Still Waters (32 page)

“You know, honey,” his mother said softly, “I think we're finding out we can't just run away from trouble. There isn't any magic place where nobody has a past and everybody just loves everybody else. Not on this earth, there isn't. This is the spot we've ended up in. All we can do is dig in our heels and make a place for ourselves.” She looked up at him, her pretty eyes so tired and sad, Trace just about couldn't stand it. “I've spent my whole life not belonging anywhere, Trace,” she said, her voice ragged with a pain that reached out and squeezed Trace's heart. “I'm tired of it. I'm tired of looking for a place that doesn't exist.”

Trace had to choke back a lump in his throat that was about the size of a baseball. Shoot, what kind of a man was he? This move hadn't been easy for his mother. He knew what she had gone through in Atlanta with Butthead Brock and his dirty lies, and the trouble Trace had given her himself with the drugs and all. He knew the kind of mean, spiteful things people said about her around Still Creek, and he knew the long hours she was working trying to make something of the
Clarion
. Now someone had wrecked the office and attacked her. God knew she had problems of her own. She sure as hell didn't need him whining like some stupid snot-nosed little kid who couldn't tie his own shoes.

“I'm sorry, Mom,” he whispered, blinking furiously at the moisture that was gathering in his eyes. A man didn't cry at a time like this. Especially not in front of his mother.

Elizabeth looked up at him, her heart aching for him. She couldn't think of a time when Trace hadn't tried to act more grown-up and self-reliant than he really was. She could still see him in her mind's eye, looking up at her, those big glasses perched on his little nose, telling her not to worry about him walking to kindergarten by himself. There was so much she wanted to say to him—that she loved him, that she was sorry, too, for the childhood he'd never really had. But the words all stuck in her throat.

They'd never been good at talking to each other. She could shoot her mouth off to everyone else in the world, but when it came to Trace, everything she felt went so much deeper, she just couldn't dig the words out. She slipped her arms around him instead, and gave him a hug, taking advantage as long as he was being tolerant of having her near him for a change.

When she pulled back, she drew in a big breath and tried to muster a motherly smile. “You look tired,” she said, rubbing a thumb against the corner of his mouth, trying to erase the line of worry the way she had done when he'd been a toddler. “You were out late, I guess.”

“Yeah.”

“Doing what?”

He looked away. “Nothing.”

That fast the emotional drawbridge went up before Elizabeth could do more than get a hold with her fingers. She heaved a sigh and let it go, telling herself she should be glad for the moment they'd had. It was more than he'd given her in months.

She went into the bathroom and drained the water heater in a futile attempt to steam away some of the aches in her body. When she finally emerged, Trace was gone. Dane sat in his place at the kitchen table, drinking a Coke and looking too damn tempting. He was in jeans and boots again, his long legs stretched out in front of him. The sleeves of his faded denim work shirt had been rolled neatly to the elbow.

“Taking the day off from crime busting?” she asked.

“No. I've got to meet Yeager in an hour.”

His gaze caught hers as he rose lazily from the chair. She stood her ground as he stepped too close and slid his hand under her hair to rub his thumb against the nape of her neck, a gesture that seemed strangely, overwhelmingly possessive.

“Are you all right?” he asked quietly.

Stupid question, Elizabeth thought as she managed to nod. There wasn't anything all right about this. She was finding herself drawn to a man she shouldn't want, wanting things she couldn't have, while the whole world went crazy around her. What was right about any of that?

This
, she thought as Dane bent his head and kissed her. The kiss wasn't long or deep, but there was a quality of intimacy about it that was almost shocking. She felt breathless and feverish when he stepped back.

Dane turned away and cleared his throat, reaching with a hand that wasn't quite steady for the gun he'd left on the table.

“I thought you were gonna take that away from me,” Elizabeth said at the sight of the Desert Eagle.

“I was,” Dane grumbled. He shot her an irritable look. “Then I started thinking you might have stolen a whole arsenal and this one could be the least of the lot. I decided a lesson might be the better way to go.”

“I can shoot a gun, sugar,” Elizabeth informed him, propping a hand on one hip. “Where I grew up it was considered an essential life skill.”

“Yeah, well, you've never shot this gun, have you?”

She cast a glance at the hole in the ceiling. “Not counting last night? No.”

“I didn't think so. Come on.”

They went out to the farmyard, where Dane had already set up a target. He had stacked some moldy bales of hay against the side of the tumbledown hog house. Tacked to the bales was a life-size black and white paper print of a snarling man pointing a shotgun at them.

“We're facing east for a reason,” he said as he loaded the clip. “There isn't anything east of here but cow pasture for a mile. We don't want any stray bullets dropping some poor Amish kid over at the Hauer place.”

Elizabeth looked off to the west, across the fields to the Amish farm. The yard was full of people, looking from this distance like a human patchwork quilt rippling across the grass, the distinctive colors of their costumes vibrant under the midday sun.

“What are they doing over there, throwing a party?”

“Sunday services. They feed their souls all morning and their stomachs all afternoon.”

“Listening to preachers for that long would be more likely to ruin my appetite,” Elizabeth said with a grimace. She could picture Aaron listening, though, maybe even preaching himself, those somber blue eyes looking out across a sea of devout faces as he spoke of faith and duty She turned back to Dane. “Can you tell me something?”

“Yeah, but knowing you, it won't do any good,” he said mildly as he slid the clip into the Desert Eagle.

Elizabeth gave him a look. “Very funny. I'm being serious here. What happened to Aaron's family? He told me his wife was dead, but they had children too, didn't they?”

Dane frowned. “Yeah, they did. Two little girls, Ana and Gemma. They were killed in an accident about a year ago. Siri and the girls were driving home from visiting a neighbor woman who'd just had a baby. It was night. Aaron won't put a reflective sign on his buggy—even now—because it's not Plain. The driver didn't see them until it was too late.”

He sighed and shook his head, wishing he could shake off the memory of that terrible night as easily. He could still hear the sickening cries of the buggy horse in its death throes and the shot he had fired himself to silence it. He could still see Aaron, inconsolable in his grief, keening from the depths of his soul as he tried to gather the limp, bloody bodies of his children in his arms.

“I'll never forget that night as long as I live,” he said. “That was the most terrible thing that ever happened in this county—murder and mayhem included.”

Elizabeth said nothing. She stared across the fields again, watching the Amish as they went about their Sunday ritual. It looked like a scene from the last century—the buggies in the drive, horses tied to every fence post; the women in their fine caps, the summer breeze tugging at the hems of their long dresses as they moved around the tables serving the men and children. They wanted to be separate, to be left alone to their ways. In spite of what had happened in his own life, Aaron still drew definite lines between the worlds of English and Amish. But the lines couldn't remain uncrossed. Their worlds collided on a daily basis.

“Are you ready?”

Dane's voice drew her back from her musings. She turned away from thoughts of the pacifist, isolationist Amish as Dane handed her the gun. He clamped a pair of earphones on her head, effectively blocking out all sound. After putting on his own protective headgear, he took a stance behind her and set her up for the shot—nudging her feet apart, squaring her shoulders, arranging her hands on the grip, raising her arms into position. When he was satisfied, he took a half step back.

Elizabeth glanced at him over her shoulder. He nodded. She gave a little shrug and turned toward the target. She didn't see what the big deal was. She'd done this before. If Dane was expecting her to make a fool of herself, like some simpy little Minnesota gal who didn't know what a gun was, he was in for a letdown.

Feeling smug, she squeezed her left eye shut, took aim at her two-dimensional assailant, and fired.

The gun bucked hard in her hands, jerking her arms up. The force of the explosion literally knocked her off her feet, the recoil sending her stumbling backward into Dane. He caught her and wrapped his arms around her, his big hands closing gently over her white knuckles on the handle of the Desert Eagle.

Elizabeth looked up at him, stunned speechless, eyes wide, mouth hanging open. She had wielded shotguns that didn't pack half the punch. The thing had nearly jumped right out of her hands.

“Jesus Christ in a miniskirt,” she mumbled as Dane tugged her headphones down to rest like a collar around her neck.

“Now you know why I don't want you pointing that thing around,” Dane said. He peeled her fingers away from the grip of the Desert Eagle. Elizabeth leaned into him, her knees still wobbling. “This is too much gun for you, Dirty Harriett,” he said dryly. “Look how the cartridge jammed instead of ejecting clean. If you're not strong enough to hold the gun steady as it fires, this happens.” Arms wrapped around her, he manually ejected the spent cartridge. “The gun can't chamber another round until the spent cartridge is out. If this had been a real firefight, you'd be a done bunny by now. You should have stolen something more your own size.”

“Sugar,” Elizabeth drawled, stroking a finger over the barrel of the gun as she sent him a sultry look, “when you're stealing a man's phallic symbols, you've got to go for the biggest ones, else what's the point?”

Dane narrowed his eyes. “Put your ears back on, Ms. Freud.”

After she complied, Dane raised the gun, his arms still wrapped around her, and fired a rapid succession of shots. The acrid scent of gunpowder drifted away on a thin cloud of smoke. The paper gunman's chest was gone, ripped away to expose his hay innards.

Elizabeth shivered at the thought of what those bullets would have done to a real man—what they might have done to Dane the night before if he hadn't knocked her over.

As he reached up with one hand and tugged his headphones down, Elizabeth yanked hers off and tossed them in the grass. “I could have killed you!”

He tipped his head to one side and gave her a sardonic smile. “You had your chance and you blew it.”

“Oh, shut up!” she snapped. “I don't know why I should even care. You're mean as cat meat and twice as tough.”

And I love you.

It made about as much sense as a snowstorm in July, but it was the terrible truth. Her fatal attraction to men who were hopelessly wrong for her had struck again—with a vengeance and in record time.

“I swore off men,” she mumbled.

She sounded so disappointed in herself, Dane had to bite back a chuckle. The gun was too handy. If he made her mad enough, she just might rethink doing away with him.

“It's simple, sweetheart,” he murmured as desire stirred inside him. “Chemistry . . . magnetism . . . animal attraction . . . sex . . .”

His beeper went off, shrieking like some kind of moralistic sex alarm.

“If I ever get my hands on the man who invented these things . . .” he snarled, pulling away.

“Give him a kick for me too,” Elizabeth grumbled as she watched him walk away to the Bronco. She sat on the ground, and amused herself by unloading the clip from the Desert Eagle while Dane called the station on the radio.

“I have to go,” he said a moment later as he stood looking down at her with a grim face. “Somebody trashed Shafer Motors last night. Shafer's saying Trace did it.”

SEVENTEEN

T
RACE SAT AT THE TABLE IN THE INTERROGATION
room, wishing he could just roll his eyes back in his head and die. He'd been in trouble before, down in Atlanta. Worse trouble than this when you came right down to it—caught in a stolen car with a gram of coke in his pocket—but he'd never felt this bad. Then he had cared only about pissing off Brock, embarrassing him, costing him money. Getting in trouble had been worth something to him then, when he'd been just a stupid kid. Now he couldn't see the value in it at all.

His mom was in the sheriff's office, waiting for him. Trace had seen her through the window on his way down the hall, and he didn't think she'd ever looked so angry or so upset, not even when she'd come to him to tell him they had to move out of Stuart Tower. And Sheriff Jantzen sat across from him at the table, just staring at him. Staring and staring with those cold eyes of his. He hadn't said a word in five minutes. Trace would never have thought it possible, but that silence was ten times worse than getting hollered at.

He shifted in his chair and looked down at the hands he clutched together on his lap, thinking he'd wrap them around Carney's throat if he got the chance. Damn Carney and his stupid “get even” philosophy. The only person Trace wanted to get even with now was Carney. It was one thing to trash a mailbox, but wrecking cars was too much. Trace hadn't wanted any part of it, but Carney had goaded him into it, calling him a pussy and a coward, and now his ass was fried. Jantzen knew. He didn't have any proof, but he knew, and for some reason that seemed just as bad as being convicted.

“I don't think much of your alibi, Trace,” Dane said softly. He couldn't break it either. There had been no witnesses to the vandalism at Shafer Motors. Trace had given Carney Fox as his alibi and Carney had backed him up, smiling that smug, sly smile of his the whole time. But Dane didn't have any doubts about it. Fox was lying. Trace was lying.

He ran a finger along the edge of the report Garth Shafer had made. Two new cars parked behind the service garage had their windows smashed. Those two and five others at the back of the used car lot had been severely scratched with a knife or some other sharp object, ruining the paint. It wasn't the kind of major damage Dane had expected after the call had come in, but it wasn't something to dismiss lightly either. The law was the law. People couldn't go around in his county thumbing their noses at the rules and just blithely walking away.

He took a long, deep breath and sighed slowly, never taking his eyes off Trace Stuart. The kid had been a nervous wreck when he'd come home last night. He hadn't been the picture of cool defiance the day they had questioned him about Fox's alibi for the Jarvis murder either. Right now he looked as though he was going to be sick. He looked as though he was caught in something he didn't know how to get out of. Elizabeth said he was a good kid with problems. Dane found himself wanting to believe that—for Elizabeth's sake as much as for Trace's.

“Mr. Shafer says you were in the shop yesterday afternoon, making trouble.”

Trace's head came up sharply, his face the picture of outraged shock. “That's a lie! I went there looking for a job. He's the one that went off, yelling and—”

“Why? What made him yell at you?”

“I don't know! 'Cause he's nuts or something! I just went to ask him about the job cleaning up in the shop and he started yelling at me and calling me names and saying stuff about my mom—” Trace cut himself off and sat back in his chair, crossing his arms over his chest. He wasn't supposed to say anything. Just deny the charges, stick to the alibi, and get the hell out.

“What did he say about your mom?” Dane asked quietly.

“Nothing,” Trace mumbled. He didn't want to talk about it. It was hurtful and embarrassing, and the way he felt about it was personal.

“What'd he say, Trace?” Dane prodded gently.

Trace sniffed and looked at the wall, furious and hurt. “He called her a whore.”

The words came out in barely a whisper, so tight with anger and pain that the last one cracked and the boy colored with embarrassment. Dane rubbed the back of his neck and sighed. He shouldn't have felt sympathetic. He would have bet the farm on Trace's guilt. But he couldn't sit here and listen to the boy and watch him stew in misery without feeling bad for him. And for Elizabeth. And he couldn't help but think that the real culprit was Carney Fox. Trace seemed angry and confused and unhappy, but he didn't seem destructive. Fox, on the other hand, liked playing the ringleader, stirring up trouble, then slipping out of it. He had all but laughed in Dane's face as he had provided Trace with an alibi. Trace wasn't laughing.

Dane laid his forearms on the table and leaned ahead. “That kind of talk can make a man pretty mad, can't it?”

“Yessir,” Trace mumbled, staring at that same blank spot on the wall, so miserable he would have sold his soul to be anywhere else.

“Mad enough that he might want to get back at who said it.”

The boy just pressed his lips together and went on looking at the far wall, his thick black lashes beating like hummingbird wings as he tried to blink back tears.

Dane wanted to sink his teeth into Garth Shafer for starting this chain of events. Where did he get off talking that way about Elizabeth in front of her son? What the hell was the matter with him anyway?
Bitter. Violent temper
. The words from Elizabeth's note cards flashed through his head.

“A man has to learn to rise above that kind of thing, Trace,” he said softly. “Revenge, retribution—all that'll get you is in deeper shit. Do you understand me?”

“Yessir.”

“And hanging around with Carney Fox is going to get your ass thrown in jail sooner or later. What do you think people would have to say about you and your mom then?”

Trace couldn't hardly believe they could come up with anything worse than what they already said, but he got the message. He could rise above their talk or live down to it.

“You still looking for work?”

“No, sir.”

Dane arched a brow. “You found something?”

“No, sir. I pretty much ran out of places to ask.”

And no one had hired the kid because his mother was a beautiful divorcee from Texas who wore tight jeans and drove a cherry-red drop-top Cadillac. Dane blew out a breath. The Stuarts were giving him a whole new view of small town life. It didn't exactly make him proud.

“Are you afraid of hard physical labor?” he asked.

Trace gave him a suspicious look, wondering if there were chain gangs in Minnesota. “No, sir.”

“Good.” Dane pushed his chair back and stood up. “Be at my place tomorrow morning around ten. I've got a crew coming to hay. They can use an extra set of muscles.”

Trace scrambled out of his chair, hardly believing his ears. He had expected Jantzen to badger a confession out of him and throw him in a cell to rot away the rest of his youth. The man was offering him a job!

“Sir—um—I—a—” he stammered, his brain racing faster than his mouth could work. “I don't know nothing about farm work,” he blurted out, then blushed at the admission. That was no way to impress a prospective employer.
Good job, Trace. Just open your big mouth and stick your stupid foot down your throat
.

Jantzen's mouth quirked up on one side. “This job needs brawn, not brains. Show me you can take orders and work like a man and I might be able to use you all summer.”

Trace bobbed his head, sending his glasses slipping down his nose. “Yessir. Thank you, sir.” He nearly tripped over himself as he hurried around the end of the table. “I'll work like a dog, sir, honest.” He started to offer Dane his hand, then checked himself and wiped the sweat off his palm on the leg of his jeans first.

Dane took the boy's hand and gave it a manly shake. Garth Shafer was going to howl at the injustice of a young hoodlum getting off scot-free. Maybe he was letting his relationship with Elizabeth cloud his judgment, but the way Dane saw it, offering a chance to a kid headed down the wrong path was serving justice just fine.

ELIZABETH PARKED THE CADDY IN THE YARD, WHERE SHE
would be able to see it from the kitchen window. Without a word she pulled her keys from the ignition and dropped them into her purse. She sat there for a while, carefully checking the lacquer on one fingernail, then got out of the car and slammed the door.

Trace winced. He had a feeling getting interrogated by Jantzen was going to seem like a piece of cake compared to what his mother had in store for him. She hadn't said a word to him. Or to Sheriff Jantzen back at the courthouse either. That was an ominous sign. His mother was a talker. When she didn't have anything to say, that usually meant she was saving up to go on a major tear. Silence in his mother was like the calm before a hurricane—a period of eerie quiet before the fury was unleashed.

He dragged himself out of the car but delayed going into the house, busying himself putting up the Caddy's rag top—just in case it rained. Then he walked around the car to check the tires, 'cause his mother was a woman and women didn't think to do that kind of thing. There was a dent in the driver's side door and a whole series of them across that side of the trunk. From the attack, he supposed, feeling sick at the thought. He licked a fingertip and tried to rub a scratch out of the paint with spit.

“You gonna do that to all Garth Shafer's cars too?”

His mother's words cracked against Trace's eardrums like the snap of a bullwhip. She was standing on the back step with a hand on her hip and fire in her eye. Trace swallowed hard.

“No, ma'am,” he mumbled.

He moved toward the house, his feet dragging as if his shoes were made of cast iron. His mother went into the house ahead of him, letting the screen door slam shut in his face. She waited for him in the kitchen. Waited until he had come in before she hurled her purse across the room and bounced it off the refrigerator door beside him, making him jump.

“Dammit, Trace, how could you do this?” Elizabeth shouted, her temper erupting with all the ferocity of a volcanic blast. “How could you do this to us? You whine to me about how bad things are here and then you go out and do something like this? Jesus H. Christ, how can you expect people to like you when you take up with the worst piece of trash in six counties and run around half the night smashing up cars and doing God knows what else?”

Trace just hunched his shoulders and hung his head.

“We came here to start over,” she said, clamping her hands on her hips to keep herself from reaching out and shaking him till his teeth rattled. “I'm working my tail off, trying to make a home for us here. And what do you do? You go out and make friends with someone like Carney Fox!

“I got a look at his file while you were having your little chat with the sheriff. How do you think it made me feel to see he'd been arrested for possession with intent to sell?” She bit her lip against a surge of fear and shook her head as she paced beside the table. Her voice thickened with a mother's terror. “Trace, so help me, if you're using again—”

“I'm not using!” Trace shouted. It was bad enough getting chewed out for things he was guilty of. “Jesus, how many times do I have to tell you?”

“Then what are you doing hanging around with him?”

“He's a friend—”

“With friends like him, you don't need enemies. Look what he's got you mixed up in now!”

“Well, maybe it was my idea,” Trace challenged his mother belligerently, his chin coming up a notch. “Did you ever think of that? Maybe I didn't like the way old Shithead Shafer called you a whore to my face and so I smashed up a couple of his stupid cars.”

Elizabeth squeezed her eyes shut and put her hands over her face. It was all
her
fault. Everything. She had driven Shafer over the edge, and Trace had tried to defend her honor in this horribly misguided way because she was a rotten mother. If she'd raised him right—If she'd given him a father—If she hadn't had such abominable taste in men—

“So I screwed up,” Trace said bitterly. “It's what I do best, isn't it?”

“Trace—”

“No, it's true,” he insisted. The feelings and words came spitting up through him from a dark, sad corner of his heart, and rolled out of him, surprising Trace as much as they surprised his mother. “I'm the original fuckup.” He said it with incredulity, shaking his head at the revelation. “From day one. My dad got you knocked up with me and life's just been one big mess ever since.”

“Honey, that's not true,” Elizabeth whispered, the words sticking in her throat.

“Sure it is,” he said bitterly. “You married Bobby Breland because of me and he kicked you around. Then you divorced him and you were stuck dragging a little kid around with you, and you probably couldn't get a decent guy because no man wants some other man's kid. And Brock probably wouldn't have dumped you if it hadn't been for me. He never wanted me around, and when I started making trouble for him he kicked us out.”

“Oh, Trace . . .”

“I never should have been born,” he mumbled.

Before his mother could refute his words, he turned and ran out the back door, jumping down off the step and charging for the woods as fast as his legs could take him. He didn't know where he was running to or why he was running at all, except that he had to do something with the anger and frustration and pain that swelled inside him before he just plain exploded with it. He plunged into the woods and ran down an old trail that was overgrown with bushes. He stumbled over roots and batted branches out of his way and ran until his lungs were on fire and his T-shirt was clinging to him like wet paper.

He slowed then, and walked for a while with his hands jammed at the waist of his jeans. The air in the woods was cooler and darker, sweet with the scent of green leaves and humus. As his pulse slowed and the blood stopped roaring in his ears he began to pick up the sounds of his surroundings—the call of
thief!
from a blue jay as it swooped from the branches of a white oak, the busy twitterings of sparrows, the scratch of squirrel claws against tree bark as they chased one another from trunk to trunk.