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CHAPTER ONE
THEFUNERALHOMEwas crowded. Charlie Butler was well-known in Catelow, Wyoming, and he owned a considerable amount of property outside the city limits, in greater Carne County. In fact, his land adjoined a small ranch that Cody Banks had purchased the year before. He’d been reluctant to leave his rented home in the city limits, but he was tired of people. Cody wanted room to breathe. Most of all, he wanted a refuge from his job.
He loved being sheriff of the county. This was his second term, and no serious opponents had jumped up to run against him in the last election. Apparently he was doing a good enough job to satisfy his critics as well as the handful of people he called friends.
He was alone, standing apart from the crowd in his uniform. He’d come to pay his respects. His late wife, Deborah, had been distantly related to Butler by marriage. So he was sort of family. He’d been fond of the old man. He’d stopped by to see him often and made sure he had heat and groceries and whatever he needed while he fought the long battle with cancer that finally claimed him. Cody had a deputy in a squad car standing by to lead the funeral procession to the cemetery, after the service.
He glanced toward the closed casket where a woman was standing with a little girl. He knew them. He winced. It had been a long time. Almost six years ago. He’d stood in the parking lot at the Denver hospital where his beloved wife, a doctor, had just died, and accused the woman and the child of killing her. The child had been sick with a virus that was deadly to a handful of people, his wife included. It hadn’t been until days later that he’d learned the woman and child had been at a funeral home to arrange services for her brother and sister-in-law, who’d been killed in an accident. His wife, Deborah, a distant cousin to the deceased woman, had gone to the funeral home to see them and express her sorrow. It was there that she’d contracted the fatal virus, and not from the woman or child, but from a funeral attendant who later also died of exposure to it.
Cody had been out of his mind with grief. They’d only been married for two years, much of it spent apart while his wife pursued her career as a neurologist in Denver, at a famous hospital. She’d commuted and only managed to get home one or two days a month, sometimes not even that much. It had been largely a long-distance relationship, but Cody had loved her so much. Too much. He thought his life was over when she died. But he picked himself up, thanks to his cousin, Bart Riddle, a local rancher, and he’d gone on. It had been hard. He hadn’t been thinking clearly, then. He’d lashed out at the most innocent people. The woman and child, standing by the casket.
When he’d walked in the door, both of them had looked hunted. The woman had taken the little girl by the hand and walked her back to the restroom. By the time they returned, Cody was at the other end of the room talking to one of the city council members. They watched him, almost fearfully. It disturbed him to see how badly he’d wounded them, so badly that they wouldn’t come near him all these years later. He wanted to apologize, to explain. He couldn’t even get close enough to do that.
She was elegant, he thought. Not beautiful. Not really pretty, but she had a pretty figure and a creamy complexion. Her long, silvery-blond hair fell to her waist in back, neatly styled. Her eyes were a pale, almost silver gray. She was dressed in a suit, very conservative. Well, she worked for attorneys in Denver, he recalled, probably she had to dress to maintain the dignity of her office. She was a paralegal. He’d often wondered why she didn’t go on to law school. But his cousin, Bart Riddle, had said that there was no money for the training. And besides that, she was reluctant to leave her little niece Lucinda in someone else’s care at night. She loved the child dearly, because of the fact that the little girl was the last family she had on earth and the last link she had with her late brother.
It had touched him, what Bart said. He had cousins, at least, although his parents were long dead. Abigail Brennan had nobody; just little Lucinda, who was nine now. Technically, he supposed, he and Abigail were related by marriage. Debby’s sister-in-law’s second marriage, after her husband’s death, was to Abigail’s brother Lawrence, and both Lawrence and Mary had been killed in a wreck just days before his wife Deborah died. Mary had been Debby’s former sister-in-law, which was why Debby had gone to the funeral home in the first place.
“Why is the casket closed?” Cody asked his cousin Bart, who’d just joined him near the potted plant at the other end of the big viewing room.
“He died of cancer,” Bart reminded him. “He said he didn’t want a bunch of yahoos staring down at him in his casket, so he put in his will that he wanted it closed.” He frowned. “Why are you standing over here all by yourself?”
Cody sighed. “Because when I walked over to Abigail to apologize for what I said to her six years ago, she took the little girl by the hand and almost ran to the restroom.”
Bart, who knew the background of these people very well, just nodded. “Shame,” he said quietly. “I mean, she and the child have nobody now. Her brother raised her, you know. Their parents died together in a car crash when she was still in school. Ironic, that her brother and his wife died together in a similar manner. Charlie, there,” he indicated the casket with a nod of his head, “was the last living relative she had, besides Lucy.” He laughed softly. “And he wasn’t much of that, either. She sent him cards on his birthday and at Christmas. Would have come to see him, but he didn’t want the kid around.” He indicated Lucinda, who was pretty, with the same silvery-blond hair as her aunt. “He never liked children. It’s a shame. She’s a nice child, from all accounts. Polite and sweet and doesn’t talk back.”
“I know a lot of nice, sweet people who get on the internet and become Frankenstein’s monster with a keyboard at their fingertips,” Cody mused.
“And isn’t that the truth?”
“What’s Abigail going to do with Charlie’s place?” he asked.
“No idea. She works in Denver. That’s an impossibly long commute.”
“It’s a good ranch. Clean water, lots of pasture, and I think he still had a pretty decent herd of Black Angus cattle, despite the downturn in the economy.”
Bart was staring at him. “What if she came to work here? J.C. Calhoun’s wife, Colie, is pregnant with their second child and she really wants to stay home with her kids. God knows Calhoun makes enough, working on Ren Colter’s ranch as his head of security. That means her job will be up for grabs, and there aren’t that many paralegals in a town the size of Catelow.”
Cody winced. “I don’t think she wants to be any closer to me than Denver,” he said quietly. “I wish I could take back all the things I said to her that day. I scared her. I scared the little girl, too,” he added sadly. “I love kids. It hurts me, remembering how they both backed away from me and ran for her car.” His eyes closed. “Dear God, the things we do that come back to haunt us.”
Bart laid a hand on his shoulder. “We can’t change the past,” he said. “We can only deal with what we have right now.”
Cody’s eyes opened, dark and somber. “I reckon.” His face was hard. “Six years,” he said. “And I still mourn her. I blamed everybody except myself. If I’d insisted, she might have come back here to live and got a job at our community hospital.”
Bart didn’t remind his friend that Deborah had been aggressively ambitious. She wanted to be the best in her field, and that was only possible working at a big hospital, where such opportunities were available. He knew, as Cody never seemed to, that Deborah was never the sort of woman who’d want to cook and clean and have babies. She’d even told Cody, when they first married, that children were out of the question for the immediate future. Cody hadn’t seemed to mind. He was obsessed with Deborah, so much in love that if she’d said she wanted to go to the moon, Cody would have been looking at ways to build a spaceship. Obsessive love like that seemed to Bart to be destructive. There was an old saying about relationships, he mused, that one kissed while the other turned the cheek. Cody was in love. Deborah was affectionate, but her true love was her work, not her husband. In the two years they’d been married, they’d spent far more time apart than together. Cody saw what he wanted to see.
“I’m going to say hello to Abby,” Bart said, hesitating.
“Go ahead,” Cody replied. “I’ll be standing here, holding up the wall.”
Bart’s eyebrows lifted in a silent question.
“If I start over there, she’ll find a way to get out of the room,” Cody replied quietly. “It’s all right. I won’t be here much longer. I was fond of Charlie and I wanted to pay my respects. I didn’t come to terrorize the women and children.”
The last remark sounded bitter, Bart thought as he walked toward Abigail. Cody didn’t realize that he was just as intimidating to men as he was to Abby and Lucinda. He did a hard job and it had made him hard. He wasn’t the easygoing, friendly man who’d attracted Deborah during a visit eight years ago. The Cody of today would have sent Deborah in search of a man who was more easily controlled. He laughed to himself. He wondered if Cody realized how much he’d changed since he’d been sheriff. He truly doubted it.
ABIGAILWASSAYINGgoodbye to an elderly woman who’d gone to school with Charlie.
The old woman smiled at her and held on to her hand. “You should come back home,” she said, smiling down at Lucinda as well. “Small towns are the best place to raise a child. And besides, Colie’s pregnant and she’s going to resign from her job at the attorney’s office. They’ll need a paralegal.” Her eyebrows lifted. “Charlie has a nice ranch, with a house he’d just renovated, and there’s kittens in the barn.”
