AN INNOCENT MAN

by Margaret Watson

  "What about Richard? Can't you make him cough up some money?"

  "Uncle Ralph keeps him on a short leash," she said scornfully. "And he's too afraid of losing his inheritance to ever defy him."

  "It sounds like Ralph Wesley has this town by the b – scruff of its neck," he said, trying to keep his voice neutral.

  She stood up and smoothed her hands down her jeans. "You could say that. Since most of the people in the town depend on him for their paycheck, either directly or indirectly, there aren't too many who'll stand up to him."

  "Except you," he guessed, watching her carefully.

  "There's not much I can do," she said, swiping at a dust mote dancing in the sunlight. "He has me by the … scruff of the neck, too. Once I threatened to leave unless he got a doctor to help me." She paused and looked at him, her eyes expressionless. "He said he'd sue me to fulfill my contract, and he'd make sure I could never leave Pine Butte."

  "What contract? What do you mean?"

  She sighed. "Uncle Ralph and a few other people financed my way through nursing school. In return, I signed a contract that said I would provide medical care to Pine Butte as long as they needed me." Her face twisted with scorn. "I was naive enough to think that we'd be able to find a doctor who wanted to move to our town. But without Uncle Ralph helping finance his salary, we don't have a hope in hell."

  "That's barbaric." He was appalled. "Indentured servants were outlawed a long time ago. That contract wouldn't have a chance if you took him to court."

  "Probably not. But he knows he doesn't really need it. How could I leave, knowing that there wasn't anyone here to help the people I care about? Uncle Ralph doesn't have to threaten to take me to court. I can't go away and abandon the people here. What would have happened to you if I hadn't been here? Or Chet, what about him? Anyone could have called the evacuation helicopter, but his leg might have gotten infected and he would have been in excruciating pain the whole time. No," she said bitterly, "I can't leave until we find a doctor to move here."

  "Why didn't you go to medical school yourself?"

  "I couldn't afford to." Pain flashed in her eyes and was quickly hidden. "Besides, it would have taken at least ten years for me to go to college, medical school and do a residency. Pine Butte couldn't wait that long."

  "I'm sorry, Sarah." The words seemed totally inadequate to express his feelings. No one knew better than he the frustration and helplessness of being trapped in a situation with no way out. When he was eighteen he had just cut and run, but Sarah was too honorable to do that.

  "Don't be," she said. Her smile looked forced. "Pine Butte is my home, and the people here mean everything to me. There are worse things than not being able to travel and see the world. At least I feel as if I'm useful. That's a lot more than some people can say."

  "Yeah." Ralph and Richard Wesley's faces came to mind, and his fists ached to smash into their mouths. The impulse shocked him. He'd come back to Pine Butte for justice, not retribution. All he was interested in, he reminded himself, was finding out what had happened to his father. That was all.

  He wasn't here to be anybody's salvation. Not even Sarah Wesley's.

  This was your home once. It could be again. The thought shimmered like a star in front of him, distant and unreachable. He closed his eyes to the sudden pain. He could never live in Pine Butte again, not after what they'd taken from him.

  They'd taken his father, then his boyhood and finally his innocence. When he left, he'd been stripped clean. It had taken him twelve years to rebuild himself, and he wasn't about to give this town the benefit of his hard work.

  "Connor?"

  Her questioning voice jerked him out of his reverie. "Yeah?"

  "I hope you're not brooding about the injustice of it all. I don't."

  With an effort he pulled himself back to the conversation they'd been having. "You should," he answered bluntly. "Somebody needs to get the better of Ralph Wesley. He's had a free hand in this town for far too long."

  "If he wasn't here, Connor, half of the people in Pine Butte would be unemployed." Her voice was so quiet he had to strain to hear her. "Power works two ways."

  "I can't believe you're defending him!"

  "I'm not defending him, I'm just saying that I'm not fighting him over my contract. I wouldn't leave, even if I took him to court and had the contract declared illegal. Uncle Ralph isn't keeping me here against my will, Connor."

  Once again the thought of what he could do for her danced in front of him. He ruthlessly beat it down, turning abruptly and heading for his mother's old desk. It was time to concentrate on business.

  "Since we can't solve your problem today, I guess we might as well work on mine." He forced a light tone into his voice.

  "You're right. It's going to take a while to go through all your mother's things. We'd better get started." Her tone matched his exactly.

  She stood up, breaking eye contact with him, and he felt oddly chilled in the warm house. While she'd talked about her dreams, he'd felt himself heated by the passion that burned inside her. Now it was back to business, the business that had brought him to Pine Butte. What was going to happen to Sarah's world when he found justice for his father?

  * * *

  Chapter 8

  «^»

  Sarah sat cross-legged on the floor, sorting documents into piles. The brittle papers cracked stiffly as she smoothed them flat and laid them in front of her. Connor sprawled against the couch, looking through his mother's old check registers.

  "I haven't seen anything yet that could help us." She stretched and shifted on the hard floor. "All that's in this pile are old bills for insurance and from the utility companies."

  Connor looked at her, lines of strain in his face. Reading the small, faded numbers in the check register couldn't be helping his aching head. "I don't really think we're going to find anything in her old utility bills. I just don't want to miss something."

  "No one could accuse you of not being thorough," she muttered, wiping a drop of sweat off her ear with her shoulder. "Could we maybe open a window or something? It's getting kind of hot in here."

  After a moment he stood up reluctantly. "I guess I can open one in the kitchen. There's probably no point in trying to keep our visit here secret, anyway."

  He strode into the other room, stretching as he went. The movement pulled his T-shirt out of his jeans and exposed his tautly muscled back for just a flash. His smooth skin looked as fluid as his walk and made her fingers itch to glide over it. Flushing, she looked at the stack of papers in her hands and tried to concentrate on what she was doing.

  It was useless. Now that she'd let Connor creep into her mind, she could think of nothing but him – the way he'd tasted and felt that morning as he kissed her, the loose-limbed, flowing way he walked, the way he'd looked at her when he told her not to hire Perry Cummings.

  He'd looked at her as though he'd known how much it was going to hurt and would have done anything to protect her from it. He'd looked at her almost as if he cared about her.

  Connor reappeared suddenly in the door to the kitchen, holding two glasses. "Here's a glass of water. I should have remembered to bring some cold soft drinks, but at least this is wet."

  She hadn't realized how thirsty she'd become. "Thanks. Even water sounds good right now."

  The water had a tepid, almost rusty taste, as if it had been sitting in the pipes for a long time. She set the glass down carefully, away from the papers they were working on, and said, "Why didn't you do this a long time ago? If you never intended to come back to Pine Butte, why bother to spend the money to take care of your mother's house when you could have sold it and used the money for something else?"

  He shrugged. "I guess because I never wanted to come back long enough to go through her papers like this. I wanted no part of Pine Butte. It was easier to just pay the money and not have to think about it."

  "Your mother must have missed you," she said softly.

  "Yeah, I
suppose she did. But she came to see me pretty regularly before she died." He paused, his mouth twisting into a grim line. "She never said a thing about Barb. I guess she was trying to protect me, or maybe it was just easier to pretend the past didn't exist."

  "I think she would be proud of you."

  "I'd like to think so," he said gruffly. "What happened with me, the way I was raised, wasn't her fault completely, you know. After my father died, she just couldn't cope. Trying to control any twelve-year-old boy would have been tough, and I was really a handful." He shrugged, turning back to the check register. "She did the best she could. I guess, in the end, that's all I could expect."

  She wondered how long it had taken him to gain that small measure of peace with his mother's memory. He bent over the small numbers, apparently concentrating only on the job. Her heart ached for him, for the lonely, frightened boy who'd lost his father and whose mother couldn't help him deal with it. No wonder he'd pulled one outrageous stunt after another. He was crying for some attention from someone.

  She suspected that he'd finally gotten it somewhere. He knew himself too well, was too self-assured to be still floundering around. She wondered, wistfully, who had finally seen the man beneath the rebellious boy.

  She beat down the tiny whisper of envy because he'd been able to escape Pine Butte and live his own life. Connor had certainly paid the price for his dreams coming true.

  A wild hope stirred in her chest that he would decide to stay in Pine Butte once he'd found what had happened to his father. She immediately told herself not to be ridiculous. The one thing that Connor had made perfectly clear from the first time he opened his eyes was that he had no intention of staying in Pine Butte any longer than it took to find out what had happened to his father. Another city was his home now, with, she was sure, many friends and colleagues who were important to him. Including one special woman? She stopped what she was doing, shocked at the path her thoughts had taken and at the unmistakable bite of jealousy that gnawed at her stomach. It was no business of hers, she told herself carefully, if Connor had ten women waiting for him in ten different cities. She and Pine Butte were very temporary distractions for him. As soon as he'd solved the mystery of his father's death, he would be gone.

  Resolutely, she put all thought of Connor staying in Pine Butte out of her mind and picked up the next paper in the stack. She stared at it blindly for a moment until she realized it wasn't the usual bill. Then, trying to gather her composure again, she turned to the man next to her.

  "You might want to take a look at these, Connor. It looks like we've found your mother's bank statements."

  He put the check register aside and leaned over for the stack of papers she handed him. "Her checkbook wasn't telling me squat. Maybe these will."

  Sarah picked up the next paper in the stack, glanced through it and put it in the proper pile. She'd checked over several more useless bills when she felt him stiffen beside her.

  "What?" she asked, looking at him expectantly.

  He looked at her, wonder in his eyes. "I think we've found something." He held the paper out to her. "Look."

  She frowned at the columns of numbers. "I'm not even sure what we're looking for."

  He scooted closer to her. His thigh touched hers and she froze, held immobile by the fire scorching through her. He didn't seem to notice.

  "Look, here's the entry for the pension she received from the mine."

  She saw what looked like a pitifully small number, considering that a woman and a growing boy were expected to live on it. "Okay. I see that."

  "Now look here." His voice rose with excitement. "Look at this other entry. It's there every month."

  The other number was twice as large as the pension. "Maybe it's just her dividends from investments or something."

  He gave her a pitying look. "My parents could barely survive on my father's salary from the mine. They didn't have any investments."

  "Then maybe it's social security money. She would have gotten some of that, being a widow with a child to raise."

  "It's not that, either. Here's the entry for her social security check, on the third or fourth of every month. No, this is another source of money." He shuffled the papers and finally looked up triumphantly. "She got this money every single month until she died. And there's no logical explanation for it."

  "What are you thinking?" she whispered

  "Somebody paid my mother to keep her quiet." His voice was flat and very grim. "They knew she needed more money than the pension and social security. My father was already dead and nothing could bring him back. In exchange for keeping her mouth shut and just ignoring whatever she knew, they'd give her enough money to make life bearable."

  "Oh, Connor, surely your own mother wouldn't have covered up her husband's death?" She was appalled that he would even think so.

  "What if she honestly thought it was an accident? Maybe she decided that whoever paid her was just easing his own conscience. Hell, she probably figured it made it easier for us and easier for the person paying it." His voice gentled. "I can't believe that she would have helped cover up a murder, either, Sarah. She might have been a weak woman, but she wasn't a bad one."

  She stared at the papers Connor clutched in his hands. "What do we do now?"

  "Now we go to the bank and find out who was giving her this money."

  She leaned against the couch and stared at him. The house was almost eerily quiet. Except for the occasional noise from a passing car, the silence was thick and heavy, weighted with years of secrets. Finally she said, "Do you think they'd tell us?" Her voice sounded unnaturally loud.

  "They'd have no reason not to. My mother's been dead for ten years, and I'm her legal heir. If I have questions about her estate, who else would I ask?"

  "I hope it's that easy." Rising to her knees, she began to pick up the careful piles of papers. "Do you want to look at these?"

  He glanced over at them and shook his head. "No, I trust you. If you say there isn't anything in them, I don't have to look for myself."

  "I said I didn't see anything," she protested. "You may recognize something that I wouldn't notice."

  He was obviously eager to get away and go to the bank. "All right, pile them up over there on the desk. I'll take a look at them later."

  Looking around the room, she noticed the glasses of water on the floor and picked them up. She walked into the kitchen, set them on the counter near the sink, then reached up and pulled the window closed. After making sure it was locked firmly in place, she walked to where Connor stood impatiently by the front door.

  As they stepped, squinting, into the bright sunlight, he turned to her suddenly. "I didn't even think. Is the bank open on Saturday afternoons?"

  She nodded, glancing at her watch. "For another half hour. We have plenty of time."

  He folded the bank statements carefully and shoved them into his back pocket. Then he draped his arm casually over her shoulder, and they began to walk toward the center of town.

  It doesn't mean anything, she told herself, too conscious of his body next to hers. Her hip bumped against his as they walked, and she tried to move further away. Grinning, he tightened his hold on her.

  "Everyone'll just think I need some support," he said, reading her mind as his fingers glided over her shoulder in an unmistakable caress. "Don't forget how weak I am."

  "You're weak in the head if you think I'm going to buy that line," she retorted. But she didn't move away. She couldn't. More than just his hand held her next to him. Invisible cords bound them together, and now they were slowly pulling tighter.

  She was the only one who knew why he was really in Pine Butte, the only one he'd trusted with that information. She was the only one who knew anything about him. And, she thought slowly, she'd told him things about herself that she'd never told anyone else in Pine Butte.

  Glancing at him, she saw the planes of his face set in hard lines. There was no softness in his eyes as he looked around his home tow
n, no happy memories to recall. Even though the mercury hovered near ninety degrees, she felt a chill ripple up her skin. There would be no happy endings for Connor MacCormac and Pine Butte. And no matter what he stirred in her, no matter how connected to him she already felt, there would be no happily ever after for them, either.

  His arm tightened around her almost painfully and he pulled her closer. Looking at him in surprise, she saw him staring ahead of them, his jaw clenched tight. When she turned to look in that direction, she saw her cousin Richard striding toward them.

  Her stomach churned. Tension flowed out of Connor and made the arm around her shoulders as hard as an iron bar. His steps never slowed, and she felt him gathering himself.

  "Connor, no," she whispered urgently. "Leave him alone."

  His fingers curled around her shoulder in a quick, hard embrace. "Worried about me, sweetheart?" The look he gave her was fierce with possession.

  "Of course I'm worried about you," she answered. "You've got a concussion. You don't need to get into a fight with Richard."

  "That wienie isn't going to hurt me." Scorn dripped from his voice. "About the worst thing he's going to do is go tell his daddy that I'm picking on him."

  "Please, Connor."

  As Richard approached, she could feel Connor's whole body tightening next to her. He stared at her cousin but didn't slow down. She held her breath, praying that Richard would just keep walking.

  Her cousin slowed and stopped in front of them, and she and Connor were forced to stop, too.

  "Hello, Sarah," her cousin said, never taking his eyes off Connor. "I didn't realize you had such poor taste."

  She twined her arm around Connor's waist and moved closer to him. "I guess there are a lot of things you don't know, aren't there?"

  Richard flushed and looked at her. For just a second, what looked like hatred glittered in his eyes, then he blinked and it was gone. "I know trash when I see it. And smell it."