The Sheriff Of Heartbreak County. Kathleen Creighton
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of Andrews & Klein on Second Street, half a block off Main and just a block down from the courthouse, it was a handy place for any of the downtown crowd with interesting plans for the weekend to drop in on their lunch hour for a wash and set. Its new proprietor, Mary Owen, generally stayed late on Fridays to accommodate the high-school girls gussying up for date night. And, of course, Miss Ada Major, the clerk of the court, who’d had a standing five o’clock Friday-evening appointment for a wash and set since roughly the Reagan administration.
Honoring Miss Ada’s Friday five o’clock was, in fact, one of the conditions Queenie Schultz, the shop’s former owner, had made Mary agree to when she’d sold the business to her six months ago—that, and a promise to do up Miss Ada’s hair real nice for her funeral, in the event the lady ever did decide to depart this mortal coil. To be truthful, that second condition had made Mary shudder a bit, and of course Queenie, being down in Phoenix, Arizona, enjoying the heat and sunshine, probably wasn’t ever going to know whether Mary actually stuck to that part of the bargain or not. But it wasn’t Mary’s nature to break a promise, and besides, at the rate Miss Ada was going, it didn’t look like the issue was going to come up any time soon.
If there was anything Mary Owen had learned in her thirty-seven years it was that life was full of surprises, so there wasn’t much point in looking too far ahead or worrying about things that hadn’t happened yet. She knew from hard experience how things could change in the blink of an eye.
“How are you doing today, Miss Ada?” Mary asked as she settled the tall, dignified lady into the chair and gently snapped a drape around her sinewy neck.
“Why, just fine, dear, thank you for asking.” The circles of rose-pink blush on Miss Ada’s cheeks crinkled with her smile. Keen hazel eyes highlighted in tissue-papery cobalt blue met Mary’s in the mirror—then went wide with horrified sympathy. “Well, my goodness me, what on earth did you do, hon?”
Mary’s teeth scraped over the tender bulge on her lower lip—a reflex she couldn’t help—but her voice was smooth as she replied, “Oh, it’s nothing, just me being stupid and clumsy. I forgot to leave the porch light on last night, and I tripped going up the front steps in the dark. Are we doing color today, Miss Ada?”
Miss Ada interrupted her little gasps and cries of commiseration and glanced at her own reflection in the mirror just long enough to murmur, “No, no, dear, I think another week, don’t you?” Her gaze flew upward past her determinedly auburn curls to home in once more on the vivid marks on Mary’s face. “Did you put some ice on those bruises? And I know you don’t wear makeup, but you know, a little dab of pancake and some face powder would do wonders.”
“Oh, like I said, it’s nothing, really,” Mary said cheerfully as she tilted the chair back and settled Miss Ada’s neck on the lip of the wash basin. “Just a little embarrassing. So…have you been having a good week? Anything exciting going on over at the courthouse?”
Keeping her blue lids firmly closed, Miss Ada gave a hoot of laughter. “Oh, well, today there’s nobody talking about anything but what happened to Clifford Holbrook’s boy. You heard about that, I suppose?” She sighed heavily, then went on without waiting for Mary’s answer, her forehead wrinkling in distress. “It is a shame—a terrible thing. My heart just goes out to Clifford. He always was a good boy—I was tempted to vote for him in the last election, even if he is a Republican—but that son of his—that Jason…it’s hard to know, isn’t it, how a child from such a nice family can turn out so wrong?”
“Yes, ma’am.” Mary murmured the all-purpose response she’d learned in a former life from a dear Southern friend, warming her fingers in the stream of water and ignoring the deeper chill inside her. “How’s that, Miss Ada? Is that gonna be too hot?”
“No, no, dear, it’s fine. Well, I suppose Clifford did the best he could, with his wife being in such delicate health most of the time. But that boy always was a bully.” She sniffed, then added, “Still and all, nobody deserves to die like that. Shot dead right in his own driveway. Makes you wonder if any of us is safe anywhere nowadays.” She gave a genteel shudder.
“Yes, ma’am.” Mary watched her fingers massage moisturizing shampoo over Miss Ada’s scalp.
“A good thing we’ve got a decent sheriff in this county,” Miss Ada said with a sniff, her festively painted features settling into stern and uncompromising lines. “Roan Harley—now there’s a fine young man. A real fine man.” She opened her eyes and aimed them upward. “Have you met our sheriff yet, Mary?”
“No, ma’am, I don’t believe I have—except to see him driving by, maybe.” She wrapped a towel loosely around the old lady’s head and raised the chair to its upright position.
Miss Ada pulled one knotted, blue-veined hand from under the drape to touch away a drop of water that had taken the liberty of trickling down her forehead, then gave one of her little hoots of laughter as she met Mary’s eyes in the mirror. “Well, I suppose that is a good thing, isn’t it? Not that I expect you’d have any reason to fear the law.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Mary agreed as she began to divide Miss Ada’s sparse wet hair into quadrants, twisting each segment loosely and securing it with a clip.
Miss Ada’s face seemed to droop with sadness as her eyes shifted focus to something only she could see, and she spoke more to herself than to Mary. “Oh my, that poor man has had more than his share of trials and tragedies to bear, yes he has….”
“Ma’am?” Mary said politely, only half listening, her mind already numbing with the tedium of winding thin strands of Miss Ada’s hair onto the old-fashioned rollers she favored.
The old lady’s eyes snapped back to Mary’s, light kindling in them now as she prepared to enjoy the kind of harmless gossip people are wont to indulge in with their hairdressers. “The boy didn’t exactly have a happy beginning, you know. No, he didn’t. His mother—Susan Roth, her name was, a perfectly lovely girl—never married, and to be unwed and pregnant in a small Western town…well. You can imagine. You had to admire her, though, she held her head up. Never let her son feel ashamed, either. She worked hard to support herself and the boy—I have an idea the father, whoever he was, might’ve helped out some—and she managed to put money away for Roan’s college. He applied for scholarships and won several—he was a very bright young man. He was going to become a lawyer—that was his mother’s fondest wish. But then she got sick and died suddenly.”
Normally it was Mary’s habit to let this sort of gossip flow in one ear and out the other, but for some reason she was finding this particular story hard to ignore. She made murmurs of sympathy, and Miss Ada sighed.
“Yes…it was sad. Roan came home to bury his mother and never did go back to the university. Instead, he stayed on, married his childhood sweetheart, enrolled in the state law-enforcement academy—I believe he’d had a minor in criminology, or forensics, or some such thing, in college. Anyway, he became a deputy, and when Jim Stottlemyer retired, ran for sheriff and got himself elected first try. Youngest sheriff in the history of the county, and I must say, it was the legal profession’s loss and Hart County’s gain. Roan’s been a fine sheriff.” She paused for another sigh. “It should have been one of those and-they-lived-happily-ever-after stories, but it wasn’t. No, indeed. Roan Harley’s troubles were just beginning.”
“Really? What happened?” Mary turned the chair in order to reach the other side of Miss Ada’s head, and Miss Ada’s eyes met hers directly instead of in the mirror. Mary was startled to see a sheen in them that could only be tears.
“I’m sorry, dear,” the elderly clerk of court said with a halfhearted smile. “Oh my. It’s been four years, but it’s still hard to talk about it. Seems like it happened just yesterday, yes it does. It was such a terrible tragedy, the kind of thing a small community like this never does get over.” She paused, lifted a hand and absently patted the neat row of curlers that marched down one side of her head.
“Well, now…I told you Roan married his childhood sweetheart. Erin Stuart—she’d been