by Meg Muldoon
When the stranger saw it, his reaction had been the opposite of mine.
No hysterics, no screaming. He just looked at it silently for a while. And then he took off his hat.
He was the one who called the cops. I had been in too much shock to really do anything. I probably would have stood there all day, my mouth gaping open, my eyes wide.
I’d never seen a dead body before.
Let alone one that belonged to someone I’d known.
Let alone one that had been murdered by a mounted ox head.
I had always said Dale was driving this place into the ground.
But in the end, this place, or more specifically, Old Velma, had driven him into the ground.
I shuddered at the cruel irony.
“I know this must be hard, Bitters,” Raymond said. “I know that the two of you were close.”
We hadn’t been close. Raymond would have known that if he’d actually ever listened to anything I said.
But despite the fact that Dale Dixon had his share of flaws, I was sorry to see him end up dead on the floor of his own saloon.
And in such a terrible way.
“I just don’t understand how it could have happened,” I said, shaking my head, the words never as useless as they were now. “Old Velma’s been sitting up on that wall for decades.”
Raymond rubbed my back. A bout of unpleasant goose bumps crawled up my arms and I shivered.
“It’s a strange one, all right,” he said. “Like God was playing a joke on old Dale. I’m sorry, but I want you to describe it all again. Can you tell me exactly how you discovered the body?”
I told him again. About the music, the lights being out, what I saw when I turned them on.
“And, uh, when did Fletcher Hart enter the bar?” he asked.
“Who?”
Raymond cleared his throat.
“The, uh, the one who dropped you back at your house the other day? When did he come into the bar?”
Fletcher Hart.
So that was the stranger’s name.
Odd, it had never come up both times I’d seen him.
There was something familiar about the name. I’d heard it somewhere before. The name swirled around in my head like an old scent, bringing me back to another time I couldn’t quite place.
“Loretta?”
I snapped out of it.
“What?” I said.
“When did Mr. Hart enter the bar?”
“A few minutes after I got here, I think,” I said. “But I don’t know. I don’t remember how long it was… how long I was staring like that.”
Raymond nodded.
“How do you know Hart?” he asked.
He said it in a very official tone, but I knew that he wasn’t asking so much for the investigation’s sake as for his own.
“I don’t, really,” I said.
“You just let men you don’t know drive your car back home for you?” Raymond asked, each word floating on a cloud of jealousy.
“That’s not your business,” I said. “Not anymore.”
“It just might be,” he said. “Strange him showing up here just a few minutes after you.”
“Yeah, well there’s a lot that’s strange about this,” I said. “That’s the least of it.”
Raymond scribbled a few more things down in his notebook.
“You still haven’t told me how you know him,” he said.
I shrugged.
“He came into the saloon for a drink the other night. He broke up the fight between Kirby and Beth Lynn’s new boyfriend. Got me a bag of frozen peas from the freezer for my cheek.”
“Isn’t that nice,” Raymond said sarcastically under his breath.
“Yes, it was nice,” I said.
“And then you saw him again? The afternoon after that?” Raymond said.
“Right after I got fired,” I said. “I ran into him down by the river, where I was, uh, trying to drown my sorrows.”
Raymond shook his head.
“Loretta, Loretta,” he said, disapprovingly. “You’re just so…”
He trailed off.
“I’m so what?”
He looked up from his notepad, dead into my eyes.
“You’re just so hard to love.”
“Then don’t.”
“It’s not my choice.”
I bit my lip.
I felt kind of bad that we were talking about this with Dale lying dead right there.
I also felt kind of bad that I didn’t return Raymond’s sentiment.
But there was nothing I could do about that.
Raymond looked back down at his notepad, seemingly reading my thoughts.
“I might need to contact you again when I have more questions,” he said.
“That’s fine.”
“Could we talk sometime?” he asked, looking up. “I mean, really talk? Like I’ve been trying to for weeks now?”
I guess I owed him that much. Sometimes people just needed closure. Maybe if he could find that, then he’d be able to move on.
“Yes, Raymond,” I said. “We can talk. Tomorrow night. But I’m not promising a thing. And just so we’re clear, the conversation ends the moment you raise your voice. Got it?”
He nodded his head solemnly.
“Come over around 9 o’clock,” I said, remembering I had my mom’s dinner to go to earlier in the night. “While I still have a house to come to, anyway.”
“You struggling with the rent again?” he asked.
I sighed.
“Dale was supposed to pay me for my last two weeks,” I said. “That’s why I came by today. But it looks like that check’s not gonna come through anytime soon.”
It sounded awful. Talking about money while Dale lay crushed in the other room.
“You need something to get you by?” Raymond asked.
It was kind of him.
But I knew owing anything to Raymond Rollins right now would be the wrong move. He’d have that to hold over me, and that was something I didn’t want.
I shook my head.
“Thanks, but I’ll be okay.”
He nodded.
“I’ll be there tomorrow,” he said, rubbing my back again.
I tried to keep from sighing.
“You think I can go now?”
He nodded.
I started for the front, when all of a sudden, a blood-curdling scream erupted throughout the bar.
There was really only one person the shrill scream could have belonged to.
The sound of glass breaking followed shortly after.
Chapter 26
“Dammit, Botkin, I told you to be on the look-out for her,” Raymond said between gritted teeth to the young deputy.
The front room was littered with broken glass, the consequence of Courtney walking in with a box of vodka bottles and finding her husband’s lifeless body in the middle of the floor.
Courtney had come in through the front door, probably wondering why there were cop cars sitting in the parking lot. Most likely, she probably thought it had to do with some sort of code violation.
Instead, she’d found a sight that was too terrible to put into words.
“He was... He was…” she said, hysterically between sobs.
She never finished her thought. The cops looked on sheepishly, like none of them knew what to say. All they could do was stand in front of the body, trying to block her view of it.
She started sobbing uncontrollably.
I looked over at Raymond, but he seemed to be stuck in a moment he couldn’t get out of. Botkin tried to reach out to her, but she slapped his hand away hysterically, and started convulsing dramatically.
I was just about to go to Courtney, when someone cut in ahead of me.
“It’s okay,” the stranger said, placing an arm lightly around her shoulder.
In one fell swoop, Courtney dropped all her hostility and fell into the stranger’s arms. She let out a few more wails into the stranger’
s chest. I went over, placing a hand on her shoulder.
Courtney and I weren’t exactly simpatico, but that didn’t mean that I wasn’t sorry about all of this.
“I’m so sorry, Courtney,” I said.
She didn’t acknowledge me. I glanced up at the stranger.
Our eyes met.
There was something familiar about those eyes, and not just because this was the third time I’d seen him.
But no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t place where I knew them from.
“I’m here if you need anything, Courtney,” I said. “Anything at all.”
“Oh, Dale,” she wailed. “My poor, poor Dale.”
Nobody in the room had an answer for her. I suddenly felt tears pulling at my eyes.
I had no control over them. They just spilled over like rainwater run-off, sliding down my cheeks without me having a say in the matter.
I brushed them away and left abruptly, getting out of the saloon as fast as I could.
Leaving behind Dale’s dead body, a sobbing Courtney, and a pay check that would probably never make its way to my bank account.
Chapter 27
I pulled over to my cottonwood grove spot by the river, my heart hammering like a paint mixer in a hardware store.
In all the commotion of Dale’s demise, I had missed his call.
He hadn’t left a message. He never did.
“Dammit,” I mumbled, getting out, jumping on the hood of my car, and dialing his number.
I listened to the rings, my heart sinking farther down into my chest with each one.
I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking I’m acting like a desperate spaz. And you know what? I’d agree with you.
I didn’t want to be a desperate spaz any more than the next girl.
But I couldn’t help myself. Jacob had a way of making me crumble.
You probably think it’s strange that I still talk to my ex. Maybe the problem is that I’ve never wanted to put that label on him. You see, in my mind, we’re still together in some sense. We’re soulmates, after all.
And a bond like that was hard to break.
Even if I wanted to. Even if he—
“Loretta?”
My heart shot back up in my chest.
“Jacob,” I said, my voice trembling a little as I pressed the phone to my ear.
“I saw that you called,” he said.
“Yeah, I uh, just…” I swallowed back spit. “I wanted to see how you were doing.”
He yawned into the phone.
“Just fine,” he said. “Things have been pretty busy. The band’s got a new record coming out at the end of the month, and we’re heading out on tour in a couple of weeks.”
Jacob managed The Rodeo Kings, a folk band that dressed like they were in the 1890s, and in my humble opinion, sounded like a poor man’s Mumford & Sons. They were the type of band that wore buttoned-up vests, and looked like they could have churned their own butter when they weren’t making music. But there was a market for a poor man’s Mumford & Sons these days, and they were on the verge of a hit record, the way Jacob talked about them.
“Sounds like things are good,” I said.
“Yeah,” he said, yawning again. “‘Cept I can’t seem to get enough sleep lately. Too much staying out late, I guess.”
“Huh,” I said.
I couldn’t help thinking about what he was doing, staying out late. My stomach twisting at the thought that it might have been more than just listening to bands that he was doing.
Not that I was one to talk. I’d gone out with Raymond for a spell. But still. I knew in my gut that Jacob was seeing other women. Maybe not seriously, but…
I tried not to think too much about that.
“Uh, that tour of yours taking you out to Oregon by any chance?” I asked.
“Depends on how well the record does,” he said. “Right now we’re touring the South, maybe the East Coast after that. But I’m hoping we’ll get out to the West too.”
“It’s just that, well, it’s been a while since we saw each other,” I said.
I heard the sound of voices in the background. They were high-pitched, and I wished I couldn’t hear them.
“I know,” he said. “Like I said, it’s been real busy. But hey, you know, maybe I could make it to Broken Hearts after the tour’s done.”
My voice caught in my throat a little at that.
“Oh yeah?” I said.
“Yeah,” he said, coolly. “I was thinking about taking a little vacation anyway. Seeing the old hometown.”
The voices in the background got louder. There was a giggle that sounded like nails on a chalkboard.
“Listen, Loretta, I better get back to work here. You know how it is. But I’ll give you a call later this month about it. How’s that?”
“Okay, Jacob,” I said.
“Cheers,” he said.
“Jacob, I—”
But he hung up before I could tell him that I loved him.
Chapter 28
It took the entire afternoon plus part of the evening to realize what a fool I’d been.
That’s always the way it was with Jacob. He had a way of blinding me—of bringing out the idiocy in me.
I threw another log onto the fire and watched the flames lick at it. After a bright blue day, a dark bank of clouds had rolled in over the high desert, and it had started snowing again. Having nowhere I needed to be, I’d come home and started a fire, trying to process what had happened in the last 12 hours.
And even though my former boss had just been killed, even though I’d been the one to find his dead body, and even though I no longer had a job or a means of supporting myself, my thoughts kept going back to the conversation I’d had with Jacob.
I’d been so elated about the possibility of him visiting, that I’d missed a few things in the conversation.
Like the fact that he hadn’t asked about his grandfather, Lawrence.
Or the fact that he hadn’t asked about me or my life at all.
But I probably just caught him at a bad time. Or so I’d been trying to tell myself. He was at work. He was tired and busy, and didn’t have much time to talk.
It wasn’t that he didn’t care. Because I knew that he did.
I had to believe that he did.
He was just caught up in other things. And I couldn’t blame him for being busy and having a life.
I poked the fire, watching embers float up into the chimney.
After I met Jacob in the parking lot of The Cupid all those years ago, he’d convinced me to leave town with him and run away to Texas. Jacob didn’t get along much with his father, and I suppose I didn’t get along all that well with my family either. And being an impulsive girl, it didn’t take much convincing before we drove his old Chevy all the way to Austin. For more than a decade, he’d tried his hand at the local music scene while I tended bar and soaked up some of the best live music in the world.
But after a while of living there, we both decided to move back to Broken Hearts Junction. Lawrence had his stroke, and then Jacob’s father died shortly after of cancer, and Jacob felt the need to come back home.
And frankly, I’d been a little homesick myself. Tired of city life, missing my juniper canyons and the cottonwood groves. Of the peace and solitude of my home’s landscape.
But there was also another reason we moved back to Broken Hearts Junction.
We had wanted to start a family.
Jacob and I never got married. He had always said he didn’t believe in marriage. And that if two people loved each other the way we did, then they should be together, and that the state approving that didn’t mean a damn thing.
I used to agree with him. But these days, I wasn’t so sure.
The family thing didn’t work out, obviously. He left before we got around to it.
Things had become rocky between us before he took off. He’d stopped looking for a job, and my meager wages at The Stupid Cupid Saloon w
ere barely keeping the two of us afloat. We had a lot of fights about money.
Maybe I expected too much from him. Maybe I drove him away.
One day he came back from seeing Lawrence, and he was fuming. I never knew the reason for it, and we got into a fight when I asked him what was wrong.
The next morning, I woke up to a note on the kitchen counter, and an empty driveway. He was going back to Austin to go find a job, the note said. He said we’d be together again soon, but that a man had to work, and that he would come back to Broken Hearts Junction when the economy got better here.
But it didn’t take long for me to realize that he was lying: the bad job market was just an excuse.
He hadn’t gone back to Austin so much to make a living as he did to get away from me.
Jacob had left me. That’s what his note said between the lines. He was moving away to make his life somewhere else.
Without me in it.
But despite all that, despite him giving up on us, I still believed.
Being the helpless, hopeless fool that I was, I still believed that he was my soulmate.
And despite all the signs pointing to the contrary, I still believed that he would find his way back home. One of these days, he’d show up on the porch with a bouquet of roses and a bottle of wine and an apology.
And he’d never leave me again.
All I had to do was wait him out.
Hank, who had been lying next to me by the fire, rolled over on his back and growled. I gave in to his demands and started rubbing his soft belly.
Jacob had given me Hank for Valentine’s Day a few weeks before he left. And looking back on it, I think he must have known what he was going to do. He must have been planning on leaving me for weeks, maybe months. Hank had been a parting gift.
But that was three years ago, and this was now. And despite him not asking about me or Lawrence, I took some solace in what he had said about coming back home for a visit. Maybe he was having a change of heart. Maybe he was beginning to see that we were meant for each other.
Maybe things weren’t as dire as they seemed after—
I jumped as there was a knock at the door. Hank rolled over and got to his feet, scrambling against the hardwood and running for the door, barking and howling.
