The Barefoot Summer Read online

  “Not yet, but I’m still investigating.” Waylon smiled.

  Might as well pack that grin up in your shirt pocket, because it’s not going to win you any favors in my court.

  “Then why are you here?”

  “I want to know where you were on the day he died, from early morning until after three,” he said.

  “Why until then? Why not until midnight?”

  He looked up from the notepad. “He died instantly at three o’clock in the flower shop.”

  “And who were the flowers sent to? They damn sure didn’t come here,” Jamie said.

  “It’s an ongoing investigation, so I can’t tell you that.”

  A new rush of pure old mad flowed through Jamie. Conrad never sent flowers to her, not one time. When they were courting, he’d brought her a bouquet of wildflowers in a quart jar, and on their first anniversary he showed up with a box of chocolates that he’d bought on the half-price after-Christmas sale shelf. At the time she’d thought it was sentimental. Now that she knew he was shopping at an expensive florist, it was just downright cheap.

  “Did that son of a bitch spend money for flowers on those other two hussies? He never sent me a damn thing, or Gracie, either, for that matter,” Jamie fumed.

  The detective poised his pen over the notebook. “I told you I can’t answer that. But it will help if you can tell me where you were all day.”

  “Thursday, I spent the morning with my grandmother. We went to a farmer’s market and bought vegetables. At noon we stopped by a burger joint down near Desoto, and then we went came home and put away the produce, had waffles for supper, and I heard about the murder on the television that evening. My grandmother and Gracie were with me all day. Do you think I killed him?”

  Was the detective mentally challenged? If Jamie had killed him, she would have been standing on the roof of that flower shop shouting to the whole world. She was not a woman to run and hide, and Mr. Detective could write that in his little notebook.

  “We are covering all bases,” he said. “Tell me the truth. Did you find out about those other women before or after he was killed?”

  “If I’d known about those other two wives, he wouldn’t have been alive on Thursday to be buying flowers in that shop. Now let me ask you something. He owns a cabin up near Lake Kemp. Since Gracie is his oldest living blood kin, won’t she inherit that?”

  He put his notebook and pen back into his shirt pocket and got to his feet. “I have no idea about property. You’ll have to talk to a lawyer if you want to get into it with his first wife.”

  “Surely that hoity-toity witch won’t end up with the cabin, since he has a child,” Jamie said.

  “She is his legal wife unless one turns up from before fourteen years ago, but a lawyer will have to help y’all with the property thing.” He started to walk away and then turned back. “Don’t leave town. I’ll have more questions as the investigation continues.”

  “I’m not guilty of jack shit, and I’m going up to that cabin this weekend. It’s Gracie’s, and nobody is taking it from her,” Jamie declared.

  Amanda heard the squeak of the door to her tiny one-bedroom apartment open and didn’t need to open her eyes to know that her aunt had stopped by—again. She could hear her in the kitchen putting food in the fridge, right along with what she’d brought the past three days. Very little of it had been touched.

  Amanda hugged her wedding picture closer to her chest and curled up around it on the sofa. She couldn’t eat. She couldn’t sleep in the bed they’d shared last week. She could barely look at the bassinet with the cute little airplane mobile above it. Conrad was dead and those other two horrible women were telling lies about him. He might have been married to them, but he’d divorced them long before he even met her. And that little girl didn’t look anything like him, so she couldn’t be his child.

  Conrad loved her with his whole heart, and he would have told her if he’d had another child. He talked all the time about the excitement of his first baby with her. She frowned. Or had he said his first son? She couldn’t remember, but still, he would have told her.

  She opened one eye to peek at the picture and then snapped it shut as the hole in her heart grew bigger and bigger. She vowed that there would never be another man in her life. She’d given all her love to Conrad, and he’d taken it to heaven with him.

  “You might as well open your eyes,” Aunt Ellie said. “This has gone on long enough. Today you are going to take a shower and get dressed, and you will leave this apartment. We are going to the store and you are going to do your job. You’ve had three days past the funeral to wallow around in sorrow.”

  “I can’t,” Amanda whined.

  “You will or I will drag you into the bathroom and put you in the shower. This is not good for that baby,” Aunt Ellie said with enough conviction that Amanda opened her eyes and sat up.

  “I loved him so much,” she said with a long sigh.

  “I reckon he was good at making the women love him.” Aunt Ellie pointed toward the shower. “Go. I’ll be right here when you get back. Put on makeup and something nice. You’re not going to the store looking like hammered buzzard shit.”

  It took an hour to shower, get dressed, and put on enough makeup to cover the circles under her eyes, but when she finished, Aunt Ellie nodded in approval.

  “Now eat,” she said. “I made bacon, eggs, and toast. Your plate is in the microwave. Coffee is in the pot. You’ve got fifteen minutes, so don’t argue.”

  Amanda wanted to revert to her old rebellious days, flip off her aunt, and curl up back on the sofa with the picture for the rest of the day. But she’d promised Jesus when she accepted him into her heart that she would put her wild ways behind her, and so far she’d kept her word. Besides, Conrad had told her repeatedly how much he loved her sweet goodness and that she was going to make a wonderful mother to their son. She could not let him down, not even if it meant eating food that would taste like sawdust.

  “I want to start my maternity leave next weekend,” she said.

  “Fine by me, but you are not holing up in this place with the curtains pulled and the lights turned off,” Aunt Ellie said.

  “I’m going to the cabin. Conrad said he was leaving it to me, and I can spend time on the deck looking out over the lake. We were supposed to go up there next week anyway. I think I can find closure there. Maybe I’ll even stay longer,” Amanda said.

  “I can agree with that,” Aunt Ellie said. “But a week before the baby’s due date, you should come on home. Your doctor is here.”

  “And I will make all my appointments.” She laid a hand on her baby bump. “I’ll take good care of this little guy. That’s the least I can do for Conrad.”

  Waylon arrived in Wichita Falls right at noon, so he stopped at a pizza place advertising an all-you-can-eat buffet and had lunch. He’d found out this morning that the florist had no idea where Conrad was taking the dozen yellow roses he’d bought that day. He hadn’t signed a card before he was slain. He had only just been in the process of paying for the roses, which he’d had in his hands when the two men in masks burst through the door and shot him.

  Mr. Drummond, the florist, let Waylon look at the record of Conrad’s purchases. At least once a week for the past three months, he’d bought yellow roses on Thursday. In the past year, he usually bought flowers right after the first of the month, and that order varied from daisies to orchids. The store owner was too eager to help, which meant he was probably hiding something big. Waylon made a note to call him later or go back to see him in a week or so. Maybe he’d deleted a couple of orders to protect someone?

  Waylon couldn’t manage to keep one wife at a time happy. How in the hell did Conrad keep three on the hook and still have time to buy flowers for other women? He had to have had a date book or a calendar somewhere. Waylon made a note to go through all the evidence they’d found in his van. He had to be a smart man, so he would not have kept it in any of the three wives’ hou
ses. The only other place it could be was in his van, with that load of clothing he was peddling across the state. If he didn’t find it in the evidence boxes, he’d tear apart the van, one piece at a time.

  He snagged the last parking space in front of Ellie’s Boutique that afternoon. He left his cowboy hat and sunglasses in the car but pasted on a big smile when he opened the door.

  “Whew, it’s a hot one. This cool air feels good.” He spotted a lady with two little girls looking at children’s clothing in one area and an older woman flipping through hangers on the other side of the store.

  “What can I do for you?” the woman who’d been sitting beside Amanda at the funeral asked. “You look familiar. Have we met?”

  “Yes, ma’am, we have. At Conrad Steele’s funeral. I am Detective Waylon Kramer.” He showed her his badge. “I came to talk to Amanda, if she’s available.”

  The woman crossed her arms over her chest. “She’s not.”

  Amanda rounded the end of a rack of clothing. “I’m right here, and I have questions for you, Detective. Follow me back to the office.” She led the way past the checkout counter and into a small room, where she pointed at an old straight-back wooden chair. “Have a seat right there. Would you like a soft drink or a cup of coffee? We’ve got both.”

  “Something cold would be nice.” Waylon sat down in a chair that was more uncomfortable than the sofa in Kate’s fancy office.

  Amanda took a Pepsi from a small refrigerator and twisted the lid off before handing it to him. “Did you find out who killed my Conrad?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Then why are you here?” she asked.

  “I need a play-by-play of where you were all day Thursday,” he said.

  “Good Lord! I didn’t kill him. I wouldn’t. I couldn’t. I love him.” She threw a hand over her forehead in a dramatic gesture. “I would never”—her eyes welled up with tears that spilled down over her cheeks—“kill the father of my baby.” She reached for a tissue and dabbed at her face. “And if you do your job, you’ll find that he divorced those other two women.”

  “We’ve been looking into that since his death. It appears that there are records of him marrying all three of you, but no divorces on file. Could you please just tell me where you were on Thursday?”

  She pointed down at her stomach. “Did either one of those masked people who shot my Conrad have a belly like this?”

  “They did not,” he answered.

  “Okay, then, take me off the suspect list. How could I? And I have dozens of people who were in and out of this store all day Thursday who will testify that I never left the place. Opened at nine and didn’t close until after five that day. We had a pre–Independence Day sale going on,” she said. “Besides, it’s three hours to Dallas. There’s no way I could have gone there and come back without being missed.”

  “Can you tell me who might want him dead?” Conrad pulled out his notebook.

  “Probably one of those other two who have burned the divorce papers,” she said.

  There was enough venom in her voice that Waylon had to fight the urge to make the sign of a cross over his chest. “You think they might have conspired together to kill him when they found out he was a polygamist?”

  “He is not.” Her tone shot up so shrill that it could have cracked glass. “They did something with the papers. I’m his only wife. That rich bitch could have hired someone to kill him, but she wouldn’t get her hands dirty with the job. The other one looked mean enough to me to have done it herself, just like she said. Your job is to find the divorce papers so my baby won’t be a bastard.” She shook her forefinger at him.

  “My job, ma’am, is to find who killed him,” Waylon said. “I’ll have more questions later, so don’t leave the state. I’ll need a number where I can reach you.”

  She handed him a business card with her cell phone number on the bottom. “When you find out who did this, I want to be the first to know.”

  “Thank you for taking time to talk to me and for the cold drink.” He straightened up and extended his hand.

  “You will find these people, won’t you?”

  “I hope so. I’m retiring before long, and I don’t want to leave an open case on my desk.” He smiled.

  “And you will let me know?”

  He nodded. “You have my word.”

  He would tell them all when he closed the case, starting with Kate, the legal wife, and working his way down to Amanda. After the hysterics from her at the funeral, he’d expected to find her still weeping and whining. Maybe it was all for show and they were in it together after all. If so, he’d see them all behind bars before he left the precinct for good.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Fourteen years hadn’t changed the old cabin much. Five mismatched rocking chairs awaited her in a line across the wide front porch. The one on the end with the wide arms sat a little higher than the others, and she’d claimed that as her chair on her honeymoon. Kate would wrap a big quilt around her body and bring her morning coffee out to the porch. There she would listen to the soft laps of the lake as it rolled up on the shore.

  Her high-heeled shoes sank into the soft green grass as she pulled two suitcases up onto the porch. She parked them on the porch and sat down in the rocking chair. Nothing happened. No peace, no memories. Just a hot wind, like that on the day of the funeral, blowing across her face and making beads of sweat pop up under her nose. She pushed up out of the chair and found the spare key hidden under the flowerpot shoved up in the corner.

  Twenty-nine steps off the deck out back led straight down to the boat shed where the pontoon used to be housed. Conrad had used it in one of his schemes a few years back and bragged about it to her, so now there was just an empty shed down there. She opened the front door and wheeled her suitcase and briefcase inside. She expected the musty scent of a house that had been closed for a long time. But the aroma of something sweet, like a scented candle or potpourri, lingered. Had someone been there recently? Kate parked her suitcases in the middle of the floor and went straight to the thermostat, turning it down from seventy-eight to seventy degrees. And then she eased down on the sofa and covered her eyes with the back of her hand.

  Coming to the cabin might have been a bad idea. She could have gone anywhere in the world for a few weeks, and this was the very last place she should be. But after her mother suggested that she get away for a while, all she could think of was the quiet happiness that she’d known sitting in that rocking chair on the porch. And she did need to get all the legal matters settled before her mother retired.

  With its log walls and Western decor, the interior of the house was as rustic as the outside. The front door opened right into a great room–living room and country kitchen separated only by an archway. A panoramic view of the lake spread out before her from the sliding glass doors that opened up to the wide deck where Kate had watched beautiful Texas sunsets every evening for a whole week.

  She was there and she didn’t plan to leave, so all that was left was to unpack. She rolled her luggage down the hallway toward the master bedroom, but she couldn’t make herself go into the room. She’d known he’d had other women, but did he bring them here? Did he have sex with them in her honeymoon bed? There was no way in hell she could sleep in that room. The therapist would call it love-hate, what she experienced as she stood there, her feet glued to the floor. She’d loved him. He’d tricked her. She hated him. All those feelings finally hit home and rolled up into a hard ball in the middle of her chest. They did not make for the happy, peaceful feeling she’d hoped for.

  She crossed the hall to a second bedroom and noticed a furry paw sticking out from under the bed. Startled, her first reaction was to run until she realized it wasn’t a mouse but a stuffed animal. She crossed the room and raised the bed skirt to find a little toy bunny no bigger than the palm of her hand and a Barbie doll wearing a bathing suit. The doll’s black hair was frayed, giving testimony that it had seen lots of time in the bathtub.
No doubt about it, Conrad had brought his daughter and her mother here.

  Kate made her way to the second guest room. Judging by the dust on the dresser, no one had been in this room in years. Evidently the wife with the little girl only dusted and took care of the part of the house that they used.

  Which makes this room perfect.

  She set her briefcase at the end of the dresser and parked her suitcases in the middle of the floor, went back to the car, and rolled in a case with her laptop and printer/fax machine. She took it straight to the room and parked it beside the dresser. A queen-size bed with a split rail–type headboard, flanked on both sides with nightstands and lamps fashioned from horseshoes, a six-drawer dresser with a mirror above it, and a nice-size empty closet waited for her. A gold velvet rocking chair had been shoved into a corner. It looked comfortable and well worn, as if someone had used it a lot in the past.

  “No bad auras here,” she mumbled.

  That room, with its rustic charm, felt right. She stripped down the bed, carried the sheets and the quilt to the utility room, and shoved as much as she could into the washer. She found a dust cloth and a can of spray cleaner in the cabinets over the washer and dryer and returned to the bedroom. While she was dusting, she thought she heard the squeaky hinges on the front door but attributed the noise to the washer and kept right on cleaning her new bedroom. She’d come to the cabin to get away from everyone, and no one even knew she was there.

  “Hello?” a thin voice yelled.

  Kate stepped out of the room to find a wide-eyed Amanda standing in the hallway not five feet from her.

  Amanda tucked her chin and glared. “What are you doing here?”

  “I own this place. What are you doing here?” Kate asked.

  Before Amanda could answer, another voice called out, “Who’s here? Show yourself.”

  Kate recognized wife number two—Jamie, was it? Amanda whipped around as fast as her big belly would allow and stomped into the living room with Kate right behind her.