“Hazel! You of all people should know I have no interest in being a gangster’s moll.”
“Would there be interest if Loudon wasn’t a gangster?”
“That’s sort of like asking what happened before once upon a time. Who knows?”
Her companion met that evasive comment with a mysterious little smile.
By now they had entered the scalloped foothills, and Hazel fell silent, enjoying the sun-luscious day and the magnificent view. The temperature dropped somewhat as they climbed higher, but nothing dramatic.
At one point near the end of the winding ascent up Old Mill Road, they rounded a tight bend and glimpsed a gorge below with white water frothing down it. Both women were almost reluctant when the road finally dead-ended at the Hupenbecker cabin.
“Just like I thought,” Constance said, nodding toward the cabin. “Front door standing wide open and the lock broken. Good thing I brought another.”
Before they went inside, the two friends walked around back so Hazel could visit the creek and the old stone bridge. It had rained earlier, up here in the mountains, and mud daubers were still active in the puddles.
“They towed Loudon’s car out, I see,” Constance pointed out. “My God, the tow truck completely tore up the ground.”
But the nastiest surprise was reserved for when the two women poked their heads inside the cabin. The place had been so thoroughly “searched” it was actually damaged. Several floorboards had been pried up and carelessly tossed aside.
“Those idiotic goons,” Constance fumed. “I’ll be sending them a bill. That is, if I can figure out whom to send it to.”
Hazel’s reaction was more speculative than angry.
“In my long experience with the state troopers and county cops,” she told Constance, “they’ve been quite professional and do everything according to Hoyle. This wasn’t their work.”
“Probably federal agents,” Constance suggested. “I assume that’s who was following me, too. The guy with Ulrick was FBI.”
“Maybe. Did you ask to see any IDs?”
A doubt had seeped into Hazel’s tone. Constance glanced at her, startled. “Actually, no. That was dumb, wasn’t it? But who else would it be?”
Hazel tossed her own words right back at her. “What happened before once upon a time? It sure looks to me like somebody is mighty danged eager to find Quinn Loudon. Or something they think Loudon has or had.”
Those words made Constance recall how Roger Ulrick had placed such great emphasis on finding out if Loudon gave her anything. She wondered if it was that “ace in the hole” Loudon mentioned. The same thing they were searching for under those torn-up floorboards….
Lost in a complicated labyrinth of inner questions, Constance placed the new padlock in the hasp and secured the cabin.
Everybody talks about the weather, Hazel told herself, but nobody does anything about it.
Well, she was a McCallum, and the McCallums were doers, not talkers.
They were ten miles down the road while everybody else was taking a vote on when to leave. And McCallums never let themselves be daunted by the size of the task at hand.
She had no desire to change the weather—it suited her just fine, especially right now. But as to her beloved town of Mystery, that was a different matter altogether.
She glanced over at Connie’s pensive, pretty face as they drove back down to the valley. She admitted to herself that this young filly was a real challenge. However, Hazel thrived on challenges; indeed, they were the savory sauce at the banquet of life. The meal would be bland without them.
Hazel had a plan. Her fires were banked, but not her ambition. She wanted, more than anything else, to see Mystery go on being the kind of town it was always meant to be.
But she had to face some hard facts. She was the last McCallum, and she would leave no line behind her. Only one thing could keep Mystery from obliteration under an influx of outsiders and greedy developers: New blood that must be carefully mixed with old. She meant to create new families from the old ones already committed to the town.
She had composed a mental list of good folks in Mystery who needed hitching up. Rodeo champ A.J. Clayburn had been first on that list, and now he was happily married—even a proud new papa. Second on the list was this troubled beauty now driving them down the mountain.
She fiercely admired Constance. That gal lived up to her name: steady and faithful. Rather than flounder from notion to notion, as so many of the younger generation did these days, she had set her sights early on becoming a successful real-estate mandarin. And she’d done it.
The big problem right now, Hazel admitted, was finding just the right man for her.
Doug Huntington had been an outright disaster. And local fellows like Paul Robeck, “nice guys” and all, just couldn’t stir Connie’s feminine passions. The man who finally reined in this little filly would have to be an outsider. An exceptional one, at that.
But Hazel trusted in serendipity. Her Prussian blue gaze turned to the granite-peaked mountains surrounding them.
She recalled the special tone in Connie’s voice every time she mentioned Quinn Loudon, and Hazel’s sly little smile was back.
Chapter 6
Quinn Loudon was on her mind when Constance went to bed on Saturday night; he was still there, like a tune she couldn’t shake, when she woke up early on Sunday morning. He never really left her thoughts all through the nearly sleepless night.
Exactly why, she couldn’t say. Obviously her ordeal had been frightening, but it wasn’t just fear she felt. Not for herself, anyway. Something about Loudon, or his plight, made her fear for him.
She had nothing but his word that he was being framed—that, and something she’d never really believed in: so-called “women’s intuition.” Where was it when she fell for Doug Huntington’s phony lines? Nonetheless, she felt it now. Either it was real, or she had been duped yet again by a convincing criminal.
For two nights in a row she had slept poorly, and it required a cold shower and plenty of black coffee to get herself kick-started and chase the cobwebs from her mind. Often she met her family at church on Sunday, then went home with them afterward for breakfast. But this morning she made a beeline to the TV set. The station in Helena featured an “Early Bird Advisory” at seven and eight o’clock, state news, local weather, and sports.
Remote in hand, she plumped down on a corner sofa cluttered with throw pillows her mother had made for her, thick with satin stitch and French knots. She wondered if the Loudon story would lead the news again. Instead, the newscaster—an info-babe with sculpted blond hair—droned on and on about a spectacular twenty-two car pile-up on the interstate near Ironwood.
Constance tuned out the quick-paced images of twisted metal and overturned vehicles. Impatience made her antsy, so she immediately stood up again and began watering her plants, one eye on the TV screen.
Her home was a tidy little two-bedroom of vine-covered brick, nothing elegant but comfortable and efficient. It was actually the yard sprawling all around it that had sold her on the place—a yard that was also home to the most magnificent white-birch trees in Mystery Valley. She had plenty of privacy, her nearest neighbor a quarter-mile away. Yet downtown Mystery was only a ten-minute drive.
She was tilting the water can over a Boston fern in a macramé hanger when the newscaster’s voice suddenly riveted her attention.
“—latest on the widening manhunt for Quinn Loudon, the Assistant U.S. Attorney who escaped from authorities in Kalispell on Friday in a hail of bullets.”
A picture of Loudon filled the screen for a few seconds. Constance watched, nervously chewing on her lower lip, while the story cut to a press-conference segment filmed late yesterday. A federal prosecutor identified as Dolph Merriday, the same spokesman she recalled from the radio report on Friday, was speaking into a clutter of microphones. The podium featured the seal of the U.S. Justice Department.
“We now have ample evidence that Lou
don is an incorrigible criminal. Even as I speak, this fugitive’s probably out robbing poorboxes somewhere to finance his getaway.”
“But Mr. Merriday,” a reporter spoke up, “today I interviewed Quinn Loudon’s legal counsel, Lance Pollard. What about Loudon’s claim that Sheriff Cody Anders’s unexplained disappearance is linked to the investigation, and that he and Loudon overheard a bribe between two key legal players in Montana road construction?”
Constance frowned at the sarcastic twist of Merriday’s mouth.
“Yes,” he replied, “I’ve heard that claim, too. Perhaps this supposed ‘bribe’ was in fact what the paranormal experts call a clairvoyant experience?” he suggested with obvious scorn. “Or far more likely, it’s an obvious and pathetic attempt to point the finger of blame elsewhere.”
The prosecutor wore a blue suit, no doubt chosen, she told herself, to accent his silver hair and project an aura of unassailable authority. And no doubt he’d succeeded.
But something about Merriday’s remarks—on TV and radio—niggled at her. She couldn’t understand this great effort to spin the story so it always emphasized Quinn Loudon’s supposed criminal nature, rather than his alleged crimes. She realized, of course, that all lawyers attacked the moral character of their adversaries. But they did it in the courtroom, usually, not over the airwaves.
It was almost as if they wanted to convict him through the media as soon as possible. Perhaps, an inner voice suggested, that makes it much easier to quell the concern if Quinn Loudon doesn’t turn up alive. Just one more hardened criminal who “got his.”
The info-babe donned a playful smile and bounced to a fluff piece about a hot-dog eating contest in Billings. Constance turned off the TV set. She admonished herself against drawing unwarranted conclusions about Quinn Loudon’s innocence.
She tried to work in the office she’d set up in the spare bedroom. Most pressing was a sheaf of legal forms she needed to fill out for a sale she had closed last week on a nice little A-frame cottage in the south valley. But she simply couldn’t concentrate, right now, on the legal niceties of escrow accounts and variable mortgage rates.
She decided to run some errands in town. She’d been so busy with this year’s surprise influx of home buyers—not to mention surprise abductions at gunpoint—that almost everything in her refrigerator was near or past the sell-by date. Since the pharmacy was open on Sunday, she decided she should also renew the prescription for her allergy medicine.
She had parked the rental car on the concrete apron in front of her attached garage. As she eased down the serpentine driveway, she searched everywhere for any sign of the gray sedan that had followed her—or so she still believed—yesterday.
However, the only vehicle she spotted on the road to town was Billy Bettinger’s old rattletrap pickup and drilling rig. Billy had dug water wells throughout the valley ever since she could remember. She waved as he flashed past her, and he honked back.
Seeing Billy coaxed the day’s first smile onto her lips. The shameless but harmless old lech never saw her without letting loose a sharp wolf whistle.
“Prettiest gal in the valley,” he always insisted. “All them curves, and me with no brakes.”
“Big talk,” she had shot back once in a challenging tone, and Billy had blushed to the tips of his sunburned ears.
Thanks in part to the unseasonably warm weather, Mystery was already fairly busy when she angle-parked in front of Omensetter’s Pharmacy on Main Street. Newcomers and longtime residents mingled on the sidewalks and frequented the various shops and the brand-new supermarket.
She quickly realized, from Wallace Omensetter’s remarks as he filled her prescription, that the brief link to Mystery had gotten the Quinn Loudon story noised about all over the valley.
“Saw your sign on the news, Connie,” he informed her. “Got yourself a free plug on TV, huh?”
“My sign?” she repeated, confused at first.
Wallace wore a longhorn mustache, the kind she saw only in cornball TV commercials featuring “Old West” characters.
“Sure. Yesterday, or actually last night on the late news. They showed the cabin where that fellow Jim Loudon holed up. I recognized the Hupenbecker place right off.”
“Quinn,” she corrected him automatically. She must have gone to bed before that broadcast.
As Wallace handed her the medicine, he bent close to her over the counter, his lopsided mouth grimly self-important under the silly mustache.
“Around here,” he said in a confidential hush, though the store was empty except for them, “rumors are always thicker ’n toads after a hard rain. But I heard this straight from Constable Lofton. This guy Loudon? He’s a notorious bank robber. You watch yourself. Lofton thinks he might even have infiltrated the town in disguise.”
Her skeptical dimple appeared for a moment. But she gave him a solemn nod, trying to keep a straight face. She wasn’t sure exactly what “notorious bank robbers” looked like these days. But she suspected that one would stand out in this valley populated by ranchers, townies, and diva-shaded yuppies like a rhinestone yo-yo.
“Thanks for the tip,” she replied from a poker face. “I’ll be careful.”
But as she left the pharmacy, Constance felt a stab of guilt. There had been several messages on her answering machine that she hadn’t bothered answering yet. Now she realized that at least one of them might have been her mom, worried by that graphic of the cabin and her real-estate sign.
She decided to stop by her parents’ place before she went shopping at the supermarket. Five minutes later, she parked alongside the curb in front of their big white frame house on Silver Street.
The moment she opened the kitchen door, she realized she had guessed right. Dorothy Adams turned from the stove and sent her oldest child a familiar glance that mixed one part relief with two parts reproof.
“Constance Adams, if you weren’t so big I’d fan your britches right now! What’s the big idea of not returning my calls?”
Calls. Plural. She felt more guilt lance through her. Constance crossed the big, cheery room and gave her mom a hug, feeling kitchen-warmed skin through her mother’s print dress.
“Beth Ann called last night, and I told her I was okay,” she replied. “Didn’t she tell you?”
“She grunted something about you still being alive, yes. But I wanted to talk to you myself.”
Constance watched her mother drop homemade dumplings into a pot of simmering chicken broth. “Your dad’s still at church,” she added. “He’s refereeing the dartball tournament against Mount Zion.”
Seven-year-old Mickey, the youngest, ran into the kitchen making fire-truck noises. He circled his big sister twice, then abruptly halted with an ear-piercing squeal meant to sound like brakes.
“Lookit my new shirt, Connie! Aunt Janet gived it to me.”
“Gave, honey, not gived.” Constance read the T-shirt message out loud: “Bee it ever so bumble, there’s no place like comb.”
She laughed. “That’s cute, sweetie.”
“Girls are sweeties,” he corrected her. “I’m a fireman!”
Mickey zoomed off to put out fires elsewhere in the house. Constance could hear Beth Ann and Pattie bickering in the next room. Beth Ann poked her head into the kitchen just long enough to taunt smugly, “See, Connie? Didn’t I tell you? ‘Beware the eighth house!’”
She was gone again before Constance could answer.
“It does give the heart a jupe,” her mom agreed, turning from the stove and wiping her hands on her apron. “My goodness, Connie, what if you and your client had been up there when that…that man was there?”
Constance had debated telling her mother more about what happened. However, the worry in her eyes scotched that idea.
But something else occurred to her. Beth Ann, too, must have assumed the client was not Quinn Loudon. She had no reason to assume otherwise.
Why had she, Constance, been left out of the details relayed to the media?
After all, she gave the Montana State Troopers a complete account of events.
She was grateful, of course, to have been spared the unwanted publicity. But it hardly seemed likely anyone would have deliberately spared her for benevolent reasons.
Unless, that inner voice whispered, somebody doesn’t want any attention on you. Because public attention is, after all, a form of protection….
She lost the thought as the argument between Beth Ann and Pattie escalated in volume.
“Spackoid!”
“Gumbah!”
“Zorch!”
“Boffo!”
“You two knock it off in there!” Dorothy called out. She sent Constance a puzzle-headed glance. “Did you understand any of that?”
Constance rolled her eyes. “Boffo vaguely rings a bell. I think it’s theater slang. But don’t ask me, I grew up in the geeks-and-nerds generation.”
“Neither one of those girls,” Dorothy lamented, “can get a decent grade in a foreign-language class. But they sure sound fluent in something besides English.”
“I just stopped to see if you need anything from the supermarket.”
Dorothy shook her head. She had never quite accepted the notion of such a huge store within the town limits. “I just went yesterday. Their meat is cheap, but none of these chain places has ever heard of a decent tomato. It’s all this genetically engineered stuff now. Thanks for asking though, hon.”
Constance was heading out the door when her mother called behind her. “Connie? You be careful, hear? That Quinn Loudon is still on the loose.”
“Oh, don’t worry so much,” her daughter assured her. “The whole thing’s a weekend wonder, that’s all. It’ll blow over soon.”
Despite her earlier worrying, Constance began to take heart at her own words. She probably was just being paranoid. It was only natural, of course, to be concerned about Quinn Loudon and even to wonder if he was being set up as he claimed. But her role in his drama was behind her. It was ridiculous to assume she was somehow involved any further.
The Lawman Meets His Bride Page 7
