Stranger in My House (A Murder In Texas) (14 page)

Chapter Fifteen

“This might take a while. The sofa’s more comfortable,” Seth said.

She bought it. “Okay.”

He pulled her down beside him and slid his arm around her. Her soft hair brushed against his chest like a promise.

“Stop coming on to me. We’re supposed to be talking. Remember? You were about to tell me about your sister.”

“Will you stay if I do?”

“Maybe.”

“I’ll be forced to make love to myself if you leave.” He rasped the words against the top of her head.

Her breath caught, but she elbowed his ribs. “Sounds like a match made in heaven.”

He laughed. Contentment filled him like helium. Was he really going to poke around in his past just to get laid?

She shifted in his arms, and the scent of her shampoo assaulted his nose.
Yeah.
He’d poke around in a nest of vipers for a shot at this. Her.

“Are you sure you want to hear a bunch of shit about me? It’s not a big deal.”

“Quit stalling.”

“Do the details really matter? My family wasn’t the Brady Bunch. It’s not a secret around here. What else is there to say?”

“Cards on the table or I leave now.” She sounded like a cop.

His penis stiffened, and he shifted his leg so she wouldn’t see. He studied the blank wall in front of him, the empty picture hook left behind by a former tenant, the chipped bowl filled with stale pretzels. This was his life. A little shabby, a little secondhand, a lot predictable. He’d shrunk it down to what he could control. But so what? He got by just fine.

He’d been this way for so long he could barely remember the boy he’d once been—optimistic and sure. Sure of his future and sure of his eventual escape from the dead-end, vagabond life of his parents. Instead his sister had been eaten alive by a mindless, sightless, soulless system, and he,
he
was stuck on a cattleless, nearly horseless ranch defending California fruit trees from the local insects.

“Come on, Seth. If you talk about it, you can deal with it.”

And sleep with her.

“My sister disappeared eight years ago.” He tried a shrug, but his muscles refused to budge. “Nothing more to say.”

“What happened? Do you know where she is?”

“No. She was already a lost soul. No one was surprised when the rest of her disappeared.” No one had cared, either. Except him.

“What about your folks?”

“Dead.”

“You’ve had it rough.”

“So have lots of people. So what?”

“What happened to your momma and daddy?” Of course she’d ask.

The anger he was sure he’d outlived—or outrun—rose in him strong as ever. He pulled his arm away from her and stood. He didn’t want anyone touching him.

“My folks were naive, stupid people who had no business having children. They called themselves free spirits. What a joke. Free to live in a run-down trailer and do drugs all day. That’s the only freedom they cared about. They wasted their whole lives dreaming about how wonderful things would be when the rest of world renounced the daily grind and smelled the pot smoke. But the world never got around to their way of thinking, and after they died no one missed them except the local drug dealer.” He stared out the window so he wouldn’t have to read the polite sympathy in her face.

“Overdose?”

“Dumber than that. We were living outside El Royo in a leaky trailer. They’d managed to buy a patch of crappy land no one else wanted. But it was something. Home. They didn’t care. On a hot summer day, they climbed into our old beater and took off for New Mexico. Left me to tend Hannah.”

“New Mexico?”

He forced himself to meet her eyes. They were alert. Ticking and tacking. Well, she was a cop. And cops were trained to smell trouble, weren’t they?

“Fifty, maybe a hundred of them would meet in the middle of bumfuck Egypt every summer. A tent-city nudist colony. They’d sell tie-dye shit to one another, listen to music, drop acid, smoke weed”—he shrugged—“I figure they were screwing one another’s brains out, being as everyone was walking around with their junk hanging out. But maybe not.”

“So what happened at the gathering?”

Beyond the window, night swallowed the last streak of sunlight, and then the ranch. All the good things, all the bad. It didn’t matter.

“Never made it. Got lost in the desert and died. Hundred degrees in the shade, and they remembered the weed but forgot the water.”

“Oh, Seth. I’m so sorry.” She came to him.

“It was a stupid, senseless end to two stupid, senseless lives.”

“That’s awfully harsh.”

He squeezed her shoulders. Hard. Pushed her away. She staggered back before catching herself.

“Is it? How’s this for harsh? My eleven-year-old sister got sent down to Austin to foster care because our Bible Belt relatives refused to take in bastards. That’s what they called us, Hannah and me. Some of the foster homes she stayed in…” His voice broke. He squeezed his eyes shut for a moment, trying to reel in his emotions.

The next words were the litany he’d repeated to himself so many times he couldn’t count. “My beautiful, sweet Hannah at the mercy of do-gooders and ne’er-do-wells. The conceited and the cruel. Too small and powerless to protect herself and unlucky enough to have a weak, half-ass brother who couldn’t.”

Kirby flexed her shoulders. The imprint of his hands marred her skin.

“Sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

“You didn’t.” She held out her hand. “Come and sit.”

He let her pull him back to the sofa.

“What about you?”

“I was seventeen. Dr. Ernesto—he owns the Hacienda Osito—took me in so I could finish my last year of high school in El Royo. Basically I did chores in exchange for room and board. His son had moved away to play football, so he needed a strong back. I was grateful, but having Hannah so far away was torture. I promised to bring her home as soon as I turned eighteen. I figured once I was an adult, they’d give me custody, since I was the next of kin.”

“You’d have to provide a home and support, wouldn’t you?”

“We still owned the trailer and a few acres of land.”

“So you decided to farm for a living.”

“It was all I had. That godforsaken scrap of land. I turned eighteen at the beginning of April, and on my birthday, I filed a petition for custody and moved back to the trailer. But I didn’t have money for seed, and the water had been shut off. There were bats and mice living in the trailer by then, and the state put a lien on the property for nonpayment of taxes.” He shrugged. “I didn’t care. I would have fought the entire state and every bureaucrat in it to have Hannah back with me. She’d gotten so skinny. I don’t think her fosters were feeding her, although she wouldn’t say what was wrong.

“Of course, the state wouldn’t give her to me. As you pointed out, I had no real means of support, and the house was barely ours. She cried in my arms when I told her. She wanted to come home so bad.”

“Why didn’t Dr. Ernesto take Hannah, too?”

“Since she was so young, the authorities scooped her up and shipped her off to Austin right after my parents’ bodies were found. It took almost a year for the legal stuff to get straightened out, and when it was over I had no home and no job. Just a high school diploma and a sister I was allowed to visit once a week. Being separated sucked the life out of her. And me. She tried to run away but only made it a few miles. So the state put her in a home for problem kids. Dr. Ernesto and Peppie—his wife—tried to get her, but it was a no go. They lacked proper credentials for troubled youth. That’s what Hannah had become.”

He’d given her the facts, skimming over his pain and self-loathing, the youthful bitterness that poisoned his big dreams, the lost little girl who would forever haunt his nightly ones.

“So what did you do?”

“I joined the army. It was Dr. Ernesto’s idea, but I had nowhere else to go. So I gave up my sister for three squares a day, a new pair of boots, and a roof over my head.”

A gentle hand pressed against his jaw. He looked at her. Her eyes burned with outrage. “You were a child yourself. There was nothing you could do.”

He wanted to believe her. But how could he? “By the time I got out four years later, she’d thrown her life away. One of her asshole ‘guidance’ counselors had raped her, and she was big time into drugs. Heroin, ecstasy, booze. Her group home was a fucking state-sanctioned crack house.”

He paused. Should he say it? Tell Kirby the whole truth? Why not? She was a cop. She’d seen kids like him and Hannah before. She’d probably guessed it already.

“Hannah hated me. Of course, I hated myself, too, so I didn’t care.” Like hell he didn’t. Nothing about that time hurt more than Hannah’s rejection.

“She was a wounded child,” Kirby said softly. “You have to remember that.”

“How could I forget?”

“When did she disappear?”

“On her eighteenth birthday they had to let her go. November tenth. Middle of her senior year. She packed a few things and just walked away. Disappeared into thin air. She told a few of the kids she was hitching to L.A. to be a movie star. I was over at Texas A&M studying agriculture.”

“I thought you hated farming.”

“I wanted to be a rancher. Maybe I wanted to prove I could do better than my parents’ pathetic vegetable patch. Besides, I thought if I could find a gig far enough from Austin and all the creeps and the drugs, I’d get Hannah to come with me, and she’d be all right. Fresh air, sunshine. The usual crap.”

“Did you file a missing-person report when she disappeared?”

He shook his head. “Didn’t think of it. I jumped in my car and drove like hell to L.A.”

“It would be like looking for a dime in a Dumpster.”

“And I didn’t have a clue where she’d go. I hit every homeless shelter and crack house and flea-bitten motel I could find. Then I roamed the alleys and the sketchy neighborhoods. Poked my head under bridges. Walked the beaches.”

He grimaced. “I even posted a reward. A hundred bucks. Enough to buy a few hits, which was all anyone in those places cared about.”

“And?”

“Somewhere between Austin and L.A., she disappeared.”

Beside him, Kirby stilled. He could feel her thinking, and oddly enough, it comforted him. “You met Mr. Shaw there.”

Not a bad guess.

“Shaw had already moved back to the ranch. According to rumors, something happened out there and he returned a broken man. But Dr. Ernesto said Shaw’s friends still ran a ministry for runaways and street people, so he asked Shaw for help. Shaw sent me to a crazy old man in white robes. He had a long beard and eyes so dark they looked like black holes.”

Seth shook his head. “I was so sleep deprived I thought he was God.”

“Bobby?”

“How did you know?”

“Mr. Shaw showed me a picture.”

“The original Bobby tried to help. He knew the seedy parts of the city, knew the inhabitants—dealers, pimps, prostitutes, junkies, mostly. He knew the hangouts, too—the street corners, the empty houses, the crash pads. But he never found any trace of her. When my next semester started in January, he sent me back to Texas, to school. I was fifty bucks shy of living on the street myself, so I didn’t argue.”

“He never found her?”

“He kept an eye out for Hannah, phoned me a few times with updates. But, no, he never found her.”

“So how did you meet Mr. Shaw?”

“At Bobby’s funeral.”

He was so tired. The way he felt right this minute, he could sleep for days. Sweet Kirby would have to wait. “It’s getting late. Miss Bea will be locking the doors soon,” he said.

“Right.” She lifted a golden hand and brushed his hair. Her breasts rose and fell with her breath. “I think you’re a good guy.”

“A hell of a lot of good it’s done me.”

A soft smile curled her lips. “If happiness wasn’t a distant star, we wouldn’t chase it.”

For a second he hated her confidence, her gullibility, her innate sureness that everything in life would turn out okay. If he couldn’t see it or hold it, if he couldn’t
own
it, it was just hogwash.

“That’s a bullshit platitude. Did your granddaddy tell you that?”

Her chin rose. “It’s true.”

“It’s bullshit,” he said.

She stood her ground. “You should know. You’re full of it.”

She deserved better than him. He’d let her go when the time came. But not right now.

He captured her head, cupped it between his palms and pressed his mouth to hers. She stilled, and the hard kiss he’d intended dropped away. He brushed her mouth softly, sweet kiss after sweet kiss, wooing her until her eyelids fluttered shut and her lips parted.

Touch me, sweet Kirby.

Maybe she read minds. Or maybe just his. Because she looped her arms around his neck and pushed her soft breasts against his half-naked body.

“Seth.”

His name pushed from her lips on a tiny, longing-filled breath that shrank the world, past and present, to just her. Grinding his mouth into hers, he forced apart her lips, pillaging her mouth. His sweet Kirby clung to him, eyes closed, accepting his fierceness without struggle or hesitation. Her heart pattered against delicate ribs like a trapped rabbit. Fear? Anticipation?

He came up for air. Toothpaste lingered on his tongue.

Fuck.
She’d brushed her teeth. She’d saved his life, then brushed her teeth before coming to him with the news. Probably washed her face and combed her hair and changed her underwear, too. What kind of ungrateful asshole screwed a woman like that just because he was feeling down? His hands fell from her face, brushing over warm shoulders and silky arms. He tore himself away.

Uncertainty flickered in her eyes. He’d bruised her mouth and burned her golden cheekbones with his beard stubble. He was a grade-A asshole.

She watched him warily.

Unbidden, his hand lifted a long strand of dark hair. The copper threads burned his palm just like he’d imagined. “You better get back to the house.”

A deep flush rose from her neck and brightened her cheeks. “Of course. I don’t know what happened to me. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be.” He stood and held out a hand to her. “Let me walk you out.”