The Complete Mackenzie Collection Read online

  Chapter Six

  It was after nine when they heard Wolf’s truck, and both of them froze with mingled tension and relief: tension because they dreaded to hear what had happened, and relief because he was home instead of locked in jail. Mary couldn’t imagine Wolf in jail, even though he’d spent two years in prison. He was too wild, like a lobo that could never be tamed. Imprisoning him had been an act so cruel as to be obscene.

  He came in the back door and stood there staring at her, his dark face expressionless. She and Joe sat at the kitchen table, nursing cups of coffee. “Why are you still here? Go home.”

  She ignored the flatness of his tone. He was so angry she could almost feel the heat from across the room, but she knew it wasn’t directed against her. Getting up, she dumped her lukewarm coffee into the sink and got another cup from the cabinet, then poured fresh coffee into both cups. “Sit down, drink your coffee and tell us what happened,” she said in her best schoolteacher voice.

  He did reach for the coffee, but he didn’t sit down. He was too angry to sit. The rage boiled in him, robbing his movements of their usual fluidity. It was starting all over again, and he’d be damned if he’d go to prison again for something he hadn’t done. He’d fight any way he could and with any weapon he could, but he’d die before he’d go back to prison.

  “They let you go,” Joe said.

  “They had to. The girl was raped around noon. At noon I was delivering two horses to the Bar W R. Wally Rasco verified it, and the sheriff couldn’t figure out a way I could have been in two different places, sixty miles apart, at the same time, so he had to let me go.”

  “Where did it happen?”

  Wolf rubbed his forehead, then pinched his nose between his eyes as if he had a headache, or maybe he was just tired. “She was grabbed from behind when she got in her car, parked in her own driveway. He made her drive almost an hour before telling her to pull off on the side of the road. She never saw his face. He wore a ski mask. But she could tell he was tall, and that was enough of a description for the sheriff.”

  “The side of the road?” Mary blurted. “That’s…weird. It doesn’t make sense. I know there’s not much traffic, but still, someone could have come by at any time.”

  “Yeah. Not to mention that he was waiting for her in her driveway. The whole thing is strange.”

  Joe drummed his fingers on the table. “It could have been someone passing through.”

  “How many people ‘pass through’ Ruth?” Wolf asked dryly. “Would a drifter have known whose car it was, or when she was likely to come out of the house? What if the car belonged to a man? That’s a big chance to take, especially when rape seems to have been the only thing on his mind, because he didn’t rob her, even though she had money.”

  “Are they keeping her identity secret?” Mary asked.

  He looked at her. “It won’t stay a secret, because her father was in the sheriff’s office waving a rifle and threatening to blow my guts out. He attracted a lot of attention, and people talk.”

  His face was still expressionless, but Mary sensed the bitter rage that filled him. His fierce pride had been dragged in the dust—again. How had he endured being forced to sit there and listen to insults and threats? Because she knew he’d been insulted, by vile words describing his mixed heritage as well as by the very fact he’d been picked up for questioning. He was holding it all in, controlling it, but the rage was there.

  “What happened?”

  “Armstrong stopped it. Then Wally Rasco got there and cleared me, and the sheriff let me go with a friendly warning.”

  “A warning?” Mary jumped to her feet, her eyes flashing. “For what?”

  He pinched her chin and gave her a coldly ferocious smile. “He warned me to stay away from white women, sweetcake. And that’s just what I’m going to do. So you go on home now, and stay there. I don’t want you on my mountain again.”

  “You didn’t feel that way in the barn,” she shot back, then darted a look at Joe and blushed. Joe just quirked an eyebrow and looked strangely self-satisfied. She decided to ignore him and turned back to Wolf. “I can’t believe you’re letting that mush-brain sheriff tell you who you can see.”

  He narrowed his eyes at her. “Maybe it hasn’t dawned on you yet, but it’s all starting again. It doesn’t matter that Wally Rasco cleared me. Everyone is going to remember what happened ten years ago, and the way they felt.”

  “You were cleared of that, too, or doesn’t that count?”

  “With some people,” he finally admitted. “Not with most. They’re already afraid of me, already distrust and dislike me. Until this bastard is caught, I probably won’t be able to buy anything in that town, not groceries, gas or feed. And any white woman who has anything to do with me could be in real danger of being tarred and feathered.”

  So that was it. He was still trying to protect her. She stared at him in exasperation. “Wolf, I refuse to live my life according to someone else’s prejudices. I appreciate that you’re trying to protect me—”

  She could hear an audible click as his teeth snapped together. “Do you?” he asked with heavy sarcasm. “Then go home. Stay home, and I’ll stay here.”

  “For how long?”

  Instead of answering her question, he made an oblique statement. “I’ll always be a half-breed.”

  “And I’ll always be what I am, too. I haven’t asked you to change,” she pointed out, pain creeping into her voice. She looked at him with longing plain in her eyes, as no woman had ever looked at him before, and the rage in him intensified because he couldn’t simply reach out and take her in his arms, proclaim to the world that she was his woman. The sheriff’s warning had been clear enough, and Wolf knew well that the hostility toward him would rapidly swell to explosive proportions. It could easily spill over onto Mary, and now he wasn’t just worried that she would lose her job. A job was nothing compared to the physical danger she could suffer. She could be terrorized in her own home, her property vandalized; she could be cursed and spat upon; she could be physically attacked. For all her sheer determination, she was still just a rather slight woman, and she would be helpless against anyone who wanted to hurt her.

  “I know,” he finally said, and despite himself, he reached out to touch her hair. “Go home, Mary. When this is over—” He stopped, because he didn’t want to make promises he might not be able to keep, but what he’d said was enough to put a glowing light in her eyes.

  “All right,” she murmured, putting her hand on his. “By the way, I want you to get a haircut.”

  He looked startled. “A haircut?”

  “Yes. You want me to wear my hair down, and I want you to get a haircut.”

  “Why?”

  She gave him a shrewd look. “You don’t wear it long because you’re Indian. You wear it long just to upset people, so they’ll never forget your Indian blood. So get it cut.”

  “Short hair won’t make me less Indian.”

  “Long hair won’t make you more Indian.”

  She looked as if she would stand there until doomsday unless he agreed to get a haircut. He gave in abruptly, muttering, “All right, I’ll get a haircut.”

  “Good.” She smiled at him and went on tiptoe to kiss the corner of his mouth. “Good night. Good night, Joe.”

  “Goodnight, Mary.”

  When she was gone, Wolf wearily ran his hand through his hair, then frowned as he realized he’d just agreed to cut it off. He looked up to find Joe watching him steadily.

  “What are we going to do?” the boy asked.

  “Whatever we have to,” Wolf replied, his expression flinty.

  When Mary bought groceries the next morning, she found everyone in the store huddling together in small groups of two or three and whispering about the rape. The girl’s identity was quickly revealed; it was Cathy Teele, whose younger sister, Christa, was in Mary’s class. The entire Teele family was devastated, according to the whispers Mary heard as she gathered her groceri