Home Is Where Your Boots Are (10 page)

The fire was gone. I wasn’t sure of anything other than the fact that in a small town, albeit above the Red River, a whole slew of people loved me and damned sure weren’t worried about me failing. What they would be worried about was my previously squeaky clean morals getting soiled by the likes of Cash Stetson, who was now a married man, which changed the game substantially. In fact, I was going to take my ball glove and go home, because truth be told, my mama’d die if she knew I was kissing a married man. Well, she'd die after she killed me. I was done.

Then the loud booming voice of the Almighty, there all along, told me to get my ass up out of the dirt and do something. So I picked myself up off the road and dusted off my graveled knees. I turned and started walking. I took it as the right sign that I never heard Cash’s truck behind me. I never had been able to trust Cash. I’d been his Sunday afternoon, but he’d always had a Saturday night and probably a Sunday night too.

I was almost there. My clarity was coming back in flashes. But one last piece still hadn’t fit itself into the puzzle. My friends were one thing, but I needed to borrow Cinderella’s godmother, or a magic wand, or some fairy dust. It dawned on me
,
and I took off in a jog toward the ranch. I knew what was missing. Three miles later, my
dress completely
pitted out, I swept into my great grandmother’s parlor.

“I need them back,” I announced to Tally, sweeping past her languid form on the sofa where she was reading a trashy paperback from the grocery store. The wooden screen door flapped dangerously on its hinges behind me.

“Need who?” she inquired, not glancing from her book, still likely irritated with me for ignoring her warning earlier. I skirted the hall table and breezed into her room, heading straight for her closet. My entre had Tally off the couch. “Get out of my room,” she growled, comically menacing. I ignored her and started to dig through the hurricane aftermath littering the floor. I heard her stalk to the closet and glanced up distractedly to see her with her hands on her hips. “What are you doing?” she asked, ticked.
I rolled my eyes.

“Looking for my boots,” I told her, throwing a sweater in her direction. I sensed her soften, and there was a long pause while I continued to dig.

“Oh sister. Get up,” she commanded me, not unkindly. On all fours, my hands buried deep in belts, I looked up. She gestured upward and grabbed my arm, hauling me to my feet and dragging me out of her room and over the cool hardwood floor to a hallway closet that she flung open with a flourish and Vanna-Whited its contents. I looked inside.

Pink and purple ostrich. Lipstick red with silver studs. Cockroach killing gold with pink crystals. Shiny black hand-stitched. Baby blue han
d-tooled. Fifteen pairs of well-
heeled, loudly adorned attestations of good old-fashioned gaudy. I pulled out my favorite grass green pair with cognac snakeskin toes and sat down in the floor to pull them on. I was back. Call me vain. Call me silly. But these boots were the symbolism of my rebirth, reclaiming my reputation, getting a clue
,
and getting over myself in the process.

The boots hugged my feet snuggly
,
and I wriggled one foot in the air appreciatively as Tally stood in the doorway like a proud mama bear. Thank God for cowgirl boots. Tha
nk God for hometowns. Thank God
Cash was a prayer that didn’t get answered
.

“I’m back.”

My cell phone started jangling while I was trying to decide which boots I could wear with a pencil skirt the next day. I ran for it, bumping my shin against the coffee table. I saw the name and sank down into the antique shocking pink sofa that Tally loved so much. I answered, crossing my booted feet, one red
leather, one yellow alligator. W
ith buoyancy yet unfelt since I’d come back to Brooks,
I
greeted the caller.

“What’s shaking, sugar?”

“What in the world, woman? You want to explain what the hell’s going on. Everyone in town has been calling me
,
and yet I can’t seem to get a hold of
you
.” I’d left a short message for Fae Lynn as I was headed toward home and then turned my phone off. In retrospect, I’m sure I had been avoiding her, and the possibility of her thwarting my bad decision.

If not for having to take care of Hazzard, she’d  have made damn sure to park behind Cash’s truck. I was sure she’d heard about the shooting from Scotty and put some facts together, which had probably made her quite agitated, not being able to talk to any real sources.

“Sorry,” I apologized, “We came hom
e to eat, and Mama made chicken,
and then well, there was the pie.” I rattled off quickly.

“Pie?” she questioned, getting to the real meat. Too late, I realized that Fae Lynn would recognize the subtle innuendo that the combination of Cash and pie seemed to imply. “What happened?”

“He took me up to the Milner’s old property after dinner.”

“The one your daddy bought and sold him for more than double the price?’

“You knew about that?”

“Of course. It was my idea. So go on, there was pie.” I sighed. I did not relish telling Fae Lynn this part of the story.

“There was pie. Literally and semi-figuratively.”

“You and Cash?” She gasped, aghast. I hastened to explain.

“I’m not proud to admit it.
I kissed him before I got ahold of myself. By the time I realized what I was doing
,
I was knee deep in exchanging saliva.”

“Why’d you stop?” she asked once I paused.

“Divine intervention. Guardian angel. Something. I was halfway in and felt like I was being burned alive. And not in a good, hot, sexy way. He’s married, Fae. Married.”

“Yes, I know, Lilly. I believe we had this conversation. And your name is on t
he papers for his response to a
temporary support request.”

“Okay, no need to rub it in. I get it.”

“Then what happened?” she ignored my defensiveness, “You get into a epic fight? That’s usually how you all end it.”

“Not this time. I left. Took off walking. He never even followed me, which I think I can take as another sign.”

“You walked all the way home?!”

“I needed to get my shit together. And I didn’t have a cell phone. And I was too embarrassed to stop to ask someone to call.”

“Huh, so is it all glued back in place?”

“My shit?”

“No, your rodeo tiara. Yes, your shit.”

“
Mostly. I did discover those damn peep-toes don’t work on a dirt road.”
Fae Lynn laughed.
“It’s funny,” I said, “how finding myself brought be back to where I started.”

“You have on you
r boots, don’t you?” She got it;
she had her own nine pair, although hers tended to be slightly more functional than mine.

“Damn straight.”

“About time,” she replied with a laugh and without any other need for explanation, “You do a good job bossing everyone else around, but you know you need this town and all of us to lean on.” She got it. Of course she did, and I’d hazard a guess that everyone in this town I’d thought I was too good for got it too.

“So,” I turned the conversation to another, less happy, topic. “Something creepy is going on at the hospital
,
and we need to figure out what it is,” I told her.

“Creepy how?” she asked. I proceeded to frankly inform her of my conversation
s
with both Ronnie Duvall and Kelli Ames.

“Oh no,” she responded when I was finished.

“I know,” I commiserated.

“No really, oh no,” she explained.

“What
?” I asked, confused. She let
out a dry laugh.

“Scott came home just the other day a
nd was complaining about the Oklahoma Agency of Investigation
coming in a
nd
causing a ruckus at the station. Apparently
,
there’s some smuggling that’s been going on in Oklahoma and they’ve traced it back close to here.” I considered the implications of this as she continued. “I guess the director of the OAI called Sheriff Clay. Told him he was sending men out
,
and if Clay interfered, he’d have the governor on his head. Supposedly
,
this is something the FBI should be handling, but they’re swamped. They’ve sent in a former agent to head the investigation.” She finally paused to give me a chance to catch up.

“Who is it? I didn’t know anyone here in Brooks worked for the FBI.”

“Don’t know. They’re undercover. Scotty’s not willing to give that up, no matter how hard I’ve tried, if you know what I mean.”

“Stop,” I said, not interested in their bedroom habits.

“What kind of smuggling?” I asked, already having a hint in my pinballing brain. Fae Lynn took a deep breath.

“Bodies.”

“Agh.”

“Parts, mostly,” she went on. “I was cooking dinner when Scott was talking, but apparently big drug companies and medical schools need dead people to study and test.” I was getting severely grossed out and wished I’d not had that bite of pie. Whatever leftover traces of Cash uneasiness I’d had were replaced by an idea of what might be happening at the hospital and why Mr. Duvall and Kelli had the issues they did.

“So they steal dead people and then sell them?” I asked. Fae Lynn paused.

“Not the whole bodies,” she informed me; and I drew my feet up off the floor to hug them to my knees, the soft floral décor of my great-grandmother’s parlor blurring and swirling around me in a haze. “Like I said, sometimes they just take parts. I have to admit I did an Internet search after Scott told me, which by the way, this is on the quiet.” I nodded silently and she continued. “Sometimes they just need certain parts, like hearts or kidneys or lungs for transplant, or bone marrow for cancer patients. Sometimes they want like fingernails and hair for testing.” A wave of nausea hit me
,
and I put my head between my knees, hoping to calm the clanging in my head. Fae Lynn knew I was a puker and waited patiently. I spoke from upside down, the phone between my knees too.

“So hospitals and drug companies are doing this illegally and immorally and getting away with it?” I was indignant. Another dry laugh.

“Kind of. But it’s only illegal if they know they’re stolen. They’re supposed to get all their stuff from donors. Problem is, the body smugglers claim that their bodies and organs are donors too, and demand is so high that the schools and dr
ug companies don’t check it out;
they just write big checks.” Fae Lynn had always had a taste for the macabre, but I was surprised by how much she knew, which let me know that this was something serious if Scott had shared it with her and it hadn’t come through the dispatch office. I asked the question and was both dying and dreading to ask.

“How big a check?”

“Four thousand dollars for a box of fingernails,” she told me.

“Ugh.” I forced my head further toward the floor and then determinedly sat up to focus. I may be a puker, but I was no fragile flower. “So you think that’s what we’ve got?” I asked her. She didn’t hesitate.

“Sounds like it.”

“And Cash?”

“I don’t want to go there.”

“Go there,” Fae Lynn said, “for the sake of argument.”

I went.

“That means he killed Mark Ames, or told someone to,” I forced myself to say it out
loud. “But I just cannot see
him do
ing
that. Even if he had the stomach, he doesn’t have the motivation. And wouldn’t put his career in jeopardy.”

“Tina was a nurse at the hospital,” she told me. “If anyone was going to help with something illegal, it’d be her.”

“So what do we do?” I asked and then went on, “I
agreed to these
investigations
thinking I would have a possible negligence case and that Mr. Ronnie had been nipping a little more than normal.”

“Maybe we should go look at the morgue, since that’s probably the place where the breakdown’s happening. And I did talk to Sherry Colms after you called today. Apparently Tina hasn’t been doing much real nursing these days. She’s been working in the pharmacy and working the desk at the morgue.” I recoiled
,
as Fae Lynn only served to further implicate Cash. Ugh. I pushed myself off the couch resolutely and began to pace.

“Well, seeing as how she’s AWOL, what with being accused of Cash’s murder, now would be the perfect time to go check it out.” I told her.

“My thoughts exactly, sister,” she agreed. “Let’s get an early start, before Cash arrives.”

“How about seven?” I asked.

“Pick me up.”

Tally came in later as I was reading the book I’d stolen from her. She curled up on my bed and I told her the latest, and her lips curled in disgust. She offered to come with us the next morning, but I figured the less conspicuous we were the better. Tally wasn’t great at inconspicuous. She got up and went to her room after a while
,
and I tried to reconcile my erratic thoughts, but I drifted off fitfully, my brain thrashing around the visions of a dead Cash, pie, and tagged toes.