Wild Horse Springs

by Jodi Thomas

  “All right. Anything I can do to help. I only got a peek at the men in the trailer. Lowlifes huddled around a table covered with stacks of bills. I wanted to tell you, but they said they’d take it out on the kid if I told anyone.” He gulped back a dozen swearwords trying to come out all at once. “Sounds like they did anyway.”

  Thatcher talked to the sheriff, retracing every moment from the time he offered the tiny girl a ride until he took back the cans. He answered every question. He didn’t think he needed to talk about what happened in the truck stop. Luther had gone over that several times, and everything the old guy said was pretty much true. Thatcher had decked him for talking about his family that way. Which was the truth, but only relatives were allowed to talk that way about his kin.

  “Thanks, kid,” the sheriff said. Both knew how hard it was for a boy from the Breaks to talk to the law. Children who grew up out there were taught from birth to turn a blind eye to questionable behavior, only Thatcher trusted Brigman; he’d always been straight with him.

  “Were either of the men who attacked you in the jail at that trailer?” Dan asked.

  “I don’t know. I only got a glimpse. Five or six men, all dressed in work clothes.” He paused, then rushed on. “I almost forgot. There was a dead hanging plant in the window. All brown and twisted. It was the first thing I saw when I looked in. Everything and everyone was seen through the spaces between the deformed leaves.”

  The sheriff asked several more questions, but Thatcher couldn’t think of anything else.

  When he hung up, Thatcher called Tim O’Grady. “Hemingway” sounded like he’d been asleep, or hung over. But then, Tim usually sounded that way. The writer struck him as an old drunk in a young man’s body.

  “What do you need, Thatcher?” he grumbled when he answered. “You’re not in any trouble again. If you are, I can’t help you. The sheriff won’t tell me where you are.” Tim talked faster as anger boiled. “Like I’m going to give away state secrets or something. He did say you’re all right, so why are you calling?”

  Thatcher thought of hanging up, but he was desperate. “No, I’m fine. I’m under protective custody. And believe me, it’s no picnic.”

  “Welcome to life, kid.” Tim wasn’t a man anyone would go to if they needed a shoulder to cry on. Too many chips on them. “I just broke up with Lauren again. Hell of a week, ain’t it, Thatcher.”

  “I didn’t think you two were together.” The words were out before he realized that probably wasn’t the right thing to say.

  “Apparently neither does she. She’s calling our great love affair a friendship. I guess it all depends on the wording.” Tim coughed and added, “Why are you calling me? I’m sure it’s not to ask for advice, because you never take it. Didn’t Lauren and I tell you to stay out of trouble, make good grades—”

  “I know the lecture by heart,” Thatcher interrupted. “Save your words, you might need them for the next book you’re supposed to be working on.”

  Thatcher figured that he’d better ask for his favor fast before Tim remembered how mad he was at him. “This hideout they’ve got me in is great, but there’s no TV and I’m out of books. You know how you’re always talking about how everyone should read the top hundred books of all time? Well, I’m ready to get started. Could you pack me up a bag full and deliver them to the sheriff’s office? Just put my name on the sack so Pearly won’t think they’re for her. Brigman will see I get them.”

  “The greatest books of all time are not all westerns, Thatcher.” Tim calmed. Books were his favorite topic, outranked only by talking about his novels.

  “I’ll read whatever you send.” He thought about adding to leave out Tim’s kind of horror books, but he guessed there were not many on the top hundred list.

  “I tell you what,” Tim said. “I’ll loan you a dozen. Read those, and I’ll give you the next dozen.”

  “Great. Don’t forget. Put them in a paper sack, write my name on it and deliver them to the sheriff.”

  “No problem. I heard you the first time. I’ve nothing to do. I have no girl. And I’m suffering from writer’s block again.”

  “Tim, if you don’t mind me saying, you get one of those blocks so often you might start building a house with them. You’d have a three bedroom in no time.”

  “Just what I need, another critic. I’m a published author, you know.”

  “Yeah, I know and so do probably thirty or forty other people.” The words were out before Thatcher remembered he’d just asked for a favor. “Just kidding. I think your books are great. The last one scared me so bad I swore off reading for a week.”

  “Really?” Tim sounded suddenly interested in the conversation. “I’ll pack a copy of the first five chapters of my new one in the sack.”

  “That’d be super. Thanks, Tim.” He hung up before O’Grady had time to tell him the entire plot of the new book again.

  Tess walked out of the bedroom with a huge box of clothes. She’d switched out of her uniform and was wearing her T-shirt and those yoga pants she looked so good in.

  “Where’s the ranger?” Thatcher asked, figuring she’d finally killed him.

  Tess smiled like she’d solved the formula for world peace.

  “Strangest thing.” She sat on the other end of the couch like they were friends now.

  Thatcher pulled his blanket up and tried to act normal, but he wasn’t used to a woman sitting on the end of his bed. “Tell me what’s strange about Cody.” Thatcher was sure he could add to the list, like the ranger didn’t sleep at night and he sometimes stared out the window as if he was seeing something in the shadows.

  Personally, he could think of a few others, like the ranger had a death wish and was hell-bent on making everyone around him miserable.

  It suddenly occurred to Thatcher that maybe Brigman put him here with these two so prison wouldn’t look so bad if he ever had to go.

  Tess seemed to be organizing her thoughts the same why she did everything else. “I was working, ignoring him with my back turned. He’d stretched out on the bed and was staring at the ceiling telling me that it wasn’t my fault if I haven’t got a rounded bottom. He knew a few movie stars that were that way and others were flat chested, but that hadn’t stopped them. Then he talked about how it was wrong how men sometimes judge women by their bodies. He claimed those things don’t matter.”

  She patted Thatcher’s blanket, and he started sweating. His leg was under the quilt, and she was getting too friendly for a lady ten years older than him.

  Thank goodness she jumped up about then and started pacing. His close call was over. He’d always dated Kristi. He’d never been out in the field. He didn’t even know where it was. What if he turned out to be irresistible now he wasn’t spoken for?

  “I was warm from working,” she said as she paced, “so I pulled off my uniform and kept working.” She pointed at Thatcher. “You said it was all right to wear this. You said I looked good in these.”

  Thatcher was thinking of retracting his opinion. Now the park ranger thought he was flirting with her. It would hurt his ego, but maybe he’d better tell her he didn’t even know how to flirt. He’d only been to second base with Kristi, and to tell the truth it didn’t seem all that exciting.

  “When I straightened from emptying the bottom drawer, I looked over at him and thought he had a stroke. His mouth was gaping and his eyes were wide open, like he hadn’t blinked in hours.”

  “So what’d you do?”

  “I just turned back around and went on working.”

  Thatcher nodded as if he understood what she was talking about.

  “Cody mumbled something about being a complete idiot. I don’t know if he’s asleep or passed out. This job might have been too much for him just out of the hospital. I decided to just let him sleep.”

  Thatch
er smiled. He knew what was wrong with Cody, and the ranger was right; he was an idiot, at least when it came to women. Thatcher knew the signs. A guy was walking along with a girl thinking they were friends, then all at once he noticed she was a woman. She was different from him, and from that moment nothing was ever quite the same.

  Thatcher would have thought Cody would have noticed it earlier, but maybe he was a slow learner, or maybe he forgot what his bride looked like when he tumbled into the canyon.

  “You got any advice, kid?”

  “Yeah,” Thatcher said. “In two hours, wake him up with a kiss. Not a little kiss but a full out, ride ’em cowboy kiss. He’s got Sleeping Beauty Fever. It’s rare but happens after a hospital stay. Tim O’Grady told me about it.” If this plan backfired, he wanted Tim to share the blame. “You’ve got to wake up the nerves in the body all over again. Hold him down while you do so he don’t hurt himself jumping around on that broken leg.”

  She looked skeptical.

  “What’s the worst thing that can happen? He’ll yell at you. He’s already doing that. You want him to go back to being the nice guy he might have been. You got to do a Sleeping Beauty treatment on him.”

  Tess gave in. “I’ll try, but I want it on the record that I think you’re full of bull.”

  “Yeah.” He tried to look innocent. “Just me and the snake over there.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  BY MIDAFTERNOON DAN found himself missing the singer. No, correction, he was missing his lover. How strange to have Brandi in his life and to think about her that way. He also realized she thought of him in the same way. It made him feel more alive, like he’d been walking through a world in black and white and suddenly discovered there was color. She’d somehow filled in the gaps between every other thought.

  What they’d done, meeting and deciding to sleep together before they spent hours talking, was foreign to him, but it felt right. All of it, from the first surprise kiss before they’d even had lunch to waking up with her in his arms.

  He had a job to do. Crimes were popping up like bindweed. Yet her memory drifted in his thoughts like smoke, and he wouldn’t push it away. He didn’t even try.

  He’d searched for the little girl’s mother and waited around the office, hoping someone would report that she’d disappeared. Nothing. Whoever the child belonged to was not looking for her or worried about her.

  Once, out of boredom, he typed Brandi Malone into his computer. A dozen sites came up about where she’d performed over the past year, and her reviews were unbelievably good. One critic wrote she was a bright, rising star in the songwriting world and on stage. There was even a short article about why someone with her talent would insist on performing in small, out of the way places when she’d easily pack a venue in Nashville.

  Dan found nothing personal about her. Brandi was a ghost behind the singer.

  Then Dan remembered that she’d mentioned her father named her after the queen of England, and her mother always insisted they have tea at bedtime.

  Hesitantly, he typed in Elizabeth Malone. A dozen people with that name came up. One by one he eliminated all but one name. An Elizabeth A. Malone in Wyoming.

  Three simple links. One, Elizabeth A. Malone graduated from high school in 1999. She’d been valedictorian, and the article commented that she had not shown up at graduation.

  Dan smiled at Brandi’s high-school picture. She’d been a smart, wild child. That didn’t surprise him.

  Second article was an obituary from 2006 about a Jonathon Day Malone who died at sixty-one, leaving his ranch in the hands of his four children. Two sons and two daughters. One named Doris Malone Black, the other Elizabeth Malone.

  Dan studied the screen. Brandi had inherited a ranch, and it had to be big if the paper did an article about the Malone spread in the same edition they carried the obit. She’d either never married or had gone back to her maiden name after a divorce. If he were guessing, he’d say never married. Brandi didn’t seem the type to want or need a ring.

  The third article was also an obit. Short, no long paragraphs. One Evelynn Day Malone, age nine, passed away at St. Jude Children’s Hospital after a long fight with leukemia. The only relative listed was Elizabeth A. Malone. No grandparents. No aunts and uncles. No father.

  Dan leaned back in his chair and let his logical mind put what wasn’t said together. No husband or father in the picture. No family had been with Brandi when her child died; if they had, she would have listed them. And she must have loved her father if she named her child after him.

  Brandi, his beautiful, wild Brandi had lost a child a little over a year ago. She wasn’t living the wild life, running free—she was simply running.

  He closed his eyes and remembered how she’d looked holding the little girl he’d found. This woman who always smiled when she saw him, who sang like an angel, who was his definition of sexy, was far more complicated than he’d thought.

  Maybe it wasn’t him, but her who needed this no-holds-barred, crazy encounter they were trying to have. She hadn’t mentioned anything about her life back in Wyoming, and Dan could come to only one conclusion. She didn’t want him to know.

  He could pretend he knew nothing about her if that’s how she wanted it, but the woman who’d said she’d be moving on soon was slowly seeping into his soul.

  Thirty minutes later, he walked into the kitchen of the Franklin B and B and found Brandi sitting alone by the window with a pot of tea in front of her. The winter scene outside framed her like a fine painting. Her hands were wrapped about a cup, but she wasn’t drinking. She was silently crying.

  He forgot about the only in private rule and almost knocked a dining chair over to get to her. Gently, he pulled her to her feet and wrapped his arms around her. She came to him easy like a trusted friend or a longtime lover.

  For a while, they just held on to each other. She felt so right with her head resting on his shoulder and her arms wrapped about his neck so tightly he could almost believe she didn’t ever want to let go.

  “You all right, pretty lady?” He kissed her cheek.

  “I’d like to file a crime in progress report, Officer,” she whispered. “I’m planning to murder whoever hurt that child upstairs. I’m going to kill them slowly, then follow them into hell and kill them again.”

  He pushed her dark curls away from her face. “I know how you feel. I’ve been out all day collecting information. I’ll find them. They are not locals, or Thatcher would have seen them around. I’m guessing they are working one of the construction sites, if they are working at all.” He kissed her forehead and breathed her in as if she were the air he needed to survive.

  “How is our little fighter upstairs?” he whispered in her ear, wishing he had other words to say.

  “The nurse came by about one. We tried to get her to eat, but she’d only take a small bite. She’s sleeping now. I think the medicine on her wounds has eased her pain enough to make sleep possible. Both the sisters are sitting with her. Rose was singing to her when I came down for tea. I think the child understands when I’m talking to her, but she hasn’t said a word.”

  He held her loosely in the circle of his arms when she backed away. “What’s wrong?”

  Shaking her head, she tried to get closer. “Hugging you with your uniform on is like cuddling with a porcupine.”

  “Sorry, I’ll take it off next time we’re alone, I promise. Where’s all the other guests staying here?” he whispered as he finally took the time to look around. He hadn’t planned to touch her at all on this visit, but now he had, he couldn’t seem to let go.

  “They’re all gone. The groom left early. He got a call from his bride. She said she’s changed her mind about the marriage, but can she keep the ring. The couple studying the canyon said they’d come back in spring. Now the roads are clear, the others dec
ided to move on. The sisters tell me there will be more guests coming the day after Thanksgiving, but it should be quiet for a while.”

  He didn’t say what he was thinking. He knew she could read his mind by now. For one night they’d made love, and he’d held her in his sleep. One night, yet he felt changed inside.

  She smiled up at him and took his hand. Without a word, they walked silently to a door at the back of the kitchen.

  “The sisters showed me this room they keep for a professor who visits his son in town a few times a year. No one ever uses it but him.” She pulled Dan into a shadowy study and didn’t bother to turn on the lights.

  The walls were lined with bookshelves except for one bay window.

  Dan knew the guest at the B and B that she was talking about. Yancy Grey’s father. The sisters had both loved him when they were teenagers. Dan wouldn’t be surprised if they still did. He must be very fond of them, too, because he always stayed with them, even though Yancy had plenty of room at his newly remodeled place.

  Love stories ran long and deep in this town, but Dan knew he’d never have a lifetime with Brandi. She’d told him from the first that she’d be moving on. He’d said all he wanted was a good time, but he was starting to realize that when she left he’d miss her. Maybe what he really needed was far more than a few wild nights, or even weeks.

  She closed the door to the hideaway study. Reaching around him, she turned the silver key left in the lock. “We’re alone for a moment, and we’re locked in.”

  He didn’t waste time talking. Dan pushed her against a bookshelf and kissed her in a rush.

  “Slow down.” Her words tickled across his lips before she pulled away. Lifting her cell from her back pocket, she sat it on the shelf. “I told the sisters to text me if our patient wakes. Until then, I’m all yours.” She winked. “Do with me what you like.”