Sweet Return (23 page)

Dalton pulled the piece of notepaper where he had jotted the old well depth from his shirt pocket. “Four thousand seven hundred thirty-two feet.”

Vance looked down at the floor, either thinking or playing a cat-and-mouse game. Dalton couldn’t tell which. “Well…. I could drill it m’self. Save a little not hirin’ a tool pusher and a driller. If I went thata-way, I could do it for a hundred.”

Dalton would definitely have to discuss this with his business manager. If oil wasn’t found, was he ready to kiss a hundred thousand dollars good-bye? And if that happened, how would his own future be affected? Suddenly he had new and wary respect for those who speculated on oil wells. “How much land do you need?”

“For a well that depth? We oughtta make do with an acre.”

Dalton nodded. “No problem. I’d need to get a lease in place and find the old oil well.”

“You don’t own the land?”

“It belongs to my mother. It’s rangeland.”

“She own the minerals?”

“The land and the mineral rights have been in our family for more than a hundred years.”

Vance grinned again. “Old-timers around here, eh?”

“Wilburn Parker was my granddad. My mother’s his daughter.”

“Oh, yeah. I heard of him. Then if you and your mama get along, things oughtta go real smooth.”

“If I gave you the go-ahead, when could you start?”

“Well, you’d need to get a survey and a drillin’ permit. You’d need to get me about five hundred feet of twelve-inch casing. You need to build us a road and a pad—”

“I can’t do any of that. I don’t live here. I need a turnkey deal.”

“I know people to do that work, yes sir. But son, if it’s gonna be your oil well,
you’v
e got to be the one to get the drillin’ permit.”

“That makes sense,” Dalton said. “I think I know roughly where the old well is. A fence and a couple of small structures might have to be moved, probably a new gate installed.”

“Got livestock, huh? You don’t need to worry, son. We do our best not to leave a mess. And we don’t never harm cattle. They can graze all around us.”

“It isn’t cattle.” Dalton hesitated, feeling silly over what he had to say next. “It’s chickens.”

“Chickens.”

Vance gave him a look devoid of expression. Dalton could almost see the gears grinding behind the man’s eyes as he tried to figure out just exactly what Dalton meant.

“Two hundred chickens and two donkeys.”

“Hunh,” Vance said, still blank faced.

Dalton suspected that the driller, in his career, had never encountered chickens as an obstacle. But Dalton had no intention of embarking on an explanation of free-range chickens and eggs.

“Well, son, we can take care of it, whatever it is. We work with folks all the time. I can get a fence moved and rebuilt for three to five hundred dollars. It’ll just take a day or two.”

“Fine,” Dalton said.

Vance reached for a pad of paper. “Tell me your name again and how somebody gets ahold of you.”

“Dalton Parker.” He cited his mother’s phone number and his cell phone number.

Vance wrote the information on the pad, then looked up grinning. “Got it. Just let me know when you wanna do business and I’ll send you a contract.”

“Fine. You can fax it to me on my mom’s phone number.”

Dalton left Vance’s office in a quandary. A hundred thousand dollars was a shitload of money. The idea of risking so much on a hole in the ground incited an unexpected anxiety within him. When he discussed the venture with his business manager, a disciplined man whose gambling instincts were restricted to the stock market, the guy might have a heart attack.

Dalton wasn’t worried about his mother failing to approve, but he had questions about how such a venture would affect Joanna’s operation. If he decided to go through with it, he would have to discuss it with her. He hated the damn chickens, but after yesterday, he respected Joanna enough not to want to harm her.

As Joanna motored toward Hatlow from Lubbock, her body felt as if it weighed five hundred pounds. Working so hard yesterday, followed by a confrontation with a rattlesnake and getting little sleep, had left her mind and body numb. Added to that was the blistering sun. Today, it had been not only oppressive but relentless. Typical of September.

She had climbed in and out of the pickup all day and heaved the egg-filled coolers into her customers’ locations. To soften asking Alicia to scrub the refrigerator in the egg-washing room, she had trekked through the mall looking for a small gift. She found a delicate gold necklace with a tiny diamond pendant that was perfect for the petite Alicia. Then she had stopped off at a supermarket and bought Clova a potted mum that she could plant in her flower bed after she left the hospital.

All of it had sapped her energy. She coasted along with the air conditioner set on high and the cruise control set on sixty, listening to the radio and thinking. She always used driving time for thinking.

Today she had collected approximately five hundred dollars. From that, she would net less than two hundred. Mental groan. She had to figure out a way to either make the egg business more profitable or quit it.

Being the only egg farmer near enough to personally deliver fresh free-range eggs to the larger city markets, and with the cost of gasoline twice what it used to be, on this trip, she had raised her wholesale price by fifty cents per dozen. Customers had readily accepted her explanation about higher gasoline prices. But adding fifty cents to the price of a carton of eggs was like putting a Band-Aid on a throat slash.

She hated to give up on the egg business. In the first place, she hated to give up on
anything
until she became convinced no other option existed. Second, she respected the chickens as living things that did their best to serve her purpose, and she had grown to love them, even with all of their brainless quirks. Third, a tiny idealistic part of her believed that by providing a natural product, she was doing something beneficial for the people she served and for Earth.

Concluding she could have sold dozens more eggs if she’d had them made her think about Clova’s offer of land. Funny how the idea of acquiring more laying hens would have never entered her head as being realistic if Clova hadn’t mentioned giving the land to her. Now the idea popped into Joanna’s mind often. More land equaled more hens and more eggs, which added up to more income.

She couldn’t keep from thinking that if she had that free land with highway frontage, she could be selling eggs at retail instead of wholesale, thus generating more cash. She had almost come to associate the gift of land with being the only way the egg business could survive. Common sense told her different, but sometimes a longing could send a person’s thoughts in a wrong direction. She knew about yearning for something just out of reach because she had been doing it her whole life. She hadn’t necessarily known what specific thing she wanted, but the yearning never left her.

Thinking of the free land took her mind to Dalton. With Clova ill, Joanna believed Dalton hadn’t yet been told of the land offer.

Dalton
. Supposedly at home preparing a meal. A meal that she would eat. The visual of a man so masculine fussing around in the kitchen cooking supper was almost ludicrous, and Joanna wondered if he would really do it.

She still couldn’t guess what he might be up to by inviting her. Seduction, maybe? Just because he had a girlfriend at home didn’t mean he wouldn’t bed the chick closest to him. She knew that male behavior well enough. Not only had she experienced it, but the beauty shop was full of talk of it every day.

A sigh involuntarily escaped her lungs.
Whatever,
she thought, annoyed by allowing herself to endlessly cross bridges before she reached them. Why debate the man’s motives when she was so tired and hungry she would dine with the devil himself? That is, as long as she didn’t have to prepare the meal.

She stopped off at the hospital to visit Clova and deliver the potted mum she had picked up before leaving Lubbock. Before going inside, she called her own mother and reported that she had returned. If she didn’t call and say she had safely arrived back in Hatlow, Mom would worry that she’d had an accident on the highway.

Clova’s head turned toward her when she entered. “Hi, sweetie,” Joanna said softly.

A huge bouquet of yellow roses in a tall clear vase sat on the windowsill in Clova’s room. The blooms were as large as baseballs, the color as deep and rich as…well, as egg yolks. She walked over and set her small mum beside the yellow roses and both she and Clova laughed at the contrast.

“Thank you, hon. But you shouldn’t have spent your money on a flower for me.” Clova’s voice came in a weak rasp, and her feverish eyes shone like obsidian in her pale face, but in spite of having an oxygen tube in her nose, an IV in her hand and being flat of her back in a hospital bed, she showed a buoyancy Joanna hadn’t seen her exhibit in months. No doubt it was because her wandering oldest son had returned, if only temporarily.

“It didn’t cost much. You can plant it in your flower bed.” Joanna touched one of the rose’s blooms. “These are beautiful. Who sent them?”

“Dalton. I can’t believe he spent good money on flowers, either. And roses at that.”

“Well, you’re his mother. I’d spend money on roses for my mom if she were sick. He came to see you today, huh?”

“Joanna, he paid the taxes on the place.”

Joanna felt a little leap in her chest. She knew the unpaid taxes had been a threat that lay like a yoke on Clova’s narrow shoulders. “Oh, my God. Did he really?”

“I didn’t ask him to, but I shore was happy he done it…. Joanna, did you tell him about Lane’s baby?”

Joanna hated being caught telling something she perhaps shouldn’t have. Her stomach made a dip. “Uh, yes, I think I did. Is that a problem?”

“Oh, I guess not. It’s just that since Mandy’s mama and daddy don’t want her havin’ nothin’ to do with us, I was hopin’ Dalton wouldn’t find out about all the upset.”

“Everyone in town knows, Clova. How could he not find out?”

“He don’t see ever’body in town. He don’t stay here that long.”

Joanna and Clova had discussed the Fergusons’ quarrel with Lane before. Fred and Eloise Ferguson called the sheriff every time Lane tried to see his daughter. From the day Mandy, their only child, revealed her pregnancy, they had made no secret of their loathing for Lane Cherry and anyone associated with him. Eloise had even ceased to be a customer of Joanna’s Salon & Supplies. Joanna had never told Clova that being her friend had cost her a customer.

“The way I remember Dalton,” Clova said, “if he finds out about Fred tryin’ to have Lane arrested, he might think he oughtta do somethin’ about it. I don’t want him to get trapped into dealin’ with that kind o’ stuff while he’s here. He don’t come home that often. This kind o’ trouble is just one more reminder how bad things used to be for him when he lived here.”

Home?
Joanna doubted if the Dalton Parker she had met would refer to Hatlow as “home.” As for Fred Ferguson’s irrational attitude toward his granddaughter’s father, Joanna suspected Dalton was a man who could and would make short order of something so silly.

She couldn’t keep from taking Lane’s side in that quarrel. Though he sometimes behaved irresponsibly, he had never denied being the father of Mandy’s child and had been willing, even eager, to do the right thing. He might straighten up and be a decent father if Fred Ferguson ever gave him a chance.

Beyond that, she wanted to ask Clova just exactly how bad
had
things been for Dalton, from a mother’s perspective? She hadn’t been able to put out of her mind her own mother’s criticism of how Dalton had been raised by his mother and stepfather. But she refrained. A woman in a hospital bed was too ill for anyone to make waves. “So how are you feeling, really?” she asked.

“I still got that deep hurt in my chest, but I guess I’m okay.”

“Did Dr. Jones talk to you?”

Clova held up her right hand, into which the IV had been inserted. “Where you think I got this?”

“What is it, antibiotic?”

“I’m leavin’ here in a couple o’ days, I’ll tell ya. I got too much to do to be layin’ up in the bed. I got to figure out how to get them yearlin’s to the sale.”

“Did Dr. Jones say you could leave?”

“Naw. That’s what
I
said.”

“This time, you should stay here until you get well, Clova.”

“I ain’t got no more money now than I did back in the spring, Joanna. Boardin’ in a hospital costs. Even if Dalton did sign that paper when y’all stuck me in here, I ain’t gonna let him or anybody else pay my doctor bills. It’s bad enough he had to pay the taxes.”

Joanna did a mental eye roll. She was too tired to cover the same old ground. She changed the subject by repeating the various snippets of gossip she had heard as she went about her egg deliveries, added some small talk, then said good night. In truth, she was in a hurry. She still had eggs to gather and supper to eat, cooked by a sexy, mysterious man.

Chapter 16

Outside, dusk had stained the landscape to mauve, and a creamy three-quarter moon had already popped up on the flat horizon. Good weather was good news for an egg farmer. “Yay. Red sky at night,” she mumbled as she climbed into her pickup.

She pulled out of the hospital parking lot, stewing over the fact that it would be completely dark by the time she reached the Parker ranch and she would be gathering the eggs with the help of a flashlight and the moonlight.

Crap
.

She had collected eggs after nightfall before without so much as a thought of snakes. But after yesterday, she was certain she would never be able to make a nighttime venture into the chicken yard again without fear.
Crap,
again.

She reached the ranch after seven and parked in front of her egg-processing room. She had thrown old clothes—a pair of jeans, a flannel work shirt and boots—in the pickup when she left home this morning. She carried them inside and stripped out of her dress clothes. Some people might not think of khaki Dockers and a polo shirt as dress clothing, but this was Hatlow, where most of the female population wore jeans and T-shirts.