by B. J Daniels
But he also knew that he was too involved in this one, even if the DCI didn’t force him to take a leave of absence. As he pulled up in the yard, the front door of the house opened and Anvil appeared. Worry burrowed the farmer’s brows. Anvil held a dish towel in one hand, a cup in the other.
There was a time when Flint would have thought the man was worried that Jenna’s body had turned up and he was about to go to prison for murder. But Anvil didn’t look worried. He merely looked mildly curious. From the beginning, the farmer had sworn that his wife had run off with another man. As it turned out, he’d been right.
Still, Flint doubted Anvil was ready for this news, he thought as he climbed out of the patrol car and started toward the porch steps.
“Sheriff?”
“I’ve got some news about Jenna.” He pulled his coat around him to ward off the cold wind coming out of the snowcapped mountains. Low clouds hung over the peaks with the promise of a winter storm by noon. Christmas was only days away, and without a doubt, it was going to be white. Just the thought of Christmas without Maggie... He felt his stomach roil. “Mind if we step inside?”
Anvil shoved the door open and moved aside to let the sheriff enter. The first thing that struck him was how clean the house was. Anvil hadn’t just cleaned up after the incident with his wife. He’d continued to do so. The house looked spotless. Flint had to wonder if it had ever been this clean when Jenna was taking care of it.
Also, Anvil looked more kept up. He seemed to be dressed better. There’d definitely been a change in the man. Some local women had noticed it after Jenna disappeared. The women were convinced that Anvil had done away with his wife and was looking for another one just because he started wearing jeans instead of overalls. At least the last half of that still might be true, Flint thought.
“Coffee?” Anvil asked as he put down the cup he was holding and moved to the sink to carefully fold the dish towel and hang it over a rack.
“Sure,” Flint said, studying the man’s back. The news he had was a double-edged sword. He feared it would draw blood from a man who had already been put through the mill over Jenna’s first disappearance.
Not only had Anvil found out disturbing things about the woman he’d spent twenty-four years with, but also he’d lost her. The worse part was that most everyone in the county still believed that he’d killed her.
* * *
“WHEN JENNA DISAPPEARED, what did she take with her?” Nettie asked in the Sheridan, Wyoming, café.
Reiner looked up at her in surprise. “You mean did she take her clothes and stuff?”
“Did she?”
“No.” He looked insulted. “She was...abducted. I told you, the apartment was torn up as if she’d struggled. I was at work. I came home and she was gone.”
“None of her things were missing?” Frank asked.
The man seemed to consider that. “Her purse was gone, some of the money I kept in the apartment for groceries. I figured that’s where she was headed when whoever took her showed up at the apartment.”
“How much money was missing?” Frank asked.
Reiner looked as if he didn’t want to answer. “She took all that was in the drawer. Maybe a couple hundred. Maybe less.” He looked sick. “You’re thinking she bailed on me, but you’re wrong. She wouldn’t have done that. You don’t know her like I do.”
Frank wondered if her husband of more than twenty years had told Flint the same thing when she’d disappeared back in March. He doubted either man had really known this woman.
“She ever talk about her past?”
“You mean like her husband?”
“More like old boyfriends before or after her husband,” Nettie said.
Reiner seemed to think for a moment. “She mentioned growing up in some hellhole in North Dakota. Her parents were really strict. She said she never saw them touch each other. Seriously, not a hug, a kiss, even hold hands. She wondered how they’d conceived her.”
“Where was this in North Dakota?” Frank asked.
“Some wide spot in the road.” He frowned as if thinking. “Radville. That’s right, because she said it was anything but rad. I thought that was pretty funny. She had that kind of sense of humor.”
“Did she say why she left there?” Nettie asked.
He shrugged. “Who wouldn’t? She might have said that her parents were glad to see her go. They didn’t want her dating. I think they wanted her to become a nun. Not really, but you know what I mean.” He laughed. “Jenna a nun? Jenna was the horniest woman I’d ever—” He stopped, his gaze going to Nettie. “Sorry.”
“So she had a sexual appetite?” Nettie asked.
“Boy howdy. I got the feeling she hadn’t had any in years, if you know what I mean.”
Frank thought he did. “She like it kinky?”
Reiner colored and shot Nettie a look before turning back to him. “Seriously?”
“Nettie can handle it,” he assured the man. “Jenna like it rough?”
Looking embarrassed, Reiner looked away and said, “I think it was all that pent-up stuff from first her parents and then that straitlaced old man she was married to.”
Frank had to smile to himself. He’d called Anvil Holloway an old man and Holloway was nearly ten years Frank’s junior. He saw that Nettie was amused since even at their ages there was nothing wrong with either of their own sexual appetites.
“What about friends?” Nettie asked. “Surely she had a friend back home that she kept in contact with.”
“Dana,” he said with a nod. “Apparently she didn’t escape Radville. Jenna felt bad for her, talked about helping her out, you know?”
“Like sending her money?” Frank asked.
“She sent her some. I didn’t mind.” He looked defensive. “She didn’t send much. Like I said, I didn’t mind giving it to her.”
“She call her?” Nettie asked.
He shrugged. “A few times. But I don’t see what—”
“We’re going to need Jenna’s cell phone number.”
“She didn’t have one. She used mine.”
“Then we are going to need it and your passcode,” Frank said. “Sorry. We’ll get it back to you as soon as we’re done with it. I can give you money for a new phone.”
Reiner looked as if he might leap up and make a run for it. But after a moment, he reached into his pocket, brought out the phone and laid it on the table with a gesture that said, “I have nothing to hide.” Nettie wrote down the passcode, and turning on the cell, she keyed it in. Seeing that it worked, she pocketed the phone.
“Dana have a last name?” Frank asked.
Reiner shrugged. “I never heard it mentioned.”
“What about friends since the two of you have been living here in Wyoming?” Nettie asked. “Friends from work maybe?”
He shook his head. “She didn’t have a job. We thought it best, you know, under the circumstances.”
“What did she do all day?” Frank asked.
“Hang. Watch TV. She cooked,” he said, brightening. “She was a great cook.” He looked at his watch. “I really need to get to work.”
“We’ll keep in touch, but if you hear from her, call me,” Frank said, sliding his business card and a hundred-dollar bill across the table. “You did good calling the sheriff. We’ll find her.”
Reiner looked like a man badly beaten with regrets. “Right.”
“We’ll mail your phone to your apartment address,” Frank said to the man’s retreating back and got a dismissive wave.
“A waste of postage,” Nettie said. “You know he’s taking off. Won’t be hearing from him again.” She brought up the photo of the man and Jenna on the cell phone.
Frank sighed. “I think we got all we could from him,” he said, watching through
the window as Reiner drove away in an old compact car, the back bumper covered with stickers.
The sky was a dull gray as they stepped out of the café and walked toward their SUV. The cold air smelled as if it might start snowing at any moment.
“We need to know more about Jenna,” Nettie said as she climbed into the passenger side of the SUV.
“My thought exactly.” Frank smiled over at her as he slid behind the wheel. They’d always had this wondrous connection. She smiled back. It still amazed him how much he loved this woman and had since he was a boy. He’d lost her to another man for a while, but getting her back was the smartest thing he’d ever done. She fulfilled him in every way. Having her as a partner in their investigative business was just the cherry on top.
So far their business was doing better than even he’d hoped. Which he thought proved it was never too late. Never too late for love, he thought, looking at Nettie. Never too late to take a chance on something you loved doing. And the two of them loved investigating. That was, he did. Nettie loved snooping into other people’s business, he thought with a smile.
“Jenna knew who was after her,” Nettie said after Frank called the Gilt Edge sheriff’s cell, only to have to leave a message. “This man is someone from her past.”
“Some bad history there. You think the man was blackmailing her?” Frank asked, looking over at her.
“Could explain the money she was taking from her grocery budget back in Montana. Might also explain the prison pen pals.” She nodded. “Actually, I’m betting she was looking for someone to take care of the problem for her.”
Frank chuckled. “Where would a woman go to get help with some man she said was terrorizing her? Prison. I like it.”
“Instead she got the brother of one of the men and either decided to leave with him or really was abducted by the man from her past.” Nettie chewed at her lower lip for a minute. “Doesn’t explain the sexy undergarments or the shoplifted makeup unless... She could have thought that she was going to have to give her possibly ex-con hired killer something, and she didn’t have much money, from what Flint has told us.”
“You think she was looking for someone to kill the man after her?”
Nettie shrugged. “At least threaten him.”
As he started the SUV, he chuckled. He loved the way Nettie thought. “That all makes a strange kind of female sense.”
“Women are pretty practical thinkers. If we need something, we try to figure out how to get it. Womanly wiles are usually a last resort.”
“Then I’d say Jenna was desperate, wouldn’t you?”
“Definitely. It would explain why she took off with Reiner. It wouldn’t have taken her long to figure out that he wasn’t tough enough to take care of the man after her.”
“So then what?” Frank said.
“Once she saw the old boyfriend, assuming that’s who the man in the brown van is, she realized Reiner wasn’t going to take care of the problem for her. So what would she do?”
“Run again.”
“Or call his bluff. What do you think the old boyfriend wants?” Nettie asked thoughtfully. “It’s got to be more than money.”
“Love? Revenge?”
Nettie had wrinkled her nose at the first one. “I’m wondering how he found her in Wyoming when law enforcement couldn’t find her even with a BOLO out on her.”
“You’re thinking she contacted him?”
“Or Kurt did. Jenna could have gotten the old boyfriend’s number from her friend Dana. She calls it on Kurt’s phone. He sees a number he doesn’t recognize and calls it, giving away her location. Reiner’s definitely feeling guilty about something. It’s why he called Flint. But it could be because he didn’t protect her. Or it could be because he got scared and didn’t want to be involved in whatever happened next. I would love to have seen his face when he realized she’d taken all his money. If either of them called the old boyfriend, it could be on the phone—or at least the bill.”
“That would be a stroke of luck, but let’s remember we’re just assuming this man is an old boyfriend,” Frank said.
Nettie chuckled. “If Reiner saw a number on his phone he didn’t recognize, called it and a man answered, I’d say that was what he would have assumed, as well.”
“Think Reiner would have been angry enough to hurt her?” Frank asked.
Nettie shook her head. “I think he really cared about her. He’s the kind of man who would take her back.”
“Like the husband. Flint said Anvil had said he just wanted his wife back.”
Nettie looked thoughtful as they drove out of town. “Makes you wonder who Jenna really is. Certainly not the woman her husband thought he married. Nor the one Reiner thought he was saving. I hope I get to meet this woman.”
CHAPTER SIX
ANVIL BROUGHT TWO cups over to the table and motioned for the sheriff to have a seat. As Flint pulled up a chair, he saw that the man’s hands were shaking as he put down the cups of coffee. He was reminded that Anvil had said he would take his wife back if she was ever found, no matter what she’d done. He wondered if that was still true. If Jenna was found again.
Or if Jenna would go back to Anvil after everything that had happened between them—including him slapping her.
The farmer pulled up a chair. “Is she...?”
“She’s been living in Wyoming.”
Anvil looked up. “Wyoming?” He didn’t seem that surprised to hear this news. But then, all along, he’d believed that she was alive after taking off to meet some man. Apparently, he’d been right. “Not very far away at all.”
“I don’t have all the facts yet, but my office was contacted by a man who said he’d been living with her since she disappeared from here in March.”
“I see.”
“The thing is, the reason the man contacted me was because Jenna has disappeared again,” Flint said.
Anvil let out a soft breath of air that could have been a laugh. “So you don’t know where she is?”
“No, but I sent a private investigator down there to find out what he can. I’ll know more when he reports in. But under the circumstances, I have a positive ID, so I wanted to let you know.”
He thought about the man in the brown van that Kurt Reiner had told him about. From Frank’s message on the phone, he and Nettie were convinced that Jenna had known the man.
“Also, I was hoping to get more information on Jenna’s past before you met and married. Did she ever talk about any old boyfriends?”
The farmer shook his head. “I knew nothing about her past.” He cleared his throat and picked up his coffee cup to hold it in both of his big rough hands.
“I’m sorry, but I have to ask. How well did you know Jenna when you married her?”
Anvil stared down at the brew for what seemed like a full minute before he said, “Apparently not very well.”
“What was her maiden name?” he asked, pulling out his notebook and pen.
“Roberts.”
“She wasn’t from here, right?”
Anvil shook his head. “She told me she grew up in a small town in North Dakota. Something-ville. I’d never heard of it.”
Flint looked on his phone. “There’s a Buttzville, but it says it’s a ghost town.”
Anvil shook his head.
“Radville?” It appeared to be the only other North Dakota town with ville on the end.
“That sounds right.”
“So you don’t know if she dated someone before she met you?”
The farmer met his gaze. “If you’re asking if she was a virgin...” He quickly looked away. “There’d been at least one other man. Maybe more. I never wanted to know.” He shook his head again.
“Does she have any family back there?”
“She said her parents died when she was young. She was raised by an old-maid aunt who died before she moved to Gilt Edge.”
“Did she ever say what brought her here?”
Anvil took a sip of his coffee and Flint could see that he was stalling for time. He took a drink of his own coffee and waited.
“I...I...found her in one of those matchmaking newspapers you pick up at rest stops.” The man kept his eyes downcast. His face was flushed and he seemed to be having trouble breathing. “If I’d known what I was getting into...” He finally looked up. “How I met my wife was something I thought I would take to my grave.”
“I’m sorry,” Flint said, meaning it. He wanted to say that there was nothing to be ashamed of for finding love that way. But whether or not it had been love on Jenna’s part was doubtful. One of the last things she’d told Anvil before she’d walked out of this house was that she’d never loved him. He wondered, though, if she’d only told Anvil that so he wouldn’t come looking for her.
“Did you happen to see anyone around town or your farm who drives a brown van?”
“A brown van?” The farmer frowned. “Not that I can recall. Is that what the man drives?”
Flint shook his head. “It’s something else I’m working on.”
Anvil rubbed a hand over his face. “How did she meet the man she’s been with?”
“Like I said, I don’t have all the facts yet. I’ll let you know when I—”
“Don’t bother,” the farmer said, shoving back his chair and getting to his feet. “I’ve managed just fine without her. I’d just as soon keep it that way.” He walked over to the sink and slumped over it, his back to Flint. “When you find her again, I just need to know where to send the divorce papers.”
“If you hear from her—”
“I won’t,” Anvil said, and Flint let himself out. As he was headed for his patrol SUV, he saw that he had missed another call from Frank. Nothing, though, from Mark. He looked at his watch. Maggie had been missing for almost twenty hours. He felt as cold and bleak as the day. The sky had darkened with the storm. He felt the bite of the freezing day as the first few flakes began to fall. The winter snowstorm had hit. He couldn’t bear to think that Maggie might be out in the storm, freezing cold and...
