by Meg Muldoon
“How much do you know about Maggie Morton?” I said. “Our bartender at The Cupid.”
The old man rubbed his chin, staring hard into the cold and lonely expanse of frozen trees and desert scrub.
“Margaret Morton, eh?” he said. “Let me see here.”
He paused for a long moment, as if he was shifting through stacks of papers and files upstairs in the recesses of his mind.
“She wasn’t born here in Broken Hearts Junction,” he said. “I don’t know where she’s originally from. But I recall first seeing her around here in the late 80s or so. She wasn’t exactly a regular at The Cupid then, but she did show up from time to time. Worked a lot of different jobs. She waitressed a lot. Worked for me for about six months, but quit on account of hunting season that year. I never held that against her, though.”
Late 80s, I thought. That fit into the timeframe of when Marie and Eddie ran away together.
Lawrence rubbed his face some more.
“Maggie’s always done a lot of charity work around town. A good woman, from everything I’ve heard.”
“When she showed up in Broken Hearts, did she come here with anybody?” Fletcher asked. “A guy named Eddie maybe?”
Lawrence looked up, deep in thought.
“No,” he said. “I don’t recall ever seeing Maggie with anybody. She was always kind of a loner. Unusual for a woman, but not unheard of. Never married, never had any kids, far as I know. From what I hear, she likes hunting an awful lot. She’s got a nice hunting cabin out in the badlands where she—”
“Maggie’s got a cabin?” Fletcher said.
Lawrence nodded.
“Right on the north side of The Crooked River,” he said. “She bought it from a buddy of mine back in the day. It’s a really pretty piece of property. You can see it from the highway. I’ll never know how she could afford a place like that on her waitressing salary.”
“Lawrence, you know where this cabin is?” Fletcher said.
The old man looked nervous.
“Aw, it’s been a long while, Fletch,” he said.
He placed a worn finger up to his head, tapping it against his temple.
“Time does strange things up here.”
Then he looked at me.
“But I’ll try to remember,” he said. “For this gal here, I’ll be Frankenstein himself and bring this old brain of mine back to life if I have to.”
I smiled, squeezing his old, wrinkly hand.
Law Dog was one in a million.
Chapter 59
“There,” Lawrence said, tapping a bony finger against the window. “That’s it, I think. That’s where Maggie’s cabin is.”
I craned my neck, looking in the direction of where he was pointing.
I couldn’t see much more beyond a thicket of juniper trees, but the old man tapped the window again.
“I’d bet the farm on it,” he said, grunting.
We’d been driving up and down the highway for over an hour now, looking for something that looked familiar to Lawrence. The sun was low in the sky, close to sinking behind the dusty, snowy buttes in the distance, and we’d come close to calling it quits several times. But Lawrence had been relentless. He wasn’t going to let his fading memory get the best of him, even if it took an entire night of driving for him to remember.
Fletcher tapped the brakes, and the truck slowed as it drifted into the turn lane. We turned down a road that hadn’t been shoveled, but that had deep tire marks gouged into it. We followed the street over and then down a ridge to a large cabin situated by the swift-moving Crooked River.
Fletcher brought the truck to a stop a few hundred yards before the house.
He took off his sunglasses and then looked at Lawrence in the rearview mirror.
Against Fletcher’s protests, the old man had insisted on bringing his old hunting rifle with him in the event that something should happen. He sat there in the back seat, resting the long barrel across his lap.
“I think you should stay here, Law Dog,” Fletcher said.
He glanced over at me.
“You too, Loretta,” he said. “For all we know, Eddie’s in there. And it could be—”
“No,” I said. “I didn’t come out here just to sit in the car.”
Fletcher sighed, rubbing his face.
“Well I didn’t come out here so that you could get hurt,” he said.
I gave him a sharp look.
“You’re crazy if you think I’m letting you go in there alone,” I said.
“It’s just Maggie.”
“That’s why I’m coming with you,” I said. “She’s not Maggie. She’s Marie. And that means she could be capable of anything. Especially if she knows that we’ve found her out.”
“Loretta—”
“Just let her go, Fletch,” Law Dog said, interrupting us. “No use in arguing with a headstrong woman. Especially when she’s offering her help.”
Fletcher looked up in the rearview mirror and sighed.
“You want to come too, Law Dog?” he said. “We can make a parade of it.”
The old man shook his head.
“I’ll be your lookout,” he said, wrapping the blanket tighter around his old, frail body.
“All right then, I’ll leave the heater on for you,” Fletcher said.
He turned his attention back to me, giving me a worried look.
“But for the record, I think Loretta coming along is a bad idea.”
“We’ll remember you said that,” I said, getting out of the truck.
He shot one last long sideways glance at me, maybe hoping that it would somehow convince me to come to my senses.
But he knew me well enough to know I wasn’t going to sit on the sidelines.
Not when we were this close to figuring it all out, and bringing justice to both Clay and Jake Warner.
Law Dog was right.
I was a headstrong woman.
Fletcher didn’t try to convince me otherwise.
We trekked through the dense snow up to the cabin in silence.
Chapter 60
I felt the hair on the back of my neck stand straight up as we approached the cabin.
Music was spilling from its windows, loud enough so that I could identify the song playing from the speakers.
The Eagles’ “Outlaw Man” echoed across the vast and empty-feeling landscape.
The night that Clay got shot, he was listening to the Eagles’ “Out of Control” on the jukebox. In fact, that was what spurred him to get into that fight with Floyd.
That couldn’t have been a coincidence. But what it meant, I didn’t know.
I took in a deep breath of fresh, cold air and shot a glance at Fletcher.
“It’s got to be her,” I whispered. “It has to be Marie.”
We walked up the steps of the porch. They also hadn’t been shoveled, but there was a single pair of footprints leading up to the front door.
Fletcher knocked on the heavy pine confidently with his good hand.
“Maggie?” he said loudly.
I held my breath, listening for any movement.
There wasn’t any. The music continued to play.
Fletcher knocked again.
“Maggie? Are you home?”
I listened again.
Still nothing.
Fletcher knocked again, louder this time. Three firm, no-nonsense, answer-the-door-or-else knocks that would have put the fear of God in anybody.
We waited again.
No answer.
I glanced back at Law Dog down a ways in the truck. I could see the old man sitting on the edge of his seat, watching us.
“Somebody’s in there,” Fletcher finally said. “And one way or another, we’re gonna find out—”
He stopped talking suddenly as the sound of footsteps came from the other side of the door.
A moment later, the music cut out.
Fletcher backed up away from the door slightly, reaching for my hand.
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“Just let me do the talking here,” he whispered. “And stay alert.”
I nodded silently.
A moment later, the door creaked open.
Chapter 61
“Oh, goodness gracious,” she said in that gruff, smoker’s voice of hers. “I hope y’all weren’t waiting out here in the cold for too long.”
“That’s all right,” Fletcher said. “We just got here.”
I took the opportunity while Fletcher spoke to study Maggie Morton’s features in the cold grey light of impending dusk.
Maggie had deep-set brown eyes and sharp cheekbones. Her hair was a dishwater shade of blond, but there was nothing to suggest that that had been her natural shade. She had dark eyebrows. Her lips were thin and when she talked, they revealed a pair of not all-together straight teeth.
All things that I had noticed before about Maggie, having worked with her for the last eight months.
But I just hadn’t thought she was Marie Altier then.
She could have easily been Marie, 25 years later, I wagered. The only thing that didn’t line up just right was the nose. But noses could be altered.
She was wearing an oversized flannel shirt, a brown vest, a pair of faded jeans, and snow boots.
“What are you and Bitters doing here?” she said, catching me looking at her. “Is something wrong? Did something else happen at The Cupid?”
“Well, in a roundabout way, yes,” Fletcher said. “Can we talk, Maggie?”
Her pupils grew large for a split second.
“Sure thing,” she said, pushing the door open for us to enter.
I stamped out the snow from my boots. She closed the heavy, carved pine door behind us as we stepped in the cabin’s entryway. I glanced around, taking in the scenery.
Calling the place a cabin wasn’t exactly accurate. When you called something a cabin around these parts, usually it meant a little shack out in the woods with no electricity or plumbing.
And this place was certainly not that.
Flames crackled in a large hearth at the center of the room. Fancy-looking rustic furniture surrounded it. The ceilings were high and the large windows provided stunning views of the snow-covered buttes in the distance that were just now catching the peachy colors of the sun’s dying rays.
And the cabin was significant for one other reason.
Mounted heads of all sorts of animals hung around the room.
I shivered.
This had been what Marie had betrayed Jake for? A fancy cabin and a new name?
This had been worth leaving her son over?
“This sure is a nice place you’ve got up here,” Fletcher said, leaning back on his boot heels.
Maggie crossed her arms.
“Isn’t it?” she said. “I never thought I’d be able to afford such a nice place when I was younger. But when my uncle died, he left me a nice chunk of money. I’d always dreamed of having a cabin out in the woods where I could go hunting. So I snatched this place up as soon as I got the inheritance check.”
She looked at us again.
“But I’m surprised to see you all here,” she said. “I didn’t think I told you about this place.”
“Lawrence remembered,” Fletcher said. “We were trying to get a hold of you, but you weren’t home.”
She nodded.
But it didn’t take a genius to figure out that she didn’t quite buy what Fletcher was selling.
She went over to one of the windows, gazing out at the pretty landscape as it fell into dusk.
She let out a big sigh.
“You’re here to lay me off, aren’t you?” she said, her voice quivering slightly. “I honestly can’t think of another reason why you two would come all the way out here.”
“That ain’t why we’re here,” Fletcher said.
She turned around to look at us, a confused expression behind her eyes.
Fletcher held up the napkin with the writing on it that he’d been carrying in his coat pocket.
She scanned it, her eyes widening slightly.
“What’s that?”
“We thought you could tell us,” he said. “You asked Amy to write it and slip it to Clay the night he was shot.”
She furrowed her brow, crossing her arms more tightly.
“Now, I don’t like talking bad about folks,” she said, coolly. “But Amy isn’t exactly the most truthful gal you could meet. I don’t know why she would have told you that, but she’s obviously lying.”
“She said you paid her money to deliver it to Clay,” Fletcher said.
Maggie scoffed.
“As in Clay Westwood? Now why would I have done a thing like that? I mean, I like the kid well enough. He’s got them soulful puppy-dog eyes that makes all the girls crazy. But I ain’t no school girl passing notes in class. Why would I do that?”
Fletcher shrugged.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe you were trying to warn him. Because you didn’t want to see your son shot dead.”
In one, quick, unexpected moment, Fletcher had just laid all the cards out on the table.
Maggie snapped her head back, her eyes growing wide as a deer caught in the headlights. Then, after a stunned moment of silence, she broke out in a fit of awkward laughter.
“I’m sorry,” she said, in between chuckles. “It’s just… I don’t know what Amy’s been smoking, but that’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard. Me being Clay’s long-lost mama?”
She let out a chortle.
“Whatever Amy’s on, I want some.”
I bit my lip, feeling my heart sink a little.
Maybe Amy had lied to us.
Maybe Maggie Morton wasn’t anything more than an aging barmaid with a nice cabin.
And here we were, badgering her.
“You’re saying you didn’t know anything about Clay getting shot, or Jake Warner getting shot 25 years ago?”
“Who?”
“Jake Warner,” Fletcher said again.
She shook her head.
“Never met a man by that name.”
“Where were you before you moved to Broken Hearts?” Fletcher said.
“I came from Beaumont, Texas,” she said. “I got married young and divorced a year later. Came out here to make a fresh start.”
She stepped away from the window, closer to us.
“Which I don’t mind talking more with you about sometime, but I think you can appreciate that I ain’t at work now. And I don’t much like my bosses coming into my home, accusing me of something they ain’t being straight with me about.”
She seemed to be genuinely upset now, and the small seeds of doubt deep in my gut started growing.
Maybe we were on the wrong path altogether.
Maybe we needed to go back to Amy and shake the truth out of her some more.
I glanced over at Fletcher.
That resolve he’d had seemed to have given way to doubt, same as me.
“Okay,” he said. “You’re right. We’ve been downright rude. And we’re very sorry about this, Marie.”
Something suddenly flickered in Maggie’s eyes when Fletcher came to that name.
Something unmistakable.Something that we all saw.
A major slip-up.
She’d just laid out her cards too, except she hadn’t meant to.
“You were just trying to save your son, weren’t you?” Fletcher said, going in for the kill. “Why would you lie to us about that?”
There was panic in her eyes now.
The woman practically crumbled in front of us.
“For the last time, Clay Westwood isn’t my son,” she said, gritting her teeth. “Now I think it’d be best if you and Bitters go. Right now.”
“No,” Fletcher said. “Not until you tell us what happened.”
“Not until you tell us where Eddie is,” I said.
Maggie’s jaw dropped open, and all pretenses seemed to dissolve completely as she stared, gaping at us.
“H
ow…?” she started saying. “How do you know his…”
“Just tell us where he is, Marie,” Fletcher said.
“Stop calling me that!” she said in a strained whisper. “I’m not Mar—”
Just then, the hair on the back of my neck stood straight up.
There was no sound. But I could sense it, just as plainly as I could sense when one of The Cupid’s customers needed to be cut off from the bar.
There weren’t three of us in the room anymore.
Someone else had stepped in.
“Eddie,” a voice boomed loudly from behind me. “Now, that’s a name I haven’t heard in a long, long time.”
I struggled to breathe as I felt the cold arrow tip dig into my back.
Chapter 62
I was too scared to look behind me.
Fletcher’s face went whiter than a slab of marble as he eyed the man that had emerged from the narrow hallway to our right.
I just stood there, frozen with fear. Unable to move. My arms and legs number than if I’d been shot with some of Beth Lynn’s Botox.
“It’s okay, Loretta,” Fletcher finally said, reassuringly. “It’s okay, just—”
“No it’s not,” the man holding the arrow at my back said.
The voice was suddenly familiar, though I hadn’t heard enough to place it.
“It’s not okay at all. I gave you a warning Loretta. I tried to keep you out of this. And you disregarded me.”
He pressed the arrow deeper into my back and I gasped in terror.
“I didn’t want it to come to this,” he said. “But you wouldn’t let it be, Loretta. It’s your fault this is happening.”
The voice was so familiar. So horribly familiar.
“Now, just hold on,” Fletcher said, holding out his hands, looking at me with a strong and steady stare. “The police don’t know about any of this. And they don’t have to. We can work something ou—”
“I don’t got to worry about the police,” he said. “Me and the chief’s got something already worked out.”
He stepped closer to me so that I could feel his breath on the back of my neck and could hear the sound of the bow stretching.
I shuddered.
“But I can’t have you two messing up everything I’ve worked for, you understand? Now I’m going to have to ask both of you to come outside with me.”
