by Diana Palmer
Finally, he got up. It was after eleven. He’d just gone inside and was turning out the lights when the phone rang.
“It’s Hensley,” the sheriff announced over the phone. “We’ve got a 10-16 at the Miles place, a real hummer. It’s outside the city police’s jurisdiction, so it either has to be you or a deputy.”
“It won’t do any good to go, you know,” McCallum said. “Jerry Miles beats Ellen up twice a month, but she never presses charges. Last time he beat up their twelve-year-old son, and even then—”
“I know.”
“I’ll go anyway,” McCallum said. “It’s a hell of a shame we can’t lock him up without her having to press charges. She’s afraid of him. If she left him, he’d probably go after her, and God knows what he’d do. I’ve seen it happen. So have you. Everybody says leave him. Nobody says they’ll take care of her when he comes looking for her with a gun.”
“We have to keep hoping that she’ll get help.”
“Jessica has tried,” McCallum admitted, “but nothing changes. You can’t help people until they’re ready to accept it, and the consequences of accepting it.”
“I heard that.”
McCallum drove out to the Miles home. It was three miles out of Whitehorn, in the rolling, wide-open countryside.
He didn’t put on the siren. He drove up into the yard and cut the lights. Then he got out, unfastening the loop that held his pistol in place in the holster on his hip, just in case. One of Whitehorn’s policemen had been shot and killed trying to break up a domestic dispute some years ago.
There was no noise coming from inside. The night was ominously quiet. McCallum’s keen eyes scanned the area and suddenly noticed a yellow truck parked just behind the house, on a dirt road that ran behind it and parallel to the main highway.
Jessica was in there!
He quickened his steps, went up on the front porch and knocked at the door.
“Police,” he announced. “Open up!”
There was a pause. His hand went to the pistol and he stood just to the side of the doorway, waiting.
The main door opened quite suddenly, and a tired-looking Jessica Larson smiled at him through a torn screen. “It’s all right,” she said, opening the screen door for him. “He’s passed out on the bed. Ellen and Chad are all right.”
McCallum walked into the living room, feeling uncomfortable as he looked at the two people whose lives were as much in ruin as the broken, cheap lamp on the floor. The sofa was stained and the rug on the wood floor had frayed edges. There were old, faded curtains at the windows and a small television still blaring out a game show. Ellen sat on the sofa with red-rimmed eyes, her arm around Chad, who was crying. He had a bruise on one cheek.
“How much longer are you going to let the boy suffer like this, Ellen?” McCallum asked quietly.
She stared at him from dull eyes. “Mister, if I send my husband to jail, he says he’ll kill me,” she announced. “I think he will. Last time I tried to run away, he shot our dog.”
“He’s sick, Ellen,” Jessica added gently. Her glance in the direction of the bedroom had an odd, frightened edge to it. “He’s very sick. Alcoholism can destroy his body, you know. It can kill him.”
“Yes, ma’am, I know that. He’s a big man, though,” the woman continued in a lackluster voice, absently smoothing her son’s hair. “He loves me. He says so. He’s always sorry, after.”
“He’s not sorry,” McCallum said, his voice deep and steady. “He enjoys watching you cry. He likes making you afraid of him. He gets off on it.”
“McCallum!” Jessica said sharply.
He ignored her. He knelt in front of Ellen and stared at her levelly. “Listen to me. My mother was an alcoholic. She used a bottle on me once, and laughed when she broke my arm with it. She said she was sorry, too, after she sobered up, but the day she broke my arm, I stopped believing it. I called the police and they locked her up. And the beatings stopped. For good.”
Ellen wiped at her eyes. “Weren’t you sorry? I mean, she was your mother. You’re supposed to love your mother.”
“You don’t beat the hell out of people you love,” he said coldly. “And you know that. Are you going to keep making excuses for him until he kills your son?”
She gasped, clasping the boy close. “But he won’t!” she said huskily. “Oh, no, I know he won’t! He loves Chad. He loves me, too. He just drinks so much that he forgets he loves us, that’s all.”
“If he hurts the child, you’ll go to jail as an accessory,” McCallum told her. He said it without feeling, without remorse. He said it deliberately. “I swear to God you will. I’ll arrest you myself.”
Ellen paled. The hands holding her son contracted. “Chad doesn’t want to see his daddy go to jail,” she said firmly. “Do you, son?”
Chad lifted his head from her shoulder and looked straight at McCallum. “Yes, sir, I do,” he said in a choked voice. “I don’t want him to hit my mama anymore. I tried to stop him and he did this.” He pointed to his eye.
McCallum looked back at Ellen. There was accusation and cold anger in his dark eyes. They seemed to see right through her.
She shivered. “He’ll hurt us if I let you take him to jail,” she said, admitting the truth at last. “I’m scared of him. I’m so scared!”
Jessica stepped forward. “There’s a shelter for battered women,” she replied. “I’ll make sure you get there. You’ll be protected. He won’t come after you or Chad, and even if he tries, he can be arrested for that, too.”
Ellen bit her lower lip. “He’s my husband,” she said with emphasis. “The good book says that when you take a vow, you don’t ever break it.”
McCallum’s chin lifted. “The same book says that when a man marries a woman, he cherishes her. It doesn’t say one damned thing about being permitted to beat her, does it?”
She hesitated, but only for a minute. “I have an aunt in Lexington, Kentucky. She’d let me and Chad live with her, I know she would. I could go there. He doesn’t know about my aunt. He’d never find us.”
“Is that what you want?” Jessica asked.
The woman hesitated. Her weary eyes glanced around the room, taking measure of the destruction. She felt as abused as the broken lamp, as the sagging sofa with its torn fabric. Her gaze rested finally on her son and she looked, really looked, at him. No child of twelve should have eyes like that. She’d been thinking only of her own safety, of her vows to her husband, not of the one person whose future should have mattered to her. She touched Chad’s hair gently.
“It’s all right, son,” she said. “It’s gonna be all right. I’ll get you out of here.” She glanced away from his wet eyes to McCallum. Her head jerked toward the bedroom. “I have to get away. I can’t press charges against him….”
“Don’t worry about it,” McCallum said. “He’ll sleep for a long time and then he won’t know where to look for you. By the time he thinks about trying, he’ll be drunk again. The minute he gets behind a wheel, I’ll have him before a judge. With three prior DWI convictions, he’ll spend some time in jail.”
“All right.” She got uneasily to her feet. “I’ll have to get my things….” Her eyes darted nervously to the bedroom.
McCallum walked to the doorway and stood there. He didn’t say a word, but she knew what his actions meant. If her husband woke up while she was packing, McCallum would deal with him.
She smiled gratefully and went hesitantly into the dimly lit bedroom, where her husband was passed out on the bed. Jessica didn’t offer to go with her. She sat very still on the sofa, looking around her with a kind of subdued fear that piqued McCallum’s curiosity.
Jessica drove her own truck to the bus station, parking it next to the unmarked car in which McCallum had put Chad and his mother. It was acting up again, and she tried to recrank it but it refused to start.
They saw the mother and son onto the bus and stood together until it vanished into the distance.
McCallum g
lanced at his watch. It was after midnight, but he was wound up and not at all sleepy.
Jessica mistook the obvious gesture for an indication that he wanted to get going. “Thanks for your help,” she told him. “I’d better get back home. Could you take me? My truck’s on the blink again.”
“Sure. I’ll send someone over in the morning to fix the truck and deliver it to your office. I’m sure you can get a ride to work.”
“Yes, I can. Thanks,” she said, relieved.
He caught her arm and shepherded her into the depot, which was open all night. There was a small coffee concession, where an old man sold coffee and doughnuts and soft drinks.
Jessica was dumbfounded. Usually McCallum couldn’t wait to get away from her. His wanting to have coffee with her was an historic occasion, and she didn’t quite know what to expect.
Two
McCallum helped her into a small booth and came back with two mugs of steaming coffee.
“What if I didn’t drink coffee?” she asked.
He smiled faintly. “I’ve never seen you without a cup at your elbow,” he remarked. “No cream, either. Sugar?”
She shook her head. “I live on the caffeine, not the taste.” She cupped her hands around the hot cup and looked at him across the table. “You don’t like my company enough to take me out for coffee unless you want something. What is it?”
He was shocked. Did she really have such a low self-image? His dark eyes narrowed on her face, and he couldn’t decide why she looked so different. She wasn’t wearing makeup—probably she’d been in too big a hurry to get to Ellen’s house to bother. And her infrequently worn, big-lensed glasses were perched jauntily on her nose. But it was more than that. Then he realized what the difference was. Her hair—her long, glorious, sable-colored hair—was falling in thick waves around her shoulders and halfway down her back. His fingers itched to bury themselves in it, and the very idea made his eyebrows fly up in surprise.
“I don’t read minds,” she said politely.
“What?” He frowned, then remembered her question. “I wanted to ask you something.”
She nodded resignedly and sipped at her coffee.
He leaned back against the dark red vinyl of the booth, studying her oval face and her big brown eyes behind the round lenses for longer than he meant to. “How is it you wound up in that house during a domestic dispute?”
“Oh. That.”
He glared at her. “Don’t make light of it,” he said shortly. “More cops have been hurt during family quarrels than in shoot-outs.”
“Yes, I know, I do read statistics. Ellen called me and I went. That’s all.”
One eye narrowed. “Next time,” he said slowly, “you phone me first, before you walk into something like that. Do you understand me?”
“But I was in no danger,” she began.
“The man weighs two-fifty if he weighs a pound,” he said shortly. “You’re what—a hundred and twenty sopping wet?”
“I’m not helpless!” She laughed nervously. It wouldn’t do to let him know the terror she’d felt when Ellen had called her, crying hysterically, begging her to come. It had taken all her courage to walk into that house.
“Do you have martial-arts training?”
She hesitated and then shook her head irritably.
“Do you carry a piece?”
“What would I do with a loaded gun?” she exclaimed. “I’d shoot my leg off!”
The scowl got worse. “Then how did you expect to handle a drunken man who outweighs you by over a hundred pounds and was bent on proving his strength to anyone who came within swinging range?”
She nibbled her lower lip and stared into her coffee. “Because Ellen begged me to. It’s my job.”
“No, it’s not,” he said firmly. “Your job is to help people who are down on their luck and to rescue kids from abusive environments. It doesn’t include trying to do a policeman’s work.”
His eyes were unblinking. He had a stare that made her want to back up two steps. She imagined it worked very well on lawbreakers.
She let out a weary breath. “Okay,” she said, holding up a slender, ringless hand. “I let my emotions get the best of me. I did something stupid and, fortunately, I didn’t get hurt.”
“Big of you to admit it,” he drawled.
“You’re a pain, McCallum,” she told him bluntly.
“Funny you should mention it,” he replied. “I made the same complaint about you to Hensley only this morning.”
“Oh, I know you don’t approve of me,” she agreed. “You think social workers should be like you—all-business, treating people as though they were statistics, not getting emotionally involved—”
“Bingo!” he said immediately.
She put her coffee cup down gently. “A hundred years ago, most of the country south of here belonged to the Crow,” she said, looking pointedly at him, because she knew about his ancestry. “They had a social system that was one of the most efficient ever devised. No one valued personal property above the needs of the group. Gifts were given annually among the whole tribe. When a man killed a deer, regardless of his own need, the meat was given away. To claim it for himself was unthinkable. Arguments were settled by gift giving. Each person cared about every other person in the village, and people were accepted for what they were. And no one was so solitary that he or she didn’t belong, in some way, to every family.”
He leaned forward. “With the pointed exception of Crazy Horse, who kept to himself almost exclusively.”
She nodded. “With his exception.”
“Someone told you that I had a Crow ancestor,” he guessed accurately.
She shrugged. “In Whitehorn, everyone knows everyone else’s business. Well, mostly, anyway,” she added, because she was pretty sure that he didn’t know about her own emotional scars. The incident had been hushed up because of the nature of the crime, and because there’d been a minor involved. It was just as well. Jessica couldn’t have a permanent relationship with a man, even if she would have given most of a leg to have one with McCallum. He was perfect for her in every way.
“I’m more French Canadian in my ancestry than Crow.” He studied her own face with quiet curiosity. She had a pretty mouth, like a little bow, and her nose was straight. Her big, dark eyes with their long, curly lashes were her finest feature. Even glasses didn’t disguise their beauty.
“Are you nearsighted or farsighted?” he asked abruptly.
“Nearsighted.” She adjusted her glasses self-consciously. “I usually wear contacts, but my eyes itch lately from all the grass cuttings. I’m blind as a bat without these. I couldn’t even cross a street if I lost them.”
His eyes fell to her hands. They were slightly tanned, long-fingered, with oval nails. Very pretty.
“Are you going to arrest Ellen’s husband?” she asked suddenly.
He pursed his lips. “Now what do you think?”
“We didn’t get Ellen to press charges,” she reminded him.
“We couldn’t have. If she had, she’d have to come back and face him in court. She’s afraid that he might kill her. He’s threatened to,” he reminded her. “But as it is, he won’t know where to look for her, and even if he did, it won’t matter.”
“What do you mean?” she asked curiously.
His eyes took on a faint glitter, like a stormy night sky. “He gets drunk every night. He’s got three previous convictions on DWI and he likes to mix it up in taverns. He’ll step over the line and I’ll have him behind bars, without Ellen’s help. This time I’ll make sure the charges stick. Drunkenness is no excuse for brutality.”
She was remembering what he’d said to Ellen about his own mother breaking his arm with a bottle when he was a little boy.
She reached out without thinking and gently touched the long sleeve of his blue-patterned Western shirt. “Which arm was it?” she asked quietly.
The compassion in her voice hurt him. He’d never known it in his youth.
Even now, he wasn’t used to people caring about him in any way. Jessica did, and he didn’t want her to. He didn’t trust anyone close to him. Years of abuse had made him suspicious of any overture, no matter how well meant.
He jerked his arm away. “What you heard wasn’t something you were meant to hear,” he said icily. “You had no business being in the house in the first place.”
She cupped her mug in her hands and smiled. The words didn’t sting her. She’d learned long ago not to take verbal abuse personally. Most children who’d been hurt reacted that way to kindness. They couldn’t trust anymore, because the people they loved most had betrayed them in one way or another. His was the same story she’d heard a hundred times before. It never got easier to listen to.
But there was a big difference between anger and hostility. Anger was normal, healthy. Hostility was more habit than anything else, and it stemmed from low esteem, feelings of inadequacy. It was impersonal, unlike aggression, which was intended to hurt. A good social worker quickly learned the difference, and how not to take verbal outpourings seriously. McCallum was something of a psychologist himself. He probably understood himself very well by now.
“I didn’t mean to snap,” he said curtly.
She only smiled at him, her eyes warm and gentle. “I know. I’ve spent the past three years working with abused children.”
He cursed under his breath. He was overly defensive with her because she knew too much about people like him, and it made him feel naked. He knew that he must hurt her sometimes with his roughness, but damn it, she never fought back or made sarcastic comments. She just sat there with that serene expression on her face. He wondered if she ever gave way to blazing temper or passion. Both were part and parcel of his tempestuous nature, although he usually managed to control them. Years of self-discipline had helped.
“You don’t like being touched, do you?” she asked suddenly.
“Don’t presume, ever, to psychoanalyze me,” he replied bluntly. “I’m not one of your clients.”
“Wasn’t there any social worker who tried to help you?” she asked.