Jack Murray, Sheriff

“I’ll talk to the people at ESPD.” His patronizing tone was enough to set her teeth on edge. “I’m sure they’ll have a patrol car come by regularly for now, especially on weekends, if that’s when Mr. Sommers takes the girls. And you know where to call.”

“Yes, I do,” she said, inclining her head with unaccustomed coolness. “I certainly hope I won’t need to.”

“Ms. Sommers…” The sheriff seemed to think better of whatever he’d intended to say. He only shook his head. “I’d best be getting home.”

He followed her to the front door. Beth held it open and said again, “Thank you.” She meant it. Jack Murray might be patronizing, but he had come to her rescue. His intentions were good.

The sheriff looked at her freshly painted front porch, strewed with shattered clay pots, spilled dirt and shreds of bright petunias and lobelia, and shook his head again. “Be careful. Call if you’re even a little nervous.”

Beth was stubborn, but not an idiot. She didn’t tell him that she was afraid his showing up tonight had made things worse, not better. He thought she was insisting on being self-sufficient to the point of foolishness. Truth be told, she was scared. Ray wasn’t going to disappear from their lives. She had to find a way to make him see that the girls were what was really important. Carrying hostilities further than she already had would only get in the way of rapprochement.

She watched the police chief step carefully around the shards of pottery and down the front steps. She had forgotten that the lights on top of his cruiser were still revolving, a beacon in the midst of her quiet neighborhood. He reached inside and turned them off even before getting in. A moment later, the police car pulled away from the curb and started down the street.

Beth hugged herself against the cool night air. She made herself stand on the porch in defiance of a panicky desire to flee inside and lock up tight. The night was calm, Ray long gone. He was angry, not sly; it would never occur to him to park his car around the block and sneak back. When she saw a shadow move under the old lilac, her pulse took an uncomfortable jump, but, just to prove something to herself, Beth waited until first one cat, then a second, strolled out.

Only then did she go back into the house and lock the door behind her.

Time to kiss her daughters good-night, time to try to convince them that their world was a secure place.

THE LITTLE REDHEAD in the third row looked familiar. Jack Murray paused a moment in his presentation to the third-grade class.

Long red curls caught up in a bouncy ponytail on top of her head. Big blue eyes, freckled nose, a mouth that had no intention of smiling. She was watching him with unusual intensity, too, as though…what?

Like a slide projector, he clicked through recent pictures stored in his mind. It didn’t take long. She was the one whose father had been trying to smash down his ex-wife’s front door. The one huddled in the hallway with her older sister.

The one whose mom had blue eyes just as guarded, just as cool.

Aware of the concerted stare of twenty-four eight-year-olds, Jack continued, “Are any of you ever home alone?”

A scattering of hands went up.

“Do your moms or dads tell you what to do if the phone rings and you’re by yourself?”

At the same moment as a little girl piped up, “Don’t answer it,” a boy said, “Mom checks to make sure I’m home, so I have to answer the phone.”

Jack strolled toward the boy’s seat by the window. “What if the caller isn’t your mom?”

The boy, whose hair was crew-cut but for a tiny pigtail in back, shrugged. “It’s usually a friend or something.”

“Usually?”

“Mom says if they ask for Mrs. Patterson, it means they want to sell her something, so I just tell ’em we don’t want to buy anything and hang up.”

Jack stood just above the boy, letting his height and the uniform awe the kid just a little.

Then he raised a brow. “Do you think they ever guess that your mom isn’t home?”

The boy squirmed. “Naw…”

Jack looked around. “What do the rest of you think? Should he answer the telephone when he’s alone?”

All sorts of small, high voices chimed in with a variety of negatives. No way. Their parents said…

“But his mom wants to make sure he’s home safe. So she has to call, right? And he has to answer.”

It was the little redhead who said solemnly, “He could call her instead. I call my friends all the time.”

“Could you do that instead?”

The kid had lost his bravado. “She doesn’t really like me to call her at work.”

“Would she make an exception for one call every day?”

He hung his head and shrugged again.

Jack touched the boy’s shoulder and said, “Mrs. Stewart will hand out pamphlets for all of you to take home today and show your parents. Maybe that will make it easier for you to talk to them about things that scare you when you’re alone.”

A few minutes later, he strode out to his squad car. He so rarely wore a uniform these days, he felt conspicuous. But that was the whole point: he still liked to do some of these school talks to keep from becoming a remote political figure in Butte County, a politician quoted in the newspapers. He wanted kids to go home and talk at the dinner table about Sheriff Murray as a real guy. This was his first visit of the new school year; nights were growing cold, but leaves had already turned and the bright yellow school buses were flashing red lights on every narrow country road morning and afternoon.

Jack grunted with faint amusement, thinking what Ed Patton would have had to say about a sheriff spending an hour talking to eight-year-olds: a pansy-ass waste of time, is what the Elk Springs police chief would have said.

But then, Ed Patton had been a grade-A son of a bitch.

As he headed back to the station, Jack’s mind reverted to the redhead’s mother. Lord only knew how many domestic disturbance calls he’d been on. Hundreds. But he still remembered the first, when he’d been a rookie in Portland.

It was also the only time he’d ever had to shoot anyone. He and his partner had been called out to a nasty argument reported by a neighbor. Working-class neighborhood, a cluster of folks standing within earshot of a modest, neatly painted house from which crashes and vicious obscenities came. The siren brought a man in his undershirt to the door. His nose was bleeding and one eye was swelling shut. He wiped blood from his nose and told them to get the hell out of there.

Jack’s partner had been walking ahead of him up the cracked cement driveway. So fast it was still a blur in Jack’s memory, the man had a rifle in his hands and was shooting, just spraying bullets and screaming the whole time. The nosy neighbors dived to the ground and behind parked cars. Jack’s partner went down with a bullet to the chest and this look of shock on his face. Jack shot the man, didn’t even think about it, just shot. Then he had to listen to the wife calling him a murderer while he held his dying partner and listened to the faraway sound of sirens.

To this day, every time he went to a house where a husband and wife were arguing, he thought about that afternoon. He never went casually, never assumed anything. There was nothing deadlier than a man and woman who hated and loved each other at the same time.

But the faces of the women had run together in his memory. The eyes were all stricken, the bruises stark, the body language the same. In recent years, when he thought of an abused woman, he saw his high school girlfriend, Meg Patton, lying about her broken arm or the yellowing bruises.

So why hadn’t Beth Sommers joined the anonymous company? Why hadn’t she become another chink in the wall of guilt he’d built since he found out how badly he’d failed Meg?

Why did he keep thinking about this woman of all others? Why did her face keep coming back to him?

Okay, it was partly because she was pretty, tall and slender, with a long graceful neck, a mass of mahogany brown hair and bright blue eyes. She was the kind of woman who could wear capri pants and a tank top and still look as good as any fifteen-year-old. But that wasn’t all of it.

In some ways she was typical of the women he saw in the same situation. The jackass who threw the tantrum might be her ex, but she was still defending him, still insisting he didn’t really mean it. But the way she protected her children, the way she tried to let them keep some respect for their father, wasn’t typical at all. Divorce, especially from an abusive man, was an ugly thing. There weren’t too many women who were able to resist the temptation to use their kids as a battleground.

Beth Sommers was a gutsy woman who reminded him of Meg Patton in this way, too. Meg had put her son first, had done what was needed to protect him from her own father. Jack had learned to respect her for the hard choices she’d made, although those same choices had cheated him of seeing his son grow up.

Like Meg, Beth Sommers was determined to take care of herself and her children, too. He admired that, even if he did think it was stupid. She might be a successful businesswoman, but she was still vulnerable in a way a man wouldn’t be. Damn it, she was fragile! Jack didn’t like thinking about that. He didn’t want to see her with a bruised face and broken bones and defiant terror in her eyes.

He’d driven by her house several times himself. He had made a point of being there Sunday afternoon, but apparently that hadn’t been one of the girls’ weekends with their dad, because Jack saw the older one in the bay window, just sitting on the window seat with her arms wrapped around her knees, staring out. Her head turned when she saw the police car, but he was too far away to see her expression.

Jack remembered the relief on the little girl’s face when her mother said that their father was just throwing a temper tantrum. He didn’t think the older one—who was maybe eleven, twelve—had been convinced. He wondered what their visits to their father were like.