Secrets in the Sand by Carolyn Brown

            He’d called her that sometimes, he realized.

            So just what in the hell was she up to? None of your damn business, his conscience told him. You gave up any rights to know what she was doing with her life that August night down by the creek when you were eighteen years old.

            He turned out the light and went to the living room where he leaned back in his father’s recliner and thought about Angela Conrad. His angel—once upon a time.

            ***

            Angel turned off her office lights and pulled the door shut. She carried a burgundy leather briefcase in one hand and her laptop in the other. She pushed the button for the elevator to take her down to the ground-floor garage where her black Jaguar was parked. It was time to go home. The two-story Conrad Oil Enterprises, Inc. building disappeared in her rearview mirror as she drove to Main Street in Denison and then east on a farm road.

            She thought about the first days when she and the girls had formed the band and played the border-town dives in Cartwright, Colbert, Yuba, and Willis. They didn’t even have a name then, just a few instruments and a need to make a couple of dollars on the weekends to keep them in college. That was before Conrad Oil Enterprises had been even a glimmer of an idea.

            One night they’d unloaded their equipment at the Dixie Pixie club in Yuba while an old man wearing faded overalls watched. He swilled his liquor from a mason jar and said to his wife, a big woman in red stretch pants, “Well, looky here, Momma. There’s a pretty little angel with her honky-tonk band. Guess we died and went to heaven.” The old man had named their band right then, and Angel wondered if he was even around anymore to know how far she and the Honky Tonk Band had come in the past years.

            She crossed the river bridge and turned left into Hendrix, Oklahoma, then drove several more miles to her farm. It was only twenty acres, but it was home, and home was where her heart was this morning.

            The sun was an orange ball on the horizon when she pulled the car into the oval driveway. When she opened the door, she could smell the welcoming fragrance of roses. Jimmy’s gardening skills kept the rosebushes looking wonderful, even if the Oklahoma winds and hot, blistering sun tried to rob the blooms at this time of year. But, as she’d told him so many times, his thumbs were greener than spring grass, and he could make silk plants reproduce if he wanted to. The house was dark, but then she hadn’t expected her housekeeper, Hilda, to be there yet. She didn’t usually arrive until midmorning and then left in the middle of the afternoon, unless Angel was there and needed her longer.

            She opened the gate to the white picket fence surrounding the two-story farmhouse that looked like it had been there since the turn of the century. But she’d had the house custom-built just four years before. It was her dream house, and Angel loved everything about it. She crossed the veranda that wrapped the house on three sides and noticed that the blue morning glories climbing the porch posts were starting to open with the approach of dawn. She unlocked the front door. Arriving early in the morning and grabbing a few hours by herself after a gig was just what she needed that morning. She’d wanted closure, but she sure hadn’t gotten any. If anything, she was more agitated than ever.

            She boiled a kettle of water and poured it over green tea leaves in a ceramic pot and waited for the tea to steep. She propped up her feet on the hassock beside the cold fireplace and watched the sun come up through the French doors leading out onto the patio. As the sun topped the well house, she could see the silhouette of her first oil well, now standing as a silent sentinel to all that was hers, and the beginning of the successful enterprise known as Conrad Oil, which had grown so fast it still didn’t seem quite real.

            Dawn was gone and a new Sunday was born before Angel poured the lukewarm tea in a cup and put a slice of Hilda’s homemade bread in the toaster. Granny would have liked this house. She would have fussed about the cost of it, but she would have grinned that big smile that made her eyes disappear in a face so full of wrinkles it looked like a road map. And she would have turned over in her grave if she knew Angel paid a gardener these days to keep the roses blooming and the morning glories watered, and had a housekeeper. But then, when Granny had inherited this property from her father and moved with Angel to the original three-room house on these twenty acres, Angel hadn’t owned an oil company.

            Angel buttered the bread with sweet butter. Someday she might have to watch fat grams and calories, but not today. She liked real butter on her toast, just as her granny had. Thoughts of the past flitted through her mind.

            She and her grandmother had arrived with all their belongings in the back of that old, rusty green truck that looked like an accident waiting for a place to happen. The old house had only three rooms—a small living room and kitchen, a tiny bathroom, and one bedroom where she and Granny put their twin beds. They’d lived there happily enough until four years later, when her granny had died peacefully in her sleep.