LITMIR.BIZ

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The dispatcher set the page on the desk.

      A drawing. He’d done a sketch, an intricately detailed sketch. For a second Meg closed her eyes. Oh, Ethan. This is so you. How on earth was she supposed to submit this to court, if the investigation reached that point?

      “What should I do with it, Chief?” Sally toyed with the gold chain around her neck.

      Meg picked up the page, tossed it onto the stack of files loading her In box. “Nothing, Sal. I’ll deal with it.” With him.

      “He left his cell phone number. Should I call and have him come back?”

      Meg shook her head. “I’ll be taking a look out that way this morning. Need to get some pictures of the scene and the eagle over at the clinic.” Deliberately changing topics in an effort to remove thoughts of Ethan in those long, lanky Wranglers, she asked, “Has Gilby left yet?” It was the deputy’s turn to pick up the bagels from Old Joe’s Bakery today.

      “Five minutes ago.”

      “Good, let me know when he’s back. I’m starving.”

      Sally laughed. “You’re always starving. Sheesh, I wish I had your metabolism, grazing on carbs all day and never gaining an ounce.”

      “It’s called being the mother of a teen, Sal. Takes a lot of stamina.”

      “I hear ya. Thank goodness those days are over in my house.” Chuckling, the dispatcher headed out the door.

      The instant she was alone again, Meg picked up Ethan’s “statement.” A time line wove over the page. Along it, he’d created more than a dozen sketches, each intricately detailed and described with notes. His spiky, slanted initials angled across the bottom right corner.

      She identified her son and Randy Leland, read the time and date. She recognized Beau’s obstinate attitude in his down-turned mouth. Randy looked out of the page with some reluctance, exactly as the boy appeared whenever he came to her house two miles east of Sweet Creek.

      And a quarter mile from Ethan’s place. Don’t forget that, Meg.

      No, she never forgot the fact as she watched the sun rise and set, ate and slept and argued with her son, just over a small bluff from the man she once loved so much she’d believed their souls were attached at the heart.

      And when she had learned a year ago about his inheritance of the O’Conner place, about his plans to move into the house on land separated from hers by a narrow creek…God, she had walked around with a clog of fear in her throat for weeks. It was one thing to see him from a distance on her brother’s ranch; it was another to be Ethan RedWolf’s direct and only neighbor.

      Blinking, she focused on his portrayal of her son and Randy Leland. They weren’t bad kids, just teenagers striving for independence. That’s what she kept telling herself.

      She studied the female figure, back to the viewer, sitting on the boulder where Ethan claimed to have discovered the raptor.

      A small jolt darted through Meg. It’s me. He’s drawn me at seventeen.

      When her hair had been long enough to touch her belt, when innocence colored the future.

      Why? she wondered. Why would he include her in a present-day time line? And suddenly she understood. She, sitting on that megaton rock, offered directions to the scene of the crime.

      Oh, yes, he knew she’d recognize the boulder. They’d sat there for hours as kids, and he’d kissed her a thousand times, touched her breasts while, over lake and mountain, they had observed a pair of adult eagles seek prey to feed their offspring.

      More than that, on that rock, she and Ethan had dreamed of the home they’d build together, of the children they’d raise. Years of life and love wending into the future from that base point. So many plans.

      Oh, Ethan. You never forgot.

      Admit it, Meg, neither have you.

      Simply put, she’d been bullheaded about burying the key that locked her heart. But looking at her younger self, remembering the emotion in his eyes back then, remembering those eyes today harboring secrets, she wondered what he would say about her secret.

      The scarred one under her shirt that said she’d been cancer free for seven years.

      Chapter Two

      Fifteen minutes after Ethan left, two more complaints were called in, the first involving five overturned headstones at the Sweet Creek Cemetery to which Meg sent Gilby. Then Beth Ellen Woodley carped about a Ford Bronco parked on her lawn with Ulysses McLeod snoring off an all-night drunk behind the steering wheel.

      By the time Meg eked out an hour of free time, it was nearly ten o. “Sal, I’m going to Blue Mountain for a written statement from Ethan Red Wolf.” She strode past the dispatcher to her private office for her notebook and digital camera. “Hopefully it won’t take long, but if something—”

      “Yeah, yeah,” Sally grumbled, typing at the speed of light. “If the town floods or an earthquake happens, call your cell.”

      Chuckling, Meg grabbed one of the sesame bagels Gilby had bought at Old Joe’s. “You know me well, Sal.”

      “Don’t talk with your mouth full.”

      “Yes, Mom.” Her step lighter, Meg headed out the back door where the police SUV waited.

      But by the time she had cleared the town’s outskirts, sweat dotted her skin and two fingers tapped nervously against the steering wheel. She’d be talking with him again, twice in the same morning. Okay, on official business, but still. Six years, and they had barely nodded across the street or spoken ten words in one sitting.

      She’d heard he renamed his grandfather’s place. Instead of O’Conner’s Fishing Dock, it was now Private Property. Meg smiled. Simple and to the point.

      No, she thought. Nothing ever had been simple about Ethan Red Wolf. The man was as complex and intriguing as his ancestry. Even his name Ethan resembled the word Earth, a word suited for a man at one with his environment.

      Turning down Lake Road—a strip of asphalt carving a path above the pine and rocky shores of the small mountain lake—Meg wondered again what Ethan had cataloged with those keen, dark eyes in those moments back at her office.

      Certainly he’d noticed the stress lines between her eyes, the gauntness of her cheeks, that her hair was bobbed short and careless—all signatures of her job and current life.

      In the sketch, he drew you with long, wavy hair.

      Well, those days were gone. Today he had the longer hair.

      Contemplating the comparisons, she nearly missed the turnoff leading on to his forty-acre property. Shadowed by pines and golden quaking aspen, the single-lane dirt trail wove a half mile down an easy incline to spill into a delta of newly laid gravel.

      He had been busy. Davis O’Conner’s rectangular house sported a fresh coat of terra-cotta paint that highlighted the reddish tint of aged pine needles on the ground. Ochre window shutters and a matching door offered a splash of vividness under the sweep of a roofed porch.

      As Meg shut off the cruiser’s ignition, she surveyed the area. To the left of the house, the squat, slant-roofed building the old man once used as an equipment and canoe shed glimmered with fresh green siding. To the right, a hundred-foot grassy trail fed into the trees to another green structure. Ethan’s photography and art studio?

      Over the years she knew he’d forged a name for himself with his environmental photographs, sketches and paintings. Paintings composed of swirls and shapes in brilliant, bold colors. Two summers ago, she had perused several in a Billings art gallery, and more recently bought calendars printed with his creations from Sweet Creek’s grocery and drugstore.

      Noticing his pickup parked in front of the new green structure, she headed in its direction—and saw what the house blocked.

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