by Tami Hoag
Gently, he swept away the tears from her cheek with the pad of his thumb. “Where’d you get to be so smart?” he asked, one corner of his mouth tilting upward.
Amy choked on a giggle, her face brightening under the light of the moon, her heart lifting. “My old man.”
“Yeah,” he said, his voice thickening. “That’s what I thought.”
He hugged her tight, rubbing his cheek against the top of her head, breathing deep the scents of apple-scented shampoo and Love’s Baby Soft cologne. He squeezed his eyes shut against the wave of emotion that threatened to crest in his eyes. “I love you too, baby. More than anything.”
“I know.” She hugged him back for a long moment, then looked up at him through a tangle of bangs, trying gamely to resurrect her pixie smile. “Enough to let me go to the fireworks with Trace tomorrow night?”
Dane laughed automatically, but his smile faded as he took in the face that was thinning from cuteness to elegance, the wide eyes filled with hope and hunger for maturity. He felt her slipping inexorably away and knew there was nothing he could do to stop it.
“We’ll see.”
IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN RAINING. THE OCCASION WAS SO solemn, so sad, it should have been against the law for the sun to shine. But it beamed down on the little knot of mourners, butter-yellow and summer-bright, oblivious to their pain.
Elizabeth straightened the lenses of her Ray-Bans and sighed at the scene being played out on the hillside below her. The Amish were burying their dead. There were only a few in attendance. Aaron’s family, she supposed, and not many others. Apparently the Amish weren’t very tolerant of killers in their midst. Madness and violence had no place in their world. It seemed they preferred not to acknowledge that kind of trouble when it happened. Maybe they thought if they ignored the bad, it wouldn’t be real and they wouldn’t have to lie awake nights wondering why or when it might happen again. Elizabeth couldn’t say that she blamed them.
She wasn’t close enough to hear the words being spoken at the graveside. She stood too far up the hill with the wind pulling at her hair and flattening the soft cotton of her white T-shirt against her. Behind her, at Still Waters, where she had left her car, work went on as usual, the sounds of hammers and saws shattering what peace Aaron Hauer might have found in death. Or maybe down there under the shade of the maple tree, beside his beloved Siri, all he would hear would be the stream gurgling and the bees humming as they hovered above the wildflowers.
A white-haired old man with a flowing beard bent slowly over the grave and threw in a handful of dirt. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. That much never changed. Amish and English, zealots and agnostics, all came to the same end.
Up on the road a tour bus rumbled past, carrying people back to town in time to grab a bite of dinner at the Coffee Cup before the Horse and Buggy Days parade. There had been talk of canceling the festival in light of the tragedies that had marred the past ten days, but economics and a need for something good to happen had overruled.
Life in Still Creek would go on because it had to. The worlds of Amish and English would continue to overlap. The horror of what had happened would fade with time. But nothing would ever be quite the same, Elizabeth thought. A certain innocence had been lost. The truth she had been so determined to dig for had not only hurt, it had left scars. She couldn’t help but feel saddened by that.
Sad was getting to be a habit. Rotten habit, she thought, like the smoking, like the scotch.
She hadn’t heard a word from Dane since the morning of Aaron Hauer’s death. The ubiquitous Lorraine had called with curt messages about statements. Mark Kaufman had stopped by the house several times, puppy-eyed and sweet as pie, for her to sign documents and clarify specific points about “the incident,” as he so carefully called it. But there had been no sign of Dane, no call. Nothing but a fresh new fuchsia plant delivered by a pimple-faced boy from Rockwell’s Flower Shop. A farewell token. He had, it seemed, taken her at her word and opted for the easy way out. Damn the man. Didn’t he recognize reverse psychology when he saw it?
Below her, the gathering of Hauer kin was breaking up. They turned away from the grave site and trudged up the hill in their somber clothes and sober faces, the women carefully holding out the skirts of their long dresses as the high grass snatched at them like long, thin fingers. Only one man remained behind to shovel dirt into the hole Aaron’s body had been committed to for eternity.
“Maybe he’ll find some peace now.”
Elizabeth swung around to find Dane standing not ten feet away. The wind teased the ends of his hair, and his expression was inscrutable, his eyes hidden by mirrored sunglasses. He stood with his hands in the pockets of his faded jeans, the sleeves of his khaki uniform shirt rolled neatly to the elbow. Two pristine white bandages on his right arm and the orthopedic brace on his left knee served as the only signs of his own brush with the great beyond.
“I’d like to think so,” Elizabeth said, scolding herself for drinking in the sight of him. Didn’t she have any pride at all? She tucked her fingers in the pockets of her snug, faded jeans and turned back toward the funeral procession. “He did some terrible things, but he wasn’t a terrible man. Just heartsick and lonely.”
She hated to think that loneliness could drive a person to the lengths Aaron had gone to, but that was what had been at the root of his illness—loneliness and grief, bitterness and hate that had steeped and fermented into madness.
“Is that what you’ll put in the paper? That he was heartsick and lonely?”
“There won’t be a paper this week,” she said, watching as the one remaining Amishman took up his shovel and began to fill the grave. “By next week this won’t be news.”
She thought of Aaron’s Amish paper, The Budget, and wondered if his death would be included among the crop reports and the scandalous news that someone from the Old Order had gone modern and bought himself a tractor.
“Will there be a paper next week?” Dane asked. He wouldn’t blame her if she wanted to leave. Nothing that had happened here could have made her want to stay. As much as he loved this place with its quiet, gentle beauty and honest, hardworking people, Elizabeth had been given a very different, very unattractive view.
She looked at him over her shoulder. “I’m not going anywhere. I’m all done moving on, looking for my life around the next corner. This is home, for better or worse. I’m hoping I’ll grow on people eventually. Get ’em so they don’t want to kill me or throw bricks through my windows, and then work my way up from there.”
“Rich is the one who vandalized the Clarion office,” Dane said. “He was the one in your garage too. I took his statement yesterday at St. Mary’s. He was looking for the book and trying to scare you off at the same time.”
“I heard he came to. Pity.” She smiled at Dane’s arched brow. “Women are vengeful creatures as a rule, sugar.”
“I’ll bear that in mind,” he said sardonically. “Will I be taking my life into my hands if I ask you to take a walk with me?”
“I’m unarmed at the moment. Should you be walking on that?” she asked, nodding at the brace on his knee.
“Doesn’t matter. I’ve got a date with an arthroscope next week.”
“Well, you’ve got my social calendar beat all to hell.”
Dane reserved comment and started down the hill toward the creek. What he wanted to say could do without the accompaniment of pneumatic power tools or the gloom of a cemetery plot.
“What did Fox have on Rich if not the book?” Elizabeth asked, falling into step beside him, feeling a need to put off whatever was to come. The famous final scene, she supposed. Like Bogey and Ingrid Bergman on the tarmac in Casablanca. Only she didn’t have Paul Henried waiting in the wings for her.
“Rich came across Jarrold when he was already dead. Instead of calling the cops, he started looking for the book, knowing if we found it first he’d be dead politically and up to his ass in indictments.”
He stopped at the water’
s edge and stared across the creek where a mother wood duck was teaching half a dozen of her fuzzy offspring to swim in the muddy shallows along the far bank. “Fox saw him at the scene. I imagine Carney figured Rich had done the deed, but it didn’t really matter one way or the other. Just being able to put him at the scene sealed Carney’s fate.”
He shook his head at the idea of Rich Cannon killing anyone. He’d known Rich forever, and it turned out that he didn’t really know him at all. It was an unsettling thought.
“He didn’t say anything about calling you,” Dane said, turning his attention back to Elizabeth.
“No,” she said. “My money’s on Helen for that one, but I don’t guess we’ll ever know for sure.” Somehow, now, in the light of day and in view of everything else that had happened, it didn’t seem important.
“What happens next?” she asked, needing to think ahead instead of back.
“Now the wheels of justice turn. The state attorney general is digging into the corruption business. There’ll be some empty seats in the legislature before too long, you can bank on that. And there’ll be a commendation for the Clarion.”
Elizabeth smiled at the irony of that. The state attorney general commending a paper the town fathers had wanted shut down. Charlie Wilder was liable to have a stroke. “It’s Jolynn they should honor,” she said, plucking up a long, tough shoot of grass to occupy her hands. “She’s the one found the book. She damn near lost her life for it. I’d say she deserves the credit.”
“Yeager says she’s doing okay.”
“Oh, yeah.” She smiled gamely. Jolynn was doing swell. She was getting her life together for the first time in a long, long time, and Elizabeth was genuinely happy for her. And jealous of her. And sorry for herself. Two more rotten habits to add to her list of thousands. She wondered if, once she got rid of all her rotten habits, there’d be anything left.
Dane studied her as she methodically split the blade of grass she held. She looked a little pale, a little thin. He wanted to take off her sunglasses so he could see those eyes that mirrored everything she was feeling, but he held himself back, the old wariness too ingrained to just let go. “And how are you doing?”
“Me? Hey, I’m a trooper.” She cursed the extra hoarseness that roughened her voice. She should have been tougher than that.
“No. No!” she said. Anger boiled up inside her as she wheeled on him, and she let it have free rein because it was a damn sight better than hurting. “I’m not fine. I killed a man two days ago. There isn’t enough bleach in the state of Minnesota to get the bloodstains out of the floor. I can’t sleep in my bed because I can still see him laying there. And I couldn’t sleep there anyway because all I can think about is you!”
Her hands curled into fists and adrenaline pumped through her. “You made me fall in love, you son of a bitch! And if that wasn’t the meanest, dirtiest trick. All I wanted was peace and quiet. I wanted to live like a normal person. And along you come—”
Dane grabbed her arms and hauled her up against him. She squirmed and twisted against his hold, swearing a streak that would have turned a sailor’s ears blue.
“Quit!” he ordered her, the weight of the command diluted by his laughter.
Elizabeth’s temper spiked upward, and she struggled all the harder. “I will not quit! And don’t you dare laugh at me! I don’t want you. I never wanted you!”
She kicked him hard in the shin. Dane grunted and wrestled her to the ground, pinning her body beneath his, pinning her arms to the ground above her head. They lay belly to belly, chest to chest, his legs sprawled on either side of hers.
He raised himself up enough to look down at her. Her sunglasses had come off in the fray and she glared up at him with eyes that were bloodshot from lack of sleep and red-rimmed from crying. She tried to be so tough and she was so vulnerable. The combination hit his heart with a one-two punch he couldn’t begin to block. She stared up at him, mad as a wet cat.
“It’s like the Rolling Stones say, sweetheart,” he said, fighting for breath. “You can’t always get what you want.”
“I hate the Rolling Stones,” she snarled between her teeth. “And I hate you. You’re mean as cat meat and—”
“I love you.”
“—twice as—” She broke off in confusion. “What?” she mumbled. “You what?”
“I love you.”
She stared up at him for a long moment. Then she worked her right hand free of his hold, reached up slowly and pulled off his sunglasses, tossing them aside.
“Say it again,” she whispered, needing to hear the words, needing to see them in the blue of his eyes.
“I love you,” he murmured. “If it’s any consolation, I didn’t want to either.”
“You sure know how to make a girl feel special,” Elizabeth said. “Maybe you should just shut up and kiss me.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
He lowered himself over her and settled his mouth against hers softly, tenderly, with a poignancy that came from his heart and a heat that seared her clear to her soul. Their lips clung, tasting, savoring, relearning, remembering. Elizabeth let herself luxuriate, steeped herself in the sweetness of the moment. As moments went, this one was perfect. She would remember every single thing about it as long as she lived.
Dane shifted his weight off her as he ended the kiss.
He traced his fingertips along the elegant line of her cheek and touched the little scar that hooked down from the corner of her mouth.
“I loved Amy’s mother, but she wanted . . . things, so many things I couldn’t give her, everything money could buy. I can’t offer you that, Elizabeth. I’m just a cop, a beat-up old football player turned cop.”
Elizabeth could see it all in his face, the pain, the wariness, the need that reached out to her own. “Oh, Dane,” she whispered. “I don’t want things. I just want you . . . to love me.”
“Well,” he said, his lips curving in a gentle smile, “maybe we can get what we want after all.”
He lowered his head and kissed her again. “I’d ask you to marry me,” he said, grinning like a champion, “but I hear you’ve sworn off men.”
Elizabeth smiled up at him. “Now, sugar,” she drawled, batting her lashes as she pulled him back down, “where’d you ever get a crazy idea like that?”
THE END
