Courting Susannah (42 page)

All of a sudden, Daphne ran out of steam. She flung out her hands and gave a laughing sigh. “Listen to me running on,” she said. Then, with a glance at her watch, she got to her feet, rinsed her iced tea glass at the sink, and popped it into the top rack of the dishwasher. “I've got shopping to do. Greg is barbequing steaks tonight, and then we're going to watch
The Best Years of Our Lives
on video.”

There you have it, Maggie thought. Any man who likes classic movies can't be all bad. “See you tomorrow?”

Daphne smiled. Now that school was out, she was on hiatus from teaching, and despite being up to her elbows in wedding plans, she insisted on helping Maggie with the heavy work over at the Springwater Station. They'd done the worst of the cleaning—the place had been closed up for several years—and for the past few days, they'd been sorting through the contents of trunks, crates, and boxes, looking for old linens and other antiques that could be used to lend authenticity. “Bright and early. We've going to that estate auction over in Maple Creek, right?”

Maggie nodded. “I'll pick you up at six sharp. We can have breakfast on the way.”

Daphne rolled her eyes. “Six sharp,” she confirmed, with a notable lack of enthusiasm, “See you then.”

With that, she was gone.

Sadie got up off the rug, stretched methodically in all directions, one leg at a time, and ambled into the kitchen area to check out her food bowl. Finding nothing there but half a dog biscuit and the remains of that morning's breakfast, she raised baleful brown eyes to Maggie's face and gave a despondent little whimper.

“Did you know,” Maggie said, already headed toward the tiny laundry room at the back of the cottage, where she stored kibble, dog dish in hand, “that the typical beagle gets way too much to eat on account of Sad-eyes Syndrome?”

Sadie panted, wagging at warp speed.
Great
, she seemed to be saying.
It's working
.

Maggie laughed, shook her head, and gave Sadie an early supper. While the dog ate, Maggie stepped out onto the back step, watching the sun set behind the gazebo. The structure was all but swallowed up in climbing rose vines just beginning to bud, and it was not only innocuous but beautiful, in a misty Thomas Kinkade sort of way. In the ten years since her wedding day, she had returned to Springwater many times for holidays and short vacations and rarely if ever associated the gazebo with any unhappy memory. Now, after her conversation with Daphne, it seemed that she couldn't get J.T. out of her mind, couldn't forget the way he'd looked in the golden light of that spring afternoon long ago—not just angry, but earnest and confounded and, worst of all, betrayed.

“I'm sorry,” she told his ghost, and turned to go back into the guest house.

J.T. gestured, in mid-stride, toward the barn, with its sagging roof and leaning walls. The whole ranch was a disgrace; Scully and Evangeline, the first Springwater Wainwrights and his great-great-grandparents, must have been turning over in their graves in the years since he'd turned his back on the land to play homicide cop in the Big Apple.

“Purvis,” he said to the older man double-stepping along beside him, “look at this place. I'd like to help you out. I really would. But I don't have
time
to take on another job.”

Purvis Digg, a friend and contemporary of J.T.'s late father, Jack Wainwright, had served in Viet Nam, and though he apparently didn't suffer from flashbacks or delayed-stress like many of his fellow veterans, he'd somehow gotten stuck in the 60s just the same. He wore his salt-and-pepper hair long, even though it was thinning on top, and bound back with a leather boot-lace. Sometimes, he added a headband, Indian-style, though J.T. had yet to see a feather. He sported a fringed buckskin jacket bought second-hand during the Johnson administration, combat boots, and thrift-store jeans embellished with everything from star-and-moon-shaped patches and old Boy Scout badges to grease stains.

“But you're a cop,” Purvis argued.

Reaching the corral gate, which was falling apart like everything else in J.T.'s life, he stopped, one hand on the rusty latch. “I
was
a cop,” he corrected his old friend.

“Once a cop, always a cop,” Purvis said.

J.T. thrust splayed fingers through his dark hair. He'd taken a bullet himself, and lost his partner to a punk who would probably be back out on the street in another eighteen months, and while he'd recovered physically, he wasn't sure he'd ever get over the memory of seeing Murphy fall. Then there was the funeral, with full honors, the brave, baffled face of the dead man's widow, the plaintive wail of sorrow from his teenage daughter. “Look, Purvis—”

“Feel pretty damn sorry for yourself, don't you?” Purvis broke in, reddening a little at the base of his jaw. Like most everybody else in and around Springwater, he knew all about what had happened in that warehouse, six months back. “Well, here's a flash for you, Junior: you're not the first guy who ever lost a buddy. Your dad was the best friend I ever had, and one fine day somebody shot him right out of the saddle, if you recall.”

Grief and exasperation made J.T.'s sigh sound the way it felt: raw. “Damn it, Purvis, that's a low blow. Of course I ‘recall'!”

“Then you probably recollect that nobody ever rounded up the shooter.”

J.T. clenched and unclenched his left fist. He could not, would not, hit a skinny old man, but the temptation was no less compelling. “I recollect, all right. I still have nightmares about it.”

Purvis slapped him on the shoulder in an expression of manly commiseration. “Me, too. How old were you when Jack was murdered? Fourteeen?”

“Thirteen,” J.T. said, averting his eyes for a moment, in order to gather his composure. His father had ridden in from the range that afternoon, on the first hot breath of a summer thunderstorm, so drenched in blood that it was hard to tell where the man stopped and the horse began.

J.T, working in the corral, with a two-year-old gelding on a lead-line, had vaulted over the fence and run toward his father. Jack had fallen from his paint stallion the same way Murphy had gone down in the warehouse, in an excruciatingly slow, rolling motion. And like Murphy, Jack Wainwright had most likely been dead before he struck the ground. J.T had still been kneeling in the dirt, rocking Jack's body in his arms, when Purvis had shown up in the squad car and radioed for an ambulance. It had been too late for J.T.'s dad.

“I didn't bring that up just for the hell of it,” Purvis said, in his gruff way. “And maybe it was a little below the belt. The thing is, J.T, that wasn't an isolated incident. A lot of the same things that were going on back then are going on now—the ranchers around here are losing livestock to theft and poison just like they were before. Just last month, somebody took a shot at Ben Knox while he was out looking for strays. I got me a crazy feeling that we're dealing with the same outfit.”

J.T.'s next instinct was to grasp Purvis by the lapels of his campy jacket and wrench him onto the balls of his feet, but he restrained himself. “Are you telling me you think these are the same people who killed my dad?”

Purvis swallowed, then nodded. “Yup.”

“You got any proof of that:?”

“No,” Purvis admitted. “Just an ache in my gut that says history is repeating itself.” He paused, “J.T, this situation ain't gonna go away by itself. I ain't as young as I used to be, and I can't run these bastards down without some help. If I
don't
get them, the ranchers are going to have my badge, and you know as well as I do that once I'm gone they'll be up in arms like a bunch of yahoos out of some black-and-white western. We'll have the Feds crawling all over the valley after that, but not before a few more people get hurt or killed.”

“There must be somebody else,” J.T. breathed. He was weakening, and Purvis surely knew it.

“There's nobody else,” Purvis insisted. “Oh, I could come up with a pack of hot-headed rednecks, call 'em a posse. But you're the only professional around here, besides me. You're a cop. You can ride and shoot. Besides that, you're a rancher, just like them, and you're Jack Wainwright's son. You've got a stake in this, too.”

J.T. was silent. Purvis might be a hick lawman from a hick town smack in the middle of no place, but he had the tenacity of a pit-bull, and he could argue like a big-city lawyer.

Purvis came in for the kill. “What do you figure Jack would do if he were in your place?”

J.T. closed his eyes, opened them again. The first seismic stirrings of a headache made tremors at the base of his skull. “All right,” he said.
“All right.”

Purvis grinned. “Judge Galloway can swear you in tomorrow,” he said.

“I'm going to an auction in the morning,” J.T. replied. There was an estate being liquidated over in the next county, household goods and livestock, and he intended to bid on a couple of quarter horses and maybe a beef or two. Then he'd be able to call this pitiful place a ranch again with a semi-straight face.

The marshal of Springwater could afford to be generous; he'd gotten what he wanted. “All right. We'll have supper together tomorrow night, then, over at the Stagecoach Café. You, me, and the judge. Be there by six.”

J.T. gave a rueful chuckle and shook his head. “You got it, Pilgrim.”

Purvis laughed, administered another resounding shoulder slap, and turned to head back to his beat-up, mud-splattered Jeep. Halfway there, he turned. “Say,” he added as a jovial afterthought. “Maggie McCaffrey's back in town. Going to spit-shine the old Springwater Station and make one of them fancy little hotels out of it.”

J.T. knew all about Maggie's return to Springwater; uncannily, her homecoming had very nearly coincided with his own, though they'd managed to avoid running into each other so far. He hadn't seen Maggie since the day he'd tried, without success, to keep her from marrying Connor Bartholomew, her big brother Simon's friend from medical school. He'd made an ass of himself, and even after all this time, he wasn't anxious to face her, and not just because he wasn't good at apologizing. He'd been married, fathered a son, gotten divorced, and dated dozens of women, before and after his ex-wife, Annie, but somewhere down deep, he'd always had a thing for Maggie. He'd known it and so, unfortunately, had Annie.

“I'll have to stop by and say hello,” he said, as lightly as he could. “The Station's been sitting empty for a long time. It's good to know somebody is going to restore it.”

Purvis nodded. “A McCaffrey, too,” he agreed, pleased. “It'll be almost like the old days, when Jacob and June-bug was runnin' the place.”

J.T. might have laughed if he hadn't just been roped into signing on for an indefinite stretch as Purvis's deputy. The way the marshal talked, Jacob and Junebug McCaffrey might have been happily retired and cruising the country in an RV, instead of dead and buried well over a century. “Almost,” he agreed.

Purvis lifted a hand in farewell, climbed into his Jeep, and started up the engine. J.T. watched until the aging lawman had turned around and headed down the long dirt road leading to the highway.

“Shit,” J.T. said aloud. He gave the gate latch a pull, and the whole thing fell apart at his feet.

He hoped it wasn't an omen.

LINDA LAEL MILLER
is the beloved bestselling author of more than thirty novels; there are more than twelve million copies of her books in print. Most recently, she has won critical acclaim for her
New York Times
bestseller
One Wish
, and her marvelous tales of life and love in the fictional towns of Springwater, Montana (
Springwater, A Springwater Christmas
, and the
New York Times
bestselling miniseries Springwater Seasons) and Primrose Creek, Nevada (
Bridget, Christy, Skye,
and
Megan
).

Ms. Miller resides in the Scottsdale, Arizona, area.