Still Waters

by Tami Hoag

  The man stood and settled his hat on his head, then walked away, losing himself in the trees that covered that part of the hillside. Elizabeth lowered her camera and started down the hill toward the creek. Aaron's wife was dead. Maybe she was spending eternity under that maple tree with a view of the creek.

  It wasn't morbid fascination that had Elizabeth skidding down the hillside, the legs of her jeans soaking up the moisture that clung to the thick grass, but caring. She liked Aaron. Under the layers of grim, pious duty, there was a man with strengths and vulnerabilities like any man. If she could learn more about him, she could be a better friend to him. To her way of thinking, both of them needed all the friends they could get.

  The feet of untold scores of trout fishermen and truants had tramped a path in the tall grass along the bank, but that was the only sign they had left behind. There was no litter. The stream itself ran sluggishly along, bottle-green with dragonflies skimming the surface in search of a waterbug breakfast. In the shallows along the bank, marsh marigolds grew in profusion, bright butter-yellow with velvet-green leaves the size of lily pads. On the opposite bank, a deer stood behind a lacy curtain of weeping willow branches and stared across at Elizabeth with limpid eyes, then turned and glided away, graceful and silent.

  What a beautiful place to be laid to rest. So peaceful. So far away from the troubles of the world.

  Elizabeth turned from the creek and looked up the hill to the shady spot where the mourner had knelt to pay his respects and say his prayers. Wild violets grew around the base of the tree. Some had been picked and placed in small bouquets on the ground where three stone markers stood side by side, a large one flanked by two smaller. Siri Hauer, Beloved Wife. Ana Hauer, Gemma Hauer, Beloved Daughter, the smaller ones read.

  She kneeled beside one little grave. Two tiny birds carved from wood nestled in the grass at the base of the marker. She traced the tip of a finger across one dainty wing and ached for her strange, quiet Amish friend. She had complained to him about her son. At least she still had Trace with her, no matter how distant he seemed, no matter how difficult to reach. Aaron Hauer could touch his daughters only with prayer . . . and violets.

  SOMEONE HAD PITCHED A BRICK THROUGH THE PLATE glass window of the Clarion office. Shattered glass was strewn across the floor. What still clung to the frame of the window hung in pointed shards, like crystal stalactites. The gaping hole had let in the rain and wind, which had left the office looking like the dubious survivor of a hurricane. The old wood floor gleamed with puddles. Leftover copies of the special edition had blown all over. But Elizabeth doubted it was the wind that had dumped boxes of old type all over the floor or smashed the monitor of her computer or ripped to shreds the fuchsia plant she had splurged on to congratulate herself for buying the Clarion.

  Jolynn, who had found the mess, sat on her desktop because her chair was just so much kindling, her eyes bright with interest as she scanned the scene and calculated the possibilities.

  “Could be the work of your caller,” she said, lifting her morning can of Pepsi to her lips.

  “Could be,” Elizabeth murmured, peeling a strip of wet paper off the counter and dropping it to the floor. “I hope so. I'd hate to think there's a whole band of crazy people out there waiting to draw a bead on me.”

  “Yeah, well, the special edition didn't exactly endear you to a lot of people.”

  “They bought it, though, didn't they?” Elizabeth said with disgust.

  Jolynn shrugged and swiped her tangled bangs out of her eyes. “I guess it was like driving by an accident. They didn't want to look, but they couldn't help themselves.”

  “Hypocrites,” she muttered. “That's what they are.”

  “Someone was mad enough to make a statement about it.”

  “Yeah, if that was their reason.”

  “You think maybe someone was trying to scare you?”

  “They managed that, sugar. That's for damn sure.” She hefted her purse up onto the counter. “Maybe somebody was looking for something.”

  “Like what?” Jo said on a half laugh. “Our hidden millions? My stash of candy bars?” She reached over the edge of her desk and yanked the top drawer open, breathing an exaggerated sigh of relief as she pulled out a Baby Ruth.

  “Like Jarvis's black book,” Elizabeth said, leaning against the counter. “Did you mention it to anyone?”

  “No. I've been thinking about who might be in it, but I haven't approached anybody yet. Have you?”

  “I mentioned it yesterday,” she said, watching carefully for Jolynn's reaction. “To Rich.”

  “Rich? Rich Cannon?” Jolynn gave a hoot of laughter. “You think Rich killed Jarrold? No way!”

  “Why not? He stood to gain.”

  “He stood to gain more kissing Jarrold's ass. Rich is too lazy and too stupid to run Jarrold's business himself,” she declared. “They had a symbiotic relationship, you know, like those slimy little remora things that suck all the crud off sharks. Jarrold provided Rich with a fat income for a minimum amount of actual work, Rich was Jarrold's trick pony, his pretty front man for the construction business, handsome husband for Susie the Shrill.” She shook her head again as she stripped back the wrapper on her candy bar like a banana peel. “Rich couldn't have killed Jarrold. He wouldn't have the inclination, the guts, or the stomach for it. Take it from me. I've known him too long.”

  Elizabeth wasn't convinced. “I don't know, sugar, ass-kissing can get old after a while. Especially if the ass is as fat and ugly as Jarrold's.”

  Jolynn scrunched her face up and groaned. “God, what an image. You should be a writer.”

  Bret Yeager stuck his head into the office through what had been the window, a laconic smile stretching across his square, honest face as his gaze landed softly on Jolynn. “Morning, ladies,” he drawled. “Can we come in?”

  “Lord, honey,” Elizabeth clucked, crunching across the broken glass in her cowboy boots to shoo him back. “Don't be sticking your head in through there! Didn't you see Ghost? Tony Goldwyn practically got himself decapitated that way.”

  “There's a lot of that going around,” Boyd Ellstrom said flatly as he pulled the door open and swaggered in. Yeager and his dog followed, Yeager whistling softly as he took in the wreckage. The dog sniffed out a dry, clean corner and curled up in a ball to sleep.

  Elizabeth darted a look at Ellstrom. He stared back at her, looking just as smug and obnoxious as he had the night he'd walked in on her and Dane. “Yeah, well, I don't want it happening here,” she said.

  “Why not?” he asked sarcastically. “You could do a special edition.”

  Yeager played diplomat, stepping in between them with an apologetic smile for Elizabeth. “Don't mind him, Miss Stuart. He's ticked because the sheriff chewed him out yesterday for giving you that quote.” Behind him, Ellstrom's Flintstone face turned a dull red. “We're here to take your statements and have a look around.”

  “Is this BCA business, Agent Yeager?”

  “Well, naw, not exactly,” he said, rolling his shoulders a little. He was wearing a tan dress shirt that had come straight from the package. The way he hooked a finger inside the collar and tugged made Elizabeth think he might have forgotten to get all the cardboard out of it, to say nothing of the creases. “But I was standing right there when Miss Nielsen's call came in and I had a minute . . .” He let the explanation die right there as he smiled at Jolynn, bringing a hint of rose to Jolynn's round cheeks.

  Elizabeth raised a brow. “Oh, well, that's fine,” she said, not quite sure Yeager was even listening to her. “Jolynn found the mess. You'll probably want to talk to her first.”

  Jolynn reached into her desk drawer and pulled out a candy bar. “Butterfinger, Agent Yeager?”

  Yeager's smile split into a lopsided grin. “A woman after my own heart. Come on, Booze,” he called to the Labrador. “We got work to do.”

  The dog heaved himself to his feet with a groan, and the three of them went off to insp
ect the back door, which had been left standing open by the perpetrator, leaving Elizabeth to deal with Boyd Ellstrom.

  Ellstrom strolled around behind the counter, looking over the damage, nudging the fallen computer monitor with his toe, poking at the deceased fuchsia with a ballpoint pen. Elizabeth stationed herself near the counter, arms folded over the front of her purple silk tank top, eyes slightly wary as she watched him.

  “I'm sorry if you had to take heat over the quote,” she said, not really caring whether Dane had chewed his butt or not. “I figured you knew your odds.”

  Ellstrom shot her a look. “I can handle Jantzen.”

  You and what army? Elizabeth's lips curved into what would have to pass for a smile and shrugged. “Then we're square, I guess.”

  “I did you a favor,” Ellstrom said. He moved toward her, his eyes drawn to the cleavage peeking up above the scoop neck of her blouse. She wore a purple stone on a chain around her neck. The jewel pointed straight to that sweet valley between her breasts. He could almost imagine how soft she would be there, and her nipples were probably as hard as that stone. His cock started twitching just thinking about it. “I did you a favor,” he said again. “The way I see it, you owe me.”

  Elizabeth lifted her chin and narrowed her eyes as he moved in on her, cornering her against the counter. The son of a bitch expected her to give him something, and she didn't have to be Einstein's daughter to figure out what it was. Her skin was already crawling just from the way his gaze lingered on her skin. He stopped his advance a scant six inches from her, the look on his big face at once disdainful and expectant. Elizabeth gave him her stoniest glare.

  “If you're looking for free samples, sugar, you better go on down to the Piggly Wiggly, 'cause you ain't gettin' any here.”

  Heat rose into Ellstrom's face, fueled by humiliation and the sting of rejection. If they had been in a more secluded spot, he might have pushed the issue. The bitch came across for every other man who wagged his dick in front of her. She probably played this hard-to-get game just to salve her conscience. But she sure as hell hadn't saved anything from Jantzen.

  “You only give it out to the man with the biggest badge?” he sneered.

  Elizabeth had to squeeze her arms against herself to keep from slapping him. Instead, she went for him where it would hurt the most. “Naw, you know what they say, honey—it ain't the size of the badge on the man, it's the size of the man with the badge.”

  The man with the badge pulled open the door and stepped inside as Ellstrom leaned toward her. The air in the room seemed to drop twenty degrees as Dane stood on the other side of the counter, staring at his deputy.

  “Have you finished cataloging the list of the damages, Deputy?” he asked in a silky voice.

  Ellstrom didn't say a word, but turned and went about his business, jerking a notebook and pen from his shirt pocket. Elizabeth blew out a long breath as she turned toward Dane.

  “You've got your faults, sugar,” she muttered, “but timing isn't one of them. Your deputy isn't terribly fond of me right now.”

  “Looks like he's part of a club,” Dane said dryly as he took in the vandalism.

  “Yeah, this is a hell of a town you got here, Sheriff,” she drawled sarcastically as she scraped a smashed fuchsia petal off the counter with her fingernail. “Folks here sure know how to make a girl feel welcome.”

  “Tell me it would be different if I moved down south to some little burg and started stirring things up,” Dane challenged her, defending his home as instinctively as he would have defended a family member. “You can't. It would be even worse because I'm a Yankee and most of those people never got the message that Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox. Hell, they'd probably have me tarred and feathered by now.”

  “There's an idea.” Her laugh was half mocking, half hysterical. “Why don't you go out in the street and holler it up and down? I don't have anything better to do tonight. If this mess is anything to go by, your deputies won't bother to interfere.”

  Dane clenched his jaw for a second and reined in his temper. She had a right to her anger. What he wasn't quite as sure about was whether or not he had a right to be angry for her. She had rejected his offer, but he still caught himself wanting to assume the role of protector, and it didn't have anything to do with her being a taxpayer. It had to do with basic instincts and natural chemistry. “Is there someplace more private where we can talk?”

  Elizabeth weighed the evils against one another. It was a no-win deal. They either stood here in full view and earshot of Deputy Dope and had their conversation, or she sequestered herself in a room with a man who was nothing but trouble. She caught Ellstrom glaring at them out of the corner of his beady eye.

  “My office,” she said. She gathered the beleaguered fuchsia in her arms, heedless of the dirt, and turned to lead the way through the wreckage.

  The office was a windowless cubbyhole of a room that smelled like a wet basement regardless of all efforts to freshen it. Elizabeth had taken one look at it and set herself up in the front room with Jolynn. The only thing she used it for was storage. As she swung the door open she discovered that its uselessness hadn't spared it from the vandal's wrath. The floor was a sea of paper that had been spewed forth by the battered file cabinets. It was going to take her a month to clean up. She set her smashed plant on what was left of the desk and fingered the ragged greenery and tattered pink flowers.

  “When I was married to Bobby Lee Breland—he's Trace's daddy—I saw one of these once in the window of the little flower shop in Bardette,” she said softly. “I asked him if he would get it for me for a present. Next day it was gone out of the window. I went home early, all het up 'cause I figured he bought it for me and that meant he loved me and he'd probably stop runnin' around and . . .” She let her voice trail away. Silly, bringing up old hurts when she had enough new ones to deal with.

  “Did he?” Dane asked, knowing the answer. He could see it in the set of her shoulders, in the way she tightened her mouth.

  She shook her head.

  “Are you all right?” he asked softly.

  “Oh, sure,” she said. “I like being victimized. I'm funny that way.”

  He propped his hands at the waist of his jeans and scowled at her. “About last night—”

  Elizabeth held up a hand to cut him off. “You don't have to feel responsible for me, Sheriff,” she said flatly. “I'm a big girl.”

  Dane looked down at the mutilated fuchsia and ground his teeth. Dammit, he did feel responsible. He felt downright territorial where she was concerned. It was a wonder he hadn't given Ellstrom a bloody nose for coming within a foot of her. The fact that he had been tempted rattled him. Christ, he'd been sleeping with Ann Markham for two years and he'd never given a damn who else went sniffing around her.

  “I got an interesting call after you left last night,” Elizabeth said, needing to get him off the topic of what had happened between them.

  His gaze sharpened and, even though he was standing with one leg bent casually, he seemed to come to attention. “What sort of call?”

  “Someone wanting to express their opinion of my character. You know,” she said, trying to sound as offhand and unaffected as she could. “Bitch. Whore. That kind of thing.”

  Blind fury rose up in Dane like a geyser. “Goddammit, why didn't you call me?”

  Elizabeth stared up at him, eyes wide with surprise at the strength of his reaction. “They didn't leave a name or number. I don't reckon you could have caught your suspect.”

  “That's not the point.” He wanted to shake her, but worse still, he wanted to hold her. She had to have been frightened, alone in that rattletrap house, knowing a killer was at large. The idea damn near choked him with impotent rage. He tried his best to clear his head and think like a cop. “Was it a man or a woman?”

  Elizabeth shuddered inwardly as the voice replayed itself in her mind. “A man . . . I think. I couldn't really tell. It sounded strange. Might have bee
n the same person who trashed this place,” she suggested, backing away from him. “Calling to see that I was out of the way. Whoever did this sure as hell felt like they had clear sailing. I find it amazing that a business on Main Street could be tossed like this without anyone seeing anything, without a deputy driving by and looking in.”

  “Vandals work fast as a rule,” Dane said. “That's why it's hard to catch them at it. As bad as this all looks, it probably didn't take more than ten minutes.”

  “If it was a vandalism.”

  He arched a brow. “Looking for conspiracies again?”

  “Still,” she corrected him, crossing her arms against her- self. “And don't you dare be amused at me, Dane Jantzen. The article in the special edition speculated as to motive for the killing. Maybe someone thinks we've got evidence here.”

  Dane rolled his eyes. “And maybe someone doesn't like the fact that you've taken the bridge club minutes out of the paper.”

  Elizabeth gave him a long, level look. “Either way, you've got some thinking to do, Sheriff. I reckon you didn't expect anyone around here, any of these people you know so well, to vandalize a business or make an obscene phone call. Same way you didn't think any of them might have killed Jarvis.

  “It seems to me you see what you want to see,” she said. “You see what you grew up seeing, what you expect to see. But I'm walking into this town not knowing anyone from Adam, and I can tell you, there are people here just as greedy, just as corrupt, just as unhinged as there are anyplace else. And one of them is a murderer.”

  DANE TURNED ELIZABETH'S WORDS OVER IN HIS MIND THAT afternoon as he stood in a side door looking at the people who had gathered to mourn the untimely demise of Jarrold Jarvis.

  He was a good cop. While old popularity and old fame might have helped him get elected, Dane knew he held the job on merit. He had never been inclined to rest on some dusty legend of his youth, like Rich Cannon. He might not have been ambitious, but he was conscientious and dedicated. Despite what Elizabeth seemed to think, he wanted the murder solved regardless of who committed it, and he was working tirelessly to that end. It was true he preferred things simple and neat, but that didn't make him lazy.