by B. J Daniels
She gave him her best everything-is-all-right smile. He didn’t look as if it fooled him, but then their cook came in the back door singing at the top of her lungs, and Lillie hurried to see what trouble her father had gotten into in the bar.
* * *
FLINT DROPPED HARP off at the sheriff’s department. But as the deputy got out of the patrol SUV, the sheriff told him, “If you happen by the mayor’s office today and your father calls me later to ask me how you got a black eye, I’m going to tell him the truth.”
“It’s my word against your crazy old man’s,” Harp said, scowling.
“Which do you think your father is going to believe? That not-quite-seventy-year-old Ely Cahill, drunk on his ass, got you, a trained deputy, before you could cuff him? Or that you were giving him a hard time, enjoying making fun of him, and he dropped you with one punch? Either way, I got the whole story from some of the patrons who were watching from the bar window. If you don’t believe it, they took videos with their phones.”
Harp clamped his mouth shut. “Is that all?”
“For now,” Flint said and drove north out of town on a dirt road toward Anvil Holloway’s farm. It was a good twenty miles of rolling hills. Turning onto an even narrower dirt road, he saw the farm ahead.
In the field next to the house, decades of old cars, pickups and farm equipment rusted in the morning sun. A few clouds scudded across a robin’s-egg-blue sky. The mountains around the wide valley were still snowcapped and the air had a crispness to it that warned summer was still months off.
Flint parked, shut off his engine and started to climb out when Anvil rushed from the house to stop on the dilapidated porch. The house needed paint and didn’t look much better than the porch.
“Have you heard from her?” Flint asked as he walked toward the house and the man anxiously waiting for him.
Anvil shook his head as if unable to draw the words. He looked older than fifty-seven. His brown hair needed cutting. It framed a once handsome face now weathered from years of working outdoors. He still looked strong from his days playing football at the University of Montana in Missoula, his only claim to fame. His large body was clad in faded overalls over a clean white T-shirt. He’d obviously dressed up for Flint’s visit, since he’d recently shaved. He still had a dollop of shaving cream congealing on one ear.
“Why don’t we go inside and sit down. You can tell me what happened,” Flint said.
Anvil nodded nervously, practically wringing his hands before he wiped both down the sides of his overalls. “It’s just not like her to take off and not call and let me know she’s all right.”
Flint followed the farmer into the kitchen of the ranch house. The room was neat and clean, dishes done, floor recently mopped, he noticed with concern. In this part of the country, men worked in the fields, barns and pastures. Women worked in the house. That Anvil had mopped the floor sent up a red flag that Flint hadn’t been expecting.
If Jenna had been gone since yesterday evening, she hadn’t been the one to mop the floor. It seemed a strange thing for Anvil to do unless he had something he needed to clean up.
They took a seat at the 1950s metal-and-Formica blue table. Anvil had inherited the farm along with the house and furnishings from his father after he graduated from college. His parents had moved down to Arkansas to be near his sister and her family.
Flint noticed that, like the floor, the table too had been wiped down recently.
“So tell me what happened,” he said as he took out his notebook and pen.
“We had an argument,” Anvil admitted as he wiped a hand over his face. His voice broke as he said, “She left.”
Flint saw with growing concern that the knuckles of Anvil’s right hand were scraped and bruised. “She leave in her own car?” Anvil nodded. “She take anything with her?”
“A suitcase and her purse.”
“She packed after the argument?” Flint asked.
Anvil shook his head. “She’d already packed. Said she needed some time to think.”
“Think about what?”
Anvil looked at the floor.
“She leave because you hit her?”
The farmer’s head bobbed up, shock and guilt on his face. “It wasn’t like that.”
“It wasn’t the first time you’d hit her?”
“I’d never laid a hand on her before. I swear to God.” The words came out in a strangled cry. Tears had filled the man’s eyes. Remorse making him appear even older. “It was the first time I raised a hand to her. I swear on my grandmother’s grave. I...I slapped her.”
Flint reached across the table to lift Anvil’s ham-sized right hand. “Looks like you did more than slap her.”
* * *
ELY CAHILL PERKED up a lot after his Johnson breakfast. Lillie had studied him as he’d eaten every bite on his plate. He was still a strong man in so many ways. Stubborn as a stump that refused to be pulled from the ground. Weathered by life and the outdoors. Tough as the proverbial nail. She envied him that he knew what he wanted and didn’t wait around for life to give it to him.
The drive up the canyon to his cabin was a beautiful one. Spring in Montana couldn’t be any more delightful. The sky was a clear blinding blue dotted with puffy white clouds over a sea of new bright green grasses and dark pines. She took it in as she drove, thinking how nine years ago she would have given all of this up for Trask.
Ely Cahill lived within sight of an old ghost town. Only a few shells of buildings still stood in the middle of the tall spring grass. His cabin fit right in.
He’d built it years ago out of hewn logs with his sons helping him. It was small and apparently all he needed.
The logs had weathered from the sun and snow and thunderstorms that passed over. Vegetation had grown up around it in his absence. From a distance, a person would think it was abandoned.
Ely spent little time here and even less in the ranch house down the road, where he’d lived with their mother and helped raise the six of them. I’m done ranching, he’d announced after their mother had died. You all can have the ranch. I want that hill overlooking this valley. That’s where I plan to die.
That had been almost twenty years ago. Lillie’s older brothers Cyrus and Hawk had taken over the ranch. She and her twin, Darby, had wanted nothing to do with it. Tuck, the oldest of her brothers, had struck out on his own at eighteen, not to be heard from again.
Tuck was the smart one to get out of here, Darby had said recently after mentioning that he should probably sell his share of the Stagecoach Saloon and take off to find his fortune.
Lillie hoped he was just talking. She couldn’t run the bar and café alone and she didn’t want to sell out or take on another partner. It wasn’t just a business. It was her home. She loved the old stagecoach stop, could feel its history in the stone walls and marred wooden floorboards, and she was determined to preserve it. Making money was the least of the reasons she had bought the building. The bar and café had been a way of hanging on to it—and put a roof over her head.
“Thank you, Lillie Girl,” her father said as she pulled up in front of his cabin. “No need to see me in. The pack rats probably carried off most everythin’ and left a mess ta boot.”
She shuddered to think what the inside of the cabin looked like as she watched him lift his pack and the bag of groceries she’d insisted on. “How long will you be staying out of the mountains?”
He looked up toward the Judiths, still snowcapped. “As long as I can stand it.” Lewis and Clark had discovered the mountains on their expedition to find the Northwest Passage. Clark named them after his soon-to-be wife, Judith.
“You’ll let me know before you leave.” What if Flint was right about their father? What might happen to him up there alone, let alone in the mountains?
Ely met her g
aze. “Don’t worry about me,” he said as if reading her mind. “Your brother doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”
She didn’t need to ask which brother. Flint was the second oldest and the one who went into law enforcement after generations of Cahills who had teetered on the edge of the law. He was also the one who seemed to think it was his job to run the family with Tuck gone. She hated how reasonable he always was when just once she’d love to see him lose his cool like the rest of them. The only stupid thing her brother had ever done was marry Celeste York.
“You sure Flint wasn’t adopted?” she joked. “Or maybe you found him on your doorstep, where someone dumped him when he was a baby?”
“He’s well-meaning,” Ely said, surprising her.
“He arrested you.”
“He did that.” Her father laughed good-heartedly. “But I wasn’t myself last night. I understand why he had to.”
Lillie shook her head. “Always by the letter of the law.”
“Yep, that’s our Flint. He’d arrest his own grandmother if she was alive.” Ely laughed at the family joke. “But that’s only if the fool woman broke the law. It’s his job. Don’t forget that, Lillie.” He turned those gray eyes on her. “He takes bein’ sheriff seriously, no matter the cost to hisself.”
Her father was trying to warn her, as if he needed to remind her, what would happen if Flint found out Trask was back in town. She tried to swallow the lump in her throat, touched by her father’s attempt to protect her. It filled her with fear of what the future held.
Trask was back, and when Flint found out, he’d have every resource available out looking for him. This time, Trask wouldn’t get away.
Hopefully, the cowboy had come to his senses and left town again. She preferred that over seeing him behind bars. But the thought that she wouldn’t see him again for another nine years or possibly ever was like a clenched fist around her heart.
“Take care, Lillie Girl,” her father said as he slung his pack over his shoulder and started to close the pickup door.
She nodded, her thoughts on Trask, a dangerous place for even her thoughts to be.
CHAPTER FOUR
TRASK BEAUMONT WAS no fool. Not anymore at least. He knew how dangerous coming back there was—let alone going near Lillie. If one of her brothers had seen him—
As it was, her father had. Ely Cahill wouldn’t tell, though. Trask had always liked the old man and thought Ely liked him, as well. It was Lillie’s brothers he had to worry about—especially Flint, the sheriff.
He knew he was taking one devil of a chance by being back in the state, not to mention what he planned to do now that he was.
As he drove the back roads he knew so well—even after nine long years of being away—he felt happy just to be home again. He’d missed all of this, but nothing like he’d missed Lillie. She was more beautiful than she’d been nine years ago, as if that was possible. She’d grown into the amazing woman he’d always known she would become. He couldn’t have been more proud of her for what she’d accomplished with the old stagecoach stop.
Leaving Lillie had been the hardest thing he’d ever done. Now he feared he’d come back too late. If he’d lost Lillie, then all his plans would have been for nothing.
He reached the turnoff that would take him up in the mountains and drove through thick pines as the narrow dirt road snaked upward. The day was incredible from the blue of Montana’s big sky to the white puffy clouds riding on the breeze to the jewel green of the pines against the snowcapped mountaintops. He’d forgotten how breathtaking it could be.
Or how much he would miss it. But he’d had no choice but to leave all those years ago. He was facing a murder rap for a crime he hadn’t committed. The law was looking for him, and Lillie... Just the thought of her made his heart ache. He should have stayed and tried to find out the truth. But he’d been young. And scared.
He’d left here a young arrogant rodeo cowboy with a chip on his shoulder and a temper. Now he’d come back a changed man determined to set things right—not just with the law, but with Lillie.
Trask worried that the latter would be the hardest one to right.
The road turned into a Jeep trail. He shifted into four-wheel drive and drove a little farther up the mountainside before pulling over in the pines and walking the rest of the way.
This spot on the mountain had been a favorite of his when he was a boy. He used to come here when life got too tough even for him. The view alone buoyed his spirit. As a boy, he’d pretended that all of this would be his one day, as far as the eye could see.
He’d definitely been a fool in so many ways, he thought now as he reached his campsite. Back in his youth, he hadn’t known what the real cost would be and not just in money.
Now, though, he knew. He’d come home determined to fix the mess he’d made—or die trying.
* * *
ANVIL HOLLOWAY LOOKED shocked that the sheriff would suggest he had beaten his wife, let alone killed her. He looked guiltily at his bruised and bloodied knuckles. “That’s not from hitting my wife. I...I... After she left...” He pointed to the hallway.
Flint got up to inspect a spot where the Sheetrock had been smashed repeatedly. There was still bloodstains where it had soaked into the ruined Sheetrock, although it was clear Anvil had also tried to clean it up as well as the rest of the kitchen.
When he turned back to the man, it was with growing dread. “That wall shows a lot of anger, Anvil.”
The farmer nodded and hung his head.
“It must have been some argument.”
Anvil said nothing.
“You need to tell me. If there is any hope of my finding Jenna...”
Slowly, the farmer lifted his head. “She told me she...had met someone else.”
Flint had expected the complaints most wives of farmers and ranchers who lived out of town often aired. Too much work, no comforts, too far from town and other people, a hard existence with little thanks, let alone money.
But Jenna had never seemed like the complaining type. A plain, big-boned, solemn, conservative woman, she’d appeared to be the perfect wife for Anvil despite their decade difference in age. Jenna was only forty-seven.
“She met someone?” Flint repeated. “You mean she had an affair?”
Anvil buried his face in his hands and began to cry in huge body-shuddering sobs.
He waited until the farmer got control of himself again. “Do you know who?” Flint asked, thinking that was probably where Jenna had gone. That is, if Anvil was telling the truth and she’d actually left under her own power last night.
The recently mopped floor still bothered him, now more than before. Just as the destroyed Sheetrock in the hallway did. He feared the wall could have been busted before Anvil turned that rage on his wife.
Anvil wiped his face with his sleeve and took a few choked breaths. “She wouldn’t tell me.”
Flint let that sink in, hearing not just frustration in the farmer’s voice, but anger. “Did she say why she wouldn’t tell you who he was?”
He swallowed again and looked at his worn work boots. “She said she was afraid I would kill him.”
Great. So Jenna had already been aware of her husband’s temper.
Flint closed his notebook. “Here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to give Jenna a little time to think. I’m betting she will call pretty soon or maybe even show up. If that happens, you call me right away, okay?”
Anvil nodded, looking relieved.
“She say how long she’d been...seeing this other man?”
He shook his head. “I got the feeling it had been going on for a while.”
“So you’d been suspicious?”
Anvil emitted a bitter laugh. “Hit me like a bolt of lightning out of the blue. Never saw
it coming. Not in a million years.”
Flint had had the same reaction. Jenna Holloway just didn’t seem the type. Whatever type that was. He thought of his ex. Right, that type.
“How long have you been married?” he asked.
“Twenty-four years. She’s quite a bit younger than me.” Anvil seemed to grind his teeth. “I reckon the man is younger than me, as well.”
“I’m going to need the clothing you were wearing when Jenna left.”
Anvil looked up at him. “You still think I did something to her.”
“It’s protocol in a situation like this. I’m sure Jenna will call today and we can put all this behind us.”
The farmer rose slowly from his chair and disappeared into the other room. He came back with a pair of overalls and a T-shirt. “This is what I was wearing, but I washed them...since they were soiled.”
Flint met the man’s eyes. “How often have you washed your own clothes, Anvil?”
The man looked confused. “It isn’t how it looks.”
“It looks like you cleaned up after she left to hide something.”
“I did. When I slapped her, it made her nose bleed. There was blood on the kitchen floor.” He broke down. “I was so ashamed for losing my temper. I didn’t want anyone to see the place the way it was. I was going to fix the Sheetrock today, but the lumberyard was closed.”
“Anvil, I shouldn’t have to tell you how bad this looks.”
The man dropped his head. “I was just so ashamed.”
Flint waited a few moments before he said, “Anvil, if you did something worse that you regret, now is the time to tell me.”
The farmer raised his head. “I didn’t kill her. She drove away. I swear.”
“All right. Here’s what you do. Go about your usual daily work until you hear from her,” Flint said. “I know that’s a hard thing to ask. But these things often work themselves out. In the meantime, I’ll keep an eye out for her. If she just went to town, checked into a motel...”