Holly Blues (27 page)

The Chevy was rocked by a gust of wind. The snow was starting again, or maybe it was sleet, icy pellets flung against the car. In the distance, a pair of bright lights topped by a revolving red light came down the road toward them.

“Pete’s tow truck,” Jamison said, and began pulling on a glove. “He’s usually quicker’n this. Guess he had somebody else in the ditch and figured this one could wait.” He looked over at McQuaid. “You know Leslie Strahorn well?”

“Yeah, pretty well,” McQuaid acknowledged. He thought of that kiss and just as quickly pushed it out of his mind. There’d be time to think about that later. Time to feel more of the pain.

“What’s your take?” Jamison made a noise in his throat. “You think there’s a connection to what happened here?”

“I don’t think Sally is capable of killing her sister, if that’s what you’re suggesting,” McQuaid said flatly.

Maybe not,
the voice put in.
But you have no idea what Juanita is capable of. Maybe she did it. Or she and Jess Myers—or he did it for her.

“Not suggesting anything, yet.” Jamison pulled on the other glove. “I hope for your sake that your ex isn’t involved, McQuaid. But I’m going to give this my best shot. Lake City, Texas. That right?”

McQuaid nodded, knowing that—overtime or no overtime—Jamison would be on the line to Lake City and have all the details in front of him inside an hour. He’d also know that Lake City was looking for Sally as a person of interest.

“Yeah, right,” he said. “Lake City.” He fished for his wallet, retrieved a card, and handed it to Jamison. “Look. I don’t have easy access to the Lake City police, but you do. I’m going to go down the road and check in at the Sycamore Court. If you find out how Leslie was killed, would you give me a call at the motel and let me know?”

“Depends,” Jamison said. “But yeah, I will if I can.”

McQuaid nodded. “Good enough. I’m planning to fly out of KC tomorrow, earliest flight I can get. Should be back in Texas by midafternoon. You come to any resolution on the Dillard case, you’ll let me know that, too?” He didn’t think there was a chance of that happening, barring a confession from somebody—Myers? Sally? A hit-and-run driver? But he said it anyway.

“Right,” Jamison said, and got out of the car. He was closing the door when he paused and put his head back in. “Thanks, McQuaid. I appreciate it.”

“Yeah,” McQuaid said. “Same here.”

The door slammed. Jamison trudged off into the dark. McQuaid sat, considering.

Could she do it? Kill or conspire to kill her parents, her sister?

No, he thought, with that half-angry, half-guilty twinge he often felt when he thought seriously about Sally. Hell, no.

Yes.
The voice was crisp, cool.
Yes, she could. Not to say she did. But she could.

He had to leave it at that. But as he put the Chevy in gear, a call came in on his cell. He flicked it open. It was China.

December days are short, and the evening sun was setting in a puddle of blood-red clouds by the time Big Red Mama got us through Austin, where the usual evening rush hour jam-ups slowed everyone down until the heavy outbound traffic shook itself out and began to move, thinning to a fast-moving stream as vehicles peeled off at the Round Rock and Georgetown interchanges, heading home to their sprawling subdivisions.

I can remember when Round Rock lay at the far northern perimeter of the Austin-area sprawl, with open land stretching to the horizon on either side of the north-south interstate. Ranches occupied the rocky, arid, grassland-and-juniper uplands of western Williamson County. Productive farms lay green across the eastern flatlands, where fertile soil and higher rainfall make it possible to grow good crops.

But no more. Fed by low-interest construction loans and subprime mortgages, Round Rock and Georgetown have merged and metastasized into an ugly octopus of supersized, overpriced McMansions and bloated retail shopping centers, with eager arterial tentacles stretching back into Austin, east to Texas Toll 130 and beyond, and west across the Hill Country to Cedar Park. Unless the current economic downturn and the rising price of gasoline slows development (which it might), the octopus will soon gobble up the entire countryside. The ranches and farms will be replaced by “luxury move-up homes” in gated “communities,” exclusive enclaves that are the antithesis of real neighborhoods, boasting vast lawns and golf courses paved with thirsty Bermuda grass and tasteful “installations” of expensive landscaping in place of mesquite trees, native grasses, and wildflowers.

The wild creatures will adapt, naturally. The coyotes are already learning to live out of trash cans. The deer will happily substitute rosebushes and well-watered garden vegetables for their native forage. And the hawks and buzzards will enjoy more roadkill feasts, since there will be more cars, trucks, hapless dogs, and unwary cats. But the Texas wilderness will be gone forever, and more’s the pity.

Lake City lies halfway between Georgetown and Temple, a few miles to the east of I-35, on the Little Blue River. As we turned off the freeway, I remembered, sadly, the happier times that McQuaid and I had driven in this direction, taking Brian to visit his favorite aunt or picking him up after he’d spent several weeks with her. Leslie had been a cheerful, energetic young woman with a great affection for her sister’s son. She loved playing games with him, loved taking him to fish at Blue Lake, where he always caught a stringer of bass, loved camping in the wilderness area at the eastern edge of the state park, which was far enough away from civilization to be imagined as a wilderness, at least by a ten- or eleven-year-old boy.

Brian had been thrilled by these adventures, especially when he turned over a chunk of limestone one day and found a lizard with saw-toothed scales and blue patches along both sides of its belly. Leslie had taken Brian and his lizard to a biologist friend who showed him how to identify it as a spiny lizard that went by the Latin name of
Sceloporus olivaceus.
Renamed Spike, the lizard came home to live with Brian. It was the beginning of his interest in how scientists think and the start of a passionate love affair with lizards, snakes, and other creepy-crawling creatures that persists to this day. The boy would be devastated when he learned that Leslie was dead. I was going to leave it to his father to tell him when McQuaid got back from Omaha.

“Why not Sally?” Ruby asked, when I told her this. “Isn’t she the logical one to tell him? She’s his mother. Leslie was her sister.”

The question had taken me momentarily aback. Why hadn’t I thought of Sally? Was it because—

Ruby put it into words. “It’s because you think she had something to do with Leslie’s death.” She gave me a sidewise look. “You don’t want to think it. You’re trying hard
not
to think it. But you know it’s possible. It could have been one of those Juanita moments. Now, couldn’t it?”

A Jaunita moment.
Sometimes Ruby has an uncanny ability to hit the nail on the head.

I didn’t answer for a moment. Then I said, “I’m trying hard to be analytical about this, Ruby. I know Sally has problems—big ones. She has a long history of erratic behavior, and she doesn’t always know the difference between what’s true and what she’s made up. This Juanita stuff only complicates things. But I’ve been with her for the past couple of days. I’ve watched her with the kids, especially with Caitlin. I don’t think she could have killed her sister and still act like a normal person.”

Ruby laughed shortly. “Sally acting like a normal person is Sally acting abnormally, China. You know that. I know that.”

I swung out to pass a slower car, discovered that I was moving into a curve, and swung back into the lane again. “You’re right,” I said. “And yes, I know it. And if you don’t mind, I’d rather try to find out some facts before I start to speculate. In the meantime, why don’t you phone the Pecan Springs police and ask if Sally’s been picked up yet? I’ll feel better if I know she’s safe, even if it means that she’s locked up for a little while.”

A couple of minutes later, Ruby had our answer: no. The police still had Brian’s blue Ford staked out in the church parking lot, and there was a bulletin out on Sally, but she hadn’t been seen. And by now, I was seriously worried.

There were too many reasons for not being able to find her, all of them bad, some of them a whole lot worse. Sally had said the night before that she would leave Pecan Springs. Maybe that’s what she’d done. She parked Brian’s car, hopped a bus, and was off to another crazy adventure, with five grand in her pocket. That would be just like Sally, wouldn’t it?

But there were other, darker possibilities. Ruby was right: she could have been involved with Leslie’s death, either alone or with Myers. Maybe she’d gone off with him, either voluntarily or—I shuddered—involuntarily. For all I knew, he had grabbed her, killed her, and dropped her into a ditch somewhere, a worry that had begun to take ominous shape in my mind since I’d learned about Leslie—and since the idea had come to me, in the phone conversation with McQuaid, that Myers could be the person Joyce Dillard believed was involved with the Strahorn murders. The person Dillard had named to Sally, whom Sally had refused to name to McQuaid. “That’s a reach,” McQuaid had said, and he was right. But the more I thought about it, the more chillingly plausible it seemed.

Thinking of McQuaid, I took out the phone to call him and find out what was happening at his end. When I clicked it on, I saw that there was a message from him. “Just got to Sanders. Bitch of a drive. Hope to hell this is worth it, China. You and Ruby be good tonight. Keep Sally out of trouble. Call me when you get a chance.”

I made a face. Keep Sally out of trouble. Oh, right. As if I could. I clicked the phone off. I’d wait to call him back until I had something definite to tell him about Leslie—and until he couldn’t tell me not to go to Lake City.

“McQuaid’s in Sanders,” I reported. “No news, otherwise.”

Ruby nodded. “So what are we going to do when we get to Leslie’s?”

I raised my eyebrows. “You mean, you don’t have a plan, Sherlock? I thought a sleuth like you would have everything all mapped out.”

“I might, if I knew where we were going, exactly,” Ruby said. “What do you think we should do, Watson?”

“How about if we split up?” I didn’t want to hurt Ruby’s feelings, but I wasn’t crazy about the idea of going door-to-door with Big Bird. “You go in one direction, I’ll go in the other. Somebody’s bound to be able to tell us something.”

Ruby settled back into the seat and stretched out her long yellow legs. “Sounds like a plan to me,” she said.

 

 

FORMERLY a stop on the old Overland Stage and Pony Express route from Dallas to Austin and San Antonio, Lake City has managed to keep much of its historic character. It is nestled in an elbow of the Little Blue River, about ten miles east of I-35 and a mile or so below the point where the Army Corps of Engineers built a flood-control dam back in the fifties. That was when Lyndon Johnson was securely settled in the Senate, looking out for his friends and supporters back in Texas, making sure that they had all the pork they needed.

But truth be told, pork isn’t always pork. The town—it was called Blue back then—was flooded every time the river rampaged, which happened at least once, sometimes twice a decade. The Little Blue’s watershed takes in a lot of territory. When the western Hill Country was deluged with what is locally known as a frog-choker, the downstream settlements were inevitably flooded. Bridges were destroyed, buildings were inundated, people and livestock drowned by the hundreds. Back in the thirties, Blue’s town fathers and mothers began lobbying for a dam, but most of the New Deal money that came to Texas went into the construction of dams along the Lower Colorado, forming the Highland Lakes. Blue had to wait for Lyndon to get elected in 1948, but by 1958, the town (much drier and a lot safer) had its dam and its very own lake—a recreational lake some ten miles long and six miles wide. It proudly renamed itself Lake City, reinvented itself as an art colony and tourist destination, and declared itself ready for an exciting new beginning. As time has gone on, the town—scarcely larger than a village—has gained a reputation as a center for fine Texas arts and crafts but has kept its zoning regulations strict, refusing to yield to the temptations of sprawl.