Fool's Gold (A sexy funny mystery/romance, Cottonmouth Book 2) (38 page)

Brax leaned forward and tapped the recorder.
“Tape two. She wanted everyone to think he’d run away with another
woman. So, she planned to keep his truck in her garage for a few
weeks, then drive it into the desert and push it off some bluff so
it wouldn’t be found. Don’t know how she figured she was going to
get back home after dumping it.” Brax puffed out a disgusted
breath. “Course, when the chickens found him, she had to improvise.
Lucky for her, the trailhead wasn’t a far walk from her house.”

Teesdale snorted. “The criminal mind. Musta
really missed the good part when I got up for that doughnut. Sorry
I didn’t bring you one.” Then he smiled a shit-eating grin. “Thank
God I had a good small town sheriff holding down the fort in
there.”

Brax didn’t comment that Teesdale should have
stayed to handle the interview, since he suspected a doughnut
wasn’t the business the sheriff had taken care of. A man deserved
privacy. Between them, they’d gotten what they needed out of
Della.

“You know, women really make murder
complicated,” Teesdale went on. “She doesn’t kill Carl because she
wants the gold, she kills him because she doesn’t want anyone to
find out she isn’t really a lawyer. Is that ass-backward or what?
She could have stolen the gold or put her own name on the claim,
or, for that matter, hightailed it out of town and started over
somewhere else. But no, she creates this elaborate murder
scheme.”

“Women are deep, complicated creatures.” Brax
doubted he would ever truly understand them.

Teesdale stretched back in his chair and put
his hands behind his head. “At any rate, Lafoote will hire some
wily lawyer to get him out of any blackmail charge. His story is
that he didn’t understand the significance of what he saw Della
doing until after you told him Carl had been murdered.” He raised a
skeptical brow. “In fact, he claims he was on his way to see me
when he saw Della following you and Simone and thought he better
see what was up.”

Bullshit. “He was following Simone, not
Della. I think the little weasel’s been following Simone for a long
time.”

Teesdale spread his hands. “It was stalking
lite, if anything at all. Nothing we can prove.”

Earlier, in her same flat monotone, Simone
had confirmed a feeling of being watched a couple of times. But
there were no threatening phone calls or messages, nothing about
her trailer that appeared tampered with—in short, no hard
evidence.

Dammit. Teesdale was right, even if Brax
didn’t like the fact. Lafoote had skirted the hairy edge on
everything he’d done, and consequently, they couldn’t get him
conclusively on anything. “Fine. I’ll give you that. But he
threatened us both with a weapon. Assaulting a peace officer. I
don’t care what you get him on, just get him. He’s got some weird
obsession with Simone, and I don’t want him out there threatening
her.”

Teesdale shook his head sadly. “Says he was
about to hand the gun over when your sister jumped him.”

“Bullshit.”

“We have nothing substantial to hold him. I
gotta let him go.”

Dammit. Brax finally raised his hands in
surrender. Maggie’s war cry had ended any further incriminating
crap that might have flowed out of the guy’s mouth. Jesus Christ.
If Simone hadn’t had a gun pointed at her, the whole incident would
have been laughable. Teesdale had followed Maggie, who’d followed
Lafoote, who’d followed Simone. Why they hadn’t stumbled all over
each other, he’d never know. God. The sheriff was right. It was a
major cluster fuck.

“I’ll make sure he doesn’t get near Simone.”
Though Brax wasn’t sure she’d let him near her even to provide
protection.

“That’s your job, buddy boy.” Teesdale
twirled a pencil stub on his blotter. “What are you going to do
about Maggie?”

An ache started behind his eyeballs. Maggie’s
friend
had planned Carl’s demise from the moment he’d
demanded she process the claim ASAP, right after his wife had
threatened to Bobbitize him. Carl told Della he had to show Maggie
the gold before she left him. It was the only hope of saving his
marriage. Brax would take that part with him to his grave and hope
to hell Maggie never found out. Jesus, Carl had simply wanted to
show Maggie he wasn’t a loser. With a million bucks in the bank,
he’d still needed to prove something. After losing everything in
the stock market, Carl had lost his belief in himself. His current
bank balance hadn’t restored his self-confidence. Brax was pretty
damn sure the gold wouldn’t have either.

They’d never know.

Della had bled Carl. She’d had him give her
money for filing fees, recording fees, et cetera, though she
claimed she still had the cash in her office desk at home. Teesdale
would check that. When she couldn’t think of another erroneous fee,
she’d had Carl catalog his entire financial history, which
explained the organization of his files and the listings in his
spiral notebook. Della had conned him into believing he’d need to
provide every detail when they finally submitted the filing papers.
Was it stupidity on Carl’s part or implicit trust in a woman he’d
known for years? Freaking pathetic. Della had been stringing him
along to cover her own ass.

That last night, when Della demanded three
thousand dollars to complete the registration, cash she’d never
dreamed Carl had access to—she hadn’t even looked over the fiscal
information he’d given her—he’d gotten the money to her the next
morning. Concealing her shock, she took it, revised her plan, said
she had to see the claim itself in order to verify it before, as a
judge, she could sign off.

She’d killed him on the way up.

Brax couldn’t tell Maggie. It would kill her
spirit to know exactly what Della had done, just as the truth had
crushed Simone.

If Maggie hadn’t screamed at Carl, if they
hadn’t been fighting about sex and money. If, if, if. Maggie would
drive herself crazy with it all, and there was nothing he could do
about it.

Except lie and hope she never heard the
gossip in The Stockyard’s produce section at.

“Don’t whitewash it, Braxton,” Teesdale said,
reading his mind. “Tell her the truth. She deserves it, and she’s
strong enough to take it. Never underestimate a woman’s
strength.”

He didn’t underestimate a woman’s strength.
He’d overestimated his own. And he didn’t know where he’d find the
extra reserves to do what he had to do.

Chapter Twenty-One

Maggie sat on the bed in her room, in the
gloom, the blinds drawn against the heat of the endless day.

Brax picked up her limp hand, pressing his
lips to the back of it. She hadn’t spoken since he told her. The
truth. All of it. From the gold to the fantasy, and finally what
her friend Della had done to them all. “Maggie.”

“I’m sorry, Tyler,” she whispered.

Listening to her childlike voice, his heart
broke in half all over again. “Carl wouldn’t want you to be sorry.
None of this was your fault.”

“I never thought he was a loser.”

Nor had Brax implied it when he revealed the
story piece by piece. He didn’t give her verbatim every detail of
Della’s confession, but the woman had shed quite a bit of light on
Carl’s antipathy. Lafoote had hammered Carl with his
less-than-a-zero-nobody theme in an attempt to sucker Carl into
supporting the resort. His plan had been to reward Carl with a
percentage of the hotel if he got Della to sign all the permits.
The strategy backfired, creating a seething anger in Carl. As soon
as Carl found the gold, he made his own plan to stick it to
Lafoote. Whatever prosperity came to the town because of the gold,
Carl intended to see that Lafoote didn’t share in it.

Maggie had known Carl’s insecurities, but
she’d misjudged where the anxiety would take him. That didn’t lay
the blame at her feet. She couldn’t have anticipated how Lafoote
would use those insecurities and that Carl’s lack of confidence
would eventually lead to his death.

Maggie wiped a tear from her cheek before
Brax could reach up to catch it. “I can’t believe he had Simone
write me a fantasy.”

“He loved you. He was willing to do anything
to make things right again.”

“I wouldn’t really have hurt him.”

“I know. He knows it, too.” Wherever he was,
Carl knew.

They hadn’t said a thing about Della’s
betrayal. Brax had told her. Maggie had heard. Then they’d put it
away.

“I didn’t mean to scare Mom by sneaking
out.”

“You promised me you’d stay put.”

She shrugged helplessly. “I said I wouldn’t
leave while you were sleeping.”

He could have given her a hard time, but what
was the point? With all his questions, he was the one who put the
idea of Jason Lafoote in her mind in the first place. “You weren’t
thinking straight, honey.”

Mom had called 911, and Teesdale had started
an immediate search. No idiot, he’d assumed Maggie would head up
the trail to see where Carl had died. The spot was a magnet. Jesus,
they’d had a posse on their tail the whole time.

Yep, the cluster fuck of the century. He
closed his eyes. Jesus. He’d almost lost Simone.

“Tyler, it wasn’t your fault.”

“Don’t start trying to look after me, Maggie.
I’m looking after you.” The way he should have done from the moment
he arrived. If he’d read the signs, Carl wouldn’t be dead.

She stared at him. “You look like me when I
see myself in the mirror. You think if you’d done this or you
hadn’t done that, none of this would have happened.”

“Yeah, that’s what I think.” If he’d listened
to his gut, Simone wouldn’t have walked into that cave either. But,
as Simone said, hindsight only worked in hindsight.

“That’s the way I think, too,” Maggie said.
“I shouldn’t have said all those awful things to Carl that
night.”

If she saw that it was wrong for him to heap
the blame on himself, then maybe she could see it was wrong for
her, too. “We both should have done things differently. But we
didn’t.”

“I should have told him he’d earned that
money and he deserved to spend it without having to account to
me.”

He should have told Simone he loved her
before he let her walk out of Teesdale’s office. “I should have
made Carl tell me how he was going to prove to everyone he wasn’t a
failure.”

She cocked her head at him. “He told you he
was a failure?”

“That was the gist.” The night they’d driven
home from The Dartboard. So many things he should have figured out
that night.

“I never called him a failure. I never
thought he was.” Maggie pulled open the drawer of the nightstand
and shuffled things around. Holding her hand out, the ring
glittered on her palm, as if it somehow found what little light
there was in the room and let itself be worshipped by it.

“Isn’t it the most beautiful thing you’ve
ever seen?” Maggie whispered reverently.

It was just a ring—Brax wasn’t partial to
jewelry—but it did glitter, a large diamond in the center flagged
by smaller stones around the band. “It’s beautiful.”

“Carl found it in one of the outhouses.”

The famous outhouse diamond. “Why keep it in
a drawer?”

“I wanted to wait until he found a diamond
necklace to match. I guess we were both waiting for something
better to come along. Carl and his gold, and me and a diamond
necklace.”

“Start wearing it now, Maggie.”

She shook her head. “It’s too late for
Carl.”

“It’s not too late for you. Put it on.”

She slipped it on next to her wedding band.
“We got married so quickly, we never even bought an engagement
ring.”

“This one will work.”

She squeezed her eyes shut and leaned against
his shoulder. “I miss him so much, Tyler. I made so many mistakes,
and I can never take them back.”

He held her hand in his. “There’ll always be
mistakes we can’t take back.” He’d made plenty of his own over the
years. “But you have to let them go and start over for yourself. It
wasn’t your fault he fell. You didn’t push him.”

She didn’t say anything.

“Look at me.” He lifted her chin. “He loved
you. Wear the ring and remember that.”

“I’ll try, Tyler. I really will.” She
sniffed, and sucked in her breath, holding back her tears.

The coming days and months would be hard on
her, but he’d remind her how much Carl loved her every time she
needed him to. She and Carl had both made mistakes, taken each
other for granted once too often. There would be no second chance
for them, and Maggie would mourn that as much as she would mourn
Carl.

Brax couldn’t say the right thing to cleanse
Maggie’s pain. He would never be able to. The only things he could
provide were an ear to listen when she needed to talk and open arms
to hold her while she cried.

Hallelujah. He’d finally figured out the big
secret. After years of searching, it all came down to those two
simple things. They were all any man could offer. Maybe they were
all a woman needed. He planned on giving both to Simone. For the
rest of her life, if she’d let him.

“Go ahead and cry your eyes out, honey. I’m
right here.” He held Maggie tight while she cried, never once
begging her to stop.

* * * * *

“Where on earth were you, Simone? We’ve been
frantic.”

Her mother didn’t look frantic. In fact, she
looked fresh as a daisy in a silk Chinese print and perfectly
painted red lips. The silk print clashed with the orange tufts of
Simone’s thrift store sofa. Jackie huddled in a ball in the
opposite corner of the couch, her chin on her knees, her eyes
wide.

Kingston nursed a steaming cup of coffee and
stared at Simone with worry. “You all right, honey?”

“I took a walk.” She hadn’t come straight
home. She’d wandered Goldstone streets, the same ones she’d already
traversed. No one had stopped to ask about Della or Carl. Nor had
anyone accosted her. She was safe.