He saw it as clear as if he’d been in Leann’s apartment that night. Friends, like sisters, she’d said. Leann going from man to man, searching for something elusive while she made promises she never meant to keep. “You tried to stop her from making a mistake.”

  Abigail made a swipe at her tears. She looked so young, so heartbroken. The woman she’d loved like a sister had been about to abandon her, probably not for the first time. “I couldn’t let her leave with that man. She knew it was a mistake, but he’d promised her a new life far away.”

  Stuart suspected she was right, given that Leann’s alleged suicide note had made it sound as if she was questioning what she was about to do. That was why it had been ruled a suicide. Had she left the note because she knew Abigail was coming to Powder Crossing? Had she thought she and Rory would be gone before her needy, clingy friend arrived?

  Abigail’s voice dropped to almost a whisper. “She was changing her mind about leaving, but then...”

  “Rory showed up,” he guessed.

  Her face went blank, her eyes unfocused as if lost in the past. “I told him to leave but he wouldn’t. He was going to make her go with him, saying that he was protecting her from me.” She looked over at him, frowning as if confused by that.

  “What happened then?” he asked, but suspected he already knew.

  Her gaze, steady, tear-free, met his. “Leann walked him out to his truck. When he climbed behind the wheel, I killed him to save her. But then she said you would come after us. You were obsessed with her. That you would find out what I’d done. That she could never be free because you were smart and would figure it out. And you would lock me up.”

  That was why Abigail had searched the file and his house. She thought he was coming after her.

  Her voice broke as she said, “She said that we were never getting that little house. We couldn’t be sisters anymore.” Tears welled in her eyes. “We couldn’t even be friends because of what I’d done. But I did it to save her. We could have run away like she was planning to do with Rory, but she said no. She was going to call you. You. I couldn’t let her do that.”

  “Abigail,” he said, his heart hurting for this misguided, trusting woman who’d been through too much disappointment. “You made it look like she’d committed suicide. It worked. It was over. I wouldn’t have come after you.”

  Tears cascaded down her cheeks even as she smiled. “I know. You really thought she’d killed herself.” Her voice dropped to a scary, paper-thin level. “But then you found his truck.” She wiped at her cheek and reached into the side pocket of the door again, only this time, she didn’t come out with a tissue.

  The blade of the knife caught the dull light before the storm. Before he could react, she struck out with it and suddenly she was screaming at the top of her lungs, her eyes wide. He got his arm up, saw the blood before he felt the pain as the blade sliced his arm open.

  “Stop!” he yelled, the word lost in her screams as she slashed at him again and again in the close confines of the car, driving the blade into him as he tried to grab her wrist. But she was too quick, too abnormally strong, in her frenzy. He tried to fight her off as he fumbled for his weapon.

  The sound of the gunshot seemed to surprise them both.

  She swung the knife in an arc, but slower, less in control. He was able to grab her wrist with his free hand and wrenched the knife from her bloody fingers. He realized he was holding his gun in his other hand. He had no memory of pulling it from his holster, let alone firing it.

  She stared at him with unseeing eyes for a moment before she slumped over onto the steering wheel. He jumped as the horn began to sound and quickly pulled her away from it. She collapsed back into the seat. Like everything around them, she was covered with splattered blood, now not all his. As he stared at her, still in shock, her blood stopped leaking out of the hole in her chest and she fell to the side, her cheek against the driver’s side window.

  Stuart felt in shock, almost unaware of how badly he was injured. He still had his gun in his hand, the knife in the other. He dropped both to the floor, fumbled to open his door, his hand slick with blood, and stepped out.

  The sky had darkened over the bare limbs of the cottonwoods. He could feel the cold as the snowstorm blew out of the mountains, the temperature dropping. He reached for his phone with fingers still dripping with blood. He was shaking so hard he could barely make the call. As he did, he stumbled off the roadbed, dropping down into the snowy barrow pit and into the trees. The ground was soft from layers of dried leaves and piles of snow that had blown in against the large trunks, too deep to have melted even during this warm spell.

  What had he done? “You reap what you sow,” he heard his grandmother say in his ear as he fell face-first into the decaying leaves and dirty snow.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHARLOTTE RODE HER horse into the meadow. It had been unusually warm lately but there was still snow banked against the north side of the trees and the creek. Elaine was already there, standing next to the creek where water burbled under a thick layer of ice. The smell of snow was in the air and Charlotte could feel the temperate dropping. A snowstorm was blowing in.

  She crossed the creek and dismounted, walking over to join her friend, who appeared lost in thought. Charlotte still marveled that she and Elaine were friends at all. Elaine was a fixture at the McKenna Ranch and had been for years. She’d become good friends with Holden’s first wife, Margaret “Margie” Smith—just as Charlotte had been at one time. Then Margie had married Holden, crushing Charlotte’s dreams.

  It had been Margie’s idea for Elaine to reach out to her, to broker peace between the families. Even when Margie was dying of cancer, she’d kept trying to get Charlotte to forgive Holden through Elaine.

  Elaine would ride over, and they would meet secretly. At first, Charlotte had wanted nothing to do with either Elaine or Margie. Yet, she’d agreed to the meetings after a while. For Charlotte, it had been a tenuous connection to the man she’d loved, one she’d guiltily indulged in.

  Over the years, she and Elaine had become good friends, cloak-and-dagger friends. It was her only way to know what was going on over at the McKenna Ranch. It was also Elaine’s way of still trying all these years later to get her to forgive Holden and bringing peace between the families.

  “I’m sorry about the Turner place,” Elaine said, knowing how much her friend had needed that ranch. Charlotte nodded. “At least this way, the ranch will stay as it is. How is CJ?”

  She shook her head. “I’m worried about him.”

  “Of course you are. He’s not any better?”

  “No. You know about Tilly and Cooper?” Of course Elaine did. She would have known even before Charlotte herself.

  “They’re in love.” Charlotte made a rude noise, making Elaine laugh. “Don’t you want to be part of that love? Part of their lives? Do you really not want to know your own grandchildren?”

  “Is she pregnant already?” she asked, afraid of how little she knew.

  “No.” Elaine laughed again. “She’s too busy planning the wedding.” Elaine reached for her hand. “It’s time to let the past go and look to the future. You aren’t going to want to miss this next part. You’ve been angry long enough.” She squeezed her hand. “Let it go. Come to Tilly’s wedding. It’s just that easy.”

  “She doesn’t want me there.”

  “Charlotte, you know better than that. Just one small step. That’s all it will take.”

  “Holden will be there.”

  “Of course he will,” her friend said, releasing her hand. “And you’ll be all dressed up with a whole new attitude.”

  She laughed. “You really are a dreamer.” For a moment she studied Elaine’s pretty face. “Why have you never married?”

  “Really?” She chuckled. “My life has always been so full at the ranch. I’ve never considered leaving.”

  “You’re in love with Holden,” Charlotte said, voicing something she’d known in her heart for years.

  “Isn’t everyone?” Elaine said, smiling. “But he’s in love with you and always has been.”

  She huffed. “That’s why he keeps marrying someone else. Can you believe he married Lulabelle Braden?”

  “That was definitely a mistake, but he was young and foolish, making one mistake on top of another. He’d never make that mistake again and hasn’t. I think he’s realized that he’d rather be alone than be with the wrong woman.”

  “He was happy with Margie.”

  Elaine nodded. “But Margie knew that she wasn’t his first choice. She did her best to make him happy. The woman was a saint,” she added with a laugh.

  “Don’t I know it and I’m nothing like her.” When her friend said nothing, she added, “You could argue the point.”

  “When we both know it’s true?”

  They laughed, then stood in companionable silence, the approaching snowstorm darkening the sky over the bare-limbed cottonwoods to throw shadows over them.

  “Was there a reason you needed to see me?” Elaine asked. “Other than for me to try to talk sense into you?”

  Charlotte smiled in spite of herself. “It’s always good to see you. I feel as if I have alienated everyone, especially my family, and been an example to CJ of how to act badly. Now he blames me for the way he is and he’s probably right.”

  “CJ is a grown man. It’s his choice how he lives his life.”

  She studied Elaine again, hearing something in her tone. “What? Have you heard something?”

  “Nothing specific. Those two men the gas company hired for security were seen coming from your ranch recently.”

  “That’s because CJ hired CH4 to drill another well.”

  “And they sent their security men out first? Have you seen them? They’re trouble, Charlotte. I just worry about Oakley after what happened to her before.”

  On the ride back, she felt a wave of shame wash over her at the memory of her argument with her daughter. She had blamed Oakley for the shooting because she’d been so afraid CJ would go to prison. A part of her knew he wouldn’t survive in that kind of setting. Or maybe he would thrive, she thought, remembering her recent concerns about him.

  She felt a chill that had nothing to do with the approaching storm.

  * * *

  THE SHERIFF OPENED his eyes to find two state police standing over him. Through the fog of both sleep and drugs, he told himself that he’d never seen either of them before. He had no idea what they were even doing here.

  Here, though, he realized, was a hospital room. He glanced down, seeing bandages on his arms, shoulders and chest. Everything came back at rocket speed. He tried to sit up.

  “Let me help you with that,” the larger of the two police officers said, moving to the end of the bed to crank up the top portion so Stuart was in a sitting position.

  He hurt all over. The movement of simply sitting up made him hurt worse. “How did I get here?”

  “You called for help.” The two cops introduced themselves. All he caught was Officer Forester for the larger of the two. Andrews for the other one. “Do you remember what happened?”

  His last memory was lying in dead leaves and snow, bleeding badly. Before that... Abigail. His heart began to pound. “Is she...”

  “Dead,” Forester said.

  Stuart closed his eyes, trying to blot out the memory of all the blood, of the wild, inhuman look on her face, the frantic screams as she attacked him. All he’d ever seen was the capable, accomplished, calculating woman who’d drugged him. But like him, there’d been that lonely, lost part of her that she’d thought she could fill with Leann’s love.

  He opened his eyes again as he heard one of the officers pull up a chair next to the bed. The other had turned on a video recorder. “We need to know what happened,” Forester said. “Can you start at the beginning?”

  The beginning. How could he possibly explain why he had gotten into a car with Abigail Creed, when he knew he shouldn’t have?

  * * *

  NEWS OF WHAT had happened to Sheriff Layton spread like wildfire across the Powder River Basin. CJ couldn’t believe his good luck. With life-threatening stab wounds, the sheriff had been airlifted out to Billings. The state police had been called in to investigate the nurse’s death.

  Which meant that until it was finished, there would be no law in Powder Crossing or the surrounding area. It felt like a gift from heaven. Now was the time to move on everything.

  “I need that drilling rig on the Stafford Ranch asap,” CJ told Frankie. “We need to move while the sheriff is in the hospital.”

  “The snowstorm held it up. Everything’s ready. You sure about this?”

  He didn’t have to ask what Frankie was referring to. Few people could understand a person who could kill his own kin and yet it happened every day. When your own blood turned against you, you did what had to be done.

  “I’ll make sure my sister and her cohorts show up. You make sure we put them out of business. Otherwise—”

  “I got it.”

  “Also, let’s find out where Dirty Business is meeting. I’m in the mood to burn a few more barns and community centers, aren’t you?”

  Frankie chuckled. “You’re making this into a war zone. You do realize that, right?”

  “Barns and community centers catch on fire all the time. I just want the message sent to those people that we aren’t playing around anymore.”

  * * *

  STUART TOLD THE state police about meeting Abigail while investigating Oakley Stafford’s shooting and how the nurse had brought him dinner when she saw him working late.

  “Were you sleeping with her?” Forester asked.

  “No.” He’d already warned himself to be careful about what he told the officers. Which meant he couldn’t mention her drugging him. Any law officer with a brain would have brought her in. The problem was that most of the drug had already left his system by the time he realized what she’d done.

  But after that, a law officer without a death wish wouldn’t have gotten into the car with her and let her take him out into the country and try to kill him.

  Nor could he tell them that the first time she’d stopped by his office with dinner for the two of them, red flares had gone off. He hadn’t trusted her. But then again, he trusted few women, given his history with them.

  “We were just friends. At least that’s what I thought. She had me over to dinner recently. When she stopped by saying she wanted to go to Baker for a burger, I didn’t feel I could say no. I wasn’t planning to see her after that. She seemed lonely. I never really understood what she was doing in Powder Crossing.”

  He saw the two cops exchange a look. Oh damn, he thought as his heart dropped. What did they know that he didn’t?

  The sheriff waited, aware that guilty people tended to talk too much when being interrogated. He didn’t want to be one of them, but he couldn’t help the feeling that the two officers knew something that might land him in trouble.

  While he waited, he tried to think of what he would say when they asked him why Abigail had tried to kill him. He had no choice but to tell the truth—up to a point. Otherwise, it might look as if he had tried to attack her, and she’d merely fought back.

  Forester cleared his throat. “Please tell us what happened on the way to get a burger.”

  He took his time. “Abigail wanted to drive. I didn’t realize anything was wrong until she pulled off the highway in an isolated spot. She’d mentioned having sex before, but I’d never taken her up on it and I wasn’t going to then.”

  “But that wasn’t what she was after?” Forester said.

  Stu shook his head. “I told you that I wondered what she was doing in Powder Crossing. She finally told me the truth. She was a close friend of a woman I had dated for a short period of time. A woman who later committed suicide, but by then the woman was with someone else.”

  “Leann Hayes,” Andrews said, verifying what Stuart had feared. The state cops had somehow found the connection between Abigail and Leann, a connection he himself hadn’t been able to find. “Can you tell us why the victim was interested in an old case of yours? A suicide?”

  “She was only interested in how much I knew about Leann’s death,” he said. “I quickly realized that two years ago she came to Powder Crossing to stop her friend from running off with Rory Eastwood. Abigail thought she was saving her friend when Rory showed up, an argument ensued and she killed Rory.

  “When Leann told her that I would know what she’d done and come after her, that all of Abigail’s dreams of she and Leann getting a place together, being like sisters, was ruined because I would find her and put her behind bars, she and Leann fought and she killed Leann, making it look like a suicide.”

  “So she feared you were coming after her even though the death had been ruled a suicide?” Forester said.

  “Apparently so. I think that Abigail couldn’t get over what she’d done and at some point she blamed me, but I’m no psychiatrist. All I know is that she tried to kill me.”

  “Almost did,” the cop said.

  * * *

  CJ STAFFORD WAS thinking about burning his bridges as well as barns when his phone rang again. “You said to call if I had something for you,” Rusty Malone said without preamble.

  He sighed. “This had better be good. What have you got?”

  “You still paying for information?”

  “Depends on the information.” CJ found it ironic that his former stepfather, Dixon Malone, was somehow related to a ranch hand on the McKenna Ranch.