Jack Murray, Sheriff

by Janice Kay Johnson

  “Let me check on the girls,” Beth said, and at his nod hurried upstairs. Stephanie was in her nightgown, bending over the tub to rinse Lauren’s hair. Beth paused in the bathroom doorway to watch for a moment, unobserved.

  “Too hot!” Lauren exclaimed.

  Her sister adjusted the water, then dumped another cup over the eight-year-old’s soapy, sodden red curls.

  “Too cold.”

  “For Pete’s sake,” Stephanie muttered, but she fiddled with the knob again. The mirror and the sliding doors that turned the tub into a shower enclosure were both steamed up. Kneeling on the bathroom floor with the towel wrapped around her head, Stephanie looked like a mother in miniature. With the mild exasperation in her tone, she even sounded like one.

  The normalcy of the scene was reassuring. Beth hated the weekends when her daughters went to their father’s, but it helped to know that they had each other. At eleven going on twelve, Stephanie was the usual confused mixture of maturity and childishness, but Beth had confidence in her judgment—up to a point.

  “How are you doing, guys?”

  Stephanie turned her head. “Okay.”

  “Too hot!” Lauren yelled.

  Stephanie rolled her eyes. “It’s never perfect!”

  Beth stepped forward to kiss the top of her older daughter’s head—actually, to kiss a wet towel, but the gesture was understood. “Sweetheart, it was never perfect when I had to rinse your hair, either. Forget toilet training. I was really happy when you started taking care of your own hair.”

  “How come she isn’t old enough to?”

  “Lauren’s doing everything but finishing up the rinsing,” Beth reminded her. “Now, I’ll be back to tuck you two into bed in a few minutes.”

  “Can we read in bed?”

  She ought to say no, as late as it was, but she was afraid once they went to bed, they would lie in the dark remembering tonight’s scene and worrying about the next visit to their dad’s. Maybe a good book would give them pleasant thoughts instead to fall asleep with.

  “Why not?” Beth said.

  She’d half expected to find the sheriff waiting in the hall, eager to make his departure. But no, he was still sitting at her kitchen table, his head back and his eyes closed as if he were catnapping. When she entered the room, he became alert instantly, his eyes appraising. She was suddenly uncomfortable, perhaps only because she hated being in this situation. Or was it that, for a moment, she had been aware of him as a weary and very sexy man, not just a police officer?

  If so, she must be crazy. She had every reason to feel grateful, humiliated, frightened, you name it. But attraction was ridiculous. Unless her hormones had decided that any man who came charging to her rescue was worth keeping around.

  If she had imagined that his appraisal had been masculine rather than professional, he quickly disabused her. “Have you changed the locks on the house since your divorce?”

  “No. I’ve been intending to…”

  “Do it. You might consider a security system as well.”

  “The only trouble is, I have to let him in,” she pointed out. “He has a right to see the girls.”

  “Yes, but at least then he couldn’t surprise you.”

  She nodded slowly. Steph and Lauren would be well aware why Mom was having a security system installed.

  “Do you have a brother or a father who could be here when Mr. Sommers picks up and drops off the children?”

  “No,” she said tersely. “I think that would make matters worse, anyway. Ray would get more belligerent. And I don’t want anyone hurt on my behalf.”

  He frowned. “You need protection, Ms. Sommers. A woman alone with two children is vulnerable.”

  Beth set down her mug with a click. “Exactly what is it that a man could do to protect me that I can’t do myself?”

  “Exert physical force, if need be.” Before she could respond to that one, he switched directions. “Tell me, do you know how to handle a gun?”

  “No, and I wouldn’t shoot my ex-husband if I knew how!” Beth said. “That’s all the girls need, to see their dad bleeding to death on our front porch.”

  Jack Murray leaned back in his chair, an expression of impatience on his hard face. “Ms. Sommers, I have the feeling you’re not taking this threat seriously. I know it’s hard to picture a man you’ve lived with doing violence to you, but…”

  Beth stood, pushing her chair back. “Sheriff, I’m a capable woman. I own a business. I employ six other people. I consider myself competent and reasonably intelligent. I would probably lose a fistfight with my ex-husband, but since that hardly seems like a solution to my problem, I’m afraid I don’t see how I could take this threat more seriously.”

  Their gazes met, before he said in that neutral tone a policeman must have to master, “I didn’t mean to imply that you’re incapable. The problem is, in a situation like this you have the reasonable facing the irrational. What if he’d come through that door tonight?”

  “He has a key,” Beth said. “He didn’t use it. When I told the girls that their father was throwing a temper tantrum, I meant it. That’s all it was.” Please, God.

  Jack Murray made a sound under his breath, one in which she read disbelief and impatience. But presumably it was also a form of concession, because he, too, stood.

  “I’ll talk to the people at ESPD.” His patronizing tone was enough to set her teeth on edge. “I’m sure they’ll have a patrol car come by regularly for now, especially on weekends, if that’s when Mr. Sommers takes the girls. And you know where to call.”

  “Yes, I do,” she said, inclining her head with unaccustomed coolness. “I certainly hope I won’t need to.”

  “Ms. Sommers…” The sheriff seemed to think better of whatever he’d intended to say. He only shook his head. “I’d best be getting home.”

  He followed her to the front door. Beth held it open and said again, “Thank you.” She meant it. Jack Murray might be patronizing, but he had come to her rescue. His intentions were good.

  The sheriff looked at her freshly painted front porch, strewed with shattered clay pots, spilled dirt and shreds of bright petunias and lobelia, and shook his head again. “Be careful. Call if you’re even a little nervous.”

  Beth was stubborn, but not an idiot. She didn’t tell him that she was afraid his showing up tonight had made things worse, not better. He thought she was insisting on being self-sufficient to the point of foolishness. Truth be told, she was scared. Ray wasn’t going to disappear from their lives. She had to find a way to make him see that the girls were what was really important. Carrying hostilities further than she already had would only get in the way of rapprochement.

  She watched the police chief step carefully around the shards of pottery and down the front steps. She had forgotten that the lights on top of his cruiser were still revolving, a beacon in the midst of her quiet neighborhood. He reached inside and turned them off even before getting in. A moment later, the police car pulled away from the curb and started down the street.

  Beth hugged herself against the cool night air. She made herself stand on the porch in defiance of a panicky desire to flee inside and lock up tight. The night was calm, Ray long gone. He was angry, not sly; it would never occur to him to park his car around the block and sneak back. When she saw a shadow move under the old lilac, her pulse took an uncomfortable jump, but, just to prove something to herself, Beth waited until first one cat, then a second, strolled out.

  Only then did she go back into the house and lock the door behind her.

  Time to kiss her daughters good-night, time to try to convince them that their world was a secure place.

  THE LITTLE REDHEAD in the third row looked familiar. Jack Murray paused a moment in his presentation to the third-grade class.

  Long red curls caught up in a bouncy ponytail on top of her head. Big blue eyes, freckled nose, a mouth that had no intention of smiling. She was watching him with unusual intensity, too, as though…w
hat?

  Like a slide projector, he clicked through recent pictures stored in his mind. It didn’t take long. She was the one whose father had been trying to smash down his ex-wife’s front door. The one huddled in the hallway with her older sister.

  The one whose mom had blue eyes just as guarded, just as cool.

  Aware of the concerted stare of twenty-four eight-year-olds, Jack continued, “Are any of you ever home alone?”

  A scattering of hands went up.

  “Do your moms or dads tell you what to do if the phone rings and you’re by yourself?”

  At the same moment as a little girl piped up, “Don’t answer it,” a boy said, “Mom checks to make sure I’m home, so I have to answer the phone.”

  Jack strolled toward the boy’s seat by the window. “What if the caller isn’t your mom?”

  The boy, whose hair was crew-cut but for a tiny pigtail in back, shrugged. “It’s usually a friend or something.”

  “Usually?”

  “Mom says if they ask for Mrs. Patterson, it means they want to sell her something, so I just tell ’em we don’t want to buy anything and hang up.”

  Jack stood just above the boy, letting his height and the uniform awe the kid just a little.

  Then he raised a brow. “Do you think they ever guess that your mom isn’t home?”

  The boy squirmed. “Naw…”

  Jack looked around. “What do the rest of you think? Should he answer the telephone when he’s alone?”

  All sorts of small, high voices chimed in with a variety of negatives. No way. Their parents said…

  “But his mom wants to make sure he’s home safe. So she has to call, right? And he has to answer.”

  It was the little redhead who said solemnly, “He could call her instead. I call my friends all the time.”

  “Could you do that instead?”

  The kid had lost his bravado. “She doesn’t really like me to call her at work.”

  “Would she make an exception for one call every day?”

  He hung his head and shrugged again.

  Jack touched the boy’s shoulder and said, “Mrs. Stewart will hand out pamphlets for all of you to take home today and show your parents. Maybe that will make it easier for you to talk to them about things that scare you when you’re alone.”

  A few minutes later, he strode out to his squad car. He so rarely wore a uniform these days, he felt conspicuous. But that was the whole point: he still liked to do some of these school talks to keep from becoming a remote political figure in Butte County, a politician quoted in the newspapers. He wanted kids to go home and talk at the dinner table about Sheriff Murray as a real guy. This was his first visit of the new school year; nights were growing cold, but leaves had already turned and the bright yellow school buses were flashing red lights on every narrow country road morning and afternoon.

  Jack grunted with faint amusement, thinking what Ed Patton would have had to say about a sheriff spending an hour talking to eight-year-olds: a pansy-ass waste of time, is what the Elk Springs police chief would have said.

  But then, Ed Patton had been a grade-A son of a bitch.

  As he headed back to the station, Jack’s mind reverted to the redhead’s mother. Lord only knew how many domestic disturbance calls he’d been on. Hundreds. But he still remembered the first, when he’d been a rookie in Portland.

  It was also the only time he’d ever had to shoot anyone. He and his partner had been called out to a nasty argument reported by a neighbor. Working-class neighborhood, a cluster of folks standing within earshot of a modest, neatly painted house from which crashes and vicious obscenities came. The siren brought a man in his undershirt to the door. His nose was bleeding and one eye was swelling shut. He wiped blood from his nose and told them to get the hell out of there.

  Jack’s partner had been walking ahead of him up the cracked cement driveway. So fast it was still a blur in Jack’s memory, the man had a rifle in his hands and was shooting, just spraying bullets and screaming the whole time. The nosy neighbors dived to the ground and behind parked cars. Jack’s partner went down with a bullet to the chest and this look of shock on his face. Jack shot the man, didn’t even think about it, just shot. Then he had to listen to the wife calling him a murderer while he held his dying partner and listened to the faraway sound of sirens.

  To this day, every time he went to a house where a husband and wife were arguing, he thought about that afternoon. He never went casually, never assumed anything. There was nothing deadlier than a man and woman who hated and loved each other at the same time.

  But the faces of the women had run together in his memory. The eyes were all stricken, the bruises stark, the body language the same. In recent years, when he thought of an abused woman, he saw his high school girlfriend, Meg Patton, lying about her broken arm or the yellowing bruises.

  So why hadn’t Beth Sommers joined the anonymous company? Why hadn’t she become another chink in the wall of guilt he’d built since he found out how badly he’d failed Meg?

  Why did he keep thinking about this woman of all others? Why did her face keep coming back to him?

  Okay, it was partly because she was pretty, tall and slender, with a long graceful neck, a mass of mahogany brown hair and bright blue eyes. She was the kind of woman who could wear capri pants and a tank top and still look as good as any fifteen-year-old. But that wasn’t all of it.

  In some ways she was typical of the women he saw in the same situation. The jackass who threw the tantrum might be her ex, but she was still defending him, still insisting he didn’t really mean it. But the way she protected her children, the way she tried to let them keep some respect for their father, wasn’t typical at all. Divorce, especially from an abusive man, was an ugly thing. There weren’t too many women who were able to resist the temptation to use their kids as a battleground.

  Beth Sommers was a gutsy woman who reminded him of Meg Patton in this way, too. Meg had put her son first, had done what was needed to protect him from her own father. Jack had learned to respect her for the hard choices she’d made, although those same choices had cheated him of seeing his son grow up.

  Like Meg, Beth Sommers was determined to take care of herself and her children, too. He admired that, even if he did think it was stupid. She might be a successful businesswoman, but she was still vulnerable in a way a man wouldn’t be. Damn it, she was fragile! Jack didn’t like thinking about that. He didn’t want to see her with a bruised face and broken bones and defiant terror in her eyes.

  He’d driven by her house several times himself. He had made a point of being there Sunday afternoon, but apparently that hadn’t been one of the girls’ weekends with their dad, because Jack saw the older one in the bay window, just sitting on the window seat with her arms wrapped around her knees, staring out. Her head turned when she saw the police car, but he was too far away to see her expression.

  Jack remembered the relief on the little girl’s face when her mother said that their father was just throwing a temper tantrum. He didn’t think the older one—who was maybe eleven, twelve—had been convinced. He wondered what their visits to their father were like.

  And he wondered about the mother. What did she do weekends, when her daughters were with their father? She’d been quick to tell him she had no brother or father to be there when she needed him. It had seemed a little too pushy to ask if she had someone else, a man who for other reasons would put himself on the line for her. Did she date?

  Or was Beth Sommers so soured by her ex-husband, she wasn’t interested in men?

  Jack hadn’t gotten any further than thinking about her. He hadn’t tried to find out yet. If he did, he wasn’t sure what he would do about the knowledge. It would be asking for trouble, dating a pretty woman whose ex-husband didn’t want to let go of her. Sommers wouldn’t like any man dating his ex-wife.

  Jack figured he could handle Ray Sommers. He half wished Beth lived outside the city limits so her problems were
his business. The scene he’d walked in on wasn’t the first between them, according to neighborhood gossip, and it wouldn’t be the last. One of these days, she’d be calling the cops. Unfortunately, she wouldn’t be calling him.

  Irritated at himself, Jack accelerated when a street-light turned green. Instead of daydreaming about being her personal hero, he ought to be worrying about her. Figuring out how to get her some help even if she didn’t believe she needed it.

  Gut instinct told him somebody should intervene. Before the ex-husband who both hated and loved her tipped a little too far toward hate, and a hell of a lot more than a few plant pots were broken.

  CHAPTER TWO

  BEHIND THE BARTENDER, a mirror decorated with a beer slogan reflected a portion of the dimly lit room. Ray could see himself in it, though the reflection seemed a little fuzzy. Hell, it must be the mirror. Couldn’t be him. He hadn’t had that many.

  He lifted his glass and downed some raw whiskey that burned his throat and brought warming anger in its wake.

  “Bitch,” he said clearly, continuing a monologue. “That’s what she is. Don’t give a damn what you think.” He thumped his glass on the bar. “Gimme another one.”

  The bartender frowned. “Ray, I think you’ve had enough. Why don’t you go on home now?”

  Just like that, his anger spilled over. Ray picked up the heavy glass and flung it as hard as he could. It bounced off the padded wall beside the mirror and clunked out of sight onto the floor.

  “You don’t want to hear what a bitch she is?” he snarled.

  He was vaguely aware that somebody had stopped behind him. He didn’t give a damn who it was. They should all know what she was like.

  A hand closed on his shoulder and turned him on the revolving stool. He wrenched himself free of the grip and blinked to bring the man’s face into focus. Who the hell?