The Maverick

“I left you,” he said. “You’re still holding a grudge about that?”

She gave a short, hard, dismissive laugh. No answer.

They were passing Punch’s place, nearing the town. In a short while Sophie would turn back into Deputy Ryan and Luke would have missed his chance. He had to speak now—or forever hold his peace.

“I wanted to take you with me, you know.”

She went as quiet and watchful as an owl, her rounded eyes reflected in the mirror.

“My brown-eyed girl,” he whispered, lost in a sudden swirl of bittersweet memory. Slow dancing with Sophie in the gravel parking lot of the Thunderhead since she was too young to go inside, her head flung back, her dark eyes on his. Speeding on his motorcycle, taking the switchback at a reckless speed, her arms wrapped tight around his waist. Hours spent lying together in the long grass of the Boyer’s Rock pasture, the sun-warmed earth their refuge, their cradle. Trading kisses, whispering confessions, studying the stars.

Sophie blinked. Several times. “Sure you wanted to take me. So much so that you left town without even saying goodbye.” Her voice was clotted with wary resentment.

Yet hopeful? he wondered, then deliberately reminded himself of why he’d left her behind in the first place. According to Heath—and other walking, talking evidence in the form of her son—she’d not only spilled her guts to the sheriff, she’d quickly found “consolation” with a string of other men.

Luke refused to let her see how badly that tore at his insides. Ice water in my veins. “Well, jeez, Sophie, I guess I figured that if you were willing to turn me in to the sheriff, keeping me as your boyfriend was not a top priority.”

She stopped the car in the middle of Granite Street, two blocks from the police station. Luckily there was very little traffic, as was usually the case in Treetop.

“Luke…” she said, turning to stare at him over the top of the car seat. Slowly she shook her head. “I didn’t.”

Anguish clawed at his gut. “You didn’t?”

She was adamant, proud, passionate—his Sophie, his brown-eyed girl. “No, Luke. I most certainly did not turn you in to the sheriff!”

SOPHIE TURNED THE KEY and sat dully in her thirteen-year-old hatchback—same age as her son—waiting for the engine to stop rattling. A wisp of smoke rose from the tailpipe.

She sighed. There was no way she could afford a new car this year, not if she intended to heat the house during the long, cold winter, keep Joey in jeans, sneakers and pizza, plus pay tuition for the last two courses she needed to complete her degree in social work. If going to college part-time had given her any smarts at all, she’d have chosen a field that paid better. Having a career that meant something to her and the world at large was more important to her happiness in the long run, but in the short run, her old car was ready to plunk its last ker-plunkety plunk.

Sophie’s head throbbed. Maybe her dad could work on the engine again, keep it going a little longer with another bubblegum-and-rubber-band miracle.

She pushed the door open with a creak and stepped out, tired to her bones. Aside from the wicked headache, it wasn’t a physical exhaustion as much as a mental one. The psychological trauma of Maverick’s return had done her in.

Facing her father and son was what she dreaded next. If Archie “Buzzsaw” Ryan had made his rounds to the Thunderhead and the liquor store instead of moldering in his trailer out back, he’d have heard the news. Word wouldn’t have reached Joey as fast. Even if it had, he wouldn’t really care about an adult he’d never met. Unless some busybody had started up with the old rumor about Luke Salinger being Joe Ryan’s father…

Rolling her head to ease the tight muscles in her neck and shoulders, Sophie clumped up the porch steps of her two-bedroom wood frame cottage. Coming home usually gave her a boost. The small house wasn’t much, but it was hers—at least the mortgage was—and she’d worked hard to make it into the kind of safe, cozy home she’d never known, growing up. Today it just looked like a money pit—a conglomeration of loose shingles, dripping faucets, crumbling plaster and buckling linoleum. If she hadn’t splashed bright jewel-toned coats of paint on every surface to distract the eye, there’d be no disguising that the place was coming down around their ears.

“Hey, Joe?” she called from the pumpkin-colored front hall, even though the silence told her that her son wasn’t home. She checked the clock. Time for a bath before she had to start dinner. If ever there was a day when she needed to be cleansed of her cares and woes, it was today.

Luke already knows about Joey.

The thought had pulsed at the back of her mind all day, a red-for-danger strobe that had given her the vicious headache. As the tub filled, she popped a couple of aspirin, staring at her face in the mirror over the sink.

“He doesn’t know everything,” she told her bleak reflection.

But he soon will—someone’s bound to repeat the rumor, argued the voice that had taken control of her pounding skull. What will you do when he shows up, asking if it’s true?

How badly did she want Joey to have a father?

“I can’t think about it now.” Sophie stripped off her uniform and dropped it in the hamper. She’d have to remember to bring the ruined shirt to the dry cleaner’s tomorrow morning—another expense she could do without.

As if it mattered in the larger scheme of things. After this morning, she had worse problems than coffee stains to think about. Confronting them made her headache intensify. She could have sworn it was gnawing away her brain.

Luke suspects.

She winced in pain.

Heath Salinger knows.

The townspeople think they know.

Gad, her head was going to explode.

But everyone’s wrong—including me.

CHAPTER THREE

TYPICALLY, JOE RYAN came home with a clatter and crash—backpack flung to the floor, high-top sneakers kicked off against the wall, a brief stop to power up the TV at top volume, a noisy forage through the kitchen, gabbing loudly all the while whether or not there was a response from Sophie. Only his garrulousness had abated recently as he took more and more to locking himself in his attic bedroom, rap music pounding the slanted walls, immune to his mother’s entreaties for either a little bit of peace and quiet or a return of their old rapport. While Sophie figured Joe’s moods were the usual teenage funk, she missed the boy he used to be: sweet, funny, affectionate—a chatterbox.

“Hey, Mom, what’s for supper?” Joe hollered from the kitchen, sounding as though his head was buried in the refrigerator.

Sophie had left the bathroom door open a wide crack. “Casserole,” she yelled, which was what she always said when she hadn’t planned a menu or shopped for ingredients. There was usually something on hand that could be made into a casserole.

Joe groaned. “Not again.”

“Unless you want to fire up the barbecue?”

He groaned louder to be sure that she’d heard.

She muttered. “Then don’t complain about the casserole.”

A creaking sound followed by the shushing slide of stocking-clad feet in the short hallway told her that Joey was trying to creep upstairs without her hearing. “Joe,” she called. “Stop and say hello before you go up to your room.”

“’Lo,” he mumbled from outside the bathroom door.

A few years back—more like four, Sophie realized with a pang—Joe used to sit with her while she soaked in the bathtub. He’d chatter about his day at school and why the pond changed color and how come Grandpa only had one arm and what he’d dreamed about last night, which at the time was usually spaceships or vampires. Now she was lucky if she could get a “’lo” out of him.

Today she needed more. “Can you talk to me, please, Joey? Tell me that you got an A on your first biology quiz and that you and Grandpa cleaned out the garden shed like you were supposed to all summer.”

“I got a B+, and Grandpa wasn’t here when I got home from school so I went over to Fletcher’s and played basketball. Okay?”

“You’ll do the shed this weekend.”

“Yeah.” Agitated, Joe rattled a bag of tortilla chips in time with his jiggling leg. He was all twitches and fidgets these days, a perpetual motion machine. “Can I go now?”

The silhouette he made hovering in the dim hallway was disturbing to Sophie’s tenuous peace of mind. Anyone looking for it would see her son’s familiarity to the Salinger brothers—the lanky frame, the handsomely carved profile, the height. Luckily Joe’s eyes were brown like hers and not Luke’s steel blue. That would have been a dead giveaway.

Joe raked one hand through the scruff of dark hair that flopped over his forehead. “Huh, Mom? Can I pleeeze go to my room now?”

Sophie squirmed in the bathtub, rubbing at the goose flesh that had sprung up on her arms despite the steamy water. “Then nothing interesting happened today?”

“Mo-o-om…”

“Okay, you can leave,” she said, relieved. “Way to go on that B+.” But Joe was already gone, galloping up the twisting steps like a gangly runaway colt. His door slammed. Two seconds later, music blared. Sophie listened for a few minutes to be sure he hadn’t sneaked in a banned CD—she knew more about gangsta rap than she wanted—before tuning out.

Reprieve. She closed her eyes and slid lower in the tub. She had time to think of what—if anything—she should tell her son about his father.

Gradually the hot bath eased her tight muscles. Total relaxation beckoned, but one thought kept intruding. Joey had said that his grandfather was gone. Which meant that Archie would return knowing of Luke’s reappearance. The Lucases—even though the younger generation carried the name Salinger, they were still considered Lucases through and through—were the kind of family that the citizens of Treetop loved to gossip about. Every lurid detail of Sophie’s chase and arrest of the black sheep would be dissected over dinner tables all over town. Archie would glare at her across the table and wave his stump around, dredging up his ancient complaints about the Lucases and how they’d done the Ryans wrong. It would be the Montagues versus the Capulets all over again, and Sophie was exhausted just imagining it.

“Nuts.” She hoisted herself out of the tub. One way or another, Maverick’s return was going to force her into a showdown with everyone in her life. And out of it, she supposed, thinking of Luke with an unwelcome but nonetheless compelling fascination. She shivered.

“Branded,” she whispered, blotting herself with a towel. Her fingers went involuntarily to the Mustangs tattoo on her rear end. Get a grip, she scolded herself. It’s just a tattoo. Not a brand. She wrapped the towel around herself, hoping that out of sight would equal out of mind, and went to get dressed.

Sure enough, by the time Sophie had concocted a kitchen-cupboard casserole and was slicing sweet potatoes to look like french fries—as if that would fool Joey—Archie Ryan had arrived in a temper. A short, stubby, muscular man in canvas work pants and an un-tucked plaid flannel shirt, he stomped past the kitchen window, ignoring his daughter’s wave. He went straight to the trailer she’d persuaded him to park in the backyard because that was the only way she could keep an eye on him.

After putting the sweet potatoes in the oven to roast, she called for Joe to set the table, knowing very well he couldn’t—or wouldn’t—hear her over his loud music. She sighed in exasperation before climbing the attic steps to bang on his door until it rattled.

Archie was next. However, as soon as Sophie stepped outside the back door, the mud-speckled red motorbike leaning against the garden shed caught her eye. And held it.

Getaway.

She plopped down onto the back step and rested her chin on the heel of her palm, letting herself imagine climbing aboard Joe’s peppy little bike and taking off for the hills, leaving behind her cantankerous father, her complicated son and all her other responsibilities. She’d go straight to the Rockies and climb toward the sky, the Continental Divide being the closest thing to heaven on earth that she knew of. Already she could feel the wind in her hair, the thrum of the engine, the adrenaline coursing through her bloodstream….

Sophie shook her head. She hadn’t dreamed about such things in years. Luke was to blame, Luke and his seductive pledge that he’d wanted to take her with him.

Fourteen years too late.

“Goddamn you, Maverick,” she said, rising to stalk across the straggly grass to pound on her father’s dented door. “Supper,” she barked. “Now or never, Dad.” Without waiting, she returned to the cottage where Joe was miraculously setting the table. She wrapped her arms around his skinny shoulders and gave him a tight hug that was mostly a comfort to herself. He slipped away, smiling sheepishly.

The screen door wheezed. “What’s to eat?” Buzzsaw demanded in his distinctive gravelly voice, already scowling at her from beneath the creased brim of his grimy straw cowboy hat. He had a grizzled week-old beard and stormy brown eyes that turned mean when he’d crossed from pleasantly buzzed to downright drunk.

Sophie was no longer intimidated. Time and circumstance had tipped the scales of power in her favor. She swept off her father’s hat and set a green salad on the table. “It’s been a long, hard day. We are going to sit together and have a nice dinner without complaint or ill comment. We will be polite and courteous and talk only of pleasant subjects. Isn’t that right, Dad?”

Archie grunted as he went to his place.

Sophie took that as agreement. “Joey, will you say grace?”

“Oh, Mom.”

She smiled—pointedly. “Pardon me. I meant, Joe, my dear, handsome, obedient son, will you please say grace?”

Joe took one look at her steely smile and ducked his chin to comply. He knew his mother’s limits.

Even Archie seemed to understand; occasionally a glimmer of a clue pierced his thick skull. They ate dinner in a near silence that Sophie found very restful. The only discussions were those she initiated, consisting of topics such as the cushions she was needlepointing for the window seat in her bedroom and the gorgeous acorn squash Bess Ripley was selling from her produce stand at the railroad junction.

When they finished, Joe helped wash the dishes one-handed—a towering ice cream cone occupying the other—and then begged to be excused to play computer games. Because he asked so nicely Sophie agreed, even though she couldn’t understand why he didn’t want to be outside on such a beautiful evening. She thought of Luke then, locked up in one of Treetop’s little-used, cement-block jail cells. Luke, who belonged to the outdoors more than anyone she’d ever known.

It wasn’t like this was the first fine September evening he’d spent in the lockup. The Mustangs’ penchant for petty crime had kept them all checking in and out of the jail on a rotating basis. Luke had always been the first to make bail or pay his fine, thanks to Mary Lucas and her attorneys-on-retainer.

There was no reason for Sophie to feel sorry for him.

She put the last plate away and slammed the yellow cupboard door. She raked her hair back from her face, hoping the taut pull of skin over her forehead would yank her out of the momentary funk.

Instead her thoughts returned to the shock of seeing Luke again. How he’d alternated between lazy taunts and the bitter accusations that had shaken her already-wobbly resolution to distance herself.

What had become of Luke? Her Luke—handsome, vital, burning with the joy of life?

Sure, he’d always been wild. But he’d never been…bad. Not at the core. Not like Demon Bradshaw, who the sheriff’s department currently suspected of selling illegal firearms, among other nefarious dealings. So far they hadn’t been able to put together enough evidence for an arrest.

“That’s not Luke.” Sophie let out a deep breath and released her hair. She pulled the drain and wiped down the counter, her eyebrows drawn together in a scowl that was an unconscious copy of her father’s.

“Hey, girl,” Archie called from the front porch. “Come on out here.”

Figuring she’d put it off long enough, Sophie went to the door, wiping her wet hands on the back pockets of her denim pedal pushers. “Ice cream, Dad?”

“Uh, no.” Guiltily Archie slipped a can of beer to his left side, holding it there with the stump of the arm he’d lost in a logging accident on Lucas land approximately thirty years ago. Sophie made no comment. Aside from the occasional sniping argument when her temper wore thin, she’d given up expecting her father to change his ways. Only middle age and bouts of ill health had mellowed his bad habits.

She sat beside him on the purple porch swing and gazed out over Granite Street, waiting for the well-named Buzzsaw to start in on the grief the Lucases had caused him. Birds twittered and hopped in the old plum tree that made a canopy over the small front lawn, pecking at the last of the rotting fruit. The saw-toothed leaves shimmered against the deepening sky.

For once Archie was subdued. “I hear that good-for-nothing Lucas boy’s back in town.”

“He’s a Salinger, Dad. His mother was a Lucas.”

Archie snorted. “Same thing. They’re all rotten, don’t matter what name they go by. It’s in the blood.”

Sophie tensed. The front windows were open. Joe might overhear their conversation from the living room. The bleeps, small explosions and mechanical screams of his computer video game reassured her that his attention was focused elsewhere—on virtual mayhem instead of the real kind. “I wouldn’t condemn them all,” she said. “But, yes, I did arrest Luke Salinger.”

Archie drank deeply and emitted a satisfied ahhh. “For speeding?”

“I gave him a citation for that. I arrested him on old charges—breaking and entering and arson. Remember the fire that damaged the law office? Fourteen years ago, next month.”

“Humph. That boy always was trouble, with his fancy motorcycle and his law-breakin’ ways. I hope you got the sense not to have any more to do with him.” Sophie’s past relationship with Luke—an alliance Archie had done his best to prevent—hung between them with all the levity of a lead balloon.

She fingered the frayed edge of her pedal pushers. “Well, Dad, I expect I’ll be seeing him in court.”

“Court.” Archie guffawed. “You think them muckety-mucks are gonna let that case get to court? Old lady Lucas will be in the judge’s chambers calling in favors—”

“Hush, Dad. I don’t want Joey to hear.”

That shut Archie up. He and Sophie had never talked about the identity of Joe’s father, partly because Archie had thrown her out of the trailer in a drunken rage when he’d found out she was pregnant. He’d been deep into a bad streak then, drinking non-stop. Only seventeen and not yet graduated, Sophie had been almost relieved to go through the pregnancy on her own, in a rented room at Lettice Bellew’s boardinghouse. Archie hadn’t seen his grandson until Joe was three years old. And it wasn’t until he and Sophie had made their uneasy peace many years later that he’d become a regular fixture in their lives.

Archie’s brows met in a deep frown. “Girl, what are you gonna tell the boy about, uh…”

Sophie held her breath, but her father didn’t finish the question. In which case she wasn’t about to volunteer an answer.

“Them Lucases,” he growled, lapsing into familiar territory. He thrust out his stump, the sleeve of his shirt knotted where the elbow should have been. “You know what they done to me, girl. By rights I should be settin’ pretty with a big pension, but nosiree, old lady Lucas is as mean as a junkyard dog, holding tight to every penny unless she’s gonna see some return…”

Sophie tuned out her father’s voice until it was no more than an annoying whine at the back of her brain. The truth of the matter was that Archie had snuck a few beers the day he’d had the accident with a chain saw that had resulted in the loss of his arm. Mary Lucas, a new widow at the time, had taken over running the Lucas cattle ranch and logging operations. She’d paid the hospital bills and given Archie a generous settlement—considering the circumstances—a goodly portion of which he’d promptly drunk up on a months-long spree. Even so, he persisted in blaming his troubles and sketchy work history on Mary Lucas and her extended family.

Sophie had heard it a thousand times before. Gently she pressed a hand on her father’s good arm. “Shut up, Dad, and take a look at the sunset. Isn’t that pretty?”

Archie barely glanced at the apricot glow that lit up the mountainous horizon before continuing churlishly, “Listen to me, girl. Call ’em Lucases or call ’em Salingers, that family will stomp you under their boot heels for so much as smiling at them the wrong way. You steer clear—”

“I’ve got a badge, Dad. Even Mary Lucas has to respect the law.”

“Sure, sure, go ask Sheriff Warren about that. He’s been doing their bidding ever since they helped him get elected top dog, just like every sheriff before him. How’dja think my accident report got cleaned up so no one named Lucas was to blame?”

Sophie simply shrugged. Argument was useless when her father got this worked up.

“That’s right,” Archie said, nodding so vigorously the swing started to sway. “I tell you—”

“Joey!” Sophie said in relief when her son made the mistake of poking his head out the door. “Join us. Please.”

Joe rolled his eyes, but he came outside and sat on the porch railing. The golden-pink light of the setting sun washed across his narrow face and baggy white T-shirt. To Sophie he was beautiful—not that she dared say so out loud when he’d become so touchy about expressions of affection. Silently she ached with her immense love for her son. Too much, she sometimes thought, for one heart to hold.

When Joe had been born she’d known with a protectiveness so fierce it scared her that she would do anything to keep her baby from suffering the kind of upbringing that she’d had—one that had become essentially homeless, parentless and loveless after her mother had died when she was only five. Right from the start, though, she’d denied Joe a father, even if it hadn’t been entirely by plan. Could she continue to deny him the truth as well, especially now that Luke was back home and the can of worms had been opened again?

Listening to his grandfather’s diatribe, Joe cocked his head in such a way that Sophie was reminded of Luke so explicitly that she wondered why no one else noticed. Or commented.

Probably some of them did, but only behind her back.

The Lucas brand, she thought, growing doleful as she twisted a thick curl of hair around her index finger. She’d always worried about what Mary Lucas, the dominating family matriarch, might do if she knew for sure that Joe carried her blood. As of yet, her eldest grandson Heath hadn’t produced an heir. For a long time now Sophie had watched and waited, knowing more about Heath’s personal life than she cared to because she was friendly with his wife, Kiki. It was Sophie’s greatest fear that one day Mary Lucas might began to look elsewhere for her heir.

And there would be Joe Ryan, hidden in plain sight.

The Lucas brand was more trouble than it was worth, in Sophie’s estimation. Joe wasn’t one of their heads of cattle, mineral mines, or uncut trees. He wasn’t their property.

She would never let that family stamp their brand on him!

If that meant she had to deny his parentage, so be it.

“TELL ME ABOUT SOPHIE RYAN,” Luke said when the deputy came to collect the hard plastic supper tray. For fifteen minutes he’d been standing at the high, narrow window of his jail cell, looking out at the sky, thinking of Sophie and her amazing statement of innocence regarding the criminal investigation. She hadn’t uttered one world of explanation to defend, or prove, herself, only brought him in silence to the station, booked him, fingerprinted him and locked him up.

And Luke believed her.

It remained true that someone with inside knowledge had dropped a bug in Ed Warren’s ear. But that someone had not been Sophie, despite the incriminating words that Luke had overheard and somehow misinterpreted.