Montana Lawman

“I don’t need you to go over what you found again at Harriet’s home, Molly,” he said quietly.

The relief that crossed her face was nearly painful to see and more in keeping with her quiet blond prettiness than her barely veiled antagonism. “Then, I…I don’t understand what you do want,” she said. “I’ve already told you everything I know.”

“Tell me what you don’t know.”

She looked at him, her eyes shadowed. “Shall I make up things, then? Is that the kind of law enforcement officer you are?”

“No, I don’t want you to make up anything. Look.” He sat forward, resting his wrists on his knees. “Sit down. Relax. Please,” he finally added.

She slowly sat. Tugged her dress down closer to her knees again, as if she knew he had a hard time not looking at them. He could have told her that her smooth, lightly tanned calves and trim ankles, clad in tiny white socks were just as much a distraction, but figured it wouldn’t help the situation. She already looked at him as if he were something to be scraped off her shoe.

“There’s got to be something we’re missing,” he told her. “Harriet obviously had a private life that nobody knew about. She was four months pregnant at the time of her death. She didn’t get that way by Immaculate Conception. And from everything that her sister, Louise Holmes, has told us, it doesn’t seem as if Harriet was likely to have been artificially inseminated.”

Molly’s cheeks went pink, and for a minute he was in danger of losing his train of thought.

“You think the father of her baby killed her?”

Tessa Madison, the clairvoyant who’d been brought in by Harriet’s nephew, Colby, had gotten the sense that Harriet was resisting an abortion. But Holt was more interested in physical evidence than psychic impressions. He didn’t discount them, but a jury wasn’t gonna convict on “feelings.”

He rubbed his forehead, wondering at that moment why the hell he’d ever believed moving to Montana would be a lifesaver. “I think that there was more going on in Harriet’s life than some people knew. Look at the way she had an ex-husband turn up.”

“I read in the papers that Warren Parrish isn’t a suspect, after all. He had an alibi or something, didn’t he?”

Holt had liked Parrish a lot for the crime. But facts were facts and there was no way Parrish could have killed his former wife. “The more I find out about Harriet,” he said, “the more complete a picture I can create of her life. The better I understand Harriet, the better I’ll understand her murder.”

“I can’t think there is anything that would make murder understandable.”

“Understandable. Not condonable.”

“Do you have any other, um, suspects?”

Not one we can find. “I can’t comment on that,” he said.

For the first time, her lips twitched. “How wise of you, considering I’d hotfoot it right to the newspaper office to give them a scoop for the Monday-morning edition. Or worse, I might run immediately over to the Calico and blab your report.”

“The news at eleven has nothing on the speed of the Rumor grapevine.”

Her eyes met his in shared humor for the briefest of moments.

Even then it was too long.

He pulled his small notepad out of his pocket and deliberately thumbed through the pages. The humidity and heat was even having an effect on the thin pages. In some places his ink was smudging.

Harriet’s writing had been smudged during the last moments of her life as she sat at her desk, he reminded himself grimly. She’d used only what she’d had available to her to leave behind three scrawled initials—a novel and her own blood. “Did Harriet keep a journal? A diary?”

“I told you before that I never saw one.”

“Then you can tell me again.”

Her shoulders visibly stiffened. “Why does this feel like an interrogation?”

Holt looked at her. “Trust me, Molly. If I were really interrogating you, you’d know it.”

Her lashes swept down, and color suddenly rode high on her velvety cheeks. “It’s you,” she said suddenly. “I don’t like you.”

He’d been a cop for more than fifteen years, and he had a fair ability to read people. Maybe that’s why he could see that she was more surprised at the soft, fierce words that had escaped her lips than he was at hearing them. And for a moment he let himself focus on Molly Brewster. Not as an irritatingly inconvenient component of his investigation but as the puzzle that she was, all on her own.

Oh, yeah, she was surprised at the words that had popped out from her mouth. She was also bracing herself, as if she expected him to slam her in the hoosegow for speaking her mind.

“It’s good to say what you feel.” He picked up the lemonade and finished it off, wondering why his suspicious nature had taken that moment to step back in favor of wanting to put her at ease. It was just more evidence that when it came to women, his instincts were all messed up.

Her smooth forehead crinkled slightly. “Is it? I suppose you make a habit of doing so.”

Now that was a laugh. “A diary, Molly. Or journal. Think about it. Did Harriet doodle on her desk pad at work?” Tessa had gotten some strong impressions when she’d been near Harriet’s desk at the library. “Did she keep phone messages tucked away in a file? Confide in you over coffee on Monday morning before the library opened? Anything?”

“Harriet drank grapefruit juice in the mornings at the library, not coffee. And you already went over her office for evidence. Between you and the sheriff when he did it, you two practically tore the office apart. I even had to have some screws tightened on her desk because you’d worked the side piece loose.”

He stifled an oath. She was secretive and she didn’t like giving simple, straight answers. Well, hell, no wonder he wanted to take her to bed. She was like every other woman he’d had the misfortune to want. As far as he was concerned, it was like some cosmic joke on him. The only women he was attracted to were the very women he couldn’t afford to trust. The kind that ended up putting him through a wringer before they were through.

The case, he coldly reminded himself. Concentrate on the case.

“Other than the morning when you went out to check on her, had you ever been at Harriet’s house before?”

Her lips firmed. He waited, wondering if she’d have the nerve to lie, even though her face plainly showed it when she did. “Yes,” she finally said.

“How many times?”

Her shoulders shifted. “I don’t know.”

“When?”

“Just after I moved here.”

“Why?”

“To go over some details.”

“Personal details?”

“No!” She wouldn’t look at him. “About the job at the library.”

“How did you get the job?”

“Harriet offered it to me.”

“After you’d been banished to Rumor?”

“I wasn’t banished! Rumor is a haven, not a prison.” She’d jumped to her feet again.