Authors: Diana Palmer
“That’s unfair!”
“I’m not arguing with that,” he said. “I’m just telling you what to expect. You know the judges around here as well as I do—probably better, because you have more dealings with them. Most of them have pretty fixed ideas about family life.”
“The world is changing.”
“Not here, it isn’t,” he reminded her. “Here we’re in a time capsule and nothing very much changes.”
She started to argue again and stopped on a held breath. He was right. She might not like it, but she had to accept it. A single woman wasn’t going to get custody of an abandoned baby in Whitehorn, Montana, no matter how great a character she had.
She faced the loss of little Jennifer with quiet desperation. Fate was unfair, she was thinking. Her whole life seemed to be one tragedy after another. She put her head in her hands and sighed wearily.
“She’ll be better off in a settled home,” he mumbled. He hated seeing her suffer. “You know she will.”
She sat up again after a minute, resignation in her demeanor. “Well, I won’t stop seeing her until they place her,” she said doggedly.
“No one’s asked you to.”
She glared at him. “She wouldn’t get to you,
would she, Deputy?” she asked with bitter anger. “You can walk away from anyone and never look back. No one touches you.”
“You did,” he said gruffly.
“Oh, I’m sure Bess got a lot further than I did,” she said, her jealousy rising to the surface. “After all, she doesn’t have any hang-ups and she thinks you’re God’s gift to women.”
“You don’t understand.”
“I understand everything,” she said bluntly. “You wanted to make sure that no one in town connected you with the object of so much scandal. Didn’t you tell me once that you hated gossip because people talked about you so much when you were a boy? That’s really why you started taking Bess out, isn’t it? The fact that she was infatuated with you was just a bonus.”
He scowled. “That wasn’t why—”
She stood up, looking totally unapproachable. “Everyone knows now that Bess is your girlfriend. You’re safe, McCallum,” she added proudly. “No one is going to pair you off with me ever again. So let well enough alone, please.”
He stood up, too, feeling frustrated and half-mad with restrained anger. “I’d been lied to one time too many,” he said harshly. “Trust comes hard to me.”
“It does to me, too,” she replied in a restrained tone. “You betrayed mine by turning your back on me the first chance you got. You believed Sam instead of me. You wouldn’t even come to me for an explanation.”
His face tautened to steel. He had no defense. There simply was none.
“You needn’t look so torn, McCallum. It doesn’t matter anyway. We both know it was a flash in the pan and nothing more. You can’t trust women and I’m not casual enough for affairs. Neither of us would have considered marriage. What was left?”
His dark eyes swept over her with quiet appreciation of her slender, graceful body. “I might have shown you, if you’d given me half a chance.”
She lifted her chin. “I told you, I’m not the type for casual affairs.”
“It wouldn’t have been casual, or an affair,” he returned. “I’m not a loner by choice. I’m by myself because I never found a woman I liked. Wanted, sure. But there has to be more to a relationship than a few nights in bed. I felt…more than desire for you.”
“But not enough,” she said, almost choking on the words. “Not nearly enough to make up for what I…am.”
His face contracted. “For God’s sake, you’re a woman! Being barren doesn’t change anything!”
She turned away. The pain was almost physical. “Please go,” she said in a choked tone. She sat back down behind her desk with the air of an exhausted runner. She looked older, totally drained. “Please, just go.”
He rammed his hands into his pockets and glared at her. “You won’t give an inch. How do you expect
to go through life in that sewn-up mental state? I made a mistake, okay? I’m not perfect. I don’t walk around with a halo above my head. Why can’t you forget?”
Her eyes were vulnerable for just an instant. “Because it hurt so much to have you turn away from me,” she confessed huskily. “I’m not going to let you hurt me again.”
His firm lips parted. “Jessica, we learn from our mistakes. That’s what life is all about.”
“Mistakes are what
my
life is all about,” she said, laughing harshly. She rubbed her hand over her forehead. “And there are still things you don’t know. I was a fool, McCallum, and it was your fault because you wouldn’t take no for an answer. Why did you have to interfere? I was happy alone, I was resigned to it….”
“Why did you keep trying to take care of me?” he shot back.
She had to admit she’d gone out of her way in that respect. She glanced up and then quickly back down to her desk. “Temporary insanity,” she pleaded. “You had no one, and neither did I. I wanted to be your friend.”
“Friends forgive each other.”
She gnawed her lower lip. She couldn’t tell him that it was far more than friendship she’d wanted from him. But she had secrets, still, that she could never share with him. She couldn’t tell him the rest, even now. His fling with Bess had spared her the fatal
weakness of giving in to him, of yielding to a hopeless affair. If it had gone that far, she corrected. Because it was highly doubtful that it would have.
“What are you keeping back?” he asked. “What other dark skeletons are hiding in your closet?”
She pushed her hair back from her wan face. “None that you need to know about, McCallum,” she said, leaning back. She forced a smile. “Why don’t you take Bess to lunch?”
“Bess and I are friends,” he said. “That’s all. And I’ve caused enough trouble around here. I understand that you’re barely speaking to her. That’s my fault, not hers.”
She glared at him. “Bess is a professional who reports to me, and how I treat her is my business.”
“I know that,” he replied. “But she’s feeling guilty enough. So am I.”
Her eyebrows lifted. “About what?”
“Neither of us made your life any easier,” he said. “I didn’t know what happened to you. But even if you’d been all that Sam Jackson accused you of being, I had no right to subject you to even more gossip. Bess knows why I took her out. I could have caused her as much pain as I caused you. I have to live with that, too. Fortunately, she was no more serious than I was.”
“That isn’t what she told us,” Jessica said through her teeth.
He stared at her with dawning horror. What stories
had Bess told to produce such antagonism from Jessica, to make her look so outraged?
He scowled. “Jessica, nothing happened. We had a few meals together and I kissed her, once. That’s all.”
“It’s gentlemanly of you to defend her,” she said, stone faced. “But I’m not a child. You don’t have to lie to protect her.”
“I’m not lying!”
She pulled the file open and spread out the papers in it. “I’d like to know what you find out about that midwife,” she said. “And about Keith, if the juvenile authorities get any results.”
He stared at her for a long moment. “Tit for tat, Jessica?” he asked quietly. “I wouldn’t believe you, so now you won’t believe me?”
She met his eyes evenly. “That has nothing to do with it. I think you’re being gallant, for Bess’s sake,” she replied. “It’s kind of you, but unnecessary. Nothing you do with Bess or anyone else is my business.”
He wouldn’t have touched that line with a gloved hand. He stared at her for a long moment, searching for the right words. But he couldn’t find any that would fit the situation.
He found plenty, however, when he closed Jessica’s door and stood over Bess, who’d been waiting for him to finish.
“What did you tell her?” he asked bluntly.
She grimaced. “I embroidered it a little, to save face,” she protested. “I thought we were going to be a hot item and it hurt my feelings that you didn’t even want to kiss me. I’m sorry! I didn’t know how hard Jessica was going to take it, or I’d never have made up those terrible lies about us.”
He grimaced. “How terrible?”
She flushed. She couldn’t, she just couldn’t, admit that! “I’ll tell her the truth,” she promised. “I’ll tell her all of it, honest I will. Please don’t be mad.”
“Mad.” He shook his head, walking toward the door. “I must be mad,” he said to himself, “to have painted myself into this sort of corner. Or maybe I just have a talent for creating my own self-destruction.”
He kept walking.
T
he last words McCallum spoke to Bess might have been prophetic. He was thinking about Jessica when he shouldn’t have been, and he walked into a convenience store outside town not noticing the ominous silence in the place and the frightened look on the young female clerk’s face.
It seemed to happen in slow motion. A man in a faded denim jacket turned with a revolver in his hand. As McCallum reached for his own gun, the man fired. There was an impact, as if he’d been hit with a fist on his upper arm. It spun him backwards. A fraction of a second later, he heard the loud pop, like a firecracker going off. In that one long minute while he tried to react, the perpetrator forgot his
quarry—Tammie Jane, the terrified young clerk—and ran out the door like a wild man.
“You’ve been shot! Oh, my goodness, what shall I do?” Tammie Jane burst out. She ran to McCallum, her own danger forgotten in her concern for him.
“It’s not so bad,” he said, gritting his teeth as he pulled out a handkerchief to stem the surging, rhythmic flow of blood. “Nothing broken, at least, but it looks as if the bullet may have…clipped an artery.” He wound the handkerchief tighter and put pressure over the wound despite the pain it caused. “Are you all right?”
“Sure! He came in and asked for some cigarettes, and when I turned to get them, he pulled out that gun. Gosh, I was scared! He’d just told me to empty the cash register when you walked in.”
“I walked in on it like a raw recruit,” he added ruefully. “My God, I don’t know where my mind was. I didn’t even get off a shot.”
“You’re losing a lot of blood. I’d better call for an ambulance—”
“No need. I’ll call the dispatcher on my radio.” He made his way out to his patrol car, weaving a little. He was losing blood at a rapid rate and his head was spinning. He raised the dispatcher, gave his location and succinctly outlined the situation, adding a terse description of the suspect and asking for an all-points bulletin.
“Stay put. We’ll send the ambulance,” the dis
patcher said, and signed off. The radio blared with sudden activity as she first called an ambulance and then broadcast a BOLO—a “be on the lookout for” bulletin—on the municipal frequency.
The clerk came out of the store with a hand towel and passed it to McCallum. His handkerchief was already soaked.
“I don’t know how to make a tourniquet, but I’ll try if you’ll tell me how,” Tammie Jane volunteered worriedly. Blood from his wound was pooling on the pavement, as McCallum was holding his arm outside the car.
He leaned back against the seat, his hand still pressing hard on the wound. “Thanks, but the ambulance will be here any minute. I can hear the siren.”
It was fortunate that Whitehorn was a small town. Barely two minutes later, the ambulance sped up and two paramedics got out, assessed the situation and efficiently loaded a dazed McCallum onto a stretcher and into the ambulance.
He was still conscious when they got to the hospital, but weak from loss of blood. They had him stabilized and the blood flow stemmed before they pulled up at the emergency-room entrance.
He grinned sheepishly as they unloaded him and rolled him into the hospital. “Hell of a thing to happen to a law-enforcement officer. I got caught with my eyes closed, I guess.”
“Thank your lucky stars he was a bad shot,” one
of them said with an answering smile. “That’s only a flesh wound, but it hit an artery. You’d have bled to death if you’d taken your time about calling us.”
“I’m beginning to believe it.”
They wheeled him into a cubicle and called for the resident physician who was covering the emergency room.
Jessica had had a long morning, and her calendar was full of return calls to make. McCallum had shaken her pretty badly about Baby Jennifer. She hadn’t been facing facts at all while she was spinning cozy daydreams about herself and the baby together in her cozy cottage.
Now she was looking into a cold, lonely future with nothing except old age at the end of it. From the bright, flaming promise of her good times with McCallum, all that was left were ashes.
She took off her glasses and rubbed her tired eyes. She’d just about given up wearing the contact lenses now that she wasn’t seeing McCallum anymore. She didn’t care how she looked, except in a business sense. She dressed for the job, but there was no reason to dress up for a man now. She couldn’t remember ever in her life feeling so low, and there had been plenty of heartaches before this one. It seemed as if nothing would go right for her.
The telephone in the outer office rang noisily, but Jessica paid it very little attention. She was half-
heartedly going through her calendar when Bess suddenly opened Jessica’s office door and came in, pale and unsettled.
“Sterling McCallum’s been shot,” she blurted out, and was immediately sorry when she saw the impact the words had on Jessica, who stumbled to her feet, aghast.
“Shot?” she echoed helplessly. “McCallum? Is he all right?”
“That was Sandy. She’s a friend of mine who works at the hospital. She just went on duty. She said he was in the recovery room when she got to the hospital. Apparently it happened a couple of hours ago. Goodness, wouldn’t you think
someone
would have called us before now? Or that it would have been on the radio? Oh, what am I saying? We don’t even listen to the local station.”
“Does Sandy know how bad he is?” Jessica asked, shaken.
“She didn’t take time to find out. She called me first.” She didn’t add that it was because Sandy thought, like most people did, that McCallum and Bess were a couple. “All she knew was that he’d been shot and had just come out of emergency surgery.”
“Cancel my afternoon appointments,” Jessica said as she gathered up her purse. “I’ll finish this paperwork when I get back, but I don’t know when that will be.”
“Do you want me to drive you?” Bess offered.
Jessica was fumbling in her purse for the keys to her truck. “No. I can drive myself.”
Bess got in front of her in time to prevent her from rushing out the door. “I lied about Sterling and me,” she said bluntly, flushing. “It wasn’t true. He didn’t want anything to do with me and I was piqued, so I made up a lot of stuff. Don’t blame him. He didn’t even know I did it.”
Jessica hesitated. She wanted to believe it, oh, so much! But did she dare?
“Honest,” Bess said, and her eyes met Jessica’s evenly, with no trace of subterfuge. “Nothing happened.”
“Thanks,” Jessica said, and forced a smile. Then she was out the door, running. If he died… But she wouldn’t think about that. She had to remember that to stay calm, and that they hadn’t said he was in critical condition. She had to believe that he would be all right.
It seemed to take forever to get to the hospital, and when she did, she couldn’t find a parking space. She had to drive around, wasting precious time, until someone left the small parking area reserved for visitors. There had been a flu outbreak and the hospital was unusually crowded.
She ran, breathless, into the emergency room. She paused at the desk to ask the clerk where McCallum was.
“Deputy McCallum is in the recovery room three
doors down,” the clerk told her. “Wait, you can’t go in there…!”
Jessica got past a nurse who tried to stop her and pushed into the room, stopping at the sight of a pale, drawn McCallum lying flat on his back, his chest bare and a thick bandage wrapped around his upper arm. There were tubes leading to both forearms, blood being pumped through one and some sort of clear liquid through the other.
The medical team looked up, surprised at Jessica’s sudden entrance and white face.
“Are you a relative?” one of them—probably the doctor—asked.
“No,” McCallum said drowsily.
“Yes,” Jessica said, at the same time.
The man blinked.
“He hasn’t got anyone else to look after him,” Jessica said stubbornly, moving to McCallum’s side. She put her hand over one of his on the table.
“I don’t need looking after,” he muttered, hating having Jessica see him in such a vulnerable position. He was groggy from the aftereffects of the anesthetic they’d given him while they removed the bullet and repaired the damage it had done.
“Well, actually, you do, for twenty-four hours at least,” the doctor replied with a grin. “We’re going to admit him overnight,” he told Jessica. “He’s lost a lot of blood and he’s weak. We want to pump some antibiotics into him, too, to prevent infection in that
wound. He’s going to have a sore arm and some fever for a few days.”
“And he can’t work, right?” she prompted.
McCallum muttered something.
“Right,” the doctor agreed.
“I’ll stay with him tonight in case he needs anything,” Jessica volunteered.
McCallum turned his head and looked up at her with narrow, drowsy dark eyes. “Sackcloth and ashes, is it?” he asked in a rough approximation of his usual forceful tones.
“I’m not doing penance,” she countered. “I’m helping out a friend.”
For the first time, his eyes focused enough to allow him to see her face clearly. She was shaken, and there was genuine fear in her eyes when she looked at him. Probably someone had mentioned the shooting without telling her that it was relatively minor. She looked as if she’d expected to find him dead or shot to pieces.
“I’m all right,” he told her. “I’ve been shot before, and worse than this. It’s nothing.”
“Nothing!” she scoffed.
“A little bitty flesh wound,” he agreed.
“Torn ligament, severed artery that we had to sew up, extensive loss of blood…” the doctor was saying.
“Compared to the last time I was shot, it’s nothing,” McCallum insisted drowsily. “God, what did you give me? I can’t keep my eyes open.”
“No need to,” the doctor agreed, patting him gently on his good shoulder. “You rest now, Deputy. You’ll sleep for a while and then you’ll have the great-grandfather of a painful arm. But we can give you something to counteract that.”
“Don’t need any more…painkillers.” He yawned and his eyes closed. “Go home, Jessica. I don’t need you, either.”
“Yes, you do,” she said stubbornly. She looked around her, realizing how crazy she’d been to push her way in. She flushed. “Sorry about this,” she said, backing toward the door. “I didn’t know how badly he was hurt. I was afraid it was a lot worse than this.”
“It’s all right,” the doctor said gently. He smiled. “We’ll take him to his room and you can sit with him there, if you like. He’ll be fine.”
She nodded gratefully, clutching her purse like a life jacket. She slipped out of the room and went to sit down heavily in a chair in the waiting room. Her heart was still racing and she felt sick. Just that quickly, McCallum could have been dead. She’d forgotten how uncertain life was, how risky his job was. Now she was face-to-face with her own insecurities and she was handling them badly.
When they wheeled him to a semiprivate room, she went along. The other half of the room was temporarily empty, so she wouldn’t have to contend with another patient and a roomful of visitors. That was a relief.
She noticed that there was a telephone, and when McCallum had been settled properly and the medical team had left, she dialed her office and told Candy his condition and that she wouldn’t be back, before asking to be transferred to Bess.
“Can I bring you anything?” Bess offered.
“No, thank you. I’m fine.” She didn’t want Bess here. She wanted McCallum all to herself, with no intrusions. It was selfish, but she’d had a bad fright. She wanted time to reassure herself that he was all right, that he wasn’t going to die.
“Then call us if you need us,” Bess said. “I talked to Sandy again and told her the truth, so she won’t, well, say anything to you about me and Sterling McCallum. I’m glad he’s going to be okay, Jessica.”
“So am I,” she agreed. She hung up and pulled a chair near the bed. She’d noticed a strange look from one of the nurses earlier. That had probably been Bess’s friend.
McCallum was sleeping now, his expression clear of its usual scowl. He looked younger, vulnerable. She grimaced as she looked at his poor arm and thought how painful it must have been. She didn’t even know if they’d caught the man who’d shot him. Presumably they were combing the area for him.
A few minutes later, Sheriff Hensley and one of the other deputies stopped by the room to see him. Hensley had gone by McCallum’s house to feed Mack and get McCallum a change of clothing. The
shirt he’d been wearing earlier was torn and covered in blood. McCallum was still sleeping off the anesthesia.
“Have you caught the man who did it?” Jessica asked.
Hensley shook his head irritably. “Not yet. But we will,” he said gruffly. “I wouldn’t have had this happen for the world. McCallum’s a good man. On the salary the job pays, we don’t get a lot of men of his caliber.”
Jessica had never questioned a man of McCallum’s education and background working in such a notoriously low-paying job. “I wonder why he does a lot of things,” she mused, watching the still, quiet face of the unconscious man. “He’s very secretive.”
“So are you.”
She grimaced. “Well, everyone’s entitled to a skeleton or two,” she reminded him.
He shrugged. “Plenty of us have them. Tell him I fed his dog, and brought those things by for him. I’ll be back tomorrow. Are they going to try to keep him overnight?”
“Yes,” she said definitely. “I’ll stay with him. He won’t leave unless he knocks me out.”
“Harris here can stay with you if you think you’ll need him,” Hensley said with a rare smile.
Jessica glanced at the pleasant young deputy. “Thanks, but the doctor has this big hypodermic syringe….”
“Good point.” Hensley took another look at McCallum, who was sleeping peacefully. “Tell him we’re on the trail of his assailant. We’re pretty sure who it is, from the description. We’re watching the suspect’s grandmother’s house. It’s the one place he’s sure to run when he thinks it’s safe.”
Jessica nodded. “That’s one advantage of small towns, isn’t it?” she mused. “At least we generally know who the scoundrels are and where to find them.”
“It makes police work a little easier. The police are helping us. McCallum’s well liked.”