Almost A Family Read online

  Strangely, it seemed Happy, just outside of Canyon, Texas, was exactly what the name implied: a happy little community. By the same token, Almost was a town that didn’t seem quite together. The place had some six hundred people or so, but because county lines crossed right through the center of town, the community was rumored to have no cohesive municipal government.

  And even though Steve’s roots were embedded in the dry, flat Panhandle of Texas, the type of people living in the tiny towns that dotted that achingly poor stretch of ground scared him to death. Tom had told him years before, back when Doug had still been alive, “Stay away from West Texas, Steve. People out there need people, and you’re a give-people-what-they-need sort of guy. You’d be fried in a week.”

  And Tom was right. Again. So, despite his roots, Steve held to the conviction that he was better suited to the broad avenues and skyscrapers of the big city any day and should leave the smell of the farm and ranch to those who could appreciate it.

  Steve smiled, remembering how Doug had described his hometown. It had sounded just like his own. Steve had been raised out on a farm near Pep, Texas, a town of less than thirty-five people. Almost was practically a metropolis by comparison.

  But that laid-back atmosphere wasn’t his cup of tea anymore. Give him an interesting and lively nightlife, an active sports life and a safety-laden triple-action job. He’d probably die of boredom in an Almost solitary afternoon.

  Doris buzzed him back. “I’ve got the number for you and tried it. There’s no answer.”

  And, Steve thought wryly, no answering machine. What would a person need with a message machine in a town where hollering out the front door would let everyone within five blocks know exactly what you were up to?

  “I think you should just go out there,” Doris drawled.

  “Oh, you do,” Steve said, wishing he didn’t agree.

  “Yes. Your pornography-ring case has slowed down,” Doris said. “Besides, it’s the ‘what if principle.”

  The “what if” principle was the informal rule applying to hunches, gut instincts, crank phone calls and letters. What if the caller or writer was onto something? What if there was some element of reality in a nutcase’s bizarre reporting?

  Steve grimaced at the intercom but said, “All right. Book me a flight to Lubbock.”

  “Today?”

  He flicked open his Day-Timer. He had nothing he couldn’t reschedule for the next few days. He thought about Doug Smithton’s widow, the mother of his three would-be informants. And he thought about Doug. And he thought about all the long nights he’d spent sleeping in the same room with Doug, envying him, jealous of him, wishing the blue-eyed girl in the photographs gazed at him with the same love she evidenced for Doug.

  He said, “Might as well make it today. And arrange a rental car on the other end. And, Doris? Make sure I have a return flight tomorrow.”

  “What if there’s really something to their story?”

  “Right. Kilkers on the loose in Almost, Texas. I’m shaking in my boots.”

  But he was.

  Chapter 2

  Without the slightest idea that step one of their plan had worked to perfection, Joshua, Jason and Jonah decided the afternoon would be well spent inspecting their various faked evidences of a crime committed in their community.

  Their first stop was the shed behind the Almost Public School. The baggies they’d carefully loaded with baking soda were still intact and just visible in the tall brown weeds flanking the back of the shed.

  “Good thing we left the dogs at home,” Jonah said.

  “Yeah, they’d probably eat all our clues!”

  They each had a dog, all of them mutts and all named after an animal the canine seemed least like. Jonah’s dog, Elephant, was a champagne-colored terrier-Chihuahua cross that liked to crawl on his master’s lap and growl at the cats that tormented him. Jason’s mutt, a huge collie-Saint Bernard cross called Shrew, would have escorted burglars into the house—had there been any. And Josh’s dog, Wolverine—nicknamed Wolne—was frightened of his own shadow, even after three years of Leary-Smithton camaraderie.

  “When Texas Ranger Steve Kessler comes, we’ll have to leave the dogs at home. They’d give everything away.”

  “Too bad all this isn’t true. Our dogs would find the killer real fast.”

  The boys considered their pets’ respective strengths. They knew from long experience that comparisons led to arguments and had tacitly agreed they all possessed superior animals.

  After a rambling, circuitous route through town, stopping to pitch a few balls with some school friends and swapping the time of day with Mrs. Sanders—who always managed to have fresh baked cookies on a hot summer afternoon when all the other grandmothers in town didn’t like to turn on their ovens—and spending at least twenty minutes staring at Lindsay Ackerman’s empty front yard, they found themselves at the very edge of town with only a half-grown, uncrowned sorghum field to cross and Mr. Hampton’s barn in clear sight.

  “What if the fake blood we made didn’t turn rusty brown like it was supposed to?” Jonah asked.

  “That’s what we’re checking out, doofus,” Jason responded.

  “But what’ll we do if it didn’t?”

  Josh shrugged for Jason. “Make some redder stuff, I guess.”

  “We better get sticks,” Jason said, searching around for a likely weapon.

  “Yeah. Snakes.”

  Jonah shuddered. “Ee-yuck.” He looked about for a stick and didn’t see one. He picked up a likely rock.

  “We’ll have to use a piece of bamboo from the side of Mr. Hampton’s house,” Josh suggested.

  “There’s even more snakes around bamboo. Mom said.”

  “We’ll stay outside the thicket and just pull out three dried old ones.”

  They approached Mr. Hampton’s house with the insouciance of three children who knew everyone in town and had always had complete access to any part of the town they chose. They picked out three perfectly straight, dried bamboo shoots from the large clump against Mr. Hampton’s front porch.

  “Maybe we should ask—”

  “Nah. Remember? He told us he wished we’d take the whole blamed bunch of it right out at the roots.”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  “‘Sides, we’re only taking the dead ones.”

  Mr. Hampton stepped out the front door and slowly crossed the porch. The boys knew him to be in his late seventies, but he stood straight and tall, and from his position above them on the well-tended porch, the septuagenarian seemed to be eight feet tall and nearly as broad across the shoulders. His shadow was thick enough to shade all three boys from the sun.

  “You young’uns want to watch out for snakes.” They backed up five paces before telling him that’s what they needed the bamboo for.

  “Get you some tough ones,” Mr. Hampton recommended. “Slap the ground with them to make sure they won’t break on you.”

  The boys rushed forward, grabbed at dried stalks and leapt back again.

  Jonah tested his stick—it didn’t break but made a perfect thwacking sound—then asked, “You mind if we cross your sorghum field, Mr. Hampton?”

  He earned a quick nudge from Jason and a half glare from Josh.

  “You ain’t up to mischief, are you, boys?”

  “No, sir,” said all three in chorus.

  All eight feet of Mr. Hampton seemed to shake for a moment. “Long as you don’t whack the sorghum with those sticks of yourn, I don’t have anything bad to say about it. I’m testing it out instead of maize this year. You knew about that, of course. And mind you stay out of the barn. There’s some rotten boards in the loft. I’d hate to have to come fetch you outta there. You hear me?”

  The three of them, already running across Mr. Hampton’s yard and heading for the sorghum field, ran backward for a while, calling out promises to do as he said. Within seconds they were hip-deep in the stunted-looking cornless cornfield, heading straight for the barn.r />
  “I didn’t know Mr. Hampton’s barn had a loft,” Jason said.

  “I didn’t, either,” Jonah said.

  “Way cool,” Josh said.

  The brothers looked at one another, then, as one, let out a whoop and took off in a sprint down the neat rows of sorghum.

  Taylor dried her hands on a tea towel as she elbowed open the screen door leading to her front porch. The screen was so dust-covered and bent from three boys’ seeming refusal to use the wood slats protecting the mesh that she couldn’t make out much more than that the man standing on her porch was tall.

  When she saw him without the dusty filter of the screen door, she checked in the act of asking if she could help him. His eyes were the brownest, warmest eyes she’d ever seen. Framed by thick black eyelashes, those eyes seemed to speak all by themselves. His brown hair, neatly combed back from an off-center part, waved slightly and looked soft to the touch. And the quiet, somewhat understated Western-cut gray suit he wore didn’t hide the breadth of his shoulders or the tapered line at his waist. He held a well-crafted straw cowboy hat against his thigh, though his hair didn’t have a crease.

  Taylor wondered if she was taking all this in just because he was a stranger in Almost, or whether there was some special magic about him that would make all women feel as if they had to memorize him before he got away. If he was selling something, she felt fairly certain most women would buy whatever that might be.

  When he smiled, she realized she’d been standing in her half-open doorway simply gawking at him the way a thirteen-year-old at a first sock hop might stare at a real dance partner.

  “Taylor Smithton?” he asked, his expression inscrutable.

  Surprisingly his voice didn’t detract from his attractiveness. She didn’t know why, but something in the rich, accented tones reminded her of chocolate.

  Because she’d been born and bred in Almost—as they said in reverse in those parts of the country—she found it strange to be called by her husband’s last name of Smithton. In Almost, she was a Leary-Smithton, but still considered mostly a Leary.

  “Yes. What can I do for you?”

  Something about him seemed familiar, as if she should have known him. The feeling was exacerbated by a fleeting look of disappointment that flitted across his face. But he introduced himself and held up a small card case he’d apparently slipped into his right hand before even knocking on her door.

  She looked at it and saw the name Steve Kessler. And though she was aware that she’d heard the name somewhere before, it was the badge that held her attention, the badge proclaiming him a Texas Ranger.

  Something had happened to the boys. For a moment, her heart seemed to stop beating. She thought she heard a faint whisper of sound from somewhere far away and realized it was only his hat brushing against his trouser leg. If something had happened to her sons, she couldn’t possibly be hearing mundane sounds, could she?

  Bad things had happened in Almost in the spring. But that couldn’t be what brought a Texas Ranger to her door in the middle of summer. She tried reading his expression, gazed into his brown eyes, hoping to understand his reason for knocking on her door.

  “It’s about your sons...” he started to. say.

  What had happened to them? A sudden rush of pure fear-inspired adrenaline coursed through her veins, forcing her heart to resume beating or burst A memory of the day Doug was killed collided with a hitherto undetected, prescient knowledge that something terrible had happened to her children.

  “Not again,” she said, unaware she was even speaking.

  She let the screen door fall back into place and swiftly shut the main door on this harbinger of bad news. Whatever he had to tell her could wait. Forever.

  If she didn’t hear it, it wouldn’t be true.

  Steve stared at the closed door for several seconds, thoroughly nonplussed. He looked down at his open badge to see if someone had switched his ID in some bizarre joke, as if Doris might have made up a card reading Steve Kessler, Murderer. But no, the wording was familiar and correct.

  However, he’d witnessed the color draining from Taylor Smithton’s lovely face. For a second or two he’d thought she would pitch right to the porch in a faint, her tea towel still draped in one hand. But she’d slammed the front door on him instead.

  Maybe there really was something going on in Almost. Few people slammed doors on Texas Rangers.

  He hesitated, then slipped his badge back into his inside breast pocket before knocking on her door a second time. “Mrs. Smithton?” he called out.

  He received no answer but somehow he felt aware of her standing just inside the door. Maybe even leaning back against it.

  He started to knock again when he understood. Not again, she’d said. And somehow he knew exactly what she meant. He hadn’t caught it from any heightened awareness of her or from a psychic connection or any mysterious source. He just suddenly and sadly remembered she was a widow of a cop killed in the line of duty.

  On a sunny day, some two years earlier, two uniformed officers, state troopers most likely, must have come to her door to tell her the news that her husband was down. Whoever came that day must have flashed a badge at her after confirming her identity.

  She must believe he’d come to tell her something horrible about her sons.

  He cursed himself for not just introducing himself and putting her at her ease before shoving the badge in her face. He should have thought it through first, not acted out of a strange nervousness at seeing her again. She didn’t know him from the man in the moon; it was only natural she’d leap to the wrong conclusion. Before he could think of something to shout that would reassure her through her closed door, she opened it.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I—”

  “It’s okay,” he said quickly, cutting her explanation off. “I’m not here—”

  “It’s not the boys, is it?”

  It was, but not in the way she thought. “As far as I know, they’re fine,” he said, meeting her gaze directly. “Honestly.”

  She closed her eyes for a brief, timeless moment. She sagged against the doorjamb, then after uttering a whispered oath—or prayer—she pushed herself erect and opened her eyes again. She smiled at him, albeit tremulously. “I’m not really crazy,” she said: “And I really haven’t forgotten who you are either. You were at Doug’s funeral, weren’t you? His college roommate?”

  Surprising him—again—she pushed the screen door open, this time inviting him inside.

  As he stepped past her into the cool air of her darkened living room, he thought of the contrasts between city and country people. In the city, a smart woman would never invite a man into her home just on a glimpse of a badge; too many women had been lured into feelings of safety because they’d thought the man they were dealing with was associated with law enforcement. This woman didn’t even lock her door. But then, she’d said she remembered him.

  Then she closed that same door behind him.

  The living room drapes were pulled against the afternoon sun. The floor was hardwood and sported a large, well-used carpet in a shade of either dark green or blue. The matching sofa and love seat were also dark and were marginally lightened by swirls of a contrasting color. Her walls were covered in soothing sea prints and bursts of wildflower stills. The effect was that of standing at the bottom of the sea.

  She stepped around him and pulled the cord at the side of the floor-to-ceiling drapes, flooding the room with light. Now, instead of the bottom of the sea, he felt the room exuded the essence of cool, garden-fresh, dappled summer.

  Like the woman herself, he thought irrelevantly.

  Taylor Leary-Smithton’s eyes were blue, the same color as the sky on a July afternoon and as warm and alluring. She’d pulled her thick blond hair back from her neck in a simple ponytail, strengthening the impression of summer heat and of refreshing afternoon breezes.

  Naturally, she was older than she’d been in the photographs, but with the years had come
a poise, a graceful self-confidence. If anything, she was more beautiful now than she’d been all those years ago. And she’d been remarkable then.

  “I’m not usually such an idiot,” she said, and smiled again.

  The smile took Steve’s breath away. A smile in a photograph, that of a young girl on the threshold of life, didn’t begin to convey what a full-gmwn, living, breathing woman could achieve.

  “Won’t you sit down?” She waved a slender hand at the sofa. “Can I get you something? Iced tea and lemonade are both made.” She stepped toward a broad hallway that presumably led to her kitchen.

  “No, that’s all right,” he said, not moving to the sofa. He knew the sooner he got out of here, the better it would be for him. Everything about her, from her beautiful face to her obvious nervousness, set alarms jangling through him. She seemed exactly the kind of woman mothers wanted their sons to bring home, the kind of woman fathers would brag about their sons finding. Doris would have invited her to dinner on one look.

  Her pretty eyes widened as he reached into his breast pocket for the letter her boys had written him.

  “I came because of this,” he said, withdrawing the bizarre correspondence and handing it to her.

  He maintained a neutral expression as she took the letter from his hands, and he watched closely as she frowned and carefully unfolded the torn notebook paper. He noted the moment her eyes flickered, then dropped to the triple signatures. And he caught the hint of a sigh as she raised her gaze back to the beginning of the letter.

  When she’d finished reading it through for the second time, she looked up at him. “I don’t know what to say.”

  He wanted to smile, to get her to smile, too, but instead he only nodded. “Then this is just a prank?” It was a simple matter of self-preservation for him to hold her at arm’s length, to remain the formal officer.