Read Online The Salt Maiden by Colleen Thompson - Free Book Online Page B

remodeling the late sheriff’s fire-damaged adobe house. Both Abe and Wallace Hooks insisted that, being a Riggins, Dennis came for the free beer Jay provided, but Jay suspected it was the man’s way of dealing with the death of an old friend, since he and Uncle R.C. had long been buddies. Drinking buddies, anyway, since the only thing Jay could remember the two doing together was sitting out on Uncle R.C.’s back steps and throwing back some cool ones at the end of a long day. While Jay, who had come to live with his bachelor relation at the age of twelve, attempted to do homework, Dennis—his hearing already fading—would boom out schemes to solve the county’s problems, most of which involved running the Hooks clan out of town. Uncle R.C. would smile and puff one of his cigars, pausing every sooften to speak of things he might have done if he had left the county, or to wave away a cloud of smelly smoke.
    Jay smiled to recall it, though he’d been damned unhappy in those days after a single-car wreck killed his mother, and his father left abruptly to work on an offshore oil rig. As his father’s calls and visits dwindled down to nothing, Jay had given Uncle R.C. nine kinds of hell, something that now shamed him as much as his failure to come back for so much as a visit after escaping Devil’s Claw. Though his uncle had been the one to recommend that he “hit the ground runnin’ and never look back,” Jay regretted that he’d missed the chance to tell the man he was sorry for his behavior, or to thank R.C. for holding his rebellion in check with a firm but fair hand. God knew it was more than his old man—who had died five years back—had cared to do.
    “I’ll be there,” Dennis told him. “But I wanted to let you know I called Haz-Vestment’s office, and the fella there assured me work’s gonna start on schedule.”
    I’ll just bet he did , Jay thought miserably—and hoped the special agent nailed the conniving bastards to the wall.
    After excusing himself for a quick cleanup in the men’s room, Jay headed for the Webb place to find out who was there. Best-case scenario would be Angie: by herself and in one piece, though mad as hell that he had padlocked the house’s doors to secure her belongings. But there were other possibilities as well, visitors who would make short work of his security measure, the drug dealers and coyotes who occasionally used such isolated places as safe houses while smuggling dope or illegals out of Mexico.
    Still, he hadn’t bothered calling Wallace, and he wouldn’t unless he saw something suspicious. With only the two of them in the department, backup was a luxury reserved for bigger things than long shots. He’d have to settle for the company of Max, who rode shotgun as the rough road jolted man and dog alike.
    In the rearview mirror, a choking plume of dust rose in theSUV’s wake. As he looked past the plastic hula dancer on the dashboard—a last vestige of his uncle’s aimless talk of retiring to Tahiti—Jay’s view was even less inviting. Tortilla-flat and hard-baked by a brutal sun, the Lost Lake area looked about as likely to support life as the surface of Mars. Jay tried to imagine what had prompted some misguided soul—Jonas Webb, according to local lore—to attempt to ranch along the salt flat’s edge decades earlier. Had to have been a freakishly wet season, one of those rare events that briefly veiled the desert’s harshness in soft green grasses. A joke played by the land to lure the unwitting into its grasp.
    But all too soon the lush grass would have withered, leaving only the thorny seedpods of the devil’s claw to catch the hooves of starving stock and the dungarees of the defeated. Had Webb cursed this place when he’d abandoned the adobe shelter he had built of earth and sweat and hope? Had he wept to leave the crosses that still stood sentry over the pair of nameless graves whose mounds still scarred the stony soil? More than once during