Confessing to the Cowboy - By Carla Cassidy Page 0,51
whoever she got close to would be at risk, as well.
Her wayward thoughts were interrupted by a commotion in the kitchen. As she headed in, Junior Lempke raced out, obviously escaping Rusty’s temper.
“What’s up?” she asked the big man who was scrapping down the grill and cursing up a storm.
“Regina is making me crazy,” Rusty said. “She doesn’t take the orders right and then they come back to me with complaints. I’m sick of it. I’m sick of her.”
It was the first time Mary had ever heard him bitch about a waitress. “I’ll talk to her,” she replied in an attempt to halt one of Rusty’s temper tantrums before it became one of his legendary ones.
“You do that,” he said curtly. “Shirley used to be the same way, God rest her soul. She was a good woman, but she screwed up her orders a lot, too. It just makes it so much easier if everyone does their jobs right the first time.”
As Mary went to talk to Regina, Mary’s heart thundered with an unexpected rumble of uneasiness. It was odd that Rusty had not only complained about Regina but had also mentioned Shirley Cook, as well.
Rusty’s cabin behind the café was completely isolated. It would be easy for somebody to come and go from there without anyone being the wiser.
Just a coincidence, she told herself. There was no way she could believe that Rusty was behind the murders. Besides, how would Rusty meet Jason? The cook was busy at the café most of the time and Rusty certainly didn’t appear to have come into a windfall of money recently.
Don’t get overly paranoid, she thought as she pulled Regina aside and told her she needed to take more care with her orders. She had to trust the people she surrounded herself with on a daily basis, otherwise she would go completely mad.
At dinnertime Maddy Billings showed up alone, a sour look on her pretty face as she glanced around the café, obviously looking for Denver and Lynette, who Mary knew were together on a date in Evanston.
Maddy flopped down in a booth near the door, her expression as sour as a lemon as she slammed her zebra-print purse on the booth seat next to her. Mary decided to wait on her and approached her with a friendly smile. “Hey, Maddy, nice to see you this evening.”
Maddy sniffed disdainfully, as if sitting in the booth she’d often sat in with Denver was far below her standards. “I see that Lynette Shivers isn’t working tonight, so I suppose the rumors are true and she’s with Denver tonight.”
“I’m sorry, I don’t keep track of my waitresses when they’re off duty,” Mary replied smoothly. “Now, what can I get for you?”
“If she thinks she’s going to have a relationship with Denver then she’s sadly mistaken. Denver has belonged to me since we were teenagers. Oh, we have our little spats and he comes in here and flirts with all the waitresses, but he always comes back to me where he belongs.” She raised her pointy little chin as if for punctuation.
“Maddy, I’m just here to feed you,” Mary replied evenly.
Maddy sighed with impatience as if what she really wanted was to discuss at length her dysfunctional romantic life. “Just give me one of those dinner salads and a diet cola.” She dismissed Mary with a wave of her hand.
Although Mary wasn’t one to get involved with town romances, she almost wished Denver would find a nice woman and settle down, a young woman who wasn’t Maddy Billings, a woman who didn’t think she could buy people and love.
Denver did like to flirt with the waitresses, and if Shirley and Dorothy had been young and carefree like Candy and Lynette, then Maddy would have been on the top of the suspect list, at least before Mary had learned that Jason was still alive.
What if it wasn’t Jason who was responsible? After all, it had been years. For all she knew Jason could have moved out of the country, divorced her and then forgotten all about her and Matt and built a new life with a new young woman he could dominate and control. And yet that didn’t explain either the anniversary card or the stuffed frog.
By the time the dinner rush began she had the mother of all headaches, torn between every theory of the case that flittered through her mind. What if Cameron focused only on the Jason angle and missed the real killer who