by Kylie Brant
“Really?” Her elbow caught his ribs with a sharp jab, bringing a satisfying wince to his face. He withdrew his arm hurriedly. “I’ve only been here days and already I feel I know you far too well.”
Tanner chortled, and beckoned for a waitress. “Admit it, pal,” he said to Cage. “She’s too quick for us.” Looking at Zoey he asked, “I’ll bet your mama sleeps well at night, assured you’re more than a match for any man you happen to meet.”
She looked at him silently for a moment, an unexpected spasm seizing her chest. Despite the years that had passed since her mother’s death, the sense of loss was never far away. It could sneak up sometimes—an emotional ambush. Aware that the two men were watching her closely, she deliberately smoothed her expression. “My mother died years ago. But I’m certain she’d be relieved to know that I can take care of myself.”
Her recovery didn’t fool the two men. Tanner reached over awkwardly and patted her hand. “Aw, damn. We’re sure sorry about your loss. Cage here lost his mama less than a year ago, and his daddy the year before that. My own father dropped dead of a heart attack at his desk last January. We know what it is to grieve. I sure didn’t mean to bring up sad memories.”
Because the look he threw in Cage’s direction was slightly panicked, Zoey loosened up enough to smile faintly. “The memories aren’t sad, it’s just the living without our loved ones that’s tough.”
“That’s a fact,” Cage responded. There was a trace of sorrow in his eyes and his voice was quiet.
Becky Jane strolled up to their booth, putting an extra sway in her hips for the benefit of the two men. “What can I get for you?”
“Nothing for me,” Zoey replied. “Just the check.”
Becky obligingly pulled the pad from her pocket and scribbled the price. When she ripped off the page and handed it to Zoey, Cage grabbed it.
“I’ll take care of this.” He winked at Zoey. “I ate more of it than you did, anyway.”
The tinge of sympathy she’d felt for him just a moment ago vanished. She shrugged, unwilling to get into a tussle over the bill. “That’s right, you did. Let me out, will you?” He obligingly slid from the booth.
Tanner smiled charmingly. “Miss Prescott. It’s always a pleasure.”
“It is, indeed,” Cage murmured.
With one last long look, she left the two men and walked out of the diner.
The sun was shining brightly overhead. It was hot enough to wilt her a little, even walking the short distance to her car. Surely no one around here ever got used to this brutal heat. She felt as though she was dashing from one air-conditioned place to another.
“You’re that writer gal, ain’t ya?”
Her attention focused on getting into her car as quickly as possible, she’d missed the figure lingering on the steps of the diner. A woman, she determined, although she was dressed in a man’s work shirt, heavy boots and jeans. Her hair was close-cropped and it was a sure guess that she didn’t frequent the Beauty Mark for occasional stylings. She looked as weathered and capable as the burly farmer in the diner. She came down the steps and crossed to Zoey with a quickness that was belied by her girth.
“Yes, I’m Zoey Prescott.”
“Fern Sykes.” Zoey’s hand was grabbed in a callused palm and shaken firmly. “I seen ya around the town. Heard you was interested in that murder we had.”
“I had questions, yes.”
The woman’s blue eyes, made brighter by the dark tan of her skin, fixed her with a direct look. “As you should have. So should everyone in this parish. Everyone with any sense, that is.”
Her interest piqued, Zoey said, “The sheriff doesn’t seem to think there’s any reason for the people to get overly panicked.”
The woman snorted. “He would if he knew what I know.”
Intrigued, Zoey took a step closer. “And just what is that?”
Tossing a quick look over her shoulder, Fern lowered her voice. “I know who killed that poor girl a few days ago. And I’ve got me a pretty good idea why it happened.”
Chapter 4
Zoey looked around the cabin with interest. She’d never seen such a rustic setting. The walls were split logs, still rough, despite their age. The floor beneath her was unvarnished pine, the furnishings as simple as the rest of the dwelling. Set well back from the road, with trees surrounding it, the cabin blended with nature.
Fern set a mug in front of her and sat down at the table across from her. “Drink it,” she ordered brusquely. “It’s tea I brew myself. Good for just about anything that ails you.”
As she took a tentative sip, Zoey’s eyes widened in surprise. It was surprisingly good. “What’s in it?”
“Natural ingredients, all homegrown.” The woman drank from her own mug, drained the contents, and poured some more from the pitcher she’d put on the table. “Had someone interested in buying the recipe once. That’d be back in the seventies. A man was gonna brew it up by the barrel, put it in fancy bottles and have it on store shelves all over the state.”
Zoey lifted the mug to her lips, took a healthy swallow. “What happened?”
Fern lifted a hand. “Oh, my husband was in poor health by then. We just didn’t have time to think about it. We lived here together from the time of our marriage till his death. Built the place ourselves.”
When she fell silent, Zoey prompted, “You said you had an idea about the murder.”
“I know what I said,” the older woman replied testily. “I’m not senile yet.” She aimed a fierce stare at Zoey. “You in a hurry or something?”
Zoey leaned back in her chair and shook her head. “Not really.”
“Good.” Fern reached over and poured more tea into Zoey’s mug. “Never could abide folks rushing around like their house was on fire. And what I have to tell you takes some leading up to, and I don’t like being pushed.”
Hiding a smile, Zoey drank from the mug and prepared for a lengthy afternoon. Whether or not Fern Sykes could, in fact, shed any real light on the murder, she was convinced that the next few hours would be entertaining.
“This is an old parish,” the woman began. “Families here can date their ancestors back to the settlers in the region. The Beauchamps, DuPreys and Gauthiers were the first to settle around these parts. Gives those families today something to be proud of, seeing as how their folks were the founding fathers and all. Not that the DuPreys have anything to show for it these days. But Jean-Paul Beauchamp, the old scoundrel, he owned the bank in town, passed down to him from his daddy, and his granddaddy before him. That’s how Tanner ended up with it. As for the Gauthiers, well, they own just about everything else that’s worth owning in St. Augustine parish.”
The news should have come as no surprise. The home Cage lived in was pure Old South, needing only women in antebellum skirts and men in frock coats to complete its historic image. He didn’t act like a man used to money and the power it wielded. But she’d learned only too painfully that she was no judge of what was in a man’s heart.
Fern’s voice went on, wrapping Zoey in a cocoon of times past. Zoey drank silently from her mug, refilling it as the older woman spun tales of times more than a century ago, of history being made in Charity, Louisiana. And, as ordered, she listened silently—until a familiar name startled an exclamation from her lips.
“‘Rutherford’?”
Fern merely nodded, paused to drink from her own mug. “Oh, sure, the Rutherfords go almost as far back in this parish as the Gauthiers. The way I heard it, first man in St. Augustine parish to be hung as a horse thief was Thaddeus Rutherford.” She squinted, looked at the ceiling. “He’d have been great-granddaddy of this no-account bunch we have now, I think. Hard to keep the clan straight, but they’re all related, one way or t’other.”
Intrigued, Zoey leaned forward. “Cage…Sheriff Gauthier seemed to think some people by that name were responsible for shooting at his house last night.”
“No doubt they were. The Rutherfords are noted for
not having a lick of sense between them. That and for being meaner than cornered rats.” She reached for the pitcher and, finding it empty, went to the refrigerator for another. Ignoring Zoey’s protest, she refilled both mugs.
“Tell me about it,” Zoey invited. Her tongue felt thick, so she soothed it with another drink of tea.
Satisfied that she had Zoey’s full interest, Fern leaned back in her chair. “Well, we ain’t had but one murder in the history of the parish. Until this last one, that is.”
“Cage said this latest murder probably didn’t happen where the body was found.”
Fern glared at the interruption, and Zoey sat back meekly. As the woman had warned, she didn’t like to be rushed. The story would be told, but only in her own time, in her own way. “It was the summer of ’60. Carl Rutherford had a real nasty way about him, was known to take a hand to his wife on a pretty regular occasion when he was liquored up, which is to say fairly often. Vella, that was his wife, she learnt real quick to dodge his fists when she could and keep her mouth closed most other times.” Fern sipped her tea and her eyes took on a faraway look. “Never could figure what made a woman take that kind of treatment from a man. Or what kind of man would dish it out, for that matter.”
She came back to the present and shook her head. “Makes no never mind, at any rate. Some say that Vella had finally had enough, that she was fixing to run off where the old man would never find her again. Others claim she’d taken up with a door-to-door salesman. But there’s no disputing the facts. Old man Rutherford came home one night earlier than expected and found her packing. Proceeded to knock her around, as was his custom. No one knows what she said to him, but from all accounts he went a little crazy. Pulled his rifle off the rack and shot her dead, right there in the kitchen.”
Maybe it was a tribute to the woman’s storytelling abilities, but Zoey felt the horror of the act wash over her, as if the murder had happened in the present, rather than before her birth. “What happened?”
“Oh, it was a while before what he done came to light. He tried to bury her body in the woods, and act like she was still at home, feeling poorly. She hadn’t gone out much anyway—he’d made sure of that. No telling how long his lies would have worked, if her sister hadn’t started making a fuss about not being able to see her. The law got involved, and eventually the whole story came out.” Her blue eyes bright, Fern leaned forward. “You might find it interesting to know that the judge who sentenced Rutherford to life in prison was the sheriff’s granddaddy.”
Zoey assimilated that bit of news. History in Charity, it appeared, was a closely woven chain, with past and present intricately linked. She supposed that was common in small towns. She’d yet to see the significance of the woman’s fascinating bits of history, but she didn’t feel as if the afternoon had been wasted. She was feeling entirely too relaxed for that to be said.
She chose her words carefully. “Well, the story’s interesting, but I can’t see what it has to do with this last murder.”
“It has everything to do with it,” Fern snapped. “The way I hear it, the sheriff has a whole bunch of Rutherfords locked up right now, all but the one that most needs to be there. Donny Ray’s the meanest of the lot, and that’s not the only way he takes after his Great-uncle Carl. He has a habit of using his fists on Stacy, that wife of his. Everyone in town knows it.”
Zoey rubbed at a point in the center of her forehead, where a headache was blooming. “Have you taken your concerns to the sheriff?”
Snorting, Fern reached for her mug. “Shoot, folks don’t listen to an old woman’s ramblings. Didn’t do me no good when I told the law what happened to cause my husband’s death.”
Because it gave her a reason not to respond, Zoey grasped her mug tightly in both hands and drank. She knew, somewhere in the distant corners of her mind, that the connection the older woman was trying to make lacked reason. But somehow, right now it was difficult to summon logic. Her thought processes seemed off-kilter—pleasantly so.
Fern began to speak again, and Zoey focused on her mouth as it formed each word. Her voice seemed farther away, although the woman hadn’t moved. She frowned. How curious. Perhaps it was this slight buzzing in her head that made it harder to hear Fern. She propped both elbows on the table and rested her chin on her entwined fingers. The woman’s face drifted in and out of focus like a computer-generated three-dimensional image.
“’Course, folks said my Louis had some sickness. But I know what I know. Wasn’t nothing wrong with the man before Cain Rutherford fixed him with the evil eye over at the tavern. He started feeling poorly that week, and never was the same after that. Less than a year later, he was dead.”
A vicious blade of sunlight probed beneath Zoey’s eyelids and seared her eyes. She groaned, awakening by slow, torturous increments. With each level of awareness came a gradual increase of nauseating sickness, until she lay there, fully awake and praying for a return to unconsciousness—preferably a permanent one.
A raucous chorus of Black & Decker power tools was racketing in her head; her temples thudded painfully in rhythm with the cacophony. Her body felt leaden, immobile. Her first attempt to lift her head an inch from the pillow raised the decibel of pounding to such an excruciating crescendo, she quickly lay still again.
She knew in that moment what it was to pray for death. For several minutes she lay motionless, trying to determine whether the massive headache or her heaving stomach was more likely to result in her immediate demise.
Slowly, carefully, she turned her head, trying and failing to avoid provoking the rising tide of nausea. Upon completion of the single act, she rested against the pillow again. Because it seemed to be a relatively pain-free action, she opened her gritty eyes.
From this position she could observe the reason she was unable to move. A heavy arm slung across her waist held her fixed in place. She slid her eyelids shut, relieved that some weird temporary paralysis wasn’t to blame. It was only a man’s arm.
Her eyes flew open again.
A man.
With a loud shriek, she sat upright in bed and kicked with all her might at the immobile figure next to her, sending him into an ignominious heap on the floor. For the next few seconds the hammering in her temples and churning sickness in her stomach were secondary. She crouched on the bed, scrabbling to reach the lamp on the nearby table. Yanking its cord free, she held the lamp over her head threateningly.
Cage looked up from his position on the floor, and his eyes widened. As he raised a hand to ward off her action, his voice was low and soothing: “Now, honey, if you throw that, someone’s gonna get hurt.”
“You’re damn right.” Her tone was grim as she hefted the lamp for better aim. “And I know who.”
If he hadn’t been watching so closely, he might not have ducked in time. As it was, the lamp missed his head by only a fraction of an inch and crashed to the floor. Discretion, he’d always believed, should never be mistaken for cowardice. He scrambled awkwardly backward until he was out of throwing range, he hoped. Only then did he rise. His tone reproachful he said, “Now why’d you want to go and do that? There’s no reason for both of us to have a headache.”
The furious screech she released then seemed hardly human. He would have smiled if he didn’t realize just how dangerous a woman in a temper could be. “For future reference, I should tell you that as a wake-up call, I prefer a kiss to a scream most mornings.”
Pure evil beamed out of her incredible eyes—eyes that looked more than a little bloodshot this morning. She leaped from the bed and headed toward the dresser. He figured she was after the heavy crystal bowl she had sitting on top of it. It could, he estimated, do a fair amount of damage if hurled with the proper force and trajectory.
Before she got two steps, her gaze dropped to her bare legs and her eyes went wide in horror. Diving back into the bed with a motion that had to have set her head to pounding, she frantically reached for the covers and drew them up. Her hands fisted so t
ightly, the knuckles showed white. Voice aghast, she accused, “You…undressed me!”
In an effort at accuracy, he felt obliged to point out, “I only slipped off your shorts.”
“And slept in my bed!”
“Actually, I was on your bed.”
Her teeth ground so violently her jaw ached. “Thank you for that illuminating clarification.”
Helpfully, he added, “You were in no condition to undress yourself last night, remember?”
She opened her mouth to make a scathing retort, and then paused. Surely it was only due to the harsh clamoring in her head, but she didn’t remember. Didn’t remember much of anything, as a matter of fact.
“You don’t recall?” He shook his head, and pulled his shirttails out of his pants. It was past time for a shower. Sleeping in his clothes never failed to make him feel grungy. “I’m not surprised. You were wasted.”
Her eyes went even wider. “I most certainly was not!” Memory, a blessed slice of it, returned. “All I had was tea. Fern Sykes served me tea.”
He unfastened his watch and slipped it into his pocket. “Yeah, those tea hangovers are hell, aren’t they? Honey, that ‘tea’ Fern concocts is almost pure alcohol.”
She wished she could dispute it. She really did. But her pounding head and rolling stomach were testament to the truth of his words. “Well, how was I to know? She said it was herbs and, and…” She tried to recall just what Fern had said. “She said it was homemade.”
He was too wise to smile at that. “I’m sure it is.”
Shoving the hair back from her face, she glowered at him. “Well, you’re the sheriff around here. Are you saying you let people operate stills in the parish?”
Wounded, he held up his hands. “Is that how you show your gratitude for my help? By attacking me?”
Her voice was strangled. “You expect me to thank you? Your nocturnal assistance was just the latest in the most egregious liberties you have taken with me since we met!”