Finding Stefanie (20 page)

Libby touched his face. “I miss you too.”

He looked away from her, out the window.

“It’s not the right timing. I’m going away to college in the fall—to be a missionary. And my dad’s right. It’s not fair to either of us to let our feelings spiral out of control.”

Oh, his emotions had already run off into the hills. He hadn’t a prayer of getting them under control. “That’s no big deal.”

His words wounded her—he could tell by the way she frowned—but she recovered quickly and nodded. “Yeah . . . no big deal.” She’d seen right through him.

He took her hand and kissed it. “I’m going to make sure you get home okay.”

“I figured.” Libby slid out of the car, slammed the door, and headed down the street toward the lit church and tiny parsonage. But every few feet, she’d look over her shoulder and smile.

CHAPTER 14

A
FTER EVERYTHING ELSE
he’d done to make God mad, Lincoln wondered why he hadn’t ended up as a pile of ash right there on the sidewalk in Phillips. Because, any way he looked at it, he’d threatened the pastor.

And meant it.

“I want a list of everyone who wants Gideon out of town.” Lincoln had stood at the door of the parsonage, the motor of his pickup still running, one arm braced on the doorframe as Pastor Pike stared at him. He’d gone there after tossing the night away, remembering how Stefanie cried in his arms. It burned a hole right through him.

Lincoln wasn’t exactly sure what had happened to him last night, as he’d held a rag to his bleeding chin, terrified that Stefanie had seen him stumble, had discovered his secret, only to have her turn into his arms and sob, but he’d felt something shift inside him.

A feeling of tenderness that he hadn’t known for years.

Maybe never.

She’d sobbed long and hard, and he saw her embarrassment in her eyes as she pulled away. She touched his wounded chin, and it was then,
right then
, that he nearly told her. Nearly confessed that it wasn’t her fault he’d fallen. That in fact, he wasn’t the man she supposed him to be but someone who wasn’t a hero, someone who had nothing but frustration ahead of him. But the words glued to his chest. She wasn’t in the mood to talk either, so he simply drew her close and turned down the lights, used his remote control to turn on some country music, and watched the stars through his giant windows.

He had a feeling her tears had to do with the more gargantuan losses in her life than just Clancy, but the fact that someone had killed her dog made the boy inside Lincoln who had once been weak and small rise up in fury. Someone had gone too far. Someone mean and vindictive.

That injustice had driven Lincoln to the door of the pastor at nine this morning, demanding a list of suspects.

“Excuse me?” Pike retorted. Attired in a friendly sweater and suit pants, with his perfect pastor smile, the close-cropped hair, looking proper and upright, he didn’t resemble in the least the kind of man who had leveled a threat at Lincoln only a day earlier.

“You know what I’m talking about.” Lincoln opened the screen door and barged in. He took off his sunglasses and rounded on the pastor, spotting a curtain fall from one of the windows in the bungalow across the street.

“Please, come in,” Pastor Pike’s voice said, even if his body stayed near the door.

“I want to know who killed Stefanie Noble’s dog.”

The pastor shook his head, and Lincoln had the crazy urge to
knock it right off his shoulders. But that would only compound his crimes with the Almighty, wouldn’t it? Moreover, he wasn’t entirely sure that he wouldn’t be run out of town if he decked the local cloth.

“Maybe you should try looking closer to home.”

“Gideon would never hurt Stefanie—”

“I’m not talking about Gideon, although I wouldn’t put it past him.” Pike strode over to a sofa, where last Sunday’s newspaper lay in a mess. The entire little house looked like it had been caught in a time warp, stuck in the early seventies. Green shag carpet that smelled as if it might have grown there ran through the family room and up the stairs. Family pictures of two little girls and an adoring wife—the ideal family—patterned the wall, and a milk-glass vase with faux flowers sat on the scratched coffee table. A macramé pillow, in the same shade of green as the carpet, decorated the sagging gold sofa.

The entire scene conjured up memories of Lincoln’s trailer home back in Dallas. He could almost hear his mother calling him inside for dinner.

“I’m talking about this blast from your past, Mr. Cash.” Pastor Pike thrust a section of the newspaper at Lincoln. “Maybe it’s you we should be asking to leave.”

What?
Lincoln looked at the page that had been turned open to the entertainment news. The Hollywood rap sheet listed the various misdemeanors.

“Middle of the page, halfway down.”

Oh. Gina Burney was out of jail. The same Gina Burney who had broken the restraining order Lincoln had taken out against her one too many times and who had been in county lockup for the last six months. The same woman who had tried to run him off
the road and set his mailbox on fire. The woman who had once, not so long ago, been an extra on one of his movies, with whom he had had a brief fling.

She probably had good reasons for never forgiving him. He tasted acid in the back of his throat. “Gina Burney is out of jail.”

“Mmm-hmm. Not that I keep track of your life, Lincoln, but that little gem in last week’s paper made me wonder exactly what someone might do to get close to you. Or hurt those who are.”

Lincoln folded the paper. It would have been nice if his agent had let him know that the woman who had once told him she would make sure he never hurt another woman—and then gone into vivid detail as to how she would prevent that—had been released. He hoped his restraining order crossed state lines.

“Gina is a sick woman, but she wouldn’t come to Montana. Besides, she’s been getting help.” Some of which he’d anonymously paid for. Because he’d never felt right about the way he’d treated her. Had he known ten years ago that the sins he committed might haunt him, he might have lived for wisdom and not pleasure. “Why would she come all the way to Montana, get into my life again, when she could start over?”

“Maybe she knows something we don’t.” Pike stood there, a pillar of righteousness, of judgment.

Lincoln simply . . . well, lost it. “This isn’t my fault. And it’s not Gideon’s fault. I want you to find out who poisoned Stefanie’s dog.”

“What do you want me to do? Resurrect the inquisition? Maybe build a pyre in the middle of Main Street?”

Wow. Pastor Pike had more spur in him than Lincoln expected. Well, so did Lincoln. “If that’s what it takes. Start with Clarisse Finney.”

“Clarisse?”

“Yes, Clarisse and her history of killing animals, namely Dugan’s junkyard dog.”

“How’d you hear that?”

“Interesting what a guy picks up sitting at Lolly’s for hours on end. I know more about the people in this town than you’d think.” His eyes traveled to the pictures on the wall, and his voice dropped a notch. “I was sorry to hear about your wife.”

Pike took a step back, the air out of his sails. “Thank you.” For a moment he stared at Lincoln, a mix of strange emotions flitting across his face. “Clarisse is an interesting lady, but she’s not a killer. She’s our resident hippie, has a strange mix of beliefs, from New Age mysticism to a Baptist-style upbringing. Makes wind chimes and sells them on the Internet. On a windy day, you can hear them all the way down Main Street. She’s got the morals of a saloon girl and the mouth of an outlaw, but I don’t think she’d kill a dog.”

“I heard she told the sheriff that she suspected Gideon of stealing from the Laundromat. I’m thinking that’s where you got your suspicions. Way to assume the best about people,
Pastor
.”

Pike actually turned ashen as Lincoln watched the last of the fight go out of him.

“Maybe I shouldn’t have jumped to conclusions, but . . . well, you know kids who come from the inner city. They’ve got a rough side—”

“Yeah, I do, actually, and Gideon is the last person who would kill Stefanie’s dog. He loves the Noble family. After what they’ve done for him, after giving him a chance and believing in him, he’s not going to wreck that by betraying them.”

“I know Gideon might be a perfectly nice—”

“Spare me. You don’t think that for a second. You see his long hair and pierced ear and rusty wheels and instantly peg him as a kid who will get your daughter in trouble, which, by the way, doesn’t say much for her judgment.”

“I admit it’s easy to give grace to people when it doesn’t affect your life. But try doing it when it means you have to trust them with something or someone who means more to you . . .” Pike sighed, running his hand over his forehead. “Okay, so maybe I shouldn’t have let my fears do my speaking for me. I’m sorry I . . . uh . . .”

“Threatened me?” Lincoln let the words be sharper than he meant.

He could see argument rise in Pike’s eyes. Then the man nodded.

“Listen—just find out who killed the dog, okay? And stop blaming me and my friends.” Lincoln turned to leave, then rounded on the pastor one final time, saying what he should have said yesterday, when he’d been too shocked to respond. “In case you’re wondering, no, I’m not asking Gideon to leave town. Frankly, I think Libby could do worse.” He crunched the newspaper in his hand. “I’m keeping this.”

Lincoln stormed back to his pickup, anger churning inside, feeling so helpless he wanted to scream. He threw the crumpled paper on the seat, grabbing the steering wheel with both hands.

What was Gina doing out of jail?

And could she have found him?

“You’re pretty. Like my mom.” Macey stood at the door, wearing a short-sleeved shirt and a pair of jeans. Stefanie noticed that she’d
stopped working so hard to hide her arms, and the few times she’d rolled up her sleeves, Stefanie saw no new marks. It made her want to sing.

Stefanie stood in the bathroom, blow-drying her hair. Thanks to a miscalculation about one of her new quarter horses, she’d taken a painful spill into the dirt, smearing mud into her hair and down her chin. Although she slept up at the hunting cabin, she’d left most of her wardrobe back at the house.

Most of the time she didn’t know where she belonged anyway. Or even who she was.

For the first time in years, she’d rushed a horse, made him skittish. Scared him. All because she couldn’t get her brain off last night. And the way she’d hidden in Lincoln’s arms.

She couldn’t believe she’d nearly dragged Lincoln right into her past, her mistakes, her broken places. She didn’t realize she was there, back in the shame of her freshman year in college, until the words had tumbled out and suddenly she’d teetered on the cusp of letting him inside, letting him see her wounds.

But after her tough-girl act last night—and she had to admit liking her newest nickname, Slugger—she couldn’t bear to let Lincoln know how much he meant to her. Or after he’d held her like he did, that she’d actually thought he was just using her.

She’d managed to keep her wits about her. Lincoln did have great arms, though. Big enough, it seemed, for her grief.

But now, it seemed that in becoming whoever she was in his eyes, she’d confused the woman she’d always been.

She flipped her hair back, staring at herself in the mirror as Macey came in and sat down on the closed toilet seat. “My mom had long black hair like yours, only she wasn’t quite as skinny.”

Stefanie supposed, in girlspeak, this might be a compliment. But as she ran the blower under her hair, she couldn’t help but compare her figure with the ones Lincoln usually spent his time with. She certainly didn’t have leading-lady curves like his most recent costar, Elise Fontaine.

But Lincoln hadn’t been holding Elise Fontaine in his arms last night, had he?

She refused to listen to the voice that told her he was just bored and used to having a woman in his life, even if he had to troll the local horse barns to get her.

“Gideon told me your mother died. I’m so sorry,” Stefanie said, glancing in the mirror as Macey chewed her fingernails down past the quick. She remembered a not-so-long-ago time when she’d done the same thing. “My mom died when I was about your age too. I still really miss her.”

Macey nodded, chewing a hangnail. “She worked as a waitress. But she loved horses. Had pictures of them up on the walls of our trailer. Sometimes she would crawl in bed with me at night and tell me stories of growing up on her ranch.”

“Your mom grew up on a ranch?”

“Yeah, in South Dakota. Until she met my dad. He was a builder and worked construction. They traveled a lot, went where he could find work. Until he got injured. Then we just stayed in Rapid City.”

“Gideon didn’t mention your dad.”

Macey shrugged. “He’s in jail. For life. Robbed a liquor store and killed someone.”

Stefanie suspected there was more to that story . . . as with every story. But she finger-combed her hair and didn’t press.