The Barefoot Summer Read online

  “Your rose,” her aunt Ellie reminded her.

  Amanda laid it on the casket with her handkerchief. “Darlin’ Conrad, take my rose and my tears to heaven with you, and someday we will be together again.”

  It might be funny if it wasn’t so bizarre. Lord, this kind of fodder just might be good enough to make it to those tabloids beside the grocery store checkout counter. Kate shuddered as she pictured all three wives with sweaty faces lined up beside a picture of Conrad on the front page of a magazine. What would that do for her reputation as president of the oil company?

  Conrad had three wives. At the same time. She held her hands to keep from counting them off on her fingers. Kate, Jamie, and Amanda, married seven years apart on the same damn day. At least he wouldn’t forget his anniversary. It sure put new meaning to the seven-year itch.

  “Did you know this?” she asked Waylon.

  “I did yesterday.” His sexy grin jacked up the temperature another ten degrees.

  “And you didn’t warn me?” She glared at him.

  “I wanted to be sure that you didn’t conspire together to kill him or have him killed. The second wife, Jamie, showed up at the precinct when she heard the news on the television. The third one, Amanda, arrived in hysterics worse than you saw today when she saw the article about his death in the newspaper,” Waylon said.

  “And what did you tell them?”

  Waylon removed his cowboy hat, combed his thick dark hair with his fingers, and resettled the hat. “That the funeral was today, where it was and the time. And that his family was taking care of arrangements.”

  “And now?”

  “I’m not ruling out a conspiracy, but you are still my prime suspect. Don’t leave the state, Miz Steele,” he said.

  “How can she be a suspect? She was with me in a board meeting all day when Conrad was murdered,” Teresa asked.

  “That does not mean she couldn’t have paid someone to do the job when she found out about these other two wives.” Waylon tipped his hat to the two ladies and headed out across the green grass toward a pickup truck parked behind Kate’s Cadillac.

  “You killed Conrad?” Jamie confronted her, hands on her hips and brown eyes flashing anger.

  “I did not.” Kate took a step forward, jolted by her unexpected burst of offense at those words, and looked down on the shorter woman. As if she’d bother.

  “You had him killed, then?” Amanda wailed as she made her way back toward Kate.

  Kate quickly shook her head. “No, I didn’t do that, either, but if either of you want to confess, I’ll chase down that detective and we can get this over with right now.”

  Amanda took a step backward. “I would never . . . how could you even suggest . . . he was my husband.”

  Jamie stood her ground. Her eyes flashed anger, and her body fairly well hummed. “Well, he’s damn lucky I didn’t know about you or that other whiny pregnant hussy or I would have done the job myself.”

  Jamie’s heart beat so fast that she thought it might jump right out of her chest. And her high heels sank into the green grass all the way from the graveside to her seven-year-old van. That hoity-toity bitch back there was probably laughing at her trying to keep her balance. She made sure Gracie and her grandmother had their seat belts fastened and drove out of the cemetery ten miles an hour above the speed limit.

  Rita Mendoza crossed her arms over her chest. “I told you that something was not right. No man leaves his wife and daughter and only comes home one week out of every month. I don’t care what his job is—if he is within a hundred miles, he should come home. Now we know that he was staying with his other wives. But that leaves an extra week. Is there a fourth wife in the woodpile?”

  “God, I hope not.” Jamie gripped the steering wheel to steady her shaking hands.

  “Mama, are they going to put my daddy in the ground? Was he really in that big black box?” Gracie asked from the backseat.

  “Yes, baby girl, your daddy is gone and he won’t come home anymore. But we will be fine. You still have your grandmother and me,” Jamie answered through clenched teeth.

  “How do we know he was really in there?” Gracie asked.

  “I’m sorry that you won’t see him again, sweetheart”—Jamie had to work at keeping her voice calm—“but he was really in the casket.”

  It wasn’t a lie. She was sorry that Gracie wouldn’t see her father, but Conrad was lucky that someone had shot him before Jamie figured out why he only came home one week during each month. How dare he turn his back on Gracie and marry that girl! She wasn’t a day over twenty. She might not even be old enough to buy a shot of tequila, and Conrad was past forty. Did Kate have children with him, too?

  Gracie nodded seriously. “Can we go to McDonald’s now?”

  Rita laid a hand on Jamie’s shoulder. “Let it go. Don’t sugarcoat the truth when she asks, but don’t say too much. He was a good father when he was around.”

  “I. Am. So. Angry.” Jamie emphasized each word with a slap of the steering wheel.

  “With damn good reason, but it will pass,” Rita said.

  “I’m starving.” Gracie folded her arms over her chest. “I hate getting all dressed up. My shoes pinch.”

  “I’m hungry, too, baby girl.” Rita smiled. “We’ll get a burger and a milk shake, and we can eat it in the playroom. Afterward you can go down the slide as many times as you want.”

  A picture flitted through Jamie’s mind. Conrad had taken her and Gracie to a McDonald’s in a different part of Dallas. He was, or had been, tall, dark haired, blue eyed, handsome, and when he walked into a room or even a McDonald’s all the women in the place eyed him. When he flashed a bright smile, they would stumble around at the privilege of being in his presence—just like she did when they’d met at the teachers’ party that year.

  “Mama, can I have a big hamburger instead of the little kids’ meal?” Gracie asked. “I’m really, really hungry.”

  “Of course,” Jamie answered. She dreaded going back to her house. Family pictures were everywhere—from a collage on the wall behind the sofa to the credenza in the foyer. One of the two of them on their wedding day was on one nightstand, and on the other side was the three of them in the hospital the day Gracie was born.

  Seven years of her life, and it was all a deception. She was mentally throwing pictures at the walls when she reached McDonald’s and pulled into a parking spot. She put her head on the steering wheel and groaned.

  “What now? He can’t be killed twice,” Rita said.

  “Pictures. Finances. Life. All of it. But I’m too mad to talk about that right now.”

  Amanda sat in the passenger seat of the small Chevrolet truck, seat belt around her bulging stomach, crying into tissues that she kept tossing behind her when they were too soggy to use anymore.

  “This is a nightmare, Aunt Ellie. I’m going to wake up and Conrad will arrive tomorrow and we’ll go to the cabin for our summer vacation,” Amanda said between sobs. “This cannot be happening. What about our baby and . . . oh, my God, what am I going to do?”

  Her aunt Ellie kept one hand on the steering wheel and shook a long, bony finger at her with the other one. “You are going to shut up that carryin’ on and get a hold of yourself, girl. You will do exactly what you’ve been doing the past six months—live in your apartment, help me run the store—and in two months you will have a baby. You were a single mother anyway. He was only home a few days a month.”

  “Do you think he was really already married to those other two women?” she finally asked.

  “Yes, I do.” Ellie pushed back a strand of salt-and-pepper hair behind her ear. “Why would they attend the funeral and why would they lie? Be thankful you didn’t have to pay for that ceremony. I bet the casket alone cost a fortune.”

  “Do you think”—Amanda hesitated, not wanting to even utter the words—“that he slept with them when he wasn’t with me?”

  “Most likely,” Aunt Ellie said.

&
nbsp; “You aren’t any help at all.” Amanda pouted. “He might have married them, but there are divorce papers somewhere. They will show up, I’m positive of it.”

  “You are acting like a dramatic teenager. Shit happens. Men are sometimes bastards. You had six months of bliss. Count that a blessing and be glad that someone shot that fool, because I would be tempted to get the pistol out of my purse and do it if they hadn’t,” Ellie scolded. “You were going to leave tomorrow for your vacation time. I suggest you take the week off and get yourself together.”

  “I hate those other two,” she said.

  “I don’t expect there’s much love in their hearts for you, either.” Aunt Ellie turned north on Highway 287 toward Wichita Falls. “Put the seat back and rest your eyes. I’ll wake you when we reach the city limits. Wanda will have closed the store by the time we get there, so I’ll take you straight to your apartment,” Ellie said.

  Amanda obeyed her aunt’s orders, but she couldn’t sleep. Conrad was dead. Really dead. She’d seen the article about his death in the Dallas newspaper yesterday and laughed at first, thinking she would tease Conrad about there being two of him.

  What appeared to be a robbery had gone bad in a well-known flower shop in Dallas. Conrad Steele had been fatally shot. The owner described two people who came into the store wearing masks. He’d given them the money without an argument, but then they’d both turned their guns on Conrad. One blew his face off with a shotgun and the other shot him in the groin with a pistol before they ran out of the store and sped away in a black late-model SUV.

  She’d called the Dallas police station and talked to a detective, who verified that Conrad Steele was dead. She wanted to go see the body, but he told her that the family had decided on a closed casket under the circumstances. Kate Steele, a member of the family, was taking care of the arrangements. He was kind enough to give her the name of the funeral home and the time.

  That was yesterday, and she had barely had time to buy a decent black dress and make arrangements for their part-time help to run Ellie’s Boutique so that she could go to the funeral. It was all so surreal—no one buried a person that fast. Three days was the minimum. Conrad had been shot on Thursday afternoon, and he was already in the ground and it was only Saturday. There’d been no wake, no family night for friends to come and console her for her loss, not even a church luncheon after the funeral—nothing but a short graveside service. There was no closure in that.

  Amanda needed something to hang on to, anything at all to replace the fact that Conrad had three wives—at the same damn time!

  CHAPTER TWO

  Emotions should have been swirling around Kate on Sunday afternoon when she opened the door into Conrad’s bedroom. She expected the memories to bring back something—anything. Something in the room should cause a flutter of love, anger, sadness. But there was nothing.

  She’d been depressed when she met Conrad, and he’d made her happy for the six months they’d dated and for nearly a year following their marriage. Surely she could latch on to one happy memory. But any happiness had been drowned the day that she lost their baby and the doctors said she’d never have any more children. Depression had set in, and Conrad began to hound her for a divorce and his money. Anger joined depression when he became mentally abusive.

  Now he was dead, and she should feel something . . . relief? Even if he had been nothing more than a con artist who had lived in her house a couple of days a month for more than a decade, he was still her legal husband. She dug deep into her heart, but there was nothing—she would have had a bigger rush of emotion if one of the janitors at the oil company had died.

  Teresa pushed past her into the room. “I told you that you should have divorced him years ago. Now you have to deal with all this, plus his business affairs. Thank God you can use the company’s legal department or you’d be out thousands in lawyer fees.”

  “Let’s just get this packing done with,” Kate said.

  “At least it’s over.” Teresa went to the dresser and picked up a man’s wedding band. “What’s this all about?”

  “He took it off years ago. I’m surprised he didn’t hock the damn thing.” Kate took it from her mother and tossed it into the bottom of the black garbage bag she’d brought with her.

  “You could get something for that in a pawn shop,” Teresa said.

  Kate shook her head and opened the first drawer. Without checking pockets or even going through pajama pants, shirts, and the rest of his things, she threw them into the bag with the wedding ring. Then she slid open the closet doors. He used to have a packed closet, but now there were only a few suits, dress shirts, and slacks in front of her.

  “I told you not to buy all those fancy things for him when you were first married,” Teresa said. “Now they are hanging in one of those other women’s closets. They’ll take them to a consignment shop and make a fortune on them.”

  “I don’t care if they burn them and dance naked around the flames. I just want this thing settled. I never want to see those women again.” Kate shoved it all into the bag.

  “Well, this isn’t going to take long.” Teresa reached for a box on the shelf. “Are you even going to look in this or do we just put it in the bag, too?”

  More to appease her mother than anything else, Kate flipped the lid off onto the bed. His last five years’ tax returns were there, but no will, which might have simplified things. The deed to the cabin he owned up by Lake Kemp, along with the taxes and insurance papers concerning the cabin, were tucked into a big manila envelope. She flipped through the federal business—no dependents, married but filing separate, with her listed as his spouse, and very little return for any of the five years. They’d been prepared by an accountant whose card was stapled to the front of each copy.

  Kate set the box aside. “I’ll take this to the lawyers tomorrow. Looks like that cabin where we went on our honeymoon is his primary asset, so I’ll have to deal with it. I’ll get in touch with his accountant tomorrow to see if he has kept the utilities paid.”

  “How many times did I tell you that man was trouble?” Teresa sighed.

  Kate didn’t answer. Arguing with her mother was like fighting with a tornado—lots of wind and noise with only mayhem and destruction remaining at the end of the argument. It wasn’t totally unlike fighting with Conrad these past thirteen years, but at least he didn’t start every other sentence with “I told you so.”

  Teresa glanced around the room. “Anything else?”

  “I don’t think so.” Kate looked down at the bag. Fourteen years all neatly tied shut with a red plastic drawstring. Nothing remained but a few phone calls and selling a cabin located two and a half hours north of Fort Worth. “I’ll take this out to your car and put it in the trunk.”

  The mistake she made fourteen years ago was finished and over. He wouldn’t appear at her house once a month and rant about a divorce.

  “Nothing else in the rest of the house?” Teresa put the lid on the box, picked it up, and followed Kate out into the foyer.

  “Not one thing,” Kate said.

  She’d long since gotten rid of pictures or anything that might remind her of him when he was gone. What he had was contained in a room she hadn’t set foot in since she came home from the hospital after losing the baby. That was the first time he’d asked her to divorce him. Emptiness was worse than any emotion that she could imagine, but that’s the only thing she felt as she carried the trash bag out.

  “Okay, then, I’ll drop the bag by the charity donation center at the church. I’m going to the office an hour or so this afternoon, so I’ll put this box on your desk,” Teresa said as they made their way out to the curb where her car was parked. “You could come home for a few days if you don’t want to be alone.”

  A sweet offer, but Kate would rather ask her housekeeper to come over and stay a couple of days as spend time in a house with her mother.

  “No, thank you. I’m fine.” Kate tossed the bag into the trunk an
d slammed the lid shut. “I’ll deal with the accountant and start proceedings for probate on the cabin tomorrow.” She didn’t need or want sympathy that day. She wanted to be alone—period.

  “If you change your mind, just give me a call.” Teresa slipped into the driver’s seat and started the engine.

  Kate waved over her shoulder as she slowly walked up the sidewalk to the big two-story house in one of the elite sections of Fort Worth. God, she hated that house and had for the past thirteen years. She’d loved her little two-bedroom bungalow set back on a wooded five acres south of Fort Worth, but Conrad wanted a big house, and in those first few months, he got whatever he wanted. Thank goodness she’d had the foresight to leave his name off the deed.

  She opened the front door, went inside, and slid down the back of the door. She drew her long legs up and wrapped her arms around her knees. She would sell the house and either build or buy a smaller place down around Aledo, where she’d lived before. She liked that little bedroom community.

  Her phone rang while she was making plans. Figuring her mother forgot something, she rolled up on her feet, fished the phone out of her purse without even glancing at who was calling, and hit the “Answer” button.

  “What did you forget?” she asked.

  “Lots of things. Can we meet tomorrow?” a masculine voice asked.

  “Who is this?” Kate snapped back.

  “Detective Waylon Kramer. This is Kate Steele, right?”

  “Yes, it is, and I’ve already answered your questions,” she said.

  “This is a murder investigation, and there will be new questions coming up every week. May I talk to you tomorrow morning?” he asked.

  “I don’t have my calendar with me, but you can stop by the office at ten and I’ll try to work you in,” she answered.

  She didn’t want to talk to him anymore. She’d told him everything she knew. Her mother and a dozen people in the office had told him that she was there all day. There was no more to say, and she did not like the way that his sexy grin affected her.