The Salt Maiden (5 page)

But his [Lot’s] wife looked back from behind him, and she became a pillar of salt.

—Genesis, 19:26
Holy Bible (King James Version)

Monday, June 25, 6:48
A.M.

67 Degrees Fahrenheit Forecast

High: 104 Degrees

“It’s bad enough I had to waste half my evening last night listenin’ to Weevil Jenkins carry on about that missin’ ATV of his. Now you want me to follow you in that little car of hers so I can drive you all the way back from El Paso. Three and a half hours each way.” Across the table of the Broken Spur, where Abe had plunked down a breakfast of eggs and sausage links, Deputy Wallace Hooks’s face took on the sour look that Jay was coming to know well. The easy translation was that Wallace would do things a hell of a lot differently if he’d been given a shot at being sheriff.

He probably would have had that chance had it not been for Dennis Riggins, who insisted the Hooks family already had too much power, and that twenty-nine-year-old Wallace lacked the “seasoning” to take on the position. Dennis had swayed the other county commissioners into seeing things his way, leaving Abe Hooks outvoted, and breathing new life into the Riggins-Hooks feud that had been a Rimrock County staple for generations. Wallace in particular was put out, since the sole deputy’s position may have been created with him in mind, but it demanded long hours in exchange for near-starvation wages.

“Think about it this way,” Jay said. “If we take Dr.
Vanover’s car to her, express a little professional concern, and update her on the investigation while she’s recovering, she’ll more than likely head straight back to Houston as soon as she’s healed up.”

Abe looked up from the grill, where he was cooking his own breakfast, since no other customers had arrived. “Man’s got a point, Wallace. We don’t need her back here, stirring up more trouble. If we’re to get this project under way…”

Wallace shut him up with a look of pure resentment. Beneath the thick, dark bangs, the son’s hazel eyes were as striking as his cleft chin and even features. Though his father had struggled to steer him toward some practical endeavor, Wallace had defied him, running off and hitching his way to New York City after high school. Everybody in the county—except the Rigginses, Jay guessed—had been rooting for the kid to make good on the promise of his handsome face. But instead of shooting straight to stardom on the TV soaps or maybe Broadway, as he’d hoped, Wallace couldn’t act his way into commercials; and the jockey’s build he’d inherited from his father hadn’t helped things. After six or seven years of knocking around the country working various dead-end jobs, he’d come back home to lick his wounds and take the deputy’s position created for him. But if Abe had been counting on gratitude to keep Wallace in line, he’d been deluded. Though Jay had been back in Devil’s Claw only a short time, he had quickly picked up on the friction between father and son.

Wallace used his fork to spear a chunk of scrambled egg swimming in hot sauce and then spoke around the mouthful. “To hell with all this door-to-door ass kissing. She and her nut-job sister, neither one had any business out here. And now we’re supposed to hand-deliver that fancy car of hers and act like we’re all concerned that she got snakebit?”

“I
am
concerned,” Jay said as a vision of Dana Vanover’s terrified face overtook him. He could feel her still, trembling as those tight curves filled his arms. That brief contact
had figured prominently in his dreams since. His subconscious didn’t give a damn that she was so far out of his league, he couldn’t reach her with an Apache helicopter. “The way I see it, putting a big rattler in that car was nothing short of attempted murder. And doing a thing like that right in front of my office shows a fundamental disrespect for this county’s law enforcement, disrespect for
me.
”

He glanced toward Abe, who had sworn he hadn’t seen or heard a thing in the minutes before Dana Vanover started screaming. Though Jay had questioned both Navarros, Mrs. Lockett, the always charming postmistress, Dorothy Hobarth—who had cursed him for his trouble—and the few other potential witnesses, each one had told a similar story. Suspiciously similar, to Jay’s way of thinking, but it was possible that his late-night reading—the Haz-Vestment community meeting transcripts he’d liberated from Estelle’s locked cabinet—could have left him feeling paranoid. Or maybe the memory of Baghdad, with its indecipherable mix of enemies and allies, had him looking for conspiracies at every turn.

Abe turned, swearing, to his grill, and scraped it as burning bacon smoked the tiny café. Rising from the table, Jay walked to the door and propped it open with a brick used for that purpose. A couple of hours from now the heat would come back with a vengeance, but Jay stayed by the door, enjoying fresher air while he still could.

“Who’s to say it wasn’t an accident?” asked Wallace. “What if she left her door ajar and the thing just crawled in looking for some shade?”

Jay shook his head in disbelief. “Parked car in the afternoon gets up to, what? A hundred thirty, hundred forty maybe. You don’t honestly think that old snake lived long enough to get as big as he was without having enough sense not to wriggle up inside a furnace.”

Wallace gusted out a pent-up breath, the surliness melting from his expression and leaving behind an earnestness that caught Jay by surprise.

“Maybe it’s the idea of something like that happening
here
that I can’t handle. Hell, Sheriff, we know the people around here—every one of ’em—and they aren’t killers. These are the folks who’re rebuilding your uncle’s house so you can get out of that RV, the people who put in those wheelchair ramps for old man Parker and took up a collection to hire a home health-care aide from Pecos after Mrs. Lockett broke her hip last summer. This is Devil’s Claw, not back where you worked in Dallas,” Wallace said. “People don’t kill people out here. Scare ’em, maybe, but that’s all.”

“If that snake had unloaded all his venom, she’d have been as dead as if a bullet did it.” Or the explosion of a suicide vest at one of Baghdad’s checkpoints. The thunder of it boomed through his memory, along with the hot splatter of crimson rain and the hail of fleshy chunks.

Heart pounding, he nearly dropped to the floor before he realized where he was. As Jay wiped sweat from his face with a folded bandanna from his pocket, Wallace rose and carried their plates to the counter.

As the deputy turned away, Jay caught Abe looking in the younger Hooks’s direction and caught, too, something in the glance that passed between them. Was it more evidence of the father-son struggle he’d seen earlier, or were the two united in their contempt for the new sheriff the county commissioners had foisted upon them? Had he flinched or made some sound that gave his too-real memories away?

Yet as frightening as that thought was, another possibility raised the hairs on the back of Jay’s neck. The prospect that both Abe and Wallace had fallen for Haz-Vestment’s promises of a Devil’s Claw transformed into some kind of oasis of prosperity. And that because of their belief, both father and son regretted Dana Vanover’s survival.

“It’s okay, Mom—
Hey.”
Moving the phone away from her mouth, Dana tried to catch the attention of the thickly
built Hispanic woman making off with her lunch tray. “I wasn’t finished with that.”

But the food service worker had already escaped the private room, so Dana sighed and returned her attention to her long-distance conversation. “Sorry for the interruption, and I do appreciate the offer. It’s just that there’s no need for you to fly out. The swelling’s way down, and I’m getting around fine with crutches. In fact, I’m doing so well the hospital’s giving me the boot tomorrow.”

“I would have made arrangements sooner if you’d called me. I would have been there for you, Dana.”

Dana bit her tongue to keep from asking,
Who the hell are you and what have you done with Isabel Huffington?
Since Dana, long ago cast in the role of the good—or at least the functional—daughter, was normally the last person her mother worried over, it boggled the mind to hear her sounding so…maternal.

Maybe, Dana thought, she should have allowed the hospital staff to call when she’d been flown in. Instead she had delayed, telling herself she was better off waiting until she felt well enough to make the call herself. For one thing, she had a dread of Isabel swooping in to order around the doctors and nurses—a behavior Dana had long ago concluded was her version of a touch-free hug. Now that the crisis was past, Dana admitted to herself that she’d feared even more that her mother
wouldn’t
care that she’d been hurt, that instead of showing up she would simply harangue Dana on the phone to get back to Devil’s Claw—for her darling Nikki’s sake.

I am total scum, the poster child for sibling rivalry run horribly amok.
Her face burning, Dana gave herself a mental kick.

“They’re making you leave the hospital already?” Isabel asked. “Don’t those people know you were at death’s door?”

She really did sound worried.

“No. Because I wasn’t. Really, it was an extremely light
dose of venom. I was lucky.” Dana glanced at her lower left leg, which had gone down to less than twice the size of her right. Though she had treated more than a few snakebites in canine patients, her stomach clenched at the thought of the lurid bruising beneath her bandages.

“You’re flying back to Houston, of course. I’m sending you an open ticket. I’ll hire a driver to see to your car.”

“Why would you do that? Angie’s still somewhere in Rimrock County. She
has
to be.” Dana took the snake incident as proof that she had come too close to finding her sister for someone’s comfort.

“I want her to be found, too. But those awful people tried to
kill
you.” Her mother sounded both furious and frightened.

“I’m sure they didn’t mean for me to die.” Dana was far from certain of it, really, but the knee-jerk denial seemed like a fitting penance for her childish jealousy. “They just wanted me to go home without messing up their chances for that project they’re so gung-ho about getting. They must think she’ll come back and start rabble-rousing again if I find her and get her cleaned up.”

Either that or they know what’s happened to her and don’t want me to find out.

“I won’t have this, Dana. I won’t lose you, too.”

Dana’s stomach tightened, and her limbs went cold as the implication sank in. “Angie might still be alive.”

“Of course she is. She has to be.” Her mother’s voice cracked on the last word, betraying a concern she wouldn’t—or couldn’t—voice.

Dana hesitated a moment before admitting, “I’m really worried, Mom. Worried that the reason someone put that snake in my car is because he doesn’t want me finding out he’s done something to Angie.”

Killed her
, her subconscious whispered.
Why can’t you just say it?

“I’m not coming home, Mom. Not until I have her with me.”

“But your leg is—”

“I’ll be fine. The doctor’s sure of it. I’ve already been walking on—”

“Dana, no. Whether Jerome approves or not, I’m sending out someone to help you—you remember Regina Lawler, don’t you? She’s good at getting to the bottom of things, and she’s volunteered to—”

“Of all the reporters on the planet,
not
Regina. No, Mom.” A longtime friend of her mother’s, the forty-something Regina Lawler had been a popular Houston news anchor—until, in an unscripted, on-air meltdown, she’d called the news director a “perfidious prick” for demoting her to weekends in favor of some “bleached-blond bimbette out of Tulsa, Oklahoma.” Summarily canned—and blackballed from the major markets—Regina was desperate for a story that would put her back on top.

The last time Dana had seen her, about two months ago, the woman had still been chain-smoking and profanely ranting—in spite of eight weeks of anger-management classes and all of Isabel’s attempts to distract her from her favorite topic. The very idea of being stuck with the reporter in Devil’s Claw was enough to make Dana break out in a cold sweat.

“I wanted to keep this in the family,” said her mother, “but if the media’s our only chance of finding Angie…”

Dana jumped at the sound of a firm rap at the room’s door. “Hang on a minute. Someone’s here.”

Though she wasn’t expecting anyone, she put a hand over the phone’s mouthpiece. “Come in.”

Jay Eversole stepped inside, his hat in hand and his expression serious. Far cleaner than he had been when she’d last seen him, the man looked like a Wild West fantasy in his tan-over-brown uniform, the silver star catching the light from the room’s window. Lynette would faint dead away, thought Dana.

She twitched the sheet to cover her injured leg and then
held up an index finger to signal him to wait. Uncovering the phone, she said, “Promise me you won’t do anything until we talk again. The doctor’s here to see me now. I’ll call you back this afternoon.”

As she clicked off the phone, Eversole smiled. “Doctor, huh? That’s quite a promotion.”

She shrugged. “If I’d told my mother it was you, she would have demanded I pass over the phone so she could give you an earful.”

“What makes you think she hasn’t? Several times, including last night, after you got around to telling her about that snakebite.”

Dana winced, imagining the conversation. “Sorry.”

“Don’t be. Upset mamas come with the territory. And your mother has every right to be unhappy, with one daughter hurt and the other missing.”

Before she could say more, a tap at the door preceded another interruption, an elderly man in wire-rimmed glasses and a volunteer’s vest who was mostly hidden behind an enormous spray of mixed flowers. He set the vase on the bed tray.

“Holy cow. Who died?” Dana asked.

The man laughed, his mostly bald pate turning pink. “Only my lower back from hauling that behemoth up here.”

He plucked out the card and passed it to her before wishing her a good day and a quick recovery.

“Thanks,” she said, as he waved and left them. Shaking her head at the arrangement, she added, “My mother really has no concept of proportion…Weird.”