Almost A Family Read online

  She flicked a glance at the hurriedly hidden—and now thoroughly crushed—papers, then studied each of her beautiful, adored and obviously neck-deep-in-something sons.

  “Okay, guys, what’s going on?”

  “Nothing,” came the chorused—and utterly expected—answer.

  “Mmm-hmm. Right. What’s with the papers?”

  “What papers?”

  Taylor bit the inside of her cheek to keep from smiling. “The papers that Jonah’s sitting on and Jason’s trying to hide behind his back.”

  “Homework,” Josh offered.

  The other two looked so awed by his quick response that Taylor had to fight to withhold an outright chuckle. The fact that school had been out for the summer for some four weeks had apparently escaped their collective attention.

  Emboldened by his apparent success, Josh asked, “What’s for dinner?”

  Jason followed this lead. “Yeah...are we having spaghetti? We love your spaghetti.”

  She glanced at Jonah. He looked decidedly uncomfortable. The worst liar of the three, he was nonetheless a tried-and-true Leary-Smithton. He gave her a sickly, half hopeful smile. “With garlic bread?”

  “Whatever you’re up to, it better not be illegal,” she said, starting to pull the door shut behind her.

  “Us?” came three voices of unrelenting principle.

  “You,” she replied sternly, pulling the door closed and pausing for a moment to smile broadly before moving down the narrow hallway to the kitchen.

  Her not-so-little angels were up to something. She hadn’t needed their furtive leaps to cover the papers on the bed to know they were involved in some scheme or another. She’d been aware of something underfoot for at least a week. Covert glances, the legendary mobile Leary eyebrows in full swing—her genetic gift to the trio-and whispered conversations that broke off abruptly the second she walked into a room. But triggering her inner alarm system beyond any of these overt signs had been a seemingly innocuous conversation with her sons not a week before.

  “Mom?”

  “Yes, Josh?”

  “Do you think we’re...unruly?”

  The use of the unusual word had actually made her stop cooking and turn and stare at one of her three sons. “Do you even know what ‘unruly’ means?” she’d asked.

  A trio of voices answered her.

  “Out of control,” Jason replied.

  Josh added, “Yeah, like we’re bad guys.”

  Jonah, the bridge linking them all, offered, “Like we cause you lots of trouble. Disobedient. Naughty. Unruly.”

  She hadn’t known how to reply for a moment. Of course they were unruly. That was the nature of boys. And three of them, all the same age, best friends, ferocious enemies, Learys all three and Smithtons, too, so like their father in temperament, so identical in looks that even she had trouble distinguishing them sometimes, were unruly exponentially personified.

  “I don’t know where you guys came up with that, but I don’t think I’m having too much trouble with you.” Two years ago she would have said “we” aren’t having trouble. She turned to Jonah. “Is this just a new word game?”

  “No. We really wanna know.”

  “Well, I haven’t murdered you yet. I suppose that’s a good clue that you’re all right in my book.”

  Three young, wholly male faces grinned up at her so guilelessly that she’d frowned down at them. “Is there something I should know about?”

  “No,” all three had said swiftly. Then they’d touched her, patting her, leaning into her in that instinctively male gesture of reassurance that invariably only serves to alert a female that something underhanded is definitely going on within the household.

  And each of her three sons had worn a face of flawless naiveté, an expression she wanted to believe they’d all been born with but suspected had taken years of practice to hone to such incredible perfection.

  That’s when her alarm bells had begun to ring. And each day since, the timpani had grown a bit stronger, more intense. And add to that the number of times they’d cozened her into making spaghetti. They’d devoured her cheap version of Italian food four times in the past six days. She sighed. At least they always ate well on spaghetti nights, even to the point of polishing off their salads.

  What were they up to? And why had her question about somebody being killed caused each of them to look so guilty—and so gleeful?

  As she once again fried the ground beef and added the seven spices she normally used for spaghetti sauce, she found she couldn’t really bring herself to be overly worried. Whatever they were doing involved writing. That, in and of itself, was practically a miracle. Not for Jonah, maybe, who as self-proclaimed family mediator always tried to make good grades, but for Josh and Jason, anything involving pencil and paper—even if it proved they were drafting the nastiest, filthiest story imaginable—was still a step in the right direction.

  She hoped.

  As she set the thick noodles the boys loved into boiling water and added a dollop of olive oil, she grinned again, hearing the boys laughing in their large bedroom. In a couple of years their voices would be changing, deepening. But now the high pitches still carried that mischievous angelic quality.

  How Doug would have enjoyed this little mystery, she thought.

  Normally, thinking about Doug made her feel a little sad, more than a little wistful. Often it made her cry. Tonight, his missing out on the boys’ shenanigans made her mildly angry with him. He’d promised he’d be there for her. For them. Promised he’d never leave. Promised that having triplets would never prove a trial. “After all, babe, there’s two of us, and for most of the time they’ll be with us, we’ll be bigger than they are.”

  But no, Doug had to go and get himself killed.

  And wasn’t that the most unfair and horrible thought?

  However true.

  “Boys!” she called, shoving her unaccustomed peevishness to the back of her mind. “Soup’s on. Wash up and come set the table!”

  A stampeding herd of antelope would have been quieter than her three boys making a halfhearted pass through the bathroom, then pelting down the hallway to skid into place. Since they were followed by three dogs of varying sizes, three equally curious cats and at least a half ton of West Texas dust, it was several minutes before she felt able to set the food on the table.

  “Josh, will you say grace tonight?”

  All three of her cherubs folded their hands and thoughtfully bowed their just dampened and combed heads.

  Josh flicked a glance at his two brothers, then lowered his eyes piously while clearing his throat. “Grace,” he said.

  All three boys dissolved into giggles.

  Steve Kessler assumed a frown.

  Doris Ledbetter, head secretary and administrative assistant in the high-rise Texas Ranger offices in Houston, Texas, stuck her head through the narrow opening leading into his office.

  Despite his furrowed brow and upraised hand, she grinned and pushed his door open wider.

  “No way,” he said before she could speak. “I’m not doing another McUnbelievable the Crime Armadillo deal at some elementary school.”

  Doris chuckled and crossed the carpeted floor to his desk. “You love it and you know it.”

  The fact that she was right and he did enjoy the Kids versus Crime gig didn’t loosen his frown one iota. It was a game the two of them played: he supposedly hated anything to do with kids, families and anticrime programs, and she purportedly believed otherwise and teased him about it.

  “Don’t even think you’re going to hand me that stack of callbacks,” he grumbled, waving a large hand at the sheaf of pink papers in her left hand.

  In one hand, she held a collection of phone messages, in the other she carried a single sheet of inexpertly folded notebook paper.

  “You’ve had twenty-three calls in one afternoon,” she said, waving the pink papers.

  “It’s love-a-crime-creature month,” he said sourly, but rea
ched for the messages anyway.

  She held them back. “Whatever you want to call it,” Doris said, “it’s working. Admit it, Steve.”

  “Not a chance. You’re telling me that’s why I went through Ranger training...so I could pal around with an oversize armadillo?”

  He managed to grab the callbacks from her hand and started sifting through them. Patently ignoring her.

  Doris chuckled. “You can’t pretend I’m not here. Your mama raised you too well.”

  Steve looked up, trying not to grin.

  Doris held the single letter to her chest.

  Steve thought Doris was a fine-looking woman. And she was decent, to boot. Nice, even. And she knew about cops. That was important. Very important. She combined just enough cynicism with motherly fussing to keep her team of Rangers in line.

  Steve knew he was her favorite and tried never to abuse the position, even if it meant suffering through one of her matchmaking dinners. Since she’d long ago decided that he didn’t know what he wanted in a woman—citing his two failed marriages as a surefire indicator of a man who was into commitment just not very hot at se!ection—she went out of her way to introduce him to a wide variety.

  His mother, had she still been alive, would have wholeheartedly approved of Doris’s matchmaking. When she died, Steve had found all his baby things still carefully packed away for “someday.”

  Tom Adams, one of his college roommates and frequent visitor to the Houston Texas Ranger offices, constantly teased him about Doris’s dinner nights. Tom, who probably knew him better than any man on the face of the earth, often warned him against asking any of the women out a second time. “Beneath that hard exterior of yours is a heart of pure butter. I’m not telling you that you shouldn’t trust a woman, Steve. I’m saying you should trust yourself. Your instincts can spot a criminal at three hundred yards...but you’d put all your money on the wrong woman every time. It’s a knack, pal. And you’ve got it honed to a science.”

  Tom was right. Deep in Steve’s heart he was still childishly convinced that every single human being—the criminal and the law-abiding citizen, the sadist and the victim—possessed a special quality, a unique trait that could make them rise to a form of glory.

  Maybe that’s why he’d fallen for his former wives. Maybe that’s why he still felt something for them, despite his depleted checkbook, his empty condo and a pervasive echo of recriminations, accusations and tears. And maybe that’s why he still bought into Doris’s matchmaking dinners... because some bruised and battered part of him persisted in believing love, some bizarre fantasy notion of true love, remained possible.

  But he knew better now than to gaze into a pair of beautiful eyes and take the quantum leap into a future. Any future.

  Doris called him her gullible cynic. “You’re the kind of man who falls for a woman in the blink of an eye, and then you blame yourself when they’re so clumsy that they fall off the pedestal you made for them.”

  Doris said now, “And so you won’t see anything of them.”

  “What?” Steve asked. Remarkable as she was, he didn’t think Doris possessed psychic abilities.

  “The kids who want you to call back,” she said, looking down at the thick stack of messages slipping from his fingers.

  “Oh. Those.”

  Doris chuckled then waved the paper she’d held to her chest. “I think you ought to read this letter.”

  “Why bother? I can dictate it verbatim.” Steve hazarded a guess. “‘Thanks for coming to talk to our school. What kind of weird animal was that with you?”’

  “Not even close,” Doris said, dropping it on his desk.

  “Really, Steve,” she said. “It’s sweet. It’s cute. And it’s from Almost.”

  “Where?” he asked, leaning forward and taking the paper by the upper right-hand corner.

  Almost, Texas, home of an ongoing drug investigation, home to survivors of a once booming town. And home to Taylor Smithton, widow of Doug Smithton, an old college friend, a fellow law officer, a man who symbolized the great potentials and the terrible pitfalls in life.

  “Just a kid—or kids, plural—trying to get your attention, I’d say. But then again, there might be something to it.”

  Steve scarcely noticed the moment Doris left the room and softly closed the door behind her; his entire being focused on the letter in his hands.

  He read it once, then again, and finally, he sighed and tossed the grammatically imperfect and atrociously spelled letter to his desk.

  He tried not to hope that some clue to wrapping up a partially unresolved case might come from this letter. What would kids know about an international drugrunning operation? Still, the first real breakthrough to the case had happened in Almost just this past spring.

  But he didn’t think the answer lay between the lines of this particular missive. These three kids, Jason, Jonah and Joshua Leary-Smithton, claimed a killer—the word had been reprinted after the writer had crossed out “kilker”—was on the loose in their little town.

  He didn’t believe their story for a single second and probably would have tossed the letter into the wastebasket but for two reasons: one, the kids were writing from Almost, and strange things had been happening in Almost; and two, they claimed to be the sons of a fallen peace officer, his and Tom’s old college roommate, Doug Smithton.

  While being from Almost and the sons of a fallen officer—a man with whom he’d once shared a thousand pizzas and stood on the stoop outside the dormitory at the break of dawn, staring into the sunrise because staying up all night together would somehow grant their wishes—didn’t automatically mean they were trustworthy, it did mean that he couldn’t simply discount their unbelievable tale. And it meant that he must, at least, acknowledge their jumbled warning.

  Doug’s kids. He recalled Doug sauntering into his and Tom’s dorm room that first afternoon. “You’d better like beer and Motown. ”

  A simple letter should do the trick. A phone call to their mother would do it even faster.

  Back in those long-ago days of college life, Steve had seen a photograph of the boys’ mother on Doug’s nightstand. She hadn’t been a mother then. In the photo on the nightstand, in the albums, in the yearbooks, she’d been a pretty girl, a homecoming queen to a class of fifteen. Nice. The girl next door.

  Steve stared out the window of his high-rise office, not really seeing Houston’s clean, city skyline, picturing instead the dusty, dry Texas Panhandle and the even dustier and drier section of land surrounding the little town of Almost.

  He’d been there for a couple of days earlier this spring. It had rained only a few days before his official “visit,” ending a five-year drought, and the entire countryside, the grasses still brown and the terrain as flat as the proverbial pancake, had been mired in thick, red clay mud.

  The black earth, reportedly the hallmark of West Texas farmland, hadn’t been apparent anywhere near Almost. There, the entire terrain appeared tinted with rust. And two days later, the Almost mud had dried to a rough, crusty red surface that curled in shapes that resembled fancy Christmas cookies and shattered beneath his boots as easily as if it had been exactly that.

  And he’d been there a year before that. As a pallbearer. That time he’d been in the little town of Almost to see his college buddy to his final rest. Until he met Doug, he hadn’t even known what Motown was and had never tasted a beer.

  And though he’d felt that he already knew her, he’d met Taylor Leary-Smithton for the first time at Doug’s funeral. He’d recognized her the first moment he saw her across a crowded, frost-encrusted funeral home lawn. He’d have known her anywhere from Doug’s photographs.

  On that cold afternoon, a day that tormented him still, Steve had felt he knew Doug’s wife better than anyone else present. He’d heard about her daily for four long years, had joked with her on the phone and had plotted birthday gifts and Christmas presents for her.

  He knew her, and yet when he’d stood beside her that d
readful day, he’d simply taken her cold hand into his for a brief second and kissed her reddened cheek before escorting her into the small mortuary chapel. And he’d stood at attention, a white-gloved salute pressing against his forehead as she had placed a farewell rose on her husband’s coffin.

  “Steve?” she’d asked, looking up at him through a veil of unshed tears. “Doug’s Steve?”

  When the FBI had conscripted him into a case involving Almost last Spring, he hadn’t hesitated. He’d marginally assisted in the roundup of some local drug smugglers at that time.

  And he’d seen Doug’s wife—Doug’s widow—from a distance. On that occasion, he hadn’t spoken to her and knew she’d never seen him; he was merely another undercover agent. And she hadn’t seemed to recognize him. He’d been conscious of a profound relief that in the aftermath of the arrest she hadn’t picked him out of the crowd at her sister-in-law’s home, because he hadn’t known what to say to Doug’s widow.

  And talking to her about Doug had been right up there on his top-ten list of least-favorite things to do.

  Surely a simple phone call about her sons’ letter would be sufficient. Ask the kids about their so-called town troubles, ask the mom what her sons were up to, chat for a minute, express the department’s concern for their general welfare, then hang up.

  Duty would be done, goodwill would be felt all around. He’d be the good guy, the man in the white hat. And she’d never know how he’d memorized every nuance of her face, every line of her body. He even reached for the phone, then realized, typical of their father, the authors of the letter had only included a return address, no telephone number. He depressed a button on his state-of-the-art desk phone and asked Doris to find the Almost number for him.

  “Wouldn’t you rather have the whole number?” she asked saucily.

  Steve didn’t bother replying. Doris played this game with half the towns in Texas, most of the more amusingly named ones seemingly located in the heart of the Panhandle. Happy, Shallowater, Levelland, Turnaround, Sorrow, Dimmit—which, according to local lore, had one letter substituted for another vowel—Farsee, Whiteface, Purty, Simple, Throughway and Needmore... The list went on and on. Between Almost and Happy, Texas, it was a tossup for the more bizarrely named institutions. The Happy Courthouse, the Almost Volunteer Fire Department. The Happy Baptist Church, the Almost Methodist. The Happy Police Department, the Almost Public School.