The Sheriff of Heartbreak County

“Don’t know when I’ve seen her so happy,” Roan said, narrowed eyes following his daughter’s progress through the food court tables on her way to the video arcade. He coughed and frowned at the coffee-flavored ice cream cone in his hand. “It was a nice thing you did, fixing her hair like that. Don’t know if I said thank you or not, but… thank you.”

Mary smiled, the cool sweet miracle of pistachio almond ice cream lingering on her tongue. “No thanks necessary. Every girl needs to feel pretty.”

He threw her a look, bright with a father’s anguish. “Yeah, I know. That’s why I…I mean, how can she-”

Without thinking, she reached across the table to put her hand on his arm, and the sensation of warm wiry muscle beneath a soft cotton shirtsleeve sent a flash of tingling heat through her fingers and hand. It had already spread into every part of her before she could snatch the hand away, and she laid her palm against her chest in a vain effort to still the turmoil it had kindled there.

“Roan, feeling pretty isn’t about what’s on the outside-it’s in here.” The quiver of emotion in her voice wasn’t only from the words, or the memories they recalled. “It doesn’t matter how pretty she is, if she doesn’t feel pretty…and vice versa, of course,” she finished in a more casual tone, when she saw he was studying her with bright and unreadable eyes.

To avoid that scrutiny, she turned her attention to her ice cream cone, turning it to find the spot most in need of licking. But she found licking it only intensified her awareness of that keen blue gaze…

Then, having taken care of all incipient drips, she didn’t know what to do with the cone. If she lowered it, which would be the natural thing to do, it would expose her lips, which all of a sudden felt ridiculously swollen, to his discerning gaze. She would feel…naked. And her lips were glazed, now, and sticky with the ice cream’s sweetness; yet licking them while he watched seemed almost unbearably seductive. What if he thought…

“Another way of sayin’ kids need to feel good about themselves.” He licked his cone unselfconsciously. Above it his eyes grew lazy and soft, as if behind the cone his mouth was smiling.

Out of the blue it occurred to Mary what his deep rumbling drawl reminded her of. There’d always been something about it…the tone, the pitch…that set pleasure vibrations humming inside her. It was like Cat’s purring. His voice made her feel happy and warm and safe.

“Yes,” she said, and smiled.

Roan frowned at his ice cream cone to hide the fact that he felt like he’d just been bucked off a horse. Oh Lord, that smile…

He thought it probably hadn’t occurred to her what she must look like when she did that. Or that she wasn’t supposed to be beautiful.

“Well, shoot,” he said belligerently, “I think Susie’s pretty, even with her scars. I’ve told her, but I don’t think she believes me. She just tells me, ‘Oh, Dad…’”

Mary nodded, and he watched her smile grow crooked. “That’s because everybody knows all dads are supposed to think their little girls are beautiful. It’s a question little girls ask their mothers: ‘Mommy, am I pretty?’” She studied her almost empty cone as if she’d lost her appetite for it. The sadness was in her eyes, now, too.

“Did you ask yours?” He smiled at her, wanting to bring the lovely green light back into her eyes.

She bit into her cone with a soft crunch and nodded. “Sooner or later we all do.”

“And what did she say?”

Her throat moved as if it was rocks she’d swallowed instead of a bite of sugar cookie ice cream cone. After a pause, looking past him she said in a voice without expression, “She told me the devil loves a pretty face. Then she told my father. He made me kneel on the church floor-I don’t know for how long…hours, I guess. Maybe all day. I remember the floor was hard…I remember my knees hurt, and my back. I remember being cold and hungry. I remember crying.”

Roan was used to hearing shocking things, but he couldn’t remember anything he’d ever heard on the job that hit him as hard. Luckily, he’d had a lot of practice keeping his feelings to himself, so he was able to respond in the quiet, even tone he’d use with a distraught witness. “Your father was a preacher?”

She nodded.

And there it was, finally-a small thing, but after a week of subtle probing his mystery woman had just handed him a piece of her past. A piece that might even help solve the puzzle of who and what she was, if he could take the time to look at it closely.

But right then he felt no flare of triumph at the revelation, no sense of achievement or success. Right then his mind was occupied by only one thing: the image of a little girl with shimmering tear-filled green eyes and the face of an angel, on her knees in a cold empty church, shivering…crying…praying. Wondering what she’d done that was so wrong.

As the shock slowly faded, rage took its place. The same rage, he told himself, that filled him every time he had to deal with a case involving abuse of a child. He never had been able to understand that kind of cruelty-never had and never would.

Stiffening his facial muscles and avoiding the eyes that gazed past him, veiled in a misty sheen that reminded him of dewfall on a gray spring morning, he tried to think of something to say, something that might restore the gray to sunlit green. His inability to do so had begun to eat dangerously at his self-control when he saw Susie Grace wending her way toward them, wearing the remnants of her Rocky Road ice cream cone as a chocolate goatee.

A final little skip-hop brought her to a halt beside the table, already launched into her appeal. “Dad, I used up all my quarters. Can I have some more? Please? I only need-”

“What’s this?” Roan touched her sticky chin with his knuckle. “Looks to me like you need to wash your face, kiddo.”

Susie Grace stuck out her tongue in a mostly fruitless effort to comply with that suggestion.

It felt good to watch his kid being a kid and be thankful for it. Laughter shivered inside his chest as he said sternly, “Nope, ’fraid it’s gonna take more than that. Come on-I’ll take you to the restroom.”

Susie Grace gasped as if he’d suggested she strip right there on the spot. “Da-ad, it’s the girls’ bathroom. You can’t go in there!”

“How about if I take you?” Mary said.

His daughter’s reply was a radiant smile, made downright impish by that chocolate goatee.

“Is that okay with you?” Mary asked Roan in a low voice as she scooted back her chair, nudging aside the pile of shopping bags that were stacked around and underneath it.

He shrugged and said, “Sure.”

Susie Grace threw him a look of pure glee. She reached confidently for Mary’s hand, Mary looped the strap of her purse over one shoulder and the two of them began to make their way through the maze of tables toward the restrooms on the opposite side of the food court.

Roan followed them with his eyes, followed them until the image was seared on his brain: little girl with tousled red-gold hair, dressed in a spanking new spring-green outfit, hopping and skipping with barely contained exuberance as she held on to the hand of a tall, slender woman…a woman who dressed in shapeless clothes, with her hair hanging down her back in a lank brown ponytail, yet who walked with beauty and grace and confidence in her step.

Then…that image seemed to shimmer and sizzle and melt like butter on a griddle, and another came to take its place: Same little girl, four years younger…same joyful exuberance as she clings to the hand of a tall, slender woman with fiery red curls tumbling untamed down her back…as she smiles down at the child… and walks with beauty, grace and confidence in her step.

And for some reason he thought again about the old Blackfoot horse trainer and the Spirit Messenger. He didn’t believe in such things-he didn’t. But something shivered across his skin and filled the inside of his head and every part of him, and he wondered whether it was a warning…or a promise.

He waited until he was certain Mary and his daughter weren’t going to look back, then buried his face in his hands.

God help me…God, or Spirit Messenger…Bear, Wolf, Buffalo or Raven…whoever you are: Help me. I think I’m in danger…of falling in love with a murder suspect.

It was late afternoon when the SUV pulled to a stop in front of Mary’s house, but at that time of year the sun was still high in the sky. Susie Grace had fallen asleep in the back seat on the drive back from Bozeman, stuffed full