Springwater Wedding

by Linda Lael Miller

  Billy looked hopeful. “I guess I just need to hang in there,” he said.

  J.T. didn’t like presenting himself as an expert, especially where women were concerned. He’d lost Maggie, thrown her away, in fact, and he’d let Annie go without a fight. She’d pleaded with him to leave the NYPD, saying the job was eating him alive, accusing him of using it as an emotional hideout, and he’d refused, over and over again, each time more adamantly than the last. Ironic, he reflected, that he’d ended up resigning after all, long after she’d met Brad and remarried.

  “Sounds to me like you have a pretty good handle on the situation,” he said.

  Billy looked shyly grateful. “Maybe I ought to bring her some flowers or something.”

  J.T. nodded. “That’s a fine idea,” he told the boy, and got out his wallet. Billy hadn’t had a paycheck yet, and he was probably broke. He tossed several twenties onto the table—neutral ground—so that the kid would feel he had a choice about accepting them. “Here. A little advance on your pay.”

  Billy hesitated, then smiled and picked up the money, folding the bills and tucking them into his shirt pocket. “Thanks, J.T.,” he said. “Cindy’s been craving Rocky Road ice cream. I guess I’ll drive into town and pick some up. The Safeway’s still open.”

  J.T. was touched. Doris Raynor had a lot to answer for, when it came to mothering, but she’d done something right with this younger son of hers. “Sounds like a good plan,” he agreed.

  “I’ll feed the horses first thing in the morning,” Billy said hastily, on his way to the backdoor.

  J.T. nodded again. “After that, we’ll turn the cattle out to graze.”

  “What about branding and doctoring them up and the like?” Billy asked, one hand on the doorknob.

  “That can wait,” J.T. said. “Fetch that ice cream for your wife and then get some sleep. Like you said, morning will be here before you know it.”

  Billy grinned, opened the door, and went out.

  J.T. sat alone with his tea for several minutes, even though he was damn near too tired to lift the cup. Young love, he thought, with a bittersweet ache in his heart.

  He took his time before heading upstairs, rinsing out his cup, scanning the inside of the refrigerator for the makings of breakfast, switching off lights. When he was sure Billy wasn’t going to come back with one more innocent sorrow to share, he climbed the steps.

  After a hot, restorative shower and the usual ablutions, J.T. dropped into his bed, still unmade from the day before, and kept right on falling, settling at long last into the abject and murky depths of slumber.

  The dream ambushed him sometime later, cornered him in a shadowy, sleep-logged part of his mind. This time, instead of Murphy, the ghost was his father.

  He was a kid again, just thirteen, working in the corral as he had been that day long ago. Jack Wainwright appeared, on cue, drenched in crimson, as was the horse he rode. J.T. felt the same sick horror he’d felt then; only too aware that he was in the grip of a nightmare, he wondered if it was possible to die in just this way, sound asleep, facing a specter he knew was imaginary.

  He’d had the dream before, of course, but not for a long time, and not in such vivid detail. Usually, he relived Murphy’s death. As he stared at his father, a shout caught like a ball of rusted barbwire in his throat, and the scene took on a new element. Jack Wainwright locked gazes with his son, tried to speak. Just as he’d tried to speak the day he died.

  J.T. sat bolt upright in bed, gasping, his bare skin prickly with a cold sweat. He leaped out of bed and went to the window, sure he would see a dead man there, mounted on a bloody horse. For that reason, when he made out the shadow of a rider, traced in darkness and moonlight, it was a moment before the implications sunk in.

  When they did, he grappled into his jeans and raced downstairs, nearly killing himself on the steps, and wrenched open the kitchen door. The rider was gone.

  J.T. went back for his boots, rummaged in the pantry for a flashlight, and hurried outside. He found the hoofprints right where they should have been, and couldn’t decide whether he was relieved by the discovery that he hadn’t been hallucinating, or scared shitless. Both, he concluded, there at the edge of the backyard, in roughly the same place where his father had fallen all those years ago.

  His strongest impulse was to saddle up and give chase, but he knew it would be useless in the dark. At sunrise he’d find the trail and follow it as far as he could.

  He glanced toward the trailer, saw that the lights were out. What he needed, he decided, was an old-fashioned alarm system. A dog.

  The image of Maggie’s beagle came to mind, and he found himself grinning. Maybe something a little meaner, he thought. Sadie probably would have left with the night rider, of her own free will.

  Upstairs, he took another shower, rinsing off the dream sweat, then went back to bed. Lying there, with his hands cupped behind his head, he assessed his situation.

  The source of the nightmare was no great mystery: he’d lost his father in a very violent way, as a young boy. Now his son was coming to stay on the ranch, and Springwater, for all its charm, was not a safe place. Not for him, and not for Quinn.

  It’s your imagination, his reason argued, but a cold fist seemed to grip his gut. Old ghosts were stirring. He’d just seen one.

  The pounding on his front door brought Purvis surging up out of a deep sleep; grumbling, he groped for his pants. “Hold your horses!” he yelled, and yelped again when he struck his big toe on the leg of the console stereo as he passed it. The hammering only intensified.

  Purvis’s irritation gave way to alarm. Simultaneously, he pulled open the front door and flipped on the porch light. A local kid, one of the high school crowd, stood in the glow, his face white with some residual horror.

  Oh, Lord, Purvis thought, here we go. “What is it?”

  “There’s a man dead,” the youth replied, his voice shaking. He’d shoved both hands into the pockets of his jacket, maybe in an effort to steady them.

  “What?” Purvis demanded. He shuffled through a mental file, located the kid’s name. Jimmy. Jimmy Kendrick. His dad owned the dry cleaners.

  “He must have fallen off the water tower, you know, near the entrance to the old Jupiter and Zeus? Some of us were out there— just hanging around and stuff—and we found him laying there.”

  “Who is he, do you know?” Purvis rasped, leaving the door agape while he went back into the dark house for his boots, a shirt, and his lawman gear. Jimmy waited on the porch, though it was obvious that he wanted to bolt.

  “I d-don’t know. There’s—there was a lot of blood—”

  Purvis heard a retching sound, and figured the boy was puking over the porch rail, into the flower bed. He passed Jimmy’s hunched figure at a high lope and headed for the squad car. “I’ll have some questions for you later,” he warned.

  “Y-Yes, sir,” Jimmy said.

  Behind the wheel, Purvis started the motor and fumbled for his cell phone, which was plugged into the cigarette lighter, and dialed J.T.’s number with quick, stabbing motions of his thumb.

  8

  The defunct water tower, which once served the needs of the Jupiter and Zeus Silver Mine, was almost fifteen miles from J.T.’s ranch. By the time he arrived the sheriff’s people were already there, taking pictures, measuring distances, stringing the familiar yellow crime-scene tape from pillar to post.

  J.T. came through the crowd without slowing his pace, the nickel badge Judge Calloway had given to him displayed in the upraised palm of one hand. He found Purvis crouching beside the body, which was awash in blood, limbs sprawled at a variety of impossible angles. Although J.T. had seen worse, many times, violent death wasn’t something he had ever gotten used to; acid chafed the back of his throat, and he swore. It didn’t help that this was someone he recognized.

  Purvis looked up at him, his face illuminated by the glare of several portable floodlights. “Throat’s been cut,” he said.

&nbs
p; J.T. hunkered down to get a better look at what remained of his uncle-by-marriage, Clive Jenson. He glanced up at the dark bulk of the water tower, wondering why anybody would take the trouble to open a man’s jugular and launch him off a platform fifty feet in the air.

  “Some kids found him,” said one of the sheriff’s deputies, a woman in jeans and a flannel shirt, with her hair caught up in some kind of plastic clip.

  “They see it happen?” J.T. asked automatically, though he already suspected Clive had taken his swan dive without an audience, unless you counted the killers. From the looks of things, he’d been lying here for a while, bones splintered, bleeding into the dirt.

  “Not as far as I know,” Purvis said. “Jimmy Kendrick made the report. He and some other kids were out here, probably necking and drinking beer, and they stumbled across the body.”

  “Shit,” J.T. breathed, through his teeth. He’d never liked the man, and there was no use pretending he had, but he wouldn’t have wished a fate like this on anybody, not even Clive. The kids who had found the body would probably never get the image of it out of their minds, and the burden of such a gruesome memory could be a heavy one to carry. Nobody knew that better than he did.

  The techs finished with the crime scene fairly quickly, which was good, because a light, steady rain had begun to fall, and Purvis took J.T. aside while the coroner’s assistants were zipping the body bag and loading it into the back of a county ambulance. “I gotta ask you this, J.T.,” Purvis whispered hoarsely, raising his collar against the drizzle and hunching a little, “even though I know you ain’t gonna like it. Where were you tonight?”

  J.T. sighed, thrust a hand through his hair. He thought of the rider he’d glimpsed in the side yard at the ranch, and the tracks he’d meant to follow when the sun came up. Tracks that would probably be washed away long before he could get back to them. “I was with Maggie McCaffrey until about nine o’clock, over at the Stagecoach CafÈ,” he answered. Although Purvis’s question was routine, there were bound to be people who remembered the enmity between Clive and J.T., and were thus inclined to speculate on the power of old grudges. “After that, I went home, did some chores, set up my computer, and went to bed.”

  Purvis waited.

  “Alone,” J.T. clarified. “Billy was here for a few minutes.”

  “And you haven’t seen him around town recently? Clive, I mean? Maybe he called or stopped by the ranch, and you talked to him?”

  “No,” J.T. said. There was an edge to the word.

  “No need to get testy,” Purvis responded. “I’m not saying you killed him.”

  “God knows,” J.T. rasped, half to himself, “I wanted to a few times.”

  Purvis heaved a great sigh. He probably hadn’t had any more sleep than J.T. had, and like as not, he wouldn’t be getting a whole lot of shut-eye in the near future, either. Once word got out that Springwater’s crime wave had escalated to include murder, poor old Purvis would be dancing barefoot on a hot griddle.

  “Clive leave any kin that you know of? Anybody we ought to notify?”

  “He had a son by a previous marriage,” J.T. recalled, after some thought. “His name escapes me. I never met the guy—I don’t think he and the old man were all that close.”

  “You got any of his or Janeen’s papers around the house?”

  J.T. nodded, watching as the ambulance trundled away with what was left of his late aunt’s husband. “There’s some stuff stored in an old file cabinet,” he said. “I’ll see what I can find.”

  Purvis rubbed the back of his neck with one hand. “Thanks,” he said. They walked together toward the town’s one and only police car and J.T.’s truck, parked behind it. “I’ll admit, I wish you’d spent more of last night with Maggie.”

  J.T. knew his grin was brittle. “So do I,” he said. His reasons were a little different, of course. The rain hadn’t slackened; J.T. wished he’d thought to wear a hat, but he’d left the house in a hurry after Purvis’s call.

  “Who hated Clive Jenson?” Purvis muttered, in a distracted tone, musing aloud.

  “Just about everybody,” J.T. answered.

  “Enough to kill him,” Purvis stipulated.

  J.T. sighed. That specification certainly narrowed the field, though he was sure several viable candidates still remained. “Let’s find out,” he said, with resignation. “We can start by going over to your office and running a few background checks.”

  Maggie stared at J.T., the next morning at the Station, after he told her about Clive Jenson, looking for any sign of grief, but all she saw was a sort of jaded weariness that made her soul ache. Homicide, in all its manifestations, was old news to J.T. Moreover, she sensed that he was already retreating into the investigation; he wasn’t the same man she’d danced with, laughed with, at the Stagecoach CafÈ only the night before.

  “Clive and I weren’t close,” J.T. said, and she saw a veil drop behind his eyes, effectively shutting her out. “There’s no sense pretending otherwise.”

  “I can’t believe this is happening,” Maggie said, taking an emotional step back herself. “This is Springwater.” The very air seemed to sparkle after the night’s rain, and the sun was shining brightly, making the whole idea of murder seem impossible.

  “Believe it,” J.T. replied. He finished the coffee she’d given him, carried the mug to the kitchen, and set it in the sink. “Purvis is going to ask if you spent time with me last night. The sheriff’s detectives might, too.”

  Maggie’s eyes widened. “They don’t think—?” She couldn’t bring herself to finish the sentence.

  “It’s routine,” J.T. said briskly.

  She sank onto one of the benches, absently petting Sadie, who had immediately lain her muzzle on Maggie’s knee. “Still,” she said.

  “McCaffrey,” J.T. drawled, rounding the table and leaning forward, hands braced against the edges, to look down into her face. “I didn’t like Clive, but I didn’t kill him, either.”

  She felt an indignant flush climb into her face and throb there. “Well, I know that,” she said, and she thought she saw relief flash in his eyes.

  “Good,” he said. “Now, I’d better get over to Purvis’s office. We’ve got more reports to fill out, even though we were at it half the night, and one of us will have to contact next of kin.”

  Maggie nodded, still feeling weak. She couldn’t get over it. She couldn’t get past it. Murder. In Springwater?

  “Later,” J.T. told her, and then he was gone.

  Daphne showed up only a few minutes after he left, carrying a little girl in her arms. The child was beautiful, with fair hair and bright brown eyes, and she clung shyly to her foster mother while studying first Sadie, then Maggie, with sober interest.

  Maggie smiled and got to her feet. “This must be Tiffany,” she said.

  “Isn’t she precious?” Daphne beamed.

  “Yes,” Maggie said, putting out an index finger. Tiffany assessed the digit thoughtfully, then clasped it in her moist little hand and squeezed. “Hi,” Maggie greeted her.

  Tiffany buried her face in Daphne’s neck.

  “Ben says there was a M-U-R-D-E-R up by the Jupiter and Zeus,” Daphne reported, looking serious now.

  Maggie nodded, no longer smiling. “Clive Jenson,” she said.

  “J.T.’s uncle?”

  “Yes,” Maggie said, and shuddered.

  Daphne set Tiffany on her feet and squatted beside her while she and Sadie eyed each other. Sadie made a tentative, friendly lap at Tiffany’s face, and Tiffany gave a gurgling, joyous laugh.

  “I thought dear old Clive was long gone,” Daphne said, at some length, still supervising as Sadie and Tiffany made each other’s acquaintances.

  Maggie frowned. “My mother mentioned that he’d been back in town a few times since his wife died. He wasn’t tremendously popular, given the way he had deserted Janeen.”

  Daphne winced. “Can you imagine leaving a person you supposedly loved to face something lik
e cancer all alone?”

  Maggie shook her head, watching with growing affection as Tiffany and Sadie made friends. “Tell me about Tiffany,” she said, glad of the happy distraction the child’s presence provided.

  Daphne lowered her voice, although it was doubtful a two-year-old child could have understood much of any adult conversation. Including one about M-U-R-D-E-R. “She was abandoned at a rest stop,” she said. “Late last week.”

  Maggie was incredulous. “No,” she protested. But Daphne nodded. “A retired couple were passing through in an RV, and they found her wandering around on her own when they stopped to stretch their legs. They brought her to the sheriff’s office in Maple Creek.” She paused. “Nobody seems to have any idea who left her or why.”

  “Then how did they know her name? Does she talk?”

  Daphne shook her head, her silvery eyes filling with sadness as she watched Tiffany awkwardly stroking one of the dog’s petal-soft ears. “She says “mama,” and “no.” That’s about it, as far as anyone can tell. But somebody had printed ‘This is Tiffany’ on the back of her hand. I saw a photograph—the letters were awkward. Childlike.”

  Maggie blinked, overcome by the image of a toddler abandoned at a rest stop, with only a few scrawled words to identify her. “What’s going to happen now?”

  Daphne’s shrug was deliberately casual. “She’ll be a ward of the court while an investigation is conducted. At some point, adoption may become a possibility. In the meantime, Tiffany will be staying with Ben and me.”

  “And you and Ben want to adopt her?” Maggie ventured softly.

  Daphne nodded. Her spine stiffened slightly, and there was a defiant glint in her eyes, as though she expected an argument. “Yes,” she answered. “But I— we—understand that it might not happen, and we’re okay with that.”

  Maggie wasn’t sure she believed that last part—Daphne obviously had bonded with Tiffany after less than twenty-four hours, even though it seemed Ben wasn’t as eager to proceed with an adoption—but she kept her misgivings to herself. Daphne was her best friend, and whatever happened, good, bad, or indifferent, she would be there for her. She prayed that Daphne wouldn’t be hurt and summoned up a smile. “A celebration is in order,” she announced, turning toward June-bug’s kitchen. “And in my family, that means homemade cookies. Want to help out?”