Crazy Mountain Kiss by Keith McCafferty

I felt guilty, but I wanted to know what she was thinking. There was an entry in it about how handsome he was and how he didn’t notice her. She wrote about how she wanted to twirl his hair in her fingers, how she’d . . . satisfy herself when she thought about him. I wasn’t shocked. I was her age once and dreamed about boys. But nothing in the diary gave the impression they had a physical relationship. It’s just within the past couple weeks I heard he mighthave been gay. If he was, maybe that would explain it. But I never voiced my disapproval of him, certainly not within my daughter’s hearing. I can’t begin to understand why she should feel the need to run away.”
    â€œDid you turn the diary over to Harold?”
    â€œNo, where I’d found it in her room, it wasn’t there. We looked hard for it. I think she took it with her, wherever she was going.”
    â€œEtta, I talked to Sheriff Ettinger on the phone before driving down here. She attended your daughter’s autopsy. There’s no easing into this. Cinderella was pregnant.”
    For a moment her face didn’t change. “Why,” she started to say. A slight tremor blurred her lower jaw. “Why wasn’t I told this?” Her eyes had a wave in their focus. “For God’s sake—”
    â€œI
am
telling you. Sheriff Ettinger didn’t call because she thought it would be better if someone told you in person.”
    A cloud had come over her face. When she spoke again, her voice had lost its frantic quality. It was if she was half talking to herself.
    â€œI never suspected.”
    Her eyes settled back on Stranahan. “I never suspected,” she said again.
    â€œThe medical examiner says five months. It could be why they ran away, that she’d found out. How would your husband”—Stranahan remembered he wasn’t to use the word—“how would Jasper Fey have reacted if he’d known?”
    â€œHe . . .” She bit her lower lip. “I don’t know really. I . . . I’m not sure how
I
would have reacted.” She blinked and looked far off, seeming to seek exactly the right words. “I would have been disappointed, but I would never disown her. I would have been there for her, for them as a couple if he stayed in the picture. Jasper, I would have said he’d kill the kid, but he seems to be trying to forget all about his stepdaughter. He did love her, though, he never had children with his first wife; you couldn’t have found a more doting father. Despite what I’ve said, we actually were a family once, before the accident changed things.”
    It was the fourth or fifth time she’d brought up the accident,speaking as if it was common knowledge. Stranahan, though, hadn’t known anything about it until a couple hours ago, when he used the computer in his art studio to scan websites, trying to get a feel for Huntington before making her acquaintance. He’d found a newspaper account in the
Bridger Mountain Star
. The accident had occurred a year ago March when Huntington was pulling a horse trailer, driving her daughter to compete in a rodeo in Sheridan, Wyoming, and had swerved to avoid hitting a deer. The truck had caromed off the road into a stack of culvert pipe, one of which slammed through the windshield and severed her right arm below the elbow. Though the pipe had an eighteen inch diameter, it had miraculously missed Cinderella, who was sitting in the passenger seat. The story was newsworthy not only because Etta had gained a measure of notoriety as the face of Chevy Absaroka, and it was a half-ton Absaroka that she’d crashed, but because less than twenty-four hours later she had ripped out her IV and walked out of the hospital to watch her daughter win the junior division in barrel racing. Fans had seen the blood seeping through the heavy sterile wraps on her arm, as well as the head