Tilting her head, she glared down her nose at him. “You know what I’m asking you!” Her voice shook, but not with the threat of tears.
Mesmerized by the scene unfolding before them, the drive-in employees had fallen silent as soon as she spoke. Everyone in Bordertown knew Edna. Normally, she was dressed to the nines, smiling and waving like some sort of prom queen riding on a float. Tonight, however, she looked as if she’d been dragged off the street after being hit by a car. But there was no question that the girls who’d made his burger recognized Bordertown’s first lady.
“I have no clue.” Rod refused to be the first to mention murder in connection with his own name. He figured he’d be smarter to make her spell it out, and she instantly accommodated him. “Did you kill him? Did you kill my son?”
A muscle began to tick in Rod’s cheek; he could feel it jump. He’d known that if he stayed, things would go this way. But leaving hadn’t really been an option. It still wasn’t. He had to face this down or it would only follow him. “Of course not. You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You were jealous of him.”
The venom in those words made Rod uneasy, but he couldn’t deny it. He had been jealous of Stuart—and Patrick—from the day he was born. They’d had it all and had taken great pleasure in flaunting it in front of him. “Go home to your husband, Edna, and let the police do their job,” he said wearily.
“The police?” she echoed. “You mean Sophia?”
“She is the chief.”
“As if she’d ever look at you as a suspect.”
He didn’t like the sound of that. Sliding out of the booth, he stood. “Calm down. There’s no need to drag other people into this.”
“Calm down?” she shrieked. “My boy is dead! Someone killed him. Everyone’s up in arms, ready to blame the Mexicans, but I think that someone was you. And I’ll never get justice as long as the chief of police is so eager to warm your bed.”
Rod caught his breath. How did she know he’d been intimate with Sophia? They’d been seen around town quite a bit since he arrived, but they hadn’t touched in any way that would make it obvious. Not in public. “What I do in my private life is none of your business.”
“It is now,” she snapped. “Stuart told me himself. He said you were here to take the girl he wanted, just to show him you could.”
Was that what he’d done? He hoped not, but the way he was feeling today—out of touch with everything he thought he’d become—he couldn’t be sure. “I’ve only been in town a few days,” he said, instead of giving her an absolute denial. “Sophia and I have barely become reacquainted.”
“Doesn’t matter.”
“You’re right,” he agreed. “It doesn’t matter. What matters is that I didn’t kill Stuart.” He’d promised Sophia discretion. And she’d trusted him. The last thing he wanted was to leave her worse off than she’d been before he came. “That’s what you say. But I’m going to prove otherwise. You wait and see if I don’t.” Edna gave Patrick’s arm an emphatic jerk. “Tell him. Tell him what you told me.”
Patrick shoved his free hand through his hair, making it stand up, which added to his look of harried bewilderment. While his mother had aged since hearing the news about Stuart, he seemed to have regressed into boyhood. “I told her you came by searching for Stuart last night.”
Rod scowled. “So what if I did? He wasn’t there and I left. Did you tell her that?”
Edna didn’t let Patrick respond. “What did you want from him?”
“Someone trashed my motel room. Cut up my clothes, wrote obscenities on the wall, broke my computer. I wanted to know if it was him.”
Her lips pursed as she shook her head. “He would never do anything like that. My boy was a good man, an up-standing citizen. He wouldn’t waste his time with such…such petty actions.”
Rod knew it was just the opposite, but what was the point of arguing with her? The family was going through enough. So he simply stuck with the facts. “Dick, the pastor, saw him leaving the Mother Lode not long before I came home. That’s why I dropped by to talk with him. Do you know of any other reason he’d have to visit the motel?”
She didn’t seem capable of taking it all in, but refused to be forced on to the defensive. “Where did you go after you left Patrick’s?” she demanded without answering.
“To the Firelight. But Stuart wasn’t there, either. I never did find him.”
“You expect me to believe that? You chased him into the desert, and you shot him!”
He glanced at the two girls who were standing behind the counter, their eyes round as silver dollars. “No, I didn’t.”
“Then where did you go after you left the Firelight? Where were you last night?”
He’d been at the safe house and then Sophia’s. She was his alibi. But he couldn’t say so or it would cost Sophia her job. Edna would settle for no less. Not if she learned they’d been together, as she already suspected. “I was asleep.”
“Where?”
He stretched his neck. “Look, you’re wrong, okay? It wasn’t me.”
“Where were you last night?”
“It wasn’t me.”
She stepped up as if she’d strike him, but Patrick pulled her away. “Mom, let’s go. He’s not worth it.”
“The police will handle it,” Rod said. “I’ll be questioned and the investigation will go from there.”
“You think you’re so smart!” she ground out.
When he didn’t respond, her eyes shifted to the bruises on his cheek and the cut on his lip. “Where’d you get those injuries to your face?”
“I ran into a brick wall.”
“Sure you did. You were up to something last night. You attacked my boy.”
He refused to flinch as she glared at him.
“I hate you,” she breathed.
They were just words and yet their malevolence settled over him as oppressively as a thick fog. He’d sensed her animosity from the very beginning, experienced it almost as a tangible force. But, until now, she’d never actually expressed it, at least to him.
“I know you do,” he said. “You always have.”
Patrick began trying to drag her out. “Come on, Mom. Let’s go. If he killed Stuart, we’ll hire whoever we have to hire to get the evidence and prove it. But we’re not going to solve this right now.”