Page 33 of Colorado Christmas Carol
Duke didn’t answer her. He just smiled.
* * *
They drove to the site of the forensics workshop the next Saturday. Duke was distracted, nobody knew why. Mellie talked nonstop about what Dean had taught them at the archaeology site.
“I think I might like to do archaeology,” Mellie said enthusiastically.
“Me, too.” Essa sighed. “But I’m not smart enough.”
“You are so,” Mellie said firmly. “You can do anything you want to.”
Essa smiled at her. “You’re very good for my self-esteem.”
“Only when she isn’t brooding about the dog we don’t have,” Duke muttered as he drove.
“We could have just a little dog,” Mellie warmed to her subject. “They wouldn’t know he was in the apartment!”
“It’s in the lease, honey,” he told her. “No pets. I’m sorry.”
“I can’t have a dog, either.” Essa sighed. “The hotel won’t allow it.”
“I saw an old lady with a little puffy dog going up the stairs,” Mellie told her.
“Oh, that’s Mrs. Greeley,” Essa replied. She smiled. “She owns the hotel. She comes every other month to make sure the place is running well and everybody’s happy with their jobs. And their salaries. She’s one of a kind,” she added softly.
“You like old people?” Mellie asked.
“Very much,” Essa replied. “You can learn so much just by listening to them!”
“You do that?” Duke asked.
“I go to the nursing home on holidays and take cookies and pies and cakes,” she said. “The manager donates them. There are so many who don’t have family anymore. All they need is somebody to just listen to them.”
Duke nodded. “One of our agents is retired from the CIA. Boy, can he tell some stories!”
“I’ll bet.” Essa chuckled. “We have a retired Texas Ranger, and she’s got lots of those, too!”
“A Texas Ranger. Wow!” Mellie said.
“I wish we had time to visit,” Duke said. “But I only have a few more days to wrap up my part of this case. Which my boss doesn’t think I’m doing.”
“Why doesn’t he come here and do it if he doesn’t trust his people?” Essa asked, outraged on Duke’s behalf.
He noted that and felt warm inside. She was getting to him. The more he learned about her, the more she attracted him. And her actions with Mellie after the asthma attack were the biggest draw of all. She was one in a million. Stupid local men, he thought, letting a treasure like Essa get away.
He thought of his late wife and how different she was from Essa. The pregnancy had been an accident. She’d wanted to end it, but Duke dug in his heels. He wanted the baby more than anything. She could have it, and he’d have to raise it, she said hatefully. She wasn’t being tied down to diapers and bottles and sleepless nights. Fine, Duke had said. He’d do all that.
And he had. Her death several years ago hadn’t been the tragedy most people thought it was. She’d had nothing to do with her little girl. She was irritated by the noise the child made, reluctant even to change a diaper, and she hated the constant crying. The child cried when she was wet or hungry, but his wife never seemed to connect those things.
He held down a full-time job and was a full-time dad, while his wife went out with her girlfriends day and night and left her child in his care. He never understood why she was so angry. When she got cancer she refused treatment. She had nothing to do with Mellie even then. Duke buried her with her parents. Mellie was only five years old.
Then he thought of Essa, rushing his daughter to the hospital, staying with her, bawling because she was afraid of what might happen to Mellie—that was incredible to him.
He rarely dated, because once women discovered that he had a child, they wanted nothing to do with him. The fact that he was a widower didn’t even give him points, because any woman he married would be raising another woman’s child.
His own wife didn’t want her own child. But here was Essa, who adored Mellie, and it showed. It was also mutual.
“One thing, and we won’t discuss this outside the car,” Duke said when they got to the site of the workshop and parked. “Nobody leaves the premises with Dean. Is that clear? Under no circumstances whatsoever,” he added, emphasizing every single word. “And we didn’t know he’d be here, also. Got that?”
