by Tami Hoag
What little strength she had left drained out of her and she gave in to the need to touch her child. He was nearly a man now, but she could still see him when he was five with his big sad eyes looking up at her from behind spectacles that seemed too grown-up for his little face. Lord, when did he get to be sixteen? she wondered desperately as she settled a hand at the small of his back. She felt no baby fat left beneath the thin fabric of his T-shirt, only muscle, and it stiffened at her touch.
“Honey, I know things don't look good right now,” she said softly, rubbing her hand in slow circles designed to soothe. He gave a harsh, humorless laugh and shook his head. “They'll come around,” Elizabeth promised, not quite sure whether she was trying to convince her son or herself. “You'll see. We just have to give it a little time, that's all.”
“Yeah, right.” He twisted away from her touch, that action cutting her more deeply than anything he could have said. His mouth bent into a parody of a smile and he blinked furiously at the tears in his eyes. “Like till hell freezes over. I'm going to bed.”
He was through the swinging door before Elizabeth could draw breath to say good night. The door swung back into the kitchen, bringing with it the faint perfume of dead mouse from the dining room, and she stood there, alone again, thinking back on the night she'd told Bobby Lee she was leaving him.
She had stood in the kitchen under the glare of the fluorescent light, the smell of bacon grease and Aqua Velva settling in a lump at the back of her throat as her nerves churned in her stomach. Trace was on her hip, chewing the head off an animal cracker, his big eyes all watery and scared—a reflection of her own expression, she was sure. She had dressed to kill in her best cowgirl outfit, thinking it might make an impression on Bobby Lee, seeing what all he was going to have to do without—jeans that clung tighter than skin on a sausage and a fitted western blouse that was exactly the color of a dandelion and had black piping and a fancy yoke and French cuffs on the sleeves, her Miss Bardette Barrel Racing buckle on a belt three sizes too big (to emphasize her tiny waist), her Tony Lama boots, freshly polished and sprayed with Amway boot shine. She knew she looked good enough to make a man howl, but that didn't change the fact that she was just nineteen and scared as hell.
She stood there in the middle of that kitchen and told Bobby Lee Breland she'd had it with his messing around, that she was going to take their son and leave him for good right that next minute if he didn't do something drastic.
The refrigerator hummed as Bobby Lee remained in the doorway, a bottle of Lone Star dangling from his fingertips, his red shirt hanging open, the tails trailing down over muscular things encased in new blue Wranglers. She would never forget how he looked—like an ad for the bad boys of the pro rodeo circuit, sandy hair falling across his forehead, green eyes hard as emeralds and boring into her, his bare chest and belly tan as leather, shiny with sweat and lined with muscle. She would never forget what he said as he pushed himself away from the door frame and walked past her, grabbing his dusty black Stetson from the table as he headed out.
“Can you be gone by nine? I got me a date with Cee Cee Beaudine.”
And he walked out the back door and left her standing there feeling like the only person left on earth.
Just exactly the way she felt now.
HIS ROOM WAS NO BETTER THAN THE REST OF THE HOUSE. On the second floor, it overlooked a boggy pasture full of cows. The window had to be propped open with a sawed-off length of broomstick because the old rope on the pulley system was broken, and then the mosquitoes and gnats swarmed in through a rip in the screen to congregate at the light bulb sticking out of the ceiling. The walls were cracked plaster painted the color of cantaloupe. Some other poor slob sentenced to live in this pit of a house had spent hours scratching obscenities and other vital messages into the wood floor with a piece of wire. COUGARS RULE. A.J. + G.L. JOE EATS PUSSY. FUCK TINA ODEGARD. LIFE SUCKS.
Trace flicked on his stereo, then flopped bellydown across his unmade bed, his gaze riveted to one particular piece of wisdom as Axl Rose screeched through the speakers about love and pain. LIFE SUCKS. There was the truth.
He hated Still Creek. Hated the way it looked. Hated the way it smelled. Hated everything about it. He hated the Amish in their stupid hats and stupid clothes, driving their stupid horses all around. He hated the businesses and he hated the people who ran them. Stupid bunch of dickhead Norwegians, that's all they were. They looked at him as though he were from the fucking moon, laughed behind his back at the way he talked.
He knew what they thought. White trash, redneck southerners, that's what they thought. Crackers with a capital C. He'd heard the whispers of gossip about his mother. They all thought she was a tramp. Just because she was pretty. Just because that son of a bitch Brock Buttwipe Stuart had divorced her.
Back in Atlanta nobody had laughed at them. They'd lived in the penthouse of Stuart Tower. Trace had had a closet bigger than this bedroom. He'd had a wall of bookshelves and a big desk with his own computer. The Stuart name meant money and influence in Atlanta. It didn't mean anything in Still Creek but that they were strangers.
Anger burned and roiled in his gut and he tossed over on his back, not sure how to escape it. He felt it more and more lately, eating away at him, churning his insides. Sometimes he just wanted to explode with it, screaming and fighting. But he reined it in and stamped it down, as he'd always done with his feelings. It didn't pay to let people see what you felt. They turned it against you more often than not. Better to show nothing.
Like when that fat jerk Jarvis had turned him down for a job at Still Waters, Trace thought as he stretched over to the nightstand and pulled a stolen pack of Marlboros out of the drawer. He shook one out, leaning on his side as he lit it, then falling on his back again to stare at the geyser of smoke he blew up toward the ceiling. Jarvis had laughed at him, as if he thought he were a baby, and told him to go get a paper route. The anger had boiled inside him then, like scalding steam. All he'd wanted to do was punch in that ugly bulldog face until there wasn't anything left of it but bloody mush. But he hadn't shown it. He'd kept his chin up. He'd stared down the laughing work crew that had been leaning against the side of a rusted Chevy pickup with coffee cups in their hands. He'd walked away like a man.
Don't get mad, get even. That was what Carney said. Carney Fox was about the only person who hadn't given him a hard time since he'd come to this shithole town. Don't get mad, get even. That was his new motto. He said it aloud, testing the sound of it on his ears, then drew another deep drag on the cigarette and shot another cloud of smoke toward the fly-specked ceiling.
He couldn't seem to keep himself from getting mad, but he was working on it. Sometimes it scared him, the way he felt, so full of fury and rage at the injustices that had all but ruined his life. But most of the time he controlled it, the way a man should. He didn't let it show, and that was the important thing. He sometimes wished with all his heart for a nice white line of coke to make it go away, but he was through with that stuff. It made a man weak, and if there was one thing he was never going to be again, it was weak.
HALF A MILE TO THE NORTH, DANE STOOD ON HIS FRONT porch, nursing a beer and staring off toward the old Drewes place. Weariness ached through him and pain pinched his bum knee like a C clamp. Another storm was brewing off to the west, grumbling threats but not making good on them, just like the earlier one that had promised to wash away all the physical evidence at the murder scene, then rolled on toward Wisconsin without so much as dampening the dust.
He tipped his bottle of Miller back and let the cold liquid slide down a throat that was raw from barking orders at his deputies and the press, and thought that thunder was appropriate tonight. It set the mood for evil.
They had worked at Still Waters until after one. The regional BCA agent, Yeager, had still been there sniffing around like a lazy old bird dog, bemoaning the fact that the Still Waters resort was going to be the ruination of a prime turkey hunting spot, when Dane had left
to check on Amy and Mrs. Regina Cranston, the woman who was going to cook and clean and maintain a grandmotherly presence in the house for the three weeks his daughter was visiting. Jarvis had been carted off to Davidson's Funeral Home for the night. His Lincoln had been towed to Bill Waterman's junkyard, which served as Tyler County's impound lot. The mobile lab had packed up and taken what evidence they'd found back to the central lab in St. Paul.
Work at the scene had ended, but the real work was just beginning. Dane figured he'd grab an hour's sleep, then return to his office and start trying to find a killer with what information they had. He almost managed to laugh at the lunacy of that. Christ, what did he know about finding killers? Nothing more than what he'd read in textbooks. The worst thing that had ever happened in his tenure as sheriff had been Gordon Johnson knocking his wife around after imbibing too much peppermint schnapps at the VFW. And Vera had managed to knock Gordon a good one back, smacking him upside the head with a frozen ring bologna and giving him a concussion.
They had the odd burglary in Tyler County, the occasional drunken fistfight at the Red Rooster bar. There was a class of social lowlifes who dealt pot and pills to one another. But for the most part, law and orderliness was bred into the folks of the Upper Midwest. Now this bastion of upstanding respectability had been breached, and he was the man who had to account for it.
Dane Jantzen, local hero. Captain of the Cougar football team. Star forward of the Cougar basketball team. Only native of Still Creek ever to be seen on national television. Tricia had accused him of wanting to come back here because he would always be a hero in Still Creek; he didn't need ambition or talent here. He could get by the rest of his life on stories of his glory days, when he had been sure-handed and fleet of foot.
Not true. He had come back because this was home, because he needed a place that was comforting and familiar after his career, his identity, had been ripped from him. In L.A. he had been Dane Jantzen, star receiver for the Raiders. Then his knee had gone and in the blink of an eye he was a nobody. The spotlight had gone out fast enough to blind him and he had been left groping around in the dark for something, someone, some clue to who he would be now that the Number 88 jersey had been handed over to another man with great hands and delusions of immortality.
Tricia had been more disappointed over her loss of status as a player's wife than in Dane's loss of mobility due to his blown knee. She had taken solace in the idea that he would go into broadcasting and eventually be a bigger star in the television booth than he had ever been on the field. When he told her he intended to move back to Minnesota, she literally laughed in his face. He'd been her ticket out of Still Creek; she had no intention of going back. She made it very clear she had married the football jersey, not the man inside it.
So he had come home alone, a beaten hero, and slowly built a new career, built a new life, carefully keeping each component separate so that if he lost one, he wouldn't lose them all, carefully keeping himself separate from the process so as not to lose himself in it. He was satisfied with the result.
He was a good sheriff. Whatever people's reasons for voting for him, they had been getting their money's worth to this point. He ran a tight county, kept crime to a minimum. Until tonight. Now he would be put to the test. Now he would have to prove that he hadn't gotten this job on the strength of his ability to run a good crossing pattern and keep his eyes on the ball.
He would do it, he vowed, pushing the doubts aside. He would catch this killer. He would win because winning was the one thing he had always done best. He wouldn't tolerate a loss. Neither would the good folk of Still Creek.
He'd done the right thing calling in the BCA. The lab boys had swarmed over the scene like ants at a picnic, dusting everything in sight for fingerprints, taking video and still pictures, making plaster casts of tire tracks, measuring blood spatters and scraping samples into plastic bags. They had vacuumed Jarvis's Lincoln and would sift through the debris for trace evidence that might make or break the case. Their efficiency was an awesome thing to behold, Dane reflected, taking another long pull on his beer. He only wished he hadn't beheld it in his county.
Tomorrow they would ship the body off to the Hennepin County medical examiner in Minneapolis, where a team of pathologists would determine the cause of death. Not that there was much question about it. Tyler County's coroner, Doc Truman, was a general practitioner who still made house calls in his '57 Buick Roadmaster. He had neither the equipment nor the inclination to handle a detailed autopsy for a murder investigation. He would, as a matter of courtesy, duty, and principle, ride along in the hearse from Davidson's Funeral Home, and stand in on the procedure, but he had told Dane he was more than happy to be relegated to the role of witness this time around.
Witness. The word brought to mind a clear image of Elizabeth Stuart sitting in his office, pale, shaking, gray eyes glazed with tears as she relived the horror of finding the body. Dane swore under his breath. He had wanted to put his arms around her, to offer comfort. He tossed back the last of his beer and set the empty on the porch rail as he looked across the pasture and woods that lay between his house and the old Drewes place. No question about it, she was more dangerous to him vulnerable than sexy. Sex he could handle. Sex he could keep in perspective. Vulnerability was another thing. And need. Need was something he didn't like to think about. He much preferred his other impression of Elizabeth Stuart—the opportunistic alley cat. Comfort was the last thing he wanted to offer her.
“Daddy?”
Dane turned automatically, as if he were used to the title, when the truth was he heard it only over the phone except for the few precious times a year when Amy came to stay with him. His daughter stood at the front door, her long brown hair in disarray around her shoulders, an L.A. Raiders jersey hanging to her knees. She blinked at him sleepily and wandered onto the porch to snuggle against him as naturally as if it were something she did every night of her life. Dane slid an arm around her and leaned his cheek against the top of her head, breathing deep the scents of Love's Baby Soft cologne and strawberry shampoo.
“What are you doing up?” he said softly. “It's way past your bedtime, peanut.”
She smiled at him as if she thought he was dear but bordering on senility. “Daddy, I am fifteen, you know.”
“No way,” he scoffed. “You're not more than ten. It wasn't a week ago you were throwing up baby formula on me.”
“Gross!” She pretended offense, but ruined it with a pixie giggle. “I'm still on California time, too, you know,” she reminded him.
“Hmm . . .” He didn't like to think about that either—that his daughter lived half a continent away with her mother and the man who had taken his place.
Six months after the divorce Tricia had signed a prenuptial agreement with a running back who had two good knees and a yearning to become the next John Madden. Dane told himself he didn't regret losing Tricia, he just regretted losing, period. He told himself he didn't even care that she'd taken him to the cleaners in the divorce. But he would never forgive her for taking his daughter away from him.
He looked down at Amy now, panic seizing his gut as the realization hit him again. She wasn't such a little girl anymore. It seemed she'd grown half a foot since he'd seen her last. The softness of childhood was beginning to melt away from her, revealing the angular bone structure of a fashion model. She wasn't a woman yet either, but somewhere in between, the transition obvious in her face, where her cheeks were beginning to hollow but little-girl freckles still dotted the bridge of her tip-tilted nose.
He'd lost so much time with her. The years had stampeded over him, leaving him with only a handful of memories of pigtails and gap-toothed smiles, of a little sprite who trailed a stuffed rabbit with her everywhere she went. He'd spent so little time being a father to a little girl that he had no idea what to do with a teenager.
A mock frown curled down the corners of his mouth, and he lifted a brow imperiously. “Your mother lets you stay up past
midnight?”
“And I shave my legs too,” she said with a saucy, teasing look that reminded him too much of Tricia. “And I go on dates with boys.”
Dane shuddered with true horror and shook his head. “That does it. I'm shipping you off to a convent.”
“We're not Catholic.”
“Doesn't matter. They're big on taking converts.”
Dating. God help him, he wasn't ready for that. His daughter wasn't old enough to date, was she? He wasn't old enough to have a daughter dating, was he? He hadn't really felt that old—until now. In that moment, standing there in the dark in the middle of the night, he felt suddenly very old and very mortal.
“Did someone really get murdered tonight?” Amy's voice cut through the silence, soft with a touch of fear.
“Yeah,” Dane murmured. “Someone did.”
She shivered delicately against him and tightened her arms around his waist, pressing her cheek against his chest. “I didn't think anything like that would ever happen here.”
Dane stared over her head, across the dark expanse of countryside to the south, toward the old Drewes place and Still Waters, and felt the heaviness of evil in the air. The thunder rumbled a little closer than before. Lightning sketched long, bony fingers across the sky.
“Neither did I, sweetheart,” he whispered.
“Do you know who did it?”
“No, but I'll find out.” He tipped her chin up with his forefinger. “It's on my list of things to do, right after tucking you in.”
Amy rolled her eyes. “Daddy, I'm too old to be tucked in.”
“Oh, yeah?” He propped his hands on his hips and gave her a look of challenge as she stepped back from him. “Does that mean you think I'm too old to carry you upstairs?”