“Apparently it was during the time she’d said she’d gone back to Indiana to take care of her sick grandmother. That too was a lie.”

  Bessie stared at him, hearing something in his voice. “Surely, you don’t think that she was responsible for the fire. I mean, how do you know anything he told you is the truth?”

  He felt a fist grip his heart, remembering what the small man in black had told him and how he’d wanted to argue that it couldn’t be true. But Leviathan Nash—or whoever he really was—had dates and times and even a copy of a newspaper story to back up his claims.

  Worse, all of it had a ring of truth that Earl Ray hadn’t been able to deny. “Tory was suspected of setting the fire. She was on the run that day she stepped off the bus and into my life.” His voice had dropped as the pain of his words dug deeper into his wounded heart. “All these years...” His voice broke again and he didn’t finish.

  He’d idolized Tory—even long after her death. To find out that she wasn’t the woman he’d thought she was, that everything had been a lie, was bad enough. But then to find out that they’d had a child and she had kept his daughter from him.

  Fighting to breathe, he couldn’t imagine a worse betrayal. He’d put Tory on a pedestal and kept her there. For years he hadn’t let Bessie into his heart because he’d felt he would be betraying Tory. Now to find out that she was the one who’d betrayed him—and in the worst possible way.

  “I’m so sorry.”

  Earl Ray reached down and drew her up onto the large recliner with him. She nestled against his chest. He could feel the steady beat of her heart. He would recover from this with Bessie by his side. He was strong and determined. It was a terrible blow, but he would be the man Bessie believed she’d married.

  “I’m here for you,” she whispered, and he held her tighter. It wasn’t until later that the weight of the news would drop on her. He had a daughter who would be about thirty now. Bessie had to know that he would move heaven and earth to find her.

  * * *

  IT HAD BEEN one of those days, Jasper thought as he wandered around his house too upset to sit. He hadn’t been able to get what was written on Earl Ray’s Gossip card out of his mind. He felt as if nothing could shock him after that. Earl Ray had a daughter. His late wife had hidden it from him, the pregnancy, the birth and whatever had happened to the child while Earl Ray had been overseas fighting for their country.

  Everyone in town had known how much he’d idolized his first wife, Victoria “Tory” Crenshaw Caulfield. The man kept flowers on her grave and had spent years denying his feelings for Bessie because of it. No wonder the shock had knocked Earl Ray for a loop, Jasper thought.

  The ballerina jewelry box. Had Earl Ray given it to Tory? He would have recognized the music. Hell, the song alone would have been a gut punch and taken him back to that other life, only to have it ripped to shreds.

  Jasper hated to think what the man must be going through. To have a child he’d known nothing about. A grown daughter? At least he had Bessie. She would get him through this. No one was stronger than that woman.

  Jasper was on his second shot of bourbon when Ruby barked to let him know that they were no longer alone. He wandered to the front window in time to see the marshal drive up. What now? he wondered as he opened the door and stepped out on the porch.

  Leroy cut his engine and climbed out of his patrol SUV. He had on his lawman face, Jasper saw and felt his pulse spike. His first thought was Earl Ray.

  “Need to ask you a few questions,” Leroy said as he removed his Stetson. “Mind if we step inside, Mr. Cole?”

  “It’s Jasper, just like it was a few days ago when you stopped by to ask for my help.” The seriousness of the marshal’s tone set Jasper’s nerves on end. “What’s this about?” he asked, but got no answer as he let the marshal into the house. “Let me put my guard dog in the kennel.” He whistled and Ruby grudgingly followed him to the kennel instead of jumping all over, wagging her tail and ultimately licking the marshal in the face.

  Leroy didn’t speak until he came back and they were seated in the living room, the marshal perched on the edge of the couch turning his Stetson’s brim in his fingers. “There’s been a murder.”

  Jasper hadn’t been ready for that. Was it possible after he’d left that Earl Ray had gone back to Gossip and killed Leviathan Nash? “A murder?” he repeated nonsensically and wished he hadn’t indulged in the second helping of bourbon.

  “A man was found bludgeoned to death in that empty lot near the motel this morning,” Leroy said. “He’s been identified as Aiden Moss.”

  Jasper swore as he’d been given yet another shock today. Darby’s former fiancé? “Does Darby know?”

  The marshal nodded and seemed to hesitate for a moment before he said, “We have a witness who saw an altercation between you and the victim earlier in the evening yesterday.”

  “What? No,” Jasper said shaking his head. “I didn’t kill anyone.”

  “I’m going to need to get a statement from you.”

  He sighed. “I’m happy to give you a statement. You want to do it here or—”

  “Here’s fine,” the marshal said and pulled out his phone and hit Record. He went through the preliminaries: date, time and name and place where he was interviewing a suspect. “Start at the beginning please, Mr. Cole.”

  He took a breath, let it out, warning himself to be careful, and began. “If you’ve talked to Darby, then you already know that she called me. She was scared of her former fiancé—and with good reason—and asked me to come to town and make sure she got to the café safely where she’d agreed to meet him at his insistence. Her ex was an abusive jerk. Not to speak ill of the dead,” he added quickly. “I was driving into town when I saw him step out of a dark alley and grab her. I jumped out of my pickup. When he refused to let go of her, I hit him.”

  “The witness said you knocked him to the ground then jumped on him and had to be pulled off by Darby,” the marshal said.

  Jasper groaned. “It wasn’t quite that dramatic.”

  “Darby’s name and address were found in the deceased’s pocket along with a switchblade knife,” Leroy said.

  A knife? The bastard had a switchblade knife. Jasper felt his pulse bump up. What was the man planning to do with a knife? He remembered the way Aiden had been trying to reach for something from his pocket when Jasper had him down on the ground. But what had his heart pounding was the thought of what the man had been planning to do when he’d pulled Darby back into the alley.

  “Now that I think about it,” he said to the marshal. “At one point Aiden reached toward his pocket as if to pull out a weapon. I thought the fool was bluffing. Apparently not. But it just proves what I’m telling you. I jumped him because he was trying to drag Darby back into the alley and she was fighting to get away from him.” He sighed and continued with what he’d overheard at the café. “He threatened her before he left.”

  “What happened after Aiden Moss stormed out of the café?”

  “I was worried about Darby so I insisted she stay in my guest room out at the ranch, which she did. I gave her a ride into town this morning, saw Aiden’s car wasn’t at the motel and figured she would be all right in broad daylight since hopefully he’d left town. End of story.”

  “Not quite. Miss Fulton substantiates your story. But she said after she went to bed, she heard you leave the house last night.”

  Jasper groaned again and ran a hand through his hair. He didn’t want to tell the marshal about the kiss. “I couldn’t sleep. I went to check on a fence that had been down to make sure none of the cattle had gotten out. That’s where I’d been headed when she called needing my help. I wasn’t gone long.”

  “You didn’t go back to town?”

  “No, I did not. Look, I was happy to do this for Darby, but it isn’t like that between us. Aiden Moss was an incredible jackass and apparently even more dangerous than I thought, but I had no reason to want him dead—let alone any reason to kill him. With guys like him, karma is the best reckoning. Or at least we hope it is.”

  “You didn’t see Mr. Moss again?”

  “No. Like I said, I thought he’d left town.” Jasper frowned. “Where’s his car? It wasn’t at the motel when we drove by this morning.”

  The marshal shut off his phone, thanked him and pocketed it. “We haven’t found his car yet. You wouldn’t mind if I had a look around your ranch, would you?”

  He felt a sliver of fear slice up his spine. If someone was setting him up... He hadn’t experienced that kind of paranoia since leaving his job in homicide. He’d thought he’d put it behind him. “You’re welcome to look around.” But even as he said it, his stomach dropped at the thought of the car turning up out here. But who in Buckhorn would want to frame him?

  “You do realize that I can’t drive two vehicles at the same time, right?” he asked as the marshal stood to leave.

  Leroy’s smile never reached his eyes. “Miss Fulton would have had to have driven one of them.” Before Jasper could reiterate that she’d been sound asleep when he’d gotten back from checking the fence, the marshal raised a hand to stop him. “You aren’t planning to leave town anytime soon, are you?”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  DARBY SAT AT her desk, too shocked to move after the marshal’s visit earlier. At her office, she’d given him her statement, but she’d sensed that he hadn’t believed her. He kept asking about Jasper and their relationship. What a laugh. There was no relationship. That too the marshal hadn’t seemed to believe.

  “Why would you call him to help you, then?”

  How could she explain the way she felt about Jasper? She knew she was a pain in his neck. He’d been pretty clear that he hadn’t appreciated any of her visits. Last night he’d only been nice to her because he realized why she was so scared of Aiden. It had been the cop in him coming out, nothing more.

  “He’s just a nice guy who I knew I could depend on.” She thought about saying that they had met in college. But it had been so much more than that. Her feelings for him were so much more as well. Any hint of that, and it would only make the two of them look guiltier.

  Leroy had been particularly interested in Jasper driving away from the house last night. “He went to check some fence.”

  “That late at night?”

  She had thought the same thing. “He’d been about to do that when he got my call.”

  “When did he return?”

  She hated to admit the truth. “I don’t know. I fell asleep.”

  The marshal had stared at her for an unnervingly long moment. “After seeing your ex-fiancé again, being so afraid of him that you called Jasper Cole to go with you to meet him at the café and what happened after that, you simply went to sleep?”

  “It was emotionally exhausting and the bed was so soft and it was so quiet out there at the ranch...”

  “Had you stayed out there before?”

  “No, I told you, Jasper and I don’t have the kind of relationship you’re insinuating.”

  “But he was the one you called when you needed help. Did you call anyone else first?”

  She shuddered again at the memory of the interrogation—not to mention what the marshal had showed her at the end of it.

  “Would you recognize Mr. Moss’s handwriting?”

  She had said that she would.

  He’d pulled out a plastic bag with a sheet of paper covered with Aiden’s writing. She saw that the pages were from a Sleepy Pine Motel notepad. It was impossible to read all of what he’d written. Words were jammed together, some of the writing almost too small to read, other words large and bold and underlined so many times that the pen had cut through the paper.

  But she didn’t have to read much of it to realize what it was. Hatred. Threats. All the things Aiden planned to do to her if she didn’t come back to him. Just a few lines in, she’d pushed the bag away with a shudder, her hand going to her mouth to keep from throwing up.

  “It would appear that your ex-fiancé was obsessed with you and wanting revenge for you breaking up with him,” the marshal had said.

  All she’d been able to do was shake her head and keep this morning’s cake down. “I had no idea. I knew he was angry but...”

  “Really? He hadn’t contacted you before this?”

  Another shake of her head. “I left right after the breakup. I didn’t tell anyone where I’d gone. The last time I saw him, he’d scared me. His temper... I wanted nothing more to do with him.”

  “So why did you agree to meet him at the café?”

  “I thought he needed closure. He told me when he stopped by my office that he hadn’t gotten to have his say. I figured once he had, he would leave me alone.”

  “But after your meeting at the café you knew he wasn’t going to let you go that easily.” The marshal had checked his notepad. Clearly, he’d talked to the residents who’d been in the café and had heard Aiden threaten her. “What were his last words to you as he left the café?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Well, the other people in the café do remember,” Leroy said. “He said it wasn’t over, that you were going to be seeing him again, that he was going to make you sorry. Isn’t that why you went home with Jasper Cole? Isn’t that why he invited you? You both had to know that Aiden Moss could be dangerous. Whoever killed him took their anger out on him.”

  She’d felt shocked that he thought she might have... “I didn’t kill him.”

  “No. It was someone who didn’t like him and since Mr. Moss had just arrived in town, you and Jasper were the only ones with a motive to want him dead... Who do you think did this?”

  The memory of the marshal’s last words still vibrated through her. Leroy Baggins thought Jasper had done this. That he hadn’t been checking his fence in the dark last night. That instead, he’d been killing Aiden—for her.

  And when she’d thought it couldn’t get any worse, the marshal had said, “But if Jasper drove his pickup into town and killed your ex-fiancé to protect you, someone would have had to drive Mr. Moss’s car since it wasn’t in front of the motel this morning. Now who would that have been, Ms. Fulton?”

  * * *

  VI MULLEN COULDN’T believe after everything that had happened recently that someone was calling with good news. She carefully disconnected. She stood ramrod straight, her head up, chin out—just like her mother had always nagged her to do. She’d felt beaten down for too long, then add this latest thing with Karla Parson—

  She shook her head and took a deep breath, letting it out slowly. The call had been from the prosecutor. Karla had dropped the assault charges against her. There would be no trial. No more jail time. It was over.

  Vi knew she’d gotten off easily, that she should look at this as a change in her luck. But what about justice? Karla had broken that vase on purpose! She’d admitted it. Instead, it had been Vi who’d been arrested and made a fool of in public. Probably most everyone in town agreed with Karla, who’d said it was an ugly cheap vase and no big deal.

  Well, it was still a very big deal to Vi. She pursed her lips in thought. Karla thought it was over. Not by a long shot. Vi would bide her time, but she would get even.

  In the meantime she had a celebration to finish planning. Buckhorn would be celebrating its 125th birthday this fall and darned if she would let anything keep her from making it happen. She’d been working on the event for the past eighteen months.

  Unfortunately, there’d been a few bumps in the road on her end. Fortunately, she’d gotten more of the residents involved including Melissa Herbert who’d just moved to town. According to the scuttlebutt, Melissa had been seeing Dave Tanner who owned the bar on the edge of town. Vi was pleased and had gotten both of them onboard to help with the celebration.

  She’d sent out invitations to everyone she could find who’d ever lived in Buckhorn. There would be fireworks, guest speakers and dances during the four-day event. Vendors would be coming to sell their wares in the new fairgrounds where the Crenshaw Hotel had once stood, along with a huge carnival with lots of rides for both kids and adults.

  For a moment, she thought of the beautiful old hotel, long gone now, and the painful memories it evoked, but she quickly pushed such thoughts away. This celebration would be a new beginning for all of them—a rebirth of Buckhorn, and she was the one who could make it happen.

  But even as she thought it, she was already thinking about how dangerous something like that could be. All those people in town, the craziness of the rides and the fireworks... Karla should be careful. Accidents happened all the time, but especially in the middle of all that excitement, noise and confusion. A woman who would probably be already half-drunk could end up dead so easily.

  Or at the very least...broken.

  * * *

  DARBY WASN’T HUNGRY, but she couldn’t stand just sitting in her office any longer. She headed down the street to the café, knowing that everyone would be talking about the murder. She took a seat in one of the empty booths since the place wasn’t as busy as she’d expected.

  From where she sat she could see the crime scene tape down the street in the empty lot next to the motel. That appeared to be where everyone was since there was a line of gawkers down there. She shuddered at the memory of what she’d seen out in that field earlier.

  “Are you all right?” Bessie startled her as she slid into the booth across from her. The older woman reached across the table, took Darby’s hand and squeezed it.

  “I’m still in shock,” Darby whispered. “I just got through being interrogated by the marshal. Leroy acted like he thought I had something to do with it.”

  “That’s just crazy,” Bessie said. “Anyway, your ex-fiancé wasn’t the only one who was attacked last night.”