DREW’S TRIO played from seven till one in the lounge at the Moose. Mari joined them, alternating two songs for every two played by the group. They offered the affluent crowd an eclectic mix of jazz, folk, country, and crossover rock. She drew heavily on her soft and bluesy repertoire, as always, her music reflecting her mood. She called on old favorites from Jackson Browne and Bonnie Raitt, and newer tunes from Rosanne Cash and Shawn Colvin, throwing in some of her own creations when the mood struck her. When the band members knew the song, they joined in and backed her up. It was one of those fine, rare instances where musicians’ styles and instincts meshed immediately, resulting in magic.
The audience, who had come into the lounge to socialize with friends, abandoned their conversations or toned them down to whispers as the music captivated them. The small dance floor was never empty. The applause was always enthusiastic.
At the start of the first break, Mari slid onto the piano bench beside Drew. The other two members of the band waded out into the crowd in search of drinks and friends. The noise level of the conversations rose to compensate for the lack of music.
“This is great,” she murmured, giving Drew a soft smile. “Thanks for inviting me.”
“The pleasure is ours, luv. You’ve a rare talent.” He picked up his tonic and lime and took a slow sip, wincing a little as he reached to set the glass aside.
“You okay?”
“Fine,” he said absently, rolling his right shoulder back. “Strained a muscle, that’s all. Clumsy of me.
“You seem a bit subdued tonight,” he said. His gaze was speculative above freshly sun-kissed cheeks.
Mari cringed. “God, do you think I’m depressing people?”
“Not at all,” he said with a chuckle. “They’re enraptured with you. It’s just there’s something awfully sad in those lovely blue eyes. Anything I can do to help?”
She shook her head, making a rueful comic face. “Got myself into something I shouldn’t have. Never fear. I’m a big girl; I can take it on the chin with the best of them.”
He frowned and reached up to tuck a rumpled strand of silver-blond hair behind her ear. “What do you mean, something you shouldn’t have gotten into? Does this have to do with Lucy?”
“No, why? Do you know something I should know?”
He glanced away, across the sea of faces in the crowd, wishing he hadn’t said anything at all. “I know if there was trouble to be had, Lucy would sniff it out, that’s all.”
“The kind of trouble that might have gotten her killed?”
“I didn’t say that.”
Mari leaned into him and tugged sharply on the full sleeve of his emerald silk shirt. “Dammit, Drew,” she whispered harshly. “If you know something, tell me. I don’t think Lucy’s death was an accident, but I haven’t been able to find a soul who gives a damn.”
Scowling, he turned his attention to the sheet music stacked against the piano’s scrolled music desk, thumbing through the titles impatiently. “I resent the implication, thank you very much. I know that Lucy was involved with MacDonald Townsend in a way he wasn’t entirely happy about, that’s all.”
“Was she blackmailing him?”
“Perhaps,” he said evasively. “Certainly he was footing part of the bill for her lifestyle, but he couldn’t have killed her.”
“Couldn’t he?”
He dropped his hands to the keyboard and stared at her. “My God, Mari, the man’s a judge!” he exclaimed under his breath. “Judges don’t go about shooting women.”
“And plastic surgeons do?”
“It was an accident. Sheffield had no reason to want Lucy dead.”
“Which makes him a very convenient fall guy, don’t you think?” Mari pressed on doggedly. “No motive, no murder indictment. He pleads guilty to making a boo-boo with a high-powered rifle and gets a slap on the hand. Ben Lucas is Sheffield’s lawyer. Lucas and Townsend are old pals. They all hang out together at Bryce’s little hacienda…”
Drew shook his head, exasperated. “You’re grasping at straws.”
Mari spread her hands and shrugged. “Maybe, maybe not. You think Townsend is above reproach? District court judges aren’t supposed to snort coke either, but I saw him nosing up to a line in Bryce’s billiard room. Makes me wonder what other nasty habits he has.”
“I’d rather you didn’t find out.”
He turned back to the music. Mari didn’t think he was even looking at the titles as he pretended to sort through them. He was merely using it as an excuse not to meet her eyes. She sat there for a while, trying to probe his brain like a psychic, trying to deduce by Holmesian logic what secrets he knew. Her efforts met nothing but a stony expression and a mind closed like a steel strongbox.
“What else do you know, Drew?” she asked at last.
“I can’t shed any light on Lucy’s death,” he said, his voice low and impatient. “I don’t know that I would if I could. Sometimes it’s best to let sleeping dogs lie.”
He wasn’t the first to express that point of view; still, it made Mari furious. She was well aware Lucy hadn’t been a model citizen in life, but did that mean she didn’t deserve justice in death? Did her flaws make her life any less valuable? Did no one but Mari remember that she had possessed good qualities alongside the bad?
“Do these dogs have names?” she asked tightly.
He hissed a long sigh out through his teeth and squeezed his eyes shut. “Marilee…”
“Fabulous music!”
Bryce’s voice snapped the tension and took it to a different level. Mari swiveled around on the piano bench to face him, manufacturing a polite smile. “Thanks.”
He stood with a bottle of Pellegrino dangling from his bony hand, a thousand-watt smile cutting across his tan face. Mari wondered uncharitably if the look was really just a grimace of pain with the corners tucked up: his jeans looked tight enough to raise his blood pressure into the danger zone. His arm was draped casually across the shoulders of Samantha Rafferty.
The girl looked uncomfortable with the situation, her dark eyes darting toward Drew and away, as if she were contemplating bolting from the room. Disapproval rolled off Drew in waves. Mari wondered if Samantha had heard about Will’s accident. The question was on the tip of her tongue, but she bit it back. Hadn’t she taken enough lumps for butting into Rafferty business as it was?
“It’s really too bad you didn’t bring your guitar to the party the other night,” Bryce said, tilting his head and giving her a look of censure. “Rob Gold from Columbia would have loved you. Now he’s gone back to L.A.”
Mari shrugged, her excitement at the prospect of meeting a record exec tempered by the source of the information. “Some other time, maybe.”
“Maybe, nothing,” Bryce declared. “You ought to hop a plane and go to him. I can make a couple of phone calls if you like-”
And get me out of Montana. “Thanks anyway, but I don’t think this is the right time for me to jump into anything.”
“Opportunities don’t happen along every day.”
“No, well, I don’t have friends killed every day either. I’d like a little time to recover.”
He gave her his patronizing fatherly look, tipping his small chin down almost to the puff of chest hair billowing out the open placket of his white oxford shirt. “You’re loyal to a fault, sweetheart. Lucy’s probably looking down at you, snickering. She would have pounced on a plum like this. Lucy was never one to miss a chance to get ahead-was she, Drew?”
Their gazes locked for an instant. Mari watched them, a fist of tension clenching in her chest. Drew rose gracefully from the piano bench and took Samantha by the arm.
“Samantha luv, may I have a word?”
Samantha’s eyes went wide. “I’m off tonight, Mr. Van Dellen.”
“Yes, darling, I’m well aware,” he countered smoothly, drawing her away from Bryce and toward the side exit to the veranda.
Bryce let her go without a hint of objection. He dropped down on the bench in the spot Drew had vacated and took a long pull on his Pellegrino. His Adam’s apple bobbed like a cork in his throat. Pressing his lips together and blotting the residual moisture with the heel of his hand, he adjusted his position a quarter turn toward Mari and pretended to be gravely concerned.
“How are you doing, Marilee? We heard you had a run-in with a burglar the other night.”
“Yeah, or something.” She shrugged it off. “Lucky for me he hit me in the head. My head is generally considered hard to the point of being impenetrable.”
“Not a laughing matter, angel,” he said with a frown. “You could have been killed.”
“Could I?”
“It happens.” It was his turn to shrug, as if to say violent death was just one of those things, an unforeseen inconvenience on any tourist’s itinerary. “So when are you going to come out and spend a day at Xanadu? With all that’s happened, you could probably use an afternoon by the pool with nothing to worry about.”
With nothing to worry about except which of the snakes in Bryce’s pit might be a murderer. What a relaxing scene-stretched out in a chaise with a daiquiri in one hand, scanning the suspects through the dark lenses of a pair of Wayfarers. Bryce and his court of vipers: the coke-snorting Judge Townsend, the shark lawyer Lucas. Maybe Bryce could fly in the sharpshooting Dr. Sheffield just to make things really interesting. Then Del Rafferty could climb up in the turret of Bryce’s rustic palace and pick them all off one by one with an assault rifle. What a swell day that would be.
“I’ll let you know,” she said, brushing the wrinkles out of her jeans as she stood. “Break’s over. Time to entertain the troops.”
“Knock ’em dead, sweetheart.”
He beamed a smile at her. Ever the benevolent monarch. He made his way toward his regular table, the high heels of his cowboy boots tilting his slim hips to an angle that encouraged swaggering. Waiting for him were Lucas, the actress Uma Kimball clinging to him like a limpet. There was no sign of Townsend. At the far end of the table, the bimbob was amusing himself by working his pecs behind a blue muscle shirt that looked like body paint. Sharon Russell was in her right-hand-man seat, wearing a black leather halter top with a neckline that plunged below table level and a scowl that would have done Joan Crawford proud.
Mari grimaced as she shrugged her guitar strap over her shoulder. “Careful, Shar baby,” she muttered. “Didn’t your mother ever tell you your face could stay that way? Guess not.”
Samantha came in the side exit looking on the verge of tears. Bryce intercepted her and steered her back out the door. Drew stalked past the piano, through the crowd, and out the door that led to his office.
Stepping up to the microphone, Mari strummed a chord and sang the opening line of a Mary-Chapin Carpenter tune, thinking that life around New Eden was getting curiouser and curiouser.
J.D. heard her voice before he set foot in the lounge. Smoky and low, strong with emotion-pain, confusion, longing for something beyond her reach. He edged inside the door and stood in the shadows.
She sat on a stool in front of a small band, a soft spotlight gilding her silver-blond hair in an aura of gold. Propped on her knee was the old guitar that seemed almost a part of her when she played it. Her fingers moved over the strings, plucking out a slow, melancholy tune. She sang of a relationship growing cold, a man slipping away behind a wall of silence and indifference; painful words left unspoken and hanging in the air, their invisible weight oppressive. A woman helpless to stop an inevitable loss. Regret for what might have been, but never would be.
He thought he might have heard the song before, but he’d never heard it like this-with the ache of loss an almost palpable thing. He tried to shut out the words, tried to detach himself from the dull throb of guilt that reverberated in his chest with each low note on the guitar. He tried to tell himself he had no reason to feel guilty. He hadn’t taken more than she had offered. Hell, he hadn’t taken that much. With that thought came not vindication, but regret, and he shoved that aside as quickly and ruthlessly as the rest.
Between verses he moved up along the wall and slid into a vacant chair at the far side of the stage area. Her eyes found his unerringly in the gloom. He thought her voice thickened a bit, but her fingers never faltered on the strings. As she plucked out the final notes, she dropped her head down near the body of the old guitar, her unruly mane tumbling forward to hide her face. She sat motionless while the crowd applauded, then set the guitar aside, walked off the stage, and out the side door.
The trio struck up a jazz number. J.D. rose and cut in front of them to exit through the door Mary Lee had taken.
“What’s with you, Rafferty?” she asked as he stepped out onto the veranda.
She stood with her butt against the railing, arms crossed in front of her. A slice of amber light from the last of the sunset cut across her, turning her half-gold, half-shadow.
She narrowed her eyes at him. “You ruined my morning. You ruined my afternoon. You won’t be happy until you ruin my evening too?”
“I tried to catch you at the ranch, but you’d gone already.”
“So now you can ruin my evening in front of a hundred witnesses. That should make your day.”
J.D. took the verbal jabs without complaint. He supposed he deserved them. It was better this way, anyhow, that she stay mad at him, that she would rather strike out at him than get close. He would rather be a bastard now than broken later by some emotion that served no useful purpose. Or so he told himself.
“I don’t have to take it, you know,” she said, her voice hoarse, the muscles of her face tightening. Blinking furiously, she shoved herself away from the railing and started past him.
J.D. caught her by the arm and pulled her in alongside him. “I never set out to hurt you, Mary Lee. In fact, I came here to see that you don’t get hurt.”
Mari glared up at him and jerked her arm from his grasp. “That boat sailed a while ago, skipper.” She started away from him again, not sure of where she was going, knowing only that she didn’t want to see Rafferty when she got there. But his next words stopped her cold.
“Miller Daggrepont is dead.”
Shock struck like a fist to the solar plexus, forcing half the air out of her lungs. She turned back to face him, a little unsteady on her feet. “What? What did you say?”
“Miller Daggrepont is dead. I found him out on Little Snake Creek this afternoon. Quinn thinks he had a heart attack.”
“And what do you think?”
“Looks to me like someone choked him.”
Automatically, Mari’s hand went to the base of her throat. She walked past J.D. to the spot along the rail she had vacated and leaned against it, staring out into the gathering gloom of twilight. But she didn’t see the mountains turning purple or the orange of the sky or the parade of ranch trucks heading to the Hell and Gone. She saw Lucy’s lawyer, his weird eyes rolling behind the slabs of glass in his spectacles as some faceless killer strangled the life from him. The image made her shudder.
J.D. stepped in behind her, cupped a big hand on her shoulder, and ran it down her arm. No more than an inch of air separated their bodies. All she had to do was lean back a little and she would be enveloped by his warmth, his strength. He took the decision away from her, closing the distance, resting his cheek against her hair.
The action was both foreign to him and automatic, natural. He wasn’t the kind of man who offered comfort easily. But she looked so small, so lost. And despite every warning he had given himself, despite every rotten thing he had said to her, the sense of possession was still there, primal, basic, answering some invisible call from her. She was vulnerable; he wanted to be her strength. She was frightened; he wanted to be her courage.
It was foolish. It was dangerous. He thought… She thought.
Mari had no doubt that in the end he would push her away for getting too close. But in the meantime… In the meantime, she could close her eyes for a moment and imagine… pretend… wish… hope… all those futile, naive practices.
God, you’re such a fool, Marilee… stayed with a man you don’t love, love a man you can never have… He had made it clear where she stood with him. Any tenderness he showed her now was only token or worse, a means to an end. She was so tired of feeling used and abused. And yet she still wanted… and wished… and hoped…
She curled her fingers tight around the railing and held on.
“Quinn’s sending the body up to Bozeman to be posted,” he said.
“Why are you telling me?”
“He was Lucy’s lawyer.”
“So? You think Lucy’s death was an accident-not that you’d give a damn either way.”
“That’s not true.”
She laughed and twisted her head around to look at him. “Yes, it is. You don’t care about anyone, remember, J.D.? You’re the lone wolf protecting his territory. The land-that’s all you care about.”
“There are probably a dozen people who would have liked to see Miller dead,” he said, simply ignoring the subject of feelings as deftly as he ignored the feelings themselves. “He had his fingers in a lot of shady land deals. But if this has anything to do with Lucy, then it might have something to do with you. I don’t want to see you dead, Mary Lee.”
“Well, I suppose that’s a comfort,” she said sarcastically. Turning to face him, she crossed her arms again and tipped her chin up to a challenging angle. “But then, if I were dead, you’d have a hard time trying to screw me out of Lucy’s land, wouldn’t you?”
She meant to hurt him, as he had hurt her, and she struck unerringly at his integrity and pride. But it didn’t make her feel any better to see his eyes narrow or his jaw harden. It only made her feel more alone.
He leaned over her, big and tough and menacing, and braced his hands on the rail on either side of her. “I admit I want the land,” he said, his voice a rumble as low and throaty as a cougar’s growl. “But the screwing part was strictly for fun. You gonna try to tell me you didn’t enjoy it, Mary Lee?”
“You bastard.”
His eyes were as hard and dark as raw granite. “Tell me you didn’t want it. You didn’t give a damn what I was after as long as I gave you a good ride.”
“I think you have me confused with someone else,” she said, glaring at him. “Too bad for you she happens to be dead. I’m beginning to think you were made for each other.”
J.D. stepped back an inch and looked away, planting his hands at his waist. He didn’t like the role he was trying to play. He hated himself for playing at all. Games had been Lucy’s forte, not his. He’d been raised to deal fair and square. That was part of the code. God help him that he’d let himself be reduced to this.
Mary Lee looked up at him, her big eyes shining with tears and condemnation. He could feel the weight of her stare, could see her in his peripheral vision. Standing up to him again. Fighting for herself.
“I cared what you were after, J.D.,” she said tightly. “My mistake was in thinking you had something in you worth putting up with all your macho bullshit. Something good. Something tender. Stupid of me to think you might let me find it. Stupid of me to think it was ever there.”
She held herself as if she were cold as she paced a short distance down the walk, her paddock boots thumping dully on the wood. When she turned around, a hunk of rumpled blond hair tumbled across her face and she tossed it back.
“You keep confusing me with Lucy,” she said. “Well, let me set you straight on a few things, cowboy. I’m not Lucy. I don’t like being used. I don’t like being hurt. I don’t play games. When I care about someone, it’s real-not always smart or what’s best, but it’s real. If you don’t want that, fine. It’s your loss. But don’t come around telling me what to do or who to trust or where I belong or don’t belong. You can’t have it both ways, Rafferty. You can’t just take what you want and leave the rest.”
J.D. lowered his head and sighed. The pressure in his chest was as heavy and spiny as a mace. He didn’t want it. He told himself he had never wanted it, had never lain awake in the night craving it. It would be far easier to keep himself intact without it. He had battles to fight, a ranch to run. He couldn’t afford to expend energy needlessly.
Mari watched him, breath held, waiting. The foolish part of her heart was waiting for him to beg her forgiveness and confess his feelings. Capital F on foolish. He wasn’t that kind of man. The tenderness she had glimpsed in him had been an aberration. He’d been bred tough enough to spit tacks and wrestle bears; a man made for the life he had inherited. But that kind of toughness didn’t come without a price and it didn’t magically stop short of his heart. She couldn’t change his past or alter the rules he lived by. What they had together was not what she needed. There was no point trying to hang on. Better to cut her losses early and just walk away.
The side door to the lounge opened and Drew leaned out, his eyes flicking from J.D. to her. “Is everything all right, luv?”
Mari held that breath just a little bit longer, just another few seconds of pointless hope, her stare hard on Rafferty’s bowed head. He didn’t say a word.
“No,” she murmured. “But I’ll get over it.”
She slipped in the door past Drew and headed for the ladies’ room.
At one-thirty only the hired help were left in the Mystic Moose lounge. Tony the bartender wiped down bottles and arranged them to his satisfaction beneath Madam Belle’s gilt-framed mirror. A custodian who bore a striking resemblance to Mickey Rooney put the chairs atop the tables and vacuumed the floor. Gary and Mitch, Drew’s trio partners, said their good-byes and left together, talking music. Kevin stood at the cash register behind the bar, checking the receipts and laughing at Tony’s cowboy jokes. Mari settled her guitar in its case and flipped the latches.
“Would you care to talk about it?” Drew asked softly.
He stood in the curve of the baby grand’s side, no more than two feet from her. Mari shook her head a little. Forcing a smile, she rose and pulled the guitar case up into her arms and held it like a dance partner.
“There’s not much to tell. I led with my heart. That’s never a very intelligent thing to do.”
Drew frowned. “Perhaps not, but think what a grand place the world would be if we all dared do it.”
He slipped his arms around her and the guitar and hugged her tight. “If you decide you need an ear to bend or a shoulder to cry on, you know who to come to.”
“Thanks.”
“Get some sleep tonight, luv,” he said, stepping back. “You look all done in.”
“Yeah, well…” Mari shrugged. “It started out as a bad hair day and went downhill from there.”
He smiled gently then grew serious. “And as for the other…” He reached out and brushed back an errant strand of her hair. “Let it go, darling. No good can come of it now. I shouldn’t want to see you hurt trying to change something that can’t be changed.”
She watched him as he glided between the tables to the bar, another line of Lucy’s coming back to her-All the good ones are married or gay. She was sure Drew knew something more about Lucy’s life here than he was telling her, but he claimed he couldn’t shed any light on her death and she had to accept that as truth. He was just too good a friend to hide something so ugly.
Saying good night to Tony, she let herself out the side door and wandered down the boardwalk along the side of the lodge. Echoes of her fight with J.D. rang in her hollow footfalls. She ignored them as best she could. Even though she’d gotten little sleep the past two nights, she was too wired to go straight to her room. She couldn’t imagine finding much solace in sleep. She had too much stewing in her subconscious to allow her to rest.
She thought fleetingly of going out to the ranch, dragging blankets out to the field to sleep beneath the stars among the llamas, but visions of grizzly bears and wandering madmen chased the fantasy away. Miller Daggrepont had been found dead in the middle of nowhere. And Lucy. There would be no sleeping in the guest bed at the ranch either. Aside from spooking her, the mere thought of spending the night way out there alone filled her head with Rafferty’s warm male scent. Damned mule-headed cowboy.
He thought he had to take on the whole world with one hand tied behind his back and no one standing on his sidelines. He was Alan Ladd in Shane, only bigger and ornerier. John Wayne without the knee-knocking walk. Hercules on a horse. Superman in a Stetson. Chivalrous and cruel. As hard as granite. As vulnerable as a broken heart. He didn’t want to admit caring about anyone who could possibly care about him-not Tucker or Will, certainly not Mary Lee the outsider.
Romanticizing again, Marilee? How like you.
Rafferty was no silver-screen cowboy hero. He was hard as nails and he didn’t want her for anything other than to relieve his testosterone imbalance and increase his property holdings. Nothing terribly romantic about that.
Even as she tried to convince herself of his villainy, she saw him in her mind’s eye, standing at the end of his barn where he thought no one could see him, looking out at the land he loved, his face a bleak mask of desperation.
Half resigned and half disgusted, she waded through the dew-damp meadow grass to her rock and climbed up to sit and stare back at New Eden. Oblongs of golden light marked windows of individual rooms in the Moose, where other people were having trouble winding down. She wondered which of the lights belonged to Drew and Kevin. She wondered how much Drew kept from his partner. She wondered if they ever had the kind of fights where one of them walked away feeling as if his heart had been kicked black and blue.
Things were still going strong at the Hell and Gone. The place lit up the night like a house afire. Noise pounded out through the walls and doors and windows, losing definition with distance so that all Mari could make out was the distorted thump of a bass guitar and the high crash of cymbals like glass shattering. She wondered if Will was inside, drinking himself blind again.
Her heart ached for him. Will, the screwup, the Rafferty black sheep. Funny he wasn’t the one she had fallen for; they had the most in common. But then, he had a wife.
She started to think about Samantha and shook her head. What a mess. She’d come to Montana for a break from reality and had fallen splat in the middle of a soap opera-good versus evil, greedy land baron versus the small family rancher, intrigue, infidelity, and God only knew what else. The road less traveled was turning out to be pretty damned crowded and rougher than a son of a bitch.
There was a part of her that wanted nothing more than to walk away. But it was a small part, a remnant of the old Marilee. She pushed it away like a dry husk and felt a little stronger. She didn’t want to leave Montana. She wanted to belong here-not just live here, belong here. She wanted to be as much a part of the place as Rafferty and the mountains and the big, big sky. And if she was to be worthy of the place, then she would have to adopt its codes-to do the right thing, to prize integrity and courage and accountability. And her first mission on this quest would be to find out the truth about Lucy’s death.
No small task with no easy answers. And no one to help her.
Tipping her head back, she looked up at the millions of stars that were scattered across the night sky and found the North Star shining bright above the peaks. Star light, star bright. She stared up at the blue-white diamond points and wished for just one thing, knowing in her heart of hearts it wouldn’t be coming tonight.
Will lay in the bed of Tucker’s old H truck, staring up at the stars through a sheen that might have been tears or the blur of too much booze. He was beyond knowing. Too bad he wasn’t beyond remembering. Images rolled across the back of his mind like a silent movie: sleeping out in the pickup bed when he was a kid, J.D. slipping into the cab and taking the truck out of gear to roll down through the yard, scaring the piss out of him. The two of them staying out all night then down in the high grass beyond the pens, where you couldn’t make out the yard light because of the barn, and you could pretend you were anywhere.
Then suddenly he was fifteen, sleeping off a bender in the back of Tucker’s H, staring up at the spinning sky and cursing God for giving him a stubborn son of a bitch for a father and a brother who made Tom Rafferty look soft by comparison. Wishing he could be free and at the same time wishing he could be more like J.D. He wanted to be everything to everybody. Instead, he was nothing. Not good enough to be a Rafferty. Not tough enough to run the Stars and Bars. His mother’s son-a crime that made him suspect in the eyes of every rancher in the valley, a title that made him a prince among the crowd his mother ran with. Prince of the do-nothings.
Then a few more years spun past and he was lying in the back of his own truck with Sam tucked in beside him. A silly grin on his face. A big warm feeling in the middle of his chest. Feeling edgy and wild. On the brink of something new, something he couldn’t name.
And then he was alone, parked on Third Avenue in front of the house the Jerry Masons had vacated in the dead of night six months before on account of a little discrepancy with Jerry’s creditors. Alone and drunk, listening to the airy purr of a Mercedes engine as it idled in front of the house he used to share with his ex-wife, ex-wife, ex-wife…
You’re gonna be free now, Willie-boy.
Free of the ranch. Free of J.D. Free of Sam.
Free to be me.
The fear of that started in his belly and swallowed him whole. And the stars blurred together as tears ran down his face.
Sharon turned her face up to a heaven as black as pitch and studded with pinpoints of light. She tried to imagine the heat of all the stars flowing into her and feeding her, recharging her, but their light was cold and white, and she felt nothing but emptiness.
She lay on a chaise on the balcony outside the bedroom, naked and alone, her long, angular body stretched out, silicone-enlarged breasts thrusting toward the sky like pyramids. She knew she was fully visible to the ranch hands who lived in an apartment above the horses in the stable. She knew one was watching her now, but she didn’t care. On another night she might have performed for him. On another night she might have invited him to join her as she had on other occasions because he shared her taste for the rough stuff and because the idea of that kind of sex with a man who was dirty and ugly seemed only fitting to her. But tonight she had other things on her mind.
Bryce had yet to come up to bed. He had sequestered himself in the inner sanctum of his study to think.
Not an uncommon occurrence. Bryce’s mind was like a Swiss watch-precision cogs and wheels running perfectly, ideas spinning through the workings. His mind and an absence of conscience had made him a wealthy man. She respected that. But Sharon suspected tonight he wasn’t thinking of business, he was thinking of Samantha Rafferty, and the idea pierced her like a skewer.
The obsession was deepening, as it had with Lucy MacAdam. With Lucy the attraction had been her style and cunning and her self-professed power over men. Theirs had been a clash of wills, a mating of cobras. Samantha Rafferty’s appeal was opposite in every way-guileless, clueless, unsure.
Sharon closed her eyes, blocking out the sky, filling her head with the vision of Bryce and the girl together. Tormenting herself with the vision. Fear slithered through her, twining around her heart, squeezing like a python. Arousal curled through it like a barbed vine. The images tilted and shifted. The partners changed. Other faces came into view, other bodies-her own among the tangle of arms and legs, light skin and dark. Memories of degradations past, the things she would do for Bryce, to Bryce, to herself. All of it for him.
The girl would never be a strong enough partner for Bryce. Her innocence would bore him eventually. His tastes would repulse her. Sharon tried to soothe herself with that promise. She closed her eyes and thought of Bryce, and satisfied herself with her own touch as she visualized him. She loved him. He was the only person in the world she loved-herself included. When the end came and she was thinking of him, there were stars behind her eyelids and heat rushing from within.
But when she opened her eyes she was alone. The stars were a million miles away.
J.D. sat on the porch with his legs hanging over the edge and his narrowed gaze on the night sky. Clear sky. Good weather. They would have a good day to move the cattle tomorrow-only they wouldn’t be moving the cattle tomorrow. They were short a hand.
He should have been glad Will was gone. No more screwups. No more questions of loyalty or duty. No more wondering when he would pick up and leave to go rodeo, or when he would gamble away two months’ worth of bank payments. No more reminder of the long, sad history of the Rafferty boys. He should have been glad. Instead, there was a yawning emptiness inside him.
He could have attributed it to a lot of things-the supper he had missed while tramping along the banks of the Little Snake with Dan Quinn and his deputies, the specter of an uncertain future that loomed over the ranch, the dead ends he’d run down in his attempts to stop Bryce from buying out the Flying K. But those answers were untrue and he’d never been a liar. He prided himself on that and other things that no one seemed to care about in the world beyond his own. Integrity. Accountability. Courage to do the right things, the hard things.
What did it matter if it mattered only to him?
What was any of it worth if he was the last of his kind?
I feel sorry for you, Rafferty. You’ll end up with this land and nothing else.
Christ, he hated irony, and he hated being wrong. He had never wanted Will to be a part of him or a part of this place. Now Will was gone. The relationship they had bent and twisted and abused was finally broken. And he cared. A lot.
He had never wanted a woman to matter to him. Then along came Mary Lee from a world he distrusted and despised, as wrong for him as she could be. And she mattered. Finding Miller Daggrepont’s body had sent a jolt of fear through him. Fear for Mary Lee.
Can’t be afraid for somebody you don’t care anything about, can you, J.D?
Never been a liar. What a lie that was.
He tried to tell himself he hadn’t been affected by her tears or her words outside the lounge at the Mystic Moose. That it didn’t matter that he’d hurt her or that he’d been the biggest son of a bitch this side of Evan Bryce. They weren’t suited. He didn’t need the kind of woman she was. And what would she need with a man like him? She was a bright, modern woman on the brink of a rich new life. He was an antique. His life was obsolete. He was tied to a tradition that was dragging him under like an anchor in high water. Skilled in ways that didn’t matter. A self-trained isolationist who had honed loneliness to perfection and called it inner peace.
Never been a liar.
The hell you say, J.D.
“A fine night.”
Chaske appeared from nowhere and lowered his lean old body to sit down the porch from J.D. By starlight he looked like a Native American version of Willie Nelson-the long braids, the headband, faded jeans, and a Waylon Jennings T-shirt. J.D. glanced at him sideways.
“You gonna tell me I’m a jackass too?” he challenged. “Tucker beat you to it.”
Chaske shrugged as if to say, You win some, you lose some, and dug the makings of a cigarette out of his hip pocket. The thin paper glowed blue-white against the dark.
“I don’t need to hear it,” J.D. said.
“Mmmm.”
“Will is who he is. I am who I am. This day was bound to come.”
“Mmmm.” The old man opened a cotton pouch and stretched a line of tobacco down the crease in the paper. He tightened the pouch string, using his teeth, then rolled the paper and licked the edge in a movement that had been perfected over a great many years.
“Will’s gone,” J.D. said, essentially talking to himself. “We’ll just have to deal with that. I’ll get on the phone tomorrow and find us a hand. We can still have the cattle up the mountain by Wednesday.”
Chaske struck a match against the porch boards and cupped his hands around his smoke, creating a glowing ball of warm light. He took his time, concentrating on the moment, savoring that first lungful of smoke. When he finally exhaled he said, “The cattle can wait. The grass will be better in a week or two. Now that we got rain.”
J.D. studied the weathered old face, an impassive face that gave nothing away and at the same time hinted at many deeper truths than those on the surface of his words.
“He won’t be coming back, Chaske. Not this time.”
Chaske grunted a little, still staring out at the night. Pinching his little cigarette between his thumb and forefinger, he took another long drag and held it deep. When he exhaled, the smell of burning hemp sweetened the air.
“The cattle can wait. You got a lotta cattle. You got one brother.” He took another toke, inhaling until it looked as if he were pinching nothing more than a red-hot spark. He ground the butt out on the porch floor and dropped it over the edge into the dirt. Slowly and gracefully, he rose, stretching like a cat. “Gotta go. Got a date.”
J.D. raised his brows. “It’s after one in the morning.”
“She’s a night owl. A man has to appreciate each woman for her own qualities. This one’s got some pretty good qualities,” he said nodding. Willie Nelson as Chief Dan George. Wisdom in a Waylon Jennings T-shirt. “That little blonde-bet she’s got some good qualities too. She’s got a look about her. Maybe you oughta find out.”
J.D. worked his jaw a little, chewing back the desire to tell Chaske to mind his own business. The usual rules had never applied to Chaske. He claimed his ties to the ancient mystics let him live on a different plane. That or what he put in those little cigarettes.
“She’s just passing through, Chaske. Anyway, I got no time. Someone’s gotta keep this place hanging together. Near as I can figure out, that’s the only reason I was born,” he said, wincing a little at the bitterness that crept in around the edges of his voice. “To keep the Rafferty name on the deed.”
“Kinda hard to do if there’s no Raffertys after you,” he pointed out. He turned his profile to J.D. once again and stared off across the ranch yard and beyond, his gaze seeming to encompass the whole of Montana.
“Man can’t own the land, you know,” Chaske announced. “Man comes and goes; the land will always be here. White men never figure that out. All we own are our lives.”
Everything he left unsaid pressed down on J.D.’s shoulders, forcing a sigh out of him. He was too tired to argue philosophy, too exhausted to defend the principles of tradition or try to impress Chaske with a white man’s code of honor and responsibility. There was no impressing Chaske; he was above it all on his plane with the mystics.
“Damn pretty night,” the old man said, pointing at the sky with a thrust of his chin. “Look at all those stars.” He glanced at J.D., his small, dark eyes glowing with amusement. “Good night for night owls.”
Then he was gone and J.D. was left with the night and the stars all to himself. Alone. The way he was meant to be, he told himself. Tough guy. Didn’t need anyone. Never had.
You lying dog.
Townsend sat at his desk, oblivious of the swath of galaxy that stretched across his windows like a sequined band of black velvet. He was shaking. He was sick. His tongue felt like a bloated eel in his mouth. He could barely breathe around it without gagging and choking. His nose ran in a continuous stream of thin, salty mucus. Tears leaked from his eyes, burning the lids raw. A drift of cocaine glowed against the dark wood of the desk. He had lost track of how much he had used and how much he had wasted, sweeping it into the leather wastebasket as he sobbed. Amid the fine white powder lay a revolver.
It was a Colt Python.357. A six-shooter with a huge barrel. Pathetically phallic, but then he was a pathetic man. Fifty-two years old, a straight arrow trying to swing with the hip crowd, falling in lust with a woman young enough to be his daughter. He had bought the gun to impress Lucy. Lucy, his obsession, his demon. Everything had happened because of her. She had led him down the yellow brick road to Oz and on to hell.
Just that morning he had thought he might climb out of the pit. He thought he might be able to salvage something of his life. Get free of the slime, cleanse himself, start fresh. But no. Another of the leeches had tried to hook on to him. He could never be free of it. Not now. Especially not now.
The fat lawyer-Daggrepont-was dead. He hadn’t meant to kill him. They had stood on the riverbank, talking, birds singing above the rushing sound of the water. The sun shone down. The mountains thrust up around them as they stood in the emerald velvet valley. All that beauty… and Daggrepont, ugliness personified, a fat, grotesque pouch of greed, avarice shining in his magnified eyes…
… Knew a little something about Lucy and him… ought to be worth a dollar or two… not greedy, just wants his due for holding his tongue…
One minute he was just standing there, listening to the music of Montana while that toad spewed poison and called it a “business arrangement,” “an understanding between gentlemen.” The next minute he’d had his hands buried in the wattle of fat around Daggrepont’s throat. He had watched as if from outside his body, as if the hands choking the man belonged to some anonymous third party.
Choking, choking, choking. Daggrepont’s eyes rolling behind the thick lenses of his glasses, his tongue thrusting out of his mouth as his grotesque face flushed purple. Townsend heard shouting, a long, loud roar that might have come tearing from his own throat or been inside his own mind. He didn’t know, couldn’t tell.
Some small shard of sanity pierced his brain, and his hands let go. He thrust himself away from the lawyer, hurtled backward as if he were being jet-propelled down a tunnel. But Daggrepont went on choking, eyes rolling, tongue lolling. His face was the color of an eggplant. Foam frothed out of his mouth and he fell onto the bank, his arms and legs jerking wildly. Townsend stood watching, hallucinating that his arms had stretched to nine feet long and his thumbs were still pressing against the fat man’s windpipe.
Daggrepont tried to stand. Couldn’t control his body. Fell into the water among a stand of cattails and rushes.
Run. His first thought had been to run. But as he sped in his Cherokee toward his cabin, other thoughts shot across his mind in bright, hot arcs. Evidence. There would be evidence. Tire tracks. There would be tire tracks. And footprints. Marks on the dead man’s throat. Evidence hidden somewhere tying Lucy to Townsend to Daggrepont. There would be no simple explanation to hide the truth this time. Even in this wilderness a coroner would know the marks of strangulation.
It was over. There would be no redemption. No rebirth. The grime of this life he had fallen into would never come off. It was like ink, like grease, and every move he made, every thought he had, smeared it over more of his soul. He was ruined, thanks to Evan Bryce and Lucy-the devil and his familiar.
There was no turning back. The truth enveloped him like a cold black shroud, like the big black night sky of Montana. A sky with no heaven above it. As black as death.
With one trembling hand he lifted the receiver off the phone and punched the button to speed dial Bryce’s number. With the other he reached for the Python.
The stars were like promises in the sky. Bright and distant. Well out of his reach. Too far off to chase away the darkness. Around him the night was matte black, electrically charged. The hair on the back of his neck and on his arms rose up like metal filings dancing beneath the magnetism of the moon.
… Dancing beneath the moon. As the blonde danced down the slope. She swayed from side to side, hair spilling in her wake. A wave of silk. Moonlight silvering her skin, glowing in her eyes, glowing through her wounds. Del rolled back behind the tree and squeezed his eyes shut so hard that color burst behind his lids, red and gold like the flash of rockets over the rice paddies. He could feel the concussion of the blasts against his skin. The smell of napalm and the putrid-sweet stench of burning, rotting flesh seared his nostrils.
Then he opened his eyes and the ’Nam was gone. The breeze cooled the sweat on his skin, filled his head with the scents of pine and damp earth. The war was gone. He held his rifle against him like a lover and brushed his lips against the oiled barrel. An absent kiss, a superstitious reflex, as if the gun had chased away his ghosts.
A high, keening wail skated across his eardrums, like fingernails on a chalkboard. The old ghosts were gone. New ones took their place. The blonde danced through his nights like a siren beckoning him to crash on the jagged rocks of madness. Panic rose up in his throat and numbed the side of his face like a wash of novocaine. She was there to steal his mind, to steal his land, to steal his family. She ran with the tigers. She died and rose again. A mythic creature.
He thought it might be his destiny, his quest, to kill her. To kill her might redeem his honor, banish his shame, give him back his place in the order of things. Right all the wrongs.
Rolling back around against the bark of the tree, he brought the gun up into place. Found the woman through the scope. Traced the crosshairs over her chest like a benediction. Raised the barrel slightly to account for drop. His finger kissed the trigger.
Kill her.
Kill her!
Save yourself!
Or chase yourself into madness.
What if the test was of control, of reason, of patience? What if he failed?
The possibilities tumbled through his head like rocks in an avalanche. He saw himself tumbling with them. Riding shotgun down the avalanche. Being crushed by the brutal weight of it. He didn’t know what to do.
Kill her.
The blonde danced on. Taunting him. Inviting him. Oblivious of him. Whirling like a dervish. The dance of the dead. An apparition in the night.
Kill her.
Kill yourself.
She turned to a blur in the glass. A kaleidoscope image shifting as he watched. The battle within him wrung his heart like a wet rag, wrenching out tears, squeezing out pain. Trembling, he let go of the trigger and pointed the rifle to the sky, the stars jumping down at him through the barrel of the scope. The bright lights of hope. Still out of reach. Always out of reach.