Texas Gothic - By Rosemary Clement-Moore Page 0,46
Breathalyzer if you get pulled over.”
Deputy Kelly would love that, I bet, so I stopped fighting. In the bathroom, where I tried to touch as few things as possible, Jessica had me strip off my T-shirt so she could rinse it in the sink—it couldn’t get any wetter—and dry it under the hand dryer. I stood in my bra and toweled off my hair and debated whether it was “nosy” to seize the opportunity that fate had given me.
Jessica looked barely old enough to work in a bar, and she was obviously a local, since she knew Ben and Joe both. Maybe it wasn’t playing fair, but I figured, what the heck. The roar of the hand dryer would cover our voices.
“So,” I began, in what I hoped was a subtle sort of way, “it sounds like you know all the families around here.”
She grinned. “You mean like the McCullochs?” At my expression—clearly I hadn’t been subtle at all—she laughed. “It’s kind of a logical guess, you being neighbors and all.”
I sighed and leaned against the counter, then thought better of it and stood up. “Okay. So, what’s his deal? Was he always such a crankypants?”
“Not really.” She thought about it while she waved my shirt under the hot air of the dryer. “He and Joe were a year behind me in high school, but it’s a small campus. Ben made good grades, went to parties, had lots of girlfriends. Lots of girlfriends.”
Her gaze slid sort of speculatively my way, and I sucked in my stomach a little bit. I mean, I wasn’t vain, but I was human, and also standing in my underwear under fluorescent lights.
Jessica went on. “But he wasn’t popular popular, if you know what I mean. Even with his being a McCulloch, which you can imagine is a pretty big deal here. He was too laid-back to be really A-list.”
“Laid-back?” I couldn’t picture it.
Jessica nodded. “I don’t think he got so serious until he came home from college.”
She could have meant when he graduated, but something in her tone, in the knit of her brow, said not. “When was that?” I asked.
“Sometime last year.” She glanced at me in the mirror. “You know about his dad, right?”
“Uh, no.” Just that I’d made an idiotic statement about him having parents, and that he’d stuttered over his answer in a way that now gave me a sinking dread in the pit of my stomach.
“His dad died not long ago.” She said it solemnly, but without the hush of a very recent death. “And Ben’s granddad isn’t doing so well. The ranch is kind of a lot for his mom to handle on her own, even with the help of Mr. Sparks, so Ben came home to help out for a while.”
“How long is a while?” I asked.
She thought about it. “Well, it’s been since last year sometime. So …”
Someone came into the restroom and went into a stall without looking at me twice. Jessica hit the blower again, and I retreated to my thoughts.
The idea of Ben putting school on hold for his family gave my heart an odd and painful twist. As much as I complained about my own family, I’d do anything for them. I mean, I was here, dealing with Phin and her inventions for a month. But my whole world was wrapped up in going to college—I’d picked all my high school classes and extracurricular activities based on what would look good on an application. If I had to stay home and run the shop for Mom for an indefinite amount of time … ? I’d be twice as cranky as he was.
The girl from the stall came out, washed her hands (thank God), and left, drying them on her jeans. When the door had swung closed behind her, Jessica turned to me in a decisive sort of way. “Can I ask you a question?”
“Uh, sure.” I hoped it wasn’t “Why do you give a fig about Ben McCulloch?” because I didn’t have an answer to that.
“Are you going to catch the Mad Monk?”
The knot in my chest, the one that had sent me fleeing the booth in the first place, the one that had slackened in my distraction, wrenched tight. So tight and so hard that I let out an involuntary wheeze. I grabbed the counter by the sink to steady myself, and deliberately rolled my eyes, hoping the sound came off as exasperation and not Holy-smokes-what-is-wrong-with-me?