“Not that I know of, and she would have said. Everyone liked Becca—” Shea stopped, and Dru heard it, too, the ethereal chime of Shea’s cell phone, coming from her bedroom. “I bet that’s AJ,” she said, dashing from the kitchen.
Dru was loading their mugs into the dishwasher when Shea returned.
“It was Mrs. Gordon,” she said, “my adviser from school. The police came to her office. They want to talk to me.”
“Why?” Dru felt a jolt of alarm.
“She didn’t know. I’m supposed to call this detective, Sergeant Troy Bushnell.” Shea read the name from a scrap of paper. “They want to talk to AJ, too.”
“AJ.” Dru, unhappily, repeated her future son-in-law’s name.
“He’s still not answering his phone. I’m worried now. I think I should talk to him before I call this detective, don’t you? I mean, what do they want with us? What could we possibly know? I wasn’t in Dallas last night.”
“AJ was.”
“Yes, but he was working at Café Blue. He was supposed to work till midnight, but they weren’t busy, so he took off early.”
Dru turned. “Maybe they only want to question you about what sort of girl Becca was, whether you know anyone who might want to harm her, that sort of thing.” Dru had no idea if she was right. She could only say what she’d heard watching shows like Dateline and the like. She was upset, though, as disturbed as Shea. What could the police possibly want with her?
“What should I do, Mom?”
Call and get it over with. That’s what Dru was going to say when her cell phone went off. She picked it up, glancing at the ID window. “It’s AJ’s mom,” she said.
“Answer it. She might know where AJ is.”
Dru did so, reluctantly, formal in her greeting—she and Lily Isley would never be friends. By contrast, Lily’s voice was sharply urgent.
“Have you seen AJ?” she asked. “Has Shea? Is he there?”
Dru straightened. “Why are you looking for him?”
A moment passed as if Lily needed time to compose an answer.
“Mom?” Shea took a step toward Dru. “What’s the matter?”
Dru met her daughter’s gaze, shaking her head slightly.
Lily apologized. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t mean to—to frighten you or Shea, but it’s—have you seen AJ, either of you? Or spoken to him?”
“No. Shea tried calling him. You’ve heard about Becca Westin?” Dru was guessing.
“She was murdered last night. I know. It’s awful.”
“Yes,” Dru said. She felt wary now and somehow suspicious of Lily. She met Shea’s alarmed stare, and although she tried, she couldn’t hold it. She wouldn’t realize it until later, that it wasn’t Shea’s fear she was avoiding as much as it was some inner recognition that once again their lives were taking a sudden detour down a dark and twisted road she hadn’t even known was there.
Lily spoke. “The police said AJ and Becca dated.”
Dru could have confirmed that was true, but in her preoccupation with her sense of things falling apart, she didn’t.
“I’m on my way to Wyatt,” Lily said. “I’m going to the ranch. I should be there in a half hour or so.”
Dru’s heart, as if it knew there was more to come that was worse, fell against her ribs. “Why? What is going on, Lily?”
“Becca was killed in AJ’s apartment.” Lily rushed the words. “The police think he had something to do with it.”
No, Dru thought. They think he did it. She turned her back to Shea, teeth clenched, fighting for breath, sense, calm. But her mind was on fire. She’d known, hadn’t she, that AJ was trouble from nearly the moment Shea brought him to meet her? The guy was a time bomb, one of those IEDs, looking for a place to explode. She didn’t give a rat’s ass about his medal or his bravery in battle. She’d seen in his eyes the mess all that had made of his sanity, and she was sorry for him. Sorry for all the boys, the fine young men, who got their bodies and minds twisted up in the name of service to their country. But compassion for their damage didn’t alter its toxicity. She’d seen what it could do—seen that same unbalanced turmoil in her ex-husband’s eyes twelve years ago, the night he ran her and Shea out of their house in Houston at the business end of a loaded shotgun.
AJ had that same wild, haunted look. Not in every moment, but Dru had seen it, nonetheless. He tried to keep it masked, but the disconnect was there. Oh, yes, it was. Dru didn’t want AJ having her daughter. She’d forbid the match if she could. But no, Shea loved him like she loved her daddy. And now look. Just look.
“Mom?”
Dru turned and went to Shea, pulling her in close.
Lily said, “The police are looking for AJ, Dru. I think he’s at the ranch.”
“Have you called?”
“I don’t want to worry Dad, and Winona’s not answering her cell phone.”
Winona Ayala was Erik’s mother and the Axels’ housekeeper. Dru knew her. Not personally, but Wyatt was a small town. Everyone talked about everyone else. Over time, Dru had learned Winona’s story: that she was from Oaxaca, a small town called Loma Bonita near the border with Veracruz. She’d come to the United States when she was seventeen on a visa, and a cousin had gotten her the job with the Axels—Jeb and his late wife, Roseanne, when Roseanne was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. Winona had been required to earn her citizenship, but Erik had been born in Wyatt. Dru didn’t know where his father was—back in Oaxaca, if what she’d heard was true.
He was a good kid. She’d hired him once when, in junior high, Shea talked her into adopting two orphaned donkeys. Dru had housed them in the old barn on her property. Not knowing a thing about caring for them, she’d stopped in at the feed store in town, where Erik had been working part-time. He’d offered to deliver their weekly allotment of feed and bedding straw, even though it wasn’t in his job description. Shea, and Kate, too, had nearly swooned every time he came over. They had acted so silly that Dru had despaired. Erik was older, eighteen to the girls’ thirteen, so she’d thought he would surely get enough of them and quit. But somehow the three had become friends. They laughed at themselves and those memories now and marveled how it was that Shea had needed to go all the way to Dallas to culinary school to meet AJ when he’d spent almost every summer here, at his granddad’s ranch, hanging out with Erik.
Lily was talking about the poor cell reception at the xL. She said, “Winona’s probably there, but I’m worried the police are, too. You haven’t heard anything, have you, on the news about the police being out there?”
“No, but Shea heard from someone at the school in Dallas that the police want to talk to her and to AJ. Shea’s got nothing to do with this, Lily. I don’t want her involved.” Not with the police and not with your son. The rest of Dru’s thought carved a bitter path through her brain.
“Involved in what?” Shea asked. Alert to every nuance of hostility on Dru’s part, she pulled free of Dru’s embrace.