TAMING JESSE JAMES

by Reanne Thayne

  She was cleaning up the mess she had made when she heard it.

  A scratching, skittery sound that didn't belong in the quiet of her classroom.

  Her heart gave a couple of hard knocks in her chest and she couldn't move. She could feel the flashback hovering on the edge of her consciousness. Broken glass. Hurtful hands. Choking, paralyzing terror.

  Just before it claimed her, she realized with a vast, painful relief what had made the sound. Only a branch from the maple tree outside her window dancing in the cool spring breeze.

  The problem was, she'd seen entirely too many horror movies when she was younger, too many shows where a scratching at the window turned out to be something far less benign than the wind.

  "Scaredy-cat," she chided herself, breathing hard to force oxygen back into her bloodstream.

  Being alone in the school had always spooked her a little, even before Tommy DeSilva. Sometimes she could swear she heard the distant echo of children's laughter, the rapping of a ruler on a desk.

  And, thanks to him, now she heard phantom attackers lurking around every corner.

  She hated being afraid.

  Maybe that's why she forced herself to come to her classroom so often on the weekend or in the evening. To demystify it. Maybe if she spent enough time here, she would eventually become inured to the bumps and squeaks, to the branches scraping against her window.

  Or maybe she just wanted to torture herself.

  Whatever the reason, her psyche had had quite enough for tonight. Sarah shrugged into her fleece jacket, then turned off her light and quickly walked outside.

  She felt instantly better out in the fresh air. The night was crisp, the breeze sweet and clean. A perfect spring night to follow two beautiful days. Above the lights of town, moonlight gleamed on the snow-covered peaks of the Salt Rivet range standing solid and firm.

  How could she leave here? She had come to love everything about Star Valley, through all the changing seasons.

  She couldn't leave, despite her suddenly awkward relationship with Jesse Harte. She wanted to be here in August when the students came back, she wanted to take up Nordic skiing next winter if her knee would allow it, she wanted to ride the Piñon trail again and feel the cool mountain air on her face.

  She would tell Chuck Hendricks on Monday that she would sign the contract and return for another year. She wasn't hiding away here. She was building a new life for herself.

  She was smiling—and favoring her knee only a little, she was pleased to discover—when she turned onto

  Spruce Street

  and passed old Mrs. Jensen's cow-shaped mailbox.

  The riot of tulips lining her neighbor's wrought-iron fence swayed in the breeze, their colors ghostly pale under the soft moonlight, and Sarah stopped for a moment to admire them.

  She would bury tulip bulbs this fall, she decided. Masses of them, in every conceivable color. Reds, pinks, yellows, purples. And next spring she would wait eagerly for them to poke through the earth.

  Already sketching out in her mind where she would plant them all—and daffodils, too—she was still smiling as she reached her own mailbox and started up the walk.

  She was halfway to the porch when she lifted her head and saw it.

  The porch light was still burning—she had turned it on when she left, as she always did when she expected to be home after dark—and its glow illuminated a scene that looked as if it belonged in one of those horror movies she'd been thinking about earlier.

  * * *

  Chapter 9

  « ^ »

  Jesse's cellular phone bleated just as the Utah Jazz basketball team tied the score at the end of the fourth quarter, pushing the critical postseason game into overtime.

  So much for enjoying the last few hours of his time off.

  He groaned and glared at the phone. His efforts to convince some of his officers they could handle all but the most urgent crises without him didn't seem to be working. They still called to check with him before making almost any kind of decision, from whether to give tickets or warnings to first-time traffic offenders to what kind of coffee filters worked best in the machine.

  He'd have to work a little harder, apparently.

  "This better be good," he growled into the phone. Silence met his snarl, then a small, ragged-sounding voice spoke. "Jesse? Is that you?"

  He forgot the basketball game in an instant as cold fear clawed at him. "Sarah! What's wrong?" He knew instinctively that she wouldn't have used this number unless absolutely necessary, especially not after the awkwardness of the day before on the mountain.

  "Can you… Do you think you could come over?"

  He shoved into his boots, not taking the time to bother with socks. "I'm already heading for the door."

  "I'm sorry to bother you. I didn't know who else to call."

  She sounded strange, disoriented, almost as if she was high on something, but he knew that was impossible. She couldn't be using. Not sweet, fragile Sarah McKenzie.

  He remembered the day she had freaked out on her back porch when her knee gave out and he'd reached to keep her from falling. That's the way she seemed now—like someone on the verge of a full-blown panic attack.

  "What's going on?" he asked, trying to tamp down on his own panic.

  "I don't know. There's blood everywhere. Please hurry."

  Blood. Everywhere. Those were the only words that registered.

  "Sarah?" he called into the phone, but the line went dead. In an instant, he yanked his sidearm from the closet and raced for his Bronco, calling for an ambulance and backup as he went.

  He drove the six blocks to her house with all his lights flashing and siren blaring, and broke just about every traffic law on the Salt River books—and a few the city council hadn't had a chance to come up with yet.

  On

  Spruce Street

  he braked hard and the Bronco shuddered to a stop just a few feet from where she stood in the middle of the road, clutching a cell phone and rocking back and forth on her heels.

  He jumped from the truck and rushed to her, pulling her into his arms. "Sarah! What happened? Sit down. Where are you hurt?"

  "No. It's not me."

  He was so completely focused on her—on trying to visually assess her injuries—that he wasn't aware of anything else until she pointed toward her house. "There."

  Reluctant to take his eyes off her for even a moment, he turned with impatience in the direction she was pointing. At first he didn't know what he was seeing. It just looked like dark shadows where there shouldn't be any, smears of muddy black.

  Then his gaze sharpened and he realized what he was seeing.

  His jaw sagged and he hissed a disbelieving curse, horrified by the scene. The dark shadows weren't shadows at all but blood. And, as she had whispered into the phone, it was everywhere.

  On her porch pillars, on the door, pooled on her steps. Quarts of it. Buckets. It looked as if someone had butchered a cow right at her front door.

  What in the world?

  He stared, trying to comprehend it. He'd been a cop for a dozen years, had investigated everything from car accidents to bar fights to spouse abuse—and even a murder a few years back when one ranch hand had shot another over a woman.

  But he couldn't remember ever seeing anything this grisly.

  It couldn't possibly be hers. She wouldn't still be standing if it were. As if on cue, at just that moment she seemed to wobble in his arms. Even if she wasn't injured, he realized, she was shocky. Her face was pale as death in the moonlight, she was shaking uncontrollably and she looked as if she would fall over at the first stiff wind.

  "Let's get you into the Bronco." He picked her up, struck by how delicate she felt in his arms, then settled her into the passenger seat. He had a wool blanket in the back in case of emergencies, although in his wildest dreams he would never have come up with this kind of scenario. He reached for it and tucked it around her.

  "Can you tell me what hap
pened?" he asked.

  She shrugged helplessly. "I don't know. I was at the school working…"

  "This late? By yourself?"

  At the fierceness of his voice, her eyes went a little wild and unfocused, and he tempered his expression. The last thing she needed after a shock like this was an interrogation from him. "Sorry. Go on."

  "I came home just before I called you and … and saw it like this. I don't know what happened."

  Another siren cut through the night before he could ask her anything more. His backup pulled in behind him and Chris Hernandez climbed out of the squad car, her eyes wide and astonished.

  "Sweet Almighty. What happened here?"

  "I don't know," he said grimly. "But I'm sure as hell going to find out."

  He was suddenly glad Chris was the responding officer. She was a good cop, one of his best. Beyond that, the fact that she was a woman might help make Sarah a little more at ease.

  "Can you stay here in the Bronco with Miss McKenzie until the ambulance arrives?"

  Sarah made a small, distressed sound and grabbed his arm. "I don't need an ambulance. I'm fine."

  "Sweetheart, you're more pale than that moon up there."

  "Please, Jesse. I feel foolish enough as it is. I don't need an ambulance. Honestly."

  After a moment of indecision, he instructed Chris to cancel the ambulance but to stay with Sarah while he looked around. "Call in the county crime scene unit, too," he added. "I'm afraid this is a bigger job than we can handle alone"

  "Sure, Chief."

  He walked toward the house, noting that neighbors had already been drawn to the sirens like flies to a corpse. With the prurient interest of the uninvolved, they stood on their front porches, craning their necks to see what was happening.

  At least they were keeping their distance. Nobody else should have to see this.

  Up close, Jesse was even more sickened by the mess. The blood or whatever it was hadn't just been randomly splashed around. Whoever had done this wanted to destroy—the bastard had set out to do the most damage possible. Dark stains covered everything. The trim of the porch, the windowsill, a white wicker planter full of cheerful pink flowers.

  Worse, words had been painted on the white of her door. Terrible, vile obscenities—names that shouldn't be used against anyone, especially not a woman like Sarah McKenzie.

  He dipped a finger into one of the puddles of red and brought it to his nose. Definitely blood, judging by the metallic tang. Where the hell had so much blood come from? It would have to be an animal, he decided. Or a couple of animals, even. The forensics lab could have that information to him in just a few hours.

  Whatever it came from, the blood was still wet, which meant the vandal had finished up probably no longer than twenty minutes ago. What if Sarah had come home and caught him in the act?

  His stomach churned at the thought. Anyone capable of this kind of viciousness would be capable of anything.

  He suddenly noticed something even more worrisome, something he had overlooked in the shock of seeing all that blood. The blood wasn't the worst of the damage. Every single window he could see had been systematically shattered.

  The raw savagery of it shocked him. This hadn't been a random act, but something aimed specifically at her. What could she possibly have done to make someone this angry at her?

  A quick look around her house showed that most of the damage was confined to the front where it would have the most shock value. He was just about to head back to the Bronco and wait for the sheriff's crime scene unit when he spotted something on the porch, something he'd missed the first time through.

  A men's baseball-type cap with an embroidered logo of an olive nymph dry fly on it was lying in a puddle of blood. The cap was dirty, as all good fishing caps are, but the only blood he could see on it was underneath, where it rested in the puddle, which likely meant it had landed there after the vandal had done his work.

  As a clue, it wasn't much. Half the men in town probably owned a similar kind of cap. But maybe forensics could lift prints off it. He used a pen to pick it up, then walked back toward the flashing lights.

  Hernandez slipped out of the Bronco to talk to him, closing the door behind her so Sarah couldn't hear their conversation.

  "How is she?" he asked the officer.

  She shrugged. "Pretty shook up. I keep trying to talk to her, you know, just to make conversation, but she acts like she doesn't even know I'm there. What's her story?"

  "She's just a nice lady who doesn't deserve to have something like this happen to her."

  "It's more than that. You haven't been sitting there with her, Chief. It's spooky, if you ask me. I've seen it before with crime victims. It's almost like she's not here, like she's gone somewhere else inside her head. Something's definitely weird with her."

  "This would be a shock for anyone to come home and find on their doorstep."

  "Maybe. And maybe she knows who it is. Maybe that's why she's so scared."

  He didn't like the implications of that idea at all, that Sarah had reason to know who might be terrorizing her.

  "You find anything up there besides a nasty mess and words that would get my mouth washed out with soap every day for the rest of my life if my mama saw them?" Chris asked.

  "Just this." He held up the baseball cap. "I want to see if she recognizes it, then you can bag it and hand it over to CSI. Why don't you start canvasing the neighbors and see if anybody saw or heard anything?"

  Inside the Bronco he found Sarah staring through the passenger window with wide, unblinking eyes. He wanted to pull her into his arms, to tuck her head under his chin and hold that trembling body against him until his heat warmed her skin, warmed her soul.

  He couldn't do any of those things, though. All he could do was try his best to find the sick animal who had done this.

  He held up the baseball cap. "Do you recognize this?"

  She blinked several times, as if sliding back into the present. "I … I don't think so. Do you believe it belongs to the person who…" Her voice trailed off as if she couldn't quite find the right words.

  It didn't matter. He knew what she meant. "Seems likely. I found it on the porch. It doesn't have any splatters on it, which makes me think it wasn't there when most of the blood was spilled."

  She drew a ragged-sounding breath. "So it is blood. I thought … I was hoping it might be paint."

  "No. Definitely blood. Probably from an animal, maybe a cow or something."

  She said nothing for several moments, mulling over the information, then she turned to him again. "How much longer before I can begin cleaning it up? Mr. Jimenez will be angry if it stains."

  "Forget Bob. I'll send someone to clean it up in the morning after the crime scene investigators are done."

  "I have to do it tonight, Jesse. I won't be able to sleep inside there, knowing all this is out here."

  At the tremble in her voice, he again fought the urge to pull her into his arms. "Sweetheart, I don't know if you noticed, but most of your windows are shattered. We can put boards up tonight, but it's going to take time to order replacements for them."

  She looked at the house once more and seemed to crumple. This time he lost the internal battle he was waging and reached for her. She came to him willingly, as if she had been waiting just for this, and settled her head against his chest.

  "If you think for one second that I'm letting you stay there alone tonight, you're crazy," Jesse murmured against her hair. "You're coming home with me."

  After a moment she pulled away. "I can take care of myself."

  She said the words firmly, and he knew she was trying to convince herself as much as him. A soft, aching tenderness settled in his heart.

  "I know you can take care of yourself. But you shouldn't have to. Not after this. I'm sorry, but you're going to have to stay with me. I would take you out to the ranch, but with the girls sick, I think Ellie has all she can handle right now."

  "I don't want to i
mpose. I could stay at a hotel until the windows are fixed."

  "Let me do this, Sarah. Please?"

  She looked at the carnage outside her house for a long time, then finally nodded.

  Both of them knew she didn't have much choice.

  * * *

  She stood under Jesse Harte's shower for a long time, long after her skin was red and puckered from the heat, long after her aching knee couldn't hold her upright anymore and she had sunk to the tile with her arms wrapped around herself, huddling there and trembling.

  But still she couldn't seem to get clean.

  He had found her. It was the only explanation she could come up with.

  Somehow Tommy DeSilva had escaped from prison and come to find her.

  Who else would have reason to hate her so badly? She couldn't think of a soul. Surely no one in Star Valley would do such a thing.

  Ever since she had seen what had been done to her house, she had teetered back and forth on the thin line between flashback and reality. She felt as if she had spent the past eighteen months trying to wake up from a horrible nightmare, only to have it sneak up on her again when she least expected it.

  Just the thought of being in the same state with Tommy DeSilva sent panic churning through her veins.

  When she realized who must have vandalized her house, her first instinct had been to flee, to pack up her car and leave Star Valley behind. But she was afraid if she started running, she would never be able to stop. She would spend the rest of her life looking over her shoulder, always waiting for him to find her.

  Still shivering, she wrapped herself in the warm towel Jesse had provided, then reached for the robe he had been thoughtful enough to instruct that kind female officer—Officer Hernandez, wasn't it?—to pack for her, along with a few of her other possessions.

  She would have to tell him.

  All of it. The awful, sordid details of what had happened in Chicago. He would have to know so that he could start looking for DeSilva.

  Dear heavens, she didn't want to tell him. She stared at her reflection in the mirror, a hot, heavy ache welling up in her throat. When she told him, he would never be able to look at her the same way again. He would see the same stranger she saw staring back at her in the mirror right now.