Three texts in a row was his personal limit. More than that warranted an actual conversation instead of an endless string of thumbed communications via text or email.
He quickly found her number on his phone and Jackie answered on the first ring.
“You’re not supposed to be working, Sheriff. You should be resting.”
He didn’t bother reminding her she had been the one to text him about overtime.
“I’ve rested plenty. Just because my leg is broken doesn’t mean my brain is. How are things there?”
“Ken Kramer is walking around like he won the lottery since the commission named him acting sheriff. He tried to move into your office, but I wouldn’t let him. I told him you left the door locked and I didn’t have the key, and if he wanted it, he would have to go there and take it from you.”
“I believe I won’t hold my breath,” he said.
Both of them knew Ken would never do that. On the surface Ken Kramer pretended to be loyal and supportive after Marshall defeated him in the last election, while behind the scenes he whispered and spread rumors. He was the kind of man who was really good at sneaky, underhanded sabotage but didn’t have the stones for outright confrontation.
He was also a brother-in-law to County Commissioner Newbold. The joys of small-town politics.
“I’ve also got about a hundred things I need you to sign. I’ll try to swing by one day this week.”
“Sounds good.”
Jackie was hyperefficient, organized and the exact opposite of Ken Kramer. Taking over the job a year ago would have been a nightmare without her on his team to help the transition.
“You should know there are all kinds of rumors flying around about what happened to you. That young reporter from the newspaper called to ask if it was true that you had been airlifted to Boise and were in a coma.”
“You didn’t tell him the truth, did you? I wouldn’t mind sticking with that story, if it meant I didn’t have to talk to him for a while.”
“You’re not that lucky,” she answered.
He glanced down at his broken leg. He wouldn’t call himself lucky, by any stretch of the imagination.
He and Jackie talked for several more moments about his calendar and meetings he would need to reschedule until the New Year, business details of running a department that employed twenty deputies and ran a jail with up to two dozen inmates.
By the time they ended the call and he hung up, the rest of the stew was cold and the exhaustion pressing on his shoulders reminded him how little sleep he’d been able to find the night before.
He was amazed at how wiped this broken leg had left him.
This wasn’t his first major injury. He broke his arm twice during his wild younger days, once skateboarding and another time backcountry snowboarding with friends in the mountains east of Haven Point.
Considering all the crazy things he used to do with his brothers and Cade, it was a wonder he came out of childhood with only those few battle scars.
His mother would freak when she found out he’d been struck by a hit-and-run driver.
Charlene was a fretter, of the highest order. She had always been overprotective, wanting to keep all her children tucked safely under her wing like a hen with her chicks, but she had gone into overdrive after Wyatt’s tragic death and then his father’s life-altering injury.
The shooting at Andrea’s house earlier in the year had only made her worse.
That he was injured on the job as well, while trying to meet a confidential informant, would probably send her over the edge. Good thing Elliot worked in Denver with the FBI or she would be camped out on his doorstep every day, making sure he came home safely from work.
He took one more bite of shortbread from the tin Andrea had brought, which automatically sent his thoughts zooming back to his neighbors next door and the problem he didn’t know what to do about.
He was still mulling his options when he drifted to sleep and dreamed of headlights coming toward him in the silvery twilight of a Lake Haven December.
* * *
FURTIVE WHISPERS AND the sensation of being watched woke him out of tangled dreams.
“Is he dead?” Marsh heard a nervous little voice ask.
“I don’t know,” another one answered. “Maybe we should poke him to see.”
“You do it,” the first voice said.
“No, you.”
“Nobody’s poking anything,” a more mature voice interjected quietly. He opened his eyes a crack and saw Andrea Montgomery walk inside the room with a stack of mail that she set on the table beside him.
Her cheeks were rosy from the cold and she looked pretty and soft and more delicious than all the shortbread in Scotland.
He blinked, wondering where the hell he came up with that thought.
“Leave the poor man alone and let him finish his nap,” she said to her children in a low voice.
“I’m not napping,” he growled—though he had been doing exactly that. He must have slept all afternoon, like some old geezer in a nursing home with nothing better to do.
“If you weren’t napping, why were your eyes closed?” Will Montgomery said, his tone accusatory.
“Just checking for holes in my eyelids,” he answered, which had been his father’s standard answer when one of his kids caught him dozing off in church.
The little girl, whom he had seen only briefly the day before when she slipped in and out of the room like an afternoon shadow, gave a little giggle. The sound seemed to take her by surprise because she quickly clamped her lips together and looked down at the ground.
“Sorry we woke you,” Andrea said, her tone brisk. “I have your groceries. I also brought you some chicken casserole and a couple pieces of spice cake.”
“I thought you weren’t coming until later.”
“We have something tonight and I’m not sure how long it will go, so this time worked best.”
“It’s a party and my friend Ty is going to be there,” her son announced. “It’s at my mom’s friend McKenzie’s house. She has a dog who’s my friend, too, and her name is Paprika. Only, we call her Rika.”
With his mom’s auburn hair and a scattering of freckles, the kid was really cute, Marsh had to admit. Too bad he wasn’t very good with kids. His uniform had always seemed to make them nervous around him—like the boy’s sister was acting.
“I know that dog,” he admitted.
Will took a step closer to the recliner. “Rika is funny. She licks my hand and it tickles. Guess what? We have a dog, too. We’ve had her for two whole weeks and her name is Sadie and she’s the best dog in the whole world.”
“Is that right?”
“She hardly ever pees in the house. Do you have a dog?”
“No. Not right now. I did when I was a kid, though.”
One or two dogs were always running through the Bailey house when he was growing up, but he hadn’t had one since he left home. It was hard to justify it when he lived alone and worked long hours.
He was much better with dogs than he was with kids, actually.
“We can bring Sadie over if you want, to keep you company while your leg is broked,” the boy offered.
The tightness in his throat at the offer was caused by the pain, he told himself. “That’s very nice of you, but I should be okay.”
“Are you sure? She’s a really nice dog. Just as nice as Young Pete, only not as big. She likes to sit on your lap and watch TV.”
“Good thing she’s not as big as Pete, then. I don’t think I’d have room on this recliner.”
The boy giggled, which Marsh had to admit was kind of a sweet sound.
“We had another reason for stopping by,” Andrea said with a meaningful look down at the girl, who had moved back to the doorway
to be closer to her mother, as if afraid he was going to reach out and whack her with his crutches.
“Chloe?” Andrea said when her daughter only looked at the carpet. “Chloe? Show Sheriff Bailey what you made.”
The little girl shook her head vigorously. “You do it,” she whispered.
“I’m not the one who made it, honey. You are. You did such a beautiful job on it, too.”
Chloe continued to look anywhere in the room but at him, and after a moment her mother sighed.
“Sorry. She’s become a little more nervous about people she doesn’t know the last few months.”
Though he had come onto the scene after the fact, Marshall had read the reports of what happened at Andie’s house over the summer. He knew Chloe was an eyewitness to the double shooting at her house, when Wyn and Rob Warren had both been injured.
When he showed up just moments after dispatch called him, Andie had been cradling her daughter close, trying to comfort her.
The tenderness of the image had stuck in his head for a long time—the bruised and bleeding Andrea, who must have been terrified herself, doing her best to calm her child.
He frowned, furious all over again at the man who had caused the whole situation.
Warren had put Andrea and her kids through hell, simply because he refused to accept a simple one-syllable word. No.
“Go ahead,” Andie encouraged.
“You show him,” Chloe said again, her voice whisper soft.
“I’ll do it.” Will, his tone exasperated, grabbed a paper out of his sister’s hand and thrust it at Marsh. “This is for you. It’s from Chloe.”
An odd mix of emotions tumbled through him as he looked at what was clearly an art project, a wreath cutout made from two pieces of green construction paper that had been sandwiched on either side of a glued-together mosaic of colorful tissue paper pieces.
“Did you make this?” he asked.
After a pause, Chloe nodded. She looked at him now, but her gaze didn’t rise above his chest.
“I asked my teacher if I could make two and she said I could,” she said, still nearly whispering. “I had to stay inside at recess so I could finish it before Miss Taylor had put away all the art supplies. I didn’t mind. Not really. It was snowy and cold out anyway.
Marshall wasn’t sure what to say. He almost felt like another SUV had just plowed into him.
Why would she do that for him, a virtual stranger who obviously frightened her?
He cleared his throat, telling himself the thickness there was only thirst. “Thank you. It’s beautiful,” he answered truthfully.
He considered it a small victory when she met his gaze for about half a second. “It’s really pretty when the sun comes through it,” she offered, her voice a little louder. “If you want, you can hang it in your window. That’s what we did with ours.”
“That’s a good idea. I think I’ll do that.”
She nibbled on her bottom lip, something he had seen her mother do the evening before. “Do you want me to hang it for you?” she asked after a minute. “That’s why I put a string on it and my mom gave me a hook thing.”
Not sure what to say, he glanced at Andie, who was watching the girl with a warm approval that touched him almost as much as the childish artwork. She met his gaze and gave a barely perceptible nod.
“Sure. That would be very kind of you. Thank you.”
“Which window should I put it in?” she asked. This time she didn’t look away as she waited for his answer.
“How about the middle one? Will that work?”
Her smile flashed like sunlight on snow, then she hurried to the appropriate window. She pulled a suction cup hook from her pocket.
“I want to stick it on! Can I?” her brother asked.
“I guess.” She handed the hook to him and Will licked the underside, then stood on tiptoe and reached over his head to push the hook against the window.
“That’s not high enough,” Chloe complained.
“It’s as high as I can go.”
“Mama, can you help him make it higher?”
Andrea moved to the window and repositioned the hook, then hung the wreath by the cheerful red yarn holder. “How’s that?”
“Good, I think.”
Marsh took it as another small victory when Chloe faced him head-on. “Sheriff Marshall? Is that okay?”
“Perfect,” he assured her. He tilted his head to admire the way the weak December sunlight slanted into the room just right, filtering through the tissue paper like real stained glass in a cathedral, scattering prisms of colored light around the room.
“It’s beautiful,” he told the girl again. “I can’t help but feel a bit of holiday spirit now.”
She smiled at him directly and didn’t immediately look away. Small steps, he supposed, though he had to wonder why he found such a grand sense of accomplishment in helping her lose her fear of him.
“Hey, you don’t have a Christmas tree!” Will said with the same aghast tone a person might use if his buddy’s head just rolled off his shoulders onto the floor.
“True enough.”
“Why not?”
Andrea sent Marshall an apologetic look before she turned back to her son.
“Honey, we talked about that. Everybody doesn’t celebrate Christmas like we do,” she said quickly, a sudden pink seeping across her cheeks that didn’t come from light rays bending through tissue paper.
“I don’t have anything against Christmas,” he was quick to assure them. “I’ve just been pretty busy this year and haven’t had time to decorate for the holidays.”
The last time he decorated for Christmas, he’d been deployed and he and a bunk mate had made ornaments out of spent cartridges to hang on a scraggly tree.
“And now you have a broken leg and can’t do it at all. That’s so sad.” Chloe’s big green eyes filled with compassion and she looked as if she wanted to cry.
“It’s fine, really,” he assured her. “I don’t need much. And now I have a pretty wreath in my window to remind me it’s the holidays.”
This resulted in a whispered conversation between the two children, with much gesturing, head-shaking and pointing.
Finally, Will nodded and turned back to Marshall. “If you want, Chloe and me can put up your Christmas tree.”
He blinked at the unexpected offer and cast a glance at Andie, who looked just as astonished as he felt.
“We put all the ornaments on ours all by ourselves. Only, our mom had to put the high ones on,” the boy added. “Then we had to move some ornaments up more because our cat, Mrs. Finnegan, tries to knock them off. She’s a rascal.”
“You don’t have a cat, do you?” Chloe asked, meeting his gaze despite the lingering nervousness that threaded through her voice.
“No. No pets here.”
“Okay. Then we can put the ornaments right on the bottom,” Will said.
“I can make snowflakes,” his sister offered. “And Willie is really good at paper chains.”
“I am,” the boy said with no trace of false modesty. “I can use scissors all by myself.”
Marshall didn’t know quite what to say to their magnanimous offer. He hadn’t particularly missed having a Christmas tree, though he had loved that ugly little thing in the desert years ago that had somehow made him more homesick than he would have believed.
Most years it had never seemed worth the energy and effort, especially when he always worked extra shifts over the holidays so the guys with families could have more time off with their kids. Anyway, his mother decorated her place like a glitter cannon exploded in there, and Wyn and Katrina always had, too. If he ever felt the need for a little infusion of Christmas spirit, he figured he only needed to stop in at one of their places.
It wasn’t worth the trouble now, really. A little holiday cheer wasn’t going to be enough to lift him out of the misery of sitting around on his ass for the next few weeks.
“Do you even have a Christmas tree? A fake one or a real one?” Will said. “We could go get one, if you don’t. I saw, like, a million of them by the store where we buy food for our dog.”
“Our mom might have to put it up, like she did ours,” Chloe said after a minute. “We don’t know how to plug in the lights and stuff.”
Andrea, who had been watching this interchange silently, finally spoke. “Kids, let’s not get carried away. Sheriff Bailey might not even want a Christmas tree.”
He was about to agree with her until he happened to glance at Chloe and Will and saw the eagerness on both of their faces.
They wanted to do something nice for him. It was a sweet and generous offer and it seemed rude to turn that away.
“My sister might have a tree out in the shed,” he said after a minute. “But I thought you all were heading to a party.”
“Oh yeah,” Will said. “I can’t believe we forgot the party!”
“Could we do it tomorrow?” Chloe asked.
They both looked at their mother. “I can text Wyn and ask if she’s got an artificial tree tucked away somewhere here or if she took it to Boise with her. If she doesn’t have one, I’m sure I can find somebody who has an extra they’re not using this year.”
At this particular juncture of his life, he couldn’t contemplate owning one Christmas tree, let alone having a spare sitting around.
“As long as Sheriff Bailey doesn’t mind.”
He had no choice, really, but to shrug. “I guess it would be okay.”
“Yay!” Will jumped up and down and Chloe beamed, as if he had just offered to take them to Disneyland instead of merely agreeing to let them do something nice for him.
“We can go home and work on the snowflakes and paper chains tonight before the party and bring them back here tomorrow,” the girl offered.
“Thanks.”
He supposed that meant he would have to have a couple little kids underfoot for a while the next day. The prospect wasn’t as unpleasant as it should have been.
Snowfall on Haven Point Page 5
