Cowboy with a Cause

by Carla Cassidy

  Another foot and her fingers touched the closet door. With Herculean effort she lurched backward and grabbed the door. With an outward gasp she pulled it open just enough for her to slink inside and then she closed the door and held the doorknob tight.

  He laughed, and although there was something strangely familiar in the laughter, she couldn’t identify it, couldn’t identify him. “Looks like you’ve worked yourself into a dead end, Melanie.”

  She squeezed the doorknob tighter, her heart threatening to explode it was beating so fast. He knew her name. Who was it? This wasn’t just a random stranger who had come into her house in the middle of the night, but rather somebody who knew her, knew her condition.

  As she felt the knob attempt to turn beneath her grasp, she wondered where Adam was, if he would make it home in time to save her.

  Somehow, someway, she realized, she had to save herself, but as the doorknob rattled again beneath her grip, she feared she wouldn’t have the strength to keep the monster out of the closet.

  * * *

  By the time Adam reached Melanie’s driveway, he was completely relaxed and ready for bed. He knew she’d already be asleep, for she rarely stayed up later than ten.

  Time would tell what kind of help she needed, and if he might be the man to stand by her side when she got that help. He wasn’t sure what was going on with her, but he knew with certainty that he wasn’t ready to walk away from her yet. For the first time since he’d left his ranch, he felt needed. He just didn’t know if she realized she needed, and wanted him yet.

  He stepped outside of the truck and stretched with his arms overhead. The day had begun fairly mildly, but now a deep chill had taken over. Clouds chased across the front of the near full moon, half obscuring what should have been magnificent moonlight.

  He shoved his hands in his pockets and jiggled the three chips inside. He’d received his third month of sobriety chip that night. He felt like a fraud when he was around the other men.

  Since the day he’d stopped drinking, he’d never thought about it again, but he knew of the daily—sometimes minute-by-minute—struggles some of the others in the group suffered as they fought the battle of booze.

  As he approached the front door, he heard the sound of muffled screams coming from someplace in the house. Panic jumped inside his veins and he fumbled with the key in an attempt to get the door unlocked as quickly as possible.

  “Melanie?” he cried through the closed door, cursing his clumsiness as he tried to get the door open.

  He finally opened it and stumbled into the dark interior, and as he took another step into the foyer, the screams became louder.

  Melanie. His heart crashed against his ribs. “Melanie!” he shouted again. Had she fallen? Maybe taken a header in the shower? Was she seriously hurt?

  He raced toward her bedroom and instantly flipped on the overhead light. In the blink of an eye he took in the scene before him, trying to make sense of it all.

  The street-level window was open, the screen missing, and her wheelchair had been pushed into one corner of the room. Melanie wasn’t in it or in the bed.

  The screams had stopped and in the silence Adam could hear the banging of his own heartbeat as a panic like he’d never known before roared through him. Where was she? What had happened while he’d been gone?

  The screams began again, sobbing, terror-filled screams, and he realized they were coming from the closet. He raced to the door and attempted to turn the knob, but it refused to turn in his hand.

  “Go away! Leave me alone!” Melanie’s voice sounded hoarse and yet was filled with such fear, it ripped through his heart. She screamed again.

  “Melanie, it’s me,” he said. “It’s Adam. Let me open the door. It’s okay. You’re safe. I’m here.”

  A deep, wrenching sob sounded, and when he tried to turn the doorknob again, it turned easily in his hand. He pulled the door open to find her crumpled on the floor like a broken doll.

  “I woke up and he was in my room.” The words came haltingly out of her, punctuated by hiccuping sobs. “He moved my wheelchair. I slid off the bed and crawled in here. I held the doorknob tight so he couldn’t open it. He was going to kill me. I know that’s what was going to happen.” Her sobs made the words half gibberish, but Adam definitely got enough information to realize what had apparently happened.

  She burst into a new fit of tears as Adam bent down and picked her up. She slung her arms around his neck and buried her face in the crook of his neck, her entire body trembling uncontrollably.

  She was nearly weightless in his arms and so achingly fragile, Adam’s blood ran cold as he gently laid her on her bed. It was now obvious what had happened. Somebody had come through the window while she slept, somebody who could only have had evil intent.

  He chilled as he thought of what might have happened to her if he’d lingered another minute over his piece of pie, if he hadn’t driven a little over the speed limit coming home. How much longer could she have held on to the closet doorknob? And what would have happened if the intruder had managed to open that door? His heart iced at the very possibilities.

  He sank next to her on the bed and stroked her hair as her tears began to ebb. “I was so afraid,” she said with a final gasping sob. “I thought I was going to be just like those other women, like the waitresses. I thought he was going to kill me in my bed.” Her body trembled with such a force he held tight, as if in doing so, he was holding her together.

  “We need to call Cameron,” he finally said as her trembling began to subside. “We need to report this.”

  Her eyes were huge as she slowly nodded her head. “Do you think it was the serial killer? Was I supposed to be his next victim?” Her voice was unusually deep and raspy, both from screaming and from the intense emotion that still coursed through her body.

  “Anything is possible,” Adam said tersely as he pulled his cell phone from his pocket and punched in the number for the sheriff.

  Melanie wrapped her arms around her shoulders as if in an attempt to fight off a shiver that began in her very soul.

  As Adam waited for Cameron to answer the call, he felt the same kind of shiver attempt to take hold of him as he realized that danger had crept not only into the house but into Melanie’s bedroom while she slept.

  It took him only minutes to reach the sheriff and give a quick assessment of the situation and request assistance. When he hung up the phone, he tucked it back into his pocket and moved away from Melanie.

  “Sit tight,” he said to her. “I’m just going to get your robe.” There was no way in hell he wanted the sheriff or any of the deputies to see Melanie in her sexy blue nightgown.

  “It’s hanging on the back on my bathroom door,” she said. Her voice sounded a little bit stronger, as if some of the shock was slowly wearing off.

  He found the white terry-cloth robe just where she’d told him it would be, and carried it back into her bedroom. He helped her into it and then once again wrapped his arms around her.

  He didn’t ask her any questions and she didn’t offer any more information. She simply clung to him as if he were a lifeline.

  The idea that anyone would try to put their hands on her in an effort to harm her shot rage through him.

  “I didn’t do this to myself,” she whispered.

  He leaned back and looked at her in surprise. “It never crossed my mind that you did.”

  “Maybe somebody will think I’m just some poor crippled woman looking for attention, that I tore the screen off the window, left my wheelchair in the corner and then crawled into the closet and waited for you to come home.” A new sob welled up and spilled from her lips.

  “Melanie, stop,” he protested.

  She looked up at him with eyes that simmered with emotion. “Isn’t that what you think? That I’m just a poor little cripple?”

  “Never,” he replied truthfully. “And you need to get that thought out of your head. We need to get you into the living room. T
he sheriff should be here anytime.”

  She swiped at the tears that had begun to fill her eyes once again. “Can you bring me my chair?”

  He started for it and then halted in his tracks. “We need to leave it where it is. Maybe there are fingerprints on it that will let us know who was in here.”

  He walked back to where she sat on the bed and scooped her up in his arms. Once again she wrapped her arms around his neck and leaned into him. For a moment he imagined that he could feel her heartbeat matching the rhythm of his own.

  “It’s going to be all right, Melanie,” he promised. “I’m here and I’m going to make sure everything is all right.” He just hoped it was a promise he could keep.

  * * *

  By the time Sheriff Cameron Evans arrived on scene with two of his deputies, Melanie was tightly wrapped in her fuzzy winter robe and seated on the sofa. The chill that she’d felt since the moment she realized somebody was in her bedroom with her had ebbed somewhat, replaced by a half-numb feeling.

  Somebody had intended to kill her. Why? Was it the serial killer who had been in the bedroom with her? Everything now had a surreal feel to it.

  Adam paced the floor in front of her, sighing in relief as the lawmen finally arrived.

  “What’s going on?” Cameron asked as he stepped into the living room, followed closely behind by Deputies Jim Collins and Ben Temple. “Your call was too frantic for me to know for sure what had happened.”

  “Somebody tried to kill me.” The words fell from Melanie’s mouth and sent a new wave of icy chills up and down her back.

  “Where?” Cameron stood at attention, his eyes narrowed in fierce concentration, as Adam sat down next to Melanie and took one of her cold hands in his.

  “I was asleep and something woke me up.” She squeezed Adam’s hand as the horror of the events she’d experienced replayed in her mind. “At first I thought it was just a dream that had awakened me, but when I went to reach for my wheelchair, it wasn’t there, and then I saw it across the room, in the corner.”

  She shuddered, remembering that moment of utter helplessness. “And then I knew somebody was in the room with me. It was a man, and he told me if I wanted the wheelchair I had to crawl to it.”

  “Did you recognize the voice?” Adam asked.

  She hadn’t told him about the man speaking to her before Cameron had arrived. She shook her head. “It was like he was trying to disguise it, but when he laughed, I thought something about it was vaguely familiar.”

  “So you think it was somebody you know?” Cameron said.

  She hesitated a moment and then shrugged her shoulders. “I can’t be one hundred percent sure, but he knew me. He called me by name.”

  For the next few minutes she told Cameron exactly what had happened, everything the man had said to her and how she’d managed to get off the bed and get into the closet, where she’d held on tight to the knob as he’d tried to open the door.

  By the time she finished, Adam’s grip on her hand was almost painfully tight and yet she welcomed the ache, a confirmation that she’d survived the night, the terror.

  “You two sit tight. We’re going to check out the bedroom,” Cameron said. He and the two men disappeared into the bedroom and Adam released her hand and then wrapped his arm around her shoulder and pulled her more tightly against his side.

  “You could have been killed,” he said, his voice deep and filled with a wealth of emotion. “If you hadn’t been smart enough to get off the bed and into the closet, he would have attacked you.”

  “I didn’t know what else to do,” she replied. “I knew if I remained on the bed, I didn’t have a chance.” She frowned and smacked her right thigh, as if to punish it. “I couldn’t exactly get up and run away.” An old bitterness crept into her tone. “He probably broke into my room because he knew that I was nothing more than a helpless cripple.”

  Adam placed his hand beneath her chin and forced her to meet his gaze. “Melanie, you’re so much more than that and you proved it tonight. You outwitted a man. You saved yourself from danger.”

  She looked at him doubtfully. “I don’t know how much longer I could have held on to that doorknob. If you hadn’t come home when you did, I think he would have managed to get the closet door open. He would have managed to get to me.”

  “But the important point is that you hung on as long as you had to.”

  She leaned back against him, finding strength in the warmth of his arm around her, in the admiration that shone from his eyes.

  He shouldn’t admire her. She’d managed only to keep herself safe until he rode to her rescue. If he’d arrived five minutes later, she probably would have been stretched out on her bed with her throat slashed.

  “I think Cameron had hoped that whoever killed the other two women was a drifter who moved out of town, since nothing else has happened in this last three months,” Adam said.

  “I guess this throws that theory out the window,” she replied.

  She had felt like she was making progress, finally seeking some sort of acceptance concerning her medical condition. But being helpless for those tense seconds on the bed had slammed her handicap home to her once again.

  She’d probably been chosen as a victim because she was weak and useless. Would he have broken into her bedroom if she were a healthy, active twenty-eight-year-old instead of a pathetic cripple? She didn’t think so.

  She’d never been so scared and she’d never felt so low, and she knew the only reason why Adam was beside her now was that he’d been pulled into her drama by being her tenant.

  “You know, if you want to move to a place with a little less stress and drama, I’d understand,” she said softly.

  “I’m not going anywhere, Melanie,” he said firmly. “I haven’t done anything to void our lease and you haven’t done anything to give me reason to want to move out. I’m happy just where I am.” He offered her a small smile. “Besides, I forgot to mention to you that I thrive on stress and drama.”

  She sighed in relief. At least for now he was here with her, beside her, lending her his strength and support. She had no idea what tomorrow might bring but at this moment in time what he had to give her was exactly what she needed.

  She straightened and Adam stood as Cameron came back into the living room. “Ben and Jim are processing things, looking for fibers or fingerprints, and I’ve called in a couple of other men to canvass the neighborhood to see if anyone saw anything. In the meantime I’d like to ask you some more questions.”

  “Okay,” she agreed. She laced her fingers in her lap, aware that the cold that encased her heart radiated down to her fingertips.

  “Is there anyone in town you’ve had a beef with? Somebody you know who doesn’t like you?” Cameron asked as he eased down in the chair opposite the sofa, a pad and pen in his hand. Adam remained standing next to the sofa, as if ready to leap to Melanie’s defense if it should become necessary.

  “The first few months I was here and in the wheelchair, I wasn’t the most pleasant person in the world,” she admitted. “But my interaction with anyone was very limited.”

  “Until the other night, when we went to the Cowboy Café,” Adam said.

  Cameron’s eyes darkened. “The Cowboy Café. Did you see anyone there in particular? Anyone pay extra attention to you?”

  “Not really. There were some people who came up to me to say hello, people who didn’t realize I was here in town.” She frowned thoughtfully, trying to imagine anyone who might want to hurt her.

  “Craig Jenkins has been giving her a hard time,” Adam said.

  “The real estate guy from Evanston?”

  “Initially when I came back here to spend my mother’s last days with her, I contacted him to make arrangements to sell the house. I just assumed I’d be returning to New York City, but then I went into the wheelchair and knew I wouldn’t be returning to my previous life, so I told him I was no longer interested.” Melanie grimaced with displeasure. “He
didn’t want to take no for an answer and became a real pest.”

  “I had a stern little talk with him last week and told him to leave her alone, that they had no business to conduct,” Adam admitted. The sound of a small vacuum sweeper whirled from in the bedroom.

  Cameron bent his head and wrote for a moment on his pad and then looked from Adam to Melanie. “Anyone else?”

  “Denver Walton seemed unusually happy to see her,” Adam added.

  Melanie laughed, surprised that she still could under the circumstances. “Maddy Billings would be more apt to murder me in my bed than Denver, and the person in my room was definitely a man.”

  “I don’t know if this means anything or not but you might want to check out Kevin Naperson’s alibi. He helped me put up some railings on the ramp, and he probably knows by now about Melanie being handicapped.”

  Cameron frowned. “That kid seems to wind up someplace in every investigation.” Once again he scribbled on his pad and then looked up again at Melanie. “Did you leave any broken hearts behind when you left New York City?”

  An unexpected burst of laughter escaped her once again. “Not that I’m aware of. It was well over a year since I’d dated anyone before I came back here.”

  “What about when you left here years ago?” It was obvious by the question that Adam was desperate to make sense of what had happened.

  “What about that?” Cameron asked.

  She shrugged. “I didn’t date anyone really seriously before I left for New York. Denver and I went out a couple of times in high school. I dated Billy Vickers for about a month. Even Jim and I went out a few times.”

  “Jim Collins?” Cameron asked in surprise.

  She nodded. “But that was a long time ago and none of those relationships were serious ones. Everyone knew that as soon as I graduated from high school, I was heading out of town. It wasn’t a big secret that I had the stars of Broadway in my eyes.”

  She glanced down at her leg, a new sense of betrayal slicing through her. She drew a deep sigh and stared at Cameron.