The Sheriff of Heartbreak County

Chapter 8

Her eyes, framed by those godawful glasses, reminded Roan of terrified wild critters cowering in the shadows. “What…what did you say?”

Watching her narrowly, he said, “Uh…Big Bad Wolf…Little Red Riding Hood? You know-”

“Oh-of course.” A smile blossomed, misty with embarrassment and relief.

“What the hell did you think?” He still felt wary, and oddly shaken. But there was a new tingle of alertness running through him, too…a feeling there was something important in this little misunderstanding, if he only knew what it was.

She tried her best to divert him with a nervous laugh and a not very convincing gesture. “I thought-you reminded me of something, that’s all.”

Something? Or…someone? But he didn’t see any point in pursuing the issue. Not then.

Gathering up his patience, which he seemed to have been losing his grip on a lot lately, he said in a weary voice, “Well, all right, Miss Mary, but do you think you could get in the damn car? I’m not gonna eat you, you know.”

She threw him her vivid green glare and muttered, “You might not believe that either, if you could see your face.” But she trotted around the SUV and opened the passenger-side door.

While she was doing that, Roan had a chance to look at himself in his rearview mirror. What he saw made him snort, then laugh silently. He was smiling when she slipped in beside him, fingering back a lock of limp brown hair that had escaped the confines of the ponytail she’d clipped haphazardly to the back of her head. Watching her, his smile grew broader.

“What now?” she demanded, instantly suspicious again. “Why are you smiling?”

What was he going to say? He couldn’t tell her he was thinking how he’d like to take that damn clip and pitch it out the window, then slip his fingers into the silky softness of her hair…and that he was smiling the same way he would if he’d just set eyes on a meadow full of wildflowers, or a wild red sunset, or a nice piece of horseflesh running free. For no other reason than to acknowledge and thank God for the beauty of it.

And he didn’t want to ask her why she was trying to hide how beautiful she was, either-not then…although he did file that question away for a future time and place, along with the others he’d collected. Because he was more and more certain the dowdiness she put on with those ugly glasses and oversized clothes wasn’t ignorance or bad taste. Considering the woman made her living making other people beautiful, it was hard for him to believe she wouldn’t know how to recognize it in herself.

Which meant… his pulse quickened as his mind tripped quickly along the path that thought opened up for him. Say she’s a protected witness, but a new identity, a new location, aren’t enough. Say she’s recognizable whoever or whatever she is. If she’s trying to hide it, could it mean it’s the fact she’s beautiful that makes her recognizable?

He put on an expression of mock bewilderment and adopted a wounded tone that wouldn’t fool Susie Grace. “Hey, a minute ago you didn’t like my face because I wasn’t smiling, now you don’t like it because I am? I just can’t win with you, can I?”

She didn’t answer that, but busied herself fastening her seatbelt, then turned her head and studied him thoughtfully while he started up the SUV and checked his rearview mirrors. When they were headed down the alley, she shifted to face forward and said conversationally, “Don’t you have anything better to do than chauffeur a murder suspect around town? Like…a department to run? Criminals to catch?”

“See, that’s the good thing about being the boss,” he said cheerfully. “You get to delegate. Happens I’ve got a whole bunch of good people working for me. Amazes me, sometimes, how much they can get done so long as I stay out of their way.” His eyes slid past her as he made the turn onto Main Street, and he added softly and without a trace of humor, “The fact is, Miss Mary, right now you’re my number-one priority.”

I wonder why he calls me that-Miss Mary, she thought.

I wonder why I don’t mind that he does.

There was a knot of tension sitting at the very top of her chest, and she rubbed it absently as she watched the quaint Old-West-style storefronts on Main Street flash by. She noticed that many of them were wearing new coats of paint now that spring had come, and some had flower boxes sitting out in front, planted with pansies and snapdragons and daffodils that nodded in the wind. A lot of them had hung American flags, too.

I wonder why he looks at me the way he does sometimes…as if he really does see right through this charade of mine…as if he knows who I really am.

I wonder how he can know who I am when even I don’t, and why it bothers me so much that he does.

I wonder why I wonder about him so much…

“What do you do when you’re not working?”

Her heart gave a nervous lurch and her breath hitched, and she’d already flicked him a startled glance before she caught herself and murmured, “What do you mean?”

Watching the street ahead, he casually lifted one shoulder. “What do you like to do in your spare time? Read? Garden? Build birdhouses? Go out with friends?”

Warning instincts shivered over her skin. What is he doing? Is he trying to trick me? “Why are you asking?” she said lightly, on guard now.

The glance he gave her seemed more amused than exasperated, like the look an indulgent parent might bestow on a rebellious child. “It’s called conversation-you know, polite small talk? That’s where I ask you unimportant questions and you answer them, then you ask me some and I answer, and maybe in the process we get to know each other a little better.”

He was patronizing her. Annoyance crept over her, banishing the pricklings of suspicion. “Conversation?” she said with an incredulous huff of laughter. “You must be kidding. We shouldn’t even be talking at all-about anything.”

He was silent for a moment, then said quietly, “I’m not trying to trick you into anything, if that’s what you’re thinking. My asking didn’t have anything to do with you having secrets…me trying to find out who you are. Maybe I shouldn’t be asking any kind of questions-most likely I shouldn’t-hell, Lord knows I shouldn’t. But look, you’re a newcomer in a town where everybody knows everybody and half are related by blood or marriage. I’d like to learn more about you. That’s it-that’s all it is.” He was frowning when he finished, maybe realizing how many contradictions there’d been in what he’d said.

Mary studied his rugged profile, cast in bronze by the setting sun. The dent in his cheek was a purple shadow, his hair burnished gold. The skin on his forehead had a rosy glow that looked as if it would be warm to touch…and she couldn’t keep herself from thinking of the ways she might. Brushing that thick silky hair back, my fingers burrowing through it…holding him close while I…

Shimmering heat crept through her. I shouldn’t be doing this, she thought, but she heard herself clear her throat. “I don’t know many people in town-other than clients, that is. In the evenings I watch television…read…listen to music-”

“Yeah? Me too.” The smile he threw her was spontaneous-the first of its kind she’d seen. It softened his face, warmed his cold-steel eyes. Her heart gave a hiccup of surprise. “What kind of music? Not country, I’m thinkin’.”

Without knowing she was going to, she smiled back. “No. Classical, I guess…pop…Broadway…and anything you can dance to.”

“You like to dance?”

“I used to,” she said. Her smile faded and died.

“You ever go dancing on the weekends? We’ve got a few places around here. Naturally, it’s gonna be country, though.”

She stared blindly at her hands and shook her head. “On weekends I usually catch up on chores…go grocery shopping. When the weather lets me, I go to the firing range…maybe for a walk.” The remembered loneliness of those solitary walks came creeping over her like nighttime fog, banishing the lovely shimmering warmth, and only now that it was leaving her did she recognize the warmth as happiness.

“You ever ride?”

“What? Ride-oh, you mean horses?” She shuddered, and when she looked up, found she’d almost missed another of his oddly endearing, crooked grins.

“Well, yeah, this bein’ Montana.”

“Oh-God, no.” She looked at him with such horror that he laughed out loud. This time when he glanced at her, his eyes were bright with curiosity.

“Mean to tell me you’ve never ridden a horse before?”

She shook her head. Her skin was crawling with new prickles of warning.

“Why is that? Never had the chance, or scared to try?”

She gave a short, high laugh, considered for moment, then decided to ignore the warnings. “Both, I guess. Maybe a cause and effect in there somewhere.”

“Ah,” he said, nodding wisely, “must be a city girl.”

She turned her head sharply and looked out the window as a memory came from nowhere, unexpected and shocking as a slap.

“You think you want to be a city girl!” My father’s voice, thundering down like the wrath of God from somewhere above me-his pulpit, maybe. I remember the church smells of old wood and linseed oil and dead flowers as he shouted, “Cities are dens of wickedness and degradation, girl-remember what the Lord did to Sodom and Gomorrah. No! My answer is no, and no, and a thousand times no! No daughter of mine will ever follow a path that can only lead to sin and death! Not while I have breath!”

She thought, Goes to show how much you know, Sheriff. But the warning prickles were too insistant now to be ignored, and they kept her from saying it out loud.

The SUV turned sharply, jounced off the pavement and into a packed-earth parking lot, and came to a halt.

Mary glanced around in surprise; she’d been too fogged in by memories to notice they’d gone beyond the turn-off to her street. “Why are we stopping here?”

The sheriff pulled the keys from the ignition and turned to look at her, his hair and features weirdly highlighted by the flashing multicolored glow of the animated neon sign on the roof of Buster’s Last Stand Saloon. “It’s dinnertime. I’m hungry, and I’m guessing you are, too. I’m also guessing-well, hell, to be honest, I happen to know you haven’t done any grocery shopping since you got out of jail. Since I’m told you like the cooking here, thought you might like to stop in…pick up something to take home for dinner.”

She stared at him, trying to read him, wondering whether he’d meant to be cruel… whether he could really be so devious. But his expression, thanks to the flickering light of the neon sign, had nothing to tell her.

She turned to stare instead at the sign-a cowboy on a rearing horse, which was said to be something of an antique, though not as much of one as the original, which Mary had been told had depicted an Indian wielding a tomahawk. It had been replaced sometime in the latter part of the twentieth century when changing sensibilities had rendered it politically incorrect.

She gazed now at the rearing horse, half-hypnotized by its flashing animated sequence that seemed to keep time with the thumping of her heartbeat and the throbbing ache in her throat, and wondered why her vision should suddenly blur with unshed tears. Because his kindness had seemed real to her…because she’d trusted him…because she felt betrayed? Or something else entirely?

“Why are you doing this?” She was so used to keeping silent…so used to keeping her secrets, she almost didn’t believe it was her own voice. “What did you hope to accomplish by bringing me here?”

“What?” He jerked back from her as if she’d struck him. Feigned innocence, she wondered, or genuine surprise? “Ah, Mary, come on, now-”

“Were you hoping I’d…I don’t know, be overcome with guilt at seeing the place where Jason and I had our…confrontation, break down and confess I shot him? Save your county the expense of a trial?” She glared at him, relieved it was anger that had brought these forbidden tears. Anger, she could deal with.

“Ah…hell. Mary…” He drew a hand over his face, then turned so that he was facing her, one arm across the back of the seats. “Look, I’ve an idea you’ve got good reasons to be so suspicious and cynical about a man’s motives. Maybe I can’t expect you to trust me, or believe me when I tell you I’m just not that devious.” His voice was a low, hypnotic rumble. She didn’t want to listen to it…didn’t want to sit unmoving when she felt his hand on the back of her neck. And yet…she did. “But I’m not,” the mesmerizing voice went on, while his hand slipped under her straggling hair to lay its comforting and intimate warmth on her bare nape. “Swear to God. Kind of wish I’d thought of it, but the fact is, all I was trying to do was get you something to eat before I took you home. I am truly sorry I upset you.”

She nodded, eyes closed, and struggled to push words past the ache in her throat. “It’s okay…I’m sorry…it’s just that…”

But how could she explain to him that in the darkness and the flashing neon lights it had all come back to her, that she could feel hot, moist hands on her body, the rough scrape of beard stubble, cruel wet lips and searching tongue…the choking stench of beer breath…the coppery taste of blood in her mouth. She felt nauseated and cold; all the feelings she’d suppressed that night rose up in her now, and it took every ounce of will she had to keep from tearing open the car door and vomiting onto the hard-packed earth…then running away as fast and as far as she could get from that soothing voice and gentle hand. So compelling was the desire to crawl trembling and sobbing into this man’s arms…to allow herself the unimaginable luxury of his comfort and protection.

“It’s okay,” he murmured. His fingers stroked the side of her neck…his warm palm massaged its base. “It’s okay. How ’bout if I go in and get you a sandwich? If you promise you won’t run off while I’m gone.” She could hear the ironic smile in his voice and gave a small answering spurt of hopeless laughter.

“Where would I go?” She shook her head and huffed in a shallow breath. “Thanks, but…I’m not really hungry. If you could just take me home…”

“I can do that-if you’re sure.” She could feel his eyes searching her face. She nodded, and felt the warmth and weight of his hand leave her neck as he turned and reached for the key.

She told herself she was relieved, and she was. Oh, she was. But then why, somewhere deep inside, did she feel a sharp bright tug of pain, as if something she’d become attached to had been roughly ripped away?

He drove her home in frowning silence, one hand clamped across the lower part of his face, the other tapping a restless cadence on the steering wheel, while Mary tried to watch him without letting him know, wondering what he might be thinking that had darkened his thoughts so. Wondering how it was that she should feel his silence as a kind of abandonment, and why she should feel this loneliness so acutely when she’d been accustomed to loneliness for years. Was it the contrast, perhaps, between this withdrawal and the unexpected intimacy they’d shared a few minutes ago? And who was this foolish stranger inside her recklessly crying, Yes-yes, I want more of that! Please, oh please…touch me again!

Seductive and dangerous thoughts…and she would put them out of her mind for good. She would.

But when the SUV drew to a gentle stop in front of Queenie’s small clapboard house, she didn’t get out right away, but sat with her hands clenched in her lap, staring up at the lighted front porch…at the lilac bush where Jason had crouched in ambush that night…

“Would you like me to come in with you for a minute?”

She almost laughed. Thankfully, she found the self-control to keep from it, and simply shook her head. If she laughed, how would she explain to him why? How could she tell him that, in her present vulnerable state, her greatest fear was that if she were alone with him she’d throw herself into his arms?

Instead, still gazing out of the window, she said softly, “What’s going to happen now? Do I just…go on about my life-as much as the news media will let me-as if nothing’s happened?”

She heard an exhalation…a small throat-clearing sound. “Well, the wheels of justice don’t grind quite as slowly here in Hartsville as they do in the big city, but it’s still apt to be a while before this comes to trial. Luckily for us, the media people have short attention spans. Most of ’em have already cleared out-except for the diehard paparazzi, maybe.” There was a pause, and a smile came back into his voice. “Guess it’s a good thing you have me to drive you back and forth to work.”

She turned to look at him. “How long are you going to keep doing this? Until the trial?”

In the darkness she couldn’t see his eyes, but the quiet voice had a silvery edge. “As long as I need to, Miss Mary.”

She gave him a small bitter smile. “Thanks for the ride, Sheriff.” She opened the door and climbed out of the car.

His voice stopped her before she could slam the door shut. “We’re gonna be seeing quite a bit of each other in the next few weeks. Do you think maybe you could call me Roan?”

She hesitated, holding the door and gazing into the deepening dusk where a few of last year’s leaves, caught by the breeze, were swirling in the SUV’s headlights. Her throat tightened. “Isn’t that unusual, considering who we are to each other?”

From inside the SUV came a short huff of laughter, and then the rumbling drawl: “Miss Mary, not one thing about you and me is usual.”

The motor fired. Mary closed the door and stepped back from the car. Folding her arms around herself, she watched as it rolled slowly away.

It was Saturday morning, and Roan was having an altercation with Susie Grace. This had been happening with some regularity of late, and it was beginning to be a concern to him. His relationship with his daughter had been a source of comfort and joy to him up to now, and he didn’t like to see that change. At least, he acknowledged, not any sooner than it had to.

The bone of contention on this particular occasion had to do with Boyd planning on taking some steers to the sale, and Roan feeling a compelling need to keep an eye on his murder suspect, and Susie Grace not wanting to accompany either one.

At the moment she had both elbows planted on the breakfast table and an expression on her face of the type that would have prompted Roan’s mother to tell him he’d better hope his face didn’t freeze that way. She’d eaten the middle out of a piece of toast and stuck her finger through the hole and was twirling it like a lasso in the vicinity of her left ear.

“I’ll stay here by myself,” she announced, in the manner of a queen issuing a royal proclamation.

Roan blew on his coffee, sipped it, said, “No, you won’t,” and watched his beloved child morph instantly from monarch into whiny seven-year-old.

“Da-ad, why? I’m old enough, I can take care of myself.”

“No, you’re not,” said Roan.

Susie Grace hurled the piece of toast across the table, tumbled from her chair and ran out of the room, bellowing like a just-branded calf.

Roan sighed and set his coffee cup down on the table. “What am I doing wrong?” he asked Boyd, who was standing at the stove tending to the last of a batch of hotcakes.

With his back to him, Boyd said, “It ain’t what you’re doin’, it’s what you’re not doin’.”

“Which is?”

His father-in-law flipped another hotcake. “Spendin’ time with her. You ain’t been home much since the Holbrook kid got killed. She’s missin’ you, is all.”

Roan’s snort of protest was prompted more by guilt than disagreement. “Well, there’s not much I can do about that,” he muttered into his coffee cup. “I’m doing the best I can.”

Boyd scooped up the hotcakes and stacked them on a plate, turned off the gas burner, then looked over at Roan. “How long you gonna shadow that little ol’ gal from the beauty shop?”

“I guess until a jury finds her innocent or guilty.” Roan looked at his coffee with distaste and set the cup back on the table, though he knew good and well it wasn’t Boyd’s coffee that tasted so bitter in his mouth.

“You tellin’ me you really think she did it?” Boyd’s sharp eyes speared him, and he shifted irritably under their gaze.

“Didn’t you already ask me that?”

The older man shrugged and turned back to the stove. “Just wonderin’, since you been spendin’ so much time with her…” He gathered up frying pans and dropped them into the sink full of soapy water. “Thought by now you mighta got to know her a little better, mighta changed your mind.”

“Ah, hell, I don’t know.” Roan gave a gusty sigh as he pushed back from the table, got up and carried his breakfast plate and coffee cup to the sink. “Truth is-and this goes no further than this room, you understand-I am having a hard time believing the woman could be guilty of killing anybody. But if not her, dammit, then who? Everything I’ve got points to her, and there isn’t anybody else around here that had a good enough reason to kill Jason-not like that, like it was a personal grudge. An execution, even.”

Boyd nodded and went on scrubbing at a frying pan. Roan clapped him on the shoulder and said with a breeziness he didn’t feel, “Good thing it’s not up to me to decide. I’m gonna let a jury do that. Listen, good luck at the sale. Right now I think I’m gonna go have a little talk with my daughter. You might want to wish me luck on that, too.”

Boyd grunted. “Yeah, you think she’s hard to get along with now, just wait till she hits puberty.” He looked at Roan and pointed a soapy spatula at him. “What that kid needs is a mother. You know that, don’t you?”

Roan said, “Huh,” and walked away. But as he headed down the hall to his daughter’s bedroom, he felt like he’d been kicked by a mule. What that kid needs is a mother. Dammit, he knew that, and he didn’t know why those words had hit him so hard just now. It wasn’t like he hadn’t said it himself a time or two before.

Maybe because it had come from Boyd, father of the woman any new mother of Susie’s would have to replace? Or because the face that had sprung unbidden and unwanted into his mind when Boyd said it was that of a woman he’d recently arrested for first-degree murder.

Saturday promised to be a busy day for Mary. It was prom weekend, and she was booked solid from opening in the morning until the last possible moment before the big night. She’d scheduled herself more tightly than she normally would, too, right through lunch and without even a coffee break. Maybe it was because she hadn’t had a prom of her own, but she felt a responsibility to make sure every single girl went off to the dance feeling beautiful.

Who knew better than she did what it was like to feel beautiful…and what it was like not to?

And so, when Cat woke her earlier than usual-in his customary fashion, landing on her bed with a thump that shook the mattress, and then, vibrating the very air with his grinding purr, plodding the full length of her body to bump his head against her chin hard enough to make her see stars-she was more than happy for the opportunity to get a head start on the day. The sun was shining, the cold spell had passed, and she saw no reason why she should wait for Sheriff Harley to drive her to work when she could just as easily walk the half-dozen blocks and spend an extra hour getting things organized and prepped for the onslaught to come.

Which was why she was in her shop, immersed in the task of laying out gloves, smocks, wraps, curlers, scissors and all the other tools and supplies and magic potions she would need to transform two dozen or so highly emotional and self-conscious teenaged ducklings into self-confident swans, when she heard the back door of the salon open, then bang shut. She barely had time to glance up before the sheriff came bursting through the curtain, looking like a fighting bull in search of the matador.

He checked when he saw Mary and said, “Ah, there you are,” in a calm voice that might have been convincing if his eyes hadn’t glittered so brightly, and if she hadn’t heard the sharp exhale of a breath through his nostrils.

She gave him a brief smile and went back to her sorting. “Did you think I’d left town?”

The sheriff folded his arms on his chest and strolled slowly toward her. “The thought crossed my mind.”

“Mine, too,” Mary said lightly, not looking up. Dismayed at the way her heart had quickened. “I couldn’t very well go today, though-it’s prom night.”

He nodded and said, “Ah.”

As if he truly understands, Mary thought, with a little tickle of surprise.

And why shouldn’t he? No doubt he remembers his prom. She felt a twinge of envy for the girl who had been his childhood sweetheart…and eventually his wife.

“You might have called me,” he said, from unexpectedly close behind her, in an undertone that was unnecessary in the empty shop. And perhaps for that reason seemed strangely intimate.

“I…didn’t think of it.” She felt too warm. Nervous, and hemmed in. He was too close…she could feel the heat from his body…smell his clean, just-shaved, just-showered smell.

She started to turn, needing to find more room to breathe, and when she did, a movement caught her eye-the curtain across the back entrance to the salon, twitching back into place, as if someone was watching furtively from behind it.

She halted and said, “Oh-” and the sheriff turned, too, following her startled gaze.

He made a gesture toward the curtain. “Come on out here, Susie Grace, she’s not gonna bite you.”

There was a pause…the curtain quivered, billowed, and then was snatched aside by a small hand to reveal a girl, possibly seven or eight but small for her age, dressed in jeans and a blue pullover with yellow butterflies appliqued on the front. She was wearing blue cowboy boots and a look that was half wary and half defiant. Her hair was pulled into two tight braids that hung stiffly to just below her shoulders. Hair the color of fire…copper pennies…autumn leaves.

Mary’s breath caught, and as the child moved reluctantly into the room, she felt the earth shudder under her feet. Thirty years fell away in an instant, and she found herself looking through a window into her own past-or was it a mirror? Except for the scars that puckered and crinkled the skin on the little girl’s neck and chin and one side of her face, Mary was gazing at herself…the child she had once been.