"Dark Paradise" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hoag Tami)CHAPTER 1 IT STARTED out as a bad hair day and went downhill from there,” Marilee Jennings said aloud as her Honda crossed the border into Montana. She took a last drag on her cigarette and crushed out the stub amid a dozen others in the ashtray. The line was a joke she and Lucy had shared time and again during their friendship. Whenever either of them began a conversation with that line, it meant the other was to provide the Miller Lite, the pizza, and the shoulder to cry on. Usually, they ended up laughing. Always they ended up commiserating. They had met in a stress management course for court reporters. After two hours of being counseled not to attempt to resolve stress with cigarettes, liquor, and shop talk, they walked out of the meeting room and Lucy turned to her with a wry smile and a pack of Salem Light 100’s in her hand and said, “So you want to go get a beer?” The bond had been instant and strong. Not a cloying friendship, but a relationship based on common ground and a sense of humor. They both worked on their own, hustling for government contracts and working for a string of attorneys, taking depositions and doing the usual grunt work of transcripts and subpoenas and fending off amorous advances of legal beagles in heat. They both saw the kinds of ugliness people could resort to in labor-management disputes, and took down in the secret code of their profession first-person accounts of everything from the absurdities of divorce battles to the atrocities of murder. They shared the common problems of their profession-the stress of a job that demanded perfection, the headaches of dealing with arrogant attorneys who wanted everything but the bill in twenty-four hours, then went for months without bothering to pay them. And yet, in many ways, they were as different as night and day. Lucy liked the glamour attached to the people she worked for. She thrived on intrigue and dyed her hair a different shade of blond every six months because sameness bored her. She looked at the world with the narrow eyes of an amused cynic. Her insights were as sharp as a stiletto and so was her tongue. She was ambitious and ruthless and wry. She adored the limelight and coveted the lush life. Mari still harbored the weary hope that people were essentially good, even though she had seen that many were not. Appearances seldom impressed her because she had grown up in a neighborhood where the phrase “all style and no substance” was the battle cry of most of the women as they ran to their BMWs, charge cards in hand, to race to the latest sale at Nordstrom’s. She had no aspirations to fame or fortune and dreamed mostly of a quiet place where she could fit in unnoticed. Their differences had only served to balance their relationship. They had shared a lot in those late-night beer and bullshit sessions. Then Lucy had come into some money, chucked her job, and moved to Montana, and while the bond between them hadn’t broken, it had been stretched awfully thin. The intervening year had been a long one. Mari had missed her friend. Neither of them was good about writing letters, and time slipped by between phone calls. But she knew the friendship would still be there. Lucy would welcome her with that same kind of casual amusement she turned on every other aspect of her life. All Mari would have to do would be to step out of her car, shrug her shoulders, and say, “It started out as a bad hair day and went downhill from there.” Her eyes darted to the rearview mirror, betraying her as the tide of depression tried to rise again inside her. She frowned at the state of her wild, streaky blond mane. Who was she kidding? Her whole life had been a series of bad hair days. While her two sisters had inherited their mother’s champagne-and-satin locks, Mari had been given a tangle of rumpled raw silk with dark roots that turned nearly platinum at the ends. It was an unmanageable mess, and she wore it sheared off just above her shoulders in a bob that somehow never lived up to the description of “classic” or “stylish.” Long ago she had decided her hair was a metaphor for her life: she was wilder than she ought to be; she didn’t match the rest of her family; she never quite lived up to expectations. “It doesn’t matter, Marilee,” she declared, leaning over to shove a cassette into the tape deck and crank the volume. “You’re in Montana now.” Sacramento was just a dot on the map behind her. The life she had led there was in the past. She was officially on hiatus with no plans, no prospects, no thoughts for the future beyond spending a week or three with her old friend. A vacation to clear the mind and soothe a bruised heart. A pause in the flow of life to take stock, reflect, and burn the pile of business suits that covered the backseat of her Honda. She buzzed down the car’s windows and breathed deep of the sweet, cool air that rushed in. A wondrous sense of liberation and anticipation filled her as the wind whipped her hair and Mary-Chapin Carpenter proclaimed to feel lucky in spite of the odds. Life began anew right now, this instant. Glancing down, she fished the pack of Salems out from among the mountain of travel guides on the seat beside her, but she paused as she started to shake one out. Life began anew. Right now. Grinning, she chucked the pack out the window, stepped on the gas, and started singing along in a strong, warm alto voice. The mountains to the west had turned purple as the sun slid down behind their massive shoulders. The sky above them was still the color of flame-vibrant, glowing. To the east, another range rose up in ragged splendor, snow-capped, the slopes blanketed in the deep green of pine forests. And before her stretched a valley that was vast and verdant. Off to her right, a small herd of elk grazed peacefully beside a stream. The sight, the setting, shot another burst of adrenaline and enthusiasm through her. The trip to euphoria from near depression left her feeling giddy. She imagined she was shedding her unhappiness like an old skin and coming to this new place naked and clean. This was paradise. Eden. A place for new beginnings. Night had fallen by the time Mari finally found her way to Lucy’s place with the aid of the map Lucy had sent in her first letter. Her “hideout,” she’d called it. The huge sky was as black as velvet, dotted with the sequins of more stars than she had ever imagined. The world suddenly seemed a vast, empty wilderness, and she pulled into the yard of the small ranch, questioning for the first time the wisdom of a surprise arrival. There were no lights glowing a welcome in the windows of the handsome new log house. The garage doors were closed. She climbed out of her Honda and stretched, feeling exhausted and rumpled. The past two weeks had sapped her strength, the decisions she had made taking chunks of it at a time. The drive up from Sacramento had been accomplished in a twenty-four-hour marathon with breaks for nothing more than the bathroom and truck-stop burritos, and now the physical strain of that weighed her down like an anchor. It had seemed essential that she get here as quickly as possible, as if she had been afraid her nerve would give out and she would succumb to the endless dissatisfaction of her life in California if she didn’t escape immediately. The wild pendulum her emotions had been riding had left her feeling drained and dizzy. She had counted on falling into Lucy’s care the instant she got out of her car, but Lucy didn’t appear to be home, and disappointment sent the pendulum swinging downward again. Foolish, really, she told herself, blinking back the threat of tears as she headed for the front porch. She couldn’t have expected Lucy to know she was coming. She hadn’t been able to bring herself to call ahead. A call would have meant an explanation of everything that had gone on in the past two weeks, and that was better made in person. A calico cat watched her approach from the porch rail, but jumped down and ran away as she climbed the steps, its claws scratching the wood floor as it darted around the corner of the porch and disappeared. The wind swept down off the mountain and howled around the weathered outbuildings, bringing with it a sense of isolation and a vague feeling of desertion that Mari tried to shrug off as she raised a hand and knocked on the door. No lights brightened the windows. No voice called out for her to keep her pants on. She swallowed at the combination of disappointment and uneasiness that crowded the back of her throat. Against her will her eyes did a quick scan of the moon-shadowed ranch yard and the hills beyond. The place was in the middle of nowhere. She had driven through the small town of New Eden and gone miles into the wilderness, seeing no more than two other houses on the way-and those from a great distance. She knocked again, but didn’t wait for an answer before trying the door. Lucy had mentioned wildlife in her few letters. The four-legged, flea-scratching kind. “Bears. I remember something about bears,” she muttered, the nerves at the base of her neck wriggling at the possibility that there were a dozen watching her from the cover of darkness, sizing her up with their beady little eyes while their stomachs growled. “If it’s all the same to you, Luce, I’d rather not meet one up close and personal while you’re off doing the boot-scootin’ boogie with some cowboy.” Stepping inside, she fumbled along the wall for a light switch, then blinked against the glare of a dozen small bulbs artfully arranged in a chandelier of antlers. Her first thought was that Lucy’s abysmal housekeeping talents had deteriorated to a shocking new low. The place was a disaster area, strewn with books, newspapers, note paper, clothing. She drifted away from the door and into the large room that encompassed most of the first floor of the house, her brain stumbling to make sense of the contradictory information it was getting. The house was barely a year old, a blend of western tradition and contemporary architectural touches. Lucy had hired a decorator to capture those intertwined feelings in the interior. But the western watercolor prints on the walls hung at drunken angles. The cushions had been torn from the heavy, overstuffed chairs. The seat of the red leather sofa had been slit from end to end. Stuffing rose up from the wound in ragged tufts. Broken lamps and shattered pottery littered the expensive Berber rug. An overgrown pothos had been ripped from its planter and shredded, and was strung across the carpet like strips of tattered green ribbon. Not even Lucy was this big a slob. Mari’s pulse picked up the rhythm of fear. “Lucy?” she called, the tremor in her voice a vocal extension of the goose bumps that were pebbling her arms. The only answer was an ominous silence that pressed in on her eardrums until they were pounding. She stepped over a gutted throw pillow, picked her way around a smashed terra-cotta urn, and peered into the darkened kitchen area. The refrigerator door was ajar, the light within glowing like the promise of gold inside a treasure chest. The smell, however, promised something less pleasant. She wrinkled her nose and blinked against the sour fumes as she found the light switch on the wall and flicked it upward. Recessed lighting beamed down on a repulsive mess of spoiling food and spilled beer. Milk puddled on the Mexican tile in front of the refrigerator. The carton lay abandoned on its side. Flies hovered over the garbage like tiny vultures. “Jesus, Lucy,” she muttered, “what kind of party did you throw here?” The pine cupboard doors stood open, their contents spewed out of them. Stoneware and china and flatware lay broken and scattered, appropriately macabre place settings for the gruesome meal that had been laid out on the floor. Mari backed away slowly, her hand trembling as she reached out to steady herself with the one ladder-back chair that remained upright at the long pine harvest table. She caught her full lower lip between her teeth and stared through the sheen of tears. She had worked too many criminal cases not to see this for what it was. The house had been ransacked. The motive could have been robbery, or the destruction could have been the aftermath of something else, something uglier. “Lucy?” she called again, her heart sinking like a stone at the sure knowledge that she wouldn’t get an answer. Her gaze drifted to the stairway that led up to the loft where the bedrooms were tucked, then cut to the telephone that had been ripped from the kitchen wall and now hung by slender tendons of wire. Her heart beat faster. A fine mist of sweat slicked her palms. “Lucy?” “She’s dead.” The words were like a pair of shotgun blasts in the still of the room. Mari wheeled around, a scream wedged in her throat right behind her heart. He stood at the other end of the table, six feet of hewn granite in faded jeans and a chambray work shirt. How anything that big could have sneaked up on her was beyond reasoning. Her perceptions distorted by fear, she thought his shoulders rivaled the mountains for size. He stood there, staring at her from beneath the low-riding brim of a dusty black Stetson, his gaze narrow, measuring, his mouth set in a grim, compressed line. His right hand-big with blunt-tipped fingers-hung at his side just inches from a holstered revolver that looked big enough to bring down a buffalo. He spoke again, his voice low and rusty, his question jolting her like a cattle prod. “Who are you?” “Who am His scowl seemed to tighten at her language, but Mari couldn’t find it in her to care about decorum at the moment. From the corner of her eye she caught sight of a foot-long heavy brass candlestick lying on its side on the table. She inched her fingers down from the back of the chair and slid them around the cold, hard brass, her gaze locked on the stranger. “What have you done with Lucy?” He tucked his chin back. “Nothing.” “I think you ought to know that I’m not here alone,” Mari said with all the bravado she could muster. “My husband… Bruno… is out looking around the buildings.” “You came alone,” he drawled, squinting at her. “Saw you from the ridge.” He’d seen her. He’d been watching. A man with a gun had been watching her. Mari’s fingers tightened on the candlestick. His first words came back to her through the tangle in her brain. With a strangled cry she hurled the candlestick at him and bolted for the door, tripping over an uprooted ficus. She heard him grunt and swear as the missile hit. The candlestick sounded as loud as a cathedral bell as it met the pine floor. The scramble of boots sounded like a herd of horses stampeding after her. She kept her focus on the front door, willing it closer, but as in a nightmare, her arms and legs weighed her down like lead. The air around her seemed to take on a heaviness that defied speed. She scrambled, stretched, stumbled, sobs catching in her throat as she gasped for breath. He caught her from behind, one hand grabbing hold of her vest and T-shirt. He hauled her backward, banding his other arm around her waist and pulling her into the rock wall that was his body. “Hold still!” Mari clawed the beefy forearm that was pushing the air from her lungs. Wild, animal sounds of distress mewed in her throat, and she kicked his shins with vicious intent, connecting the heels of her sneakers with bone two swings out of three. “Dammit, hold still!” he ordered, tightening his arm against her. “I didn’t kill her. It was an accident.” “Tell it to a lawyer!” she managed to shout, pushing frantically at the big hand that was pressed up against her diaphragm. She couldn’t budge him. She couldn’t hurt him. He had her. The panic that thought bred nearly choked her. “Listen to me,” he ordered sharply. Then he gentled his tone as skills from other parts of his life kicked in. He knew better than to fight fear with force. “Easy,” he murmured to her in the same low, soothing voice he used with frightened horses. “Listen to me now. Just take it easy. I’m not here to hurt you.” “Yeah? Well, you’re doing a pretty damn good imitation of it,” she snapped, squirming. “You’re pushing my spleen into my lungs.” Immediately he loosened his grip but still held her firmly against him. “Just settle down. Just take it easy.” Mari craned her neck around to get a look at his eyes. Men could say anything, but their eyes seldom lied. She had learned that in the courtroom and in the offices of countless lawyers. She had taken down testimony word for word, lies and truths, but she had learned very early on to read the difference in the witness’s eyes. The pair boring down on her were tucked deep beneath an uncompromising ledge of brow. They were the gray of storm clouds, and slightly narrow, as if he were permanently squinting against the glare of the sun. They gave little away of the man, but there was nothing in them that hinted at lies or violence. She relaxed marginally and he rewarded her by easing her down so that her feet touched the floor. Air rushed back into her lungs and she sucked it in greedily, trying not to lean back into him for support. She was already too aware of his body, the size and strength of it, the heat of it. His left hand encircled her upper arm, the knuckles just brushing the outer swell of her breast. The fingers of his right hand splayed over her belly, thumb and forefinger bracketing the inner and under contours of the same breast. He smelled of hard work, leather, and horses. As he murmured to her in his low, soothing voice, his breath drifted like a warm breeze across the shell of her ear and the side of her face. Butter mint. She couldn’t think of a single psychopathic killer who had been described as having butter mints on his breath. “You gonna be still?” he asked softly. Her body was pressed back into his, reminding him just how soft a woman could be. His line of sight down over her shoulder gave him an unobstructed view of the rise and fall of her breasts as she struggled to slow her breathing. The loose vest she wore had slipped back during the struggle. The outline of a lacy bra was unmistakable, reminding him just how delicate a woman’s underwear could be. All he needed to do was turn his hand a fraction and he could fill his palm with the weight of her breast. His fingers flexed involuntarily against her rib cage. Damn. He’d gone too long without. That was clear enough. He didn’t allow himself to indiscriminately want women. He had too many more important things to focus his attention on. He shouldn’t have even considered the possibility with this one. A friend of Lucy MacAdam’s. He didn’t have to know any more about her than that to know she was trouble. He dropped his hand away from her belly abruptly and took a half-step back, distancing himself from temptation. Mari turned to face him, her sneakers crunching on the kindling that had once been an end table constructed of raw twigs. Still trembling, she planted one hand on her hip and snagged back a tangled mass of hair from her eyes with the other, anchoring it at the back of her neck. “Who are you?” she demanded, wary. “J. D. Rafferty.” He bent to pick up the hat he’d lost in the scuffle, never taking his eyes off her. “I live up the hill a ways.” “And you’re in the habit of just walking into people’s homes?” “No, ma’am.” “But you saw me come in, so you just thought ‘Hey, what the hell? I might as well go scare the shit out of her’?” He narrowed his eyes. “No, ma’am. The lawyer asked me to look after the stock. I saw you come in, saw the lights. Didn’t want anything funny going on while I was down here.” Mari cast a damning glance around the room, stricken anew by the utter destruction. “Looks to me like something already happened, Mr. Rafferty. And I don’t happen to think it’s particularly funny.” “Kids,” he muttered, staring at the broken frame of a bentwood rocker. He detested waste, and that was what vandalism was-waste of time, energy, property. Waste and disrespect. “Town kids get a little tanked up. They go riding around, lookin’ for trouble. Don’t usually take ’em long to find it. This happened a week ago. I called the sheriff. A deputy came out and wrote it up, for what that’s worth.” Putting off the inevitable, Mari went to the ficus that had foiled her escape and righted it carefully, her hands gentle as she stroked the smooth trunk and touched the dying leaves. “I didn’t catch your name while you were kicking my shins black and blue,” Rafferty said sardonically. “Marilee. Marilee Jennings.” “Mary Lee-” “No. Marilee. It’s all one word.” He scowled at that, as if he didn’t trust anybody who had such a name. Mari almost smiled. Her mother wouldn’t like J. D. Rafferty. He was too rough. Crude, Abigail would say. Abigail Falkner Jennings thrived on pretention. She had given all her daughters pretentious names that only snooty people didn’t stumble over-Lisbeth, Annaliese, Marilee. “She’s dead,” he declared bluntly. She would have put the question off a while longer, would have thought of inane things for another moment or two. Her fingers tightened on the trunk of the ficus as if trying to hold something that had already slipped beyond her grasp. “Happened about ten days ago…” Ten days. Ten days ago she had been crying over a man she didn’t love, giving up a career she’d never wanted, breaking ties to the family she had never fit into. Lucy had been dying. She brought a hand up to press it over her trembling lips. She shook her head in denial, desperation and tears swimming in her eyes. Lucy couldn’t be dead-she was too ornery, too cynical, too wise. “… hunting accident…” Rafferty’s words penetrated the fog only dimly. He sounded as if he were talking to her from a great distance instead of just a few feet away. She stared at him, her defenses raising shields that deflected the harshness of the subject and focused her attention on unimportant things. His hair-it was sensibly short and the color of sable. He had a little cowlick in front at the edge of his high, broad forehead. His tan-it ended in a line of demarcation from his hatband. Somehow that made him seem less dangerous, more human. The paler skin looked soft and vulnerable. Stupid word for a man with a six-gun strapped to his hips-vulnerable. “Hunting?” she mumbled as if the word were foreign. J.D. pressed his lips together, impatience and compassion warring inside him. She looked as fragile as a china doll, as if the slightest bump or pressure would shatter her like the lamps and pots that lay scattered on the floor. Beneath the tangled fringe of flaxen bangs and the soft arcs of dark brows, her deep-set blue eyes were huge and brimming with pain and confusion. Something in him wanted to offer comfort. He labeled it foolishness and shoved it aside. He didn’t want anything to do with her. He hadn’t wanted anything to do with Lucy, but she had drawn him into her web like a black widow spider. He wanted this place, that was true enough, but he didn’t want He steeled himself against her tears and settled his hat firmly on his head, an insult she would probably never fathom. “Lucy didn’t go hunting,” she mumbled stupidly. “It was an accident. Some damned city idiot shot without looking.” Ten days ago. It seemed impossible to Mari that she could have lived ten days oblivious of the death of a friend. Shot. God. People moved to the country to Mari shook her head again, trying to clear the dizziness, only making it worse. “W-where is she?” “Six feet under, I reckon,” he said brutally. “I wouldn’t know.” “But you were her friend-” “No, ma’am.” He moved toward her slowly, deliberately, his expression dark and intense. He came too close. Close enough that she had to tilt her head back to look at him. “We had sex,” he said bluntly, his voice low and rough. “Friendship never entered into it.” Rafferty raised a hand and traced his thumb down her cheek to the corner of her mouth. “How about you, Mary Lee?” he whispered. “You want to give a cowboy a ride?” He knew he was being a bastard. J.D. didn’t give a damn. If he was lucky he would scare her away from this place. “How about it, Mary Lee?” he murmured. “I’ll let you be on top.” “You son of a bitch!” Thinking she would choke on her outrage, Mari kicked him in the shin. He jumped back from her, swearing, his face flushing dark with pain and fury. Belatedly she questioned the wisdom of making him angry. He could take what he wanted. They were in the middle of nowhere. No one knew she had come to Montana. He could rape her and kill her and dump her body in the mountains, never to be found. Christ, for all she knew, he had killed Lucy. But the deed was done. She couldn’t cower from him now. “Get out!” she screamed. “Get the hell out of here!” J.D. gathered his temper with a ruthless mental fist. He moved to the front door and leaned a hand against the jamb, looking back at her from under the brim of his black hat. The door stood open to the night, inviting a swarm of bugs to buzz around the antler chandelier in the foyer. “All you had to do was say no.” He tipped his hat in a gesture that seemed more mocking than polite. Mari followed him out and watched as he mounted a stout sorrel horse that stood waiting in the puddle of amber light that spilled from the house. “There’s a motel on the edge of town,” he said, settling into the saddle. “Drive slow on your way down. You hit an elk with that damned Japanese car and there won’t be enough left to make a sardine can.” She crossed her arms against the chill of the evening and glared at him. “You could at least say you’re sorry,” she said bitterly. “I’m not,” he replied, and reined his horse away. She watched him ride off at an easy lope, away from the ranch yard, away from the road. The darkness swallowed him up long before the hollow drum of hoofbeats faded. “Bastard,” she muttered, turning back to go inside. The adrenaline ebbed from her system, leaving the weight of exhaustion in its wake. The last vestiges of shock lingered like novocaine, keeping the first sting of grief at bay. She tried to fix her mind on the mundane tasks of getting back to town and finding a hotel room, tried to forget the residual feel of J. D. Rafferty’s hands on her, his big body pressed against her back, his rawsilk voice murmuring indecent proposals. But the sensations lingered disturbingly, adding a vague, grimy film of guilt to the complex layers of emotion. Feeling a need to wash both physically and psychologically, she went in search of a bathroom, finding one on the second floor. It had fared no better than the rest of the house. The lid from the toilet tank had been smashed. It looked as if someone had taken a jackhammer to the shower stall, then broke up the tile floor into rubble and dust. The faucets still worked, and she filled the sink with cold water, bending over to bathe her face with it. She pulled the bottom of her T-shirt out of her jeans and used it as a towel, then stood, staring for a moment into the cracked, gilt-framed mirror that hung above the vanity. The woman who stared back was pale and dark-eyed with pain. She looked like the survivor of a hurricane, ravaged by wind and elements that had roared so far beyond her control that she felt as insignificant and powerless as a gnat. She had packed up her life and run to Montana, to a friend who had been dead more than a week. Lucy would have seen a bitter, ironic humor in that. She thought of her friend, of what Lucy would have had to say about the way things had turned out, and tears swelled over her lashes and slid down her cheeks. He watched her through a Simmons Silver 3¥9 wide-angle Prohunter scope. Not his favorite, especially not for this time of night, but it was all he had with him. He came here nearly every night, not because he expected to see the blonde, but because he wanted to draw her down off his mountain. She lingered there, a pale apparition among the dark trees, a phantom carried on the wings of owls. She haunted him. Too many things did. He never slept at night. The dead came to him anyway. There was nothing he could do to stop them, but he stayed awake and watchful, willing them to leave. An exhausting vigil that was never rewarded. He watched her cross the yard toward a small foreign car, his heart galloping, a dozen hammers pounding against the plate in his head. The fine lines of the sight crossed her chest. His cheek rested against the stock of the Remington 700 rifle. Half a breath settled in his lungs. His heart rate slowed in conditioned response. His fingertip remained still against the trigger. There was no killing a ghost. He knew that better than anyone. He could only pray for it to leave and not come back to his mountain. If only there were a God to hear him… |
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