JoAnn Ross - Confessions

Silvery rain snakes streaked down the bedroom window. Her wounded heart continued to beat.

Pumping out precious blood.

Laura’s last conscious thought was regret that she hadn’t told Clint about their baby.

And then, as a second sharp retort filtered through the fog clouding her mind, Laura Swann Fletcher surrendered to the darkness.

Chapter Two

“Well, this is another fine mess you’ve gotten yourself into,” Mariah Swann muttered.

Her fingers gripped the steering wheel of her new fire-engine red Jeep Grand Cherokee. A drenching downpour streamed across the windshield, as the ineffectual swish swish of the wipers added accompaniment to Travis Tritt singing on the CD player about the perils of falling in love with an unfaithful woman. The storm, which had stuck like glue overhead all the way from her Malibu beach house had her two hours behind schedule. The digital clock on the dashboard said two o’clock. In the morning. She still had another twenty miles to go before she reached Whiskey River. And then there was that death-defying drive up to her sister’s ranch.

“You’ve been gone ten years, dummy,” she scolded herself for her impatience. “What’s another two hours, more or less?”

It shouldn’t matter. But it did. Because recently she’d been thinking about Laura. A lot.

The time had come for making amends. For healing old wounds. And who better to begin with than the woman who, once, had been Mariah’s best friend?

Her thoughts in a turmoil as she relived the tempestuous day she’d left Whiskey River, Mariah almost didn’t see the white barricade blocking the roadway. She slammed the brake pedal to the floor, grateful for the antilock brakes that kept her from sliding through the barricade into the swirling, churning waters.

The rain had caused the river to flood its banks. Attempting a crossing, especially in the dark, would not only be foolhardy, but possibly deadly.

“Damn!”

Mariah glared out at the raging river, at the rain streaming down the windshield, at the stormy sky and considered her options. She could sit here, wait until dawn, and check out exactly how deep the water was running. Or she could turn around, head back the way she’d come, get a motel room in Camp Verde and wait the storm out.

Choosing caution for once, she managed, just barely, to make a U-turn. Fifteen minutes and thirty-five dollars later, she was sitting on a too soft mattress in the Pinewood Motel, telephone receiver in hand trying to get through to her sister, so she could advise Laura not to wait up.

Mariah frowned at the busy tone. “Who could she be talking to at nearly three in the morning?” She tried once more. Again, the line rang busy.

“Maybe she took the phone off the hook.” Mariah wondered if Laura was avoiding her. It wouldn’t be all that surprising, considering their rocky past. But during the past two years when they’d begun speaking again, she’d hoped that she and her sister had put those days behind them.

Perhaps the storm had knocked down the lines.

“Shit.”

Patience had never been Mariah Swann’s long suit. It wasn’t now. She dug through her purse, searching out the cigarettes she’d bought in Kingman, swearing, as always, they’d be her last. She located the already crumpled pack, shook a cigarette loose and picked up the matches from the tin ashtray on the bedside table. The matchbook cover suggested she was only a free test away from a career as a commercial artist.

As she lit the cigarette, drawing the acrid smoke into her lungs, she could almost hear Laura lecturing her, the same way she had the first time Mariah had gotten caught smoking in the girls’ bathroom at school.

Their mother, unable to stand the remoteness of ranch life, had fled Whiskey River—and her domineering husband. The same day Margaret McKenna Swann packed her Louis Vuitton suitcases and returned to Hollywood, Matthew Swann had filed for divorce.

Angry, unable to understand their mother’s defection, and chafing under her father’s iron hand, Mariah became the rebellious Swann daughter. Which left Laura, by default, the role of the solid, responsible daughter.

Only lately had Mariah begun to understand how having so much responsibility dumped on Laura’s shoulders at such a young age must have cost her older sister. Not that Laura had ever complained.

Except the time she’d shocked everyone by eloping with Clint Garvey. The ill-fated marriage had lasted less than a day.

After their father brought her home Laura never mentioned Clint again. A few years later, she married the man her father had chosen for her, and if the glowing articles Mariah read in all the magazines were any indication, her sister was happy.

But sometimes, when the camera lens was focused on the senator while Laura stood loyally in the background, a photographer would capture a candid, unpracticed expression on her face. An expression so filled with sadness that Mariah wanted to cry.

“I’ll make it up to you, Laurie.” Guilt and regret snaked through her. “I promise.”

Unable to sit still, Mariah began to pace and smoke. Waiting for morning.

* * *

Trace Callahan was dog tired. Throughout the night he’d driven the back roads, setting up barricades in the pouring rain, trying to keep idiot vacationers and drunk residents of Mogollon County from driving their four-wheelers into the raging Whiskey River.

When he’d first applied for the job of sheriff, he couldn’t help thinking of the old days when cowboys got drunk and smashed up Whiskey River’s saloons. These days, kids got drunk and smashed up their daddies’ pickups.

He hung his dripping poncho on the rack by the front door and tossed his hat onto a nearby table. Rotating his aching shoulder, which went stiff when it rained, he went into the kitchen, ignoring the trail of muddy footprints he left in his wake.

He opened the refrigerator and had just pulled out the beer he’d been thinking about for the last hour, when the phone rang. The caller I.D. screen announced the call was from his office.

“I told you I was going off duty, Cora Mae,” he barked into the mouthpiece. “This had better be important.”

“It is if you consider a possible one-eighty-seven in progress important, Sheriff,” Cora Mae Jackson shot back.

A wave of adrenaline rushed through his body. Fatigue was immediately forgotten. “A one-eighty-seven?”

A murder? In Whiskey River? Impossible. There hadn’t been a murder in the Arizona mountain town since 1957, when Jared Lawson got drunk at a family Thanksgiving dinner and shot his mother-in-law to death over a white meat–dark meat argument.

“A one-eighty-seven,” the night dispatcher repeated. “At Senator Fletcher’s ranch.”

Trace could feel his body relaxing again. He hunched his stiff shoulder, holding the receiver against his neck as he unscrewed the beer cap.

“You mean a possible burglary.” There’d been at least a half dozen false alarms at the ranch. Trace wished Fletcher would either get the damn system fixed, or tear it out.

“After thirty-five years I should know my codes, Sheriff,” Cora Mae sniffed. “I meant a murder. The senator just called in on 911. He’s been shot. He thinks his wife was shot, too.”

Trace’s pulse rate soared. “Is the gunman still in the house?”

“The senator said he heard them run out. He thinks there were two of them.”

Trace slammed the bottle down onto the counter. Foam ran over his hand. “Why didn’t you say so in the first place?”

“I believe I did, Sheriff.”

“Dispatch the county medical unit,” Trace instructed. “And get hold of J.D.”

“J.D. was here when the call came in. He’s on his way to the ranch now.”