Authors: Bethany Campbell
Eden kicked the swing into action. “I’ll
never
be ready to go back.”
“It can’t be that bad,” he said.
“You’re not the one answering that phone. Or trying to watch a child all day. I don’t belong here. I belong in California.”
He gave an unsympathetic shrug. But to her surprise, he said, “I can help. Or try.”
Eden’s heart took a little lurch that was half wary, and, to her dismay, half excited. “You must have more important things to do.”
“I’d just be hunting,” he said. “I can arrange my time how I want.”
“Lucky you,” Eden said, pumping the swing so it would go faster. “Don’t you work?”
“My family’s got property. Since my father died, I manage it.”
“ ‘My family’s got property,’ ” she said, gently mocking him. “I like the sound of that. We were never able to say it. What property? Castles? Racehorses? Diamond mines?”
“Real estate,” he muttered. “That’s all. I manage my sisters’ shares, too. They like the income, but not the math involved.”
“Real estate’s a nice, genteel business,” she said. “So why’d you become a policeman—of all things?”
“Genteel’s the last thing I wanted,” he said. “I’ve got no talent for it.”
“But you quit the police?” she asked, arching her body to the swing’s motion. “And became genteel?”
“I quit,” he said, stepping behind her. “I didn’t become
genteel.” He caught the chains and brought her to a stop. His lean hands nearly touched hers. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s go back.”
Raylene had picked up her car at the Dallas airport and spent the night in a Holiday Inn on the outskirts of the city. It had taken another eight tablets of Xanax to get her to sleep. This morning she’d risen early and driven straight through to Sedonia.
By the time she pulled into the farmyard that afternoon, she was half-ill from nerves and exhaustion. She got out of the car feeling used up and old.
But then Drace appeared on the porch of the farmhouse. It was as if a young god had manifested himself, and her fatigue fell away as if by magic. He descended the stairs of the farmhouse to meet her, the late afternoon sunlight gleaming on his golden hair.
Drace came to her and looked deeply into her eyes and smiled down at her, and she smiled back, tremulous and happy. They had done it. Flight 217 was ashes.
Wordlessly, he embraced Raylene, holding her close for a long, intense moment. Tears of joy and weariness welled in her eyes, and she clung to him.
“Soldier,” Drace said against her hair, hugging her more tightly still. “My beautiful soldier girl.”
Raylene closed her eyes in pleased surrender, her heart beating fast. But slowly she realized that there was tension in Drace’s trim body, and that the arms that held her were rigid.
“Come to the creek,” Drace said in her ear. “We need to talk.”
He drew back but kept his arm around Raylene’s shoulders. Together they walked toward the field that
separated the farmyard from the creek. She was home again, she thought. Home at last.
Drace was a tall young man with sinuous, graceful movements. He wore his blond hair rather long and parted so that it fell forward in two waves that framed his brow. He was fair and blue-eyed and proud that he had one hundred percent Aryan blood.
His skin was flawless, and he much resembled Raylene, who was his cousin. She thought he had the most winning, most heart-stopping smile she had ever seen, a movie star’s smile.
Raylene was smaller and seemingly more delicate than he, but she was strong for her size, well muscled without being muscular. She could go on many maneuvers with the best of men, including Drace himself.
Drace ruffled her hair with affection, but he seemed distracted somehow, not altogether happy.
“How’s Yount?” Raylene asked, circling her arm around Drace’s waist. She had seen no sign of the others.
“Better. He’s healing.”
“Is Stanek back yet?”
Stanek had traveled separately to meet Raylene in Florida. It was he who had assembled the bomb. Such things were his specialty. Yount had originally been selected to place the bomb, but the day before, he had badly cut his foot with an ax. Drace was going to plant the bomb himself, but Raylene had insisted she could do it.
Now the two cousins walked in silence, Drace’s arm still draped around Raylene’s shoulders. She did not ask about Mimi, she did not like her. She hated it that Drace wanted other women, even that he wanted other followers, though he said such thoughts weren’t worthy of her.
She rubbed her cheek lightly against his bare, muscular
arm. “Where’s the next bomb?” she asked. “Have you decided?”
“Not yet,” Drace said, his expression remote. He raised his eyes to the sky, which was gilding with twilight. “Maybe New Orleans. Maybe not.”
“Who’ll take it this time? Yount? Me?”
Me
, she thought almost prayerfully.
Let it be me again
.
“Yount, if he’s well enough.”
Raylene’s heart sank, but she kept her face stoically blank. She said nothing.
At last they reached the creek’s high dirt bank. Drace dropped his arm from her shoulders, stooped, and picked up a handful of pebbles.
He stood watching the brown water swirl beneath him. He skipped a pebble along the water’s surface. Then he turned and gave Raylene a measuring look.
“Mimi’s gone,” he said in his quiet voice. “She took the kid and split.”
At first Raylene felt a surge of joy. But then the true import of what he said struck, and a shocked dread surged through her.
Mimi
, she thought, stunned—that trashy guttersnipe. The bitch was gone, run away? She could undo them all, utterly.
Oh, Raylene had despised it when Drace had brought Mimi and her brat among them—but what could
she
say? She had resented both intruders, Mimi and that strange child of hers, with her black eyes always watching, her ears with the big, ugly earrings always listening.
She stared at Drace, too stricken to speak.
Drace shook his head sadly, so that his golden hair stirred around his face. “When you left for Miami?”
“Yes?”
His gaze locked with hers. “That same night, Mimi took the kid and left. Just walked away in the middle of the night.”
Raylene’s knees felt weak, the trees around her seemed to turn gray and dance drunkenly, and she wondered if she was going to faint. “Walked away?” she repeated. “But how far could she get walking?”
“I had all the car keys locked up,” Drace said. “Of course.”
Raylene nodded numbly. Of course. Drace was the keeper of the keys and the weapons, this was a given. And Mimi had never been allowed access to any of the vehicles except the old Mercury. Even if she’d secretly had another key made for it, the Mercury’s gears were so faulty she could not count on it to get her far.
Yet it was fourteen miles to Sedonia, the only town of any size. She and her bastard brat might have caught a bus from there—but how could they have walked fourteen miles?
“She had help,” Drace said, his jaw hardening.
“Help?” Raylene’s voice rose. “Who in God’s name would help her?”
“I gave that some thought,” Drace said dryly. He let his fingers open slightly, let the pebbles sift through and fall.
“She’s got no friends here.” Raylene frowned, sincerely baffled. “She only knows us. She never went anywhere.”
Drace leaned toward her, tenderly clasped the back of her neck. “She took money. A couple hundred dollars or more. She paid somebody to help her. I know who.”
His breath was fragrant and she could feel it, warm, against her face. She looked into his beautiful eyes helplessly.
Drace seldom allowed Mimi to leave the farm; it was Stanek and Yount who usually went out. Mimi bitched and complained, but Drace let her go only a few places, none of them in town.
Sometimes, just to get her and Peyton out of the way, he would send them on minor errands. Mimi was allowed, for instance, to go to the NiteHawk Diner and convenience store to buy things like bread or milk or cheese.
“The diner,” Raylene said accusingly. “She picked up some trucker or something.”
Drace gave a silent laugh and shook his head. “I figured she must have contacted somebody last time she had the car. So I looked inside. I found a bag of spilled apples.”
“Apples?” Raylene repeated, uncomprehending.
“Rotting,” he said, his smile dying. “Stinking. Full of worms. And there was this with them.”
From the pocket of his jeans he drew a folded square of paper and handed it to Raylene. She unfolded it and saw it was a badly photostated copy of two recipes and a Bible verse. Beneath the verse was written, in a shaky scrawl, “From Your Freind Louise Brodnik.”
The page seemed familiar to Raylene, for she had seen others like it, in bags of raspberries and beans and tomatoes. She had a sudden mental image of the woman’s tacky little blue house, the signs in the yard for vegetables and baby-sitting.
“The Garden Lady?” she breathed.
Drace caressed her cheek with the back of his hand, then turned from her to stare out over the creek. “I looked up her number, phoned her. I called her. No answer. Finally, last night I drove over there. No lights on. No car in the garage. She was gone.”
Raylene was bewildered. “Then it wasn’t her?”
“I had this feeling,” Drace said almost dreamily. “So today I had Stanek keep an eye on her place. Drive past it once every hour or so. She got back this afternoon.”
Raylene’s heart pounded hard. She nodded, waiting for him to go on.
“So I called, told her I’m looking for them. That I have reason to believe she’d seen Mimi and the kid. I say ‘You better tell me, lady, because I’m that kid’s father, and I’m looking for her. I don’t want to bring the law up against you.’ ”
Raylene’s heart beat more wildly. The lie about the father was good, she told herself, very good.
“I scared her, I could tell,” Drace said with a soft laugh. “But she’s spunky. She said ‘Don’t ask me about her whereabouts. Ask her
people
.’ ”
“Her people?” Raylene said, bewildered. “What did she mean?”
“That’s what I said. ‘What do you mean, her people?’ She says ‘Her family. Her blood kin.’ And she hung up on me. Rude. Extremely rude.”
“Then she knows where they are,” Raylene said, awed by Drace’s powers of detection.
Drace turned to face her again. The fading sun made his face look golden. “We need to get to them. I want them. She’s burned us. And they know too much. Both of them.”
It was true, Raylene thought, her fear rising again. Mimi knew almost everything about the bombing, and the damned kid had always been underfoot, listening and watching like a dark and evil imp.
“But how do we find them?” she asked.
“I’m having Stanek keep watch on the old woman’s
place,” Drace said and stared up at the sky. It was slowly starting to darken.
“B-but,” Raylene stammered, “what’s this about Mimi’s ‘people’? About ‘blood kin’? She always said she had no family.”
Drace kissed her lightly on the lips. He smiled his beguiling smile. “We’ll have to have a talk with the Garden Lady about that,” he said. “Won’t we?”
Owen came into the office to hook up the recorder and caller ID, and Peyton followed him. She stood in the doorway of Jessie’s office, a truculent expression on her face. “Are you going home soon?” she asked Owen.
“Peyton!” Eden exclaimed. “That’s not polite. Say you’re sorry.”
Owen bent over Jessie’s desk, attaching his own caller identification device to her unplugged phone.
“You shouldn’t touch my granny’s phone,” Peyton said accusingly.
“I
want
him to do this,” Eden said, warning in her voice. “Now say you’re sorry. I mean it.”
“I’m sorry,” Peyton said with no sincerity whatever.
Eden put her hand on the child’s shoulder and drew her from the doorway and into the hall. “Go watch television. Draw pictures. Leave Mr. Charteris alone.”
Peyton shrugged and skipped off down the hall.
“Oh, God,” Eden said, raking her hand through her bangs.
“Forget it,” he said shortly. “You ever used a caller ID before?”
“Yes,” she said, “but will it do any good? A lot of Jessie’s calls are long distance. Most won’t register.”
He shook his head. “It’s a long shot. Anybody who
wants to block his name and number from showing can do it. But we cover as many bases as we can.”
He reached into the worn leather satchel he’d brought from his house and took out a sophisticated-looking black device with buttons and cords.
“This is a recorder,” he said. “It’ll tape all your calls, incoming, outgoing. You can get eight hours on a tape.” He took off the cord that attached the phone to the receiver and plugged in the one that fed into the recording machine.
Eden watched, feeling dubious. “It looks complicated.”
“It’s not. Once I set it up, it’s voice-activated. You don’t have to do anything but change the tape when the red light comes on. You take out the cassette, put another one in. It’s simple.”
“But is this legal?” she asked. “To tape someone without telling them?”
“It varies from state to state,” he said. “You can do it here.”
She was hesitant. “Some of the people who call say—well—pretty intimate things.”
“We’ll erase those. It’s only this ‘Constance’ we want.”
Eden shook her head uncertainly. “But even if she phones again, what good will it do to record her?”
He slipped in a cassette, punched a button, then straightened and met her eyes. “It’s surveillance. If she identifies herself, lets anything slip, we have a record.”
“And if she doesn’t identify herself? What then?”
“I want Jessie to hear her. To see if she thinks it could be Mimi.”
Eden wasn’t certain Jessie should be told of her suspicion, but she said nothing.
“And,” Owen said, “if she calls again, keep her talking as long as you can. Draw her out. Play her. You’re smart. You can do it.”
“Right,” she said sardonically. “Eden Storey, junior G-girl.”
“Are you ready for me to plug this phone back in?”
“Of course not.”
“Tough,” he said and plugged it in.