A Hopeless Sheriff (A Hope Walker Mystery Book 9) Read online

  A Hopeless Sheriff

  A Hope Walker Mystery Book 9

  Daniel Carson

  Contents

  Newsletter

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  A Note From Daniel Carson

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  Daniel Carson

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  Chapter 1

  My name is Hope Walker, and I live in the weird but beautiful mountain town of Hopeless, Idaho. My mom left when I was just a baby and I was raised by my granny, a woman so tough, she once won a local arm-wrestling contest against a biker gang leader named Shotgun Shane McGee, then left for the hospital so she could give birth to my mother. Asked by the doctor if she wanted an epidural for the pain, Granny told him that if “epidural” was a fancy word for Miller Lite, then hell yes.

  Granny may have been tough, but she could also love, and love me she did, fiercely, the very best she knew how. And when teenage me fell in love with a boy named Jimmy, I think Granny thought her work might be almost done. Jimmy and I would get married after high school, we would live outside of town in a cabin along the Moose River in my favorite spot in the world, and one day she’d be a great-grandmother. And maybe at some point, the indescribable pain of losing my mother would finally go away.

  But Jimmy and I never did get married.

  He died in an accident that changed our lives forever. I ran away from Hopeless and worked as an investigative reporter in Portland for a big-city newspaper over the next twelve years. I returned in the fall for my granny’s fake funeral and remained for good after that same big-city newspaper fired me. And since I’ve been back, I’ve been living in the apartment above my granny’s bar, reconnected with my best friend, Katie, and now own the local newspaper, the Hopeless News.

  I’ve also solved a bunch of local murders. And I met a guy. And yes, in case you were wondering, it’s complicated. Not the murders—the guy.

  I also received a strange note back at Christmas. A note from my mother. A note that led me one particular morning to an old brown barn twenty-five miles southwest of Hopeless to see if I could finally answer the question that in some way had haunted me my entire life.

  What happened to my mom?

  The barn itself was clad in western red cedar that had weathered to a pretty gray over the years. A beautifully restored 1950s Ford pickup was parked in the gravel lot out front. Above the large barn doors was a hand-carved wooden sign. Osterholm’s Fine Furniture. On the left side of the barn was a small storefront window and a single door. I walked over and peered into a small room like a foyer one might see at an automotive shop. There was precisely one chair. One counter. And one bell. Behind the counter hung pictures of various furniture pieces.

  I opened the door, stepped in, and immediately heard the whir of a saw. I slowly walked past the counter and looked through the open door to the barn beyond. There, no more than thirty feet away, stood a man carefully moving wood through a table saw. Noise-cancelling earmuffs wrapped around his head while safety goggles adorned his face. But there was no doubt about it, even from this distance—this was definitely the man on the company’s web page. This was the man I had come to see.

  I stepped through the opening and into the heart of the barn. Various tools, bundles of lumber, and furniture pieces dotted every square inch of the place. And in the middle of it, completely oblivious to the world and to the young woman who had just walked in, stood this man, this carpenter, alone with his tools. The man’s name was Ned Osterholm, and I was hoping he could help me unravel the mystery behind what had happened to my mother so many years before. Why had she left Hopeless? Why did she leave me behind? Where had she gone? What had she been doing for the last thirty years? And though I knew it was a long shot, I wondered if Ned might also be able to answer another question of mine. A question I’d been asking myself more frequently as of late.

  Who exactly was my father?

  His head snapped up at that moment, and the noise of the table saw changed as he killed the motor. He took his earmuffs off first, then his safety goggles. Behind his goggles, a set of eyeglasses was perched on his long, angular nose. His hair and beard were both salt and pepper, the sign of a man fully in the middle of his life. He was taller than I’d expected, maybe six foot two, and when he raised his hand over his head to wave at me, his arm seemed impossibly long.

  “Hello there,” he said as he made his way around his table saw, then weaved through two stacks of lumber until he was just a few feet away from me. He smiled an easy smile, and his dark brown eyes sparkled. “What can I do for you?”

  “I hope you don’t mind,” I said. “The door was open.”

  He made a “don’t worry about it” gesture with his hand. “That’s why the door is open. In the market for some custom furniture?”

  “I wish,” I said, looking at some of the almost-finished pieces that were lined up to my left along the wall. “These are gorgeous, and I’m guessing expensive.”

  He shot a glance at the furniture and then looked back at me with a mischievous grin. “Expensive? I suppose you’re right. Compared with what you can get down at Walmart or even at that Swedish place where they make you build the furniture yourself . . . compared with that, my furniture’s probably expensive. But I suppose the difference is this—in two or three years, that other furniture will be falling apart and well on its way to the landfill or playing a central role in the high school’s next Homecoming bonfire. But my furniture? In two hundred years, my furniture will still be used with love in someone’s home. And those people won’t call my pieces expensive.” He winked. “They’ll call them antiques.”

  “You’re a pretty good salesman.”

  “It’s easy to sell good products.”

  “One day, when I have a house and the money, I promise I will buy one of these beautiful future antiques.”

  He nodded. “I’ll hold you to that. So, if you didn’t come in here to buy furniture, how can I help you?”

  I hesitated, not knowing exactly how to proceed. The thing was, Granny had told me that Ned Osterholm was not my father. But Granny also didn’t know who my father really was. Which means, there was a chance she was wrong. On those occasions throughout my life when I had wondered about my dad, I obviously wondered what he looked like. I remember telling Katie one time when we were in middle school that if I ever ran into my dad, I would just know. I thought about that as I stood just a few feet from this man from my mother’s past. I wondered if this carpenter with the brown eyes and the easy grin
might be my dad. And, I decided, Granny was right after all. He was not.

  “It might help if I introduce myself,” I finally said. “My name is Hope.” I put out my hand, and he took it.

  “Ned Osterholm. But I suppose you already knew that.”

  “I did. Because my name isn’t just Hope. Ned, my name is Hope Walker.”

  It took two or three beats for the information to fully register. But when it did, Ned’s eyebrows lifted. His eyes grew big behind his glasses, and he put his hand to his chest.

  “Oh, my dear Lord,” he said in a whisper. Then he leaned forward. “Hope, is that really you?”

  “It is, Ned. It really is.”

  The same hand that was on his chest now moved to his mouth. Then suddenly and without any warning, Ned shot those impossibly long arms of his out, wrapped them around me, pulled me in for a hug, and softly cried.

  Ned sat on a stool beside one of his work benches, sipping a mug of coffee, staring at me with fascination. I sat on a stool on the other side, staring right back, wondering how I should approach this topic.

  I decided to be bold.

  “Ned, are you my father?”

  He continued to stare at me as if he didn’t even hear my question. Then he took a long sip of his coffee, shook his head, and looked at me with kindness. “No, Hope. I am not your father.”

  “But you were dating my mother . . .”

  “When she got pregnant with you, yes. That’s true.”

  “Then forgive me for being so personal, but how do you know you’re not my father?”

  He shrugged. “Simple. We never crossed that line.”

  “Never?”

  “Never.”

  I said nothing. Instead, I studied him, sized him up. Trying to see if he was lying.

  “Not that I didn’t want to. Your mother was a beautiful young woman, and I was crazy about her. That wasn’t the problem. The problem was your granny.”

  “Oh, no,” I said, suddenly smiling at the thought.

  He smiled back. “Oh, yes.”

  I leaned in. “What’d Granny do?”

  “She may or may not have pulled me aside one day and let me know in exquisite detail exactly what I could expect if I ever did cross that line with her daughter. I found her very convincing.”

  “She’s got a special gift for that kind of thing,” I said.

  Ned laughed. “I for one didn’t want to find out.”

  “So you never crossed that line . . . but clearly my mother did.”

  He gestured toward me. “Clearly.”

  “That couldn’t have felt good. How’d you take it?”

  “The news that my girlfriend was pregnant with somebody else’s child? I’m sure you can imagine.”

  “Yeah, that would be brutal. But Ned, I’m curious. Granny told me that you stuck around. That you were there for my mom throughout the pregnancy. Even offered her support after I was born.”

  “And you want to know how I could do such a thing if the child wasn’t mine?”

  “Let’s just say I don’t think I’d be so forgiving if I was in your situation.”

  “What can I say? I was in love. Or as much in love as a dumb nineteen-year-old kid who didn’t know any better could be. Was I mad? Crazy jealous? Heartbroken? Yes, yes, and hell, yes. But once I got over my own pride and ego, what was left was Rebecca, this girl I still loved. Except now she was in a tough spot. Ultimately, she didn’t need my judgment. She needed my support.”

  “Now I know for certain you’re not my father,” I said sarcastically.

  “And why’s that?”

  “Because you are a much better human being than I am. I don’t think most people would have done that, Ned. Certainly not most guys.”

  He smiled. “They would if they knew your mother. She was . . .” He stopped and looked up and away, as if accessing a memory from days gone by. A gentle smile spread across his face. “She was something else.”

  “I wouldn’t know,” I said.

  His smile faded. His eyes closed. And he nodded slowly. Painfully. When he opened them back up, he leaned forward. “I can’t imagine how hard that’s been on you, Hope.”

  “I had Granny. And Bess. They loved me. Gave me a good home. And the thing is, I never knew my mom. I have no memory of her. So it’s not like I really even miss her. I think . . . I think I miss the idea of her.”

  “I get that,” he said.

  “Ned, if you’re not my father, then who is?”

  He shrugged. “I honestly don’t know.”

  “That’s the same thing Granny said—that she didn’t know, and you didn’t know.”

  “And yet, here you are.”

  “Here I am.”

  “Because you think I do know.”

  “Ned, I’ve spent the last thirteen years of my life as an investigative reporter. A pretty good one, in fact. I’ve learned a lot about people in that time. They hide things for all sorts of reasons.”

  “I’m not hiding anything.”

  “And sometimes people don’t even know they’re hiding something.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Most people remember way more than they think they do about—well, almost everything. Our brains take in an extraordinary amount of data all the time. We’re not even aware of it. And because most of us don’t consciously organize that data into some kind of framework, we have a difficult time retrieving it when needed.”

  “I’m not sure I follow.”

  “Ned, you’re a nice man. I can tell that much. And you’re not lying to me. I can see that as well. You don’t know who my father is, but you do know something. Something about my mother and who she was and what was happening in her life. My job is to figure it out and try to make sense of it.”

  “And this would help you?”

  “Yes, Ned, it would.”

  “Then what would you like to know?”

  “I’ll take your word that you didn’t know who got my mother pregnant, but you’re human. You may not have known for sure, but I bet you had a guess.”

  “I had a couple of guesses.”

  “And?”

  “That didn’t make your mother very happy. She denied it was any of them. She became angry. Shut down.”

  “So, what’d you do?”

  “I kept asking her about it. She got angrier and angrier, and finally, I had to make a decision—either keep bringing it up and drive her away, or like I said earlier, offer her my friendship and support. So I dropped it.”

  “And you never brought it up again?”

  “Nope. Now, understand, once Rebecca became pregnant, it’s not like we dated anymore. I really was there as a friend. I was willing to do more. To be more. But she wasn’t, and I accepted that.”

  “And after all these years, what do you think about those guesses you had?”

  “I think Rebecca was telling the truth. That my guesses were wrong.”

  “And you never came up with any new theory?”

  “Honestly? No. One day, Rebecca was here. The next day, she was gone. At some point, Granny told me to stop coming around. That Rebecca probably wasn’t returning. That I needed to move on with my life. Eventually, that’s what I did.”

  “Then let’s focus on that part of this story. My mom leaving. Do you have any idea why she left?”

  “Specifically? No.”

  “Why’d you say ‘specifically’?”

  “Because I don’t know the actual reason why your mother left.”

  “But you know something?”

  “What I know . . . or what I knew . . . was your mother. And Hope, she was scared.”

  “Granny told me that as well.”

  He nodded. “At first, I thought it was about being pregnant. I mean, who wouldn’t be scared? But then you were born healthy, and I thought everything was fine. That the people in your mom’s life had proven they weren’t going to abandon her. But something wasn’t right with Rebecca. She was scared of something else.
” His eyes darkened. “Or maybe, someone else.”

  I could tell where he was going with this.

  “And you think this someone else—the man she was scared of—could have been my father?”

  “Yes, I do. Though I don’t know and could never prove it, I think she left not just to protect herself, but to protect you.”

  “Protect me?”

  Ned nodded, and I thought about it. The idea had never occurred to me. Not ever. I always thought my mother had abandoned me. Could Ned possibly be right? Was the real reason my mom left more complicated? Did she somehow do it for me? My mind was swirling with thoughts, but before I could ask Ned a follow-up question, my phone rang. It was Katie.

  “Hey, can I call you back?”

  “Sure, but holy crap, right?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I assumed you were already on the scene.”

  “I’m not even in Hopeless. Katie, what’s going on?”

  “I’m talking about the bank, Hope. The bank was just robbed.”

  Chapter 2

  A huge crowd was gathered on Main Street outside the Hopeless Bank and Trust by the time I arrived twenty minutes later. A police barricade had been set up in a semi-circle in front of the bank, and a young sheriff’s deputy was patrolling the scene. After Alex Kramer had been fired and Mayor Gemima Clark disingenuously offered the job to me, my enemy for life revealed her real choice for the job—Cameron Stangle, a veteran lawman from Bozeman, Montana. Gemima had been recruiting him for a couple of weeks. She gave Sheriff Stangle the larger budget Alex had been wanting, and the new sheriff’s first act was to hire a fresh-faced deputy to assist in policing Hopeless.