Corralled

by B. J Daniels

  “Why?” Laura cocked her head almost in amusement. There was intelligence in her blue eyes but also a brightness that burned too hot.

  “Do you hate Hoyt that much?”

  Laura looked surprised. “I love Hoyt. I will always love him. Haven’t you ever loved someone too much and realized they could never love you as much?”

  Aggie hadn’t. Other than her job. “Let me guess, everything was fine until he adopted the boys.”

  Laura’s face darkened. “I wasn’t enough. First it was just three boys, then three more. He said he had enough love for all of us.” She scoffed at that.

  “You could have just divorced him and made a life for yourself.”

  Laura smiled. “Who says I haven’t?”

  “But you couldn’t let go. You’ve been killing his wives.” There was no accusation in her voice. She was just stating what they both knew.

  Laura looked down at the thick gnarled wood cane in her hand, then up at Aggie. “If I couldn’t have him, no one else could either.”

  “Why didn’t you just kill him?”

  The woman looked shocked at the idea. “I loved him. I couldn’t do that to him.”

  But killing his wives was another matter apparently. “I’m curious. How did you get away that day at the lake?”

  Laura frowned and waved a hand through the air as if the question was beneath Aggie. “I told Hoyt I was afraid of water, that I couldn’t swim. He believed anything I told him. I grew up in California on the beach and learned to scuba dive in college. I set everything up beforehand, the scuba gear, the vehicle on a road a few miles from the spot where I would go overboard. I simply started an argument with Hoyt and let the rest play out. When he realized that I’d filed for divorce, it made him look guilty. I thought he would never remarry. I was wrong.”

  She shrugged, and Aggie realized what Laura had been able to do since then was much more impressive. Laura had dedicated her life to making sure Hoyt found no happiness with another woman.

  Just as Aggie had dedicated hers to chasing the truth. Other people had balance in their lives, they had their job, their family, their friends, but not her and Laura. They’d both sacrificed their lives for something intangible: a cockeyed sense of being the only ones who could get justice.

  Was this woman’s quest any crazier than her own? Aggie had lost the job she loved because she couldn’t let go of that thin thread of suspicion that something wasn’t quite right about Laura Chisholm’s death.

  Had she been able to let go, where would she be now? Certainly she wouldn’t be wanted for murder, nearly committed to a state mental hospital and about to die at the hands of the real killer.

  And Laura? Had she felt loved, wouldn’t she still be with Hoyt, raising six sons, getting old with him in that huge house on the ranch?

  “We don’t choose this, it chooses us,” Aggie said seeing the truth of it.

  Laura nodded as if she had been thinking the same thing.

  Then again Laura might simply be crazy.

  The difference now was that Laura would win.

  “Has it been worth it?” That was the real question Aggie had wanted to ask. She watched Laura lift the thick wooden cane and step toward her.

  “Worth it?” Laura asked as she closed the distance between them. A smile curled her lips, her eyes now bright as neon. “What do you think?”

  Aggie’s last thought was Emma. She said a quick prayer for her. The fourth wife of Hoyt Chisholm didn’t stand a chance against a woman this obsessed.

  LOGAN WOKE TO FIND HIS BED empty. For just an instant, he thought he’d dreamed last night. But Blythe’s side of the bed was still warm, her scent still on his sheets. He heard the soft lap of water in the tub of the adjacent bathroom, then the sound of the water draining, and relaxed.

  A few moments later Blythe came out, her wonderful body wrapped in one of his towels. He grinned at her and pulled back the covers to pat the bed beside him.

  “Sorry, but I have to call the Flathead sheriff, then get to work, and so do you,” she said, reaching for her clothes. “Zane said you have Emma duty today.”

  He couldn’t believe she was really going to go to that waitress job, but he was smart enough not to say so. With a groan, he recalled that she was right. He had Emma duty today. He much preferred working on the ranch than hanging out at the house. Today though, he much preferred staying in bed with Blythe. He reached for her, thinking they had time for a quickie.

  She giggled, pretending to put up a fight.

  At the sound of a vehicle coming up the road, they both froze. “Are you expecting anyone this morning?” she whispered.

  He shook his head and reluctantly rose from the warm bed to pull on his jeans. Going to the window, he looked out and felt a start. It was a sheriff’s department patrol SUV coming up the road. He watched it grow closer until he could see the sheriff behind the wheel. She had someone with her.

  He swore under his breath as he hurriedly finished dressing.

  “Who is it?” Blythe asked sounding worried.

  “The sheriff. She has someone with her. I’ll go see what they want.”

  “You know what they want.”

  He gave her a smile he hoped was reassuring, kissed her quickly and went downstairs. He’d wanted to call the sheriff before anyone found out that JJ was staying with him. He figured it would look better for Blythe.

  As the patrol car came to a stop in front of his house, he stepped out onto the porch. “Sheriff,” he said as McCall Crawford climbed out. He felt as if he’d seen too much of her during the mess with his father’s former wives.

  “Logan.”

  His gaze went to the big older man working his way out of the passenger seat. He was big-bellied, pushing sixty, his face weathered from years in Montana’s sun.

  The man merely glanced in Logan’s direction before reaching back into the patrol car for his Stetson. As he settled it on his thinning gray head, he slammed the patrol car door and stepped toward the house.

  “This is Sheriff Buford Olson from the Flathead County,” McCall said. “We’re here about Jennifer James. JJ?”

  Logan nodded as the door opened behind him and Blythe stepped out.

  JETT ATKINS GROANED AT THE sound of someone knocking on his motel room door. It was that damned sheriff, he thought as he went to the door. Sheriff Buford Olson acted as if he wasn’t all that sharp. But Jett wasn’t fooled.

  He hurriedly hid the suitcase he’d had by the door. The sheriff hadn’t told him he could leave town yet—even after Martin Sanderson’s death had been ruled a suicide. It was that damned JJ. The sheriff had said he was waiting for the coroner’s report.

  All Jett knew was that he’d had enough of this motel room, this town, this state. He wanted to put as much distance as he could from whatever Martin had been up to with JJ’s former band members.

  But when he opened the door, it wasn’t the sheriff. Loretta stood in the doorway.

  “What are you—”

  She didn’t give him a chance to finish as she pushed past him. He closed the door and turned to find her glaring at him. It reminded him of all those years ago when the two of them had dated. Well, he wouldn’t really call it dating. More like what people now called hooking up.

  “Where’s JJ?” she demanded.

  “What are you talking about? She’s dead.”

  “You haven’t seen the news today?”

  He hadn’t. He was sick of sitting in this room with nothing to do but watch television. Last night he’d packed, determined to leave town no matter what. Then he’d finished off a half quart of Scotch and awakened with a hangover this morning. He hadn’t even turned on the TV.

  “No, why?” he asked now. Loretta said she sang in a bar and nightclubs. He knew she was just getting by. He’d shuddered at the thought, since it was his greatest fear. At least she hadn’t been famous and had the rug pulled out from under her. Most people hadn’t even heard of her or Tough As Nails.

/>   “That body that was found in JJ’s rental car turned out to belong to some woman from Arizona. The cops think the woman stole JJ’s car and crashed it. I heard just now that they are investigating the crash as a homicide.”

  He had to sit down. He lowered himself to the edge of the bed. “You’re saying someone tried to kill JJ but killed some other woman instead? Then where is JJ?”

  “That’s what I just asked you.”

  “I haven’t seen her. She was gone by the time I reached Martin and found him dead…” He stared at Loretta. “I wasn’t joking about one of you wanting her dead.”

  Loretta rolled her eyes. “If I wanted to kill her, it would be more personal than a car wreck. I’d want to be the last person she saw before she died.”

  He shuddered. “Maybe you were.”

  She scoffed at that. “I vote for Betsy. That sweet act of hers? I’ve never bought it. It’s women like that who kill, you know.”

  He didn’t know. He figured any of the three were capable of it. Especially if they acted together.

  “Or Karen,” Loretta said, as if she’d been giving it some thought. “After all, JJ was her best friend—or so she thought. Also, I heard that Martin went to Karen first.” She nodded at his surprise. “Karen had the talent. But I heard she turned him down flat, saying she could never desert JJ.”

  Jett let out a low whistle. “Then JJ deserted her without a thought.”

  Loretta shrugged. “There is another possibility,” she said eyeing him intently. “You.”

  He laughed. “Why would I want to kill JJ?”

  “According to the tabloids, she dumped you.”

  “Do you really believe anything you read in them?” he challenged. “Anyway, that was just the spin Martin put on it after I dumped JJ.” He could see Loretta was skeptical. “You have no idea what it’s like to date someone with her kind of star power. It was exhausting.”

  “She did outshine you, didn’t she?” Loretta said with no small amount of satisfaction.

  “Well, whoever tried to kill JJ…apparently they failed,” Jett said. “And now she’s disappeared.”

  “So it would appear,” Loretta said mysteriously.

  “If you know where she is, then why were you asking me?” he demanded.

  She smiled. “I just wanted to see if you knew where she was. You don’t. She’ll turn up. She owes me for this mess and I intend to get my money out of her, one way or another.” With that she left, slamming the door behind her.

  “WE WERE GOING TO CALL YOU this morning,” Logan said as Sheriff Buford Olson’s gaze went to Blythe.

  “Is that right?” he said, not sounding as if he believed it for an instant. “I think we’d better sit down and talk about this.”

  “Do you mind if we come in?” McCall asked.

  Logan shook his head. “Come on in. I’ll get some coffee going.”

  “So why don’t we start with you telling me who you are,” Buford said after they’d all taken chairs and cups of coffee at the kitchen table.

  Blythe braced herself as she looked into the sheriff’s keen eyes. “My name is Jennifer Blythe James, but I think you already know that.”

  “JJ,” he said. “Okay, now tell me what you’re doing here.”

  “Getting on with my life,” she said.

  “You do realize that you left the scene of a death without calling anyone, then left the scene of an accident that resulted in another death, not to mention let everyone believe you were dead.”

  “At first I panicked,” she admitted. She had felt no need to clear her name. Not her name, JJ’s. How strange. JJ had become a separate persona over the past ten years. Blythe had lost herself and only found that girl she’d been the other night at a country-western bar dancing with Logan Chisholm.

  But she doubted the Flathead sheriff would understand that.

  “I’d been getting death threats and having some close calls on my music tour,” she continued. “I was convinced someone was trying to kill me. Martin had made it appear that the incidents were nothing more than a publicity stunt. I left the tour and came to Montana to try to talk him into letting me out of my contract. I’d had enough.”

  Sheriff McCall Crawford sipped her coffee and didn’t say a word. Clearly, she’d just come to bring the Flathead sheriff.

  “Did you talk him out of it?” Buford asked.

  Blythe shook her head. “I thought I had. But that night when I returned to the house, he told me he had contacted the members of my former band and was going to make me do a reunion tour with them if I didn’t go back on my music tour. I told him to stuff it and left the room.”

  “Did you hear the shot that killed him?”

  “No, that house is too large, I didn’t hear a thing. I didn’t know he was dead until I came back down to the living room the next morning and saw him.”

  “Saw him and the note pinned to him,” Buford said. “What did the note say?”

  She had to quell a shudder at the memory. “You’re next.”

  The sheriff studied her. “Why did you take the note?”

  “I don’t know. I grabbed it before I thought about what I was doing, wadded it up and stuck it in my pocket. I guess it made everything a little less real. Then I realized that whoever had killed him could still be in the house. So I ran. I thought if I could get far enough away from there, go some place that no one knew about…”

  “That was pretty shortsighted,” Buford said.

  She nodded and glanced at Logan. “I just wanted to escape my life for a while. By the way, Logan didn’t know anything about what I was running from or even who I was.”

  “Did you recognize the handwriting on the note?” Buford asked.

  A chill snaked up her spine. Hadn’t she known how vindictive Martin was? How deceitful? The man had made his fortune using other people and their talents.

  “No,” she said. “I just assumed the person who’d killed him was the same one who’d been threatening me. Now I think he might have written the note himself.”

  “Why would he do that?” Buford asked.

  “He wanted me to fear for my life. I think he killed himself hoping I would be under suspicion for his death.” If it hadn’t been for fate and a car thief, she might have been arrested.

  “You’re that sure he wrote the note,” the sheriff said. “What about his other guests?”

  “Other guests?” she echoed.

  “You weren’t aware your former band members were staying in the guesthouse just out back?”

  She could feel the color drain from her face. Reaching for her coffee, she took a drink, burning her tongue.

  “So you didn’t know that Karen, Loretta and Betsy had already arrived?” he said.

  She shook her head.

  “Is it possible one of them found the body and wrote the note?” he asked.

  Blythe couldn’t speak. She looked from her coffee cup to him and knew he saw the answer in her eyes.

  “You said there had been death threats before this? Do you have copies of those?” he asked.