All Night Long

that.”
    “I’m afraid that I let them push a few of my buttons.”
    “I was glad to see you push right back. The truth is, a lot of folks around here have reason to be grateful to your dad. Isn’t that right, Tess?”
    “Absolutely right,” Tess agreed. “It’s amazing how short memories can be.”
    “There were plenty of times when Hugh Stenson handled things quietly so that someone didn’t go to jail or end up with a record or was just plain embarrassed to death,” Sandy added. “And he knew how to keep secrets, too.”
    Irene felt a rush of gratitude. “Thank you, Sandy.”
    “One of those secrets involved my mom and me. My step-dad, Rich Harrell, was mean, real mean. He’d get drunk and slap my mother around, and then he’d start in on me.”
    “I didn’t know that,” Irene said. She felt oddly shocked. How could she not have realized what was going on in that household? she wondered.
    ” ‘Course you didn’t,” Sandy said calmly. “I never said a word to anyone. Neither did Mom. She wanted to leave Harrell, but she was afraid he might kill her and me, too. Like I said, she never told a soul, but Chief Stenson somehow figured out what was happening. One day he came to our house and told Harrell to get into his car.
    They drove off and were gone for a long time. When they came back, I could tell that Harrell was really nervous. He packed a bag and left town that same day. We never saw him after that.”
    Tess frowned. “Abusive men don’t usually disappear so conveniently just because of a conversation with a cop.”

    “They do if they get real scared,” Sandy said. “A few years later we heard that Harrell had gotten drunk, smashed his car into a tree and died. We celebrated, Mom and me. That’s when she told me what happened the day Hugh Stenson took him away to have that private chat.”
    “What was that?” Irene asked.
    Sandy’s eyes gleamed with remembered satisfaction. “Don’t know how he did it, but the chief found out somehow that Harrell had once ripped off a really dangerous man down in San Diego, a guy who laundered money for South American drug lords. Harrell had faked his death after he took the man’s cash. Your dad warned Harrell that if he ever came back to Dunsley or if anything suspicious ever happened to me or my mom, he’d make sure the man in San Diego got word that the guy who stol ome of his money wasn’t really dead.”
    Irene shivered a little. “I never heard that story.”
    “Neither did I,” Tess said.
    Sandy looked at them knowingly. “Like I said, Hugh Stenson kept a lot of this town’s dirty little secrets. Took them to his grave.”

Ten
    Sam picked up the clicker and muted the annoying noise being made by the too-perky, too-perfect woman reading the evening news. He leaned back in the recliner and closed his eyes.
    The crushing guilt closed in on him. He wondered if he would just stop breathing altogether under the weight of it. Maybe that wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world.
    He had been doing okay in the past few years, he thought. It had taken a lot of work, but he’d finally been able to shove the guilt into a deep hole and cover it up. Sure he’d had some problems. He’d screwed up his marriage for one thing, but that didn’t exactly make him unique. A lot of people managed that trick.
    On the plus side, he thought he had become a fairly good cop, the kind of cop that Hugh Stenson would have approved of. He upheld the law here in Dunsley. He had never accepted a bribe, not that bribes were a big temptation in a town where incomes tended to range from modest to low. And he kept people’s secrets, just as Stenson had taught him.
    Lately he’d even been thinking of trying to resurrect something resembling a social life. Half a dozen times in the past month he’d almost picked up the phone and called her. But always he had hesitated. She wa good woman, a pretty woman, a compassionate woman. The problem was that she considered him a friend. He hadn’t been sure how she would react if he tried to turn their friendship into something else.
    He looked at the phone on the table beside the chair. One thing was certain, he sure as hell could not call her now. The return of Irene Stenson had changed everything.
    One look at those haunting eyes and al he guilt that he had buried so carefully had been exhumed from the grave.
    He knew that nothing he had accomplished as chief of police could compensate for what he had done