by B. J Daniels
“Can’t you even tell me what she looked like? Pretend it’s a description of one of your criminals,” his granddaughter persisted.
He thought for a moment. “She’s tall and slim and has really amazing eyes. The color of…”
“Worn blue jeans?”
He nodded smiling. “She was wearing jeans, a Western shirt, blue I think, and red cowboy boots. Her hair is dark and long and looks natural. And she just learned how to ride a horse.”
Amy seemed pleased to hear that. “Did she say anything about when she would be singing again?”
“No. I think it could be a while.” If ever. “She’s taking a break. Waitressing at a café in Whitehorse.”
“That is so cool,” Amy exclaimed excitedly. “Can you imagine walking into a café in the middle of Montana and JJ was the one who took your order?”
He couldn’t. “Are you still listening to Jett Atkins’s music?” He was afraid if he told her how much he disliked Jett, it would only make her like the man’s music simply out of rebellion.
“I don’t like him as well as JJ.”
Buford was glad to hear that.
“He really needs a new hit.”
“What about that one you played for me?” He’d heard it several times on the alternative radio station since this whole thing started with JJ. He’d been listening to the station realizing it was high time he knew what his granddaughter listened to. “What was the name of that song again?”
“Poor Little Paper Doll.” She said it as if she couldn’t believe he had forgotten. “That song is really old,” she said. “It came out in 2002!” The way she said it, 2002 was centuries ago. He supposed it seemed that way to a fourteen-year-old.
“Hasn’t he had other hits?” He realized how little he knew about the music business, just as he’d been told numerous times lately.
“Not really. Especially lately. His songs haven’t been very good. I read online that his sales are lagging and his last concert didn’t even sell out,” she said.
Interesting, he thought. Jett hadn’t had a hit for a while and his career was faltering. He said he didn’t know why Martin Sanderson had invited him to Montana, but of course he could have been lying about that.
What if Martin was putting some kind of pressure on him?
But what could that have to do with JJ?
Buford shook his head. He was too tired to think about it anymore tonight.
“It’s funny, the songs that did well for Jett were nothing like the ones he’s been singing lately,” Amy said thoughtfully as they went to find her grandmother and see what was for supper. “Maybe he’s writing his own songs.” Apparently seeing that her grandfather had lost interest, she added, “Maybe his songwriter died. Or was murdered.” She’d always known how to get Buford’s attention.
“What’s wrong?” Blythe asked, sitting up in bed to find Logan at the dark window looking out.
“One of the horses got out,” he said. “I must not have closed the gate again. Nothing to worry about.”
She watched him as he reached for his jeans, pulled them on, then leaned over the bed to give her a kiss.
“I’ll be right back.”
Blythe lay back down, content and snug under the soft, worn quilt. A cool breeze blew in one of the windows bringing the sweet new smells of the spring night. She smiled to herself, listening as she heard Logan go down the stairs and out the front door.
Rolling to her side, she placed a hand on his side of the bed. The sheets were still warm from where his naked body had been only minutes before. She breathed in his male scent and pulled his pillow under her head, unable to wipe the smile from her face.
This was a first for her, falling in love like this. She’d thought it would never happen. The men she’d met were more interested in JJ and being seen with her. She’d never met a man like Logan who loved Blythe, the girl she used to be.
A horse whinnied somewhere in the distance. She closed her eyes, wonderfully tired after their lovemaking, and let herself drift.
Logan would be back soon. She couldn’t wait to feel his body next to her again, have him put his arms around her and hold her close as if he never wanted to let her go.
She just hoped he was right about them being safer together. She couldn’t bear it if something happened to Logan because of her. Just as she couldn’t bear being out of his arms.
LOGAN WALKED ACROSS THE starlit yard. No moon tonight, but zillions of stars glittered in a canopy of black velvet. Dew sparkled in the grass, the starlight bathing the pasture in silver.
He had pulled on his jeans and boots, but hadn’t bothered with a shirt. The air chilled his skin and he couldn’t wait to get back to Blythe. He smiled to himself as he thought of her, but then sobered as he remembered that she was a star.
Maybe she thought she didn’t want to go back to it now, but she would. She would miss being up on stage, singing for thousands of screaming fans. Living out here in the middle of Montana certainly paled next to that. Right now, all of this was something new and different—just like him.
She was living her childhood dream of riding off into the sunset on the back of a horse with a cowboy. But that dream would end as the realization of a cowboy’s life sunk in. He didn’t kid himself that even the fact that he’d fallen in love with her wouldn’t change that.
The thought startled him—just as the horse did as it came out of the eerie pale darkness. It was the big bay, and as it thundered past him, he saw that its eyes were wide with fear.
The horse shied away. Something in the darkness had startled the big bay. He’d never seen a rattlesnake near the corral at night, but he supposed it was possible.
Watching where he was walking, he moved closer to the open gate. The barn cast a long dark shadow over most of the corral and the horses inside it.
He heard restless movement. Something definitely had the horses spooked. As he neared the gate, he looked around for the shovel he’d left leaning against the post earlier. If there was a rattler in the corral tonight, the shovel would come in handy. But as he neared the corral, Logan saw with a frown that the shovel wasn’t where he’d left it.
Something moved off to his left in the shadowed darkness of the barn and for a moment he thought it was another one of the horses loose.
The blow took him by surprise. He heard a clang rattle through his head, realization a split-second behind the shovel blade striking his skull.
The force of it knocked him forward. He stumbled, his legs crumbling under him as he fell face-first into the dirt.
BUFORD COULDN’T SLEEP. IT was this damned case. Slipping out of bed, careful not to wake his wife, he went to his computer. Something his granddaughter had said kept nagging at him.
First he checked to see when Jett’s hit song, “Poor Little Paper Doll,” came out. Six months after Tough as Nails broke up. Six months after Jett and JJ were “discovered” by Martin Sanderson.
Did that mean something?
He looked at the time line he’d made of the lives of the former members of the band. The only musician whose life changed at that time was Lisa “Luca” Thomas. She’d apparently come into money.
He checked his watch. It was late, but not that late, he told himself. He was afraid this couldn’t wait. He called his friend who worked in the U.S. Treasury Department and explained that it was a matter of life and death and there wasn’t time to go through “proper” channels.
“Lisa ‘Luca’ Thomas was employed as a songwriter. Ten years ago? She had a very good year with her songwriting.”
“Who paid her the most?”
“Martin Sanderson.”
He hung up and called the deputy he’d had working on the backgrounds of his suspects—the former members of the Tough as Nails band as well as Jett Akins. So far, the deputy hadn’t come up with anything of real interest, but Buford had told him to keep digging until he did.
“I just put what I found on your desk at the office,” the deputy sa
id. “It’s a birth certificate.”
“Give it to me in a nutshell,” Buford snapped.
“Betsy Harper Lee had a baby seven months after the band broke up,” the deputy said.
“And I care about this why?”
“At the time the band broke up, according to Jett, who I called to confirm this, he and Betsy were hooking up. She hadn’t even met her soon-to-be husband. Jett was the father of the baby Betsy was carrying. I suspected that might be the case when I saw the baby’s middle name: Ray, Jett’s real name.
“Did Jett know she was pregnant?” Buford asked.
“He did. He came up with all kinds of reasons he couldn’t ‘do the right thing’ ten years ago, but the bottom line was that he left her high and dry because of his career—and he was with JJ by then.”
Who would Betsy blame for the father of her baby leaving her? Not Jett—but the woman she believed had stolen him from her: JJ.
Now too wound-up to quit, Buford hung up and called the dispatcher to see if any of the rental agencies had gotten back to him.
“There is a message on your desk. Four different rental agencies called. All four of the names you gave them rented vehicles,” the dispatcher said.
“Does it say what kind of cars they rented?” he asked. It did.
Only one had rented a pickup.
BLYTHE WOKE WITH A START. She hadn’t intended to fall asleep, wanting to wait until Logan returned. The bed felt cold, the air coming in the window sending a chill over her bare flesh. She started to pull up the quilt to cover her shoulders and arms when she heard what had awakened her.
The phone was ringing downstairs.
She glanced at the clock on the nightstand next to the bed.
11:10 p.m.?
She blinked in confusion. Logan had gone to check the horses a little after ten. He hadn’t returned from putting the horse back in the corral?
The phone rang again.
Something was wrong. Hurriedly she sat up and swung her legs over the side of the bed to reach for Logan’s robe. As she hurried out of the room and started down the stairs, the phone rang again.
“Logan?” She thought he might have come back in and decided to sleep on the couch for some reason. But he would have heard the phone, wouldn’t he?
The whole house felt empty and cold. Starlight shone in through the windows, casting the living room in a pale otherworldly light as she came down the stairs.
As the phone rang again, it took her a moment to find it. She hadn’t even realized that Logan had a landline. Another ring. She realized the sound was coming from the kitchen. From the moonlight spilling in the window, she saw the phone on the kitchen wall, an old-fashioned wall mount.
She snatched up the phone. “Hello?”
“JJ?” The voice was gruff and familiar and yet it took her a moment to place it. She hadn’t been sure who might be calling this time of the night—and somehow she’d expected it would be Logan, though that made little sense. He’d only gone out to put the horses back in. Unless there was a phone out in the barn.
“I’m sorry to wake you. Is Logan there?” Sheriff Buford asked. There was an urgency to his tone that sent her heart pounding harder.
“No, I…he went out to check the horses and he hasn’t come back. I thought it might be him calling from the barn—”
“Listen to me,” the sheriff snapped. “You have to get out of—”
Blythe heard the creak of the old kitchen floor behind her. As she turned, a hand snatched the phone from her and hung it up. She stumbled back as the kitchen light was snapped on, blinding her for an instant, as the last person she’d expected to see stepped from the shadows.
“What are you…” The rest of her words trailed off as she saw the gun.
Chapter Thirteen
“Thought I’d left? Or thought I’d forgiven you?” Karen asked as she leveled the gun at her.
Blythe remembered that bitter edge she’d heard in Karen’s voice. She hadn’t forgotten or forgiven. “But that truck. It almost hit us both.”
Her old friend smiled. “Nice touch, huh. I thought you would appreciate the drama. I certainly lived through enough of yours when we were kids. Remember all the nights you used to crawl in my bedroom window to get away from one of your mother’s drunk boyfriends?”
Until one night one of Blythe’s mother’s boyfriends followed her and threatened to go after Karen if she ever went to her house in the middle of the night again. That’s when Blythe had started going to her own bed at night with a knife under the pillow.
“You had to know how much I appreciated that. I don’t know what I would have done without you.” She thought she heard a sound outside. Logan could be coming in that door at any moment.
“Until you got the chance to make something of yourself and left me behind,” Karen snapped.
“I didn’t want to. I told Martin I wouldn’t go without you.”
Karen seemed surprised by that. “What did he say?”
“He told me that he’d already offered you a music contract, but that you’d turned it down. Are you telling me he lied about that?”
“It’s true I turned down his offer.”
“Karen, why would you do that? Martin told me that you were his first choice because you were the one with all the talent.”
Tears welled in her eyes. “Because of you. I couldn’t leave you and the band.”
Blythe studied her in the harsh glow of the overhead kitchen light. She could see the clock out of the corner of her eye. Logan should be coming back at any moment.
“He won’t be coming,” Karen said with a smile.
“What did you do to him?” Blythe cried, and took a step toward her.
Karen waved her back with the gun. “Don’t worry. I didn’t kill him. He’s tied up out in the barn. I didn’t want him interrupting our reunion. You did plan on the old band doing that reunion tour, didn’t you, JJ?”
“That was Martin’s doing. Not mine. He knew how much you all resented me. I’m sure the twisted bastard was hoping one of you would want to kill me.”
“Or maybe he knew all along it would be me,” Karen said. She hadn’t let the gun in her hand waver for an instant. There was a determination in her eyes that Blythe remembered from when they were kids.
“I’m going to be someone someday,” Karen used to say. “Those people who look down their noses at me now will regret it one day. I want fame and fortune. I want people to recognize me when I walk down the street and say, ‘Isn’t that her? You know that famous singer.’”
Blythe’s dream had been to get out of the desert trailer park and away from her drunk mother’s boyfriends. She hadn’t dreamed of fame and fortune and yet she’d gotten both.
“You could have had fame and fortune just like you used to say you wanted when we were kids. You turned it down, and not because of me.”
Karen started to argue, but Blythe cut her off.
“Martin always said that what I lacked in talent I made up for in guts. He said it was too bad you were just the opposite.”
“Don’t I look like I have guts?” Karen demanded and took a threatening step toward her. Karen aimed the gun at Blythe’s heart. “If you think I won’t kill you, you’re wrong. I can’t bear the thought of you living the life that should have been mine any longer.”
