Killer Moves: The 4th Jolene Jackson Mystery (Jolene Jackson Mysteries) Read Online Free Page B

workbench was pretty much as he’d left it. I blinked back tears.
    I really missed my daddy—biology realities didn’t change that. Still, he’d been a part of the big lie too—the writing and rewriting of my history—and that made me angry. I’d had no say in any of it, and yet I somehow felt guilty for all of it. There was no logic in it, and I wasn’t going to magically discover any in the garage, so I packed up those tail-chasing thoughts and focused on unloading the car.
    It went faster than I’d expected, and after a second quick shower, I was on my way to even more unhappy reality unraveling in Redwater Falls.
    On the short trek out of the neighborhood and onto the highway, I kept thinking about the property. In fact, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. And even before I could really see the intersection with Turkey Ranch Road, my foot was on the brake, slowing down to turn. I don’t know why—I had a long list of reasons not to—but something pushed me forward. And within seconds, I was nearing the gate of “The Big House.”
    I’d decided on the new moniker for the house on the hill while in the shower. I couldn’t keep calling it Bob Little’s house and I wasn’t ready to call it mine yet either, not to mention that the backhanded prison implication was amusing. Besides, at nearly 6,000 square feet, the place was plenty big in my book so the name fit. It was also a better choice than the runner up, which was “creepy house filled with stuff from dead people I didn’t know.”
    The big iron entry gate was open, just as it had been before when I’d stood by the road with Lucille. Unlike then, there were no crowds, TV cameras or emergency equipment. The foreboding feeling, however, was still sort of the same. And yet, as I drove under the massive namesake archway onto the sprawling estate, I couldn’t help but find the incongruity amusing. I was going to The Big House at The Little Ranch. It was good for a laugh, forced as it was. More importantly, it was a nice distraction from the building apprehensive about following through with my impromptu visit.
    The driveway up to the house was two lanes of asphalt that was bigger and better than the county road at the bottom of the gate. It was smooth and black, and from the smell, freshly sealed. It ran along the right edge of the plateau as it meandered upward.
    Clusters of big trees covered the interior area, along with lush landscaped beds of shrubs and flowers. The rest of the grounds looked like a manicured golf course. Some serious bucks had been spent creating this, not to mention maintaining it. I felt like I’d stepped out of the real world into a hidden oasis—a private estate seen by few—oh, wait, I had.
    Now that I thought about it, I suppose I’d been expecting a rundown retro-themed nightmare—a 1970’s dilapidated flattop house surrounded by overgrown mesquites and scraggly weeds. I couldn’t see the house yet, but if the “yard” was any indication, I’d been totally wrong. About everything. In fact, the higher I climbed, the more the whole place felt, well, sort of palatial, like a grand castle on a rocky cliff—flatland Texas-style, of course.
    The road curved around to the left at the top of the hill, presumably toward the house. The increasing rise in elevation gave me an expansive view of the surrounding area to the north along the highway and a growing view west toward Kickapoo. I couldn’t see anything to the south, but if the ranch boundaries were what I could see on this side, the place was beyond huge.
    To my right, acres and acres of fenced pastureland, complete with livestock, stretched all the way to the highway. In front of me, toward Mother’s house, were fields with of scrub mesquites with large patches of bare red dirt. Dozens of pump jacks and clusters of storage tanks dotted the area. I couldn’t see any of the large white splotches that showed up on the aerial photos—the salt flats I remembered from my