Page 35 of The Killing Plains

Pink-faced and slightly pear-shaped, Maybrey reminded Colly of Colonel Sanders, minus the white linen suit. Blinking through horn-rimmed glasses, he murmured a polite greeting and surprised Colly by raising her hand to his lips for a moist kiss. She had to resist the urge to wipe her knuckles on her dress.

“Sit down, you three,” Iris said. “Care for a drink? My housekeeper makes a marvelous old-fashioned.”

“Iced tea for me.” Brenda settled herself into a chair at some distance from Lowell.

Russ rubbed the back of his neck. “Momma, we thought we’d run down to the cabin before dark. Colly wants to look at the scene.”

A flicker of pain showed in Iris’s face, but her voice remained placid. “Of course, dear. We’ll eat at seven.”

“Not so terrible, eh?” Russ grinned as they followed a flagstone path through a thicket of still-bare crape myrtles on the other side of the pool.

Not if you enjoy catty microaggressions,Colly thought. “What do you mean?”

Beyond the thicket, the path skirted the tennis courts and wound down a grassy slope.

“C’mon, admit you were dreading this.” Russ prodded her good-naturedly with his elbow as they started down the hill.

Having lowered her emotional defenses on the drive from town, however, Colly intended to keep them fully raised while here. “Remind your mother that I’m not retired. I’m taking a break, figuring out what I want to do next.”

Russ chuckled. “Fine, change the subject.”

Colly ignored him. “What was that about with Lowell?”

“His usual jackassedness. He’s got the emotional maturity of a toddler who missed naptime.”

“Seemed like more than that.”

“Forget it.” Russ waved dismissively. “What’s your impression of the judge?”

“Now who’s changing the subject?” Colly muttered. Whatever was going on between the brothers, Russ definitely didn’t want to talk about it. “The judge seems okay.”

Russ smiled. “He is, as long as you don’t get him going about his stamp collection. Lowell can’t stand him, thinks he’s a gold-digger.”

“You don’t?”

“I ran a credit and background check. Talford’s legit. Momma needed someone. Been a hellish couple of years—losing Randy and Victoria, and now Willis, too.”

Colly said nothing. She tried to keep her eyes on the path but felt them inexorably drawn to a distant spot on the hillside, where, beneath a spreading oak, a cluster of white stones glimmered in the twilight.Such a tranquil scene, she thought numbly. In a few weeks, it would be covered with bluebonnets waving cheerfully in the breeze—as if nothing but joy could be associated with that place.

Russ followed her gaze, then dropped his arm across her shoulders and drew her against his side. “Sorry, wasn’t thinking when I came this way.” He hesitated. “Long as we’re here, want to go visit them?”

For a moment, Colly almost turned to bury her face in his shoulder. But she couldn’t afford to feel anything right now. A breeze ruffled her hair. She inhaled sharply, catching the fresh, chalky scent of the scrublands all around.

“Maybe later,” she said and pulled away.

Chapter 10

Willis’s cabin, as the Newlands called it, sat at the base of the slope, where the tended lawn gave way to a wild tangle of juniper and mesquite. It had been built in the 1980s as a place for Bryant’s mother to live out her retirement. After her death, it sat unused until a teenaged Willis began begging for a pet snake. When Bryant, in a rare moment of parental indulgence, returned from a business trip and popped the Cadillac’s trunk, beckoning Willis to look inside a mysterious container, the boy stared, a lopsided grin on his face. Iris refused to allow the young Burmese python in the house, so it was relegated to the cabin, where Willis kept it in a fish-tank terrarium, feeding it mice that he raised in cages stacked nearly to the ceiling.

The snake was the circumference of a broom handle and the length of a child’s arm when Bryant brought it home. He had no idea that pythons could live a quarter-century, or that a mature specimen could be twenty feet long and weigh over two hundred pounds.

After Delilah, as Willis called it, outgrew a succession of tanks and graduated from a diet of mice to rats to live rabbits, Iris eventually persuaded Bryant to have the cabin’s bedroom turned into a full-blown habitat. Willis was in his mid-twenties then, having graduated from high school only by dint of the fact that he was a Newland. The family had come to terms with the reality that hewould never hold down a job or live on his own. Nevertheless, he’d developed an almost savant-like expertise in herpetology. He spent much of his time in the cabin with Delilah, often sleeping there on a cot and sometimes staying for days.

In 1999, when Willis went to prison, Bryant ordered Felix, the ranch foreman, to get rid of the snake. “Chop its head off and feed it to the dogs. I’m tearing this damn place down.”

Somehow, Iris managed to change his mind. Keeping Delilah was a way of clinging to hope that her son would someday be released. Occasionally, after Felix fed the thing and Iris knew it would be sluggish, she’d don khakis and boots and head down the hill to sit in the musty room in front of the herpetarium, thinking things she never spoke aloud. And so the cabin remained, as did the rabbits in the hutch behind it. When Willis was finally released, a condition was set that he must stay a hundred yards from the big house whenever children were present. So the cabin became his full-time home.

Dusk was deepening towards darkness as Colly and Russ mounted the cabin’s steps.

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