LITMIR.BIZ

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wrong with their former womb-mate.

      She gave him her best everything-is-all-right smile. He didn’t look as if it fooled him, but then their cook came in the back door singing at the top of her lungs, and Lillie hurried to see what trouble her father had gotten into in the bar.

      * * *

      FLINT DROPPED HARP off at the sheriff’s department. But as the deputy got out of the patrol SUV, the sheriff told him, “If you happen by the mayor’s office today and your father calls me later to ask me how you got a black eye, I’m going to tell him the truth.”

      “It’s my word against your crazy old man’s,” Harp said, scowling.

      “Which do you think your father is going to believe? That not-quite-seventy-year-old Ely Cahill, drunk on his ass, got you, a trained deputy, before you could cuff him? Or that you were giving him a hard time, enjoying making fun of him, and he dropped you with one punch? Either way, I got the whole story from some of the patrons who were watching from the bar window. If you don’t believe it, they took videos with their phones.”

      Harp clamped his mouth shut. “Is that all?”

      “For now,” Flint said and drove north out of town on a dirt road toward Anvil Holloway’s farm. It was a good twenty miles of rolling hills. Turning onto an even narrower dirt road, he saw the farm ahead.

      In the field next to the house, decades of old cars, pickups and farm equipment rusted in the morning sun. A few clouds scudded across a robin’s-egg-blue sky. The mountains around the wide valley were still snowcapped and the air had a crispness to it that warned summer was still months off.

      Flint parked, shut off his engine and started to climb out when Anvil rushed from the house to stop on the dilapidated porch. The house needed paint and didn’t look much better than the porch.

      “Have you heard from her?” Flint asked as he walked toward the house and the man anxiously waiting for him.

      Anvil shook his head as if unable to draw the words. He looked older than fifty-seven. His brown hair needed cutting. It framed a once handsome face now weathered from years of working outdoors. He still looked strong from his days playing football at the University of Montana in Missoula, his only claim to fame. His large body was clad in faded overalls over a clean white T-shirt. He’d obviously dressed up for Flint’s visit, since he’d recently shaved. He still had a dollop of shaving cream congealing on one ear.

      “Why don’t we go inside and sit down. You can tell me what happened,” Flint said.

      Anvil nodded nervously, practically wringing his hands before he wiped both down the sides of his overalls. “It’s just not like her to take off and not call and let me know she’s all right.”

      Flint followed the farmer into the kitchen of the ranch house. The room was neat and clean, dishes done, floor recently mopped, he noticed with concern. In this part of the country, men worked in the fields, barns and pastures. Women worked in the house. That Anvil had mopped the floor sent up a red flag that Flint hadn’t been expecting.

      If Jenna had been gone since yesterday evening, she hadn’t been the one to mop the floor. It seemed a strange thing for Anvil to do unless he had something he needed to clean up.

      They took a seat at the 1950s metal-and-Formica blue table. Anvil had inherited the farm along with the house and furnishings from his father after he graduated from college. His parents had moved down to Arkansas to be near his sister and her family.

      Flint noticed that, like the floor, the table too had been wiped down recently.

      “So tell me what happened,” he said as he took out his notebook and pen.

      “We had an argument,” Anvil admitted as he wiped a hand over his face. His voice broke as he said, “She left.”

      Flint saw with growing concern that the knuckles of Anvil’s right hand were scraped and bruised. “She leave in her own car?” Anvil nodded. “She take anything with her?”

      “A suitcase and her purse.”

      “She packed after the argument?” Flint asked.

      Anvil shook his head. “She’d already packed. Said she needed some time to think.”

      “Think about what?”

      Anvil looked at the floor.

      “She leave because you hit her?”

      The farmer’s head bobbed up, shock and guilt on his face. “It wasn’t like that.”

      “It wasn’t the first time you’d hit her?”

      “I’d never laid a hand on her before. I swear to God.” The words came out in a strangled cry. Tears had filled the man’s eyes. Remorse making him appear even older. “It was the first time I raised a hand to her. I swear on my grandmother’s grave. I...I slapped her.”

      Flint reached across the table to lift Anvil’s ham-sized right hand. “Looks like you did more than slap her.”

      * * *

      ELY CAHILL PERKED up a lot after his Johnson breakfast. Lillie had studied him as he’d eaten every bite on his plate. He was still a strong man in so many ways. Stubborn as a stump that refused to be pulled from the ground. Weathered by life and the outdoors. Tough as the proverbial nail. She envied him that he knew what he wanted and didn’t wait around for life to give it to him.

      The drive up the canyon to his cabin was a beautiful one. Spring in Montana couldn’t be any more delightful. The sky was a clear blinding blue dotted with puffy white clouds over a sea of new bright green grasses and dark pines. She took it in as she drove, thinking how nine years ago she would have given all of this up for Trask.

      Ely Cahill lived within sight of an old ghost town. Only a few shells of buildings still stood in the middle of the tall spring grass. His cabin fit right in.

      He’d built it years ago out of hewn logs with his sons helping him. It was small and apparently all he needed.

      The logs had weathered from the sun and snow and thunderstorms that passed over. Vegetation had grown up around it in his absence. From a distance, a person would think it was abandoned.

      Ely spent little time here and even less in the ranch house down the road, where he’d lived with their mother and helped raise the six of them. I’m done ranching, he’d announced after their mother had died. You all can have the ranch. I want that hill overlooking this valley. That’s where I plan to die.

      That had been almost twenty years ago. Lillie’s older brothers Cyrus and Hawk had taken over the ranch. She and her twin, Darby, had wanted nothing to do with it. Tuck, the oldest of her brothers, had struck out on his own at eighteen, not to be heard from again.

      Tuck was the smart one to get out of here, Darby had said recently after mentioning that he should probably sell his share of the Stagecoach Saloon and take off to find his fortune.

      Lillie hoped he was just talking. She couldn’t run the bar and café alone and she didn’t want to sell out or take on another partner. It wasn’t just a business. It was her home. She loved the old stagecoach stop, could feel its history in the stone walls and marred wooden floorboards, and she was determined to preserve it. Making money was the least of the reasons she had bought the building. The bar and café had been a way of hanging on to it—and put a roof over her head.

      “Thank you, Lillie Girl,” her father said as she pulled up in front of his cabin. “No need to see me in. The pack rats probably carried off most everythin’ and left a mess ta boot.”

      She shuddered to think what the inside of the cabin looked like as she watched him lift his pack and the bag of groceries she’d insisted on. “How long will you be staying out of the mountains?”

      He looked up toward the Judiths, still snowcapped. “As long as I can stand it.” Lewis and Clark had discovered the mountains on their expedition to find the Northwest Passage.

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