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“Fourteen?” Miranda repeated, staring at Crystal as if she were out of her mind. When she hadn’t heard from Hunter for nearly four days, Miranda had driven into town, circling the streets restlessly until she’d finally stopped for a Coke at the Dairy Freeze. She’d spotted Crystal, who had visibly started at the sight of her, but Miranda hadn’t been deterred by Crystal’s grief over her brother or her jealousy of a Holland for snagging Weston Taggert’s attention. Crystal and her mother both had ears for gossip, so with Dan’s mention of Hunter and trouble in mind, Miranda had slid onto the empty bench at Crystal’s table then asked about Hunter and any gossip surrounding him.
Now, as oil sizzled in deep fryers behind the counter, the cash register dinged and the blender whirred before spitting out the next milk shake, Miranda sat across the yellow plastic table from Crystal and waited as she sipped her drink.
“The way I heard it is that Hunter got this girl pregnant, then he wanted her to get an abortion, but she’s underage.”
Miranda felt the color drain from her face and nearly dropped her soda.
“Her mother’s some kind of religious nut—real right-wing, Born-Again Christian who doesn’t believe in abortion in any circumstance. Anyway, the girl, she spills the beans that she’s gonna have a baby, and the woman nearly has a heart attack.”
“No way.” Miranda swirled the crushed ice in her cup of Coke and shook her head. But doubt, like an ever-faster flowing whirlpool, surrounded her, threatening to drown her last shred of faith in the boy she loved. “I—I can’t believe that he . . .” She swallowed hard to fight off a brutal attack of nausea.
“Hey,” Crystal said, dunking a french fry into a pool of catsup. “I’m only telling you what’s going around. I don’t know if it’s true.”
“Hunter wouldn’t . . .” Or would he? Her throat closed, and she fought a rising sense of panic. “Who’s the girl? What’s her name?”
Crystal lifted a shoulder. “No one seems to know.”
Miranda was determined to find out. “I think it’s a lie.”
“Maybe.” Crystal frowned. “Who knows?”
“Someone knows.”
“Yeah, Hunt.”
“And the girl. If she exists. Who told you this story?”
“My mom. She heard it from some of the women she plays pinochle with, and that lady said her husband told her the story because it was going around the Westwind Bar late last night.”
“But—” But she’d been with Hunter only a few nights ago. How would anyone have known? Miranda would make it her personal mission to find out. She finished her drink and stood. “Look, thanks. You know how bad I feel about Jack.”
Crystal’s gaze slid past Miranda’s shoulder, to a middle distance only she could see. “He didn’t just slip off the ridge that day, you know,” she said, her voice flat. “He’d been on that path a million times.”
Shoving her fries aside, she chewed thoughtfully on her lower lip. “And he didn’t fall because he was drunk.”
Miranda had heard the stories that Jack, after being fired from Taggert Industries, had drunk his fill of hard liquor, driven up the ridge, and then, while walking along an old Indian trail, fallen from the cliff to his death.
“He was pushed.” Crystal sounded certain.
Miranda’s stomach clutched. “Pushed?” Again, her queasy stomach revolted, and she had to swallow back the bile that rose in the back of her throat. “As in murdered?”
Crystal brushed a tear from the corner of her eye. “There’s no doubt in my mind or my mother’s. We just can’t prove it yet. But we will.”
“Good luck, I guess.” Miranda felt suddenly awkward. “We miss Ruby, you know.”
“Do you?” Crystal gave out a heartless laugh and pinned Miranda with sharp, black eyes. “Or do you miss having an Indian squaw for a slave?”
“You know that’s not true! We think of Ruby as one of the family,” Miranda said, rising. “We always have.”
“Then why doesn’t your dad use some of his stinking money and hire a first-class private investigator to find out what happened to Jack?”
“I thought the police ruled it was—”
“An accident, right. And they thought they were saving us some embarrassment by not suggesting that it could have been a suicide. Suicide! Can you believe it? No one loved life more than Jack.”
“I’m sorry—”
“Then do something. Aren’t you planning to be some kind of hot shit lawyer?”
