Moonglow, Texas

by Mary McBride

  The worst thing that was going to happen to her during this computer crisis had already happened when Dan backed his trailer into her house. And the worst thing that was going to happen to him was discovering once and for all that he was washed-up.

  He turned the key in the ignition. Well, hell. He could always make a halfway decent living on the demolition derby circuit. And maybe, if he was really, really lucky, he’d be demolished in the process.

  This time he shifted into Drive, easing the ancient Airstream out onto Second Street, then circled the block until he found access through a narrow vacant lot into Molly Hansen’s backyard. After half an hour he had the trailer unhitched, his lawn chair unfolded in the shade of the live oak, and a warm beer in his hand.

  It was only nine-thirty, but he felt as if he’d already put in a full day’s work trying to ignore Molly Hansen’s long blond curls and the dangerous curves of her body. He hadn’t been with a woman since…

  Damn. He’d promised not to think about that. His nightmares were bad enough. How many times could you watch your partner die because of something you’d done or failed to do or simply overlooked? How long could you try to dream it different, only to have it all turn out the same? The answer, after nearly five months, was indefinitely. He took a long pull from the bottle and let the warm lager slide down his throat. Unless, of course, you overmedicated yourself into besotted oblivion, which was still his favorite place to be.

  Not Moonglow, that was for sure. He’d never expected to come back here, to come full circle. Bad boy leaves town. Bad man comes back. Dan closed his eyes. Hell, it seemed there had been nothing in between.

  Molly showered, dressed, put on her makeup, took her morning coffee into her tiny back bedroom office as she did every day, then proceeded to spend more time at the window watching Dan Shackelford not working than she spent working herself.

  Trust the government to hire a good-looking bum who didn’t know a hammer from a Heineken, she thought, glad it wasn’t her money that was paying him to sit around swigging beer all morning.

  For a moment, while she was showering, she’d actually gotten a little excited about the prospect of fixing up this falling-down house. Not that she’d ever really like it, no matter the improvements, but maybe she’d hate it a little less. Now it looked as if any repairs would be accomplished in an alcoholic haze. Her house would probably look worse, not better, once Dan Shackelford was done with it.

  All of a sudden Molly wanted to cry, but she wouldn’t let herself. If she started, even so much as a sniffle, there was no telling if she’d ever stop.

  “I hate my life,” she muttered, settling once more in front of her computer screen and forcing herself to focus on sentence after sentence, paragraph after paragraph of the most unrelentingly boring and ungrammatical prose in the history of English composition.

  When she’d applied for the position of English instructor at the online university, it seemed the perfect choice for her new persona. It didn’t pay much, but her need for privacy and safety was greater than her need for money. There was nothing to spend it on in Moonglow, anyway. She’d approached the job with her typical determination to succeed, but the challenge of correcting her invisible students’ errors in spelling and grammar had quickly dissipated when she found herself correcting the same mistakes over and over and over again.

  “I hate your life, Molly Hansen,” she muttered at the screen. “I hate your cutesy-poo name, too. And I hate your bleached-blond hair. I hate everything about you, including that bum who’s set up residence in your backyard.”

  It had all gone wrong so fast that she’d barely had time to comprehend it before she had been whisked into WITSEC. Kathryn Claiborn’s life, the one she had struggled so long and hard to achieve, had literally blown up in her face.

  She’d been crossing the campus of venerable Van Dyne College, where she was director of financial affairs in addition to being associate professor of business, taking her usual shortcut through the basement of the Chemistry Department on her way to the Administration Building, when her world had exploded. One minute she was waving a cheerful hello to Dr. Ian Yates and the pale, white-haired fellow by his side, and the next she was waking up in a hospital with bandages on her face and half a dozen federal agents in her face.

  Nothing had been the same after that. Kathryn Claiborn had died, giving birth to Molly Hansen. Kathryn Claiborn had been so frightened at the thought of having her throat cut by the white-haired terrorist whom only she could identify that she had willingly abandoned her job, her home, her fiancé, even her very self in order to insure her survival.

  “Way to go, Kathryn,” Molly said with a sigh.

  There was no way she was going to be able to concentrate on slipshod essays this morning, so she turned off her computer, then went to the window to see if her handyman was still swilling beer. If he was, it wasn’t where he’d been swilling it earlier. His ratty lawn chair was empty.

  Molly glanced at her watch. She had a one o’clock appointment for a root touch-up. Maybe, since it was Tuesday and hardly anybody in Moonglow got her hair done this early in the week, Raylene could fit her in a little bit early.

  Raylene Earl wasn’t exactly a friend. Unable to disclose anything about her life prior to her arrival in Moonglow, Molly wasn’t in a position to make friends. Of course, that didn’t keep the hairdresser from talking her head off.

  Raylene’s hair was pink this week.

  “Well, I dunno,” she was saying. “They call it Sunset, so naturally I was expecting something on the gold side. You know, the way the sun sets here in Moonglow. I’m getting used to it now, but lemme tell you, it played hell with my Passionate Pink lipstick and nail polish. I’m wearing Strawberry Frappé now.” She waved a hand under Molly’s nose. “What do you think, hon?”

  “I like it,” Molly replied, her typical three words in exchange for Raylene’s hundred.

  “Yeah? I dunno. I think it looks like I stuck my fingers in a jam jar or something.” She pursed her lips, studying them in the mirror over the top of Molly’s head. “Buddy says why worry when they kiss just the same, but then what can you expect from a man who wears his skivvies inside out half the time and swears it doesn’t matter?”

  “Does it matter?” Molly got in her three words while Raylene dragged in a breath through her strawberry-frappéed lips.

  “Of course it matters. Good Lord, Molly, would you want somebody reading your waist size every time you bent over?”

  Molly laughed. “I guess not.”

  “Not that you’re not a tiny little thing, even if you do persist in wearing clothes that don’t show off your choicest parts. They’re having a sale at Minden’s this week. Thirty percent off everything, if you’re in the mood for a little change.”

  “Oh, no thanks.”

  What Raylene didn’t know was that Molly had already undergone a change of huge proportions. Kathryn had left behind a closet full of conservative suits and dark, understated shoes. There was no need to replace them. Nobody here wore suits except the banker and the undertaker, and those outfits tended toward odd colors and western cuts. In laid-back Moonglow, most people thought glen plaid was somebody’s name.

  Ordering online, Molly had slowly filled her closet with soft skirts, tunics, a few khaki shorts and slacks. It had taken her a while to get the colors right. Kathryn, with her dark hair, light blue eyes and fair skin, was a Winter, who looked best in blacks and whites and true reds. Blond Molly, on the other hand, couldn’t handle Kathryn’s colors. She had no idea what season Molly had turned into, but, to her dismay, she now looked best in shades she’d always detested. Washed-out blues, sherbet hues. So, in addition to hating her life, she hated her clothes.

  “Oh, I know what I meant to ask you the minute you came in,” Raylene said as she dabbed more bleach preparation on Molly’s roots. “What’s the deal with the trailer? You got relatives visiting from up north?”

  “No. Not relatives. A handyman is
doing some repairs on my house. He’s from around here, I guess. At least, that’s what I assumed.”

  “Oh, yeah? What’s his name?”

  “Shackelford.”

  Raylene’s hands dropped to Molly’s shoulders. “Not Danny Shackelford!”

  “Well. Dan.”

  “Oh, my Lord!” Raylene whooped. “Oh, my dear sweet Lord.”

  In the mirror Molly saw a woman she hadn’t yet met come through the door. The hairdresser saw her, too, and immediately called out, “JoEllen, you’re not gonna believe who’s back. Not in a million, jillion years.”

  “Who?” JoEllen didn’t look all that interested until Raylene told her the handyman’s name, but once she heard it, she was whooping, too. “Danny Shackelford. If that’s not a blast from the past, I don’t know what is. How long’s he been gone, Raylene? Fourteen, fifteen years?”

  “More like nineteen,” Raylene said over her shoulder. “He took off right after old Miss Hannah passed away, and that’s been close to twenty years.” She met Molly’s eyes in the mirror. “How’s he look? You’ll break my heart if you tell me he’s got a potbelly and a receding hairline.”

  “He looks fine,” Molly said, lifting her shoulders in a little shrug beneath her plastic cape.

  “Fine! Oh, honey, you can do better than that. Now, what is it? Fine as in you wouldn’t kick him out of bed? Or fine as in you’d sell your soul to the devil to get him there?”

  JoEllen, the newcomer, chuckled while she poured a cup of coffee. “If memory serves, that wouldn’t be all that hard to do, Raylene.”

  “He was pretty wild, I take it,” Molly said, suddenly not all that comfortable with the thought of Dan Shackelford roaming like some feral beast through her house.

  “Wild?” Raylene exclaimed. “Well, let me put it this way. If Moonglow had had a zoo, Danny Shackelford would have been the main attraction. Right, JoEllen?”

  The two women drifted off to other topics then, with Molly putting in her occasional three words while her thoughts strayed repeatedly to the man lazing under the live oak in her backyard. A sleepy lion on some distant savanna, waiting for a slower, weaker creature to appear.

  Dan was putting in the last screw on the new brass lock of the double-hung window in the living room so he had a perfect view of Molly Hansen walking along Second Street on her way back from town.

  Her stride was long with her feet turned out slightly, like a ballet dancer. Her skirt swung softly around her shapely calves with each step. What idiot at WITSEC had thought a woman like that would be invisible in a town like Moonglow? She stood out like a diamond in a pile of wood chips.

  “God bless it!”

  The screwdriver slipped and gouged a chunk out of his thumb. A little reminder from the gods that he was here to do a job, not ogle a pretty blonde from a window. Then, a second later, as if to really drive home their point, the deities pinched the flesh of his thigh between the entrance and exit scars.

  “Yeah. Okay. Okay,” Dan muttered, grimacing as he finished tightening the screw on the lock. “I get the message.”

  He tossed the screwdriver into the paint-stained toolbox he’d bought early that morning from Harley Cates after it had occurred to him that a handyman couldn’t very well show up without the tools of his trade.

  Harley had recognized him right off the bat, which had been more than a bit disconcerting, considering he hadn’t seen the old codger in nearly twenty years.

  Dan had dug around in Harley’s barn for a while, deflecting the old man’s questions as best he could.

  “How much do you want for this old toolbox, Harley?” he’d asked him.

  “I’d ask twenty from a stranger, Danny, but since you’re Miss Hannah’s boy and all, I’ll take fifteen.”

  Dan had opened his wallet, relieved to see that he had the fifteen bucks.

  “You back to stay, son?” Harley asked, folding the fives and sliding them into his back pocket.

  “No, I’m just passing through.”

  “Don’t let much grass grow under you, huh? Shackelfords are like that. All but Miss Hannah, God rest her soul.”

  Dan looked out the window again now. Molly Hansen was pulling a little grocery cart behind her. He could almost hear Miss Hannah saying, “Don’t stand there like you’ve put down roots, boy. Where’s your manners? Go give that little girl a hand.”

  “Thanks, anyway. I can manage.”

  “Aw, come on, Molly. I’ve got a bad enough reputation in this town already. What’ll people say if they see me strolling empty-handed while you’re lugging that cart?”

  Molly cocked her head. Her handyman was wearing his sunglasses, so she couldn’t see his eyes, but judging from his grin, she sensed they were twinkling. “I just got an earful of that reputation of yours, Shackelford, down at the beauty shop.”

  “Oh, yeah? You mean somebody in Moonglow actually remembers me?”

  “Sounded to me as if your name is prominently featured in the local Hall of Fame,” she said. “Or was that the Hall of Shame?”

  The wattage of his grin diminished a bit. “Well, don’t believe everything you hear. Especially in a beauty shop.”

  Molly’s right arm brushed his, and she deliberately maneuvered her shopping cart a few inches to the left, putting more distance between them.

  “Who’s still talking about me after all these years?” he asked.

  “Raylene Earl.”

  “Oh. Damn.”

  He whipped off his glasses and came to a complete standstill on the sidewalk.

  “Raylene Ford? Then I guess she must’ve married Buddy Earl. I’ll be damned. Is she still…?” His open palms came up in a descriptive fashion.

  Ordinarily such a blatantly sexist gesture would have made Molly angry, but knowing the pride Raylene took in her generous endowments, she found herself laughing instead. “She remembers you pretty vividly, too.”

  “We had our moments,” he said, repositioning the dark shades on the bridge of his nose, cutting off her view of his deep green eyes.

  “I’ll bet you did.”

  They were both quiet, caught up in their own thoughts, the rest of the way to the house. Molly couldn’t help but notice that Dan wore a goofy little half grin that she suspected had something to do with Raylene. For some strange reason, she found herself envying the hairdresser for that. Heaven knows, nobody had such fondly amusing memories of Kathryn Claiborn. Not even her fiancé.

  She had stopped at the post office after she left Raylene’s, and picked up another letter from Ethan Ambrose, her longtime fiancé. He knew she was under the protection of WITSEC, but he didn’t know where. All of his letters to her from New York were filtered through Washington and Houston before they ever arrived in Moonglow. Molly picked them up each week, read them and put them in a desk drawer. For some reason she couldn’t begin to understand, she hadn’t written Ethan back. She just didn’t know what to say. She just didn’t feel like his Kathryn anymore.

  They had reached the end of the driveway and were at the back door when Dan reached into the pocket of his palm-tree-studded shirt.

  “Your new keys,” he said.

  “Thanks.” Molly was wondering if she should invite him in for a glass of lemonade or something. She chided herself for not picking up a six-pack at the store.

  “Guess I’ll knock off for today,” Dan said, already heading for the rear of the house. “See you tomorrow.”

  “See you,” Molly said, fitting the shiny key into the shiny new lock, thinking of course he didn’t want to spend any time with her after his work was done. Who did she think she was, anyway? Raylene?

  Dan stabbed a fork in the steak and flipped it, taking a moment to appreciate the fine parallel burn marks from the grill. It was the first time in a long time he wasn’t drinking his dinner with a bag of pretzels on the side. Smoke from the fire filtered up through the leaves of the live oak. Too bad there wasn’t a nice little breeze to blow it toward the house, he thought. Who could r
esist a steak on the grill?

  Don’t, he cautioned himself. Easy as this job is, you can’t afford the distraction. You screw this up and it’s so long, Dan. When you were good, you were very, very good. When you went off the rails, you were gone.

  He heard the screen door in back squeak open. He wouldn’t fix that, he thought. It was as good as any alarm.

  What it signaled now was Molly, coming around the corner and sauntering barefoot across the lawn while the sunset tinted her hair a reddish gold.

  “Smells good,” she said.

  “Doesn’t it, though?” He jabbed at the steak with the fork. “Just about done, too.”

  “Mmm.”

  Her deep-throated murmur was so sensual, Dan nearly stabbed himself with the damn fork. He took a swallow of his beer to cool himself off. “There’s plenty here. Want to join me?”

  “Oh, I… Well, I just made a Greek salad.”

  He thought that was more of a yes than a no, but he didn’t want to press his luck. “They’re selling feta cheese in Moonglow? What is this world coming to?”

  She laughed softly. “Would you like some?”

  “Bring her on out,” he said.

  By the time Molly was back with her big wooden salad bowl and—smart girl that she was—two steak knives, Dan had unfolded a second lawn chair, put half of the steak on each of two paper plates and popped open another bottle of beer. He opened one more when she said that sounded good.

  “This is nice,” she said, digging into her steak. “I mean, it’s nice not having to eat alone.”

  “Amen to that.”

  For a minute, just on the edge of sundown, sharing a good meal with a pretty woman, Dan was nearly feeling human again. And then the big Crown Victoria cruiser with the Moonglow Sheriff’s Department insignia on the door swung into Molly’s driveway.

  It figured, Dan thought. You couldn’t come home without a homecoming party.

  Molly didn’t like the set of Sheriff Gil Watson’s thick jaw as he lumbered across the lawn, or the half-dare, half-smirk tilt of his lips. The man took his job way too seriously in her opinion. Moonglow wasn’t exactly the South Bronx.