Dark Paradise

by Tami Hoag

  “You know,” she said, turning back toward J.D., “you're nothing but a hypocrite, Rafferty. You sit up on your big horse on your precious mountain and pontificate about integrity and personal accountability. Look in a mirror. I'd say you're about a quart low on both.”

  J.D. said nothing. He stood on the deck and watched her go in. A few minutes later, her Honda started up on the other side of the house and gravel crunched and popped beneath the tires as she drove out of the yard.

  CHAPTER

  25

  SAMANTHA lay in the center of the king-size bed, staring up at the ceiling, listening for night sounds. There weren't any. Not like there was in her house in town. No dogs barking. No late traffic from the patrons of the Hell and Gone on their way home. No grinding groan from her dinosaur of a refrigerator as it edged its way toward extinction. No ringing in her ears from straining to hear Will come in when she knew in her heart that he would not.

  Oh, Will. What happens now?

  The decision had already been made, she supposed. Will had made his feelings clear, and she had taken her first step away from him. A giant step. Onto shaky ground. Her heart beat at the base of her throat while she waited to take a long fall.

  Bryce had made love to her. It seemed like a dream, but she knew it wasn't. Her body hummed with the aftereffects.

  He had told her he loved her.

  She should have felt . . . something. Happy. Relieved. Excited. Vindicated. But she mostly felt numb. She was a naive stranger in uncharted territory. She didn't know what was expected of her or what to expect of anyone else.

  Bryce had slipped from the bed as she slept. She wondered now where he was, wondered what he might be thinking. Probably that she was an inexperienced girl and not very good in bed. If she had been good in bed, Will would never have left her.

  Sighing, her heart weighing heavy in her chest, she sat up and propped herself against the headboard. There was a stem of purple snapdragons on the empty pillow where Bryce's head should have been. Beneath the flower he had tucked a note. She opened it and read it by the soft light of the lamp on the nightstand.

  Samantha,

  I knew you would want some time to think.

  Please don't feel guilty. We followed our hearts;

  they are seldom wrong.

  Bryce

  Her heart had steered her wrong more than once. Into Will's arms. To the altar with a man who had no business being married. She no longer trusted it. She held her breath now and tried to listen to what it might tell her, but all she heard was the low buzz of the clock-radio on the nightstand.

  Too tense to be still, she slipped out of bed and into the jeans and T-shirt that had been discarded. Barefoot, she padded across the thick carpet and stood staring out the window. The pool lights had been switched off. A thin sliver of moon turned the water to liquid pewter.

  A memory surfaced, sweet and painful. Will grinning at her with a wicked gleam in his eyes. A pool behind a house in Reno. They were on their honeymoon—two whole days of unbridled lust. They had blown all their cash but three dollars and ninety-seven cents playing slots and keno. Will had finagled a room for their wedding night in the Biggest Little Honeymoon Motel as a part of the package deal with the Biggest Little Wedding Chapel, but they had no money for a second night and Will's MasterCard privileges had been revoked.

  Knowing they would be spending the night on the air mattress in the back of Will's pickup, they had gone driving in search of a scenic, private parking spot. The night was hot. Samantha had longingly wished for a dip in a swimming pool. Then there was the pool—shaped like a peanut, shimmering under the moonlight behind a dark, low-built brick house.

  “We'll get caught,” she whispered, barely able to contain her excitement. The high of becoming Mrs. Will Rafferty made her dizzy. The prospect of doing something forbidden compounded the sensation.

  Giggling and shushing each other under their breath, they stripped their clothes off in the shadows along the garage and slipped carefully into the cool water. After their swim they lay in the back of the truck and named the stars and made slow, sweet love.

  Tears slipped over Samantha's lashes and rolled down her cheeks as she brought herself back to the present. Loss clenched inside her like a fist. Why did it have to be so hard? Why couldn't she be what he needed? Why couldn't he love her as much as she loved him?

  She still loved him. The knowledge didn't make her feel anything but despair. She loved a man who didn't want her, and had given herself to a man she didn't love. There was a word for that, but she couldn't think what it was. Bryce would know, she thought, moving away from the window, but she couldn't ask him.

  Her thoughts chased each other around in her brain until she wanted to shake them all out. What should she do, what should she say to Bryce? Did she go on as a hopeless, stupid kid, waiting for Will to come back to her, or did she take that step into a new world as an adult and start working on a new life?

  The room seemed to press in on her. The questions and recriminations swirled faster inside her head. Careful not to make any noise, she slipped out into the hall and crept downstairs and out the French doors to the terrace. She avoided looking at the pool, going instead to the low stone wall that edged the area, where she climbed up and swung her legs over.

  Below her, the ground fell away in a steep, rock-strewn, tree-studded slope, down and down to the valley, where fog crept off the creek and seeped outward. The air was cool and thick with damp, and Samantha shivered and wrapped her arms around herself, glad for the distraction. Far to the west she could make out the dark ridge of the next range, the snow on the peaks like a strip of white lace in the thin moonlight.

  She sat there for a long time. Not thinking. Not deciding. Just sitting and absorbing the still of the wilderness. The sensation of being watched crept up on her from behind slowly, touching like fingertips between her shoulder blades. Then the fingers trailed lightly up her spine to the base of her neck, and she twisted around on the wall so quickly that she nearly slipped off.

  There was no one on the terrace. The chairs were empty. The lounges where Uma and Fabian had sunned themselves had been stripped of their beach towels and lined neatly three feet back from the pool. A soft breeze toyed with the umbrellas tilted above the tables, but nothing else moved. No eyes glowed in the night. She looked up at the house, expecting to see someone staring out at her from one of the windows. But the windows were vacant.

  Must have imagined it. Probably wanted it to be Will. Stupid kid. He's never coming back to you. You shouldn't want him to.

  She slipped off the wall and let herself out through a side gate, thinking she would walk down to the stables, but the sensation followed her, hovered around her shoulders like a swarm of gnats. Up in the towering pines that grew thick around the edge of the grounds, a barred owl let out a series of low, rhythmic hoots.

  The sound skimmed over her flesh like a clammy hand. Superstitions from childhood floated up from the depths of her mind. Owls were bad luck, bringers of omens, the familiars of evil spirits. Her Cheyenne grandfather, whom she remembered only as a stooped, gnarled man with a face like tree bark and the sour stink of liquor on his breath, had told her and her brother Mike that owls brought news of death.

  Silly. Why should she think of death? But the night seemed suddenly too still around her, and the air seemed suddenly too thick to breathe. The stables loomed dark too far down the path and the trees closed in all around. Fear rose like a scream up the back of her throat. For a moment she hesitated, hovered between logic and instinct. Then everything seemed to happen at once and in super-slow motion.

  A dark figure stepped out of the shadows as Samantha wheeled back toward the house. A figure without features, without gender, clad in black with a mask and gloves. The sight drove terror into her chest like the blade of a knife. Samantha opened her mouth to scream, but the sound was caught and snuffed out as a black bag descended over her face and was pulled tight by a drawstring ar
ound her throat. She lashed out wildly with her fists, with her feet, but the sudden and total darkness robbed her of her equilibrium and she staggered and fell.

  Crushed rock bit into her palms and elbows and knees as she hit the ground. She scrambled to stand, but her assailant beat her back down with something that felt like a baseball bat. The blows landed over and over on her back, on her sides, on her arms. She tried frantically to crawl out of the path of the club, but the ground sloped sharply down and she fell and skidded face first, the rocks tearing at her cheek and chin through the rough fabric of the hood.

  Questions pulsed like a strobe light through her brain as she lay there. Who? Why? What would become of her? Would anybody care? Tears pressed like fists behind her eyes and leaked out to soak into the hood. She wanted to sob, to wail out the pain and the terror that was choking her, but the hood was suffocating her and it was all she could do to draw in enough air to breathe.

  The drawstring tightened around her throat, pulling her head up, hanging her. Driven by self-preservation, Samantha clawed at the hood. She got her feet back under her and surged upward, tearing at the string with one hand, lashing out at her attacker with the other. The heel of her hand connected with bone and she heard a grunt of pain and surprise.

  Then she was trying to run and pull the hood off all at once, and the world, the night, tilted crazily around her, everything a blur of black and white. Her legs pumped, her arms swung wildly, but she seemed to go nowhere. As in a nightmare, the house looked farther and farther away. Her heart beat wildly, drowning out everything but the scrape of boots on gravel behind her.

  She glanced back over her shoulder just as the bat swung forward. The pain was a brilliant orange and red explosion inside her head. Then everything went black, as if the plug had been pulled, and the world ceased to exist as the barred owl called.

  CHAPTER

  26

  MARI WALKED the streets of New Eden in the predawn gray. Fog shrouded the buildings and houses, casting everything in an indistinct haze, like a half-forgotten memory. Somehow the old buildings looked older, the old business obsolete. Quaint traditions hanging on as progress overtook them. Sweet and sad. Lockhart's Ladies' Shop with its window display of polyester pant suits next door to the trendy Latigo Boutique. The shabby old Rexall drugstore with its original soda fountain and special on Geritol standing shoulder to shoulder with Mountain Man Bike and Athletic. Monroe Feed and Read combination feed store/bookstore, its shelves stocked with teat dip and fly spray and dehorning paste, its racks full of old Louis L'Amour titles and hunting magazines and cheap cookbooks printed on Xerox paper by the ladies auxiliary of the Lutheran church, just down the street from M. E. Fralick's New Age bookstore with its Zen master clerk and thousand-dollar quartz crystals.

  Sadness seeped into her muscles and bones, and she curled her hands into fists in the pockets of her old denim jacket. She jaywalked across the street to the square and settled on a bench in front of the Carnegie Library. Across the park, Colleen Bentsen's sculpture, which Mari had first appreciated as a symbol of cooperation, was taking shape in its pen in front of the courthouse. The courthouse had been built of red brick in the 1890s. A pair of Doric columns held up the portico at the top of the stone stairs. The paint was flaking off them like dandruff, but it was a venerable old building. Not very big, not very fancy, but proud of its heritage. Out in front of it the sculpture looked like a chunk of wreckage from a collapsed suspension bridge. Out of time, out of place, an unintentional insult on the place it was meant to honor.

  Restless, and disgusted with herself for her melancholy mood, she left the park and started back toward the Moose. She wouldn't stay there much longer. A week or so. The suite Drew and Kevin had given her was beautiful, but it wasn't a home. The ranch was a home. Hers. It was time to accept it, to stop questioning Lucy's motives in leaving it to her. She might never know exactly what had compelled Lucy. She might never find the evidence that would explain so many things. That wouldn't change the fact that the ranch was hers now. As soon as she felt comfortable being out there at night alone, she would move into the house for good. Work on her music. Hang with the llamas. Maybe start a garden.

  And up the mountain Rafferty would prowl the boundaries of his kingdom and look down on her.

  The pickups were gathering in front of the Rainbow. Ranch dogs patrolled the open truck beds with ears up and eyes eager for the sights of town. No blue and gray Ford with a Stars and Bars bug guard. No sign of Zip. Mari contemplated a cup of coffee and a plate of steak and eggs with crisp hash browns on the side, but her heart wasn't in it. She wasn't in the mood for camaraderie. Maybe she'd stop by for a late supper and she and Nora could go honky-tonkin' after her shift was over. But the chance of running into Will dampened the prospective fun and she discarded that idea too.

  She cut through the lobby of the Moose, not expecting to see anyone but Raoul at that hour, but Kevin stood behind the desk, scowling down at a computer printout. He glanced up at her with tired eyes and a face drawn from lack of sleep. He looked like a man sorely in need of a shave and a cup of coffee.

  “Hey, Kev, what's up?” Mari asked, propping herself against the counter. “You pull the graveyard shift?”

  The boyish smile made a halfhearted appearance, flickering and fading in the blink of an eye. “Not exactly. I knew I wasn't going to get any sleep, so I gave Raoul the night off.”

  “Insomnia?”

  “Fight with Drew.”

  “Oh.” She winced in empathy. “Ouch. I'm sorry.”

  “Me too,” he mumbled, flipping a page of green-lined paper without even looking at it.

  “Bad one, huh?”

  “Bad enough.” He shook his head, staring across the lobby and into the bar, his gaze fixed on the moose head that hung above the fireplace. “You think you know someone and then suddenly you look at them and you don't know them at all. . . .” His thoughts trailed off into a sigh of frustration and confusion. He snapped his mouth shut and shook his head again, his brown eyes bleak.

  “Is he around?” Mari asked. She didn't want to meddle in their personal lives, but Kevin looked so forlorn, and then there was the matter of Townsend. She wanted to bounce the news off Drew in hope of getting something more from him. No harm in killing two birds with one stone.

  “I don't know where he is,” Kevin mumbled, glaring down at the computer paper. “He blew out of here last night. I haven't seen him since.”

  Mari's eyebrows scaled her forehead. It had to have been some fight. She wondered if there was any possibility it had to do with what Drew knew of Lucy's life and times, then she chided herself for being a mercenary. Poor Kevin looked like a lost puppy.

  “You'll work it out,” she said softly, touching his sleeve.

  He didn't meet her eyes. His face tightened and he flipped another page on the printout. “Yeah. Sure. Umm—a—will you excuse me, Mari? I think I hear the phone in my office.”

  He turned away and was gone through a door marked AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY before Mari could so much as nod.

  She went into the empty lounge and slipped behind the ornate bar. A multiline telephone sat beside the cash register. She hit an open line and punched the number for the CHP computer room in Sacramento.

  “California Highway Patrol.”

  “This is Marilee Jennings. Can I speak with Paul Kael, please?”

  “Hang on.”

  She jammed the phone between her shoulder and her ear and passed the time picking at her ragged cuticles. When she had begun to think the connection had been cut, Paul came on the line, out of breath.

  “You owe me, Blue Eyes,” he said without preamble.

  “Not hardly,” she scoffed. “Did I or did I not introduce you to the lovely Mrs. Kael?”

  “Irrelevant. She is outranked on the list of women who strike terror into my heart by one Beverly Tarbon, my supervisor, who damn near caught me violating about a million rules.”

  “Close only counts in
horseshoes,” Mari said without sympathy. “Did you find anything?”

  “Yeah. You're not dating this guy, are you?”

  “Don't make me gag. He's a major sleaze.”

  “You don't have to tell me; I got a peek at his report card. He flunks social skills in a big way. The guy's had half a dozen charges filed and dropped. Two stuck and he went away to the state resort for a while.”

  “For what?”

  “Criminal sexual conduct and assault. You sure know how to pick 'em, Marilee.”

  Mari's heart dropped into her stomach. “It's a talent.”

  She let herself out the side door of the bar and walked in a daze to the parking lot, fishing in her purse for the keys to her Honda. The llamas needed feeding. There were still rooms in the house that hadn't been put to rights.

  Kendall Morton was a sex offender.

  She shuddered at the thought and the implications. Lucy's hired man had been a rapist. Was there any way she could have known that? More important, did it have anything to do with her death? Mari recalled the coroner's distinct lack of enthusiasm when she had asked him whether Lucy had been sexually assaulted. He hadn't bothered to check.

  She stopped at the Gas N' Go on her way out of town, bought a jumbo coffee to go, a bear claw, and a chocolate doughnut, hoping to pique her appetite. She drove out the ridge road listening to Vince Gill's thin sweet tenor voice lament the pains of love.

  The fog dissipated bit by bit as she climbed up out of the floor of the valley, tearing apart like wisps of cotton candy and disintegrating. But the sun refused to shine. The big sky hung like a leaden blanket, threatening rain but not making good on it. Beneath the gray the shades of green on the hills and in the valley looked deeper, richer. The wildflowers hid in the grass, their heads bowed demurely in deference to the wind. The mountains looked black in the distance, their snowcaps hidden by the bellies of low-hanging clouds.