Those Texas Nights. Delores Fossen
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quickly turn to smothering. Then nagging. Then, she’d go after Brantley with a vengeance.
“We know she’s here. We followed her muddy footprints.” Voice number three. Lawson. Her cousin. He’d berate her, coddle her and then assist Garrett and her mother with giving Brantley a serious butt-kicking.
The only Granger missing was her other brother, Roman. He’d been invited to the wedding, of course, but he hadn’t shown and probably wouldn’t. Too bad, because if Roman had come, then it would have taken some of the ugly spotlight off her. A black sheep brother could do that.
“We need to see her.” Voice number four. Her best friend, Mila Banchini. There’d be no nagging, butt-kicking and only minimal coddling from her, but for the next decade Sophie would have to listen to Mila’s attempts to find her a suitable husband.
“I’m sorry,” Sophie said to the chief.
“For what?”
“This is the only tweak I can think of.” And despite it being a stupid tweak, Sophie launched herself into Chief McKinnon’s arms.
From the corner of her eye, Sophie watched her family and friend trickle in. She also felt the chief’s muscles go statue-stiff and expected a similar reaction from the others.
That didn’t happen.
They were standing there. Three Grangers and Mila, who was wearing her champagne maid of honor dress. Each of them looked at her not with sympathy, exactly. There was something else. Something that caused her to go still.
They didn’t rush to coddle her. Didn’t issue death threats about Brantley. And they especially didn’t ask what she was doing in Chief McKinnon’s arms. The chief remedied that, though. He backed away from her, staying by her side and studying her family.
“We know about Brantley,” Garrett said. “He came and talked to us right after he spoke to you.”
Oh. Sophie hadn’t expected that from the man she was now thinking of as freshly dropped cow dung.
“I know it’s hard,” her mother added. “You’re crying.”
It was the right thing to say. The right tone, too, but the four were still standing in the same spot as if someone had magnetized their feet to the floor. And Lawson and her mother were dodging her gaze. Definitely not a good sign.
“Did someone die?” Sophie came out and asked. Then, she got a horrible, gut-twisting thought. “Did one of you kill Brantley?”
“No,” Garrett answered. He didn’t add more because his phone buzzed. He mumbled something about having to take the call and walked out.
That knot in her stomach got worse. Because here she was jilted and broken, something Garrett would have almost certainly realized, and yet he’d taken a call.
“Did Brantley do something to harm himself?” the chief asked.
Evidently, he was also aware that something wasn’t right about this visit. Something other than the obvious, that is, since she’d just been jilted and her family had seen her with her arms wrapped around the police chief.
“As far as I know, Brantley’s okay,” Lawson said.
There was a huge but at the end of that. Sophie could hear it. “What’s wrong?” she asked.
Her mother, Mila and Lawson volleyed glances at each other, but they didn’t say a word. They appeared to be waiting for Garrett to return, which he did a couple of moments later.
“Anything?” her mother said to him.
Garrett shook his head and drew in a long breath as if he would need it. He went to Sophie, taking her by the shoulders. “I know this is a shitty day, but I’m about to make it even shittier.”
Not possible.
But a moment later, Sophie learned she was wrong about that. A whole new level of shitty had been added to her life.
A FAILED WEDDING. Now a funeral.
Not a literal funeral, but to Sophie it certainly felt like another sucker punch of fate. This couldn’t happen. It had to be a mistake.
“It’s a mistake,” she repeated, this time aloud, but Garrett didn’t react. Probably because she’d already repeated it a dozen times, and he’d likely gotten tired of telling her that it wasn’t.
That something very bad had indeed happened to Granger Western.
Just how bad, they didn’t know yet because they didn’t have answers. Answers they needed from their chief financial officer, Billy Lee Seaver, who’d seemingly taken money and lots of it from the company.
Sophie held on to the seemingly part, figuring this was all some kind of banking error or a computer glitch, and she made a call to the next person on her contact list. The first sixteen calls hadn’t produced much, and this one was no different. Saturday evenings apparently weren’t a good time to reach business associates who would perhaps know Billy Lee’s whereabouts.
When she struck out with the next two calls, Sophie looked at Marcum Gentry, their legal advisor, to see if he’d had any better luck. Judging from his body language that would be a no. He was pacing while having an intense conversation with someone at Austin PD. Marcum’s pricey shoes clicked and tapped on the hardwood floors as he went from one side of Garrett’s office to the other.
Her brother wasn’t pacing, though. Garrett was seated behind his desk, looking very much like a troubled cowboy rather than a concerned CEO. He was in his usual jeans, his Stetson sat on the corner of his desk and he’d ditched the two items he rarely wore—a jacket and a bolo tie. Sophie hadn’t even tried to talk him into wearing dress pants for the wedding because she was reasonably sure that her brother didn’t own dress anything. However, he had put on his good boots to attend the ceremony, which he’d also already swapped out for his usual ones.
The boots and his clothes were the only thing usual about this day, though. Garrett was having his own intense conversation with one of their accountants he had managed to reach. Sophie watched Garrett’s mouth move, and she was hearing him say the words. But her brain just wasn’t processing what he was saying. Perhaps it was the tequila aftermath or maybe her mind just couldn’t handle two major shocks like this in the same day.
At least she wasn’t having to deal with this shock while wearing her wedding dress. Once they’d arrived at the Granger Western building in downtown Austin, Sophie had made a beeline to her office and changed into one of the spare business suits she kept there. Thankfully, none of their employees had been around to see her.
Of course, having their employees see her was the least of their problems.
If the initial reports were true, then Billy Lee had basically screwed them six ways to Sunday by embezzling a fortune. And after doing that, he’d disappeared.
Much as her ex-fiancé had done.
Too bad her heart hadn’t done a vanishing act along with them because she wasn’t sure how much more she could take. The panic was rising inside her. The pressure in her chest, too, and if this was some dream, she prayed she’d wake up from it soon.
Sophie forced herself to her feet, and while dodging Marcum’s pacing pattern, she walked to the floor-to-ceiling window in Garrett’s office. It was identical to hers, which was just next door. The view of downtown Austin was one of the best in the city, and it normally gave her a jolt of pride.
This was theirs.
The company their great-grandfather Zachariah Taylor Granger had built from the ground up. To remind them of that, there was a massive twelve-foot-high oil portrait of Z.T. on the wall of Garrett’s office. Not an especially good portrait, Sophie had always thought, what with his stern gaze, slightly narrowed