He abandoned his search for something to read and sat down in a heavy leather wingchair. “I’m sorry, Dad. It won’t happen ever again. I promise.”
Bushy eyebrows went up. “And why should that be true?”
“I promised Gabe. I swore on Ruthie.”
His father considered him, then nodded. “Good, then. She’s a good girl, your Gabe. She needs you to make things easier for her around here, not harder. You’ve been letting her down.”
Unable to hold his father’s estimating gaze, Heath studied the toes of his boots. He focused on a dark dot on the left one that was new. Blood. “I know. I see that now.”
“Good. Make it right.”
“Yes, sir.” He hesitated, then added, “Black is working with Whitt, though. That’s something to pay attention to.”
“What? Why? What’s going on?” Wes asked, becoming a participant rather than an observer.
No one answered him. Heath started to, but Logan shook his head and said, “We talked about that already. Dad thinks it’s a red herring, and now I tend to agree.”
“Dad?”
Morgan Cahill folded up his front page and set it beside him on the sofa. He leaned forward. “I think hiring Black was just kicking dirt in your face. I don’t even think the land buys are his gambit anymore. You gave him a better play when you stirred Catherine up. I don’t know what it is yet, but I know he’s got himself a sidekick now.” His laugh was scummed with bitter humor. “That is one vindictive wasp of a woman. So set Black aside, Heath. Turn your attention to what’s important. We’ll all figure out Whitt together, we’ll get shit sorted with the Moondancer, and you’ll ignore Black like the maggot he is. God’ll take care of him in His own time. Then he’ll burn the way you want. For all eternity.”
The town was split by shit he bore significant responsibility for, and they still didn’t know what in the blue hell Denny Whitt was after, but Heath realized that he felt good. It felt good to set Black aside. Like he’d cleaned out his mind’s gutters. His heart was open. His thoughts and feelings flowed.
Shit, he was happy.
He grinned, and it must have looked like a new thing on his face, because his brother and Wes both reacted with surprise and then gave him broad grins right back. After a beat, his father smiled, too.
Just then, Anya skipped into the room, Chester padding after her, tail wagging. She had a red prize ribbon pinned to her flowered top. “Breakfast time! Wash up!”
*****
“That’s a pretty pin you’re wearing, Annie.” Heath winked at his niece as he forked a couple of waffles onto his plate and then one for Gabe’s plate.
“It’s not a pin, Uncle Heath. It’s a ribbon. Shadow and me won second place!”
“Shadow and I,” Emma corrected.
“That is fantastic, kidlet! Good job!” Heath lifted off his chair and reached his arm across the table, holding his hand up for a high five, which Anya happily provided.
“Daddy says second place is first loser,” Kendall sneered.
“Mama!”
“Kendall, there’s no call for meanness. Apologize.” Emma glared at her husband, who shrugged, chewing on a mouthful of scrambled eggs.
While Emma and her family squabbled, Gabe leaned close and whispered in Heath’s ear. “Pass the strawberries, please?”
He picked up the stoneware bowl and plucked a single strawberry from it. Pinching it by its leafy top, he held it near her perfect mouth. She licked her lips and wrapped them around the succulent fruit. Her eyes on his, she bit down, and he stared while she chewed it—oh so slowly—and swallowed, then licked her lips again.
Christ.
The table had gone quiet around them until his sister said, her voice bright, “Well! I have to say that I thought breakfast this morning would be a grim affair, but it looks like everybody’s happy and well!”
Heath smiled at Gabe, then turned to his sister. “Yeah. We are. We’re sorry we missed the rodeo, though.”
“Yeah!” Gabe offered. “We sure would’ve liked to see you get that ribbon, Anya. I’m so sorry we weren’t there.”
“That’s okay. Uncle Logan said you were feeling bad and Uncle Heath had to take care of you. Did you have too much kettle corn? I had too much kettle corn the other day, and my tummy felt bad and Daddy had to take care of me.”
“I did have too much,” Gabe agreed. “But Uncle Heath took good care of me.”
“That’s good. Uncle Heath is good.”
Gabe turned to him. “Yeah, he is.”
Damn. Love and contentment was making him feel drunk. He wanted to grab her and find a room where he could ravish her. He blinked and turned back to the table before he did exactly that.
“So, Kendall,” he asked. “Where’s your ribbon?”
Kendall was only eight, a little kid himself, but he could be a real shit to his baby sister, and Heath didn’t mind taking a light jab to remind him to be a good brother. Emma glared at him for asking such a question, and Kendall scowled at his waffles. Logan, their dad, and Wes all chuckled.
Wes answered. “Some kid had pompons in the front row, and Tahoe couldn’t take his eyes off ‘em. Swingin’ his head every which way. Kenny dropped his egg on about the second stride.” He smirked at his son. “Guess you’d’ve been okay with a ribbon like your sister’s, huh son?”
“It wasn’t my fault. Stupid Tahoe wouldn’t pay attention.”
“Whose job is it to make your pony mind, Kendall?” Heath’s father gave his grandson a serious look.
Kendall was suddenly abashed. “Mine, Poppy.”
“That’s right. Cahill men don’t shrug off our responsibilities. Blame or credit, if it’s due, we carry it.”
“My son is a Taylor, Morgan.” Wes stared across the long table at his father-in-law.
“Wes,” Emma muttered. “Don’t.”
“He’s half Cahill, and he’d do better to build up that half, I’d say.”
“Daddy,” Emma sent a plea to the other end of the table. “Please. We’re having such a nice breakfast.”
“We are!” Logan jumped in. “Ems, I gotta say, you outdid yourself this morning. The waffles melted in my mouth. And what’s in the eggs? So good and spicy!”
As soon as he’d tasted the eggs, Heath had known that Gabe had made them. She had a hot tongue, and everything she made had a peppery bite. She even put chili pepper in her cocoa. Everybody at the table had figured that out by now, and knew to alternate their servings on their plate when the two women cooked together, so Emma’s tendency to sweet and Gabe’s tendency to spicy didn’t clash.
Emma looked like she wanted to hug their brother, and she played along. “Thank you, Loge. Can’t take credit for the eggs, though. That’s all Gabe. She’s a wonder.”
Logan turned on Gabe the smile that Heath had always called his leg-spreader leer. “Well, Gabe, darlin’, the eggs are lip-smackin’ good.” He smacked his lips for proof.
She blushed and grinned happily. “Thanks, Logan. I love helping Emma cook for this family.”
Heath felt that bolt of territorial jealousy. Logan would never in a hundred lifetimes make a move on his girl, but, nevertheless, he didn’t like that charm turned Gabe’s way. Logan was a slut, pure and simple, and if Heath weren’t with Gabe, he’d have absolutely made a move.
But Heath pushed the jealousy away and smiled, helping Gabe, Logan, and Emma bring the mood of the table back up. Wes and their dad were always one word away from an argument. No point helping them along.
Before another, safer topic of conversation could get started, the heavy chimes of the doorbell rang, and everybody froze in surprise.
The doorbell never rang. This was a working ranch in the twenty-first century. Though they kept the gate open except on rare occasions, few people who weren’t close—or weren’t expected—ever came to this door. The big house was the family headquarters. People who belonged there came and went at will, including close friends. Those who weren’t welcome to
come on in were expected and almost always met outside. Ranch hands used their phones to contact Morgan, Logan, or Wes. And when they needed to come in, they used the kitchen door.
Heath couldn’t remember the last time those chimes had sounded.
“What’s that?” Anya asked, giving him a possible clue about how long it’d been.
“Front door. I got it.” Logan stood and dropped his napkin on his seat. Everybody sat quietly, staring at the doorway through which he’d left.
The dining room was back from the entry of the house just enough to obscure both sight and hearing, but Heath listened hard, and everybody else did, too. The anxiety he felt had no obvious origin—it had just been the damn doorbell—but it was so strange that it would ring on Sunday morning. He could hear the low murmur of voices. Male voices.
“Is something wrong?” Gabe asked, clutching his hand.
With a squeeze of her fingers, he stood. “I’m sure it’s fine. I’ll check.”
Before he could step clear of the table, Logan was back, and he was pale. “Dad, Heath. We need to talk. Now.”
“What is it, son?” Their dad stood up.
Logan’s eyes scanned the table, focusing on the women and children—Emma, Anya, Kendall, and Gabe. “Uh…shit.”
“Uncle Logan, it’s Sunday,” Anya admonished.
“Sorry, honeybee.” He turned to Heath and answered their father’s question. “The sheriff’s in the living room. We got trouble.”
*****
Sheriff Norbert Murphy looked like a country sheriff in a county full of people more inclined to mischief than mayhem. Soft in the middle, bald on the top, fleshy at the jowls and lined at the eyes. His uniform, dark green pants and a lighter green shirt, was crisp and without a single wrinkle, and the dark green, flat-crowned cowboy hat in his hands looked like it had come out of the box that morning.
He was pushing seventy, but the extra weight filled in creases and took ten years off. He’d been sheriff as long as Heath could remember, and he’d been a family friend far longer than that.
Now he stood in the middle of Heath’s father’s living room with two deputies standing just behind him, as if in formation. They knew them both: Pete Burgess had been in Heath’s class in school. Ryder Wells had been a town favorite son while he’d been topping the rodeo circuit. The best bull rider Jasper Ridge had ever raised. An injury had cut his circuit career short.
Ryder was wearing blue latex gloves, the kind television cops wore when they collected evidence. And apparently real LEOs wore them, too. Heath noticed those blue gloves immediately as he came into the room behind his brother and father, so he noticed what Ryder was holding in them before he’d noticed anything else.
He was holding Heath’s hat, sealed in a big, clear plastic baggie. An evidence bag.
Everything around Heath slowed and dimmed. His heart began to thud heavily against his ribs.
“What’s goin’ on, Norb?” Heath’s father asked as he shook the sheriff’s hand. “You know I’m always happy to sit a spell with you, but my family’s in the middle of our Sunday breakfast.”
“I know, Morgan, and I’m sorry. This couldn’t wait. But it’s not you I need to speak with.” He turned to Heath, and his eyes dropped to Heath’s swollen and scraped hands. Without changing his focus he asked, “How you doin’, son?”
With a massive effort, Heath forced his senses back into good working order. “I think you’re gonna have to tell me, Norb. I thought I was doing okay.”
The sheriff nodded at his hands. “What happened there?”
No point in skirting the truth; there had been people everywhere. “Got into a scrape outside the Jack yesterday. I’m sure it’s doing the rounds today.”
“Indeed it is. Lot of people saw you beat holy hell out of Brandon Black yesterday. Lot of people heard you yellin’ that you’d kill him. Ain’t the first time you been at Black, either, is it?”
“Is he pressing charges?” Logan asked.
The sheriff sighed. “Got a call first thing this mornin’ from Charlie Granville. Seems a team of his boys was ridin’ the border, and they came across a scene that shocked the devil out of ‘em. Body in the creek. Torn to bits. Jaw pulled almost clean off. Gruesome. ME’s just gettin’ started, but he says he can’t find no sign of a weapon. He says it looks like somebody went at the guy with his bare hands and did all that damage.”
He paused before he said the thing Heath already knew he would say: “It’s Brandon Black. Had his mama in to identify his remains.”
From the entryway behind him, Heath heard a horrified gasp in a voice he knew and loved deeply. He turned to see Gabe, her eyes huge and full of pain, her hand covering her throat. Oh, God.
He stepped toward her, and she stepped backward. “Gabe, no. I—”
His words broke off when his father laid his hand on his arm. “Focus front, son.”
“You recognize this hat, Heath?” Sheriff Murphy flicked his hand, and Ryder stepped forward.
“Yeah. It’s mine. I lost it at the parade yesterday. I was going to call Reese later and see if anybody might have turned it in.”
No one had, obviously, and he could guess where it had been found. Which meant that somebody was setting him up for a murder. Spicy eggs and sweet waffles churned in his gut.
“It was at the scene where Black’s body was found, son. Everybody for miles around knows what good reason you have to want to hurt Black as bad as anybody can hurt. Just about as many people have seen you hurt him and heard you threaten to do more. The ME did some mumbo jumbo science stuff and came up with a range for time of death. So I gotta ask you if you can account for your whereabouts late last night and early this morning, from eleven p.m. to four a.m.”
For at least three of those five hours, maybe more, he’d been on his own, up at the stable with Maggie or sitting on his porch. “I was here at the ranch. At home.”
“And can anyone corroborate your account?”
As he opened his mouth to say no, Gabe answered, her voice shaking and frail. “Yes. He—he was with me.”
The sheriff turned his attention to her. “All night? You’re sure?”
“Y-y-yes.”
Heath spun back to her, and he could see it all over her face—all over her whole body. One arm was wrapped around her middle so tightly he wouldn’t have been surprised to see her fingertips come around the other side. The other had protective hold of her throat, the move she made when she felt most threatened. Her eyes were huge and floating in unshed tears, and her lips trembled.
She thought he’d done it. At the very least, she thought he might have. The very thing she most feared. She thought he’d broken his promise scant hours after he’d made it, and she was lying to save him anyway.
He couldn’t let her do that. She knew full well that he’d been out of bed for at least part of the night, and he’d been dressed when she’d found him. He hadn’t told her where he’d been. Even though he wasn’t guilty, she was afraid he was, and she was lying for him. He couldn’t let her get caught up in his shit.
“No, Gabe. It’s okay. I didn’t do this. I promise. So it’s okay.” She gave no sign at all that she believed him or that she’d even heard him.
He turned back to the sheriff. “I couldn’t sleep. I got up about one or so—I didn’t check the time, so that’s a guess—left Gabe sleeping, got dressed, and went up to the stables. Got my horse out and spent a couple hours brushing her down.”
“At one o’clock in the morning?”
“Yeah. Settles my head. Then I went back down to my house and sat on the porch and just…thought for a while. Gabe came out while it was just getting light, say five or so, and sat with me a bit. Then we went back in to bed.”
The sheriff gave Gabe a compassionate smile, obviously showing her he understood and she wasn’t in trouble, and then returned sharper attention to Heath. “Anybody see you?”
“No. It was the middle of the night.”
“Tha
t’s a damn shame, Heath. It leaves me no choice here. I got you beatin’ hell out of my vic more’n once and just hours before. I got you threatenin’ to kill him in front of twenty or more witnesses. I got your hat at the scene. I got you with no good alibi, and I got a mother on her knees in my station doing that damn moanin’ thing they do.”
He was talking about lamentation, part of traditional Shoshone grieving. Black was—had been—full-blooded Shoshone. With a small reservation on the town border, and with about half the tribe’s members partly or wholly assimilated into town life, there had always been a fragile balance between racial tension and racial harmony in and around Jasper Ridge. Norbert Murphy sometimes fell off that balance and landed on the tension side.
Heath’s mother had been half Shoshone, and he and his siblings were registered members of the tribe, though they had never involved themselves in tribal matters. But they sure as hell didn’t land on any side of the racial balance but harmony.
Now was not the time to correct the sheriff’s insensitivity, however. “I know, Norb. I understand. I didn’t do it, but I understand.”
Sheriff Murphy nodded, then squared his hat on his head and reached back to pull a set of handcuffs from his belt.
“Norb, come on,” Heath’s father complained. “Is that necessary?”
“This is murder, Morgan. I’m sorry as hell. I am. But yeah, it’s necessary.” He grabbed Heath’s arm and turned him around. As he cuffed him, Pete Burgess came around and patted him down.
Heath was now facing Gabe again, and their eyes locked. In those beautiful, glittering brown pools, he saw terror and sorrow, shock and confusion. He saw betrayal. He saw trauma. Through all that churning mass, he couldn’t find love.
“I didn’t do it, little one. I swear. Please believe me. I can’t lose you.”
The cuffs were closed tightly over his wrists, and the sheriff grabbed his upper arm again. “Heath Cahill, you are under arrest for the murder of Brandon Black. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say or do can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to an attorney. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be appointed to you. Do you understand these rights as they have been explained to you?”
Somewhere (Sawtooth Mountains Stories Book 1) Page 20