Big Sky Lawman Read online

  Stories of family and romance beneath the Big Sky!

  “I would never hurt you, Crystal. Can’t you believe that?”

  Sloan was standing too close—so close that his murmur raised goose bumps on her neck.

  “It’s not a matter of my believing you, Sloan. I can’t believe in myself. My judgment has proved to be so flawed that I’m afraid to trust it anymore. It tells me you’re not like other men, but I don’t know if that’s true, or if it’s wishful thinking, or if it’s just lust.”

  “Well, at least you admitted you want me,” he said with a gently teasing grin. “But you’re wrong, Crystal. Never assume that because one man hurt you, the next one will, too.”

  “And never—” he bent closer “—ever think you can casually mention lusting for me and then just walk away….”

  MARILYN PAPPANO

  Big Sky Lawman

  MARILYN PAPPANO

  has spent most of her life growing into the person she was meant to be, but she isn’t there yet. She’s been blessed with family—her husband, their son, his lovely wife and a grandson who is almost certainly the most beautiful and talented baby in the world—and friends, along with a writing career that’s made her one of the luckiest people around. Her passions, besides those already listed, include the pack of wild dogs who make their home in her house, fighting the good fight against the weeds that make up her yard, killing the creepy-crawlies that slither out of those weeds and, of course, anything having to do with books.

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Epilogue

  Prologue

  On a bright, sunny Tuesday afternoon, with the Montana sky a clear, perfect blue and a gentle breeze blowing the scents of fall from the north, Crystal Cobbs opened a book and saw a vision of terror.

  With trembling hands, she set the ancient, leather-bound first edition down, staggered back a step or two and sank down onto a Queen Anne chair in a state of disrepair. She squeezed her eyes tightly shut and whispered a frantic prayer for the vision to disappear. When she opened her eyes, though, it was still there.

  A wooded hillside. A curving road a short distance away. Water quiet and still in the evening. A cluster of small buildings on the far side of the road.

  And the woman.

  She lay on the wet ground with blood everywhere, soaking her clothing, seeping into the earth. She was unmoving, her head tilted to one side, her blond hair falling to hide her face. Her hand was frozen, stretched out, palm up, a beseeching gesture. The hand showed signs of terrible suffering—deep cuts caused by manicured nails, raw scrapes from clawing at the hard ground beneath her.

  Crystal covered her eyes with her hands, rubbed fiercely as if she could make the scene disappear. She knew she couldn’t, though. It would never disappear. Along with the other one, she would remember it forever.

  When she took her hands away, the image was fading. The lake disappeared first, then the buildings, the road. The woman—not dead, Crystal realized, but dying—was the last to fade away, her outstretched hand the very last. The pleading, supplicating hand. Help me, please help me.

  “I can’t,” Crystal whispered brokenly. Not again. The last time had almost destroyed her. She’d lost her job, her home, the man she loved, her parents. It had left her with nothing.

  She couldn’t lose what little she’d since regained. She couldn’t risk her new life for someone who was already dead, who couldn’t be helped. She couldn’t do it!

  When she thought her legs might support her, she got to her feet. With some trepidation, she picked up the book, half afraid that it had somehow triggered the vision, but her mind remained assault-free. Maybe this vision was different. Maybe she could put it out of her mind, ignore it, pretend it didn’t exist, and in time, oh, please, maybe she could forget it.

  If it would be ignored.

  If she could forget.

  If it didn’t keep haunting her the way the last one had.

  Giving her head a shake to clear it, she carried the book and its three companions to her desk. Her workspace in the back room of her great-aunt Winona’s shop was filled to the rafters with boxes awaiting unpacking, items needing sorting, cleaning or repairs, items to be disposed of. The aisles were narrow and the desk was overflowing, but she managed to find the phone and the Rolodex card file.

  She placed a call to a rare book dealer in Helena, a good friend of Winona’s, and arranged to deliver the four volumes to him for appraisal. As she hung up the phone, her gaze caught on her hand. With a growing sense of horror, she watched as it shifted, changed, turning into someone else’s hand—smaller, pampered, reaching, pleading.

  “Leave me alone!” Crystal whispered angrily. “I can’t help you! No one can!”

  …Please help me…

  “No!” Crystal jerked her hand back, clutched it in her other hand to make certain that it was hers. Though the fingers were unnaturally cold, it most definitely belonged to her. It was her gold nugget ring on the index finger, her Red-brown Haze polish on the nails, her calluses and cuts.

  Turning away from the desk, she almost bumped into Winona, gave a startled cry and took—jumped—a step back.

  “Why, Crystal, you look as if you’ve seen a ghost!” her aunt said with a laugh. Her expression sobered, though, as she studied Crystal’s face. “What’s happened?”

  “N-nothing. Really, Aunt Winona, it’s…it’s nothing.”

  When she would have pushed past, her aunt stopped her with one gentle hand and continued to study her. After a moment sympathy flashed through her eyes and her mouth flattened into a thin line. “You’ve had a vision,” she said as if it were the most natural thing in the world. “Tell me about it.”

  Crystal wanted to refuse, but refusing Winona was easier said than done. Besides, in truth, some part of her wanted to confide in her aunt. She wanted to unload the whole burden onto Winona’s far more capable shoulders. Having psychic powers of her own, Winona would never mock or scorn her, the way people back in Georgia had. She would never hush her in mid-telling, as her parents had, with warnings to keep her oddities to herself, lest she be shunned by the normal people around her.

  “Tell me, child,” Winona encouraged, “and together we’ll deal with it.”

  Together. In twenty-six years, there’d never been a together for Crystal, except that one last, awful time. And what a disaster that had turned out to be. It had all been too much to bear—the humiliation. The hurt. The ostracism. Her parents, distancing themselves from their own daughter, coldly shaking their heads and muttering, “We warned you.” Her fiancé, benefitting from her so-called gift, then breaking her heart because of it.

  It had been the worst experience of her life. She’d thought running halfway across the country might save her, but now it was starting again.

  But this time she had Winona. Her aunt who’d welcomed her, loved her and never made her feel like a freak, would help her this time.

  Winona took Crystal’s hands, holding them firmly in hers, and waited without judgment, without fear. Gathering courage from her, Crystal haltingly answered. “I saw…a woman. I think it was Christina Montgomery, and—and…” Drawing a deep breath, she blurted out the rest.

  “Aunt Winona, she was dying.”

  One

  Deputy Sloan Ravencrest sat at a red light, tapping out an intricate rhythm on the steering wheel and thinking about the drive he was ab
out to take out to Winona Cobbs’s Stop-n-Swap outside town.

  There were some, including most of the other officers assigned to the Montgomery case, who would say he was wasting his time and the taxpayers’ money. Winona Cobbs was a flake, a crazy old woman who talked with spirits and ghosts. She was forever coming forward with some bit of information gleaned from the “other side.” She was crazy, but harmless.

  On the other hand, there were some, including his father, his grandfather and most of the more traditional Cheyenne on the reservation, who accepted that “other side” as a natural part of life. They had visions, too, or knew people who did. They believed in mysteries and spirits and things logic couldn’t explain. They didn’t discount anything merely for lack of proof.

  Sloan wasn’t sure which group he belonged in. He had some faith, but he also had his share of skepticism. That was thanks, his father claimed, to his white mother. He had a foot in both the Cheyenne and the white worlds, so why shouldn’t he straddle the line on this, too?

  All he knew for a fact was that Winona had come by the sheriff’s office a few weeks ago to recount her latest vision to him, one in which she’d claimed to see Christina Montgomery dead. And that neither the sheriff’s office nor the police department nor the state bureau of investigation had any better leads to follow up. And that the powerful Montgomery family wanted answers yesterday.

  And one other thing, he acknowledged with a grin as the light changed and he eased away from the intersection. He knew that Winona Cobbs’s niece Crystal was just about the prettiest little thing he ever did see.

  His grandfather who’d helped raise him would tell him he should be ashamed of himself, using his job to get an introduction to a pretty woman. But, hell, he’d tried every other way. He’d managed to bump into her on a couple of her rare trips to town, but she’d been in too big a hurry for small talk. He’d tried to get one of her few friends to coax her into the bar where a fair number of Whitehorn’s single folks hung out, but that had been a no-go. He’d even done a little unnecessary shopping at the Stop-n-Swap, but she’d hardly looked at him.

  His grandmother, who had also helped raise him, would tell him he was foolish, expending effort to meet a white woman. Hadn’t it been a white woman who’d broken his father’s heart? Who had abandoned Sloan on his father’s doorstep three days after he was born to save her parents the shame of knowing they had a half-Indian grandbaby? Why didn’t he look closer to home? she would urge. Why not look for one of his own kind?

  Because not one of his own kind had ever intrigued him the way Crystal Cobbs did. Maybe it was the way she looked—beautiful, with black hair, green eyes and pale china-doll skin. Fragile, with her defenses firmly in place whenever anyone came close.

  Or maybe it was the way she talked—in a rich, lush Georgia drawl that put a man in mind of hot days, steamy nights and astounding women. Even curt brush-offs sounded incredibly sensual in her slow, honeyed voice.

  Maybe it was the way she moved. Just last weekend he’d stood in the produce section at the grocery store and watched her select apples and tomatoes in a way that made his mouth go dry and his mind go blank. He couldn’t have spoken to her to save his life, not after watching her long, slender fingers and their slow, enticing touches.

  Maybe it was the look in her eyes when he did try to talk to her. Wary. Aloof. Distant. And, underneath all that, frightened. It was easy enough to guess that she’d been hurt. Why else would such an elegant Southern belle trade Georgia’s gentility for Montana’s rugged frontier?

  It wasn’t so easy to tamp down the protective feelings she roused in him. It wasn’t at all easy when he watched her stroll through the market, touching this, damn near caressing that, to restrain the urge to wrap his arms around her and promise she would never be hurt again.

  But he never made promises he couldn’t keep. Since he hadn’t yet managed to get beyond “Hi, how are you?” with her, the chances that he could protect her from anything were somewhere between slim and none.

  Slowing down, he turned off the highway just outside of town onto the dirt-and-gravel parking lot that fronted the Stop-n-Swap. In weather warmer than this November day, Winona did much of her buying, selling and trading outside on a shaded patio, but the bulk of her goods were stashed in one giant room in a squat, concrete-block building. Much of it was junk, but if a person took the time to poke around, he could find some bargains. His grandmother’s oak rocker had come from there, and half of Aunt Eula’s Depression glass collection could be traced back there.

  There was only one find Sloan was interested in. Maybe this third visit would be the charm.

  He parked beside a battered pickup that belonged to one of the old Jefferson brothers and climbed out of his patrol unit. Considering that Montana was widely believed to be the finest of God’s country, the landscape around the Stop-n-Swap wasn’t particularly pretty, and the two-bedroom trailer off to the side where Winona and Crystal lived did nothing to enhance it. The mobile home was forty years old if it was a day, white with turquoise trim and skirt, with a wobbly deck serving as front porch and an array of faded plastic whirligigs in flowerbeds where, to the best he could recall, no flowers had ever grown.

  It was easier by far to imagine Crystal living in a pre-Civil War mansion, some gracious, elegant place with eighteen-foot ceilings, three-story-high columns, verandas and servants.

  He went inside the shop, removed his hat and sunglasses and took a quick look around. Winona was dusting a display of china, and Vern Jefferson was in a distant corner. As he’d expected, there was no sign of Crystal.

  As soon as the bell over the door sounded, Winona put down the dusting cloth and approached him with both hands extended and a warm smile. “Deputy Ravencrest. How nice to see you.”

  She was as short as her niece was tall, as round as Crystal was slender. As did most of the elderly ladies he knew on the rez, she wore her iron-gray hair in a braid that wound around her head, and covered her all-purpose bright cotton dresses with shawls that sometimes matched but just as often didn’t. There was no family resemblance between her and Crystal, but the word around town was that they were devoted to each other.

  So if Winona liked him, would that win him any points with Crystal?

  “Are you here to shop, Deputy, or is this official business?”

  “It’s business, ma’am. I’d like to ask you a few questions.”

  “I’ll answer them if I can. Would you like something to drink?”

  “No, thank you, ma’am.” Not unless accepting would bring Crystal out of hiding.

  She pursed her lips a moment, then called, “Vern, you find what you’re looking for, I’ll be outside.” The volume went up a notch. “You hear that, Crystal?” Without waiting for a response from either one, she linked her arm through Sloan’s. “We can talk on the patio.”

  There were two patios—one directly in front of the store, shaded by a faded awning that stretched out from the roof, and a smaller one between the store and the house trailer. This one was half open to the Montana sky, half covered by a trellis that supported honeysuckle vines. When they were in bloom in the spring, he imagined it was quite a place to sit.

  They sat at the dining table under the trellis, with Winona facing the trailer, Sloan watching the shop.

  “Is this about our last visit? About the vision?”

  “Yes, ma’am. Have you had any other visions?” He’d already ridden into the woods up near the Crazy Mountains but had seen nothing. He needed more to go on.

  “Not a one—at least, not about that. I did preminisce that a collector from Los Angeles would buy those books we got from the Fortier estate, and sure enough, he did. Paid more than I was planning to ask but less than they’re valued at, so we were both happy.”

  She flashed a self-satisfied smile that Sloan couldn’t help but return as he pulled his notebook from his pocket. “Have you remembered anything else about this vision?”

  Her expression shifted slig
htly, became less open, more guarded. He wondered why. Was it as simple as the fact that visions of Christina dead made her uncomfortable? After all, Winona’s premonitions were generally of the harmless guess-who’s-coming-to-call variety. They rarely involved anything as serious as death.

  “No,” she said quietly. “Not another thing.”

  “You said the scene was a wooded area, with a road and a body of water in the distance. Can you tell me anything else about it? Was the water a lake, a river? Was there anything you might recognize?”

  She shook her head. “None of it was familiar.”

  “Except Christina, and you didn’t see her face. How could you be so sure it was her?”

  “I just knew. You’re a policeman. Sometimes you just know.”

  True. In his business they called them hunches, and he’d learned over the years to trust his. It was a hunch that made him go on. “You said she was lying on her back with her arm stretched out.”

  “That’s right. She was covered with blood, and her head was bent like this—” she demonstrated “—and her left arm was stretched out.”

  “Could you see her hand? Was it palm up or down?”

  She considered her own beringed hand a moment before deciding. “Down. I believe it was down.”

  Feeling a curious tickle on the back of his neck, Sloan flipped through his notes, found what he was looking for, then fixed his gaze on the old woman. “A few weeks ago you said it was her right arm that was stretched out and the palm was up.”

  Winona appeared startled for a moment, then gave a nervous chuckle. “Left, right…depends on your point of view, doesn’t it? Your left is my right.”

  “Up and down don’t change, though,” he said mildly. “Were you looking at her palm or at the back of her hand?”