by Tami Hoag
“You dropped the Mrs. but kept the last name. Is that proper?”
“I don't really care.”
“I suppose by that point in time you'd probably lost track of what name to go back to anyway.”
That wasn't true, but Elizabeth didn't tell Dane Jantzen. Her roots went back to a cowboy named J. C. Sheldon and a mother who had died before Elizabeth could store up any memories of her. Victoria Collins Sheldon, a beautiful face on a photograph, one framed sepia-toned photograph J.C. had kept with him as they had moved from ranch to ranch. A photograph he had kept beside his bed, wherever his bed happened to be, and gazed at with heart-wrenching longing as Elizabeth stood out in the hall and peeked in at him, wondering why he didn't love her the way he loved that picture. A photograph J.C. had cried over when he'd had too much to drink. A photograph Elizabeth had studied for hours as a skinny, lonely little girl, wondering if she would ever be as pretty, wondering if her mama was an angel, wondering why she'd had to go and die.
But that was all too personal to reveal to this man. Under the cynical hide she had grown over the years lay a wellspring of vulnerability. She seldom acknowledged it, but she knew it was there. She would have had to be a fool to reveal it to Jantzen, and she had ceased being a fool some time ago. So she let Dane Jantzen think what he wanted, and told herself his sarcasm couldn't hurt her.
“I can see how you might have felt you didn't get anything out of him in the divorce so you might as well try to wring a few bucks out of his name,” he said bluntly. “That's just business as usual for you, right?”
“I kept the name because my son didn't need another change in his life,” she snapped, her cool cracking like a dry twig beneath the weight of his taunt, making a mockery of the platitudes she had calmed herself with just seconds before. She lunged forward on her chair, poised for battle, cigarette clutched in her hand like a stick to hit him with. “He didn't need another reminder that Brock Stuart didn't want him.”
And neither did I.
The words hung between them, unspoken but adding to the emotional tension that thickened the air like humidity. Dane sat back, a little ashamed of himself, not at all pleased that his poking had stripped away a layer of armor and given him a glimpse of the woman behind it. Not at all pleased that that kind of rejection gave them a common bond. He didn't want bonds. The truth was he didn't want Elizabeth Stuart to be anything other than what he had imagined her to be—a cold, calculating, manipulative gold digger, his ex-wife in spades. He didn't want to know that she had a son she cared about, didn't want to know she could be hurt.
Elizabeth forced her stiff shoulders back against the chair, a little shaken, a lot afraid that she had just revealed a weakness. What had happened to her restraint? The stress of the evening was wearing on her, wearing through that hard-earned thick skin in big raw patches. To cover her blunder she turned the cigarette in her hand, planted it between her lips, and lit it as quickly as she could so as not to let Jantzen see her hands shake.
“I'd rather you didn't smoke,” he said.
“And I'd rather you weren't a jerk.” She took a deliberately deep pull on the cigarette, presented him with her profile, and fired a stream of exhaust into the air, flashing a razor-sharp glance askance at him. “Looks like neither one of us is going to get our wish.”
He yanked open a drawer, pulled out a plastic souvenir ashtray from Mount Rushmore, and tossed it across the desk in her general direction.
Elizabeth eyed the ashtray. “What a gentleman.”
His mouth curved ever so slightly. “You ought to see what they taught me in charm school.”
“Charm?” she scoffed, tapping her ash off on Teddy Roosevelt's head. “I'll bet a dollar you can't even spell it.”
Point to Stuart, Dane conceded, grinding his teeth.
“Tell me what happened out there tonight,” he said softly, welcoming the stirring of anger. Anger was an emotion he could grasp and wield like a sword. It was safe as long as he could control it.
He pulled a pocket cassette recorder out of his top right desk drawer and clicked it on. “For the record,” he explained with a cool smile, tilting his head in mock deference. “This is the statement of Elizabeth Stuart regarding the Jarvis murder.”
He plunked the recorder between them on the desk. Elizabeth regarded it with a suspicious look. She abandoned her cigarette to smolder in the ashtray, curling ribbons of smoke fluttering up from it. “I worked late on the ledgers at the paper office,” she began without prompting or preamble. “They're a mess. I don't reckon old Larrson had balanced those books since Jesus Christ was in knickers. Took off about quarter to eight. That I know 'cause there's a clock in the office. I live out past Still Waters, about a mile or so east.”
“The Drewes place.”
She lifted an angular shoulder in an offhand shrug. “So I'm told.” She hadn't bought it from a Drewes. No Drewes had lived in it for fifty years or more, but their name had stuck, making everyone who had lived there after them a trespasser of sorts.
She gave the sheriff an assessing look, deciding she'd better tell the tale exactly as it had happened. It was one thing to fib a little to Ellstrom; this man was a whole different breed. “I saw some deer standing in the trees along the north side of the road and I stopped to take a couple of pictures. I got too far off the shoulder and my car got hung up.”
She paused, waiting for a sarcastic comment, but none was forthcoming so she pressed on, thankful for small favors.
“I didn't have much choice but to start walking.” In Italian sandals with pencil-slim heels. She was going to have blisters for a week.
“Why did you turn in at Still Waters? The Hauer place is closer to the road.”
“It didn't look like there was anyone home. Besides, if I have my choice between begging a ride in a Lincoln and begging a ride in an Amish buggy, call me strange, but I'm liable to pick the car every time.”
“Had you met Jarvis before?”
She took up her cigarette and pulled at it, sighing out a plume of smoke. “Yeah, I'd met him,” she said with a note of resignation that indicated it hadn't been the most pleasurable experience.
“Did he hit on you?”
Her eyes flashed. “That's none of your business,” she snapped, tapping the ash off her cigarette with a sharp flick of her forefinger.
He smiled unpleasantly, leaning his forearms on the desk. “I beg to differ, Liz. Did he hit on you?”
“Yes,” she said, exasperated. “He did a couple of times. Not that it matters.”
“Maybe it matters a lot.”
“Only if I killed him, which I didn't.”
He gave a shrug. Elizabeth narrowed her eyes at him and stubbed out her cigarette.
“What did you do when he hit on you?”
“I told him to go eat dirt and howl at the moon.”
“In so many words?”
“No, not in so many words,” she spat out. “I've got more class than that.”
“Class?” Dane sat back and lifted one straight brow. “I'll bet a dollar you can't find it in the dictionary.”
Elizabeth scowled at him. “You've got a real way about you, Sheriff. How'd you get elected anyway? By threatening the voters with thumbscrews and rubber hoses?”
He bared his teeth in a parody of a smile. “On my looks and my sterling character.”
“Sterling?” She gave an unladylike snort and shifted in her chair. “Looks like brass to me.”
“And you with such a discerning eye for men. What did Jarvis look like to you—gold?”
“He looked like the butt end of an ugly dog,” she said bluntly. “I don't care if he had money coming out his ears. I wasn't interested and I made that clear to him.”
“So you walked up to the construction site to ask for a ride home. Jarrold suggested a ride of another sort—”
“The only ride Jarrold might have suggested was a ride to the mortuary. He was dead when I got there,” she insisted, intent on
steering the sheriff's line of questioning away from his overblown impression of her sex life, a sex life that was nonexistent in reality and notorious in the press. “I looked around for him, yelled my stupid head off, then saw he was sitting in the Lincoln. I was mad 'cause I figured the jerk had been sitting there looking at my backside the whole time, so I yanked the door open to give him a piece of my mind.”
She stopped then and shuddered as the memory descended on her like an anvil. The image flashed before her eyes—Jarvis falling out of the car, his head hitting her feet with a sickening soft thud, his black eyes staring up at her with stark surprise, his blood splashing across her bare skin in macabre polka dots. She flinched and tried to swallow the revulsion crowding her throat as waves of heat and cold flushed through her, leaving her feeling dizzy and weak.
With one shaking hand she combed back her hair, anchoring the thick mass at the base of her neck as she rocked forward on the chair, head down. “Oh, God,” she murmured, the beginning of a prayer for deliverance.
Dane watched her struggle with the emotions suddenly threatening to overwhelm her. All her sass had deserted her, leaving them both in a dangerous position. He wasn't in the habit of harassing distraught women. He wasn't in the habit of harassing women, period. Leaning back in his chair, he steeled himself against the sight of this tough lady falling apart. She was a witch who'd left a trail of devastated males in her wake, he reminded himself. She could very well have had something to do with Jarvis's death. He told himself so, but he didn't really believe it. The shaking was too natural, the combination of terror, denial, and revulsion in her expression was too spontaneous to be a put-on. He doubted even the infamous Elizabeth Stuart was that good an actress.
“I'm sorry,” she whispered, her breath hitching in her throat. She let go of her hair to press her hands together before her like a penitent sinner. “I'm sorry.”
Dane watched the rise of tears in her eyes. He felt something like sympathy shift through him and he lashed out at it, telling himself he was doing them both a favor. “That's all right,” he said. “But you might as well save the waterworks. I don't go for the damsel-in-distress routine.”
Elizabeth snapped her head up and gaped at him, stunned that he could be so cold, so uncaring. She pushed herself out of her chair and leaned across the desk, wincing as her skinned knuckles kissed the smooth wood surface. “It's not a routine, Sheriff Jantzen. I'm sorry, but I don't have a severed head fall on my feet every day of the week. I don't have a repertoire of witty things to say when I find murdered bodies.”
“And the press said you had an answer for everything,” he said with mock surprise.
She knew he was referring to the smear campaign instigated against her by Brock during the divorce. The power her ex-husband wielded over the press was awesome and terrible. The stain of his influence had spread all over the country—even to Still Creek, Minnesota, apparently—and had left her with a reputation blacker than Texas tea. Brock and his wizard lawyers had taken the truth and twisted it like a Gumby doll. But she wasn't going to fight Brock Stuart's lies tonight. She was too damned tired to care what Dane Jantzen thought of her.
“Don't believe everything you read, sugar,” she said softly, straightening away from him.
That one mocking brow sketched upward again, and Elizabeth had to clamp down on the urge to fling herself across the desk and rip it off his face.
“That's an interesting piece of advice coming from a reporter,” he said, the calm words belying the fact that she'd struck a bull's-eye.
Don't believe everything you read. Didn't he know that better than most people? Christ, the press had had a field day with his divorce—the divorce from his profession and his wife. And as a professional athlete, he had learned long ago that the differences between reality and journalism laid end to end could reach Mars. He knew better than to believe everything he read at face value, but another part of him knew better than to believe an ambitious woman. His sense of fair play pulled him in one direction, his sense of self-preservation pulled him another.
He watched her move to the end of his desk, her attention on the framed documents on the wall. She had fought back her tears, pushed herself past the panic that had had her shaking in the chair. He had to admire her guts, if nothing else.
His gaze drifted down to the faded denim cupping her ass, and he decided there was definitely more to admire than inner strength. She shifted her weight restlessly from one booted foot to the other and raised both hands to comb her hair back. Her T-shirt tightened across her breasts.
“If I believed only half of what I read about you, I still wouldn't like you,” he growled, pushing himself up out of his chair.
“Like I give a rat's ass.”
Dane stepped closer, so close that her shoulder brushed his breastbone and the high curve of her cheek was only a breath away from his mouth. “You'd better care, honey, because if I find out you're even remotely mixed up in this murder, I'll nail your pretty ass.”
“That's harassment, Sheriff Jantzen,” Elizabeth murmured. She wanted to move away from him, but she wouldn't give him the satisfaction.
“It's the truth,” he said softly with a chilling smile. “Nobody's going to commit murder in my county and get away with it.”
“Are you charging me with something? If you are, do I get to call a lawyer, or don't you have them up here in the Great White North?”
“Oh, we have them. Can't get rid of them any more than we can get rid of welfare cheats and outsiders.”
Ruthlessly checking the fine tremors shuddering through her, she turned very slowly, very deliberately, and sauntered away from him. “Oh, for the days when the sheriff could ride undesirables out of town on a rail!”
“Here, here,” Dane grumbled, though he had a hell of a time thinking of her as undesirable.
He retreated to his chair again. He picked a red pencil out of the ceramic holder and drummed the eraser end absently against the blotter. “What happened after you found the body?”
“I threw up,” Elizabeth admitted candidly. “I imagine one of your lab boys is out there right now scraping up the remains of my Snickers bar, putting it in a Ziploc bag to be microanalyzed or carbon-dated or whatever it is they do with stuff like that.”
She dropped back down into her chair, exhausted and tense from trying to act as tough as she talked. The truth was, she could have used a shoulder to cry on, but it had been so long since anyone had offered one, she wasn't sure she would even remember what to do with it. Probably shove it away out of habit and old suspicion, she decided sadly.
She leaned forward and grasped the edge of the seat with both hands, rocking slowly from side to side to relieve a little of her nervous energy as the rest of the memory played through her mind.
She had stood staring at Jarvis, and it had suddenly occurred to her that whoever had killed him might still be there, hiding in the cover of the woods that surrounded the construction site, watching her. And as the tall cottonwoods and oaks seemed to press in on her and the air grew heavy with the scent of blood and evil, she gave in to the panic and ran, tripping and falling because of her heels. She sprawled headlong, the gravel shearing the skin off her knuckles and tearing out the knees of the capri pants she'd bought in Cannes. Hysteria rose up inside her, freezing her lungs and coating her mouth with the taste of copper. Tears streaming down her cheeks, she pushed herself back up and ran on, her breath sawing in and out of lungs that had inhaled too many Virginia Slims in the last few years.
“I ran to the Hauer place,” she said flatly, condensing the experience into brief, emotionless sentences. “Aaron Hauer was out in the barn. He gave me a ride home.”
“Did he say if he'd seen anything?” Dane asked, the edge gone from his voice. He could see her strength flagging. He probably should have gone in for the kill, but he couldn't bring himself to do it. Some little shred of chivalry made him back off.
“He didn't say much at all. I got the impressi
on he wasn't too pleased to get involved. He started lecturing me on being separate from the world. I told him it was kind of tough to be separate when a dead guy fell on your feet.”
Dane tried to picture Aaron Hauer dealing with Elizabeth Stuart and almost chuckled. Two people couldn't have been more different. Aaron, so staunch in the old faith, so reserved, being confronted by Elizabeth, the model of the decadent “English” woman, flamboyant and outspoken, blatantly sexual.
“He took me home, I called 911, changed my clothes, and here we are at the end of a wonderful evening,” she said, mustering a big false smile.
The red pencil stilled against the blotter. Dane's eyes narrowed. “Changed clothes? Why?”
“Why?” she repeated, incredulous. “Because I smelled like a horse and there was blood on my feet! Because a dead guy touched me. Because I found a murdered corpse in that outfit and I couldn't stand the idea of wearing those clothes another minute. I took off every stitch I was wearing and threw it in the trash. And let me tell you, that just plain broke my heart 'cause that was my favorite Armani silk blouse.”
“It was evidence,” Dane growled. “You tampered with evidence.”
“I washed my feet too,” she sassed. “Is that some kind of capital offense? For crying out loud, if you want blood to look at, it seems to me there was plenty on Jarrold.”
His voice dropped to that silky-soft pitch that raised the hair on the back of her neck. “There might have been plenty on your clothes too.”
Elizabeth bit back a half-dozen words ladies weren't supposed to know, tamping down her frustration and capping it with a paper-thin layer of composure. “So we're back to that. I swear, you're worse than a terrier with a rat in its mouth. For the last time, I did not kill him. I'm sorry if that makes your life harder because you can't just pin this rap on the notorious stranger in town, but that's just too damn bad.”
“I want those clothes,” he said stubbornly. “All of them.”
She waved her hands in surrender, slumping back in her chair. “Well, fine, but let me tell you, sugar, you don't look like a 36C, and if the rest of the deputies catch you in French-cut red lace panties, you're liable to have a hard time living it down.”
