Pushing Up Bluebonnets

28

We left JoLynn with her doting surrogate grandfather a few minutes later. The less-than-doting family members bombarded us with questions outside JoLynn's room. They wanted to know what we learned and if we were ready to close the case. We didn't inform them JoLynn was not related to the Richters as per Elliott Richter's request. That left little for us to talk about to folks who would have been overjoyed to learn she was an even bigger liar than they thought. I hated to think of JoLynn that way, but it was true.

While I was left bursting to tell Cooper and Kate my idea that Simone might have taken those pictures, Cooper fielded their questions with expert efficiency. He managed to tell them absolutely nothing—a technique I vowed to get better at. This left Matthew and Piper sulking and Adele, Leopold and Ian wondering what the hell was going on. Then we beat a hasty retreat.

I mentioned Simone and my picture theory on the walk to Kate's car.

"You're saying this teenager took the pictures and then somehow Dugan got ahold of them?"

"It's possible," I said. "What we don't know is how he got them."

Cooper said, "We have nothing except her possession of a camera to support your theory. Pretty thin, Abby."

"Don't you think we should investigate the possibility?" I said. "Simone could have followed JoLynn around. I saw her in action and believe me, she's capable of doing that."

"Even followed JoLynn to that cemetery? Can the girl drive?" he said.

Kate laughed. "How old do you think Simone is? Twelve?"

"But why would Simone follow her there?" he said.

"Seems like the kind of thing she does," I said.

"Okay. I give. But I'll let you handle this one. I've got a pile of phone records to examine. That seems like a less-theoretical way to make a connection between family members and Dugan."

Bet the phone company loved his constant nagging, I thought. Plus now he had to wait on whatever HPD could recover from Dugan's soggy cell phone. Obviously Cooper wanted to rely on hard evidence, not my theory about a girl and a camera. But my bet was on Simone.

So when we got to my place and Cooper said he needed to head back to Pineview, I said I'd follow him. Besides talking to Simone, I wanted to search JoLynn's room once more—but now I knew what I was looking for. That necklace.

Cooper shrugged and said to come along. But after he came downstairs with his bag, and Kate and I met him in the foyer, he said, "You heading to Pineview with Abby, Kate? Or do you have plans for this hot Sunday afternoon?"

"No plans," she said.

"Want to ride with me?" he asked.

She gave him a warm smile. "I would love to, Cooper."

The drive took far longer than I anticipated thanks to lots of Sunday traffic heading to The Woodlands Mall and Lake Conroe. On the way, I called Richter and told him I wanted to search JoLynn's room again. He told me he was coming back to Pineview as well, but was probably behind us. Then he abruptly hung up.

Huh? And then I realized he wasn't alone in the car and didn't want whoever was with him to know I was calling. I turned my full attention to Cooper's truck up ahead.

When we reached the ranch and stopped on the curving drive in front of the house, Cooper got out while Kate stayed put.

I rolled down my window.

He said, "Kate asked to see the police station. I'll drop her off back here in, say, an hour? Is that long enough to talk to Simone?"

I smiled. "Sure. You might even take Kate out to dinner. I'm sure you know all the healthy places in Pineview."

He grinned back. "Great idea."

Then the two of them took off, the dust of our dry summer in their wake.

I got out of the Camry, went to the door and knocked. The younger housekeeper, Estelle, answered. She looked surprised.

"Hello, Ms. Rose. Mr. Richter isn't home at this time."

"We've spoken. He's on his way back from the hospital but gave me permission to reexamine JoLynn's room. But first," I said, "if you could direct me to where Simone lives, that would be great. I understand she and her mother and stepfather live on the property?"

Estelle pointed left, where the drive wound behind the barn. "You take that road. It travels around the edge of the property. Mr. and Mrs. Hunt live in the very first house you'll come to, a stone house set back in the woods."

"Thanks. Mr. Richter might be home by the time I return." I started for my car.

Estelle called, "Would you like me to call, see if Simone is there? She could be out."

"No. I'd like to drive around the property anyway. Beautiful place, Magnolia Ranch. If she's not home, I'll come right back here." Showing up unannounced might give me an advantage, especially if Simone was hiding the fact that she'd followed JoLynn around, taken pictures and then somehow hooked up with the charming, good-looking Kent Dugan—a man who liked young, naive women.

Cement gave way to gravel as soon as I reached the barn and the Camry crunched along for about a half mile. To my left, I saw horses in a rolling pasture that was growing brown from lack of rain. On my right, woods filled with pines, maples and oaks shaded the bumpy road. I came upon a fieldstone two-story house with a green slate roof, though I nearly missed the place, since it was set back so far from the road.

I thought about parking in the narrow driveway, but a red Corvette already occupied the spot closest to the door. And if Adele and Leopold came home, they might be annoyed if they had nowhere to park. I pulled over onto the small stone shoulder.

I wanted to surprise Simone and got my wish.

When she opened the door, she said, "What are you doing here?" Her crazy hair was bound into a ponytail on top of her head. She wore a Coldplay T-shirt nearly hiding her cutoff jean shorts.

"You mind if I come in?" I said.

She shrugged and opened the door wider. "Whatever. But I'm pretty busy. And the parents aren't home."

"I came to see you," I said.

She sprinted up the stairs before I was even inside, and yelled over rock music coming from above for me to follow her. As I went after her, I caught a glimpse of an elegant formal living room off the marble foyer. It was filled with the kind of furniture Aunt Caroline likes. Nothing comfortable, everything pretty.

Seconds later, standing in the doorway of Simone's bedroom, I was thinking this could have been declared a state disaster area. Besides pictures clipped to a thin clothesline strung from one end of the room to the other, and larger photographs covering every available space on the walls, there were clothes, books and shoes piled on the bed and heaped on the floor. CDs and DVDs spilled out of several laundry baskets. Lots of CDs. The music was blaring from the entertainment center opposite the cluttered bed.

The walk-in closet behind Simone appeared to have empty shelves and racks, so I assumed all this came from in there.

Simone pointed a remote at the entertainment center and the music stopped abruptly. She dropped the remote, then stood with her hands on her hips in a small clearing in the center of the room. "I'm leaving for school in a few weeks and as you can see, I have way too much stuff. This is a disgusting example of my past materialistic life. I'm giving most of it away."

I nodded. "Good idea. You couldn't fit half of this in a dorm room anyway."

"My mother wants me to live in an apartment. She networked with future Longhorn moms and had my roommates all picked out. But I'm living in the dorm. Period." She sounded a little defiant, like I might actually argue with her.

"Sounds like you know what you want," I said.

She seemed to relax then and said, "Why are you here?"

"I'm hoping you can help me. Did you know that the man JoLynn used to live with is the person who tried to kill her?"

"Are you kidding me? So they caught him?" Simone pulled a giant black garbage bag from a box near her bare feet and shook it open.

"They didn't catch him. He was murdered."

She stopped shoving clothes into the bag and stared at me. "Really? That's a giant coincidence."

"Which probably means it's not a coincidence. Mind if I sit down?" I nodded at a chair by the computer desk stacked with what looked like yearbooks.

"Go ahead." Simone sat cross-legged on the floor, her eyes never leaving me as I stepped carefully over to the chair, placed the yearbooks on the floor and sat.

I noticed her camera bag on the desk before I swiveled the chair to face her. "This is serious business, Simone."

"You don't think I know that?" Her defiance was back, but this time it was tainted by fear. Why?

"I know your photography is very important." I glanced around. "Did you take all these pictures?"

"Yeah. So?"

"You're good. I was wondering if you took any pictures of JoLynn, because I don't see any in here."

"Why would I take her picture?" Simone started peeling blue polish off her ragged fingernails.

"Because from what I saw in the hospital and what I'm seeing here"—I pointed at one wall where there were photos of Scott sitting at a computer, her uncle riding a horse, her mother wearing a ridiculous hat and Matthew kissing Piper at their wedding—"you take pictures of everything."

Beneath her pale makeup, the redness of a flush began to break through. "Maybe I did take a few pictures of JoLynn. So what?"

"No problem. Except for the ones she didn't know you were taking. That's kind of invasive, wouldn't you say?"

She took a deep breath and rubbed thumb against index finger so hard I thought she might take off a layer of skin. "She was an interesting subject. She was like this . . . enigma."

"You followed her?"

Simone nodded.

"Where did you follow her?" I said.

"Not many places. She didn't leave the property much. Usually Scott drove whenever she wanted to go somewhere."

"Tell me where she went."

Simone let out a huge breath and shifted her gaze from her hands to my face. "She went to that old cemetery, okay?"

"And you took her picture there?"

"Bad pictures. I couldn't get close and I'm not good with the telephoto lens yet."

I noticed that my heart had sped up, that I could feel my throat pulsing. "What did you do with those pictures, Simone?" I didn't add, Sell them to your new friend with the six-pack abs and the pretty-boy face?

"I think I threw them away," she said. "They were awful. After I printed a few straight from the camera and saw them, I didn't even load them on my computer— they were that bad."

"You think you threw them away? Come on, Simone. You're a very smart girl. You can do better than that."

She held up her hands. "Okay, okay."

Ah, here it comes, I thought. The Dugan connection to this family. A very bad connection for Dugan, though. One that led to his death.

But Simone said, "I lost them. Lost my camera, too. That's why I don't even have any copies to look at and learn from my mistakes."

"What? I saw you with a camera at the hospital the other day."

"That's my new camera. I replaced the one I lost with the exact same model, got the money from Uncle Elliott. And you can't tell my mother. She doesn't think I can make it as a photojournalist—which is what I want to do. If she found out I was stupid enough to lose my camera, she'd say, 'Simone wants to be a photographer and she can't even keep track of her equipment.' "

"Were any other photos missing?" I asked.

Simone thought for a moment. "Just the ones on the camera. There were more of JoLynn I hadn't downloaded or printed out. No matter how spoiled rotten my relatives all are, they make for some great shots, and I had a few pics of them, too. I'm always catching little arguments, Scott and Matthew getting into it over a poker game, Uncle Elliott's face getting dark as night when someone doesn't hop when he says hop, my mother being, well, my mother. She's the only one who doesn't understand that I have to do this."

"And none of these photos ended up on a disc or on your computer?"

"No," she said.

How I wished I had a photo of Dugan with me. Maybe Simone saw him hanging around. Could be that when he tampered with JoLynn's car, he somehow found the camera and the pictures and took them. "Did you lose the camera and printed-out photos of JoLynn at the same time?"

"I'm not sure. Since they were all fuzzy and terrible, I never wanted to see them again. As for the camera, well, my parents and I went to U.T. for a visit and when I was unpacking once we came home, I realized I didn't have my camera case. I called the hotel, but nothing from our suite had been turned in by the maid service. It's an expensive camera, so I'm sure someone in Austin is learning how to use it as we speak."

"I hate to ask, but could your mother have taken that camera without you knowing? She had access. And she doesn't like the idea of you becoming a photographer, right?"

Simone's jaw nearly dropped. "Oh man, I never thought of that. I was a 'real pisser,' as my dad said, on that trip. Oh my God. Maybe she was trying to teach me a lesson."

"Did she seem surprised when you were using a camera again as if nothing had happened? I mean, if she took it away and then you show up with the same—"

"I get what you're saying. No. She wasn't surprised. She seemed as annoyed as ever, but she knew Uncle Elliott would be the person I'd go to, and she wouldn't argue with anything he bought me."

My mind was racing now. But I couldn't share my suspicions about Simone's mother possibly being in on the murder attempt. Still, I was wondering if Adele did a little detective work of her own, found Dugan and showed him the pictures of JoLynn, maybe asked him how he felt about his ex-girlfriend living with rich folks. Maybe she merely wanted Dugan to take JoLynn far, far away. Or maybe she asked him or paid him to tamper with the car. That would be a very bad deal for this kid if her mother did something like that.

"What are you thinking, Abby?" Simone asked.

"I'm trying to make sense of this," I said. "When was the trip to U.T.?"

"About a month ago. Why?"

"Just considering other scenarios of how your camera disappeared. Maybe a student saw it and stole it. Anyway, thank you for coming clean. You've been a huge help." I didn't even want to look her in the eye now. What if her mother did hire Dugan to kill JoLynn? And maybe, when he asked for more money, she felt she had to get rid of him.

"You won't talk to my mother about this camera thing?" Simone said. "Maybe one day she'll show up and hand me the one she took and we'll laugh about it. At least that's my dream if I live that long."

"Not to worry. I don't think she and I run in the same circles." I hated not being straight with her, hated what might lie ahead if her mother was arrested. I'd seen firsthand how quickly Adele had taken charge when the security guard disappeared. Now I wondered if she'd hired the impostor herself and covered it up by helping her irate brother, Elliott, find a new man for the job. After all, the impostor was at the hospital for a reason, perhaps hired to finish the job Adele first gave to Kent Dugan.

"You'll keep this between us?" Simone was saying.

"That's what I want to do," I said with a smile. Now I was resorting to semantics.

Simone hugged me and then thanked me profusely. And I felt like a rat. I told her I could find my way out.

I left the house, wondering if I should leave Simone with the house unlocked. Who could find this place? I thought, heading for my Camry. No one but the family probably knows it's even here.

Boy, was I wrong.

Pine needles must have muffled the footsteps of the man who grabbed me and again I found myself in an oppressive and painful bear hug. But unlike before, I'd never heard him coming.

Then I smelled chloroform and thought, Not this again.