The Sheriff of Heartbreak County

a breath. “Never did come back. That’s the last any of us saw him, I guess.”

“Except for the one that shot him,” Roan said, and got an angry look in return.

“Like I said, I can’t believe-”

“Like I said, I have to follow it up. You know that.” Roan laid a calming hand on the big man’s shoulder. “I appreciate you telling me about this.” Buster muttered something unintelligible but was obviously unhappy, and Roan clapped him good-naturedly on the back. “Hey, come on, you know I’m gonna be fair. If this lady’s as innocent as you say she is, she’s got nothing to worry about. But I am going to need to talk to her. Tonight.” The easy smile on his lips tightened into grimmer lines. “Be seein’ you, Buster. You take it easy, now.”

The sheriff touched the brim of his Stetson and plunged through the door and into the twilight.

“You can stare at me all you like, but that’s all you’re getting,” Mary said firmly to the beast watching her avidly from his perch atop the kitchen counter. “The rest is mine. You’re getting too fat anyway.”

The animal, a huge and amazingly ugly orange tabby tomcat, blinked at her in slow motion and went right on staring. He’d come with the house, and allowing him to remain there, as well as providing him with food and other feline comforts, had been another of the conditions under which Queenie Schultz had consented to leave her home and business in Mary’s custody. So, she tolerated the creature, and since he had no name that she knew of and because he reminded her-with a bittersweet ache of longing for a place and time lost to her now-of Audrey Hepburn’s cat in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, that’s what she called him. Cat.

For his part, the animal seemed to have accepted the alien presence in his domain, although he did insist on staring at her with unnerving intensity, as if he expected her to turn back into Queenie at any moment, in a puff of magical smoke.

Mary picked up the last triangle of her smoked turkey club on whole wheat bread and was about to sink her teeth into it when Cat startled her by coming abruptly to life. He leaped down from the countertop to land with a heavy thud on the linoleum floor, then vanished into the nether regions of the house. An instant later, there came a knock on the front door.

Her heart leaped, then plummeted, a fair imitation of the maneuver Cat had just demonstrated. Who on earth? Her eyes went automatically to the oversized purse on the table that sat in the dimly lit living room just to the right of the front door. In all the months she’d lived in Hartsville, she’d never had anyone knock on her door before. And at this time of night?

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.