| |
After breakfast, Jake returned to his office. His deputy, Chuck Jones, had arrived. Laughing, he told about herding Hart’s cow with his truck. Jake laughed with him. Jake had worked in law enforcement in the highest crime locales in the world and had confronted his share of danger. He relished the idea that the only escapee he had to worry about in Lockett was somebody’s cow.
A few minutes later, his assistant/receptionist/dispatcher/9-1-1 operator and last, but not least, deputy, Amanda Mason, bustled through the front door. “Sorry I’m late.” She sank into her chair behind her desk. “I had to meet my cousin. She got here early this morning. I went ahead and took her out to the Circle C. Got there in time for breakfast burritos. Brady Fallon made them, if you can believe that.”
“Brady’s a versatile guy,” Jake replied.
“They’re sure missing Windy out there.”
Windy Arbuckle, the Circle C’s chuck wagon cook for years, then the ranch’s kitchen cook in later years, had died from a sudden heart attack a month ago.
“What’s going on out at the Circle C?” Chuck asked.
Jake had no desire to discuss the Circle C Ranch with his two employees. He left the discussion to them and walked into his office, sat down behind his desk with a report from Homeland Security and INS about drug and people-smuggling across the Mexican border.
Unable to clearly read the title page, he sighed and pulled a pair of glasses out of his shirt pocket. He had finally broken down and gone to Lucky’s Grocery, Lockett’s only grocery store besides the Circle C supply house, and bought a pair of “readers.” Suzanne Breedlove, who worked there, had helped pick them out—little gold-framed half-glasses that perched on the end of his nose.
He hated wearing glasses. Worse than that, he hated admitting he needed them. Until now, it had never occurred to him that thirty-six years old was old enough to need glasses.
In the tiny sheriff’s office, he couldn’t keep from overhearing Chuck and Amanda’s conversation.
“You ain’t gonna believe this, either,” Amanda was saying.
“What?”
“Jude Strayhorn’s pregnant.”
Jake glanced up from his reading, his attention diverted to the local gossip.
“She ain’t Jude Strayhorn anymore,” Chuck said.
“She’ll always be Strayhorn in Willard County,” Amanda retorted. “Maybe in the whole state of Texas.”
Jake didn’t disagree. Strayhorn roots went deep and far.
A little more than a year ago, Jude had married one of Jake’s childhood friends, Brady Fallon. He was glad she hadn’t done one of those pretentious hyphenated things like calling herself Jude Strayhorn-Fallon. She had been satisfied to become just “Jude Fallon.” Jake was sure Brady hadn’t asked her to abandon her maiden name and he knew Jude well enough to know she had done it by choice.
Jake had stood up with Brady when the wedding took place in the church that had been built by Jake and Jude’s great-great-grandfather, Roslyn Shaffer Campbell. Just looking at her and Brady together on that day, Jake had known it was only a matter of time before she got pregnant. He had never seen two people more into each other. In some ways Jake envied Brady.
Jake had never had such intense feelings for a woman, had never found one to whom he had been willing to give so much of himself.
“She just found out,” Amanda said. “Says she’s due this fall. October.”
“Hunh,” Chuck said. “Hope they get that boy they’ve been wanting. To be the Strayhorn heir, I mean.”
A hundred mixed emotions stirred within Jake. There had been a time years ago when he himself had been a male heir to the Circle C empire. Now he was an outsider just as surely as if he hadn’t been born with the name or spent the first fourteen years of his life on the ranch that sprawled over more than half of Willard County. Still, he felt no jealousy of Jude. She was one of his favorite relatives.
Besides, his grandfather, Jeff Strayhorn, had taken care of him and Jude and their cousin, Cable, equally. The patriarch of the family had set up trusts for his three grandchildren and set aside additional funds to send each of them to college.
As established by the old man, Jake had taken ownership of his trust fund when he was thirty and he assumed Jude and Cable had, too. Employed as a cop for Dallas PD, Jake had left the fund in the charge of the banker in Abilene and told him to build it for his retirement. Now he was well off. He dipped into the trust fund proceeds occasionally because no man could get along very well on what Willard County paid its sheriff.
Even if Jake were not content with his lot, in a litigious society, had he been interested after the old man’s death last year, he could easily have found some lawyer willing to take on the challenge of suing Strayhorn Corp for a piece of their vast holdings. Doing it would have been a foolish endeavor. Knowing the thoroughness and ruthlessness of his grandfather, Jake was pretty sure the man had wrapped up any inheritance issues and tied them with a tight knot. The Strayhorns had enough power and influence to keep something like a lawsuit that might destroy the family enterprise tied up in court for a hundred years. The biggest beneficiaries from suing an empire were the lawyers.
In spite of those benign feelings toward his paternal family, in his secret heart, Jake sometimes wondered what might have been if his father Ike Strayhorn had been a man of honor instead of an alcoholic, philandering sonofabitch. He hated being saddled with guilt for what the father he barely remembered had done.
Amanda came into his office and plopped into the chair in front of his desk. “Listen, Jake, I want to thank you again for speaking to Jude for Jolie. That’s my cousin’s name, by the way. Jolie Jensen. Jude might not have hired her if you hadn’t said something.”
Jake knew only a smattering of Amanda’s cousin’s problems—spousal abuse and the accompanying ills. As a career cop, he had heard it and seen it many times. All such cases were fundamentally the same. “I was glad to do it, Amanda.”
“Well, thanks anyway. She’s thrilled to death to be here.”
“That’s good, that’s good,” Jake said.
When Amanda had asked him to talk to Jude about the kitchen job at the Circle C, she had said her cousin was honest and trustworthy and had a child to support. Jake had the utmost faith in Amanda’s judgment and in her word. If he didn’t, he wouldn’t have hired her in the first place. He had done nothing more than mention to Jude that Amanda had a cousin who had years of restaurant experience and needed work. Jude had been more than glad to give her first consideration simply because Jake had asked. Now that the Circle C had hired the woman and furnished her a house, Jake only hoped he didn’t come to regret his role in the hiring.
***
JUDE SHRUGGED INTO a jacket and started the trek back to the cottage that had always been known as the “cook’s house.” The brisk walk would be good for her.
Still, as she walked, an uneasy feeling nudged her. She had never had a moment’s worry about who lived in the cook’s house before because for the past fifteen years the resident had been Windy Arbuckle, one of her dad’s oldest and best friends. Now a stranger would be moving in and it was a stranger who was nervous as a cat. Jude suspected she was hiding out. Anyone could see it. But why? And from whom? And why here? There had to be plenty of places closer to Dallas where Jolie could have gone to work.
Amanda had said Jolie and her husband had split up and Jolie needed a job, but not much more than that. Jude trusted Amanda. Beyond that, beneath Jolie’s obvious nervousness, Jude thought she saw sincerity and she also trusted her own instincts about people. She saw something else, too, that she hadn’t quite identified yet, but she would eventually.
Jude unlocked the door and showed Jolie and Danni into the two-bedroom cottage. “I hope Amanda told you it isn’t necessary for you to live here unless you want to. A furnished house has always been part of the pay for the kitchen manager, but if you—”
“No,” Jolie said quickly. “Living here is fine.”
“Good, then. I hope you’ll be comfortable. It isn’t a real big house, but it has big rooms and we’ve kept it up pretty well.”
As they stepped into the living room, Jude couldn’t keep from thinking of Windy and sadness passed through her. She missed Windy gimping around the kitchen with his crippled leg, missed his corny cowboy talk. He had been a presence in her life for as long as she could remember. At times she had regarded him as an old windbag who tattled on her. She had sometimes been angry at him, but that didn’t mean she didn’t care about him. He was like family.
“We’ve never lived in a house,” the little girl said. “We’ve only just lived in a trailer.”
“Danni, shh,” Jolie said.
“Of course you should treat the place like your own,” Jude said, ignoring the scolding. “You’re far enough away from the ranch house to have your privacy. We don’t want to interfere with your life.”
She led them into the bedroom behind the living room. The bedrooms were arranged at either end of a hallway, with the bathroom between them. A brand-new queen-size mattress still enveloped in clear plastic lay on a bed frame. It had been delivered from a furniture store in Abilene just this week. “We’ve bought new mattresses for both beds,” Jude said. “I didn’t know what kind of bedding you might bring, so I bought new sheets. They’re in the linen closet in the hall.”
Jolie made a little gasp. “Oh, my gosh. That’s wonderful. I’ve never had a queen-size bed.”
“Windy lived here a long time. It was just time for new mattresses.
“That’s just...just wonderful,” Jolie said again.
They moved on to the bathroom and stepped inside the all-white room. “The plumbing’s been replaced, too. It was plugged with mineral. That happens pretty often around here. We have very hard water and it devours plumbing. You probably didn’t have that problem in East Texas.”
“No, we didn’t.” Jolie said.
“In the ranch house, we get our drinking water from cisterns. Feel free to bring water back to the cottage for your own use if you want to. There’s a water softener here, but the softened water just doesn’t taste as good as rainwater.”
“What’s cisterns?” Danni asked.
Jude smiled at the little girl’s curiosity. She liked this kid already. Being a teacher, Jude could see she had an agile mind. “Big concrete holding tanks where we catch water when it rains.”
They moved on and peeked into the back bedroom where a smaller bed was located and another brand-new mattress. Then they walked back toward the kitchen, where several plastic jugs of water sat on the counter. “This is water from the cisterns,” Jude said, placing her hand on one of the jugs. “I asked Rueben to put it here in case you want to use it to wash your hair. I wash mine in the softened water in the house, but sometimes I use the cistern water just because it feels so good.”
“Thank you,” Jolie said, and Jude saw a puzzled expression on her face. She would learn to live here soon enough, Jude thought.
“Do you speak Spanish?” Jude asked.
“I’m sorry. I’m afraid I don’t. Do I need to?”
Jude perched a hip on the bathroom counter. “Not really. Irene speaks broken English and she’s learning more all the time. Windy was teaching her and she takes some classes from the Catholic church in town. Reuben—that’s her husband’s name—speaks hardly any English at all. They came from a village in Mexico. They’re good help and very loyal. I don’t speak Spanish, either, except for a few words, so sometimes communication is a challenge.”
“I could learn, too,” Jolie said, intrigued by the idea of learning another language. “I do know a little bit already. If you live in Texas, I think you just do.”
Jude chuckled. “Right. I’m the same way.”
“I’ve worked around Hispanics in the restaurant kitchen for years,” Jolie said. “I’m sure I won’t have any trouble getting along with them. We’ll figure out how to talk to each other. What does Irene’s husband do?”
“He does the outside maintenance around the ranch house and takes care of the yard and orchard. He worked on a farm in Mexico. He says he’s a good gardener, so he wants to start a garden this year. The ranch used to always have a garden, but in his later years, Windy didn’t want to fool with it. He went to the farmers’ market in Abilene and bought fresh vegetables and fruit.”
“I’m afraid I’m not much of a gardener, either,” Jolie said, “but I’m willing to learn to do that, too.”
“Okay, but don’t feel that you have to.” Jude waved a dismissive hand. “Even if Reuben’s garden turns out, I doubt he’ll be able to grow enough to supply the house and the cookhouse. You’ll still have to shop at the farmers’ market or somewhere. Abilene has several of the large chain grocery stores, including Walmart. We also have an account at Lucky’s grocery store in town and you can shop there, too. Basically, we try to buy everything wholesale and a lot of what we need gets delivered. You can coordinate with the cookhouse cook when he places orders.”
“Cookhouse?” Jolie asked.
“It’s attached to the bunkhouse. We feed breakfast and supper to at least forty hands and provide take-out lunches if the hands are going to be out on the range. Even employees who don’t live in the bunkhouse come to eat in the cookhouse if they want to. And sometimes we have special meals for their families. One thing we never have is a shortage of food.
“By the way, you and Danni are free to have all of your meals in the ranch house or you can bring food from the ranch house here to your place.”
Jolie gave a faint smile.
“Daddy takes care of the kitchen budget,” Jude went on, getting to her feet. “You’ll have to work with him, too. He’s the moneyman since Grandpa passed away.”
“You aren’t in charge of the kitchen?”
Jude huffed out a laugh at the thought of herself fumbling around in the kitchen. “Oh, Lord, no. I can barely boil water without a disaster. I mostly manage the bull herd and work with Doc Barrett and with the horses. You’ll be in charge of the kitchen.”
Danni’s voice broke into the conversation. “Can I have a horse?”
“Danni!” Jolie said. She shot a quick glance at Jude, then back at her daughter. “The horses belong to Mrs. Fallon and the ranch. They’re for work.”
“That’s okay,” Jude said, smiling at Danni. “We’ve got horses you can ride. We’ve got a couple of gentle ones my stepson and his half-brother ride when they come to visit.” She turned to Jolie. “And you don’t have to call me Mrs. Fallon. Everyone calls me Jude. It’s short for Judith Ann.”
“Okay,” Jolie said.
Jude started for the front door. “Well, I’ll leave and let you get settled. Do you need some help bringing in your things? I can find—”
“No, that’s okay,” Jolie answered too quickly again. “We don’t have that much to unpack.”
“Okay, then,” Jude said, but she saw the fatigue in Jolie and was reluctant to leave. “Tell you what. I’ll help you myself.”
Unloading Jolie and Danni’s belongings took less than an hour. Most of what they carried into the house were pillowcases stuffed tightly with something and a couple of laundry baskets. Jolie had left from somewhere in a hurry, but Jude told herself Jolie’s problems were none of her business. All the Circle C expected was for her to be honest with the money she would be in charge of and to do what was expected in the kitchen.
Reminded of laundry by the stuffed pillowcases and laundry baskets, Jude said, “There aren’t a washer and dryer in this house. You can use the utility room in the ranch house to do your laundry.”
“That’ll be fine. With just Danni and me, we won’t have that much washing to do.”
Jude started to leave again. “Oh, I should tell you, you’ll also have to get with Daddy on some payroll information. He’ll get you enrolled in our insurance plan. We provide our employees with group insurance and a small life insurance policy. Daddy can fill you in on all those details.” With a big smile, she handed the house keys to Jolie. “As I said before, we’re glad you’re here.”
Before finally leaving, she stopped one more time. “Jolie, I don’t know what you left behind, but you’re safe here. You don’t have to worry. We take care of our people.”
Jolie’s eyes took on a sudden glister. Oh, no! Was she going to cry?
“Thanks, Mrs....uh, Jude. I—I know we’ll be happy here. And I’ll do the best job I can.”
Jude smiled. “Amanda told me you would and I believe her.” She started to leave again, but thought of yet another thing. “I’m a teacher at the high school here. I can probably help you get your daughter enrolled. We don’t have that many students. The whole school’s in one building.”
***
AS SOON AS MRS. FALLON—OR Jude—left, Jolie returned to the Ford for the laundry basket on the backseat. She stood a few minutes, studying the license plate on the back bumper. At some point she would have to renew the registration. She had just done that a couple of months back, but she didn’t know the expiration date on the stolen plates.
If Billy were somehow able to trace her to Lockett, even if he didn’t see her or Danni in person, if he saw the Ford, he would recognize it no matter what license plates it had. On the other hand, if he turned her in to the police for taking the car, they would be looking for the original plate number.
Given Billy’s history with law enforcement, he might not contact them for any reason. She wondered if she should tell Amanda about the stolen plates, but decided against it. Amanda had helped her get this job. No way would she want to make her an unknowing participant in a crime. And last of all, Amanda worked for the county sheriff and she might be obligated to report a stolen license plate.
With her mind foggy from stress and exhaustion, Jolie couldn’t think clearly. In a split second she decided to leave the stolen license plates right where they were and to keep her mouth shut. She might be functioning on pure adrenaline, but at least the sun was shining, the sky was clear and it was as blue as Danni’s eyes. She had her father’s eyes, one of the few redeeming basics of being his daughter.
Carrying one last laundry basket into the cottage’s living room, Jolie found her daughter slumped in the corner of the sofa and scowling. Jolie fought not to break into tears. She had planned so carefully, taken a huge risk by uprooting their lives. What if Danni, in the end, was unhappy?
She took a few minutes, slowly turning in a circle and taking her surroundings. The house was old, but she could already tell it would be comfortable. She had never had so much space, never lived with a floor so solid. The furniture, though obviously old and used, was far better than what she had left behind.
Her survey stopped with a natural stone fireplace in the corner of the living room. She had never had a fireplace, hadn’t even been in many buildings that had one. “Did you see the fireplace, Danni?”
“Yes,” her daughter said in a small voice. “But where will we get some wood to burn?”
Jolie wondered the same thing, because so far, she hadn’t seen an abundance of trees growing naturally. She was sure the huge old trees around the ranch house had been planted a long time ago. “I don’t know, but we’ll get some. I think the winter is colder here than in Grandee. A fireplace will be nice. We really don’t need it for now. It’s spring. We’ll worry about burning a fire in the fall.”
If we’re still here.
Who knew where she and Danni would be come fall? Once Billy knew she had pulled out, they might be on the run.
Danni got to her feet and went to the fireplace, ran her small beringed fingers along the highly varnished wooden mantel. Jolie set down the basket of clothing and joined her, looped her arm around her shoulder. “Just think, Danni. We can put up Christmas stockings. Can’t you see our stockings hanging here and a big fire?”
“I guess so,” Danni said with little enthusiasm.
She wrapped Danni in her arms in a tight hug, rested her cheek on her daughter’s hair. “Listen, we’re going to be okay. We’ll take a day to get straightened out and rest. Then we’ll see about getting you into school.”
“But why do I have to, Mama? School’s almost out and I already learned everything.”
Jolie squeezed her eyes tightly shut, pushing back tears. This behavior wasn’t like Danni. She loved school, was a good student, but the last twenty-four hours had surely scared her. Jolie couldn’t blame her if she just couldn’t stand the thought of one more big change.
Jolie would love nothing more than to grant her daughter’s wish about not enrolling in school. Having her attending public school could be a way Billy might find them. But she couldn’t allow Danni to not finish the school year. “Because you have to get a good education. You need to pass fifth grade so you can be in sixth.”
She set her daughter away and brushed tendrils of her brown hair off her face. “Did you decide which bedroom you want?”
Danni answered with a scowl and a nod of her head.
“Which is it?”
“The last one.”
“Good. Go ahead and get the sheets out of the hall closet and start on the bed. I’ll come help you as soon as I put these clothes away.” Jolie picked up the laundry basket and carried it to her bedroom.
There, she paused and heaved a great breath, her gaze landing on the queen-size bed and its new mattress. The Jensens had never slept on brand-new mattresses.
As she placed the laundry basket on the bed and began to sort through the folded clothing, she looked around the room. The walls were painted beige and the floors were made of some kind of wood. There were two tall windows side by side, with white blinds and white crocheted curtains. Besides the bed, she had a bedside table and a lamp, a dresser and a matching chest of drawers and a wooden rocking chair. She walked over to a closet with sliding doors and peeked inside. The closet was huge, far more than enough room for her scant wardrobe.
A sliver of happiness began to peek through Jolie’s fatigue and gloom as she thought of what Jude had said: “Jolie, I don’t know what you left behind, but you’re safe here....We take care of our people.”
Already, Jolie felt it. Safety. Working as a waitress for so many years had afforded her an uncommon ability to read people and she sensed that Mr. and Mrs. Fallon were what Amanda had said they were—good, fair people. On the way back to her daughter’s room, she stopped off in the bathroom. She found a corner in the bathroom closet and left the laundry basket there to collect dirty clothing, remembering that Jude had told her to feel free to use the washing machine and dryer inside the ranch house.
The job that was expected of her didn’t frighten her. She suffered no lack of confidence when it came to cooking, though she wasn’t a trained cook. She had worked with food and food service for all of her working life, first as a teenager in fast-food joints, then as a dishwasher and waitress in busy cafes. Over the years, she learned food prep from the various professional cooks with whom she had worked. She had no doubt she could manage the Circle C’s kitchen, though she had never had a restaurant manager’s job.
The Cactus Café, for instance, located at an intersection that was an interstate exit, was a large, busy place, with customers ranging from truckers to travelers in luxury RVs. Beyond that, being the oldest of three sisters and with her mother working long hours for as long as Jolie could remember, at a young age, out of necessity, Jolie had learned to cook and manage their small household. The Circle C Ranch’s kitchen couldn’t be much different.
She tried not to think of that ranch house. Not yet. She couldn’t even guess how many rooms it must have. Going to it every day and going inside, having free run of that fancy kitchen, she would feel like a princess. She already felt as if she had entered a fictional world.
Robotically, she walked to Danni’s room and began to help her with the sheets. On the wall opposite the regular-size bed was a blank wall painted a soft yellow, which was probably why Danni had chosen this room. “I was thinking, Danni, after I get a paycheck, maybe we could get a little bookcase where you could put all of your books. Wouldn’t that be neat?”
“I could put my stuffed animals in it if I had some.”
Jolie felt a stab of guilt over her daughter’s collection of stuffed animals they had left behind, including the brand-new stuffed bunny Jolie had bought her for Easter. But she couldn’t let little things affect her shaky resolve. Stuffed toys were easily replaced.
She could get a desk for Danni. A place for her to work on her lessons would be a luxury. Maybe someday, once Jolie established some order in their new lives, she could even think about a computer. “Maybe soon we could get you a desk and put it right over there.” She pointed toward the corner.
For the first time, Danni’s blue eyes sparked with interest in what they were doing. “Could I get a bulletin board?”
“We could do that. There’s plenty of room for it. Soon as we get organized and I start making some money, we can work on it.”
