Untamed Page 5

  She searched the cupboards, frustrated but not surprised when all she could find were the herbal teas her grandmother had so successfully marketed through various catalogs. And as much as she had enjoyed the lemon balm tea with her mother the other day, what she needed now was a strong jolt of caffeine to rid her mind of cobwebs and lingering thoughts of a man she had no intention of becoming involved with.

  Despite her grandmother's interference.

  Deciding the only thing to do was get dressed and go into town for coffee at the Branding Iron Cafe before meeting with Brigid's lawyer, she went back upstairs to take a shower.

  "I realize your talents far surpass mine, Grandy," she muttered out loud as she blew her hair dry. "But if I wanted to, I could cast a spell of my own. To counter yours."

  "Of course that's also what you want me to do, isn't it?" Tara frowned at her reflection in the wavy bathroom mirror. "That's what all this is about. You've brought me back here to force me to get in touch with my roots. Well, I've got news for you, Grandy. I'm not going to cast any spells. I've made a life for myself that doesn't involve magic. I'm happy."

  The falsehood hung in the air, mocking her. "All right, perhaps satisfied is a better word. But it's only because I've had a grueling year. By the time I leave here, I'll be itching to get back to work."

  Back to her tax tables and interest rates and stock indexes. Back to her tidy apartment on Russian Hill, decorated with no-nonsense Scandinavian furniture, where she spent her nights and weekends laboring over computer spreadsheets.

  "I've worked hard to get where I am," she insisted as she marched into the bedroom and for the second time that morning almost tripped over the suitcases that had not been there when she'd gone to bed last night.

  The idea that Gavin had brought them up while she'd been sleeping, had invaded her bedroom and watched her, made her blood boil. She was going to give him a piece of her mind, Tara vowed.

  Just as soon as she had her coffee.

  It was not surprising to Tara that the cafe had not changed during her years away. The plastic cow waiting to be branded still stood on the flat roof. Inside, the tables were still Formica, the booths red vinyl and red-and-white gingham curtains framed windows decorated with cardboard cutouts of broom-riding hags, grinning orange pumpkins and cartoonlike skeletons. Men in baseball caps and Stetsons sat at the counter hunkered over their cups of coffee. Two of the booths were taken up by older couples, another by an elderly man with a thick snowy beard.

  Tara's entrance caused a notable stir. She could feel the eyes of the other patrons on her as she made her way to a back booth.

  "Hi, Tara," the owner of the cafe greeted her as she filled the heavy white coffee mug and put a laminated menu on the table. "Welcome back. It's been a long time."

  "Yes. It has." Tara took a careful sip of the steaming coffee. It was black and strong.

  "I was real sorry when Brigid passed on. She was a nice lady."

  "Yes, she was." Tara had never understood people who could be chatty in the morning. She took another longer drink of coffee and willed the caffeine to enter her bloodstream.

  Iris Johnson leaned forward to keep her next words from being overheard. "You know, your grandmother was responsible for my third marriage."

  "Really." Tara tried to appear interested, although she knew it really didn't matter. The cafe owner was obviously tickled to have a new audience for her story.

  "Lyle and I were high school sweethearts. But my mama and daddy thought he was too wild, so I ended up marrying Joe Porter. Who was a darling, and we had six terrific kids together. But he never made my heart race like Lyle could. Know what I mean?"

  Tara instantly thought of Gavin Thomas standing in front of the fire with his shirt unbuttoned. "Yes, I think I get the drift."

  "Well, Joe passed away about two years ago, about the time you were supposed to get married to that doctor fellow—"

  "He was an attorney," Tara corrected without thinking.

  "That's right." Iris nodded. "I remember thinking that a big-city lawyer should know something about breach of promise."

  Despite her discomfort with the way the conversation had suddenly veered off course, Tara found herself speculating about how her filing such an outdated lawsuit would have gone over in Richard's uptown law firm. Especially when he'd been so concerned about making partner.

  The partnership, she remembered all too correctly, he'd feared he would lose if anyone found out that he'd married a witch.

  "You were saying?" she prompted, wanting to return the topic to its original track.

  "Oh, yeah. Well, anyway, I missed my Joe so much, I married this slick guy who drove into town in a flashy Ford Thunderbird and promised to make me his queen."

  The frown on the woman's face suggested that had definitely not been a match made in heaven. "I take it that didn't work out."

  "After he managed to fleece me outta my nest egg, I discovered he already had six other wives scattered over three states."

  "That's terrible!"

  "Could've been worse if I'd given him half interest in the Branding Iron, like he'd wanted," Iris said pragmatically. "Fortunately, Trace—he's the sheriff here, a great guy, you'll like him a lot—was suspicious and ran a check on him before I could sign the final papers."

  "Well, you can understand how after that close call, I'd about decided to give up on men altogether."

  "I know the feeling," Tara murmured.

  "I figured you might," Iris said with a nod. "Anyway, then Lyle's wife, Edith, passed on. That's when I decided to take the bull by the horns and visit Brigid."

  "Who gave you a love potion," Tara guessed.

  "She had me stand in front of the mirror every morning and every night and recite three new things I liked about myself each time. Said it wasn't really a spell, but more of a self-confirmation. That before someone could love me, I needed to be able to love myself."

  "At first I thought it was foolish. Like some of that new-age self-help stuff. But I'll admit that my self-esteem had taken a battering from that rat of a bigamist, so I think your grandmother was right to remind me that I had some things going for me."

  "My grandmother was a very wise woman."

  "That's sure enough true. After two weeks of that, she told me to hang one of those wind chimes on my front porch where the west wind would blow, and gave me some words to say each morning. And she gave me a lodestone to carry in my pocket."

  She reached into the pocket of her black skirt and pulled out a small, dark, outwardly unremarkable stone. "Said I should touch it several times a day and think of my Lyle."

  Her weatherworn face softened. "I didn't have this stone more than a week when Lyle came into the cafe and ordered the Rustler's Special. That's the Number Four. Steak, two eggs, cottage fries and toast."

  "Well, when I was handing over the plate of whole-wheat toast our fingers touched, and it was like a shock of electricity just shot through the both of us. Made me drop the plate and the toast fell right onto his lap. Jelly side down."

  "But you know, Lyle didn't even seem to notice. We just kept looking at each other, and right then and there I knew that Brigid had made all my dreams come true."

  Tara smiled. "That's a nice story."

  "Isn't it?" Iris sighed happily. "We were married down at the Healing Waters Baptist Church six weeks later. Course I never did tell Lyle what brought him into the Branding Iron that morning. And I keep the stone in my pocket. Just to make sure he sticks around."

  Her eyes looked misty and reminiscent, making Tara afraid that she might start weeping when a red truck driving past the window caught Iris's attention.

  "Did your grandmother tell you about Gavin Thomas?"

  "No. But we've met. Apparently he's been looking after her house."

  "Tryin' to, anyway," Iris said. "He and Brigid got to be really good friends, which, of course, didn't surprise me, since Brigid took to just about everybody. Although some of the people in town w
orried about her getting mixed up with a convicted felon."

  An icy chill skimmed up Tara's spine. "A felon?" she asked, trying to keep her voice from betraying her distress . She thought again of her mother's belief that Brigid's death was not an accident.

  "He did time for murder in Texas."

  Murder. The ugly word tolled in her head like a death knell. "Are you sure about that?" Tara knew, all too well, how fast gossip spread in a small town, and how easily facts became twisted.

  "Apparently he killed the woman he was having an affair with," Iris divulged, her eyes brightening as she realized that she was the first person in Whiskey River to pass on this particularly sordid little story. "A married woman. Who was pregnant, to boot."

  Tara found it difficult to believe that the man who'd boarded up her grandmother's windows and helped her play a trick on those teenagers had committed such a horrendous crime.

  "Are you certain? Wouldn't he be in prison?"

  "Trace—that's the sheriff—" Iris reminded Tara, "was a police officer in Dallas before moving here. Word is that he found some evidence that got Gavin out of prison on some kinda legal technicality."

  "I see." But she didn't. Not at all. "He killed his lover?" And she'd gone to bed with him still in the house? Boy, that was a real smart move!

  "His married lover," Iris repeated. "Not that I much blame the woman for letting him park his boots beneath her bed. He's a handsome devil. I can't picture many women bein' able to resist those dark and dangerous charms."

  Tara was about to say that she could certainly think of one, when a trucker in a denim shirt and a black Oakland Raiders cap called out for a refill.

  "Well, I've done enough jawing for one morning," his said, returning to being the brisk cafe owner who managed to keep a steady procession of orders coming out of the kitchen.

  "I'd better get back to work and let you figure out what you want. You can't go wrong with the pecan sticky buns," she suggested. "I don't want to blow my own horn, but there are those who think that the Branding Iron serves the best sweet rolls in the state."

  "The sticky buns sound great."

  "You got it." She picked up the menu with a satisfied nod and hurried away to make the rounds of the tables refilling cups. That accomplished, she returned with a chipped plate of warm sticky caramel buns studded with pecans.

  "I forgot to ask," Iris said, "are you planning to live here and take on your grandmother's mail-order business?"

  "No." Tara managed a tight, polite smile. "Actually, I'll be staying in the house this month. But then I'm selling it, and returning to my own home."

  "That'd be in Frisco."

  "San Francisco. That's right." Tara remembered how there was no such thing as privacy in a small town.

  "Too bad. Don't tell Pastor Peabody I said this, but it's my opinion that every town needs a witch." Her expression became thoughtful. "The problem is finding one. Can't hardly advertise in the Rim Rock Record."

  "I suppose not." Tara could feel her polite smile slipping and was relieved when the cook called Iris back to the kitchen, leaving her to ponder the news that Gavin Thomas had murdered his married lover.

  5

  After paying her bill—and tacking on a generous tip—she visited her grandmother's attorney to sign the multitude of papers that effectively transferred ownership of the house to her.

  "You do understand the conditions of the codicil?" Thatcher Reardon asked, eyeing her over the tortoise-shell frame of his reading glasses.

  "That I can't list the house for sale without living in it for a month? Yes."

  "Will this be a problem?"

  "Not really." Tara sighed. "It's longer than I'd planned to stay away from my business, but I think I can manage. Although I still find it frustrating that my grandmother disapproved so highly of my career choice that she'd pull a stunt like this."

  "It wasn't that she disapproved," the sixty-something lawyer said. "On the contrary, she was quite proud of your accomplishments."

  "You could have fooled me," Tara muttered.

  "If you'd visited her these past two years, perhaps you'd have been in better touch with her feelings."

  Although his tone was mild and lacking in censure, Tara prickled at the unspoken accusation. Before the Richard debacle, she'd visited all the time. In fact, she'd even spent most of her childhood summers in Whiskey River. How could she explain that returning to the scene of her greatest embarrassment was too painful?

  How, especially, could she make him understand that just being with her grandmother, sensing Brigid's unspoken disappointment at how she'd chosen to turn her back on a family tradition that went back centuries, was too difficult?

  She crossed her legs with a swish of silk. Although she knew she was overdressed in her chic black-and-cream suit, she'd wanted to appear businesslike for this meeting. "My grandmother was a wonderful woman, but she could be more than a little intimidating."

  "Tell me about it." The lawyer chuckled. "We were bridge partners every Thursday night for ten years and in all that time I never outgrew my fear that she'd turn me into a toad if I misbid."

  "A toad?" Tara stared at him. "Are you saying that you knew—"

  "That Brigid was a witch?" Thatcher asked easily. "Of course."

  "And that didn't bother you?"

  He shrugged. "Most people here in Whiskey River tend to have a live-and-let-live attitude. Your grandmother was a warm and generous person, Ms. Delaney. She contributed a great deal to the town and I think there was hardly anyone who didn't show up at her house for help with one thing or another."

  "In fact, she gave me some salve that did wonders for my bursitis. And my social life hasn't been the same since she passed." A twinkle brightened his intelligent blue eyes. "Not only was she an excellent cardplayer, but not many eighty-year-old women could do the Texas Two-Step like Brigid Delaney. I suppose it was her theatrical background," he mused out loud.

  "My grandmother danced? To country music?"

  He looked at her with surprise. "Of course. This is, after all, ranching country."

  "Of course," Tara murmured. "Well. That certainly is an interesting piece of news." Wanting to be alone to let it all sink in, she stood and held out her hand. "It was nice meeting you, Mr. Reardon."

  "It was nice meeting you, as well, Ms. Delaney. And I'm sure I'll be seeing you around." A significant pause settled over the room, giving Tara the impression that he had not quite finished.

  "Was there something else?"

  "I was just wondering if you'd considered taking over your grandmother's business."

  "No." She picked up her purse and straightened her spine. "I don't do magic, Mr. Reardon. And I don't cast spells."

  That said, she left the attorney's office. The next order of business, she'd decided, was a visit with the sheriff.

  The office, located on the third floor of the town's eighty-year-old redbrick courthouse, was shabby, but neat. Two mud brown chairs sat in front of a weathered pine desk. A law enforcement recruiting poster featured a scrubbed and polished young man in a starched khaki uniform standing beside a patrol car. Taped to the beige wall next to the poster were crayon drawings, a thank-you from a first-grade class for a tour of the jail.

  Trace Callahan was a tall man. Even without the wedge-heeled cowboy boots, Tara would have guessed his height to be around six foot four. His eyes were gunmetal gray, his jaw square, his hair black. He might have traded in a uniform for a plaid shirt and jeans, but even without the silver star pinned to the front of the green-and-black shirt, she would have had no trouble pegging him for a cop. The authority he radiated was a relief; Tara had been worried that the new sheriff might be some burned-out hack who'd ended up in Whiskey River because he couldn't cut it anywhere else.

  "Ms. Delaney." His smile was quick and warm, at odds with the harsh lines of his face. "It's good to finally meet you. Brigid talked a great deal about you."

  "So I've heard."

  "She was very
proud of you. And, from what I've heard, with good reason." Sympathy softened the steely color of his eyes. "I'm sorry about your loss. She was a wonderful woman."

  "Yes. She was." Tara drew in a determined breath. "I'm not here on a social call, Sheriff Callahan. If you don't mind, I have some questions I'd like to ask you."

  "Of course."

  Watching him carefully, Tara didn't see a hint of surprise or curiosity. It was his official cop face, she supposed—polite, distant, not giving anything away.

  "Would you like some coffee?" he asked easily. "It's fresh."

  "No, thank you." She sat down in the chair on the visitor's side of the desk and crossed her legs. "I've had more than enough today." Along with the two cups at the diner, she'd had another at Thatcher Reardon's law office and her nerves were already jangling. The one thing she definitely didn't need was any more caffeine.

  The sheriff sat down in the leather chair behind the desk. "I suppose this is about the vandalism to your grandmother's house?"

  "Oh, no. That's all been taken care of."

  "So Gavin told me. That was clever the way you scared those kids away."

  "They didn't really mean any harm. But that's not why I'm here. I wanted to ask you about my grandmother's death."

  "What about it?"

  "You're certain her heart attack caused her fall?"

  His eyes narrowed. So imperceptibly that if Tara hadn't been watching him carefully, she would not have noticed the change. His body had tensed, too, she thought.

  "That was the coroner's opinion. Of course, there was also the possibility that her fall caused her to have the heart attack. The two things were concurrent."

  "I see."

  There was a little pause.

  "Do you have some reason to believe otherwise?"

  Tara thought about telling him about her mother's vision, then decided he'd think she was nuts. Which was undoubtedly what he thought about her grandmother.

  "Not really."

  "I know it's difficult, losing someone you love. But everything pointed to a combination of natural causes and her accident, Ms. Delaney. However, if there's any reason to open the case…"