Chapter Five
Rose watched Toby Dixon’s receding back—beautifully sculpted and tapering down to his narrow waist with a handkerchief wadded in his back pocket and a pair of socks dangling over his rear, an old tattoo of a Lone Star on the back of his forearm—then glanced down at the urn.
The man, on the surface, seemed so easy to decipher: a player with a rich inheritance from Daddy, who he resented. A guy who didn’t need to work a day in his life if he didn’t want to and could hire out all the help he wanted to run the Legacy. Judging by the row of shiny work trucks she’d seen upon pulling up, he had wranglers or some sort of crew. So not the type she’d go for, even as a friend. But he was leading a group of kids on a hike today. Her heart had squeezed a bit when he’d said that. No guy would trouble himself with kids if he didn’t like them, at least to a degree. And his good nature had been easygoing, comfortable. She’d liked it.
But now, radio silence. And an urn. And a confusing moment when it seemed as if he’d forgotten that this mortuary vessel was sitting right here to smack him in the face.
There you go using archaeology terms out of context. Mortuary vessel?The urn wasn’t some relic dug out of the ground. It belonged to the tall drink of water that had just disappeared out of sight. She and her crew had just barged into the middle of someone’s grief without knowing it. She squatted down and looked at the delivery paper banded to the side of the shiny urn as Toby rounded the corner, disappearing.
Cremated remains of… “Deborah Ann-Michael Dixon,” she whispered. And signed was a scrawling signature that looked as if it could say Toby B. Dixon. RELATIONSHIPTOTHEDECEASED: Son.
Jeezus. The papers showed yesterday’s delivery date with the signature and a death date of…a year ago? Strange, and yet if he’d just received it, no wonder he’d forgotten about her arrival today. No wonder he had an obvious hangover from trying to drown himself in spirits.
Rose knew what it was like to lose a mother.
Tenderly, she picked up Toby’s mother and set her on a side table of polished wood hammered together artfully with horseshoe nails. They had tables to carry in as well as chairs and equipment, and she wasn’t going to risk knocking it over as they moved about. But as she situated it, she knocked a manila folder haphazardly to the floor. Scrambling to scoop it up, she saw sheets of numbers, itemized amounts of dollars, and a paper headed by the word Proposal to the Brewster County Junior Ranchers Education Program for Disadvantaged Youth.
None of my business.But as she tucked it all back into the envelope to set it aside, she couldn’t help but smile. Summer camps and now this. He did like kids.
Her students clopped up the sweeping front steps with the foldout tables, Kelsey and Megan chatting, while Howie came up beside her as their commotion echoed up to the rafters.
“He seems like a prick,” he muttered.
Rose glared in the wake of his remark and pushed to standing. “He’s a nice guy—”
“A prick whose life is a mess. Who’s in the urn?”
She frowned further. After three years of Howie trying to act charming after cheating, this bout of sudden irritation seemed out of character.
“His mom, I think. I would have canceled field school this summer or found a backup location had I known the Dixon family had suffered a loss.”
“We can’t find a backup location, Rose. We need annual, measurable progress of panther shaman to keep the records accurate and to map any degradation of the art’s pigment. A year lapse would skew the records.”
“Yeah, Professor, I know. This is my rodeo.” Howie was always “teaching” her with the way he spoke. But she was the specialist in the lead—the one thing she had going for her curriculum vitae making its rounds through academia. “This is also Mister Dixon’s home—and his mom.”
“Quit with that ‘Mister Dixon’ BS. I saw him whip your ass with his shirt. Damn, Rose, a car ride was all it took to sauce up the landowner?”
“He whipped my thighs—Did you say, ‘sauce up’?” She snorted. Why correct him over something trivial? It just proved Howie’s point. “We hit it off. So what? It has nothing to do with you.”
He smirked. “You guys have barely met, and already he’s checking you out like he hopes you’ll be his next drunken booty call. We could have set up lab in the barn like both previous years and avoided his midlife crisis altogether,” Howie said. “We have no business being in here.”
Rose’s frown turned into a glare. She didn’t know Toby or any of the other Dixons because Shirley had always been the one to facilitate things. But even if Toby was Casanova incarnate, it didn’t diminish his grief. And if she didn’t know any better, she sensed a shit ton of jealousy wafting off of Howie. Hilarious. Howard “free love—monogamy is a worthless social construct” Glenmore, cultural anthropology extraordinaire, had zero grounds for such a sentiment, considering he’d trampled his one shot with her.
“The barn is being renovated. He offered us this space instead because it’s large and it’s climate controlled, but whatever, be an ass about it.” She turned to Howie and looked up at him. “I’m not sure what the issue is, but whatever goes on in his personal life is his business. And you need to remain professional. Capisce?”
Rose tried, even to this day, not to hold a grudge against Howie, but his sleeping around had hurt. She was over it. Yeah.
Says the girl who hasn’t dated anyone in three years now, even though you know Sage desperately wants a daddy.
She listened to Toby’s noise in the kitchen, thinking about Howie’s uncharacteristic jealousy as bitterness rolled up the back of her throat. Perhaps space from him was what she needed, knowing the past hung over her like a storm cloud always on the verge of pouring. If only she could clinch a job!
“Yeah, did you look at the barn?” Howard quipped. “Not an ounce of scaffolding or construction work. Renovation, my ass. He just wants you in here.”
He snorted, then pulled out his phone and tapped around the screen, probably on one of his many apps. She shook her head and Howie, catching her disdain out of his periphery, scoffed, but she cut him off before he could remark upon it.
“I think you need to go outside and help unload the van.”
At her flat statement, he nodded knowingly to himself, smirking, then turned back through the front door to help their minions unload the tables.