When Night Falls (5 page)

He caught Lonny’s quick, pleased smile before it was replaced by an impassive mask. Lonny had been the only person in the department back then who’d believed that the Warrens hadn’t set the fire for insurance purposes.

Lonny followed him outside to his pickup and clapped a big paw on Mitchell’s back just as he had done years ago. Mitchell had listened to more than one lecture about “keeping on the narrow path.” “Seems you’ve learned a few things, like how to hold in that temper—it used to get you in trouble years ago. You know how to back up what you say and not with your fists, either—the times I had to pull you boys out of scuffles…. glad you’re back.”

“You might be the only one. Things haven’t changed much when it comes to my family and Madrid’s best.”

“Your dad was a good man in a hard place. He wasn’t a rancher, but he was trying his damndest. And there wasn’t a better mechanic. He could make a dead motor sing. If you want it quiet about what you did before coming back, that’s the way it will be. I’ve got a little pull around here, and higher up in the state. ‘Hot-shot’ back there needs to learn some manners. Welcome back to Madrid. See you around.”

As Mitchell drove home, slowly cruising Main Street, lined with shady oaks and old two-story buildings, he noted the stealthy stares labeling him as a troublemaker. It was a look he’d known since childhood. “Uh-huh. Madrid is really happy that I’m back. And I’m not leaving.”

“I’m sorry if I disturbed you. I had to come to be with her tonight,” Uma said quietly at nine o’clock that evening when Mitchell opened his house door. She knew he’d been grilled for hours at the police station, and the shadows and lines of his face said he still carried those hours with him. She could
feel the defensive shell around him, the vibration of his anger. It quivered in the fresh flower bouquet she held, the flowers Lauren had loved best. “It’s late, I know. Please tell me if you’d rather not have me here.”

He nodded and opened the door wider, and the smell of fresh paint matched the butter-cream spots on his bare shoulders, face, and hair. Unused to the certain raw masculinity that was Mitchell’s, Uma looked away from the spots clinging to the hair on his chest. Mitchell inhaled impatiently, rubbing his broad hands on his jeans, also mottled with paint. “I’ll get a shirt.”

While she waited in the foyer for him to return, she angrily noted Lauren’s beloved wooden tile, ruined by water stains. Billy had often left the door open, careless of the rain storms. It had been Lauren’s duty to keep everything safe—

Mitchell returned, wearing a T-shirt. “Go ahead,” he said quietly, watching her. “Can I get you a drink? The bottled water is top notch. If you like, I have something stronger.”

Uma shook her head and searched his face. The lines were deeper now; the day’s stubble covering his jaw also bore paint spatters. “Lauren loved fresh flowers. I hope you don’t mind…you’re tired. The discovery this afternoon, and all the time with the investigators, must have been draining. I’m sorry I broke down like that at the scene. Just seeing that car in the shadows with the crime people working around it was enough to bring back that night.”

“Forensics people will be working on that bullet hole, trying to match it to a gun.”

“Pete Jones, that’s who they said he was, the car identification tracked to him, and so did the dental work his wife described. He isn’t much—has a few stretches in prison behind him for car theft. He’s the suspect in a car theft, a little black Miata convertible, but they couldn’t pin it on him. The car is still missing. He’s taken odd handyman jobs when he feels like getting off the couch—some alarm systems, some carpentry.
He’s been missing since a short time after Lauren was killed. The mug shot of him matches the man I saw that night—I’d never forget him. Maybe it is over, and he’s been made to pay.”

“Maybe.”

Uma looked at him sharply. “What do you mean?”

Mitchell looked away, the bald light above him hitting his harsh profile, his deep-set eyes in shadow. “Just that—maybe. He didn’t shoot himself. That means whoever did might still be around. I put a chair in that back room. Let me know if you need anything else.”

He hesitated, then said, “Maybe you should call Everett. I saw him with you today, his arm around you. He wants to protect you. Maybe you should talk to him, invite him here, if you need him.”

Everett had wanted her to come home with him, pleaded with her to let him take care of her. His concern was honest, but she didn’t want to slide back into that comfort, not when she’d struggled to find herself, what she was as a woman. It would be so easy, and then eventually she would hurt him. She couldn’t bear sensuality now, the needs of an aroused man. And she couldn’t be the woman Everett should have.

A woman crying softly was probably the worst sound in the world, worse than a drunken man’s raging yells, Mitchell thought, as he rearranged his ladder to paint the kitchen ceiling.

He thought he heard a woman’s whisper, then realized it was only the cat, watching him patiently. The cat’s tail swayed against a window screen placed against the wall, creating the sound. Mitchell shook his head—maybe Uma was right, maybe the spirit of the dead woman was still here—if he believed that sort of nonsense.

The oscillating fan whirred, pushing the paint fumes toward the open window, and stirring the picture of Uma as she had arrived tonight. She was too pale, her eyes huge and
shadowed, her hair long and flowing around her. When he’d opened the door, the streetlight had framed her, picking up the curling tendrils playing in the light breeze and draping her in silver. She belonged to the soft, gentle side of life, and looked like a fairy princess from another world, her mauve shift stirring around her.

His discovery of the car had freshened her pain, and she needed someone to help her. But he couldn’t; he didn’t know how. It was better to stay on the outside of her life. The cat suddenly leaped from the shadows and sat staring up at Mitchell—the animal’s tail twitched as if he were waiting. And Uma’s soft weeping seemed to roar.

Mitchell rubbed his hand across his face and stepped down from the ladder. Someone had to say something, do something to comfort her, and he was elected. He placed the paint roller aside, briskly rubbed his hands on the rag, and then stood at the kitchen sink, carefully washing them. What could he say to her? How could he help her?

In the end, he carried two bottles of water into the shadowy room to find Uma seated on the floor, an album across her lap, her back against the wall. On a small table near the open window, the red roses and daisies and blue batchelor buttons caught the slight breeze, the scents as soft and feminine as the woman on the floor.

He’d never been comfortable with softness, with the gentleness of women
. That stark truth hit him as he eased down beside her, stretching out his legs. Her eyes were closed, her cheeks damp with tears.

If there was anything Mitchell did not want to do, it was to comfort a grieving woman.

He studied her profile, the sweep of her lashes, that perfect nose, the honed high cheekbones that said girlhood was years ago, the lips that were just as full and lush on the top as on the bottom.

Mitchell looked away into the night. He didn’t want to
think about Uma’s trembling soft lips, the glitter of tears on her cheeks—or the button of her dress that had come undone, just enough to show the curve of her breast above her bra. Each unsteady breath she took lifted that fascinating curve and he damned himself for the flick of sensual interest.

“What happened to you and your wife? You said you were divorced,” Uma asked, the quiet question creeping out of the soft shadows to jar him.

He handed the water bottle to her. “Lots of things. It wasn’t Serene’s fault. It was mine.”

Those lips curved slightly. “You’re a cautious man. You always were guarded. Intimacy would be difficult for you. A woman needs that link.”

He let that remark pass by into the night. But the next hit him dead center, too poignant to ignore.

“Your mother and father loved each other. It wasn’t their fault that she left. You can’t blame yourself for that, or for the fire that night.”

“I don’t want to talk about her.” Mitchell sat in stony silence for a moment, then rose to his feet.

“You can’t unwrap the past without her.”

“How do you know I want to relive anything?” he shot back at her, surprised at the bald truth she’d served him, the penetrating boldness of it. She’d snagged his anger, pressed too close to what he didn’t want to believe—or remember.

He was safer away from Uma than with her. He didn’t like the feeling that he was emotionally running from her, but he was. And he was running from any discussion about his parents. Maybe he was afraid of whatever she knew—Uma had always known more about Madrid’s lives than anyone. His father had said that her grandmother knew everyone’s secrets, dark as they might be. An elegant woman, she had held a lynching mob at bay with those secrets, protecting a young man suspected of rustling.

Later the man was proven innocent, but the power of
Uma’s grandmother was remembered as a soft hand in a lace glove, a sweet smile; she was a tigress when fighting for what she believed, with a backbone of steel. Priscilla Raleigh liked things quiet and peaceful in Madrid and had often guided the community into civilization with that velvet touch.

Uma’s mother had once caught and held his ear painfully when he’d tried to steal candy; she’d held him there, stretched up on his toes until he promised never to steal again—and he never did. Now, just for a moment, Mitchell suspected that Uma had inherited that same unrelenting, ear-twisting quality.

And he wasn’t about to get pushed around by her. His business was his, and he didn’t like the mental image that his ear was grabbed, stretched painfully, until he was standing on his toes, ready to obey. He was thirty-seven and Uma was butting into his personal life.

Mitchell returned to the kitchen, to painting the edge of the ceiling. He tried to ignore the woman standing at the door, watching him, knowing that she’d come too close to his shadows. “Lauren would have liked that, a fresh coat of paint, the same shade as it was. We picked out that shade together,” she said. “I’d like to help. I’ll feel like I’m doing something for her, cleaning what she loved.”

“I like working alone.”

“Mmm. Do you?” Uma’s eyebrows arched higher, her expression too bland.

He hadn’t expected that touch of insolence, that mocking tone, that slight ridge of anger. He didn’t want to look at that one untethered button, the gap it created in the soft curve of her breast.

He rammed a hand through his hair and a gob of paint plopped on his face. He knew what women’s breasts looked like, all shapes and sizes in clothing and without. But dammit, he didn’t want to think about Uma’s breast, or how
he’d foraged roughly for it when he was a boy in that hospital bed. “You’ll ruin your dress.”

“Give me something to wear—an old shirt, some boxer shorts.” She wasn’t backing off, watching him with those shadowed eyes, coolly drinking the bottled water. “It’s going to be a long night for both of us, I think. You’re furious now and it’s showing. You’re fairly bristling, that cool dispatched shield away for the moment—you missed that bit to the right…a little more…there, that’s it. I would like something to do, here for Lauren. May I?”

He didn’t like people ordering him around; he’d had enough of that growing up. When he looked down at her, Uma met his look. “You’re bristling now. You don’t like orders, and from a woman, right?”

Mitchell came down from the ladder, carefully placing the paint can and brush on the plastic sheeting covering the floor. He faced Uma and tried to keep his eyes on her face, not on the gap in her dress. He’d been a business manager; he knew how to control a situation—and Uma was a definite situation, a troubling one. “It’s been a hard day for you. You should go home and rest.”

She glanced at the whiskey bottle on the counter. “It’s been a hard day for you, too. You resent the suspicions, don’t you? I don’t blame you. It must have brought back bad memories. You’re emotional now and hiding it behind by growling. That won’t do, Mitchell. Not everyone is your enemy.”

She went right for the heart of his mood, leaving him nowhere to hide. Feeling raw and exposed to her, he decided to take a defensive shot—just a little warning to tell her it was backing-off time. Mitchell leaned back against the counter and crossed his arms over his chest. “What do you want from me? Bottom line? And by the way, your dress is unbuttoned.”

He’d expected her embarrassment and enough distraction to send her on her way. Instead, Uma looked down; she
slowly, methodically secured the button in its hole and then met his eyes. “The shirt and boxer shorts? Would you mind terribly if I helped paint tonight? Or are you set to growl some more?”

“Why don’t you just run on home to Everett? Or back to your nice, safe house?” He didn’t like revealing the bitterness in him, that lack of control, the edges that Uma could raise.

And she wasn’t backing off, ignoring his warnings. “I could. But then I’d miss the fun of seeing you trying to bully me.”

Bully
. That’s how he’d thought of Fred. The label shocked Mitchell. “Huh?”

“You’re wounded and you’re hurting and you’re striking back. Madrid is a good town, Mitchell. Give us a chance.”

How much of a chance had they given his family years ago? Instead of answering Uma, Mitchell turned away. “You lived one life. I lived another. Our viewpoints aren’t going to match…my clean laundry is on the bed. Use what you want.”

An hour later, Mitchell tried not to look up at Uma’s bottom, cupped within his boxer shorts, or the muscles flexing in those long legs, her bare feet slender on the ladder.

He wasn’t used to sharing his life or his personal space and Uma had stepped right into both.
Bully
. The word still burned. But then, he shouldn’t be shocked, he was Fred Warren’s son, wasn’t he?

They’d worked quietly, effectively, noting briefly only the necessities. He turned away from the light fabric over her breasts, the uptilt of them as she raised her arm to paint around the ceiling. He didn’t want to think of her as a desirable woman, one he’d want to carry into his bedroom, there to forget about the rest of the world.