Confessing to the Cowboy. Carla Cassidy

“This is really a bad time to have a long discussion,” she said as she got up from her stool. “The dinner rush is heating up. Will you be stopping by later tonight?”

      He frowned. “Doubtful. I’ve got a meeting with Mayor Davidson at eight and I don’t know how long I’ll be with Dorothy’s sister.”

      “Dell giving you a hard time?” she asked as she thought of the young mayor who had been elected two years before.

      “He’s been okay until this last one, but he’s more than a little frantic right now. I just wish I had some information to let him know we’re on top of this.” He got up and grabbed his jacket. “Go on,” he said as Rusty called for her again. “I’ll catch up with you sometime tomorrow.”

      Mary watched him shrug on his jacket, grab his hat and then disappear out the door. As she hurried to the kitchen her thoughts remained on Cameron. The weight of the safety of the entire town rested on his broad shoulders and this wasn’t the first time he’d faced difficulties as sheriff of the small town.

      In the past couple of months he’d had to deal with the kidnapping of a baby and the disappearance of Adam Benson’s girlfriend. In that particular case he’d had to arrest one of his own. Along with the bigger crimes came the smaller ones that all towns suffered. Domestic abuse, robberies and bar fights had already kept Cameron’s team of deputies pretty busy, now with these murders they all had to be stretched to their very limits.

      She knew there were a dozen women in town who would love to be Cameron’s rock, the one he came home to every night after a long, hard day. But he’d never looked at any of them. For the past eight years that she’d been in town she’d never heard any gossip about him and any woman.

      Several of the waitresses teased her and told her that it was obvious Cameron was crazy about her and was just waiting for her to give him a signal that she was open to him. She hoped that wasn’t the case, for he would wait forever. She didn’t want Cameron to live the rest of his life alone—that was a choice she had made for herself, but would never choose for anyone else.

      As always, the dinner rush pushed all thoughts out of her head as she focused all her concentration on running a successful café.

      By the time the café closed and all the cleanup was finished, Mary was tired. Despite her aching feet and overall exhaustion it always took her a little while to wind down before going to sleep.

      After checking that Matt was sleeping peacefully, she took a long, hot shower and then pulled on the oversize Cowboy Café T-shirt that she used as nightwear. Finally she sank down on the sofa, the pile of mail in a stack on the coffee table.

      The first thing she did was separate the stack into three piles—catalogs, bills and advertising trash. She frowned as she picked up what was obviously a card envelope in her favorite lavender color. It was addressed to the Cowboy Café. Curious, she opened it and pulled out a glittery card that read Happy Anniversary.

      She frowned in confusion. She opened it to discover a traditional anniversary verse printed inside and no signature. Why would anyone send such a card to the café? Had the café originally opened its doors on November 10?

      As the day’s date reverberated around in her head, she gasped and the card fell from her hands to the floor.

      Her heart beat with a frantic rhythm that threatened darkness at the edges of her consciousness. She bent over, with her head nearly in her lap and tried to regulate her breathing as images from the past crashed through her brain.

      It had to be a coincidence, she thought as she finally raised her head. Her heartbeat slowed from an explosive rapidity to one of simmering panic.

      Coincidence, her brain repeated, desperate to believe it so. After all, the card hadn’t been addressed to her personally, but rather to the café.

      It couldn’t have anything to do with her or her past. She leaned over and picked up the envelope from the coffee table. The postmark was from right here in Grady Gulch.

      “Nobody knows,” she whispered, her voice making the words sound more like a mantra, a prayer rather than a statement of fact.

      With a new panicked wildness she ripped both the envelope and the card into tiny little pieces and carried them to the trash can in her bedroom.

      She sat on the edge of the bed and clasped her trembling hands together. Who had sent the card and what could it possibly mean?

      Over the past eight years had she mentioned anything that personal to anyone? She didn’t think so, but how could anyone in Grady Gulch know that thirteen years ago on November 10 she’d married a monster named Jason McKnight. Who in town might know about her past? Who in Grady Gulch might know what she had done?

      * * *

      He wished he could have been there when she’d opened up the card. He wished he could have seen the stunned horror wash across her pretty features as she realized what it was, what it meant.

      Everyone in town loved Mary Mathis...everyone but him. He hated her. Everyone thought she was good and kind, but she wasn’t. She was a selfish bitch who only pretended there was goodness in her heart.

      The Waitress Waster, that’s who he considered himself to be, a cheesy name for a serial killer, but he’d claimed it as his own. He only wished he’d been present each time that Mary had learned that one of her precious waitresses had been killed.

      He’d wanted to see her grief in the dimming of the brightness of her blue eyes, in the tremble of her lush lower lip. By now she had to realize that the murders were all related and that they were all aimed at the place she called home, at her personally.

      He hoped her heart beat with frantic fear each time she got into bed to sleep. He hoped she feared everyone around her, unsure where danger might arise.

      Foreplay, that’s what the dead waitresses had been to him...a prelude to the big event and of course the big event was the destruction of the café and all that Mary loved, the final big event would be the utter destruction of Mary Mathis.