Turkey Ranch Road Rage (19 page)

I didn’t care. Somewhere in the last few seconds I’d gone from fairly oblivious to seriously annoyed myself. I hurriedly stacked the trash on the red plastic tray, grabbed my cup and nudged her again. “Let me out. I’ve had all the fun I can stand.” She didn’t move immediately and that just added fuel to the fire that had already been lit. “I’ve got to go, Mother, really I do. Right now. Move.”

Ethel sucked in an indignant breath. “Are you going to let her talk to you like that?”

Lucille turned and glared at me again. However, she was between the proverbial rock and a hard place. If she snapped back at me as she so dearly wanted to do, she’d save face with Ethel and might win the battle. But my last straw had clearly snapped and that made me a loose cannon, which gave her zero chance of winning the war. She gritted her teeth, slid to the end of the booth and stood. She huffed and sputtered, still wanting very badly to give me a what-for. But since all eyes were already on us, she was more concerned with avoiding the equivalent of an international incident at the Dairy Queen.

I had no such concerns. I might have been in some level of shock for the last twenty minutes, but I was remembering clearly now, and what I remembered was that Ethel Fossy had not only verbally abused us in public every chance she got, she’d started vicious rumors, sent threatening hate mail and was consistently and vocally self-righteous and judgmental. Just because Mary Kay Yoda had given her a few tips on makeup, hair and clothing, it didn’t change the fact that her protégé from the dark side would still happily burn me at the stake given the opportunity.

I slid out of the booth, grabbed the tray of trash and looked down at Bony Butt. “Well, Ethel, this whole extreme makeover thing you’ve got going is pretty impressive, I’ll give you that. But there’s still that old saying about leopards and spots and such. Then again, a Bobcat may trump leopards and spots, and you could have really turned over a new leaf, or at least nailed an old hippie.”

Lucille groaned. “Oh, my Lord, Jolene.”

Ethel’s face turned so red that the expertly applied blush and highlights completely disappeared. “What do you mean by that?”

“I’m not casting stones. Hooking up with Bobcat has clearly done you a world of good. Makes you feel alive again, doesn’t it?”

“Oh, my Lord,” Lucille repeated, darting her eyes around the room to quantify witnesses.

“And finding yourself a godly man too,” I continued. “Why, I’d say he uses the word ‘god’ at least twice in every sentence.”

Mother grabbed me by the arm and dragged me to the door. “Why do you say these things?”

It was a rhetorical question; she had no intention of me answering. I fully intended to, of course, but Ethel raced up beside us and cut off whatever clever remark might have fallen out of my mouth.

“Are you going to let her get away with that?” Ethel said, her voice elevated with indignation and outrage. “If she was my daughter, she wouldn’t be getting away with that.”

Lucille grabbed the red tray out of my hands and set it on top of the trash can and shoved me toward the door. “Don’t pay her any mind, Ethel. She’s still real tired from her trip, jet lag and all that.”

“I just never dreamed this was what you had to put up with.”

“Well, Ethel,” I said, “there just wasn’t time to do it your way. If I had to say it behind your back and then wait for it to make the rounds on the gossip mill, well, it could take days or at least an hour.”

“What an awful thing to say! I do not gossip!” Ethel gaped and worked her jaw up and down. “You’re right, Lucille, after all you’ve done for her and she still doesn’t care at all about other people’s feelings. It is just like a knife to the heart.”

I shoved open the door and walked out.

Mother scurried out of the restaurant behind me, huffing and clucking as she followed me to the car. She clicked open the locks, opened the passenger door and flung herself inside. After I was seated, she tossed me the keys and said, “There’s no reason for you to be snippy. These situations are delicate and I just said what I had to in order to get Ethel to open up to me.” She gripped the handles of her purse and huffed. “You obviously do not understand a single thing about psychology or finesse in communication.”

“Obviously.” I stuck the key in the ignition and started the engine. “But I apparently excel at heart knifing.” I laughed, not because it was all that funny, but because it was funny enough to give me a way to release some tension other than yelling or crying. I laughed again.

“I don’t see what’s so funny.”

“Of course you don’t. You’ve had a grand time today. Your morning started out perfectly with a cup of coffee and a shooting.”

She sucked in an indignant breath then muttered, “He had it coming.”

“For most folks, that would have been a full day of fun in and of itself, but no, you were only getting started.” I ignored her scowl. “After a stimulating experience at the Little Ranch, Grannie Columbo was off to outsmart the cops at the motel room with the dead guy.”

“You can’t be blaming me for all that.”

I raised a hand to stop her. “And just because the town’s morality watchdog has rediscovered life in the immoral fast line doesn’t mean you have to conduct a fashion intervention to support it.”

She gave me a look that said she hadn’t exactly thought of it that way then muttered something under her breath that included “hateful” and “pitiful.”

“I, on the other hand,” I said, raising my voice appropriately for drama, “was dragged along for the ride of shock and fear, none of which would have been necessary had you told me the truth from the beginning. My icing on the day’s cake was being kidnapped at gunpoint by two psychos after you abandoned me in the parking lot of the Dairy Queen. But not to worry, I’m fine.”

“Oh, good grief, Jolene, I can very well see that you’re just fine,” she snapped, jumping back on the defensive and sweeping away any pesky twinge of guilt that might have occurred. “You’re certainly cranky and hateful, but you’re fine. As for Bobcat, he’s got a foul mouth, but he’s harmless.”

“No, he’s a jumpy guy with posttraumatic stress disorder and a gun.”

She waved a dismissive hand. “Well, I knew you wanted to talk to him alone and see what you could find out behind my back anyway, not that he knows anything.”

I looked at her for a few long moments, thinking that she hadn’t always been this way. However, that was only true to a point. Lucille had always been Lucille—she’d just kept it under wraps and within the socially acceptable boundaries. Now, she had no such restrictions and she was doing exactly what she wanted to do and didn’t care what anybody thought about it. In theory, I admired that attitude. In practice, it left a lot to be desired for me.

Lucille dug around in her purse and huffed. “Well, I have just had enough of all this. I believe it’s time we went home.”

“Finally, we agree on something.”

Mother Compassion scowled at me as she held up her phone and hit a speed dial number. “Agnes, where are you? . . .Okay, well, good. Would you go to the Dairy Queen and get Ethel and take her home? . . . Yes, that Ethel. . . . Well, it’s a very long story and I don’t have time to explain, but she darn well looks better than she did. I have done my Christian service for the next year, maybe five, I’ll tell you that for sure. . . . Well, I know you aren’t going to like it, Agnes. I surely didn’t like it either, but I’m in a bind and I need your help. . . . Yes, I’ll tell you all about it later. I’m with Jolene right now and she’s having one of her snits so I can’t talk. . . . Yes, okay, I know I owe you. Bye.”

I did not say one word, not one, just put the car in drive and drove. We’d barely made it out of the DQ lot when we met a sheriff’s vehicle. It passed us then whipped around, lit up the blue flashing lights and headed after us.

Even though I knew better, my automatic reaction was to look down at the Buick’s speedometer. For the record, I was going twelve miles per hour. I pulled over to the shoulder and the car pulled up behind us, without the lights.

“What’s wrong?” Lucille said. “What’d you do?”

Before I could respond at all, Sheriff Jerry Don Parker was opening my door.

“Well, it’s about darned time,” Lucille said, snapping back around in her seat. “I’ve got some questions and I want some answers.”

“Miz Jackson,” Jerry said, nodding to Lucille over my shoulder. Then, he looked back at me. “I’d like to talk to you alone.”

The way he made that sound made me real sure that I would like it too.

“I don’t suppose you could take your hands off her long enough to tell me what’s going on around here,” Lucille snarled. “We’ve got dead people, and missing people, and crazy people, and I’d like some answers.”

“We’ll just be a minute or two,” he said, ignoring her demands and slamming the door.

And there, in the span of a very few seconds, my whole outlook on life had changed. The cavalry—i.e. Jerry—had arrived and freed the little peptides in my brain that had been pinned down by enemy fire. The tension that had me ready to snap melted into a glorious rush of endorphins and every cell in my body felt it.

Jerry led me back to the Expedition and opened the passenger door, blocking us from most of the viewing public passing along on the highway, but most especially from my mother. “We have got to find a way to do better than this,” he said, wrapping his arms around me. “But, I’ll take what I can get.”

Yes, well, ditto. I’ll spare you the private details, but it was just about as good as you could get standing beside a sheriff’s vehicle on the side of the road in Kickapoo, Texas, in broad daylight with your mother watching. And no, it wasn’t nearly enough.

He broke away just a bit and looked down at me. “Hmm, I figured the first thing you’d do was quiz me about this morning.”

It took a few seconds for his words to penetrate the rather pleasant haze in my head. “What?”

Jerry brushed a windswept curl away from my face and smiled. “Sarah’s okay. I took her to Amy’s.”

My eyes widened as he confirmed what I’d suspected. “I was sure you knew who she was.”

“Kind of hard to miss.”

“I was shocked, seeing her in Texas, and with you.”

He smiled. “And a little jealous.”

“Just a little,” I agreed. I pushed back from him. “Does she know what’s going on?”

“No, I really think she was just indulging Lucille.”

“Well, she wasn’t really staying in that motel room where the dead guy was. I figured that much out.”

Jerry nodded. “Yes, I know. She was at the Hilton.” Before I could voice any further questions, he said, “One of them better come clean about all this very soon or I’m going to get involved where I said I wouldn’t.”

No matter how I tried to prevent it, Jerry seemed to get dragged into my family messes. Now, however, it wasn’t only my mother causing trouble, it was my daughter too. “I’m sorry, Jerry, I really am.”

He ran his fingers over my cheek and behind my neck, making light butterfly circles with his fingertips. “I’m just glad you’re here.”

Every tingling fiber of my being screamed in agreement. I didn’t care where I was or how it came about, all that mattered was that we were together and it felt really, really good. However, before I drifted completely out into the stratosphere of desire, I had to tell him what had happened today or at least a fast forward version of it. “I just spent the last few hours with Bobcat and Lily in a van, and not by choice, driving around the countryside for reasons still unknown, although clearly related to the property behind my mother’s house. Those people have issues. In a semi-related but probably irrelevant incident, my mother gave Ethel a makeover.” When he raised a questioning eyebrow, I added, “It’s a long story and I know you don’t have the time right now, but I do need to talk to you about some things soon. In fact,” I said, running my hands over his chest and tugging on his shirt, urging him closer, “there are a lot of things we need to deal with. Very soon. And not on the side of the road.”

He leaned in for what I thought was one last hug, but before I knew it his hands were under my hips, pulling me against him and sliding me up onto the edge of the seat. “I want you,” he whispered, gently tugging my legs apart and pressing forward. “It’s been so long.”

“Oh, God.” I wrapped my arms around him and ran my hands down his back, pulling him closer. “You feel so good.”

He groaned in response then pressed light kisses against my face. He nibbled at my ear then moved to my neck, kissing and gently nipping in a way that he knew made me absolutely crazy. Every touch of his mouth sent hot quivers through me.

“Oh, God,” I groaned again, moving, tugging, trying to get closer, my whole being begging him for more.

His hands still under my hips, he lifted me to fit fully against him. The connection was instant and electric. His scent filled my nostrils, sending me even higher, and I could taste him. With my breasts pressed tight against his chest and my hands on his back, I could feel every part of him as if there were no clothes between us.

His breath hot in my ear, he held me there, caressing me, pressing hard against me, our bodies pulsing in rhythm, seeming to blend together. With a groan, he moved his mouth to mine. As we kissed, hot waves erupted from where our hips joined. Tingling warmth shot up my spine and rippled through me, finally bursting into that incredible peak moment of pure feeling.