The Sheriff Of Heartbreak County. Kathleen Creighton

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СКАЧАТЬ for Jason Holbrook, who was now dead. Coincidence?

      Sitting there in his SUV on a quiet street in the town he’d lived in most all his life, Roan felt the Spirit Messenger stir once more across his skin.

      Inside the house that wasn’t and never would be her home, the woman who called herself Mary Owen leaned back against the door and closed her eyes. As she waited for the sound of the sheriff’s car starting up and driving away, she felt the fear creep over her…the hollow sense of dread that meant her life had just taken a hard left turn and was about to go careening off in an unexpected direction.

      It wasn’t a new feeling. She’d felt it for the first time almost twenty years ago, that fear, the day she’d run away to New York City to pursue a modeling career, never to return. Not exactly an original move for an unhappy young girl in a drab and miserable existence; a few decades earlier, she might have fled to Hollywood with dreams of becoming a movie star.

      A life of glamour, excitement and beauty…what young girl didn’t dream of such things? How many found the courage to risk everything, leave the security of the only life they’d ever known to follow the dream? Darn few, Mary thought, with a valiant lift of her head. Darn few. She didn’t regret leaving home, even if the dream she’d sought so long ago still fluttered like a rare and lovely butterfly, tantalizingly beyond reach.

      Not that she’d be all that sorry to leave this town, she thought, at least no more sorry than all the other times she’d had to pull up stakes and start over again someplace new. It had begun to seem natural to her always to be the new face in town. The shy, retiring stranger who keeps to herself and never lets anybody get too close….

      Hartsville, Montana—Heartbreak, she’d heard the oldtimers call it, the ones who remembered way back to when the mines went bust. She’d come to the town purely by chance. It had merely been the place she’d wound up in last winter when she’d pulled off the interstate in the middle of a snowstorm because a warning light had come on in her car and she’d needed to find a service station right quick. Waiting in the coffee shop across the highway from the Gas-n-Go Kwik Service for a new alternator to be installed in her elderly Ford Taurus, Mary had found herself in friendly conversation with Queenie Schultz, owner-operator of the town’s only beauty parlor. She’d learned that Queenie’s sister down in Phoenix had been after her to move down there, and that Queenie had about had her fill of the cold and the snow, but couldn’t bring herself to run off and leave her faithful customers with nobody to do their color and sets.

      Mary hadn’t expected to spend the rest of her life in Hartsville. But not even six months? That was a record, even for her.

      She opened her eyes and found the cat still crouched on the back of the sofa, watching her with an expression of profound disdain. The silence in the room crawled over her skin and pricked her scalp like a premonition.

      Why hasn’t his car started up yet? Why hasn’t he gone away?

      She crept to the front window, fingered back the brown plaid drape and its heavy insulated lining and peered out. The sheriff’s SUV was still parked in front of the house—across the bottom of the driveway, in fact. To keep her from escaping, she wondered? Her skin prickled again, and she shivered. What is he doing out there?

      “Daddy!”

      Roan felt his heart lift, the way it always did when he heard his daughter’s voice…which at the same time, oddly, also made his heart ache.

      In the darkness and privacy of his patrol vehicle, his mouth formed a grin. “Hey, peanut, how ya doin’? You and Grampa Boyd eatin’ supper?”

      “Yeah…Grampa made hot dogs and beans…again.” Roan chuckled; he could almost hear those eyes rolling. “We were gonna make cornbread, but Grampa said we should save that for when you’re home, ’cause we know how much you like cornbread. Dad…”

      “Yeah, peanut?” Roan pressed his thumb and forefinger against his forehead and rubbed, bracing for Susie Grace’s inevitable disappointment.

      “Grampa said you have to work because something bad happened and a man got killed and you have to find the person that did it. But when are you comin’ home?”

      He let out a gusty breath. “I’m gonna be pretty late, Susie-G. Most likely it’ll be past your bedtime, so don’t you try and wait up for me, now. You go to bed when Grampa Boyd tells you, you hear me?”

      He heard a noisy exhalation that was a pretty good imitation of his own. “Okay. But, Daddy?”

      “Yeah?”

      “If I’m asleep when you get home, would you come and kiss me good night and tuck me in anyway?”

      “Don’t I always?”

      “Yeah, but promise me anyway.”

      Roan gave an exaggerated sigh. “I promise.”

      “Okay, then. G’night, Daddy. I love you bunches and bunches.”

      “Love you the same back atcha. G’night, now. Be good.”

      With the cell phone dead in his hand and the silence of night settling in, Roan realized his face was aching—most likely because he was still wearing that grin. He scrubbed a hand over his face to ease the muscles and was reaching for the ignition key when his radio crackled to life.

      He thumbed it on and ID’d himself. “Yeah, Donna—what’s up?”

      “Sheriff, uh…what’s your ETA back here at the shop?” The night dispatcher sounded uncharacteristically restrained.

      “Let me guess,” said Roan with a new and decidedly sardonic grin stretching his face muscles. “There’s a United States Senator sitting in my office right now, spittin’ bullets.”

      “Uh…that sums it up pretty well, only he’s not sittin’. More like…pacing. Think…a big old mountain lion in a cage.”

      He chuckled and reached for the ignition. “I’m on my way.”

      As the SUV’s lights came on he looked up at the house once more, in time to see the window curtain twitch back into place.

      At least, the sheriff thought as he drove away from the dark, quiet house and its puzzling, enigmatic and oddly disturbing occupant, I can tell the victim’s father we have a possible suspect.

      He wondered why that thought didn’t make him happier.

      Mary let the draperies fall back into place, laughing silently at her own foolishness. He’d only been checking in, or calling in, or whatever it was policemen did when they’d been absent from their radios for a time. She was being paranoid, worrying for nothing. Sheriff Harley had her gun, and if he was as competent and as good and decent a man as Miss Ada said he was, it shouldn’t take him long to conclude that she’d had nothing whatsoever to do with the murder of Jason Holbrook.

      But I could have. Maybe I would have….

      Revulsion rippled across her skin, and she fought down a wave of nausea as for a terrible moment it all came rushing back—the smell of his breath, hot and thick with beer and tobacco and lust…the pressure of his arm across her throat, and the rising curtain of blackness and terror that threatened to СКАЧАТЬ