“I can’t believe you’re here, all dressed up. I’d be curled in the fetal position in bed with the doors and windows locked.”
“I told my dad as soon as I reached the Trail Office. Rachel and he came on out. But by then the wolf-man was nowhere to be found.”
Lucy felt a chill shoot down her spine. She’d been hoping that the hideous creature she’d seen out on Eagle’s Pass that day had fled town, never to return. It was wishful thinking.
“What’s the sheriff going to do about it?” she asked, remembering how Lucy had only been able to convince Rick that the wolf-man existed after relaying to him the vision that the deformed werewolf had planted in her paralyzed mind. Maybe he’d believe her now, fully. Word around town was that he dropped his investigation of the wolf-man in favor of hunting a white wolf he’d seen out on Trout Street.
Whitney’s answer was to open her purple clutch purse on the table and angle it towards Lucy.
Lucy gasped. There was a Glock handgun tucked inside next to a compact powder and tube of lipstick.
“It’s loaded with silver bullets,” Whitney whispered. “Don’t worry, I know how to use it. Daddy trained me years ago when the boys around these parts started gettin’ ideas, if ya know what I mean.”
“I don’t know, Whitney, that seems dangerous.”
“I’d rather be armed, Lucy-goose, than have nothing but my voice to scream with should anything happen.”
Lucy drew in a deep breath, but it did nothing to calm her nerves.
“If you ask me,” Whitney went on, “you need one of these yourself. I mean, I’ve taken a gander at Kaleb Quinn, girl, and he ain’t packing nothing by the way of firearms. Nothin’ but a six pack and I don’t see how his washboard abs are going to help you if and when push comes to shove.”
Lucy sucked down the rest of her martini. She hadn’t meant to inhale it so quickly, but her nerves were starting to get the better of her and she didn’t want to reach for her Xanax if she could help it.
“Daddy’s got plenty,” Whitney went on, referring to firearms. “I can take you out back on our property. There’s a range. I can show you how to handle one of these things. We got tin cans and targets.”
“I really don’t know,” she said dubious.
“Think about it,” she said as she slung her purse over her shoulder. “I’ve gotta use the little girl’s room.”
With that, Whitney started through the bar, leaving Lucy to ponder the unthinkable.
She was so lost in thought, in fact, that she hadn’t noticed Courtney Harrington saunter her entitled self into the bar until she’d surprised Kaleb by throwing her arms around him from behind.
Lucy frowned, furrowing her brow at the sight of Courtney’s mini-skirt inching up her rear-end as she practically swallowed Kaleb in a hug.
“I thought I’d find you here,” she heard Courtney coo from across the room. “This is totally our place, ain’t it?”
Lucy rolled her eyes. Libations was everyone’s place since it was the one and only bar in town, and if you wanted to hook-up it was the lone scene to prowl.
Courtney must have felt eyes on her because the next thing Lucy knew, the aggressive girl was glaring at her.
“I think Pollyanna over there might have a thing for you,” Courtney told Kaleb in a condescending tone. “Lemme handle this.”
“Courtney, no—”
But Kaleb’s objection wasn’t enough to stop her.
Coming right up to Lucy’s table, the girl sucked in a deep breath, expanding her full chest beneath the skimpy tee-shirt she was wearing, and said, “I really hope you’re not the type of person to try and steal a girl’s man.”
“I’m here with Whitney,” she said dryly. “See?”
Courtney turned her confrontational attention to find Whitney Abernathy nearing them.
Whitney was a hawk when it came to spotting female aggression, and she’d never backed down from an opportunity to fiercely defend her friends. But her reputation had proceeded her and as soon as Whitney came to a standstill next to Courtney, the girl flashed an appeasing smile then turned on her heel after coolly saying, “Enjoy your drinks.”
“What the hell was that all about?” asked Whitney as she sat down, eyeing Courtney’s return to the bar beside Kaleb. “Oh, Christ.”
“Yeah,” agreed Lucy. “Tenacious, that one.”
“I’m sure Kaleb brought it on himself. What was she doing here at the table, though?”
“The same thing she was doing at the diner earlier today. Claiming Kaleb as her territory.”
“To you?”
“I guess so.”
“It’s about to get worse,” Whitney informed her and it took Lucy a fraction of a second to understand why.
Kaleb was headed this way, having left Courtney to her lonesome at the bar counter.
“Hey,” he greeted Whitney before turning his attention to Lucy. “I think it’s time to get out of here.”
“Why?” Whitney challenged. “We’re having a nice time and were about to enjoy a second cocktail.”
“Seriously,” he pressed.
“Excuse me, Kaleb Quinn,” the fiery redhead cut in, “but she isn’t here to protect you. As far as I heard, it’s supposed to be the other way around, and whatever mess you’ve created for yourself having gone to bed with the queen sorority psycho of Devil’s Fist, is your own problem, so if you want to make yourself useful, why don’t you mosey on over to Jack and get us two more martinis, shaken not stirred. Vodka. And don’t forget the olives.”
Damn.
Lucy’s jaw had practically dropped to the floor, but it wasn’t entirely because of Whitney’s no-nonsense command. Kaleb had pressed his mouth into a hard, obedient line and was now starting towards the counter to do just that.
“Men,” Whitney huffed as she crossed her legs in a bizarrely ladylike fashion.
At the bar, Courtney tried to distract Kaleb from his task, but he wasn’t having it, and this time when he returned to their table with two cocktails in hand, he pulled up a chair and sat.
Courtney looked like she was going to blow her top, but when she slid off her barstool, she didn’t march over like Lucy feared. Instead, she glared at Kaleb something nasty and stomped out of Libations all together. As she started off down Main Street, she held her glaring eyes on Kaleb through the large picture windows, but soon she was gone, having disappeared down the sidewalk.
“So,” said Kaleb with an easy grin on his face. “What are we talking about?”
Whitney screwed her face up at him and retorted, “Wouldn’t you like to know.”
***
It might have been the martinis she’d drank. It might have been Kaleb’s gentlemanly manner that he’d maintained throughout their conversation. Or it might have been the fact that Whitney had decided to lighten up and go easy on him. But after nearly an hour of hanging out and unwinding in Libations, Lucy knew that she definitely did not want to go home alone.
Whitney had parked her Jeep curbside in front of the bar, so it was no problem at all for Kaleb to walk her out to it. Lucy gave her friend a hug and asked for the third time if Whitney would be alright to drive, and after she assured her that she was a-okay, she took off down the street. Lucy and Kaleb watched her Jeep until it turned down Bison Road a few blocks ahead and when it was out of sight, Lucy realized that she was holding Kaleb’s hand.
Had she taken hold of his large, warm hand? Or had he slipped his fingers into hers?
Whoever was guilty of being so bold, she couldn’t pinpoint. She just folded her arms and started up the sidewalk, trusting that Kaleb would stay by her side.
“Hey, about Courtney,” he began in an apologetic tone.
But she didn’t let him continue. “It’s really none of my business.”
“It’s nothing,” he interrupted, perhaps needing to get his version of the facts out in the open. “I mean, it happened—”
“Really, Kaleb—”
“Bu
t I didn’t mean to lead her on—”
“I don’t need to be hearing any of this.”
“But I need to say it,” he asserted, and it was enough to give her the kind of pause that caused her to face him.
They stood on the sidewalk, cool night air breezing down the street, stars twinkling high in the sky overhead. Lucy stared up into his dark eyes and could see clearly his need to explain himself, so she listened.
“I take my responsibilities seriously,” he said. “I’m not trying to let some girl distract me.”
“You think you’re responsible for me?”
“I know I am.”
“Well, you don’t have to be—”
“Stop,” he barked. “I know I don’t have to be. But I also know what I want.”
Her eyes widened at his admission, the implication it contained, and she felt her chest warm with something that felt like affection.
He’d almost said it. Almost admitted that he might actually have feelings for her. But instead of making himself perfectly clear, he urged her to keep walking down the sidewalk, his hand now pressing gently and protectively into her lower back. It was enough to make her second guess his implication, and the next thing she knew they’d crossed the length of Main Street in silence and were cutting down Bison Road and coming to the back of Angel’s Food where the entrance door to her apartment was still strung with yellow police tape.
Kaleb tore it down and the yellow tape fluttered to the pavement. When he opened the door for her, he informed her, “I’m staying with you tonight whether you like it or not.”
“Because you’re responsible for me,” she supplied, though she’d meant for it to sound like a challenging question.
She knew why she’d been halfhearted about it. She wasn’t going to fight him. She liked that he was determined to keep her safe, whether or not that was actually necessary.
When they reached the landing, she held the apartment door open for him after stepping inside. The door hadn’t been locked, which didn’t immediately strike her as odd. Not at first. Not until she thought about it.
Then she remembered getting changed into her dress. She remembered leaving her apartment with Kaleb. And she definitely remembered having rattled the doorknob to test that it was in fact locked.
“Kaleb,” she said in a low whisper as trepidation swelled in her stomach. “I’m certain I locked this door.”
The apartment was dim with only the faintest glow of streetlights brightening the windows on the far side of the living room, but it wasn’t so dark that she couldn’t see a flicker of concern flare behind his dark eyes.
He took gentle hold of her shoulders and deposited her beside the coat rack as if to tell her to stay put. She did, as he crept into the dim living room then around the corner into her bedroom, out of sight.
It was quiet. Too quiet. Her heart was pounding so hard, her pulse filling her ears, that she could barely hear Kaleb’s boots softly padding over the wooden floors.
He returned a few tense moments later, flipping on the lights as he rounded through the living room.
“There’s no one here,” he told her and she let out a rocky breath, wondering if Angel had come up for some reason, perhaps at the sheriff’s request, and simply forgot to lock up afterwards.
But when she walked through and went into the bathroom, intending to wash her makeup off, she froze, heart punching hard against her chest cavity as soon as she saw her reflection in the mirror.
Over the mirror’s glass, someone had drawn an oval circle in the lipstick Lucy had put on. Her face filled the pink oval. Above it was written in capital letters: GUILTY.
“Lucy?” Kaleb asked when she’d fallen deathly silent, having forgotten to close the bathroom door.
As soon as he rounded into the bathroom, he saw the mirror and froze.
“My parents,” she breathed. “That’s how I felt after I found them. Guilty.”
***
At about the time Lucy was rising into another anxiety attack, but fighting it by focusing on angrily cleaning the oval of pink lipstick off of her bathroom mirror and the shaming word written in all caps above it, Sheriff Rick Abernathy was settling down at the desk in his study at home, a faxed conviction in his hands.
The home office, or study as he liked to refer to it as, was rustic and handsome with a stately mahogany desk lit with green banker’s lights, leather couches and armchairs configured in a rectangle in front of it. Bookshelves lined the walls. There was a fireplace that wasn’t lit since he had no use for it this time of year, and behind him was a large picture window that looked out over the west side of the acreage and the dirt driveway that led to his daughter’s significantly smaller cabin behind his own. The old Halsey land beyond the driveway was dark and rustling in the night breeze, pines and evergreens adding texture to the landscape. But Rick wasn’t gazing out at it.
His attention was fully fixed on the documents he’d had faxed over from the courthouse in Jackson Hole.
He remembered the case well, the double homicide of Roxanne and Harold Cooper, Lucy’s parents.
It was twelve years ago, Lucy had been twelve years old at the time, a spindly little thing. She hadn’t yet come into her slender 5’6” height, and she was even more of a tow-head blonde than she was to this day. Rick had been the one to find her. She’d been covered in blood, right down to the tips of her hair. Practically catatonic, she’d been in a state of collapse on the floor. Staring. He’d never seen shock so crippling. It had cut right down to his core. When she’d finally loosened up, the light having returned behind her focusing eyes as well as her voice, she’d been absolutely no help. Hadn’t seen a thing. She’d gotten home too late for that. If she hadn’t, she probably would’ve ended up like her parents, slaughtered.
Rick first noted the dates to confirm or dismantle a hunch that had taken over him. He wouldn’t have even thought to request that the records be faxed to his home office had the time of year not struck him suddenly. The cusp of spring and summer, when the Fist started heating up but kids hadn’t been released from school yet. It happened every so often after particularly harsh winters if the snow-day cancelations really piled up. Even his own Whitney had, at times, marched off to elementary school in late June and early July if February had been particularly brutal, snowstorms having forced the roads closed for a week here, a few days there.
There had been no trial. The guilty man, who Rick had investigated then arrested, had pleaded down to manslaughter. In exchange for a signed confession and no time wasting, he’d been carted off to prison only a month or so after the crime had taken place.
The confession, which Rick was now studying, was dated in mid-July. He flipped a few sheets deeper to the preliminary police report and sure enough, there was the date of the double-murder—June 12.
The number twelve was jumping out at him.
Lucy had been twelve. The murders occurred twelve years ago, on the twelfth.
Rick didn’t have to open his active case file on Leeanne Harrington’s murder. He knew the date.
June 12.
It gave him serious pause.
Every bone in his body had told him that Leeanne had been killed by the same animal and in the same manner as Holly van Dyke, but as he absorbed the significance of June 12 another, darker possibility crept through his mind.
What if whoever had killed Leeanne Harrington had intended to make the death look like a copy-cat murder, identical to Holly van Dyke’s?
But why Leeanne?
It was eating at him and he set the faxed copies on his desk and leaned back in his chair to concentrate. He swiveled around and stared, unseeingly, out at the dark, breezy acreage.
Leeanne’s murder had nothing to do with Leeanne, he concluded. It was all about Lucy Cooper, wasn’t it? And the goddamn killer had attacked the wrong girl.
Had the double-homicide of Roxanne and Harold Cooper also been about Lucy? He couldn’t imagine that it had been. She’d been an i
nnocent girl of twelve. But Rick was starting to accept that nothing was truly as it seemed in the Fist. Never had been and never would be.
The man who was convicted had been a little older than thirty at the time of his arrest. He was about forty-two or maybe forty-three now.
Peter Swanson.
An absolute waste of human life, Peter was a middle school drop-out—hadn’t even made it to the ninth grade, for Christ’s sake—who had been more or less taken in by Curt Wilson, the owner-operator of Damned Repair, the automotive repair shop on the west side of town.
At the time of the investigation, Curt had taken not one shred of responsibility for Peter, having insisted that he’d taken pity on the kid because of his own big heart and had put him to work in the salvage yard. Peter hadn’t eaten at his table or received a dime that he hadn’t earned working, he certainly hadn’t received one word of advice from Curt. And as soon as Peter had turned eighteen, he became so unreliable, according to Curt’s interview, that the man had to fire him. It was unofficial, of course, because by the time Curt had made up his mind about letting the kid go, Peter didn’t bother to ever again set foot inside the chained link fences of Damned Repair.
He had, on the other hand, set foot all over town, getting himself arrested here and there for petty crimes, which was what had put his fingerprints in the system.
The double-homicide had seemed calculated, passionate, thorough, and, not that a failure of a person like Peter Swanson deserved the credit, impressive.
Back in the day, it had never sat fully right with Rick that Peter was their man, but the hard evidence hadn’t lied and Peter had confessed right quick. At the time, it had made sense that Peter would’ve been too stupid to skip town after killing Roxanne and Harold, but now, as Rick pondered that decision, it seemed… well… Had it been planned?
Had Peter been some kind of fall guy?
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