Confessions

by JoAnn Ross

  Maggie had been luckier. Even as drunk as she was, she'd managed to fasten her seat belt. The first patrolmen on the scene had found her, unconscious, not from any injuries, but from the alcohol she'd imbibed earlier.

  As Mariah read the damning pages, Trace sipped his brandy and watched the color drain from her face.

  "He lied," she said flatly when she finally finished. She polished off her barely touched brandy in thirsty gulps, willing the alcohol to jolt her stunned mind back to life.

  "Yes." Trace put his glass on the pine coffee table, took her empty snifter and placed it beside his. Then he took hold of her hand. It was ice cold. He felt a need to warm it, and her. "It seems he did."

  "That son of a bitch." Her words were angry, but her eyes were flat and drained of emotion. "His lies cost us our mother."

  "Perhaps he felt you'd be better off—safer—with him than living in California with Maggie," Trace suggested, playing devil's advocate. He didn't point out that if Laura and Mariah had been in that car, they could have died as well.

  "That's not the point, dammit!" Color rose again in her cheeks. Warmth flooded into her eyes, her hands. "He could have fought for custody on the grounds of Maggie's drinking. And won."

  "But the underhanded methods he used, the way he allowed her to think that she'd been the one driving, to believe for all those years that she was directly responsible for a man's death, the way he forced her never to see her daughters ever again and encouraged Laura and me to believe that she'd never wanted us in the first place, all that was horrendously cruel. Even for him."

  She'd known her father could be autocratic and controlling. She also knew, all too well, that he was a vindictive man. What Mariah had never realized, until now, was exactly how diabolic Matthew Swann could be. "I hate him." Her tone was flat. Final.

  He ran his thumb around her jawline. "In the long run, that'll probably end up hurting you a lot more than him."

  Mariah sighed. "I hate it when you're right, Callahan." She looked up at him, all her tumultuous feelings swirling in her sober gaze. "How did you get so smart?"

  He framed her face in his hands. "Life, I suppose." He stroked his thumbs soothingly up her cheekbones. "If it was meant to be easy, it'd probably be boring."

  It was something he'd once believed, something he'd said on innumerable occasions over the years. Until the shooting. Until he'd watched Danny die. Then, caught up in his own helpless feelings of anger, he'd lost his focus. Now, slowly, surely, Trace realized he was getting back on track.

  Something flickered in his dark eyes and made her pulse jump. She felt the chains around her heart loosen ever so slightly.

  "Ah, a small-town sheriff philosopher." Mariah's reluctant smile creased the silky skin beneath his hands. "I think we might have an idea for a series here, Callahan."

  The mood was changing. The air around them became warm and sultry. "Sounds good to me." He ran his hand down her throat and watched her eyes cloud. "But doesn't a new series concept take a great deal of research?" His hand continued over her breasts, his fingers flicking tantalizingly at the nipples engulfed in folds of fleecy sweatshirt, drawing a soft moan.

  "Of course it does." Mariah thrust her hands into his silky dark hair and went willingly, eagerly, as he laid her back on the couch. "But I told you, Sheriff, I've always prided myself on my research."

  While Mariah allowed Trace to ease her pain, Alan let himself into the house his wife had left to her sister. With his father-in-law's help, he'd already packed the few personal belongings he intended to take with him back to Washington. They were currently in cardboard boxes down at Waggoner's Lock and Store, awaiting shipment to the Capitol. But there was one more thing. Something he hadn't been able to retrieve with Matthew hovering over him.

  He went into the den and made his way directly to the fireplace where he removed a sheaf of papers from behind a loose stone. He dropped it into the metal wastebasket, took a fireplace match down from the mantel, struck it against the front of the fireplace, then touched it to the papers.

  He stood there, watching silently as the evidence that could derail his presidential hopes went up in flames.

  Two days later, Mariah was back at The Branding Iron, waiting for an order of sticky buns to go.

  "So," Iris, whose family had run the cafe for three generations, said as she refilled Mariah's cup of coffee, "today's the big day."

  Mariah was not all that surprised that Iris knew about her plans to move into Laura's house today. "I guess so." She ran her finger around the rim of the cup.

  "Kind of a surprise, I'll bet," the sixty-something cafe owner offered. "Laura leaving you her house that way."

  "That's putting it mildly," Mariah agreed grimly.

  "You gonna stay?" Iris scooped up the buns with a white waxed paper square and placed them in a pink box the same color as the walls of The Shear Delight salon.

  "I don't know." Mariah shrugged. "Right now, I'm just trying to take things day by day."

  "Makes sense, I suppose. But I gotta tell you, girl, if it were me, I wouldn't be in any hurry to hightail it back to California. Not if I had a chance to have Trace Callahan's boots under my bed."

  Mariah felt the damning color rising in her cheeks and realized that in spite of two deaths having occurred in this peaceful town, she and Trace were still managing to provide entertainment for Whiskey River's residents.

  It was not easy, moving into what, during Mariah's childhood in Whiskey River, had been her grandmother Prescott's house. Especially since memories of Laura continued to live on in every room, making the transition painful.

  When she first entered the ranch house, although it was a bright sunny July day, Mariah felt chilled all the way to the bone. The investigation had left the house a mess, but Mariah didn't focus on the papers scattered all over the floor, the overturned drawers, the fingerprint powder still dusting the bannister, the doorways, the desk drawers. Instead, at first, she saw only a vague blur.

  Then gradually, she began to focus. The furniture was Ethan Allen traditional country, with a comfortable western influence which suited the casual ranching life-style. The knotty pine paneling looked buttery in the slanting sun streaming in through the oversize windows that overlooked the back pasture and beyond that, the woods.

  Various personal items—family heirlooms—were scattered about in what Mariah suspected was a vain attempt to make the Fletcher house a home.

  She recognized her grandmother's pewter watering can by the living room fireplace. It had been used as a vase, although the fresh daisies and black-eyed susans had died. Their white and yellow petals were scattered carelessly on the red brick hearth. A leather-bound photo album sat on a pine plank coffee table, its pages filled with faded sepia photographs of ancestors and more candid shots of the family from happier times.

  Although there were no pictures of Maggie, which made Mariah assume that her father had destroyed any reminder of his wife, there were several shots of herself as a young girl: seated astride Buttermilk, her first pony, standing beside Whiskey River, a toothless grin splitting her face as she held up an eight-inch rainbow trout.

  She paused at a picture of herself and Laura, decked out in western wear for some long ago Fourth of July and holding huge slices of watermelon, their joyous smiles offering no proof of the rift that was to come.

  Saddened by the image of those two young girls—herself at eight, Laura, at thirteen on the threshold of womanhood—Mariah bit her lip and closed the album, unable to continue toward the time when her presence would no longer appear in the family annals. She had no idea how long she sat there, remembering, regretting. The towering grandfather clock in the corner had not been wound; its pendulum was motionless, its once cheery Westminster chimes silenced by death.

  When she finally went into the den and saw her brother-in-law's blood still staining the back of the leather sofa, Mariah's head began to swim. She sank down on a nearby chair and pressed her fingers tightly against h
er eyes.

  It was not that she felt any sympathy for Alan Fletcher. On the contrary, she still believed he was responsible for Laura's death. But viewing the scene of his shooting reminded her all too well what awaited her upstairs. And although she knew it was cowardly, Mariah was not prepared to witness the room where her sister had died.

  Her first night in the house, Mariah slept downstairs, in a little room off the kitchen that in her grandmother's day had belonged to the cook employed by the Prescott family. The cot she'd found packed away in the camping equipment was hard and narrow, but since she doubted she would have gotten any sleep anyway, Mariah didn't mind.

  Her second night, she managed to move upstairs, to the guest room. But she turned her head away as she passed the master bedroom.

  She avoided her sister's bedroom for two additional days. Then, finally, knowing she could no longer put it off, Mariah ventured into the room where Laura died. It was a mess. Clothes and personal belongings had been strewn everywhere. Like downstairs, fingerprint dust had drifted over everything. The faint odor of dried blood lingered, giving testimony to what had occurred here.

  She began shortly after dawn and worked all day, scrubbing the floor, the walls, the headboard, picking up Laura's scattered clothing and jewelry.

  Since she could not bring herself to rid the house of her sister's presence, as if preparing the room for Laura's return, she returned the lingerie to the bureau, the paperback romance novel to the drawer in the mission-style bedside table, and changed the bedding.

  One thing she had no qualms about throwing away was the framed wedding photo of Laura and Alan.

  Little by little, as the days went by, and she began to settle into the house, the good memories began to out-weigh the bad and gradually, Mariah began to believe that perhaps Laura was, as usual, right. Perhaps she did belong here, after all.

  It was late. Jill had gone home and Cora Mae was settled behind her desk, knitting away at an afghan for her granddaughter. The phone had been blessedly silent, allowing Trace an opportunity to review the information on Southwest Development's alleged business ventures in Arizona. He'd requested, and received, the information by fax from the attorney general's office in Phoenix. The AG assured Trace that he was keeping a close eye on the company, but since the elected official was known for his political ambition, and there were rumors of Alan Fletcher having promised his longtime friend a cabinet post, Trace had wanted to read the paperwork himself.

  To someone ignorant of the company's origins, Southwest would have seemed hike nothing more than an extremely successful construction company. They'd built a senior citizen condominium project in Tucson, a time-share resort hotel in Sedona, and a federally funded low-income housing project in Phoenix.

  Trace could find no record of any permits requested or issued for any project in Whiskey River. Or Mogollon County.

  Wondering if he was wasting time on a wild-goose chase, he'd just filed away the papers when Cora Mae appeared in his doorway.

  "You have a visitor, Sheriff."

  Trace glanced up at the wall clock. It was nearly midnight. "A little late for visitors," he noted. Unbidden, the thought that Mariah might have driven down from the ranch popped into his mind.

  Cora Mae's frown took up her entire fleshy face, from her three chins to her wide forehead. "Not this visitor," she harrumphed. "The only surprise is she didn't wait until the bars closed."

  His curiosity aroused, Trace said, "Send her in please, Cora Mae."

  She nodded brusquely, causing her pewter corkscrew curls to bob. "You're going to need coffee," she informed him. "I'll make some."

  "Thank you," Trace said, still as mystified as ever.

  Cora Mae marched out, her spine, beneath the tan uniform she insisted on wearing, as stiff as the trunk of a ponderosa pine.

  Trace heard two voices, both female. A moment later, a woman he didn't recognize appeared in his doorway.

  "May I help you, Ms.—"

  "Jones. Nadine Jones." The woman, who Trace guessed to be about the same age as Maggie McKenna, looked every day of her fifty-some years. Her hair was a mass of bleached fuzz that reminded him of a yellow Brillo pad. Looking at it, Trace suddenly recalled where he'd heard the name before. Nadine Jones, he remembered, was the infamous hairdresser from hell.

  "Won't you come in, Ms. Jones." He stood up, went around his desk and held out a chair.

  "Thank you." She smelled of cigarette smoke, beer and cheap, sweet perfume. "I want you to know," she informed him right off the bat, "that I've never been in any trouble with the law." She lit a cigarette, drawing in the smoke with an ugly rattling of her lungs.

  "Uh-huh." Trace nodded.

  She gave him a stern look. The whites of her eyes were lined with more red than a road atlas. "You can look it up in your files." She waved the cigarette toward the beige metal cabinets. "You won't find me in there."

  "I'll take your word for that," Trace said agreeably. "What can I do for you, Ms. Jones?"

  "Call me Nadine, honey," she drawled. He could smell the beer on her breath from across the desk. "I've never been much for formality."

  "Are you here to file a complaint, Nadine?"

  "Actually—" she drew in on the cigarette again "—I'm here to tell you who killed Laura Swann." An acrid blue cloud billowed between them on the exhale.

  Despite Nadine Jones's beery proclamation, the next day Trace was no closer to solving what he still considered a double homicide.

  He did, however, find it mildly interesting to learn that Patti Greene had a habit of slashing tires. According to Nadine, the tires on her Camaro had been slashed after she'd threatened to tell the state cosmetology board that Patti was doing the occasional wash and blow-dry at her house. And off the books. Either act, if proved, could cost the hairdresser her license.

  In addition, Nadine had professed, there was a little matter of selling shampoo and hair coloring to customers without a resale tax permit.

  When he'd told Nadine he couldn't see how that led to murder, she'd gone on to say, with that slow, drawn out speech pattern peculiar to drunks, that Patti had bragged to her about slashing the tires on Laura Fletcher's Blazer after she found out the senator's wife had spent the night at Clint's ranch.

  "Don'tcha see," the former hairdresser from hell had said, "when that didn't stop Laura from seeing Clint, Patti shot her."

  It was a quantum leap from slashing tires to shooting a person in the head at close range. But Nadine wasn't finished. "She shot her husband." Another wave at the files. "Look it up."

  Trace had, although it took him a while to find the paperwork, which had been misfiled. According to the report written by Ben Loftin, Patti Greene had peppered Jerry Greene's jean-clad behind with birdshot from her Ithaca shotgun after catching him making out in the parking lot of Denim and Diamonds with the girl singer. The singer subsequently left town and after having the doctor at the Payson emergency room pick the buckshot out of his ass, Jerry had spent the next two weeks sitting on a pillow and promising his trigger-happy wife that he'd behave himself. Which, of course, he hadn't.

  Although he reminded himself that Nadine obviously had an ulterior motive for declaring Patti to be the killer— she had, after all, been fired by the salon owner—Trace was in no position to overlook any lead. No matter how small.

  Which was why he was hanging around the outside of Shear Delight, waiting for Patti Greene to show up. "Home with my kids," she said when he asked where she'd been the night of the murder. "I told you, I didn't kill Laura."

  "But you did slash her tires?"

  She pushed the door open, setting the bell tinkling. "Who the hell told you that?" She slammed her purse onto the reception counter and began turning on lights. The salon smelled vaguely of ammonia. "It was Nadine, wasn't it? Lord, I'd love to wring that old bitch's neck."

  Although she didn't admit to the crime, her anger was confirmation enough. "How about Clint's and Fredericka's tires? Did you do them, too
?"

  She pulled some combs and brushes out of the sanitizing solution. "You going to take me in, Sheriff?" She held out her hands, dripping the liquid onto the pink-and-black tile floor. "Why don't you just put the cuffs on me and get it over with?"

  Behind the anger flashing in those bright green eyes, Trace could see fear. And exhaustion. Remembering the kids and the trailer with the leaky roof, and looking at this place so badly in need of a paint job, he decided nothing would be solved by taking the woman in for vandalism.

  "I'll make you a deal."

  "What?" She eyed him suspiciously, giving him the feeling that most of the time when this woman made a deal with a man, she found herself on the losing end.

  "You arrange to make restitution on the tires, and I won't write it up."

  She tossed her red curls and lifted her chin in a way that reminded him of Mariah. "I'm not a goddamn charity case. Not yet, anyway," she tacked on under her breath.

  "I didn't say you were." He put his hat back on. "I figure Clint'll be understanding. If you have any trouble with Fredericka, let me know and I'll see what I can do."

  The defiance left her eyes, which filled up, threatening to brim over. "Why?"

  Despite the fact that he still couldn't take this woman off his suspect list, Trace smiled. "Didn't anyone tell you? I'm one of the good guys."

  Satisfied with the way he'd settled that crime wave, he left the salon. As he pulled away from the curb, he saw her standing in the window, watching him, still, he suspected, not quite understanding his behavior.

  "Who was that masked man?" Trace asked himself out loud, feeling for the moment, pretty damn pleased with himself.

  Back at his office, Trace couldn't shake the feeling that Laura Fletcher's death had nothing to do with her infidelity, or Clint Garvey's expectations of their marriage, or even Alan Fletcher's desire to be free to marry his congressional aide.

  For not the first time since he'd arrived at the Fletcher ranch—now Mariah's ranch—on the morning of the murder, his thoughts came back to the idea that Laura was killed not for sex, but for money. Which, in this case, translated into land.