Close To The Edge (Westen #2) (21 page)

Emma came around the corner. “I’m so glad you could join us,” she said to Bobby as she waved them all into the kitchen connected to the great room—a newly remodeled portion of the house.

Moments later, seated at the oak country table that was the center of the kitchen, Bobby listened to the boys try to tell Gage about everything that had happened in the past month, each finishing the other’s sentence between bites of pancakes in their haste.

“Brian, Ben, slow down,” Clint ordered, but with a smile. “You’re going to end up choking on your food. Gage isn’t leaving before his breakfast is finished.”

“But the bus…” Brian said, shoving half a piece of bacon into his mouth.

“…will be here soon, Dad,” Ben finished.

As if on cue, the sound of a school bus horn blasted from the street. Chaos ensued. The doctor went to hold the bus, while the boys grabbed their backpacks and their mother did a quick once-over to be sure their faces and clothes were clean for school. As the boys ran out the front door, their mother following behind them, Gage chuckled beside Bobby. “They’re like two spring tornadoes.”

“I’ll bet they’re a handful.”

“They used to be worse. Before Emma married Clint. She never knew what they’d get into. But now they mind both Em and the doc without question.” He sipped his coffee, nodding his head as if he approved of his cousin’s family.

“How long have they been married?”

“A little over a year.”

Before she could ask any further questions, a movement from the hallway caught her attention. A white-haired, frail-looking lady stood in the doorway, a confused look on her face as she rubbed her hands one over the other in nervous agitation.

“Aunt Isabelle?” Gage carefully set his coffee mug on the table and eased his chair back. He approached the elderly woman with slow, gentle movements. “Is something wrong?”

She looked up at him, no recognition on her face. “Do you know where my little girl is, sir?”

“Emma is out on the porch with your grandsons.” Gage smiled and took her by the shoulders, leading her into the kitchen. “Why don’t you sit with Bobby while I get you some breakfast?”

His gentleness with his aunt amazed Bobby. It was a new side to him. She’d seen his anger, most of which was directed at her, his patience with Cleetus, and his disdain—that’s the emotion he used with the mayor and his entourage. But gentle kindness? Out of the big tough sheriff?

Who’da thought it?

Isabelle blinked and her eyes seem to focus on her nephew. “Gage, it’s so nice to see you. I’d love a cup of coffee, please.” She glanced at Bobby, smiled and leaned closer. “It’s about time he brought you to visit us, my dear. I thought your name was Mary, or Maureen, or…what is your wife’s name, Gage?”

“Her name
was
Moira, Aunt Isabelle,” he said as he set a plate of pancakes in front of her and a cup of coffee. “Remember, we’ve been divorced more than a year.”

“Oh, dear. I’m sure your father is very disappointed.” Isabelle sipped her coffee.

A brief flash of pain crossed his features, from the mention of his father or the divorce, Bobby wasn’t sure, but Gage quickly replaced it with a smile and a pat to his aunt’s hand. “Don’t worry about Dad. By the end, he was as glad the marriage ended as I was.”

For a moment, an uncomfortable silence filled the kitchen then the front door closed.

“Well, they’re off,” Emma said as she and Clint joined them once more. She leaned over and kissed her mother on the forehead. “Good morning, Mama.”

“Good morning, Emma. We need to plant the spring vegetables today, dear.”

Emma heaved a heavy sigh as she retrieved a bottle of medicine from the cabinet. “Not today, Mama. I have nursing classes. You’ll be going to the day center. Remember?”

“Oh yes, with that lovely girl, Libby.”

“Yes, Mama, Libby Wilson.” Emma glanced at Bobby. “Libby is a social worker and a friend.”

“She always has the most interesting things for me to help those poor elderly people do,” Isabelle said, almost to herself.

Emma doled her mother’s medicine into her wrinkled and frail hand. The unshed tears in the other woman’s eyes made an ache around Bobby’s heart and she wanted to hug Gage’s cousin.

Since her parents died so young she’d never been around an elderly person in such an intimate fashion, especially not one so obviously suffering from Alzheimer’s. Emma certainly had her hands full with her mother, sons and a new baby on the way.

Clint cupped his wife’s face and kissed her. The worry around her eyes softened immediately.

Bobby swallowed hard. If she could look as happy as these two, she’d gladly trade places with Emma, despite all her responsibilities.

“So did you get a chance to look at those pictures?” Clint asked, sitting across from Bobby and Gage once more.

“Not yet.” Gage glanced at his aunt, seated next to him and staring off into space. He opened the file in front of him.

Emma gasped, Gage muttered a curse and Bobby swallowed hard at the gruesome sight in front of them. The young woman—at least she appeared to be young, she was so thin—had stringy blonde hair. Her left eye, black and blue, was swollen nearly shut and the skin just below it over her cheekbone had a long gash that Clint had stitched closed. When Gage turned to the second picture of the woman’s torso, Emma left the room looking rather green and Bobby turned from studying the images.

“You have no idea who the bastard is that did this?” Gage asked through nearly clenched teeth.

“No. I never saw him before this morning. Harriett was at the clinic early to type up files for all the summer baseball physicals we’ve been doing, when the guy knocked on the door. She called me, and as soon as I got there, the guy bolted.” Clint drank his coffee. “Figured I best take care of the girl, then call you.”

“You know,” Gage spread the pictures out on the table, lightly tapping the full-frontal one. “She looks a little familiar.”

Clint and Emma, who’d returned looking pale but not so green, leaned in to study the picture.

“Yeah, I think so, too. But not anyone I can put a name to.” He looked at his wife.

Emma cocked her head to one side. “It’s the color of her eyes, er…eye,” she said, since only one was open enough to see the iris. “Such an unusual shade.”

Bobby leaned it to see more. Yep, almost a translucent green.

“Well, hopefully someone will know who she is.” Gage scooted his chair back, gathered his and Bobby’s breakfast dishes and took them to the sink to rinse.

Emma looked at her watch. “I need to get Mama over to the center. Libby wanted to do some special memory exercises with her today.”

“Do they help much?” Bobby couldn’t help but ask, rising from her seat.

“Actually, for a day or two they do seem to help. Clint is also considering increasing her medication dosage.” She smiled at her husband as he wrapped his arms around her. “We’d like to keep her home with us as long as possible. Once she’s in a care facility, I’m afraid her memory will completely disappear.”

“We’re hoping she’ll get to see her newest grandchild before that happens.” Clint kissed his wife on her cheek.

Afraid her envy for their obviously happy relationship was written all over her face, Bobby looked at the pictures on the table once more. “It’s a shame no one knows this girl. She didn’t have any identification on her?”

Clint shook his head. “No. It’s as if he was through using her and threw her away.”

“Hold onto this for me,” Gage said, handing Bobby the tape recorder. She slipped it into her black bag as he started to gather up the pictures. His hand was on the last one, when Isabelle placed her hand on top of his, stopping his movements.

“She looks just like her mother.”

The foursome grew very quiet, exchanging startled looks with each other.

“Who looks like her mother, Aunt Isabelle?” Gage asked in a quiet voice, laced with his own anxiousness.

“Teeny.”

“Teeny?”

Isabelle tapped her hand on the photo. “Teeny Miller. Her real name is Tina, but she was always such a little shy thing—not really bigger than a minute, barely came up to the middle of her mama’s chest—that everyone called her Teeny. Her mother used to come to church on Sundays looking like this.” Isabelle tapped the picture of the battered woman and leaned closer as if whispering a secret to them. “Twyla always said she’d hit her face on the door, but we all suspected it was her husband’s fist instead.”

“So you know Teeny, Mama?” Emma asked.

“Oh of course, you’d already gone off to college by the time she came to my middle school girls’ classes at church on Sundays. I tried so hard to get her to stay out of trouble, but she just couldn’t seem to stay away from him.”

“Who?” Gage asked, sitting next to his aunt once more, apparently thrilled to hear some gossip.

“Oh dear, what was that boy’s name?” Isabelle stared off into space a minute. “Something like dirt. Or dust. No that wasn’t it. Rust! Rusty Davis. That was his name.” She leaned closer to her nephew. “He was a no-good troublemaker, always sneaking out during services to smoke. Teeny couldn’t stay away from him.”

Gage and Clint exchanged looks. Gage patted Isabelle on the arm. “Do you think Teeny is dating this Rusty fellow still?”

“Oh yes. Like two peas in a very bad pod they were.”

“Do you know what he looked like?”

“Who, dear?” Isabelle’s eyes clouded over once more. Her period of lucidity apparently finished.

***

“Do you think he might be the one who did this?” Bobby asked as she and Gage sat in his truck behind the sheriff’s office. It had taken only a few minutes to travel the four blocks from

the clinic.

“I don’t know, but at least I have two names to start searching for information with.” He pulled off the baseball cap, which seemed to be his version of the sheriff’s hat and ran his hands through his blond hair.

Trying not to remember how her hands had felt doing the same thing in the early morning hours, she closed them into tight fists.
Get a grip, girl. Yes, it was the best night of sex you’ve ever had and will probably ever have again, but there are more important things going on here.

She looked down at the closed file in her lap and the contents it held. How could someone be so cruel to another person? “Do you think this Rusty-the-tweaker has anything to do with Harley’s murder?”

“I doubt it. I’d think he’d be more likely to be involved in the fire two days ago,
if
there’d been some evidence of a meth lab. Damn.” He turned to her, complete frustration in his eyes. “Last week I lived in my own version of Mayberry. No big-city crime, no worries. Hell, I even had my own Barney Fife. Now, I wonder what the hell is going on. A fire, a murder, breaking and entering, assault and battery. It’s like I woke up in an episode of
The Twilight Zone
.”

She shook her head. “Or
The Wizard of Oz
.”

“At least I have my own Dorothy to keep me company.” He reached out a hand to flip her dark hair off her shoulder.

Their gazes locked and tension sizzled in the air between them. Bobby inhaled air like a deep-sea diver. This whole affair was too intense for her, even after last night. She blinked first. “So what are your plans for today?”

He studied her for a moment longer, as if he tried to decide whether to let her hide behind all the chaos around them or force her to acknowledge this thing growing between them. He swallowed, his decision made.

“I think it’s time I found out just what’s going on in this town.”

“How are you going to start? With the murder, the fire, or finding Rusty?”

“Good question. I think this morning, I’ll see if I can find Rusty. We’ll have to postpone our trip to the bank a little while.”

“We?” She perked up at his reference. “Does that mean you’ve changed your mind about me helping?”

“You and I will go to the bank this afternoon for some answers. While we’re doing that, maybe one or two of my deputies can canvas the foreclosed farms in the area.” He climbed out his side of the truck and she followed suit from hers.

“And this morning?” God, she hated sounding like a hopeful puppy.

He winked at her and headed for the back door of his office. “You get to unravel some more of Ruby’s secret filing system.”

“Oh, great. Leave me with the work while you go have fun.”

Holding the door closed, he drew her up against his hard body and grew serious once more. “You saw what this tweaker did to Teeny. I’m not letting you get within a hundred feet of him,
if
I find him and
until
I know he’s out of the violent stage.”

The intense protectiveness rolling off him shook her to the core and Bobby had to fight to take in another breath. She should be pissed he was taking the big, bad alpha male role with her. For all of her adult life she’d been in charge of what she did and where she went. No one had protected her or tried to take care of her. Now here she was with a man who wouldn’t take no for an answer. Of course he had way more experience than she did with crazy drug addicts.

“Okay. I’ll stay here.”

Her acquiescence relaxed him once more. He lowered his head and kissed her. Long, slow and with just enough intensity to make her melt up against him. Slowly he eased his lips from hers, smiling. “Besides, yesterday you found the fire pattern buried in the mess. Who knows what other secrets you’ll find in there.”

She laughed. “Maybe Ruby has the answers to who shot Kennedy hidden in those files.”

With a shake of his head, he opened the door and held it for her. “You never know what surprises we’ll find waiting to pounce.”

***

“The shipment’s ready.” Rusty Davis paced behind the cookhouse. He shook his other hand wildly. It felt like he’d been stung by a dozen fire ants. The kind that drove him crazy while living one summer in Florida with Grandma Pen.

“Did you take care of our little problem?” the man asked. The cold in his voice sounded like death.

Rusty leaned his head to hold the phone against his shoulder while he scratched at his arm. God, he hated the feeling. He’d just bet bugs were crawling on him. “Yeah, the bitch won’t be talkin’ to no one. Not for a long while.”