The Last Chance Cafe

by Linda Lael Miller

  “Not ever,” Hallie said. And she meant it. Whatever she had to do, she would be there for her children, as long as they needed her.

  Presently, the girls relaxed, and Hallie switched the TV back on and left them to watch Leave It to Beaver. On the screen, Mrs. Cleaver was vacuuming the living room of her perfect black-and white house, while wearing high heels, a shirtwaist dress, and pearls.

  Chance was just coming in from the barn when Hallie reached the kitchen, where she’d seen him last. He’d left the rifle behind, she noticed, on its rack above the door. Did every house in Primrose Creek have one of those?

  “How long do you think it will be before we hear from the FBI?” she asked nervously.

  Chance took off his coat and hat, hung them on the pegs where his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather had probably hung theirs. “I don’t imagine it will be too long,” he answered, going to the sink, rolling up his shirt sleeves, and turning on the water so he could wash up after the morning chores.

  “What’s going to happen now, Chance?” she asked, leaning one shoulder against the framework of the door to the dining room. “Between us, I mean.”

  “I guess that’s up to you.”

  “Unfair,” she protested. “Tell me what you want.”

  “I want to be able to trust you.”

  “If you don’t trust me now, maybe you never will.” She felt an infinite sadness, weighing her down. Crushing her.

  He watched her for a long while as he dried his hands. “Maybe not,” he agreed, at long last.

  After that, it seemed to Hallie that there was nothing more to say. Without trust, their relationship wouldn’t have a prayer, and if Chance couldn’t believe in her, well, that was nobody’s fault but her own.

  “We shouldn’t do this,” Kiera said, watching round-eyed as her sister took the plastic cover off Chance’s computer and switched it on. “We’re not supposed to touch other people’s things.”

  “I just want to tell Daddy that we love him,” Kiley replied. She climbed into the desk chair and concentrated on the screen. “That’s all.”

  Kiera drew a little closer. “We’ll get in trouble,” she warned, but she liked the idea of talking to her daddy, even if it was only by e-mail. Back in Phoenix, she and Kiley had sent him messages all the time, at his office, and most of the time, he’d answered, though he never said much.

  Kiley was online in no time. She clicked on the little envelope-shaped icon up in the left hand corner. A blank form appeared almost instantly, and she smiled as, using two fingers, she typed in their father’s address.

  14

  W hen Hallie entered the kitchen, dressed in jeans and a long-sleeved knit shirt, hair still damp from the shower, Kiera and Kiley were seated solemnly at Chance’s kitchen table. Two other chairs were occupied by strangers, a man and a woman, and though they had an official air about them, Hallie was alarmed at first. The man stood, nodded. “Hallie O’Rourke?” he asked.

  Hallie sagged against the doorframe. She was calculating the distance between herself and her daughters; on one level, she was ready to snatch them and run. On another, she was too startled to move. Her reason said, These are the people from the FBI, but the message coming from the oldest part of her brain was different. Wrong. Something is wrong.

  “Yes,” she managed to say. Only a second or so had passed since she’d stepped into the kitchen, surely, but it felt more like a lifetime.

  Chance was at her side, close, but not crowding. Silent, but solidly there.

  “I’m Agent Baker,” the stranger went on, letting his hand fall back to his side. He indicated the woman, who was still seated. “And this is Agent Simms. We’re with the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”

  A badge was produced; Hallie studied it, saw that the information was there, but couldn’t take it in. It might as well have been written in Russian.

  “Sheriff Stratton called our field office in Reno last night,” Agent Baker prompted. He spared Hallie a brief, official smile. “According to the information he gave us, you must have quite a story to tell.” He indicated an empty chair, across from his own. “Won’t you sit down?”

  Hallie hesitated for a moment longer, then sat, perched on the edge of the seat. She didn’t pull her chair up close to the table.

  Chance stood behind her, hands resting on her shoulders. His touch, his presence, gave her an infusion of strength. She smiled reassuringly at her children.

  “Why don’t the two of you go in and watch some television?” she said.

  The twins stared at her as though she’d suggested paragliding off the roof of the house. Although they were allowed to watch TV in moderation, she never encouraged the activity.

  “Could we play Tetris instead?” Kiley asked. As usual, she was the first to rally. She was looking up at Chance, and Hallie vaguely recalled that there was a computer in the study, as well as a television set.

  “Just don’t erase my tax files,” Chance said, with a nod, and the girls raced off.

  Hallie looked up at him, bewildered. He was going to turn two seven year olds loose on his computer, without supervision? Lord, maybe the situation was more desperate than she’d imagined.

  “They’ll be all right,” he said quietly.

  Agent Simms spoke up at last. “We’d like to talk to Ms. O’Rourke in private,” she said. Her smile was real, but her eyes were watchful, as though she expected someone to bolt, and was bracing herself to give chase.

  Chance didn’t move. “That’s too bad,” he said. “This is my house, and I’m staying right here.”

  Agent Simms, an athletic type with a rather severe haircut, raised an eyebrow. “We could take Ms. O’Rourke into custody—” she began.

  Agent Baker, evidently her superior, raised a hand to silence her. He was middle-aged, barrel-shaped without being fat. “There’s no need to make a big deal out of this,” he said quietly. “Mr. Qualtrough, if you’d sit down, I think we would all be more comfortable.”

  Chance took the chair closest to Hallie’s. He was still holding her hand.

  Baker focused on Hallie, his gaze as penetrating as a laser beam, and simply waited.

  She swallowed and, seeing no alternative, began to tell the story, starting with Lou’s wake, when Charlie Long had given her the key to the cashbox, ending with her own flight to Primrose Creek. Nearly an hour had passed when she finished.

  “Where is this box?” Agent Simms wanted to know, when Hallie finally fell silent, trembling a little. She had, in many ways, relived the whole ordeal in the telling of it.

  Hallie’s gaze stopped on Chance’s face before moving on to the female agent. “Sheriff Stratton took it with him last night,” she said.

  Simms and Baker exchanged looks.

  “I would have thought you’d know that,” she said.

  Chance leaned forward slightly in his chair, like a jury member tuning in to important testimony, but he didn’t speak.

  Agent Baker smiled another of those semi-smiles, as if his lips were glued together and he was trying to pull them apart without hurting himself too much. “Just a mix-up, I’m sure,” he said. “Simms, put in a call to the sheriff, will you?”

  Chance folded his arms, leaned back, resting one foot on the opposite knee, nodded when Agent Simms indicated the telephone on the nearby counter and asked, “May I?”

  Hallie glanced through the window over the sink, noticed for the first time that it was still snowing. Growing up in the desert, she’d often longed for snow, imagining cozy winter days spent beside a fire, sipping tea and reading. Now, far from soothing her, the weather made her feel trapped, cut off from the rest of the world.

  “He’s on his way,” Simms said, after a brief, monosyllabic conversation.

  “Good,” Agent Baker said.

  Wrong, wrong, wrong, said Hallie’s gut.

  By the time Jase arrived, carrying the cashbox with him, however, Hallie was beginning to question her instincts where Agents Simms an
d Baker were concerned. They had begun to seem ordinary, after Chance made a fresh pot of coffee and nuked a frozen cinnamon-and-apple cake for breakfast.

  Hallie’s throat was constricted, but she forced herself to nibble at her food, take an occasional sip from her coffee. For a variety of reasons, she didn’t want to seem nervous, though the effort was probably too little, too late.

  At last, Jase showed up, stomping snow off his boots, rapping at the glass in the back door before turning the latch and letting himself in. He carried Lou’s cashbox under one arm, greeted the FBI agents with a cordial nod. Hallie wondered if he was personally acquainted with Simms and Baker, hoped he was, but she couldn’t tell.

  “Morning, Sheriff,” Agent Baker said, ever the spokesperson. He stood and put out a hand.

  Jase returned the favor. “Morning,” he said.

  Agent Simms was staring at the cashbox.

  “Is that the evidence?” Baker asked.

  Jase nodded and handed it over, just like that. Hallie wanted to protest, she’d given up so much, risked so much, to protect the pictures and documents Lou had gathered, but she refrained.

  Both agents were on their feet, almost immediately. “Thanks, Sheriff,” Baker said. “We’ll be in touch, soon as we’ve had a chance to look this over and run some investigations of our own.”

  Hallie frowned. This was it? They were just going to take the box and leave, with no talk of safe houses, or protective custody?

  “Fine,” Jase said, and smiled benignly. “Drive carefully in this snow. Storm’s getting worse all the time.”

  The agents left, practically tripping over each other to get into their overcoats and be gone.

  “Well,” Chance drawled, giving Jase a narrow look, “that was easy. For them, anyway.”

  Jase grinned, helped himself to a mug from the cupboard, filled it with coffee, took a sip. Savored it. “I made photocopies of everything,” he said, in his own good time. “And I’ve still got the disk.”

  Hallie recalled that Jase had taken a disk from the cashbox the night before, after she’d given her informal statement, and tucked it into his shirt pocket. “Have you looked at it?” she asked. She hoped whatever data the thing contained hadn’t been ruined by the elements. She’d taken every care to shelter the box, when she hid it next to her father’s grave, but there had been a lot of weather in the interval.

  “I tried,” Jase said, with a sigh, “but it’s protected by a password.” He looked at Chance, grinned. “I gave it to Henry, over at the high school. If he can’t get into that disk, nobody can. Including the FBI.”

  “Henry?” Hallie echoed.

  “Henry,” Jase confirmed. “He’s a junior at Primrose High. Big future in software design.” He paused. “Don’t worry.”

  “A kid,” Hallie said, worrying.

  Chance cocked a thumb toward the door; the engine of the agents’ car could be heard, retreating into the distance. “Are those two on the level?” he asked, putting many of Hallie’s concerns into words.

  “We’ll see,” Jase said, sounding unconcerned. “I’d better get back to town. You two sit tight right here.”

  Hallie let out her breath. “Isn’t there anything else we can do?”

  “You can get some rest,” Jase said, with quiet concern. “You look all done in.”

  Chance walked his friend out, through the ever-deepening snow, and Hallie watched from the glass panel in the back door as the two men conferred. Neither of them smiled, even once.

  When Chance got back, shivering because he hadn’t bothered with his coat, he settled Hallie in a chair in front of the massive stone fireplace in his living room, handling her as carefully as if she were an injured bird, with tiny, brittle bones, propping her feet on a hassock, tucking a blanket around her. Then he vanished into the kitchen, returning a few minutes later with a steaming cup. His two sheep dogs, lying on the hearth, perked up their ears at his approach.

  Hallie caught the scent of chicken broth, as did the dogs, no doubt, and she was profoundly touched by that homely offering. She sipped, then looked up at Chance with weary eyes. Suddenly, she felt impossibly old, ancient enough that she’d seen more grief and sorrow and warfare than God. “I’m not sick, you know,” she said. “You needn’t fuss.”

  He leaned down, resting his work-roughened, rancher’s hands on the arms of her chair, his breath warm on her face. “Let me take care of you, just for a little while,” he said. “Ever since the night you came into the Last Chance Café, half-frozen and scared out of your wits, I’ve wanted to make sure nothing ever hurt you again.”

  She swallowed, and her eyes burned. “I’m not one of your wounded horses,” Hallie reminded Chance, very gently.

  He hadn’t moved, and his smile was a cocky little quirk of his lips, though she could see by the shadows in his eyes that he was afraid for her. “Most of the principles are the same,” he said.

  She set the mug of chicken broth aside. The twins were still in the study, watching television. “Make love to me, Chance,” Hallie said, surprising even herself with the request. “Now. Make me forget everything but the way it feels when you touch me.”

  He gave a sigh, lifted her feet, and sat down on the hassock. He took off her shoes, then her socks, and began to massage her arches, her toes, her insteps, her heels. It was bliss, but it wasn’t what she’d asked for.

  “Don’t you want me?” she asked, injured.

  He chuckled, shook his head, as if amazed. “Oh, I want you, all right,” he answered evenly, “but if I took you to bed now, I’d be taking advantage of you. I can’t do that. Besides, we’re not alone, remember?”

  She flushed, because she had forgotten, for the space of a heartbeat, about everything and everybody in the world except Chance and the way he could transport her.

  She found a smile, somewhere inside, and stuck it to her mouth. It was loose on its hinges, and promptly fell away. “So take advantage of me,” she said, but she was joking now, and he knew it.

  He raised one of her feet to his lips, kissed her instep, and she was stunned by the jolt of need that raced through her. “Later,” he said. “Right now, I want to concentrate on making sure you and the kids stay safe.”

  She tilted her head back, sighed, then crooned, as he continued to rub her feet. Who would have thought, she wondered, that her arches were erogenous zones? In time, she met his gaze again. “I’ve told you all my secrets now,” she said. “How about giving up a few of yours, Mister?”

  “What do you want to know?” he drawled. So help her God, if he kissed her instep again, or nibbled at one of her toes, she’d have a meltdown, right there in his living room.

  Hallie squirmed a little. “Why didn’t you ever get married and have a family? You seem like a pretty good catch to me.”

  “I’m glad you think so,” he said. He spent a while considering her question; he was not a man to hurry. She’d learned that at excruciating leisure, in Jessie Shaw’s spare room bed. “I guess, after Katie and I broke up, I felt obliged to sow a few wild oats. I was pretty sorry for myself, too. Drank a lot, got into more than my share of fistfights, and slept with half the women in the county.”

  “You must have loved her very much,” she said. “Katie, I mean.”

  He sighed, waggled her little toe in a small, delicious circle. Shrugged those powerful shoulders. “I thought I did, at the time,” he said. “I used to lay on the floor, in the dark, and listen to old love songs on the stereo for hours.” He smiled a rueful, self-deprecating little smile. “God, I must have been a pain in the ass.”

  She laughed, in spite of the fact that she was a woman in hiding, with no place to call home, and the future, if she had one at all, stretched before her like some primeval desert, lonely and barren. Chance, she decided, didn’t have a corner on self-pity. “You must have been very young,” she said.

  He winced comically. “I kept it up for a long time,” he said. “Until Jessie and Doc came over here one night, a
fter I’d wrecked my fourth rig, and set me straight. That was when I went away to college. When I got back, I found out I had a knack for making a ranch pay.”

  “So,” she said, flirting a little, whistling in the dark, “you’re not only a good kisser, a hell of a lover, and a friend to horses, you’re a pretty good businessman.”

  He grinned. “When you put it that way, it sounds impressive,” he joked. “Fact is, I needed the distraction, so I put in a lot of hours.” He paused, shrugged. “The land and the horses kept me pretty well occupied.”

  “But weren’t you lonely?”

  “Weren’t you?” Chance countered. “Loneliness hurts, but it’s not fatal.”

  She let her gaze stray to the framed painting hanging above the first landing of the staircase. The young man and woman in the picture were good-looking, both fair-haired and blue-eyed, and their clothing and hairstyles indicated that the portrait had been done in the late 50s or early 60s. “Is that your mother and father?” she asked.

  He nodded. “I kept that painting behind some boxes, in the attic, until about a year ago. I was mad as hell that they’d gone off and left me. Does that sound crazy?”

  She shook her head. “I was furious with my mother for getting sick and dying, when I needed her so much.”

  “What about your father?”

  “Never knew the biological one,” she said. She smiled, remembering happier times, when she was seven, and dancing a waltz with her stepfather at the wedding of a family friend. “Lou was my dad. A lot of men wouldn’t have hung in there the way he did, after Mom died. After all, I wasn’t his blood. I was a teenager, with a major attitude and a smart mouth. He could have put me in a foster home, or looked up some distant relative and palmed me off on them, but if he ever even considered doing anything like that, he never mentioned it to me.”

  “He never remarried?”

  Hallie shook her head. “He must have dated—he was still a young man when Mom passed away—but if he did, he kept his own counsel.” She braced an elbow against the chair arm, propped her chin in her hand, and pondered. “I should have listened to him more. Lou didn’t like Joel, from the very first. Said he was a hotshot, into power instead of service. But he came to the wedding at city hall, and he was at the hospital when the twins were born, too. God, he was so proud of them, and of me. You’d think I was the first woman who ever delivered a child.”