Confessions

Whiskey River is a quiet Arizona mountain town—until it’s rocked by murder. The death of Laura Swann Fletcher, the beautiful wife of charismatic senator Alan Fletcher, makes headlines across the nation.

Trace Callaghan’s job is to solve Laura’s murder, and solve it quickly. As the sheriff of Whiskey River, he has a reputation for unwavering logic and deliberate action. But this case is unlike any he’s ever handled before—because Laura’s sister, Mariah, insists on being fully involved, an involvement that extends beyond seeing her sister’s killer unmasked.

In this twisted case packed with illicit desires and dark secrets, everyone is a suspect. And nothing is what it seems.…

Praise for Confessions by

“Masterfully weaves a tale of momentum and curves. Between the intrigue and the steamy romance, you’ll be left breathless.”

—RT Book Reviews

“JoAnn Ross takes her audience on a thrilling roller coaster ride that leaves them breathless.”

—Affaire de Coeur

“Touches of humor nicely relieve the suspenseful nature of the intriguing and intricately plotted tale. Bravo!”

—The Paperback Forum

“A hot, steamy mystery sure to keep the reader guessing right up to the final climax. A page turner.”

—A Little Romance

Confessions

JoAnn Ross

www.mirabooks.co.uk

To Jay

Dear Reader,

Although I’ve since moved back home to the Pacific Northwest, in 1996, while my husband and I were living in Arizona, I wrote much of Confessions at our mountain cabin set in the middle of an old growth forest high on the Mogollon Rim where this story is set. Although Whiskey River is a fictional town, the local history and landscape are very real.

One of the themes in all my stories is family. Of course, not all families are formed by common ancestry, but by bonds of the heart, born from friendship, loyalty and love. As Mariah Swann knows all too well, tangled blood ties can often complicate family issues—exaggerating wounds and leading to resentment and regret.

What begins as a trip home to make amends

becomes an unexpected journey of self-discovery. I hope you’ll enjoy, as I did while writing Mariah and Sheriff Trace Callihan’s story, following along as the Emmy-winning television crime show writer struggles to find not only her sister’s killer, but acceptance, healing and ultimately, her own true-life happy ending.

JoAnn

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter One

Laura Swann Fletcher had never realized how long five minutes could be. Especially when you were holding your breath.

She scowled at the vial atop the cultured marble countertop, as if intimidation could speed up whatever mysterious chemical reactions were taking place inside it.

Heat lightning flashed outside the bathroom window, hinting of the storm to come. A distant taste of rain rode on the sultry air. Normally, summer storms in Arizona’s high country never bothered Laura.

But tonight was different. Tonight she felt as if the electricity had gotten into her blood, making her edgy.

“Dammit, hurry up,” she begged. As if she didn’t have enough to deal with. “Please, hurry up.”

She took a deep breath that should have calmed, but didn’t. “It’s only stress,” she insisted, as if saying the words could make them true.

Perhaps she should have taken Fredericka Palmer up on that offer of Valium. Only last week her longtime best friend had professed concern about her. If only Freddi knew the whole story.

“Dammit, get hold of yourself.” Laura hardly recognized the high, nervous voice. She pressed her palms against her rib cage and, taking several more deep breaths, willed herself to relax.

But her mind continued to churn restlessly, tossing up the myriad problems that had been plaguing her. Problems without end. Dilemmas without solutions. Nerves humming, Laura decided to see if one all-important call she’d been waiting for had come while she’d been out buying the home pregnancy kit.

The answering machine was downstairs, in the den. The red light was blinking, signaling four calls. She pushed the Rewind button. Then, Play.

Unbearably restless, she prowled the plank floor.

Beep. “Laura. It’s your father.” His recorded voice was as gruff as always, but she thought perhaps it was only her imagination. His next words confirmed that it wasn’t. “I heard a story today that damn well better not be true. If you’re there, pick up.”

There was a slight pause as he waited for her to do as instructed. As she always had. “Hell.” Another frustrated pause. “When I get back from Santa Fe, you and I are going to have a talk. Because you’ve got a lot of explaining to do, girl.”

So, he’d found out. Even as Laura reminded herself that she’d been going to tell him herself, painful memories, buried but never forgotten, snaked through her.

She looked down at her watch.

Two more minutes.

She continued to pace.

Beep. “Laura, it’s Alan. Thunderstorms kept us on the ground at National, now we’re stuck on the runway at O’Hare. We’re going to be late getting into Phoenix, then with the ninety-minute drive to Whiskey River, it’ll probably be past midnight before I get home. Don’t bother waiting up.”

It was not the first time her husband had been delayed while on a trip with Heather Martin, his ambitious and sexy chief of staff. Laura doubted it would be the last. The difference was, this time she honestly didn’t care.

Alan Fletcher was a rising political star, the brightest, most promising light in the Republican political firmament. Having won reelection to the U.S. Senate by a landslide, he was being touted as the party’s best hope to regain the White House.

Laura had never enjoyed living in Washington. She hated the artifice, the parties that were nothing but power plays, the emphasis on political prestige rather than character. The role of senate wife had been difficult enough. The idea of becoming First Lady gave her hives.

Beep. “Hi, Laura. It’s Mariah. Kill the fatted calf, the prodigal daughter is coming home! Do I have a lot to tell you! Guess it’ll have to wait until I show up on your doorstep, which should be around midnight, which I know is an ungodly hour, but I’m dying to share my news with my big sister. Love ya.”

Damn. Laura dragged a trembling hand through her auburn hair. Trust Mariah to choose this weekend to return to Whiskey River. Nothing like throwing a lit match into an already volatile situation.

Then again, Laura considered, if anyone could appreciate what she was about to do, it would be the woman who, like their glamorous mother, had been banished from the Swann family.

She looked at her watch again.

Only one more minute.

Beep. “Hi.” The deep, intimate voice sent a familiar heat surging through Laura.

“I just wanted to make sure you’re okay. Hell, the truth is, I’m worried about you, babe. I still wish you hadn’t insisted on doing this alone.

“Christ, Laurie—” she could picture him dragging his hands through his thick black hair “—I don’t remember you being so stubborn twenty years ago. If you had... Oh, hell. Forget I said that. One day at a time, right?”

“One day at a time,” Laura whispered.

It was the same thing she’d been saying for months. The problem was, she knew Clint Garvey would not wait any longer. The last few times they’d managed to be together, they’d wasted valuable time—time they could have spent making love—arguing.

Finally, last weekend, Clint had issued an ultimatum. She knew, with every fiber of her being, that if she didn’t keep her promise to leave her husband, she would lose the only man she’d ever loved.

She sighed as she looked down at her watch again.

Finally!

The indicator’s damning red Plus sign confirmed what she’d suspected all along. It hadn’t been stress that had caused her to feel so tired lately. And it hadn’t been flu that had brought about the occasional bouts of morning queasiness.

She was pregnant.

With her lover’s child.

Timing, Laura considered weakly, was indeed everything.

With her back against the wall, both literally and figuratively, she slid down to the tile floor, wrapped her arms around her bent legs and rested her forehead on her knees.

What on earth was she going to do? A fleeting dread shot through Laura. Her first thought was that Clint would think she’d been lying when she’d assured him that she could not get pregnant. But how could she have known otherwise? After having spent years trying to conceive?

When pollsters had informed her husband that a pregnant wife was worth from eight to fifteen points in the opinion polls, Alan had begun dragging her to infertility clinics all over the country. None of the increasingly esoteric, uncomfortable and horribly embarrassing treatments had worked.

Finally, last year, after her thirty-sixth birthday, Laura had given up the quest for a child. Alan, needless to say, had not been pleased. It was, after all, a great deal easier to campaign on a family values platform with a smiling wife and darling children by your side.

Alan. Laura groaned. Her husband was going to be absolutely furious. What if he attempted to pay her back for her infidelity by refusing to grant her a divorce? Worse yet, what if he decided to claim this child for his own?

“I won’t let that happen!”

Laura reminded herself that her husband’s most consistent personality trait was that everything Alan Fletcher said, everything he did, including marrying her, was geared solely toward enhancing his career. If he attempted such a ploy, she’d hold her own press conference and tell the entire world the truth.

Ronald Reagan had proven that a divorced man could get elected president. But would voters choose a candidate involved in a messy paternity battle? Laura didn’t think so.

“It’s going to be all right,” she assured herself. And her baby. “Granted, this complicates things. But Alan will see that a quick, quiet divorce is in his own best interests.”

Latching on to that optimistic thought, she pressed her hands against her still-flat stomach in an unconscious gesture of maternal protection.

Her churning mind gradually calmed as she began to view her unborn child—hers and Clint’s child—as a reward for all the pain they’d suffered.

There would still be problems. Problems with her autocratic father, with Alan, with the press. And there was no way this baby could ease her current troubles regarding the ranch.

But as she ran a bath in the ancient, lion-footed copper tub, for the first time in a very long while, Laura felt capable of sorting everything out. A heady, forgotten confidence flowed warmly through her veins. Dual feelings of joy and wonder bubbled up from some hidden wellspring deep inside her.

Sometimes miracles really did happen.

Laura was soaking in the perfumed water when the storm that had been threatening earlier arrived. The sharp staccato of rain sounded on the roof. Thunder rumbled. A bolt of lightning forked just outside the window.

Suddenly, a sound like a Klaxon blare echoed through the house.

“Dammit.” An irritating flaw in the security system was that the sensors on the windows couldn’t tell the difference between a storm rattling the glass or an intruder breaking in.

She rose from the water, wrapped a towel around herself and ran back downstairs, leaving a trail of wet footprints. After deactivating the blaring alarm, she placed a call to the sheriff’s office—which was automatically alerted each time the alarm went off—assuring the dispatcher it was a false alarm.

“Stupid thing,” she muttered, clutching the towel to her breasts as she glared at the computer control panel. Alan had been promising to change the system for months. After tonight, Laura vowed, she was just going to tear the damn thing out.

At the age of thirty-seven, Laura was determined to reclaim control of her life. Along with the house and the 20 thousand acres of prime Arizona ranch land her grandmother Ida Prescott had bequeathed her.

After years of unhappiness, she’d returned home to Whiskey River. Where she belonged. And where she had every intention of spending the rest of her life with the man who, for eight blissful hours, in what seemed another lifetime, had been her husband.

Laura returned back upstairs, traded her towel for a long seafoam silk nightgown, then climbed into the cedar log bed.

Knowing she’d never be able to fall asleep, she sat bolt upright and twisted her hands together atop the Sunshine and Shadows quilt she and Clint had unearthed in a quaint Shenandoah Valley antique shop during a clandestine, love-filled weekend. The same weekend their child had been conceived.

The storm stalled overhead, wrapping the house in its grip. Rain pounded against the windows. Thunder boomed like cannon fire; psychedelic flashes of lightning streaked across the sky. Wind wailed outside the bedroom window like a savage spirit.

It was going to be, Laura thought, a very long night.

Although she’d not considered it possible, Laura eventually fell asleep. She dreamed of Christmas, could actually smell the pungent scent of the pine tree taking up most of the living room. Beneath the tree were gaily wrapped presents. Enough toys to fill F.A.O. Scharwz spilled over the floor.

A fire blazed in the fireplace; fat white flakes drifted down like snowy feathers outside the window, creating a scene straight out of Currier and Ives.

Laura saw herself sitting on the couch in front of the fireplace, Clint sitting beside her. A little boy with her husband’s jet hair and solemn blue eyes sat on her lap, listening intently as his father read aloud from Dylan Thomas’s A Child’s Christmas in Wales.

It was an idyllic scene, born of Laura’s most private yearnings. One she was loathe to leave. Which was why, when the sound of the bedroom door opening filtered into her consciousness, she fought waking up.

The bedroom lamp, operated by a wall switch beside the door flashed on. Still struggling to hold on to her dream, which was rapidly disappearing like morning mist over the tops of the tall ponderosa pines outside the ranch house, she mumbled an inarticulate complaint.

The dream faded from view. Laura reluctantly roused, blinking against the blinding light.

Her sleepy mind recognized the familiar face. As her lips curved in a groggy, puzzled smile, a sound like an early Fourth of July firecracker shattered the nighttime stillness.

Startled, and unaware she’d been shot, Laura pressed her hand against the searing heat at her breast. Crimson blood flowed over her naked flesh, staining her fingertips.

Still uncomprehending, she stared up at her attacker, tried to ask Why? but discovered she’d gone mute. A mist covered her eyes.

Silvery rain snakes streaked down the bedroom window. Her wounded heart continued to beat.

Pumping out precious blood.

Laura’s last conscious thought was regret that she hadn’t told Clint about their baby.

And then, as a second sharp retort filtered through the fog clouding her mind, Laura Swann Fletcher surrendered to the darkness.

Chapter Two

“Well, this is another fine mess you’ve gotten yourself into,” Mariah Swann muttered.

Her fingers gripped the steering wheel of her new fire-engine red Jeep Grand Cherokee. A drenching downpour streamed across the windshield, as the ineffectual swish swish of the wipers added accompaniment to Travis Tritt singing on the CD player about the perils of falling in love with an unfaithful woman. The storm, which had stuck like glue overhead all the way from her Malibu beach house had her two hours behind schedule. The digital clock on the dashboard said two o’clock. In the morning. She still had another twenty miles to go before she reached Whiskey River. And then there was that death-defying drive up to her sister’s ranch.

“You’ve been gone ten years, dummy,” she scolded herself for her impatience. “What’s another two hours, more or less?”

It shouldn’t matter. But it did. Because recently she’d been thinking about Laura. A lot.

The time had come for making amends. For healing old wounds. And who better to begin with than the woman who, once, had been Mariah’s best friend?

Her thoughts in a turmoil as she relived the tempestuous day she’d left Whiskey River, Mariah almost didn’t see the white barricade blocking the roadway. She slammed the brake pedal to the floor, grateful for the antilock brakes that kept her from sliding through the barricade into the swirling, churning waters.

The rain had caused the river to flood its banks. Attempting a crossing, especially in the dark, would not only be foolhardy, but possibly deadly.

“Damn!”

Mariah glared out at the raging river, at the rain streaming down the windshield, at the stormy sky and considered her options. She could sit here, wait until dawn, and check out exactly how deep the water was running. Or she could turn around, head back the way she’d come, get a motel room in Camp Verde and wait the storm out.

Choosing caution for once, she managed, just barely, to make a U-turn. Fifteen minutes and thirty-five dollars later, she was sitting on a too soft mattress in the Pinewood Motel, telephone receiver in hand trying to get through to her sister, so she could advise Laura not to wait up.

Mariah frowned at the busy tone. “Who could she be talking to at nearly three in the morning?” She tried once more. Again, the line rang busy.

“Maybe she took the phone off the hook.” Mariah wondered if Laura was avoiding her. It wouldn’t be all that surprising, considering their rocky past. But during the past two years when they’d begun speaking again, she’d hoped that she and her sister had put those days behind them.

Perhaps the storm had knocked down the lines.

“Shit.”

Patience had never been Mariah Swann’s long suit. It wasn’t now. She dug through her purse, searching out the cigarettes she’d bought in Kingman, swearing, as always, they’d be her last. She located the already crumpled pack, shook a cigarette loose and picked up the matches from the tin ashtray on the bedside table. The matchbook cover suggested she was only a free test away from a career as a commercial artist.

As she lit the cigarette, drawing the acrid smoke into her lungs, she could almost hear Laura lecturing her, the same way she had the first time Mariah had gotten caught smoking in the girls’ bathroom at school.

Their mother, unable to stand the remoteness of ranch life, had fled Whiskey River—and her domineering husband. The same day Margaret McKenna Swann packed her Louis Vuitton suitcases and returned to Hollywood, Matthew Swann had filed for divorce.

Angry, unable to understand their mother’s defection, and chafing under her father’s iron hand, Mariah became the rebellious Swann daughter. Which left Laura, by default, the role of the solid, responsible daughter.

Only lately had Mariah begun to understand how having so much responsibility dumped on Laura’s shoulders at such a young age must have cost her older sister. Not that Laura had ever complained.

Except the time she’d shocked everyone by eloping with Clint Garvey. The ill-fated marriage had lasted less than a day.

After their father brought her home Laura never mentioned Clint again. A few years later, she married the man her father had chosen for her, and if the glowing articles Mariah read in all the magazines were any indication, her sister was happy.

But sometimes, when the camera lens was focused on the senator while Laura stood loyally in the background, a photographer would capture a candid, unpracticed expression on her face. An expression so filled with sadness that Mariah wanted to cry.

“I’ll make it up to you, Laurie.” Guilt and regret snaked through her. “I promise.”

Unable to sit still, Mariah began to pace and smoke. Waiting for morning.

* * *

Trace Callahan was dog tired. Throughout the night he’d driven the back roads, setting up barricades in the pouring rain, trying to keep idiot vacationers and drunk residents of Mogollon County from driving their four-wheelers into the raging Whiskey River.

When he’d first applied for the job of sheriff, he couldn’t help thinking of the old days when cowboys got drunk and smashed up Whiskey River’s saloons. These days, kids got drunk and smashed up their daddies’ pickups.

He hung his dripping poncho on the rack by the front door and tossed his hat onto a nearby table. Rotating his aching shoulder, which went stiff when it rained, he went into the kitchen, ignoring the trail of muddy footprints he left in his wake.

He opened the refrigerator and had just pulled out the beer he’d been thinking about for the last hour, when the phone rang. The caller I.D. screen announced the call was from his office.

“I told you I was going off duty, Cora Mae,” he barked into the mouthpiece. “This had better be important.”

“It is if you consider a possible one-eighty-seven in progress important, Sheriff,” Cora Mae Jackson shot back.

A wave of adrenaline rushed through his body. Fatigue was immediately forgotten. “A one-eighty-seven?”

A murder? In Whiskey River? Impossible. There hadn’t been a murder in the Arizona mountain town since 1957, when Jared Lawson got drunk at a family Thanksgiving dinner and shot his mother-in-law to death over a white meat–dark meat argument.

“A one-eighty-seven,” the night dispatcher repeated. “At Senator Fletcher’s ranch.”

Trace could feel his body relaxing again. He hunched his stiff shoulder, holding the receiver against his neck as he unscrewed the beer cap.

“You mean a possible burglary.” There’d been at least a half dozen false alarms at the ranch. Trace wished Fletcher would either get the damn system fixed, or tear it out.

“After thirty-five years I should know my codes, Sheriff,” Cora Mae sniffed. “I meant a murder. The senator just called in on 911. He’s been shot. He thinks his wife was shot, too.”

Trace’s pulse rate soared. “Is the gunman still in the house?”

“The senator said he heard them run out. He thinks there were two of them.”

Trace slammed the bottle down onto the counter. Foam ran over his hand. “Why didn’t you say so in the first place?”

“I believe I did, Sheriff.”

“Dispatch the county medical unit,” Trace instructed. “And get hold of J.D.”

“J.D. was here when the call came in. He’s on his way to the ranch now.”

“Radio him and let him know I’m on the way. Oh, and tell him not to touch anything.”