Maggie's Man

by Alicia Scott

  C.J. didn't bother with shock or denial. He had some practice in this sort of thing. And nobody, but nobody was going to hurt his baby sister. He gave Lydia her instructions. Then he called and left a succinct message with Brandon's answering service.

  Ten minutes later, C.J. had a bag swung over his shoulder and was striding out of his bar. "Gus," he thought to call over his shoulder at the last minute, "you're in charge now."

  Gus didn't even look up from drying the freshly washed beer mugs. C.J.'s "other job" as a bounty hunter had made his spontaneous exits for places unknown for times undetermined fairly commonplace.

  C.J. was whistling beneath his breath as he shouldered open the door. "Hang on, Maggie. The cavalry's coming."

  Cain wasn't speaking to her anymore.

  Hunched up on her side of the truck, her arm laid out across the bench seat thanks to the handcuff, Maggie stared miserably out the window and told herself that silence was a good thing. What kind of pathetic prisoner longed to make idle conversation with her captor anyway?

  She was obviously already suffering from Stockholm syndrome, a phenomenon where a hostage bonded with her jailers and began to sympathize with their plight. Why not? Maggie had always been too sensitive for her own darn good. And now she was insane as well.

  She sneaked another glance at Cain. The baseball cap was off, and his window was rolled down two inches. The cool spring wind tousled his light blond hair, every now and then raising the strands high enough to reveal the port-wine stain at his hairline. So his father had named him Cain due to that birthmark. What would it be like to go through life named Cain?

  She had a feeling that indicated less than desirable family dynamics. Was that why he became a killer? It sounded as if his family was violent and steeped in paranoia. Maybe he'd never had a chance. If he'd been raised in more idyllic surroundings, he and his brother would have suffered from simple sibling rivalry instead of a homicidal need for revenge.

  What are you going to do, Maggie, reform him on the road? She was idealistic to the point of hopelessness. Even as she called herself a dim-witted fool, she found herself saying hesitantly, "Are you still angry with me?"

  She risked a second glance at him. His forehead had creased into long lines. His hands flexed on the wheel of the truck, then slowly curled around the grip. "I'm not angry," he said abruptly, "I'm frustrated." He turned toward her briefly. "And why does it matter if I'm angry with you?"

  "Well … you do have a gun."

  He finally nodded as if to say that was a valid point. She sat up a little straighter. "You must be getting tired," she said after a moment.

  He didn't respond one way or another, but her stomach growled. She flushed and his lips twitched suspiciously close to a smile. "I must be getting hungry, too," he suggested.

  "Perfect," she said with false cheeriness. "I'm starved!"

  "When we get to Bend."

  "Bend? That's another fifty miles!"

  "So it is."

  "Why do we have to wait so long? We haven't seen a cop since Salem."

  "And I'd like to keep it that way. Plus, we now have this brother of yours to deal with."

  She managed to bite her lower lip right before she blurted out that C.J. couldn't possibly be on their tail yet since he had to come all the way from Arizona. She might be naive, but she was trying not to be a complete idiot.

  "And your other brother," Cain continued levelly, slanting another glance toward her. "I suppose your other brother will join him?"

  "Ah … yes," she declared.

  Cain was so impressed he arched a droll blond eyebrow. "Is he a Marine, too?"

  "Brandon? No, he's an investment banker."

  "Wonderful. So one brother can shoot at me and the other can sell me short. Any shotgun-toting father I should be concerned about as well?"

  "No, my father's dead. His plane went down in Indonesia when I was seven." She stated this matter-of-factly. "They never found his body. After a year, we had a memorial service and buried an empty casket, as if that made sense of it all."

  "Oh." The conversation drifted. Finally, he shifted restlessly on the seat. "Well, what about your mother, then? Will she come after me with knives? A man needs to know his opponents."

  Maggie, having seen her mother wield steak knives before, was not amused by the picture. "My mother is a little wild," she conceded, unconsciously scowling. "She likes to break things, but only expensive things. If they won't be missed, then they aren't worth breaking, that's her motto."

  "Sounds nice."

  "Oh yeah. She's the life of the party." Maggie didn't want to talk about Stephanie anymore. Supposedly she was somewhere in the Mediterranean now with some man she'd met on some yacht in some sea. Stephanie was never without a man. Maggie had no idea how she and her mother could even be remotely related. "You know who you should be genuinely terrified of?" she suggested at last, switching from her mother to a much more pleasant topic of conversation.

  "Do tell."

  "My grandmother!"

  "Your grandmother?" If his eyebrows had climbed any higher he would have lost them.

  "Yes, absolutely. My grandmother is a Hathaway of the famed Hathaways who used to be incredibly beautiful Southern belles." He looked even more skeptical—which hurt—but she'd long ago come to terms with the fact that she hadn't inherited her ancestors' looks. "The Hathaways," she continued unperturbed, "fell on hard times after the Civil War. My great-great-great-grandfather decided plantation life was over so he packed up the whole family and they headed west to Texas and got into cattle rustling."

  "Rustling? As in stealing?"

  "Absolutely. No one said my great-great-great-grandfather was honorable. Actually, we consider him the first real entrepreneur in the family."

  "I see."

  "His wife was my great-great-great-grandmother Margaret, who was renowned for her flaming-red hair."

  "Ah. Now I get the connection."

  Maggie beamed at him as if he were a very good student. "Yes, my grandmother, Lydia, named me after the first Margaret, but I'm afraid red hair is the only thing we have in common. She wasn't exactly a marriage counselor. I gather she could ride and shoot like nobody's business, and she and Harold pretty much ran amok as outlaws in Texas."

  "Ran amok?"

  "My grandmother's phrasing, not mine."

  "Of course."

  "At any rate, Harold was finally captured by a posse formed by one of the more powerful landowners, and sentenced to hang in the morning as an example to all cattle rustlers. My great-great-great-grandmother was so distraught at the news that she approached the land baron dressed in only a black lace shawl and her flaming-red hair."

  Both of Cain's eyebrows climbed to the ceiling again. "The plot thickens," he murmured.

  "Oh, yes. She strode into the hacienda, her noble head held high, her bare feet padding against the cool tiles, her red hair shimmering around her shoulders, and in front of all the slack-jawed, lusting cowboys, she told the land baron that if he would let her husband go, she would give him a night like no other."

  "She said this, half-naked in front of a bunch of hired guns?" Cain quizzed dubiously.

  Maggie leveled him with an impatient stare. "She was a very brave woman."

  "And a good candidate for gang rape," he exclaimed.

  "Hey!" Maggie hit his shoulder so hard she startled both of them. "Don't talk about my great-great-great-grandmother that way!"

  Cain blinked, looked at her stubborn features and blinked again. "My apologies," he said at last, his voice perfectly sober.

  "Well," Maggie said, instantly relaunching into her story, "since the land baron apparently didn't have a mind as filthy as yours, he didn't toss her to the rabble. Instead, he agreed to her offer. If she could make him unconscious with satiated lust by morning, Harold would go free."

  "Hmm," Cain said and shifted a bit in his seat. He wasn't sure this was a good story for a man of six years' abstinence to hear, but on the
other hand, he certainly didn't want to interrupt. "So did she conquer the man with passion?"

  Maggie looked at him triumphantly. "Of course not! My great-great-great-grandmother was a one-man woman. She was also incredibly devious. She took a thick lotion, added arsenic and rubbed it all over the evil land baron's body, telling him it was a Far Eastern aphrodisiac. When he was still blubbering about how this was going to be the best night of his life, she pulled out his own gun from his holster and turned it on him. He tried to fight, of course, but by then he was too sick to move. She calmly put on his clothes, pulled his hat low over her head and grabbing the keys to the prison, marched right out to the shed, freed her husband, stole the land baron's two best horses and rode off into the sunset! Ta-da!"

  She grinned at him, her cheeks flushed and her eyes brilliant with vicarious triumph.

  "Happily ever after," he filled in, amused in spite of himself.

  "More or less." Then on a more serious note, she concluded, "Unfortunately Harold wasn't as good a rider as Margaret and broke his neck falling off his horse a year later. But Margaret lived to be eighty-five years old, outliving her own children, and at the age of seventy-two she still lived by herself and protected her land by pulling out her false teeth and chasing warring braves from her log cabin with the chattering dentures."

  "That must have been a sight to behold," he concurred.

  "Yes." Then abruptly she jabbed her finger in the air at him. "And my grandmother comes from that stock, and she doesn't take any garbage from anyone, let me tell you. If you have a choice about whether to get captured by my brother C.J. or my grandmother, pick C.J. He's only a trained Marine. My grandmother is a Hathaway woman!"

  "I'll remember that," Cain promised soberly, having a hard time taking his eyes off Maggie's face. Flushed and triumphant, she was something else. His ever-uncontrollable mind took in her old, dowdy clothes and replaced them with a simple, black lace shawl. His hands tightened instantly on the wheel and he swallowed two times really fast, then made his brain promise never to do that again. Six years, Cain. Six years, and she looked at you like she wanted to inhale your lungs. God give him strength.

  When he trusted himself enough to speak, he said as carefully as possible, "You're a Hathaway woman."

  It must not have been the right thing to say. Maggie seemed to simply wilt beside him. Her shoulders hunched. Her gaze fell to her lap and her fingers picked restlessly at her wool skirt. Then she gave up on her skirt and toyed with the old locket around her neck. He wasn't even sure she was aware she was doing that. "I suppose," she said at last, but the doubt was evident in her voice. Finally, she simply shrugged. "All gene pools get a mutant sooner or later."

  His forehead creased and though it wasn't his business, he was insulted for her. "Who told you that?"

  Her head came up and she peered at him curiously. "No one told me that," she said clearly. "But it's fairly obvious. I mean, just … look at me." Her hands came up, doing a little motion as if to say, This is it and don't I know it.

  Cain's frown deepened to a full-fledged scowl, and he hated scowling. His fingers flexed and unflexed on the wheel again. Then he found himself saying abruptly, "Don't sell yourself so short, Maggie. Maybe you just need to meet the right Harold, or get into cattle rustling."

  She smiled softly, but he could tell from her expression that she didn't believe him. She shrugged and that was the end of the matter. "And your parents?" she asked lightly. "Were they cattle rustlers?"

  "I don't know. They're not storytellers like your family."

  "What did you do at night?"

  "Read from the Bible."

  "Oh."

  He offered her a crooked grin. "From the little I know, my mother came from well-to-do people back East. I don't know how she met my father, but she fell in love with him for reasons that escape the rest of us, and he convinced her that cities were too dangerous for raising a family. So they moved from Newark to the untamed mountains of northern Idaho, for it is said, 'On the mountain of the Lord, it will be provided.'"

  Maggie nodded wordlessly. The phrase sounded familiar—she went to church every Sunday with her grandparents—but she couldn't quite place it.

  "I don't think my mother understood what she was getting into," Cain said abruptly, his hands tightening on the wheel, his eyes narrowing unconsciously. "People have a tendency to mistake fanaticism for stupidity and that's not the case—fanaticism is very clever, very insidious in its own way. You don't ask new members to promptly walk up to the Cliff of Reason and leap off. You lead them down it one step at a time, slowly and surely. Was my mother a good Christian woman? Yes. Was she concerned about the environment? Definitely. Did the disintegrating social fabric of the U.S. culture worry her? A great deal. Did the growing number of fractured families scare her? Did schools seem overcrowded and hotbeds for gangs, violence and drugs? Did she worry about the future for her children? Of course.

  "And so she found herself living on ten isolated acres of Idaho, educating the children at home to protect their values and their minds. But my father had read in some pamphlet that children could also be contaminated by poisoned public water supplies, so the next thing she knew she was digging wells and pumping her own water. Taxes were no longer being paid because my father pointed out that the white race is God's chosen people and God stated, 'The earth is mine,' and thus why should the white race pay taxes on 'His Land'? Which soon meant disregarding social security cards, driver's licenses, insurance, vehicle registration, hunting licenses, all that stuff, because those are 'man-made laws,' ZOG laws, and we have only to follow the words of the Almighty God.

  "The militias haven't 'sprung' from the earth as everyone seems to think. They've grown slowly and carefully over time, fertilized by the fear of our decay, and as with most movements, powered by a deeply buried kernel of truth."

  He paused, realizing suddenly everything that was pouring out and wondering if he'd said too much. His hands loosened on the wheel. He forced his shoulders straight. For six years, in the oppressive solitude of his jail cell, he'd turned over these issues in his mind, replaying his childhood like a movie reel that should have lost its color, as he sought to understand what of his upbringing he could accept and what he had to reject. He'd thought it would be a simple matter. He hadn't realized how easily and tightly natural fears and rampant paranoia could mesh.

  Now, Cain forced his voice to sound light. "Well, at any rate. My mother found herself married to a husband who'd transformed himself from Bob the accountant to Zechariah the sermonizing militia leader, and she spent the rest of her days in a one-room cabin, hand-pumping water from a well and dressing fresh-killed deer." And she'd grown old too fast, worn too fast. The only time he'd ever seen her faded eyes light up was when his father was gone and Abraham out. Then she'd sit down Cain, and tell him her one good story—the time she'd gone to Boise before he was born. Then her face would become animated once more as she described the wonders of the city, the crush of the people, the flavor of the streets. She only shared this story with him. It was their little secret, this quiet longing to leave the mountains and see what else was out there. To maybe live a little bit more.

  "Oh," Maggie said. Her face had paled again. "That … that must have been … very interesting."

  He smiled and forced himself back to attention. "You're a lousy liar, Maggie."

  She nodded readily. Then as if following his lead for light conversation, offered, "It's the fresh-killed deer thing. I don't like blood. I can't even buy hamburger from the grocery store because it makes me too sad."

  "Hamburger makes you sad?"

  "Yes. Haven't you ever seen a cow?"

  "I've seen a cow," he agreed slowly and with something akin to fatalism.

  "But have you ever really looked at one?" She leaned forward earnestly, peering at him with those soulful blue eyes, and he had a hell of a time keeping his attention on the road. "They're such gentle creatures, you know. You can scratch them behind
the ears, they love to lick salt off your fingers. And their eyes … they have such huge, liquid brown eyes and they are so trusting. Can you imagine turning that into hamburger?"

  "Ah…" he said weakly, "no."

  She sat back with a sigh. "Exactly my point. But please, don't tell my grandmother I said all that. She's a farmer. She doesn't really approve of overromanticizing animals. I once took one of the beautiful Swiss heifers for a pet—Maple—and the year she went dry, Grandma sent her out to get butchered along with the other dry cows. It didn't matter that she had a name, it didn't matter that I trained her to come when I called—"

  "She trotted over whenever you called her name?"

  "Oh yes. Just like Lassie."

  "Of course."

  "But then they butchered her." Her face had gone pale with just the memory and she looked at him with troubled eyes. "Can you believe they had Maple one night for dinner?"

  "No," he said, honestly feeling a little queasy at the mere thought—and he was a man who appreciated a good steak. "But I'm beginning to understand how you ended up with a three-legged cat."

  "Exactly," she said and slapped her knee. "Would you believe no one would give her a home just because she was missing her hind leg? I mean, she was born without it and she didn't seem to miss it. If she could be so well-adjusted about it, why couldn't the rest of us?"

  "Of course," he murmured and suddenly had this image of himself being slowly and methodically snowed under. "Why couldn't the rest of us?"

  "You're not just humoring me, are you?" she asked abruptly, her voice suspicious.

  "Maggie," he said sincerely, "I wouldn't do that."

  She relaxed again, and appeared satisfied, her gaze going back out to the windows and the verdant line of towering trees.

  He stifled a yawn, then another, then figured he would have to bring it up sooner or later. "I have a project for you, Maggie," he said lightly in the companionable silence.