by Diana Palmer
“Most kids are,” McCallum said curtly. He was remembering how he’d protected his brutal mother, right up until the night she’d broken his arm with the bottle. He’d made excuse after excuse for her behavior, just as Keith was probably doing now.
He contacted the juvenile officer and had a long conversation with him, but the man couldn’t tell him any more than he already knew. Keith hadn’t reached the end of his rope yet, and until he did, there was little anyone could do for him.
McCallum did get a break, a small one, in the abandoned-baby case. It seemed that a local midwife did remember hearing an old woman from out of town talk about delivering a child in a clandestine manner for a frightened young woman. It wasn’t much to go on, but anything would help.
McCallum decided that it might be a good idea to share that tidbit with Jessica. He dreaded having to see Bess again, after the way he’d led her on.
But it turned out not to be the ordeal he’d expected. Bess was just coming back from the small kitchen with a cup of coffee when he walked into the office. She moved closer and grinned at him.
“Hi, stranger!” she said with a friendly smile. “How about some coffee?”
“Not just now, thanks.” He smiled ruefully. “Bess, there’s something I need to tell you.”
“No, there isn’t,” she said with a sigh. “I’d already figured it all out, you know. I never meant to step on Jessica’s toes, but I had a major crush on you that I had to get out of my system.” She gave him a sheepish glance. “I didn’t realize how painful it was going to be, trying to work here after I’d all but stabbed Jessica in the back. No one in the office will speak to me, and Jessica’s very polite, but she isn’t friendly like she used to be. Nothing is the same anymore.”
“I’m sorry about that,” he said, knowing it was as much his fault as hers.
She shrugged and moved a little closer. “Still friends?” she asked hesitantly.
“Of course,” he replied gently. He bent and kissed her lightly on the cheek.
Jessica, who’d come into the outer office to ask Bess to make a phone call for her, got an eyeful of what looked like a tender scene and froze in place.
“Jessica,” McCallum said roughly as he lifted his head and saw her.
Bess turned in time to watch her boss disappear back into her own office, her back straight and dignified.
“Well, that was probably the last straw,” Bess groaned. “I was going to talk to her today and apologize.”
“So was I,” he replied. “She didn’t deserve to be hurt any more, after what Sam Jackson did to her.”
“I hope it’s not too late to undo the damage,” Bess added. Then she realized how false a picture she’d given everyone about her dates with McCallum, and she felt even worse. She’d embroidered them to make herself look like a femme fatale, because McCallum hadn’t been at all loverlike. But her wild stories had backfired in the worst way. In admitting that she’d lied, she’d make herself look like a conceited idiot. Jessica was cool enough to her already. She hated the thought of compounding the problem with confessions of guilt.
“There’s nothing to undo,” McCallum replied innocently. “I did enjoy your cooking,” he added gently.
“I’m glad.” She hesitated nervously. She might as well tell him how she’d blown up their friendship, while there was still time. “McCallum, there’s just one little thing—”
“Later,” he said, patting her absently on the shoulder. “I’ve got to talk to Jessica about a case.”
“Okay.” She was glad of the reprieve. Not that she didn’t still have to confess her half-truths to Jessica.
He knocked briefly on Jessica’s door and walked in. She looked up from her paperwork. Nothing of her inner torment showed on her unlined face, and she even smiled pleasantly at him.
“Come in, Deputy,” she invited. “What can I do for you?”
He closed the door and sat down across from her. “You can tell me that I haven’t ruined everything between us,” he said bluntly.
She looked at him with studied curiosity. “We’re still friends,” she assured him. “I don’t hold grudges.”
His jaw clenched. “You know that wasn’t what I meant.”
She put down the file she’d been reading and crossed her hands on it. “What can I do for you?” she asked pleasantly.
Her bland expression told him that he couldn’t force his way back into her life. He couldn’t make her want him, as she might have before things went wrong between them. She was going to draw back into her shell for protection, and it would take dynamite to get her out of it this time. He doubted if he could even get her to go out for a meal with him ever again, because she wouldn’t want gossip about them to start up a second time. He’d never felt so helpless. Trust, once sacrificed, was hard to regain.
“What about Keith?” she asked. “I presume that’s why you came?”
“Yes,” he confirmed untruthfully. He sat back in the chair and told her about the talk he’d had with the school counselor. “But there’s nothing we can do until I have some concrete reason to bring his father in for questioning. And Keith is holding out. The juvenile authorities can’t dig anything out of him.” He crossed his long legs. “On the other hand, we may have a break in the Baby Jennifer case.”
She started. It wasn’t pleasant to hear him say that. She’d become so involved with the tiny infant that a part of her hoped the mother would never be found. She was shocked at her own wild thoughts.
“Have you?” she asked numbly.
“A midwife knows of an old woman who helped a frightened young woman give birth. I’m trying to track her down. It may be our first real lead to the mother.”
“And if you find her, then what?” she asked intently. “She deserted her own little baby. What sort of mother would do that? Surely to God the courts won’t want to give the child back to her!”
He’d never seen Jessica so visibly upset. He knew she’d allowed herself to become attached to the infant, but he hadn’t realized to what extent until now.
“I’m sure it won’t come to that,” he said slowly. “Jessica, you aren’t having any ideas about taking the baby yourself?” he added abruptly.
She glared at him. “What if I do? What can a court-appointed guardian do that I can’t? I can manage free time to devote to a child, I make a good salary—”
“You can’t offer her a settled, secure home with two parents,” he said curtly. “This isn’t the big city. Here in Whitehorn the judge will give prior consideration to a married couple, not a single parent.”
“That’s unfair!”
“I’m not arguing with that,” he said. “I’m just telling you what to expect. You know the judges around here as well as I do—probably better, because you have more dealings with them. Most of them have pretty fixed ideas about family life.”
“The world is changing.”
“Not here, it isn’t,” he reminded her. “Here we’re in a time capsule and nothing very much changes.”
She started to argue again and stopped on a held breath. He was right. She might not like it, but she had to accept it. A single woman wasn’t going to get custody of an abandoned baby in Whitehorn, Montana, no matter how great a character she had.
She faced the loss of little Jennifer with quiet desperation. Fate was unfair, she was thinking. Her whole life seemed to be one tragedy after another. She put her head in her hands and sighed wearily.
“She’ll be better off in a settled home,” he mumbled. He hated seeing her suffer. “You know she will.”
She sat up again after a minute, resignation in her demeanor. “Well, I won’t stop seeing her until they place her,” she said doggedly.
“No one’s asked you to.”
She glared at him. “She wouldn’t get to you, would she, Deputy?” she asked with bitter anger. “You can walk away from anyone and never look back. No one touches you.”
“You did,” he said gruffly.
“Oh, I’m sure Bess got a lot further than I did,” she said, her jealousy rising to the surface. “After all, she doesn’t have any hang-ups and she thinks you’re God’s gift to women.”
“You don’t understand.”
“I understand everything,” she said bluntly. “You wanted to make sure that no one in town connected you with the object of so much scandal. Didn’t you tell me once that you hated gossip because people talked about you so much when you were a boy? That’s really why you started taking Bess out, isn’t it? The fact that she was infatuated with you was just a bonus.”
He scowled. “That wasn’t why—”
She stood up, looking totally unapproachable. “Everyone knows now that Bess is your girlfriend. You’re safe, McCallum,” she added proudly. “No one is going to pair you off with me ever again. So let well enough alone, please.”
He stood up, too, feeling frustrated and half-mad with restrained anger. “I’d been lied to one time too many,” he said harshly. “Trust comes hard to me.”
“It does to me, too,” she replied in a restrained tone. “You betrayed mine by turning your back on me the first chance you got. You believed Sam instead of me. You wouldn’t even come to me for an explanation.”
His face tautened to steel. He had no defense. There simply was none.
“You needn’t look so torn, McCallum. It doesn’t matter anyway. We both know it was a flash in the pan and nothing more. You can’t trust women and I’m not casual enough for affairs. Neither of us would have considered marriage. What was left?”
His dark eyes swept over her with quiet appreciation of her slender, graceful body. “I might have shown you, if you’d given me half a chance.”
She lifted her chin. “I told you, I’m not the type for casual affairs.”
“It wouldn’t have been casual, or an affair,” he returned. “I’m not a loner by choice. I’m by myself because I never found a woman I liked. Wanted, sure. But there has to be more to a relationship than a few nights in bed. I felt…more than desire for you.”
“But not enough,” she said, almost choking on the words. “Not nearly enough to make up for what I…am.”
His face contracted. “For God’s sake, you’re a woman! Being barren doesn’t change anything!”
She turned away. The pain was almost physical. “Please go,” she said in a choked tone. She sat back down behind her desk with the air of an exhausted runner. She looked older, totally drained. “Please, just go.”
He rammed his hands into his pockets and glared at her. “You won’t give an inch. How do you expect to go through life in that sewn-up mental state? I made a mistake, okay? I’m not perfect. I don’t walk around with a halo above my head. Why can’t you forget?”
Her eyes were vulnerable for just an instant. “Because it hurt so much to have you turn away from me,” she confessed huskily. “I’m not going to let you hurt me again.”
His firm lips parted. “Jessica, we learn from our mistakes. That’s what life is all about.”
“Mistakes are what my life is all about,” she said, laughing harshly. She rubbed her hand over her forehead. “And there are still things you don’t know. I was a fool, McCallum, and it was your fault because you wouldn’t take no for an answer. Why did you have to interfere? I was happy alone, I was resigned to it….”
“Why did you keep trying to take care of me?” he shot back.
She had to admit she’d gone out of her way in that respect. She glanced up and then quickly back down to her desk. “Temporary insanity,” she pleaded. “You had no one, and neither did I. I wanted to be your friend.”
“Friends forgive each other.”
She gnawed her lower lip. She couldn’t tell him that it was far more than friendship she’d wanted from him. But she had secrets, still, that she could never share with him. She couldn’t tell him the rest, even now. His fling with Bess had spared her the fatal weakness of giving in to him, of yielding to a hopeless affair. If it had gone that far, she corrected. Because it was highly doubtful that it would have.
“What are you keeping back?” he asked. “What other dark skeletons are hiding in your closet?”
She pushed her hair back from her wan face. “None that you need to know about, McCallum,” she said, leaning back. She forced a smile. “Why don’t you take Bess to lunch?”
“Bess and I are friends,” he said. “That’s all. And I’ve caused enough trouble around here. I understand that you’re barely speaking to her. That’s my fault, not hers.”
She glared at him. “Bess is a professional who reports to me, and how I treat her is my business.”
“I know that,” he replied. “But she’s feeling guilty enough. So am I.”
Her eyebrows lifted. “About what?”
“Neither of us made your life any easier,” he said. “I didn’t know what happened to you. But even if you’d been all that Sam Jackson accused you of being, I had no right to subject you to even more gossip. Bess knows why I took her out. I could have caused her as much pain as I caused you. I have to live with that, too. Fortunately, she was no more serious than I was.”
“That isn’t what she told us,” Jessica said through her teeth.
He stared at her with dawning horror. What stories had Bess told to produce such antagonism from Jessica, to make her look so outraged?
He scowled. “Jessica, nothing happened. We had a few meals together and I kissed her, once. That’s all.”
“It’s gentlemanly of you to defend her,” she said, stone faced. “But I’m not a child. You don’t have to lie to protect her.”
“I’m not lying!”
She pulled the file open and spread out the papers in it. “I’d like to know what you find out about that midwife,” she said. “And about Keith, if the juvenile authorities get any results.”
He stared at her for a long moment. “Tit for tat, Jessica?” he asked quietly. “I wouldn’t believe you, so now you won’t believe me?”
She met his eyes evenly. “That has nothing to do with it. I think you’re being gallant, for Bess’s sake,” she replied. “It’s kind of you, but unnecessary. Nothing you do with Bess or anyone else is my business.”
He wouldn’t have touched that line with a gloved hand. He stared at her for a long moment, searching for the right words. But he couldn’t find any that would fit the situation.
He found plenty, however, when he closed Jessica’s door and stood over Bess, who’d been waiting for him to finish.
“What did you tell her?” he asked bluntly.
She grimaced. “I embroidered it a little, to save face,” she protested. “I thought we were going to be a hot item and it hurt my feelings that you didn’t even want to kiss me. I’m sorry! I didn’t know how hard Jessica was going to take it, or I’d never have made up those terrible lies about us.”
He grimaced. “How terrible?”
She flushed. She couldn’t, she just couldn’t, admit that! “I’ll tell her the truth,” she promised. “I’ll tell her all of it, honest I will. Please don’t be mad.”
“Mad.” He shook his head, walking toward the door. “I must be mad,” he said to himself, “to have painted myself into this sort of corner. Or maybe I just have a talent for creating my own self-destruction.”
He kept walking.
Ten
The last words McCallum spoke to Bess might have been prophetic. He was thinking about Jessica when he shouldn’t have been, and he walked into a convenience store outside town not noticing the ominous silence in the place and the frightened look on the young female clerk’s face.
It seemed to happen in slow motion. A man in a faded denim jacket turned with a revolver in his hand. As McCallum reached for his own gun, the man fired. There was an impact, as if he’d been hit with a fist on his upper arm. It spun him backwards. A fraction of a second later, he heard the loud pop, like a firecracker going off. In that one long minute while he tried to react, the perpetrator forgot his qu
arry—Tammie Jane, the terrified young clerk—and ran out the door like a wild man.
“You’ve been shot! Oh, my goodness, what shall I do?” Tammie Jane burst out. She ran to McCallum, her own danger forgotten in her concern for him.
“It’s not so bad,” he said, gritting his teeth as he pulled out a handkerchief to stem the surging, rhythmic flow of blood. “Nothing broken, at least, but it looks as if the bullet may have…clipped an artery.” He wound the handkerchief tighter and put pressure over the wound despite the pain it caused. “Are you all right?”
“Sure! He came in and asked for some cigarettes, and when I turned to get them, he pulled out that gun. Gosh, I was scared! He’d just told me to empty the cash register when you walked in.”
“I walked in on it like a raw recruit,” he added ruefully. “My God, I don’t know where my mind was. I didn’t even get off a shot.”
“You’re losing a lot of blood. I’d better call for an ambulance—”
“No need. I’ll call the dispatcher on my radio.” He made his way out to his patrol car, weaving a little. He was losing blood at a rapid rate and his head was spinning. He raised the dispatcher, gave his location and succinctly outlined the situation, adding a terse description of the suspect and asking for an all-points bulletin.
“Stay put. We’ll send the ambulance,” the dispatcher said, and signed off. The radio blared with sudden activity as she first called an ambulance and then broadcast a BOLO—a “be on the lookout for” bulletin—on the municipal frequency.
The clerk came out of the store with a hand towel and passed it to McCallum. His handkerchief was already soaked.
“I don’t know how to make a tourniquet, but I’ll try if you’ll tell me how,” Tammie Jane volunteered worriedly. Blood from his wound was pooling on the pavement, as McCallum was holding his arm outside the car.
He leaned back against the seat, his hand still pressing hard on the wound. “Thanks, but the ambulance will be here any minute. I can hear the siren.”
It was fortunate that Whitehorn was a small town. Barely two minutes later, the ambulance sped up and two paramedics got out, assessed the situation and efficiently loaded a dazed McCallum onto a stretcher and into the ambulance.