Kathleen Creighton: The Sheriff of Heartbreak County

But then a strange sort of calm settled over her. Because, of course, she knew.

She laid the uneaten sandwich carefully on its plate, picked up the pair of dark-rimmed glasses lying on the table and arranged them on her face. She touched the tender place on her jaw and skimmed her teeth across the swelling on her lower lip. Then she drew a deep breath, rose and walked to the door.

She paused to open the wide mouth of the purse and shift it slightly so as to put it within easier reach of her right hand, before taking a deep breath and calling out, “Who is it?”

“Sheriff Roan Harley, ma’am. I’d like to talk to you, if you wouldn’t mind.” The voice was deep and growly, pleasant and even soft in pitch, but there was no mistaking the iron authority in it.

Mary closed her eyes briefly, then reached once more for the purse, this time picking it up, then bending over to tuck it under the table. She unlocked the door and opened it a cautious crack, leaving the screen door latched. And a moment later was clutching it for support as she felt herself tumbling headlong into a memory she thought she’d put away and forgotten long ago.

I thought Diego DelRey was the most handsome man I’d ever seen. Tall, dark and exotic, he was standing in the middle of that vast hotel lobby in a shaft of sunlight from the leaded-glass skylight, smiling at me through the cascading waters from a Moorish fountain.

“Throw a penny in the fountain and make a wish,” he said in a voice softly accented and exotic, sensual and dangerous as a tiger’s purr. “Tell me what it is and I’ll make it come true.”

And I thought, as I smiled back at him, Oh, but I think you already have.

Why do I remember this now? This man is nothing at all like Diego DelRey. If he reminds me of anyone it’s the Marlboro Man.

Still clutching the latched screen door, she said politely, “May I please see your I.D.?”

The man standing on the front porch seemed surprised by the request, as if it wasn’t one he was accustomed to getting. While he fumbled to pull the folder containing his badge from his shirt pocket with one hand-the other was full of a big light-colored cowboy hat-Mary had time for more analytical thoughts.

He was tall. She was tall herself, but he was taller by half a head, with hard, sinewy flesh arranged sparingly but well over big bones. His hair, sculpted in classic cowboy fashion by the press of the hat brim, gleamed like tarnished gold in the overhead porch light. His features were strong-maybe too strong to be called handsome, with high cheekbones and a square-cut jaw-but his mouth looked as though it might smile easily and well. There were depressions in his cheeks that lacked the benign cuteness of dimples, but rather lent his face a rakish kind of charm that seemed somehow at odds with the somberness of his profession. And even though it was coming on night and his eyes were in shadow, they seemed to squint a little, as if from a lifetime spent gazing at sunshot horizons.

He stepped forward into the light and handed over his identification. She took her time studying it, then deliberately met his eyes for a long unflinching moment as she gave it back to him. His eyes, a cool glittery blue, returned her appraisal for a time that seemed just a little too long.

He won’t miss much, she thought. No, there’s no resemblance to Diego at all. But…maybe it’s that supreme and unshakable self-assurance that’s the same.

A shiver found its way past her defenses and scurried away down her spine as she stepped back and held the door open, wordlessly inviting him in.

“Sorry to bother you so late, ma’am,” he said in his soft, rumbly voice, and shifted his feet as he moved past her, as if he would have liked to wipe them on a doormat that wasn’t there.

In the better light, she amended her thoughts about his eyes. They seemed tired, she thought. Or sad. Remembering Miss Ada’s tale of this man’s personal tragedies made her tone warmer than it might have been.

“That’s all right, I just got home myself, actually.” She closed the door and turned with a gesture, directing her visitor through the shadowy living room toward the lighted rectangle of the kitchen doorway.

And as she did that, she was aware of each of her movements as if a camera’s eye was scrutinizing her face and body in the finest detail. She was conscious of every expression, every muscle and nerve, in a way she hadn’t been even in those long-ago times she’d spent in front of a real camera.

And she was conscious, too, and even ashamed, of the room they were passing through. She tried not to see the comfortable but drab brown tweed sofa and worn beige fake leather rocking chair, or the faded green braided rug that could only have come from a long-extinct mail-order catalog. Even the attempts at decoration made her cringe: The mass-produced and overly sentimental prints of cats and dogs-or worse, houses with impossibly lovely gardens and lighted windows-that hung on the walls, the bowl of artificial daisies that shared the coffee table with a book of Life magazine photographs and a ceramic rooster, the basket of pine cones and the stuffed blue calico cat on the hearth in front of the unused fireplace. Nothing wrong with any of it, and the homey little knickknacks were pretty enough, she supposed, but so…alien to her. It felt like a set, and she walked through it like an actor on a stage.

But this is who I am, now. Shabby…ordinary. I should be used to it by now. And I must not forget it…ever.

“I was just having a bite to eat,” she said, touching her mouse-brown hair in a self-conscious way that was only partly artifice. “If you, um…wouldn’t mind talking in the kitchen? I’m sorry things are such a mess…as I said, I just got home.”

She’s nervous, Roan thought. He didn’t make too much of that, nervous being a pretty usual way for people to be around officers of the law, he’d found, even the ones who had no reason to be. Especially the ones who had no reason to be.

Like Buster had said, the woman fidgeting her way from table to sink to fridge as she cleared away the remains of her evening meal definitely wasn’t the head-turner type. Not the kind of woman to stand out in a crowd in spite of how tall she was. Not the type to stir a man’s juices to lust, either, not at first glance anyway. Though that may have been due in part to the fact that whatever figure she did have was all covered up by the loose-fitting pink nylon smock she wore.

All together, he decided, she wasn’t bad-looking or what he might call homely, just…plain. As in, ordinary. Her hair was kind of a neutral brown, neither curly nor straight, without much body or shine to it and no particular style either, just sort of twisted up on the back of her head. Which struck him as kind of odd for somebody who made her living fixing up other people’s hair. Her eyes were unremarkable, too, a flat greenish-gray in color, like old moss-though it was hard to tell much more about them, hidden as they were behind a pair of dark-rimmed glasses even he knew were both too big for her face and years out of style.

“Can I get you something to drink?” she asked as she brushed some imaginary crumbs off the tabletop. “Some… coffee?”

“Oh, no ma’am, thanks, I just had a cup over at the Last Stand.” He laid his hat on the tabletop she’d just cleared off and pretended not to notice the way she’d twitched when he mentioned the saloon. “I’ll try not to take up too much of your time. I just need to ask you a few questions…”

“Oh-of course.” She leaned her hip against the countertop and folded her arms in a way he didn’t have to be a student of body language to know was defensive.