Forsaken

The deputy studied her for a long moment before he asked, “Has Dewey been in trouble before?”

“Who says he’s in trouble now?” she snapped, and looked away, angry with herself, Dewey and the situation. If this man would just let her talk to Dewey and find out what had happened up in those mountains, she could get this cleared up before Deputy Jamison jumped to the wrong conclusion.

“You might as well tell me if the boy’s been in trouble,” Jamison said. “I’ll find out soon enough.”

Silence stretched between them until she finally broke it. “Dewey got into some dustup at school. His father thought spending the summer in the mountains, away from his friends...”

“What kind of...dustup?”

“Boy stuff, I would imagine.” She glanced toward the sound of footfalls in the hallway. “I don’t really know,” she said quietly then turned as Dewey filled the open kitchen doorway. “Come have some coffee,” she called, moving to get him a mug.

Dewey came meekly into the kitchen, wearing her son’s clothing. He looked enough like her Matthew that it felt like being kicked by a horse. She already felt sick at heart as it was for Dewey, for his horse, for whatever had frightened him and maybe worse, whatever he might have done.

“Sit,” she ordered, and turned away to cut the chocolate cake she’d made only that morning. She’d planned to take the cake to the stock-growers’ meeting she had later in the afternoon, but all her plans would change now.

Dewey pulled out a chair at the end of the table, and she placed a slice of cake and a mug of coffee in front of him. She automatically reached for the sugar and cream because that was the way Matthew had always taken his coffee. Dewey ignored both and began to slurp up the hot coffee as if dying of thirst.

The deputy was watching the boy closely. She felt her chest tighten at the thought of what kind of trouble Dewey might be in. “Dewey—”

Jamison cut her off. “That cake looks awfully good, Mrs. Conner. Mind if I have a piece?”

Maddie tried to still her impatience as she sliced the deputy a large portion and topped off his coffee even though he hadn’t touched it. She desperately needed to know what had happened and what she was going to have to do about it.

“Mrs. Conner here was just telling me—”

“Maddie,” she interrupted.

Jamison shot her an annoyed look before turning back to the boy again. “Maddie was just telling me you were hired on as the sheepherder’s tender.”

Dewey nodded but kept his eyes on the cake he was in the process of devouring. He acted as if he hadn’t eaten in days. She realized with a start that Branch wouldn’t have let the boy go hungry—that was, if he’d been able to take care of the two of them.

Did that mean something had happened to Branch? Her stomach dropped at the thought. What of her sheep? She’d been hanging on to the ranch by a thread for so long...

“Son, can you tell me what happened?” the deputy asked.

The fork froze in Dewey’s hand, and then slowly he began to scrape the crumbs from the plate, never taking his eyes off the table, before dropping his fork and washing the cake down with the rest of his coffee.

“How about we start at the beginning?” Jamison said. “For the past four days, you’ve been up in the mountains with the sheepherder, is that right?”

Dewey nodded.

“Where is Branch now?” Maddie asked, ignoring the warning look the deputy shot her.

“I don’t know,” the boy said, dropping his voice and his head.

The deputy cleared his throat. “When did you last see him?”

“Just before bed last night. He said he’d been having trouble sleeping. The noises were keeping him up.”

“The noises? You mean the sheep?” the deputy asked.

Dewey lifted his head and frowned at the silly question. “Branch was used to the sheep. He said he could tell if they were happy or scared just by the sounds they made at night.”

“Then what was keeping him up at night?” the deputy asked.

“The strange sounds...” Dewey glanced back down at the table “...the...crying.”

Maddie couldn’t help herself. “Crying?”

“I’m not making it up,” the boy said, lifting his head to plead his case with her. Tears filled his eyes, and he began to tremble again. “I swear. We heard awful...crying on the wind.”

“You have heard the sound of wind or a coyote calling at night, haven’t you?” Maddie asked in exasperation.

“It weren’t no coyote,” the boy snapped. “It weren’t just the wind, either. It was...something else. Even old Branch was spooked by it.”

“Are you sure Branch didn’t just wander off?” the deputy asked.

“Maybe. His horse was missing this morning. I called for him and looked all over.”

Maddie doubted Dewey had done much searching for the sheepherder given how scared he was.

“How did you get the blood on you?” the deputy asked.

The boy wagged his head without looking up. “One of the lambs. She was hurt. I tried to help her.” He was close to tears again. Maddie remembered her son at that age, so tough and yet so tender, a boy on the edge of manhood doing his best to measure up. If only Matthew was here now, she thought with that unbearable grip at her heart.

“How did you and Branch get along?” Jamison asked.

“Fine,” he said to his empty plate.

Maddie took the plate and cut him another slice of cake. She could feel the deputy’s irritation with her, not that she gave a damn as she slid the second slice of cake in front of Dewey and refilled his mug. She noticed the deputy had hardly touched his cake or his coffee.

“I would imagine with only the two of you up there all alone, you might have had disagreements on occasion,” the deputy asked.

Dewey said nothing as he dived into the cake and coffee she’d set before him. She felt torn between wanting to shake the truth out of Dewey and wanting to protect him. All her instincts told her that the boy needed protecting.

“Branch hard to get along with, was he?” Jamison asked.

“Meaner than a rabid dog when he drank.” The kid, realizing he’d just spilled the beans, shot Maddie an alarmed look and quickly gulped out, “Not that he drank usually.”

Maddie groaned.

“If you had something to do with Branch going missing up there—”

“I didn’t!” he cried. “I swear. I don’t know what happened to him.”

She felt her stomach go tight with fear as a thought hit her. “Where’s Branch’s dog, Lucy? That dog would never have let him out of her sight.”

Dewey shook his head and began to cry.

“Son,” the deputy pressed. “If you know something, you have to tell me.”

“I don’t know. I’m telling you. I...I don’t know anything.”

“I’ve had enough of this,” Maddie said as she shoved off the kitchen counter.

Dewey looked up, startled, as if he thought she planned to beat it out of him.

“I have two thousand sheep up in those mountains, and I can’t be sure anyone is watching them,” she said to Jamison.

“Right now, I have bigger concerns than your sheep,” he said, getting to his feet. “I’m going to have to hold the boy until I know what happened up there. I’m afraid this warrants investigating.”

“Then you see to your investigation, Deputy. I’m going to check on my sheep.” What she couldn’t bring herself to say, let alone admit to this Easterner, was that the future of her ranch was riding on this year’s sheep production.

Not that she wasn’t even more scared out of her wits that something bad had happened to Branch. He wasn’t just her sheepherder. He was as close to a grandfather as she’d ever had. He was also her closest friend.

But if she had tried to explain it to the deputy she would have been fighting tears. And she never cried. She’d done all her crying a long time ago.

As she started down the hallway toward her bedroom, she heard him coming after her. “Mrs. Conner—”

“Maddie,” she snapped without turning around. She had no idea what had happened back in those mountains, but she was scared, sick over the pain she saw in that boy sitting in her kitchen and worried as the devil about Branch, as well as her sheep.

She didn’t have the time or patience to deal with the law right now.

Jamison caught up to her halfway down the hall and grabbed her arm, forcing her to stop and face him. “Maddie, I can’t let you go up there alone.”

“No offense, but a greenhorn like you would just slow me down.”

“I’ll do my best not to,” he said. “But I’m going with you.” His gaze softened as he seemed to notice the tears in her eyes. She wiped at them, as angry with herself as she was with him for noticing.

“Right now I’m concerned about my sheepherder. Branch has been with my family for years. He wouldn’t leave the sheep unattended. Either Dewey is wrong or—”

“Or your sheepherder met with some kind of accident.”

She connected with his gaze. “He’s my responsibility. I really don’t need your help.”

“Did you notice the kid’s knuckles?”

Maddie started. She hadn’t.

“He’s been in a recent fistfight. And that cut over his eye? He didn’t get that from falling down. On top of that, he’s lying about something.”

“You don’t know—”

“I might be a greenhorn in Montana, but I know when a suspect is lying. Before I took the job as deputy here, I was a homicide detective.”

A dark, cold lump formed in her chest. A suspect? Homicide?

“I’m sorry, Mrs.—Maddie, but I’m afraid under the circumstances, neither of us has a choice right now. You have a missing sheepherder and sheep you need to see to. But I can’t let you go up there alone and destroy what I suspect is going to be a crime scene.”

CHAPTER THREE

NOTHING MOVED FASTER in the near ghost town of Beartooth, Montana, than gossip. Even the powerful, fearful winds that blew down out of the Crazy Mountains were no match for the wagging tongues.

This morning the gossip was about Maddie Conner and the Diamond C Ranch’s young tender.

Every morning Lynette “Nettie” Benton crossed the street from her store to the Branding Iron Café to get a cinnamon roll and coffee and the latest gossip. She could always depend on the regulars to dish up tasty tidbits of news or scandal.

In fact, she prided herself on knowing everything that was going on in town. She spent much of her day at the front window of the Beartooth General Store watching the world go by. True, the world passed more like a glacier in Beartooth.

The town, in the shadow of the “Crazies,” as the locals called the Crazy Mountain range, had once been quite the wild mining town back in the late eighteen hundreds. Now, though, other than a bunch of deserted old buildings, there was only her general store, the post office, the Range Rider Bar, a community church and the café, which suited most folks in the area just fine since the larger town of Big Timber was only twenty-some miles away.

In Montana traveling twenty miles was nothing. Many traveled much farther and often on dirt roads just to get to a store—let alone to catch a flight or shop at a big-box store.

Nettie liked to say that she knew more about the people in the area than they did about themselves. And she’d never been shy about spreading what she knew, either, which was why she’d become known as the county’s worst gossip.

She didn’t mind. Let them say what they would. Most days, the tidbits she picked up weren’t all that exciting. This morning, though, she’d hit the mother lode when she’d overheard Fuzz Carpenter.

Fuzz was sitting at the front table at the Branding Iron Café with the rest of the ranchers who gathered there every morning when she heard him mention the woman sheep rancher and her young tender.

Historically sheep ranchers, in what had originally been cattle country, weren’t all that popular. While cattle and sheep ranchers now got along, it was still rare for a woman to be running a sheep ranch. Not to mention the fact that Maddie Conner didn’t take any guff off anyone—especially male ranchers who thought she needed their advice.

“Covered with blood,” Fuzz was saying. “Didn’t take more than a look in that boy’s eyes. Somethin’ bad happened back in those mountains. Mark my words.”

Nettie’s first thought was to call Sheriff Frank Curry and find out what was going on. But then she heard Fuzz say that he’d talked to some new deputy because the sheriff was out of town.

“Bentley Jamison,” Fuzz mocked with the worst impression of a New York accent Nettie had ever heard. “What the hell kind of name is that?” The ranchers all laughed. “Wait until he meets Maddie Conner.” That brought on more laughter. “I wouldn’t even want to take her on.”

Nettie was thinking about the sheriff being out of town. No doubt Frank was visiting his daughter, she thought with a chill.

* * *

SHERIFF FRANK CURRY nervously turned the brim of his Stetson in his fingers as he waited. He was a big man, a throwback from another era with his thick handlebar mustache and longish hair. He could have been a sheriff from a hundred years ago.

The nurse had told him to sit down in one of the chairs in the glassed-in solarium, but he could no more sit than he could fly. He stood at the window, looking out at the rolling land and counting his regrets. They’d been few—before a seventeen-year-old young woman named Tiffany Chandler had shown up at his door. Actually the first time they’d met, he’d caught her in his house going through his bureau drawers as brazen as any thief he’d run across.

Now, at the sound of footfalls behind him, he braced himself and turned to see his daughter and a nurse come into the room.

“Hi, sweetheart,” he said.

Tiffany looked paler than he remembered, thinner, too. She’d cut her long blond hair, hacking it short and choppy with a pair of scissors she’d somehow gotten her hands on.

“How the hell does a mental patient get hold of scissors?” he’d demanded when he’d received the call from the hospital.

“Your daughter is a very...determined young woman,” the nurse had told him. The woman meant sneaky, cunning, shrewd, manipulative—deadly. Determined was a kindness to him that sounded more like pity.

Frank knew what extremes Tiffany would go to once she set her mind to something. She’d almost killed him, after killing something he’d loved.

Looking at her now, he could see there was still a lot of hate and anger in her. He knew that defiant, hurt look too well and liked to believe it masked fear rather than soulless hatred.

Tiffany glared at him with huge blue eyes that dominated her waiflike features. She had refused to let anyone repair the damage she’d done to her hairdo. He’d always noticed a fragility about her, but now it was heightened.

He felt desperate to take her in his arms and protect her—just as he had last February when he’d learned who she was. Until then, he hadn’t known he had a daughter. Still didn’t, actually.

After she’d tried to kill him, the county attorney had sent her for a mental evaluation to see if she could stand trial. The state had also insisted on running a paternity test to see if the teenager actually was Frank’s birth daughter.

The report had come in a large brown envelope, but Frank had never opened it. He felt Tiffany was his responsibility no matter what blood ran through her veins because she was the creation of his vindictive ex-wife.

When he thought of his ex-wife, Pam, he often thought of killing her. That thought only lasted an instant because he wasn’t a killer—and because he had created Pam, just as she had created Tiffany. Pam had kept the pregnancy from him, raising the girl alone and programming her to ultimately take revenge against the man they both now hated.

“How are you doing?” he asked Tiffany, gripping the brim of his hat when he wanted more than anything to hold this poor child. But the nurse had warned him not to try.

“How do you think I’m doing in this crazy bin?” Tiffany spat.

Better than prison, he wanted to tell her. But he couldn’t be sure that prison wasn’t still in her future. It would be up to the state eventually. Right now, he was fighting to keep her from going before a judge on attempted-murder charges against an officer of the law. He feared she would be tried as an adult, and he couldn’t bear the thought of her in prison.

“Is there anything you need, anything I can get for you?” he asked.

“You’ve done quite enough. If that’s all...” She started to turn away.

“Tiffany, the doctor said you haven’t been cooperating.”

She raised one very pale blond brow at him as she let her blue eyes return to him.

“If you get well—”

“Is that what you’re telling them?” She crossed her skinny arms over her skinny chest. “That I’m unwell? Crazy? A lunatic just like my mother?” The nurse put a hand on her shoulder, but Tiffany shook it off. “I’m just fine. And so was my mother before she met you.”

He hated that she wouldn’t take responsibility for what she’d done any more than her mother had the one time he’d talked to her after he’d found out about Tiffany.

“You tried to kill me,” he said to the girl now.

Her eyes glittered an instant before she gave him a slow smile. “I’m just sorry I failed.”

“It’s talk like that that will end you up in prison. Don’t you understand I’m trying to help you?”

“By pressing charges against me?”

“That was the state because I am a county sheriff.” And Tiffany was dangerous, no matter how much he might want to argue otherwise. He sighed, his heart breaking with frustration. He wanted to help her. Why couldn’t she see that?

“Tiffany, I love you. You’re my daughter. I want time to make up for the past since I didn’t even know you existed. Give us that time by working with the doctor so you can get out of here.”

Tears suddenly filled her eyes. “You turned my mother against me.”

His fury at his ex-wife boiled to the surface. She’d sent her only child to seek revenge in the most deadly, destructive way for both him and Tiffany. And now she’d washed her hands of the girl. What mother could do such a thing?

Pam was the one who needed to be in a mental institution, he thought, tamping down his murderous rage. “You know I have no control over your mother. She wants to hurt us both. By making you think I’m responsible, it’s just another way for her to drive us apart.”

Tiffany shook her head, tears now streaming down her face. “She said you would blame her.”

Frank balled his fists at his sides. He didn’t know where Pam was, afraid sometimes of what he would do if he found her. He unclenched his fists, not wanting to give his daughter any more ammunition against him.

“This is your fault,” Tiffany cried. “If you had loved my mother and not that horrible Nettie Benton...”

Frank felt his heart clinch at his former lover’s name on his daughter’s lips. There was only one other person Tiffany and her mother hated more than him.

“None of this has anything to do with Lynette,” he said, using the name he’d always called Nettie. “She was married to Bob when your mother and I were together, and there was nothing going on between us.”

“Mother said you never got over the bitch.”

He would have loved arguing that, but he couldn’t. His daughter would have seen the truth. “I married your mother because I loved her.” That much at least was true. Pam’s jealousy had destroyed the marriage, but Tiffany wouldn’t believe that. He hated even thinking about those dark days, never knowing what mood Pam would be in when he returned home.

“Mother said you never tried to get her back.”

They’d had this discussion too many times, and nothing he could say weakened the venom Pam had injected into their daughter’s veins.

“I can’t change the past. Had I known about you, I would have gone after your mother and brought you both back. She never gave me that chance.”

The girl shook her head, her big blue eyes filling with tears. “If I had known that Nettie Benton was the woman you were in love with...” She didn’t have to continue. He knew. Tiffany had come to Beartooth with a gun and a heart full of hate.

She knew where to find him, but she’d been looking for Lynette Johnson. That had been Lynette’s name when the two of them were in their early twenties and lovers. Tiffany hadn’t known that Lynette went by the name Nettie Benton.

Frank wished more than anything that he and Lynette had married and had children of their own. Instead Lynette had married Bob Benton. And years later, he’d foolishly married Pam Chandler. Their marriage had been short and far from sweet.

It wasn’t enough that Pam and Tiffany had brought him to his knees. But he lived in fear that Tiffany, if released, would go after Lynette, the woman he’d loved and lost years ago and still loved now.

Or that Pam, realizing her daughter might never be free again, might decide to take matters into her own hands.

* * *

JAMISON CALLED HIS office in Big Timber and discussed the situation with the undersheriff in charge. They both agreed he should go up into the mountains with Mrs. Conner.

“At this point, it doesn’t warrant sending search and rescue up there,” Undersheriff Dillon Lawson said. “We don’t know that a crime has been committed or even if the sheepherder is actually missing.”

They wouldn’t know about the blood on the boy’s coat until the forensics came back from the state lab, and who knew how long that would take?

“The boy’s been in a fight,” Jamison said. “Something happened up there. Something bad enough that the boy is terrified. But you’re right—there’s no smoking gun.” Not yet anyway.

“Okay. This could take you a few days, though. You’re scheduled off this weekend. If this case runs over...”

“I doubt it will. If it does, it isn’t a problem.”

“Let me know what you find—if you can get cell-phone coverage from one of the higher peaks up there, call me. Coverage up there is sketchy at best. If it becomes a rescue operation or worse, we can send in a helicopter once we have the location. So it is just going to be you and Maddie Conner going up there?”

“She’s not keen on my going along.”

Dillon chuckled. “I’ll just bet. Good luck.”

Jamison hung up and went to check on Dewey Putman. He got the feeling that the undersheriff thought his going up into the mountains would be good for him. Knock some of the back-East off of him. Apparently Maddie’s reputation had also preceded her since the undersheriff found some humor in his going with her.

In the kitchen, he saw that Dewey had finished his cake and coffee, shoved his dirty dishes away and, with his head cradled on his arms, had fallen into an exhausted sleep on the table.

He knew Maddie Conner was holding out hope that Dewey hadn’t done anything wrong and that they would find nothing out of the ordinary back in her summer sheep camp. He wished he could share her optimism.

“For all you know that is lamb blood on that boy’s jacket, just like he said,” she’d argued before he’d gone out to make the call to the office.

“Maybe. I think you should call the boy’s father. Meanwhile, I’m afraid he’ll have to be held in custody at the jail since his guardian will be in the mountains with me.”

“I already called the oil company and left a message for his father. Since there is no one else, I guess that’s the best we can do for now.”

“We shouldn’t be gone that long,” Jamison had said.

She’d given him a disbelieving smile. “There is only one way to get back where we need to go, Deputy, and that’s by horseback, so it’s going to take a while. You ever ridden a horse? Never mind. I’ll saddle you a gentle one. But you’re going to need some boots and some practical clothes. I think some of my husband’s will fit you.”

Before he’d been able to ask about her husband, she’d disappeared down the hall. He remembered the way Maddie had been looking at the kid earlier, so much heartbreak in her eyes. It had made him wonder where she’d gotten the clothing she’d given Dewey. Did she have a son of her own?