The Sheriff of Heartbreak County

Chapter 3

He waited patiently in the silence while she puttered around the sink, doing what looked to him were totally unnecessary cleaning chores, and it occurred to him only then how out of place this woman looked in that particular kitchen. He hadn’t known its former owner, Queenie Schultz, all that well, except to say hello to when he’d dropped off Erin or picked her up from her monthly trip to the beauty shop, but he sure did remember her big-toothed smile and big brassy laugh, and the pinkish-tinted platinum blond hair she wore teased up and lacquered into a bouffant the size of a basketball. That, and her short but big-busted shape she liked to squeeze into smocks that were just a wee bit too small, so she always put him in mind of a little strutting pigeon.

Her he could see in this kitchen, with its pink and yellow flowered wallpaper, ruffled curtains, potted sweet potato vine on the windowsill and potholders shaped like kitty-cat faces. Miss Mary Owen didn’t fit, like the one kid who hadn’t gotten the word it was supposed to be dress-up day, and he wondered if that might account for some of her awkwardness.

He felt a strange desire to reassure her…put her at ease. He’d almost forgotten the question he’d asked, when she gave him the answer he didn’t want to hear.

“Yes, I do own a gun.” She threw him a quick defiant look over one shoulder. “I have a license for it, too, in case you’re wondering.” Then she turned and leaned against the sink and folded her arms with an air of weary acceptance as if answering his questions was an unpleasant task she’d decided to get over with as quickly as possible. “I got it several years ago. For protection, since I live alone, and I often work late.”

“Mind if I ask what kind it is?”

“It’s a Ladysmith,” she replied without hesitation. “Thirty-eight caliber.”

Again, it wasn’t the answer he’d hoped for. He lifted his eyebrows. “That’s a lot of gun for a woman. Know how to use it?”

Her lips flirted with a smile that made him aware of how he’d sounded-like a bad John Wayne imitation. “Yes, Sheriff, I do. I practice at a firing range at least once a month.”

“So you’re a pretty good shot?”

Watching him, she hitched one shoulder in a wary shrug. “I usually hit what I’m aiming at.”

“How long’s it been since you went shooting?”

Behind the ugly glasses he saw her eyes kindle again as she countered softly, “I went this last weekend.”

Convenient alibi, Roan thought, in case a weapon turns out to have been fired recently.

“Where’s the gun now? Mind if I take a look at it?” He asked it in a friendly way, smiling. “Take it with me, run a few tests on it?”

The smile she gave him back was a lot less friendly than his. “Don’t you need a warrant for that?”

“I do if you make me get one,” Roan said, still showing his teeth, “or, you could agree to give me the gun of your own free will. Save us both some unpleasantness.”

While he waited for her reply, it struck him that it was an odd sort of conversation to be having with a murder suspect. More like a verbal fencing match than an interrogation-rapid and light in tone, almost playful, but with an underlying tenseness, each of them concentrating with laser-like focus on the other, both of them wary…poised to thrust or parry for real at an instant’s notice.

Excitement raced through him as she lifted her chin and threw at him in direct challenge, “I could…but you’d have to tell me why you want it.”

The tension rose again to a screaming pitch while he pondered his options…while he wondered what kind of a lawman he was to be playing this kind of game with a suspect in a murder investigation. Finally, he drawled, “Oh, I think you know why.”

She sighed and her lips curled, but not with a smile this time. “You think I shot Jason Holbrook with it.”

“Did you?”

“No.” It was a quiet but vehement explosion.

Roan narrowed his eyes. He wasn’t conscious of movement, but the distance between himself and the woman seemed to shrink. “But didn’t you say you got the gun for protection because you work late…protection, I’m assuming, against just the sort of thing that happened to you last night?”

She stared at him and didn’t answer…didn’t confirm it, or deny it, either. But he could see shadows of what might have been fear or pain, or maybe both, flit across her eyes.

“So, if you didn’t use the gun last night when Jason attacked you,” he went on, scratching his chin in a puzzled way, “my question would be, why not? It would make sense to me if you had shot him-might even be considered self-defense.” He knew damn well it hadn’t been, but handed it to her like a gift, just to see what she’d do with it.

Again she didn’t bite, just looked at him with eyes green and deep as the sea and quietly said, “Do I need a lawyer?”

He folded his arms and gave her an ambiguous little nod. “Not if your gun checks out.”

She let out a breath, then pushed abruptly away from the sink…stalked across the darkened living room with a long and panther-like stride. And as he picked up his hat and hurriedly followed, Roan was conscious once more of the woman’s unexpected grace. And something else. Something he couldn’t put his finger on, but that stirred up a prickly feeling on the back of his neck. Something about that walk…

When he caught up with her she was pulling out her purse from underneath a small table beside the front door. His stomach lurched when she opened it and took out a slim, lethal-looking handgun, but she merely handed it over to him, butt first.

“I’d like it back as soon as possible,” she said, and this time there was no mistaking the flicker of fear in her eyes.

So…I guess maybe she wasn’t lying when she said she needed this thing for protection, Roan thought as he carefully wrapped the weapon in his handkerchief. The lady was definitely afraid of something-or someone. Not for the first time, he wondered where she’d come from and what she was doing here, a couple of hundred miles from nowhere, and if it was the usual domestic abuse thing she was running from, or something more sinister.

One thing for sure, he was going to be running a check on Miss Mary Owen the minute he got back to the shop. Maybe he’d call in from his vehicle, get the ball rolling even before that.

“I guess you’ll be wanting something with my DNA.”

He looked up and found her gazing at him, head held high and bruised jaw set at a proud angle, eyes fathomless now, behind the glasses. Since he was juggling his hat and the gun, about all Roan could do was nod. He was doing that, getting ready to say the usual things he’d say to a viable suspect he wasn’t quite ready to arrest yet, when he came close to dropping everything in his hands and just about jumped out of his skin.

Something brushed across the back of his legs.

He did a clumsy sort of pivot, swearing under his breath, adrenaline hitting him like a blast of buckshot. Then, with an embarrassed snort, he bent and scooped up the big orange tomcat busily doing figure eights around his ankles. “Jeez, cat,” he muttered, “you damn near scared me out of my growth.” The animal’s only reply was a raspy purr as he butted his big head up underneath Roan’s chin hard enough to make him see stars.

He lifted his eyebrows and shifted his gaze back to Mary Owen. “This monster belong to you?”

But she seemed to be in some sort of trance, staring at the cat as if it had just sprung full-grown from his chest, like an alien birth. Roan had to repeat her name twice before she twitched her eyes back to his and words came gasping out of her already open mouth.

“No-I mean, yes-but…he’s Queenie’s-he came with the house. But he’s never let me get near him, much less pick him up. What on earth did you do?”

“Cats are funny about who they decide to like,” Roan said, and the cat’s purring was so loud and ratchety he had to raise his voice to make himself heard over it. He chuckled as he gave the cat a good scratch along the edge of his jaw and the purring rose to a snarl of pure ecstasy. “He’s sure a big ol’ boy-seems friendly enough now. Here, maybe he’ll-”

He was about to hand the cat over to her when the beast lunged out of his grasp and, hissing and spitting, vaulted off Mary’s unprepared arms and hit the floor with a heavy thud. From there he surged upward in one fluid leap to the back of the sofa where he crouched, eyes round and glowing, fur rippling, tail twitching, growls coming from low in his chest.

“Well, now you see what I mean,” Mary said as she gazed dispassionately at the bleeding scratches on her forearm. She reached into the pocket of her smock, pulled out a crumpled tissue, pressed it against the scratches and handed it to him. “That should do it for DNA. If not, you know where to find me.”

She groped for the doorknob, her jerky movements telling him she didn’t have it together as well as she wanted him to believe. “If there’s nothing else, Sheriff…” She hitched in a breath as she pulled the door open and held it, gazing at him and waiting.

It was too dark for him to see the color of her eyes, but he’d have bet they’d gone that fiery greeny-gold again.

Thinking about that, remembering those eyes and that curiously electric fire, he felt a stirring on his skin, as if something had flown close enough over it to disturb the fine hairs there.

And then he thought of an old horse trainer he’d once known, a member of the Blackfoot tribe, who’d told him about spirit power, and how he must listen to the messages given him in dreams by the spirit animals, which might be a bird or a wolf, or even a buffalo. And that he must obey them, because one day when he needed help he could call on the spirit animal and be answered. Why he should remember this now he couldn’t imagine, but that stirring across his skin did seem to him like a warning of some kind…call it instinct, call it a gut feeling, but something was telling him that something about this lady wasn’t right.

“Ma’am,” he said, and gave her a nod as he stepped through the doorway. He’d barely drawn his first breath of the chilly spring night air when he heard the door close and a dead bolt lock slide home behind him.

Back at the four-wheel-drive SUV that served as his patrol car, he got a couple of evidence bags out of the back and stowed the gun and the tissue with Mary Owen’s blood on it, then un-hooked his cell phone from his belt and climbed behind the wheel. He’d already hit the quick-dial button he used most when it came to him-the thing that had been bothering him about the woman he’d just left, the thing he hadn’t been able to put his finger on, the thing that just wasn’t right.

It was her walk. More specifically, the way she’d walked when she’d left him standing in the kitchen and crossed through the living room on her way to the front door to get her gun. That one time when she’d been too upset, too ticked off to remember the role she was supposed to be playing.

Like a panther.

How was it that mousy Miss Mary should have a walk that was long-legged, strong, confident and graceful…the walk, not of a shy homely mouse, but of a beautiful woman?

Yes…a tall, graceful woman with a panther’s walk and eyes that sparked with green-gold fire. It struck him, then, that Miss Mary Owen was anything but mousy. That she was, in fact, a very beautiful woman, though she seemed to be trying her level best to hide the fact. And he and everybody else in town had evidently been too damn blind to see beyond her disguise.

Everybody…except for Jason Holbrook, who was now dead. Coincidence?

Sitting there in his SUV on a quiet street in the town he’d lived in most all his life, Roan felt the Spirit Messenger stir once more across his skin.

Inside the house that wasn’t and never would be her home, the woman who called herself Mary Owen leaned back against the door and closed her eyes. As she waited for the sound of the sheriff’s car starting up and driving away, she felt the fear creep over her…the hollow sense of dread that meant her life had just taken a hard left turn and was about to go careening off in an unexpected direction.

It wasn’t a new feeling. She’d felt it for the first time almost twenty years ago, that fear, the day she’d run away to New York City to pursue a modeling career, never to return. Not exactly an original move for an unhappy young girl in a drab and miserable existence; a few decades earlier, she might have fled to Hollywood with dreams of becoming a movie star.

A life of glamour, excitement and beauty…what young girl didn’t dream of such things? How many found the courage to risk everything, leave the security of the only life they’d ever known to follow the dream? Darn few, Mary thought, with a valiant lift of her head. Darn few. She didn’t regret leaving home, even if the dream she’d sought so long ago still fluttered like a rare and lovely butterfly, tantalizingly beyond reach.

Not that she’d be all that sorry to leave this town, she thought, at least no more sorry than all the other times she’d had to pull up stakes and start over again someplace new. It had begun to seem natural to her always to be the new face in town. The shy, retiring stranger who keeps to herself and never lets anybody get too close…

Hartsville, Montana-Heartbreak, she’d heard the oldtimers call it, the ones who remembered way back to when the mines went bust. She’d come to the town purely by chance. It had merely been the place she’d wound up in last winter when she’d pulled off the interstate in the middle of a snowstorm because a warning light had come on in her car and she’d needed to find a service station right quick. Waiting in the coffee shop across the highway from the Gas-n-Go Kwik Service for a new alternator to be installed in her elderly Ford Taurus, Mary had found herself in friendly conversation with Queenie Schultz, owner-operator of the town’s only beauty parlor. She’d learned that Queenie’s sister down in Phoenix had been after her to move down there, and that Queenie had about had her fill of the cold and the snow, but couldn’t bring herself to run off and leave her faithful customers with nobody to do their color and sets.

Mary hadn’t expected to spend the rest of her life in Hartsville. But not even six months? That was a record, even for her.

She opened her eyes and found the cat still crouched on the back of the sofa, watching her with an expression of profound disdain. The silence in the room crawled over her skin and pricked her scalp like a premonition.

Why hasn’t his car started up yet? Why hasn’t he gone away?

She crept to the front window, fingered back the brown plaid drape and its heavy insulated lining and peered out. The sheriff’s SUV was still parked in front of the house-across the bottom of the driveway, in fact. To keep her from escaping, she wondered? Her skin prickled again, and she shivered. What is he doing out there?

“Daddy!”

Roan felt his heart lift, the way it always did when he heard his daughter’s voice…which at the same time, oddly, also made his heart ache.

In the darkness and privacy of his patrol vehicle, his mouth formed a grin. “Hey, peanut, how ya doin’? You and Grampa Boyd eatin’ supper?”

“Yeah…Grampa made hot dogs and beans…again.” Roan chuckled; he could almost hear those eyes rolling. “We were gonna make cornbread, but Grampa said we should save that for when you’re home, ’cause we know how much you like cornbread. Dad…”

“Yeah, peanut?” Roan pressed his thumb and forefinger against his forehead and rubbed, bracing for Susie Grace’s inevitable disappointment.

“Grampa said you have to work because something bad happened and a man got killed and you have to find the person that did it. But when are you comin’ home?”

He let out a gusty breath. “I’m gonna be pretty late, Susie-G. Most likely it’ll be past your bedtime, so don’t you try and wait up for me, now. You go to bed when Grampa Boyd tells you, you hear me?”

He heard a noisy exhalation that was a pretty good imitation of his own. “Okay. But, Daddy?”

“Yeah?”

“If I’m asleep when you get home, would you come and kiss me good night and tuck me in anyway?”

“Don’t I always?”

“Yeah, but promise me anyway.”

Roan gave an exaggerated sigh. “I promise.”

“Okay, then. G’night, Daddy. I love you bunches and bunches.”

“Love you the same back atcha. G’night, now. Be good.”

With the cell phone dead in his hand and the silence of night settling in, Roan realized his face was aching-most likely because he was still wearing that grin. He scrubbed a hand over his face to ease the muscles and was reaching for the ignition key when his radio crackled to life.

He thumbed it on and ID’d himself. “Yeah, Donna-what’s up?”

“Sheriff, uh…what’s your ETA back here at the shop?” The night dispatcher sounded uncharacteristically restrained.

“Let me guess,” said Roan with a new and decidedly sardonic grin stretching his face muscles. “There’s a United States Senator sitting in my office right now, spittin’ bullets.”

“Uh…that sums it up pretty well, only he’s not sittin’. More like…pacing. Think…a big old mountain lion in a cage.”

He chuckled and reached for the ignition. “I’m on my way.”

As the SUV’s lights came on he looked up at the house once more, in time to see the window curtain twitch back into place.

At least, the sheriff thought as he drove away from the dark, quiet house and its puzzling, enigmatic and oddly disturbing occupant, I can tell the victim’s father we have a possible suspect.

He wondered why that thought didn’t make him happier.

Mary let the draperies fall back into place, laughing silently at her own foolishness. He’d only been checking in, or calling in, or whatever it was policemen did when they’d been absent from their radios for a time. She was being paranoid, worrying for nothing. Sheriff Harley had her gun, and if he was as competent and as good and decent a man as Miss Ada said he was, it shouldn’t take him long to conclude that she’d had nothing whatsoever to do with the murder of Jason Holbrook.

But I could have. Maybe I would have…

Revulsion rippled across her skin, and she fought down a wave of nausea as for a terrible moment it all came rushing back-the smell of his breath, hot and thick with beer and tobacco and lust…the pressure of his arm across her throat, and the rising curtain of blackness and terror that threatened to suffocate her…the sharpness of his belt buckle cutting into the small of her back…the sound of his breathing, intent and determined…the sense of stark disbelief that curtained her mind from the thought that shrieked from some distant place: Oh God, I’m being raped.

And perhaps most shockingly, she recalled the violence and brutality of her release, and the strange mixture of rage and relief that had shaken her then, to the very depths of her soul. Not raped… violated nonetheless. She had not been a well-loved child, nor had she lived a protected life up to then, but she had never been spat upon before. She had never been struck in the face. Even Diego had never struck her in the face.

She could still taste the sickness that had risen into her throat after Jason had left her, in spite of all her efforts to prevent it.

Oh, I wish I could have killed him.

Would she have, she wondered now, if she had been able to reach the gun in her purse, the one she’d bought and practiced with so faithfully, then left sitting on the table beside the front door when she’d stepped onto the porch to check on the burned-out light bulb…only to realize a moment later, with a horrifying clutch of fear in her belly, that the bulb had been deliberately removed…and to know, with a cold sick sense of irony, that all her vigilance and preparation had been for nothing?

For nothing. Because in the end, the boogieman had found her anyway. Not the boogieman she’d been expecting, true, but bad enough. Definitely bad enough.

But the sheriff had taken her gun, and the forensics would prove she hadn’t shot Jason, no matter how much she might have wanted to. She had nothing to worry about.

Well, maybe not nothing. The sheriff had struck her as a man to be reckoned with, a man who wouldn’t be easily fooled.

Once again a little frisson stirred through her body as she recalled the cool blue glitter of those farseeing eyes, and it was followed by the surprised realization that, like the first time it had happened, when she’d first seen Roan Harley standing on her front porch, this wasn’t exactly an unpleasant sensation.

“What are you looking at me like that for?” Mary said to Cat, who was still crouched on the back of the sofa, staring at her with what she could have sworn was a sneer of contempt. “Just because you took a fancy to him. You’re a cat-what do you know? The man’s dangerous, I’m telling you.”

The cat gave her one of his slow-motion blinks and turned his face away.

Mary shrugged. What had she expected? She was, as she had been for ten long years, utterly and completely alone.

Taking a purposeful breath, she crossed the living room to the door that opened onto a short hallway and thus to the house’s two bedrooms and only bathroom. She went into the bathroom, turned on the light and closed the door.

With only the briefest glance at her image in the medicine cabinet mirror above the sink, she pulled the clip from her hair, letting it fall to her shoulders, not in the vibrant tumble of curls that was its true nature but in limp straight strands. She scrubbed her scalp vigorously with her fingers for a few moments, then opened the cabinet below the sink and took out several plastic bottles with applicator tips, a small glass bowl and a number of odds and ends she’d become all too familiar with during the past ten years.

Slipping disposable gloves onto her hands, she squeezed dollops from the plastic bottles into the glass bowl and mixed them thoroughly. Then, using a small soft brush, she began to dab the resulting jelly-like gunk onto the strip of flaming red at the roots of her dirt-brown hair.

Roan entered the sheriff’s station through the front door, removing his Stetson as he nodded at the dispatcher ensconced in her cubbyhole behind a pane of bulletproof glass. At that hour, the business day and visiting hours at the detention center being long over, the lobby was empty. There were no washed-out women balancing babies on their hips waiting to visit their no-account husbands in the lock-up, no parolees keeping appointments with their parole officers, no unhappy teenagers and grim-faced parents waiting to pay traffic fines. The silence had a suspenseful, waiting quality, like a held breath.

The blast of the buzzer announcing the unlocking of the door to the inner sanctum sounded raucously, making him wince as it always did. The combination sheriff’s station and county detention center was a relatively new facility, having been one of the first major promises Roan had made good on after getting himself elected sheriff. Considering that the one it replaced could have been taken straight off the set of a Hollywood Western movie, the effect had been to boost the county’s law-enforcement capabilities from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century in one giant leap, vaulting over the twentieth in the process. The facility had been all state-of-the-art at the time, with the latest security safeguards considered necessary in this age of terrorism. Roan had no objections to the protection, even if any terrorists to be found in the environs of Hart County, Montana, were likely to be of the homegrown drunk-and-disorderly-cowboy or disgruntled-hunter variety. He did wish that buzzer could have been toned down a bit, though.

As the outer door closed behind him he paused to stick his head through the open top half of the dispatcher’s doorway and said in an undertone, “He still here?”

Donna gave him a grim look and tilted her head toward the back of the building. “Down there in your office.”

Roan nodded, slapped his hat against his thigh and continued on down the hallway. He didn’t hesitate at the door to his office; the way he saw it, postponing the moment wasn’t going to make it any easier. He took a firm grip on the doorknob and turned it.