The Love of a Lawman, The Callister Trilogy, Book 3

by Jeffrey, Anna

  "It was my pleasure. I've got some ideas we could discuss one of these days. About the horses."

  "Okay, sure. I'm open to suggestions."

  He shrugged into his coat, ran a hand over his hair and set on his hat. Ava jumped up from playing with the puppies. "Mama cooks supper every night," she said. "We always have a lot."

  Isabelle did a mental eye roll. Indeed she did cook every night, but how desperate did it sound having her daughter imply that John should come and eat. "Have you done your homework?" she asked Ava. "Didn't you have geography questions?"

  "They only take a minute. I already know all the answers. I learned geography a long time ago."

  "I used to be good at geography," John said with an easy grin. "Someday we'll have a contest. See who knows the most."

  Ava giggled. Isabelle opened the back door.

  "Far as I can tell now," John said, "I won't get back 'til next week. I stick close to town on Friday and Saturday nights."

  "Because of the bars?"

  "Yep. You never know which sets of drunks are gonna try to kill one another."

  Isabelle's thoughts flew to Paul.

  Chapter 9

  A houseful of people celebrated John's mother's birthday. His sister, Jessica, and brother-in-law, Richard, had come from Twin Falls for the occasion. Some cousins from Spokane and a few of his parents' friends from town showed up, too.

  The home of John's youth was old, roomy and warm from a fire smoldering in a stone fireplace. It was also bright with natural light. No curtains hung on the row of east windows that brightened both the dining room and the great room and none ever had. Katie Bradshaw wanted to look at nature.

  With the weather too inclement for a backyard barbecue, John's dad cooked steaks—Bradshaw's own beef—over hot coals on the brick indoor grill in the kitchen. They ate in midafternoon.

  After the dishes had been cleaned up, Jessica brought out a large, flat cake and set it on one end of the varnished pine dining table. The confection was big as a saddle blanket and heaped with swirls of colorful frosting. Miniature plastic cows grazed on a green-sugar pasture and plastic bucking broncs reared behind a fence of chocolate strips.

  The thing looked too pretty to eat. Jessica produced a camera and snapped pictures.

  A pile of gifts covered the opposite end of the long table. As the well-wishers gathered around, Richard pulled bottles of champagne from the refrigerator. John's mother was coaxed from the kitchen to the table by Jessica and listened, her face flushed, while the group toasted her, then sang "Happy Birthday."

  Jessica presented a fancy wrapped box from the Bon Marche in Boise. John's mother opened it and lifted out clothes that John thought looked frumpish for a woman who roared around a ranch on an ATV.

  The outfit came with a lecture about how she should get out of those jeans and into some feminine clothing now that she was getting older. What in hell did Jessica mean? Their mother was only sixty-three and she still cut a fine figure in a pair of jeans. Mom gushed over the gift John knew she would never wear.

  John didn't pretend to understand his sister. With her being ten years older, he felt almost as if they had grown up in different families. She had met Richard in college. Before John reached high school, both she and Richard had graduated from U of I with degrees in elementary education and certificates to teach. They had been married nineteen years, had no children. They did have a dachshund they treated like a child and called Adolph. The name fit the demanding little fart. Adolph was the only dog Mom and Dad had ever allowed in the house.

  The dachshund and their teaching careers appeared to be his sister and brother-in-law's existence. Neither of them had an interest in ranching or livestock. They sided with the radical environmental groups that believed grazing cattle were a blight on the earth, but, John noticed, they didn't turn down a good steak when it was offered.

  At some future point, if his parents didn't sell out, he and his sister would inherit the Lazy B, which encompassed some premium pastureland, a sizeable government grazing allotment and a herd of well-bred cattle and other livestock. When that thought barged into his head, John always set it aside, unprepared to face his parents' passing or the aftermath.

  As he knew they would be, the turquoise Zuni earrings he gave his mother were a hit. He and Mom had always understood each other. She put them on immediately. Dad gave her a new watch, which she promptly put on and showed off for all to admire and covet. If John knew his dad, the watch had cost several hundred dollars.

  John looked on with something akin to awe as his parents hugged and kissed. There had always been an abundance of expressions of affection between his parents—touching, kissing, hugging. Watching them, he suspected their sex life had been hot and healthy, though try as he might he couldn't imagine his dad as a lover. The testy old guy must have something going for him, though, because even now, at sixty-seven, when he put his hand on Mom's bottom, she sidled closer to him for more.

  Growing up, John had taken for granted that the warm give-and-take between his parents defined married love. That was before he got hitched to Julie, who dashed the illusion in a hurry.

  Richard opened champagne, Mom blew out candles and cut the cake. John passed up the champagne for coffee and carried his serving to the sofa near the fireplace. Other than being friendly and making empty talk, he had managed to steer clear of his dad all day. No point ruining Mom's birthday party with a sarcastic exchange between him and Dad. Fortunately, enough people milled through the house to capture and hold the patriarch's attention.

  Mom brought her glass of champagne and sat down beside him. "No bubbly?"

  John had avoided alcohol since the day he agreed to take on the sheriff's job, believing it tarnished his image as the chief law enforcer in the county. Excessive use of it had damaged him as a man and though he'd seen many a cowboy drown in a lake of booze, some inner force he didn't understand or question had saved him from becoming one of them. He swallowed a sip of coffee and gave his mother a smile. "You never know. I might get a call to go back to town."

  She stuck out her arm. "Like my new watch?"

  "It's cool. You're a cool lady, Mom."

  "Your dad spoils me." She turned and straightened his shirt collar and fondled the shaggy back of his hair that had grown past his collar. "When you were a little boy, those curls were cute, but now—"

  "I know, I know. I need a haircut." He grinned, tilting his head away from her fingers, and had another sip of coffee.

  "What you need is some doting female to look after you."

  Izzy Rondeau's smile and the supper they had shared three nights ago flew into John's mind. He thought about her attempts to elevate his mood, about helping her with the dishes and touching her fragrant hair. The intimacy of hanging his chinks in her tack room. What would his mother make of all that?

  "Nadine Flagg," she was saying, "told me you're dating that new teacher who came here from Pocatello."

  Callister gossip. John tolerated it because he knew that beneath all the nosing into people's lives, most folks in Callister would do anything they could to help a man if he needed it. But tolerating it didn't mean he intended to fan the flames by telling his mom about his meeting with said teacher in the courthouse after hours and how she would have stuck her hand in his pants if he hadn't stopped her. Besides, a man his age dating sounded dumb. He chuckled as he sliced off a bite of cake. "Just ran across her accidentally in Betty's Road Kill. And only once, so you and Nadine don't need to get carried away."

  "Son, you're thirty-two and you've been divorced over three years now."

  "Broke as I am, I can't afford women." He savored a bite of the white cake that tasted as good as it looked.

  His mom sighed. "I know you're working for starvation wages. When you finish with this sheriff's thing you've committed to, I wish you'd talk to your dad. Nothing would make him happier than to have you come home and move into the foreman's house. It's just sitting there empty since Warren lef
t us. We could use your help. We aren't getting any younger, you know."

  "Mom, you'll be young forever." John didn't like hearing talk about his mother aging. "If Dad wants me closer, it's so he won't have to yell so loud when he chews my ass."

  She smacked his knee. "Listen to you. You may not want to admit it, but you two are just alike. Both hardheaded as bulls."

  John winked at her. "It's you I get that from."

  "Pshaw. What am I going to do with you?" She sipped from her glass and John grinned at her choice of an expletive. If the house weren't full of people, she would have said, "Bullshit."

  "Mom, do you remember Isabelle Rondeau?"

  "Vaguely. I heard she's back, living on the old place."

  "What do you know about her and her family?"

  "Not much lately. When she lived here before, she was a shy, good little girl, so self-conscious of her red hair and those freckles. She never gave anyone a minute's trouble. Her mother and I went to Callister High School together. It broke Helen's heart when her only daughter ran off with one of the Bledsoes."

  "I'll bet," John mumbled around a bite of cake.

  His mother took a sip of champagne. "But Helen accepted it. She told me once she would never try to pick out a man for Isabelle after the bad choice she'd made for herself. Frenchie Rondeau was such a bastard. I suspect that when Isabelle was a girl, she thought Billy Bledsoe was her only chance."

  His mom leaned forward, resting her elbows on her thighs, rolling her glass between her palms. Her eyes took on a distant look. John could see she was a little tipsy. "Poor Helen. I always wished I could help her, but I didn't know how. It's bad business to step between a woman and her husband." Mom sighed and sipped again. "She cooked in Betty's 'til the day she collapsed and died."

  John had a dim memory of Helen Rondeau cooking at Betty's Road Kill Cafe, but as a teenager, he had paid no attention to such. "Just like that? What'd she die from?"

  "Sudden heart attack. Passed away in the helicopter on the way to Boise. Ten years back, I think. I always figured she died young from living with a mean and hopeless drunk. Paul's headed down the same path as his dad. Don't tell me you've had a run-in with him."

  "Art 'Dimos shot Isabelle's dog. I had to go out there. He said some mean things about her. I wondered why."

  "Oh, it's probably because Art and Frenchie feuded for so many years. I doubt if Isabelle has done anything bad to Art."

  "Okay, you started it, now you're gonna have to tell me the whole story. What'd they feud over?"

  "Land, of course. Rondeau's grazing land is some of the best on that side of the county. Art wanted it in the worst way so he could expand his sheep herd. When Frenchie wouldn't sell to him, Art tried to take it by throwing his weight around and bullying the tax assessor."

  John's curiosity perked up. Callister County's tax assessor was a nice, grandmotherly lady of sixty-something who had held the office for years. John saw her or someone from her office every day. The idea of anyone bullying her set off a burst of protectiveness in him. "What do you mean? What did he do?"

  "Frenchie always struggled to pay his taxes. Art watched like a hawk. He tried to set up a situation where the county would take Rondeau's land for taxes, then if Frenchie couldn't pay up, Art would be able to buy the land cheap for back taxes."

  A spark of anger flashed within John. Lately, he kept running headlong into a righteous streak he hadn't known he had. "Why, that old crook."

  His mother laughed. "You're too young to remember, but they came to blows a couple of times, downtown in the saloons. Some of us even wondered if one would end up shooting the other."

  "Does Art still want the land?"

  "I doubt it. Lou leaving took some of the bluster out of his drawers. His thinking's always been screwed up, even when we were young."

  "He's got a nice house," John said, picturing the log structure that looked like a picture in a magazine.

  "He spent a fortune building it just the way Lou wanted it, but that didn't keep her from leaving him. She'd had all she could take. I don't know why your dad hangs on to his friendship. I don't know what they have in common."

  John thought he knew. As far as he was concerned, Tom Bradshaw and Art 'Dimos had similar controlling personalities. His mom frowned and looked at him over her shoulder. "That's something else I hate about you having that sheriff's job. You're bound to have to deal with people like Art. Or Paul Rondeau. You could get yourself shot."

  In an abstract way, getting shot had occurred to John. Cops did, after all, get shot. Bbut he wouldn't worry his mother with the thought. "Mom, it's the twenty-first century. People don't shoot the sheriff these days." He popped the last bite of cake into his mouth and scraped the white frosting off the dish with the side of his fork.

  "Says you. Policemen get killed every day. I see it on TV all the time in those true crime shows your dad likes. And this is Callister County. There's plenty of misfits around here who might shoot anyone that came in their gunsights." She tipped her head back, drained her glass, then turned to him and patted his knee. "Tell me about my grandbabies."

  A part of John wanted to throw his head against his mother's shoulder and weep over the latest turn of events with his sons. "They're doing good. I talked to them on the phone last week and I got a letter from Julie a few days ago."

  "California's so far away. But it's not that long 'til summer. I can hardly wait for them to get here. Your dad and I are going to start riding their horses soon as the weather gets better, so they'll be fit for little boys."

  The ache inside John's rib cage grew more acute. He had ignored Julie's letter for the past two days, as if it might disintegrate and he wouldn't have to deal with it. Before he could reply to his mother's remarks, to his great relief someone called to her and she rose and left him alone.

  As the afternoon turned late, the guests began to depart. His mother had had one glass of champagne too many and his father told her she should go lie down.

  John had stayed long enough. If he lingered he might get trapped into conversations about his kids or his ex-wife or his interrupted rodeo career. He had been less than honest with his parents about each of those subjects. Going out of his way to avoid giving his dad a bone to chew on seemed like a good plan.

  As he drove past the corral, he spotted his rope horse. He stopped off and said hello to the big gray. He had always thought of Rowdy as a "man's horse." At sixteen hands he was the perfect mount for John's height and weight. Together, they had been a winning team and Rowdy's power and burst of speed out the gate had been a major factor. John didn't mind giving him the credit he deserved. As the horse snuffled and nuzzled him, John wondered if he would ever again be able to keep him on his own place.

  At home, he pried off his boots, picked up the new issue of Western Horseman and settled into his chair. He hadn't been there long when the phone warbled. The familiar voice on the other end of the line didn't even say hello. "Didn't you get my letter?"

  His stomach knotted. Chaos and confusion. "Well, hello to you, too, Julie. Yeah, I got it. How're the boys?"

  "Carson took them to the movies. That's why I'm calling you now, so I can talk to you privately."

  Shit. "Then speak your piece."

  "Carson's been to an attorney and discussed the procedure for adoption—"

  "Just hold it right there. I can't imagine you thinking I would go for that. I miss those kids. They mean everything to me. And to my family. Mom and Dad can't wait for them to get here this summer."

  "That's very self-centered of you, John. But then you always did think only of yourself and what you wanted." John heard a tremor in her voice—either anger or tears, he wasn't sure which.

  "I'm not gonna fight with you," he said. "But I'm telling you, I'm not giving up those kids to your boyfriend."

  "He isn't my boyfriend. He's my husband. Damn you, John. Can't you, for once, look at the bigger picture? What can you do for them? You don't even have a decent job. My
God, you've been absent more than half their lives."

  He had heard the same old accusations a thousand times. He had traveled, sure. But he had not been absent half his kids' lives. Besides, it wasn't like he hadn't begged Julie to go with him when he traveled and bring the kids.

  Before they married, she had been enthusiastic about his rodeo career. After the wedding she refused to even go to a rodeo or to take the boys to one. Every time he tried to discuss it with her, she expounded about cruelty to animals and cowboys being drunks and good-for-nothings. Her rants about his chosen career rankled to this day. "I'm their daddy, Julie, and you can't change that. What I can do is remind them where they came from and be there for them if they need me."

  "Given your history, I hardly find that a comfort."

  Julie had always gone for the jugular. He let it pass. "So when is school out? I want to get plane tickets—"

  "Forget that. My God, with terrorists and child molesters around every corner these days, do you think I'm going to let two young boys get on an airliner and fly across the country alone?"

  John rolled his eyes to the ceiling, but he wasn't insensitive to her concerns. "Then I'll come down and get them."

  "I don't know. Carson has plans. He's free most of the summer, so he's thinking about an extended vacation—"

  "It's my turn, Julie. I didn't raise hell when you got the visitation changed, but I'm telling you now, those kids are spending the summer in Callister. With me and their grandparents. And if it gets to be an issue, dammit, this time, I'll go see that judge myself."

  Clack! She hung up.

  He stood there a few minutes staring at the receiver, wondering how the hell he could feel so strong a bond with children whose mother he barely tolerated.

  With his attention fractured, he could no longer concentrate on reading. He punched the TV on and found a movie he hadn't seen, but his mind wandered to Ava Rondeau and Billy Bledsoe. What kind of jerk had no interest in his child, especially when the kid was as cute and smart as Ava?