by Tami Hoag
But he wasn't a killer. He couldn't be a killer. Now that she had beaten back the fear, Elizabeth knew it with a certainty that went soul deep. Trace was her baby, her flesh and blood. She might not have known everything that was going on in the turbulent heart of a boy struggling to become a man, but she knew that at the center of the turmoil his heart was good. He couldn't have killed anybody.
Then why was he lying?
She groaned and leaned her forehead on the steering wheel as her thoughts chased each other around. The truth. She needed to find the truth. She was growing to hate that word more with each passing day.
Sniffling, she turned and reached into her purse for a tissue, but came out with the small manila envelope that held Trace's personal effects. Wanting to feel closer to him, she opened the flap and dumped the contents into her lap. Pocket comb, two pieces of Bazooka bubble gum, and his wallet. She stroked a hand over the fine calfskin wallet and smiled a sad smile. She had given it to him for his fourteenth birthday. Not a happy day either. Brock had promised to take him to a Braves game, then reneged when the opportunity had arisen to be seen at a big diplomatic do for the Japanese minister of trade. Business was more important than a boy's birthday, Brock said. Not to the boy.
Absently, she opened the wallet, snooping through it more out of habit than in the hope of finding anything. Seven dollars and a coupon for a jumbo popcorn at the State Theater. His student ID from the snotty prep school Brock had insisted he attend in Atlanta.
Tucked behind the ID was an old, dog-eared snapshot. Elizabeth plucked it out carefully, a wistful smile turning her lips. It was a picture of herself and Trace. They stood in front of a big old bright yellow Victorian house with green shutters and white trim on the wide porch. Elizabeth was wearing navy shorts that revealed a mile of tanned leg, a sky-blue T-shirt from Six Flags amusement park, and the biggest, brightest smile. Lord, had she ever really looked that young, felt that happy? Her hair was its usual wild mess and her sunglasses were crooked, and she stood behind Trace with her arms wrapped around him. He was grinning and gangly, his smile a checkerboard mix of baby teeth, permanent teeth, and no teeth. He wore the same Six Flags T-shirt, and he was clutching an inflatable brontosaurus by its long skinny neck.
Happier times. Elizabeth could easily picture the man behind the camera. Donner Price. A big gentle bear of a man. A Methodist minister, of all things. They had known him for a summer down in San Antonio. The best summer of her life, not counting the summer she had fallen in love with Bobby Lee. That summer had been filled with hope and possibilities. Then Donner had been killed in a plane crash, flying medical supplies to the poor in Guatemala, and she had taken Trace and her broken heart and moved to Atlanta for a fresh start and a job at Stuart Communications.
She flipped to the next window in the wallet, shuffling past the memories and regrets. Her heart gave a thump and her melancholy vaporized. Another photograph. A school picture of a girl with rumpled chestnut hair and freckles on her pixie nose. She smiled out at the camera, her eyes a warm shade of blue, sweet and tinted with a sparkle of mischief.
Amy Jantzen.
THE REPORTERS FOLLOWED DANE FROM THE COURTROOM like a swarm of gnats, hovering and buzzing but never getting close enough to bat away. He had just finished his second press conference in a week. Two too many for a man who had never been able to stand the sight of a press pass. Bunch of goddamn vultures. With no fresh meat on the Jarvis murder, the flock had begun to disperse, but they were back in full force today, with pencils sharpened and hunger in their eyes. Two murders in a week might not have impressed New Yorkers, but it was big news when it happened in the sticks. He could see the headline now: Reign of Terror in Tourist Town.
At the stairs to the law enforcement offices a pair of husky deputies stepped in behind him and planted themselves like oak trees, effectively stopping the mob. Dane breathed a short sigh of relief that ended on a groan as Charlie Wilder and Bidy Masters met him in the lower hall. He didn't so much as check his stride, hoping that they would get the hint and let him pass. They fell in beside him, rushing at his heels, trying to make eye contact, their faces creased with lines of worry.
“Dane, can't you do something?” Charlie said, not bothering to butter up his demand with his usual smile and chuckle. He was huffing and puffing at the pace, his round face going red from the effort and the stress. “There are news crews using the Horse and Buggy Days parade stand as a backdrop for stories about a murder spree! Do you have any idea what this is going to do to attendance?”
“Kill it?” Dane asked sardonically.
Bidy turned a shade of ash. “This is no joking matter.”
“No,” Dane agreed, “murder isn't.” He stopped in front of the door to the offices and gave the pair a cool look. “I've got better things to worry about than the decline in revenues at the bingo tent.”
Bidy bobbed his head down between his shoulders like a vulture, his dark eyes dead serious. “Like your job.”
“You were elected to protect the community,” Charlie said. “There hadn't been a murder here in thirty-three years, now we've had two in a week!”
“Well, I didn't kill them, gentlemen,” Dane said softly, his gaze never wavering. “And maybe, if you'd quit hounding me about this penny-ante Podunk festival, I could direct my attention to finding out who did.”
They stepped back as one, stiffening with affront. Not smart, offending the town fathers, Dane thought as he left them standing in the hall, mouths agape. But he was at a point where he didn't really care. His prime suspect in the Jarvis murder was at this moment stretched out at Davidson's Funeral Home with a skull that resembled a squashed pumpkin. Trace Stuart was cooling his heels in the holding cell, hiding something. And Elizabeth was out there somewhere, cursing the day they'd met.
The office was louder than the press conference had been. Telephones rang incessantly. Officers and office personnel alike were rushing back and forth, in and out. A steady stream of noise ran in an undercurrent beneath staccato bursts of conversation. Lorraine was manning her post with a fierce look. In front of her desk stood a uniformed bus driver and a blonde in short shorts and a tube top. Dane took them in at a glance. The bus driver was forty-five and fat. The blonde looked like a twenty-five-dollar date with too much makeup and half a can of mousse in her hair.
Lorraine rushed out from behind the desk. “Dane, the phone has been ringing off the hook for you.”
“I'm incommunicado, Lorraine,” he said, heading for his office. “Have you spoken with the coroner?”
She rushed along beside him, the chain on her cat-eye spectacles swinging. “Yes, and Doc Truman too. I left the messages on your desk.”
“Good. Thanks.”
“There's a bus driver here reporting a missing tourist. What should I do?”
Dane flicked another glance at the pair by the desk. Christ, this was all he needed—tourists getting lost. “Have Kenny handle it.”
“All right.” She dogged his heels another few strides, then stepped in front of him as they reached his office door. Her lips thinned into nothingness and her brows slashed down over her eyes like twin bolts of lightning. “That Stuart woman is waiting for you. With Amy.”
“With . . . ?” Elizabeth and Amy? They had never even met. They were two very separate parts of his life. He shook his head at the thought that they had somehow come together without his knowledge or consent. “All right,” he mumbled.
Lorraine sniffed indignantly and marched back to her post.
Dane swung the door open on his sanctuary and stepped inside. Elizabeth sat on the edge of his desk, long legs crossed, smoking a cigarette and wearing her best poker face. Amy sat in the visitor's chair in a bright pink T-shirt and faded denim shorts, her hands folded in her lap, looking like a truant awaiting the arrival of the principal. She turned her face up to him, her eyes wide, freckles standing out against her pale cheeks like nutmeg sprinkled on milk.
“Daddy,” she said softly,
looking as if she were bracing herself for a terrible blow, “I have something to tell you. . . .”
TWENTY-TWO
“I'LL LEAVE YOU ALONE,” ELIZABETH SAID, SLIDING FROM the desk. She stubbed her cigarette out in the Mount Rushmore ashtray and handed it to Dane, her gaze locking on his. “Seems the two of you have a whole lot to talk about.”
Dane couldn't read anything in her expression. An ominous sign, he thought, wariness stirring instinctively inside him. He turned toward his daughter. Amy cast a worried look up at Elizabeth, who paused and patted the girl's shoulder.
“It was nice meeting you, honey,” she murmured, smiling softly with sympathy and encouragement.
“You too, Mrs. Stuart.” Amy bit her lip as nerves did a tap dance in her stomach. “Do you really have to go?”
Elizabeth stroked a hand over the girl's chestnut hair, remembering vividly what it had been like to be fifteen and in love—or at least infatuated. It had been difficult to differentiate between the two, all emotions being magnified enormously by that first mad rush of hormones. “I think it's best. You have to go this round with him, sweetie. It's part of the process.”
“What process?” Dane asked as Elizabeth slipped out of the office and closed the door.
“Growing up,” Amy mumbled, staring down at the nails her cousin had painted hot pink for her over the weekend. She would have given just about anything to avoid this conversation. She hadn't spoken more than a dozen sentences to her father since their blow-up over the dating issue. She had held her silent vigil, bolstered by the sure knowledge that he had wronged her. But now not only was she going to have to talk to him, she was going to have start out by telling him something he wasn't going to want to hear, something that made her feel more like the guilty one instead of one unjustly oppressed.
Dane took Elizabeth's place on the desk, sitting back against the smooth oak, hands braced on either side of him. “What's this all about?”
“Trace was with me.” She blurted out the words, heart thundering, eyes trained on her fingernails, hoping that her father would be calm and rational and understanding.
There was a long beat of silence, during which a dozen different scenarios flashed through her head. Then came his voice—low, tight, deceptively soft, like the first distant rumble of thunder before a storm. “What?”
She lifted her chin and faced him, thinking that now she knew what it must have been like for French underground spies to be interrogated by the SS. He stared at her, his face taut, anger simmering in the depths of his eyes. “Trace couldn't have killed that person because he was with me when it happened.”
Dane held himself perfectly, utterly still, tension tightening every muscle, every sinew, skimming across his nerve endings like a razor. “How could he have been with you? You were home in bed.” Mrs. Cranston had told him that when he had come in. He had even gone up to check on her, only to find her door locked for the second night in a row.
Amy took a deep breath and told the story from beginning to end. How she and Trace had met. How she had been at the VFW baseball game, waiting for him to come, when news of the fight at the Rooster had hit the stands. How she had found Trace at their spot in the woods and invited him to the house to talk. How she had talked him into climbing the oak tree outside her bedroom window.
“We were only talking,” she said, knotting her hands in her lap. “Trace is so sweet and I really care about him. I hated to see him hurting—”
Dane cut her off with a motion of his hand. “After I expressly forbade you to date—”
She bounced ahead on her chair, her face earnest. “It wasn't a date. We were just—”
“Dammit, Amy, don't try to argue technicalities with me!” he thundered, pushing himself off the desk. “You knew what I meant.”
“Yes,” she shouted back. “You meant you thought I was a child. Well, I'm not, Daddy!” She came up out of her chair, trembling with anger and fear, her long hair swinging around her shoulders like a rumpled veil. “I'm fifteen. I'm a young woman. Mom understands that, Mike understands, why can't you—”
Dane saw red at the mention of the man who had usurped his place in his daughter's life. “I don't give a damn what Mike Manetti understands,” he snarled. “I'm your father—”
“My father, not my keeper,” Amy said, refusing to back down now that the fight was on. “You can't force me to stay a child. That's one thing you can't manipulate and control, Daddy. I'm going to grow up whether you like it or not.”
“You call asking a boy to sneak into your bedroom growing up?” Dane asked, arching a brow. “I call it childish.”
“I call it trying to have a life when my father doesn't want to allow it.”
“Oh, and I suppose Saint Mike would allow it?” he sneered, old resentments seeping up through old wounds to burn and sting like acid. “What the hell else does he allow my daughter to do? Throw orgies in the pool house?”
Amy rolled her eyes. “God, now who's being childish?” she said, shaking her head. She planted her hands on her slim hips, in unconscious imitation of her father's stance, and took a deep breath to try to calm the emotions roiling inside her, to try to ease the lump of tears in her throat. “Mike sees me for who I am and he trusts me,” she said. “You don't know who I am. You see only what you want to see. You want me to be your little pal, your little ‘peanut,' for the rest of my life, because that's the niche I fit into in your life and God forbid you should have to change or compromise or not get your own way.”
Dane narrowed his eyes. “What's that supposed to mean?”
“It means you didn't want to live in L.A., so you left. Never mind what Mom wanted or might have compromised on. Never mind that I got left out—”
“Amy, you were a baby!” he exclaimed, wondering how they had veered onto this topic. Wondering how to get off it before all the memories and emotions he had kept penned up inside him all these years found their way out. “You don't know anything about what went on between your mother and me.”
She stared up at him through a sheen of tears and hurt. “I know you left.”
“Your mother could have come with me. I wanted you with me. Hell, I fought to get you!”
“You fought over me,” Amy declared, feeling that same helplessness, the same worthless frustration and pain she had felt during the divorce. She remembered realizing that Mommy and Daddy had stopped loving each other, and wondering if they would stop loving her too. Tears rolled off her lashes and down her cheeks. She wiped them with the back of her hand. “Like I was a toy or something,” she muttered bitterly. “A prize. Well, I'm not a prize, I'm a person, and I'm growing and changing and having relationships with other people, and if you're not willing to accept that, Daddy, maybe I should just go home!”
Choking back a sob, she grabbed her purse from the back of the chair and stormed out of the office, slamming the door behind her.
Dane stood there like a statue, feeling old and weak as the anger ebbed away. He heaved a sigh and slicked his hands back over his hair. Why did life have to be so damned complicated, every issue tangling with the next, clouding the big picture, confusing, confounding? One of the things he missed most about football was the simplicity of it, the orderliness. The field was clearly defined, the boundaries absolute, the rules unbending, the enemy instantly recognizable. Goals were set and gone after with logical precision. Why couldn't life be more like that?
He didn't think it was an unreasonable request. None of the things he asked for in life seemed out of line—peace, order, his farm, his job, his daughter.
God forbid you should have to change or compromise or not get your own way.
He lifted the picture frame off his desk and stared at his little girl, frozen at eleven, happy, smiling, holding up her hand-lettered sign. I LOVE YOU, DADDY.
His fingers tightened on the frame. That was what he wanted most—for his daughter to love him. He didn't like to think he had emotional needs, but he couldn't deny that one.
He had been robbed of Amy's childhood, her presence had been stolen from his daily life. All he got to have of her were photographs and snatches of time. It didn't seem unreasonable to want to prolong that time in any way he could.
Growing up couldn't happen fast enough as far as Amy was concerned. She was eager to experience, to sample life, to become an adult. But for Dane that time would go by so quickly. A handful of visits. A series of days. Then she would be gone, with a life of her own, a family of her own. And he would be left with his little cache of memories . . . peace, order, his farm, his job . . .
His job. His mind seized on the words, frantic to escape the emotional mine field. He had a job to do. Drawing in a breath that wasn't quite steady, he blinked to clear his vision, set the picture frame down, and left the office.
“YOU WERE TOGETHER,” DANE SAID TIGHTLY. “TILL WHEN?”
He watched Trace shift uneasily on his chair and swallow hard, his Adam's apple bouncing in his throat. “Till about two-thirty.”
Trace watched the muscles work in Sheriff Jantzen's jaw. He was a dead man now. Messing with the sheriff's daughter. Jantzen looked mad enough to pull out a big ol' .44 Magnum, like Dirty Harry, and plug him right between the eyes. He had told Amy they would get in trouble, but she had begged him to stay, just a little while, and he couldn't see how any man could look into those big blue eyes of hers and refuse her anything. He couldn't. He didn't want to. He was up to his ears in love with her. It was wonderful and terrifying, and now he was going to get his butt kicked because of it.
“We didn't do anything, Sheriff,” he said, scrambling to allay a father's worst fears. “Honest, we didn't. I mean—well, I kissed her—” Jantzen's nostrils flared. Trace gulped down another knot of fear. “But that was all. My hand to God,” he swore, raising his right hand like a pledge. “We mostly just talked.”
He was telling the truth. That was one thing about Trace, Dane thought as he sat back and rubbed a hand against the band of tension tightening across his forehead. He wouldn't have had any trouble catching the kid in a lie. Trace was positively beaming with honesty, his eyes wide and imploring Dane to believe him. Dane drummed his fingers against the tabletop and glanced at Elizabeth, who stood off to the side with her arms crossed. She hadn't had much of anything to say throughout the interview. Hadn't had a single word for him. She offered nothing now, not anger, not sympathy, nothing.
