TAMING JESSE JAMES

by Reanne Thayne

  It wasn't much to go on. It hadn't rained hard that day, so for all he knew, it could have been left earlier by a meter reader or Bob Jimenez, her landlord. But it was all he could see in the dark.

  A careful look around the small house revealed little else, other than the interesting tidbit that Sarah McKenzie appeared to be an avid gardener, judging by all the upturned earth around the house.

  She must spend every spare second she wasn't teaching outside with her hands in the dirt. The thought of the quiet, skittish schoolteacher pouring her heart and soul into creating beauty around her touched him in ways he couldn't explain.

  He didn't know too many renters who would put such care and effort into beautifying a house they didn't own. Hell, he could barely manage to keep the grass mowed in the summertime around the place he'd bought after he made chief.

  But Sarah was a nurturer. Plants, children, whatever. Would she go for neat, ordered gardens, he wondered, where no flower would dare touch the next and all were arranged in some precise pattern according to shade, color or height?

  Or would she prefer wild jumbles of color? Frenzied splotches of yellows and reds and purples growing every which way?

  It seemed logical to assume a quiet schoolteacher would prefer a prim and proper garden. But some instinct told him that in a mouth or so the yard around her house would burst with lush, unrestrained beauty.

  He had a feeling that for all her subdued reticence, there were hidden depths to Sarah that fairly begged to be discovered.

  But not by him. He'd leave any exploring of Sarah McKenzie's deeper passions to some other man.

  Some better man.

  A guy who could give her happily-ever-after, a white picket fence and all the flowers and children she could ask for.

  Why should that thought depress him so much?

  It was none of his business. She was none of his business, other than one of the citizens of Salt River he was sworn to protect.

  Keeping that firmly in mind, he forced his attention back to the investigation and finished walking the perimeter of her house. When he finished, he rapped hard on her door. She opened immediately, almost as if she'd been standing just inside watching and waiting for him.

  She could tell instantly by the regretful look in his eyes that he hadn't found anything substantial.

  Had she imagined the whole thing? Had she been having another of those damn flashbacks again and somehow merged nightmare with reality?

  She must have been. What other explanation could there be? She had been seeing things.

  Anger at herself and an awful, painful embarrassment warred within her. After this and the way she'd freaked out the other day on her back porch, he probably thought she was the most ridiculous, paranoid schoolmarm who ever lived.

  She had a fierce, painfully futile wish that Jesse Harte could have known her Before.

  When she had been fun and adventurous and whole. When she drew people to her just like an ice-cream shop does on a warm summer day.

  When she never saw strangers lurking in the shadows or panicked if a man touched her or had bouts where she stood in the shower for hours, scrubbing and scrubbing but somehow never coming clean.

  "You didn't find anything," she said, a statement not a question.

  "A bootprint in the mud. Other than that, nothing."

  "I'm sorry." She clasped her hands together tightly, wishing she'd never called the police, wishing a different officer had responded, wishing she could sink right through the carpet and disappear. "You must think I'm the most foolish woman in town."

  He grinned suddenly, looking impossibly gorgeous. "Not even close, sweetheart. You're not calling me to report seeing little green men in spaceships."

  "No. Only bogeymen who don't exist."

  "Sarah, if you think you saw a man out there, I believe you. Just because I can't see anything to prove it beyond a shadow of a doubt doesn't mean the guy wasn't there. It might have been a kid looking to steal some tools or just a peeping Tom hoping to get lucky and find an open curtain somewhere."

  She couldn't help her instinctive shudder at the idea of someone watching her without her knowledge.

  Jesse's cop eyes picked up on her reaction. "It's probably nothing for you to worry about," he assured her. "I'll cruise around the neighborhood and see if I can find any suspicious characters lurking around and I'll also put an extra patrol in this neighborhood for a while."

  "Thank you. I… You've been very kind."

  He gave her an inscrutable look. "Call me immediately if you see anything else suspicious. Try to get some sleep, okay?"

  She nodded, then watched him walk back out into the drizzly night. A week ago, she never would have even considered the word kind in the same sentence as Jesse Harte. He was hard and dangerous and he scared the stuffing out of her. But something had changed in the past few days. She was coming to see there were facets to the man she wouldn't have guessed at before.

  He believed her.

  She pressed a hand to her chest, to the warmth that blossomed there despite the lingering anxiety. Another man might have shrugged off her concerns, especially after witnessing firsthand one of her wild panic attacks.

  But Jesse believed her.

  * * *

  Sarah lifted her face to the gloriously warm afternoon sun, wishing she didn't have to go back into her classroom in another few moments.

  She would have been tempted to sacrifice her entire summer vacation if she could only spend the rest of the day right there on the playground with the sun on her face and that sweet-smelling breeze coyly teasing her hair and rustling her skirt around her legs.

  She had spring fever as badly as her students. After a week of gloomy weather, she longed to be out in the garden, planting and pruning and fertilizing.

  Who would have thought she would be so addicted to gardening? What had started out as a little thing earlier in the spring—a simple desire to plant a few flowers in the empty beds around the house—had quickly turned into an obsession.

  It amazed her because it was so unexpected. She, who'd never even had a houseplant before, was turning into an avid gardener. She loved the whole process. Painstakingly selecting seeds or starts at the nursery, preparing the earth for them, watching the hesitant little green stalks slowly unfurl toward the sun.

  There was an odd sense of power in the process. Though Mother Nature definitely played a heavy hand with her sun and rain, in all other respects Sarah was master of her little garden. She chose which seedlings belonged where, when and how many to plant, which to thin away and which would be given the chance to bloom.

  She found it heady and intoxicating. At least in this one area of her life, she felt in control.

  She rolled her eyes at herself—how pathetic was that?—then lifted her face to the sun.

  On a day like this one, her panicked call to the police three nights earlier seemed unreal. Ridiculous. As far away as the few wispy clouds up there. She could only have been imagining that terrible moment when she thought she saw someone standing outside her back door. It was the only explanation that made any kind of sense.

  This was Star Valley, a place that could practically be the poster child of peaceful, rural America.

  Who here would want to lurk outside the house of a boring schoolteacher?

  She sighed. No one. That's why she must have been imagining things.

  Jesse had been very patient with her. He had been true to his word—several times each evening she had seen police vehicles drive past her house. She found their presence comforting. And if she carefully watched to see if a certain gorgeous police chief might be driving one of them, well, that was nobody's business but her own.

  She glanced at her watch. Five more minutes before the bell. She hated to be a spoilsport, but she was going to have to start gathering her students. She glanced around the playground at the rope-jumping and the hopscotching and the heated game of four-square in the corner. The children looked jubilant to be
outside. Maybe she could just hold class out in the sunshine today.

  She spied Corey under the spreading branches of a maple tree whose leaves were small and new, his back propped against the trunk. As usual, he sat by himself, and her heart twisted with sympathy for him.

  He had a few friends, she knew, but none in their class. Her students were not cruel to him, but they were uneasy around a boy with such a hostile attitude toward everything.

  He could use some company, she decided, and ducked under the low overhang of branches to join him.

  As she neared the boy, she could tell instantly something was wrong. Corey's head was buried in his arms and he was shivering slightly in the cool shade.

  "Corey? Honey? Are you all right?"

  After a long moment he lifted his face slowly, as if the movement pained him. He was pale, she saw with concern, his flushed cheeks the only spots of color on his face.

  "I don't feel too good," he whispered.

  She knelt in the grass and touched his forehead with her fingers. "You do seem warm. What else is going on?"

  "My throat and my head hurt and I itch." For the first time she noticed ominously familiar red blisters creeping up his neck and covering his arms below his sleeves.

  "Where do you itch?"

  He looked positively miserable. "Everywhere. Especially my stomach and my back."

  "Oh, dear," she murmured.

  Corey finally met her gaze, worry darkening his eyes. "What's wrong with me?"

  For all his cocky bravado most of the time, he was still just a boy, she reminded herself. And right now he was a very sick boy. "Sweetheart, have you ever had the chicken pox?"

  "No," he mumbled. "I don't think so."

  "You do now."

  The boy's eyes widened, his features twisted with dismay. "I can't. I'm supposed to help Chief Harte. We're supposed to practice today after school."

  "He'll just have to do his presentation without you or reschedule it until you're better. You need to be home in bed. I'm sure that's what's itching. Let's take a look at your back."

  She reached for his T-shirt Corey froze, then scrambled back against the tree, out of her reach. "No. No. That's okay."

  "Just pull it up a little so I can see how bad the spots are on your back."

  He batted halfheartedly at her hands, but she persisted and finally lifted his T-shirt up just enough so she could see.

  The normal playground noises around them—the rattle of chains on the swings, the shrieks and laughter of children, the breeze rustling the new maple leaves above them—seemed to fade away.

  All she could hear was her own horrified gasp.

  Halfway down his back, red, puckered skin surrounded a sickly gray scar in a distinctive S shape at least three inches long. It looked like a brand, like the ownership mark she saw on cows all around Wyoming.

  Bile swelled in her throat and her stomach heaved. Dear Lord. How could anyone do such a thing to a child?

  "Who did this to you?" she asked when she could find her voice through the horror.

  His lips clamped together and he looked away from her, avoiding both her gaze and her question. Her hand shook, but she reached out anyway and gripped his shoulder firmly. Fury made her voice hard, tight. "Corey, answer me. Who did this?"

  She felt him tremble a little under her fingers and realized she was taking completely the wrong tack with him. If her fierceness didn't scare him, it would only make him more belligerent. She yanked her hand back and shoved it into the pocket of her cardigan.

  "Sweetheart, you have to tell me. This is wrong. Who did this to you?"

  "Nobody," he finally answered. His voice sounded thin and raspy, but she didn't know if it was from fear or from his illness. "I … I did it myself."

  She stared at him. "What?"

  "Yeah. I did it. Well, I had my friend help."

  Could he be telling the truth? She had read of children with severe emotional or developmental problems being self-destructive. Pounding their heads repeatedly against the cement or pulling out clumps of their hair or shredding their skin. She knew that sometimes physical pain could be a release valve of sorts for children who didn't know how else to cope with their emotional pain.

  Maybe Corey was far more troubled than anybody realized.

  Merciful heavens. Nothing in her training had prepared her for anything like this. She wanted to gather him into her arms and hold him close, but she didn't want to make a wrong move here. Perhaps she should leave this to trained professionals. But she cared about Corey too much.

  "Why would you hurt yourself this way?" she asked quietly.

  "Didn't burn much."

  He was lying. She could see it in his eyes. It must have been excruciatingly painful—the scar still looked red and sore.

  "Why, Corey?"

  He shrugged, looking down at the grass. "My mom wouldn't let me get a tattoo."

  "A … a tattoo?"

  "I wanted my name but she said no, so I did an S for Sylvester."

  "How?" Her voice sounded as raspy as his. "How did you do it?"

  Corey still continued looking down at the grass. She looked at him carefully but couldn't tell if he was being evasive because he was embarrassed or because he was being less than honest.

  "Me and some guys heard about gangs branding themselves. It sounded cool so we, um, decided to see if we could do it. We bent a hanger into an S and heated it up. You won't tell my mom, will you?"

  Another wave of nausea washed through her. Dear heavens. The child was only ten years old and he was scarring himself, mutilating himself, to look cool. And then he was worried about her snitching to his mother!

  The bell rang. She could see her students lining up at the door waiting to go in. They would have to do without her for a few more minutes, at least while she called Ginny Garrett. She would see if one of the other teachers could take her class until Corey's mother could arrive for him.

  "You need to see a doctor, Corey."

  "For the chicken pox?"

  "And for your … for what you did. It could be infected."

  "Then my mom and Seth would have to know."

  "I can't keep this a secret, Corey. I'm sorry. It's not right. I have to tell them."

  His face crumpled and again he looked exactly his age, like a scared little boy, then his features hardened into familiar belligerent lines. He called her a harsh name a ten-year-old had no business even knowing, let alone repeating. "You act like you're my friend, but you're not. You're just like all the other stupid teachers. If you tell my mom, you'll be sorry."

  He climbed to his feet and would have run away, but she held him in place and half dragged him to the office so she could place the call. By the time they got inside the building, Corey stopped struggling. He walked along beside her like a prisoner on the way to Old Sparky.

  Maybe Star Valley wasn't so idyllic after all, she thought as they neared the office. Not if children could do such horrible things to each other.

  She didn't even want to think about the alternative, that someone else—his stepfather, maybe—might have done this to Corey.

  * * *

  Jesse pulled up to the Salt River Medical Clinic and sat in his Bronco, studying the low-slung cedar building. Ginny and Corey were still here. He could see her silver Range Rover in the parking lot.

  Since Sarah's call a half hour earlier, the beauty of the bright April day seemed to have dimmed. The sun still shone, but its glow seemed tarnished somehow.

  He muttered an oath. He could hardly believe what she'd told him—that Corey and his friends had branded themselves as if they were no better than cattle.

  Sarah had been distressed almost to tears as she'd told him the details of the scar on Corey's back.

  "It was horrible, Jesse. You should have seen him so calmly describing how he did it. I can't understand why he would do such a thing."

  "It's not against the law, Sarah. I'd say this is something Ginny and Seth are going to have to de
al with."

  "I know. I just… You're going to think I'm crazy again, but when he was talking about it, I got the distinct impression he was lying about the circumstances. What if he didn't get it willingly? Couldn't criminal charges be filed then?"

  "You think whoever might have given him those black eyes and other injuries might be responsible for this, too?" Jesse had asked.

  "I don't know. Maybe." There had been a long silence on the other end, then Sarah had spoken quietly. "I know you're busy, but will you please talk to him? Just see if you believe him. He's a child, Jesse. A boy who was squeamish last week when he skinned his knee on the playground. Why would he consent to do this to himself?"

  In the end, what else could he do but agree to talk to the kid? Sarah trusted him to get to the bottom of the many mysteries surrounding the boy. How could be do anything else?

  He blew out a breath and climbed out of the Bronco. Inside the clinic he found Ginny at the counter filling out insurance forms, bracing Maddie on her hip with one hand while she wrote with the other. She looked small and fragile.

  Lost.

  "Hey, Jesse," called Donna Jenkins, her red hair just a few shades lighter than her lipstick. The nurse gave him a flirtatious smile—the same one she always gave him—which he returned quickly before turning to Ginny.

  "How did you find out?" she asked, and he frowned at the defeated look in her eyes.

  "Sarah—Ms. McKenzie—called me. She's worried about Corey."

  Ginny nodded, absently grabbing her baby's fingers before Maddie could steal the pen out of her hands.

  "How is he?"

  "He's in with Doc Wallace right now. He's definitely got the chicken pox, and the … the other thing is apparently infected. Doc Wallace is writing him a prescription for antibiotics."

  "You mind if I talk to him?"

  She shrugged. "You can try. He's not saying anything about it, but maybe you'll get more out of him than I can."

  Doc Wallace was just closing the door to the examination room when Jesse walked down the hallway. He turned in surprise when he saw him. "Jesse Harte! What brings you here?"

  Jesse could never see Salt River's crusty doctor without remembering that terrible night when he was seventeen and he'd been brought here right after the accident before being airlifted to the regional medical center in Salt Lake City. He had a flash of memory, of kind words and a comforting touch and teary blue eyes telling him without words that his parents hadn't made it.