Still Waters (28 page)

The doorbell jolted her from her trance. She went to answer it, trying to straighten her clothes and wipe her tears away with her good hand. She had to look like hell, but she didn't really give a damn. It wasn't likely to be anyone but the paper boy coming to collect.

Yeager was standing on the doorstep in rumpled chinos and worn-out purple knit shirt, a strand of sandy hair sticking up in front like an antenna. Yeager and his dog, side by side. The dog cocked his head and gave her a quizzical look that confirmed Jolynn's worst fears about her appearance. Yeager's lazy smile faltered.

“Am I here at a bad time?” he asked softly, concern lighting his dark eyes.

Jolynn shook her head. “No,” she said, a secretive smile blossoming on her rosebud mouth and in her heart. “The bad time is over.”

“I brought that book over.” He lifted a thick, hardbound tome as evidence. “
Arnaut's Science of Blood Spattering
.”

Jolynn accepted the offering with a misty smile. She stroked her hand over the cover. “How sweet.”

“And I brought cookies,” he said, his grin making a comeback as he pulled a giant-size Ziploc bag from behind his back. “Double chocolate chunk with pecans. They're my personal favorite.”

“Come on in,” she said, stepping back from the door, hugging the book against her. “I think I even have a quart of milk that hasn't gone bad.” She turned and headed for the kitchen, waving her good arm at the living room. “Sorry about the mess. I haven't felt like cleaning up for the last two or three years.”

“Looks okay to me,” he said innocently as he and his four-legged pal followed her into the house, tromping over magazines and past the display of dying plants.

Jolynn cast him a smile over her shoulder. “You're a man after my own heart, Agent Yeager.”

Yeager's grin widened. “Yes, ma'am.”

FIVE BLOCKS AWAY TROUBLE WAS BREWING IN THE PARKING
lot of the Red Rooster. The building that housed the bar and pool hall, appropriately enough, looked like a chicken coop with a thyroid problem. It had, at one time, been used as a storage shed for the volunteer fire department, then a school bus shed, then a dance hall. Over the years the building had been modified and updated, never in any way that could have been considered anything but half-assed. Workmanship and quality materials had been spared, and tackiness given free rein. The place looked as though it would have gone over at the first strong wind, but it had managed to remain standing for nearly forty years.

The town council had finally shamed Arnie Myers into painting it—barn red—and Mrs. Myers had contributed a touch of Still Creek hominess by planting geraniums in whiskey barrels by the doors. The result was politely called “quaint” by tourists. Arnie didn't much care. He had a deficiency of iron and civic pride that melded into a general kind of apathy. As far as he saw it, it didn't matter what the tourists thought; he catered to a more local clientele.

One of the worst of that crowd loitered in the dark parking lot near the side door. Smoke and noise wafted out through the screen: the clack of cue balls hitting their mark, cheers, groans, raucous laughter, glass hitting glass. The jukebox blasted over it all—Garth Brooks bragging about having friends in low places. Carney Fox lit a cigarette and leaned back against his Impala, his dark eyes gleaming bright as he looked up at Trace Stuart.

“Turned you down, huh?”

Trace laughed, but it was a sound of teenage affront, not humor. “Shit. Turned me down? He damn near threw me out with his bare hands.”

Thinking of it still made him furious. Old Shafer had lit into him with his teeth bared, yelling and screaming that he wouldn't hire Trace for anything, that the Stuarts weren't anything but trash and troublemakers and no one wanted them in Still Creek. Well, Trace had news for him. He didn't want to be in Still Creek either. He would rather have spent his whole frigging life in Siberia than in this stinking squarehead Norwegian town. Humiliation burned inside him as Carney laughed. The rage that he never seemed to know what to do with reared up and chomped at the bit to be set free.

He hated this place. Hated it, hated it, hated it.

“So, what are you gonna do about it?” Carney asked slyly. He took a drag on his cigarette. The red glow from the tip illuminated his sharp, bony face with eerie light.

Trace scowled at him. “Hell, what can I do? I can't hardly make him give me a job.”

And dammit, he'd
wanted
that job. Wanted the money, the independence. Just the
idea
of having that job made him feel more like the man he wanted to be. That and the idea of the car he would have saved for. Now he was stuck with his stupid bike like some stupid little kid.

Carney sucked at the last of his smoke, pinching the filter tip with grubby fingers. He tossed the butt into Carol Myers's geraniums and spread his skinny arms expansively. “No, but you can make him sorry he didn't give it to you.” He flashed his crooked teeth in the dim light and trouble hummed in the air around him. “Don't get mad, Trace, my man. Get even.”

FIFTEEN

E
LIZABETH WOKE WITH A START, AS IF HER BODY
were aware of something her mind had yet to pick up on. She had fallen asleep on her lumpy beige sofa, curled up in her oldest pair of jeans and a sky-blue Gianni Versace silk shirt—another item she'd stolen from Brock. The lamp on the end table was turned on low, creating a puddle of amber light in the otherwise darkened house. Her three-by-five cards were scattered across the worn brown shag carpet like confetti, notes about the murder—motives, suspects, hunches.

She had sat there all evening, staring at the notes until her eyes refused to focus and her brain had long since given up trying to untangle the threads. She was no detective. Hell, she wasn't even really a reporter. How did she think she was going to solve this mess? How was she supposed to sort fact from fiction, gossip from grounds for murder?

Dismissing the questions, she sat perfectly still, listening until her ears rang from the silence. The Bonnie Raitt tape she had fallen asleep listening to had played itself out, the cassette player had turned itself off. There was nothing in the air, no sound from inside the house, no sound drifting in through the open windows, only a fresh, cool breeze.

She had waited in dread all evening for the phone to ring, but it hung, silent and mocking, on the kitchen wall. According to the clock on the VCR it was twelve, twelve, twelve. According to the wind-up alarm clock sitting on the TV it was eleven twenty-five. She thought she might have heard Trace coming in, but there was no sound from the kitchen.

“Paranoid,” she mumbled, rubbing her hands over her face.

She pushed herself to her feet and shuffled into the kitchen, trying to rouse her mind from the fog of hard sleep. A bright wedge of moon beamed silvery light down on the countryside and into the kitchen. Pretty night. Quiet night. She poured herself a glass of milk to combat the burn of anxiety and scotch in her stomach, sniffed at it to make sure it hadn't gone bad, and moved to the counter to look out the window.

Everything was still outside. She saw no sign of Trace coming home. There was no light on in the shed. There was no silhouette of him on the road. The idea that he was far away in more ways than just distance made her heart ache. She wanted to be up when he came in, wanted to just sit with him and talk, not fight, which was about all they had been doing recently. Fighting wasn't doing her any good. At this moment he was probably off somewhere with Carney Fox, telling him what a bitch his mother was.

It didn't do her any good to worry about it though. The worry would eat her alive and leave the problem to grow on unhindered. What she wanted to do was get into her car and go after him, track him down and bring him home, but she could well envision the kind of fight that would spark. The need to have him here and safe and free of the influence of people like Carney Fox warred mightily with the logic of letting him go.

He was sixteen. She had been barely a year older when she'd gotten pregnant with him. No one could have told her then that she didn't know everything she needed to know about the world. It might have made a difference if she had had a mother, but it hadn't made a difference to have J.C. The only time he'd taken any interest in her was when she was winning money on the rodeo circuit, barrel racing, or when he was drunk and mistook her for the ghost of the long-dead, long-lamented Victoria. She tried to take some comfort in the knowledge that she was a better parent than J.C. had been, but then, slugs probably made better parents than J. C. Sheldon.

It was hard, she thought, sipping at her milk, so hard for a woman to raise a boy on her own. What Trace needed at this point in his life was a role model, a male to bond with and look up to. She thought of Dane and laughed bitterly at her mind's ability to ferret out ways of justifying a relationship with him.

What she needed was something to occupy her mind until Trace showed up. Something to keep her calm and distracted. Then, when Trace came in, they would have that heart-to-heart and she would try her best to steer him in the right direction without pushing him into an even worse rebellion.

She needed to go over the inventory of damages to the paper office for the insurance company, but she had inadvertently left it in the Caddy out in the shed, and the idea of walking out there in the dead of night didn't appeal. In fact, she shivered at the thought of it.

Coward
. The word poked at her, taunted her. Once Aaron got the locks on the doors, she would become a virtual prisoner in her own home, she thought, her mouth curling downward in disgust at her lack of nerve. She would just sit in here every night, petrified, afraid of every sound, afraid to hear the phone ring. What kind of life was that? What self-respecting girl from West Texas lived that way?

Stepping around the sawhorses and over the nomadic pile of shoes that had migrated to a spot near the refrigerator, Elizabeth made her way to the back door. The night was just as quiet from this vantage point. No suspicious sounds, no dark shapes lurking in the shadows of the old buildings. Dane had told her he was sending a car by every hour or so during the night just to keep a lookout. That reminder gave her enough courage to go out onto the back step.

All she had to do was walk across the yard to the lean-to shed at the end of the barn, dig the papers out of the mess she'd left in the car, walk back to the house. Not a tall order. Nothing complicated. Nothing she would hesitate to do in the light of day. Night always seemed more frightening, but the fact of the matter was Jarvis had been killed in broad daylight. He had probably felt perfecly safe—until the blade had sliced across his throat.

Turning that image off before it could rattle her, Elizabeth descended the steps and headed for the shed, picking her way barefoot across the weedy, thistle-strewn yard, glass of milk still clutched in her hand.

The shed was narrow and decrepit, not much wider than the Caddy, with a dirt floor, no windows, and mountains of junk around the sides of it, stuff left by previous Drewes usurpers—old crates of motor oil, rusty tin cans full of rustier nails, amputated car parts, bald tires. The only light was a feeble seventy-five-watt bulb up in the rafters that cast about as much illumination on the mess as a candle, but it was better than nothing. Elizabeth made her way along the wall, feeling for the switch, heart thumping in the base of her throat as something skittered along the floor among the retreads. She flipped the switch and turned toward the Cadillac.

Paper was strewn everywhere. She had dumped much of the mess from the
Clarion
office into the car, planning to sort through it Sunday and get some of the files back in order. Someone had already been sorting—or searching for something. The driver's side door stood ajar, papers spewing out of it in a trail of white onto the hard-packed dirt floor of the shed.

Elizabeth's breath froze in her lungs. The short hairs bristled on the back of her neck. The house suddenly seemed a long, long way away, and tears blurred her vision as she stared through the open door toward it. What good would it do her once she was inside? There were no locks. There were no neighbors near enough to hear screams.

But there was a big pistol in her purse on the kitchen table.

She started to move toward the door, feeling as if she were going in slow motion, when all hell broke loose behind her. Her brain absorbed the action in snatches, as if through the blinding flashes of a strobe light. A figure clad in black. Only the eyes and mouth visible. Eyes wild. Mouth open. It lunged from the dark corner near the hood of the Cadillac, looming up over her shoulder like a specter, one arm raised high.

A scream tore from Elizabeth's throat as the figure lunged at her, arm swinging down. She pitched forward, crying out again as something hard hit her a glancing blow to the shoulder and pain rained all the way down her left arm to her fingertips. The glass of milk dropped from her hand and shattered across the floor of the shed. Stars shooting across her vision, she stumbled, staggered dizzily, and went down to her knees on the hard, lumpy, glass-strewn floor. Glass bit into her right knee, but the pain was there and gone in a white-hot burst as adrenaline swept it away. Her legs felt like rubber and the world seemed to pitch and roll beneath her as unconsciousness beckoned. But from some corner of her mind came a loud, insistent shout—
Move or die! Move! Move! Move!

She scrambled ahead, frantically, awkwardly, grasping at the side of the car for a handhold that might give her enough leverage to pull herself to her feet. A muffled curse sounded behind her as her assailant struggled with the car door that had become wedged open, caught against the wall of the narrow building. A second blow rang against the Caddy. The door slammed shut as Elizabeth got her feet under her and pushed herself up and forward.

Cold dread washed through her, along with the heat of panic. This was like a nightmare where you ran and ran but never gained any ground, and the harder you tried, the slower you moved. Time became weirdly elastic. Sound came and went through the jet-engine noise of her blood surging through her veins—silence, then deafening sound, snatches of her own mumbled words of panic, the grunt of her assailant as he moved behind her.

She grabbed blindly for a stack of junk to her right and jerked at it as she stumbled past, sending an avalanche of old Coke bottles tumbling into the path of her pursuer. There was a series of crashes and thumps, the rattle and smash of glass bottles, and another loud thump against the Caddy, but she didn't look back to see her attacker fall. Lungs burning, ears roaring, heart choking her as it lodged in her throat, she hurled herself away from the car, away from the building. She burst from the shed into the moonlit yard and ran, not thinking about anything—not pain, not death, not anything—except getting to the house and the gun that waited for her inside.

THE SCREAMS CUT THROUGH THE STILL OF THE WOODS LIKE
knives singing through the air. Dane's big gray gelding brought his head up and snorted, gathering his legs beneath him in a nervous dance. Dane rose in the stirrups and set his heels to the horse's flanks. The gray bolted forward, plunging through the woods on the narrow, overgrown trail with Dane leaning over the horse's neck, ducking limbs as the gelding weaved between trees. His mind was already on the other side of the woods, with Elizabeth, and his heart was in his throat.

Dammit, he should have stationed a deputy at her house, even if the only man available for the job tonight had been Ellstrom. She had gotten a call, her office had been ransacked. Christ, she'd damn near witnessed a murder. And he had left her alone. It didn't matter that he had already been on his way to keep his nightly vigil. He had left her alone for a few hours. Minutes was all it took to kill. Seconds.

What if he were seconds late?

Refusing to think about the possibility, Dane nudged the gray again with his heels and was rewarded with an additional burst of speed that took them over a fallen log and brought them within sight of the Drewes place. They broke the clearing and raced across the yard toward the house. As Dane shifted his weight back and picked up the reins, the quarter horse went into a skidding, sliding stop, tucking his hind legs beneath him and skating across the lawn, front legs paddling.

Dane was out of the saddle and running for the house before the horse came to a full stop. Pain bit into his left knee like vise grips, but it registered only in a far corner of his mind. Reacting on instinct—a man's instinct, not a cop's —he bounded up the back steps, flung open the screen door, and hurled himself into the house without breaking stride.

If she was hurt, if she was dead—

“Elizabeth!” he shouted as he burst into the kitchen.

The room was dark. Shadows and the hulking shapes of appliances, a slice of moonlight, a figure standing near the table. He focused on the figure just as it wheeled and the moonlight flashed on the silver barrel of a gun.

In his playing days for the Raiders, Dane had been famous for diving catches. Laying out his body, stretching for the ball, his concentration on the catch instead of the pain that would follow. The move came as naturally to him now. He launched himself across the room, his concentration on the gun, hands stretching for it, fingers closing on the wrist of the gunman. The momentum of his body carried them both to the floor, and they bounced hard and skidded across the linoleum, cutting the legs out from under a sawhorse and sending a sheet of heavy plywood crashing to the floor. The gun went off with a deafening explosion, firing into the ceiling, and plaster rained down on them like hailstones.

Gritting his teeth against the pain in his ribs, Dane hauled his upper body up off the prone form beneath him. The weapon had fallen to the floor, and he swept it out of reach as he braced himself up on one hand and looked down.

“Elizabeth!”

She lay beneath him, face stark white with terror.

Anger, relief, belated fear surged through Dane all at once. He was shaking inside as he started to get to his feet. Anger seemed the safest of the three emotions, the least complicated. He seized it with both hands and gave it free rein.

“Jesus Ever-Loving Christ!” he roared, sitting back on his haunches. “What the hell do you think you're doing—”

Elizabeth didn't wait to hear the rest. She struggled up onto her knees and hurled herself against him. She threw her arms around his neck, nearly knocking him on his butt, and buried her face against his chest.

Dane felt his tirade die inside his chest and something else blossom in its place. He wouldn't acknowledge the feeling, but he couldn't seem to keep himself from putting his arms around her. He couldn't seem to stop himself from holding her or stroking her hair or whispering soft words to her as his lips brushed against her temple. She clung to him, shaking so badly he was afraid she was ill.

“What happened?” he asked. He tipped her head back away from his shoulder and brushed wet hair out of her eyes. “What happened, honey?”