A Sheriff in Tennessee

by Lori Handeland

  He was a cop because he wanted to help; he needed to be needed. When he’d first left the marines, he’d taken a job with the Atlanta PD, figuring there’d be a whole passel of people who needed help there. What he’d discovered was that there were too many of them and not enough of him. He’d wound up feeling like a failure, becoming more depressed with every passing day.

  So when he’d heard of the opening on the detective force in Savannah, he’d moved there. Smaller town, fewer problems, he’d thought, but still a big enough place to need him.

  Wrong again.

  Savannah had big-town problems as a result of more tourists than Klein ever cared to see again, not to mention the movie crews in and out of the city and surrounding area, filming the movie of the moment. With that many strangers, trouble was rampant. Once again Klein had felt he was fighting a battle that could not be won.

  He’d made friends there—Livy Frasier, her mother, Rosie, and her son, Max, as well as her business partner, Kim Luchetti. He missed them, but in truth, he’d been on the outskirts of their busy lives—a guy they saw sometimes, even if he was a guy they liked.

  By the time Klein moved to Pleasant Ridge, Livy had married Max’s father, the bestselling horror novelist Garrett Stark, and she had another baby on the way.

  Klein hadn’t liked Stark at first—the guy had run off and not returned for nine years—but once Stark had come back he’d turned out to be all right. Klein had made sure of that before he’d left. Garrett Stark loved his wife and son more than Klein had believed him capable—

  Yip. Yip. Yip.

  Something tugged on his pants leg. Klein looked down to find Miss Dubray’s Chihuahua, Tid Bit, growling viciously as it fought the battle of the trouser cuff. Some men might boot the pipsqueak into the next county. The dog was a menace. But Klein didn’t have the heart. Instead, he paused in front of the Pleasant Ridge Civil War Museum and waited, as he did every day.

  “T.B.? T.B.?” Miss Dubray skidded from the front door, frantically searching the street for her baby.

  At least the thing wasn’t wearing a lace bonnet today. That always gave Klein the creeps.

  “Oh, hello, Sheriff. I should have known it was you by the tone of T.B.’s voice.”

  “Miss Dubray.” He nodded politely, standing still while she disengaged T.B. from his cuff.

  Once released, the miniature monster trotted back toward the museum, throwing a haughty glance over its shoulder and, Klein could swear, a smirk.

  Considering his experiences with the Chihuahua, Klein wasn’t sure what had prompted him to get a dog of his own—except a lifetime of loneliness. A dog’s devotion had nothing to do with a master’s charm, looks or bank account. Klein could use a little everlasting dog love in his life.

  At home, Clint waited—calm, patient and huge—the perfect animal for a man like Gabe Klein. Perhaps he should bring Clint into town to meet T.B. Klein grinned at the image. He didn’t think T.B. would be smirking anymore.

  “My, my, what a nice smile.” Miss Dubray observed. “I hardly ever see you smile.”

  He’d heard that often enough. He found little in this world to smile about. Law enforcement was funny that way.

  “Did you hear, Sheriff? I’m designing a new display for the artifacts from Shiloh. You’ll have to stop in next week and see what I’ve done.”

  Miss Dubray had a nice smile of her own, and she used it often. Even though her hair was still jet black, her skin lined but smooth and her figure pretty nice, too, she was seventy if she was a day. She’d never married—maybe she’d never wanted to—and she had more energy than her blasted dog. Which was lucky, since she owned and ran the museum all by herself.

  Not that there was very much to do in the Civil War Museum, except dust and take money for tickets—the latter only if someone happened off the interstate for a night and slept at the Pleasant Ridge Hotel-Motel, which itself most likely dated from the War of Northern Aggression. But Miss Dubray had a fascination with the war that she felt never should have been lost.

  Not only had her great-granddaddy left her this building on Longstreet Avenue, but he’d left her the artifacts he’d brought home from the war. Miss Dubray made a small but adequate living with her museum, and she was doing what she loved.

  That most of her artifacts were junk or worse held no weight with her. Kids liked to see the forearm bone of a Yankee, and the news-at-five from Chattanooga had once come and done a spot on the bloody sash of Nathan Bedford Forrest. Miss Dubray had not been amused when the news made mention of General Forrest’s postwar activities. Just because they’d blabbed everything in Forrest Gump didn’t make it acceptable to discuss the KKK in public. Down here, such embarrassments simply weren’t verbalized.

  Miss Dubray still stared at him expectantly. “I’ll be sure and stop by next week,” Klein promised. Maybe I can find some chain-mail pants by then.

  Klein moved on down Longstreet Avenue. As a result of his conversation with the mayor, he peered at the business district and cataloged the empty storefronts. There were far too many. He’d never noticed before, but the main drag of Pleasant Ridge was looking a bit shabby. To him, the place had seemed quaint, homey. Now he knew better.

  The schools did need work. Heck, they had one computer per building. These days, that was as bad as having one book per classroom. The floors needed fixing and there was asbestos in the ceiling tile. He didn’t even want to think about the safety hazard in the outdated playground equipment at the elementary school or the prehistoric science lab at the high school. Perhaps a little progress wouldn’t hurt. Nor would a lot of money.

  Klein sighed. If he blew this deal and the town died, he’d have no one but himself to blame.

  At the end of Longstreet Avenue he paused. A few hundred yards outside of town the avenue became Highway B and extended all the way to Knoxville. But near Pleasant Ridge, Highway B was a paved-over dirt road that skirted the mountains and curved past a lot of farms, his included. Klein could see the white roof of his house over the next incline, and coming down another slope, just past his place, ran a solitary figure.

  He frowned. Who was out there alone, and why was this person running?

  Klein lifted his walkie-talkie and let Virgil know where he was going. Then he set his feet on Highway B.

  BELLE RAN until her heart rate rose to one hundred fifty beats per minute, then she ran some more. The first ten minutes were always the hardest, anyway.

  After her argument with the sheriff, she’d returned to her apartment. Restless, she’d gone over and over her conversation with the man, trying to pinpoint what he’d said that had made her crazy. That comment about her being dumb? Probably. She couldn’t recall any cracks about her weight, her talent or anything else personal. Just her mind.

  When the wheel in her head that went round and round whenever she felt a lack of control—and oh, did she feel a lack of control around Gabriel Klein—kept spinning, she’d cursed, tossed off her clothes and rummaged through her bags for shorts, sports bra and T-shirt. From past experience, she knew she had to run and run until the madness went away.

  She’d headed straight out of town so she wouldn’t have to make chitchat with the populace. Running was serious business when she was in a mood like this.

  She’d always been sensitive; the most offhand personal comment would haunt her for days. After having been called “Big Belle” for years, she ought to have acquired a thicker skin. Instead, losing weight seemed to have made her skin thinner, too.

  Why was it that people felt it was all right to ask a thin person how much she weighed? To ask if she’d gained weight, lost weight, eaten for a year? Questions that they’d think twice about asking a heavy person they announced in the middle of a crowd to her, never realizing that could send her to the scale, and from there to a binge-and-purge cycle that might last for days.

  She’d learned to control that cycle by jogging whenever the mad wheel began to spin. She’d come to crave the runner’s hig
h whenever she felt inadequate. Run long enough and you received an incredible head rush, a sense of well-being and power better than drugs, alcohol or sex. Or at least better than most sex she’d had. Not that she’d had very much.

  Belle had jogged in cities all over the world. The change in scenery made for an interesting workout. She had to say, jogging outside of Pleasant Ridge was as appealing as jogging along the Seine and more peaceful than running through a foggy dawn in London.

  Those mountains—they reminded her of home.

  Belle shook her head and picked up the pace. No use mourning what she couldn’t go back to. For the next little while, home was going to be Pleasant Ridge, Tennessee. Or rather, she’d live in Pleasant Ridge. Belle had learned long ago that home was where your loved ones slept, and hers were in Virginia.

  When she was a good distance out, Belle glanced behind her and pulled a U-ie to the opposite side of the highway. She’d calmed down enough to really look at things now. As well as mountains and new grass, there were working farms and play farms—as her daddy always called those the rich folks bought on a lark, then fixed up and sold at a loss.

  She wasn’t sure what to make of the farm she approached now. The land hadn’t been worked in a long while, and the outbuildings and the house weren’t being fixed up, either—at least, on the outside. The whole place had a lonesome air, almost abandoned. But the curtains in the windows—there were so many the place had to have twenty rooms—the red, white and blue peonies marching along the sidewalk and the paper in the paper box nixed that theory.

  The main building was huge—three stories, with a lived-in attic from the appearance of the highest window, which was also curtained. A wraparound porch sported rocking chairs at every corner—another indication the farmhouse had not been abandoned.

  Belle swallowed against a sudden thickness in her throat. Her mama would love this house. Shoot, Belle was already half in love with it, and she had no need of such space when there was only her, and probably always would be.

  She was so interested in the house that she didn’t see the man on the other side of the road until he spoke.

  “Like my place?”

  Belle tripped over the toe of her running shoe and tumbled headfirst into the ditch. Lucky for her it was a grassy ditch. The only things skinned were her pride and her elbow.

  She lay there for what seemed a long time, staring at the clouds and muttering every curse word her brothers had ever taught her, until Klein’s head blotted out the sun. His eyes were the same shade of blue as the sky and as calm as the sea at midnight.

  The observation annoyed her enough that she snapped, “What did you do—stroll over here? I might have killed myself.”

  “I could hear you cursing. No one with breath left to curse is seriously hurt.”

  Klein put one foot on the incline, leaned over and held out his hand. He was so tall he could reach her with that minute movement. For some reason, the thought calmed Belle more than her run had.

  She placed her palm in his. He hauled her to her feet, straight on out of the ditch, then released her so abruptly she stumbled again. He caught her, steadied her—fascinated her.

  Even though he must have walked out from town—a distance of several miles—he still appeared crisp and clean in his uniform. His ebony hair sparked blue and silver in the sun and his bronzed skin shone. He should be sweating, as she was. He should smell, as she probably did.

  Belle took a deep breath. He did smell—terrific—a combination of sun and wind and grass. Or maybe that was just the sun and wind and grass—although those things had never smelled quite so good before. She swayed.

  “You twist something?” he barked. “Knee, ankle, arm?”

  She shook her head. “Why?”

  “Tripping, stumbling, falling—you don’t seem the type.”

  Belle narrowed her eyes. “What type do I seem?”

  “The smooth type. I doubt you got where you are today by tripping down the runway or stumbling through your screen test.”

  True enough. She lifted one shoulder, then lowered it again. Her T-shirt stuck to her chest. Lovely. “I didn’t do a screen test.”

  “No? Thought that was standard.”

  “They came after me for this show. It was mine before anyone else was even cast. The director and I have a rapport. The producers knew what they wanted.”

  “Baywatch comes to Mayberry,” he grumbled.

  The sweat trickling down Belle’s spine turned cold. “Is that what they told you?”

  “Isn’t that what it is?”

  Good Lord, she hoped not. But it wouldn’t be the first time people in the business had lied to get her to do what they wanted.

  Belle patted her chest, trying to soak up some of the sweat and get rid of the annoying trickles. “I was told Mayberry RFD meets Picket Fences. We tap the good memories for the senior set and the kids who watch a lot of Nick at Night with the Mayberry angle, and we gain the mid-age group with the Picket Fences aspect. That show was brilliant—funny and dramatic. Didn’t you watch it?”

  Klein stared across the road at the big, white house and not at her. “I don’t watch much television.”

  “No VSC, no SI, no TV. What do you do for fun, Klein?”

  “I don’t do fun.”

  “I’ll just bet you don’t.”

  He snorted, and she could have sworn it was a laugh, but when she sharpened her gaze on his face, there was no humor to be seen. How did he do that?

  Belle was very good at emotion—both real and pretend. What she couldn’t get a handle on was how to remain stoic in the face of disaster. She needed to learn, and she wasn’t too proud to beg.

  “Listen, Klein, I’d like your help. I know we didn’t start off on the right foot, but could we try again? Maybe be friends?”

  Friends? Had she actually said that? She couldn’t recall meeting a less friendly man.

  “Friends?” he murmured, and looked at her at last.

  The idea of friendship must seem as outlandish to him as it did to her. But he also appeared intrigued, which only made her wary.

  Belle knew what she wanted from him, but what did Klein want from her? With most men, she’d know. With Klein, she might never be sure.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  “YOU SAID you weren’t hurt.”

  “I’m not.”

  Klein took a step closer and reached for her arm. “Then, what’s this?”

  He turned her elbow, big hands gentle and sure. Running down Belle’s forearm was a bright-red trickle of blood.

  “Hmm,” she said, and raised her gaze to his.

  He was watching her face in that way he had that made her think he was trying to see inside her. Belle’s youngest brother looked just that way at machinery—large and small—right before he took it apart to discover what made it tick.

  “Hmm,” he repeated. “Funny, that’s just what I thought.”

  She smiled, and amazingly, he smiled back. Perhaps their being friends wasn’t such a foolish, farfetched idea after all.

  But as quickly as he’d smiled at her, he stopped. As quickly as he’d reached for her arm, he dropped it. As quickly as he’d moved toward her, he turned away.

  “You’d better clean that out and put a bandage on it before you get blood all over your designer sneakers.”

  Belle’s own smile faded. “Thank you for the advice, but I could figure that out for myself. And I have other sneakers.”

  “I’ll just bet you do.”

  Why did that sound like an insult?

  “Come on,” he grumbled, and headed for the white farmhouse on the opposite side of the road.

  Belle hesitated. “Come where?”

  He stopped, turned and stared at her as if she were dim. “My place.” He jabbed a thumb at the farmhouse. “Remember?”

  Suddenly she heard clearly what he’d said before she fell into the ditch. “Oh! So this is yours?”

  His nod was slow and deliberate. Though she re
ally should turn up her nose and jog on back to Pleasant Ridge, the idea of dripping blood behind her like Hansel and Gretel’s trail of bread crumbs held very little appeal. Her elbow was starting to sting, and in truth, she really wanted to see the inside of that house.

  Belle hurried across the road and joined him at the gate. There was actually a white picket fence around the yard. It could use painting, perhaps not white this time but sky blue or yellow, with ivy, stenciled or real, winding up every third picket.

  Lost in her dream decorating, Belle didn’t realize at first that Klein hesitated outside the fence. She glanced at him just as he unloaded his pistol and tucked the clip into one pocket.

  She frowned. Did he have children? That would make him married, something she hadn’t been told. The disappointment that flowed through her should not be so strong. Shouldn’t be, but was.

  Her confusion deepened when he drew a large bandanna out of another pocket and wrapped the gun in the cheery red material. Then he unlatched the gate and stepped into the yard.

  Belle opened her mouth to ask what on earth he was doing, but before she could, the air was filled with the braying bark of a hound dog.

  Expecting to see it tear around the side of the house toward them, ears flapping madly, huge feet pattering wildly, tongue lolling, jowls dripping, Belle was bewildered when no dog appeared.

  “Quiet, Clint,” Klein ordered, and the braying stopped.

  “Where is he?”

  “On the porch.”

  Belle peered at the house, and sure enough, a hound dog lay at the top of the porch steps, head on his paws as he calmly observed them with sad, sad eyes.