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She hands me a glass, with ice cubes and lemon pulp floating in the cloudy liquid. One swallow makes my lips pucker.
I tell her it’s delicious, then add, “I must say, I’m a bit envious of you and Parker. You seem to have it all. Beautiful family. Perfect marriage.”
“I picked a good man,” she says. “The best.”
I can’t argue with that.
At least not until I have more evidence,I think with a pang of guilt.
I say, “Megan’s great and all…”
Josie says, “But?”
Just like Carlos, she can sense abut.
“We don’t have what you two have,” I say.
“Being married to a Texas Ranger isn’t easy,” she says. “Trust me: I know. But if it made Parker happy to stay a Ranger, I would have stuck with him. If you’re with the right person, you figure it out.”
As much as I wouldn’t mind sitting down with Josie and talking through the woes of my love life, I’m here for another reason. And I’m anxious to see what’s out in the barn. I take the second glass of lemonade from Josie and head through the back door.
Halfway to the barn, I hear a shriek coming from the back of the yard. Kids can make all kinds of racket when they’re fooling around, but there’s a distinct difference between shrieks of play and screams of pain or terror.
These are the latter.
Parker bursts out of the barn, looking around. He glances at me and doesn’t so much as register an ounce of surprise that I’m there. I point toward the back of the yard, where the kids were playing by the fallen tree, and he takes off in a sprint.
I drop both glasses of lemonade in the grass and run after him.
CHAPTER 15
IT TAKES US only a second or two to sprint to the back of the property where the fallen oak lies. Parker sawed many of the branches off and split them into logs, but the main trunk—a good three feet in diameter—is still intact. Parker leaps it like an Olympic hurdler, and I place one hand against the bark and vault over.
On the other side of the tree, we find Parker’s two kids, tears streaming down their cheeks and looks of fright on their faces.
“What happened?” Parker says, keeping his voice steady—instilling calm rather than panic.
“A snake bit Leo,” the girl wails.
Parker kneels to examine his son’s leg, as Josie comes running up and lifts Etta into her arms. From where I’m standing, I can see nothing more than a small red welt on Leo’s leg, no bigger than a dime. I lean forward and spot the bite marks, just small punctures like two bee stings.
It doesn’t look bad.
Probably scared the kid more than hurt him.
“You okay?” Parker asks his son.
The boy nods, trying to put on a brave face, but his mouth is turned down in a frown. At any moment, he’s going to burst back into tears.
“Where did the snake go?” I ask, keeping my voice calm so I don’t spook the kids any more than they already are.
Leo points into the woods, and I start walking that way, eyeing the grass at my feet.
Parker follows me, leaving Josie to comfort the children. We step from the grass into the woods where the vegetation is thick with weeds growing up through a layer of leaves and fallen branches.
Parker says, “There’s no way we’re going to find that sn—”
About ten feet away, a slithering rope of red, black, and yellow slides underneath a log and disappears. I run to the log and spot the snake on the other side, about to disappear in a cluster of tall grass.
