Mountain Sheriff

by B. J Daniels

  Mitch flipped through the interviews Sheriff Hudson had done after the abduction, fearing this old case was the key to Nina Monroe’s disappearance. Jotted in the margins was a note. A name jumped out at him. He flipped back and stared down in disbelief. Ruth Anne Tanner. His mother? The sheriff had tried to reach Ruth Tanner to question her about her visit to the Dennison house earlier on the day of the kidnapping twenty-seven years ago?

  “Where can I reach you?” Sissy asked as Mitch he stormed out.

  “The Dennison house.”

  “Oh.”

  Mitch couldn’t have been more shocked as he drove out of town. Why would his mother go to see Daisy—the woman who’d been having an affair with Ruth Tanner’s husband?

  Mitch tossed his hat on the seat beside him and raked his hand through his hair. His head ached and he couldn’t shake the bad feeling at the pit of his stomach.

  His mother had dropped by for a visit with Daisy? Not bloody likely. She must have gone over to the house to confront Daisy about the affair, demand Daisy leave her husband alone.

  He’d only been six but he remembered that day like it was yesterday. He’d come home from school to find not only his mother gone, but all her things. She hadn’t even left a note. She was just gone. He’d found his father sitting on the deck facing the road. He’d told Mitch that he didn’t know why she’d left, but they’d both known. They’d never heard from her again.

  Years later, Mitch had tried to find her but to no avail. She’d probably changed her name. She obviously didn’t want to be found for she’d left no trail.

  So what had happened at the Dennison’s that day? Had Daisy refused to break off the affair? Is that why his mother had left the way she had?

  Mitch shook his head at his mother’s timing. She had gone over to see Daisy just hours before the woman’s baby was stolen—and before she herself disappeared without a trace.

  The two couldn’t have anything to do with each other. Dear God, he hoped not.

  THE DENNISON HOUSE was pretentious at best, a huge plantation-style home with white pillars, porticos and a sweeping lawn completely out of place in the middle of the mountains of Oregon.

  Out back was an indoor pool and recreation room. Beyond that, stables and corrals, where Daisy Dennison had once raised expensive horses.

  Mitch parked the patrol car in the woods a couple of hundred yards from the house, checked his watch and waited, knowing there was no turning back once he knocked on the Dennisons’ front door.

  A few minutes later he saw the housekeeper leave. Anyone could have set a clock by her schedule. She drove into town the same time every day to do the shopping.

  He figured Desiree would still be in bed this early, and Daisy would be forced to answer the door. He rang the bell a dozen times before she finally did.

  She looked furious. He wasn’t surprised, given their past. Or his persistence.

  Her appearance, though, startled him, and he tried to remember the last time he’d seen her. She didn’t come into town anymore, not that she’d ever embraced the locals. Most worked for her husband and so were beneath her.

  Her implicit snobbery and her former legendary shopping trips to New York and Paris, among other things, had made Daisy Dennison the talk of Betty’s for years. Back then, she’d dressed to kill, driven the most expensive cars, ridden the best horses money could buy and done whatever she damn well pleased, all the time rubbing it in everyone’s faces, including her husband’s.

  That was until Angela’s kidnapping. After that, Daisy had become a recluse, which started its own round of gossip. But even that had died down over the years, due to a lack of fresh dirt.

  As far as Mitch knew, Daisy Dennison was seldom seen by anyone except her immediate family and their housekeeper, a tight-lipped German named Zinnia.

  Zinnia did all the shopping, but spoke only broken English and didn’t gossip, a crushing blow to Betty’s crowd.

  So Mitch was taken aback by how much Daisy had aged. Wade had shocked the town when he’d brought his new mystery bride home to Timber Falls. Daisy, a dark-haired beauty, was nineteen at the time, Wade forty. Great gossip down at Betty’s for weeks.

  Now Daisy, who wasn’t even fifty, looked older than her husband, who was hugging seventy. She was far too thin. Her once gorgeous hair was dull and graying and pulled severely back from her face. Her clothing was equally stark—baggy black sweats and worn black slippers.

  There was no color in her face, no light in her eyes, not like the way she’d looked the summers she’d ridden her horse on the trail behind his house. Mitch had been just a kid, but he still recalled his father disappearing into the woods on those sunlit mornings and coming back in the late afternoon smelling of wine and perfume.

  Mitch shoved aside the memory the way he did most thoughts of his father. Always better not to go there.

  “Mrs. Dennison. Sorry to bother you, but I’m working on a missing person’s case and I need to ask you a few questions.”

  Her look berated him for not calling first.

  But they both knew why he hadn’t.

  “It will only take a few minutes.”

  She glanced at her watch as if trying to come up with an excuse. She didn’t need an excuse not to talk to him and they both knew it. With an irritated sigh, she stepped back and let him enter.

  He wondered about her life as she led him into a large living room to one side of the house. Long windows ran the perimeter of the room on three sides, providing views of the front, side and back yards and the deep green of the encroaching wilderness beyond—if the blinds hadn’t been closed. The room was as dark and gloomy as the weather outside and the woman in it.

  What did Daisy Dennison do in this huge house all day? And why had she closed herself up here all these years? He wondered what it must be like for her daughter Desiree, who still lived at home. Or maybe that was why Desiree stayed here—for her mother.

  “What is it you want?” Daisy asked impatiently, motioning to a chair, making it clear he wouldn’t be sitting long.

  “One of the decoy painters is missing. Nina Monroe.” He waited for a reaction and got none. Hadn’t Wade told her about Nina? Obviously not. By just coming here, he was treading on thin ice. He decided to dive in and get it over with. “Wade is worried Nina might have met with foul play.”

  “I’ve no interest in the decoy business.” Her tone made it clear she never had.

  “Even if your husband and Nina have a relationship?”

  The smile was bitter. “Especially if that’s the case.” She started to get up. “You should have called. I could have saved you the trip.”

  “Why did my mother come to see you the day Angela was abducted?”

  Daisy Dennison lowered herself slowly back onto the chair, her face stony. “She wanted money to leave town. She thought she could blackmail me.”

  “That’s a lie.” The words were out before he could stop them.

  She arched a brow. “You obviously didn’t know your mother. How old were you—six when she left? I threw her out and never saw her again.”

  “What about my father? Did you see him again?”

  Her gaze softened. “No. Not after I lost Angela. I doubt you’ll believe this, either, but I loved your father.”

  He got to his feet. “I’d like a word with Desiree.”

  It was her first genuine emotion. Fear. “Desiree doesn’t know about your father and me.”

  “But she might know about Nina Monroe,” he said. Daisy couldn’t keep him from talking to her, though she might try.

  “Nothing can change the past,” Daisy said, her voice sounding like an old woman’s, weak and shaky, all that confidence and bravado gone. “Can’t you leave it buried for all our sakes?”

  “I wish I could, but I’m afraid some things just won’t stay buried.”

  Her dark eyes glinted with tears. She walked to the back wall. He thought for a moment she was calling someone to have him thrown out.
r />   But instead, the blinds on the windows there groaned upward. She pointed toward the indoor pool, then reached for the phone, dismissing him.

  He listened to her dial. She was calling her husband, sure as hell. Wade would be furious. Not that it mattered. It had been more than thirty-six hours since Nina was last seen. Mitch couldn’t shake the feeling he was now investigating a homicide.

  “OH, THESE COOKIES,” Charity moaned with pleasure.

  “Better than sex?” Lydia asked with a wink.

  “If I ever have sex, I’ll let you know.”

  Lydia laughed, then leaned forward in her wheelchair. “So tell me. Why are my brother’s shorts in a bunch over this decoy painter?”

  “I was hoping you could tell me. No one seems to know anything about her. Have you ever seen Wade this crazy before?”

  “Just once,” the older woman said. “When Angela was taken.”

  Charity nodded, counting on that answer. “You remember anything about that time?” she asked as she took another cookie.

  “Like it was yesterday,” Lydia said.

  WARM MIST rose off the turquoise-blue water to fog the glass windows. Through the mist, Mitch saw Desiree Dennison lying on a lounger by the pool wearing a pale-pink one-piece. The suit was wet, her tanned skin covered with tiny droplets of water, the room hot as a sauna.

  She glanced up as he approached. She reminded him of a sixteen-year-old. Not only because she was young-looking, but because she acted young. He found it hard to believe she was three years older than Charity.

  “Sheriff Tanner?” Desiree sounded surprised. Was it possible she hadn’t heard Nina Monroe was missing? Or maybe she couldn’t have cared less, just like her mother.

  “Is there someplace less…damp we could talk?”

  She groaned and covered her eyes with one slim arm. “I have a bitch of a hangover and I’m in no mood for a lecture.”

  “I didn’t come here to lecture you.”

  She lifted her arm and gazed up at him. “Did I break one of your laws?”

  Probably a half dozen. “They aren’t my laws. Would you mind putting something on?”

  She looked down at her tanning-bed tanned full-figured body, then up at him and smiled teasingly. “Sure, Sheriff, if that’s what you want.”

  He looked away as she slowly rose from the lounger and slipped into a large long-sleeved man’s shirt. He wondered whose shirt it was. Definitely not her father’s taste.

  “Want something to drink?” she asked as she led him from the pool area into the game room, complete with dozens of commercial-size video games.

  “Beer? Soda? Bottled water?” she asked as she went behind a bar and opened a small fridge.

  “Nothing. Thanks.”

  She shrugged as she twisted the top off a bottle of beer, careful not to break her long lacquered nails.

  “Come on, Daddy asked you to talk to me about…what? The evils of alcohol? Drugs? Speeding?” She grinned. “Sex?”

  “I’m here about Nina Monroe’s disappearance.”

  “Who?”

  “The decoy painter at your father’s plant everyone’s talking about,” he said patiently.

  Desiree grinned. “I might have heard something about her at the Duck-In last night, but why ask me about her?”

  “You never met her?”

  She wrinkled her nose. “I don’t hang out with people from the plant.”

  “Never ran into her at the Duck-In?”

  She shrugged. “I guess not.”

  “Your father thinks Nina might have met with foul play.”

  “You mean like someone murdered her?” She made it sound as if Timber Falls could never be that interesting. He wondered why she’d stayed here. Was it the pool, the stocked fridge, the free ride on Daddy’s money? Or was she afraid to leave her mother alone in this big old house?

  She took another drink.

  “One more question,” he said, tired of the Dennison women. “What would happen if Angela came back?”

  Desiree choked. “The precious younger child I’ve never been able to live up to because I’m still alive?” She made a disgusted sound. “Why would you even ask that? You don’t think Nina—”

  “Just curious.”

  She studied him for a moment, obviously battling with the idea. “My parents would stone her to death because how could she possibly live up to the perfect lost child they’ve canonized for twenty-seven years?” She looked at him, bitterness souring her gaze. “But you know, even if she wasn’t the perfect daughter, she’d still make me look bad, wouldn’t she?”

  Chapter Twelve

  As Mitch drove away from the Dennison house, the radio squawked and Sissy came on.

  “I think one of your Bigfoot fanatics might have found something you’ve been looking for,” she said.

  “Go to the security channel.”

  A moment later, “You there?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Just got an anonymous call from some guy who says he spotted an older red compact in a ravine. He says he thinks there’s someone in the car. Too steep to go down there. He called to the person a few times, but got no answer. So he drove out to report it. Didn’t want to get involved, so he declined to give a name. Called from the pay phone outside the Duck-In.”

  Mitch muttered an oath. Wasn’t this what he’d feared all morning?

  “Where’d he see the car?”

  “Just past Lost Creek Falls.”

  Seven miles out of town. “I’m on my way.” He reached Main Street and started south on the highway. No lights. No siren. Watching his speed. He didn’t want to add to the rumors already whizzing around town.

  Suddenly a figure in a bright-red rain slicker rushed out into the street, arms waving. All he caught was a flash of red before he hit the brakes. The patrol car skidded on the wet pavement, coming to a stop just inches short of catastrophe.

  Charity grinned at him from under her hood and stepped around to the passenger side to open the door.

  “Have you lost your mind? I almost hit you,” he hollered, his voice betraying just how close he’d come. Wade was right. The woman was a menace.

  “You would never run me over,” she said as she calmly climbed in and buckled her seat belt. “You might want to—” there was a smile in her voice “—but you wouldn’t.”

  “What do you think you’re doing?” he asked.

  “I thought you might want to have some lunch,” she said. “Betty made coconut-cream pie and I’ve found out a few things you’re going to want to hear, such as Wade and Daisy had a huge fight the night Angela disappeared.”

  He hoped this fight had nothing to do with his mother. All these years he’d believed that no one knew about the affair between his father and Daisy Dennison. Was he only kidding himself?

  Charity glanced into the rearview mirror. “You realize you’re blocking traffic?”

  He started to tell her he didn’t have time for food or gossip, but if Nina’s body was in her car in a ravine, then leaving Charity alone in town was too dangerous, given everything that had happened lately.

  Mitch was only one of a half dozen sheriffs who covered remote areas of Oregon alone. When he needed help, he could call the state for backup—or deputize locally. Most of the time, though, he handled things just fine on his own. Having Charity where he could keep an eye on her would be the safest thing for her. As for him…well, that was another story.

  He shifted into drive and got moving.

  “Betty’s is back that way,” she said as he passed Florie’s and left the city limits.

  “I’m taking you into protective custody.”

  “Protective custody?” She seemed to like the sound of that. “Although unnecessary.” She opened her purse and pulled out the small gun he’d seen the night before, a can of pepper spray and a set of handcuffs.

  He groaned. “What the hell do you plan to do with the cuffs?”

  “I might have to detain someone until you ca
n get there to save me.” She grinned. “Unless you can think of something else to do with them.”

  “Don’t make me sorry I didn’t just lock you up at the jail.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “To check on an anonymous call about a red compact in a ravine.”

  She looked over at him in surprise. “Nina?”

  “Maybe.”

  She shivered and looked out at the highway ahead. “We still don’t know who she is, right?”

  “No.” He drove out of town to the hypnotic sounds of the falling rain, the hum of the heater and the rhythmic sweep of the wipers, trying to ignore Charity’s warm tantalizing scent.

  Charity took off her rain jacket and tossed it in the back, making him too aware of the way her rust-colored turtleneck sweater brought out the gold in her eyes, not to mention how it hugged her full breasts.

  He cracked his window open to let in a little of the cool damp air. Charity smiled as if she not only knew exactly what she did to him, but also enjoyed every minute of it.

  Fog hung in the trees on both sides of the road like cotton ticking. A thin white mist swirled restlessly on the blacktop ahead of them. Not far out of town, they lost all traffic. This part of the state was isolated. Nothing but a narrow stretch of secondary two-lane highway hemmed in by dense coastal growth. The closest town, Oakridge, was a twenty-mile drive.

  Unfortunately there were only a couple more hours of daylight left. Between that and the rain, the day was dark and gloomy enough without going looking for a dead body.

  “So tell me about this alleged fight between Wade and Daisy,” he said to keep his mind off what was up the road.

  He didn’t really mind having company on the drive to break the monotony. And as long as he kept pretending he wasn’t susceptible to Charity’s charms, he’d be fine.

  “Wade and Daisy fought all the time, but this night it was huge.”

  “According to…?”

  “You know I can’t reveal my sources.”

  “Of course not.”

  “The nanny, Alma Bromdale, told my source in strictest confidence that she put Angela to bed, then went down to get the cold medicine she’d left in the kitchen.”