Busted in Broken Hearts Junction

by Meg Muldoon

  And that wasn’t a good feeling.

  Not a good feeling at all.

  I grabbed the full glass of whiskey off of the coffee table in front of me and threw back a mouthful, feeling the burn as it slid down my throat.

  Damn Fletcher.

  Damn soulmates.

  Damn love.

  I looked up at the empty space on my wall, the one where Jacob and me had been. The one where Fletcher and me should have been.

  I wasn’t going to do this all again. I had seen Fletcher once in a soulmate vision, true. But that didn’t mean I was going to stand for something like this. Something that felt so wrong. Something that didn’t sit right with me. Something that—

  I jumped as Hank let out a high-pitched bark, lifting his head and pointing his nose toward the door.

  A second later, there was a loud knock.

  I sucked in air sharply and kept still.

  My heart beat hard in my chest as a terrible thought crossed my mind.

  What if…

  What if she was back?

  And what if she was back for a reason?

  I sat there, listening to Hank bark, encased in a prison of fear for I don’t know how long.

  There was another loud knock.

  Hank jumped down, his claws scraping against the wood floor as he charged the door.

  I held my breath, praying that whoever was on the other side would just—

  “Loretta, I know you’re in there,” a familiar voice sounded. “Loretta, I’ve got to talk to you.”

  I let out a sigh of relief.

  Chapter 49

  “Well, you sure look like hell.”

  I narrowed my eyes.

  While most likely true, being told that I looked like hell was definitely not something I wanted to hear right now.Especially not when it was accompanied by Raymond Rollin’s trademark smart-ass smirk and smug look.

  “Thanks,” I said. “I really needed to hear that.”

  “If I were to guess, you’re probably crying ‘cuz you found out about that redhead your boyfriend was with the other day,” he said, that smug, all-knowing look still on his face.

  I felt my fists curl up at my sides.

  I could have smacked Raymond Rollins right then and there. Reveled in the prospect of knocking that conceited expression clear to the other side of tomorrow.

  But my fists stayed where they were.

  “Raymond, I swear, if you say something like that again to me, I’ll—”

  “Take it easy, take it easy,” he said, holding up his hands. “I didn’t come over here to talk about your love life, Loretta.”

  “Then why in the hell are you here?” I said.

  “I found out some stuff,” he said. “About the Westwood shooting. Thought it might interest you to hear. That is, if you’re not too busy having a pity party for yourself.”

  I did my best to let that little zinger go, mostly because it was the other thing he said that interested me.

  “What’d you find out?”

  “Are you gonna invite me in first?” he said.

  “I only invite friends and congenial folks into my home,” I said. “And you most certainly don’t fall into either one of those categories.”

  I crossed my arms, sizing him up.

  “C’mon, Loretta,” he said, stomping his feet on the porch. “I came all the way over here. And it’s freezing, for the love of Broken Hearts.”

  I let out a sigh.

  “All right,” I said, opening the door further and stepping aside. “You can come in.”

  He took his hat off and brushed past me, stepping over the threshold.

  I took in a deep breath.

  I didn’t much like Raymond Rollins here in my home.

  But at least he’d be useful if Christina Grayson decided she wanted to pay a second visit to my humble abode.

  Chapter 50

  “I don’t think you’re holding up your end of the bargain,” Raymond said, leaning forward in the chair that was situated closest to the fireplace.

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “I mean, that little piece of information you dropped earlier, about a similar incident happening back in the 90s? How’d you know about that?”

  I shrugged.

  “Law Dog was there when it happened,” I said. “He owned The Cupid back then. Said the case was never solved.”

  Raymond rubbed the stubble on his chin.

  “I still think you know more than you’re saying,” he said. “Don’t forget that I do this for a living, Loretta. I know when people aren’t being all around truthful.”

  I kept from rolling my eyes.

  I knew that when it came down to it, Raymond’s deduction wasn’t so much about his copley intuition as it was about me being a poor liar.

  I brought my legs up to my chest and then rubbed the top of Hank’s head. Hank had his eyes glued to Raymond. The dog had never much cared for the man when we’d been dating, let alone now, when we were less than acquaintances. He’d seen Raymond raise his voice at me one too many times.

  “Is that why you came over here?” I said. “To point fingers? Or do you actually have some news to share.”

  He crossed his arms, then glanced over at the crackling fire. He sighed.

  “Well, I’ll be honest with you, Loretta, despite the fact that you’re not returning the favor,” he said. “Because I don’t know exactly what to do about all of this. And perhaps you can help me think this through.”

  He rested his head on the edge of his palm and looked back over at me.

  “I’m all ears,” I said.

  “I looked into the old file on Jake Warner’s death,” he said. “As you seem to already know, it was never solved. Warner was shot and killed with a bow and arrow, almost in the identical fashion as Clay Westwood. Oddly, the details of the crime never came out to the press. The old file on the murder was damn near impossible to find at the station. The happenstance of which, brings me to another point.”

  I nearly snorted at Raymond’s use of the word “happenstance.” He was always doing that. Using fancy words that didn’t sound altogether natural in his way of speaking, and sounded almost as if he didn’t quite know what they meant.

  But I quit smirking when he looked at me hard.

  He paused dramatically.

  “Did you know that Clay’s real name, before he got famous, was Clay Warner?” he said. “Did you know that?”

  Raymond said it in an accusing tone. Knowing, probably by the look in my eye, that I already knew about the father-son connection.

  I thought about denying my knowledge of that fact, but as it was, I couldn’t see a reason why I shouldn’t tell Raymond the truth at this point.

  “I know,” I said. “Jake was Clay’s father.”

  “I knew it,” he said, clicking his tongue against the roof of his mouth. “You were holding out on me, Loretta.”

  He gave me a pouty little look that was unbecoming on his bulldog face.

  “You know how Clay came here to play Beth Lynn’s wedding because Fletcher asked him to? Well, I don’t think friendship was the motivating factor behind Clay’s visit to Broken Hearts Junction. I don’t think it was his motivating factor at all, in fact.”

  Raymond nodded. I was surprised that he wasn’t angrier with me keeping mum on all this, being as he was prone to heated outbursts with little provocation.

  “So Clay was looking to solve the murder,” Raymond said. “So that’s probably why they found that pistol in his hotel room. He was out for revenge.”

  “It certainly seems that way,” I said.

  “But just what was Jake Warner doing out here in 1990?” he asked. “Broken Hearts ain’t exactly a place you end up ‘less you want to.”

  I thought about whether to keep quiet about that.

  But we were, after all, supposed to be on the same side.

  “He was looking for his woman,” I said. “He thought she was here.”

&
nbsp; “His woman?”

  I nodded.

  “Clay’s mother, I think,” I said. “From what I saw in…”

  I trailed off.

  Raymond knew about my matchmaking visions. But he’d always found a way to belittle them or discount them, much like my family. He especially hated them because of what they’d told me about me and him – that we didn’t belong together. As a couple, or as anything else for that matter.

  He raised one of his thick eyebrows, noticing how abruptly I stopped talking.

  “How were you gonna finish that sentence, Loretta?”

  I rubbed my face.

  Maybe I should have moved right along, moved past it. Pretended like Law Dog had given me the information instead.

  But if there was one thing the past few years had taught me, it was that I was who I was. And that no matter what other people thought about it, I couldn’t be anything other than true to myself.

  And sometimes that meant some people would end up thinking I was plain nuts.

  “I’ve been getting visions,” I said, blurting out the words. “Visions from Jake Warner’s perspective, before he was shot 25 years ago.”

  The pupils in Raymond’s eyes expanded for half a second.

  I looked away.

  “I didn’t ask for these visions,” I said. “But I’ve been having them. I’ve seen his woman in these latest ones. Her name’s Marie Altier. The last vision I had, she told him she was pregnant. I imagine, with Clay.”

  Raymond didn’t say anything. He just looked away from me, staring at the fire. Unresponsive.

  I sighed.

  I don’t know what I expected from anybody.

  “I did a little digging around in Jake Warner’s past,” he finally said, shifting the conversation in another direction.

  Which was exactly what I expected him to do, given his skepticism of my visions.

  “What’d you find?”

  “You know, he was under investigation in the state of Tennessee at the time of his death? Cops thought he was behind a string of bank robberies in Memphis. Him and another fella made out with a boatload of money. It was a big story back then. A lot of newspaper articles.”

  “Doesn’t surprise me,” I said.

  That answer did surprise Raymond, though. He turned around to look at me.

  “The vision,” I said.

  “Oh, that’s right,” Raymond said, disbelief running through each word like a river.

  I tried not to let it anger me.

  “They never solved the robberies,” he said. “Never found out where all that money went. But you know what I think, in light of what you’ve told me tonight?”

  “What?”

  “I think Jake’s woman stole that money from him and made off with it,” he said. “He came all this way to find her and get that money back. And you know what I think? I think she must have caught on and shot him dead for it.”

  I furrowed my brow.

  “But if that’s true, then you’re saying that Marie is still here, and that she shot her own son,” I said. “That she shot him in cold blood.”

  Raymond shrugged.

  “I think if she was capable of shooting Jake, what’s to stop her from shooting Clay?” he said. “If she thought she was cornered, a woman like that might do just about anything.”

  I shook my head.

  Maybe being a woman, something about that scenario just didn’t sit right with me.

  True, Marie might have been cold-blooded enough to leave her two-year-old son behind.

  But to kill him?All these years later? That was another level of cold heartedness that didn’t seem to fit.

  Then again, it wasn’t as if I knew Marie. It wasn’t as if I knew what she was capable of.

  “‘Sides,” Raymond said. “We don’t even know for sure if she is Clay’s mother, do we? For all we know, Jake slept around and she left when she found out he had a son with another woman.”

  I shook my head again.

  “That’s not how it happened,” I said.

  “Oh, that’s right,” he said. “You saw it in the vision.”

  Damn Raymond.

  I got up, going over to the fire. I stoked it angrily with the fireplace poker.

  I was one step away from asking Raymond Rollins to get out of my house.

  He seemed to notice my agitation, and he quickly cleared his throat.

  “Well, regardless of how it happened, you know what else I found out?”

  “What,” I said, my voice completely devoid of feeling.

  “Guess who worked the Jake Warner investigation?”

  “Who?” I said, crossing my arms.

  “Chief Alan Longwell.”

  I raised my eyebrows.

  “Chief Longwell?”

  He nodded.

  “He was just a deputy back then though,” he said.

  Raymond’s eyes seemed to be dancing in his head.

  I supposed he was hoping for a little revenge of his own.

  “Something mighty strange is going on,” he said. “The chief’s getting up there in age, but he ain’t senile. He should’ve made the correlation between the two crimes. Which leads me to believe he is knowingly turning a blind eye to the unsolved murder of Jake Warner. Which leads me to believe something incredibly shady is going on.”

  “What reason would the chief have to do that, though?”

  Raymond shrugged.

  “By all appearances, the investigation into Jake Warner’s death was lazy police work,” Raymond said. “Now I don’t know if that was inexperience, or slothfulness, or something more. But I’m inclined to believe it was something more in this case, with the way he covered up Clay’s station visit the day he was shot.”

  He rubbed the back of his neck.

  “So you see, Loretta, I’m between a rock and a hard place here. If I confront the chief about it, then I’m most likely looking at being out of a job soon. If I go to another agency about this, and I’m wrong, then I’m probably looking at being out of a job soon also.”

  “What option does that leave?”

  “I’ve gotta find a way to get some evidence,” he said. “Something other than what I saw. Something I can actually show somebody.”

  He sighed.

  “But as of yet, I’ve got nothing,” he said. “It’s just my word against his. And ain’t nobody gonna take mine after the Dale Dixon investigation.”

  He rested his head on the palm of his hand again, letting out another long, depressed sigh.

  I stoked the fire some more, wondering if I should tell him what else I knew.

  The part about Maggie paying Amy to pass that note along to Clay the night he was shot.

  A crazy thought crossed my mind.

  Maggie was in her 50s. Putting her at just the right age to be Clay’s mother.

  Was Maggie actually Marie Altier? The woman that Jake had come to Broken Hearts to find? The woman in my visions?

  She didn’t really look like that woman. But then again, 25 years could do a lot to a person.

  I was just about to say something when Raymond stood up abruptly.

  He stepped close to me.

  “Listen, there’s something else I came over here to talk to you about,” he said. “It’s got nothing to do with any of this Westwood business.”

  I looked up at him, biting my lip.

  It didn’t surprise me.

  I’d sensed as much when I saw him standing on my porch there. He could have just called. And Raymond wasn’t exactly the sharing type. There was another reason behind him being here tonight.

  It was hard to believe, though. Over a year had passed since we had dated. He hadn’t found another woman in that time as far as I knew, but to think that he was still pining for me, and had hopes, despite me clearly having chosen somebody else, made me feel bad.

  Maybe he was here tonight because he saw a small window of opportunity. A moment of weakness, where he thought he could be the shoulder to cry o
n. Someone to lean on.

  A chance to show me just how much I was missing by being with Fletcher Hart.

  I looked at him, shaking my head.

  “Raymond, it’s been a long day,” I said. “I’m tired.”

  He raised an eyebrow at me.

  But there was no anger, so flash of rage, so typical of him.

  He just hung his head down and nodded.

  “Okay, Loretta,” he said. “But it would mean a lot to me if you could find the time for a talk soon.”

  There was a hint of desperation in his voice. Something not typical of the big man.

  He grabbed his police jacket from off the chair and headed for the door.

  “You let me know if you find out anything more,” he said. “And uh, if you find anything else out, you know, from one of your visions.”

  I opened the door for him. He gave me one long last look before heading down the porch and out into the frosty night.

  I watched as Officer Raymond Rollins got into his police car and pulled away down the street.

  I may have been mad as hell at Fletcher Hart at the moment.

  But there was no way Raymond was going to worm his way back into my life.

  That was the difference between Fletcher and me.

  Chapter 51

  He’d been dreaming of black clouds and rain flooding the meadow where they lay that one day in late June when she told him she was going to have his baby. He dreamt of snakes swimming on the surface of the flooded field, zipping across the water lethally fast. Their fangs bared, heading straight for him.

  He woke up in a cold sweat, the baby screaming, the other side of the bed empty.

  Cold. Oh so cold.

  But the smell of coffee hung strongly in the air, and there was a little light growing in the sky.

  He got up, went to the baby’s room. Picked his son up, held him in his arms, patted his back.

  The kid just kept crying.

  Jake never had the touch when it came to calming the baby down. But at least he was better than Marie. She seemed to have no patience with the child. There was a lack of tenderness there that disturbed Jake sometimes. Something that made him worry.

  Jake had thought about talking to the doctor about her and the way she’d been acting lately. He’d heard that some women got depressed after having a baby. She’d been quiet, withdrawn. When she picked up the baby, she didn’t hold him like a mother should.