Perfect Touch (18 page)

Reg was left holding the filthy end of more than one stick, but she's not complaining about how unfair life is.

I've had a gut full of excuses, Barton's most of all.

Jay trotted the mare back to the corral where the horses that would be ridden the next day were kept. Automatically he cared for the mare, then turned her loose in the corral and carried the tack to the barn before he headed to the house.

Sara is here.

He gave up trying to talk himself out of caring. Life was unexpected. Death was the same and utterly final. Sara was here and he would enjoy her for as long as it lasted. If it got under Henry's skin, he could take his meals in the bunkhouse the way he had when Liza lived on the ranch.

Within minutes, Jay was climbing the stairs to Sara's room. The door was ajar, so he pushed it open. She was sitting cross-legged on the bed, reading one of the papers from the carton open beside her. Other papers fanned across the bed in a pattern only she could make sense of.

“Can I help?” he asked.

“You know anything about Custer's shorthand?”

“As in old-fashioned bound steno notebooks?”

She picked up a paper. “As in ‘GP. G's bad.'”

Jay held out his hand. Without hesitation, she turned over the paper. Frowning, he stared at the enigmatic letters. The date put the notes in the last months of his mother's long illness.

“Does GP appear in other papers?” he asked.

“Frequently. Often preceded by ‘GDJD!!!'”

Jay closed his eyes, remembering his mother. Tall, dark, striking, with a laugh that lit up the world. Warm and gentle, yet demanding good manners and better grades, smiling as she checked his cheek for the stubble only a kid on the roller coaster of early puberty would long for.

He missed her still, an ache that would never leave because it had become a part of him.

“Let me see some more from around this date,” he said, “and some from years earlier, if you have any.”

Sara reached for one of the piles she had clipped together. “These are from before you were born to about five years after.”

“How do you know when I was born?”

“It's in the papers you're holding.”

He read through the papers quickly, efficiently, letting the words ignite memories long buried beneath passing years. He paused for the words that announced his birth. “‘GDJD over moon. LGDJD at last.'” He laughed. “That one is easy enough. JD was happy that they finally had a child.”

“Really?” She leaned forward until she could read over his arm. “I didn't see that.” She looked at the paper, frowned, and looked at Jay. “Translation, please.”

“Remember that JD and Custer fought a lot.”

She nodded.

“As a kid I often wondered why Custer muttered ‘GDJD' all the time. I asked Mom what it meant and she laughed. She said Custer was calling on God to help him with JD.”

“As in God damning JD?” Sara asked wryly.

“Like I said, they fought like two dogs over a bone, except that nobody ever figured out what the bone was.”

“So LGDJD is . . . ?”

“Little GDJD.”

“No wonder Custer used shorthand. So your mom and dad had trouble having children?”

“They never talked about it. From some of the things JD let drop, I figured that the problem was on her side. The fact that Barton was born so quick cinched it.”

“Yet still Liza and JD had only one child,” Sara said.

“It was the only thing Liza and JD argued about. He wanted more. She didn't.”

“She'd already landed him. What did she need with more kids?” Sara heard her own words and winced. “That sounded awful. What I mean is—”

“You nailed it the first time,” Jay said over her words. “She had a rich man bagged, tagged, and mounted on the bedroom wall. Now it was time for her to enjoy the results of all her hard work.”

The ice and distance in his voice sent a chill down Sara's back. “You really don't like her at all, do you?”

“JD did. That's all that mattered.”

“Was she a good wife to him?”

“She never got caught with another man, if that's what you mean. No surprise, really. She didn't have much use for the male of the species.”

“Or the female, either,” Sara said.

“Point to the pretty lady. All Liza ever needed was money and admirers. But that won't help us with these papers. Move over, would you?”

She scooted to the side, making room for him on the old double bed. Then she read over his arm, trying to see what he did with the
papers covered with caricatures and a sprawling kind of writing revealing Custer's equally sprawling thoughts.

“So G is God,” she said.

“Depends on the context. G also stands for Ginny, my mother, Virginia. Custer used to call her Saint Ginny for living with JD.”

“He said that in front of your father?”

“Repeatedly, now that you mention it.” He shook his head. “The things I have stored in my memory that I didn't know. G'mom, Mother's mother, called Custer and JD Mutt and Jeff. It fit. Custer certainly could have come from an insane asylum. JD was a lot smarter than Jeff, except when he lost his temper. Then he was as dumb as any man.”

Sara picked up her tablet and started entering in notes. “So SG can mean Saint Ginny. Any idea about GP?”

“Could be Gone Painting.”

“Beats Going Postal, which was my best guess.”

Jay smiled. “I think your slang is years out of date.”

“Details.” She leaned over his arm. “What's this about buying a kid?”

“Mother wanted to adopt. JD flatly refused. There's an old Vermilion saying, so old that it must have come over on the boat with the first Vermilions. ‘Better one chicken than ten cuckoos.'”

“Meaning?”

“Better one child of your own blood than ten of another man's get.”

“Good old patriarchy,” she said. “Blood, not the child, is what matters.”

“When property is tied to blood,” he said, reaching for another paper, “things get real sticky. Apparently my great-great-great-grandfather found that two of his five children weren't actually his.”

“Oops.”

“He was furious. He wrote the first Vermilion will. Disowned his wife and her two kids. Every Vermilion male after that put the ‘only blood inherits' clause into their wills. Of course, until genetic testing, no one was really sure either way.”

“Were you tested?”

“Before I inherited, yes.”

“Harsh,” she said. “So a child only counts when it's your blood. Was JD into chastity belts?”

“Mom would have put it on
him
.”

Sara laughed. “I would have liked your mother.”

“She would have loved you. She always wanted a daughter to teach how to barrel race and cook and sing the old songs about love and broken hearts and death.”

“Lots of new songs have those themes.”

“People don't change much,” he said. “That's the good and the bad news in one.”

“I take it you don't believe in the perfectibility of man.”

“If it could be done, it would have been done. It hasn't, so it can't.” He set another paper down.

“No wonder you don't like cities,” she said, reading over his shoulder. “People in cities tend to have a lot of rules designed to make everyone better than they would be otherwise.”

“How's that working out?”

She laughed. “About like you'd expect.”

“If it works at all, it's a tribute to the people, not to the rules. I've been in places where the only rule was survival. There were good people in those places. Rules had nothing to do with it.”

“Did JD think like that?”

“No. Mom was the pragmatist. JD was JD. He was educated, but he
wasn't bookish. Yet he read Mother poetry every day as she lay dying.”

“Just when I think I understand the man,” Sara grumbled, “I discover something that throws everything out the window.”

Smiling, Jay stole a kiss. “My parents were people, sweetheart. They made mistakes, learned from them, fought, laughed, cried, made love—the whole human experience. Just because they were my parents didn't mean that they lived only for me. They had lives separate from their child. I didn't see it that way at the time, but that doesn't make it any less true.”

Sara thought about her own parents, just people living each day as it came, coping as best they could.

Like her.

Except I made choices my mother never could, because the single choice of marrying a poor dairy farmer left her with too few choices after that.

Good for me. Now, am I going to let her choices continue to rule my life?

Motionless, Sara stared at the papers she was holding without seeing them, her mind playing Ping-Pong with the subject of choices.

“Yo?” Jay tugged gently at the papers in her hand. “Anybody home?”

“Sorry,” she said absently, releasing the papers. “I was thinking.”

“Nothing happy, from your expression.”

“Not really unhappy, either. Just unexpected.”

He stood and pulled her up with him. Before she could get her balance, he fitted her to his body and kissed her like she was water in the middle of a desert. By the time he lifted his head, she was clinging to him, taking from him, giving him her breath and her hunger.

“Come on,” he said huskily. “Enough poking around in the past. It's been a long day. I don't know about you, but I'd like to take a nap before dinner.”

“A nap?” She smiled. “I never heard it called that.”

“Wait until you hear me snore.”

“Remember how you didn't want your ribs counted?”

“Still don't.”

“Then don't snore.”

Sara didn't know when she had fallen asleep. She only knew that Jay's arms and warm male scent were wrapped around her. Or she was wrapped around him. Maybe they were just like the sheets, tangled together and warm. She was boneless, sated, utterly relaxed in the aftermath of slow, intense loving. Because she could, she licked the bulge of his bicep, enjoying the heat and salt on his skin.

Then she realized that his bicep was flexed, hard, as if his hand was fisted.

“Jay?”

“Go back to sleep, sweetheart. It's at least an hour until dinner.”

“Is something else wrong?”

He knew she meant if anything other than the murders was bothering him. He hesitated, then showed her the text message that had just come in on his phone from Liza.

           
URGENT. MEET ME AT ROTH'S OUTSIDE JACKSON TOMORROW 9AM. YOU WANT TO HEAR WHAT I HAVE TO SAY BEFORE YOUR LAWYER DOES. BRING YOUR ‘GUEST.'

“I thought the art community gossiped more than anyone else,” Sara said. “Looks like the Wyoming grapevine is faster. Of course,
Liza had an inside source. Is Barton getting even with you for the helicopter?”

Jay flicked the phone off and set it on the end table. “I'll know tomorrow.”

“
We'll
know. She included me in the command performance.”

“That doesn't mean I have to expose you to more of her poisonous tongue. Her choice of the meeting place tells me it's going to be a bad one.”

“Why?”

“Roth's is a roadhouse Custer used to tear up with JD on a regular basis. The kind of place someone with Liza's mouth belongs in, quite frankly.”

“I'm a big girl,” Sara said. “I can do bitch with the best of them. But why the text? Why didn't she just call you?”

“She didn't want to hear what I had to say.”

“That's what lawyers are for. Oh, right, now that she's paying, she may be doing a lot more of the legwork herself.”

He smiled rather grimly. “A minimum of two thousand dollars a week for her lawyers will cut into her pocket change.”

“Two big ones per week? Whew. No wonder she's doing the meeting on her own.”

Jay stretched, trying to release some of the tension Liza's text had caused.

Surprisingly strong fingers began massaging his shoulders as Sara said, “I could hate Liza just for the grief she causes you.”

“Don't waste your energy,” he said, flexing and turning beneath her probing fingers.

“Face down, soldier.”

She worked her way down his back, admiring the line of his spine
and the muscular bunch of his buttocks. Slowly his body loosened until she no longer felt like she was massaging rock. Smiling, she whispered a finger down his spine to the coccyx, then gently bit one of his cheeks.

“What was that for?”

“Just keeping you awake,” she said.

He moved and suddenly she was on her back, knees spread, and he was teasing her so hotly that she could barely ask a question.

“What—about dinner?” she managed.

“In the flyover states, we eat dessert first.”

R
OTH'S 24-HOUR ROADHOUSE
was crammed with hot-rod remnants, the debris of a hundred races gone wrong, pieces recovered and polished to a hard shine. A tangle of chromed exhaust pipes hung like a mass of silver snakes over the register, brilliant in the reflected light of morning. The waitresses were dressed like last night's party. Unlike the chromed wreckage, the daylight didn't do the people any favors. Televisions featuring various sports blared from every corner. Only the early—or late—drinkers at the long bar watched them.

“I bet there's a card room or two in the back,” Sara said, fiddling with her coffee mug with one hand. The other was held by Jay.

“You win,” he said.

“Are they legal?”

From the back of the main dining room came the clack of pool
balls and the loud cursing of the loser. From the sound of her voice, she hadn't been home since yesterday.

“If things get too raucous, the sheriff notices,” Jay said. “Otherwise, he waits for the good citizens to complain. A lot of the women are semipro, which, like the illegal gambling, is a big draw.”

“Semipro as in part-time hookers?”

“Yeah. They do a big lunch trade with truckers,” he said.

“And you say Liza belongs here, hmm?”

“JD and Custer met her in a place just like this down in Nevada.” Jay glanced impatiently at his watch. “Three more minutes and we're gone.”

Sara looked around again. Nothing had changed for the better. “Odd choice for a meeting. I can't imagine that returning here is very comfortable for Liza. Unless the food is better than the coffee.”

“If she's here to chew on anything, it's us.”

The front door opened, sending more unfriendly sunlight through the dark room. Sara looked at Liza. The older woman wore black jeans, a turquoise jacket, and matching turquoise sweater. Her needle-heeled black leather boots hit the stone floor with a tattoo that sounded like small bones snapping. She had left the diamonds at home, settling for some old, exquisite, and seriously expensive Indian jewelry. Her lips and nails were stoplight red.

Sara said quietly, “That outfit would support months of lawyers.”

“I know. The ranch paid for every bit of it. The jewelry had been in the family for three generations. Mother loved it. Wore it every chance she got and talked about the granddaughter who would someday enjoy it.” He shrugged. “Win some, lose some.”

“I'm sorry,” she whispered.

“So am I. Liza only wanted the ‘Indian stuff' because JD's first wife had made it her trademark. She's wearing it today to remind me of who won that particular battle.”

“Bitch.”

“Oh yeah.”

He watched as Vermilion Ranch's biggest enemy stopped in front of their table. He could smell the stale liquor on her breath and wondered if she had reached the stage where she sweat booze because her liver couldn't handle it anymore.

“Good morning, Jay,” Liza said, glancing at his hand holding Sara's. “Ms. Medina.”

He nodded—and didn't stand up.

Sara just watched Liza. If Jay had shelved his ingrained manners today, so would she.

After a brief hesitation, Liza sat down like she had built the place with her own two hands.

“Tomato juice,” she said, without looking at the waitress who was a step behind her. “Nothing else.”

The waitress looked uncertainly at Jay.

“We ate at home,” he said to her. “Coffee is all we need.”

The waitress smoothed her hands over the hips of her skintight short skirt, calling attention to an unusually nice ass. “Whatever you want, sir. No charge for the coffee . . . or anything else. Boss said it's been too long since he's seen a Vermilion in here.”

“Bless him,” Jay said blandly.

Sara choked back a laugh at his echo of the sheriff.

After a long look over her shoulder, the waitress sauntered off to get Liza's tomato juice.

“Well,” Liza said brightly. “What should we talk about?”

Her eyes burned as she held herself absolutely still, waiting for a reaction.

“We don't have time to play games with you,” he said evenly. “There's a ranch to be run.”

“You called the meeting. Get to the point,” Sara's cool voice did nothing to hide her dislike.

Liza let the silence grow until the waitress set down a tall glass of thick red fluid. The shock of living color with no artifice made Liza look like a bad reflection of life. Without the height of her heels, she was small, almost frail.

Don't fall for it,
Sara silently advised Jay.
Like tears, it's the oldest trick in the female playbook.

“This is the thanks I get for doing you a favor?” Liza asked, her voice raw.

She took a long drink, leaving a lipstick mark on the rim of the glass that was redder than the tomato juice. She dabbed at her mouth with a napkin, leaving another mark on the stark white paper.

He watched her like the venomous snake she was.

“No questions?” she asked. “How disappointing.”

Silence answered her.

Liza fixed him with eyes that were somehow glassy, vague, and yet eerily intent. “My lawyers tell me we have a very good chance of vacating the previous judgment in the case of the Custers.”

“On the basis of what evidence?” Jay asked, playing idly with his coffee spoon.

“Conflict of interest.” Liza smiled like a child, but the gaze she turned on Sara was anything but innocent.

A chill moved over Sara's neck. “What conflict?”

“You. Obviously you lied in your assessment of the paintings in order to please your lover.”

“Bullshit,” he said. “We didn't even meet until after the judge decided the case.”

“Barton talked to your last clients. The Chens,” Liza said, her eyes
avid on Sara's face. “They said you were in an awful hurry to get to Wyoming.”

“I had been in Atlanta for months already. Get to the point.” Sara's voice was calm, but what she saw in Liza's eyes made her want to run.

Does Jay know that his father's ex is more than fashionably insane?

“You were expected to be in Atlanta for two more weeks,” Liza said in a rising voice. “But you rushed here to get some cock time with your client. Was that your payoff, or did you expect a crack at the Vermilion money, too?”

Sara's fingertips flexed on Jay's hand in a silent demand that he let her handle this.

“Don't judge me by what you would have done in my place,” Sara said calmly.

“Does she hiss like a cat in bed, too?” Liza asked Jay.

“What do you want?” he asked, his voice calm and his eyes promising hell. “More money?”

“I want
everything,
” Liza said, no longer hiding the vicious rage that animated her. “JD dumped me like yesterday's garbage.”

“Wrapped in diamonds and couture? Try again.”

“I want everything that JD loved more than he loved me. The ranch, the Custers,
everything
.”

“And then what?” Sara asked. “You expect the black hole in your soul to be magically filled? News flash, sister. It doesn't work that way. You'd be no more happy—”

“Shut up! I don't need your whore's wisdom.”

“If whores were wise, you wouldn't be here,” Jay said to Liza. “But you aren't and here we are. You can spend the rest of your life trying to piss in my coffee or you can cut your losses and enjoy the good life you have.”

“You'll learn,” she said. “I promise you. Just like JD did.”

“I already figured out why he divorced you,” Jay said. “That's all the learning I have to do.”

“I will be
respected
.” Liza's shrill voice hung in the suddenly silent room.

“Not until you grow up,” he said, his voice cold enough to burn. “Now, is there anything else you wanted to discuss?”

“You wipe that look off your face,” she said, her hands trembling against the glass.

Jay smiled slowly. “Better?”

It wasn't.

Sara squeezed his hand lightly in warning. Baiting a crazy woman wasn't going to accomplish anything but a huge scene.

Maybe that's why she chose this roadhouse,
Sara thought.
Anything short of knives won't be noticed.

The thought of knives reminded her of the Solvangs, slashed and bloody, silently waiting for whatever justice there was.

Suddenly she was soul-deep tired of Liza and her constant search for a way to the bottom of the Vermilion pocketbook.

“You will increase my stipend by one hundred percent,” Liza said.

“You already get more than the ranch can afford,” he said.

“You can afford it. I've a good idea how much the ranch makes.”

“Are you familiar with the Golden Goose whose owner killed it by demanding more and more eggs?” he asked sardonically.

Liza's hands gripped tightly around the juice glass.

For the first time Sara noticed that one of the older woman's thumbnails was bitten past the quick. The dried blood on the rim was darker than the nail polish.

“Barton will get control of his one quarter of the ranch right now,” Liza said.

“No.”

“And one more thing,” she said.

Jay watched her with the eyes of the combat veteran he was. “Since all you're blowing is air, go ahead.”

“I will have
Muse
.”

“We can't prove it exists,” Sara said. “Jay can't give you what doesn't exist.”

“Custer painted it for a friend of mine,” Liza said. “I watched him. I get that portrait or there is no deal.”

“We've had this discussion and you've lost at every step of the way,” Jay said, putting on his hat. “The answer hasn't changed. No.”

“That was before Sara,” Liza said quickly, harshly. “What do you think a new judge would make of the word of a so-called expert who is fucking you on her way to the Vermilion riches?”

“Not one word of the judge's verdict would change,” he said. “It was based on law, not gossip.”

“Perhaps. But,” Liza added slyly, “can your whore's professional reputation survive the gossip?”

There it was, the reason Liza had brought them here. She thought she had a lever big enough to pry more money out of Jay.

“My reputation will do just fine,” Sara said. “I've got a list of happy clients who keep me very busy.”

“After Guy Beck gets through with you,” Liza said, smiling like a death's head, “your clients won't call you.”

“My clients know Guy. Whatever he says won't worry them,” she lied without hesitation.
I'm damned if I'll be the cause of her ruining Vermilion Ranch.

“The painting exists,” Liza said to Jay. “It was mentioned in the receipts.”

“Only a portrait was mentioned,” he said. “No name attached.”

“If you can't find
Muse,
it's because you're hiding it.”

“Or Custer burned it before he left,” Jay said.

“He wouldn't have done that! You have a week to cough up that painting. Then I'm going to hire lawyers and turn Guy Beck loose to destroy little Ms. Medina's reputation.”

From the corner of Sara's eye, she saw the spoon between Jay's fingers flash as he fiddled with it, his big fingers turning it over and over in one hand.

“Your so-called conflict of interest is too thin a twig to hang a new case on,” he said to Liza.

“No thinner than any of the other motions that kept dragging out the case for so many years,” Liza said. “God, it was sweet knowing that you paid my lawyers to tie yours up in knots. Too bad I couldn't bleed you into selling the ranch.”

“You've misread me from the jump,” he said, his eyes gleaming from beneath his hat brim, the spoon flashing between his fingers.

“The hell I have. You want the ranch all to yourself, but your brother has his own ideas about what the ranch is worth and how best to extract it. He deserves his chance.”

“He'll have it in seven years.”

“No. Now!”

The spoon bent back on itself. Jay tossed it aside.

“I'm done,” he said to Sara. “Let's go.”

“Wait,” Liza said urgently. “I can keep my son's focus off your precious ranch. He's a realist. You're a romantic. But since Barty
is
a realist, he can be redirected more easily than you.” She crossed her arms on the table and leaned toward Jay. “Give me twice my stipend and
Muse
. I'll see that no more fences get cut or holes get dug in the creek and chemicals left behind. We won't ask any more of you. Ever.”

Sara's lips pulled tight across her teeth. “Every boy loves his mother, right?”

“He may love me or hate me, but he listens to me if he wants money to spend.”

“I'll require it in writing,” Jay said, curious about how far Liza would go. “You get twice your stipend and
Muse
. I get an end to the engineering raids on the ranch, you make no more demands, and you give me your word that you won't trash Sara's professional reputation.”

“No,” Sara said angrily. “Don't let her use me against you!”

His fingers wrapped gently around hers beneath the table.

She looked at him and saw the faint negative movement of his head. “But—”

His fingers squeezed harder. With a muttered word, she sat back silently.

“You get nothing in writing,” Liza said. “You'd just call it blackmail.”

“Which it is. And that's why this isn't coming through Mr. Abrahamson Esquire and Mr. Wilkie Esquire, of Abrahamson and Wilkie Law Practice, two of Wyoming's most expensive lawyers. This meeting would have cost you about five thousand, coffee not included.”

“Did I mention that you will pay for any lawyers involved?” Liza asked, wide-eyed.