by Cindi Myers
“Is the road open again?” Lacy asked.
“Nope.” Travis finished the last bite of roast beef. “Which means he found somewhere else to stay. Maybe he heard we were looking for him.”
“Or he figured since Bette and Lacy saw him, it was time to hide out,” Cody said.
“Every one of my deputies has his description and photograph and will be watching for him,” Travis said. “So do all the ranch hands. He won’t get near the ranch without us knowing.”
“Thank you,” Bette said. “I... I don’t know what to say. If I brought this trouble to you and your family—”
“You didn’t do anything wrong,” Travis said. “If this man intends to cause trouble, that’s on him.” His eyes met hers. “You’re my guest and my wife’s friend. I’m going to make sure you’re protected. I’m sorry if I didn’t make that clear before.”
Bette read the determination and sincerity in his eyes and in that moment thought she knew what Lacy saw in this serious, quiet lawman. She nodded and turned away, aware as she did so of Cody watching her, just as he had watched her in Travis’s office. He was serious and quiet, too, but harder for her to interpret than the sheriff. How could he have made such passionate love to her one night, and stood by saying nothing while Travis accused her of taking those rings? Whatever feelings he had for her, they weren’t enough to overcome his suspicions—or his desire to look good in front of his friend. He wasn’t that different from Eddie, really—the kind of man who would always put his own best interests ahead of any woman.
Chapter Thirteen
Bette returned to her cabin after breakfast the next morning, and found Cody waiting on the front porch.
He rose from the chair where he had been sitting. “I wanted to talk to you,” he said.
She did not want to talk to him. What could she possibly say to him? When he refused to defend her to Travis, she had known what people meant when they talked about a broken heart. It had felt that way, that night in her cabin, a great, tearing pain in her chest.
“You shouldn’t be here,” she said. “I don’t have anything to say—” She stopped, the incongruity of his presence here hitting her. “How did you get in here?” she asked. “I locked the door when I went to breakfast.”
He held up a key, identical to the one in her hand. “There are at least three of them for every cabin,” he said. “In a box in the drawer of Mr. Walker’s desk, where anyone can help himself.”
She shut the door behind her and sat on the side of the bed, while he once more took the chair she had almost begun to think of as his. “Why do they have so many keys?” she asked.
“When they built the cabins, they had the idea to rent them out to tourists—sort of a cowboy guest ranch,” he said. “They had multiple keys made so that they could give out more than one if, say, a couple stayed in a cabin, and in case someone lost a key.”
“How did you find out about the keys?”
“I asked Travis. And I told him about the paint on your door and the paint you found in the bathroom. I know you didn’t want me to say anything about that, but I wanted him to know it was possible someone got into your cabin—using a spare key—and planted those rings there.”
She eyed him warily. Cody had actually defended her? And Travis had listened? “Did he believe you?”
“He was open to the possibility.”
Do you believe me? But she had too much pride to ask the question. “So I know how you got in,” she said. “What are you doing here?”
“I came to ask you to go ice fishing with me.”
She definitely hadn’t seen that one coming. “Ice fishing?”
“Yes. There’s a lake on Forest Service land near here that Nate Hall assures me has good fishing. We can use one of the snowmobiles to get there.” He actually looked excited about the idea.
“Why would I want to go ice fishing?” she asked. “With you?”
“It’s a beautiful day. And I don’t want to go fishing by myself.”
“Then ask Travis or one of the ranch hands to go with you.” She folded her arms across her chest. “Or is this your idea of keeping an eye on me—trailing after me like you trail after one of the fugitives you intend to apprehend?”
He flinched, but she couldn’t feel very victorious about the hit. Sitting here with him, in such familiar postures, made her ache for what they had had between them. How perverse was it that she could hate him—and at the same time want to jump his body? She stood. “You need to leave.”
He stood also, but instead of moving toward the door, he moved toward her. “Look,” he said. “I’m sorry about the other night. You don’t want to hear it, but I am.”
“You didn’t even try to defend me!” She couldn’t keep the words back, or the venom behind them. “You stood there while he accused me of a horrible betrayal of my best friend, and you wouldn’t even look at me. And you helped him paw through my things, as if I was some common criminal—because that’s all that I am to you.”
“Bette, no.” He took her by the arms. She tried to pull away, but he held on, gentle, yet unyielding. “Look at me,” he said.
She looked, and was surprised to see pain in his eyes. “I’m a cop,” he said. “It’s what I do. What I’ve trained to do for years. That night, I wasn’t here as your lover, I was here as a cop. I had to put aside emotion and consider the evidence as dispassionately as possible.”
“So I didn’t matter at all—only the evidence.”
“That’s what I’ve been taught.” He slid his hands down, until they encircled her wrists, his touch burning into her. “But I learned something important that night.”
She couldn’t help it, he mesmerized her. This must be what the mouse felt before it was swallowed by the viper. “What did you learn?”
“That I’m not the stone-cold, by-the-book cop I always thought I was. You do matter. And it didn’t make any difference what my brain told me when I looked at the evidence, my heart shouted something different. That’s why I told Travis about the paint, and went looking for the key.”
She wanted to believe him, more than she had ever wanted to believe anyone. Her gaze shifted to his lips, and she leaned in closer, wanting to feel their touch, to taste him, to breathe him in and...
She pulled away. “I don’t know if I can trust you,” she said.
“I understand that. But come fishing with me today anyway.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re smart. And I’m smart, too. And I think the two of us can figure this out. Whoever put those rings in your cabin wanted to get you into trouble. I figure if we spend some time away from the ranch and all the tension here, just the two of us doing something mindless like fishing, it might come to us how and why they did it—and maybe even who.”
He released her wrists and stepped back. “The Walkers are having a new lock put on your cabin today,” he said. “With only one key, which they’ll give to you. It would be a good idea if you got away for a few hours so they can do the work.”
“So I guess I might as well come with you,” she said. “But just so you know—fish are the only thing you’re going to catch today.”
The lines around his eyes tightened, and she wondered if he was trying not to laugh at her. “Understood.”
* * *
APPARENTLY, ICE FISHING required donning a pair of thick insulated coveralls and round-toed insulated rubber boots that made prison uniforms look like high fashion, and a helmet that weighed as much as a Thanksgiving turkey. “Are we going fishing or visiting the moon?” Bette asked when she was thus dressed.
“You don’t want to get cold, do you?” Cody asked.
“Why would anyone want to do anything where you have to dress like this?” she asked, as she climbed onto the back of the snowmobile he had parked in front of her cabin.
“Because it’
s fun.”
“Standing around a hole in the ice waiting for a fish to get hungry enough to eat a worm does not sound like my idea of fun,” she said.
“Sure it is.” He climbed on the snowmobile in front of her and punched the button to start the engine. It roared to life, shaking every part of her. “Hang on!” he shouted over the rumbling noise, then they shot forward.
She clung to him, her heart in her throat, but after a few hundred yards she began to relax a little and enjoy the sensation of racing over the snow. Cody whooped and steered the machine through the trees, which sped by in a blur of white and green. They roared up an incline, then plunged across an iced-over creek. It was like riding a motorcycle, only better, since they didn’t have to follow a road. They could pick any path they liked over the deep snow, though she realized after a while that Cody was following orange markers blazed on the trees.
Half an hour or so later, he slowed the machine. He gestured toward a frozen lake in the distance, the ice a blue mirror reflecting the surrounding evergreens. After a few minutes, the lake disappeared from view. Cody halted the snowmobile in a clearing. Bette’s ears rang in the sudden silence. They climbed off the snowmobile and removed their helmets. “You know how they say getting there is half the fun?” she asked.
“Yeah,” he said.
“I think in this case, it was all the fun.” She grinned. “That was a blast.”
“You’ve never been on a snowmobile before?”
“No.”
“Then after we’re done fishing I’ll take you the long way home.”
“I want to drive,” she said.
“No.” He pocketed the keys. “You just told me you’ve never even been on one of these things before.”
“I’m a quick learner. Besides, how hard could it be? They rent them to tourists.”
He opened a compartment on the back of the snowmobile and took out some disassembled fishing poles, a tackle box, two plastic buckets and what looked like an oversize drill. He fitted the sections of the poles together, handed the poles and tackle to her, then shouldered the drill and picked up the buckets. “What is that thing on your shoulder?” she asked.
“Ice auger. We just have to hike through those trees and up that little rise to reach the lakeshore.” He strode toward the trees and she tromped through the snow after him. As the woods thinned, the lake came into view once more, heavy snow on its shore giving way to thick ice. Out on the ice, Cody lowered the auger. “As soon as I drill a hole with this, we can fish,” he said.
“Excuse me if I don’t stand around watching,” she said. She returned to shore and began following a trail around the edge. Hoofprints in the snow showed where deer had walked along the edge of the lake, perhaps searching for open water to drink. She couldn’t see the snowmobile from here, which made her feel all the more isolated. When she had gone some ways, she turned and looked back toward Cody. He was attacking the ice with the auger, all his concentration on the task.
I’m a cop. It’s what I do. What did that mean—to be a cop? If someone had asked her that question a year ago, when she was still in prison, she would have said cops went after people who committed crimes—and a lot of people who didn’t. She would have pointed out that cops too often locked someone up because it was easy to make a case against them, and that they were more interested in cadging free doughnuts from the coffee shop than finding out the truth.
There were still some cops like that, she believed. But there was another kind, too. Travis had worked hard to get to the truth and free Lacy, long before she fell in love with him. His brother, Gage, seemed to be a man who tried to do what was right.
Then there was Cody—who had refrained from killing a desperate man, only to have that man commit suicide right in front of him. The pain she had seen in his eyes when he had told her that story, and the pain she recognized when he had apologized to her, had been real, mirroring her own hurt. She believed he was trying to see past the evidence and his training to her innocence. But was that going to be enough?
He set aside the auger, then spotted her and motioned her to come back to him. She retraced her steps around the pond and out onto the ice. He handed her a fishing pole, then turned one of the buckets upside down and set it beside the hole. “Make yourself comfortable and drop your line in,” he said.
She sat on the bucket and plopped the end of the weighted line into the water, where it sank out of sight. Cody sat on the other bucket beside her. “Isn’t this fun?” she said, heavy on the sarcasm.
“It’s a beautiful day,” Cody said. “We’re out in the fresh air, we might catch some fish for supper and we’re alone.”
Right. Alone at last. “Then let’s talk about who stole those wedding rings and put them in my cabin,” she said.
“Almost anyone at the ranch could have taken the key from Mr. Walker’s desk and let himself into your cabin,” Cody said. “Just as many people had access to Travis’s bedroom, where he kept the rings.”
“It would be easier on everyone if the thief wasn’t someone on the ranch, but an outsider,” Bette said. Another reason suspicion had focused on her.
“Someone like Carl Wayland,” Cody said.
“Yes, but I don’t see how Carl—or Charlie, or whatever name he’s going by these days—could have slipped into the house unnoticed, taken the key and the wedding rings and stashed them in my cabin,” she said. “There are always too many people around. Besides, why carry out such a complicated plot to implicate me?”
“I agree,” Cody said. “I still think Doug or Rainey is the most likely candidate for that, though I can’t think why. Even given that they’re jealous of you, or want to cater the wedding themselves, that kind of behavior doesn’t make sense. They risk too much for too little gain.”
“I agree,” Bette said.
“Is there someone else who wants you away from the ranch, but is being more subtle about it?” Cody asked. “Do you have an ex-lover among the ranch hands? Or someone you double-crossed in prison who wants to get back at you? Are you the long-lost daughter of the duke who has come to claim her birthright and the family fortune?”
She laughed. “I guess those theories made as much sense as anything I can come up with.”
His expression grew more serious. “Let’s put aside the ring theft for a while. What about the person who attacked you with the big rock on your way home from town? Still no memory of that?”
“No. I’m wondering if I should try being hypnotized or something. I can’t remember anything.”
“But it could have been Carl?”
“Yes,” she said. “That attack strikes me as more his style.”
“Why would he want to hurt you?”
“He was friends with Eddie. Eddie swore he’d kill me if I gave the police any information about the gang or the robbery.”
“So you think maybe Eddie sent him here to make good on his threat?” Cody asked.
She shifted the fishing pole in her hand. “I don’t know. That doesn’t make a lot of sense to me, either. By the time the police arrested me, they already had everyone but the getaway driver, and I didn’t know anything about him. Nothing I told the police made things worse for Eddie. I never talked to him again after the day of the robbery, but he could have easily gotten a message to me if he wanted to threaten me again or remind me of his promise. I’ve been out of prison eight months and nothing has happened to make me feel like I’m in danger.”
“Until you showed up here.” He sat forward on his bucket. “I think I got a bite.”
A few seconds later, he was scooping a large trout into a net and depositing it on the ice between them. “Dinner,” he said, and grinned at her.
While he took care of the fish and rebaited his hook, she thought about Carl. “When I saw Carl in the grocery store, he didn’t seem surprised to see me,” she said. “Maybe that�
�s because he did come to Eagle Mountain to look for me.”
“Was a lot of money taken in that robbery?” Cody asked. “Maybe Carl thinks Eddie gave the loot to you and he wants his share.”
She shook her head. “The bank got all the money back. The police caught Eddie and the others before they even had a chance to divide it up.”
“Why didn’t they catch the driver?” Cody asked.
“I guess he wasn’t at the apartment the afternoon the police showed up. I really don’t know, since I wasn’t there, either. They arrested me later, after they learned of my relationship with Eddie. They already knew someone had shut off the alarm system and left the back door unlocked.” She hung her head. “You don’t know how many times I’ve regretted doing those things. I knew they were wrong, but Eddie had persuaded me the ends justified the means. I was so stupid.”
“You paid for your mistake,” he said.
“I did.” She gripped the fishing pole tighter. “I’ve worked really hard to build a new life for myself, and I wouldn’t risk throwing all that away by stealing a couple of wedding rings—especially rings that belong to a woman who’s done everything she could to help me.”
“I believe you,” Cody said.
She stared at him. “You’re willing to overlook the evidence and take my word for it?”
“I’m not overlooking the evidence,” he said. “The rings were hidden in an obvious location. You’re not that dumb. If you had taken them, you would have locked them in your suitcase or tucked them under the eaves or, I don’t know, sewn them into your bra. You wouldn’t have put them where we could find them so easily.”
“Maybe I believed you wouldn’t look,” she said.
“You let us search your cabin without a warrant. Even an innocent person might not have done that. Again—you’re not stupid.”
“Thank you. I think.”
“I convinced the Walkers not to tell anyone about the new lock on your cabin,” he said. “They’re going to leave the spare keys in the desk, just like before, and Travis is setting up a hidden video camera in the office, focused on the desk. If anyone comes to take the key again, we’ll catch them.”