by Tami Hoag
Jolynn emerged from the door and held it open while Phyllis stepped outside, a tray of tall iced Cokes in her gnarled hands. The three of them settled back and sat in silence for a moment, savoring their drinks and the quiet. The scenery left a little something to be desired—a weedy, graveled alley that faced the back of Buzz Knutson’s welding shop and lawn implement dealership. But someone had hung a trailing pink geranium from one of the porch posts, giving the spot some color and a fresh scent, and the day itself was pretty, if not the surroundings. The sky was a soft, cloudless blue, the breeze warm with just a hint of the humidity Elizabeth had been told would come in July.
She closed her eyes and leaned her head back, pretending she was a thousand miles away, on a secluded beach on Paradise Island, with nothing to do but enjoy the feel of a man’s strong hands as they rubbed suntan lotion into her back. Dane’s hands.
Cursing her wayward hormones, she snapped her eyes open and shot a sideways look at her companions. Jolynn was off in her own dreamworld. Phyllis, though, was watching her like a hawk, watery brown eyes wide, ruby lips pressed into a thin line.
“What?” Elizabeth asked, sitting ahead and smoothing her long Ralph Lauren safari skirt. She lifted her hand to her cheek. “Have I got ink on me?”
“I’m just wondering if you’ve got the mettle to stick it out here,” Phyllis said, then sucked on her straw. “It’s not a bad town, you know. You’re just here at the wrong time.”
Elizabeth arched a brow. “Murder brings out the worst in people?”
“Adversity makes them close ranks. People are afraid. They band together with their own and leave outsiders to fend for themselves. I ought to know, I was an outsider thirty years ago.”
Elizabeth sighed. Not only was she not “closing ranks” with the natives of Still Creek, she was holding up a spotlight to the town’s flaws and warts and secrets. That was her job. How would they ever accept her if she insisted on doing it well?
“They had to accept you,” she said dryly. “You give them food. All I give them is bad news and grist for the gossip mill.”
“Things will settle down once Dane and Yeager nail whoever killed Jarvis,” Jolynn said. Still overheated from the excitement of catching Helen Jarvis with Boyd Ellstrom, she raised her glass and brushed it across her forehead, wondering what would become of her fledgling romance with Yeager once the case was solved. As regional agent, Rochester was his base of operations. Rochester wasn’t so far away—if you had a car that ran on all cylinders. . . .
“That might happen a little faster if we could get our hands on Jarrold’s little book,” Elizabeth said. “If we could convince Dane the book exists.”
“Oh, he’s convinced,” Jolynn said, leaning around Phyllis to look at her friend. “Bret told me they were going to take another look at the interior of the Lincoln today in case it got wedged down in between the seats or something. I think you getting attacked convinced him.”
Phyllis pricked her ears and went on point like a bird dog scenting a quail. “Bret?”
“Agent Yeager,” Jolynn said primly, a hint of color staining her cheeks.
“Well, I’m glad to be of service,” Elizabeth said irritably, too caught up in her own problems to catch Jo’s reaction “He might have told me he decided to believe me,” she grumbled. “That man is the most stone-headed, stubborn, rude—”
“Sounds like someone I know,” Jo said dryly.
Elizabeth narrowed her eyes. “I am not rude.”
“Pardon me.”
Phyllis watched her carefully, reading all the nuances of her expression as skillfully as any psychiatrist. She hadn’t spent thirty years observing folks without learning a thing or three about human behavior.
“Dane’s a good sheriff,” she said. “And a good man. Tricia turned him sour when she divorced him, but he’s still got a good heart waiting for the right woman.”
Elizabeth sniffed, dodging the older woman’s sharp gaze. “Don’t look at me, honey. I’ve sworn off men. Besides, there’s only one thing Dane Jantzen wants from me, and it is not my hand in matrimony.” She took a sip of her Coke and changed the subject. “So, what do you know about the Widow Jarvis and Deputy Dope?”
“There hasn’t been anything on the grapevine,” Phyllis said. She squared her bony shoulders and lifted her tiny chin to an angle of smugness. “But I’ve suspected something for a while now. There’s something odd about that trio—Jarrold, Helen, Boyd.”
“Gruesome, you mean,” Jo said, shuddering.
Phyllis ignored her, too caught up in her role as consultant to bother with jokes. “I got the feeling Jarrold had some kind of sway over Boyd.”
Jolynn made a face. “Jeez, you don’t mean you think they were all involved, do you? God, Phyllis, that’s disgusting.”
“It might not have been that. It might have had to do with business, I don’t know. But I wouldn’t rule it out just because it paints an ugly picture. Small towns have their share of perversion and depravity too. We just don’t like to think about it.”
Preconceived ideas. Elizabeth set her glass aside, watching the condensation run in rivulets down the side to puddle on the red tin Dr Pepper tray. No one wanted to see the underbelly. Small towns were supposed to be neat and clean and free of sin. Deputies were good guys. Businessmen were upstanding. Divorced women who drove flashy red cars were trouble on the hoof. People saw what they wanted to, clung to their ideals of small town life, fought against anything that disputed their perceptions. She couldn’t say that she blamed them. The more she found out about the truth, the less she wanted to deal with it.
Chapter Nineteen
THE TRUTH. CARNEY FOX HAD DANCED AROUND THE edges of it most of his life. From the time he was a little kid he had cultivated the fine art of lying. Like telling people his father had been killed in the famous wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald on Lake Superior when the truth was his father was his mother’s uncle, a piss-mean son of a bitch who worked on the docks in Duluth and screwed anything that didn’t move fast enough to get away from him. Lying had become as natural to Carney as breathing. He had never been able to figure out why everyone didn’t do it. A lie could save your ass every time if you were good at telling it.
It struck him as being wildly funny now that it was the truth that was going to have him rolling in dough.
“I know the truth,” he said, his voice pitched to the level of conspiracy. He almost couldn’t hear himself above the happy-hour noise in the Red Rooster, even though he was tucked back in the dark, narrow hall by the johns. In the pool room behind him, Gene Harris shot the break for a game of nine-ball and a chorus of shouts went up as balls skittered off in all directions. Garth Brooks was blaring again from the jukebox. Shameless. Half a dozen women just off work from the furniture factory joined in with voices like chain saws. Carney stuck a finger in his free ear and pressed his mouth against the receiver. “I saw you there. In Jarvis’s car.”
He had made this call once before. Just to get his new friend thinking about it, sweating out the possibilities, considering what the going rate for silence might be these days. With this call he would arrange the delivery of the first installment of his fortune. Shit, he was going to be a master at blackmail too, he thought, snickering, smiling against the grubby receiver of the pay phone. Someone flushed a toilet on the other side of the wall and he waited for the noise to subside.
“I think five thousand is a nice wad of cash, don’t you?”
TRACE WHEELED HIS BIKE INTO THE PARKING LOT OF THE Red Rooster and parked it next to the Pepsi machine. He dug a pair of quarters out of the pocket of his jeans and bought himself a Mountain Dew, which he slammed down in half a dozen gulps, Adam’s apple bobbing. The soda cleared the dust from his throat and hit his stomach with an explosion of bubbles that came bursting back up in the form of an enormous belch.
No one was around to hear it. Happy hour was in its final raucous minutes. Everyone was in the bar sopping up the last of the cheap bee
r. Trace wished he could join them. A man liked to toss back a brewski or two after a long hard day in the fields—or so he was told.
He had lived up to his promise to Sheriff Jantzen and worked like a dog, first laboring under the sun on the back of a hay wagon, stacking bales until the muscles in his arms and shoulders were hard as rock, then standing up in the hay mow, where the air was stifling and dusty, stacking the bales as fast as the elevator ran them up.
He’d never worked so hard in his life. His hands ached from lugging countless sixty-pound bales by the twine that bound them. Truth to tell, his whole body ached as if someone had beat him from head to toe with the narrow edge of a yardstick. By the end of the day his clothes had been drenched in sweat, as wet as if he’d stood out in a downpour. Chaff had covered him, sticking to every inch of exposed skin. The stuff was embedded in his hair and in his ears and fine bits of it were still working out of his eyes.
He had gathered from the grumblings of his coworkers that haying was no one’s favorite job. The heat, the dirt, the backbreaking endlessness of it got to everyone except the lucky dog who got to drive the tractor—a job reserved for females or men with seniority. The latter had been the case at the Jantzen place. Pete Carlson had supervised the work. His two sons and Trace had provided the muscle.
Pretty good guys, the Carlson boys. Ryan and Keith. Seventeen and fifteen respectively. They had shown Trace the ropes. They had teased him about being a city kid, but it had been a good-natured kind of teasing. By the end of the day they had all been kidding around like old buddies. Ryan had even invited him to come to the VFW baseball game that night. The team was pretty well set, he’d said, but they could always use some extra guys for practice.
That was where Trace was headed. Never mind that he was so exhausted he could have lay down and slept for a week. He had his mind set on playing baseball—and seeing Amy.
Amy. His stomach did a double clutch at the thought of her. Man, she was pretty. She had brought them all lemonade that afternoon. Ryan and Keith had eyes for her too—what man wouldn’t?—but she had let Trace know, just by the sparkle in her eyes and the way she crinkled her nose when she smiled at him, that he was the guy for her. He shook his head at the wonder of it. Quick as he could snap his fingers, his whole life seemed to be turning around.
He crushed the pop can and tossed it into the trash barrel ten feet away, pretending he was Larry Bird sinking a game winner at the buzzer. The Rooster’s side door swung open and Carney Fox ambled out with a can of Old Mil in one hand and a cigarette in the other.
“Hey, kid, where ya been all day?”
Trace cursed his luck. He hadn’t planned on running into Carney, had hoped to avoid him for the rest of his life actually. He leaned back against the Pepsi machine and tucked his fingertips in the pockets of his worn jeans.
“Working,” he said.
Carney sucked on his beer and belched derisively. “Working?” he sneered. “Working for who? I didn’t think anyone in this shit town would hire you.”
“Yeah, no thanks to you,” Trace grumbled.
“Hey, you were swinging that pipe same as I was.”
“It was your idea.”
Carney took a step back, as if Trace’s change of heart was a personal affront. He cocked his pointy chin to a truculent angle. “Jesus, what are you now—some pussy won’t stand up for himself? I thought you had balls. Maybe I was wrong.”
Trace just glared at him.
Carney took a long drag on his cigarette and exhaled twin streams of exhaust through his nostrils. “So, who ya workin’ for?”
The answer stuck hard in Trace’s throat. He didn’t have to be a genius to know Carney wasn’t going to think much of him working for the sheriff. Tough shit. A man had the right to work where he wanted, where he could.
“I was putting up hay at Jantzen’s.”
“Shit!” Carney jumped back, his sneakers scraping on the gravel. He tossed his cigarette aside. “The sheriff? What are you—stupid? The sheriff! Christ!”
He wagged his head in disbelief, then jerked it up and took an aggressive step toward Trace, his dark eyes gleaming with a feral brightness. “You didn’t tell him nothing, did you?” he asked quietly, menacingly, leaning up into Trace’s face.
Trace grimaced. “Jesus, what’d you eat for supper—shit sandwiches?”
Carney’s expression hardened, tightening the skin over his bony face. He poked Trace in the sternum with a grubby forefinger. “Did you tell him something?”
“No.”
“Then why’d he hire you? He thinks you’re a jerkoff juvenile delinquent.”
A part of Trace wanted to refute the statement. Dane Jantzen thought he was decent, had called him a man, had given him a chance. But he held his tongue. You couldn’t win an argument with a guy like Carney. Better to just keep your mouth shut.
He sidled away from the pop machine, away from Carney and his rancid breath, and moved toward his bike. “I gotta go.”
“Where?” Carney challenged. “Off to suck up to the sheriff some more?” His expression twisted from snottiness to a leer that curled his lip and showed off his crooked teeth. “Or is it his daughter you want to suck?”
Trace stopped in his tracks, protective instincts stirring to life inside him.
Carney cackled a malicious little laugh. “Oh, yeah, you got your pecker primed for her, don’t you, Trace? I’ll bet she’s got some sweet hot pussy. She give you a taste yet?”
“Back off, Carney,” Trace said softly, turning slowly around. His hands curled into fists at his sides and his temper rose inside him like steam in a pressure cooker.
Carney laughed again, flashing his crooked teeth. “Come on, Trace, tell me. She let you get in her panties yet?”
“It’s none of your business,” Trace snarled.
Swaggering a little closer, Carney tipped his head back and snickered again. “Afraid to fuck her, virgin?”
The taunt struck a nerve, jolting Trace like a bolt of lightning. How could he ever have thought this creep was his friend? Why would he ever have wanted to?
“Maybe you need a real man to show you how,” Carney sneered. “I wouldn’t mind taking a poke at her. She’s just my type—”
The rest of his monologue rushed out of him in a grunt as Trace barreled into him, head down, and hit him square in the chest with his shoulder. Carney sailed backward, landing on his ass and skidding back another five feet on the gravel. His beer spewed out of the can he still hung on to, white foam flowing down over his hand like lava from a miniature volcano. He hurled it aside and scrambled to his feet, his eyes narrowing, mouth twisting into a grotesque grimace.
“You little shit!” he hissed, spittle spraying.
He came at Trace with both fists flying, catching him in the belly with one and the nose with the other. Trace’s glasses went flying. He doubled over as blood spurted from both nostrils in a hot red stream. Through the haze of pain he saw Carney’s knee coming up and he grabbed it and shoved, sending Carney sprawling backward again.
All the pent-up rage came rolling out like floodwaters from a burst dam. Trace didn’t try to stem the flow. He’d been holding it back so long, he was sick of it. He let it all pour out, all the anger, all the hurt, all the fury he’d been storing up for years. And he focused it all on Carney, letting Carney take the fall for everyone who had ever hurt him or let him down—his father, Brock, Shafer, everyone.
He fell on Carney, swinging, and landed two hard blows before Carney reversed their positions. They rolled across the parking lot, grunting and swearing, each straining for the upper hand. Trace was bigger and stronger, but Carney had grown up scrapping to survive. The patrons of the Rooster streamed out of the bar to watch and cheer. Trace didn’t see them, didn’t hear them. All he was aware of was the blood roaring in his ears and the acid burn of anger in his veins. He fought blindly, not really seeing Carney Fox’s face even when he rolled on top of him again and started swinging at his head.
He didn’t see the police car skid to a stop on the lot either, didn’t hear the doors slam or Deputy Ellstrom yell at him.
Ellstrom grabbed him by the back of his neck and hauled him to his feet with a series of rough jerks. Carney scuttled out of harm’s way and got to his feet, jabbing a bloody finger in Trace’s direction.
“You’re fucking crazy, man!” His lip was split, his nose was bleeding. Beneath a shock of greasy red hair that had fallen across his forehead his left eye was already beginning to puff up and darken. Half the buttons had been ripped off the front of his thin brown plaid shirt, and the tails hung out, making him look even skinnier and more weasellike than ever.
Trace had fared no better. The front of his white T-shirt was spattered with the blood still flowing from his nose. An inch-long cut angled across his cheekbone. His knuckles were scraped and bleeding. The left knee of his jeans had ripped wide open, the tear framing a kneecap that was bloody and dotted with bits of gravel. He figured he looked as though he’d just gotten the shit kicked out of him. Swell. He couldn’t go to the baseball game like this. He couldn’t let Amy see him this way. Damn Carney. All that bastard had given him was trouble from the word go. Trace couldn’t believe he’d ever been desperate enough to want him as a friend.
