style="font-size:15px;"> “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
