Shifters' Storm (7 page)

“Wine,” she said. “House red.”

“You’ve got it.”

Rane sat as Joe wiped water off a wineglass. Once she was settled, she glanced at the men on either side of her. Harry Schneider was on her right, what was left of his left hand around a beer bottle. Harry had lost three fingers to a table saw while doing some remodeling around his place. Word was he got some kind of disability and still did occasional long-distance trucking. He also collected firearms. Divorced with grown children, he could have gone wherever he wanted. Apparently he hadn’t wanted.

Nodding at and then dismissing Harry was easier than doing the same to the man who’d already twice bumped her left elbow.

“I heard you’ve been riding the deputy’s ass,” Clifford Jones said by way of hello. “What is it, you think he should bring in the FBI?”

Forestville couldn’t afford its own police department and contracted with the county’s sheriff’s department to have a deputy assigned part-time. Gannon gave Forestville more than twenty hours a week, but that left a lot of time with no law enforcement. As far as she knew, the FBI didn’t know Forestville existed. Even though her mother had been a federal employee, she couldn’t imagine them sending anyone here, because the entire sheriff’s department had initially been involved in the investigation. What more could the FBI do?

“I’ve talked to Gannon a number of times.” She had no intention of telling Clifford more than that, because several years ago her mother had helped arrest his and his older brother Chip’s three cousins for hunting out of season. The trio had been convicted, which had stripped them of the right to hunt for five years. Needless to say, Andy, Aaron and Albert Jones hated her mother.

“Talk’s cheap,” Clifford said. “What about action?”

She accepted the full wineglass from Joe. “I trust Gannon. He and the rest of his department will get the job done.”

Heavy hands landed on her shoulders. Instead of whirling and punching whoever had touched her as she wanted to, Rane willed herself to remain still.

“Hey Rane, good to see you.”

For a moment, she couldn’t put a name to the voice, but the pleased look on Clifford’s face helped. Little more than a year apart in age, Clifford and his younger brother had always been best friends, more like twins than siblings.

“Hello, Chip,” she said. She noticed that Joe’s lips had thinned a little. “You startled me.”

“Sorry.” Chip squeezed her shoulders. “I just didn’t expect to run into you in here. Still staying at your mom’s place, are you?”

Everyone around here knew what she was up to. There was no reason to read anything into what Chip had just said. Of course there was the memory of when Chip had tried to maul her behind the school gym when they were both in high school. She’d been shocked, but not so shocked she couldn’t ram a knee between his legs. He’d later apologized.

After school, he’d spent a couple of years in the army and came back much more mature. To her way of thinking, Chip should have stayed away. There was no future here for either him or his brother.

To her relief, Chip let go of her. That done, he squeezed in between her and Harry.

“Harry, old man, how about you let me talk to my friend?” Chip didn’t wait for Harry’s response but hip-bumped the thin man off his stool. Grumbling, Harry backed away still holding on to his beer.

“Say Rane,” Harry said. “If you’ve got no use for your ma’s rifle, give me a call.”

“What? That’s the last thing on my mind right now.”

“Of course, of course. I’m just offering to take it off your hands.”

“You heard her,” Chip said. “Bug off.”

“That was rude,” Rane said after Harry was out of earshot. Just what she didn’t need, being sandwiched between the Jones brothers.

“Was it? Sorry.”

“No you’re not.” Glaring, Joe leaned across the bar. “I thought you were going to be at the logging site all week.”

“I wish.” Chip frowned and pointed at a refrigerator behind Joe. “The usual. Damn transmission on the loader’s shot. I’ve got to go into the city for a replacement.”

“It’s shot?” Clifford asked from her other side. “I thought you said it could be repaired.”

“I said I hoped it could. One damn thing after another.”

As the brothers and Joe agreed that everything seemed to be against them when it came to the small Jones logging company fulfilling their contract with the Forest Service, Rane decided to cut Chip some slack. He and Clifford weren’t as crude and uneducated as their cousins.

For generations men from the Jones and other local families had filled their freezers without governmental rules and regulations. In recent years, short hunting seasons and limits on how much game they could harvest had meant an end to a way of life they’d long taken for granted. In addition, Jones Logging was part of a dying industry thanks to more bureaucracy and decreased need for timber products. Chip, Clifford and their cousins knew how to fell timber and hunt. Unfortunately, that was basically the limit to their skills.

“I feel sorry for them,” her mother had said more than once. “They represent what our pioneers were about. They should have been born decades ago. At least most are telling their children not to follow in their footsteps.”

That, Rane had tried to tell her mother when Jacki asked why she was so dead set on building a life far from the Chinook Mountains, was why. There was an exciting world out there, new places to explore. No way was she going to spend hers stuck in Forestville the way her mother was.

Well, she was back. And it was too late to apologize to her mother.

“Where’s your wife?” she asked Joe. “Isn’t she always with you?”

“Deana’s been sick. Well, not sick. She needs a knee replacement. That keeps her off her feet.”

“I’m sorry. Will she be having surgery—”

“Not unless I win the lottery. We’re self-employed, don’t have insurance. Don’t have anything except this.” He indicated the bar.

After a minute, Joe left to tend to the needs of his other customers. Wishing she knew what to say to Joe, Rane continued to sip her wine. Even with the TV blaring, she could hear rain hitting the metal roof. No matter that she was tired and hungry, she couldn’t quite talk herself into going home. If only the small, well-built place her mother had loved didn’t feel so empty.

Sighing, she looked toward the front door, then shook her head. Surely she hadn’t been hoping Songan would walk in, and even if she had, it wouldn’t happen.

Enough with the sexual energy building at the base of her spine.

Enough with asking herself if the
grizzly
might be contributing to her mood.

“You didn’t get married, did you?” Chip asked. “I thought for sure you would.”

Chip’s unexpected question accomplished what she’d been unable to do on her own, which was get her mind off sexual matters. She turned toward him, then was sorry because he hadn’t brushed his teeth for a while. Apparently dental hygiene took a backseat to keeping one’s work equipment running. But if the company was that important, shouldn’t he be heading for Eagle Pass since the city was a good hour and a half away?

“I didn’t realize my marital status mattered to you,” she said.

Chip shrugged. The gesture sent his beer belly to jiggling beneath his padded flannel jacket. “Just making conversation, Rane. You were the best-looking girl to come out of these mountains. Too good for me, remember? I figured someone would have snagged you by now.”

“Guess I didn’t take the bait. Mom told me you married Kathy Framer.”

“Had to,” Chip muttered. “Got me two sons and a daughter, not that I see much of them since the divorce.”

Another wave of sympathy for Chip caught her by surprise. Maybe he could have done a better job of planning his life, but this was what he was stuck with. Logging with his brother put food on the table and paid child support right now, but what about after the current government contract was over?

“I’m sorry,” she said, feeling inadequate. Did everyone in town have financial problems? Enough to make them do reckless, crazy and illegal things? Enough to turn them into killers?

“Just like I’m sorry about what happened to Jacki,” Chip said. “I thought I knew everything there was to about these mountains, but she… Just goes to show what an education will get you. She had a career, a damn secure one. Now she has nothing.”

Much as she hated hearing that, Rane couldn’t disagree with Chip. For all the bureaucracy that went with working for the Forest Service, it could turn out to be a life-long career.

Unless the employee was murdered.

Rane stayed at the Sawmill for the better part of an hour, sipping slowly and talking to several other people from the past. A couple of men offered to buy her drinks, then backed off when Joe gave them the evil eye. When Joe privately asked why she was putting up with this, she decided to tell him the truth, that she needed to learn as much as she could about the people who had made up her mother’s world.

“I’m not a detective,” she’d said unnecessarily. “I’m hoping someone will say something that, I don’t know, will trigger something in my memory. Mom and I talked a lot, which means I got all the gossip.”

She hadn’t mentioned the possibility that her mother’s killer might have been in the Sawmill.

Joe had hugged her to his sticky apron but hadn’t added anything to what little she’d learned from those conversations. Either Joe tuned out the wagging tongues loosened by the liquor he sold, or he didn’t want to encourage her poor excuse for an investigation. Or concern for his wife’s health came before anything else.

Alice and her friends had left before she did, saving her from trying to decipher the older woman’s expression. She couldn’t imagine Alice approving of her coming alone to the bar and allowing herself to be surrounded by men who weren’t the town’s most upstanding citizens.

Fortunately the rain had let up. There wasn’t much snow mixed in with it, but according to the news she caught on the truck radio, things were going to get colder in a few days. That coupled with the accompanying clouds added up to one thing: winter’s first snowstorm.

Then what, she asked herself as she unlocked the door to what had been her mother’s place. Should she stay here and risk not working for the Service in Alaska after all? Her supervisors were being understanding about her need to take some time off, but they could only leave that wildlife biologist position out of Homer vacant for so long.

She couldn’t remember her or her mother ever locking themselves in while she was growing up, but she did so. After putting away her groceries, she started a toasted cheese sandwich. Then she went into what had been her childhood bedroom and took off all but her shirt and jeans. She put on slippers, turned on the TV in the living room and flipped her sandwich over.

A police investigation show was playing. She’d never understood the appeal of graphic crime scenes but stared at the screen until she smelled something burning. After scraping off the burned parts, she plunked herself on the couch in front of the TV with her dinner and a glass of milk on the coffee table. Tonight she wasn’t going to think about the nights her mother had spent doing the same thing; she wasn’t!

Jacki had had at least two romantic relationships after her daughter moved away. The one she’d talked the most about had been with another ranger who’d been transferred up to Washington State. Instead of asking for a transfer herself as Jerry had wanted, she’d chosen local spotted owl research over him.

Prescott had entered the picture less than a year after the relationship with Jerry ended. He’d been and still was a Fish and Wildlife employee. Whenever Rane asked about him, Jacki had given her a brief answer and changed the subject. Finally her mother admitted that Prescott was married. Separated but not talking divorce.

A few awful times right after Jacki went missing and Rane was sick with fear, she’d wondered if her mother had decided she couldn’t live without Prescott. By day’s light, she’d acknowledged her mother was stronger than that. Her belief in her mother had been confirmed when Jacki’s body was found. No way could the bullet that killed her have been self-inflicted.

An ad for a luxury car came on. As she watched beautiful people speeding along a deserted stretch of highway in a black convertible, she wondered what made advertising companies think that would sell cars. Her job paid relatively well, but she’d never be in that driver’s seat. Besides, she didn’t want to be.

That led to the question of what she was going to do with her life now that the most important person in it was dead. Murdered.

“Damn it, enough!” Upset and angry at herself, she extracted the knife her mother had given her from her backpack. Today had been full enough without throwing questions about life direction into the mix. Placing the knife on the couch next to her, she leaned back and closed her eyes.

Did she really want to see Songan again? He might be her only chance of learning the truth about her mother’s death, but there was a lot of baggage where he was concerned.

He turned her sexual cranks. Absolutely no doubt about that. When he became human, he gave new meaning to the word hunk. Not only could he make professional athletes and bodybuilders wave the white flag of surrender, sex with him had always been wildly satisfying. For someone who spent only roughly half his time as a human, he sure as hell knew what a woman—this woman—needed.

Was sex enough?

Standing, she carried the dinner remains into the kitchen and returned to the living room. The crime show had started again, not that it mattered, because she had no idea what the plot was about. Her mother’s house was about fifteen hundred square feet, which she figured was more than enough room for one person, so why did she feel as if the walls were squeezing her in? She’d spent the day outdoors. She’d had great sex. She should be tired and brain dead. Tomorrow was soon enough to revisit the awful questions surrounding her mother’s death. Give it a rest for one night, all right. Find a spot of peace.

No longer listening to her self-directed argument, she paced from one end of the room to the other and turned around. Thinking to retrace her steps, she lifted her right leg. Her slipper hit the short brown carpet.