Free High Country Horror by Jon Sharpe

and leaned in so that her lips practically brushed his ear. “I know something no one else does. Something I’ve never told my husband or the marshal. Something that might help you.”
    “Why tell me and not anyone else?”
    “Because it would drive my husband deeper into the bottle and I can’t trust Tibbit not to let the secret out.” Susannah bit her bottom lip. “It’s not the kind of thing you want to get around. It’s about Tamar. She—” Susannah stopped and closed her eyes and trembled as if she were cold, or deathly afraid.
    “Here,” Fargo said. He guided her to a chair and eased her down. “Anything I can get you? Coffee? Water?”
    “No.” Susannah bowed her head. “God, this is hard. I’ve kept it in so long and here I am confiding in a stranger.” She gripped his wrist, her nails digging deep. “I want your word. I want your solemn promise that this will be between you and me and no one else.”
    “You have it.” Fargo had to admit he would like to learn what had upset her so deeply.
    “My Tamar. She was the sweetest girl you’d ever want to meet but she wasn’t—” Susannah groaned, took a deep breath, and said in a rush, “She wasn’t pure.”
    “Pure?”
    “You know.”
    The revelation tore one of Fargo’s earlier hunches to shreds. He sat down across from her. “Your daughter slept around?”
    Susannah’s head snapped up and she looked ready to bite him. “Goodness gracious, no. What do you take her for? What do you take me for? She didn’t sleep with a lot of men. Only one. She was in love, or thought she was. I caught her sneaking out one night and threatened to tell her pa if she didn’t tell me where she was off to.” Susannah put a hand over her eyes and her shoulders slumped. “I figured she was traipsing off to see one of the neighbor boys. But it was worse than that. A lot worse.”
    “She was going to see a girl?”
    Again Susannah’s head snapped up. “God Almighty, the things that come out of your mouth.”
    “Then what?” Fargo asked. The answer hit him even as he asked the question.
    “She was going to meet a man. A married man.”
    Fargo stared.
    “That’s right. My precious Tamar took up with a man who had a wife. The shame of it cut me to the quick.” Susannah gripped her chair as if afraid she would fall off. “I tried to make her see sense. I talked myself blue in the face but she refused to listen. She said that he loved her as much as she loved him and when the time was right he was going to leave his wife for her.”
    One of the oldest lies around, Fargo reflected, and the girl had fallen for it.
    “I tried to find out who the man was,” Susannah continued. “I asked and pried and snooped in her room but there was never a clue. All she would say was that he was handsome and a gentleman.” Susannah snorted in derision. “The vermin seduced my little baby and she called him a gentleman.”
    “How long had she been seeing him?”
    “Tamar wouldn’t say,” Susannah said. “She clamped up and gave me that look of hers that told me wild horses couldn’t drag it out of her. I was worried sick. ‘What if you become pregnant?’ I asked her. She said the man promised to leave his wife right away if that happened and they would go off together to live happily ever after. Her exact words. Happily ever after. What do you think of that?”
    Fargo had learned long ago that people were as stupid as they wanted to be and nothing anyone could say could change them. “It’s too bad you couldn’t find out who it was.”
    “I know. I know,” Susannah sadly agreed. “You can imagine my predicament. I was the only one who knew her secret. My husband went on with his daily routine, thinking everything was fine, and I didn’t dare confide in him. It would have destroyed him to think his pride and joy could stoop so low.”
    “And then she disappeared,” Fargo said.
    “Yes.” Susannah grimaced with inner hurt. “I thought it couldn’t