Long, Tall Texans_ Boone (Long, Tall Texans #35) - Diana Palmer Page 0,48

out. “I’m so sorry!”

The expression on her face spoke volumes. She never could keep secrets, and this one had cost her many a night’s sleep. If Hayes pushed, she’d have to tell him. She went pale.

“You know, don’t you?” he asked quietly. “Tell me, Keely.”

She wrapped her arms tight around herself. “If I do, my mother will go to jail,” she said miserably.

“If you don’t, your mother may die,” he countered. “Your father was seen at a roadhouse over in Bexar County two days ago.”

She actually gasped. “With Jock?”

“The person who saw him didn’t know about the other man. Probably wouldn’t recognize him. What does Brent have on your mother, Keely, and what has it got to do with my family?”

She leaned back against his patrol car, looking at him with dead eyes. “My father was apparently dealing cocaine before he left here with me, and he had some pure stuff. He made a deal with…” She stopped and bit her lip. She hadn’t thought how it would sound.

Hayes seemed to know. He shifted his tall frame. “I know what my brother was,” he said quietly. “You don’t have to pull any punches on his account. He’s long dead and buried.”

She drew in a long breath. “Yes, but he was still your brother and you loved him,” she said gently. “I loved my father. I never dreamed…” She stopped. “Your brother saw my father make a drug buy. My father offered him a small fortune in cocaine not to tell you.”

“So that was it.”

“My father gave it to your brother. He didn’t tell him that it was a hundred-percent pure. Your brother had his supplier inject him with it. That’s why he overdosed.” She lowered her eyes. “I’m so ashamed!”

“No!” He moved forward and framed her face in his big, warm hands. “No, Keely, it’s not your shame or your guilt! You’re as much a victim as Bobby was. Don’t take that burden on your own shoulders. It’s their crime, not yours!”

Tears were rolling down her cheeks. Hayes felt for a handkerchief, but he didn’t have one. Keely laughed as she tugged a paper towel out of her jeans pocket. “I always carry them around,” she explained, dragging at her eyes. “We’re constantly cleaning up messes. Some dogs get sick when they’re brought here.”

“I can sympathize with them,” Hayes said with a forced smile. “I don’t like going to doctors myself.”

She blew her nose. “I wanted to tell you. I couldn’t. I haven’t been close to my mother, until the last few days, and I knew if I told, she could go to prison.”

“What for?” he asked heavily. “There’s no evidence. Everybody directly connected with the case is dead. The woman who gave Bobby the drugs was Ivy Conley’s sister, Rachel. She died of a drug overdose herself not long ago. She left a diary and confessed that she’d given Bobby the overdose,” he said surprisingly. Actually Keely knew Ivy, who had just married Stuart York, her best friend’s brother.

Hayes looked thoughtful. “Your father and Rachel handed Bobby the gun, but he pulled the trigger himself, figuratively speaking. Bobby was an addict from the time he was twelve. I knew and tried to stop him. I never could.”

“You mean, Mama won’t go to jail?” she worried.

“No.” He hesitated. “But your father will, if I can find one damned thing to pin on him,” he added in the coldest tone she’d ever heard him use.

She felt sad, because her father had been kind to her. She hadn’t known about his dark past, and she’d loved him. It was hard to know that he was one jump ahead of the law. She wondered why, what he’d done to get in so much trouble that he was running scared. “If he’s running, and he needs money,” she reasoned out loud, “he must be desperate to get away.”

He pursed his lips. “You think like a detective,” he mused.

“He’s done something bad,” she continued. “Or Jock has, and he helped.” Her eyes were sad as they met Hayes’s. “He was good to me, those two years I lived with him. If he’d never got mixed up with Jock again, he might have stayed changed.”

“Bad men don’t change, Keely,” Hayes said in a resigned tone. “A lot of them are easily led. Others are just lazy, and they don’t want to have to work for a living. Some have been so badly abused that they hate the world and want to get even. In between, there