when she reached out to close the vents until only a thin line of air came out.
For a while she’d been lost in blessed numbness. She’d walked calmly out of the backyard, stopped Ruben and asked him to go with her. He’d taken one look at the body, shooed her away and called 911. Next he’d pushed her down onto the driveway in the miserable bit of shade the pickup provided, thrust a bottle of water into her hand and stopped the other two working. She’d had a few lovely minutes when she saw nothing, thought nothing, remembered nothing, when she was just a drifting soul in a distant universe where no person or thing could follow her.
Then she’d heard the sirens, reminding her of other sirens, other lives, other deaths. The noise and bustle of the first responders had drawn her back into this universe, reminding her to pull herself together. It hadn’t been easy gathering all the parts of herself back into a coherent being. Fortunately, these people, this police chief, would find nothing unusual about an incoherent being under these circumstances.
She waited for Chief Douglas to begin his interrogation. He was entering information into the computer mounted between them, and she watched peripherally, thinking his big hands were better suited to birthing cattle or catching footballs than typing on laptops. When his fingers went still, she felt his gaze shift to her.
“Are you all right?”
The question surprised her into looking at him. His eyes were blue and serious, and he studied her as if he could read everything he needed to know in her own eyes. Only one person had ever truly read her emotions—she confused her grandmother and her psychologist on a fairly regular basis—and that person was nothing more than dust and bones in a pauper’s grave. She would spit on it if she knew where it was.
The chief was still waiting. “Yes. I... I walked into that yard not thinking about anything other than the work and the flowers, and instead I saw—” With a shudder, she raised one hand that she knew would still tremble, would make him sympathetic, because he just had the look of someone who was very sympathetic, then sighed.
“I’m sorry.” His voice rang with sincerity.
Guilt twinged deep inside, but she forced it back. She wasn’t lying, just playing a role. Any other person in her spot right now would be entitled to sympathy without feeling guilty, and she was pretending to be any other person. “Better me than his wife or kids.” Her voice came out small, the way it did when she was trying to shrink out of existence.
That wasn’t a play for sympathy. She knew better than most that Carlyle’s six-and eight-year-old daughters didn’t need to see their dad like that, just as she hadn’t needed to see her father in all the ways she’d seen him.
Douglas watched her a moment longer before turning his attention to the report template called up on the computer screen. “I need to get some basic information from you.”
He asked questions; she answered. Some of her answers were even true. All of them felt true. She had been Milagro Ramirez for so long that it felt genuine. Cassie, Candace, Melanie...all the other names she’d answered to were like a long-distant dream. The name she’d been given at birth wasn’t even that. She was no longer any of those girls. She was Milagro, who had never had a mother or a father, who lived happily with her grandmother Jessica, whose life had begun at age eleven.
As she talked and he typed, yet another vehicle parked ahead of them. A man and a woman got out, retrieved a gurney from the back of the van and disappeared around back. Presumably they were from the medical examiner’s office. They would put Mr. Carlyle into a body bag, then wheel him back around front, no longer a husband, a father, a boss, just a package, evidence, to be delivered to people who would do even more damage to him than his killer had. They would take specimens and photographs and notes, and then they would send him on to some funeral director who would fix it all so his family wouldn’t recoil in shock.
Her stomach heaved.
Mila shifted so she was facing Chief Douglas, so the activity at the house was a blur she couldn’t easily follow. He gave the impression of being a big guy, but she doubted he was taller than six feet or heavier than 190 pounds. It was just this air of confidence about him, not boastful or brash but quiet, like he knew he could hold his own, and it didn’t matter if anyone else knew it.
He wasn’t a guy she would look at and think, Damn, he’s gorgeous, but he was definitely someone she’d look at and think, He’s in charge here. Authority accompanied that quiet confidence, backed up by the badge, the weapon and the Taser.
But he was good-looking, too. Light brown hair slicked down by the hat he’d worn, earnest blue eyes, a straight nose, a square jaw, a mouth that probably delivered impressive smiles...among other things. If he’d only had dimples, Gramma would melt in a pool at his feet. “I’m sixty-five” she liked to remind Mila. “That’s a long way from dead.”
And sometimes that was followed by a reminder. You’re a long way from dead, too, sweet girl. You should be grateful for it every single day.
She was grateful, more some days than others. She knew how fragile life was, how it could be taken on a whim, how the same hand that tickled or soothed or petted could also deliver pain so intense that it stole her tears.
She was very grateful. Mostly.
The chief’s cell phone rang, and with an apologetic gesture, he answered it. She narrowed her focus to him. If her attention didn’t wander outside this vehicle, it couldn’t go where she didn’t want it to. Instead, she wondered if he was married. He didn’t wear any jewelry, not even a watch, but that didn’t mean anything.
What was his first name? She would vote for something wholesome, middle America, untrendy: Joe, Tom, Jack. Gramma had bought her a subscription to the Cedar Creek newspaper, which had surely printed his name a thousand times, along with some personal information, but Mila didn’t often read it. She wasn’t interested in crime or politics or who got married, had a new baby or won the trout derby out at the lake.
She wasn’t interested in the police chief, either.
Really.
He kept the conversation relatively short. “...just the basic info for the reporters—name withheld until next of kin is notified, our investigation continues, so on.”
Mila wondered briefly if Chief Douglas and his officers had investigated many murders. As cops, were they good, bad or indifferent? Fifteen years she’d lived in Cedar Creek, and she’d never had any contact with the police, not even a warning. She’d made a point of not being noticed by them, either.
She took a sidelong look at the chief and drily wondered, how was that working for her?
* * *
In a lot of big police departments, the chief’s job was administration, political meeting and greeting, and dealing with the media. Cedar Creek’s department was small enough that if Sam wanted to work traffic or act as primary investigator on a routine case, he could. Today, he was grateful to leave this case in Ben and Lois’s capable hands. He’d made one too many death notifications, had dealt with one too many grieving family members and friends. He would be satisfied to make his notes on the interview with Milagro Ramirez, turn them over to Ben and get back to the work piled on his desk.
As soon as he dispensed with Ms. Ramirez herself.
“If you’d like me to call your boss and see about getting the rest of the day off...”
Her gaze slid his way quickly, shy or possibly furtive, then shifted forward again. She considered the offer, looking tired and pale and tempted. He didn’t know her situation. He did know an unexpected day off resulted in financial hardship for people who counted on every hour’s salary to pay their bills. It was a decision she would have to make.
She looked at him again, keeping the eye contact to a minimum. Her hands were clasped in her lap, long fingers, nails cut short, a bandage wrapped around one tip, a bruise discoloring another. Not delicate hands, no polish, almost certainly callused, but capable. Strong. “I—I would appreciate that.”
As he picked up his phone, she told him the number. “What’s his name?” he asked during the first ring.
“Lawrence.”
“First name?”
“Mister.”
Ah, one of those people who didn’t get overly familiar with his employees. At the moment, that grated on his nerves, but then, his nerves had already been shredded in the few minutes in the backyard.
A woman answered on the third ring, and he asked for her boss. Overhearing her call out “Ed, it’s for you,” when the man came on the line, Sam adopted what he considered his politics voice.
“Ed, this is Sam Douglas down at the police department. How are you, man? It’s been a long time.”
Sam didn’t know if he’d ever met Ed Lawrence, but he certainly knew his kind. Made his success on the backs of underpaid, overworked employees, somehow convinced himself that they would be nothing without him when it was really the other way around, smarmy and blustery and always looking for anything he might use to increase his sense of self-worth. In a small town, being on a first-name basis with the police chief could be that something.
“Oh, I’m good, Chief, good.”
“You heard about the incident out here at Hawk’s Aerie, I’m sure. Your employees have been most helpful. I really appreciate it a lot.”
“At Happy Grass, we’re always glad to help. Glad to help.”
Great, a repeater. It was a quirk of cops that too many of them figured if it needed saying one time, it couldn’t hurt to say it twice. It was on the short list of things that drove Sam crazy.
“Listen, your worker who found the body...she’s pretty shook up by this. You can’t imagine what it was like for her.”
“Must have been a pretty ugly scene.”
Lawrence’s voice held a sly, inviting tone that all the put-on sympathy in the world couldn’t hide. He would love to share the gruesome details with his buddies while bragging that he got them straight from the police chief himself. That would be worth free rounds at the bar for two or three days, at least.
“Ugly enough that she really needs to take the rest of the day off. You’re fine with that, aren’t you, Ed? I mean, supporting the community and the police department the way you do, of course you’d want her to go home and deal with this instead of worrying about lawns.”
In his peripheral vision, he caught Milagro rolling her eyes. Apparently, she couldn’t imagine her boss caring anything about his employees except that they showed up and worked hard. Sam couldn’t imagine being that kind of supervisor. Couldn’t imagine anyone in his family letting him get away with it before they smacked him back down to size.
“Sure, sure, she can take the day off,” Lawrence said. “It’ll put us behind schedule, of course, but that’s a small price to pay given the circumstances. You just go ahead and tell Maria—”
“Milagro.”
“Yes, yes, of course she should deal with this. Tell her I said don’t think about work at all today. Tomorrow’s plenty soon enough for that.”
“I will. And you know, Ed...” Sam adopted Lawrence’s insincere good-ole-boy tone. “I would consider it a personal favor if you didn’t dock her pay for the time off. She’s doing her civic duty, helping the police, and I would just hate to see it cost her more than the emotional trauma she’s already been through. You think you could do me that favor, Ed?”
The level of joviality in Lawrence’s voice dropped enough to force him to clear his throat to answer, but he came out with the right response. “Of course, Chief. I’m happy to do it. Happy to do it.” He pronounced each of the last four words with extra emphasis, like he was trying to convince himself.
“Thanks, Ed. I’ll see you around.” Sam laid the phone in the console cup holder.
Milagro was watching him again, but this time her gaze didn’t dart away and back. Her brows were narrowed, and something that might be the start of a smile curved her lips a bit. He got the impression that she didn’t smile much. Lurking beneath the lingering shock and dismay was an intense solemnity that he doubted gave way very often.
What had she been through in her twenty-six years that made her so solemn?
The list of possibilities was too long to consider right now.
She made no comment about the conversation, though she’d clearly heard enough from his end to get the gist of it.
“Do you need to go back to the shop to pick up your car?”
She shook her head.
“How’d you get to work this morning?”
“Ruben picks us up. We’re on his way.”
“I’ll take you home then.” When she opened her mouth to argue, he went on, “You’re on my way. Buckle up.”
She did, and so did he. He pulled out and drove to the driveway, where he rolled the passenger window down. “Simpson, get a ride back with Lois. And Lois, give him the benefit of your years of experience, will you?”
Lois saluted him with a wink and a grin.
After raising the window again, he followed the loop past quiet grand houses and out the gate. He figured Milagro would be happy if they made the drive in silence, but silence wasn’t usually one of his strong suits. “How long have you lived in Cedar Creek?”
Quick glance, hesitation. Yep, she’d rather not chitchat. “Fifteen years.”
“Hmm. I see the same people so often, sometimes I start thinking I know everyone in town. You go to school here?”
“I was homeschooled.”
“Church?”
“No.” After a moment’s pause, he guessed curiosity made her ask, “Do you?”
“Regularly enough that God doesn’t forget my face. Every Sam Douglas in town is expected to be there at least twice a month on Sundays.”
That caught her attention, as he expected it would. “How many are there?”
“There’s me. My father. My grandfather, who’s gone now. My cousin Samson. His boy, Sammy. A cousin Samantha. And her son, Samwell. Samantha hyphenates Douglas with her husband’s last name for both her and Samwell.”
“Maybe your family should look at one of the other twenty-five letters in the alphabet.” She folded her arms across her chest, tucking her fingers into the folds of fabric at her elbows.
Wow. A long sentence with a little bit of humor in it. Feeling a sense of accomplishment, he turned the AC lower. “We’re a big family. We require a lot of names.”
She didn’t ask how big. If she had, he would have turned the question back on her. Since she didn’t, he turned it back anyway. “Do you have family?”
Her expression turned both pensive and wary, and though the truck cab left her little room to move, she managed to put some distance between them.
“Look, Milagro, I don’t know if you’re a citizen, an immigrant or an undocumented worker, and I don’t care. You had a shock today. You probably need someone to stay with tonight, just in case. Do you have someone you can call?”
Her face had gone pale once more, but reluctant acceptance replaced the wariness. “Gramma. My grandmother.”
“Do you want me to take you to her house?”
“No. She’ll come.”
He caught a glimpse of that tiny sort-of smile, softened with deep affection.
“She always comes.”
Whatever she’d been through, she’d held on to her faith in her grandmother with both hands. That was good. With a family the size of his, it could have been easy for some of the kids to get lost in the crowd, to not have anyone special they could trust no matter what, but with parents and grandparents like his, that hadn’t happened to them. He appreciated that it hadn’t happened to Milagro, either.
By that time, they’d reached her street. Sam’s own house was only six or eight blocks away, across Main Street and in a very similar neighborhood: old houses, some neatly maintained and others looking as if the next strong wind would blow them away. Some of the yards were lush with flowers and vegetable gardens; some looked as if a flock of ravenous chickens had pecked out the last piece of grass and it had never grown back.
Milagro’s house was, like his, on the better side of things. It occupied the corner, a decent-size lot with a white-sided house, a deep front porch and a picket fence containing the closest thing he’d ever seen to an English cottage garden. He hadn’t expected her to have a pretty yard or a lot of flowers. She did that sort of thing all day. Didn’t she want a break from it at night?
The driveway went only as far as the sidewalk, the rest of it having been claimed for plantings. He shifted the truck into Park, then turned to face her. “Are you going to be all right?”
She nodded.
“You’ll call your grandmother?”
Another nod.
“Here’s my number. If you need anything, even just to talk, call me.”
She hesitated before accepting the business card he offered. Then, with a polite nod, she opened the door, got out and walked through the gate and into her garden. She followed the stone path to the porch, never glancing back. There she unlocked the door, opened it to the bare minimum of space she needed to slip through and did just that.
The cop in him wondered about that. Was someone inside she didn’t want him to see? Did she have an inside garden that he might have to haul her to jail for? Was she such a bad housekeeper she didn’t want anyone to catch a glimpse of the mess? But in those seconds the door was open, he’d heard excited barking and gotten the impression of a yellow-furred mass of energy greeting her. She had a dog, a big one judging from what he’d seen, who’d been locked up all day and probably regarded an open door as an invitation to romp down the streets.
Would she call her grandmother? Would she do it now or wait until tonight, when it was dark and she was vulnerable and the image of Evan Carlyle’s face haunted her even with her eyes squeezed shut?
Her decision to make, he reminded himself. He’d done his duty, both as police chief and as Samuel Douglas’s son. The rest was up to her.
