by Cindy Myers
Not bothering to change clothes, she’d dropped her dust rag and driven straight to the Last Dollar. That book had to be somewhere in Jake’s belongings; she’d never forgive herself if she forfeited her best chance to get it back.
The street around the café was crowded with cars, so Cassie had to double-park in front of the saloon next door, beside a black SUV with Connecticut plates. She could hear the hum of conversation from the restaurant as she approached and had to squeeze past a trio of smokers on the front porch to get inside.
As Danielle had promised, Cassie had no trouble picking Jake’s daughter from the crowd. She sat at a table near the front with Lucille and Reggie and Katya, her hair a shade darker than Jake’s, without the smattering of gray. Even without the hair, there was something about the tilt of her head that was so familiar Cassie felt a pull at her heart.
Pushing sentimentality aside, she marched across the room. “Maggie Murphy,” she called, her voice ringing above the hum of conversation.
The woman turned wide eyes to her. Jake’s eyes, the same clear blue. “It’s Maggie Stevens, actually,” she said. “Murphy was my maiden name.”
“Now, Cassie—” Reggie half rose from his chair, but Katya put a restraining hand on his arm.
“Hello, Cassie,” Katya said pleasantly. “Maggie, this is Cassie Wynock, the town librarian.”
“It’s good to meet you,” Maggie said carefully, her gaze shifting between Cassie and Reggie. Worry lines furrowed the lawyer’s forehead as he stared at the older woman, as if he expected trouble.
“You’re staying in Jacob Murphy’s cabin,” Cassie said. It was a statement, not a question.
“Yes.”
Cassie took a deep breath, aware that conversation had died around her, every eye fixed on her. Were they wondering why she was here? Did they think she was here because she mourned Jacob Murphy? Because she still carried a torch for him? “While going through your late father’s belongings, have you come across a book that is marked as the property of the Eureka County Library?” she asked, her voice steady. She wanted everyone in the room to hear she’d come about the book, not about the man who stole it.
“I can’t say that I’ve examined every book on my father’s shelves,” Maggie said. “Does this one have a name?”
“The name of the book is History of the Mining Regions of Eureka, Colorado, and the Surrounding Territory by the Reverend A. J. Kirkland. It’s one of the oldest and rarest books in our collection.”
“Is the book valuable?” Maggie asked.
What did that matter? Was she thinking she could take it back to wherever she was from and sell it? “A book’s value is not necessarily measured in dollars,” Cassie said, “but in the information that it conveys or the beauty of its prose.”
Someone off to the side snickered. Cassie sent a withering look in that direction, but she couldn’t be sure of the culprit.
“What makes you think my father had this book?” Maggie asked.
“Because he was the last person to check it out.”
“When was that?”
Was the woman deliberately baiting her? She looked innocent enough, her face calm, a little weary even. “Jacob Murphy checked out that book on August 7, 2006,” Cassie said, “and thereafter ignored repeated requests for its return. When you locate the book, I trust you will return it immediately. If you do so, we will consider waiving the accompanying fine.”
Maggie arched one pale brow. “Any fine was my father’s responsibility, not mine,” she said.
“If you’re his heir, you have a responsibility to settle the debts of his estate, and this is one of them.” Honestly, did the woman have no sense of justice?
“Cassie, you can’t hold Maggie responsible for a book she doesn’t have,” Reggie said. “Now, why don’t you find a seat. I think the service is about to start.”
As if on cue, Danielle struck up a melodic ringing with a spoon against the side of a water glass. “I want to thank you all for coming out tonight to honor the memory of Jacob Murphy,” she said.
Cassie whirled and pushed her way toward the door. She had no interest in honoring Jacob Murphy. And no interest in being mocked by his daughter or his friends. They thought she was crazy for being so concerned about a book, but there was more to it than the mere volume. Jacob had stolen an important artifact from the county, and a Wynock family heirloom, but worse still, in walking off with that volume, he’d stolen Cassie’s pride. She’d do whatever she could to reclaim it, and to destroy yet another bit of evidence of her folly with a man who didn’t deserve to wipe her boots.
Chapter 8
Maggie watched the strange gray woman hurry out the door, then forced her attention to Danielle, who stood beside Jacob’s portrait. “We have a very special guest with us tonight,” Danielle was saying. “We want to welcome Murph’s daughter, Maggie Stevens.”
A smattering of applause greeted these words. Maggie flushed and offered a weak smile. Lucille took her hand and squeezed it, a gesture that made Maggie feel stronger.
“I thought we’d start by asking our mayor to say a few words,” Danielle said.
Maggie started as the chair beside her scraped back and Lucille stood. “Jacob Murphy was a valuable member of our community,” she said. “He had strong opinions that didn’t make him popular with everyone. But he was definitely a man who stood up for what he believed in. He told me once if people were too afraid to speak up to right a wrong, terrible things could happen, so Murph always spoke up. And if you needed help, he was always there to help you.”
Heads nodded around the room and Maggie heard murmurs of “That’s right,” and “That was Murph.”
“I hope Murph is looking down on us all right now,” Lucille continued. “I think he’d be especially happy to see Maggie here, in the place he loved so much.”
Maggie blinked back tears and swallowed hard. Lucille sat and patted her hand again, and a lanky man with a patch over his right eye unfolded from his chair. “I was thinking today about what I wanted to say about Murph,” he said. “I remember the first time I ever met him was when we competed against each other at Hard Rock Days. I’d won the competition the year before and I was the favorite to win again, when up steps this big redhead.”
At Maggie’s puzzled look, Lucille leaned over and whispered, “It’s an annual celebration of the area’s mining history. Men compete in things like drilling rock and swinging sledgehammers.”
“. . . said he was going to beat me and I swore to myself that wasn’t going to happen. Sure enough, we set out neck and neck. He even fell behind a little, and I pushed harder, sure I’d bested him. I saw my mistake too late. I’d come on in such a rush, I’d burned up by the time we got to the end. Old Murph put on the steam and beat me, fair and square. He took home the trophy that year.”
“And two years after that,” someone added.
“Then he stopped entering,” a woman offered. “I always wondered why he did that.”
“I always figured it was because he knew he didn’t have anything left to prove,” Bob said. “Murphy liked to make a point, but once it was made, he moved on.”
The stories continued: of Murph building Janelle and Danielle’s chicken house, of skiing down Mount Garnet on a dare, of climbing Mount Winston to string a clothesline in front of an old miner’s shack and hanging a pair of red long-handle underwear, a yellow flannel shirt, and blue jeans where they’d be visible to tourists on the highway below. “For the next year people would come into the café and ask who lived in that house way up near the top of Mount Winston,” Danielle said. “We took turns making up outrageous stories about the Hermit of Mount Winston.”
“The next summer Murph made the climb again and added a pair of ladies’ bloomers and a calico dress to the clothesline,” Janelle said. “He decided the hermit had gotten married.”
Maggie listened to the stories, piecing together a picture of an outrageous, profane, generous, and courageous man—the
kind of man she would have liked to have known. Bob told his story about Murph almost killing him, but it was presented as almost a badge of honor, as if he’d been singled out for special attention by the town’s hero.
“He was mighty stubborn,” someone said.
“If he didn’t believe something was right, you can be sure you’d hear about it,” said another.
When the talk died down, Janelle handed around plastic cups and Danielle poured everyone present a shot of Irish whiskey from a bottle she carried from person to person. “Let’s drink a toast to the memory of Jacob Murphy,” she said. “I hope he was in heaven a half an hour before the devil knew he was dead.”
“Knowing old Murph, he’s down there giving the devil a run for his money,” Bob said.
Maggie cautiously sipped the whiskey. She wasn’t ordinarily much of a drinker, and already she was thinking about the drive up the mountain in the dark. She pushed her cup toward Reggie. “You can have mine if you want it,” she said.
“Why, thank you.” He reached for the glass, but before he could take hold of it, the door to the café flew open.
“Big Mama’s back!” shouted a boy of about sixteen who carried a skateboard tucked under one arm.
The buzz of conversation increased. As organized as any lifeboat drill, people began lining up by the kitchen. Janelle and Danielle handed pots, pans, and utensils over the counter of the pass-through. Someone shoved a saucepan and a wooden spoon into Maggie’s hands. “What is this for?” she asked. “Who is Big Mama?”
“Big Mama’s a big sow bear,” Lucille said as she pulled Maggie toward the door. “She likes to raid the Dumpster behind the restaurant. Janelle and Danielle keep replacing the locks, but she manages to break them all.”
“But what does that have to do with all these pots and pans?” Maggie asked.
“Bang on the pot with the spoon. The idea is to make so much noise she and her cubs won’t want to come back.”
They were outside now, and Lucille had to shout to be heard over the din of cookware and cutlery. Maggie stared at a fat black bear who stood beside a Dumpster, glaring at them like a nearsighted matron. Behind her, two rounded black shapes emerged from the shadows—cubs, peering from behind their mother at the crowd of noisy creatures who had descended upon them.
“Is she dangerous?” Maggie asked. “Will she attack?” The only thing she knew about bears were stories she’d read in Reader’s Digest of campers who survived having their scalps ripped open by marauding grizzlies.
“Only to defend herself or her cubs,” Lucille said.
“Then why are we trying to scare her away?”
“The Department of Wildlife has already tagged Big Mama once. If they catch her a second time, they’ll shoot her.”
“Shoot her? But—aren’t bears protected or something?”
“A bear that thinks of people as a source of food will end up in trouble sooner or later. We’re hoping we can reform Big Mama and her babies before it’s too late.”
Tonight, at least, the tactic was working. With a last, disgusted glance at the noisy onlookers, Big Mama ushered her brood off into the darkness, loping down the street at a surprisingly swift pace.
The crowd filed back into the café and their noisemakers were returned to the kitchen. Maggie dropped into a chair and studied the glass of whiskey still before her. She wasn’t drunk, so she hadn’t imagined that a café full of people had banded together to drive away a bear—not because the bear was a danger to them, but to protect her, in a way, from themselves.
The same people who lauded her father, while readily admitting his faults. No wonder her father had chosen to settle here—where his dark side was welcomed along with the light. Where being different was something to be celebrated, not suppressed.
She felt embraced by them, too, at home in a way she had not felt since Carter announced he was leaving and turned her whole world topsy-turvy. “Welcome to a gang bang, Eureka style.” Jameso spoke from behind her chair.
Maggie tilted her head to look up at him. “Thank you for hanging my curtain rod,” she said. “It looks good.”
“You’re welcome. I’m thinking of adding to my business card: Jameso’s Odd Jobs.”
“What kind of a name is Jameso?” she asked.
“It’s Jameson,” he said. “My handwriting’s not that great and when I hired on at the ski resort, someone in the office misread my application as Jameso, so that’s what they ordered for my name tag. I decided I kind of liked it.”
Danielle came to stand beside Maggie. “It was a good evening, wasn’t it?” she said. “Everybody had good stories to tell about Murph.”
“Thank you for doing this,” Maggie said. “I learned a lot about my father I might not have otherwise known.”
“Reg said you were pretty little when he and your mom split up,” Danielle said.
“I was only a few days old, so I really have no memory of him at all.”
“Still, you probably know things we don’t,” she said. “He never talked about his life before he came to Eureka.”
“I know he was in Vietnam,” Maggie said. “And something happened there that changed him. That’s what my mother said, but how could war not change a person?”
“Vietnam was one thing he refused to talk about,” Jameso said. “One year someone asked him if he’d march in a Veteran’s Day parade and he went off on a rant about how we had no business celebrating something like that.”
“When the U.S. declared war on Iraq, Murph was so upset,” Danielle said. “He left town and was gone for over a week.”
“Where did he go?” Maggie asked.
“He called them camping trips,” Jameso said. “He’d buy a bunch of booze and go off in the mountains and stay drunk until he got it out of his system.”
“Did he do that kind of thing often?” Maggie asked.
“Once or twice a year,” Jameso said.
What kind of pain would drive a man to take such drastic measures to try to kill it?
“I don’t want to give you the wrong impression,” Jameso said. “He wasn’t a drunk. He just had things that upset him and had his own way of handling them.”
“Like beating up Bob to make a point.” Maggie frowned.
Jameso shrugged. “Murphy wasn’t into talking to people when he could use his fists. He didn’t let his temper get out of hand very often, but when he lost control, it could be bad,” Jameso said. “I think that’s why he went off in the mountains to do his drinking, so no one else would be around to suffer the consequences.”
“And after a few days or a week, he’d show up again all right?” Maggie asked.
“Sometimes I’d go looking for him,” Jameso said. “To tell you the truth, I half expected to find him dead out there at one of his camps some day, not in his own front yard at a time when he’d been sober for months.”
“But he was a good man.” Danielle slid into a chair across from Maggie and Jameso. “He had his troubles,” she said. “But if his friends needed help, he would do anything for them.”
His friends, but not his family, Maggie thought. She stood. “I’d better go. Thank you again for tonight.”
“You okay making the drive up there in the dark?” Jameso asked.
“That’s what headlights are for,” she said, annoyed at his sudden solicitude. What did he care how she felt about the drive?
“I should come up someday soon and show you how to check the water lines,” he said. “They can freeze up there all the way into July.”
What was with this guy? He’d appointed himself her father’s caretaker; now he seemed determined to take the same role with her. “If I need your help, I’ll ask for it,” she said. “You don’t have to keep checking on me like I’m some idiot child who might fall down a well or forget to eat if you don’t watch over me.”
“Oh.” Danielle’s face clouded. “I’m sure Jameso didn’t mean—”
“Maggie’s right.” Jameso’s express
ion hardened. “I’m sure she can look after herself. After all, Houston isn’t all that different from Eureka.” He nodded. “Good night, ladies.”
“Don’t mind Jameso,” Danielle said when he was gone. “He was probably closer to Murphy than anyone. His death hit him hard.”
“They seem to have had an odd relationship,” Maggie said, remembering Jameso’s refusal to characterize their interactions as friendship.
“I think the two of them were a lot alike,” Danielle said. “Jameso doesn’t go on wild binges or beat people up, but there’s a lot of emotion under the surface, like maybe he would do that stuff under different circumstances. I think he and Murphy understood each other, and that made things difficult between them sometimes.” She made a face. “Then again, they were two guys; you know how weird they can be when it comes to emotional stuff.”
Right. Though Maggie wasn’t sure women handled the “emotional stuff” any better. If she’d punched Carter in the face when he told her he wanted a divorce, would it have made him think twice about leaving her? Would it at least have made her feel better?
When Lucille arrived home after Jake’s memorial service, Olivia’s SUV was no longer parked in the alley behind the house, and the house itself was dark and quiet. Lucille’s heart sank as she stood in the shadow-filled kitchen and listened to the steady tick of the clock in the hall and the creak of the old house settling—sounds of emptiness. Her heart felt just as empty. Couldn’t Olivia stand to be with her even twenty-four hours?
“Ma’am? Why are you standing here in the dark?”
Lucille started at the voice, and Lucas moved into the room, his round, worried face illuminated by the night light on the stove. Relief at the sight of him made Lucille feel almost giddy, and her hand shook as she leaned over and switched on the overhead light. “Lucas, I’m your grandmother,” she said. “You can call me Grandma.”