Through the Sheriff's Eyes

by Janice Kay Johnson

  She would be sorry if she missed her last chance to say goodbye before it was gone forever.

  THE MINUTE GRAY WALKED IN the front door he said, “Did you know the farm’s already being leveled?”

  “What?” Charlotte had appeared from the kitchen to greet him. She was playing happy homemaker tonight and enjoying it—a curried chicken dish was ready to come out of the oven and the salad was already on the table. Now, stunned, she let the pot holder she’d been holding drop from her hand. “What do you mean, leveled?”

  “They bulldozed the house today,” her husband said bluntly. “The cornfields are raw land. They’ll be a sea of mud the next time it rains. I don’t know what the hell they’re thinking.”

  “Faith,” Charlotte whispered.

  He walked toward her, picked up the pot holder, then wrapped her in his arms.

  Burrowing into his warmth and strength, she shook her head. She felt idiotic to realize her eyes burned. She’d spent a good part of her life desperate to escape the farm. The past ten years, she had done her very best to avoid visits home. Now she wanted to cry because the house where she’d grown up was gone?

  “What the hell happened between her and Ben?” Gray asked. “All he’ll do is shake his head when I ask.”

  Charlotte stepped back from her husband’s embrace. “She says they don’t have the same idea of love. She thinks he only liked the idea of rescuing her.” Her indignation fired. “Which may be true. He wasn’t nearly as interested before.”

  She loved Gray’s face, not exactly handsome but very male, and she especially loved his eyes, calm and clear and somehow able to see the pain she’d once tried to hide from him. Of course, she loved him, and the depth of her emotion still surprised her.

  He frowned, momentarily lost in thought. “I’m not so sure. I had the impression Ben really had taken a header for her.”

  “I did, too,” Charlotte admitted. “Maybe it’s not Ben. Maybe it’s Faith.” She paused. “I thought she and I had come so far, but nothing’s been the same since she shot Rory. This distance has opened up that I don’t know how to close.”

  It hurt, and yet she had long since lost the right to be inside her sister’s guard. If Faith truly trusted anyone, it was Dad, who had been there for her all along.

  When I wasn’t, Charlotte couldn’t help thinking, her chest constricted.

  She’d tried to be satisfied with the relationship she had with her twin, because they were friends now. But the truth was, Faith was still holding a huge part of herself back. Maybe she always would; maybe it was too late to hope for anything else. But…

  I can keep trying.

  “I need to call her,” she said.

  Gray nodded, his eyes keen on her face, and she knew that he understood every ounce of her guilt and her grief. “Is there anything I can do to get dinner on while you talk to her?”

  THERE WERE A COUPLE of lights on in the small house Don Russell had bought, but neither he nor Faith came to the door when Ben rang and then knocked. Frustrated, he drove around to the alley where he found neither of their vehicles, but one of them might be in the garage. They’d probably gone out to dinner.

  His mood restless, he went to Tastee’s for a burger and fries. All he could think about was the damn cell phone in his pocket and the ugly message saved in its sent file. How would Faith react? Was he doing the right thing, taking it to her? Maybe it would be the equivalent of trying to return the handgun to her; not a comfort, but a tearing reminder of the worst day of her life.

  Ben made an effort to hide his mood and nodded greetings to a few acquaintances, then crumpled the wrappings of his meal, deposited them in the trash can and left before he was forced to actually make conversation with someone.

  He’d filled an hour; maybe Faith was home by now. Ben realized he was going through with this, despite his doubts. As it had all along, instinct told him she needed to know that Rory’s intentions had been lethal. Yeah, it would remind her of the thunderous crack of the gun firing, of the blood and the way a man’s eyes glazed over when he died, of her own terror and relief and horror. But Ben thought her wound still festered, and maybe this bit of knowledge would help it heal cleanly, once and for all.

  Don came to the door this time.

  “No, I’m sorry, Ben,” he said, looking surprised. “Faith isn’t home. I was out to dinner, and she didn’t leave a note. She might have gone out with a friend, or be at the library.”

  His restlessness became disquiet. “Did you know your land’s already being cleared?”

  Don nodded somberly. “I found out this evening.”

  “Faith?”

  “I don’t know,” he admitted. “She wouldn’t have had reason to go by.”

  “But someone might have told her.”

  “They might have,” he admitted, in his slow, quiet way. “I came home hoping to talk to her.” He opened the door wider. “Sorry, didn’t mean to keep you standing out there. If you’d like a cup of coffee…?”

  “No, thanks.” Ben hesitated. “Will you call me when she gets home?”

  “I’ll do that,” her father agreed. “Don’t mind telling you I’m a little worried about her.”

  Ben was a lot worried. Probably for no reason, he tried to convince himself. She did have friends. He doubted she spent every evening sitting at home. She was used to being busy; he couldn’t imagine she’d taken to watching hours of TV to fill her time. For all he knew, she was volunteering for some worthy organization by now, or had a school open house she’d forgotten to tell her dad about.

  He drove by the elementary school just in case. It was dark and closed.

  Seeing no alternative, he went home, where he paced. The minutes crept by. After half an hour, he phoned Charlotte.

  “I’ve been trying to call her,” she said, anxiety tight in her voice. “Her cell phone is turned off and Dad says she isn’t home.”

  Ben muttered an expletive and swung around to circle the room again. The sense of urgency wouldn’t let up. “Have you tried friends? Is she taking classes? Volunteering?”

  “I’ve tried the couple of friends I know. She hasn’t said anything about classes or volunteering.”

  “Call me if you hear anything.”

  “Yes. Okay,” she said, without asking why he was seeking her sister now, when he’d been absent for weeks. He was grateful for small favors.

  Ben set down the phone and tried to focus. Chances were good Faith hadn’t heard anything and was up to something innocuous. She knew her father was going out to dinner, so there wasn’t any reason to explain her own activities. Why would it occur to her that anyone would worry? If she had heard about the farm—if that’s why she wasn’t home—where would she have gone?

  Where else? he realized, feeling stupid. If the news had hit her hard, there was only one place she’d have gone to mourn.

  Home.

  Moving fast, Ben grabbed his parka and went out the door.

  FAITH DIDN’T KNOW what had made her get out of her Blazer. It wasn’t as though she hadn’t seen enough when she pulled in off the highway. She’d felt a flash of relief when she saw the solid, enduring bulk of the barn in her headlights. In the next moment, her breath stopped in her lungs. The house. Oh, God. Her house was gone.

  No, not gone—it was a pile of rubble.

  She pulled in beside the barn, hidden in its shadow from passing traffic. Then she sat there for the longest time, unable to move.

  Silly, she kept thinking. Of course the house was a teardown; she’d known that.

  But she was rocking slightly, a child trying to comfort herself. Inside, the same child wailed, Mommy, Daddy. I want to go home.

  What was wrong with her? Why did this matter so much?

  Finally, she took the flashlight from the glove compartment, got out and walked slowly to the house. To what had been the house. She turned the flashlight on and moved the beam slowly over the pile, picking out shattered floorboards here, tumbled chunks of
the concrete that had made up the foundation, smashed cupboards and windows, crumbled plaster with tattered wallpaper she knew as well as her own face.

  That’s the living room. She fell to her knees. Oh, God, there’s my bedroom. A tiny, terrible, torn bit of her bedroom, once shared with Charlotte, always her refuge until the night Rory had invaded it.

  Still she didn’t cry, although she was in such pain she didn’t think she could bear it. It was as if everything that had ever meant anything to her had been smashed along with the house and only shards were left. None fixable, nothing that could be glued together.

  She heard a sound, low and agonizing, vibrating through her own throat. Faith pushed herself to her feet and stumbled away. She didn’t have the sense to aim the flashlight ahead of her and walked right into a bulldozer that appeared from the dark. She groped her way around it. The blade—this blade—had pushed her house down, had been stronger than all the years and the people who’d lived here. Stronger than the memories. She pressed her forehead against the cold metal blade, crusted with dirt and bits of concrete.

  From her house.

  Perhaps she knew another vehicle had pulled in, that the headlights had swung over her; she must have heard the slam of a door. Because she wasn’t altogether surprised when two powerful hands closed on her shoulders and turned her around. When Ben pulled her into his arms and held her tighter than anyone had ever held her in all her life.

  “Faith, honey,” he murmured. “I’m sorry, love. Let me hold you. At least let me hold you.”

  Her breath left her lungs in the longest sigh of her life, taking some of the pain with it. She leaned against Ben’s tall, powerful body and laid her cheek against his shoulder. What a strange moment to recognize that she didn’t just feel safe in his arms, she felt at home. She needed this refuge as she’d never needed anything in her life.

  His hands moved up and down her back, soothing, squeezing, loving. His voice, low and gruff, still managed to croon. The words hardly mattered. She pushed herself closer to him.

  Abruptly she began to cry. He kept holding her, kept talking to her, and weirdly these tears seemed to be cleansing.

  Faith realized they’d sunk down to the raw ground, frozen hard. She was cradled on Ben’s lap, his back to the blade of the dozer.

  How had he known she was here? Why had he come?

  Because he did love her, of course. He must. Anyone else would have lost patience with her long ago. Even Char had; she’d been…wary lately, sneaking quick assessing glances she thought Faith hadn’t seen.

  They all think I’ve gone crazy, she thought with a peculiar, tired bubble of amusement. Maybe I have.

  But Ben was here anyway.

  Feeling utterly drained, Faith lay against him. At some point he’d opened his parka and pulled the zippered edges around her, so she was surprisingly warm and the nubby texture of his sweater was under her cheek.

  “I’m sorry,” she mumbled into his chest. “Here I go again.”

  His head moved as though he was looking down at her. “Again?”

  “Off the deep end.”

  “Are you?” he said after a moment, quietly.

  “Yes.” She thought about it. “No. Not the same way. Last time…I hated losing control. But tonight it felt good to cry. I needed to cry.” Feeling inexplicably shy, considering how little she’d ever succeeded in hiding from Ben, Faith added, “I think I could let myself cry because you were here. So, um, thank you.”

  He actually chuckled, the warm air of his breath stirring her hair. “You’re welcome.”

  They sat in silence for a long time; several minutes, anyway. She realized they’d both dropped their flashlights to the ground. The weak beam of hers was swallowed by the night. The brighter beam of his more powerful flashlight glanced off the boards of the barn wall.

  “How did you find me?” she asked.

  “Once I reasoned out that you’d probably heard work had started here, I knew where you’d go.”

  That made sense. But… “Why were you looking for me?”

  It wasn’t as if he’d been moving, but she felt his increased stillness. Finally his hands tightened on her. “I found where Rory was hiding.”

  Faith drew back. “Where?”

  “Gold Bar. Did you know a J. P. Hammond?”

  He hadn’t really been in her circle, and she thought J.P. had been a year or two ahead of her, but… “Yes, from high school.”

  “His aunt owns a run-down log cabin up the Skykomish. I guess the uncle liked to fish, but he died a couple years back and she hasn’t gotten around to selling the place. J.P. let Rory stay there.”

  She groped at what all this meant. “You were still looking.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “I thought it might help you to know what he intended that night.”

  She’d believed herself too drained to feel new apprehension, but she did. Faith sat up, her hand flat on Ben’s chest. She strained to see his face and couldn’t. “Did you learn anything?”

  “Yeah.” He exhaled heavily. “I have his cell phone. It retains the last text message he sent. It’s ugly, Faith.”

  He was remembering the way she’d reacted to the gun when he tried to return it. Faith could tell.

  “I think,” she said carefully, “I’d like to know.”

  He told her, and she sat there on his lap in the darkness absorbing the straightforward proof that Rory wanted, needed, to kill her. She’d already known, in a way, or she wouldn’t have been able to shoot him, but a part of her had never wanted to believe that he could really hate her so much. Not that long ago, she would have grieved anew, and wondered what she’d done to deserve a hate so unrelenting. Now…relief blossomed in her chest. Mixed with it, to her surprise, was outrage.

  It made her voice shake. “Do you know how mad it makes me, to think of how much guilt and…and anguish I wasted on him? I was so afraid…”

  “That you didn’t have to kill him.”

  “Yes. But I did.” The relief was swelling, filling her with an astonishing feeling that might be peace.

  Ben had been right all along. She’d been strong; she’d saved herself from the maniac who had somehow fooled her into marrying him.

  “I wish I knew what I ever saw in him,” she heard herself say. “Why I married him. No.” She frowned. “Not that. Why I stayed with him, when he treated me so badly.”

  He gathered her firmly into his arms and tucked her again inside the wings of his parka. His hands, bare of gloves, had slipped up inside her coat and were splayed across her back. “You took your vows seriously,” Ben suggested.

  “Yes, but I think it was more than that.” She was silent for a moment, listening to the steady, strong beat of his heart. “I wanted to believe it was because I felt rejected by Char, that somehow I was…damaged. But it’s not that simple. I was always the uncertain one, you know. Char would charge ahead, and I’d peer cautiously around corners. I just never had the confidence in myself. What little I did have, he undermined.”

  She felt Ben’s nod. “That’s a classic story. The irony is, he was the one who really lacked confidence. He needed you to be everything to him, to the point where he couldn’t let you exist if you weren’t completely his. It took you a while, honey, because you’re loyal and gentle and wanted to believe in him, but you did fight back, and you won.”

  The words were a balm, even though she didn’t like the reminder that Ben saw her as too gentle to be able to hear a single thing from his past that made him heartsick.

  The time, she thought, had come to fight for him.

  Rather fiercely, she said, “You know, I killed him and I’m glad. Tonight I was sad when I saw the house, but I’ll survive. I’m not the weakling you think I am.”

  “I never thought that.”

  “Yes. You did.”

  “Not that,” he argued. “I thought you deserved a cleaner soul than I have. I should let you go, but I can’t.” He ga
ve her a little shake. “I can’t, Faith. All I can do is try to avoid giving you any more nightmares than you already have.”

  “Do you think I can’t love you if I know too much? Is that it?”

  It was his turn to hesitate. “Maybe,” he admitted at last, his voice even deeper than usual, rougher textured. “I had a pretty crappy childhood. It left me with a temper I didn’t always know how to control and a sense of right and wrong that was more shades of gray than clear-cut black and white. I have to live with things I’ve done, Faith, but you don’t.”

  “But if I’m to love you, I do.” It was that simple.

  One big hand came out from beneath her parka to grip the back of her head. “God, I want to know you love me,” he said hoarsely. “I don’t deserve you, but I need you anyway.”

  How astonishing that she could feel giddy, exultant, like a helium balloon floating free and rising higher and higher into the sky, leaving behind the murk and misery below. She had been right to come here tonight to say goodbye. It was done. And she was desperately in love with a man who loved her, too. A man as vulnerable as she was, with as many self-doubts. Why hadn’t she seen that sooner?

  Shaken, she whispered, “I do love you, Ben. If you can trust me, at least a little…”

  “More than a little.” He sounded as shaken as if he, too, had had to say goodbye to his own rubble of old dreams and regrets. “I love you, honey. So damn much.”

  He kissed her, his mouth cold. Her mouth cold, although they warmed each other quickly. There was nothing skillful about this kiss. It wasn’t so much passionate as hopeful, even amazed.

  You love me?

  I do.

  The stroke of a tongue, the graze of teeth, the seal of their lips, could say so much.

  She felt the moment his mouth curled into a smile that became a laugh when she lifted her head inquiringly.

  “I just lost all feeling in my butt. And, hell, probably some other parts of my anatomy.”

  Now that he mentioned it, her toes had gone from painfully cold to numb.

  “It’s freezing out here,” she pointed out.