by Tami Hoag
“Why didn't you tell me this before, Trace?”
Trace rocked ahead on his chair, pushing his broken glasses up on his nose. “I didn't want to get Amy in trouble. She said you were being a real hard-ass—” He bit off the word and cursed himself for being dumber than dirt. His face flushed scarlet and he tried again. “I mean, that you thought she was too young and all.”
“Trace, you could have been charged with murder—”
“But I didn't do it!” he said emphatically. “I figured you'd catch who did and then that would be the end of it. I'd go free and Amy wouldn't get in trouble with you. All we did was talk . . . mostly—”
Dane lifted a hand to hold off any more revelations. On the scale of bad days, this had to rank up there with the 1979 game against Seattle that could have won the Raiders a wild card berth in the playoffs. He had dropped a sure thing on the twenty-yard line and blown his knee in the ensuing collision with the Seahawks free safety. They lost the game 29 to 24 and he spent the next six months in rehab.
“Please don't be too mad at Amy, Sheriff,” Trace said earnestly, his young heart aching at the idea of his sweet little Amy weathering the kind of storm her father could undoubtedly unleash. “I take full responsibility. I mean, I'm older than her, and I should have known better, but I . . .”
He shrugged and looked down at his fingernails, not quite able to put into words what he felt when he was with Amy. She was so sunny and sweet, and she got him talking about things he didn't ever talk about with anybody. Like how he wanted to go to college to become an aerospace engineer, and how much it had hurt to have Brock Stuart reject him. In the few days he'd known her, Amy had become the best friend he'd ever had—besides his mom, and moms fit into a category of their own, so that didn't count. He wanted to make Jantzen understand, but he had a feeling that wasn't going to happen, him being Amy's dad and all.
“I just wanted to be with her,” he mumbled, tamping down all the grand and frightening feelings of first love and compressing them into that one statement. He glanced up at Jantzen through his eyelashes. “I'll understand if you don't want me to work for you anymore.”
Dane heaved a sigh. How could he come down hard on a kid who had been willing to go to jail to protect his daughter's honor? It wasn't Trace he was disappointed in, but Amy. And maybe not so much Amy as fate, the fate that had separated him from his daughter, the factors that had driven Tricia to want things he couldn't give her. All of it weighed down on him like a millstone, making him feel too vulnerable, too mortal. None of that was Trace Stuart's fault.
“I don't want you climbing in my upstairs windows,” he growled. “But you're not fired. Amy, however, is likely to be grounded for the rest of her natural life.”
“But Sheriff—”
Dane cut him off with a look. “Don't push it, Trace.”
“Yessir. Thank you, sir.”
Dane pushed his chair back and rose, feeling old and tired, responsibility hanging on him like a wet woolen robe. He had two murders to solve and a private life that was tumbling around him like a house of cards in a stiff wind. “You're free to go.”
He looked at Elizabeth, who was still watching him with that even, emotionless expression. “I'd like to talk to your mom for a minute in private.”
Elizabeth pushed herself away from the wall and stepped ahead, nodding to her son. “Wait for me in the car, Trace.”
“Yes, ma'am.”
Trace slid out of his chair and followed Deputy Kaufman out of the interrogation room. The door closed and for a moment silence hung like humidity in the air, thick and oppressive. Finally Dane shrugged.
“I'm sorry.”
Elizabeth gave him a smile and shook her head. “It's not your fault your daughter is growing up to be sweet and beautiful. In fact, I can't see that you had much of anything to do with that—especially the sweet part.”
“That's not what I meant.”
“I know what you meant.” She slung her purse strap over her shoulder and started for the door, the last scene they had played out in this room too fresh in her mind. She had all but told him she was in love with him. It didn't seem smart to stick around and further endanger her dignity. “I've got to go,” she said, looking past him. “I've got a paper to get out.”
He should have let her go. A smart man would have. “I'm sorry about this mess with Trace. I wouldn't have put you through it if I could have helped it.”
“You were just doing your job.”
Somehow, when she said it, it didn't sound like a very good excuse, Dane thought. The separate strands of his life had crossed and tangled—job, fatherhood, friendship, sex. This was just the kind of mess he had diligently avoided for most of his adult life, the kind of mess he would avoid again as soon as he got the lines uncrossed and straightened out.
“I'm sorry if you got the wrong idea—about our relationship.”
Elizabeth bit down on her pain and managed another brave smile. “We don't have a relationship. We have sex. See there?” she asked, meeting his gaze for one brief, painful second. “Now you've got me doing it. Cutting up my life into neat little chunks. Next thing you know, I won't be able to let any of my foods touch on my plate.”
She sauntered to the door, throwing him a sultry look over her shoulder as she went. “See ya 'round, cowboy. Catch yourself a bad guy. Maybe you'll get your name in the paper.”
She walked out of the station with her head up and her eyes forward, ignoring the male heads she turned and ignoring the pernicious glare of the ever-diligent Mrs. Worth. She cut through the mob of reporters waiting outside the door, blocking out the noise of the questions they hurled at her, blocking out the feral looks in their eyes with her Ray-Bans.
Trace waited for her in the Eldorado. He had raised the top on the car, shut the windows, and locked the doors to keep the press at bay. Elizabeth slid in behind the wheel, started the engine and the air-conditioning. Without a word she put the car in gear and piloted it away from the courthouse. Neither of them said anything until they were out of town. Then Elizabeth pulled off on a side road and stopped the car.
Trace looked at her, bracing himself for the worst. “I guess you're pretty pissed at me, huh?”
“I'm not proud that you lied,” Elizabeth said, pulling off her sunglasses and setting them on the dash. She turned toward him with love in her eyes. “But I'm kind of proud of the reason you did it. It wasn't smart, but your heart was in the right place.”
His brows shot up above the rims of his glasses. “You're not mad?”
“I don't want to be mad right now,” she whispered, reaching out to brush his short dark hair. “Right now I just want to be glad to have you sitting here with me instead of in some cell. I want to tell you that in spite of all the mistakes we've both made, I'm glad you're my son.”
Tears brimmed in her eyes and in her throat, thickening her voice. She caught his hand with hers and squeezed it hard, as if she might be able to pass her feelings to him through touch. “Don't ever think you messed up my life, Trace. Don't ever think I didn't want you,” she whispered. “God knows I haven't had the greatest life to date, but you are the one bright spot. You're the best thing that ever happened to me, honey. I wouldn't trade you for anyone or anything in the world.”
A big ball of tears wadded up at the back of Trace's throat and he knew he had to say something stupid or start crying like a baby. One corner of his mouth hooked upward in a lopsided smile. “Not even for a million dollars and a new Ferrari?”
Elizabeth shook her head, laughing and spilling tears to be quickly wiped away with her free hand. “Not even.”
She leaned over and rested her head on his shoulder, struck anew by how broad it was getting, how strong. The knowledge that he wouldn't be a boy much longer struck her like a spear. He had already begun the struggle toward manhood, was already feeling his way along to find the right path. At that moment, perhaps more than any other, she wished she had made better choices for him, wished
she could have given him a stable home, a father who loved him, a man who could help him take the right steps on that climb. But she hadn't. She would have to live with the choices she had made, and with the knowledge that Trace would be grown-up and gone soon, making his own choices.
“Mom, please don't cry,” he said softly.
She heard the embarrassment in his voice, but she heard the love too, and the concern. It had always upset him to see her cry. He had always tried to talk her out of it. The memories of other times, other tears brought a bittersweet smile to her lips. She lifted her head and looked him in the eye through the cracked lenses of his glasses.
“I'll always be your mama, and I'll always have the right to cry over you, even when I'm a hundred and you're old enough to keep your teeth in a glass at night,” she told him, blinking to hold her tears at bay. “Don't you forget it, mister.”
He grinned a lopsided grin he had inherited from her and glanced away to hide the fact that his eyes were shiny too. “Yes, ma'am.”
Elizabeth sniffed and turned her attention back to driving, putting the Caddy in gear and pointing it in the general direction of home. “I'll drop you off,” she said as all the feelings settled like dust inside her. “You can do penance by cleaning up your room.” She shot him a sideways look. “And don't forget the ashtray under the bed.”
Trace ducked his head and smiled to himself. “Yes, ma'am.”
TWENTY-THREE
THE WORDS ON THE SCREEN OF THE RENTED computer blurred together, solidifying into a white blob the shape of a snowman. Elizabeth sat back and rubbed her eyes, fighting a yawn. She had dropped Trace off at home, then come back to town, sticking to the side streets to avoid any attention from the out-of-town press—or from the citizens of Still Creek, for that matter. News of Trace's arrest and release would not be popular with the locals. They were frightened and angry at the violence that had so thoroughly disrupted their lives, and they were looking for someone to blame, someone they could see and point at and envision in their minds as being the embodiment of that violence. They saw Trace as a likely candidate. Someone from outside their world, outside the realm of their influence and experience, someone safe to hate.
As much as she wished it weren't her son they had singled out, Elizabeth understood their reasons. If they looked to their own, if someone they knew and trusted had turned on them, then their whole world would tilt on its axis and they would be left with nothing to cling to, nothing to believe in, no one to trust. They would each be left alone in a sense, and she understood the dread of that better than most.
She hoped for everyone's sake the case would be solved soon. Once the real killer was caught and the truth was known, the healing process could begin. The town would never be quite the same again, but the wounds would scar over and life would settle back almost in place. The hoopla surrounding the Stuarts would die down and Elizabeth would be able to print a softer kind of truth in the Clarion—the truth as it normally stood around Still Creek. The minutes from the PTA. The news of whose relatives had visited on the weekend. No murders, no conspiracies, no dark secrets.
She glanced at the little wind-up clock she had brought in and wondered what was taking Jolynn so long. She had gone on a food run at eight-thirty. It was now nearly nine. Through what was left of the front window Elizabeth could see the last remnants of daylight fading into night. They had three articles to finish and typeset, and the paste-up to do. If Jo didn't get back soon, they would be working right through the night in order to get done in time to make it to Grafton for the printing of the regular weekly edition.
“What we need is another pair of hands,” Elizabeth muttered. Of course, there was no money for additional employees. If the advertisers kept pulling out and the circulation kept dropping, there wouldn't be a paper.
Life's a bitch and then you die . . . alone.
It would have been so nice to have someone to lean on, just a little bit, right now. A pair of strong hands to rub her shoulders after a day like today, or to pat her back in consolation. But that wasn't in the cards for her.
“You swore off men, sugar,” she muttered to herself, clicking out another few words at the prompting of the blinking cursor on the screen. “Stick to your word.”
Dane Jantzen wasn't going to make a go of things for her here. Only she could do that. And she would give her best shot. She glanced again at the clock. If Jolynn would ever get back . . .
She breathed a sigh of relief at the sound of the back door creaking open and slapping shut.
“Well, it's about time you got—” Her words died in her throat as she swiveled her chair toward the back of the room.
Leaning against the greasy old Linotype machine was Boyd Ellstrom.
JOLYNN SLIPPED INSIDE THE OPEN GATE AT BILL Waterman's junkyard, shaking her head at the lack of security. Situated half a mile out of town, on the back road to the Hudson Woods, the space was rented by the county and used as an impound lot because the yard was surrounded by a chain-link fence —never mind that Waterman never bothered to lock the gate. Of course, most of the time there wasn't anything here worth stealing. Tonight there was something that at least one man may have died for—Jarrold Jarvis's book.
The yard was deserted and spooky-looking, ringed by trees and lit by a single mercury vapor light on a tall bare pole. Mountains of metal sat rusting, oxidizing into dust while Waterman put off hauling it away. In the center of the scrap heaps stood the corrugated tin shed where dead cars were dissected for their parts and where Waterman kept an office of sorts. The Lincoln would be parked around back.
Jolynn thought she would be eternally grateful to Phyllis for running out of barbecued potato chips. If not for that, she would never have stopped in at the Rooster, would never have struck up a conversation with a disgruntled Harley Cole. Harley, of Harley's Texaco fame, who had bid for the contract on the county impound yard and lost because he didn't have an adequate fence. Harley, who felt entitled to keep Jarrold Jarvis's powder yellow Lincoln Town Car at his place since he had done every bit of service work on it—including installation of an oversize key box on the undercarriage.
If Jolynn's hunch was right, Harley's handiwork wasn't a key box at all, but a neat little hidey-hole. She was going to find out. She crossed her fingers and offered up a little prayer as she wound her way among the stacks of rusted junk. If she was right, and she found the book, the Clarion could scoop the city papers. She would get back to the office and spend the night working on the story. The weekly edition would be run in the morning and on the stands before anyone else would have time to substantiate the rumor that the book even existed.
The phrase tampering with evidence drifted through her head, but she dismissed it. She had no intention of taking the book with her. All she wanted was a peek at what was in it. Then she would call Yeager in.
The two of them had stayed up half the night racking their brains over the whereabouts of the book. Bret had bet on a hiding spot at Still Waters, somewhere in or around the office trailer, but the search today had proved futile. Jolynn smiled at the prospect of outsnooping him. He would owe her a hot fudge sundae. And a back rub. Most of all, she smiled at the prospect of being the one to crack the case. Elizabeth would be proud of her, Bret would be proud of her. She would be proud of herself for the first time in a long time.
That thought gave her the courage to shake off the jitters creeping in on her from the shadows of the junk piles. She had wasted too much time mourning the loss of her marital status. Her worth was in herself, not in being Mrs. Rich Cannon. She hadn't lost any of her talent or intelligence when she had lost Rich. All she had lost was dead weight. He had never encouraged her or seen any worth in her abilities. Her sole purpose in his life had been to pay homage to him, to see to his comfort and needs.
Susie Jarvis could have him. The man Jolynn could love would share interests with her, would see her for the bright, capable person she was, would treat her with both passion and compassion, and most
of all respect.
She had a sneaking suspicion his name would be Bret Yeager.
The nose of the Lincoln came into sight as she rounded the corner of the building, and Jolynn set her mind to the matter at hand. The box was right where Harley had told her—within easy reach of the driver's seat, just under the side panel. The ease with which it came loose gave a clue as to how frequently Jarvis had used it. Not remarkable in itself, the black metal box was no more than four inches by five inches and less than an inch thick. The notebook inside —carefully wrapped in plastic—was equally unimpressive. A simple black binder holding pages of blue-ruled paper. The value of the thing lay in the neatly printed notes.
Jolynn sat down on the gravel with her back against the Lincoln and began scanning the pages by the beam of a pocket flashlight she had brought along for the purpose. Most of the names on the pages were familiar. Townsfolk who had gone to Jarvis in time of need. Ivan Stovich, who was on the brink of losing his farm because of his alcoholism. Todd Morrison, who had already failed in three different business ventures. Verne Syverson, who played the commodities market with no skill and less sense. Boyd Ellstrom—
Boyd Ellstrom: $18,700.00—gambling debt.
“Holy shit,” Jolynn whispered. Apparently, Deputy Ellstrom wasn't any better at betting than he was at law enforcement.
As she turned to the next page her eyes widened and her stomach dropped. She scanned the narrow beam of her flashlight down the column of dates and figures, then flicked it back up to the name at the top of the page, her heart pounding as adrenaline and dread shot through her.
