by Tami Hoag
She wondered if J.D. hung out there. She told herself it didn't matter.
The stores that serviced the common folk stood dark and silent, but the trendy shops were still lit up, their doors held open with crocks of geraniums. There wasn't a soul going in or out of those boutiques that didn't look like an outsider.
It seemed odd to her that she should be able to spot them. She was, after all, an outsider herself. But something within her protested the label. She felt as comfortable strolling these streets as if she had been raised here. More so. The upscale haunts of her mother and sisters back in Sacramento had never felt anything but foreign to Mari.
She stopped now in front of the post office and studied her shadowed reflection in the dark glass of the front window. Her hair was a mess. She had let it dry on its own after her shower and it made a wild cloud of waves and tangles around her head, thick strands tumbling into her face. She snatched them back behind her ears, her small hands darting out the ends of her too-long jacket sleeves and disappearing again as she dropped her arms.
She didn't think she looked like an outsider. Certainly, she didn't bear any resemblance to the people drifting in and out of the Latigo Boutique. Even the ones in jeans had an expensive look about them, a sleek quality. Sleek was not a word anyone had ever used to describe her.
“Marilee.” Her mother ground her name out between her beautifully capped teeth. She flapped her manicured hands at the sides of her Mark Eisen suit in a gesture of futility. “Can't you even try to make an effort to look good? Your hair is impossible and you dress as if you shop at Goodwill.”
“I do shop at Goodwill. It's the best place to get jeans.”
Abigail Falkner Jennings heaved a sigh of supreme motherly disgust and shook her head. Her perfect champagne-blond tresses swung just enough for effect and settled perfectly into place. “I don't understand you, Marilee. Why can't you be more like your sisters?”
Because I'm me, Mom, she thought to herself, her heart sinking. Mari the Misfit.
For twenty-eight years she had struggled to be a good Jennings girl like Lisbeth and Annaliese were good Jennings girls. Instead, Marilee had always been known as that Jennings girl. The one who stuck out like a bunioned big toe through a fine silk stocking.
She had felt like an outsider her whole life, but she didn't feel that here, standing in front of the New Eden, Montana, post office.
Rafferty thought she was an outsider.
“Damned city bitches . . . Are you like your friend Lucy? You want to know what it's like to tease a cowboy?”
“No,” she whispered, not wanting to remember the sensation of his body against hers or the taste of his kiss. Not wanting to wonder what Lucy had done to him or with him.
She walked on down the street and turned on impulse into a New Age shop called Selah, just for the distraction of people and lights. The store was tiny, a rough cedar cubbyhole crowded with bookshelves and displays of crystals and candles and baskets of polished stones. The spicy scent of incense filled the air like a thick perfume. From the speakers of a tape deck came the sounds of birds, running water, the wind in the trees—nature in a box. Mari's lips quirked at the idea. Who would come to this land of paradise and settle for its sounds on so many inches of flimsy tape?
“How's the obsidian working?”
She turned away from a display of birch twigs in a bark vase and jerked her gaze up to meet M. E. Fralick's intense visage. She was in another of her jumpers, this one deep blue over a salmon silk T-shirt. A cameo on a strip of blue velvet circled her graceful throat.
“Excuse me?”
Behind the big lenses of her glasses, M.E. rolled her eyes with a drama that befitted her profession, propping one long hand on her hip and gesturing with the other to the heavens, invoking the attention of who knew what gods. “She's not centered,” she said with impatient disgust. Turning her attention back to Mari, she explained as if she were speaking to the most backward of children. “The stone I gave you yesterday. Obsidian. Obsidian works wonders for blocking disturbing vibrations.”
“Oh, well . . .” Mari shrugged apologetically. She dug the small stone out of her jacket pocket and held it up to the light. “I probably need something more the size of a basketball. But I appreciate the thought. Thanks.”
The actress shook her head, frowning gravely. “You must get centered. Talk to Damien, darling,” she said, nodding to the enormous bald man behind the counter. “He's a Zen master.”
Mari eyed him dubiously. He looked like a hairless version of Chef Paul Prudhomme. His bulk took up the entire space behind the counter. She couldn't help thinking that if he got himself truly centered, small moons would go into orbit around him.
A fresh group of customers streamed into the shop, snagging M.E.'s attention, and Mari managed to escape the actress and the store without the pleasure of meeting the Zen master.
She returned to the Moose as the moon was beginning to rise over the Absarokas and went up to her room to get her guitar. Rafferty notwithstanding, she had enjoyed her time out back of the lodge the night before. Just the moon and the mountains and her music. The prospect was more soothing than a wheelbarrow of obsidian.
Kevin Bronson was standing in the hall when she stepped off the elevator. He looked up at her from the stack of reports in his hands and grinned engagingly.
“Hey, Lucy told us you played,” he said, gesturing at her old guitar with the papers.
“She did?”
“Yeah, she said you were great. She said you were wasting yourself in lawyers' offices, that you should have been in L.A. or Nashville or someplace, doing justice to your talent.”
“Lucy said that?”
It seemed inconceivable to her. Lucy had listened to her play on a few occasions during jam sessions in local bars. Sometimes during their B&B sessions in Mari's apartment when the conversation had run out she would pick up her guitar and just toy with it, sing a few bars of something that had been taking shape in her head, absently, casually; and Lucy would listen and sip her beer and make a wry comment when she was done. You oughta be a star, Marilee. Idle talk. Just something to fill the silence after the last note.
Kevin seemed a little baffled by her surprise, but he was too well bred to comment. He stood there in navy pleated chinos and a white polo shirt. A Yale boy from his GQ haircut to the tips of his Top-Siders.
“I was just on my way into the bar to join Drew for coffee. Will you come with us?” He smiled again, even white teeth flashing in his lean face. “Maybe we'll be able to persuade you to play something for us.”
She laughed and fell in step beside him. “Don't worry about twisting my arm; I'm shameless.”
They sat at a table near the fire and talked over French roast spiked with Irish cream. Mari told them about her adventure with Miller Daggrepont, and they both shook their heads and chuckled over Lucy's choice of resting places.
“That's positively macabre,” Drew said, sipping his coffee. “How very Lucy.”
“I can't believe she left everything to me,” Mari blurted out into the silence, needing to say it again even though she felt as if she were confessing to a crime.
Drew and Kevin exchanged a glance, but there were no exclamations of shock or denial. Drew curled his fingers over the head of the guitar she had propped against the table and rocked it gently. “Will you stay?”
“I don't know. I don't know what to think,” she said, but she thought of the view off the deck of the log house, the sense of peace she absorbed from the mountains, the sense of fitting in she had longed for in futility her whole life. She thought of Rafferty rolling her beneath him in the dust of the corral, holding her awkwardly while she cried, and a warmth rose inside her that had little to do with the low-burning flames on the fieldstone hearth.
She forced herself to think of Lucy, and the questions came to the surface of her mind like oil on water.
“So what was the deal with this hired man she had working for her?” she as
ked. “I heard he just vanished after the accident.”
“Kendall Morton?” Kevin made a face. “Sleazy. I always thought he looked like Pigpen grown up and gone bad. Tattoos, bad teeth, B.O.”
Drew took a sip of his coffee and nodded. “Odd fellow. Never had much to say. Always skulking about in the background.”
“The guy is that weird and nobody thought to question him after Lucy's death?” Mari said, gaping in disbelief.
“There was no reason to,” Drew explained. “Sheffield came forward and that was the end of it. Besides, Morton had no reason to kill her.”
“Since when do people need a reason?”
“Motive,” he said with an elegant shrug. “Rules of evidence. You ought to be familiar with the procedure. Morton lacked motive—”
“But not opportunity, probably not means, certainly not suspicious behavior. Do you have any idea where he went?”
His brows came together in a look that seemed more confused than curious. “Why are you trying to make more of this than what it was? It was an accident; they happen.” She felt his gaze on her for several moments, probing while she stared down into her coffee. She thought she could feel questions in it, in him, but all he said when he spoke again was “It was an accident, luv. Let it go.
“Play something for us, will you?” he said, tilting her guitar toward her so that she had to take it or let it fall. “Lucy told us you have an extraordinary voice.”
Relieved to let the topic go, Mari slid her chair back and took up the old guitar, testing strings, fiddling with the tuning pegs. “I was supposed to be a cellist,” she said. “My sister Lisbeth plays the violin; Annaliese, the flute. Mother thought it would impress her friends if we could play as a trio for charity functions.”
“What happened?” Kevin asked.
Her mouth twisted at the memory in a soft combination of a smile and a frown. “My instructor said my bow work was reminiscent of a hacksaw on a chain-link fence. I started skipping the lessons in favor of hanging out with an aging hippie who ran a health food store down the block. He used to jam with the Grateful Dead.” She arched a dark brow as she settled her fingers on the strings. “Mother was unimpressed when she found out, but . . . so it goes . . .”
She strummed a chord, appreciating as always the perfect resonance of the old guitar; then she began picking out a gentle, familiar rhythm and joined in with the melody in her low, rich voice. The song was about the rain and the end of a relationship, a woman contemplating what she's lost and moving on with her life; a song about the rhythm of the blues. She never gave a thought to how strongly it reflected her own life. It simply came out as honest as the truth. The emotions and impressions twined together inside her and rolled out in a voice as dark and sweet as the coffee they had drunk.
When she finished she sat there for a moment, lost, unaware of the silence that had descended all around the room. A ripple of applause snapped her back. She rolled her eyes a little, feeling sheepish, and raised her hand in acknowledgment, trying to wave the bar patrons back to their conversations.
Kevin looked astonished, enormously pleased with her, which Mari wrote off as his natural state. He had that excited-puppy air about him, a sense of youthful naivete that had nothing to do with age. Drew's scrutiny was more weighty; she tried to shrug it off, reaching for her coffee cup, wishing for a cigarette.
“Lucy was right,” Kevin declared. “You were wasting yourself on lawyers.”
“Yeah, well, you don't know the half of that,” she said dryly, taking a sip.
“You deserve an audience,” Drew said. “We'd love to have you play here as long as you're staying. We have a trio that plays on weekends. Do say you'll join them.”
Mari made a face. “I don't horn in on other musicians. Maybe I'll talk with them.”
“You already have,” he said, green eyes shining. “I'm the piano man.”
They shared a laugh, and Mari marveled at how good it felt, how good she felt, sharing this time with these new friends. Sacramento and Brad Enright and her family suddenly seemed years in the past, half a world behind her.
“I hope that won't be the last we hear from you, Marilee.”
Evan Bryce smiled down on her like a long-lost friend. Mari bent her mouth into a polite social smile and murmured something appropriately humble. She had taken an instant dislike to him, in part because of his connection to Lucy's death. The rest was intangible. She didn't question it. Her instincts regarding human nature had been sharpened to a fine point in her years of legal work. She seldom wasted time questioning those instincts. Something about his I'm-your-best-friend act just didn't ring true.
He looked much as he had the first time she had met him—the same high-heeled boots, the same skin-tight jeans that advertised his gender in no uncertain terms, the same expensive-looking belt that was constructed of hand-tooled leather and bone ferrules that looked as if they had been “salvaged” from the breastplate of a Cheyenne warrior. He had traded his denim work shirt for a fine linen poet's shirt with billowing sleeves. Half the buttons were left undone in a look that was calculatedly careless. She got the impression that the bare chest and tight pants were overcompensation for something—probably his height or lack thereof.
“I hear you've suddenly become a property owner in our little paradise,” he said, hooking a thumb in the pocket of his jeans. A chuckle tumbled out of him at her surprise. “The curse of the small town, I'm afraid. News travels at an alarming rate. Of course, I've kept an ear to the ground, so to speak. Lucy's property borders mine.”
“Yes, I know.” That's why she's dead. She bit the words back, too well schooled in social niceties to be so blunt. Besides, in all fairness, he hadn't been the idiot with the rifle.
“Does this mean you'll be joining our community?” he asked, looking too hopeful to be believed. “Or will you sell?”
“It's too soon to say.”
“Of course,” he murmured, tipping his head in concession. “Well, if you would like a tour of the property or the area, don't hesitate to ask. I'd be more than happy to squire you.”
“Thanks.”
“It's a lovely property. Lucy was very comfortably ensconced there. Did she ever happen to tell you how she came to own it?”
There was an odd sharpness in his gaze. Mari wasn't sure whether he was asking an idle question or waiting to see if she passed some secret test. She answered the only way she could.
“She told me she saw it while she was vacationing here. Then she came into some money and decided to buy it.”
If there were more to the story—and Mari was certain there was—she didn't know it. She wondered if Bryce did.
He gave nothing away with his expression. The light from the fire glowed against his high forehead. He dropped his lashes to half mast. “Lucy was very lucky . . . and very clever.”
A strange tension held the moment in its grip. Then Bryce smiled. “I hope we'll get a chance to hear you sing again, Mari. You're very talented.”
“Thanks.”
He said his good-byes and went back to the entourage at his own table. Kevin glared down into his coffee cup, his jaw set. Drew rubbed a finger along his lower lip, his eyes hooded. He glanced up at her, looking almost sinister in the flickering shadows of the firelight.
“He'd dearly love to have that land,” he said softly. “So would J. D. Rafferty, for that matter. Not that a hundred-odd acres will make much of an impression on Bryce's holdings. Rumor has it he's up to eighty thousand acres.”
“God.”
“Yes.” He cut a glance across the room. Bryce was laughing as one of his guests raised a glass in a toast. Samantha Rafferty sat to his right in the chair usually occupied by Bryce's cousin, Sharon Russell. Samantha laughed as well, though her head was ducked down, as if she didn't want anyone to see that she hadn't gotten the joke. Drew frowned. “He collects land like some people collect stamps.” He had his own suspicion that land wasn't all Evan Bryce collected, but he kept
that to himself and made a mental note to have a private chat with Samantha the next time she came in to work.
“Interesting man,” Mari murmured.
Kevin shoved his chair back from the table, his head down. “Excuse me,” he mumbled. “I have work to do.” With clumsy hands he gathered the papers he had brought in with him and left.
Drew sighed and rubbed his left temple.
Mari felt suddenly as if she were intruding on something very private. She slid the guitar from her lap and rose. “Thanks for the coffee. I think I'll turn in. I want to get up early. Wouldn't want to miss that sunrise.”
Drew forced a smile, but it vanished when he caught hold of her wrist. “Watch yourself with Bryce, luv,” he murmured. “Lucy enjoyed playing with snakes, but then, she had fangs of her own. I wouldn't want to see you hurt.”
“Hurt how? Literally?”
“Just be careful.”
He rose then too, and left by the same back door Kevin had taken, leaving Mari standing by the fire, her eyes on Evan Bryce as he effortlessly charmed the young woman beside him, her thoughts on the serpent in the Garden of Eden.
“You had a good time tonight, Samantha?”
Samantha smiled shyly at the man strolling beside her up the cracked sidewalk to her empty house. Bryce had insisted on following her home to make certain she was all right. His beautiful cousin waited for him in the Mercedes convertible parked at the curb behind Samantha's old junker of a Camero.
“Yeah,” she said, shrugging as if to discount the pleasure. “It was a lot of fun.”
“Everyone enjoyed having you there. You're a breath of fresh air, so . . . untainted by the world.”
“Naive, you mean.”
“Not in a way meant to insult you. You're young and beautiful and full of promise, with so much ahead of you.”
Like another night spent in an empty bed. Like a future full of days waiting tables at the Moose. The thoughts weighed her down like stones as she climbed the sagging steps to her front porch.