by Anne Stuart
Ellie had moved out of the room ahead of him. Lonnie smiled faintly. “Anytime. Anything you want to know, just ask. I’ve made sort of a study of that day. There’s probably no one around who knows as much as I do about the details, is there, Ellie?”
“Probably not, Lonnie,” she said.
Tanner’s eyes narrowed. He knew that tone of voice, even if Poor Lonnie didn’t. It was maternal, gentle and far too knowing. Lonnie was no threat to Tanner’s plans for Ellie, no threat at all. “Anything you want to know,” Lonnie said again.
“I’ll take you up on that,” Tanner said.
The good people of Morey’s Falls had given up waiting. It was afternoon when they left the newspaper office, and there was no one in sight. They walked down the block in silence, Ellie remembering she had to limp this time, Tanner stifling his irritation as he glanced down at her. He liked her shoulders. They were thin, broad under the soft cotton shirt. Probably covered with freckles from yesterday’s outing in the sun. He wished they were back up in that mountain meadow and that Charles Tanner had never lived.
No, that wouldn’t do. If Charles Tanner had never lived, neither would his son. And if Charles Tanner hadn’t wiped out a good portion of Morey’s Falls, Ellie Lundquist would have moved away long ago, been married to a man her own age and had a couple of kids by now.
You can’t change the past, no matter how much you want to. He’d learned that long ago—now was no time to be forgetting.
* * * * *
Why had she left her cane in the car? For that matter, why hadn’t she suggested they drive to the park? To be sure, it wasn’t very far away. But they were unprotected, on view, with no place to run to. She couldn’t rid herself of the feeling that someone was watching them, someone with the same twisted outlook as Charles Tanner. Someone with a gun.
Don’t be absurd, she warned herself. Lightning didn’t strike twice in the same tiny Montana town. One crazed killer was more than their quota—coincidence couldn’t be cruel enough to bring another one into their midst.
If there was another murderer around, coincidence had nothing to do with it. It had to be heredity. But the man walking beside her with that easy, loose-limbed grace wasn’t the danger she was half imagining. It was someone else, watching them. But it was probably just her overwrought imagination and a sleepless night. Not to mention the upcoming anniversary. The whole town was on edge.
“This is it,” she said, coming to a halt at the small patch of green on the corner of Main and Bank. She tried to see it through his eyes. It wasn’t much—just an empty lot turned into a park, with benches and winding paths and a huge monolith in the center, covered with a drop cloth.
There used to be a fountain there, and Ellie still missed it. She’d liked having it there, something fresh and blue to focus her gaze on. The memorial would be nothing more than a grim reminder of something no one ever forgot.
Tanner hadn’t said a word. He was moving around the structure, that distant, enigmatic expression on his face. And then he squatted down, poking at something in the dirt.
“What have you got there?” Ellie asked, moving closer. She never liked being in the park, and would have preferred to stay on the sidewalk, looking in. When it came right down to it, no one liked the park. No one spent their lunch hours on the comfortable benches, kids didn’t congregate, old men didn’t feed the birds. It was still haunted, fifteen years later.
Tanner rose, looking down into his hand with an odd expression on his face. “It’s a cigarette butt,” he said, his voice sounding peculiar.
She peered into his hand. “It doesn’t look like it.”
“That’s because someone’s crumpled it past recognition. Do you know anyone who does that to their cigarettes?”
Why was his voice sounding so strained? You’d think he’d found a bone or something equally nasty. She was about to say so, when she realized he was genuinely disturbed by the shredded bit of paper in his hand.
“No,” she said finally. “But then, I don’t know many smokers. Why do you ask?”
He stared down into his hand for a long, speculative moment, and then turned his palm over, letting the tiny scraps drift back onto the recently upturned dirt. He met her gaze blandly. “Just curious,” he said. And she knew he lied.
* * *
Chapter Eight
* * *
Ellie Lundquist felt a sudden chill. A cloud had passed over the noonday sun, darkening the once bright day, and she shivered in her light cotton shirt.
“Where to next?” she asked in a deliberately cheery voice. “We could go out to the graveyard. Or we could see if some of the relatives would talk to us. Or we could...”
“I think I’ve had enough for today,” Tanner said slowly. “It’s after one. Let’s get something to eat. What about the restaurant across the street?” He nodded in the direction of Pete’s Fireside Cafe.
Ellie followed his gaze, looking at the faces turned out toward them. “No,” she said. “That’s not the place to go if you’ve had enough for one day.”
“All right.” He accepted it without question. “Got any alternatives?”
“I need to check my horses. I have them stabled out at Maude’s. If we show up there she’s bound to offer us lunch. Plus more advice than we could ever want.”
“I’m used to advice.’’
“You just don’t take it,” she supplied.
He smiled that cold, wolfish grin. “Not if I can help it. I prefer to make my own mistakes.”
“Okay, let’s go to Maude’s. If you want,” she kept her voice carefully diffident, “we could go for a ride up into the hills.”
“On that old slug you rode yesterday?”
“Mazey’s a wonderful horse,” Ellie protested. “Anyway, I have three horses. You could ride Hoover. He’s got a little more energy.”
“I don’t know if I think you’re much of a judge of horseflesh.” They were walking back toward the big black car, the eyes from Pete’s Fireside Cafe following them.
“And you are?” she shot back, incensed.
He shrugged. “I know my way around a horse.”
“I think you’ve been standing at the back end too long,” she said sweetly, yanking open the car door.
His laugh was a short, rusty sound of surprise. “Ellie, you amaze me,” he said, sliding in beside her. “What an image!”
She switched on the ignition, grinding the starter unnecessarily, and pulled out into the street without looking. Fortunately traffic in Morey’s Falls was nonexistent. It would have been extremely embarrassing to have collided with another car with Tanner as witness. Not to mention Lonnie’s brooding gaze from the front window of the Gazette office. She had to learn not to react to Tanner’s deliberate goading. She had to be cool, friendly, helpful, and let his taunts slide off her back.
It was easier said than done. For some reason she was vulnerable to the man, in ways she hadn’t been vulnerable to anyone in years. Tanner saw straight through to that vulnerability and used it, and her.
She lifted her foot slightly from the accelerator and forced herself to loosen her tight grip on the leather-covered steering wheel. She plastered a pleasant smile onto her face as she headed out toward Maude’s rambling ranch house. “Where do you live, Tanner? What do you do for a living? You can’t walk all the time.”
She didn’t have to look at him to know that a cynical grin had stretched across his too-handsome face. “Welcome wagon time again, Ellie?”
She ignored the gibe. “I’m just making friendly conversation. Besides, I’m curious.”
“I live in New Mexico. A little town up in the Sangre de Cristo mountains that you never would have heard of.”
“What do you do there?” She allowed herself a brief glance in his direction.
His grin broadened. “I live on a horse ranch, Ellie. I’m partners with the man who should have been my father. We raise the best quarter horses known to man. And yes, I’ve spent more than my shar
e of time at the back end of a horse.”
“And your partner doesn’t mind you taking off like this?”
It was the wrong question. His face darkened for a moment, and he reached for the pack of cigarettes in his shirt pocket with impatient fingers. “He knows when it’s necessary.”
“And it doesn’t matter how long you’re gone?” she pushed.
“It matters.” He lit the cigarette and blew a long stream of smoke into the pristine interior of the Judge’s car, watching for her reaction.
“Then you can’t very well stay here indefinitely.”
“I can stay here just as long as I need to,” he said in a low, rough voice. “And not a minute longer.” He stared out at the scrubby landscape. “Alfred’s dying.”
He’d surprised himself by saying that, she could tell by the sudden grimness around his mouth. He hadn’t surprised her. She had a way about her that invited confidences. People told her things they never expected to tell anyone. Usually they didn’t mind when they found they’d been indiscreet. She could tell Tanner minded like hell.
“Alfred’s the man who should have been your father?” she prodded gently.
He leaned forward and stubbed out the half-smoked cigarette in the ashtray. Two of his cigarette butts already rested there, staking his claim to what had once been the Judge’s. “Alfred is everything Charles Tanner wasn’t. My mother and I moved in with him when I was a wild fifteen-year-old and Marbella had had too many of the wrong men for the wrong reasons. He gave us a home, he gave us love, he gave us a future.” He leaned back against the seat. “It took him five years to talk Marbella into marrying him. She’d decided she wasn’t worth the kind of love Alfred was offering her, and it took him a long time to convince her.”
“So he was your father,” Ellie said softly. “Your stepfather, at least.”
“Marbella died in a car accident two weeks before they were set to get married,” he said in a short, unemotional voice.
“But you stayed on?”
“No. I left Alfred to grieve on his own. I took off the afternoon of the accident and didn’t come back for a year and a half. I wasn’t even sure Alfred would let me come back. But he did.”
“Where’d you walk that time?” Her voice was deliberately prosaic.
Some of the tension seemed to leave him. “I’d never seen New England. It seemed as good a direction as any. Anyplace but Montana.” There was a long silence, broken only by the powerful hum of the Buick’s engine.
“But now you’re here.”
He shrugged, and his hand strayed toward the cigarettes again, then dropped onto the seat beside her. “Alfred gave me a future when I needed it. I’ve got to give him the only kind of future he’ll have. I’ve got to make sure the ranch will be safe, that it’ll be in good hands.”
“You’ve got to be sure that you won’t take off again.”
His eyes met hers for a brief, startled moment. “Exactly,” he said. “Alfred’s had two strokes, and he could have another any time now. He’s holding on by the skin of his teeth, and his last months are misery, not knowing what’s going to happen to everything he’s worked for. I owed it to him to come up here, to the last place on earth I’d ever want to go, and make peace with the past. And why the hell am I telling you all this?” he added with sudden savagery.
“Because I’m easy to talk to?” she suggested softly.
“Because you’re a nosy busybody.” He reached for his cigarettes.
She didn’t even flinch. “You know, you shouldn’t smoke those things. You’re not really a smoker—when you’re preoccupied you forget all about needing them.”
She should have known better than to have twitched the tiger’s tail. He turned the full force of those cold blue eyes on hers, and she felt like shivering all over again. “And you, honey, are not really lame. You limp when you remember you’re supposed to be the martyred cripple, and the rest of the time you do just fine.”
The fact that she deserved it didn’t help the pain slicing through her. For all the physical and emotional anguish she’d been through in her thirty years, she’d never had anyone be deliberately cruel to her. The shock of it took her breath away, and she quickly turned her face back to the road, gripping the steering wheel with shaking hands.
She could feel her eyes fill with sudden, stinging tears, and she tried to blink them away. Her mouth trembled, and she bit down on her lip, hard, as she turned down Maude’s dusty driveway to the rambling little ranch house that had served the old woman as home for over eighty years.
She pulled to a stop and switched off the car. “We’re here,” she announced brightly, praying he wouldn’t notice her absurdly childish reaction to his random cruelty. She reached for the door, hoping to get away from him, to dash the demoralizing tears from her eyes before he noticed, but he was too fast for her.
He caught her wrist, drawing her back, and her resistance was just so much wasted effort. He could see her tear-filled eyes, her trembling mouth, her stupid, babyish behavior, and color flooded her pale cheeks.
“I’m being ridiculous. I’m sorry,” she began, embarrassed, but he stopped her, his fingers touching her mouth to silence her.
His eyes were no longer cold. “You’re sorry?” he echoed. He pulled back his hand, and there was a fleck of blood on his fingers. She must have cut her lip when she’d bit down. His other hand was still holding her wrist, and she felt it tighten around her, felt the infinitesimal pull, and she was ready to move with it, toward him, when he suddenly released her.
He pulled back and reached for the car door. “Maybe,” he said, “I’m more like my father than I thought.”
This time she stopped him, her hand catching his arm, feeling the warm flesh and bone and sinew beneath his skin. “What do you mean?”
“Taking potshots at helpless children,” he said. “Maybe you should keep as far away from me as you can.”
“I’m almost thirty-one, Tanner.”
“That doesn’t keep you from being a child in some ways. You’ve lived in a cocoon here in Morey’s Falls. One moment of random violence and you’ve been protected ever since. You’re not equipped to face the real world and mean, rotten men like me.”
“If I’m still a child,” Ellie said quietly, her tears long gone, “then it’s time I grew up. And you’re not a mean, rotten man, Tanner.”
He leaned across the seat, and before she could realize his intent his mouth had brushed her lower lip, softly, barely touching. When she looked at him again the blood was on his mouth, not hers. “Honey,” he said, “I’m one of the worst.” And before she could say anything more he’d opened the door and slid out into the bright sunlight.
* * * * *
Maude Gilles was standing there, just outside the car, her dark, sprightly eyes an interested witness, no doubt, to the past few moments between her two visitors. She was shorter than Tanner remembered, and older. The merciless glare of the early-afternoon sun played up every wrinkle in her seamed, lined face, making her appear as old as time. She had to be under five feet, and her long, thick white braids hung past her tiny shoulders.
Ellie had wasted no time climbing out of her side of the car. She had the cane in her hand and a stubborn look of defiance around her mouth. “Hi, Maude. We came for lunch.”
He didn’t miss the look that passed between the two women. A very slight expression of inquiry passed over Maude’s face, answered by an imperceptible shake of Ellie’s head. He filed it in the back of his brain for further study, grimacing in annoyance as he watched Ellie limp forward, leaning heavily on the damned cane.
‘“Bout time, too,” Maude announced. “I was wondering when I was going to see the two of you. My spies tell me you’ve been wandering all over town.”
“Who are your spies, Maude?” Tanner asked with deceptive laziness.
“Jamie, I suppose,” Ellie supplied calmly, almost as if the tense moments in the front seat of the Buick hadn’t happened. “He helps ou
t around here, feeds the horses, takes Maude shopping and fills her in on all the gossip. What’d he tell you, Maude?”
“Just that the two of you were as thick as thieves. The old ladies in town are worried about you. They think Tanner here is clouding your mind.”
“The spawn of the devil,” Tanner said in a pleasant tone of voice. “I don’t think Ellie’s mind is too clouded.”
“It’d take more than a good-looking young stud like you to do it,” Maude said bluntly. “More’s the pity. Come along in. You’ll have to make do with peanut butter sandwiches, but I guess you’ll both survive. I’m glad you came, Ellie. Jamie said Shaitan didn’t touch his food. Of course that fool boy didn’t dare get close enough to see if something was the matter. Why you have to keep a horse like that is beyond me.”
“I’d better go see....”
“Ellie, he’s waited this long....” Maude might just as well have been talking to herself. Ellie had taken off in the direction of the barns, limping slightly, barely using the cane. “Damn the girl,” the old woman said under her breath. “What about you, Tanner? Are you going with her or are you going to help me make lunch?”
Tanner looked down, way down into those fierce little eyes. “What do you think?”
“I think you’d be a fool to spend time with an old lady when you could have a pretty young thing like Ellie. And I expect your mama didn’t raise no fools.”
He laughed. “You’re right. But it’s a close decision.”
“Lunch will wait. She’ll be in the stalls to the left in the big barn. You can’t miss her. Watch out for Shaitan, though. If anyone’s a spawn of the devil that creature is.”
“I’ll be careful.”
The barn was dark and shadowed after the bright sunlight, and a wave of familiar smells washed over him. Fresh straw, horseflesh, leather and saddle soap. He stopped for a moment, letting the smells surround him with a comforting blanket of memory. This was solid, real, this was waiting for him in New Mexico.