by Tami Hoag
“Oh, no,” she said, giggling, holding her hands up to fend him off as she backed across the porch toward the door. “No, no, you don't.”
It was a ritual they had gone through since she turned ten, when she had first decided she had outgrown the piggyback ride. Tradition. The kind of ritual most fathers went through with their daughters on a nightly basis, Dane imagined. One day Amy would be genuinely too old for it, but it damn well wasn't going to be tonight. Too many other aspects of his life seemed suddenly threatened by change; his daughter wasn't going to grow up on him tonight too.
He cut off her route to the door, keeping his eyes on hers, bending down, hands up, ready to catch her or block her. Old instincts from his former life came back to him and for an instant he felt just as quick, just as strong as he had when Kenny Stabler had been throwing him bombs.
“Daddy, I mean it,” Amy said, trying to look stern. “I've grown. You'll hurt yourself.”
“That does it,” Dane growled.
He feinted left, then bolted right, catching her as she tried to slip past him. She squealed a protest as he swung her up in his arms, her long hair and long legs flying as he held her against his chest. They were both laughing when Mrs. Cranston came rushing to the door, armed with a baseball bat, her head crowned by spiny pink curlers, her face shining with a liberal application of Oil of Olay. She was a short woman in her sixties, built like a small tank, with fire in her small dark eyes.
“Sheriff, for heaven's sake!” She clutched her blue chenille robe to her throat with her free hand as she pushed open the screen door with the Louisville Slugger.
“It's okay, Mrs. Cranston,” Dane said while Amy buried her face against his shoulder in humiliation. “This is a family tradition. Sorry we woke you.”
He stepped sideways through the door and strode across the living room with its soft beige carpet and sturdy masculine furnishings. Mrs. Cranston, shuffling along behind him in a pair of fuzzy slippers, said, “I thought you might be the killer.”
“He is,” Amy muttered through her teeth. “I'm going to die of embarrassment.”
Dane ignored the comment and shot a look at his housekeeper's weapon. “Well, it's nice to know you're ready to protect us, Mrs. Cranston.”
She pulled up at the door to the guest bedroom and rested the bat across her massive bosom. “I was a switch hitter on the all-ladies team back during WW II.”
“Armed and dangerous.” He shifted his daughter in his arms and started up the stairs, calling back over his shoulder, “Remember to have me deputize you.”
The housekeeper giggled before she caught herself and sniffed. “Oh, pshaw.”
Dane turned his concentration to making it to the second floor of the house. Halfway up the stairs he was reminded of the cruel reality that Kenny Stabler hadn't thrown him a bomb in over a decade. Pain clutched at what cartilage remained in his left knee and he tried to bite back a grimace without much success.
Amy caught the look and frowned at him as she threaded her fingers together at the back of his neck. “I told you so.”
“You can't tell me anything,” he grumbled. “I'm your old man.” He groaned as they gained the landing and an old back injury made its presence known. “Emphasis on the old.”
“See?” she said as he set her on her feet on the smooth oak floor. She tugged down the bottom of her jersey and tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. “We're both too old for this.”
Dane sighed and scratched at a mosquito bite on his neck. “Humor me, will you? I don't get to play Daddy very often.”
Amy bit her lip and looked entirely too perceptive and too sympathetic, too wise to be a child. “I wish you weren't so alone, Daddy,” she said softly.
The sentiment hit Dane like a linebacker out of nowhere, knocking him mentally off balance. Automatically, his hand reached down for the polished stair railing, as if to steady himself. Christ, the whole damn world was shifting beneath his feet tonight. That aspect of his personal life was a totally separate issue from his relationship with his daughter. He had honestly never thought of the two coming together in any context.
He shook it off and forced a grin. “Who could put up with me?”
She shrugged and stepped closer to slide her arms around his waist, her face earnest and somber as she rested her chin against his chest and stared up at him. “I could, and if I could, then—”
“You don't count. You're related, you have to put up with me.” Dane dropped a kiss on her forehead and gently pushed her and her subject of discussion away. “Go to bed. It's late.”
Amy backed toward the door to her room, looking frustrated, looking as if she had a lot more to say but knew this wasn't the time to say it. “Good night, Daddy,” she said with a sigh of resignation.
“'Night, peanut.”
He stood in the hall until the beam of light shining out from under her door went out. Then he turned slowly and made his way back down the stairs, his eyes scanning the photographs of Amy that marched down the stairwell in chronological order, from when she was a bright-eyed baby, to a toddler with a scrape on her chin—the result of her determination to run down the sidewalk when her legs hadn't yet quite gotten the hang of walking—then a grade-school student. He stopped before he came to the junior high photos and went back to the last picture taken before Tricia had ripped their family apart.
Amy at six. A smile that showed an incongruous mix of baby teeth and permanent teeth. Crooked pigtails and bangs in her eyes. Not long after that picture had been taken, Tricia had severed their relationship as brutally as if she'd taken a knife to him.
Knife. His mind seized on the word greedily, eager to turn his thoughts away from his personal life. He had a murder to solve, and now seemed as good a time as any to get started. He padded down the stairs and slipped out of the house soundlessly, locking the door behind him.
SEVEN
MORNING BROKE SO FRESH AND PRETTY IT WAS almost impossible for Elizabeth to believe the events of the previous night had happened. Almost. Birdsong drifted through the open window on a rain-washed breeze and pink-tinted beams of sunlight. The heavy malevolence that had hung in the air as she'd stood over the body of Jarrold Jarvis had passed with the storm during the night.
Perhaps, if she had slept at all, she might have been able to convince herself that finding the victim of a brutal murder had been nothing more than a nightmare. But she hadn't slept. She'd gone upstairs after using up every last drop of hot water in the tank trying to scour the taint of Jarvis's death off her, turned Trace's stereo off and covered him with a blanket as he lay sleeping in his clothes. She had considered emptying the ashtray he had stashed under his bed, but she left it. Compared to some forms of rebellion he'd already tried, this one was minor.
For a time she just stood in his doorway and watched him sleep, needing to be near him even if he wouldn't have wanted her there. Aching to be closer to him as the chasm of the generation gap yawned between them. He was all she had, her only family—not counting J.C., who was living out the last of his days in a V.A. home in Amarillo, his mind so pickled by years of drinking that he didn't even remember he had a daughter.
Trace was hers, the baby she had given birth to when she'd been little more than a child herself, the little boy whose scrapes she had tended, whose tears she had dried. They had drifted apart over the last few years, the whirlwind of life in Atlanta's social stratosphere pulling them away from each other. But they had come back down to earth with a crash, and now it was just the two of them again, and Elizabeth wanted to cling to him, to hold him to her for comfort. Only she hadn't figured out how to get him to let her that close.
She stood in his doorway and looked across the room at him, fear knotting in her stomach at the thought that emotionally he might always be half a room away with a barren no-man's-land between them. Then she went off to her own room with her memories of murder and a bottle of Brock's imported forty-two-year-old scotch. Now she felt as if someone had filled her
head with sand. It lolled on her shoulders as she dropped her legs over the edge of the bed and struggled into a sitting position.
“Oh, Lord,” she groaned as the room swirled once around her. She squeezed her eyes shut and ran her tongue over her teeth, grimacing at the taste of old sweat socks in her mouth. “I'd beg for mercy and promise to never do it again, but we both know I'd be breaking a commandment.”
A pounding was going on somewhere behind her ears that had her contemplating the possibility of crawling back into bed and staying there for the next five years or so. But there was a day to face, and it was liable to be a doozy. Today the shit would hit the fan. News of Jarvis's untimely demise would spread through Still Creek over doughnuts at the Coffee Cup. The phone lines would be humming with it. People would want details and answers. And since it was her job to ferret out those details and print those answers, she would have to haul her fanny out of bed and go scrub the fur off her teeth.
Gingerly she put her fingers to her temples, holding her head in place as she rose unsteadily to her feet. The pounding grew louder, more real, more like the sound of knuckles on wood. She grimaced as her foot hit a puddle of water and she remembered too late that she had left the window open during the storm, craving for the cleansing feeling of windblown rain to wash away the cloying scent of death that seemed burned in her nostrils.
Squinting against the bright, pretty morning, she leaned heavily on the windowsill and peered down at the yard. A bony sorrel horse was tied to the light post, harness hanging on its gaunt frame, one hind leg cocked as it dozed. A boxy black Amish buggy stood behind it, looking too much like an old-fashioned hearse to suit Elizabeth. The pounding came again, this time drawing her gaze to the door that was directly below her.
An Amishman stood on her back porch stoop. He must have sensed her presence, because he took a step back and looked up at her, drawing his wide-brimmed straw hat off to reveal a head of silky blond hair. Aaron Hauer. The man who had been her reluctant taxi driver the night before, taking her home in his buggy so she could call the sheriff's department to report the murder.
He looked nearer to forty than thirty, a tall, rawboned man with a face from “American Gothic,” austere and joyless. His jaw was trimmed with a thin stubble of pale whiskers. He stared up at her, regarding her with a kind of subtle disdain through the lenses of a pair of old-fashioned rimless spectacles.
“Mr. Hauer,” she called, wincing a little at the rusty sound of her voice and the ringing it set off in her head. She offered what would have to pass for a smile as she clutched the neck of her nightgown together in a fist, hoping he couldn't see enough through the fine white silk that would offend his Christian sensibilities. “What are you doing out at this hour?”
“The sun is up,” he declared, as if that were an excuse for getting people out of bed.
Elizabeth glanced to the east, sucking a breath in through her teeth as the rays stabbed into her eyeballs like needles. “Dawn. By golly, it is. Funny, I didn't hear it crack.”
Her sarcasm was lost on Hauer. He looked up at her expectantly. “I come to look at your kitchen, Elizabeth Stuart.”
“My—?” The mere effort of trying to make sense of this episode was giving her a case of vertigo. She tipped her head back against the window frame and let out a slow, deliberate breath in an attempt to calm the squall churning through her stomach. She had no memory of asking him to come back, but she had no intention of arguing about it from this position either. “Just give me a second here, sugar,” she called, not risking another look. “I'll be down in two shakes.” Down on the floor, puking up whatever dregs remained in her stomach, she thought bleakly as she moved away from the window.
She made her way across the room, sloshing through the puddle again, gritting her teeth against the urge to moan. Moaning was a luxury she didn't have time for. She would have to deal with Aaron Hauer, then call Jolynn to come and get her. She intended to camp out on Sheriff Jantzen's doorstep until he gave her something she could print in the Clarion.
Holding her breath to ward off the dizziness, she bent over and dug through her closet, pulling out a pair of jeans and a gray UTEP T-shirt that was so old and faded the insignia across the front was little more than a shadow—a bleak reminder of how long it had been since she'd walked the hallowed halls of the University of Texas at El Paso. The outfit was hardly high fashion, but it would do for the moment. After she sent Mr. Hauer on his way, she would come back and rummage through for something with a Fortune 500 look about it. Something appropriately businesslike. Something that would make Dane Jantzen sit up and wipe the smirk off his face.
Aaron Hauer was still standing patiently at the back door when Elizabeth arrived some ten minutes later. She figured anyone who came calling before the coffeepot kicked in could damn well cool his heels until she'd had a chance to pee and run a brush through her hair.
She leaned a shoulder against the door frame, needing to prop herself up. “What can I do for you, Mr. Hauer?”
“Aaron Hauer,” he corrected her, his voice rising and falling with the heavy accent of the German dialect his people spoke among themselves. His gaze was somber and steady behind the lenses of his spectacles. “My people, we don't believe in titles. Titles are Hochmut, proud. Pride is a sin.”
“Really? My, well, I guess I'll have to add that one to my list.”
He sighed briefly, no doubt already appalled by the list of her sins, Elizabeth thought. She was a far cry from the Amish women she'd seen around town in their long dresses and concealing bonnets, their eyes downcast demurely, voices hushed.
“I come to look at your kitchen, Elizabeth Stuart.”
“So you said.” She scratched a hand back through her hair, rubbing at her scalp as if she might jar loose some memory of inviting him back to her house. None came.
Aaron held up the doorknob that had fallen off as he'd knocked. One corner of his mouth quirked upward in a wry smile that transformed his face and complemented the tiny spark of humor hiding in his eyes. “I'm thinking you're needing a carpenter.”
The laugh that rolled out of Elizabeth was spontaneous. She didn't even try to hold it back, though it made her head pound like a bass drum. So the Amish could be opportunistic just like everyone else. At her insistence, Aaron Hauer had come into her house last night to stay with her while she called the sheriff's office. Obviously, he'd taken one look at the way the place was falling down around her ears and started adding up the dollar signs.
“Sugar,” she drawled, “what I need here is a stick of dynamite and a big fat insurance policy, but I'll be damned If I can afford either one.” She sobered and sent him a look of genuine apology. “I'm afraid I can't afford a carpenter either, for that matter.”
He frowned a little, tilting his head to the side, his gaze narrowing. “You can't know that. I have yet to tell you my price.”
“If it's more than a cup of coffee, I can't afford you.”
“We'll see.” He picked up his carpenter's box and pulled the screen door open, inviting himself in. “My consultation fee is a cup of coffee. You can manage that, I guess.”
He moved past her and into the kitchen as if he had every right to be there. Elizabeth followed, mouth hanging open, caught between amusement and irritation. “You've got a golden future as a Fuller Brush man just waiting for you, honey.”
Aaron ignored her. He set his toolbox on the table between cereal boxes and surveyed the room with a critical eye. The place was a shambles. It looked even worse in the light of day than it had the night before under the glare of artificial light. The only thing saving it from total disgrace was the scent of fresh coffee wafting from the electric pot on the counter. He didn't approve of electricity, but coffee was something else again.
“You can't cook in this kitchen,” he declared.
Elizabeth went to a cupboard with a door that hung by one hinge and pulled out a pair of mismatched coffee mugs. “I've got news for you, Aaron. I couldn't cook in
Wolfgang Puck's kitchen.”
He glanced at her, straight brows pulling together in suspicion. “Who is this Wolfgang?”
“Nobody you'd know. Only a world-renowned chef and restaurateur.”
He shrugged, largely unconcerned with anyone who lived outside a ten-mile radius of his community. Oh, he read in The Budget news of Amishmen who lived in other parts of the country, but the English didn't concern him. They could keep their fashions and their wars and such to themselves. He wasn't one for restaurants either. His nieces and nephews liked to go to the Dairy Queen in Still Creek for French fries and ice-cream cones once or twice a summer, but he never enjoyed taking them. Too many tourists staring, pointing, shooting their pictures as if they thought Amish were little more than animals in a zoo.
He accepted the mug of coffee Elizabeth offered him with a softly murmured “Danki,” and lifted the cup to his lips with no small amount of trepidation. If her housekeeping skills were anything to go by, he was in for an unpleasant shock. But the coffee was smooth and rich, and he sipped it, his brows lifted in surprise.
Elizabeth gave an offended sniff. “You don't have to look so shocked. I can measure out Folger's Crystals with the best of them.”
“You make a good cup of coffee too,” he said with a decisive nod.
She shook her head and chuckled to herself. “Thanks. Maybe I should have made Brock's coffee for him,” she murmured reflectively as she dug through the rubble on the counter for a cigarette and a book of matches. “He might have decided I was good for something.”
“Brock?”
“My husband—formerly.”
“You are a widow?”
Her gray eyes narrowed with malicious glee as she stared up through a cloud of smoke. “I wish,” she said with relish.
Aaron watched her with a kind of stern bewilderment, tucking his chin back, instinctively knowing he should take a dim view of her attitude even though he didn't understand what she was talking about.
