Promises of Home Read online

  Praise for Jeff Abbott’s previous

  Jordan Poteet mystery,

  The Only Good Yankee

  “Jordan Poteet, small-town librarian, is an amateur sleuth with a fresh new voice. Jeff Abbott is a phenomenal talent; his style is as easy as a walk down Main Street on a sunny morning, but don’t let that fool you. There is a subtle power here that haunts you long after the book has been put down. The characters are quirky and vivid enough that you just know they have lives apart from Abbott’s pages.”

  —SANDRA WEST PROWELL

  “A carefully considered plot, clearly drawn characters, and Abbott’s irresistible Southern voice combine to create an exciting new entry in mystery fiction.”

  —DEBORAH ADAMS

  “Escapist fare that’s as good as it gets. Speaking in the first person as Jordan Poteet, Abbott brings an engaging new voice to Southern mystery fiction.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  Please turn the page for more reviews. …

  Praise for

  Do Unto Others

  “For ages I’ve been saying that fame and fortune awaited the man who could write charming and funny mysteries set in small-town America. When I read Jeff Abbott’s Do Unto Others, I knew that the position had been filled.”

  —SHARYN MCCRUMB

  “Abbott’s debut has both light and dark tones, is thoroughly readable, and presents a well-drawn gallery of suspects.”

  —Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine

  “A haunting story of a small Texas town overflowing with decade upon decade of dark secrets.”

  —R. D. ZIMMERMAN

  “One of the most fun mysteries I’ve read in years. Thumbs up to Jeff Abbott’s delightful debut novel.”

  —CAROLYN G. HART

  Praise for

  Do Unto Others

  “A wonderful blend of craftsmanship, complexity, and compassion.”

  —M. D. LAKE

  “A delightful continuation of the cozy mystery by an author who expresses an engaging voice and sense of humor.”

  —Mystery News

  “A promising debut and a fine new author I shall watch with interest.”

  —MARGARET MARON

  “There are some nice comic touches, Jordy is a likable fellow, the action is flashy, and the ending is heartwarming.”

  —Booklist

  By Jeff Abbott

  Published by Ballantine Books:

  DO UNTO OTHERS

  THE ONLY GOOD YANKEE

  PROMISES OF HOME

  Books published by The Ballantine Publishing Group are available at quantity discounts on bulk purchases for premium, educational, fund-raising, and special sales use. For details, please call 1-800-733-3000.

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Cast of Characters

  Then

  Prologue August 12-twenty Years Ago

  Now

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Copyright

  This book is for my stepfather,

  Dub Norrid,

  with affection and gratitude.

  I WOULD LIKE TO ACKNOWLEDGE THE HELP OF the following people in writing this book:

  Joe Blades, for his enthusiasm for this book from its earliest stages;

  Nancy Yost, for her always wise input;

  Bruce Little, for the most unflappable sense of humor in New York City;

  Mary Anthony, for equestrian information;

  Lisa Wellons, LMSW-ACP, of the Insight Center, Austin, and Vicky Hanson of the National Association of Social Workers for answering my questions regarding grief counseling and the ethics of therapy;

  Dr. Robert Power, for medical information;

  Chief Lee Nusbaum, Smithville Police Department;

  Susan Rogers Cooper and Megan Bladen-Blinkoff, for their thoughtful criticism and support;

  Floyd Goodrich, HI, for his excellent suggestion—the Mirabeau High School mascot.

  Any errors are my fault—not theirs.

  Then and Now:

  Jordan Poteet chief librarian

  Junebug Moncrief police chief of Mirabeau

  Trey Slocum ne’er-do-well

  Davis Foradory lawyer and radio-station owner

  Clevey Shivers journalist

  Ed Dickensheets salesman and entrepreneur

  Now:

  Sister Jordan’s sister, Arlene

  Mark her son, 14

  Anne Poteet Jordan’s mother

  Candace Tully Jordan’s girlfriend

  Clo Butterfield Anne’s nurse

  Hart Quadlander gentleman-rancher

  Nola Kinnard rodeo queen

  Scott Kinnard her son, 14

  Steven Teague psychotherapist

  Wanda Dickensheets Ed’s wife

  Ivalou Purcell Wanda’s mother

  Cayla Foradory Davis’s wife

  Bradley Foradory Davis’s son, 14

  Truda Shivers Clevey’s mother

  Gretchen Goertz Jordan’s stepmother

  Bob Don Goertz Jordan’s father, currently in Las Vegas

  Peggy Godkin editor of The Mirabeau Mirror

  Miss Ludey Murchison storyteller

  Rennie Clifton a young girl

  Thomasina Clifton a mother

  Eula Mae Quiff romance writer and Mirabeau bon vivant

  Glenn Wilson a long-gone beau

  Forgive these wild and wandering cries,

  Confusions of a wasted youth;

  Forgive them, where they fail in truth,

  And in thy wisdom make me wise.

  —Alfred, Lord Tennyson

  In Memoriam

  “WHAT YOU FELLOWS DON’T UNDERSTAND,” Trey Slocum growled, a cigarette clenched between his teeth, “is that you got to stare death in the face to be a real man.” The rest of us soon-to-be seventh-graders weren’t quite so sure; outside, the wind howled fiercely, rattling the tree house and moaning with the promise of tragedy. I knelt on the rough wooden floorboards and risked being called a yellow-liver sissy by peeking out the small, open window.

  “What’s wrong, Jordy, you got to see if the bad ol’ storm’s comin’?” Trey jeered, kicking my sneakers with his muddy cowboy boots. He was awful proud of those boots, always claiming they were hand-tooled leather from his uncle over in Giddings. I had a half a mind to tear one off his foot, throw it into the storm, and let him fetch it.

  “My daddy says hurricanes are real bad news. They ain’t no ladies,” Little Ed Dickensheets said, trying to keep a note of panic out of his voice. He’d been whining since birth.

  “Shut up, Dick-in-Mouth,” Clevey Shivers teased, and then, of course, Little Ed was all over Clevey, pummeling him with fists. Clevey outweighed Little Ed by about twenty pounds, so he just rolled on the tree-house floor as Little Ed tried to inflict damage, laughing in counterpoint to the lament of the wind. Little Ed exhausted himself soon enough and gave up, rolling off Clevey, honor served by his effort. Clevey yawned, his normally red face a little more florid.

  I believed Little Ed’s daddy, Big Ed, was a wise man. Clouds blackened the sky above the Colorado River and the wind shrieked through the
tree branches like a vengeful banshee. They called the storm Althea on the TV news, and she was bearing down on Central Texas like a mother who, sick and tired of calling you home for supper, brandished a hickory switch in her hand.

  “She was a hurricane only when she hit the coast,” Trey said knowingly. “She done spent herself hitting Corpus Christi. They start dyin’ over land. She’s just a tropical storm now.” Trey always spoke in this way, as if the secrets of the universe had been revealed to him and to no one else. We didn’t much challenge him on it because he was too cool for words.

  “My mama’s gonna whip me good for staying out in this,” Junebug Moncrief fretted, scratching his brown bur of hair. I wouldn’t be worried about his mama if I were him; I always thought his daddy was a sight meaner. My own daddy wasn’t going to be too pleased about my afternoon, either.

  Trey pushed his black cowboy hat back and surveyed us sitting around him, scowling, his night-dark eyes ranging across each of us: me, Junebug, tanned Little Ed, red-haired Clevey, and blond and bespectacled Davis Foradory, who sat placidly playing solitaire, smoking a menthol cigarette, and ignoring the rest of us.

  “Y’all are just a bunch of little chickenshits,” Trey snorted. “Y’all were all gung-ho to sit out this hurricane in the tree house and swear to be blood brothers in the very face of death itself, and now y’all just want to run home and cry against your mamas aprons.”

  The tree creaked loudly as the wind surged, and Little Ed’s brown eyes widened, as though that crying-in-the-apron suggestion wasn’t a bad one at all. I patted him on the shoulder; Little Ed Dickensheets truly was the littlest of us, still eleven and scrawny for his age. We picked on him but didn’t let anyone else. Plus, with that surname of his, he needed our protection.

  Davis Foradory pushed up his glasses and cut his playing cards in the slow, measured manner in which he did all things. “They’re going to be looking for us, you numbnuts. We probably got another ten minutes left till one of y’all’s mamas calls my mamaw and she comes out here to see if this is where we’re at.”

  The tree house sat near the Colorado River, in the middle of the live oaks and loblolly pines that gave way to Foradory pastureland. Davis lived on the farm with his grandmother Foradory, who was a right sweet old lady, and his grandfather (who everyone knew had lost his mind and never went looking for it).

  The tree house groaned, the way I’d imagined a woman in heat did. I could feel the floor swaying against my butt, the nose-wrinkling smell of wet wood pervading the room.

  “You could find a turd in a bowl of ice cream, Four Door.” Trey shook his head at Davis’s pessimism and finished off his cigarette. “Hey, Jordy, give me another of those, will you?” I tossed him the pack after I took one for myself. Junebug, sitting next to me by the open window, looked surprised but didn’t comment. Trey smiled and tossed me the matches.

  “Look at young master Jordan, trying to become a man.” Trey laughed as I lit up and took a tentative puff. I’d only smoked a couple of times before; I wasn’t yet a hard-core smoker like Trey or Davis. I figured Daddy’d whip me good for venturing into this storm; I might as well indulge in the few vices available to me as a twelve-year-old. I coughed and Trey laughed again. Junebug, who did not approve of cigarettes, looked away from me. I saw Trey’s eyes watching me and Junebug, as though some contest for my lungs was being waged.

  It had seemed a good idea, riding out the storm together; I’d gotten worked up with excitement sitting around the house that still summer day, watching the grayish-white curls of Althea’s strange clouds inch across the sky, knowing that they were from some fierce faraway tempest that might touch or spare us. No telling. Although Mirabeau was a few hours inland, Daddy and Mama stayed by the TV and radio nearly all day. There was talk of evacuations of Corpus Christi and Galveston; talk of the hurricane in 1900 that had leveled Galveston and killed six thousand people; talk of earlier, deadly Texas ladies: Carta, Beulah, and Celia; and talk of flooding in the inland towns on the Texas rivers. Mirabeau sat in a gentle bend of the Colorado, and we’d all been watching the skies, waiting for the torrents that must come if Althea hit the coast at an unkind angle.

  Trey had stopped by while I sat on my front porch, idly tossing a softball in the air. With little preamble he proposed camping through the storm in the old Foradory tree house we used for smoking, cussing, and bragging.

  “Are you crazy? Sit out a hurricane in a tree house?”

  “Shoot, she’ll be all broke up by the time she gets here, if she ever shows up. Not much more than a rainstorm, I reckon. Get Junebug and Clevey and Davis. It’ll be cool. We can brag about it in school.” Boasting was Trey’s butter on the bread of life.

  “If it ain’t gonna be so bad, then we won’t have too much to brag about,” I pointed out. Although the suggestion did have an edgy appeal, I wasn’t about to jump into another one of Trey’s harebrained schemes. I’d gotten my britches warmed good for the last one: fashioning a swing rope on the bridge into town that spanned the Colorado.

  Trey deliberated, pushing back his cowboy hat. He dressed just like a grown man did; his daddy tended horses out at Hart Quadlander’s place and Trey felt it necessary to dress exactly like his father: Western shirt, faded jeans, and boots that were cared for like a rich woman’s skin. “If the storm ain’t shit, then we just hang out. But”—and the devil glinted in his dark Cherokee eyes—“if it is, then we can say we stared down death.”

  I let the softball rest in my hand. Trey would do any crazy stunt that popped into his brain; if reason was ink, he couldn’t dot an i. But he knew that I was the barometer of what would impress our peers; if I thought the notion was worthwhile, he’d pursue it with relentless vigor.

  But this idea sounded a little insane, like perching on the tracks of the approaching train and taking your own sweet time to get out of harm’s way. “I don’t know, Trey.”

  “Look, Jordy,” he said, in a caressing voice he’d later use on women with much success, “it’ll be the last great adventure of the summer. We’ll all be trapped in school soon enough, and man, that’ll be real death. Let’s do it. We haven’t had a storm like this come in ages. Next time one this big comes, we’ll be long in the tooth.”

  “Less we get killed today.” I tossed the softball back up into the air.

  He shrugged. “Okay, Jordy. The rest of us’ll sit up in the tree and watch you swim with the other losers when the floodwaters come.”

  I frowned at him, the ball bouncing in my hand. I still hadn’t figured out why Trey’d decided last year to be my friend. Since birth, I’d hung around with Junebug and Davis and Clevey and Little Ed. Trey was too cool for us regular kids, what with his calmly appraising eyes, loner’s swagger, and quick-fisted way of dealing with anyone who crossed him. But he’d taken to me and then to the others. I wasn’t sure Davis and Junebug were pleased about my newest friend, but Trey finally beguiled them. A natural air of danger surrounded Trey that other boys couldn’t resist. He made Mirabeau less boring, an achievement of no small value.

  My mother came out on the porch, drying damp hands on her slim jean-clad hips. As always, Trey was at his most gentlemanly with her, tipping his hat like she was a Houston debutante come to call. “Mornin’, Miz Poteet. I was just tellin’ Jordan here that we’re fixin’ to get us some blowin’ tonight.”

  My mother, with her blonde hair, high cheeks, and penetrating green eyes, was the prettiest of all my friends’ mamas. And the smartest and the funniest. I took great pride in her. She came up behind me, leaning against the back of the wicker chair. She liked Trey, but I didn’t think she was ever fooled by his wiles; he was trouble, pure and simple.

  “Good afternoon, Trey. I hope y’all’ve got your horses set to weather the storm.”

  “Yas’m, we do. Daddy and Mr. Quadlander are gonna take good care of them.”

  “And won’t you be helping them?” Mama asked, her voice wry. It was a practiced game between them—her giving him his cha
nce for a honeyed explanation.

  Trey posed, the poster child for earnestness, with his cowboy hat held over his innocent heart and a dark cowlick standing at bent attention. “Ah, no, ma’am. See, I’m going to be out courtin’ Miss Althea so she don’t blow any of us away.” He was only a boy, but already he had the sparkling eye of a dedicated flirt.

  Mama laughed, a sweet musical tinkle that sounded more like a young girl’s than a mother’s. “I’ll certainly sleep better knowing that you’re protecting us all. Jordan, I’m going to make lunch now. Trey, would you like to stay and eat ham sandwiches with us?”

  “No, thank you, ma’am.” Trey smiled. It was hard to believe the number of cuss words he’d taught me when he put on his proper talk. “I got to go buy Miss Althea some candy and flowers.”