“Why the hell not?”
“Colt, he told me he wants to start over some place away from Madison Valley.” She paused. “Somewhere he can be just another rancher, just like everybody else.”
He was silent for a moment, his mouth set in a hard line, then he swore softly, pungently. “How can we argue with that?”
“Exactly.”
“I don’t understand,” Maggie interjected with a frown.
Colt turned to his wife. “You know what it’s like for him in town. How people talk. He tries to pretend it doesn’t matter, but it obviously affects him more than any of us thought.”
The kettle whistled suddenly, shrilly, and Annie rose from the table to pour water for Maggie’s tea. “It just makes me so mad,” she muttered. “Why can’t people forget, just stop judging him for what happened years ago, for heaven’s sake? Why can’t they look at the man he’s made of himself?”
“We don’t have all that many murders around here, Annie. Of course people are going to remember it.”
“It wasn’t murder and you know it! And so does everybody else in town.”
“Not everybody. There are a lot of people who think Joe killed his father in cold blood and got off easy.”
In cold blood. It was an odd term to use for something as violent as taking the life of another human being.
“It was an accident.” She couldn’t help her vehemence, even though she knew she was preaching to the choir. “That’s why he pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter. The only reason he served prison time at all was because he had alcohol in his system, even though it was under the legal limit, and because he was already on probation for that stupid bar fight when he was just a kid. Everybody with a brain in his head knows Joe was trying to protect his mother after Al beat her half to death.”
“You’ve heard the rumors that there was more to it than that.”
Yes, and she knew exactly who was behind them. She frowned. Charlie had kept his promise after he married her and hadn’t gone to his boss at the sheriff’s department with his version of events that night. But he hadn’t had any qualms whipping up the rumor mill in town.
Just another sin to lay at the door of her ex-husband.
She knew Joe hadn’t meant to kill his father when he had delivered that fateful punch. But even if he had, Albert Redhawk deserved everything he got and more.
He had spent his whole life and two marriages physically and emotionally abusing his entire family, turning one son into a mirror image of himself and the other into a stoic little boy who buried all his emotions so deeply it took nothing short of a cataclysmic event to ever bring them gushing out.
“It’s funny what people choose to remember of the dead.” Colt’s low voice jolted her back to the conversation. “Selective memory, I guess. Al was a real son of a bitch to just about everybody, but if you listened to some people in town, you’d think he was the next best thing to Santa Claus.”
“Is it any wonder Joe wants to make a fresh start somewhere else.”
“I guess.” Colt sipped his coffee glumly. “So what are we gonna do about it?”
She rested a hand on his shoulder. “Nothing we can do. Just miss him, I suppose. Just miss him.”
Colt and Maggie didn’t stay long after that, only long enough to finish their coffee and tea. When she had the house to herself again, she forced herself to stay in the office until she could make inroads toward finishing her paperwork.
The mysterious door opening completely slipped her mind until hours later, after Leah and C.J. came home, strewing their customary clutter throughout the mudroom and kitchen.
She was picking up backpacks and mittens and school books when she saw what looked like a white square of paper under one of C.J.’s wet boots near the back door. She gave an exasperated sigh. It was probably a permission slip for a school field trip or something equally important.
She lifted the boot away and picked up the soggy paper, then felt her whole body go stiff and cold.
It wasn’t a permission slip at all, but a photograph.
A Polaroid taken through her office window that afternoon, of her sitting behind her desk doing paperwork.
Chapter 4
Something was wrong.
Joe sat at the kitchen table watching Annie bounce from the table to the stove to the refrigerator then back to the table like some out-of-control mechanical toy on an endless track.
Something was definitely wrong.
He’d noticed it all through dinner. She hardly touched her food and her face was so pale her little sprinkling of freckles stood out in stark relief.
Every few minutes she would pause from shifting her food back and forth on her plate and gaze out the window, her eyes wide and frantic as she searched the early-evening darkness, looking for what, he couldn’t even begin to guess.
No one else seemed aware of her unease. Leah and C.J. both sat sullen and silent, ignoring him to the point of rudeness, and the rest of the men were too tired from the long day of cleaning the mess from the storm to pay attention to much of anything but their food.
He noticed, though, just as he noticed everything she did. Something had her more high-strung than a thoroughbred in a barn full of snakes and he couldn’t even begin to guess what it might be.
Wood squeaked on linoleum as Leah suddenly pushed her chair back, jolting him from his thoughts. “May I be excused?”
Annie turned from the window. She blinked a few times, then focused on her daughter. “I…yes. What’s the status of your homework?”
Leah’s mouth tightened. “Almost done.”
“As soon as it’s finished, bring it down so we can go over it together.”
“I said I was almost done. Don’t you believe me?”
Despite whatever was bothering her, Annie’s voice was calm in marked contrast to her daughter’s. “It’s not a matter of me believing you. I would just like to try to help you by checking your answers. We have the same goal here. As soon as you get your grades back up, you can regain your riding privileges. That’s what you want, isn’t it?”
Leah’s look fell just shy of a glare. “Whatever,” she said shortly, then hurried from the room.
As soon as she left, C.J. set his fork down on his plate with a loud clatter and looked past Joe toward his mother. “May I be excused, too?”
Annie nodded distractedly and didn’t even chide C.J. when he went into the family room and turned on the television set without clearing away his plate.
The children’s departure seemed to signal the end of the meal. Patch and the rest of the men scraped their plates clean just a few moments later and rose to leave.
Luke Mitchell paused by the table. “Real fine dinner again, Miz Redhawk. Just about the best beef pie I’ve ever had.”
His words didn’t seem to register for a moment, then she shook her head. “Beef pie is Patch’s specialty. It was his night to cook.”
“Oh. Well, it was real good. Good night.”
She was busy looking out the window again and didn’t answer him. Luke finally shoved his hat back on his head and stalked out the door.
The compliment to Annie was the most genial Joe had seen him all day. The kid had had been brooding and