In Plain Sight

CHAPTER TWO

THE IRRIGATION PUMP had broken down again. Dan Gibson knelt and prodded it carefully with grease-stained fingers, wondering if all it needed was something simple like new washers, or if this was going to be another expensive overhaul. Maybe he’d even have to replace the creaky old piece of machinery.

He couldn’t afford a new pump without getting another operating loan. And even Bill Hendricks, the sympathetic bank manager in Crystal Creek, was probably going to tell him that was impossible.

Wearily, Dan sat back on his heels and squinted into the fading sunlight where his children played along the river.

Twelve-year-old Ellie was in the water, wading up to her knees, bent almost double as she searched for arrowheads in the bright shallows.

Chris was four years younger than Ellie, and she wasn’t allowed to go into the water unless Dan was with her. She was dragging their red wagon along the river’s edge, and she and little Josh were filling it with mounds of colored pebbles they intended to use for some mysterious game of their own.

Josh was only two, chubby and energetic in a blue-denim romper suit. His sisters were in sandals, but Josh wore heavy miniature boots to protect his feet from the rocks along the shore. His golden curls shone in the sunlight, and his voice drifted on the wind, as happy as a little bird’s.

Dan grinned briefly and tipped his cap back, watching the children. But his smile faded when he looked around at the hay meadow behind him, then at the stalled irrigation pump.

At least a heavy rainfall the night before had provided some moisture for his rapidly maturing crop. It gave him a little breathing room while he worked on the pump. But if he couldn’t harvest this final hay crop and pay back a few loans, his financial prospects for the coming year were going to be damned bleak.

“Ellie,” he called, “it’s time for the kids to have a bath and go to bed.”

The two girls raised a howl of protest, claiming extra privileges because it was Saturday night. Josh chimed in, though Dan suspected his son was objecting more to be companionable than out of any real indignation.

Josh was such an easygoing little boy. He actually loved the routines of bedtime, with his bubble bath and toys and storybooks.

“Okay, fifteen more minutes,” Dan said. “But you two have already been up more than an hour past your schoolday bedtime.”

A contented silence fell, and he returned his attention to the pump.

Dan was a tall, well-built man in jeans and a plaid work shirt, with a disheveled head of light brown hair that was as unruly as Josh’s if it got too long. He had smoky green eyes and a grin that transformed his hard face, though these days it was an increasingly rare occurrence.

As he probed the pump mechanism with a screwdriver blade, something caught his eye and he looked up quickly. A flash of color glimmered in the brush near the water, just downriver from where his children were playing. But whatever was in the thicket vanished as quickly as it had appeared.

He frowned, wondering if one of the McKinney horses had strayed this far from the Double C. If so, he’d have to give J.T. a call.

For a moment he considered going over and checking, then dismissed the thought.

Most likely it was a deer, or a hawk flying low after some scurrying rodent, or even a plastic sack blown along the river in last night’s storm, caught and fluttering from a branch.

At least to his immense relief, Dan found the problem with the pump—a ragged washer—and knew the repair was only going to cost a few dollars. He had only to get to the hardware store in Crystal Creek.

Disaster was averted for another day, he thought wryly.

But how many bullets could a man dodge before one of them finally hit him and killed all his dreams?

“Come on, kids,” he said, getting to his feet. “Time’s up.”

There was another brief protest, but this time it was halfhearted. They knew he meant what he said, and it was pointless to argue.

Chris walked at her father’s side toward the little farmhouse, holding his hand and pulling the wagon, now heavily loaded. Dan looked down into her earnest, freckled face. “What are you going to do with all the rocks, honey?”

“Josh and I are building a castle,” Chris said. “We’re starting on it tomorrow. It’s going to be awesome, Daddy.”

“Awesome,” Josh said contentedly, trotting at Dan’s other side, clinging to his other hand. “Gonna be awesome.”

“You two babies don’t have a clue how to build a castle,” Ellie said scornfully from behind them. “It’ll just be a big mess.”

Chris’s face turned pink with outrage, and Dan ruffled her hair.

“Maybe I’ll have a little time to help with the castle tomorrow, sweetie,” he said.

His younger daughter’s eyes blazed with happiness. “Really, Daddy?”

“Maybe,” he said cautiously.

Chris rounded on her sister in triumph. “Daddy’s going to help me and Josh build the castle,” she said, “and it’ll be the best castle in the whole world. So there, you stupid dummy.”

“Stupid dummy yourself,” Ellie said, unperturbed. “I wish Gypsy was here,” she added. “Does it hurt to get spayed?”

“Gypsy’s having a good time at the clinic with all the other dogs,” Dan said. “She’ll be home tomorrow.”

Josh stumbled on a tuft of grass near the house and whimpered, rubbing his eyes with a dirty hand. Dan picked the little boy up and carried him the rest of the way, wondering if he’d be able to keep his word and find a few minutes the next day to help Chris with her castle.

He worked from dawn to dark, often eighteen hours at a stretch. In addition to the hay fields, he grew grapes for the McKinney winery, kept bees in rows of wooden hives at the edge of the hay meadow, a small herd of cattle and some pigs and goats, anything he could think of to pay the mortgage and keep his farming operation afloat.

And with three little kids to look after, his life wasn’t easy. In fact, most of the time it was a waking nightmare.

Still holding Josh, who nestled drowsily against his father’s shoulder with a thumb jammed into his mouth, Dan followed the two little girls into the house.

In the kitchen he glanced around and sighed.

The place looked like a tornado had passed through. No matter how hard he tried, tidiness and order seemed impossible to attain. Toys and clothes littered the floor and the sink was stacked with dirty supper dishes; the girls had fought over whose turn it was to do them. Through the doorway he could see into the sparsely furnished living room and knew how badly it needed dusting.

There were times when Dan longed fiercely for the simple things, like a clean house and a hot meal on the table when he came in from work, and some peace from kids who seem to squabble all the time.

Not that he’d ever want to be parted from his children for long. But sometimes he was just so weary.

He sent Chris into the bathroom to run a tub for herself and Josh, then began to pick up the things scattered about the floor. Ellie surprised him by marching over to the sink and filling it with hot water.

Something about her rigid back alerted him. He sat down at the table and watched her thoughtfully.

Ellie’s real name was Danielle, which she hated with such passion that nobody ever dared to use it. Of the three children, she was the only one who looked like their mother, and one day she was going to be a real beauty.

She had silky black hair with a touch of curl, clipped short around her face, and big brown eyes that could be lively or sullen depending on her mood. In June, just a month after her twelfth birthday, she’d begun her menstrual periods and been appalled by her body’s treachery. It was “gross,” she’d said, and burst into tears.

Dan had cuddled her tenderly while she cried. He’d shown her books on female reproduction and explained that what was happening to her was not a tragedy but a wondrous thing.

But her moods were more erratic all the time nowadays, with shifts that left him feeling baffled and hopeless.

He suspected she might be having a tough time getting along with some of the kids at school, though she refused to talk to him about it. When he spoke to her teachers, they said Ellie was bright but very quiet. None of them were aware of any particular problem.

At the moment, however, Dan sensed that his daughter’s silence needed to be explored. He sat at the kitchen table, doodling with a blue crayon in one of Chris’s coloring books and considering how to go about it.

He could hear muffled shouts and laughter from the direction of the bathroom, and winced at the sound of water splashing onto the worn tiles he’d never had time to replace.

“So,” he said casually, “what’s up, Ellie?”

She kept her back turned, wiping dishes, rinsing them and stacking them in the plastic rack. “I don’t see why we can’t have a dishwasher,” she muttered. “You should see Aunt Mary’s house now, Daddy. She has two dishwashers. Last month Uncle Bubba gave her another one just for pots and pans.”

“Good for Mary,” he said mildly. “She’s worked hard all her life, and her ostriches are making a lot of money for them now. She deserves anything Bubba wants to give her. But we can’t afford a dishwasher.”

“We can’t afford anything,” the girl said. “It’s so stupid, how poor we are.”

Dan restrained himself from making a sharp reply. She was just a child and couldn’t be expected to understand his financial situation.

“So what’s going on?” he asked again.

“I don’t know what you mean,” she said, but he could see the way her thin shoulders stiffened.

“You’ve been real quiet since we came in from outside. Is something bothering you?”

“Of course not.” She wiped a plate with unnecessary energy and slammed it into the dish rack. “Except that I have to do stupid Chris’s job for her because she’s too lazy.”

“You might as well tell me, Ellie,” Dan said reasonably, “because you know I’m going to find out, anyhow. And I might be upset if something happens to catch me by surprise.”

When she turned around, her boyish face wasn’t defiant, just troubled.

“Daddy…” She leaned against the counter, one thin brown leg wrapped around the other. Dan could see the bare sole of her foot, dirty and marked with a painful-looking bruise.

“What, sweetheart?” he asked.

“If I found something, would it be mine to keep?”

“I guess it depends on where you found it,” he said after a moment’s thought.

“I mean, if I found it here on our farm and I knew it didn’t belong to you or Chris and Josh.”

“So how would it get here?”

She turned away uneasily and looked out the window while Dan watched her with growing interest.

“How about if the wind blew it here?” Ellie said, fixing her dark eyes on him again. “Would it be mine if I found it?”

Dan thought this over, then nodded. “Yes,” he said. “If the wind blew something here and you found it, I’d say you were entitled to keep it.”

She turned back around, relief shining in her face. She reached into the pocket of her shorts, took a bit of paper out and came over to place it on the table in front of him. Dan stared in astonishment.

It was a wet, crumpled, fifty-dollar bill.

“I found it in the river,” she said. “Just floating along in the water.”

“No kidding.” Dan studied the bill, fascinated, then grinned at his daughter. “Let’s get some flashlights and go back out there,” he said. “Maybe there’s more.”

She laughed, picked up the bill and returned it to her pocket.

“It’ll have to go into your bank account,” Dan told her. “Unless there’s anything you need to buy. Clothes or something for school.”

“I don’t want any stupid clothes. Can you put it in the bank for me when you go to town?”

“Sure,” Dan said. “And if things get real tough,” he added, “I can borrow from you. With fifty dollars in the bank, you’ll be the richest person in the family.”

She smiled, then turned away and began drying dishes. An uneasy silence fell.

“So,” Dan said at last, “we haven’t had a chance to talk much since yesterday, Ellie. What happened with Mrs. Graham?”

Her back stiffened again, and she rubbed a plate without looking at him. “That woman was such an old cow,” she muttered. “And she was mean, Daddy. You should have heard how she yelled at Josh.”

Dan sighed. “You never give them a chance, honey. Mrs. Graham was the third housekeeper I’ve hired in the last four months, and she only lasted a few days. That’s some kind of record, even for us.”

“We don’t need a housekeeper,” Ellie said. “Chris and I can do it.”

Dan looked around at the messy kitchen, then back at his daughter. “She told me you were rude and impossible to manage.”

“She was a jerk!” Ellie said passionately. “I hated her!”

Dan struggled to be patient.

“You hate all of them, sweetheart. But we need some help, and it’s not easy to find a housekeeper like Mrs. Graham who’s willing to live in Crystal Creek and drive back and forth every day. Most of them want to live in, but we don’t have an extra room.”

“We don’t need her! I hate having strangers in my house, Daddy. Especially jerks like her who don’t even know what they’re doing.”

“She was highly recommended by the last family she worked for,” Dan said. “And she was willing to do housework and child care and make a hot meal in the evening. It seemed like a pretty good deal to me.”

“But it must have cost a lot.” Ellie turned to look at him directly.

“Quite a bit,” Dan admitted.

“And you’re always talking about how we don’t have any money.”

“Things are tight, but some expenses are necessary, Ellie. I worry about Chris and Josh. They need more attention than they’re getting, and I’m too busy to look after them properly.”

“I can look after them,” Ellie said stubbornly. “And Chris and I can work harder to keep the house clean. I’m learning to cook supper, too.”

“Macaroni and cheese every night isn’t exactly a balanced diet, honey.”

“Aunt Mary can teach me other stuff. She said I could come over any time I wanted to learn to cook.”

Dam looked in despair at his daughter. He loved her dearly, but Ellie was the most frustrating, inflexible person he’d ever known.

She’s just like you, his wife used to point out. Everybody in Crystal Creek knows where that stubbornness of hers comes from, Dan Gibson.

“Do you ever give any thought to what life is like for me, Ellie?” he said quietly.

“I don’t know what you mean.” She stood on tiptoe to put glasses away in the cupboard.

“Well, you keep telling me how you and Chris can look after things and we don’t need a housekeeper. But the two of you are in school all day. That means I have to take Josh with me all the time, no matter what I’m doing. It’s not easy to do a full day of farm work with a two-year-old running along behind you. And he still needs a nap in the afternoon, you know.”

She considered this, frowning. “Aunt Mary would look after him anytime you asked. She loves him.”

“You kids are my responsibility,” he said. “Mary and Bubba have been good to us since your mother went away, but I can’t ask Mary to be a full-time baby-sitter. She has work of her own to do.”

Ellie put the plastic rack in a lower cabinet and wiped out the chipped sink.

“Well, I still don’t see why we need to have some creepy stranger around the house,” she said. “And I just hated that Mrs. Graham. She looked in all my dresser drawers.”

“She was housecleaning,” Dan said wearily. “God knows, this place could use it.”

“Chris and I can clean,” Ellie said again. “We can clean as good as she did.”

Dan watched his daughter, wondering what made her so prickly and defensive. But he understood her well enough to know he wasn’t getting anywhere with the argument.

He’d just have to try again, and see if next time he could manage to hire somebody who wouldn’t alienate this difficult child of his.

“I’ll go and help Chris put Josh to bed,” Ellie told him, sidling from the room.

At least she seemed anxious to appease him.

“Thank you,” Dan said, opening up the newspaper. “Call me and I’ll come in and read to them when they’re in bed.”

He barely had time to scan the headlines before Chris trailed into the kitchen wearing what passed for pajamas with both girls—jogging pants and a T-shirt. She carried her old Raggedy Ann doll and was looking for a glass of milk.

Dan gave her the milk and a couple of cookies, then took her down the hall and supervised as she brushed her teeth, ignoring her protests that she’d already brushed them.

He tucked her into the upper bunk, smoothed the blond hair back from her forehead and gave her a kiss while Ellie carried Josh into the room and deposited him in the lower bunk.

The little boy snuggled drowsily into the pillows, his thumb in his mouth again, his teddy bear held close to his face.

The girls had washed and dried his hair, and it smelled pleasantly of strawberry shampoo. Dan bent to kiss his son, then settled on the floor near Josh’s bed, reading aloud to the two younger children from an old copy of Peter Pan.

Josh didn’t understand the story, but he was usually too sleepy at bedtime to care what his father read as long as he was nearby for a while. Chris, however, was passionately caught up in the adventures of Peter and Tinkerbell. Several times recently Dan had caught her trying to fly off the haystack.

Ellie left the crowded little bedroom, heading out to the front porch where she had a private sleeping space on all but the coldest winter nights, when she bunked on the sofa in the living room.

After the younger children were settled, Dan went out through the house and knocked on the door of the little screened veranda.

“Come in,” Ellie called.

She was lying in bed, reading a copy of My Friend Flicka from the school library.

“I loved that book when I was a kid,” Dan told her, pausing near her bed. “There are two more in the series, you know.”

“I already got the librarian to reserve them for me. Can I tell you something, Daddy?” She looked up at him gravely.

“Sure. What is it?”

“I’m not sorry Mrs. Graham went away, because she was a real stupid woman, but I’m sorry the place is such a mess all the time. If we don’t get another housekeeper, I’ll try harder to keep things nice.”

“Thank you, Ellie.” He kissed her cheek and went back toward the living room. “Don’t leave your light on too long,” he said over his shoulder.

“Okay, I won’t.”

He paused to smile at her. She lay in a warm circle of lamplight while crickets chirped beyond the window and moths fluttered softly against the screens.

“Good night, kiddo.”

“Night, Daddy.”

Dan wandered back to the kitchen, too tired to think about reading a book himself or even watching television. All he wanted was to have a shower in the damp, cluttered bathroom and fall into bed.

But first he made himself a cup of instant coffee and carried it over to the table to read the rest of the newspaper.

A small article on the second page, accompanied by a photograph, caught his attention.

“Heiress missing after car plunges into the Claro River,” the caption read.

Dan scanned the article, realizing the fatal accident must have happened last night, quite close to his farm. A young woman named Isabel Delgado, age twenty-seven, had been in a car and plunged to her death from the rocky promontory overlooking Rim-rock Park.

“It is unknown at this time,” the article said, “whether Delgado’s death was accidental. She is the daughter of well-known Texas industrialist Pierce Delgado, who is on his way home from a business meeting in Belgium. Isabel Delgado was divorced two years ago from Eric Matthias, a police lieutenant in Austin. Matthias told reporters he has not seen his ex-wife for several weeks, but that her behavior has been ‘unstable’ in recent months.”

The paper went on to report that searchers had scoured the banks of the Claro River, looking for any trace of the woman whose body had not yet been recovered, although the late-model Mercedes had been dragged from the river about twelve hours after its disappearance. A number of the missing woman’s personal papers had been recovered from the car, including her passport, but there was no sign of her body.

Of course, that wasn’t surprising to Dan. She’d apparently been driving a convertible with the top down, and her body would have been sucked right out into the river.

He’d lived in this county for all of his thirty-five years and was intimately acquainted with the river and its habits. He knew that near Rimrock Park the Claro ran deep, with a powerful undercurrent that had caused many drownings over the years.

He looked at the woman’s picture displayed beside the article. She had an unusual face, framed by shoulder-length hair that seemed light, though it was hard to tell from the grainy black-and-white image.

What caught him most were her eyes, looking straight at the camera with a thoughtful, appraising look, and her mouth that lifted on one side in a smile that seemed both quizzical and a bit timid.

It was an interesting face, he thought. She looked like a woman who had some humor and intelligence, and would be fun to talk with.

Then he remembered that Isabel Delgado was dead, and her body would no doubt be washing up in a few days along the banks of the Colorado or the shores of Lake Travis. She would never smile or talk with any man again.

Suddenly feeling unbearably tired, Dan folded the paper to conceal the woman’s charming lopsided smile and put it in a wastebasket near the door.

He got up, switched off the kitchen lights and headed for his bedroom.

CHAPTER THREE

ISABEL CROUCHED in the bushes, watching as the lights winked off one by one in the little farmhouse. It had been more than twenty-four hours since she’d plunged over the cliff, and she was in agony.

Her right forearm was definitely infected, swollen and hot, throbbing with pain. The rest of her body was also scratched and bruised. She was filthy, hungry and ravaged with thirst, but afraid to drink the river water.

All day she’d been making her way along the shoreline, struggling through thick brush, hiding fearfully whenever she was in danger of being seen. Now she shivered with cold and felt weak and light-headed, ready to cry like a child at the thought of spending another night outdoors.

For the past several hours she’d been lying in the brush, watching the farmhouse and the three children who played along the water’s edge while a big, rugged-looking man she guessed was their father crouched over some piece of machinery in a field nearby.

The house was isolated, at least a mile from anybody else. Isabel was hoping that like many others in this peaceful, rural area, the farmer didn’t lock his doors at night. She had a risky plan.

After the lights were all out and enough time had passed for everybody to be asleep, she intended to sneak into the farmhouse and steal some food, maybe even a change of clothes and some medicine for her arm.