Tami Hoag

Dark Paradise

© 1994

AUTHOR’S NOTE

INSPIRATION comes from everywhere and from no-where, from life and from dreams and from places that have no names. It comes most often in small pieces as tiny and bright as diamonds. I catch them when I can and hold them tight. I wish on them like stars and from them come the seeds of stories.

This book is the result of many small inspirations that came to me over the course of time. I have a number of people to thank for those diamond lights. Mary W., for striking a spark half a decade ago. Mary-Chapin Carpenter and Shawn Colvin, songwriters whose gift for touching the soul with words continually leaves me in awe. Philip Aaberg, Montana-born pianist who can transport me west with a handful of tender notes and the exquisite silences between them. John Lyons, cowboy and teacher of wisdom and patience. Sarge, old friend long gone from all but my memory and my heart.

Also, thank you to fellow Bantam author and agency sister Fran Baker for your generous donation of information on the life of a court reporter. Thanks, Don Weisberg, for the Feed and Read. Thanks to C.B. and M.E.F. for your spirited bidding in support of MFW and my ego.

Readers, I hope you enjoy this trip to Montana. It is a place of unique and spectacular beauty, at once tough and fragile, timeless and threatened, as is the American West itself. It is a place where the incredible, boisterous spirit of the frontier can still be felt, and where it can be felt slipping away like sand through grasping fingers. To all who would fight to save that spirit-natives and outsiders alike-I wish you success.

PROLOGUE

SHE COULD hear the dogs in the distance, baying relentlessly. Pursuing relentlessly, as death pursues life.

Death.

Christ, she was going to die. The thought made her incredulous. Somehow, she had never really believed this moment would come. The idea had always loitered in the back of her mind that she would somehow be able to cheat the grim reaper, that she would be able to deal her way out of the inevitable. She had always been a gambler. Somehow, she had always managed to beat the odds. Her heart fluttered and her throat clenched at the idea that she would not beat them this time.

The whole notion of her own mortality stunned her, and she wanted to stop and stare at herself, as if she were having an out-of-body experience, as if this person running were someone she knew only in passing. But she couldn’t stop. The sounds of the dogs drove her on. The instinct of self-preservation spurred her to keep her feet moving.

She lunged up the steady grade of the mountain, tripping over exposed roots and fallen branches. Brush grabbed her clothing and clawed her bloodied face like gnarled, bony fingers. The carpet of decay on the forest floor gave way in spots as she scrambled, yanking her back precious inches instead of giving her purchase to propel herself forward. Pain seared through her as her elbow cracked against a stone half buried in the soft loam. She picked herself up, cradling the arm against her body, and ran on.

Sobs of frustration and fear caught in her throat and choked her. Tears blurred what sight she had in the moon-silvered night. Her nose was broken and throbbing, forcing her to breathe through her mouth alone, and she tried to swallow the cool night air in great gulps. Her lungs were burning, as if every breath brought in a rush of acid instead of oxygen. The fire spread down her arms and legs, limbs that felt like leaden clubs as she pushed them to perform far beyond their capabilities.

I should have quit smoking. A ludicrous thought. It wasn’t cigarettes that was going to kill her. In an isolated corner of her mind, where a strange calm resided, she saw herself stopping and sitting down on a fallen log for a final smoke. It would have been like those nights after aerobics class, when the first thing she had done outside the gym was light up. Nothing like that first smoke after a workout. She laughed, on the verge of hysteria, then sobbed, stumbled on.

The dogs were getting closer. They could smell the blood that ran from the deep cut the knife had made across her face.

There was no one to run to, no one to rescue her. She knew that. Ahead of her, the terrain only turned more rugged, steeper, wilder. There were no people, no roads. There was no hope.

Her heart broke with the certainty of that. No hope. Without hope, there was nothing. All the other systems began shutting down.

She broke from the woods and stumbled into a clearing. She couldn’t run another step. Her head swam and pounded. Her legs wobbled beneath her, sending her lurching drunkenly into the open meadow. The commands her brain sent shorted out en route, then stopped firing altogether as her will crumbled.

Strangling on despair, on the taste of her own blood, she sank to her knees in the deep, soft grass and stared up at the huge, brilliant disk of the moon, realizing for the first time in her life how insignificant she was. She would die in this wilderness, with the scent of wildflowers in the air, and the world would go on without a pause. She was nothing, just another victim of another hunt. No one would even miss her. The sense of stark loneliness that thought sent through her numbed her to the bone.

No one would miss her.

No one would mourn her.

Her life meant nothing.

She could hear the crashing in the woods behind her. The sound of hoofbeats. The snorting of a horse. The dogs baying. Her heart pounding, ready to explode.

She never heard the shot.

CHAPTER 1

IT STARTED out as a bad hair day and went downhill from there,” Marilee Jennings said aloud as her Honda crossed the border into Montana. She took a last drag on her cigarette and crushed out the stub amid a dozen others in the ashtray.

The line was a joke she and Lucy had shared time and again during their friendship. Whenever either of them began a conversation with that line, it meant the other was to provide the Miller Lite, the pizza, and the shoulder to cry on. Usually, they ended up laughing. Always they ended up commiserating.

They had met in a stress management course for court reporters. After two hours of being counseled not to attempt to resolve stress with cigarettes, liquor, and shop talk, they walked out of the meeting room and Lucy turned to her with a wry smile and a pack of Salem Light 100’s in her hand and said, “So you want to go get a beer?”

The bond had been instant and strong. Not a cloying friendship, but a relationship based on common ground and a sense of humor. They both worked on their own, hustling for government contracts and working for a string of attorneys, taking depositions and doing the usual grunt work of transcripts and subpoenas and fending off amorous advances of legal beagles in heat. They both saw the kinds of ugliness people could resort to in labor-management disputes, and took down in the secret code of their profession first-person accounts of everything from the absurdities of divorce battles to the atrocities of murder. They shared the common problems of their profession-the stress of a job that demanded perfection, the headaches of dealing with arrogant attorneys who wanted everything but the bill in twenty-four hours, then went for months without bothering to pay them. And yet, in many ways, they were as different as night and day.

Lucy liked the glamour attached to the people she worked for. She thrived on intrigue and dyed her hair a different shade of blond every six months because sameness bored her. She looked at the world with the narrow eyes of an amused cynic. Her insights were as sharp as a stiletto and so was her tongue. She was ambitious and ruthless and wry. She adored the limelight and coveted the lush life.