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  “What?”

  She struggled off of his lap, and he didn’t try to hold her there, but only because the last time he’d tried to hold her where she didn’t want to be, he’d scared her. “It’s okay, Mitch. Let’s just move forward. I guess I caught you in a weak moment, and that’s not really fair, is it?”

  She turned and headed for the house.

  Mitch opened his mouth twice to say something, then clamped it shut. How could he explain how he felt when he didn’t know? She thought he didn’t want her, that he wasn’t attracted, and that was about as far from the truth as she could get. But overriding his raging hard-on was the fact that he truly didn’t want to hurt her. And falling for a guy who beats people up for fun when she abhors violence—a guy who might be sentenced to death row in the next few weeks—didn’t sound like the shortest path to happiness and fulfillment.

  There was one thing he could do, though, to at least prove to her that he’d listened.

  After giving Beth time to get upstairs, he straightened his clothes and followed her inside. The kitchen was dark, but a glow from the TV drew him to the living room. His mother was slumped in her Barcalounger, a glass of red wine at her elbow. He’d wondered if she still drank wine. She obviously hadn’t felt comfortable enough to imbibe when they had guests.

  “Hey, Mom,” he said softly from the doorway, not wanting to startle her.

  He did anyway. She turned suddenly. “Oh, Mitch. I guess I thought you’d gone to bed.”

  “I was out with the goats. You know you have a new kid, right?”

  She flashed a little smile. “It came a couple of nights ago. I wanted to name it Snowball, but Davy tells me not to name the babies. It hurts too much when we sell them.”

  Mitch remembered now how his mother doted over the baby goats, and baby chicks when they had them. And how cruel his father had been when it came time to sell the babies, or the old hens that had stopped laying eggs.

  “I suspect it still hurts. You always were partial to those little goats.”

  “We can’t keep all the babies. But I keep the old chickens now. It costs so little to feed them, and it doesn’t seem fair to send them off to be soup when they’ve given me years of loyal service. Davy doesn’t mind. He’s kind to the animals. He talks to them and gives them treats. He makes sure they’re warm enough in the winter. And if the goats or the dog gets sick, he calls the vet.”

  Instead of using his shotgun to deal with the problem.

  “Are you happy with Davy?”

  “He’s a good man. But he’s shy, doesn’t show much of himself to you until he knows you and trusts you.”

  “He obviously doesn’t trust me.” Mitch sat in the chair next to his mom’s, the one Davy usually claimed. The dog, asleep by the chair, roused herself enough to settle her head on Mitch’s foot.

  “Give him time.”

  “For what it’s worth, I’m glad you’re happy.”

  “We do a lot of give and take. I compromise here, he does there, and we pick our battles. So, yeah, I’m happy. Well, not about everything.”

  Mitch knew what that meant. “I guess I haven’t been a very good son to you.”

  “Why should you be?” She studied one of her ragged fingernails, then picked up a nail file from the small table next to her and went to work. “I was no prize as a mother.”

  He wanted to deny her assessment, but the words wouldn’t come. In his mind, she hadn’t done the most basic thing a mother should do. Beth had guessed right; he resented that his mother hadn’t done a better job protecting him from his brute of a father. Mitch had always thought that meant she didn’t love him.

  But surely that was a child’s simplistic conclusion. If she didn’t feel something for him, she would have turned her back on him when he’d been charged with murder. It would have been easy enough to just write him off as a bad seed.

  Instead, she was trying to bridge the chasm between them.

  He’d spent a lot of years consumed with hate for his father, but he’d also devoted no small amount of energy blaming his mother.

  A few generations ago, women had no recourse against violent husbands and boyfriends. But even when he’d been a kid, surely his mother could have done something. Right?

  One way to find out. “Mom, why didn’t you leave him?”

  Pain registered on her face before she quickly shuttered her expression. “Because he wouldn’t let me. It’s as simple as that.”

  Mitch was at a crossroads. He could argue that her maternal instincts should have been stronger than that, but he remembered the fear—no, the terror—of saying the wrong thing at the wrong time, making the wrong decision. She couldn’t have simply packed up her bags and left if Willard didn’t want her to.

  “I tried once, you know,” she said quietly. “You were a baby, and I feared for your life, truly I did. I didn’t even pack a bag. I just showed up at your aunt Trudy’s house. She’d told me often enough that she would help me get away from him. We were packing to move to Baton Rouge, getting some cash together. It lasted two whole days.”

  “What happened?”

  “He showed up. And he told me if I didn’t come home with him he would…he would…”

  “He threatened to kill you?”

  “No, baby, he threatened to kill you. Said he would smother you when my back was turned.”

  Jesus.

  “The more I loved you, the more dangerous it was for you. You were his weapon against me. When he wanted to hurt me, he hurt you instead.”

  “You never told the police?”

  “Oh, yes, I did. Three times. The first time he broke a rib, the second time he broke my arm. The third time, he broke your arm. I stopped after that.”

  A doctor had told him once that he had an old fracture, probably sustained before he could remember. In very cold weather, it ached.

  “So why didn’t he go to jail?”

  “Because the chief of police was his hunting buddy, that’s why.”

  Mitch just shook his head. “I don’t know what to say. I had everything so wrong. I was mad because you didn’t protect me from him, but I should have done something, too.”

  “You were just a child—”

  “Later, I mean. He left me alone once I got big enough to fight back. But did he leave you alone?” Willard Bell had been a big man, six foot two and 250 pounds. His mother was small, physically weak even for a woman. The thought of the damage he could have done to her… It made him shudder with revulsion.

  Myra sat up straighter, and a fierceness entered her eyes. “You did nothing wrong, Mitchell. Once he couldn’t bully you any longer, he lost interest. Found another woman. One who already had a child.”

  That horrific possibility had never even occurred to him. Yeah, he knew his dad ran around. In a town as small as Coot’s Bayou, people talked. But people had known not to bring it up around him, so he hadn’t ever heard any details. “How many lives did that one sick bastard ruin?”

  “Mitch, listen to me. He didn’t ruin our lives. Not if we don’t let him. Don’t give him that power. Yes, he caused us both pain. But it’s far in the past now. We can’t touch him, he can’t touch us. The best revenge you can take on Willard Bell is to live a good life. Put your anger aside, and don’t continue the cycle.”

  “I don’t know how to put it aside, Mom,” he confessed. “I was doing fine until I came back here.” Now it was a festering, open wound.

  “There’s only one antidote to hate and fear.”

  “Yeah, beating the crap out of someone who deserves it.”

  “No,” she said firmly. “The only cure is love, and more love. You have to let yourself feel love, and you have to give it back. You can do that, Mitch.”

  He wasn’t so sure.

  “Start small,” she said, obviously sensing his doubts. “Build your life one small, loving act at a time.”

  “I’ll try.”

  “You could start with a hug for your old ma.”
r />   His heart jumped with some unnamed emotion, but he went through with it. They both stood, and he wrapped his arms around her. She tentatively squeezed back.

  He honestly couldn’t remember ever hugging his mother. It wasn’t so bad. He could almost feel her love radiating through him.

  After a few self-conscious seconds, they pulled apart. “Thank you, Mom. For letting me stay here, for believing in me.” And for protecting him the only way she knew how.

  “You’re welcome, son.”

  He wanted to tell her he loved her, but he wasn’t there yet. His brain cells needed to process this new reality for a while before he could accept it as true. So before he said or did anything that would open a new can of worms, he turned and headed for the stairs.

  Beth’s bedroom door was closed, but a light shined from under the door, so she was still up. He stood in front of the door, his heart thumping like a rubber hammer on his ribs as he debated whether to knock.

  Finally, he did. Just a soft tap, in case she’d gone to sleep with a lamp on. Some people didn’t like the dark.

  He heard rustling from inside the room, then the creak of floorboards. The door opened and Beth stood there framed by the soft glow of a bedside lamp behind her, creating a halo around her chocolate-brown hair. She wore a distinctly unsexy baby-blue nightshirt that reached almost to her knees, but it turned him on anyway. He thought he could see the outline of her nipples, and the memory of holding her breasts sprang instantly to mind. He forced his eyes down, but the sight of her bare legs and cute, pink-polished toenails was damn near as sexy.

  “Mitch?” The one syllable was filled with questions.

  He tore his gaze away from her trim calves and ankles to focus on her face. Hard to tell whether she was pleased to see him. She seemed to be keeping her voice and expression carefully neutral.

  “I just wanted to tell you—you were right.”

  She opened the door wider and stepped back, allowing him inside, though she left it standing wide-open. Definitely not an invitation to anything but conversation.

  She’d clearly been in bed, working on her laptop, which she’d set aside on the bed, along with her reading glasses.

  “Right about what?”

  “My mother. I just spent the last few minutes talking to her. Seems there’s a lot I don’t understand about what went on when I was a kid. Probably I’ll never know everything. But I do think she cared for me in her own way.”

  Beth smiled as if he’d just handed her a dozen roses. “That’s wonderful. I’m so glad you talked to her. It couldn’t have been easy.”

  “No, it’s a lot easier just to assume you know what’s going on in someone’s head.” He waited to see if she would take the bait. She had to know he was talking about her, now, not his mother.

  But she didn’t respond as he’d hoped. “Right. Well, I better get some sleep. Long day tomorrow. I’ll have to get up early if I want to observe the crime scene guys doing their thing.”

  He wanted to tell her she was wrong about him—that he did want her, that she hadn’t merely caught him in a weak moment. Maybe she deserved better than him, but he could try to live up to what she deserved, couldn’t he? He wanted to tell her that this was the wrong time and place, but that after all this was over—after he’d been proven innocent—he wanted to revisit the idea of him and Beth as more than friends.

  But that was the crux of the issue. He might not be proven innocent. And until he was, he couldn’t start anything. Or even talk about starting anything. It wouldn’t be fair to Beth.

  “Okay, then. Sleep well.” He forced himself to turn and walk out. She closed the door behind him, the click of the latch sounding way too final.

  “RALEIGH’S TIED UP IN COURT,” Daniel informed Beth the next morning. Her yellow Ford Escape was parked on the side of the road near the footpath that led to the crime scene, and she’d been about to get out when her cell phone had rung. “She probably can’t get back to Louisiana for a couple of days but she says the local attorney can handle anything minor that comes up. What’s your status?”

  “Been at the crime scene all morning, not that the CSIs let me anywhere close to the action.” She’d been relegated to sitting on a log outside the yellow tape, watching as the investigators dismantled the shack and toted just about everything to a flatbed truck parked on the road.

  One man with a metal detector had turned up a half-dozen bullets on the grounds—all different sizes and conditions, which didn’t bode well for Mitch. A case could be made that any bullets found in the shack that didn’t support him as the killer were unconnected to the murder, since apparently lots of guns were fired in this vicinity.

  “Looks like we won’t have access to the car for a while, and when we get it, it’ll be swept cleaner than a quarter that’s gone through the washing machine.”

  “The car’s a dead end,” Daniel said flatly. “The parish lab will find any evidence that’s big enough to survive all those years underwater. We need to focus on people. Witnesses.”

  “Mitch and I are going to search for Crazy Larry as soon as I get back to his mom’s house. Mitch knows all of the likely hangouts.”

  “Larry—the guy who almost killed you?”

  “He said he was just trying to scare us off, not kill anyone.” Beth didn’t mention how she’d felt one of the bullets pass only inches away from her head.

  Daniel didn’t respond immediately. She could tell he was thinking. “Is that the best use of your time? I can send someone else to scare up witnesses and interview them.”

  “If I’m needed back in Houston, I’ll go right away. But meanwhile—” How could she explain that she didn’t want to leave Mitch alone? He might start to feel as though he was at the bottom of the priority list if people at Project Justice kept passing around responsibility for his case.

  “You want to stay with Mitch.” Daniel sounded as if he didn’t altogether approve.

  “I can keep pressure on the locals as well as anyone. And I can interview witnesses. I might not have ever been a cop, but I did most of the training.” She didn’t add that she’d learned a great deal about interrogation from watching her true-crime shows and reading books and transcripts. “Hey, you’ve seen me face down the baddest of the badass lawyers in court.”

  “True. But working in the field, investigating—it’s not really your job.”

  She might as well just spit it out. “I want to stay. Mitch doesn’t just need competent investigators and legal help. He needs a friend. He can’t face this alone.”

  “Beth, is there something I should know about you and Mitch?”

  “No,” she said, much too quickly and emphatically.

  Daniel said nothing.

  “We’re not sleeping together, if that’s what you mean. I won’t deny that I find him… What has Raleigh told you?”

  He laughed. “Not a thing. I can hear it in your voice. And I just used the oldest interrogation trick in the book—going silent, forcing you to fill the gap.”

  “Dammit,” she grumbled.

  “This case is going to get ugly. The media haven’t glommed on to it yet, but unfortunately, Project Justice has garnered enough national press lately that everything we do gets picked up sooner or later. You do understand that any hint of an affair between you and Mitch—”

  “I get it. And I don’t think you have to worry.” Sad but true.

  “Okay. I’m sending Billy down there to shake the bushes for witnesses, but I want you to stay, as well. Your job—besides evaluating physical evidence—is to keep Mitch on a leash. He’s more of a loose cannon than I ever would have imagined. I understand he assaulted this Larry character.”

  Beth had been trying not to think about that. “He did it to get the gun away. And I think the floor did more of the assaulting than Mitch did.”

  “Very brave of him. And foolhardy. He needs to stay away from the investigation. The only good thing about Larry escaping custody is that no one took a pictu
re of his broken nose. That’s all a jury needs to see when we’re trying to convince them Mitch isn’t violent.”

  Daniel made a good argument. She wondered what he would think if he knew Mitch and Dwayne had scuffled, as well.

  “Keep him at his computer. That’s where he can do the most good.”

  “I’ll do what I can, Daniel.” But she suspected if Mitch didn’t want to be kept someplace, he wouldn’t be. He’d been paying far more attention to the black cuff around his ankle than she thought appropriate.

  CHAPTER NINE

  “BILLY WILL BE HERE this afternoon,” Beth reported. She’d returned to Myra’s house just in time for lunch—tuna salad sandwiches on soft white bread and fruit salad made from canned fruit and little marshmallows. It was another meal that reminded Beth of her grandmother.

  They were seated at the picnic table again. Apparently this was where Myra served meals whenever the weather was at all hospitable. There was always a can of Off! around to discourage mosquitoes; Beth knew she would forever associate the scent of bug repellant with this episode in her life.

  “So we’re just supposed to sit on our hands and wait for him?” Mitch seemed antsy, and she supposed she couldn’t blame him. He pulled a cherry out of the canned fruit cocktail and tossed it to Poppy, who waited patiently under the table.

  “Daniel thinks your time is best spent doing what you do best.”

  “I’ve gone as far as I can in cyberspace.” He crammed one of the neat triangles of sandwich into his mouth and chewed as if he couldn’t taste anything. “I have addresses for Amanda, for the Monte Carlo owner, and I even have a lead on Studs the Fence.”

  “We should let Billy question them,” Beth insisted. “He’s better at it than either of us.”

  “Why Billy?” Mitch asked suddenly. “Was that your idea?”

  She thought the question odd. “No, it was Daniel’s decision. We could wait for Raleigh to finish her court thing, but we might not have the luxury of time. Justice is pretty swift around these parts.”

  “About as swift and precise as a sledgehammer,” Mitch agreed. “Still, there’s one thing we can do. We can try to find Larry. And don’t tell me Billy’s more qualified to do that than me. I know all his favorite spots.”