Linda Lael Miller Montana Creeds Series Volume 1: Montana Creeds: LoganMontana Creeds: DylanMontana Creeds: Tyler

by Linda Lael Miller

  Kristy heard a siren in the distance. Eased herself onto the edge of her bed, too shaky to stand. “He wouldn’t have been convicted—would he?”

  Floyd sighed. “Probably not,” he said. “But don’t you see, Kristy? He and Louise were barely holding on as it was. A long court case, and all the legal fees—how was he supposed to pull the family through something like that?”

  Kristy bit her lower lip, absorbing that. “You’re not going to kill me?”

  Floyd gave a raw chuckle. “Now, why would I do that?”

  “To shut me up?”

  He shook his head. “You read too many thrillers, kiddo. Branch out a little.”

  “Then I guess you—saved my life.”

  “Not much gets by you,” Floyd said. This was the Floyd she knew and trusted, the one who’d sat at her parents’ kitchen table all those times, drinking coffee and eating apple pie and talking about Vietnam until Kristy’s mother insisted that he and Tim change the subject.

  “How did you know? That I needed help, I mean?”

  “Like I told you before, I make a habit of cruising by here every so often. Hell, this town is so small, I cruise by every house in it, half a dozen times a day. I was about a block away, and old Mrs. Beckings, across the street, popped out of one of those lilac bushes of hers and flagged me down—said she’d just seen a burglar pry open your cellar door and slip inside. Sure enough, that old padlock had nearly rusted through—Freida probably sprung it with a stick or something. I came in the same way, figuring you were probably at work, and would have locked all the doors, and I was about to call out when I heard a scream from up here, so—”

  “That was me,” Kristy said. A shudder went through her as she recalled opening her eyes and seeing a ski-masked figure lying on the bed beside her. She looked at Freida, lying there on the floor. “Did you hear what she said, Floyd?”

  “About me being a fat old fool who wouldn’t leave his wife?” He seemed grimly amused. “Hell, it’s the truth.”

  “Not that,” Kristy said. “She told me she killed Ellie Clarkston. Over Mike Danvers.”

  “Yes, I heard her say that.”

  The siren gave another shrill bleep and, moments later, someone hammered at the front door.

  The paramedics, of course.

  “I’d better let them in,” Kristy said, forcing herself to stand.

  “I’ll do it,” Floyd offered. “You stay here with Freida.”

  Kristy shook her head. Being alone in a room with Freida Turlow, incapacitated or not, was more than she could manage.

  Dylan tore into the driveway, wheels flinging gravel every which way, just as Kristy opened the front door for the paramedics and both of Floyd’s deputies. He left the engine running and jumped out of the truck, vaulting over the fence and darting across the lawn.

  Kristy met him at the bottom of the porch steps.

  One of the paramedics asked if she was all right.

  Kristy looked down at her bloody shirt and nodded that she was.

  Dylan had taken note of the blood, too, of course. Gripping her shoulders, he closed his eyes tightly for a moment, breathing hard. When he looked at her again, he said, “I saw the ambulance—I thought—”

  Kristy dropped to sit on one of the steps.

  Dylan sat beside her, wrapped an arm around her as she began to tremble.

  The story poured out of her: waking up to find she wasn’t alone in the bed, Freida raving and brandishing the gun after she’d pulled off the ski mask, confessing to the Clarkston girl’s murder, Floyd appearing in the literal nick of time.

  If it hadn’t been for footsteps clattering on the stairs just inside, they might have sat there, the two them, for hours, Dylan holding Kristy tightly, Kristy glad to be held. But the paramedics had already loaded Freida onto a gurney, and they were in a hurry to get her into the ambulance and race away.

  Dylan got up first, pulled Kristy off the steps so the EMTs could pass. Floyd walked slowly in their wake, like a man in a stupor.

  Kristy remembered the tender way he’d spoken to Freida, after shooting her, and how he’d covered her with the bedspread in an effort to keep her warm until she could be moved.

  Maybe he had loved Freida Turlow.

  And maybe he was simply the good man Kristy had known for so long.

  “You going to be all right, Floyd?” Dylan asked him huskily.

  “God damn this job,” Floyd muttered, as though no one had spoken to him at all. “God damn it.”

  Kristy touched the sheriff’s arm. She wanted to promise that she’d never tell anyone—besides Dylan—that he’d helped her father bury a body, then cover up the truth about what had happened. She owed him that much, she figured, because if not for Floyd Book, she’d be dead by now. The trouble was, she couldn’t get the words out—they were all snarled up in her throat.

  “It’s all right, Kristy,” Floyd said, turning to look down into her face. “Soon as I get back to my office, I’ll call the state police and turn myself in.”

  Dylan’s jaw dropped. For once, he was the speechless one.

  “Freida’s been blackmailing me all these years—though I didn’t figure out who was behind it until today. It’ll be worth whatever comes now just to be free of that.”

  Kristy nodded.

  One of the deputies had gone with Freida in the ambulance. The other circumspectly took his boss by the arm and ushered him toward a waiting squad car.

  Kristy hurried to catch up. “Freida said there was a diary,” she told Floyd quickly. “She was sure I had it, sure I knew what she’d done.”

  Floyd stopped again, there on the sidewalk, while the deputy stood holding the front passenger door of the squad car open for him. “I have the diary,” he said. “Brett Turlow gave it to me, before he went into treatment. Said he’d been holding it over Freida’s head for years, and now he’d get back at her for signing off on him the way she did.”

  “Then you did know?” Kristy marveled.

  “Hell, no,” Floyd said gruffly, and she believed him. “I figured it was stuff about Freida and me, when we were together. Came close to burning the thing a couple of different times. Now, I’m real glad I didn’t.”

  “Do you think you’ll be arrested?” Kristy asked, as the sheriff stooped to get into the squad car.

  “Maybe,” Floyd said. “Maybe not. I’ll have to resign right away, that’s for sure, and I guess I could lose my pension. Once word gets around that Freida killed a girl over him, Mike Danvers won’t have a chance in hell of getting elected, even though I’ll eat my hat if he had anything to do with the murder. And that means Jim Huntinghorse will be the new sheriff.” The lawman sighed heavily, plunked himself down on the car seat. “I don’t imagine he’s got the first idea what he’s getting into.”

  Kristy reached into the car to lay one hand on Floyd’s shoulder. “Thank you,” she said. “Thank you for saving my life.”

  Floyd leaned forward a little way, to look around Kristy at Dylan, who was standing close by, watching and listening in silence. “You take care of this lady, young Mr. Creed,” he said. “She’s a keeper.”

  “I’ll do it,” Dylan vowed, putting an arm around Kristy and pulling her close against his side.

  As soon as the squad car pulled away from the curb, Dylan hustled Kristy into his truck, and they headed for the clinic, even though she swore up and down she wasn’t hurt.

  X-rays and a thorough examination confirmed what Kristy had known all along—she was going to have some bruises and maybe even a black eye, but she’d suffered no serious injuries.

  By the middle of that afternoon, the reporters were back in town, some posted in front of the sheriff’s office, others practically at Kristy’s front door. A team of evidence technicians, accompanied by high-ranking members of the Montana State Police, had cordoned off her bedroom, in order to take photographs and pluck up fibers with tweezers, she supposed.

  Kristy sat with Dylan at her kitchen table, Winst
on curled on her lap. Now that the immediate danger had passed, she was calm enough to be scared out of her mind. Dylan had put a call through to Logan, while she was being poked and prodded at the clinic, and Logan was already geared up to defend Floyd, if things came to that.

  At that point, no one knew exactly what would happen.

  “I don’t think I can sleep in that room again,” Kristy confessed.

  “I’ll be with you when you do,” Dylan said.

  She gave a completely humorless little laugh. “This is like getting back on a horse right after you’re thrown, isn’t it?”

  “Same principle,” Dylan agreed, with a ghost of a grin. “It won’t be that long until the new place is done. In the meantime, we’ll deal. Get on with our lives.”

  Kristy sucked in a sudden, gasping breath. “I completely forgot about the library!”

  Dylan smiled. “Folks will cope,” he told her. “As soon as the police are done upstairs, we’ll go out to the ranch and get Bonnie. Or I could call Briana and ask her to bring her by.”

  Kristy merely nodded, still distracted. She’d failed to open the library before, once when she had the flu, and couldn’t get out of bed or even grab the phone on her nightstand to call Susan or Peggy for backup, and another time when she’d had a bad case of cramps in the night and thought her appendix was rupturing. But she’d never forgotten.

  Then again, she’d never been held at gunpoint, in her own home, by a woman who had once been her babysitter, either.

  Babysitter.

  Gravesitter.

  Kristy’s shock-addled mind made the leap. Was Freida Gravesitter? Had she been the one to send that scary IM?

  She might never know. And that was a hard thing to accept.

  “What?” Dylan asked, evidently reading her expression.

  Kristy told him her theory.

  He didn’t offer an opinion, one way or another.

  When his cell phone rang, Kristy jumped. He frowned, checked the caller ID panel and then answered.

  “Hello, Logan.”

  Kristy let out the breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding. It wasn’t Sharlene, then, calling to make some threat about taking Bonnie back. The relief was almost as great as when she’d known for sure that Floyd Book wasn’t going to shoot her.

  “Okay,” Dylan said. “Yeah—right. Thanks.”

  Kristy leaned forward in her chair, waiting for him to click the phone shut and say something.

  When he did, the room seemed to tilt crazily to one side, then the other.

  “Freida Turlow died in the ambulance,” he said.

  Tears sprang to Kristy’s eyes. Even with all that had gone on, she hadn’t wanted this to happen.

  “Oh my God,” she whispered, then gulped back a rush of bile. “And Floyd?”

  “There’s an investigation pending,” Dylan answered. “According to Logan, that’s routine, whenever a police officer has to shoot someone.”

  Kristy doubled over, arms wrapped around her middle, and let her forehead rest on the tabletop. Dylan rubbed her back.

  “It’s pretty obvious that Floyd shot Freida in the line of duty,” he told her quietly. “He isn’t under arrest or anything like that. But he’s got a lot of questions to answer.”

  Kristy straightened. Looked him in the eye. “He’s told them that he helped my dad bury that body, and then kept the secret. Won’t he be in trouble for that?”

  Dylan considered. “Probably. But I don’t think he’ll go to jail, Kristy. Neither does Logan.”

  “What will happen to him, then?”

  “I don’t know,” Dylan answered. “Logan should be able to shed a little more light on that, once he gets here. He’ll stick close to Floyd until the state police are through questioning him, though.”

  Floyd Book, being questioned by the state police.

  It was incomprehensible.

  Floyd was an Eagle Scout leader. He was a member of the Rotary and Lions clubs. He taught Sunday-school classes, and he’d been a good husband to Dorothy, at least since her accident.

  What would become of Dorothy, if the state decided to prosecute Floyd for the cover-up? She and Floyd had no children, no immediate family, as far as Kristy knew.

  “This is awful,” Kristy said, starting to get out of her chair. “Floyd’s wife—she’s in a wheelchair and—”

  Dylan eased her back down. “Word’s out by now,” he said gravely. “The neighbors will look after Dorothy. This is Stillwater Springs, remember?”

  Kristy nodded. For all the town’s faults, collective and individual, people rallied around whenever trouble came. When she’d come home from college for her parents’ funerals—first her mother’s, then her dad’s—she’d barely been able to navigate the house for all the concerned friends who’d come to sit with her, and the casseroles and bakery goods they’d brought had crammed the freezer to capacity.

  Dylan left his chair to make her a cup of tea.

  Briana arrived, bringing Bonnie and Sam, and Logan got there soon after that.

  Kristy, glad to have something to do, filled Bonnie’s sippy cup and put her into the playpen where, miracle of miracles, she sat quietly, drinking her milk and finally toppling over on one side to sleep.

  Watching, Kristy wondered if she’d ever be able to sleep again, especially in that room upstairs, where she’d almost died.

  Logan joined Briana and Dylan at the table, all of them drinking coffee and talking quietly.

  “I know you’re probably pretty upset right now,” Logan said solemnly, as Kristy sat down at the table. “But I need you to tell me what happened here today, Kristy. Floyd’s answers were pretty jumbled—he was having chest pain, from the stress, so the police decided to hospitalize him overnight.”

  This brief speech earned him a glare from Dylan, which he ignored.

  Slowly, carefully, Kristy repeated the awful story, aware that it was one she’d have to tell again, and yet again, possibly under oath in a court of law or before some investigating committee.

  Logan listened without interruption, his face revealing none of what he was thinking.

  When Kristy finished, he nodded, as though she’d confirmed something he’d already deduced.

  “He saved my life,” Kristy said. “Won’t that carry some weight with the judge or the grand jury or whoever decides things like this?”

  “Most likely,” Logan replied.

  “Why can’t they just let him go?”

  Logan sighed. “He’s a cop, Kristy. Sworn to uphold the law. He helped dispose of a body and then covered up what happened. He did give me Freida’s diary—I haven’t had time to do more than scan a few pages, but there’s enough in there to convince anybody that he’s known, at least since that journal came into his possession, what happened to Ellie Clarkston. And it’s possible, if the prosecutor gets involved, that the state will claim he was covering up for Freida, the way he did for your dad, because they were involved.”

  “He told me he hadn’t read the diary, Logan, and I believed him.”

  “He also said,” Dylan put in, “that she’d been blackmailing him for years, anonymously, because she’d seen him helping Tim bury that drifter. What do you suppose she was doing out there in the dark, anyhow?”

  “Kids used to roam all over the countryside at night,” Logan reminded his brother. “We did.” He reached over, took Briana’s hand, squeezed it lightly. “If she had a reason, it’ll be in the diary.”

  Kristy nodded. “What about the statute of limitations?” she asked, clutching at straws. “Hasn’t it run out?”

  “There is no statute of limitations on murder,” Logan told her.

  “But Floyd didn’t—”

  Just then, one of the evidence techs came down the rear stairway and announced that they were finished, and they’d be leaving now. The detectives stayed, however, and battered Kristy with quiet, pointed questions, and she was glad Logan and Dylan were there, and Briana, too.

  Dyla
n and Briana offered silent moral support, and Logan made sure Kristy’s rights were respected.

  Logan didn’t mention the diary to the police, Kristy noticed. Clearly, he wanted to read and perhaps photocopy it before turning it over to the authorities.

  The detectives thanked Kristy politely and left.

  Once they were gone, the house seemed to let out its breath.

  Briana glanced at her watch. “Alec and Josh are at the pool,” she said. “I’d better pick them up.” She leaned over to kiss Logan, then stood. “See you at home.”

  He nodded, his eyes shining as he looked at her.

  At the door, Briana paused, swept Kristy, Dylan and Bonnie up in a glance. “You’re welcome to come and stay at our place, if you’ve got the heebie-jeebies or anything.”

  “Thanks,” Dylan said, when Kristy didn’t speak. “But we’ll be okay.”

  Briana hesitated, as though she’d like to argue, then went out.

  “You’re sure you don’t want to come out to the ranch for a while?” Logan asked. “It’s still your home, too, you know.”

  Dylan smiled, shook his head.

  Logan stood to go.

  “If you hear anything about—about Floyd, will you call?” Kristy asked.

  “I’ll call,” Logan confirmed.

  He’d barely stepped out the door before Kristy was on the kitchen phone, dialing the sheriff’s home number. She wouldn’t stop obsessing about Dorothy Book until she knew the woman wasn’t alone, stunned by the news that her husband was under investigation and in the hospital for chest pain. If indeed she’d heard the news at all. Poor Dorothy might be sitting there, waiting for Floyd to get off work, like any other day, with no idea what had happened.

  Carla Adams, a neighbor of the Books’, answered on the second ring. “If you’re a reporter—” she began tersely.

  “It’s Kristy Madison,” Kristy said.

  “Kristy,” Carla said. “Good heavens. Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine. The question is, how’s Dorothy?”