“You believe wrong, Alex. I didn’t kill her.”
“What about your father? Do you think he did?”
He shook his head. “He treated Celina like a daughter. Thought of her that way, too.”
“And Reede Lambert?”
He shrugged as though no elaboration was necessary. “Reede, well…”
“What?”
“Reede could never have killed her.”
Alex settled deeper into her fur coat. The sun had set, and it was getting colder by the moment. When she spoke, her breath fogged the air in front of her face. “I spent some time in the public library this afternoon, reading back issues of the local newspaper.”
“Anything about me?”
“Oh, yes, all about your Purcell Panther football days.”
As he laughed, the wind lifted his fair hair. His was a much lighter blond than Reede’s, and it was finer, better controlled. “That must have made for some fascinating reading.”
“It did. You and Reede were cocaptains of the team.”
“Hell, yeah.” He crooked his arm as though showing off muscled biceps. “We thought we were invincible, real hot snot.”
“Her junior year, my mother was the homecoming queen. There was a picture of Reede kissing her during halftime.”
Studying that photograph had made Alex feel very strange. She’d never seen it before. For some reason her grandmother had chosen not to keep it among her many others, perhaps because Reede Lambert’s kiss had been audacious, full-fledged, and proprietary.
Undaunted by the cheering crowd in the stadium, his arm had been curved possessively around Celina’s waist. The pressure of the kiss had angled her head back. He looked like a conqueror, especially in the muddy football uniform, holding his battle-scarred helmet in his other hand.
After staring at the photograph for several minutes, she began to feel that kiss herself.
Coming back to the present, she said, “You didn’t become friends with my mother and Reede until later on, isn’t that right?”
Junior pulled up a blade of grass and began to shred it between his fingers. “Ninth grade. Until then, I attended a boarding school in Dallas.”
“By choice?”
“By my mother’s choice. She didn’t want me picking up what she considered to be undesirable habits from the kids of oil-field workers and cowhands, so I was packed off to Dallas every fall.
“My schooling was a bone of contention between Mother and Dad for years. Finally, when I was about to go into high school, he put his foot down and said it was time I learned there were other kinds of people besides the ‘pale little bastards’—and that’s a quote—at prep school. He enrolled me in Purcell High School that fall.”
“How did your mother take it?”
“Not too well. She was definitely against it, but there wasn’t much she could do about it. Where she came from—”
“Which is?”
“Kentucky. In his prime, her old man was one of the most successful breeders in the country. He’d bred a Triple Crown winner.”
“How did she meet your father?”
“Angus went to Kentucky to buy a mare. He brought it and my mother back with him. She’s lived here for over forty years, but she still clings to Presley family traditions, one of which was to send all the offspring to private school.
“Not only did Dad enroll me at Purcell, he also insisted that I go out for the football team. The coach wasn’t too keen on the idea, but Dad bribed him by promising to buy new uniforms for the team if he’d take me on, so…”
“Angus Minton makes things happen.”