“Why are you looking up custody cases?” Greg asked, casually leaning his forearms on the computer table beside him.
Shit.
She’d closed the screen she’d been on. But behind it had been the original search request.
“I wasn’t…originally,” she said, focusing her energy. Focusing on what mattered most: being calm, keeping Ryan safe.
“I’m here looking for options for Ryan,” she told him, deciding that honesty was the best way out of this one.
“Custody options? With his father dead, isn’t that a given?”
“Unless something happens to me.”
They were speaking quietly, in deference to their surroundings, and Greg stood suddenly. “Let’s go for a walk,” he said, taking her hand.
Beth shut down the computer and picked up her bag—the canvas gym bag she’d found with her in Snowflake—allowing herself to be led out into the Arizona sunshine.
Montford’s campus was beautiful. The cultivated grass was as green and manicured as any golf course. The big old trees, pretty uncommon in this part of the country, threw shade on benches placed all over the university grounds.
Greg led them to one such bench, not releasing her hand as they sat. Beth was more than a little embarrassed by the cut-off sweats and T-shirt she was wearing.
“I love a woman who polishes her toes to clean house,” Greg said, grinning as he stared down at her flip-flops.
“I polish them for me,” she murmured. “They just come along when I clean house.”
Polishing her toenails was almost a ritual for Beth. She’d had red-polished toes when she’d awakened in Snowflake. Keeping them that way seemed like a way to keep herself—the old self she didn’t know—alive. It seemed disloyal, unfaithful to that woman, not to do so.
He rested his arm along the back of the bench. “So, why the sudden worry about Ryan?”
And that was one of the reasons she was uncomfortable around Greg. He had a way of jumping from topic to topic with absolutely no warning. From serious to comic. And back again.
It was a trait she had a feeling she’d have liked if she’d met him in another lifetime.
Greg waved at a distinguished-looking man striding purposefully on a sidewalk across from them.
“Who’s that?” she asked.
“Will Parsons. He grew up in this town, went to school here, and is now the president of Montford.”
“His daughter is at Little Spirits with Ryan….” Which brought her right back to the question he’d asked her. Why was she worried about her son?
Flicking her hair over her shoulder, Beth resisted the urge to lean into the crook of his arm. She straightened, looking directly ahead of her.
“I’ve been worrying about what would happen to him if anything happened to me. I don’t know what took me so long to think of it, but now that I have, I’m not going to rest until I’ve made some kind of arrangements.”
And that meant she might not be resting for a good long time.
“Your husband’s been gone, what—eight, nine months? A year?”
“Yeah.”
“Not such a surprise that you’re just thinking about this now. Starting over is tough. It can only happen a little at a time.”
He was speaking as someone who knew. Who’d been there. “Was it hard for you, coming back here after so much time away?” she asked. “Or did growing up in Shelter Valley make the transition easier?”
Greg shrugged, gazing out over the expanse of lawn. He seemed to be watching a couple as they made their way hand in hand down a walkway that cut through the middle of campus.
“Change is always hard,” he said eventually. “And Shelter Valley was a double-edged sword. It’s my home, and it welcomed me.”
“But?” Beth loved the curls at his forehead. She’d always longed to run her hands through his hair. Sensuously, seductively…
Right now, though, she had the urge to run her fingers through those curls as she would Ryan’s, to offer comfort. Solace. A promise of peace…
“My life here was with Shelby,” he told her. “We’d been friends since kindergarten.”
“You must have known her very well.”
She couldn’t imagine the luxury of having someone know her that well. But she imagined she’d love it.
“I thought I did. Almost as well as I knew myself.”
Hurting for him, wishing she were stronger, more in control of life, Beth met his eyes. “I remember you said she didn’t want to wait to get married. That she met someone else in L.A.”
He shrugged. “I guess what I saw in Shelby and what was really there were two different things. I trusted her to be honest with me. She wasn’t.”
“So you…created an image you fell in love with?”
“Worse than that,” he said, looking over at her, his eyes lacking their usual spark. “The things I loved about her were real enough to keep that love alive and burning. And to work against me, blinding me to the ways she was changing. What I didn’t want to see.”
“Maybe she helped that along by hiding them from you.”
“I don’t think so,” Greg said. “I almost wish she had, because then I could just chalk the whole thing up to the fact that she was a jerk. But it wasn’t like that. Shelby’s a good woman who tried her best to do what was right. And what turned out to be right for her—leaving Shelter Valley—wasn’t right for me.” He shook his head. “When I left, it wasn’t by choice. But Shelby decided she wanted a different kind of life.”
“So the moral of the story is that you can’t trust anyone?”
“I don’t want to believe that.”
“What, then?”
“Maybe what you can trust is that people will change. No one’s going to stay the same forever.”
She could attest to that. “Just living changes people,” she said slowly, watching a girl who was reading a book under a tree. She’d been highlighting so much, Beth had to wonder if she should even have bothered. From a distance, it appeared that she was including everything on the page, so none of it was going to stand out from the rest, anyway. “Each decision, no matter how small, each interaction, can have repercussions that affect your whole life.”
“Living in a town like Shelter Valley,” he said, “sometimes you forget that.”
“Maybe it’s different in a town like Shelter Valley. There are an awful lot of people here who’ve known each other all their lives and are still happy living side by side, supporting and loving each other. I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many happily married couples.”
“In a perfect world, people grow together, flowing along with each other’s changes, rather than letting those changes tear them apart.”
“Could you and Shelby have done that?”
“Maybe,” he said. “I know I sure would’ve tried if she’d given me the chance.”
For a split second, Beth was sick with jealousy. Who was this woman that had evoked Greg Richards’s eternal love?
And was there any hope that she, Beth Allen, would ever be able to grasp even a crumb of it for herself?
She couldn’t even be honest with him about the most basic realities of her life. If she told him the truth, he’d have to start looking for her identity. And if he found something bad, she’d be forced to run before he could turn her in.
But in that moment she wanted him to know her.
Better than she knew herself.
CHAPTER SEVEN
GREG WALKED BETH TO HER CAR in the visitors’ parking lot. She was late picking up Ryan or he’d have tried to get her to stay longer.
“This is your alma mater, isn’t it?”
“Yeah,” he said, his hands in his pockets as he walked beside her. “Got a degree in criminal justice.”
“I try to imagine sometimes what it would’ve been like going to school here. It makes me yearn to be twenty again.”
“They were good times.” Greg thought back to some of the parties. The friendships.
The feeling that the world was waiting at his feet.
Beth nodded, a yearning look on her face. It puzzled him.
“Probably not much different from wherever you went,” he said. “Unless you studied business at New York University and did Juilliard at the same time.”
He was baiting her.
She didn’t bite.
He pretended that her reticence didn’t bother him. He couldn’t figure out how telling him where she’d gone to school, grown up, been born, involved any kind of risk.
But then, he’d never been so completely alone in the world. And he’d given her his word….
“Ryan doesn’t have any other family, besides you?” he asked as they left the classroom buildings behind and walked across the gravel that led to the free parking lot.
“Not that I know of.”
An odd answer.
“Wouldn’t you know if he did?”
“I don’t know much about my husband’s family.”
“He wasn’t close to them?”
“I guess not.”
Greg frowned. Beth was too warm, too intelligent, not to have probed more deeply than that.
“Is there anyone who could serve as his guardian? A close friend from home, maybe?”
“No.” She stopped at her car, looking up at him, eyes filled with concern. “There’s no one, Greg, and it’s scaring the hell out of me. If something happens to me, he’ll become a ward of the state, won’t he?”
He wished he could tell her differently, but he couldn’t. “Yes.”
“And because he’s not an infant, that probably means he’d be in and out of foster homes.”
She was scaring herself. And yet, there was some truth to what she was saying.
“Maybe.”
“The thought of that’s been making me sick for two days.”
“Foster homes aren’t all evil,” he said. “Don’t borrow trouble, Beth. You’re young, healthy, and you live in a town where law enforcement has substantial success in keeping down crime and keeping citizens safe.”
She grinned, as he’d meant her to. But sobered quickly.
“Promise me something?”
“Of course.”
“Promise me you’ll take him if anything happens to me.”
She wasn’t kidding. Nor did she appear to be reacting to runaway emotions.
“You really think there’s a possibility something might happen.” It wasn’t a question.
Beth looked away—her evasion a sickening confirmation of what he thought he’d just read in her eyes.
“It’s always a possibility, isn’t it?” she whispered.
He grabbed her arm, forestalled her as she started to climb into the driver’s seat of the old Ford Granada. “Beth, look at me.”
“What?” Her demeanor was suddenly that of a defensive child. She couldn’t get away from him fast enough.
And he hadn’t yet granted her request. Hadn’t made the promise she’d asked.
“Are you in some kind of trouble?”
“No! Of course not.”
The denial came too fast. Was too effusive.
“I’m not, Greg,” she said, meeting his eyes. “Or put it this way—if I am, I certainly don’t know about it.”
He believed her—which made the entire conversation, the woman, that much more confusing.
“You’d tell me if you were, wouldn’t you?”
“Of course.”
“Come to me for help?”
Her expression completely serious, she stared up at him. “I think that’s what I’ve just done, isn’t it?” she said softly. “Please promise me you’ll take Ryan if anything happens to me.”
“Of course, but…”
“Thank you.” She interrupted him before he could tell her there was little he’d be able to do, that he’d have no power whatsoever to keep the boy unless she put something in writing.
But almost as though she knew it was coming, she forestalled even that. Standing on tiptoe, she pressed her lips to his in a kiss so tentative it was almost virginal.
And before he could do more than soak up the flood of intense desire her touch had evoked, she’d climbed in her car and was gone.
“WHAT DO YOU MEAN the photos are ruined?” Greg yelled into the phone. It had been two days since he’d seen Beth. Which only added to his frustration.
“I’m sorry, sir, the developer overheated and when I jumped up to tend to it, I knocked the envelopes into the sink….”
“But you’ve got the originals,” Greg said. He was at home, hadn’t yet left for work when the lab technician called.
“Well, that’s just it, Sheriff. We used the pictures you asked for, but the images weren’t clear enough to get the exact marks you highlighted. The only way to—”
“Tell me it wasn’t the originals that were just demolished.”
“Yes, sir, they…”
The expletives that flew from his mouth didn’t make Greg proud. Didn’t help his temper much, either. He pounded his fist against the wall, restraining himself enough to prevent punching a hole in the plaster—but not to save his hand from a well-deserved bruise.
“What about negatives? Previous prints? Even if you can’t produce the exact image I want, we can take them somewhere else. Get them digitally restored.”
“They were all in that pile, Sheriff.”
Jaw clamped against scathing words he’d regret, Greg stared out the huge window over his kitchen sink to the landscaped pool and barbecue in his backyard.
“You’re telling me we don’t have one single image left of any of those cars? Not from ten years ago?”
“Or this summer.”
Greg frowned, every nerve on alert. “What were you doing with the ones from this summer? I marked only the four from ten years ago. And the ones from the summer were digital.”
“Deputy Culver brought the disc, too, sir. Said something about comparing measurements of the horseshoe-shaped dents in the lower right front ends.”
So Culver was suspicious, too.
“We have a back-up disc of photo evidence. Always.”
“Deputy Culver thought so, too, but he couldn’t find it.”
“What you’re telling me is that we’ve somehow managed to lose all visual record of those cars.”
“The victims, too.”
Greg hung up before he fired the bastard on the spot. He’d have to deal with this incompetence—if incompetence was all it was. But not before he’d had a chance to powwow with Culver. They might want to have the technician remain on staff just to keep track of him.
One thing was for sure.
Something was very wrong.
GREG ASKED BETH OUT TWICE that month. Both times she refused. He’d wanted to take her to Phoenix, to the theater. And to a campfire steak dinner in Tucson. Beth didn’t dare leave Shelter Valley. Not until she had some idea of who might be looking for her.
And what she should be looking for. Prepared for.
Not while she was still so obsessed with the feeling that she didn’t want to be found. Until she’d regained her memory, she had to trust that her mind, even while it withheld information, was telling her something.
She just couldn’t take any chance on anything happening to her. Or leading anyone to Ryan.
Of course, there was no guarantee that she was safe in Shelter Valley. But after more than seven months in town, she felt an aura of security here.
It was the only home she knew.
And then Greg asked her to a concert at a casino on the Indian Reservation that bordered Shelter Valley. She was familiar with the band, knew the lyrics to their songs, but didn’t have a single memory attached to them.
She wanted to go. She was afraid that if she kept turning Greg down, he’d give up on her. It shouldn’t matter. But it did.
There were days when thinking about him, about the hopeful anticipation he sometimes instilled in her, about the warmth she felt when he was around, were the only things tha
t kept her sane.
The casino was set in the middle of nowhere, and while it was bound to be crowded, it wasn’t a crowd she’d need to fear.
She was still planning to refuse. Until Bonnie offered to keep Ryan for the night and Ryan, having heard that he might get to play at Katie’s house again, looked at her and said “pwease?” Just like Katie did when she wanted something.
Beth was too busy blinking back tears to say no.
And that was why, on the fourth Friday in September, she was sitting beside Greg in the lounge of the Kachina Grounds Casino. She was dressed in her only pair of nice slacks—black stretch denim she’d bought at Weber’s Department Store, just for the occasion—and a new gauzy red-and-black top. She had no idea if the outfit was anything she’d have worn in her previous life, but she felt good in it.
The cigarette smoke, on the other hand, felt like death to her.
“Will it bother you if I tell you how beautiful you look?” Greg asked, his arm around the back of the booth. The lonely woman inside Beth wished he’d touch her.
She was relieved he didn’t.
“No,” she answered honestly. “I’m the only other one who’d tell me something like that and it sounds much better coming from you.”
“You tell yourself you’re beautiful?”
“Only when I’m feeling desperate.”
She was only half joking. “Times like those, I’ll believe just about anything.” She grinned at him. She’d had a glass of wine, the first she could ever remember. Maybe it had gone to her head more than she’d realized.
“Let me know next time it happens. I’ve got a few other things to tell you,” he said. He looked so good sitting there in jeans and a navy-and-white plaid button-down shirt. The top button was undone and the shirt kept drawing her eye to what it covered.
She wondered if the hair on his chest was as thick and black and tightly curled as that on his head.
“Like what?”
“Uh-uh.” He shook his head, taking a sip from the beer he’d ordered.
His grin made her warm in places that had no business feeling warmth.
“I’m not giving them up until you’re in a believing mood,” he said.
Thankfully she was saved from any further flirtation when the lights went down and then, on the stage, a single white spot appeared. In the shadows there were instruments set up. Really expensive-looking drums. Some guitars and amplifiers. An alto sax.
The Sheriff of Shelter Valley Page 8