CHAPTER TEN
LAUREN SAT IN her tiny office in what everyone called the strip mall. Three ten-by-twelve offices with small loft apartments above and a parking lot out front for eight cars. She’d opened a site for online news called ChatAroundCrossroads after she moved back from Dallas. She planned to sell ads on her webpage for income in the morning and work on her writing in the afternoon.
Only, everyone read the news, but no one bought ads, so she was forced to take editing jobs to pay the bills. Still, broke in her hometown among friends and family was better than being broke in Dallas alone.
Lauren had always thought her real money would come from writing. Short stories, poems, articles. After all, every English teacher she had in college told her she could write.
But they hadn’t told her what to write.
So far everything she tried only dribbled in small change. But last month she’d had a new idea. Dakota Davis, in the office next door, had told her scary tales about her neighbor’s place and she’d pitched the idea to Texas Monthly. They said they’d consider it.
Lauren didn’t believe any of the stories, but that might be something people would read. A feud over cattle. A gunfight over love. And a ghost who walked the land by Indigo Lake.
From there she could write other stories. Ransom Canyon was full of legends and stories.
She stared out the glass door, thinking she’d managed to get nowhere with her writing career in her five years since college, so she might as well try this road. There was good money in magazine writing if she could just make herself write. At the rate she was going she’d die of old age with her obituary only half-written.
But if she wrote about legends and curses people passed down, she might build a name for herself. She could do a series of shorts and eventually put them together in a book. The people around here knew her, trusted her. They’d open up to her.
Tapping her pencil against her forehead, she decided if she stepped into nonfiction, she’d check her facts, make it almost like a historical account. Somewhere back in the history of this area must be a real event that started the stories.
“Write, write, write,” she mumbled to herself as her fingers danced across the keyboard too lightly to produce words. She had to work, or go back to wondering why Lucas had kissed her last night like he was leaving for the front lines.
Lucas reminded her of a recurring dream that never ended. Part love story, part nightmare. She sometimes told herself he was the reason she never made up her mind about anything.
Maybe this was just puppy love that hung around ten years too long. But the truth was, she hadn’t met anyone she wanted to move on with.
Sometimes hanging on to a maybe was enough to last awhile. She’d let go of the dream of her and Lucas so slowly it had drifted out of sight before she realized it was gone. Even when he’d kissed her last night, she hadn’t allowed hope to crawl into her heart again.
She glared through the glass door at the antiques store across the street, which usually looked abandoned except on Saturdays. Maybe the town had evacuated and had forgotten to tell her. Zombies were probably roaming the streets looking for fresh brains, and here she was worrying about an almost-love she couldn’t get over.
She’d die of boredom here in her ten-by-twelve office. Passing tourists visiting the ghost town years from now would find her skeleton at her keyboard. Her fingers typed her thoughts almost as if she were really working.
Lauren hit Delete. Even when jotting down her thoughts she was overwriting. Overthinking everything.
Back to the legend of Hamilton Acres.
“Ring,” she whispered to the phone. If something didn’t happen soon, she’d fall asleep at her desk...again.
A rapping on the wall made Lauren jump. Three knocks. Dakota’s code for “ready for lunch.” It must be after one o’clock.
Lauren rapped back once and reached for her purse. The soup special at Dorothy’s Café would do today. She’d be going out with Tim tonight and he had the money to buy steak.
Lauren stepped out just as Dakota came out her door. “Have a good morning?”
“No. Not enough sleep.”
Lauren grinned. “The Hamilton ghost haunting your dreams again?”
Dakota laughed. “It’s more than that. This Hamilton is very much alive.” She giggled as if she were sixteen and not twenty-five. “I’ll tell you about it over lunch, but first, I have a surprise. I got a call off the website you set up for me.”
The conversation turned to the real estate business as they walked to the café. Lauren wanted to talk about her idea for her series, “Legends of the Plains,” but it could wait. If one of the Hamilton clan was still alive, she planned to interview him as soon as possible. If she could include pictures, Texas Monthly might be impressed.
Just as they reached their destination, Lauren’s phone rang. She waved Dakota in and answered, noticing the call was coming in from the county sheriff’s office.
“Hi, Pop, I thought you’d be sleeping by now. Brandi called to check in and said you were out at the Collins place all night.”
“It’s Pearly,” a high-pitched woman’s voice said. “Your dad doesn’t know I’m calling. He’s still out at the ranch.”
Lauren waited. As the county clerk, Pearly was one of her best sources of info on the happenings around town. Lost dogs. Wrecks on the highway. Bobcat sightings near Ransom Canyon. “What’s new?” Lauren asked, already digging in her purse for a pen.
“Your father’s been calling in orders all morning. He’s finishing up at the ranch and heading back in soon. Wanted me to know he hired a new deputy on the spot.” Pearly hesitated.
New deputy, Lauren wrote down, then waited for the name. “Fill me in on details, Pearly. Was he already in law enforcement? Where’d he find the guy? What’s his name? Old? Young?”
“That’s not why I called.” Pearly ignored all the questions. “They found a body in one of the barns that burned.”
“What!” Lauren’s mind was already running through a list of possibilities.
A homeless person bedding down—the barn was not too far from the road. He could have been trapped.
A drunk cowboy—not likely; everyone was moving out, but one might have decided to get drunk first, then leave.
A thief caught at the crime scene—went into the barn to steal something and was caught when lightning struck.
A murder—someone thought they’d cover the evidence with a fire. No, not in Crossroads.
Pearly ended her guessing game. “The body was burned too badly to tell who it was. The sheriff’s made all the right calls and secured the crime scene. I just called to give you the heads-up. Sheriff says he’s got a real special agent on scene investigating. Only, where he’d find one of them this far from nowhere, I haven’t got a clue.”
“Thanks, Pearly.” Lauren hung up, thinking of how she’d put the news together so everyone in town would check in on her site. Then she’d email the stations in Amarillo, Lubbock, and Abilene. They might run the story and give her credit, or even send out a crew.
Suddenly she felt guilty. Someone had died. Maybe he had been dead a long time, years even, buried in the back of a hay barn. Whatever the facts were, she needed to get them to the press first. She couldn’t change what had happened, but like they say, If it bleeds, it leads. A burned body might not bleed, but it was a violent death in a small town. Unless some old cowboy just died of old age and accidently got cremated when lightning struck the barn.
That didn’t make sense. There wasn’t much lightning last night, and she was out there when the barn fired up.
She rushed into Dorothy’s Café, ordering her soup as she passed the waitress, and sat down across from Dakota. “I’ve got a crime scene. A burned body. A real mystery.”
Dakota, like Lauren, would probably feel guilty later, but she said, “It’s not in a house that’s for sale? I’d hate to have to put up a this-house-is-not-haunted sign on one of my listings.”
“No. It’s at the Collins ranch, you know that big spread they call the Bar W,” Lauren said as she began jotting down questions.
“Reid Collins’s place?”
“Yeah. You know him?” Lauren was writing, only half listening.
Dakota nodded. “He’s older than me by a few years. I know he’s a town hero, but the guy always struck me as a little on the creepy side. His only topic of conversation is himself.”
Lauren grinned. “You know him, all right. He was a year ahead of me in school and we had a few dates in college. Our fathers were friends years ago, so he invited me to a few football games at Tech. I was bored to death on those dates.”
Dakota added sugar to her tea. “He asked me out last year. I hadn’t been on a date in months but I said no. I told him to ask again in ten years. I’m not that desperate yet.”
Both women laughed as they downed their cup of soup and hurried back to their little offices. Lauren had news to report and Dakota always feared she’d miss a call. Of course, since she was the only housing agent in Crossroads, whoever called once would probably call back or try her cell.
As if on cue, Lauren’s cell started ringing as she unlocked the door.
She stepped inside as she waved at Dakota.
“More news, Pearly?” Lauren said as she tugged off her jacket. Two calls in a row from the sheriff’s office.
There was a long pause, and then her Pop said, “No, this is your father.”
Lauren cringed. He never used that tone unless he was angry.
“I’m guessing Pearly has already called you.” At least Pop was quick enough to recognize the facts, even if he hadn’t had any sleep. “I fear the leak in this office is more like a waterfall.”
“Yes. She’s just keeping the press informed, Pop. Don’t yell at her.” Lauren was already typing out the few facts she knew on her website.
His voice was scary calm now. “I never yell at Pearly. She’d probably yell back.”
Lauren laughed. For twenty years she’d always suspected her brave father was a bit afraid of the county secretary. “What’s new with the investigation that I can put out? I know you found a body in one of the barns that burned. That’s all the facts. Give me more.”
Another long pause. Lauren typed in all caps, BODY FOUND AT LOCAL RANCH. This was big. Everyone in town would be reading her news site today. She’d feed them one fact at a time.
“Nothing to report beside the facts you already have, Lauren, but I thought you should know that we’re bringing Lucas Reyes, along with pretty much everyone from the Bar W, in for questioning.”
Lauren’s fingers froze on the keyboard.
Her father’s voice sounded more worried than official. “Several people have reported seeing him on the county road that runs between the Collinses’ spread and Kirkland’s land. And he did have a reason to be mad at Reid. After all, Collins fired his father yesterday. Everyone I’ve talked to this morning thinks Reid Collins handled the closing of his ranch badly. He didn’t even give the notices himself. He hired a ranch manager to do it. I don’t blame Lucas for being angry.”
“Oh, no.” Part of her wanted to tell her father that she’d been with Lucas when the first fire flamed. “You don’t think he did it, Pop? Not Lucas.”
“No, I don’t. But if he was on that road, he may have seen something out of the ordinary. Right now I’m following any lead I have.” He hesitated. “You can report that Reid was fighting to keep the sale of the ranch quiet until it was completed. As of this morning that sale has been put on hold until we find out more about both the body and the fires.”
Before she could say anything, he said he had to run and then hung up. Her father’s way of never answering questions.
Lauren sat back in her chair. The sale of one of the big ranches would be front-page news. Her father wouldn’t have told her about it unless he wanted it out. The sale of land owned for generations and the body found must be somehow linked. What a mystery!
She’d heard rumors that Reid and his dad had been selling off small sections the last few years, but not the whole ranch. She also knew Reid hated ranching, but didn’t he realize that if he sold, the income stream would stop? The older Collins probably had plenty of money for his lifetime, but Reid lived big. He’d run through whatever he made from the sell in a few years.
Lauren hesitated, her fingers over the keys. Another problem. If she told Pop she was with Lucas last night, she’d have to tell him that Lucas had punched Reid. That would only make Lucas look more guilty. But if she didn’t tell her father, the sheriff, she might be somehow withholding evidence.
She typed more details to follow and posted the few lines under Breaking News. There would be no mention of Lucas.
Lauren snapped her laptop closed. More news on the story could wait twenty minutes. Right now, she had to talk to Tim, her best friend. Maybe they could think of a way to help Lucas without making him look guilty.
If Lucas needed her testimony, she’d gladly tell the world he was with her, but if he didn’t, Lauren promised herself she wouldn’t say a word. If her dad knew about the fight earlier, he’d know there was bad blood between the two men.
“Be home, Tim,” she whispered as she headed for her car.