“What is it?” Sandra asked coming down the hall. She was looking at him as if she’d seen him pale, had noticed the tremor in his hand clutching the phone. Sweat broke out under his arms. He worried she could smell the fear on him.
“They found her car in an old barn near Antelope Flats,” Bernard was saying on the other end of the line.
Kerrington said nothing. He’d checked out the town when Jasmine had told him her plans to marry the sheriff. He’d laughed in her face. He’d known she would never go through with it.
“What?” Sandra demanded. She was standing directly in front of him now, her eyes locked on his face as if she could see through him, always had been able to.
Sometimes he forgot that Sandra had known Jasmine probably as well as anyone. She and mousy little Patty Franklin had been Jasmine’s roommates at Montana State University in Bozeman. Jasmine had gone there on a whim after she’d already worked her way through all the men at several other universities, he thought bitterly.
Sandra had been the opposite of Jasmine, tall and slender, her hair dark like her eyes. She’d been available and he’d needed someone to use to make Jasmine jealous. Jasmine would never have believed it if he’d dated Patty the Pathetic, as Bernard called her.
“What?” Sandra demanded again, practically spitting in his face.
“They’ve found Jasmine’s car,” he said, knowing it would be impossible to keep something like this from her.
He’d expected the green-eyed monster to rear her ugly head. Instead, Sandra seemed stunned. She leaned against the wall, her face stony and remote.
“Sandra is there?” Bernard said with obvious disgust.
Where else had Bernard expected her to be? She was his wife, although Kerrington couldn’t even guess where she’d been spending a lot of her time lately. He was hit with the most ridiculous thought. That the man Sandra had been seeing behind his back was Bernard. The two deserved each other, no doubt about that. But they couldn’t stand to be in the same room together.
He rubbed a hand over his face and turned his back to Sandra to look in the hall mirror. He felt a need to assure himself and he’d always been reassured by what he saw in the mirror, as long as he didn’t look too deeply.
Jasmine used to say he was classically tall, dark and handsome. Only she’d made it sound as if he were a cliché. He’d even overheard her and her brother Bernard refer to him as her “mindless pretty boy.”
He shook off the memory, replacing it with a more pleasant one. Jasmine naked and in his arms begging for more.
“I’m flying out tonight,” Bernard was saying. “I think you and I should talk before I go, don’t you? The cops are going to be asking a lot more questions. I think we need to get our stories straight so we tell them the same thing we did seven years ago.”
Kerrington swore softly under his breath. It had been so long, he’d thought all of this was behind them. He should have known Jasmine’s car would eventually turn up. Wasn’t that what he’d hoped? Just not now, not after all this time.
“I’m going, too,” he whispered into the phone as he caught movement out of the corner of his eye. Sandra had gone into the living room and sat down, her sour hatred of Jasmine almost palpable.
“You should just stay home and take care of your wife,” Bernard said.
“Never mind what I should do,” Kerrington growled. Had Bernard heard something about Sandra? Is that why he was suggesting Kerrington take care of his wife? Or was that earlier thought of Bernard and Sandra closer to the truth than he’d wanted to admit? It would be just like Bernard.
“I’m flying to Montana as soon as I can get a flight,” Kerrington said, keeping his voice down, his back to Sandra and the living room. “We can talk there.”
“That’s not a smart thing to do.”
“She was my girlfriend,” Kerrington argued.
“The one who dumped you.”
“Who knows who she’d be married to now if she were still alive.”
Bernard made a scoffing sound on the other end of the line. “Assuming she’s dead.” He hung up.
Assuming she’s dead. Kerrington stood holding the phone. Did Bernard know something? It had been Bernard who’d come to him with the offer of an alibi.
“If you need to, you can say you were with me,” Bernard had said two days after Jasmine disappeared—just before the cops arrived to question them. “I was hiking in the Bridger Mountains. Took my gear and camped up there. Didn’t get back home until well after dark the second day.”
Kerrington had been so grateful to have an alibi at all that he’d gone along with Bernard’s. It wasn’t until later that he realized he’d also given Bernard an alibi.
He hung up the phone, then turned, bracing himself for the mother of all arguments he knew he was about to have with Sandra.
But Sandra was gone.
Antelope Flats, Montana
NEWS TRAVELED AT the speed of light, even in a county where there was little or no cell-phone service and ranches were miles apart.
The news about Jasmine’s car being found had given Shelby McCall’s return-from-the-dead story a rest. For hours Cash had been able to avoid his mother’s call, but when the phone rang shortly after he’d hung up from talking to Bernard Wolfe, he knew before he answered who was calling.
“Cash? Are you all right?”
He wanted to laugh. He was so far from all right…. “I’m fine.”
“I think you should move back home so you are close to your family during this time.”
That did make him laugh. This coming from a woman who’d been gone for thirty years? Where was his mother when he’d needed advice about Jasmine? Being raised in an all-male household had left him pretty clueless about women. Dusty hadn’t counted since she was just a kid. He really could have used a mother during those years.
“I’m sorry, Cash.”
Sorry that Jasmine’s car had been found and searchers expected to find her body in some shallow grave on the old farm at any time? Or sorry that she’d never been a mother to him and it was too late to start now?
“I know what you must be going through.”
“Do you?” he said, then could have kicked himself.
“Obviously you loved her or you wouldn’t have asked her to marry you.”
He said nothing, afraid of what would come out.
“Let me know if there is anything I can do.” She seemed to be waiting for him to say something. When he didn’t, she hung up. She didn’t mention dinner. Must have realized it would have been a bad time to ask for anything.
When he looked up, his brother J.T. was standing in his office doorway.
“Mother? She means well,” J.T. said, closing the door behind him as he came in.
Cash grunted.
J.T. stood, looking uncomfortable. That was the problem with being raised by a bad-tempered man like Asa and a disagreeable ranch foreman like Buck. The brothers had grown up believing that softness was a weakness. So they sure as hell knew nothing about comforting each other.
Even Dusty was more tomboy than girl.
But J.T.’s rough edges had been smoothed a lot since Regina Holland had come into his life last fall. Cash had seen the change in him and approved. Reggie, as J.T. called her, was perfect for his brother, strong and yet soft in all the right ways. She was like