Red Wolf's Return

Red Wolf’s Return

Mary J. Forbes

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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

Epilogue

Chapter One

A mist lay on the lagoon below Blue Mountain the September morning Ethan Red Wolf faced a past he’d buried years ago.

Won’t be hi and bye this time, Meggie.

No, he’d have to make an elaborate report of the wounded eagle huddling against the boulder. Which meant talking to her.

“Easy,” he soothed when the raptor squirmed weakly on the shoreline rocks. Slipping his Nikon camera into his backpack, he crouched for closer inspection—and mentally cursed.

The bird’s tail feathers had been plucked like unwanted hairs.

Thankfully, the cool, rainy temperatures during the past two days had kept the scent down and coyotes and wolves at bay—a cleanup process as old as the mountain above him.

He snorted softly. Wasn’t this just bloody typical? Seemed after all these years, America’s heritage symbol—his heritage symbol—would be the catalyst bringing him eye to eye with Sweet Creek’s police chief.

Meggie McKee.

Gently he lifted the bird. “It’s gonna be okay, little lady,” he murmured. Rising, he cradled the eagle against his chest before starting over the rocks toward his house on the other side of the diminutive lake shrouded in the foggy dawn.

Ah, Meggie, he thought. We’re about to have a real conversation. A first since she’d returned to Montana from the west coast six years ago.

Hell, if he were honest with himself, this would the first time they exchanged more than ten words in nineteen years.

Sure, they had nodded to each other on the street, said “Hi” in passing, had even traded the old, “How’s it going?” “Oh, fine. You?” “Good, good…” when he used to work as her brother’s foreman on the Flying Bar T Ranch.

But a conversation? An honest-to-God, intelligent discourse between two people?

Every time they were within ten feet of each other, one or the other zipped to an exit at the first chance. Him, because of her marriage—and too many other reasons he’d locked away over the years. Her…well, her reason had been the one he’d never forgotten. The one she had decided the night of their prom. You’re not what I want in a man, after all.

Today, another female would alter fate. He looked down at the eagle with her shot-up wing and thigh and shook his head. Little lady…if you only knew what your sacrifice is about to set in motion.

Because he sure as hell wasn’t talking to Gilby Pierce, Meggie’s second-in-command. Nope, Ethan intended to speak to the head gal herself—if for no other reason than to establish some prolonged face time.

He walked through the thick timber and across a minimeadow where two hours ago his camera lens had caught the chipmunk chewing a seed on the rotted log. At the crest of a small knoll, he appraised the little homestead his grandfather Davis O’Conner had built a half century before. Protected by a grove of pine, aspen and birch, rich in autumn splendor, the renovated house sat two hundred yards from the lagoon.

His home now. His spot on the map.

He wondered if in the past year—since he’d taken residency on this side of the hill a quarter mile from where Meggie lived with her sixteen-year-old son—had she ever looked down onto his home as he did now?

Don’t be a fool, Ethan. She’s a different woman than she was at eighteen. All brass and guts now.

She needed to be, as chief of police.

The Meggie he’d kissed as a teenager no longer existed. This Meggie wouldn’t spare one frivolous second mooning over some bygone childhood love.

That much he’d witnessed in the past six years after Mayor Hudson Leland and the town council hired her to run Sweet Creek’s police department. Hell, not long ago, she’d practiced at the former rifle range—shot bull’ seyes, in fact—an eighth of a mile from Ethan’s house. A range on the property left to him by his late grandfather that Ethan had bulldozed last June to make room for the therapeutic riding center he wanted to establish. Which, of course, didn’t sit well with the locals, including the mayor and his cronies—in particular Jock Ralston.

Lifting his head, Ethan sought out the mammoth boulder sitting like a rough-edged beacon across the lake. The boulder where he’d found the raptor.

Where, under a stadium of stars, eighteen-year-old Meggie McKee had once said she would love him forever.

Ethan grunted. Right. And there went a lake of water under that bridge.

Firmly cradling the bird in his arms, he walked down the hill toward the house in the trees.

A thicket of yellow aspen on the outskirts of town encircled Sweet Creek’s animal clinic. Turning into its lane, Ethan squinted as the dawn light glanced off the windshield of the doctor’s van in front of the tomato-red barn.

Three minutes later, after carrying the injured eagle into the reception area, he and his longtime friend and town veterinarian, Kell Tanner, considered the bird’s wounds on an examination table.

“Can you save her, Doc?” Ethan wanted to know.

“It’ll be touch-and-go. Only blessing is she has youth on her side.” He removed the tea towels Ethan had bound around the wings. Before bringing the bird in, he’d dribbled water into its beak with an eyedropper until its glassy yellow eyes blinked open, the nictitating membranes gliding slowly across the corneas, back to front. At that point, Ethan had breathed a sigh of hope.

Gently the veterinarian carefully probed the bird’s torn thigh and shattered wing. “Damn shame.”

And then some. “Do your best, Doc. She deserves it.”

Kell nodded. “Come back in a couple hours. She’ll be in recovery then.”

“Thanks.” Ethan headed for the door.

“You realize they’re not going to like what you’re thinking here,” Kell said over his shoulder. “That one of their gun buddies might be a poacher.”

They. The law or the town council? Ethan shrugged. “Guess I’ll take the chance.”

“Good luck.”

Ethan nodded.

Outside, mellow morning sunshine warmed his face as he looked toward the trees across the road separating the clinic from the town proper where two blocks away he’d noticed her pickup at the police station’s curb. Still the early riser, Meggie?

He pulled his ball cap from a hip pocket, settled it on his head.

Time to get the show on the road.

Resolute, he climbed into his pickup and pulled out of the clinic’s graveled parking lot. In the two minutes it took to get to the station, he thought about how she would react to his information, facts that would likely separate them further if he implicated the gun club. Or her son. Well, if that was how it played out he’d take the chance anyway. This was for the raptor.

Besides, Meggie lived her own life now—though he’d observed her hire on as chief, watched her son, Beau, grow from a kid with freckles to a teenager with a bad-boy attitude.

Like you were at that age.

And he had watched Meggie date other men, even get serious about one four years ago.

Not that there hadn’t been women in Ethan’s life. He’d had his share and then some. Except none had ever measured up to dark-haired, blue-eyed, long-legged Chief Meggie.

Meg. That’s the name she used these days. Meg. Hard and headstrong. Huh. Well, she’d always be Meggie to him. Soft and sweet natured. The girl he remembered.

Heart pounding, he parked in front of the rectangular wooden structure that had been the police station for nearly two and half decades. Moments later he pulled open its door to walk into a room that took up most of the front length of the building. LED day lighting presented the brightness of July at noon.

She stood to the right, viewing a county map tacked to the wall with her second-in-command Gilby Pierce and dispatcher/secretary Sally Dunn. All three turned, pinning Ethan like the map they’d been scrutinizing.

Meggie’s eyes went wide, then she caught herself, and a smile Ethan knew was meant for the sake of her companions curved her mouth before she stepped forward.

For five long seconds he couldn’t inhale. Meggie.

“Mr. Red Wolf.”

Mr. Red Wolf. Fine. She wanted to playact, he’d give her one hell of a performance. “Chief McKee.”

Blue uniform crisp, gun slung on her belt, she was all cop in her approach. “Something we can do for you?”

He looked into those beguiling blue eyes. Well now, Meggie-girl. You’re finally looking at me for longer than sixty seconds. How’s it feel?

Hell. He had no delusion that she saw him; it was the probable complaint he’d come about that held her interest.

“There is. An eagle’s been shot on my property, and I’m wondering if it wasn’t for possible profit.”

Those fine, black brows he had traced with his mouth twenty years before arced. “Care to explain?”

“Tail and wing feathers missing. Bird’s over at Kell’s getting its thigh sewn up and its wing bones splinted.”

“It’s alive?”

“Barely.”

She studied him for a moment, assessing his words while he assessed her. Her dark chocolate hair, worn in a neat bob, was shorter than his by several inches. She wore no lipstick, very little rouge, and her gaze was direct in a way it hadn’t been when she was a girl. Regret coursed through him at the sight of the hair-fine lines caging those same eyes. She’d had her share of heartache, he surmised. Hell, maybe she still mourned for her ex—the renowned Dr. Doug Sutcliffe—these six years. Ethan shoved away the notion. Meggie thinking about a man bothered him for reasons he did not want to investigate, especially when she was no longer his. Never had been, Ethan.

“Why don’t you step into my office?” Turning, she led him down a short hallway to a cluttered room with a long wooden desk supporting a computer. Several filing cabinets filled the right wall while the left held another county map, a half-dozen Wanted posters, and a corner window with—irony of ironies—a view of Blue Mountain.

Daily those lake-blue eyes saw the terrain where he lived.

Where she lived a shout away.

Did that ever cross her mind?

“Have a seat.” All business, she shut the door behind them.

Ethan took the only chair free of file folders. Mere feet from his knees, she hiked a slim hip on her desk and crossed her arms. “Where’d you find the bird?”

“Across the water from my place. On the shore,” he added and observed her pinpoint the area in her mind, remembering spots where, as high school sweethearts, they had done their share of kissing.

“Anyone been using the rifle range without your knowledge?” she asked.

“The range doesn’t exist anymore, as you know.” After the town’s rental lease had expired last spring, he’d demolished the target hill and shooting stalls, removed the obstacle course used for the annual Mounted Shoot. He had wanted no part remaining of the thirty-year-old range his grandfather founded. In its place Ethan was creating a healing-horse retreat where troubled kids could find a little peace. Kids like he’d once been.

But his plans were not her affair.

“I’m well aware the range is gone,” Meggie replied. “However, that doesn’t mean people won’t try to use those twenty acres.” A corner of her mouth lifted. “Old habits die hard. I was wondering if some folks still consider the field open for target practice.”

“I’ve posted No Trespassing signs.” He shifted his booted foot several inches from her police-issued shoe. “But you’re right. It doesn’t rule out the mayor’s gun cronies.”

Her gaze didn’t waver. “What are you saying, Ethan?”

An air balloon’s torch whooshed through him. The last time his name crossed her lips…Hell, he couldn’t recall.

“I’m saying I’ve seen hunters on Blue Mountain.” And one of them was your son.

She slipped off the desk, walked around to her chair. “Who?” she asked, her fingers easy on the computer’s keyboard. All police business now.

“Couple kids.”

Her head swung around. “With rifles?”

“Twenty-twos.”

“I need names, Ethan.”

Ethan again. Twice in less than sixty seconds. “Randy Leland, Linc’s boy and the mayor’s grandson—”

“I know the Lelands,” she retorted. Her eyes softened. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to snap. It’s just…Let’s say it doesn’t surprise me.”

Of course it didn’t. Linc Leland and Jock Ralston—and sometimes her second-in-command Gilby Pierce—had blighted Ethan’s high school years, and Meggie, his noble, valiant Meggie, had tried to install herself as his shield. Until he’d had to physically fight Linc and Jock—and get his nose busted—to prove himself.

He gave her a half beat. “I also saw your son.”

“Beau?” Her pupils pinpricked. “With Randy? When?”

“Last weekend.” Labor Day weekend. “Sunday to be exact. They were popping shots at deadwood on my land.”

She typed in his response. “Did you talk to them?”

He hesitated. Her son hadn’t welcomed Ethan’s intrusion. “I told them to use the range at Livingston or Bozeman, that they were on private property now.” Her son had shrugged and said something about how Old Man O’Conner never gave a rat’s ass before, why should Ethan?

He’d told the boy if he didn’t get his ass off the property right quick, he’d find it hauled down to the chief’s office. Or words to that effect. The kid had laughed.

“Did they leave?” Meggie asked.

“They did.” Just to be sure, he’d followed them until they were in Beau’s Chevy pickup and roaring down the dirt road that wound around the lake and hooked up with the pavement to Sweet Creek’s town proper.

“Was that the only time you saw the kids on your land?”

“Beau was there once before, far as I know.”

Her expression remained bland. “When?”

“End of July. He was walking along the lakeshore around seven-thirty in the evening.”

“With the twenty-two?”

“Over his shoulder.”

“Did you talk to him at that time?”

“No. He was crossing my property line and heading up the mountain.” Foothill, actually. Blue Mountain was part of the timbered hills evolving into the Absaroka Range to the east.

Meggie got out of her chair and walked to the corner window where the strengthening morning sunlight fell in a block on the floor. Ethan envisioned her conjuring pictures of her boy on the mountain beyond. “Still doesn’t mean those kids shot that eagle.”

“You’re right,” he conceded. “It doesn’t.”

It could have been someone else, an adult, a poacher or poachers trafficking eagle parts. Off and on such stories had been on the nightly news, in the papers. Stories relaying the profit of wildlife products such as bear claws, teeth and gall bladders, antler velvet, hooves from elk and deer.

Of feathers and talons from birds of prey.

Or it could it have been a brash sixteen-year-old proving a point to his mother, officer of the law.

She returned to the desk. “I’ll need a statement from you. Please,” she added, and again the severity in her eyes lessened. “When Beau gets home from school this afternoon, I’ll talk to him.”

Ethan didn’t envy her the job. He’d heard the rumors, the gossip. Over the past year and a half, Meg McKee’s boy had transitioned into the classic badassed teenager.

The way he’d been once.

Old history, Ethan.

Except, people didn’t forget. Not in this town. Restless to leave, he took the pen and notepad she dug from a desk drawer.

“The room across the hall’s more private,” she said, and he saw something in her eyes. Something that had him wanting to reach over, touch her hair, that sleek short bob skimming to her chin. So different from when she’d been young. When touching had been easy and natural and they’d been crazy about each other.

Ethan shoved back his chair and stood. He’d seen the nameplate on the door of the interview room when he stood on the threshold of her office. The office of Meg, the cop. Meg, the woman he barely recognized.

She rose with him. Their eyes held. A long moment passed and all he could think was how nearly two decades had altered little of her physique. She retained those same long lean bones, but, tall as she was, the top of her head still remained below his chin.

He turned and walked across the hall, flicked on the light.

“Ethan,” she said as he rounded the small, stark table marred with dozens of scuffs and scratches and initials. “I’ll get to the bottom of this.”

“I know you will.”

She leaned in the doorway, her chief’s badge glinting in the ruthless lighting. She had something on her mind, he could see, something that bowed between them, eye to eye, and he remembered days long past when tension between them was as foreign as a bluebird nesting in winter.

“It’s…” she began. “It’s been a long time since…”

Since they’d stood within each other’s proximity. Since they’d talked, actually talked.

What do you want me to say, Meggie? That I haven’t forgotten what we had once? That I wish your best friend hadn’t died during prom week? That, God help me, I wanted so badly to soothe your grief, heal your heart?

“How’ve you been?” she asked softly, and he saw the question was genuine and came from a history long past.

“Good. Real good.” Same old mundane response.

Swallowing the sudden lump in his throat, he glanced at the paper in his hand, focusing on his reason for being here—because if he didn’t, he’d step across the confined space and haul her into his arms. “Look, I should get this done.”

She straightened from the doorjamb. “’Course. Just leave it with Sally when you’re finished. And Ethan? Thanks again.” With that, she walked across to her office and closed the door.

He stared at the page. In his chest, his heart hammered. Well, it was a start, this dialogue between them. The proverbial ice had been broken. So where did he take it from here?

Think about her later.

He set aside her pen, drew the ever-present pencil from his shirt pocket. Trouble was, he’d never stopped thinking about Meggie McKee.

In the sanctuary of her office, Meg sat at her desk, propped her elbows on its surface and put her face in her hands. Ethan.

Still the rescuer of wild creatures. Still healer of the hurt. A thousand memories besieged her of a teenage Ethan, holding a maimed squirrel, a fledgling robin with a crippled foot; working to save a carstruck doe.

Lord, the years. Here today, gone tomorrow, and before you knew it a chunk of life vanished.

He looked so familiar—yet not. Lines fanned around those quiet, earth-colored eyes she’d gazed into ten million times, eyes that understood pain and loss and bias, and had spoken to her heart from the moment they’d met when he was eight and she seven.

His hair was far longer than it had been at eighteen. Back then, he’d still been trying to squeeze into a world that often shunned him. Today, he was his own man and that hair was artfully cut into a shaggy, raven mane that touched the collar of his denim jacket. Her fingers tingled to dive into the thick mass, feel the silk slide against her fingers.

But she had no right to touch anymore. No right to him. She had made the choice two decades past.

Oh, the losses. She couldn’t begin to tally them.

Dropping her hands, she looked at her closed door, heard the soft scrape of his boots as he came from the interview room and stopped outside her office.

Would he knock? Call her name?

No, he walked away. Away, as she had at seventeen.

Ethan.

It wasn’t lost on Meg that he hadn’t used her name during the interview. Undoubtedly, she had been a stranger, a woman he no longer recognized.

Well, wasn’t that what she wanted when she’d returned to Sweet Creek six years ago, why she had not sought him out, rekindled their friendship, their love?

God, he’d been her best friend. She’d told Ethan things she never told a soul, not her best girlfriend, Farrah; not her brother, Ash. Not even her ex-husband.

A knock sounded. He’d returned, changed his mind. “Come in.”

Dispatcher and receptionist Sally Dunn poked her head around the door. “Chief, you might want to see this before I scan it into the computer.” She held a sheet of paper.

“What is it?”

“Ethan Red Wolf’s…statement.”

Meg tamped back a sigh. “You’re going to tell me he didn’t give one.”

“Uh, well, actually he did. Just not the way you’d expect.” The dispatcher set the page on the desk.

A drawing. He’d done a sketch, an intricately detailed sketch. For a second Meg closed her eyes. Oh, Ethan. This is so you. How on earth was she supposed to submit this to court, if the investigation reached that point?

“What should I do with it, Chief?” Sally toyed with the gold chain around her neck.

Meg picked up the page, tossed it onto the stack of files loading her In box. “Nothing, Sal. I’ll deal with it.” With him.

“He left his cell phone number. Should I call and have him come back?”

Meg shook her head. “I’ll be taking a look out that way this morning. Need to get some pictures of the scene and the eagle over at the clinic.” Deliberately changing topics in an effort to remove thoughts of Ethan in those long, lanky Wranglers, she asked, “Has Gilby left yet?” It was the deputy’s turn to pick up the bagels from Old Joe’s Bakery today.

“Five minutes ago.”

“Good, let me know when he’s back. I’m starving.”

Sally laughed. “You’re always starving. Sheesh, I wish I had your metabolism, grazing on carbs all day and never gaining an ounce.”

“It’s called being the mother of a teen, Sal. Takes a lot of stamina.”

“I hear ya. Thank goodness those days are over in my house.” Chuckling, the dispatcher headed out the door.

The instant she was alone again, Meg picked up Ethan’s “statement.” A time line wove over the page. Along it, he’d created more than a dozen sketches, each intricately detailed and described with notes. His spiky, slanted initials angled across the bottom right corner.

She identified her son and Randy Leland, read the time and date. She recognized Beau’s obstinate attitude in his down-turned mouth. Randy looked out of the page with some reluctance, exactly as the boy appeared whenever he came to her house two miles east of Sweet Creek.

And a quarter mile from Ethan’s place. Don’t forget that, Meg.

No, she never forgot the fact as she watched the sun rise and set, ate and slept and argued with her son, just over a small bluff from the man she once loved so much she’d believed their souls were attached at the heart.

And when she had learned a year ago about his inheritance of the O’Conner place, about his plans to move into the house on land separated from hers by a narrow creek…God, she had walked around with a clog of fear in her throat for weeks. It was one thing to see him from a distance on her brother’s ranch; it was another to be Ethan RedWolf’s direct and only neighbor.