something he’d been putting up with since he’d reached the age of puberty, but lately it had begun to grate on his nerves.
The voice in his ear was still an unintelligible mumble, so he said, “Hold on, I can’t hear you,” and got up and walked across the patio and made his way around the corner of the house, where he’d be out of vocal range of both the football game and the sisters. “Yeah…okay. So who did you say this is?”
“Sorry. My name is Holt Kincaid. I’m a private investigator. I’m working for a friend of yours-Cory Pearson- tracking down his brothers and sisters, who got separated from him when he was a kid.”
“Oh yeah…yeah, I knew about that. Found his brothers already, I heard. Fantastic. That’s great. So why are you-”
“Cory gave me your name and number, told me to call you if anything came up while he was on assignment and I couldn’t reach either him or Sam-his wife. So…they’re both on assignment, and…something’s come up. So, I’m calling.”
“Wow. So…what? You find the baby sisters?”
“Well, yeah, one of them, but-”
“Hey, no kidding? That’s
“Yeah, well, maybe not. There’s…a problem.”
“Oh, yeah? What kind of problem?”
“It’s a little complicated to explain over the phone, and this is a terrible connection, anyway. How fast can you get to Colton, Texas?”
Gazing off across the dirt yard to where the football game was still in noisy progress, Tony could hear that the voices of his sisters around the corner on the patio had died to a frustrated mutter. Which meant they’d be turning their attention back to him the minute he showed his face again.
“Colton-whereabouts in Texas is that?”
“Uh…roughly southwest of Austin and northeast of nowhere. Hill Country.”
“Okay, how’s about tonight? Say around dinnertime.”
“What? Where in hell are you?”
“At the moment I’m in Arizona, at my mom’s. It’s her birthday. Talk about northeast of nowhere. Otherwise I’d be there sooner.”
“Are you crazy? That’s gotta be eight or nine hundred miles.”
“What? You think I’m gonna drive it? Across West Texas? Now, that would be crazy. Hey, do me a favor, okay? Check and see if this town you’re in has a general-aviation airfield. Failing that, any kind of level airstrip…piece of road-hell, even a cow pasture without too many rocks.”
“I can tell you right now,
“Cool. I’m on my way.”
Tony disconnected the phone and stuck it back in his pocket, then took a breath and summoned the courage to go and break the news to his mother that he was going to be leaving her birthday party a little sooner than expected.
Brooke’s lawyer was an old-school Texan, a grand-fatherly sort named Sam Houston Henderson, from her father’s old law firm in Austin. He drove her home after the bail hearing and left her surrounded by a welcoming committee consisting of Daniel; Pastor Steven Farley and his wife, Myra; Rocky and Isabel Miranda, her neighbors from across the road who’d been looking after the animals in her absence; and of course, Hilda, who almost knocked them all flat in her exuberant joy at having the missing members of her “flock” all together and back under her protection again. Brooke was glad to be back, too, of course, but her relief was tempered by what the lawyer had told her in the car on the way home.
“Now, Brooke, honey, you know just because the judge granted you bail doesn’t mean you’re out of the woods on this thing. You got bail because you’ve got sole responsibility for your boy and your animals, and because pretty much everything you own is tied up in your place and in that trust your daddy set up for you. So it’s not likely you’d be goin’ anywhere. And it’s also not likely you’d be a further danger to society, so there just wasn’t any justification in keepin’ you locked up. But that is a deputy sheriff and a local boy you’re accused of killin’, so we’ve got one hell of an uphill fight ahead of us. You know that, don’t you?”
“What about Lady?” Brooke had asked.
“Lady-oh, yeah, the cougar. Well, now…”
“Lonnie Doyle is going to do his best to have her put down.”
“I’m gonna be honest with you, Brooke. It’s gonna be tough to argue that lion isn’t a dangerous animal. She did maul your husband-”
“Ex-husband.”
“-and she did draw blood, whether that was what killed him or not. But for now I don’t want you to worry about that. We’ve got some time before they get around to a hearing about the cat, and right now you need to get yourself rested up so we can figure out how to fight this battle we’re in. Okay? Now, you go on and enjoy being with your boy, and have a quiet weekend, and I’ll talk to you next week.”
“Yes, sir,” Brooke had murmured, and now she stood safe in her own home, surrounded by the warmth and love of her son, her dog and her good friends the Farleys and the Mirandas.
“It’s gonna be okay, Mom,” Daniel whispered as he let her hug him longer than usual.
“I know. Of course, it is.” But as she watched Sam Houston Henderson’s taillights turn the corner at the end of the lane, inside she felt nothing but cold and hollow and scared to death.
“Must be nice, having your own plane,” Holt said to his passenger as they sped back to town on the two-lane FM road that connected it to its surprisingly busy airfield. He’d discovered airfields of the kind that served the town of Colton were pretty common in Texas, which made sense, seeing as how airplanes were probably the most practical means of bridging the enormous distances between anyplace and anyplace else in that part of the country.
“Yeah,” Tony said, “the kinds of places my job takes me, sometimes it’s about the only way to get there.” He looked over at Holt. “Matter of fact, it was your client’s wife-Sam-she’s the one that taught me to fly.”
“That right?”
“We had an…adventure, the three of us, a few years back. In the Philippines. Kind of got me hooked on vintage planes, I guess. She was flying a World War II Gooney Bird at the time. Mine’s a little later vintage than that, though-1979 Piper Cherokee. I’ve got her equipped for long-range flying-extra fuel tanks and all that. Places I go, refueling can be a problem.”
Holt glanced at the man taking up what seemed like more than his share of space in the car. From what little chance he’d had to take the man’s measure, Holt couldn’t in any way, shape or form call him overweight, so it must be something to do with charisma, he decided, that made Tony Whitehall seem larger than life. “So, you’re a photographer?”
“Photojournalist,” Tony corrected, but with a forgiving grin.
That was another thing Holt had noticed right away, the easygoing but straightforward manner that made a person both like and trust the man instinctively. He was beginning to see why Cory Pearson had put him at the top of his list of people to go to in an emergency.
“Well, you’re gonna fit right in, in Colton,” he said dryly. “The place is a zoo. Crawling with news media.”
“Yeah?” Tony shifted around to look at him. “This wouldn’t have anything to do with the ‘problem’ you mentioned, would it?”
“It would.” Holt stared at the road ahead and thought about where to begin. Finally, he said, “You said you knew we found the boys, right? Cory’s two brothers. Last summer. Found Wade-the oldest-first. He was a cop up in Portland. And since the two boys had been adopted by the same couple, he put us right in touch with Matt, down in LA.”
“Right, and now you say you found the girls?” Tony prompted, but not in an impatient way.
“
