Chapter 5
Chapter Five
W yatt fought to regain his equilibrium after leaving Jenny’s house. He’d been knocked off keel the moment he learned a body had been found on Summerlin Groves because the initial reports had been sketchy. Some said a dead body had been found, others said an old skeleton. Either way, he had to be certain Jenny was okay.
He should have reversed gear and sped back to town the instant he confirmed she was alive and well. Instead, he waited in the car until his pulse returned to normal, then made the monumental mistake of getting out to talk with her. Despite everything, Jenny still had the power to trigger a raw, primitive urge to swoop in and protect her.
The discovery of the skeleton was going to be blared all over the evening news, which meant he needed to warn his parents. They shouldn’t hear about it from anyone else. It took a while to navigate around the vehicles clogging the narrow rural lane just outside Jenny’s grove, but soon he was on the road leading back to town.
Besides, he had other news to tell his parents. He’d been trapped in this town too long, and an avenue for escape had just appeared on the horizon like a shaft of sunlight breaking through the small-town gloom. Better still, it might even help his mom heal.
The drive to his parents’ store was interrupted by a slow-moving train at the railroad crossing a mile outside of town. The nation’s largest phosphate mine was right here in Pierce County, so trains carrying freshly mined rock were a common sight. Soon the lumpy gray rocks would be pulverized and mixed with a little nitrogen and potassium to turn them into fertilizer that was sold all over the world.
United Phosphate & Fertilizer was the largest employer in the county, with three thousand people either mining rock, staffing the factory, or working in the office. Could the body in Jenny’s tree have been someone who worked at the mine? United Phosphate had been operating in this part of Florida for over a hundred years. Some of their workforce was seasonal, so it was possible a migrant laborer with no family had come here for a few months of work. Once the medical examiner narrowed down the approximate year the guy died, the mine would be the first place to check. Wyatt was friendly with the folks at the mine . . . after all, they’d once offered him a job in Morocco.
Jenny had a lot of nerve to bring up Morocco in the middle of all this. He switched on the radio to think of something else, scrolling through the preset stations, bypassing the ads, except one cheerful voice caught his attention.
“Are you worried that a loved one isn’t eating properly?”
He paused, unable to move on to the next station as the advertisement continued.
“Our easy-to-drink, complete meals will give you peace of mind, and your loved one the proper nutrition for a healthy life!”
The ad ended with instructions on how to order the high-calorie drinks. He ought to order a case . . . anything to stop his mom from losing more weight. She claimed to be eating, but he didn’t believe her. Now instead of travelling the world in a life of adventure, he monitored how many calories his mother ate and the number of hours she slept.
He jotted the website down on a notepad he kept in his car. He and his dad had tried just about everything to get Donna to eat, but depression was a strange beast neither of them understood. He was still thinking about it as he arrived at his dad’s feed and farm supply store ten minutes later.
It was a relief to see both his parents’ cars in the parking lot. They didn’t actually need his mom’s help at the store, but she couldn’t be left alone anymore.
A bell dinged as he entered and the dusty scent of cattle feed awakened childhood memories of growing up here. His mom sat at a stool behind the front counter, sorting sales receipts. The cheerful sunflowers embroidered on her sweatshirt were in stark contrast with the gaunt hollows beneath her eyes. She hadn’t bothered to shop for new clothes in eighteen months, and still wore tops printed with sunflowers, nesting bluebirds, and American flags. Her goofy clothes had always been her trademark but were now a sad reminder of her former self.
“Hi there, stranger,” she said with a hint of a smile.
Relief trickled through him at the sight of that smile, though it would vanish once she heard what he had to report. He peeked his head down the aisles loaded with bags of fertilizer and pesticides.
“Is Dad around?”
“Right here,” Ed said as he emerged from the irrigation aisle carrying a box of PVC fittings. Ed’s lanky frame had become a little stooped over the past few years, but behind the horn-rimmed glasses his eyes were as kind as ever. “What’s up, son?”
There was no point beating around the bush. “You need to know that I got called out to Summerlin Groves on a case this morning.”
Donna visibly flinched, while Ed plonked the box of supplies down and went around the counter to join Donna. His eyes went steely as he waited for Wyatt to continue.
This wasn’t going to be easy, and he gentled his voice. “A human skeleton was found in a hollowed-out tree trunk at Summerlin Groves, but I don’t think Jack had anything to do with it. The medical examiner thinks it’s been there for a long time, maybe even decades.”
“That doesn’t mean Jack couldn’t have done it,” Donna accused. “Or his crazy dad or crazy granddad.”
Ed rubbed Donna’s shoulders as he frowned at Wyatt. “Why does stuff like this always happen in that family? They’re a bad lot, and always have been.”
Wyatt didn’t say anything, because, yes, the Summerlins had a wild, cantankerous history, even though Jenny never struck him that way. At the beginning, Jenny seemed pretty much perfect, and he’d overlooked her dubious family when he fell head over heels for her.
Ignoring his instincts had been a mistake. Family mattered, and when his sister stepped into Jack Summerlin’s world to facilitate parental visitation, none of her training as a licensed social worker had prepared her for the violence she faced that night.
“Did you see her?” Donna asked. His parents had never been wild about Jenny to begin with, and now her name was anathema.
“Yeah, she was there,” he admitted. “We were cordial, but that’s all. Don’t worry . . . I won’t start things up with her again.”
Donna had been hospitalized for depression twice in the months following Lauren’s murder, though she’d finally begun slowly stitching the pieces of her life back together. Nevertheless, Wyatt had learned from painful experience that it didn’t take much to plunge Donna back beneath a suffocating blanket of despair.
Hopefully, his next bit of news would cheer her up. Donna hated that he carried a gun as part of his job. Working for agricultural law enforcement wasn’t nearly as dangerous as when he was in the army, but she still worried.
“Roger Adkins died in office last week,” he said, referring to Florida’s Commissioner of Agriculture. Technically, Commissioner Adkins had been Wyatt’s boss, although he’d never met the man. The Department of Agriculture was based at the state capitol up in Tallahassee. The department oversaw thousands of employees spread across a dozen smaller agencies for farming, ranching, water policy, and consumer affairs.
Wyatt continued, trying not to let his anticipation show. “There are three years left in Adkins’s term, and the governor has decided to call a special election in June.”
“Why so far off?” his dad asked.
“There will be a primary next month, then plenty of time for a head-to-head campaign between the two top finalists in June. I want to run for it.”
The last time Wyatt had run for office had been for senior class president in high school. He’d never considered a career in politics until last week when Commissioner Adkins died of a stroke. For years Wyatt had been frustrated by the shifting political and economic forces that whittled into the livelihood of Florida’s farmers and ranchers. It was time to stop grousing about it and do something.
“Doesn’t it cost a lot of money to run for office?” Ed asked. The Rossiter family was comfortably middle class, but they didn’t have a fortune to splash around on a vanity political campaign.
“I won’t put much money into the race unless I win the primary, and I’m a long shot.” The Commissioner of Agriculture was a stepping-stone to a higher office like governor or the U.S. Senate. It was a coveted job, and everyone who sat in the commissioner’s chair for the past fifty years had been a career politician. They were slick, polished candidates with professional campaign advisors and the ability to raise millions in contributions.
Donna sat a little straighter on the stool. “I would love for you to have a good job where you didn’t have to carry a gun.” She nudged her husband. “Wouldn’t you, Ed? I think we should do everything possible to get Wyatt elected.”
“It seems an awfully big step,” his dad warned. “Where did this come from all of a sudden?”
All of a sudden? A glance around this old store was proof of how sharply agriculture had declined in the state. Wyatt folded his arms and stared out the plate-glass window. “I’m sick to death of watching farms and ranches going under because of regulations imposed by politicians who cater to the city vote. Look at that thing,” he said, pointing to a twirling metal rack filled with keychains and video games. “This place used to sell nothing but farm supplies, but now you sell video games to round out the business. The people who run the Department of Agriculture cater to tourism and land developers because that’s where the money will come from when they run for higher office. That’s not how it’s supposed to be. Whoever is in charge of the department should be interested in pastureland, not parking lots.”
Donna hopped off the stool to nudge his shoulder. “Oh, Wyatt, I like that. Pastureland not parking lots . Can’t you see that on a bumper sticker, Ed?”
“I see a lot of money squandered on a hopeless campaign.”
Donna came from around the counter and reached up to tug the collar of Wyatt’s uniform a little straighter, her smile reaching all the way to her eyes. It was the brightest he’d seen from her in eighteen months.
“Oh, Wyatt, let’s do it!” she said. “You can dust off that law degree and have a nice job in an office building where you aren’t getting shot at by cattle rustlers.”
He’d only been shot at once, and it wasn’t from cattle rustlers, just a drunk ranch hand siphoning gasoline from his employer. Still . . . bullets had been flying that night, and no mother wanted her son in the middle of that.
The odds were stacked against him in the coming race. He had no money or connections, just a solid grounding in agriculture and a desire to make a difference. His odds of winning were low, but he intended to saddle up and fight for it.