Welcome to Last Chance (Last Chance #1)(22)
Author: Hope Ramsay

How could she have been so stupid? How could she have traded in a caring and responsible man for the likes of Chad Ames? Forget the fact that Chad made her heart go pitty-pat, or that the man had lit her up in bed, or that she loved him with all her heart.

All of that was immaterial.

Chad Ames wasn’t father material. In fact, he’d said as much to her face last night. He wasn’t going to marry her. He wasn’t going to settle down with her. He wasn’t even committed to taking care of the child he’d fathered.

He was, in a word, the most selfish and immature man she had ever met. He had literally pushed her out of their hotel room in Atlanta, where he and Tumbleweed were performing, leaving her pretty much stranded.

She could go back to Nashville, lick her wounds, and think about suing for child support. Or she could try to fix what she had stupidly broken a year ago. It seemed like fixing the broken stuff was a better plan than going back to Music City.

“I’ll take one ticket to Last Chance,” she said to the agent.

The man looked down at her. “So what’s happening in Last Chance these days?”

“Excuse me?”

“Oh, I don’t know. It just seems like there are a bunch of women headed in that general direction. And that seems odd to me on account of the fact that I might sell one ticket to Last Chance every month or so. It ain’t exactly a tourist spot, you know?”

She gritted her teeth. “Yes, I know. Can I have my ticket, please?”

“Sure. Bus leaves in ten minutes.”

Jane tried to rub away the feeling of the handcuffs on her wrists. She sat in a small, windowless room on a cold metal chair with her hands resting on a gray Formica-topped table. The walls were white, and the floors looked like the same linoleum they used in Value Mart stores—utilitarian and dingy.

Jane was alone. Chief Rhodes had locked her in. In a minute, he would return and maybe then he might tell her who she was supposed to have murdered.

She drew in a deep breath through her mouth and exhaled through her nose. She had been doing her relaxation routine for the last fifteen minutes while endlessly repeating Dr. Goodbody’s advice about negative situations. Dr. Goodbody said that obsessing over a problem or trying to wish the problem away was a big mistake. Instead, positive thinking requires a person to be honest with him- or herself and consider alternative courses of action.

The truth was, she had never killed anyone. As for the alternative courses of action—well, she doubted she could break out of prison, and Stone Rhodes was a formidable adversary, so her mind was drawing a complete blank.

Except for the look on Clay’s face the moment that he had pressed his hand up against the cruiser’s window. That look, if she let herself believe in it, said he cared about what happened to her. Like he was, maybe, the total embodiment of what Miriam Randall had told her she should be looking for.

That scared her silly.

Because the girl inside was hoping that Clayton P. would come busting in here like Sir Galahad. She could just imagine Clay rescuing her from this mess and carrying her off to some castle where he would sing love ballads to her.

Yeah, right. Like that was ever going to happen.

The door opened with a little squeak, and Chief Rhodes strode in. He wasn’t wearing his hat, although his short hair bore the unmistakable indentation of his Stetson, as did the skin of his forehead. He’d lost his utility belt, too. But he was still packing heat and still wearing a bulky Kevlar vest.

Which explained why the room had been air-conditioned into something that resembled wintertime in Juneau.

The chief took a seat and dropped a thin manila folder on the table. Then he reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out Jane’s West Virginia driver’s license.

“Okay, Mary, suppose we start with a simple question. Where’d you get this?” He held up the license and then placed it on the tabletop in front of her.

A tense little laugh burbled out of her. Forty-eight hours ago, his younger brother had rifled through her belongings and concluded that her name was not Mary. Obviously, Clay had better police instincts than the chief.

“You think this is funny?” the chief said.

Jane sucked in the frigid air and hugged herself, trying to find some warmth in the cold room. “I got the license in the usual way.”

“The usual way? Were you looking for identities online? Did you buy it from someone?”

She stopped laughing. “I hate to tell you this, Chief, but most folks go down to the DMV and apply for their licenses. Didn’t you know that?”

He pressed his lips together. It wasn’t a friendly look for him. “Do not get cute with me. I’m onto you.”

“I got the license at the DMV.”

“Uh-huh.” He leaned back in his chair and pulled a piece of paper from the folder. “If you think I believe that, then you need to think again. There is no way in hell you are Wanda Jane Coblentz.”

He slid the paper across the table. Jane recognized it as the missing flyer that had dogged her heels for years. It featured her eighth-grade school photograph—not because she’d gone missing in eighth grade, but only because her parents couldn’t afford to pay for a high-school yearbook head shot.

Looking down at her young face was never much fun. She always wondered where that little girl had gone off to. She had traveled a long way down life’s road since this photo had been taken. She’d hit more than her share of potholes and taken way too many detours into blind alleys on the road of her life.

Jane worked to suck back the tears. On some deep level, she mourned that little girl. That Wanda Jane was missing. She had died a long time ago.

She refused to meet that pain head-on. She had been running from the memory of the girl she once had been for the last seven years.

“All I can say is thank the Lord for laser hair removal,” she said in a shaky voice. “That unibrow was not attractive, was it? They ought to have a law prohibiting any photographs of a person between the ages of thirteen and seventeen. It’s an awkward age.”

She looked up into Stone Rhodes’s stony face and knew that the man had zero sense of humor. “You know,” the chief said, “you have an attitude problem. This is not a joking matter. That little girl, right there, has been missing for seven years, and her folks are tore up about it. And the police in Lexington, Kentucky, are certain she was murdered not long after she ran away.”

It didn’t seem possible, but the temperature in the room dropped a few more degrees. A cold sweat trickled down Jane’s back as she thought about Ma and Pa and her two little brothers. How on earth had the police in Lexington come to the conclusion that she was dead?

She was a runaway. That was true. She already knew Ma and Pa were looking for her. The Center for Missing and Exploited Children had been trying to locate her for years. She had seen her own face a dozen times on milk containers and bill stuffers. The photo was always the same: that eighth-grade graduation photo.

She had always been grateful for this fact, because it was amazing how people could look right past those milk container photos when they showed a thirteen-year-old girl with heavy eyebrows and a bad case of acne. She no longer resembled the girl in the flyer.

She put the flyer down on the table and leaned in. “As you can see, I am alive. So can I go now?”

The chief wasn’t moved by her statement. “So tell me,” he asked. “How are you acquainted with Joseph Andrew Hamil?”

She hugged herself harder as it occurred to her that the police always referred to the notorious by their full names, like Lee Harvey Oswald or Mark David Chapman. Not that Joey was all that notorious. But the boy had been a peanut-brained weasel, for sure.

It was a sad commentary that Joey was the first peanut-brained weasel in her life—the bad-boy hero she had mistakenly expected to rescue her from Seth, West Virginia, and her dysfunctional family. Instead, Joey had dumped her in a hotel in Lexington the minute reality came knocking.

He had done her a big favor. She had learned how to take care of herself, thanks to Joey. She had managed for seven years until Woody came waltzing into the Shrimp Shack throwing hundred-dollar tips around and talking about his musical connections.

Jeez, when would she learn?

Jane didn’t want to talk about this. She had done nothing illegal that night in Lexington. Not that the same could have been said of Joey. But she wasn’t Joey’s keeper.

And clearly Joey had not been hers.

She pushed the shameful memories back, just like she fought her tears. She didn’t have to tell this story. She wasn’t guilty of anything except terminal gullibility.

“What do you want to know about Joey?” she said on a sniffle.

“So you know him?”

“Sure, I know him. We were classmates at Sherman High School in Seth. We were in chorus together. He was one heck of a guitarist, too, and if he hadn’t been such a complete screw-up as a human being, he might have made it in Nashville. But, unfortunately, the guy was a loser.”

A little muscle pulsed in Stone Rhodes’s cheek. “So what is it, Mary, you have a thing for musicians? Do you cruise through small towns picking them up and then rolling them for cash? For the record, my brother is not a rich man, despite his recent successes.”

Wow, this was personal with the chief. Stone Rhodes was doing more than his job. He was looking out for his little brother. She gritted her teeth and decided that she wasn’t going to say another word.

He waited a long moment for a response, then he heaved a big, disgusted sigh. “Look, Mary, I’m about to haul your butt down to the county and have you thrown in jail. There is a detective up in Lexington who is pretty hot to have you extradited up there for interrogation. You are in serious trouble. I’m trying to help you out before the higher authorities tie my hands.”

Right. He was trying to play the roles of both good and bad cop. She leaned forward in her chair and spoke. “Okay, Chief, I guess I’m going to exercise my rights and ask for—”

A commotion in the outer office interrupted Jane’s words. An instant later, the door swung open, revealing a man who looked like he had just stepped off the greens at Augusta National. He wore a yellow V-necked sweater over a white Cutter and Buck golf shirt. A pair of cream-colored slacks and saddle shoes with soft spikes completed his ensemble.

“I’m here to see my client,” the man announced. He looked down at her out of a pair of sparkling blue eyes hidden behind horn-rimmed glasses. “Wanda Jane, I presume.”

She nodded. This was manifesting at its finest, because she had been on the point of requesting an attorney. And bingo, one appeared as if by magic. The Universe was her friend.

Although it occurred to her that the Universe might have had a helping hand in the form of one Clayton P. Rhodes. That gave her a sense of hope.

She could fall for a guy like that, especially since he had a few additional talents, like fiddling and other stuff between the sheets and, after all, Miriam Randall had told her to ask for more.

“Oh, for goodness’ sake, Eugene. You do divorces and family law. You don’t know squat about criminal defense. Get out of here. Go back to the country club. I’m trying to do my business,” Stone said.