by Tami Hoag
Tomorrow they would ship the body off to the Hennepin County medical examiner in Minneapolis, where a team of pathologists would determine the cause of death. Not that there was much question about it. Tyler County’s coroner, Doc Truman, was a general practitioner who still made house calls in his ’57 Buick Roadmaster. He had neither the equipment nor the inclination to handle a detailed autopsy for a murder investigation. He would, as a matter of courtesy, duty, and principle, ride along in the hearse from Davidson’s Funeral Home, and stand in on the procedure, but he had told Dane he was more than happy to be relegated to the role of witness this time around.
Witness. The word brought to mind a clear image of Elizabeth Stuart sitting in his office, pale, shaking, gray eyes glazed with tears as she relived the horror of finding the body. Dane swore under his breath. He had wanted to put his arms around her, to offer comfort. He tossed back the last of his beer and set the empty on the porch rail as he looked across the pasture and woods that lay between his house and the old Drewes place. No question about it, she was more dangerous to him vulnerable than sexy. Sex he could handle. Sex he could keep in perspective. Vulnerability was another thing. And need. Need was something he didn’t like to think about. He much preferred his other impression of Elizabeth Stuart—the opportunistic alley cat. Comfort was the last thing he wanted to offer her.
“Daddy?”
Dane turned automatically, as if he were used to the title, when the truth was he heard it only over the phone except for the few precious times a year when Amy came to stay with him. His daughter stood at the front door, her long brown hair in disarray around her shoulders, an L.A. Raiders jersey hanging to her knees. She blinked at him sleepily and wandered onto the porch to snuggle against him as naturally as if it were something she did every night of her life. Dane slid an arm around her and leaned his cheek against the top of her head, breathing deep the scents of Love’s Baby Soft cologne and strawberry shampoo.
“What are you doing up?” he said softly. “It’s way past your bedtime, peanut.”
She smiled at him as if she thought he was dear but bordering on senility. “Daddy, I am fifteen, you know.”
“No way,” he scoffed. “You’re not more than ten. It wasn’t a week ago you were throwing up baby formula on me.”
“Gross!” She pretended offense, but ruined it with a pixie giggle. “I’m still on California time, too, you know,” she reminded him.
“Hmm . . .” He didn’t like to think about that either—that his daughter lived half a continent away with her mother and the man who had taken his place.
Six months after the divorce Tricia had signed a prenuptial agreement with a running back who had two good knees and a yearning to become the next John Madden. Dane told himself he didn’t regret losing Tricia, he just regretted losing, period. He told himself he didn’t even care that she’d taken him to the cleaners in the divorce. But he would never forgive her for taking his daughter away from him.
He looked down at Amy now, panic seizing his gut as the realization hit him again. She wasn’t such a little girl anymore. It seemed she’d grown half a foot since he’d seen her last. The softness of childhood was beginning to melt away from her, revealing the angular bone structure of a fashion model. She wasn’t a woman yet either, but somewhere in between, the transition obvious in her face, where her cheeks were beginning to hollow but little-girl freckles still dotted the bridge of her tip-tilted nose.
He’d lost so much time with her. The years had stampeded over him, leaving him with only a handful of memories of pigtails and gap-toothed smiles, of a little sprite who trailed a stuffed rabbit with her everywhere she went. He’d spent so little time being a father to a little girl that he had no idea what to do with a teenager.
A mock frown curled down the corners of his mouth, and he lifted a brow imperiously. “Your mother lets you stay up past midnight?”
“And I shave my legs too,” she said with a saucy, teasing look that reminded him too much of Tricia. “And I go on dates with boys.”
Dane shuddered with true horror and shook his head. “That does it. I’m shipping you off to a convent.”
“We’re not Catholic.”
“Doesn’t matter. They’re big on taking converts.”
Dating. God help him, he wasn’t ready for that. His daughter wasn’t old enough to date, was she? He wasn’t old enough to have a daughter dating, was he? He hadn’t really felt that old—until now. In that moment, standing there in the dark in the middle of the night, he felt suddenly very old and very mortal.
“Did someone really get murdered tonight?” Amy’s voice cut through the silence, soft with a touch of fear.
“Yeah,” Dane murmured. “Someone did.”
She shivered delicately against him and tightened her arms around his waist, pressing her cheek against his chest. “I didn’t think anything like that would ever happen here.”
Dane stared over her head, across the dark expanse of countryside to the south, toward the old Drewes place and Still Waters, and felt the heaviness of evil in the air. The thunder rumbled a little closer than before. Lightning sketched long, bony fingers across the sky.
“Neither did I, sweetheart,” he whispered.
“Do you know who did it?”
“No, but I’ll find out.” He tipped her chin up with his forefinger. “It’s on my list of things to do, right after tucking you in.”
Amy rolled her eyes. “Daddy, I’m too old to be tucked in.”
“Oh, yeah?” He propped his hands on his hips and gave her a look of challenge as she stepped back from him. “Does that mean you think I’m too old to carry you upstairs?”
“Oh, no,” she said, giggling, holding her hands up to fend him off as she backed across the porch toward the door. “No, no, you don’t.”
It was a ritual they had gone through since she turned ten, when she had first decided she had outgrown the piggyback ride. Tradition. The kind of ritual most fathers went through with their daughters on a nightly basis, Dane imagined. One day Amy would be genuinely too old for it, but it damn well wasn’t going to be tonight. Too many other aspects of his life seemed suddenly threatened by change; his daughter wasn’t going to grow up on him tonight too.
He cut off her route to the door, keeping his eyes on hers, bending down, hands up, ready to catch her or block her. Old instincts from his former life came back to him and for an instant he felt just as quick, just as strong as he had when Kenny Stabler had been throwing him bombs.
“Daddy, I mean it,” Amy said, trying to look stern. “I’ve grown. You’ll hurt yourself.”
“That does it,” Dane growled.
He feinted left, then bolted right, catching her as she tried to slip past him. She squealed a protest as he swung her up in his arms, her long hair and long legs flying as he held her against his chest. They were both laughing when Mrs. Cranston came rushing to the door, armed with a baseball bat, her head crowned by spiny pink curlers, her face shining with a liberal application of Oil of Olay. She was a short woman in her sixties, built like a small tank, with fire in her small dark eyes.
“Sheriff, for heaven’s sake!” She clutched her blue chenille robe to her throat with her free hand as she pushed open the screen door with the Louisville Slugger.
“It’s okay, Mrs. Cranston,” Dane said while Amy buried her face against his shoulder in humiliation. “This is a family tradition. Sorry we woke you.”
He stepped sideways through the door and strode across the living room with its soft beige carpet and sturdy masculine furnishings. Mrs. Cranston, shuffling along behind him in a pair of fuzzy slippers, said, “I thought you might be the killer.”
“He is,” Amy muttered through her teeth. “I’m going to die of embarrassment.”
Dane ignored the comment and shot a look at his housekeeper’s weapon. “Well, it’s nice to know you’re ready to protect us, Mrs. Cranston.”
She pulled up at the door to the guest bedro
om and rested the bat across her massive bosom. “I was a switch hitter on the all-ladies team back during WW II.”
“Armed and dangerous.” He shifted his daughter in his arms and started up the stairs, calling back over his shoulder, “Remember to have me deputize you.”
The housekeeper giggled before she caught herself and sniffed. “Oh, pshaw.”
Dane turned his concentration to making it to the second floor of the house. Halfway up the stairs he was reminded of the cruel reality that Kenny Stabler hadn’t thrown him a bomb in over a decade. Pain clutched at what cartilage remained in his left knee and he tried to bite back a grimace without much success.
Amy caught the look and frowned at him as she threaded her fingers together at the back of his neck. “I told you so.”
“You can’t tell me anything,” he grumbled. “I’m your old man.” He groaned as they gained the landing and an old back injury made its presence known. “Emphasis on the old.”
“See?” she said as he set her on her feet on the smooth oak floor. She tugged down the bottom of her jersey and tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. “We’re both too old for this.”
Dane sighed and scratched at a mosquito bite on his neck. “Humor me, will you? I don’t get to play Daddy very often.”
Amy bit her lip and looked entirely too perceptive and too sympathetic, too wise to be a child. “I wish you weren’t so alone, Daddy,” she said softly.
The sentiment hit Dane like a linebacker out of nowhere, knocking him mentally off balance. Automatically, his hand reached down for the polished stair railing, as if to steady himself. Christ, the whole damn world was shifting beneath his feet tonight. That aspect of his personal life was a totally separate issue from his relationship with his daughter. He had honestly never thought of the two coming together in any context.
He shook it off and forced a grin. “Who could put up with me?”
She shrugged and stepped closer to slide her arms around his waist, her face earnest and somber as she rested her chin against his chest and stared up at him. “I could, and if I could, then—”
“You don’t count. You’re related, you have to put up with me.” Dane dropped a kiss on her forehead and gently pushed her and her subject of discussion away. “Go to bed. It’s late.”
Amy backed toward the door to her room, looking frustrated, looking as if she had a lot more to say but knew this wasn’t the time to say it. “Good night, Daddy,” she said with a sigh of resignation.
“’Night, peanut.”
He stood in the hall until the beam of light shining out from under her door went out. Then he turned slowly and made his way back down the stairs, his eyes scanning the photographs of Amy that marched down the stairwell in chronological order, from when she was a bright-eyed baby, to a toddler with a scrape on her chin—the result of her determination to run down the sidewalk when her legs hadn’t yet quite gotten the hang of walking—then a grade-school student. He stopped before he came to the junior high photos and went back to the last picture taken before Tricia had ripped their family apart.
Amy at six. A smile that showed an incongruous mix of baby teeth and permanent teeth. Crooked pigtails and bangs in her eyes. Not long after that picture had been taken, Tricia had severed their relationship as brutally as if she’d taken a knife to him.
Knife. His mind seized on the word greedily, eager to turn his thoughts away from his personal life. He had a murder to solve, and now seemed as good a time as any to get started. He padded down the stairs and slipped out of the house soundlessly, locking the door behind him.
Chapter Seven
MORNING BROKE SO FRESH AND PRETTY IT WAS almost impossible for Elizabeth to believe the events of the previous night had happened. Almost. Birdsong drifted through the open window on a rain-washed breeze and pink-tinted beams of sunlight. The heavy malevolence that had hung in the air as she’d stood over the body of Jarrold Jarvis had passed with the storm during the night.
Perhaps, if she had slept at all, she might have been able to convince herself that finding the victim of a brutal murder had been nothing more than a nightmare. But she hadn’t slept. She’d gone upstairs after using up every last drop of hot water in the tank trying to scour the taint of Jarvis’s death off her, turned Trace’s stereo off and covered him with a blanket as he lay sleeping in his clothes. She had considered emptying the ashtray he had stashed under his bed, but she left it. Compared to some forms of rebellion he’d already tried, this one was minor.
For a time she just stood in his doorway and watched him sleep, needing to be near him even if he wouldn’t have wanted her there. Aching to be closer to him as the chasm of the generation gap yawned between them. He was all she had, her only family—not counting J.C., who was living out the last of his days in a V.A. home in Amarillo, his mind so pickled by years of drinking that he didn’t even remember he had a daughter.
Trace was hers, the baby she had given birth to when she’d been little more than a child herself, the little boy whose scrapes she had tended, whose tears she had dried. They had drifted apart over the last few years, the whirlwind of life in Atlanta’s social stratosphere pulling them away from each other. But they had come back down to earth with a crash, and now it was just the two of them again, and Elizabeth wanted to cling to him, to hold him to her for comfort. Only she hadn’t figured out how to get him to let her that close.
She stood in his doorway and looked across the room at him, fear knotting in her stomach at the thought that emotionally he might always be half a room away with a barren no-man’s-land between them. Then she went off to her own room with her memories of murder and a bottle of Brock’s imported forty-two-year-old scotch. Now she felt as if someone had filled her head with sand. It lolled on her shoulders as she dropped her legs over the edge of the bed and struggled into a sitting position.
“Oh, Lord,” she groaned as the room swirled once around her. She squeezed her eyes shut and ran her tongue over her teeth, grimacing at the taste of old sweat socks in her mouth. “I’d beg for mercy and promise to never do it again, but we both know I’d be breaking a commandment.”
A pounding was going on somewhere behind her ears that had her contemplating the possibility of crawling back into bed and staying there for the next five years or so. But there was a day to face, and it was liable to be a doozy. Today the shit would hit the fan. News of Jarvis’s untimely demise would spread through Still Creek over doughnuts at the Coffee Cup. The phone lines would be humming with it. People would want details and answers. And since it was her job to ferret out those details and print those answers, she would have to haul her fanny out of bed and go scrub the fur off her teeth.
Gingerly she put her fingers to her temples, holding her head in place as she rose unsteadily to her feet. The pounding grew louder, more real, more like the sound of knuckles on wood. She grimaced as her foot hit a puddle of water and she remembered too late that she had left the window open during the storm, craving for the cleansing feeling of windblown rain to wash away the cloying scent of death that seemed burned in her nostrils.
Squinting against the bright, pretty morning, she leaned heavily on the windowsill and peered down at the yard. A bony sorrel horse was tied to the light post, harness hanging on its gaunt frame, one hind leg cocked as it dozed. A boxy black Amish buggy stood behind it, looking too much like an old-fashioned hearse to suit Elizabeth. The pounding came again, this time drawing her gaze to the door that was directly below her.
An Amishman stood on her back porch stoop. He must have sensed her presence, because he took a step back and looked up at her, drawing his wide-brimmed straw hat off to reveal a head of silky blond hair. Aaron Hauer. The man who had been her reluctant taxi driver the night before, taking her home in his buggy so she could call the sheriff’s department to report the murder.
He looked nearer to forty than thirty, a tall, rawboned man with a face from “American Gothic,” austere and joyless. His jaw was trimme
d with a thin stubble of pale whiskers. He stared up at her, regarding her with a kind of subtle disdain through the lenses of a pair of old-fashioned rimless spectacles.
“Mr. Hauer,” she called, wincing a little at the rusty sound of her voice and the ringing it set off in her head. She offered what would have to pass for a smile as she clutched the neck of her nightgown together in a fist, hoping he couldn’t see enough through the fine white silk that would offend his Christian sensibilities. “What are you doing out at this hour?”
“The sun is up,” he declared, as if that were an excuse for getting people out of bed.
