Lone Star Lonely (24 page)

Penny Lane Brand was one hell of a private
eye, even at six months pregnant. But when there was nothing to
find, there was nothing to find. And Ben could feel her
disappointment coming at him in waves.

They’d searched Madden Hawkins’ house, his
office, his car, his attic, even his back lawn and basement. They’d
turned over cushions, lifted up carpets, checked above the ceiling
panels and in the soil of the houseplants. Nothing. No sign of
Cowan’s will.

Time to move on, time to think of some other
way to help Penny’s best friend, Kirsten.

Ben slipped his arm around Penny’s shoulders
and squeezed. “We’ll come up with something, hon. I know we
will.”

“I know,” she said. “But will it be in time?
This is frustrating! Why wouldn’t Hawkins have that will here? It’s
like he hid it deliberately.”

Ben shook his head. “Garrett thinks the
killer took it.”

“No.” Penny paced, head down, deep in
thought. “No. And that’s just what’s bugging me about this. If the
killer had taken the will, there would still be something here. The
rest of Cowan’s file. An empty folder. Another copy. A file on the
computer. There’s nothing. Nothing, Ben.”

“And you think that means…?” he prompted,
then awaited a reply. She was thinking something. She was always
thinking something.

“What if Hawkins hid it himself?’’

“Why would he?”

Penny shrugged. “Won’t know that until we
find it. The police wanted it to use as evidence against Kirsten.
The will would have given her a motive…so what if Hawkins hid it to
buy Kirsten some more time? What if he was trying to help her?”

She paced some more, thought some more. “Or
maybe he wasn’t hiding it from the police. Maybe he was hiding it
from the killer for some reason.”

Ben shrugged. “Like you said, when we find
it, we’ll probably know. That will must hold all the answers.” He
opened Hawkins’ front door, and the two of them stepped out and
walked toward Ben’s truck. A small white bulldog stood in the front
seat, forepaws on the window glass, staring out at them. Olive went
just about everywhere they did. Her pups might rule the roost at
home, but Olive was queen of the pickup truck.

Ben stopped walking when a small car with a
U.S. Mail emblem on it slowed down, veered over, then stopped right
in front of Madden Hawkins’ old-fashioned rural mailbox. An arm
emerged from the car window, dumping a manila envelope into the
mailbox. Then the car moved away.

Ben and Penny looked at each other. Penny
smiled. “Of course,” she whispered. “That’s it, Ben.”

Ben ran to the mailbox, yanked the envelope
out and stared at the label. The “from” address was the same as the
“to.” “He mailed it to himself?” Ben asked.

“I should have figured. Best way in the world
to buy time. A couple of days, at least. No one’s gonna find
something once it’s in the mail. Not until it gets where it’s
going, at least.” Penny took the envelope from him and ripped it
open. She pulled the last will and testament of Joseph Cowan out of
its envelope and began flipping pages, her eyes moving rapidly over
line upon line of text. Until finally she sighed and shook her head
slowly.

“My God, that man was evil.”

“What is it, Penny?” Ben asked, moving
closer.

She looked up, meeting her husband’s eyes.
“He left everything to Kirsten with the provision that should
anything happen to her before his wishes could be carried out, then
everything would go instead to one Phillip Carr.” She lifted her
head. “He might as well have paid Carr to kill her. So long as it
doesn’t look like a murder, and it’s done before she inherits, he
gets everything.”

“But then, if this Carr was supposed to kill
Kirsten anyway, why bother making it look like she’d killed
Cowan?”

“I don’t know,” Penny said. “To make sure
she’d never get a thing, even if Carr failed? To stall her getting
her inheritance long enough for him to have the chance to kill her?
To make sure Carr wouldn’t end up taking the rap for Cowan’s murder
himself, allowing Kirsten to go free and inherit the money? Maybe
all of the above,” Penny said. “Who the hell is this guy, anyway?
Phillip Carr…why does that name sound so familiar?”

“Carr,” Ben repeated. “Wait a minute, isn’t
that the name of Cowan’s driver? Yeah, that’s right,” he said with
barely a pause, answering his own question. “I always thought it
was strange that he had a driver named Carr. Doesn’t he live—”

“At the estate. Come on!” Penny grabbed her
husband’s hand, clutching the will in her other one, and raced to
the truck.

The Brands gathered beyond the gates of the
Cowan estate, a few at a time. Adam, Garrett and Elliot had been
the first to arrive. They’d stopped when they’d seen the limo
parked in front of the garage. It hadn’t been there before. So they
left the pickup a safe distance away, out of sight, and then
crouched in the bushes, whispering their plan of attack.

Chelsea arrived on their heels. They hadn’t
heard her pull up, because she’d left her car near where they’d
left the truck, and walked in the rest of the way.

“It’s gotta be that Phillip Carr,” she
whispered, crouching beside them.

Adam was so startled he damn near fell
over.

“She’s right,” Penny said.

Adam swung his head around to see Penny and
Ben creeping nearer, and, behind them, Wes and Taylor bringing up
the rear. “How did you all know we were here?” he asked.

“We didn’t,” Ben said. “We came looking for
Carr. We found the will, Adam, and it’s set up so that if something
happens to Kirsten, Carr inherits the works.”

Wes nodded. “So that’s why. I figured it was
him when I found out he’d been stockpiling sleeping pills. So
what’s the game plan?”

“He’s got Kirsten in there,” Adam said
slowly. He looked at his family members, one by one.

“Then let’s go in and get her out!” Jessi
said.

“No, wait. There’s something you need to know
first.” Adam licked his lips, swallowed hard. “Jessi, Wes,
Ben…Kirsten told me why she married Cowan in the first place. And
it’s…it’s liable to change your minds about her, once you know the
truth.”

“He was holding something over her,” Ben
said. “She confided that much to me a long time ago, but she would
never say what.”

Adam nodded. “She told me. And I have to tell
you. It’s…about the accident that killed our par-ents….”

Ben, Jessi and Wes exchanged stunned looks.
But they all stayed silent and listened intently while Adam spoke.
He told them everything Kirsten had told him. He told them his
reaction. And he told them that he wouldn’t blame them if they
wanted to walk away from this rescue now that they knew the
truth.

No one said a word for a long moment, and it
was Jessi who finally spoke up. “Do you think our mama would have
held any of this against Kirsten? Something she did at
fourteen?”

“No,” Ben said softly. “And our daddy
wouldn’t have turned his back on a girl in trouble, either. She was
a kid, Adam. She was a kid and she made a stupid mistake. We all
did dumb things when we were kids.”

Adam nodded and met Wes’s eyes. “What about
you?”

Wes drew a slow breath. “I’m resisting the
urge to knock you on your backside, Adam. For walking out on
her.”

“Amen to that,” Jessi said.

“What are we waiting for?” Garrett asked
finally. “That girl in there is family.”

Jessi lifted her brows and looked from
Garrett to Adam. “Is she?”

“Yeah,” Adam said. “Yeah, she is.”

“Hot damn,” Jessi said. “Then let’s get our
butts in there and get her out.”

Everyone spoke in agreement. Adam choked back
tears. “Thanks, you guys.”

“Enough, already,” Wes said. “What’s the
plan?”

Kirsten’s hand moved a half beat behind
Phillip’s commands. His harshly spoken words seemed to go directly
from his lips to the pen in her hand, without bothering to make a
pit stop at her brain. She didn’t know what she scrawled across the
page, or even if it would be legible when she finished. She didn’t
care. Her body was still shuddering with residual electricity.
Tremors worked up her spine and slammed into the base of her skull
every once in a while. The discomfort had eased up a whole lot,
though, once those sleeping pills had decided to kick in full
force. Their effect was numbing. And she was grateful for it at
this point.

Her head felt like lead. Her limbs heavy, the
pen like a log in her hand.

“Sign it.”

She blinked up at Phillip, then shook herself
and stared down at the uneven words dancing drunkenly across the
page. Her vision was none too clear. “I killed my husband and I
can’t live without him. The guilt of what I have done is driving me
insane. There’s only one way out. One way to atone. And that is by
following Joseph to the grave.”

Narrowing her eyes on the sloppy words, she
felt her lips pull into a grimace. “I wouldn’t follow that bastard
inside if it was raining out.” But her words sounded funny. The
vowels slurred, and the consonants didn’t make the trip to her ears
or feel as if they were happening on her lips. Her s-words were
lisped, as if she had gaps in her teeth.

“Sign it, Kirsten.”

She threw the pen down on the table.

Phillip picked up his stun gun and flicked
the switch, and Kirsten cried out automatically, flinching back
into her chair so hard it tipped over. She crashed to the floor and
lay there, closing her eyes, wishing for a miracle.

Phillip didn’t pick her up. He came closer,
leaned over her with the crackling little torture device, and her
eyes flew open when she heard it. The ropes binding her upper arms
and waist to the back of the chair pulled tighter as she tried to
move away. They cut into her ankles as she pulled against them. He
leaned closer, closer, the nose of that horrible device hovering a
millimeters from her shoulder. Tears streamed, and sobs wrenched at
her sternum. “P-please…I’ll sign it. J-just give me the pen.”

Smiling, Phillip backed off. He gave the
chair a kick, so it tipped to the side. Then he knelt, shoving the
paper onto the floor near her hand, sticking the pen between her
thumb and forefinger. Barely able to see through her tears, she
scratched her name onto the bottom of the sheet. Phillip yanked the
paper away so fast she barely saw it move.

He turned away from her. The pen was still in
her hand. Kirsten maneuvered it into her sleeve, pushing it up
farther and farther until it was out of sight. Then she thought it
might not have mattered. He was paying very little attention to her
now. Instead, he was pacing. Pacing, with the note in his hand,
reading it over, and thinking.

Of how he would kill her, she supposed.

Then he stopped. “More pills would be
simplest, of course, but it would take too long. They’ll be looking
for you soon.” Again he began pacing. “And they can’t find you
here.”

Then suddenly he came to where she and the
chair lay toppled on the floor, reached down and yanked her
upright. The tugging hurt her arm, but she was beyond caring about
that. Phillip crouched behind her to untie the ropes. “The house,”
he told her. “The very room where Joseph died. Using the same gun
would be nice. Dramatic, you know? But of course, the police have
that. Still, this will be almost as good. We’ll make
it…poetic.”

He freed the ropes from around her ankles,
jerked her to her feet and pulled her with him to the door. She
staggered, feet feeling oversized and clumsy as the blood rushed
back into them. They prickled and stung. She tripped. And still he
kept her moving through the door and toward the outside stairway.
Frantically, she searched the driveway. Why wasn’t anyone coming
for her?

Because she had no one. No one who cared,
anyway. Adam hated her, and if he’d told his family what she’d
done, then they all must feel the same by now. Even big, sweet Ben.
Even Penny, who’d been her best friend. Odd that she’d once thought
of them, all of them, as the next best thing to her own family. Odd
that she’d kept that feeling alive all this time, even though she’d
been estranged from them.