by Tami Hoag
“She's so sweet,” Bryce murmured to the world at large, marveling in the concept of sweetness. “I can't believe how sweet she was, how needy.”
His wonder struck Sharon like a hail of jagged gravel, pelting her ego, biting into her heart. She couldn't be sweet. She had never held any sweetness inside her. Need she knew too well. What she needed now was to distract Bryce from his preoccupation. If he became too fixated on the girl, he would shut her out altogether. The idea terrified her, but she would never show him that fear. Never.
“We're all needy,” she breathed, brushing up against him.
She let him feel her full breasts through the sheer fabric of the black lounging pajamas she wore. Rubbing against him like a cat, she started to cup him through his jeans. He turned and moved away from her without a hint of interest.
Panic balled like a fist in the back of Sharon's throat, and she had to fight to keep it out of her voice. “If she was so wonderful, what are you doing down here?”
Bryce paused by the sideboard, considered the idea of a small drink, then discarded it. He didn't want anything interfering with the high. He didn't want anything slowing his thought processes. He envisioned himself as a diamond—brilliant, hard, powerful.
“She's fragile,” he said. “She'll need finessing. She'll probably have second thoughts. If I smother her with possession, she'll bolt.” He rubbed his chin for a moment, staring off into the middle distance, his face aglow with his pleasure in his own brilliance. “Finesse.” He smiled the Redford smile. “That's the ticket.”
“How about finessing me?” Sharon said, forcing a smile as she closed in on him again. A subtle tremor of desperation thrummed in her low voice. She hoped he didn't notice it. Something like a spring coiled tighter and tighter in her chest.
“Not tonight,” Bryce said impatiently.
He walked away from her for a second time. Without looking at her. Without touching her or promising tomorrow. The spring wound tighter.
“Not tonight,” she snapped, her voice low and vibrating with anger. She stalked around a white leather sofa and cut off his path to the window. “You have to save yourself for your precious virgin princess. Is that it?”
Bryce gave her a flat, hooded look. “Spare me the jealous-woman act. You stood right here and told me to sleep with her.”
“For us,” she clarified. “Not for you. For us, for the plan, to get what we want, not so you can wander around in a fog, dazzled by innocence.”
He huffed out a breath. “Take a Valium and go to bed. You're getting on my nerves.”
“How dare you dismiss me like some bothersome servant.”
“That's exactly how you're behaving.”
“You bastard!” she spat out, her voice a feral, animal sound low in her throat as the anger burned away her control. “After all I've been to you! After all I've done for you!”
When he tried to turn away again, she grabbed his arm and dug her fingernails in to hold him while she tore her top open with her other hand, baring her breasts. “Look at me!” she snarled. “Look at me, damn you!”
He looked. Without desire. Without emotion. He stared at her, repulsed by what he saw—desperation, degradation, dissipation; a jaded, aging harlot whose depravity knew few bounds. Never once did it occur to him that he was looking in a mirror. He was above and beyond. Bound for new glory. Reborn in the eyes of an innocent.
He brought his eyes to his cousin's and said without inflection, “You're losing control.”
Sharon fell back, clutching the ruined front of her top together. Ashamed, beaten, stunned at what he had reduced her to. Numb with the shock of it.
“I'm not the one who's losing control,” she whispered. “Look at yourself. Your brain is infected with this girl. She's all you think about. A week ago you wouldn't have given her a second glance.”
“That was a week ago. Now I know her. Now I see the possibilities. That's one of your many faults, Sharon, you lack foresight.”
“No. I can see perfectly,” she said bitterly. “You're obsessed with her. The way you were obsessed with Lucy—”
He shook his head and grinned that damned Redford grin, having the gall to be amused at her. “No. You're so wrong. It's not that at all.”
She stared at him, forcing herself to read the expression in his eyes, the strange euphoria. “You think you've fallen in love with her, don't you?” she whispered, barely able to stand the sound of the words. She could feel her world crumbling around her. Her mind raced for some way to stop the damage. She had leverage. Bryce couldn't drop her altogether; she had enough on him to make her an invaluable ally or a formidable enemy. She could destroy him if she had to.
But she couldn't make him love her. She hadn't thought him capable of romantic love. He was a man capable of many things, but love was not among them.
He didn't turn back as he walked to the doorway and killed the lights in the display cases. “I don't think, I know I love her.”
“She'll leave you, you know,” she said, struggling for calm, clinging to some small scrap of pride and cynicism. “She'll find out what you really are and she'll hate you, and she'll leave you.”
“No,” he murmured, feeling omnipotent. “I won't allow that.”
The dream was of death. Filled with a cast of people who were either in fact dead or metaphorically dead to her. Lucy with a clean round hole through her body. Townsend with no skull above his eyebrows. Miller Daggrepont wearing a jaunty purple ascot around his fat throat. Del Rafferty with the lower part of his face gone. Then there was Brad Enright, a stick-on label on the pocket of his Egyptian cotton shirt that read HELLO, MY NAME IS: ASSHOLE. And Will wearing a goofy cap that had been outfitted to hold a beer can on either side of his head. Clear plastic straws looped down in a circuitous route to his mouth.
The guests milled around at a cocktail party held in Del Rafferty's cabin. Her family stood off to the side, near the guns, refusing to mingle. Kendall Morton leered at them from the corner, where he stood in a cloud of self-generated dust.
Mari walked in wearing a cowboy hat, boots, and a vest and nothing else, and realized immediately that she was severely underdressed. Her mother and sisters shook their heads.
“Marilee, you're just not one of us,” her mother said.
“She's sure as hell not one of us,” Will said.
They circled around her and started moving in closer and closer, their faces grim with disapproval. Except Lucy's. Lucy was smiling her wry half-smile. J.D. stood beside her.
“Here, peach,” she said, holding out the Mr. Peanut tin. “Something to take with you on your trip.”
“What trip?”
“The trip to find yourself.”
Then the floor opened up and she was falling straight down into a black hole, staring up at the ring of faces and half faces.
Lucy waved. “Be sure to send a postcard!”
She jerked awake and her heart sprinted into high gear as she tried without success to get her bearings. Darkness. Cool, damp. She was sitting up . . . on the deck outside Lucy's house.
Drawing in a deep breath of night air, she pressed a hand over her breastbone and assured herself that she was real and alive. Her eyes adjusted to the lack of light, and familiar shapes came into focus—the rail of the deck, the towering pine trees, indistinct outlines of the llamas in the pasture near the creek.
She had come out from town to feed them, had meant to sit in the Adirondack chair on the deck only a moment or two as the sun set. She had certainly never meant to fall asleep. Now the sense of being alone in the wilderness seeped into her like cold dew.
Three people had died violently in this dark paradise. Each of those deaths had touched her in some way. She could feel them touching her now, like bony fingers reaching up from the afterlife, clawing at her, pulling at her, trying to draw her deeper into the evil.
And she was going with them. Willingly. Not exactly the kind of trip she'd had in mind when she piled her business s
uits in the back of her Honda and left Sacramento a lifetime ago.
She had come here for fun. She wasn't having any. She had come here to find herself and was instead trying to find a killer. She had come here for companionship. She was alone.
Somewhere down the valley, coyotes began to sing. In contrast to their high, thin voices, the air on the deck seemed to thicken with an electricity that raised the hair on the backs of Mari's arms. She was alone, but suddenly she didn't feel alone. She felt the intensity of a gaze on her, eyes that could have been anywhere in the darkness.
Kendall Morton's round, ugly face floated through her imagination. She had called a friend who worked the night shift in the California Highway Patrol computer room and called in six years' worth of markers for favors. Could he contact the Montana computer banks—providing Montana had computer banks—and get a rap sheet on Kendall Morton? He had sighed heavily, made noises about losing his job, then promised to have something for her by morning.
Kendall drifted away and a vision of Del Rafferty took his place. An apparition. A ghost. Another of the walking dead from her dream. One of the suspects. She wanted to pity him, but she couldn't discount him. He had been a paid killer in the service, and the war had never ended for him. Or maybe he had traded one war for another; service to his country for service to the Rafferty land.
She didn't want to find out the hard way.
She eased herself forward in the chair, trying to breathe slowly, straining to hear above the drumbeat of her pulse in her ears.
“You sleep like a city girl.”
J.D. eased out of the shadows at the corner of the house, hands in the pockets of his jeans, big shoulders hunched. Mari glared at him over her shoulder as she rose from the chair.
“What are you doing here?”
“Some big mountain lion could have had you for supper.”
“Not likely,” she retorted, calling up her guide-book facts. “There's never been a report of a mountain lion attacking anyone in this area.”
He raised a brow. “Maybe the poor son of bitch wasn't around afterward to tell the tale.”
Refusing to play games, Mari ignored his line of questioning and stuck with her own. “I asked you what you were doing here, Rafferty. You weren't invited.”
“I saw a light in the upstairs window,” he said, leaning back casually against the railing. He didn't feel casual. He felt like a clenched fist. He felt pressure from all sides compressing him into something hard and dangerous. And she looked soft and sleep-rumpled. If he pulled her against him now, he imagined her body would be warm, her nose cold, and her hair would smell like dew and pine. But her eyes were wary beneath the slash of dark brows, and he knew she wouldn't willingly come to him now. He had seen to that. He had pushed her away. Because it was for the best. Because he didn't want the distraction or the danger of a woman in his life.
Never been a liar, J.D.?
“You've been relieved of your duties as caretaker,” Mari said. “You're not responsible for this place.”
His concern hadn't been for the place, but he wouldn't admit that. It wasn't the time. The time had passed.
“Habit,” he said.
“Break it.”
“Del says he saw a big cat up along Five-Mile Creek,” he said, looking off to the south, as if he half expected to see something prowling among the dark stand of trees.
“Yeah, I'll bet Del sees a lot of things,” Mari said, more sharply than she had intended. She would have skinned snakes with her teeth for a cigarette. Her fingers flexed and clenched, nervous for something to do.
“Don't, Mary Lee,” J.D. warned, his voice tight and weary. “This day's been too damn long already. I don't want to talk about Del.” Or think about Del, or deal with Del, or believe what Del might have become while living under the protective banner of the Stars and Bars.
“Tell me about it. I started out the morning by finding a dead body. That just set the tone right off, you know what I mean?”
J.D. pushed himself away from the railing and stared at her. “You what!”
She gave a look that said she had been the butt of a tasteless practical joke. “Found a dead body. Yesterday was your lucky day; today was mine.”
“Who?”
“MacDonald Townsend. Esteemed judge. Philanderer. Cokehead. That MacDonald Townsend. You'll like this; it's very macho: he blew the top of his head off with a .357 Colt Python.”
“Judas,” he said, the word blowing out of him on an exhaled breath. He narrowed his eyes and focused hard on Mary Lee's face. She looked as pale as cream in the dark. “Are you all right?”
She jammed her hands in the pockets of her denim jacket and tipped her chin up, as if he had affronted her pride. “I don't think I'll eat grits again anytime soon.”
“Judas,” he muttered again.
He had to give her credit for not falling apart just in retelling the tale. He thought most women would have. But then, as Mary Lee liked to remind him, she was not most women. She was seldom what he expected her to be—or wanted her to be, for that matter. She stood there beside him with her chin up, daring him. Tough little cookie.
“Where did you find him?” J.D. asked in a thick voice, stepping back as she stepped away.
Mari cleared her throat and tucked her hair behind one ear, staring hard at the boards of the deck. “In his study. I went to talk to him about Lucy. I thought he might know something. They were involved, you know. I think Lucy might have been blackmailing him.”
She cut a glance at J.D. for his reaction. He didn't so much as blink at the suggestion. As if he expected as much from Lucy or thought that blackmail was perhaps a common hobby among the kind of people Lucy had associated with.
“Townsend,” he said, his brows drawing together in concentration, a deep line of concern digging into his forehead. “He a friend of Bryce's?”
“Was. Past tense. Why?”
J.D. didn't answer. He just stood there, stroking his thumb back and forth across his lower lip as his mind worked. He had ridden back up along Five-Mile Creek after leaving Del, as much to clear his head as to look for signs of Del's phantom cougar. The creek ran through a narrow strip of Forest Service land that acted as a buffer of sorts between Rafferty land and Bryce's land. Heavily wooded, it had seemed like twilight in the middle of the day—a sensation that might have been peaceful if it hadn't been oddly disturbing.
He hadn't expected to find much of anything worth looking at. Some tracks maybe, nothing more. The area was isolated, with no easy access. Not the sort of place the tourists and hikers sought out. The Absaroka—Beartooth wilderness offered miles of trails for them, although he had seen backpackers and signs of backpackers on Rafferty land more and more as the legitimate park areas became more crowded. What he found on Five-Mile Creek he couldn't attribute to weekend foot traffic.
Signs of horses—a number of horses—and dogs. The carcass of what had been a big, strong hunting dog a week or so ago lay half in the creek, its body torn and rotting, fouling the water. He pulled it out and left it on the bank for nature to dispose of. The state of decay made it difficult to determine how the dog had met his end. He thought of Del's claim of a big cat, and wondered. A cougar would turn and fight if it had to.
Horses, dogs, cigarette butts, and shell casings on the ground. Signs of a hunt. But there was nothing in season. Cougars were protected, at any rate—not that some didn't meet untimely ends every year. There were guides who would promise big cats to hunters for a price. Poaching was one of the most common—and most profitable—crimes in the state of Montana.
Horses, dogs, signs of a hunt. And just north of Five-Mile Creek lay Evan Bryce's private paradise. Bryce the sportsman. Bryce the high roller. Bryce, who was a friend of the dead judge who was the lover of the dead Lucy, who was the client of the dead lawyer, Daggrepont.
“I broke the news to Bryce myself,” Mari said. “He was devastated.” She rolled her eyes and made a face.
“What'd
he do?”
“He made the appropriate noises, but his heart wasn't in it. Actually, I think he couldn't have cared less. I didn't see any genuine emotion out of him until Will crashed the party. Talk about uncomfortable moments. I don't think Emily Post ever covered what to do when a drunken cowboy assaults the host and accuses him of playing the ol' bump and grind with his wife.”
“Oh, Jesus,” J.D. swore, driving a hand back over his forehead and through his short dark hair. He cocked a leg and huffed out a sigh as he tried in vain to massage the knots from his neck. “What happened?”
“Will took a couple swings at Bryce, said some mean things to Samantha. Samantha ran into the house in tears, then Bryce broke a chair on Will's ribs. He's got an ugly temper. I wouldn't want to get on the wrong side of it.”
“I'd rather you didn't get on any side of him.”
“Yeah, like you have anything to say about it.”
She started to turn from him, as if she meant to walk away. J.D. snagged her by the arm and took a subtly aggressive step toward her. “I mean it, Mary Lee. I don't like the feel of any of this.”
“And I don't like you telling me what to do,” she said, scowling at him. She felt as if she hadn't slept in days and the insulation on her temper was being stripped away layer by layer, exposing a tangle of raw nerve endings, which Rafferty poked at every time he came around. “You're not a player here, cowboy, as far as I can see. You made that very clear last night. And before that, and before that. All you ever wanted from Lucy or me was sex and this land. You're not getting either now, so that puts your nose out of joint. Tough.
“You don't want me nosing around Lucy's death. You don't want me checking out your loony uncle. You don't want me hanging around Bryce. Well, guess what, Rafferty? I don't care what you don't want. You don't want me on mutually acceptable terms, so get the hell out of my life.”
She pulled her arm free of his grasp and started toward the house, feeling old and battle-scarred. Fleetingly she wondered what the folks back home would say if they could see her now. Little Marilee, who had almost compromised her life away in a failed attempt to please everybody else. If someone asked her to compromise now, she thought she would probably just haul off and punch that person in the mouth.
