The Red Hat Society's Acting Their Age (7 page)

Leanne shook her head. “No, it’s fake.”

“Good. I don’t like animals getting killed.” Rachel nibbled her lip and gave Leanne a tentative look. “Can I try it on?”

“Sure. Go ahead.”

The coat was too big, but Rachel’s eyes lit up when she pulled it around her. “It
feels
real.” She glanced at her feet. “You know what would look totally cool with this?”

Leanne lifted a brow and smiled. “Those boots from Jesse’s?”

Rachel nodded. “Only in brown suede instead of pink.”

“That’s just what I was thinking.” Leanne smiled. “I’m just wild about those boots.”

“I bet this coat’s expensive,” Rachel said, sounding dejected. “All the clothes I like cost too much.”

“There are ways around that.” Leanne left the table and walked over to her. “When I was your age, I made most of my outfits. Sometimes I even took hand-me-downs and reworked them.” Facing Rachel, she zipped up the coat, reached around her and pulled the extra fabric together in back so that it fit her body more snugly. “A little nip here, a tuck there . . . I could make it my own design.”

Rachel gazed up at her. “Did your mother teach you?”

Still holding the coat in place at Rachel’s back, Leanne leaned away to take a look at her handiwork. “No, my mother died when I was eight.”

Warmth spread through Mia as she watched them together. She saw their gazes meet briefly before Leanne averted her eyes.

“I learned to sew in a homemaking class I took in junior high,” Leanne said. She turned Rachel around, moved her slightly so that she could see herself again in the mirror over the buffet across the room.

Though the shoulders were still too wide, the sleeves and hem too long, Rachel smiled at her image. “I don’t have a sewing machine,” she said, running her hand across the fur lapel.

Aggie sat forward. “I have an old one I never use. You’d be welcome to it.”

“Who’d teach me to sew?”

“Leanne could teach you.”

Leanne let go of the coat and scowled at Aggie.

Aggie seemed not to notice. “The machine’s portable. I could bring it over here tomorrow and you could give her a quick lesson, just to get her started.”

“Would you?” Rachel blinked wide eyes at Leanne. “I want to make some halter tops for this summer. The older girls at my school? They wear them all the time when it’s hot. Not to school, though. They’re not allowed. But to movies and stuff. They look like they’d be really easy to make.”

“I don’t know, Rachel.” Leanne returned to the table, her back to the girl. “It’ll depend on what happens tomorrow.”

The excitement in Rachel’s face disappeared. She slipped the coat off and carried it back to the chair. “You mean, it’ll depend if you tell the sheriff about me or not.” She turned and ran from the room.

“Rachel—” Mia pushed back her chair and stood.

Aggie touched her arm. “Let her go. That was my fault.”

Leaning against the table, Leanne sighed. “What were you thinking, Ag?”

“I wasn’t. It’s just so much fun having a young girl around. I suppose I was wishing she
could
stay. She makes me think of my granddaughters.”

A sense of helplessness swept through Mia. “So what are we going to do?”

“Don’t look at me,” Leanne said. “I’m more confused than ever.”

“Maybe we should just sleep on it tonight.” Aggie began gathering the teacups. “Surely the answers will be clear to us in the morning.”

Two hours later, Aggie carried a couple of bowls of chili to the kitchen table where Roy sat reading the newspaper. Mia had the right idea at lunch, Aggie thought. It was chili weather. Cold, snowy and gray. Aggie had passed up the chili Mia made for Rachel’s lunch, since she had consumed two sweet rolls, a carton of yogurt, and an apple that morning. But now, after the close call with Cade followed by Rachel’s emotional scene, she was in dire need of some stress relief. Nothing worked better for that than a big ol’ pot of Texas comfort food.

Besides that, chili was Roy’s favorite, and she wanted him in a good mood when she told him the idea she’d come up with on the way home from Mia’s house. When it came to convincing Roy of anything, she knew to lay her groundwork first then ease into it.

She set Roy’s bowl in front of him, put hers at the place beside him then went to take a pan of cornbread from the oven.

Roy folded the section of paper containing the evening television programming and tossed it aside. “We might as well just throw the set out the window,” he rumbled. “Not a damn thing worth watching these days. Nothing on but that reality crap. If eatin’ worms and runnin’ races half nekkid on some beach with a bunch of strangers is the world’s new reality, we’re moving to the Twilight Zone.”

“Ha!” Aggie pulled out her chair and sat. “The U.S. Army couldn’t drag you off this farm.” She sliced the cornbread and served him a piece. “How’d the fence building go today, anyway?”

“Same as yesterday.” Roy tasted the chili, licked his lips, frowned. “You go a little crazy with the cayenne pepper, Aggie girl?”

“I made it same as always.”

In answer, Roy grunted and took another bite. “You know I don’t like eatin’ this late. It gives me indigestion.”

Aggie lifted her spoon. “Sorry. The girls and I got to talking and the time slipped away from us.”

He eyed her purple blouse. “You wear that to the shop this morning?”

“No, I came home to change for the meeting after I ran my errands.”

“Must’ve just missed you.” He lifted his left hand and showed her his bandaged index finger. “Cut it on some barbed wire and ran home to fix it up; you weren’t here then.”

She looked at him sympathetically.

Swallowing, he rolled his shoulders then tilted his head side-to-side. “Dad-gum crick,” he muttered.

“I’ll give you a back rub later.” Aggie smiled at him.

Roy looked up briefly from his bowl and smiled back.

“It’s nice havin’ you home earlier these days,” she said.

“Nothing too pressing in the winter. You know that.”

“Seems to me, hiring J.P. took some of the load off, too.” Their nephew had moved back to Muddy Creek a year ago, and Roy had hired the young man to help out with the last harvest. Afterward, he kept J.P. on. “I guess he’s working out?”

“You kidding? J.P. could run the place single-handed.”

“Good. You don’t need to be putting in the long hours you used to, winter or not.” Aggie knew better than to remind him that the doctor had ordered as much. Last year’s “little flare-up,” as Roy called it, was a touchy subject for him. He liked to pretend the chest pains he’d had, not to mention the test results showing off-the-charts cholesterol, didn’t mean anything. She also never mentioned that they now ate ground turkey instead of ground beef, that the milk he drank these days was skim rather than whole, and a hundred other little healthy adjustments she’d made to her cooking.

“I heard you had to swing by Mia’s today and lay down.”

Aggie lowered her spoon. “I swear, a person can’t burp in this town without everyone knowing ten minutes later what it smelled like. Who told you that?”

“Buck Miller. He called while you were at your meeting to see how you were feelin’.”

“Well, that makes sense.” Mia’s widowed seventy-something next-door neighbor had been shoveling snow off his front walk when the Sheriff showed up unannounced. The man might be half-blind, but his hearing obviously wasn’t suffering. “Poor old man needs something to occupy his time now that Martha’s gone. To keep him from eavesdropping.”

Roy huffed. “Snoopy s.o.b. couldn’t mind his own business when the wife was alive, either. He said Cade Sloan stopped by Mia’s twice today. What’s up with that?”

Aggie buttered her cornbread. “I didn’t ask. It’s none of my business.”

“That’s never stopped you before.” Roy crumbled cornbread into the big glass of milk Aggie had poured for him. “Since when do you get migraines?”

“Since about eleven-thirty this morning. You mean Buck didn’t tell you the time?”

With half the cornbread broken up, Roy used his spoon to dunk the crumbs into the milk. He nodded at his glass. “You were a little stingy with the milk, hon. How ’bout a top off?”

Aggie pushed away from the table and headed for the refrigerator, wondering if the time was right to tell Roy her idea. He didn’t know it, but she’d recently opened her own savings account at the bank and, for the past month and a half, she’d been depositing her coffee shop earnings. She had planned to use the money to buy two tickets to Boston for their granddaughters’ graduation in May. But now, after spending time with Rachel this afternoon and realizing all she’d missed out on with the girls living so far away, she didn’t want to wait another four months to see them. She might not have enough money yet, but they could use what she had to pay for some of the trip, and Roy could spring for the rest.

And after they went and Roy realized how much he, too, had missed seeing Jimmy and the girls all these years, she’d insist they go back in May.

Aggie returned to the table with the milk carton, considering how to broach the subject. “What do you want to do tonight?” she asked while pouring a stream of white over the cornbread in Roy’s glass.

“I don’t know.” He shrugged. “Watch TV, I guess.”

She emptied the carton and sat. “You said nothing was on.”

Roy spooned a bite of soggy cornbread into his mouth. “We still got time to go into town and rent a movie.”

“You’ll only fall asleep watching it.”

Leaning back in his chair, Roy settled his hands atop his round belly, right above his belt buckle. “Why don’t you just tell me what you’ve got planned for me, Aggie girl?” His dark eyes held a twinge of amusement, and a whole lot of wariness.

“Well . . .” Aggie leaned over and pinched a crumb from the corner of her husband’s mouth. “Since winter’s slow for you around the farm, and you said J.P. can run the place single-handed anyway, I was thinking we might get on the Internet and check out flights to Boston.”

Beneath the sparse strands of hair atop Roy’s head, his scalp turned fire-engine red. “Are you crazy, woman? Do you know what they’re charging for plane tickets these days?”

“Not all that much.” Unsurprised and undeterred by his outburst, Aggie scowled at him. “To hear you talk, you’d think we’re on our last dime. We’ve got plenty of money in the bank, Roy.”

“I don’t care how much money we’ve got, I’m not paying some airline hundreds of dollars for a five-hour ride and a package of stale peanuts.”

“What if the tickets don’t cost you anything?”

He gave her a look of disbelief. “Where do you think you’re gonna get free tickets to Massachusetts?”

“Just
what if
?”

“That’s the dangedest thing I ever heard, Aggie. Why would anyone want to go to the Northeast in January?” He crushed his paper napkin and tossed it into his bowl. “It’s colder than a witch’s tit up there this time of year.”

Aggie shoved her chili to the center of the table and crossed her arms. “It’s cold here, too, if you haven’t noticed.”

“There’s a difference between Yankee cold and Texas cold.”

She’d promised herself she wouldn’t let his stubbornness reduce her to tears. But, like always, when Aggie’s frustration with her husband reached its limit the waterworks started. “Why would anyone want to go up there?” Pushing her chair back, she stood and glared down at him. “To see granddaughters, that’s why. To see a son and daughter-in-law. What’s wrong with you, Roy Cobb? Don’t you have a heart? Have you forgotten the meaning of family?” She stormed from the kitchen.

Behind her, chair legs scraped the linoleum, and she heard the thump of boots against the floor. “Aggie, come back here. What’s got into you?”

As she entered their bedroom, Aggie turned and slammed the door in Roy’s startled, red-splotched face. Then she locked it.

He rattled the knob. Pounded on the door. Waited several seconds. Knocked more softly. “Aggie, honey,” he said with what she knew was forced calm. “Open up.”

“Don’t you ‘Aggie, honey’ me.” She threw a pillow at the door. “Is this how it’s going to be, Roy?”

“How what’s gonna be?” His voice became louder and more exasperated with each word.

How could the man have lived with her forty-seven years and be so out of touch with her heart? “The rest of our lives. The two of us alone in this house, me waiting on you hand and foot while you gripe about everything from what’s on TV to the way I cook.”

“I love your cooking, hon. You know that.”

“This isn’t about my cooking,” Aggie said between gritted teeth, trying not to scream.

“Damn it, woman.” Roy sounded baffled. “What’s it about then?”

“I want more, Roy.”

“More what?”

“More in our old age than staring at each other from a set of matching recliners every night.”

A long silence, then, “Like what?”

Aggie closed her eyes, puffed out her cheeks, let the air seep slowly from between her lips. “Like a simple night out every now and then. Like an occasional trip. Maybe even across the blessed state line. Like visits with our family. I want—”

“What you’re really saying is you want more than
me
,” Roy exploded. “That you’re not happy with
me
anymore.”

“I didn’t say I wanted to go alone.” When she heard him stomp off, Aggie unlocked and opened the bedroom door. He stood across the den in the front entry hall, snatching his coat and hat from the rack. “Where are you going?”

“To Joe Pat’s,” Roy answered, his back to her.

Aggie’s irritation shifted, making space for a slice of concern. Roy hadn’t played pool in years. And he didn’t drink. “You never go to Joe Pat’s.”

He opened the front door, glanced over his shoulder at her. “Maybe it’s time I started.”

Chapter 6

C
ade stood on Mia’s dark front porch, holding a small gift bag. He still believed she knew something about Rachel Nye’s whereabouts. Was certain of it. But after coming up empty-handed this afternoon, he’d called Judge Brennan. The old man was bullheaded. He refused to grant any more search warrants unless Cade presented hard evidence instead of mere suspicion.