by Nora Roberts
“Who? Oh. Wait.” She took a moment, eyes closed, until her brain settled back down between her ears. “It’s delicious, that’s what the hell it is. Go sit down, give me a minute and I’ll prove it. You want coffee?”
“You don’t have coffee.”
“Actually…” She sidestepped to avoid contact with him again, and picked up a thermos she had on the counter. “I got some from downstairs.”
“You got coffee?”
She saw—for once—she’d surprised him. “Light, one sugar, right?”
“Yeah. Thanks.”
She fixed the dessert, served it in the living area. “It’s not sex,” she said, “but it’s a nice end to a meal.”
He took the first spoonful. “Where has this been all my life?”
“I learned to make it for my father. It was a favorite of his.”
“A man of good taste.”
She smiled, toyed with her own. “You haven’t said anything at all about…I’m not sure what to call it.”
“I think the term’smurder .”
“Yeah, the term’smurder . One of the sheriff’s theories is that I mistook the spot, and she wasn’t dead. Maybe I saw a couple of people in an altercation, but it wasn’t murder. Which is why no one’s reported anyone like her missing.”
“And you disagree.”
“On every point. I know what I saw and where I saw it. Maybe she hasn’t been reported missing because she’s not important to anyone. Or was, well, from France.”
This time Brody smiled. “Wherever she was from, odds are someone saw her. Getting gas, buying supplies, in a campground, in a motel. How well can you describe her?”
“I’ve already told you.”
“No, I mean, could you describe her to an artist?”
“Like a police artist?”
“Angel’s Fist doesn’t run to that, but we’ve got a couple of artists. I was thinking of Doc.”
“Doc?”
“He does charcoal sketches. Sort of a hobby, but he’s not bad.”
“And I’d be describing a murder victim, not getting a medical evaluation?”
Brody shrugged. “If you don’t trust Doc, we can get someone else.”
“I trust you.” She nodded when Brody frowned. “See? I told you about the weight. I trust you,” she repeated, “so I’m willing to try this with Dr. Wallace. If you come with me.”
He’d already planned to go with her. There was no possible way he’d miss out on any angle of the situation. But he continued to frown as he spooned up more dessert. “You want me to go with you, what have you got to trade for my time? I’m thinking along the lines of something that goes with the bottle of white in your fridge.”
“I’ve got Sunday off. I’ll take care of the menu.”
He polished off the last bite in his bowl. “I trust you. I’ll talk to Doc.”
12
SO HOW’D IT GO?” Linda-gail set the tub of cleared dishes on the counter for Pete, then gave Reece an elbow bump.
“How’d what go?”
“Your date with Brody last night.”
Reece flipped the burgers she was grilling for a table of after-school teenagers. “I just fixed him dinner. A payback for a favor.”
“Just dinner.” Linda-gail rolled her eyes over at Pete. “And you’re going to tell me you didn’t make a move on that?”
“She’s in love with me.” Pete slid dishes into the sink. “She can’t help herself.”
“It’s true. It’s a constant battle of control back here, every shift.”
“You bought candles,” Linda-gail pointed out. “And cloth napkins. And fancy wine.”
“Jesus.” Reece didn’t know whether to laugh or cringe. “Are there no secrets in the Fist?”
“None I can’t unearth. Come on, give me some dish. My own love life’s been as sparse as Pete’s hairline lately.”
“Hey! My hair’s just taking a little rest between growing seasons.” Pete slicked a hand over what hair he had left. “And I can feel my scalp starting to tingle in anticipation of a new crop.”
“Need some more fertilizer. Is he a good kisser?” Linda-gail demanded.
“Pete? Amazing. I’m a puddle at his feet. Order up,” Reece said when she’d finished plating the burgers, fries, and the little tubs of coleslaw she already knew would go to waste on the high-school crowd.
“I’ll get it out of you sooner or later.” After gathering up the plates, Linda-gail sashayed out.
“I am an amazing kisser,” Pete announced. “Just FYI.”
“I never doubted it.”
“Guys like me—you know,compact guys—pack a hell of a punch. We…fuck me.”
“I really don’t think I can take the time for that right at the moment.” Amused, Reece glanced over.
Then everything inside her went woozy and sick. Blood dripped from the hands Pete gripped together and splattered on the floor at his feet.
“Teach me to pay attention to what’s in the water, goddamn it. Sliced it good. Hey. Hey. Hey!”
She heard Pete shout as if he stood on a mountaintop and she in the valley below. Then the shouts went to buzzing, and the buzzing to silence.
The quick taps on her cheek brought her around. When Joanie’s face swam into her vision, nausea rolled in Reece’s belly. “There’s blood.”
“Is she all right? Christ, Joanie, she went down hard. I couldn’t get to her. Is she all right?”
“Stop breathing down my throat, Pete. She’s fine.” But Joanie was already running a hand over the back of Reece’s head, checking for bumps. “Go on down to Doc’s. Get that hand stitched up.”
“I just want to make sure she’s okay. She might be concussed or something.”
“How many fingers?” Joanie demanded of Reece.
“Two.”
“There, she’s fine. Now go get that hand tended to. Can you sit up, girl?”
“Yes. Pete.” Fighting nausea and the shakes, Reece sat up on the kitchen floor. “Is it bad? Your hand.”
“Aw, Doc’ll sew it right up.”
He had a cloth wrapped around it, but Reece could see the blood seeping through. “I’m sorry.”
“My own fault. You just take it easy now.” He patted Reece’s shoulder with his good hand before he straightened up.
“Got a knot coming up on the back of your head here. I’ll get you some ice.”
“It’s okay.” Reece gripped Joanie’s fingers. “I just need to get my breath back. Someone should go with Pete. That’s a bad gash.”
“Sit still a minute.” Joanie got up. “You there, Tod! You drive Pete down to the doc’s. Your burger’ll wait five minutes, and it’ll be free.” She turned back. “Satisfied?”
“There’s blood.”
“I can see that. A man’s bound to bleed when he slashes his hand with a knife. That’s all there is to it. Accidents happen in kitchens all the time.”
“I’ll clean it up, Joanie.” Linda-gail stepped in. “Juanita’s covering my tables.”
Saying nothing, Joanie got a small ice pack from the freezer, wrapped it in a thin cloth. “Hold that on the knot,” she ordered Reece. “Once you get your feet back under you, you can go on upstairs. I’ll take over here.”
“No, I’m okay. I can work. I’d rather work.”
“Fine. Get up then, and let’s see how steady you are on your feet. Dead pale,” Joanie pronounced when Reece gripped the counter to haul herself up. “Take a break, get some air. Drink some water.” She pushed a bottle into Reece’s hand. You get some color back, you can go on back to work.”
“Air would be good. Thanks.”
When Joanie jerked her head, Linda-gail nodded and followed Reece out the back.
“You want to sit down?” she asked Reece.
“No, I’ll just lean here for a minute. You don’t have to watch me. I’m just feeling a little queasy and a lot stupid.”
And shaky, Linda-gail thought as she took the bottle of water from Reece�
�s unsteady hands and uncapped it herself. “Spiders do that to me. Not just the big fat ones—you know the ones that look like they could carry off a good-sized cat if they put their mind to it? But even the little bitty ones give me the serious creeps. I once ran straight into a door and knocked myself silly trying to get out of the room where I saw a spider.
“Put that ice pack on your head, like Joanie said to. Bet you’ve got yourself a big fat spider-sized headache.”
“I guess I do. But Pete—”
“You fainting like that scared Pete so bad he forgot how bad his hand must’ve hurt. So that’s something.”
“A good deed.”
“And Joanie’s worried enough about both of you she hasn’t gotten pissed yet that she’s going to have to find somebody to fill in for him until the stitches are out. Two good deeds.”
“I’m loaded with them.”
“You want to go out for a beer later to toast your good deeds?”
Reece took another cool sip of water. “You know what, I would.”
THE BAR FOOD at Clancy’s wasn’t bad, at least not washed down with beer. But more important to Reece was she’d taken another step on her journey back.
She was sitting in a bar with a friend.
A very strange bar, to her East Coast sensibilities.
There were trophies hanging from the wall. Mounted heads of bear, elk, moose and mule deer adorned the knotty pine paneling, along with what Linda-gail identified for her as a couple of whopping cutthroat trout. They all stared out into the bar with what Reece thought of as a little shock, a little annoyance.
The paneling, with its lower section of logs, looked as if it had soaked up a generation of smoke and beer fumes.
The floors were scuffed and scarred and had probably been hit with kegs of spilled beer over time. Part of the area, just in front of a low stage, was sectioned off for dancing.
The bar itself was big and black, and lorded over by Michael Clancy, who’d come to Wyoming straight from County Cork some twelve years before. He’d married a woman who claimed to be a quarter Cherokee and called herself Rainy. Clancy looked like what he was, a big, bluff Irishman who ran a bar. Rainy tossed nachos and potato skins, and whatever else she might be in the mood for, in the kitchen.
The bar stools were worn down on the seat and shiny from a dozen years of asses. There was Bud and Guinness on draft, and in long-necks a few local brews including something called Buttface Amber, which Reece had declined. Other options were Harp by the bottle, or if you were female—or a pansy in Clancy’s opinion—Bud Light. The crowded display of liquor behind the bar leaned heavily to whiskeys.
The wine Clancy poured from a box, Linda-gail had warned Reece, was cheap and tasted like warm piss.
There were a couple of pool tables in another section, and the sound of balls clacking carried through the music piped through speakers.
“How’s the head?” Linda-gail asked her.
“Still on my shoulders, and probably feeling a lot better than Pete’s hand.”
“Seven stitches. Ouchie. But he loved how you fussed over him when he came back in. Making him sit down, serving him that fried trout yourself.”
“He’s a sweet guy.”
“Yeah, he is. And speaking of guys, now that I’m plying you with alcohol, spill. Just how hot is Brody?”
If she was going to have a girlfriend, Reece decided, she was going to act like one herself. She leaned in. “Combustible.”
“Iknew it!” Linda-gail banged a fist on the table. “You can just tell. The eyes, the mouth. I mean, there’s the build and the rest of him, but the mouth especially. Biteable.”
“It is, I must admit, it is.”
“What other parts of him have you bitten?”
“That’s it. I’m thinking about the rest.”
Mouth open, eyes wide, Linda-gail sat back. “You have superhuman control. Is it learned or inherited?”
“It’s what you call a by-product of abject fear. You’ve got the story on me by now.”
To give them both a minute, Linda-gail sipped at her beer. “Does that bother you?”
“I don’t know. Sometimes it does, and sometimes it’s a relief.”
“I didn’t know whether to say anything about it or not. Especially after Joanie…” She trailed off and took a sudden, keen interest in her beer.
“Joanie what?”
“I wasn’t supposed to say she’d said. But since I already have, sort of, she gave the bunch of us the what-for when Juanita started chattering about it. Juanita doesn’t mean anything by it; she just can’t keep her mouth shut. Or her skirt down, come to that.”
Linda-gail took another sip of beer. “Anyway, Joanie pinned her ears back good about it. And she made it plain and clear that none of us were to poke at you about it. But since you kind of brought it up…”
“It’s all right.” And wasn’t it, well, amazing, to have the inimitable Joanie Parks standing as her champion? “It’s just not something I like to talk about.”
“I don’t blame you.” Linda-gail reached out, squeezed a hand over Reece’s. “Not one bit. If I’d been through something like that, I’d still be curled up in the corner crying for my mama.”
“No, you wouldn’t, but thanks.”
“So, we’ll just talk about men and sex and food and shoes. The usual.”
“Works for me.” Reece reached for another nacho. “As for food, you know what’s gunked on here has absolutely no relationship with actual cheese.”
“It’s orange.” Linda-gail dug in, scooped the loaded chip through something pretending to be guacamole. “Close enough. Just so we’ll be on level ground, men-wise, I’m going to marry Lo.”
“Oh, oh, my God!” Reece dropped the loaded chip on her plate with a plop. “This is great. I had no idea.”
“Neither does he.” Linda-gail crunched into her nacho. “And I figure it’s going to take some more time and effort to refine him into anything worth marrying. But I’m really good at projects.”
“Ah. Um, so you’re in love with him.”
Her pretty face softened, and the dimple deepened. “I’ve loved him all my life. Well, since I was ten, and that’s a long time. He loves me, too, but his way of dealing with that is to run in the opposite direction and bang every female within reach so he won’t think about me. I’m letting him get it out of his system—time’s about up.”
“Well, huh. That’s a unique and broad-minded system you have there, Linda-gail.”
“It’s getting a little more narrow-minded these days.”
“He and I never…in case you wonder.”
“I know. I wouldn’t hold it against you if you had. Or I wouldn’t very much. Juanita and I get on fine, and he was lighting her up like Christmas awhile back. Then again, who hasn’t?” She chortled out a laugh. “But I probably wouldn’t buy you a beer if he’d nailed you. We were together, Lo and me, when we were sixteen, but we weren’t ready. Who is at sixteen?”
“Now you are.”
“Yeah, now I am. He’s just got to catch up. Brody hasn’t dated anyone in the Fist, in case you wonder. Word was he was seeing some lawyer type in Jackson on and off for a while, and there’s been a couple of suspected oners with tourist types, but nobody right local.”
“I guess that’s good to know. I’m not sure what’s between us, really. Except some heat.”
“Heat’s a good place to start. Being a cook and all, you should know that.”
“It’s been a while.” Idly Reece toyed with the ends of her hair as she studied Linda-gail’s do. “Where do you get your hair done?”
“When I’m in a hurry or when I want to splurge?”
“I’m mulling the splurge.”
“Reece, Reece, you can’t mull the splurge. You just, by definition, take the splurge. I know just the place. We can finagle Joanie into giving us both the same day off next week and go for it.”
“Okay, but I should tell you that the last time I tried
to keep a salon date, I ran like a rabbit.”
“No problem.” Linda-gail sucked orange goo off her thumb and grinned. “I’ll bring some rope.”
As Reece broke into a grin, one of the local cowboys sauntered up toward the little stage. He was a lean six feet in cowhide boots, faded jeans. The white circle worn into the back pocket came, Reece had learned, from carrying a can of snuff.
“Live entertainment?” Reece asked as he picked up a microphone.
“Depends on how you measure entertainment. Karaoke.” Linda-gail lifted her drink toward the stage. “Every night in Clancy’s. That’s Reuben Gates, works out at the Circle K with Lo.”
“Coffee black, eggs up on toast, bacon and home fries, Sunday morning regular.”
“You got it. He’s pretty good.”
He had a deep, strong baritone, and was an obvious favorite with the crowd that whistled and clapped as he broke into his rendition of “Ruby.”
As she listened to him sing about a faithless woman, she tried to imagine him standing by the banks of the Snake River in a black jacket and orange hunter’s cap.
It could be him, she thought. His hands would be strong, and there was a stillness about him now as he stood, as he sang.
It could be this one, a man she’d fried eggs and potatoes for on Sunday mornings. Or it could be any of the men hunched at the bar or scattered at the tables. Any one of them could be a killer. Any one, she thought again as panic tickled slyly at her throat.
Music tinkled out, and the deep baritone cruised through it. Conversations continued, muted now out of respect for the performance. Glasses clinked on wood, chairs scraped the floor.
And the tickling panic began to close into a fist to block her air.
She saw Linda-gail’s face, saw her friend’s mouth moving, but anxiety had stuffed cotton in her ears. She forced a breath out, forced another in. “What? Sorry, I didn’t hear…”
“You okay? You’ve gone pretty pale. Does your head hurt?”
“No. No, I’m all right.” Reece made herself look back at the stage. “I still have some trouble in crowds, I guess.”
