The Salt Maiden (3 page)

If he meant that literally, Dana felt sorry for his mother. “Sorry,” she said. “I understood that the last sheriff died, that you had recently been recruited.”

He gave her an appraising look, one that lingered a bit too long for comfort. “Been checking up on me?”

She nodded. “The
Pecos Enterprise
is online. I read about it on the Web, tried to find out as much as possible about what I was getting into before I headed out here.”

He hesitated before answering. “My uncle…he was the sheriff killed in the house fire that burned what used to be my grandfather’s homestead.”

“I’m sorry.”

“So am I. But the paper had some of its facts wrong. I didn’t get recruited. Before the Guard called up my unit I was a cop in Dallas, and by the time I got back stateside I was more than ready to head home.”

“You were overseas?” she asked. It made sense to her: his rigid posture and directness, his terse way of speaking on the phone. All bespoke a military background.

But something had shifted in him with her question. Tension stiffened his limbs, and the light dimmed in those blue eyes.

“I was proud to serve,” he said quietly.

She wondered about that but answered honestly: “You should be.” Though she had a whole flock of reservations about the current conflict. None of them, however, dampened the respect her late father, who had served as a surgeon in Vietnam, had instilled in her for those who fought and sometimes died to fulfill what they saw as their duty.

But even if Eversole had served in hell, Dana couldn’t imagine anyone willingly returning to Devil’s Claw, Texas. Strong homing instinct, she decided—or the Dallas PD didn’t want him back.

“Well, I’m home now,” he said, “though I’m pretty sure I’ve wasted most of my first week on the job hunting a woman who took a notion to move on. That happens around here, especially among the squatters. And your sister has a history.”

“She wouldn’t leave her car.”

“Could be she abandoned it. It’d cost more to fix than it’s worth.”

Dana cast a guilty look at her little blue convertible, a “pick-me-up” gift from her mother after the one-two punch of the surgery and breakup. Angie, on the other hand, had been driving an ancient Buick with a couple of hundred thousand miles and almost no paint on it. Anything better and she’d simply trade it for a high-grade hit of whatever
she could find, or turn it into quick cash to donate to some crazy cause or a friend with a sob story.

“Maybe she left the car, but I’ve already told you she’d never go without that loom, especially with a nearly finished tapestry on it. I called the gallery owner she deals with, and he told me she has a buyer waiting. Angie stands to collect close to two grand on delivery.”

He shook his head. “Drugs and alcohol can reshuffle a person’s priorities. Your sister has both weaknesses, from the looks of her arrest record. Probably plenty more charges I haven’t found, too, since she’s skipped through a lot of jurisdictions.”

“I
know
she’s still around here.” Dana stared up at the sheriff over her sunglasses’ dark rims. “We can’t quit looking. And you won’t. You’re just hot and tired and frustrated right now. And annoyed that I’m here to bother you in person.”

“I wouldn’t say annoyed”—beneath the grime there was the suggestion of a smile as his gaze skimmed over her—“exactly. But the rest is on the money. And I mean what I say. Always.”

Aggravation tightened her mouth. One thing she was sure of: he was stiff-necked. Proud, too. But if he thought that she would give up, he was also clueless.

“You can’t,” she insisted. “What can I do to help you? I could go through her house.”

“It’s only a one-room adobe, and my deputy and I have both been over it twice already.”

“Please, I’d like to see it.”

Beneath his hat’s brim, the sheriff squinted. “Damned blast furnace out here. Might want to finish this conversation inside. Not that it’s going to change my answer.”

“What’s the real reason you want to drop this? Because some fry cook gave you the evil eye?”

Looking grimmer than ever, he slammed shut the SUV’s door. “You’d better not let Judge Hooks hear you call him that.”

A buzzing started in Dana’s ears as a sense of unreality descended. With so few people, roles overlapped here, creating crosscurrents she could never hope to understand. The thought left her disoriented, as if she’d been dropped off in a country where she didn’t know the customs and couldn’t speak the language.

The sheriff took a step or two toward the courthouse, then turned to peer over his shoulder. “You’d better hurry. Estelle’ll be turnin’ off the air-conditioning in another twenty minutes. County budget cutbacks.

“I’ve got a little fridge behind my desk,” he added, sweetening the deal. “Cold jug of water in it, maybe even a Coke or two.”

Despite the hat, the dirt, and the creases, his blue eyes smiled as he said it. Maybe he guessed that the suggestion had her suddenly parched mouth begging for a sip of icy sweetness.

“I’ll come in,” said Dana. “I think I could learn to appreciate shade in a whole new way here.”

Not that summer in Houston, with its stifling humidity, was any picnic, but even this late in the afternoon the desert sun seemed hell-bent on sucking every drop of moisture from her cells. For all her differences with Angie, it was that sun that most scared Dana. What if, instead of shacking up with some new lover, Angie was wandering somewhere in the featureless, flat scrubland, disoriented by the heat and sunburned lobster red?

If she’s out in that, she’s as good as dead.
Dana closed her eyes as the horizon tilted.
And more than likely so is Nikki.

The dog barked at the same moment the sheriff caught her arm. “Inside,” he urged. “Gotta get you cooled down. Then we’ll talk.”

He held open the front door for her. The dog slipped through first, his short nails clicking on a marble floor dulled and scratched by years of sandy footsteps. The dark-paneled walls looked worn, too, and yellow splotches
marked the ceiling tiles in places and accounted for the musty-stale smell, at least in part. A bucket of sand, bristling with cigar butts, offered further explanation. Dana figured they probably kept a spittoon tucked inside the men’s room. Or maybe even in the ladies’.

“They had this place done up real nice back when the oil revenues were better,” Eversole said as his boot heels struck a deeper note. He pulled off his hat, revealing short, light brown hair darkened in the places sweat had dampened it. “Been a while, though. Back when my granddad was the sheriff.”

She heard the defensiveness in his voice, a warning that he wouldn’t tolerate her looking down on the courthouse, town, and county he’d reclaimed as his own. It didn’t much surprise her. She’d seen his mouth tighten when he’d caught sight of the Beamer. Besides that, the Anne Klein shorts and Talbots top she wore with her flat sandals were simple, classic—and as out of place as scuba gear in Rimrock County.

“So you’ve come back to the family business?” She preferred small talk over her mother’s methods of persuasion.

He shrugged and opened a smoked-glass door labeled sheriff. “Pay’s steadier than ranching, but I plan to keep a hand in that, too. Or will until the damned salad lovers take over the world.”

She smiled. “That would be me. Vegetarian for five years. Since I toured a slaughterhouse in vet school.”

He shook his head and snorted.

“Vegetarian veterinarian who sees fuzzy little pups and kitties instead of dosing heifers.” His eyes glinted with amusement. “This is gonna be the greatest thing for local gossip since that pack of flying-saucer hunters took a wrong turn on the way to Roswell in the eighties. But not even those weirdoes would dare to stick their noses up at Abe Hooks’s burgers.”

She laughed and stepped inside the office, where a plump woman was rifling through the top drawer of the only desk.

“Help you find something, Estelle?”

As the woman looked up, Dana’s focus remained stuck on the flypaper of that iron gray hairdo. Half pompadour, half beehive, with a neat little bun in back, it went well with the fifties checked dress and made Dana think of Aunt Bea from the reruns of that old
Mayberry
show.

With a start Dana recognized the small brown eyes and the nose, which clued her in that she had just met the she-male version of this woman at the Broken Spur. The one with the Clark Kent glasses, the gray hair, and what had turned out to be one foul mouth. There was no question that the two must be related, but talk about flip sides of the same coin.

“We’re out of paper clips again, Jay. How on earth do people expect a tax office to run without a decent supply budget—Oh.” Her expression closed as she noticed Dana. “You must be that other Vanover girl that Jay said would be coming.”

“Dana Vanover.” Smiling, she offered her hand, ridiculously eager to win over one person in this county. Especially someone clever enough to manage that feat of hairstyle engineering without a salon for miles around. Dana’s own strategically messy blond hair had long since fallen limp around her shoulders.

Estelle didn’t take her hand. “
Miss
Vanover?”

“Actually, it’s Doctor, but Dana’s fine,” she said.

“Around here, Dr. Vanover, we’re not so fast and loose with first-name privileges. I’m Mrs. Hooks, the county tax collector.”

“And the judge’s wife?”

“I am.”

All hope of an ally fizzled. For all Dana knew, Abe Hooks had already phoned the woman since their run-in. Or perhaps in a town this small, gossip traveled by osmosis.

“Do you…do you have a sister?” Dana asked, grasping at one last straw.

The woman nodded stiffly and excused herself, but not
before giving Eversole a look as pointed as her husband’s. As she closed the door behind her, Dana noticed that her right foot dragged.

“Sore subject.” Eversole tossed his hat onto the desktop, where a small mushroom cloud of dust rose. “They may’ve shared a womb once, but Estelle and Dorothy haven’t spoken for a lot of years.”

The two were
twins
? Stranger and stranger…“Seems like that could get pretty inconvenient in a town this small.”

“You’d be surprised at how much feuding we pack in per capita. Same old grudges I remember from when I was a kid.” With that, Eversole gestured toward a straight-backed chair, then went to a peeling, square refrigerator wedged between two four-drawer file cabinets behind his desk. He pulled out a Coke for Dana before filling an aluminum pie pan with water and setting it on the floor beside the dog.

“There you go, Max,” the sheriff said. As the animal lapped and splashed, his stub tail wagging, Eversole filled a huge plastic cup with more water from the gallon jug.

Because she liked a man who tended his animal before himself, Dana didn’t ask him where Abe Hooks kept his puppet’s strings. Instead she thanked him for the soda and savored each sweetly carbonated swallow while she watched the way his throat worked as he drained his cup. When he went for a second, her gaze lingered on the fit of his Levi’s as he bent over.

Not half-bad for a marionette. He definitely had the whole cowboy thing working for him. She ought to take pictures for Lynette, since her partner—who had worked with equines until a fractious filly kicked her hard enough to shatter her knee—followed the pro rodeo riders’ circuit with a devotion most often reserved for cult religions. Dana had always preferred a little more polish in her men, though considering Alex and his damned text message, she had decided that Ben and Jerry were male company enough for the foreseeable future.

Eversole sat in the wooden roller chair behind a beat-up desk. She lowered herself into the chair he’d indicated to her and took another sip of blessed cola. “The gallery owners who handled Angie’s weavings haven’t heard from her in months. The friends and former lovers I was able to track down haven’t either. She hasn’t contacted our mom to ask for money, and with her car out of commission, I would have expected that for sure. Angie’s never liked to be tied down.”

Eversole nodded, then pulled a bandanna from the pocket of his jeans, wet it with more water, and wiped some of the dirt from his face before he spoke. “I’ve made some more calls since we last talked, to law enforcement in surrounding counties and over in New Mexico. She hasn’t been arrested in any of them, and no unidentified…uh…remains match her description.”

“Which means she’s still here,” Dana insisted.

“Search hasn’t turned up one sign, not even the plane.”

“It’s a big desert,” she said. “And with all the shadows from those rills and washes I saw on the way here—”

“They’re arroyos. They drain rainwater off the foothills. Funnel flash floods, too, on occasion.”

Dana’s heart sank. “Should we search downstream, then? Have there been any hard rains since she vanished?”

“No, and there is no
we
in this search, not out on the desert. It’d kill you fast this time of year—kill anybody who doesn’t know what times of day to look and what to stay away from.”

Though it rankled, she suspected he was right. Her nature experience mostly consisted of jogs along carefully manicured park trails. “I understand, but what if I offered to bring in an investigator and a couple more planes, with private pilots? My family will gladly pay for—”

The blue eyes narrowed. “While you’ve been sitting back in Houston dreaming up ways to throw around your money, my deputy, a few volunteers, and I have thoroughly searched all around the place where she was living. And I’m telling
you we haven’t found a single thing to indicate—”

“Why don’t you just say it?” Dana asked him. “You want me gone from here, the same as Angie. You’d just as soon forget about my sister and that little girl in Houston.”

When his jaw clenched, attraction stirred inside her, as annoying as it was disconcerting. But Dana knew relief, too, that she still had the capacity to feel it, though both the man and the timing were nonstarters.

“I want your sister found as much as you do.” His eyes held a quiet sincerity that looked real.

But so did the mirages that shimmered in the afternoon heat. Thinking of what the Clark Kent woman had said as she was leaving the café, Dana decided it was time to let him know that she might be a long way from Houston, but she was even farther from being a gullible mouth-breather.