The Sheriff of Heartbreak County

Chapter 10

Susie Grace was the only one in Roan’s household watching television Monday morning when the news story broke. Boyd had installed the small set, one of the under-the-counter, fold-down flat-panel kind, so he could keep up with the news and his favorite programs while he was doing the cooking or cleaning up the dishes. Since this was Monday morning, though, he was still digesting Sunday’s newspaper, and Roan was around the corner in the bathroom mopping up after shaving and trying to decide if it was time to drop in at the barber shop or not.

Susie Grace had been keyed up and fidgety all morning, which Roan figured meant she was feeling either excited or apprehensive about the prospect of her first school day sporting her new hairdo. Consequently, she’d been doing more playing with her bowl of cereal than eating. She was picking raisins out with her fingers and sucking the milk off them when Boyd looked up from his paper long enough to tell her to quit fooling around and eat her breakfast or she was going to miss the bus.

“I don’t like the cereal. It’s soggy,” Susie Grace said crossly.

“Not surprised,” Boyd said, and went back to his paper.

Lacking a better target, Susie Grace glared at the TV set, lower lip sticking out, arms folded across her new green top with the yellow and white daisies on the front. A moment later, she sat up straight, sulks forgotten. “Look, Grampa, it’s Mary.”

“What? Where?” Boyd flicked the newspaper over, looking around as if he thought someone might be hiding underneath it.

“Not there.” Susie Grace giggled, then pointed. “Right there. On TV.” Boyd put down the paper and picked up the TV remote. Susie Grace tumbled out of her chair and ran out of the kitchen yelling, “Dad! Come quick-Miss Mary’s on TV!”

Roan poked his head out of the bathroom and frowned at her over the towel he was using to pat his freshly shaved jaws dry. “What are you talking about?”

With patient emphasis she repeated it. “Mary’s on tee vee. I saw her. Come on, hurry-you’re gonna miss it.”

Roan felt the blood draining out of his head and his body going cold, but there wasn’t time for his mind to form coherent patterns. It was a little like being caught up in an earthquake or volcanic eruption-while it was happening there was only one thought possible: catastrophe.

Boyd was staring intently at the small TV set, the remote control he’d used to turn the volume up still pointed at it. “Didn’t realize that little ol’ gal was such a looker,” he muttered without looking up.

“What’s going on?” Roan asked in a low voice, ignoring Susie Grace, who was dancing and chattering excitedly somewhere on the edges of his awareness.

Boyd clicked the remote and turned the sound up another notch. “See for yourself.”

Roan glared at the set through narrowed eyes. It was one of the network morning shows…two well-known faces, one belonging to the morning show’s female host, the other the classically chiseled features of the evening news anchor…sitting in chairs opposite each other in standard interview fashion.

“…did you first realize the woman in the photograph was your-I guess I should say our former colleague?”

“Well, as you know, the photo came in on the wire yesterday evening, after I’d signed off the evening news broadcast. I recognized her right away. There was no doubt in my mind that it was Yancy.”

The photograph that had caught Susie Grace’s eye filled the screen, and Roan felt a sharp squeezing around his heart. Because he knew, almost to the second, when the picture had to have been taken. Mary’s clothes were the ones she’d been wearing the day before, during the shopping trip to Bozeman. And the smile…ah, the smile. It was the one he’d only seen a time or two…the one that took his breath away. The last time he’d seen it was the evening before, when she’d turned to him with her face full of joy and laughter and light, and he’d been so blinded by the radiance of it he’d forgotten to pay attention to what was going on around him.

“How well did you know Yancy Lavigne?”

“I’d just started with the network as a reporter. My beat was the west coast-L.A., San Francisco-and of course hers was fashion, which meant she covered all those ‘red-carpet’ events. So our paths crossed quite a bit. I guess I knew her as well as anybody did. She seemed like a genuinely nice girl, which is why we were all so shocked when we heard she’d gotten mixed up with the South American mob.”

“Yes, but if I remember correctly, didn’t she testify against some members of the DelRey family? Wasn’t she the key witness, and instrumental in getting the main kingpins of that cartel convicted and sent to jail?”

“Yes, she was. And after doing so, apparently vanished off the face of the earth-or, as we now know, into the Witness Protection Program. I guess we know now where she’s been all these years.”

There was more, but Roan didn’t hear it. He was too busy cussing under his breath, half-choking on the anger that was billowing up from the cold, burning place inside him, like smoke from dry ice.

And then his phone rang.

On Florida’s Gulf Coast, Joy Cavanaugh, also known as Lynn Starr, creator of the Asia Brand series of bestselling murder mystery novels, was enjoying one of her favorite moments of the day. Her husband Scott, chief homicide detective for the county sheriff’s department, was already at work, and their nine-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Carrie Jane, had just left for school. This was the time before she tackled the household chores, and then had to face the computer and the overdue rewrites on her current novel, that precious hour-which admittedly sometimes stretched into two or more-when she allowed herself the luxury of curling up with someone else’s book.

She poured herself a second cup of coffee, then settled on the sunroom couch and tucked her bare feet up under the edge of her bathrobe. She heaved a happy sigh as she picked up the hard-cover romance she was currently reading, her place marked with the flap of the dust jacket. The television was on, tuned, as always, to her favorite network morning show. It didn’t interfere with her reading pleasure; she enjoyed an ability to tune it out when it didn’t interest her. And she liked to catch the local news and weather every half hour or so.

She read, contentedly sipping her coffee, the television making companionable noises in the background…until a word, a name, penetrated her shields like a steel-tipped arrow and stabbed straight through to her heart.

Coffee slopped onto her robe. The book slipped unnoticed from her hand. Trembling, clutching the coffee cup to her chest, she stared at the image on the screen…the face of a woman well-remembered, beloved as a sister, lost to her for ten long years.

When her brain resumed functioning she picked up the phone and, with hands still shaking, dialed her husband’s number.

Mary woke on Monday morning to a yawning emptiness…empty house, empty schedule, empty future. After Sunday’s glimpse into the secret garden, the barren landscape of her own life seemed to stretch around her in every direction, as far as she could see…emptiness and only more emptiness.

Since she stayed open on Saturdays, the shop, like most beauty salons, was closed on Mondays. Normally, she filled the day doing the countless routine chores necessary to keep herself, her household and her business functioning-collecting the trash, watering the plants on the kitchen windowsill, cleaning the litter box, dusting and vacuuming and laundry, washing the car, raking up leaves and pine needles, bookkeeping, making out lists of supplies to order for the shop.

Today she didn’t feel like doing any of those things.

Normally, she would have grocery shopping and banking to do, maybe a scheduled appointment with the dentist, or to have her car serviced. But her car was in the sheriff’s department’s impound yard, and she couldn’t carry groceries home without it.

Normally, she might look forward to a drive or a hike in the mountains, or a trip to the firing range, both of which were now out of the question.

Yesterday, strolling through a shopping mall with Roan and his daughter, picking out clothes for Susie Grace, eating ice cream cones in the food court, for the first time in so many years she’d felt…almost happy. Carefree. Normal. But of course, she realized now-had known even then-it had all been no more normal for her than a day at Disneyland. Her life, her real world, had been waiting for her beyond the magic gates.

That’s what you get, Mary, for letting yourself dream.

Depression settled over her like a blanket.

When Cat came to wake her in his usual manner, she pushed at him irritably, muttered, “Go ’way, dammit,” and pulled the covers over her head. Cat’s response to this was to park himself on her chest and make kneading motions with his forepaws in the mound of blankets where he calculated her face should be.

“I think I liked you better when you hated me,” Mary grumbled, pushing both blankets and the cat aside and reaching for the TV remote. She aimed it at the small portable set on the dressing table across the room and clicked On.

A moment later she was sitting bolt upright in her bed, awash in adrenaline: jangled, head ringing, body gone clammy and cold. She stared at the screen, unable to tear her eyes from it, and this time when Cat came to rub against her she gathered him unthinkingly into her arms and hugged him close, trying to warm herself with his small furry body.

Joy’s legs had stopped shaking, pretty much. Now she was pacing back and forth through the rooms of her house, talking on the phone and making wild, out-of-sync gestures with her free hand like a mishandled marionette.

“I have to go to her,” she said, sniffling into the phone. “She needs me. Oh, Scott…poor Yancy.”

“You don’t need to be running off up to Montana and getting into the middle of this,” her husband said calmly but firmly. “There’s nothing you can do anyway, except make things worse.”

“I can be there. She shouldn’t be alone through something like this.”

“What makes you think she’s alone? It’s been ten years, honey, she’s probably married, with a family of her own.”

Joy was silent for a moment, brushing away tears. Then she said in a low, choked voice, “She didn’t do it-shoot that senator’s son. You know that-she couldn’t have. Yancy couldn’t kill anyone.”

There was a soft exhalation, a pause, and then, “I know.”

“I have to do something. Please-I can be on a plane by-”

“Joy, absolutely not. I mean it. What am I gonna have to do, handcuff you to the bathroom plumbing again?”

Joy gave a watery squeak of laughter and a grudging sniff. “Yeah, look how well that worked the last time you tried it.” But she’d heard the genuine concern in her husband’s voice. They were both remembering what had happened last time she’d been hell-bent on rescuing Yancy.

“Look, dammit-” Joy winced. It wasn’t like her patient teddy-bear husband to shout. “What do you think you’re gonna do if Junior DelRey comes for her? Jump in front of a bullet?”

Her heart gave a sickening lurch. “Junior? But-I thought he was in prison.”

“Oh, no. His father and uncle got life-I think they both died in prison. Diego DelRey was sent up as accessory. He’s been out for…I guess it’d be two years, now.” Scott’s voice was grim.

“Oh God…if he sees that news broadcast-Scott, you have to do something!”

“Yeah.” There was another, gustier exhalation. “Okay, look, I’ll see what I can do. I’ll try and get hold of the sheriff up there-what was the name of the place again?”

“Hartsville,” Joy said with a relieved sniffle. “Hart County, Montana.”

Roan argued with himself as he drove into town. Not out loud-he wasn’t that crazy-although at the rate he was going, he figured that was coming, it was only a matter of time. Right now, thankfully, there was still a rational, grown-up part of him that demanded to know what the hell the rest of him thought he was doing.

It was way too late to try to pretend he hadn’t compromised his objectivity where Miss Mary Owen-or Yancy, or whatever the hell her name was-was concerned.

Much harder to admit he might be in over his head.

Easy enough to admit learning the truth about his mystery woman had hit him hard. What man wouldn’t be ticked off to find out the woman he was teetering on the brink of falling in love with, to the point where he’d convinced himself she wasn’t a murderer, had been in bed-literally-with the South American mob? He could admit to being mad as hell, feeling like he’d been conned, made a damn fool of.

It was harder to admit how much it hurt.

He’d trusted her, dammit-ironic, too, when he considered how he’d started out trying to get her to trust him. Instead, he’d come to trust and believe in her innocence enough to introduce his daughter to her, and even, God help him, include her on a family outing. Clearly, he had lost his mind.

Temporarily, he told himself grimly as he jerked the SUV to a stop in front of Queenie Schultz’s little clapboard house. Which was something he’d almost begun to look forward to, these past few mornings…pulling up, tapping the horn, then watching Mary emerge from the house like a little brown mouse from its hole. And he’d be smiling to himself, enjoying the secret knowledge that the mouse was really an enchantress in disguise. Enchantress? What the hell was that? Now I’m weaving fairy-tale fantasies about my murder suspect?

He sat staring at the house, girding himself. He told himself he was through being blinded by a pair of green-gold eyes and that he was seeing everything clearly now. He told himself this morning’s development was the wake-up call he needed to get himself back on track, remember who and what he was and get back to doing the job the people of Heartbreak County paid him to do. He told himself he was damn lucky he’d come to his senses when he had.

He stared at the house and the front porch and the lilac bush and told himself he wasn’t seeing her there, that breath-stopping smile and those shimmering eyes lifted to his, and hearing his little girl’s laughter. He told himself his heart wasn’t thumping like a jackhammer inside his chest.

“Time to quite actin’ like a lunatic and start actin’ like a sheriff,” he growled to himself as he opened the door and reached for his Stetson.

She answered the door wearing a flannel bathrobe, an ugly blue and purple plaid the color of bruises. She wasn’t wearing her glasses-had they been part of the lie, too, he wondered? Without them her eyes had a dazed, unfocused look, and there was a purplish-blue smudge, like a thumbprint, below each one. Her skin had the almost translucent quality he’d noticed that first night, with only the faintest lingering hint of the bruises Jason had given her, and no trace at all of a blush. Her hair was loose and tousled, as if she’d just gotten out of bed. It was the first time he’d seen it that way, tumbled down around her shoulders, and he couldn’t help but notice it was longer and thicker than he’d thought it would be, and had a little bit of a tendency to curl after all.

“It’s Monday-the shop is closed,” she said, gathering a handful of her hair and raking it back. She lifted her chin and her eyes darkened and her face closed up like a fortress preparing for battle. “I won’t be needing a ride.”

“I didn’t come to give you one,” Roan said between clenched teeth. He opened the screen door and moved past her into the house. He pitched his hat onto the back of the sofa, then turned and arrowed a look at her. “Is it true?”

It wasn’t what he’d meant to say-at least, not like that, with his voice sounding like a rusty gate hinge. But it was out, now; there was nothing he could do but wait for her answer.

He needed the answer, dammit. Which was maybe why he did what he did when she seemed about to brush past him without giving him one. He grabbed her arm. Not acting like a sheriff, for sure, and maybe not a lunatic, either. Maybe just a man caught up in an emotional confrontation with a woman, and there was no use kidding himself this had anything to do with the job. Not any longer.

She flicked a glance down at his hand, then lashed it back at him, and he swore he could feel the burn of that look on his skin. He didn’t fold, just stared back at her, his own eyes on fire in their sockets.

“I just got up,” she said very softly. “I was going to get some coffee. Do you mind?”

“Hell with the damn coffee! The story on the news this morning-is it true?”

There was a long pause. His heart knocked against his ribs, and he could feel his pulse in his fingers where they circled the sleeve of her robe.

“Some of it.” She spoke as if her lips were made of glass.

The smile he gave her felt no less rigid. It cramped the muscles in his jaws. He said with exaggerated patience, “Well, let’s start with your name. I seem to recall you swore to me it was Mary. So who is Yancy? Huh? Now what’s the truth?”

“Roan…”

The sound of his name coming so softly from her mouth hit him like a blow. He felt sick. It shamed him to realize he’d tightened his grip on her arm, but he couldn’t seem to let go. “Oh, well, hell-I forgot. What good does it do me to ask you for the truth? How am I even supposed to know what the truth is, coming from you? ‘My name is Mary,’ you told me, and you didn’t kill Jason. Since you lied about the one-”

She gave a sharp, angry gasp, and he felt the muscles in her arm go rigid. “I didn’t lie. My name is Mary. Mary Yancy.” Her chin came up, en garde, once again ready for battle. “Yancy Lavigne was my professional name.”

But he was too angry to absorb such a simple explanation, and instead plowed on. “Yeah, and I was right about you being a city girl, wasn’t I? That story you told me-your father, the church-how does that fit with your New York City glamour-girl-”

“That was true-every bit of it.” Her eyes had darkened, but he couldn’t let himself acknowledge the pain in them. If he did, the anger would go out of him like air from a leaky life raft, and right now it was the only thing keeping him afloat.

“My father’s name was Joshua Yancy,” she went on, speaking rapidly, breathlessly, wounded but defiant. “He was the pastor of a church-strict fundamentalist-in a small town in upstate New York. My mother’s name was Rebecca. She played the organ. I was their only child. My father was fifty and my mother was in her mid-forties, I think, when I was born. My arrival must have been a tremendous embarrassment for them, indisputable evidence, you see, that they’d been engaging in Pleasures of the Flesh.” She said it as if it had been written in capital letters, her lips twisting into a bitter smile. “It didn’t help matters that I turned out to be pretty, but I think the capper, the final disgrace, was my red hair. Neither of them had it, so they-”

“You had…red hair.” He felt as though he’d gone deaf-and numb. He didn’t feel the flannel robe beneath his fingers anymore-wasn’t aware he was holding her by both arms now.

She shook her dirt-brown hair back on her shoulders. He felt the warm tickle of it on his hands. “Oh, yes-fiery. I’m sure they thought I must be the Devil’s spawn. They certainly never let me forget it.”

Roan was barely listening to her. His head was full of the sounds of his good intentions and common sense colliding with concepts of some sort of Fate or Destiny he’d never even believed in before. Logic and common sense told him this woman’s hair being the same color as his wife’s and daughter’s had nothing to do with anything. And yet, why did he feel like he’d just been bucked off a bronc…shaken, bruised, and not sure which way was up?

He shook his head, and when the dust began to clear, realized his fingers were woven through locks of silky brown hair they’d found all on their own, and were testing the texture of it against their tips as if it were some rich and rare fabric he was thinking of buying.

He thought of her skin…that particular translucence, clear and pale as porcelain. The way her eyes could go in an instant from rain on the ocean to sunshine on meadow grass. The fact that she hated pink.

“My God,” he murmured. “My God. How-”

“I dye it, Roan,” she said, gently sardonic. “It’s not that hard to do, considering I’m a hair stylist.”

She jerked away from him, and his hand, thoughtlessly clutching, caught the sleeve of the flannel robe. Her momentum pulled it off her shoulder. What lay revealed, then, like the unveiling of a lovely work of art, was a gentle round of creamy white faintly shadowed, as was her face, with freckles. And the narrow strap of a silky nightgown, the exact color of the lilacs beside her front porch.

Something slammed him in the gut-he told himself it was anger. It ricocheted through him, blowing all thought from his mind the way a gunshot sends a flock of birds exploding from a tree. Thoughts of Erin and Susie Grace vanished, along with any notion he might have had about behaving like the professional lawman he liked to think he was. The only thing in his head right then was the image of that pale, lovely body…and the Mob.

He followed her into the kitchen, his skin sizzling and blood pumping hot in the bottom of his belly. “Tell me-how did you get from singing in church choirs to sleeping in a drug lord’s bed?” he said with a cruelty that shocked him.

She didn’t seem to notice it. She fussed with the coffeemaker, putting in a filter, counting out spoonfuls of coffee. She waited until she’d finished, then muttered without looking up, “It’s a long story.”

“For God’s sake, Mary-why didn’t you tell me about this?”

She shook her hair back and tilted her face toward him-another unconscious gesture of a beautiful woman. “Apparently you’re not acquainted with the protected witness’s first rule.” Her smile was faint and sardonic. “Tell no one. It’s the first thing they tell you: if you break security they can’t protect you. They hammer that into you until you’re afraid to admit even to yourself in the privacy of your own bedroom who you really are-” her voice caught “-or who you used to be.”

He wouldn’t let himself hear the pain. “My God,” he said, almost shouting-something he did so rarely he didn’t recognize his own voice. “Do you know what this does to the case against you? You were the mistress of a mobster. Not only does that make you look like the kind of person who might kill somebody, at least in most people’s minds, but the prosecution can make a helluva good case for blackmail. How’s this? Jason found out about you somehow-is that what happened, Mary? He threatened to expose you unless you gave him what he wanted, so you shot him?”

Her eyes had gone the dark slate-green of thunder clouds, and the way they were glaring at him now, he wouldn’t have been surprised to see lightning bolts shoot out of them. “I…have…never…shot…anyone…in…my…life,” she said in a voice pressed between clenched teeth, enunciating each word separately as she advanced across the kitchen toward him. “In fact-I think the only wrongdoing I’ve ever been guilty of in my life is being stupid. Stupidly chasing after the wrong dreams, maybe. And you know what?” Almost nose-to-nose with him now, she punched his chest with one finger. “I know for a fact I don’t have to take this from you. In fact, I want you to leave. Right…now.” The finger punched him again.

In full retreat, backing up with his hands held out to his sides in surrender, Roan found himself wondering how in the hell this firebrand had managed to pass herself off as a mouse for so long.

“I want you out of my house,” she finished, folding her arms on her heaving chest. “And I’m calling my lawyer.”

The funny thing was, watching her work up such a spectacular head of steam, Roan could feel his own temper cooling down. Something began to hum deep inside him-excitement, maybe, or anticipation…appreciation…respect…who knew? What he did know was he suddenly had to fight an urge to grin.

“Look…Mary,” he began, and was on the verge of putting his hands on her shoulders again, with the memory of what was under that flannel robe all too fresh and vivid in his mind.

So it was maybe a good thing his cell phone picked that particular moment to ring, although he didn’t see it that way at the time. Some adrenaline squirted into his system, just enough to make his heart do a little hop-skip and his skin tingle with the disappointment of missed possibilities, and he was swearing as he snatched the trilling phone from his belt. He glanced at it to make sure it wasn’t Boyd or Susie Grace’s school calling, then thumbed it on and barked, “Roan.”

“Uh, yeah, Sheriff,” came the cigarette-raspy voice of Carol Butterfield, the morning dispatcher, “sorry to bother you, but I’ve got somebody on the line here I think you’re gonna want to talk to. Fella says he’s a deputy sheriff down in Florida, has some information on the Holbrook murder-or rather, on the woman you arrested for it. You see the news this morning?”

“Yeah, I did.” He glanced at Mary, who gave him a hostile look, then whirled and marched back to the counter and the coffeepot. “Okay,” he said, “put him through.”

Mary leaned against the countertop, sipping her coffee and watching the tall, lean, golden-haired sheriff restlessly pace the two stingy steps the confines of her back stoop allowed him. Two steps…turn. Two steps…turn. Now and then he’d throw a glance her way, and when he did, some sort of electric current would shoot along her nerves and her muscles would tense and shiver, her heart would skip, her breathing quicken, and threatening tears sting her eyes and nose like pepper.

Just tears of anger, she told herself. Tears of confusion.

Confusion. Oh yes. She couldn’t think. Inside her head there was nothing but noise, a babble of voices all shrieking at the top of their lungs, like a town hall meeting gone berserk.

I want him to leave!

I want him to hold me…

I want to be alone!

I’m so tired of being alone…

I want to run away, far, far away!

But I’m so tired of running.

All this emotion-I hate it! I was calm before-I want to feel calm again!

Maybe you weren’t calm, just dead.

At least I didn’t hurt!

That’s what dead is, dummy. It’s pain that tells you you’re alive.

Outside on the stoop, Roan was folding his cell phone, ready to come back in. Mary watched him through the divided panes with narrowed eyes and pounding heart, quivering inside. Turning the volume down on the voices, she prepared herself, ready to stoke up the fire of her anger again, because at least anger was a choice-something that let her be in control.

He came through the door, tucking the phone into its holster on his belt. He closed the door behind him, then looked at her and said, “That was somebody you know.”

Her stomach flip-flopped and her body went cold. She didn’t know she’d set her coffee cup down until it hit the countertop with a clunk that jarred to her elbow. “Not…”

He shook his head, confusing her all the more. I thought he was angry with me. Why are his eyes so gentle?

“A sheriff’s detective from down in Florida-Scott Cavanaugh. Says he only met you once, but you know his wife real well. Her name’s Joy? I guess the two of you used to be roommates?”

“Joy?” It came from her mouth but she didn’t recognize it, that dazed and bewildered voice, like the cry of a lost child beholding a familiar face.

Then, everything inside her simply…crumbled.

In some disconnected but still-functioning part of herself she understood she was falling apart, but like a spectator watching a train wreck unfold before her eyes, she was powerless to stop it. She began to shake, then to laugh, and finally, to cry-all three happening to her at once, and while she could wrap an arm across her waist to contain the shivering and clamp a hand over her mouth to hold back the laughter, there was nothing she could do about the tears pouring from her eyes like a summer sunshine-and-rain squall after a long, long drought.

Roan started toward her and she backed away from him, putting out her hand in what he knew must be an instinctive effort to ward off the inevitable, the way someone facing a gunman throws up his hands to stop the bullets. And with about as much effect.

He folded her into his arms, though she fought him-fought desperately, folding up and barricading herself behind a wall of hands and arms and elbows. He knew to ignore all that; long years of experience dealing with a redheaded woman had led him to understand she was apt to fight hardest against what she needed-and wanted-most. And it had taught him to be patient with those kinds of contradictions.

So he corraled her with strong arms, gentle hands and soothing words, stroked her back and her hair, cradled her face against his thumping heart, smiling over her head and a little misty-eyed himself because there was a poignant familiarity about the feel of her quivering body in his arms, the little snuffling, hiccuping sounds, and even about the damp spot she was making on the front of his shirt. Erin had been prone to rain squalls like this. Some of his best memories of his life with her involved their sweet, sweet aftermath…which was possibly why, when he felt Mary’s shivering and tears subside and her body begin to relax, it seemed so natural to him to gently tilt her face up and kiss her.