The Sheriff of Heartbreak County

Chapter 5

Mary was sweeping up after her last client when the light seemed to dim around her, as though a cloud had passed in front of the sun. Then the glass front door to her shop slapped open and Sheriff Roan Harley stepped inside, politely removing his hat as he closed the door behind him.

Her heart thumped like an alarmed rabbit and fear fisted in her stomach, but she gave no outward sign of that as she called out, “Be with you in a minute,” and went on carefully coaxing snowdrifts of crisp gray-white hair into a dustpan.

Oh, but even without looking she could feel his presence, jarring and alien, too much rawboned masculinity for such a cozy, pink, feminine place. And she could feel him watching her. When she straightened, dustpan in one hand and broom in the other, awareness bloomed warm in her cheeks, and she touched an unsteady hand to smooth back the strands of hair that dangled limply around her face.

Don’t be a fool…don’t let him get to you…he can’t hurt you. She sang the words silently to herself like a calming lullaby while she tilted the dustpan into the nearest wastebasket and propped the broom against the wall beside the work station. Then, jamming her hands into the pockets of her smock to stop their fidgeting, she turned resolutely to confront her visitor.

And once again, as it had the night before when she’d first seen the sheriff of Hart County through her latched screen door, she was conscious of a strange sense…not of déjà vu, exactly, but more as if she were seeing a double exposure…the vibrant flesh-and-blood man standing before her, and the memory of a much different man, one from a life she’d put behind her long ago.

Right now, today, this man, the real man, was turned sideways to her, leaning on one elbow against the glass display case that served as a reception counter, turning his hat around and around in his hands and watching her through the arrangement of white artificial tulips in a Blue Willow bowl.

Against that image, blurring it like rain cascading down a windowpane, the memory: Dark, sultry Latino eyes laughed at me behind a single red rose, taunting me…daring me…seducing me into dancing the tango…

Then the sheriff straightened and she moved toward him and the memory shimmered into nothingness.

“Miss Owen,” he said in his soft, grumbly voice, nodding his head toward her in an awkwardly formal way that was oddly attractive in so self-assured and masculine a man.

“Sheriff,” she said, returning the nod. And for some reason she found herself gazing, not at his face with its probably un-characteristic shadowing of beard stubble, but at his thick sunshot hair, with the imprint of a hatband molded into it. Her fingers tingled with the urge to plunge into it…burrow through it…fluff out and smooth away that telltale cowboy’s furrow. The hairdresser in her, she told herself. Except that hairdressers weren’t supposed to think of how that hair would feel, were they? Warm silk…vibrant and alive…

She forced her lips into the shape of a smile, and the twinge of pain that action caused was an acute reminder of why this man was here. She touched her lip and asked, “Did you come to give me back my gun?” Knowing he hadn’t. Her heart was beating as if she’d been running hard uphill, beating so fast it made her chest hurt.

He didn’t return her smile. “’Fraid we’re going to be needing it a while longer.” His sky-blue eyes studied her narrowly, and there was a hardness in them that hadn’t been there before. “I’m going to need to ask you a few more questions, too, if you wouldn’t mind coming down to the station with me.”

“Would it make any difference if I do mind?” Mary asked, tilting her head slightly, still holding on to the smile. Surprised at how little emotion she felt, now that this moment-the moment she’d been dreading-had finally arrived.

The sheriff kept his face impassive. He stood tall and arrow-straight now, a commanding presence, but completely relaxed, with his feet a little apart and his hat held casually in both hands. “No, ma’am,” he said, “I don’t believe it would. I guess it’s up to you whether you want to make it easy or hard on yourself.”

“Are you arresting me?” And how was she able to ask it so calmly, while deep in the pockets of her smock her tightly clenched fists felt like chunks of ice?

He made a small dismissive gesture with his hat. “Ma’am, like I told you, I’d just like to ask you a few questions.”

“I can’t imagine what I could tell you that your deputy hasn’t found out already, over at the courthouse,” Mary said pointedly.

The sheriff acknowledged that with a hint of an ironic smile. “News travels fast.”

“It’s a small town,” Mary said. “And Miss Ada’s a good customer-and friend-of mine.” Anger was beginning to seep through her veil of calm. Anger and a bitter sense of irony. After all I’ve been through, everything I’ve sacrificed, to have it all undone by some small-town back-country sheriff with a great big murder to solve. “I’ve given you my gun and my blood-what else can you possibly want?”

“Well, for starters,” the sheriff drawled as he folded his arms on his chest and seemed to take root and grow immoveable as a ponderosa pine, “I’d sure like to know your real name.”

The world darkened. A rushing sound filled the inside of her head. Her voice caught, and then she said, “My…my name? I don’t know what on earth you mean.” But there was no real conviction in it. She’d waited just that critical heartbeat too long.

She heard a soft hissing sound-an exhalation. The sheriff’s eyes narrowed and his features hardened…darkened…became the face of a man nobody in his right mind would care to cross. “Oh, sure you do,” he said in his soft, growly voice, and Mary marveled that a voice she’d thought so pleasing, even sexy, could sound so dangerous now. “We both know you’re not Mary Owen. For one thing, she’s dead-been dead for thirty-some years. So that brings me back to my question: Who the hell are you?”

Mary did the only thing she could think to do. She drew her hands from the pockets of the smock, nudged her glasses more firmly onto her nose as if girding herself for battle, then folded her arms tightly across her waist and slowly shook her head. She made a small, throat-clearing sound and said, “Don’t I have a right to remain silent?”

The sheriff’s chin jerked up a notch. For a moment or two he didn’t answer, and the space between them pulsed with the shimmering, vibrating silence. A muscle twitched in the side of his jaw-the only sign of any annoyance he might have felt. “If I place you under arrest,” he said finally.

Then once more the silence waited, growing denser…harder to break. Mary’s throat and mouth were too dry to form words and swallowing didn’t help. In the end she had to whisper them. “Then I guess you’ll have to do that. Because I have nothing more to say to you.”

The sheriff made that hissing sound again, and slowly shook his head. “Miss Mary,” he said as he settled his hat on his head, “you have no idea how sorry I am to hear you say that.”

Roan closed the door to the interrogation room carefully behind him, resisting an unprofessional urge to slam it. Frustration tension gripped his neck and shoulders as he nodded brusquely at the man standing with folded arms in front of the observation window, then continued on down the hallway to his office without saying a word.

After a moment, Senator Holbrook pivoted and followed, his steps hurried and heavy with anger. He fired point-blank as he pushed through the door behind Roan, almost on his heels. “You didn’t arrest her?”

“No,” Roan snapped back without turning as he rounded his desk and jerked back his chair, “I did not.”

Gripping the back of the chair closest to the desk, Holbrook leaned on his white-knuckled hands, hardened his already iron jaws and demanded tightly, “Why the hell not?”

Instead of answering immediately, Roan stared down at his own hands and pictured his daughter’s face-for him the equivalent of counting to ten. The fact that the man standing before him huffing and snorting like an angry bull was a United States Senator didn’t have much bearing on Roan’s efforts to cut him some slack, but the fact that he was the murder victim’s father sure did. All Roan needed to keep his own temper under control was to remember what it had felt like to be in this man’s shoes.

“The fact that she’s not willing to talk to us, aggravating as that may be, does not mean she’s guilty,” he said patiently, bringing his eyes up to meet Holbrook’s narrow and glittering glare. “I’d really like to have some evidence she is before I arrest her, and right now we don’t have any hard evidence connecting her with Jason’s murder. We know the gun she gave us isn’t the murder weapon, and we didn’t find any others when we searched her place. Her blood on Jason’s sleeve only proves he assaulted her, it doesn’t-”

“It proves she had motive to kill him, dammit! I said it before: she had motive and opportunity. She was the last person to see my son alive-”

“That we know of,” said Roan.

“-and she knows how to shoot a gun,” the senator forged on as if Roan hadn’t spoken, stabbing the air like a stump speaker at a political rally. “You said she told you she’s a good shot, and if she has one gun she could just as well have had two. You didn’t find it because she got rid of it, obviously-hell, she’d have to be a dang fool to hang on to it after she’d shot somebody with it! She’s not who she claims to be, so that already makes her a liar. And she’s for damn sure a flight risk, given what little history you have for her. You let her walk out of here now, and what makes you think she’s gonna still be around when that evidence you’re looking for does turn up? Dammit, Roan, if you won’t arrest that woman, I’ll find somebody who will. Hell, I’ll get those state guys to do it. If I have to.”

Roan closed his eyes and rubbed the lids with the fingers and thumb of one hand, and it occurred to him to wonder if Cliff Holbrook’s red-rimmed eyes felt as tired and sore as his did; he imagined neither one of them had gotten much sleep last night. And exhausted though they both might have been, he had to admit the senator was right about one thing: The woman calling herself Mary Owen was one hell of a flight risk.

Projected against the backs of his eyelids he saw an image of her as he’d seen her last, sitting unnaturally still and upright in a straight-backed chair in the center of his interrogation room. And neither the ugly dark-rimmed glasses veiling her dull gray eyes nor the strings of dirt-brown hair drooping into the collar of her pink nylon smock could disguise the elegance of bone structure, the symmetry of features, the translucence of skin she tried so hard to hide. Now that he knew it was there he wondered how he ever could have missed it.

Another image took the place of that one: a man he knew well, lying on his back with his arms flung wide, sightless eyes staring up at the sky and an ugly dark hole squarely in the center of his forehead. And try as he would, Roan could not make those two images come together in his mind.

It just didn’t jell. Not that he had a whole lot of experience to judge by, but it didn’t feel right.

On the other hand, there was no getting around the fact that the woman had been living under a false identity for the past ten years. And she was definitely a flight risk. And if there was one thing Roan was certain of right now, it was that he didn’t want Mary Owen-or whoever she was-to slip away from him before he got some answers to his questions.

He let out a breath and the words he didn’t want to say came with it. “All right, dammit, I’ll arrest her.” But he still didn’t think it was going to solve his case. It just seemed like the only course open to him right then. His belly knotted and burned as he snatched his phone from its cradle, and it occurred to him that the way things were going, this case, the senator, that woman, were going to give him ulcers.

“What are you doing now?” Holbrook demanded as Roan stabbed at the numbers on the phone.

Roan shot him a look, wishing he had the gumption to say the words that had popped into his mind. None of your damn business, Senator. Instead, he calmly explained, with only a slight touch of sarcasm, “I’m calling a lawyer. I doubt the woman knows anybody in town to call, and since she’s choosing to exercise her Constitutional rights, we can’t deal with her without one.”

“Do you understand these rights as I’ve explained them to you?”

Mary focused her eyes on the pair of hands that were loosely clasped together on the wooden tabletop just across from her. She nodded.

“Would you mind answering out loud for the recorder, please?”

That voice. Why had she ever thought it warm-sounding and pleasant? It reminded her now of the purr of a tiger.

“Oh,” she said, “I’m sorry.” She cleared her throat lightly. “Yes. Of course I understand.” No, I don’t understand. Dear God, why is this happening to me?

“All right, that’s it then, until your attorney gets here.” The sheriff turned off the recorder.

Mary’s eyes followed him as he picked it up and rose from his chair. “May I-” She paused to take a breath; the rapid tapping of her heartbeat against her breastbone made it hard to speak, harder to keep her voice steady. “May I make a phone call?” The sheriff looked down at her, frowning in a rather remote, distracted way, and she felt her temper kindle. “I do get one phone call, don’t I?”

He snorted softly. “You can have more than one, far as I’m concerned. But like I told you, your lawyer’s already on his way. You might even know him-he’s a neighbor of yours. Harry Klein-Andrews & Klein? They’re right next door to your shop.”

She waved that aside with a gesture. “That’s not-I’d like to call someone else. If I’m allowed.”

There was a long pause while the keen blue eyes studied her, their gaze no longer remote. Then, “Sure. Fine. I’ll have Lori bring you a phone. Do you need a phone book?”

She shook her head, then added self-consciously, “No. Thank you.”

He nodded and went out. Mary sat still, refusing to look toward the mirror she knew wasn’t really a mirror, listening to the relentless thumping of her heart, trying to summon enough moisture in her mouth to relieve her papery throat. I should have asked for a glass of water. Or he should have offered me one, she thought with a flash of resentment. But then I’d probably have to ask to use the restroom. And she felt a cold quivering deep in her stomach as the realization hit her: This is what it’s like to be arrested. You have to ask permission to do everything.

A young deputy with dark hair and a suggestion of Native American heritage in her cheekbones came in carrying a cordless phone. She placed it on the table and turned to go, then paused, looked back and asked, “Want anything? A soda? Glass of water?”

The unsolicited kindness caught Mary unawares, and she found herself fighting an unexpected urge to cry. And once again memory came, not déjà vu, just the past overtaking the present.

Oh God-I hate these memories! But the room was so much like this one, although I hadn’t been arrested then, only placed in “protective custody.” I felt numb though, like I do now. It seemed like a bad dream, and I was too exhausted to make myself wake up.

I can still hear the FBI agent’s voice. “You do realize that you must not contact anyone from your past life, ever?” His face…so grave it scared me. “If you do, we won’t be able to protect you. I need you to understand that.” He waited for my nod. “Do you have immediate family members you’d like included in the program with you?”

I thought…but there was nobody. “Just…my friend, Joy,” I said, “and she’s not…” There was an aching tightness in my throat. I whispered, “Will I have a chance to say good-bye?”

He shook his head and leaned toward me. His eyes seemed to bore into mine. “I’m sorry. There’s a U.S. Marshal waiting outside that door right now. His name’s Stillwell. He’ll explain in more detail, but basically he’s going to take you to a safe house tonight, and you’ll stay there until we get everything squared away. Once we have all the red tape taken care of, marshals will escort you to a remote location where you’ll stay until it’s time for you to testify, at which time you’ll be brought back to Jacksonville under the tightest security for the duration of the trial. When it’s all over, you’ll be taken to your final destination and set up with your new identity. Okay? Do you understand everything so far?”

Do I understand? I wanted to shout at the man, scream at him, No! No, I don’t understand! How did this happen? All I wanted was to meet a handsome prince and live happily ever after, and now you tell me my life is over! How could this have happened to me?

But I only whispered-I think I whispered, “Yes.”

The FBI agent said brusquely, “It’s a lot to take in, I know.” I remember that he reached over and placed his hand on mine and gave it a squeeze. Then he stood up and as he did he looked back at me and I saw that his eyes were kind. “Can I get you something to drink?” he asked me. “Coffee? Some water?”

That terrible aching tightness gripped my throat, just as it’s doing now, and just as I am now, I was fighting to hold back tears. How strange, I thought then, after everything I’d been through, the horrors I’d seen, the fear and disillusionment and despair I’d felt, to be undone by a small unexpected kindness…

“Yes, thank you. I’d love some water,” Mary murmured, and the young female deputy nodded and went out.

Mary counted slow deep breaths until the deputy came back in with a bottle of water. She thanked her and unscrewed the top of the bottle and drank thirstily while the deputy went away again. Only then, left alone and feeling much more in control, did Mary pick up the phone the deputy had left on the table. She shifted her chair around so that her back was turned toward the wall mirror and the unseen watchers behind it, then closed her eyes, huffed out one more breath, and with cold stiff fingers punched in a number she was surprised she still remembered.

After only one ring an androgynous voice droned, “U.S. Marshal’s Office, Special Services.”

“Deputy Marshal Stillwell, please. That’s in Witness Protection.” Oh, how her heart was pounding! She pressed her hand against her chest, which didn’t help at all. The hand that was holding the phone began to tremble, and she couldn’t stop that, either.

After what seemed like a very long pause, but was probably no more than a minute, the voice was back. “Marshal Stillwell is no longer with the service, ma’am. Would you like to speak with someone else?”

“I-are you sure? James Stillwell?”

“Yes, ma’am, James Stillwell retired from the service two years ago.”

“But he was my-” She stopped, unable to think. She felt a curious sensation of being adrift, or of falling, like someone who’d grabbed hold of her one lifeline only to discover there was nobody holding onto the other end.

“Ma’am, if you’ll give me your I.D. number, I’ll see if I can find out who’s handling your case. It might take a while.” The voice had begun to sound testy and harassed. “We’re short-handed around here right now. Maybe you’d like to call back a little later?”

“Yes…all right…thank you,” Mary whispered. Her throat ached terribly, and it wasn’t just her hand that was shaking now. She didn’t remember disconnecting the phone call; her mind seemed capable of processing only one thought: Oh God, I’m going to jail…for murder. How can this be happening? What’s going to happen to me now?

On Sunday morning right after breakfast, Boyd announced his intention to ride up to the high pastures to see if the feed was high enough yet to turn the cattle out. Naturally, Susie Grace wanted to go along, so Roan decided they might as well all go and make a day of it.

After the events of the last couple of days, he figured he needed a break, though he suspected it was going to take more than a pretty spring day and a horseback ride with his daughter and father-in-law to cleanse his mind of the images of Mary Owen the way he’d seen her last. Looking…not like any murderer he’d ever seen before-not that he’d seen so many, but no murder suspect he’d ever encountered or imagined over the course of his career had ever seemed so…bewildered, he guessed was the best way to describe it. The expression on her face, the look in her eyes… The way those changeable eyes of hers had clung to his as she was being led away to lock-up, neither the flat gray-green that so effectively hid whatever she might be thinking nor that surprising golden shimmer of anger, but the deep slate of storm clouds, and the message in them plain and troubling as thunder: Help me. A plea her hopeless expression acknowledged was not likely to be answered that day.

The day had started out cool, but by the time they reached the saddleback ridge the sun was hot on their shoulders. They paused there on the pretext of shedding their jackets, but in truth it was to do as they always did, turn and survey the vista spread out around them, which Roan considered to be 360 degrees of pure heaven on earth. From where they stood, on the crest of a wide-open space knee-deep to their horses in lupin and paintbrush, the world rolled away on one side in gentle waves of foothills carpeted with new green, speckled with buttercups and tiny blue forget-me-nots and dotted with clumps of juniper and sage, down, down, down to the ranch far below, looking like a child’s play toy with its cluster of red-and-white painted barns, stables, corrals and feed-storage silos, the main house barely visible in its copse of pines and cottonwoods, and beyond and a little way up a wooded draw, the foreman’s cottage where Boyd lived now, and beyond that, the sweep of hazy blue and purple mountains stretching all the way north to Glacier Park and Canada. On the other side, the high country began just beyond the thickets of pine and aspen that bordered the meadows, where snow lay in shady places until mid-summer, bald eagles nested and in the autumn the slopes rang with the shrill challenges of bull elk in rut. And above it all, the never-ending sky. It made a man feel small and unimportant, that sky, and damn lucky just to be alive underneath it.

“Been a good rain year. Feed’s lookin’ good,” Boyd said, squinting into the sunlight and nodding to himself as he leaned on his saddlehorn. And Roan knew the old rancher was feeling much the same way he was.

He clicked to his horse, a bay gelding named Springer for the habit he’d had when he was younger of shying at every little thing, tugging his nose out of the grass and clover he’d been sneaking mouthfuls of during the respite. Beside him, Boyd, mounted on Foxy, his favorite Appaloosa mare, did the same, and they went on at a walk, scaring up clouds of little yellow butterflies and an occasional meadowlark, which would fly, scolding, almost from underneath the horses’ hooves. Susie Grace, impatient with their leisurely pace, kicked up Tootsie, the little red-gold mare she’d picked for her own because, she said, it had hair the same color as hers, and went loping on ahead. To Roan she looked frighteningly small and precarious perched on top of that horse with her blue cowboy boots sticking straight out in their stirrups and her pigtails flapping under the brim of her blue cowboy hat.

He hollered at her to take it easy and was about to take off in pursuit when Boyd looked over at him and said, “Let her be. She’d ain’t gonna fall offa that horse, and you know it. The kid rides like an Indian. Comes by it naturally-her mama was the same way. Erin used to scare her mother to death.”

His tone was easygoing, but when Roan glanced over he saw that the rancher’s face wore the same bleak and aged look it always got when he spoke of his daughter. He shifted his gaze back to the little girl and her red-gold horse galloping blithely through a sea of wildflowers, her hat now blown off her head and bouncing against her back, caught by the cord around her neck. The sun struck red-gold fire into her hair the same way it had once done her mother’s, and Roan caught his breath, waiting for the stab of grief and pain to follow.

It came…it would always come, but now it mostly came when he summoned it, rather than keeping him company every waking moment of every damn day and then haunting his dreams at night. Sometimes he even thought if he could just find the bastard who’d set the fire that killed her he might be able to move on. He knew he needed to; the years since Erin’s death had been damned lonely for him, and besides, a little girl needed a mother. He knew human beings weren’t supposed to be alone, and that it was supposed to be possible for them to fall in love more than once in a lifetime, in theory, at least. Maybe, he thought, it was coming time to put that theory to the test.

Though…with Clifford Holbrook’s ravaged face fresh in his mind and the sadness he’d gotten used to seeing in Boyd’s, he thought it must be different for a parent losing a child. He didn’t think the pain of that ever did go away. He tried to imagine how it would be for him if Susie… But his mind refused to go there, and he shifted in his saddle, cold to his core in spite of the noonday sun beating down on his shoulders.

“Heard you arrested somebody for the Holbrook kid’s murder,” Boyd said, as though his mind had been following the same trail.

Roan threw him a look, half-surprised, half-ironic. “News travels fast.”

“It’s a small town, what’d you expect?” Boyd let his horse plod on a few paces, then hitched a shoulder in an off-hand way. “Little bit and I stopped in at the one-stop on the way back from fishin’ last evenin’ to pick up some lemons and breadcrumbs to go with them trout we caught. Ran into that deputy of yours-what’s her name? Lori? Said you’d arrested the gal that took over the beauty shop when Queenie moved south last winter.” He glanced over at Roan, eyes squinted almost shut in the shadows of his hat brim. “You really think she did it? That little gal?”

“Wouldn’t have arrested her if I didn’t,” Roan said in an even tone. He didn’t exactly feel comfortable discussing his case with a civilian, even if he was family. And he was even less comfortable with the nagging doubts that question kept stirring up in his own mind.

Boyd lifted up in the stirrups and resettled his bony backside more comfortably in the saddle, a sure sign his arthritis was hurting him. “I don’t know, just can’t hardly believe she’d be capable of doin’ somethin’ like that.”

“You know her? Mary Owen? How’d you manage that? You’ve never been inside a beauty parlor in your life.”

Boyd snorted. “The hell I haven’t. Used to take my wife for her permanent wave every so often-Grace was a good customer of Queenie’s right up until just before she died.” He threw Roan another look, quick and oddly furtive. “Don’t really know the new gal, except to see her around, you know. Seems kinda meek and mild, though, like she wouldn’t hurt a fly. Sure don’t seem like the type to commit murder.”

“There isn’t any ‘type’ when it comes to murder,” Roan said grimly. “Anybody’ll kill if you give ’em enough cause. Even meek, mild people you’d think would never hurt a fly.”

“Well, I guess you’d know,” Boyd said.

After an oddly unhappy little silence, by some unspoken accord both men nudged their horses to an easy gallop, heading down the gentle slope to where Susie Grace waited for them at the edge of the grove of aspens.