"Thanks, brat."
"You're welcome." She slid back into her chair. "All kidding aside, Lucky, if Susan Young has got it in her head that you're her prospective groom, you'd better be shopping for a diamond ring. When she doesn't get her way, she causes trouble."
"What more can she do? I'm already in trouble up to my gills."
A week had passed since his fight with Little Alvin. It had been the longest week of Lucky's life. The area around his right eye had run the gamut of rainbow colors, and was still a sick, jaundiced yellow. The red line across his abdomen had faded to pink. Together with Sheriff's Department deputies and insurance investigators, federal agents continued to sift through the debris left by the fire. Due to the unfavorable publicity, Tyler Drilling's client list had dropped drastically. The note payment was coming due in less than a month, and what little revenue had been trickling in had stopped altogether. Bankruptcy seemed unavoidable. There wasn't even a glimmer of light on the dark horizon.
"One good thing," Chase had optimistically remarked the evening before, "they haven't turned up any hard evidence against you. Without something that places you on the scene at the time of the fire, they haven't got a case. It's all circumstantial."
"That's a plus from the legal standpoint," Lucky had said. "But until the insurance company is satisfied that we were victims and not perpetrators, they aren't going to honor our claim. So, while I won't go to jail, we're still in hock."
They desperately needed verification of Lucky's whereabouts that night in order to eliminate him as an arson suspect. They desperately needed Dovey.
Thus far, however, his attempts to track her had led him nowhere except in circles. Daily he polled the patrons of the place, asking everyone who had witnessed the incident with Little Alvin and Jack Ed if he remembered anything about the elusive woman or her car. All the men remembered that she was a good-looking redhead. Beyond that, he had come up empty-handed.
A return trip to the motel to speak with the night clerk hadn't been productive either. The man remembered her, all right, but she had registered as Mary Smith, paid for one night with cash, and that was all he knew. The convenience-store clerk who had sold him the whiskey, steak, and aspirin had never seen him with Dovey.
"She couldn't have just vanished off the face of the earth!" Lucky had exclaimed to his family after his discouraging interview with the motel clerk. "She's somewhere, walking around, breathing, going about her business, eating, sleeping, having no idea of the havoc she's created in my life."
"Maybe not," Tanya had suggested.
He had stopped pacing and looked toward his sister-in-law. "What do you mean?"
"Maybe she's read about the fire in the newspaper and realizes she's your alibi, but hasn't come forward because she doesn't want to become involved."
"That's a possibility," Chase had said.
Because it irked Lucky to think so, he dismissed that worry. "It's only been in the local papers, and she said she wasn't from around here when Pat asked her. I think she was telling the truth when she gave Dallas as her address. She looked like a city girl."
But for the next several days he had logged a lot of miles on his Mustang, driving to neighboring communities and tracking down all the Mary Smiths on the lists of registered voters. He found several. One was eighty-two; one was middle-aged, blind, and living with her elderly parents; one was a coed. All were dead ends.
He considered combing Dallas, seeking out every Mary Smith, but he knew it would be a time-consuming chore and, in the end, an exercise in futility. Tongue-in-cheek, and very cleverly, she had used that fictitious name. Why? She hadn't known then that he would eventually be looking for her to serve as his alibi in a criminal investigation.
"Lucky, are you listening to me?"
Sage's impatient inquiry brought him back to the present. "Hmm? What? You were saying something about Susan?"
"I was saying that she's a spiteful bitch."
"How do you know so much about her? She was several classes ahead of you."
"But her legend lived on even after I got to high school."
"Legend?"
"Her meanness was legendary."
"Example?"
"She was so envious when one of her classmates was named Homecoming queen instead of her that she circulated the rumor that the girl had herpes."
Lucky gave a spontaneous burst of laughter.
"It's not funny!" Sage exclaimed. "The gossip ruined that girl's reputation and made the remainder of her days at high school pure hell. That's not all."
Propping her arm on the edge of the table, she leaned toward him. "Susan was named first alternate on the girls' varsity basketball team. The next morning, when the newly named team was suiting up for practice, a bank of lockers fell over on top of one of the girls and broke her arm. Susan was standin
g on the other side of the lockers."