Jack Murray, Sheriff

by Janice Kay Johnson

  He ran a hand over his face and for a moment his cool, expressionless facade fell, letting her see anguish to equal her own. He sat heavily. “No. It’s not all lies. I told your daughter once that I’ve done things I regretted. I wasn’t so much telling her as you. I wanted you to ask me, but you never did.”

  “So it’s my fault?” she asked incredulously.

  “No. I didn’t mean to imply that. But answer me this—If I’d told you about everything in there—” he waved at the newspaper “—would you have agreed to date me?”

  The answer he’d asked for showed on her face.

  He grimaced. “So I was damned if I did, and damned if I didn’t.”

  “If…if you had explained, if I hadn’t had to discover who you are on the pages of the newspaper, I might have given you the benefit of the doubt.” Was that true?

  “Yeah. Sure.”

  “You’ve shot someone before.” That had hit her especially hard. He had gone in there last night knowing what he might need to do, knowing what it felt like. And she had never guessed that he had blood on his hands.

  He swore suddenly and shoved his chair back from the table, although then he didn’t rise. “I’m a cop! I’d just watched my partner be gunned down. The son of a bitch swung around to shoot me and I got him first! I should apologize for that?”

  “There was an investigation….”

  Now he did rise to his feet, towering over her as he flattened hands on the table and leaned forward. Between gritted teeth, he said, “There is always an investigation. Not even police officers can shoot citizens with impunity. There’ll be one this time, too. What do you think all that crap is about?”

  “Crap?”

  He was in a rage. “There were investigations every time. I have been exonerated every time. Violence is everywhere. You’ve never wanted to see that. You thought you lived in some kind of damned paradise, but you don’t. People get murdered in Butte County, too. Throats get slit and children get raped. My job is to see that they don’t, and when I fail at that part, I try to catch the scum who did it. Does that lower me to their level? Who the hell knows?”

  “You didn’t shoot Ray.” Now, where had that come from?

  “I didn’t have to.”

  “But you looked like you wanted to.” A corrosive poison, this fear rose from deep within her, and she wished the moment the words were out that she hadn’t spoken them. Hadn’t thought them.

  He looked as if she’d punched him. His eyes were dark, his stare stunned. “Do you really think I’d kill a man for no other reason than my own temper?” A muscle spasmed under his eye and he shook his head as though to clear it. “You think that’s why I shot Gary Hansen?”

  Shocked, she pressed a hand to her mouth. “No! Oh, no! I never thought…”

  But she was too late.

  Jack shoved the chair hard and walked out. She’d barely stumbled to her feet and started after him when the front door slammed hard enough to rattle the side panes.

  He was gone. This time, she knew with terrible clarity, for good. Because, once again, she hadn’t listened, had only reacted out of long-held fears.

  Beth crumpled back into her chair and laid her forehead on her crossed arms. Her tears soaked the newspaper.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  “MURRAY HERE. Leave a message if you want me to call.”

  She’d heard the same terse, canned response a dozen times. Beth moaned in despair and then hung up the telephone quickly, hoping the machine hadn’t recorded her misery. Legs wrapped around the legs of the kitchen stool, she buried her face in her hands.

  Where was Jack? Had he gone to work today or had he spent the day being grilled by—who did this kind of thing?—internal investigators? The FBI? Tonight, was he sitting in his huge old house listening to the phone ring and choosing to ignore both it and her earlier messages? Would his anger cool so he could forgive her? Or had she driven him away once and for all with her constant distrust—the distrust he had done nothing to earn?

  “What’s wrong, Mommy?” Her younger daughter’s voice came from behind her.

  Beth whipped her head up and tried to summon a smile. “I’m just tired, honey.”

  The sound of the television still came from the living room. Stephanie had probably turned on some program too teenage for her younger sister.

  “You don’t look tired.” Lauren eyed her shrewdly. “You look sad.”

  Beth’s first instinct was to lie. But how could she expect honesty from her children if she didn’t give it in return?

  “I suppose I am,” she said with difficulty. “I did something stupid, and Jack’s angry with me.”

  A frown gathered on Lauren’s high, curved brow. “What did you do?”

  Beth put it as simply as she could. “I didn’t trust him when I should have.”

  “Why didn’t you?” the eight-year-old asked in clear surprise.

  There was the question. Why hadn’t she?

  Beth knew the answer: Because the newspaper article had echoed her fears as if it had been a personal letter. Dear Beth, you were right all along.

  She had reacted to her own deep-rooted fear that all men turned angry eventually. She had reacted to her father, to Ray. Not to Jack at all.

  “I haven’t known him that long,” she explained to her daughter, who came into the kitchen and leaned against her. The warm, sturdy body pressed so close brought a sting of tears to Beth’s eyes and she wrapped an arm around Lauren. “When you’re dating a man and thinking…thinking that you might want to marry him someday, you worry. Divorce isn’t fun or easy, and it shouldn’t be. When you marry, you intend it to be forever. But what if you don’t know him as well as you think you do? What if he’s hiding something from you?”

  “Do you think Mr. Murray is?”

  “I think now there are things he didn’t tell me, because he knew they would worry me. I wish he had. Or I wish I’d asked.”

  Lauren didn’t say anything for a long while. “You know Saturday, when Daddy took us for ice cream, even though it was so-o cold?”

  Puzzled by the apparent non sequitur, Beth nodded.

  “I asked if he still thought we’d be all together again someday. He said no. That we were still a family, but we’d never all live together again.” She tilted her head back, eyes inquiring. “Does Daddy know that you’re thinking about marrying Mr. Murray?”

  “No…yes. I don’t know,” Beth said honestly. “What he knows is that he and I won’t remarry, that we’re happier living separately.”

  “Oh.” Lauren burrowed her face against her mom and mumbled something.

  Beth kissed the silky top of her head. “I couldn’t hear you, honey.”

  “I said—” the words were barely louder “—that I think I might like it if you did marry Mr. Murray. He’s nice.”

  Blunt knife to the heart. Her daughter knew without hesitating what Beth should have known.

  “Yes,” she whispered, tears seeping from beneath eyelids she’d squeezed shut. “Yes. He is.”

  JACK STARED at the frantically blinking red light on the answering machine. Twelve—no, he recounted, fourteen new messages. On a sound of disgust, he swung away. He wasn’t in the mood for any of them.

  He was, however, going to return Mark Dunford’s call. The journalist who’d written this morning’s splendid, front-page piece wanted the sheriff’s comments. Jack had stewed all day over that one. The bastard had a nerve.

  Well, it so happened that Jack did have a few comments to make. He’d waited this long in hopes he could make them more temperate than they would have been at ten o’clock this morning when his secretary had handed him the little pink message slip with Dunford’s name on it, when his own rage and pain had felt like a heart attack.

  Jack dialed the SOB’s home number and waited while a woman went to get her husband.

  “This is Mark Dunford,” the other man said.

  “Sheriff Murray.”

  “Ah. Thank you f
or returning my call. Our readers—the citizens who elected you—will be curious about any progress in the investigation of yesterday’s tragedy. And particularly, of course, in your side of the story.”

  “Story?” The burning pain spread in his chest again. Harshly, he said, “What happened yesterday was the horrific end of a troubled man’s life. It was the beginning of growing up without a father for two children, of struggling to survive as a single mother for his wife. I shot a man I liked and respected. Story? I understand what you do for a living, Dunford. Just remind yourself occasionally that you’re writing about real people.”

  “Sheriff Murray, I became a journalist so that I could personalize news events, remind everyday folks that behind the headlines real people are suffering. If you took offense…”

  “Yeah.” Jack stalked through his house with no goal, just needing to stay in motion. “I did. I’ve cooperated with you in the past. I’ve encouraged everyone in my department to do so, when it was possible without jeopardizing an investigation. Frankly, my interest in future cooperation dwindled this morning when I and every citizen of this county read that pack of innuendos about my career.”

  “I wrote nothing but fact—”

  Ruthlessly, Jack overrode him. “And left out the parts that wouldn’t have supported your thesis. You know damn well that in every case you cited, I was cleared without question. You know, too, that any cop who uses a weapon is automatically investigated. So why imply that a board of inquiry is looking into what happened not because that’s routine, but because I’m a loose cannon? Tell me, did I shoot Gary Hansen because I was in a bad mood and felt like killing someone? Or maybe just because I didn’t want to bother with that negotiation crap?”

  “Sheriff…”

  “You have my comments,” Jack said coldly, and hung up.

  He returned to the kitchen and slammed the phone back in its cradle. That was a phone call he probably shouldn’t have made. It hadn’t been politic. Maybe tomorrow he’d give a flying damn.

  The red light on the answering machine kept winking at him, and he chose to ignore it some more. Right this minute, he didn’t want to hear from anyone. Not even Beth.

  He’d fantasized half the day that she would be on his doorstep when he got home, begging his forgiveness, swearing her undying faith in him. He wasn’t young and foolish enough to believe his own fairy tale. Jack wasn’t even sure he wanted to hear about her undying faith at this particular moment. Maybe he was feeling too cynical.

  Maybe she’d hurt him too badly.

  The doorbell rang and his heart squeezed in an extra beat of hope or despair, he wasn’t sure. Ignore it, he told himself. Whoever was on his doorstep would go away. All he wanted was his solitude. If ever a man needed to lick his wounds…

  It rang again, insistently.

  “All right, damn it,” he muttered. From the front room he could just catch a glimpse of the porch. A blond woman with a kid beside her stood with hand outstretched to ring the doorbell again.

  Jack grunted in surprise and faint amusement. Meg Patton. Of course, she wouldn’t go away and leave him in peace. On the job, she treated him with some deference. Out of uniform, that evaporated.

  Cold air rushed in when he opened the door. Her nose and cheeks were gaudy red to match her hat and her breath was a puff of steam.

  “Hi,” she announced, looking him over with bright eyes.

  Beside her, Evan McNeil, almost three years old, stared solemnly, his cheeks as red as Mom’s and a lot rounder. He didn’t see his half brother’s father often enough to feel comfortable with him.

  “I suppose this is where I say ‘Come in,”’ Jack said wryly.

  “Yep.” Meg stepped across the threshold with no appearance of shyness. Once inside, the door shut, she began unswathing layers of winter clothing, her own with one hand and her son’s with the other.

  “Planning to stay awhile?” This time Jack sounded downright disagreeable.

  “I’m hot,” Meg said simply.

  For a woman her age—his age—who had a kid in college, she looked damned good—slim, leggy, tough. She was as pretty as she’d been in high school.

  And he just wished she’d go away. He wished she was another woman.

  He led the way into the kitchen and poured Evan a glass of apple juice. Meg turned down his offer of coffee. Hip against the counter, Jack crossed his arms and waited.

  “I talked to Will tonight,” Meg said, craning her neck to keep an eye on Evan, who was wandering into the dining room.

  Jack grunted.

  As direct as always, her blue eyes connected with his. “He says you traded yourself for the Hansen baby-sitter because of me. Because of that scene with my father.”

  The kid had a big mouth.

  “I did it because I thought Hansen was serious about killing her. I didn’t see a choice.”

  “Policy…”

  Jack said the same, profane thing about policy he had the night before.

  Meg made a face. “Yeah, okay.”

  “I couldn’t take the chance he meant it.”

  “All right. But tell me the truth, Jack. Did you do it partly because of that day? In…atonement?”

  Funny she should choose the very word he had. They knew each other too well. Came of sharing a child.

  He rubbed the back of his neck and said with sudden weariness, “Maybe. Yeah. You know I’ve always felt guilty. I let you down, Meg. I guess I’ve always wondered whether I would again, if I had it to do over.”

  She studied him with the unnerving, unblinking scrutiny of a child who hasn’t yet learned that you aren’t supposed to stare. “And do you know now?” Meg asked.

  “Now I know,” he agreed.

  “Well.” Meg smiled, an irritating beam of sunshine. “It’s about time.”

  “What the hell’s that supposed to mean?” he asked grumpily.

  “I’ve told you a thousand times. You were a boy. How could you have stood up to Chief Ed Patton?”

  “I wanted to think I was a man.”

  “Those teenage years are tough,” she said. “Darn it, where did Evan go?”

  The boy was sitting at Jack’s dining room table, drumming his heels against the cherry legs of the chair. His plastic cup of juice sat in front of him, about chin level.

  The adults retired to the kitchen and left the kid to reign over the table. There wasn’t anything he could get into in there, Jack figured.

  “I hear you’re dating someone,” Meg said, changing tack in her disconcerting way.

  “Beth Sommers.” She’d know that much already, thanks to Will’s loose lips. “She owns the stationery store.”

  “I browsed in there the other day just to get a look at her.”

  His turn to stare.

  She shrugged blithely. “I figure I have a proprietary interest. You are Will’s father.”

  “Beth read the newspaper this morning and ditched me.”

  “What?” Outrage added syllables to the single word.

  Now he was the one with the big mouth. “Oh, hell. That’s not true. I walked out, not her. I needed her to be furious at the garbage they said about me. Instead, she believed every word and I could see in her eyes that she was sure she’d never really known me.”

  Meg cocked her head to one side. “Why?”

  “Why what?” he asked, irritated.

  “Why did she believe it?”

  Jack swore and scrubbed a hand over his face. “Because her ex-husband was abusive, and I suspect her father was, too. Because I knew she was afraid of men and therefore tiptoed around the subject of my job. Hell, I made it sound like ticketing jay-walkers is my principal duty outside of playing politics. Thanks to Mark Dunford, she now knows better.”

  “Did you…well, talk to her?” Meg sounded unusually tentative.

  “No. I already told you. I walked out in a huff.” He gave a twisted smile. “But I will. Soon.”

  “Tonight?”

  He made a roug
h sound. “You know what today was like. I talked myself hoarse. I had to explain every second, every thought that crossed my mind, every goddamned word Gary said. And then I had to start all over again. To cap off my day, I went to see Janet Hansen.”

  “Oh, dear,” Meg said inadequately.

  “She thinks it’s her fault, that somehow she could have prevented his tumble into alcoholism and depression. I talked some more, with her nodding and not buying a word. Oh, yeah. It was a hell of a day. No, Meg, I’m not going to justify myself to a single other person.”

  “Even the woman you love?” she asked softly.

  “Even her.” He heard his own flat tone and wished she’d go home. Meg Patton, he realized, had slowly become a friend, even a good friend, in the years since she’d come back to Elk Springs with the fourteen-year-old son he hadn’t known he had. He appreciated the fact that she’d visited tonight. But it was not her understanding, support and love he wanted.

  And Beth’s was not forthcoming. Nor was he going to beg for it, not tonight.

  “Okay. I’ll let you brood in peace.” Meg hopped off the stool again and went to fetch her son. He held coats for them, watched as they tugged Polartec hats over their heads, wound mufflers around their necks, and squeezed hands into mittens. Hurry, he asked silently.

  Meg stood on tiptoe and kissed his cheek. “It’ll work out, Jack.”

  “Thanks.” He opened the door for her and her son. Not until they’d started down the steps did he see the woman standing on the sidewalk in front of his house. A few dry white flakes drifted from a dark sky. She looked incredibly lonely out there, wearing a bright blue parka but with her head bare.

  “Beth?”

  She still hadn’t moved, still stood there, when Meg and the boy reached her. The two women exchanged a few words, Meg buckled her son into her 4×4, waved and got in herself. Jack gripped the door and waited, watching Beth come slowly up the walk. As she neared, he could see her face in the porch light, eyes huge in a face pinched from the cold—or apprehension.