“Tell me about yourself,” she suggested. “I heard what a good investigator you are, and everybody seems to like you, but I don’t know anything else about you.”
“If you listen at night, you know I snore.”
That drew another laugh from her.
“We could play truth or dare or whatever the kids call it,” he suggested.
“About as likely as playing strip poker.” As soon as the words were out, she wondered what devil had caused her to speak them. At least Cade didn’t miss a beat.
“Too much chance of frostbite,” he replied. “This place is drafty. Okay, about me. I was ranch raised like a lot of young people in this state. My dad was a foreman on one of the bigger spreads, up near Gillette. The place got turned into an oil field about the time I was graduating from the police academy.”
“You wanted a more exciting life? And what about your parents?”
“They’re gone. Dad had a heart attack about six months after he got laid off from the ranch. He didn’t know how to do anything else, and he couldn’t find work. I blame it on stress.”
“And your mom?”
“Grief took her about a month after my dad. She just sat down in a chair after the funeral and hardly moved again.”
“God, I’m sorry.”
He looked up from the game box he was putting the lid on. “I was pretty sorry for me, too, but not for them. They were done. Might as well have put it on a neon sign. Their way of life and everything that gave them purpose was gone.”
She nodded. She thought she could understand that. “Did your dad mind that you wanted to join the police?”
“Hell, no. I grew up hearing that he wanted me to get out just as quick as I could. Make something better of my life. I don’t think he hated what he did, not at all. I think he loved it. But I think he also didn’t see much of a future in it for a young man. Agribusiness was moving in, small ranchers were on the way out, oil fields were chewing up the land. I think he saw the handwriting on the wall, at least from where he was. So they were proud I decided I wanted to be a cop.”
“That’s good. That’s really good.”
There was a smile in his eyes as he pushed the game to one side and looked at her. “What about you?”
“Not very many parents are happy when their eighteen-year-old daughter announces she’s enlisting in the army.”
He tilted his head a little. “Big fight?”
“More like big fears. Maybe they were right to be afraid. But I’m still here, they’re proud of me, and they’re still living in the one-horse town I grew up in. Texas, if you want the state. I just wanted to escape to bigger and more exciting things.”
“I guess we both succeeded.”
She shook her head. “Nothing more exciting that sitting locked up in a snowstorm waiting for another shoe to drop.”
He threw back his head and gave a deep laugh. “Okay, I can’t argue against that. But at least it’s temporary.”
Silence fell again, except for the storm battering the outdoors and the incessant sound of the forced-air heat trying to keep up. Talk about being at loose ends. She glanced at Cade again and saw him studying her with a faint frown.