Mountain Sheriff

He heard the disappointment in her voice. He hated hurting her. It was one of the reasons he would never have left her a present. “Sorry, it wasn’t me.”

She let out a small sigh as if she should have known. Just as she should have known not to set her heart on marrying him. But she had, anyway.

Despite his feelings for her, he couldn’t marry her. Couldn’t marry anyone. But especially Charity. Just the thought of mixing their genes made him break out in a cold sweat.

“I wonder who could have left the present, then?” she said more to herself than to him.

He wondered the same thing. Hadn’t he known it was only a matter of time before some man swept Charity off her feet? Knowing it was one thing. Having it actually happen… It surprised him how much the idea of Charity with another man rattled him.

“I almost forgot,” she said. “Didn’t I just see Wade Dennison come out of your office a few minutes ago? Something going on at Dennison Ducks I should know about?”

This Charity he could deal with. “Not everything is a news story. Or any of your business.”

Charity laughed. “We both know better than that.”

He hung up and saw Sissy in the doorway again, giving him one of her why-don’t-you-do-something-about-that-woman? looks. “Let me ask you something,” he said before she could start to nag him about his personal life. “Do you think Wade Dennison is handsome?”

“Not my type.”

“No, I mean, do women find him…attractive?”

She snorted. “He’s got money, so hell yes, women find him attractive.”

Mitch shook his head, wondering why it was so hard to get a straight answer out of a woman. “Is it possible that Wade and a twenty-something woman might—”

“I see where you’re going with this,” she interrupted impatiently. “Would he be interested in a woman young enough to be his daughter?” Her brows shot up. “Wade Dennison is a man, isn’t he?” With that she turned and marched back to her desk.

Mitch shook his head and looked at the information Wade had given him. But his thoughts veered off again to Charity and the “present” some secret admirer had left her. It bothered him that the man didn’t have the guts to come forward and make his intentions known. He wondered who the guy was. And what his intentions were.

With a curse, he again looked at what Wade had given him, focusing on Nina Monroe’s address. He groaned when he saw who her landlady was—Charity’s Aunt Florie. This town was too damned small, and it only seemed to get smaller when the rainy season began.

CHARITY JENKINS took a bite of the banana-cream pie, closed her eyes and instantly conjured up the image of Mitch Tanner. Something about the combination of sugar, cream and butter…

Of course, she’d been thinking about Mitch since she was four, so it came pretty easy after twenty-two years.

It was odd, though, the way she saw him in her daydreams. If she was eating something rich and wonderful, like banana-cream pie, then Mitch always appeared in snug-fitting worn jeans and a T-shirt that accentuated his broad muscled chest and shoulders. Without fail, he would be smiling at her, the sunlight on his tanned face, his eyes as blue as the Pacific.

Other foods, however, such as vegetables or anything low-fat, had Mitch in his sheriff’s uniform, scowling at her in disapproval. For obvious reasons, she avoided those foods.

She took another bite of pie, closed her eyes and was startled when Mitch popped up in her daydream wearing a black tuxedo and standing at an altar.

Her eyes flew open, her heart pounding. Her wedding? The one she’d imagined and planned since age four?

On this, she was not mistaken. Mitch in a black tux, she in white satin. Or maybe white silk. Or lace. The imagined wedding changed, depending on her mood. But the groom never had.

“The pie all right?” Betty asked as she stopped on the other side of the counter.

“De-e-elicious,” Charity said, closing her eyes again and licking her lips in true delight, hoping to see Mitch in that wedding tux again. No such luck. She opened her eyes as Betty refilled her diet cola.

Betty Garrett was a pleasingly plump bottled-blond on this side of fifty but who could pass for thirty-five in a pinch and had a talent for attracting the wrong men the way a white blouse attracts blackberry jam. She’d married and changed her last name so many times that most people in town couldn’t tell you what it was at any given moment. Right now Betty was between men, but it wouldn’t last long. It never did.

“I just put a couple of lemon-meringue pies in the oven in case you’re interested,” Betty said.

Interested? Lemon meringue was her second favorite.

“I figure this Bigfoot sighting will bring ’em in for sure. Did last time,” the older woman said. “I decided I’d better make some extra pies.”

Bigfoot sightings packed the town. The curious drove up to Timber Falls in hopes of seeing what some called the Hill Ghost or Sasquatch.

“I heard the No Vacancy sign is already on at the Ho Hum and a half-dozen campers are parked over by the old train depot,” Betty was saying. Everyone wanted to see Bigfoot and prove the legendary creature’s existence.

None as badly as Charity Jenkins, though. Every journalist dreamed of that one big story. The Pulitzer-prize winner. Charity yearned to write about something other than church dinners and wooden decoys. The truth was, she desperately needed one big story. It was the only way she could make everyone in this town see that she wasn’t like the rest of her family, she was a normal level-headed woman and a serious journalist. All right, she didn’t care about everyone in town. She just wanted to prove it to Mitch.

She took the last bite of her pie, savoring it, eyes closed. No Mitch in jeans or a tux. She opened her eyes, disappointed.

“Where do you put it all?” Betty asked with a shake of her head as she took the empty plate.

Charity was blessed. Probably because she was a fidgeter. She couldn’t sit still. Nor did she ever stop thinking. Like right now. Between planning how to play the Bigfoot sighting in tomorrow’s paper, she was thinking about Mitch and if her banana-cream-pie fantasy had any credibility.

Just the thought of Mitch standing next to her at the altar was enough to burn up a whole day’s worth of calories. She and Mitch had a history, an off-and-on-again attachment that went as far back as shared glue in kindergarten.

Right now they were at a slight lull in their relationship: he pretended he was a confirmed bachelor and she pretended she was going to let him stay that way.

This morning she’d been so excited when she’d seen the present on her doorstep. She’d been so sure it was from Mitch. Who else? But he’d sworn it hadn’t been him. And why pretend he hadn’t left it if he had? Then again, why pretend he wasn’t wild about her when he obviously was? She’d never understand the man.

“Would you look at this place?” Betty said, shaking her head. The café was full, everyone talking about the Bigfoot sighting. “I can’t believe these fools are still arguing over Bigfoot after all these years.”

Charity glanced around the small café. It was the only place in town to sit down and eat, plus it was the place to get homemade pies and cinnamon rolls and the latest scuttlebutt.

As she picked up her diet cola, she had an eerie feeling that someone was watching her. It wasn’t the first time, either. She turned and caught a flash of black on the street outside. Her breath caught as a black pickup drove by. It was the same black truck she’d seen last night by her house and again on her way to Betty’s this morning. Both times she’d had the feeling the driver was watching her.

She shivered as she watched the truck disappear up Main Street. While she could only make out a large shape behind the dark-tinted windows, she could feel the driver watching her through the rain. Her stomach tightened, remembering the present she’d found on her doorstep this morning. Could one have anything to do with the other?

RAIN HAMMERED the roof of the Sheriff’s Department patrol car, mist rising ghostlike from the drenched pavement, as Mitch drove out to the address Wade had given him for Nina Monroe. A swollen gray sky hung low over the pines as if closing in the tiny town, limiting more than visibility.

Mitch dreaded another rainy season in Timber Falls, especially one that appeared to be starting a month early and could last until at least April. It wasn’t just the endless rain or the dull overcast days. Without fail, the rainy season seemed to bring out the worst in the residents.

One year, Bud Harper hung himself from a beam in his garage just days before the sun shone. Another year, a local guy shot up the Duck-In bar when he caught his wife there with another man. And twenty-seven years ago, during the worst rainy season of all, Wade and Daisy Dennison’s baby girl Angela disappeared from her crib, never to be found.

It was always during the rainy season that strange and often horrible things happened in this small isolated town deep in the Cascades. It was as if the gloomy days, when the rain never stopped, did something to make the residents behave more oddly than usual. As if on those days, the only place to look was inward. And sometimes that was as dark as the day—and far more disturbing.

And if the rain wasn’t bad enough, there was the forest that surrounded Timber Falls, imprisoned it, really, and constantly had to be fought back as if it was at war with the tiny town. As he drove past the city limits, the forest formed almost a canopy over the two-lane highway, a tunnel of green darkness over the only road out.

To the clack of the wipers, he turned off in front of a cottage-style house with a dozen smaller bungalows lined up behind it. Years ago, the place had been a motel. But not long after Wade Dennison started his decoy factory, Florence Jenkins had taken down the motel sign and started renting out the bungalows as apartments.

It was about the same time that Florence discovered her hidden powers. The sign out front now read: Madam Florie’s. Under it was her Web site address.

Nina Monroe had been renting from Charity’s Aunt Florie, Timber Falls’s self-proclaimed clairvoyant.