Still Waters33

by Tami Hoag

  Heat rose into Ellstrom’s face, fueled by humiliation and the sting of rejection. If they had been in a more secluded spot, he might have pushed the issue. The bitch came across for every other man who wagged his dick in front of her. She probably played this hard-to-get game just to salve her conscience. But she sure as hell hadn’t saved anything from Jantzen.

  “You only give it out to the man with the biggest badge?” he sneered.

  Elizabeth had to squeeze her arms against herself to keep from slapping him. Instead, she went for him where it would hurt the most. “Naw, you know what they say, honey—it ain’t the size of the badge on the man, it’s the size of the man with the badge.”

  The man with the badge pulled open the door and stepped inside as Ellstrom leaned toward her. The air in the room seemed to drop twenty degrees as Dane stood on the other side of the counter, staring at his deputy.

  “Have you finished cataloging the list of the damages, Deputy?” he asked in a silky voice.

  Ellstrom didn’t say a word, but turned and went about his business, jerking a notebook and pen from his shirt pocket. Elizabeth blew out a long breath as she turned toward Dane.

  “You’ve got your faults, sugar,” she muttered, “but timing isn’t one of them. Your deputy isn’t terribly fond of me right now.”

  “Looks like he’s part of a club,” Dane said dryly as he took in the vandalism.

  “Yeah, this is a hell of a town you got here, Sheriff,” she drawled sarcastically as she scraped a smashed fuchsia petal off the counter with her fingernail. “Folks here sure know how to make a girl feel welcome.”

  “Tell me it would be different if I moved down south to some little burg and started stirring things up,” Dane challenged her, defending his home as instinctively as he would have defended a family member. “You can’t. It would be even worse because I’m a Yankee and most of those people never got the message that Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox. Hell, they’d probably have me tarred and feathered by now.”

  “There’s an idea.” Her laugh was half mocking, half hysterical. “Why don’t you go out in the street and holler it up and down? I don’t have anything better to do tonight. If this mess is anything to go by, your deputies won’t bother to interfere.”

  Dane clenched his jaw for a second and reined in his temper. She had a right to her anger. What he wasn’t quite as sure about was whether or not he had a right to be angry for her. She had rejected his offer, but he still caught himself wanting to assume the role of protector, and it didn’t have anything to do with her being a taxpayer. It had to do with basic instincts and natural chemistry. “Is there someplace more private where we can talk?”

  Elizabeth weighed the evils against one another. It was a no-win deal. They either stood here in full view and earshot of Deputy Dope and had their conversation, or she sequestered herself in a room with a man who was nothing but trouble. She caught Ellstrom glaring at them out of the corner of his beady eye.

  “My office,” she said. She gathered the beleaguered fuchsia in her arms, heedless of the dirt, and turned to lead the way through the wreckage.

  The office was a windowless cubbyhole of a room that smelled like a wet basement regardless of all efforts to freshen it. Elizabeth had taken one look at it and set herself up in the front room with Jolynn. The only thing she used it for was storage. As she swung the door open she discovered that its uselessness hadn’t spared it from the vandal’s wrath. The floor was a sea of paper that had been spewed forth by the battered file cabinets. It was going to take her a month to clean up. She set her smashed plant on what was left of the desk and fingered the ragged greenery and tattered pink flowers.

  “When I was married to Bobby Lee Breland—he’s Trace’s daddy—I saw one of these once in the window of the little flower shop in Bardette,” she said softly. “I asked him if he would get it for me for a present. Next day it was gone out of the window. I went home early, all het up ’cause I figured he bought it for me and that meant he loved me and he’d probably stop runnin’ around and . . .” She let her voice trail away. Silly, bringing up old hurts when she had enough new ones to deal with.

  “Did he?” Dane asked, knowing the answer. He could see it in the set of her shoulders, in the way she tightened her mouth.

  She shook her head.

  “Are you all right?” he asked softly.

  “Oh, sure,” she said. “I like being victimized. I’m funny that way.”

  He propped his hands at the waist of his jeans and scowled at her. “About last night—”

  Elizabeth held up a hand to cut him off. “You don’t have to feel responsible for me, Sheriff,” she said flatly. “I’m a big girl.”

  Dane looked down at the mutilated fuchsia and ground his teeth. Dammit, he did feel responsible. He felt downright territorial where she was concerned. It was a wonder he hadn’t given Ellstrom a bloody nose for coming within a foot of her. The fact that he had been tempted rattled him. Christ, he’d been sleeping with Ann Markham for two years and he’d never given a damn who else went sniffing around her.

  “I got an interesting call after you left last night,” Elizabeth said, needing to get him off the topic of what had happened between them.

  His gaze sharpened and, even though he was standing with one leg bent casually, he seemed to come to attention. “What sort of call?”

  “Someone wanting to express their opinion of my character. You know,” she said, trying to sound as offhand and unaffected as she could. “Bitch. Whore. That kind of thing.”

  Blind fury rose up in Dane like a geyser. “Goddammit, why didn’t you call me?”

  Elizabeth stared up at him, eyes wide with surprise at the strength of his reaction. “They didn’t leave a name or number. I don’t reckon you could have caught your suspect.”

  “That’s not the point.” He wanted to shake her, but worse still, he wanted to hold her. She had to have been frightened, alone in that rattletrap house, knowing a killer was at large. The idea damn near choked him with impotent rage. He tried his best to clear his head and think like a cop. “Was it a man or a woman?”

  Elizabeth shuddered inwardly as the voice replayed itself in her mind. “A man . . . I think. I couldn’t really tell. It sounded strange. Might have been the same person who trashed this place,” she suggested, backing away from him. “Calling to see that I was out of the way. Whoever did this sure as hell felt like they had clear sailing. I find it amazing that a business on Main Street could be tossed like this without anyone seeing anything, without a deputy driving by and looking in.”

  “Vandals work fast as a rule,” Dane said. “That’s why it’s hard to catch them at it. As bad as this all looks, it probably didn’t take more than ten minutes.”

  “If it was a vandalism.”

  He arched a brow. “Looking for conspiracies again?”

  “Still,” she corrected him, crossing her arms against her- self. “And don’t you dare be amused at me, Dane Jantzen. The article in the special edition speculated as to motive for the killing. Maybe someone thinks we’ve got evidence here.”

  Dane rolled his eyes. “And maybe someone doesn’t like the fact that you’ve taken the bridge club minutes out of the paper.”

  Elizabeth gave him a long, level look. “Either way, you’ve got some thinking to do, Sheriff. I reckon you didn’t expect anyone around here, any of these people you know so well, to vandalize a business or make an obscene phone call. Same way you didn’t think any of them might have killed Jarvis.

  “It seems to me you see what you want to see,” she said. “You see what you grew up seeing, what you expect to see. But I’m walking into this town not knowing anyone from Adam, and I can tell you, there are people here just as greedy, just as corrupt, just as unhinged as there are anyplace else. And one of them is a murderer.”

  DANE TURNED ELIZABETH’S WORDS OVER IN HIS MIND THAT afternoon as he stood in a side door looking at the people who had gathered to mourn the
untimely demise of Jarrold Jarvis.

  He was a good cop. While old popularity and old fame might have helped him get elected, Dane knew he held the job on merit. He had never been inclined to rest on some dusty legend of his youth, like Rich Cannon. He might not have been ambitious, but he was conscientious and dedicated. Despite what Elizabeth seemed to think, he wanted the murder solved regardless of who committed it, and he was working tirelessly to that end. It was true he preferred things simple and neat, but that didn’t make him lazy.

  His gaze scanned the crowd slowly, taking in the faces of people he had known his whole life. He had always felt his knowledge of these people made him a better sheriff, not a poorer one. He knew what to watch for, whom to keep an eye on. He knew Gordon Johnson got mean when he drank because he always had. He knew that the young Odegard boys drove too fast on the Loring road because the Odegard men had been driving too fast since the days of Henry Ford; fast driving ran in their genes. He knew who was always scraping by to make ends meet and which families had kids who were liable to end up in trouble. He knew Tyler County, knew Still Creek. He didn’t want to think that knowledge had become more hindrance than help.

  Our Savior’s Lutheran Church was full. The sun shone through the huge stained glass window depicting Jesus wringing his hands in the garden of Gethsemane, raining colors down on the heads of those who had come to grieve or gawk. There were both, Dane knew, though he suspected the gawkers outnumbered the grievers by a wide margin.

  Helen Jarvis made a production of breaking down beside the closed polished oak casket at the front of the church, half collapsing against it and wailing like a banshee. This outburst was something so out of character for her—or for anybody in the state, for that matter—that no one knew quite how to react. There were a lot of horrified, embarrassed looks. Arnetta McBaine cranked up the volume on the old pipe organ and pounded out the chorus of “How Great Thou Art” so loudly that people actually cringed.

  Susie Jarvis Cannon was sitting in the front row in her little black dress and hideous pillbox hat. She had Helen’s tiny eyes, Jarrold’s hook of a nose and weak chin, the overall effect making her face somewhat parrotlike. Her two bored children sat beside her, swinging their feet and pinching each other. At her mother’s outburst Susie turned from her children to her husband with her ears pinned back and all but shoved him out of the pew. Looking sulky rather than solicitous, Rich stood and straightened his dark suit jacket, then took Helen by the arm and tried to lead her to her seat.

  Helen had her widow’s veil peeled back over a hat with a brim so exaggerated that it looked as though it might have been involved in one of man’s early attempts at flight. She presented her stricken visage to the crowd, and this time Dane cringed a little. She looked like Bette Davis in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? Her makeup so overdone she could have been a geisha girl—porcelain-white skin, dots of cherry red on her cheeks and outlining her mouth, long false eyelashes elaborately curled and caked with mascara. Of course, she had cried most of the mascara off into black rivulets that streaked down her face. The dark crescents beneath her eyes gave her the appearance of some odd tribal woman emulating the sacred raccoon.

  The overall picture was ghoulish, and no one seemed to know what to make of it. Everyone in town knew Helen and Jarrold had stayed together only out of spite and meanness. Dane doubted either of them had held much capacity to love anyone but themselves. So this was another of Helen’s little melodramas, which seemed to be getting stranger and stranger.

  “Was it a man or a woman?”

  “A man . . . I think. It sounded strange.”

  Elizabeth’s answer whispered through the back of Dane’s mind as he watched Helen slump into her seat. He couldn’t help but think of the way the woman had looked when she had launched that Jell-O fish at Elizabeth, or the way she had sounded. If Helen was slipping a few gears in the wake of all that had happened, she might have made a call like that. She didn’t like anyone stealing her thunder the way Elizabeth had inadvertently done by stumbling across Jarrold’s body and triggering an avalanche of gossip. But the vandalism was out of the question. It had taken strength to pry the padlock off the back door of the Clarion office, more strength than Helen possessed even in a rage.

  Dane pulled his gaze away from the grieving widow, looking at Rich in his new politician suit, and Susie, who was more concerned with her children making her look bad in public than with the idea of laying her father to rest. In the pews behind them sat a dozen people who owed Jarrold money, and more whom he had cheated in one way or another. Dane looked over this crowd of people he had known since childhood and realized that his perception of them was changing subtly. For the first time he was looking at them as potential suspects, and he didn’t like it. He didn’t like seeing them that way any more than they liked the idea of crime coming to Still Creek. But times they were achangin’, and, like it or not, Dane knew he and the rest of Still Creek would have to change with them.

  He slipped into a pew as Reverend Lindgren emerged from the sacristy, and turned his mind to murder as the rest of the crowd turned their hymnals to “Faith of Our Fathers.”

  ELIZABETH WHEELED HER ELDORADO INTO THE SERVICE drive of Shafer Motors and cut the engine. The business was located on the southwest side of town along the highway, to help attract customers, Elizabeth suspected, but there wasn’t any sign that the location was doing good today. In fact, most of the town had looked deserted as she drove down Main Street, devoid of locals at any rate. Two tour buses were parked in front of the Coffee Cup, and she had spotted a gaggle of tourists gawking and pointing as an Amish buggy clomped toward Hardware Hank’s. But the crowd was down at Our Savior to see Jarrold Jarvis put into the ground, and to feast on ham salad and German chocolate cake in the church basement afterward. All things considered, Elizabeth had decided it prudent to send Jo to observe the ritual.

  She climbed out of the Caddy and took a long look at what Garth Shafer had done for himself after the partnership with Jarvis had gone awry. The building that housed the Ford dealership was by no means new or fancy. In fact, the cinder-block building looked badly in need of paint, the sea-green walls having turned a polluted shade over the years. A new gray Thunderbird was parked in the showroom window, but most of the cars on the lot appeared used.

  The sign in the door proclaimed the place open, and Elizabeth let herself in quietly, hoping to get a look around before anyone came to sell her a car. The sound of power tools whined and wheezed from what was presumably the service garage. The manager’s office stood open and empty. Shafer himself was probably at the funeral with all the other hypocrites, Elizabeth thought, edging toward the office. She was wrong.

  He came up behind her, quiet as a cat as she leaned into the office. Suddenly his reflection appeared in the window glass and Elizabeth jumped, clutching her heart, nearly crashing into him. He took a step away and she stumbled around and backed toward the Thunderbird, scrambling to compose herself as her heart rammed into her ribs like a paddleball.

  “Oh, my Lord in heaven, you startled me!” she gasped, trying to laugh it off and seem friendly and innocent all at once.

  He didn’t apologize, but stood there with a frighteningly large wrench in his hands and a carefully blank look in his dark eyes. He was a tall man, late forties to early fifties, who bore an unfortunate resemblance to Jack Palance. Unbidden, the lines from City Slickers came to Elizabeth’s mind: “Kill anyone today, Curly?” . . . Jack Palance smiles that chilling smile. “Day ain’t over yet.”

  She rubbed her hand over the purse that rested against her hip, trying to take reassurance from the solid weight of the Desert Eagle tucked inside, trying not to imagine a situation where she would actually have to use it.

  “Can I help you with something?”

  “Well—a—you just might, sugar,” she said, pasting on a bright smile. “I might be in the market for a car soon.” Or not. “Someone told me to come on down and ask for Garth. I don’t recko
n he’s here today, though, what with the funeral and all.”

  His expression didn’t change so much as a blink. “I’m Garth Shafer.”

  “You are?” She tried to sound more pleasantly surprised than dismayed by the prospect of having this particular conversation with an armed man. “Well, I’m in luck, then, aren’t I?”

  He didn’t seem to have an opinion on that one way or the other. He just stood there in his grimy blue coveralls, twisting that blasted wrench around and around in his greasy hands.

  “I’m Elizabeth Stuart.”

  “That newspaper woman.”

  “Yes.”

  He nodded and turned to glance out the door at the Caddy that gleamed as bright and red as a maraschino cherry under the afternoon sun. “Trading in?”

  “Could be.” She started to circle the Thunderbird slowly, needing to put some distance between herself and that wrench. She shot him a curious look. “Mind if I ask why you aren’t at the funeral? I understand you and Jarrold used to be partners.”