The Sheriff of Shelter Valley

“Anyway,” Bonnie said suddenly, spreading her arms wide, “Greg moved back here to run for Sheriff last January and hasn’t had a single date since he was elected. And it hasn’t been for lack of trying on my part, either.”

“So I’m just one in a long line to you, eh?” Beth asked, trying to lighten the tension a bit, make sure Bonnie knew there were no hard feelings, and the two women chuckled as they returned to the playroom.

Bonnie went back to supervising and Beth to finding crayons and engaging little minds in age-appropriate activities. On the surface, nothing had changed. But Beth was looking at her friend with new eyes. She’d had no idea Bonnie had led anything other than a blessed life.

There was a lesson in this.

Bonnie had suffered, and still found a way to love life. The other woman’s cheerfulness, her happiness, could not be faked. It bubbled from deep inside her, and was too consistent not to be genuine.

Beth had a new personal goal. Peace was still what mattered most—behind Ryan’s health and happiness, of course. But she didn’t plan to completely scratch happiness off her list. At least, not yet.

The next time Bonnie asked her and Ryan to Sunday dinner, she was going to accept. What was she accomplishing by denying herself friends? She literally didn’t know what she had to offer, so there was no way she could embark on an intimate relationship. But where was the harm in taking part in a family dinner? How was she ever going to create a new life for Ryan and herself if she didn’t start living?

CHAPTER THREE

LOOKING AT THE PHOTOS WAS GRUELING.

“I think we’re wasting our time here, looking in the wrong places,” Deputy Burt Culver said. Greg studied the photos, anyway.

It was the third Friday in August, and there’d been a fourth carjacking the night before. This time the victim hadn’t been so lucky. A fifty-three-year-old woman on her way home from work in Phoenix had been found dead along the side of the highway. There was still no sign of the new-model Infiniti she’d been driving.

“I understand why it’s important to you to tie these incidents together with what happened ten years ago, Greg, but you’re letting this get personal.”

Anyone but Burt would be receiving his walking papers at that moment. Eyes narrowed, Greg glanced up from the desk strewn with snapshots. “I appreciate your concern,” he said, tight-lipped, and turned back to the pictures—both old and new—of mangled cars. Of victims.

“But you’re not going to stop,” Burt said. In addition to obvious concern, there was a note of something bordering on disapproval in the other man’s voice.

Studying a photo of the smashed front end of a ten-year-old Ford Thunderbird, Greg shook his head. “I’m not going to stop.” The front end of a year-old Lexus found abandoned earlier that summer, its driver nearly dead from dehydration, unconscious in the back seat, looked strangely similar to that of the Thunderbird. They hadn’t started out looking similar. “Neither am I going to let my personal reasons for wanting this case solved interfere with the job of solving it.”

His trained eye skimmed over the image of the nearly nude young woman found in the desert ten summers before. The carjackers had become rapists that time. Her car, a newer-model Buick, had turned up twenty miles farther down the road. Also smashed.

Greg frowned. Another front-end job.

“My instincts—” He paused. “My cop instincts are telling me there’s some connection here.”

“Why?” Culver asked, barely glancing at the photos. Of course, he’d seen them all before. Many times. As had Greg. “Why these two sets only? Why not look into the rash of heists down south?”

“Those cars were being put to use.”

“So?”

“Whoever’s doing this is taking brand-new or nearly new cars, expensive ones, and smashing them up.”

“Joyriders.”

Yeah. It happened. More often than Greg liked to admit.

And yet… “Look at these front ends,” Greg said, lining up a few of the photos on another part of the desk.

Burt looked. “They’re mangled.”

“They’re identical,” Greg insisted.

“They’re smashed, Greg.” Burt wasn’t impressed.

Hell, maybe he was letting it get personal. Maybe he should agree with his deputy and back away. Still…

“They all look like they hit the same thing at the same angle and speed,” he said slowly.

Pulling at his ear—something he only did when he was feeling uncomfortable—the deputy leaned his other hand on the desk and gave the photos more than the cursory glance he’d afforded them earlier. “Could be,” he said.

It would be pretty difficult, especially after the hard time he’d just given Greg, for the older man to admit he’d missed something that might be important. Greg had no desire to belabor the issue. His eyes moved to the table behind his deputy and the partially constructed jigsaw puzzle there, which gave Burt a moment to himself.

“Let’s not write off the past just yet” was all he said.

“I’ll order some blowups of these….”

Burt didn’t meet Greg’s eyes again as he left the room. Standing over the puzzle, pleased to fit in the first piece he chose, Greg sympathized with his friend and coworker. There was nothing a cop like Burt—or Greg—hated more than to have missed something important.

WHY HAD SHE THOUGHT this was a good idea? With her canvas bag clutched at her side, Beth stood in Bonnie Neilson’s sunny kitchen on the third Sunday in August, watching Ryan and Katie ignoring each other as they played quietly in the attached family room. She longed for the dingy but very organized interior of her rented duplex. Better the hardship you knew than one you didn’t.

The duplex wasn’t much, but for the time being, it was hers. She was in control there. Safe.

“Keith just went to town for more ice,” Bonnie was saying as she put the finishing touches on a delicious-looking fresh vegetable salad. Already in a basket on the table was a pile of homemade rolls. Really homemade, not the bread-machine kind she used to make…

Beth froze. She’d had a memory. A real one. She had no idea where that bread machine was, no picture of a kitchen, a home, a neighborhood, a town or state—but she knew she’d had a bread machine. And she’d used it.

And been chastised for it?

“Can I do something?” Beth asked, probably too suddenly, reacting to a familiar surge of panic. She needed something to occupy herself, calm herself.

Staying busy had worked for months. As far as she knew, it was the only thing that worked.

“You can—”

“Unca!” Katie’s squeal interrupted her mother.

The ensuing commotion as Katie tossed aside the magnetic writing board she’d had on her lap and jumped up to throw herself at her newly arrived uncle—and Ryan dropped the circular plastic shape he’d been attempting to shove into a square opening on the shape-sorter to make his way over to his mother’s leg—served to distract Beth. She was so relieved, she didn’t have nearly the problem she had anticipated with the arrival of Greg Richards.

Instead, she was almost thankful he’d come.

LATER THAT AFTERNOON, Beth had very mixed emotions about Greg’s presence at his sister’s house. Bonnie and Keith, her husband, had left to drive over to his grandmother’s. Katie was asleep in the new trundle bed in her room. Ryan was also asleep, his little body reassuring and warm against her. He’d climbed in her lap after lunch, when they’d all migrated to the sitting room before trying the new chocolate cream cheese dessert Bonnie had made that morning.

That was when Keith’s grandmother had called and Beth had suddenly found herself alone with a man who launched her right out of her element.

Not that she had any idea what her real element was. These days, all she had to go by was the Beth Allen Rules of Survival. A notebook with frighteningly few memories. Plus the perceptions she’d had, decisions she’d made, since waking up in that motel room.

He lounged on the leather couch, dressed in jeans and a cotton-knit pullover that emphasized the breadth of his chest. He was surveying her lazily, and appeared content to do so for some time to come. Beth didn’t think she could tolerate that.