The Ex Who Wouldn't Die (25 page)

Charley gazed into the distance, his lips tightly compressed.

"Come to think of it, you never acted the least bit guilty when you slept with some bimbo."
She watched the tall, regal figure of Sunny Donovan disappear into the courthouse. "And that woman doesn't look like any of your other bimbos. She's dignified, not sleazy."

Charley said nothing. That meant something.

"You said you can't lie to me."

He looked at her, and this time she was certain she saw guilt and remorse in his gaze. "It's true. I can't lie."

Guilt and remorse.
She would have sworn Charley couldn't spell either of those emotions, let alone feel them.

Had he hurt Sunny Donovan?

He'd hurt her, Amanda, and never shown the slightest signs of guilt or remorse.

It was hard to imagine that dignified woman involved with Charley in any other capacity than as his lawyer
, trying
to keep his sorry ass out of jail.

But something was going on, something she needed to know.

"Then tell me the story about Sunny Donovan. Why do you freak out when she comes around? What's going on between you two? And where do I know her from?"

He said nothing.

"So you can't lie to me, but that's not the same thing as refusing to answer. Is that the deal?"

Charley shrugged, a remnant of his old, arrogant expression returning in a half-smile.

"Fine." She took a step forward. "I'll go ask her myself." After approaching Kimball, talking to this lady who seemed quite nice would be a snap.

"Wait!" A chill wind passed through Amanda's arm as Charley attempted to grab it and restrain her.

"Why should I wait?"

Charley opened his mouth as if to speak, then closed it again. "You don't understand."

"My point, exactly. I don't understand what's such a big deal about this Sunny Donovan, but I'm going to."

"No!"

She leaned forward, invading his space. He took a step backward. Oh, yeah. Something was going on. Charley never backed away.

"Then talk," she ordered. "Tell me why you don't want me to meet her. Tell me what's going on wi
th that
woman."

Charley drew in a deep breath and squared his shoulders as if prepared for battle. "If I help you get your gun back from Kimball so you can prove you didn't kill me with it, will you go home to Dallas, get out of Silver Creek?"

Amanda leaned back, folding her arms and
studying him.
This was a completely unexpected turn of events.
M
ild curiosity about
the
woman had just turned into a puzzle she was determined to solve.

"Is that it?" she asked. "You help me get the gun, I go back to Dallas? That's all I have to do in exchange for your services?"

Charley's features contorted, his lips twisting as if they wanted to speak but he was trying to keep them shut.

"What else do you want from me, Charley? What's the rest of the deal?"

Charley opened his mouth then closed it. He rose a few inches off the sidewalk, straightened and met her gaze. "Forget about Sunny Donovan."

Wow.
The Sunny Donovan story was big, so big Charley would do anything to keep her from finding out. "Okay, sure," she said.

She was under no compulsion to tell the truth.

Chapter Twelve

Only Irene and Amanda were home for lunch. The house was unusually but not uncomfortably quiet. All the windows stood open, and ceil
ing fans whirred in each room.
Amanda could hear a mockingbird chirping, tweeting, and trilling its diverse song from a nearby tree. Leaves on the dozens of large trees around the house stirred quietly in the faint breeze, their shade shielding the house from the midday heat.
After her morning meeting with Kimball, Amanda had expected to feel stressed for at least the rest of her life, but Irene and this house had a calming effect on her.

"I thought we could have some ham sandwiches, if that's okay with you," Irene said, taking a large platter from the refrigerator. "Allan Middleton smokes his hams with mesquite instead of hickory. Some say he just does it because he has so much mesquite on his property. I say it's the best ham I ever ate so who cares why he does it."

"I agree," Amanda replied. There had been such a quantity of food the day before, she'd only eaten a
few
bite
s of the ham. However, those
bite
s
, unadorned with any of the fancy sauces her mother favored, had, indeed, been the best ham she'd ever eaten. "What can I do to help?"

"Why don't you look through the refrigerator and see if you can find that potato salad Alta
Bernhart
brought. And pick out anything else you see that looks good."

Amanda opened the refrigerator door and peered at the large quantity of food crammed inside. "It all looks good. If I stay here very long, I
'll gain so much weight, I
won't be able to get through the door of my shop."

"That's a big door. You'll have to eat a lot of ham and potato salad."

"I can do that." Amanda located the large glass bowl of potato salad and put it on the table.

"If you'll get the plates and silverware, I'll slice a tomato, pour some tea, and we should be ready to eat."

Amanda set the table while Irene added tomato, lettuce and pickles to the tray of ham then cut slices from a loaf of homemade bread and poured the translucent amber tea into ice-filled glasses.

Finally they sat down at one end of the wooden table. Amanda built her sandwich, took a big bite and then a drink of the cold, sweet tea.

"This is wonderful," she said, leaning back with a sigh. "Not just the food. You, your home, your family." This place and these people were one-hundred-eighty degrees different from her home and family, but Amanda felt more comfortable, more at home here than she'd ever felt in that mausoleum in which her mother held court.

Irene smiled, the lines around her eyes tilting upward. Beverly Caulfield would never have allowed those lines to appear on her face. Of course, her mother didn't smile often enough to cause them. "We're your family, too," Irene said. "I can't tell you how much it means to me, to all of us, that you came down here, that we finally got to meet you and welcome you to the family." The smile remained, but her blue eyes misted. "You're all we have left of Charley."

If you only knew,
Amanda thought, her
gaze
searching the corners of the room to see if he was lurking. His mother would have been thrilled to see him again. Amanda would have been thrilled to
never
see him again.

For the moment, he was not in sight. Good. She could relax and have a chat with this woman he'd kept hidden from her. "I don't understand why he told me…" She stopped herself before telling Irene the horrible stories he'd fabricated about his family. "Why he never told me about you all. I never even knew he talked to you."

"He was trying to protect you."

Not likely. Protect himself, maybe.
"Protect me? From what?"

Irene sipped from her tea, then set it on the table. "I don't know. He said he was in trouble, and all he could say was that we couldn't tell anybody where he was or who he was married to."

"So it was okay if people knew he was married, just as long as they didn't know my name?"

"That's right," Irene confirmed. "He told me your first name
but not your last
. He didn't intend to
say that much
, but he talked about you so
often
, it just came out."

Amanda supposed that ruled out Charley
's
hiding from an ex-girlfriend. She chewed another bite of sandwich then decided to go for it. "How well did Charley know the mayor?"

Irene's gaze sharpened, and she frowned slightly. "Roland Kimball? Him and Charley didn't exactly travel in the same circles."

Amanda studied Irene. She did not have her son's talent for deceit. The woman knew something she wasn't telling. "Maybe not, but they had some sort of connection, didn't they?"

Irene shook
her head
. "
No, but a
fter Charley left, the mayor came by looking for him. Said he needed to talk to him about a business deal he thought Charley might be interested in."

"What kind of business deal?"

"He didn't say. I couldn't have told him anything even if I'd wanted to since Charley had left a few days before and hadn't told me where he was going. Roland seemed upset. Like the deal was important. Like he didn't believe me. When Charley finally called me, I told him about Roland's visit. He said he didn't know anything about a deal, and I shouldn't tell the mayor or anybody else where he was."

"Because he was in danger."

Irene nodded.

"From the mayor?"

"He never said that." Irene started to say something, hesitated, then continued. "I figured it had something to do with him. Otherwise, why would he have come around looking for Charley?
I
figured—" She broke off, hesitated again.

"You figured Charley had run some kind of a scam on the mayor."

Irene sighed. "Charley had a good heart. But some of the things he did weren't always good."

Amanda could attest to that. "He told you he was in Dallas?"

"Oh, no. I figured it was Dallas because that's where he'd always wanted to go. But I never told anybody what I thought. We didn't know where he was living or anything until the police came down here to talk to us after he…" Her voice wavered, she blinked a couple of times, then cleared her throat and continued. "After he was killed."

Amanda ate a couple more bites of sandwich and some potato salad while she considered the ramifications of what Irene had told her.
Adding her mother-in-law's information to what she'd learned about Kimball this morning,
Charley's
crazy stories were beginning to sound a lot less crazy.
If Charley had
blackmailed then
double-crossed Kimball
, he would need to hide, and a big city like Dallas was a good place to do that. But Dallas was only an hour's drive away.
Silver Creek was p
ractically a suburb of Dallas. It would have made more sense for him to go farther…Los Angeles, Chicago, even Houston.