Montana Mavericks 04 - The Once and Future Wife

by Paige, Laurie

  “Where were we?” he asked. “Oh, yes, I was about to ravish you, Mrs. Hensley.”

  They made love there on the floor at eight o’clock on a late summer’s evening with the door wide open. Fortunately, all the neighbors were still at the party.

  Fourteen

  T racy woke at dawn. Judd was tickling her nose with the corner of the blanket. She laughed, pushed his hand away and scratched the offended part.

  “What do you want to do today?” he asked.

  “Well,” she drawled, “what did you have in mind?”

  “We’ve never had a honeymoon,” he reminded her. He combed her tangled curls with his fingers. “The first time we couldn’t afford it. But now we can. I’d like to take you somewhere special, to a place you’ve always wanted to go, but never had the chance.”

  “There’s only one place,” she said softly. “It’s here, in your arms. From the moment I met you, this is where I’ve longed to be. Always.” She caressed his strong jaw and ran her thumb over his lips. “For me, this is paradise.”

  They stayed in bed another hour, and Judd said all the things she wanted to hear, the special things that lovers say. She loved it that he opened himself to her and expressed his feelings, and she told him so.

  “If only we’d talked before,” he said at one point.

  She laid a hand over his mouth. “No regrets,” she ordered. “We look forward from this moment on.”

  “No regrets,” he agreed. His kiss was his promise.

  “Well, look who’s here—the folks who ran out on their own wedding party.” Sterling laid a report on the secretary’s desk and followed the couple into the other room.

  “It was either that or arrest half the town, including the chief deputy, for disturbing the peace.” Judd hung his hat on a peg and hobbled over to his chair.

  Tracy grinned at the two and left them. Going into the small conference room, she plunked her purse on a chair, took her seat and picked up where she’d left off two days ago. Today she would finish the box of records.

  A tingle of excitement shot through her as she lifted the next file, opened it, glanced at the macabre grin on the skeleton and looked at the dental record.

  A filling in a molar matched, she saw. And another. And another. The root canal in a bicuspid was the same. The lower back molars had been extracted, according to the dental chart. The lower back molars were missing from the skull.

  “Judd!” she yelled. “Sterling!”

  The two men stopped their monthly planning session and peered through the open door at her.

  “I’ve found him!” she said. “I’ve found our cowboy!”

  Both men leapt to their feet and stampeded into the room. One on each side, they peered over her shoulders.

  “Look.” She pointed to each detail on the chart and on the teeth in the skull. Every one was the same.

  “What’s the name?” Judd demanded. “Who is it?”

  She turned the card over and peered at the information side. “Charles Avery,” she read. “Oh…”

  “What just occurred to you?” Judd asked, his eyes narrowed on her as if she were the suspect in the case.

  “He was the one…Lily Mae told me about him and the Baxter girl who used to live here. Everyone thought they’d run off together. That was about twenty-eight years ago. Oh, Judd, Melissa Avery from the Hip Hop Café—the bones…they belong to her father.”

  “Hmm,” Sterling mused aloud, “did she kill him?”

  “Melissa? She couldn’t have. She was just a baby at the time,” Tracy explained.

  Sterling gave her a pained look. “I meant the woman he was supposed to have run off with.”

  “Lexine Baxter?”

  “She would have had to be pretty strong to have killed him with a rock,” Judd said.

  “She wasn’t an Amazon type, not that I remember,” Tracy put in. “I don’t think Avery was dead when he was pushed under the ledge. Remember, I found blood in the soil there? He could have been in a daze, then gone into a coma.”

  “And bled to death,” Sterling concluded.

  “Winona saw our cowboy…Charles Avery,” Tracy amended. “She saw him fighting with another man. Maybe that was who did him in and left him to die.”

  “But who was that?” Judd frowned, then gave Sterling a wicked grin. “I know just the man to put to work on a twenty-eight-year-old murder mystery.”

  Sterling said a rude word.

  The telephone rang. Tracy hit the speaker button. “Tracy Roper…Hensley,” she said in her official voice, grinning at Judd’s scowl.

  “Tracy, I have some news for you.”

  “Winona,” Tracy said warmly. She had news of her own. “We know who the cowboy was. I found his dental records. You’ll never guess in a million years—”

  Winona wasn’t the least interested in the past. “It’s a girl,” she said smugly. “But the next one will be a boy.”