noticed that, like the floor, the table too had been wiped down recently.
“So tell me what happened,” he said as he took out his notebook and pen.
“We had an argument,” Anvil admitted as he wiped a hand over his face. His voice broke as he said, “She left.”
Flint saw with growing concern that the knuckles of Anvil’s right hand were scraped and bruised. “She leave in her own car?” Anvil nodded. “She take anything with her?”
“A suitcase and her purse.”
“She packed after the argument?” Flint asked.
Anvil shook his head. “She’d already packed. Said she needed some time to think.”
“Think about what?”
Anvil looked at the floor.
“She leave because you hit her?”
The farmer’s head bobbed up, shock and guilt on his face. “It wasn’t like that.”
“It wasn’t the first time you’d hit her?”
“I’d never laid a hand on her before. I swear to God.” The words came out in a strangled cry. Tears had filled the man’s eyes. Remorse making him appear even older. “It was the first time I raised a hand to her. I swear on my grandmother’s grave. I...I slapped her.”
Flint reached across the table to lift Anvil’s ham-sized right hand. “Looks like you did more than slap her.”
* * *
ELY CAHILL PERKED up a lot after his Johnson breakfast. Lillie had studied him as he’d eaten every bite on his plate. He was still a strong man in so many ways. Stubborn as a stump that refused to be pulled from the ground. Weathered by life and the outdoors. Tough as the proverbial nail. She envied him that he knew what he wanted and didn’t wait around for life to give it to him.
The drive up the canyon to his cabin was a beautiful one. Spring in Montana couldn’t be any more delightful. The sky was a clear blinding blue dotted with puffy white clouds over a sea of new bright green grasses and dark pines. She took it in as she drove, thinking how nine years ago she would have given all of this up for Trask.
Ely Cahill lived within sight of an old ghost town. Only a few shells of buildings still stood in the middle of the tall spring grass. His cabin fit right in.
He’d built it years ago out of hewn logs with his sons helping him. It was small and apparently all he needed.
The logs had weathered from the sun and snow and thunderstorms that passed over. Vegetation had grown up around it in his absence. From a distance, a person would think it was abandoned.
Ely spent little time here and even less in the ranch house down the road, where he’d lived with their mother and helped raise the six of them. I’m done ranching, he’d announced after their mother had died. You all can have the ranch. I want that hill overlooking this valley. That’s where I plan to die.
That had been almost twenty years ago. Lillie’s older brothers Cyrus and Hawk had taken over the ranch. She and her twin, Darby, had wanted nothing to do with it. Tuck, the oldest of her brothers, had struck out on his own at eighteen, not to be heard from again.
Tuck was the smart one to get out of here, Darby had said recently after mentioning that he should probably sell his share of the Stagecoach Saloon and take off to find his fortune.
Lillie hoped he was just talking. She couldn’t run the bar and café alone and she didn’t want to sell out or take on another partner. It wasn’t just a business. It was her home. She loved the old stagecoach stop, could feel its history in the stone walls and marred wooden floorboards, and she was determined to preserve it. Making money was the least of the reasons she had bought the building. The bar and café had been a way of hanging on to it—and put a roof over her head.
“Thank you, Lillie Girl,” her father said as she pulled up in front of his cabin. “No need to see me in. The pack rats probably carried off most everythin’ and left a mess ta boot.”
She shuddered to think what the inside of the cabin looked like as she watched him lift his pack and the bag of groceries she’d insisted on. “How long will you be staying out of the mountains?”
He looked up toward the Judiths, still snowcapped. “As long as I can stand it.” Lewis and Clark had discovered the mountains on their expedition to find the Northwest Passage. Clark named them after his soon-to-be wife, Judith.
“You’ll let me know before you leave.” What if Flint was right about their father? What might happen to him up there alone, let alone in the mountains?
Ely met her gaze. “Don’t worry about me,” he said as if reading her mind. “Your brother doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”
She didn’t need to ask which brother. Flint was the second oldest and the one who went into law enforcement after generations of Cahills who had teetered on the edge of the law. He was also the one who seemed to think it was his job to run the family with Tuck gone. She hated how reasonable he always was when just once she’d love to see him lose his cool like the rest of them. The only stupid thing her brother had ever done was marry Celeste York.
“You sure Flint wasn’t adopted?” she joked. “Or maybe you found him on your doorstep, where someone dumped him when he was a baby?”
“He’s well-meaning,” Ely said, surprising her.
“He arrested you.”
“He did that.” Her father laughed good-heartedly. “But I wasn’t myself last night. I understand why he had to.”
Lillie shook her head. “Always by the letter of the law.”
“Yep, that’s our Flint. He’d arrest his own grandmother if she was alive.” Ely laughed at the family joke. “But that’s only if the fool woman broke the law. It’s his job. Don’t forget that, Lillie.” He turned those gray eyes on her. “He takes bein’ sheriff seriously, no matter the cost to hisself.”
Her father was trying to warn her, as if he needed to remind her, what would happen if Flint found out Trask was back in town. She tried to swallow the lump in her throat, touched by her father’s attempt to protect her. It filled her with fear of what the future held.
Trask was back, and when Flint found out, he’d have every resource available out looking for him. This time, Trask wouldn’t get away.
Hopefully, the cowboy had come to his senses and left town again. She preferred that over seeing him behind bars. But the thought that she wouldn’t see him again for another nine years or possibly ever was like a clenched fist around her heart.
“Take care, Lillie Girl,” her father said as he slung his pack over his shoulder and started to close the pickup door.
She nodded, her thoughts on Trask, a dangerous place for even her thoughts to be.
TRASK
