The Barefoot Summer Page 18

  “Yep, and they are amazing,” he said.

  “How’d you find out about this place?” she asked.

  “My daddy was a big fan of hamburgers and hot dogs, so when we drove up here for a load of feed or to go to the stockyards, we always went to Bobby Joe’s. The original owner died some years ago and they changed up the sign a little bit to be Bobby Jo’s, as in a girl’s name. She’s his granddaughter.”

  Kate’s stomach growled.

  “That’s a good sign,” Waylon said. “You want to go in there hungry.”

  He drove past a mall and several other places to eat, made a few turns that had her completely lost as to how she’d ever find her way back out of the maze without him, and then parked in a lot crowded with trucks and cars.

  “We’re lucky,” he said. “We got here before the church crowd. Welcome to the best-kept secret in North Texas.”

  She stepped out to the smell of grilled onions and burgers. “It smells heavenly.”

  “Tastes even better.”

  With his hand on the small of her back, he ushered her inside, and a cute little red-haired woman left her place from behind the hostess counter and hugged him tightly. “Waylon Kramer, where have you been keeping yourself? This gorgeous woman is too good for the likes of an old cop like you.”

  “Kate, meet Bobby Jo. Bobby Jo, this is Kate Steele, and I agree with what you said, which makes me the luckiest man in the place today.”

  Kate blushed scarlet but did remember to hold out her hand. “I’m pleased to meet you, Bobby Jo. I hear you make an awesome burger.”

  Her handshake was firm, and her blue eyes twinkled. She had kinky red hair that she’d pulled up in a messy bun, and she wore a T-shirt that advertised the business. “My cooks do, and I’ll fire their asses the day they don’t. Y’all come on back here. You can have the VIP table today.” She dropped Kate’s hand and motioned for them to follow her, leading them through a maze of tables filled with people who had already been served.

  “First class,” Waylon said as he seated Kate. “Thanks, Bobby Jo.”

  “Anytime, darlin’.” She went up on tiptoe to kiss him on the cheek. “I loved this man’s daddy. He always left me a dollar tip just for bringing him the menu. That’s all Grandpa let me do in those days. Your server will be with you in a minute.” As she left she pulled a set of sliding doors shut, leaving them in a small enclosure with a window facing a tiny little garden.

  “This is great, Waylon,” Kate whispered.

  “I’ve been in here dozens of times, and I didn’t even know there was a VIP table.” He grinned. “She must like you.”

  The doors opened, and a waitress appeared with two glasses of water and a couple of one-page menus. “What can I get for y’all today?”

  “I want the double bacon cheeseburger, chili cheese fries, and a Coors in the bottle. Longneck if you have it,” Kate said.

  “Well, that was quick. How about you, sir?”

  “The same, and add a foot-long hot dog with cheese and chili, no onions on anything for me,” he said.

  Kate handed her the menu. “Hold the onions on mine, too.”

  Waylon’s hand closed over hers. “You know this means we have to sit here and talk for an hour so the beer will be out of our system before we leave.”

  “As long as we don’t talk about the murder, I don’t suppose that will be a hardship,” she said. “I have a question to get us started. Have you ever thought of drilling for oil on the ranch?”

  The waitress brought their beers and set them down. He took a long sip of his before he answered. “No, thank you. We make a fine living with our Angus cattle. I might look into the equipment to make big round bales of hay in the next couple of years, though. It would mean not having to go out to feed cattle twice a day. But I’d rather talk about something other than ranching.”

  “Such as?”

  “You. The future. What happens when your vacation ends? How much I like the color of your eyes. Those could be starters,” he said.

  “Maybe we’d best see if I’m indicted for murder before we think about us or the future,” she said. That could have a huge bearing on whether he’d ever see the color of her eyes again.

  He covered her hand with his. “I do not believe you killed Conrad. I just have to find who did so that you are cleared.”

  “Thank you for that. Now let’s talk about today and whether the chili in this place is as good as what you make. Or we can talk about how much I adore Gracie and really would steal her if I could figure out a way to do it legally.”

  “Whatever you want to talk about is fine with me. Hell, woman, you could read that menu backward to me,” he said.

  “Now that’s a pickup line if I ever heard one.” She laughed. “When we finish eating, would you mind if I did some shopping?”

  “Darlin’, I’ll sit outside the dressing room door and enjoy the show as you try on clothing. Think you could model one pair of jeans for me?”

  “It could be arranged.” She nodded. Jeans? She hadn’t bought jeans in years. She worked in power suits, and when she was at home, she wore sweatpants and T-shirts. It might be fun to try on a pair and maybe some boots. If she was going to work on a ranch in the wintertime, she would need boots.

  Where in the hell did that thought come from? She almost gasped.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Is my mama going to die?” Gracie asked Amanda over breakfast the next morning.

  “Of course not! Why would you ask that?” Amanda frowned.

  “My daddy just up and died. He didn’t tell me he was going to die, and if my mama is going to die, will my Mama Rita take care of me? Will I have to go back to Dallas and leave the cabin?”

  “Your mama would have told us if that was happening, don’t you think?”

  “My daddy didn’t tell me anything. I wish I could stay here forever.” Gracie propped her elbows on the table and rested her chin in her hands. “I didn’t like that funeral. Everyone was so sad and then after the preacher finished, everyone was mad. Mama was really mad until we came here and now she is happy. I don’t ever want to live in our old house again, because she might be mad like that again.”

  “We were all mad. So was Kate and so was I,” Amanda said.

  Gracie went back to eating. “You’d tell me the truth if my mama was going to die, wouldn’t you?”

  “Yes, I would,” Amanda said.

  “Would you tell me if Kate was going to die?” Gracie asked.

  “I promise that no one is going to die,” Amanda said. “And if I know they are going to pass away, I’ll tell you. Now let’s finish our breakfast.”

  “Okay, but did my daddy die because I didn’t tell him good-bye the last time he came to see me and Mama? Lisa said she wouldn’t tell her mama good-bye when she was sick and she died. Is it our fault?”

  Why couldn’t Gracie have gotten up with her mother that day instead of sleeping until almost nine o’clock? That way Jamie would be answering these questions. Amanda wasn’t a mother, not yet. A little voice in her head reminded her that she would someday have to answer more questions than these. Her child would want to know why the other kids had a father and she didn’t. What had happened to him and could she see pictures.

  “No, darlin’, your daddy did not die because you didn’t tell him good-bye. Some really bad men killed him.”

  “Why?” Gracie’s eyes widened. “I heard all y’all talking about it, but why? I want to know why bad men killed my daddy, but everyone talks in whispers or in big-people talk when I’m there.”

  Amanda hauled her heavy body up from the chair and hugged Gracie, then took her by the hand and led her to the sofa. “You didn’t have anything at all to do with your daddy’s death.”

  “Promise?” Gracie snuggled in close to Amanda.

  “Cross my heart.”

  Gracie held up her hand. “Pinky swear and I will believe you.”

  Amanda laced her smallest finger with Gracie’s. “
I do hereby pinky swear.”

  Gracie giggled. “That sounds funny.”

  Sighing with relief, Amanda nodded.

  Kate and Waylon were on the way from plowing fields all morning to the ranch house when Waylon hung back to answer the phone. She went on into the house and washed up in the bathroom. When she came out, he was still talking, and from all the gesturing, it was not a good conversation. She knew anger when she saw it.

  He was probably mad about something with the investigation or with his paperwork concerning when he could leave the precinct permanently. It had nothing to do with her, she hoped. She kept walking right out the front door without looking back over her shoulder.

  When she parked in front of the cabin, her phone pinged with a text from Waylon: Can we talk?

  She turned off the engine and typed: For what and why?

  The return message said: Meet me at the dock?

  She sent back: One hour in the church parking lot.

  Black clouds gathered in the southwest again that afternoon. The rain that they thought might be coming the day before had gone around Bootleg and Mabelle and hit around Archer City with severe wind and even marble-size hail.

  If the rain materialized, she didn’t want to be on the dock when it hit. And if this was going to be a big black moment with Waylon, she sure didn’t want Gracie to hear it. Before she could get out of her car, Jamie pulled in right beside her.

  Kate stepped out and pointed at the sky. “Looks like a storm coming our way.”

  “Let’s go get a glass of sweet tea and a cinnamon roll and sit on the porch. I love the smell of rain in the air,” Jamie said.

  Kate jogged from her car to the porch. “You haven’t eaten yet? It’s almost one thirty.”

  Jamie hit the first porch step by the time Kate got to the door. “I wanted to finish a file drawer, so I worked an extra hour. I sent Amanda a text, and she sent one back to say that she and Gracie were making yeast bread and cinnamon rolls.”

  Kate shook her head. “I smell cinnamon all the way out here.”

  With hands on her hips, Gracie waited for them in the middle of the living room floor. Her hair had been french braided and her little faded shorts and shirt had the remnants of flour stuck to them.

  “You scared me,” Gracie scolded her mother.

  “I’m only an hour late. Didn’t Amanda tell you?” Jamie said. “Where is my welcome hug?”

  Gracie squared her shoulders. “You can have it later. I’m mad at you and Kate both.”

  “What did I do? Are you mad at Amanda?” Kate asked.

  “Bad men killed my daddy. He didn’t die because I didn’t tell him good-bye. You should have told me, Mama, or you should’ve, Kate.”

  “Oh!” All the wind left Kate’s lungs in a whoosh.

  Amanda came out of the kitchen and shrugged. “I didn’t know what to do.”

  Jamie sank down on the sofa and patted the spot beside her. “Come and sit beside me and we’ll talk about it.”

  Gracie crawled up into her lap and laid her head on Jamie’s shoulder. “I been afraid for you to go anywhere if I didn’t tell you good-bye. I thought you’d die, too.”

  “That isn’t why your daddy died. Some bad men came in the flower shop where he was buying roses and they shot him,” Jamie said. “This is really not your fault, sweetheart.”

  Kate had been almost thirty when her father died, and she had not told him good-bye. They’d had a horrible argument the night before his heart attack, and she’d stormed out of the house in anger. Poor little Gracie was only six, and she’d been carrying this burden around the better part of a month.

  “Amanda said it’s not my fault that he’s dead. And that it’s not Lisa’s fault that her mama is dead,” Gracie said.

  Kate sat down on the other end of the sofa and held Gracie’s hand in hers. “Amanda is right. Sometimes bad things happen and it’s nobody’s fault.”

  “It’s those bad men’s fault and I hope Waylon shoots them.” Gracie tilted her chin up a notch. “Now, let’s go have some cinnamon rolls. Me and Amanda worked hard all morning. She’s nesting, you know.”

  “Oh, she is?” Kate smiled.

  “I don’t know what it means, but I hope it lasts a long time, because I like cookies and cinnamon rolls,” Gracie said.

  The first raindrops hit the windshield of his truck as Waylon pulled into a space in the church parking lot. He sat there for five minutes, hoping that Kate hadn’t changed her mind. When she finally pulled up beside him and motioned for him to come over to her vehicle, he wasted no time getting out of the truck. He started to open the passenger door of the Cadillac but noticed her long legs going over the seat.

  He hurriedly got into the backseat and scooted over into her embrace, pulling her so close that their hearts beat in unison. “Bad news. All that information checked out, but the one suspect we thought it might lead us to didn’t pan out. I was so angry. I hope you didn’t think it was at you.”

  “I didn’t, but I did know that you needed some cool-down time. That means I’ll get top billing on the list of suspects, because I have the money to pay someone to kill him, right?”

  He nodded. “I’m sorry. We’ll keep digging.”

  “Thank you for that much. Gracie had a meltdown today, and Amanda had to take care of it. I’m going to talk to the girls tonight about all this. In my opinion, Gracie needs a day at the ranch next week. Meeting with you this afternoon is good. I can tell them that’s what we were talking about,” Kate said.

  He wanted to kiss her again, but with the newest turn of events, maybe that was a bad idea. It wouldn’t be good for her case or his record if he was romantically involved with the lead suspect in his final case.

  “I should be going,” he said.

  “Me, too. I’ve got a lot to tell the girls, and hopefully, the festival and the day at the ranch will help Gracie. I didn’t realize that a little kid went through the stages of grief just like an adult.”

  “Me, either.” He scooted across the seat and out the door. “Thank you, Kate, for everything.”

  “It is what it is.” She shrugged.

  But why can’t it be different just this one time, Waylon thought as he started up his truck engine and drove away. Why couldn’t we have met under different circumstances—like at a party or even on a couple of bar stools?

  Kate watched the rain splat against the windshield and the side windows for five minutes. What-ifs played through her mind the whole time. What if they came and took her away in handcuffs? What would Gracie do if the policemen took her mother? Did Mama Rita have enough money to take care of her properly? And Amanda? What if her baby was born in prison and they gave it up for adoption?

  Finally, with no answers to any of the questions, she crawled over the seat and headed home. Home. Was that what the cabin had become?

  She stopped by the convenience store and picked up two bottles of wine and a couple of two-liter bottles of Diet Coke for Amanda and tossed in a bag of Gracie’s favorite gummy candies. Other than Conrad’s monthly overnight visits, her life had been in a nice comfortable rut for the past thirteen years, and now it was one big mess after another. Paying him the million-dollar settlement would have been so much easier than all this, but then she would have never met Gracie—or Jamie and Amanda. The latter two were beginning to get under her skin, but not as much as that little dark-haired girl.

  There was no way she could get from car to cabin without getting wet, so she embraced the rain, enjoying the feel of its warmth as it soaked her from head to toe. When she reached the door, she kicked it with her sandal and yelled, “Hey, Jamie or anyone in there, would you open the door, please?”

  Her phone rang at the same time Gracie slung open the door. She recognized the ringtone as the one she had assigned to her mother, but it stopped before she could answer it.

  “What’s in the bags?” Gracie asked.

  “Wine for me and your mother. Diet Coke for Amanda and a bag of t
hose sour candies that you like,” Kate said.

  “Thank you, thank you.” Gracie wrapped her arms around Kate’s long legs. “I love you, Kate.”

  “Not as much as I love you, Gracie.”

  “I love you to the moon and back.” Gracie grinned.

  “Well, I love you a bushel and a peck and a hug around the neck,” Kate said.

  Gracie drew her dark brows down over deep-brown eyes and asked, “Is that a lot?”

  “More than to the moon and back,” Kate said.

  “Okay, then you love me more today, but tomorrow I will love you more. Mama, guess what Kate brought me?” She fished the candy from the bag and went down the hall in her famous run-everywhere mode.

  Kate went to her bedroom and changed into dry clothing, then sat down in the rocking chair and hit the speed dial for her mother.

  “I told you this was going to turn into a nightmare before it was over. That’s the reason I wanted you to be out of town for a while,” Teresa said without so much as a hello or hey.

  “And here I thought you wanted me to be rested in December when I took over your office,” Kate said.

  “Don’t you get sassy with me! Have you seen the Dallas newspaper?”

  “No, I have not. Here in the hinterlands we use smoke signals—they tell me we might get the Pony Express to deliver newspapers to us pretty soon,” Kate answered.

  “This is not a laughing matter.” Teresa’s voice hit a brand-new high.

  “Okay, Mother, what does it say?” Kate sighed.

  “Third page. Upper half. A columnist is talking about the murder and he’s gotten all kinds of information from somewhere, like all of Conrad’s aliases, his real name, and that he was a polygamist, and he lists his three wives at the time of his death. And your name and the fact that you are an oil heiress is right there in black and white.”

  “Did it say anything about Gracie?” Kate gasped.

  “Who the hell is Gracie? Another wife?”

  “No, she’s Jamie’s . . . Conrad’s . . . daughter. I’ve told you about her,” Kate whispered.

  “Nothing about a Gracie, but there is something about an Iris, and he says that you three should be behind bars. Do you have any idea what that is doing to your reputation?”