by Tami Hoag
TWENTY
ELIZABETH SAT BACK IN HER SQUEAKY DESK CHAIR and rubbed her hands over her face, obliterating the last remnants of her makeup. She savored the silence in the office. If there was one thing to be said for working late it was this—peace. No abusive phone calls, no people dropping in to cancel their subscriptions and demand their money back, no Horse and Buggy Days workers pounding up a storm outside. Now, in the quiet, she could pretend all was right with the world—as long as she didn't look at the plywood in the front window or the empty spot on the desk where her computer had once been.
She had missed supper and her stomach was complaining about it. She had missed her nightly chat with Aaron. Really missed it. It was getting to be a regular habit for her to hash over the events of the day with her Amish friend. Not that he ever had much to contribute, but he was a good listener and he had such a stoicism about him he never failed to calm her down.
Of course, she thought with a frown, he hadn't seemed in the best of moods when he had arrived that morning. She suspected his temper had something to do with the renewed construction at Still Waters, but she hadn't asked him about it. The look he'd given her when she had asked him if she could fix him a cup of coffee had been so hostile she had thought it wise to leave more volatile subjects alone. She supposed Amish people got up on the wrong side of the bed some days too, just like everybody else. Being a religious fanatic didn't necessarily spare a person from having moods.
“Burning the midnight oil?”
Elizabeth bolted in her chair, swiveling around toward the back of the room. Dane stood by the door, near the greasy old Linotype machine, leaning a shoulder against the door frame.
“What's that?” she asked about the plant he held. A pink fuchsia plant, like the one the vandal had killed.
Dane shrugged, moving into the room. Now that he was here with the thing, he felt stupid for bringing it. He had told himself all day he didn't have anything to apologize for. If he hadn't seen the light on in the office, he probably would have just gone home and given the plant to Mrs. Cranston.
“I—a—a peace offering,” he mumbled, holding it out to her.
Elizabeth rose and took the plant from him, curling one arm around the pot and lifting the other hand to touch the pretty green leaves. “I gave you a piece, you give me a plant—is that it?” she said, one corner of her mouth curling up in a bitter imitation of a smile.
“I didn't deserve that,” Dane said evenly, his gaze holding hers until she blinked and glanced away.
“No, you didn't,” she murmured. She turned back toward her desk and set the pot down. “I'm sorry,” she said, rubbing two fingers against her right temple. “I'm just feeling . . . beat up . . . used up. It's not your fault.”
Dane stepped behind her. “I don't want anything permanent. I decided that a long time ago. It doesn't have anything to do with you.”
“That's a comfort.” Before he could comment, she turned toward him with a brittle, valiant smile. “You don't need to worry about me, sugar. I just got rid of a husband. I'm sure as hell not angling for another. I swore off men, remember?”
“Yeah,” he said. “I remember.”
And he remembered very well how she'd stuck to her vow. Just as she remembered.
“She did a real number on you, didn't she?”
“This isn't about Tricia.” That was a lie and Dane knew it, but he plowed on past it, the master of denial. “I like my life the way it is.”
“Well, you're the lucky one, then, aren't you?” Elizabeth said, looking straight past his macho bullshit. “The rest of us are scared of what we want, reaching for things we can't have. You've got it all together. The man in command. Your ducks are all in a row. Your pigeons are all in their little compartments. I'll bet that's what drives you craziest about this murder—it doesn't fit into your neat little scheme of things.”
Direct hit—Stuart. Dane tightened his jaw but said nothing.
Elizabeth turned away and blew out a long breath. Her gaze fell on the plant. She wanted it to mean something that he had brought this plant to her. She wanted to mean something to him. Lord, she was as bad as Jolynn letting Rich use her. The man felt guilty so he brought her a present; it was a story as old as time. Just because it was a fuchsia plant, just because he'd held her while she cried, just because he'd made love to her with a kind of tenderness and passion she'd never known . . . It didn't mean anything.
Just as well too. She didn't need a man in her life. She didn't need complications.
“Don't worry about your precious world order,” she said. “I don't want anything from you, Sheriff.”
She was lying. She didn't do any better at it than Trace. Dane couldn't believe he'd ever taken her for an actress. Elizabeth might have put on any number of acts, but she was as transparent as glass.
“We can be friends,” he offered. “Lovers.”
Elizabeth looked up at him and laughed her hoarse, bawdy laugh. “You've never been friends with a woman in your life.”
He flashed her a grin. “There's a first time for everything.”
“Sure, why not? Want a candy bar, friend? Jolynn's got a stash in her desk.”
“No, thanks.”
Elizabeth gave him a look as she crossed the space between the two desks and helped herself to a Snickers. “Don't you have any vices—besides me, that is?”
“Sure.” He leaned a hip against her desk, crossed his arms, and smiled. “I leave the toilet seat up.”
“Oh, well, now I know you're not the man for me,” she quipped. “That's a habit I just purely hate. I once fell into a toilet because a man had left the seat up.”
She peeled the candy wrapper and took a bite, closing her eyes and moaning appreciatively at the taste of chocolate melting on her tongue. She swallowed and shot him a sideways glance, licking a fleck of chocolate from the corner of her mouth. “Find anything in the Lincoln today?”
“Nope.”
“Would you tell me if you had?”
“Nope.”
Elizabeth sniffed. “Some friend you are. I've got half a mind to keep to myself the fact that your Deputy Dunderhead Ellstrom is doing the old bump and grind with Helen Jarvis.”
Dane narrowed his eyes. “Where did you hear that?”
“Oh, I didn't just hear it, sugar. I got me a witness. Unless your deputies are going around conducting police business in their skivvies, it's a plain fact.”
“Great.” Dane rolled his eyes heavenward. Helen and Boyd. Talk about strange bedfellows . . . or partners in crime? He fought off a yawn and tried to shut off his cop mode for the night. It was past eleven. Nothing was going to get solved at this hour.
“Well,” he said, straightening away from the desk, “he can screw her all night for all I care. I'm going home. Come on, Mata Hari, lock up and I'll give you a police escort.”
Elizabeth locked the front door, gathered her purse, her keys, the pack of photographs she'd gotten back from the drugstore that afternoon. She picked up her plant and headed for the Caddy parked in the alley. Dane double-checked the new lock on the back door, then followed her home, where Kenny Spencer was dozing in his cruiser in the driveway.
Dane reached into the car through the open window and hit the horn, jolting the deputy awake.
“You're on duty, Deputy.”
Kenny straightened his shoulders back and swallowed hard. “Yes, sir.”
Elizabeth gave the young deputy a sympathetic smile. “I'll bring you out a cup of coffee, sugar.”
Spencer smiled shyly. “Thanks, ma'am. That'd be just the thing.”
Dane snorted as they walked toward the house. “Is there a man in my department you haven't charmed?”
“Sure,” she said, stopping on the top step and turning to face him. “You.”
Not true, Dane thought, but he didn't correct her. It wouldn't have been the smart thing, and he prided himself on being a smart man.
“Thanks for the plant,” Elizabeth said, ta
mping down the hurt flaring inside. When he started to shrug off her gratitude, she raised a hand and pressed her fingers against his lips, lips that had kissed her, loved her, whispered to her in the night. “Don't say it was nothing,” she whispered. “Just don't say it.”
And she turned and left him standing there before he could leave her.
THE NEXT MORNING ELIZABETH MOVED AROUND THE obstacle course that had become her kitchen, searching for a clean coffee cup. Her head was aching from another night with too little sleep. After taking a tour through her empty house, she had given in to the urge to go looking for Trace, leaving Kenny Spencer in her yard with a thermos of coffee. She hadn't returned until nearly one A.M., tired, upset, and without her son. She sat up, waiting on the sofa, watching a video of an old Tracy-Hepburn movie, determined to have it out with Trace about his nocturnal wanderings the minute he came home.
When she hadn't been thinking about all her problems with her son, she'd been stewing on thoughts of Dane. The movie had rolled on, without generating much interest. The last thing she remembered was Katharine Hepburn sassing off to Spencer and old Spencer kissing her socks off. Then the sun had come streaming in the window and she had awakened to white noise hissing out of the television.
“A masochist—that's what I'm turning into, Aaron,” she mumbled, snagging a handful of hair out of her eyes. She had crawled off the sofa, up the stairs, and into a pair of age-faded cutoff jeans and her old UTEP T-shirt. She frowned now as she glanced down and caught sight of a new hole wearing through the cotton in the vicinity of her belly button.
“Do y'all have masochists in your group?” she asked, looking down at the Amishman who knelt on her kitchen floor doing something to the cupboard with a vicious-looking pry bar. “People who punish themselves over and over until you just want to slap the snot right out of them?”
Aaron glanced up at her, up what seemed to be an endless length of shapely bare leg, his mouth curving with disapproval even as desire stirred in the pit of his belly. Punishment. That was what he deserved for wanting her. It was what she deserved for tempting him, for going around half naked, her legs bare for all the world to see and covet. But punishment was for God to decide, he reminded himself, jerking his head back down to focus on his work. He picked up the pry bar and started loosening nails.
Elizabeth arched a brow at his nonresponse and continued on her search, picking up a stoneware souvenir mug from the Great Smoky Mountains and peering into its depths. “I reckon people have wanted things they couldn't have since Eve got her heart set on that damned apple, but I'm about sick of it myself.”
She hit the jackpot, finding a pair of china cups that had belonged to the Stuarts for a hundred fifty years and gave a little whoop of triumph. She ducked down, coming almost face-to-face with Aaron as he plied the pry bar. “You want a cup of coffee, sugar? Served in a cup Great-grandma Stuart hid from the Yankees during the War?”
Aaron paused in his work, staring at the nail head. She was too close. He could smell her, the fragrance she wore, the soap she used on her hair, and beneath it all—woman. Warm, wicked, English woman. It was just this moment he had spent hours in meditation on since the Sabbath. Hours of wrestling with conscience and heart and bodily desires and spiritual needs. Gritting his teeth, he brought his weight against the pry bar and the nail came free with a horrible screech.
“I don't want nothing from you, English,” he said.
His tone was as sharp as the nail he pulled from the cupboard. Elizabeth straightened and stepped back, feeling more hurt than she probably had a right to. After all, he had come to her for work, not friendship. And she was English. English, like the people putting up their garish resort right across the road from his house.
“They're going hot and heavy at Still Waters again,” she said, pouring herself a dose of hot black caffeine. “I guess you're not too happy about that.”
“They do what they will,” he mumbled, flinging the bent nail away.
“Yeah, well . . .” Elizabeth took in the grim set of his mouth and the bleak cast to his eyes and poured him a cup too. She handed it down to him and he accepted it without a word. “That doesn't mean you have to like it.”
Her attention drifted away from Aaron as Trace shuffled into the room in his sock feet, hair standing on end at the back of his head. His glasses were broken and his face was an artist's palette of blue and purple with sickly yellow tinges. Elizabeth nearly dropped her cup.
“Trace! Honey, what happened?” she asked, slopping hot coffee over her hand as she scooted around Aaron's toolbox to get to her son. She set the cup on the table and took hold of him by the arms, her expression twisting with a mother's sympathy pains and concern as she took in the damage to her baby.
Trace ducked his head in embarrassment. “I got into a little fight, is all,” he mumbled. He wished he could have just stayed in bed until his mother had gone, but he had to get to work, therefore he had to suffer the inevitable fuss.
“A little fight?” Elizabeth reached up to touch the gash on his cheek and he jerked away from her. “You look like you took on a Mack truck!”
“It's nothing,” he said, sidling away from her. He eased himself down on a chair, aching more from the work he'd done than from the fight, and reached for his high-top Air Jordans that crowned the pile of shoes on the floor. “Don't make a big deal out of it, Mom.”
“Nothing?” Elizabeth parroted, bringing her hands up to rub her temples. Exasperation and concern rose in her like a pair of tidal waves. “How can you say it's nothing?”
“'Cause—”
A knock sounded at the back door, forestalling Trace's explanation. Elizabeth huffed a sigh and turned as the kitchen door swung open and the frame filled with the bulk of Boyd Ellstrom. An instant burst of instinctive wariness shot through her as she looked at the deputy.
“What are you doing here?” she demanded, abandoning her usual southern charm. She liked this man less and less, and she'd pretty much loathed him to begin with. She couldn't look at him without picturing him and Helen, and if that wasn't enough to turn a stomach, nothing was.
Ellstrom let his gaze roam down over her, and she instantly wished she were wearing something less revealing—like a suit of armor. From the corner of her eye she could see Aaron straighten from his work and regard the deputy with a cold look. Ellstrom dismissed him with a glance.
“I'm here to see your son,” he said at last.
Elizabeth turned toward Trace, her heart thudding in her chest.
Trace met the deputy's gaze, a terrible sense of foreboding sliding down through his stomach.
“Trace Stuart,” Ellstrom said, shouldering past Elizabeth as he pulled a pair of handcuffs off his belt. “You're under arrest for the murder of Carney Fox.”
TWENTY-ONE
“I CAN'T BELIEVE YOU DID THIS,” DANE SAID IN A dangerous whisper that had the other men in his office exchanging nervous glances. Kaufman cracked his knuckles. Yeager's dog whined a little and scuttled farther under his master's chair.
Ellstrom raised his double chins a notch. “I was out that way when the call came in about Fox. Stuart killed him, sure as I'm standing here. He probably would have finished the job in the parking lot at the Rooster if I hadn't pulled him off. The kid was pounding the shit out of Fox—”
“I can't believe it,” Dane growled.
Ellstrom gave a snort of indignant disbelief. “There were fifty witnesses—”
Dane cut him off with a look. He pressed his hands on his immaculate blotter and rose slowly from his chair, never taking his eyes off his deputy. “You just took it upon yourself to barge in there without a warrant, without consulting me—”
“I'm a cop,” Ellstrom barked. “I had grounds to believe Stuart committed a felony. I don't need your permission to do my job.”
“You do if you want to keep it.”
“You don't scare me, Jantzen,” Ellstrom sneered.
Faster than he could draw breath, Dane
was around the desk and in his face, those arctic-blue eyes boring into his. Boyd had to fight the urgent desire to back away. A healthy dose of fear clawed up his throat, belying his tough talk. Sweat popped out across his brow like dew beading on the skin of a pumpkin. His intestines curled into a writhing knot.
“I've had it with you, Ellstrom,” Dane snarled through his teeth. “You mouth off to the press, disobey orders, slack off on the job—”
“Me, slack off?” He swallowed down the bile in his throat and went on the offensive. “What about you, Sheriff? Everybody knows the Stuart kid busted up Shafer's and you let him off. Now he kills a man and you're chewing me out! I'm doing my job while you stand back and let that black-haired bitch lead you around by your dick,” he said bitterly, envy joining the ranks of the sour emotions churning in his belly. “What's the price to beat a murder rap, a great blowjob? I'll bet she wrote the book on it.”
Dane's temper snapped. The cool control he was so famous for cracked like thin ice beneath the weight of Ellstrom's taunt. In a move from his football days he brought his forearm up and caught the deputy beneath the chin. Ellstrom's teeth closed with an audible snap and he slammed against the wall with enough force that the framed commendations jumped on their pegs.
The logical half of Dane's brain told him to back off, that Ellstrom had been within his rights to arrest Trace Stuart, that he should have been able to keep himself in check better than this. But Ellstrom had crossed too many boundaries that had nothing to do with logic and everything to do with the more primitive side. By badmouthing Elizabeth he had trespassed on Dane's territory. Dane recognized that fact even as he denied its implications.
“You're through here, Ellstrom,” he whispered, his face inches from the deputy's.
Boyd choked as his windpipe bowed inward. He could barely hear his own voice above the pounding of the blood in his head. “This is assault,” he sputtered, saliva running like water in his mouth, wetting his thick lips and gathering in bubbles at the corners of his mouth.
Jantzen smiled at him, a smile that sent ice through his veins and had his nerves clutching at his guts like frantic hands. “Yeah, too bad you don't have any witnesses.”