Confessing to the Cowboy - By Carla Cassidy Page 0,32

and left by the back door that led to the four cabins behind the café.

As she watched her son and the tiny dog walking the area, her head whirled with possibilities and suppositions. They all led back to the same time and place of terror.

The anniversary card...the prince frog...the dead waitresses...somehow they were all tied together. She knew with a horrifying certainty that they were all linked to her.

She could pack their things, take the money from the cash register, the stash she kept in her closet and they could disappear. She’d done it before, she could do it again...go far away and start all over.

A new town...a new name...an aura of safety.

She watched Matt through a veil of sudden tears, his laughter at Twinkie’s antics like a dagger through her heart. The last time she’d run away, she’d easily uprooted a two-year-old.

This time she’d be tearing an eleven-year-old from his school, his friends and the only home he’d ever known for the uncertainty of a life on the run. She couldn’t do it again. She loved Matt too much to pick up and run. Her sins had finally caught up with her and she realized she was tired of running, and besides, Matt deserved more than that kind of a life.

She quickly swiped the tears from her eyes as Matt and Twinkie came bounding back to her. “All done,” Matt said proudly, like a new parent. He picked up Twinkie in his arms. “And now I think we’re ready for bed.”

It took a half an hour for Matt to take a shower and change into his pajamas. While he was doing that Mary sat on the edge of his bed and played with the little Chihuahua mix who had already stolen her son’s heart.

A little over an hour later Mary stood in Matt’s doorway, watching him sleep with Twinkie curled up at his feet. Grief ripped through her, crushing her heart and twisting her insides like a well-wrung washrag.

Maybe the frog really had come from a school friend of Matt’s. Or maybe one of the waitresses had left it for him, finding the frog silly and cute and thinking of him as Mary’s little prince.

She tried to cling to that tiny ray of hope but it could find no purchase in her cold, frightened heart.

She knew the truth. Somebody had found her. Somehow her past had finally caught up with her.

Tomorrow was Sunday and Matt had a playdate at Jimmy’s house. Even though Sundays were busy in the café, at the moment business was the last thing on her mind.

Tomorrow she’d call Cameron and tell him the truth about herself, about her past. It would be one of the most difficult things she’d ever done, but she knew now that it had to be done.

Tomorrow life as she knew it would end, and she stifled a sob with the back of her hand as she worried that, once she spoke with Cameron, once she spilled her secrets, she’d never see her son again.

Chapter 6

To say that Cameron was having a bad morning was a vast understatement. He’d awakened just before dawn, his thoughts not only filled with moments of the day he’d spent with Matt and Mary, but also with worries about the unsolved murders.

It hadn’t been the warmth of thoughts of Mary and Matt that had driven him out of bed, but rather the haunting of the dead and his frustration with the lack of leads in the case. He could only hope that somebody on his team had come up with something yesterday while he’d been off duty, although he knew that if any real leads had been discovered somebody would have called him.

It was just after six when he got to the office. He holed himself up in the small room with a fresh cup of coffee, a stale donut left in a box from the night crew and the files of the three murders he desperately wanted to solve.

Candy Bailey had died in one of the cabins behind Mary’s café. For a long time Cameron had believed her boyfriend, Kevin Naperson, was guilty despite the fact that his father had alibied him for the night and time in question. Even when Shirley Cook had wound up dead, Cameron had wondered if Kevin was responsible, attempting to take the heat off himself for Candy’s murder by killing another woman he had no ties to.

But Dorothy’s death had put a whole new spin on things. There was