Читать книгу Secret of Deadman's Ravine - B.J. Daniels - Страница 8

Chapter Two

Sheriff Carter Jackson had a theory about bad luck. He’d decided that some men attracted it like stink on a dog. At least that had been the case with him.

His luck had gone straight south the day he found Deena Turner curled up and waiting for him in his bed. He’d been more than flattered. Hell, Deena had been the most popular girl in high school, sexy and beautiful, the girl every red-blooded male in Whitehorse, Montana, wanted to find waiting for him in his bed.

So Carter had done what any dumb nineteen-year-old would do. He’d thanked his lucky stars, never suspecting that the woman was about to take him to hell and back.

Finding Deena in his bed had only been the beginning of a string of mistakes over the next twelve years that culminated in Deena lying about being pregnant and the two of them running off and getting married.

It had been hard at first to admit he’d made a mistake marrying her. He’d seen marriage as forever and divorce as failure. So he’d hung in. Right up until he caught Deena in bed with his best friend.

That had been two years ago. Since then he’d gone through a long, drawn-out, painful divorce. Painful because he felt guilty that it hurt more losing his best friend than it did ending it for good with Deena.

But that was the problem. It hadn’t ended for good with Deena. Two weeks ago, she’d decided she wanted him back and that she would do anything to make that happen.

And she meant anything.

He pulled up in front of the house he and Deena had shared during their marriage. It was too early in the morning for this, but he just wanted to get it over with. Weighed down with dread, he climbed out of his patrol car, trying to remember a time when he’d looked forward to seeing Deena in the morning.

As he walked up the cracked sidewalk, he told himself this would be the last time. No matter what.

He grimaced at the thought, remembering how many times he’d left during their twelve years of marriage only to go back out of guilt or a sense of obligation. No wonder Deena just assumed he would always come back to her. He always had.

She opened the door to his knock almost as if she’d been expecting him. After what she’d left at his office for him, he didn’t doubt she was.

She was wearing one of his old T-shirts and, from what he could tell, little else. His once-favorite scent floated around her. Her blond hair was pulled up, loose tendrils framing her pretty face.

“Hello, Carter,” she said in that sultry voice, the one that had once been his undoing. “I had a feeling you’d be by this morning.” She shoved open the door a little wider and gave him “the look.” Boy, did he know that look.

Without a word, he reached into his pocket and took out the plain white envelope with her name and address neatly typed on it and handed it to her.

She took it, her smile slipping a little. “Something for me? You shouldn’t have.”

No, he thought, you shouldn’t have. All the surprise visits at work and at his house, the presents, the constant phone calls, the urgent messages. The more he’d tried to get her to stop, the worse she had become.

He waited as she opened the envelope, resting his hand on the butt of the weapon at his hip.

Her eyes widened as she took out the legal form and read enough that, when she spoke, her sultry voice was long gone. “What the hell is this?”

“It’s a restraining order. From this time forward you are not to contact me, send me any more letters or packages or come within one-hundred-and-fifty feet of me.”

She narrowed her eyes at him. “We live in Whitehorse, Montana, you dumb bastard. The whole town is only a hundred and fifty feet long.”

“If you break the restraining order you will be arrested,” he said, hating that it had come to this.

He tipped his hat and turned his back to her as he headed for his vehicle, hoping she didn’t have a gun, because he was pretty sure she’d have no compunction about shooting him in the back.

“You just made the biggest mistake of your life, Carter Jackson!” she yelled after him. “You’re going to regret this as long as you live, you smug son of a bitch. If you think you can just walk away from me—”

The slamming of his patrol-car door thankfully cut off the rest of her words. This was not the morning to tempt him into arresting her for threatening an officer of the law.

It had taken him years, but he finally understood Deena. She only wanted what she couldn’t have. His allure was that he hadn’t been available. Just before he found her in his bed, he’d begun dating a neighboring ranch girl he’d known all his life, a girl he was getting serious with.

And that, he knew now, was why Deena had thrown herself at him. Deena had always been jealous of Eve Bailey and became worse after he and Deena married. Even the mention of Eve’s name would set Deena off. He’d never understood her jealousy, especially since Eve had left the area right after high school and hadn’t come back.

Until two weeks ago. Just about the time Deena decided she was going to get him back, come hell or high water.

As Carter drove away, he didn’t look in his ex’s direction, although out of the corner of his eye he saw that she’d come down the sidewalk in her bare feet and was now waving the restraining order and yelling obscenities at him.

“Good-bye, Deena,” he said, hoping his luck was about to change. Maybe she would meet an unavailable long-haul trucker who’d take her far, far away.

As he drove back toward his office in the large three-story brick county courthouse, his radio squawked.

“Lila Bailey just called,” the dispatcher told him. “She’s worried about her daughter. Says they had a big storm down that way last night. Her daughter apparently went for a horseback ride yesterday evening and didn’t return home last night.”

“Which daughter?” Carter asked, his heart kicking up a beat.

“Eve Bailey.”

The way his luck was going, of course it would be Eve. He’d grown up around the Bailey girls. Eve was hands-down the most headstrong of the three. And that was saying a lot. But she was also the most capable. She knew that country south of town. If anyone could survive a night out there, even in a bad storm, it was Eve.

“Lila said one of Eve’s sisters saw her ride out yesterday evening toward the Breaks. Eve is staying in her grandmother’s old house down the road from her folks’ place so no one knew she hadn’t returned until her horse came back this morning without her.”

Carter rubbed the back of his neck. There was nothing south of the Bailey ranch but miles and miles of Missouri Breaks badlands. Searching for Eve would be like looking for a needle in a haystack. “Tell Lila I’m on my way.”

IT WAS A SLOW NEWS DAY at the Milk River Examiner office. Glen Whitaker had come in early to work on a feature story he was writing about the couple who’d just bought the hardware store. This was news, since the population of the county had been dropping steadily for years now. While parts of Montana were growing like crazy, the towns along the Hi-Line were losing residents to more prosperous places.

Glen ran a hand over his buzz-cut blond hair and glanced out his office window past the park to the railroad tracks. A coal train was rumbling past. His phone rang. He let it ring a couple more times as he waited for the train to pass and the noise level to drop. “Hello.”

“One of the Bailey girls is missing.”

Glen groaned to himself as he recognized the voice of the worst gossip in the county. From the moment he took the job as reporter at the Milk River Examiner, Arlene Evans had been feeding him information as if she was Deep Throat.

“Missing?” Most of Arlene’s “leads” turned out to either be erroneous or the type of news he wasn’t allowed to print. He’d ended up at Whitehorse after working for several larger papers where he’d made the mistake of printing things he shouldn’t have.

He didn’t want to lose his job over some small-town gossip. But then again, he had printer’s ink in his veins. Working for a weekly newspaper, all he wrote about were church socials and town-council meetings.

Glen Whitaker was ready for a good story. “Which Bailey girl?”

“Eve Bailey. I just talked to Lila, her mother, and she said Eve rode out yesterday afternoon,” Arlene said with her usual relish. “Her horse came back this morning without her.”

Like the Baileys, Arlene lived south of Whitehorse.

The first settlement of Whitehorse had been nearer the Missouri River. But when the railroad came through, the town migrated five miles north, taking the name with it.

The original settlement of Whitehorse was now little more than a ghost town except for a handful of ranches and a few of the original remaining buildings. It was locally referred to as Old Town.

The people who lived there were a close-knit bunch to the point of being clannish. They did for their own, seldom needing any help and definitely not interested in any publicity when something bad happened.

But this could turn out to be just the story Glen had been waiting for—if Eve Bailey didn’t turn up alive and well.

Glen already had a headline in mind: Whitehorse Woman Lost In The Breaks, No Body Found.

“Her horse came back without her, so she’s stranded out there?”

Arlene clucked her tongue, her voice dropping conspiratorially. “Little chance of surviving that storm on foot. No shelter out there. And it got really cold last night.”

Whitehorse Woman’s Body Found Frozen.

Unfortunately, it was June and while it could snow in the Breaks any month of the year, the chances were good she hadn’t frozen to death. But hypothermia was a real possibility.

The problem was Glen knew about the Bailey girls, as they were called, although they were now young women. Attractive, but headstrong and capable. With his luck, Eve Bailey would survive. No heartrending story here.

He could picture Eve Bailey, so different from her sisters, who were blond with blue eyes. Eve had long dark hair and the blackest eyes he’d ever seen. But then he’d always been attracted to brunettes rather than blondes.

“Everyone is meeting over at the community center,” Arlene was saying in her excited high voice. “The women are putting together a potluck for the search party. It’s sewing day. We have to finish a quilt for Maddie Cavanaugh’s engagement to my son. With Pearl in the hospital with pneumonia we’re behind on the quilting. You know quilts are a tradition down here.”

He groaned inwardly. “I know.” Arlene had tried to get him to do a story on the Whitehorse Sewing Circle ever since he’d taken the reporter job. The group of women met most mornings at the community center and had for years. He suspected it was where Arlene picked up most of her gossip.

“I have to go. My pies are ready to come out of the oven,” Arlene said.

“Are you making one of your coconut-custard pies?” Glen asked hopefully. Arlene had taken a blue ribbon last year at the Phillips County Fair with her coconut-custard pie—and he’d been one of the judges.

“I always make the coconut-custard when there’s trouble,” Arlene said. “This could be your biggest story of the year.”

Arlene was forever hoping to be the source of his biggest story of the year. “My daughter Violet is helping me,” she said, shifting gears. “Did I tell you she’s quite the cook?”

Along with dispensing gossip, quilting and pie baking, Arlene Evans also worked at matchmaking, although she’d had little luck getting her thirty-something daughter, Violet, married off. From what Glen had heard Arlene had been trying to marry off Violet since she was a teenager.

The older Violet got, the more desperate Arlene had become. She considered it a flaw in her if her daughter was husbandless.

“Save me a piece of pie,” he said as he grabbed his camera and notebook, figuring it would probably be a waste of gas, time and energy. He was sure that by the time he reached Whitehorse, Eve Bailey would have been found and there would be nothing more than a brief story about her harrowing night out in the storm.

For a piece of Arlene’s coconut-custard pie he could even feign interest in her daughter.

BY THE TIME Sheriff Carter Jackson picked up his roping horse and trailer from his brother’s place and reached the Old Town Whitehorse Community Center, there were a dozen pickups and horse trailers parked in front.

He pulled into the lot, noticing that all of the trucks and horse trailers were covered in the gray gumbo mud that made unpaved roads in this part of the state impassable after a rainstorm.

Fortunately, the sun had come out this morning and had dried at least the top layer of soil because it appeared everyone had made it.

He’d always been proud that he was from Old Town and was sorry his family was no longer part of this isolated community. No matter how they were getting along at the time, the residents pulled together when there was trouble like a large extended family.

As he pushed open the door of the community center, he spotted Titus Cavanaugh at the center of a group of men. Titus had a topographical map stretched out on one of the women’s sewing tables and was going over it with the other male residents.

“Here’s the sheriff now,” resident Errol Wilson announced as Carter walked toward them.

“We’re putting together a search party,” said the elderly Cavanaugh, who was unmistakably in charge. If Old Town had been an incorporated town, Titus would have been mayor. He led the church services at the community center every Sunday, organized the Fourth of July picnic and somehow managed to be the most liked and respected man in the county, hell, most of the state.

His was one of the first families in the area. His grandmother had started the Whitehorse Sewing Circle and never missed a day until her death. Titus’s wife Pearl was just as dedicated to the group, although Carter didn’t see her. He’d heard Pearl was in the hospital with pneumonia. She’d always made sure that every newborn got a quilt, as well as every newlywed. It had been an Old Town tradition for as long as anyone could remember.

“Give me a minute,” Carter said to Titus. “I’d like to talk to Eve’s family before we head out.”

He gathered the Bailey women in a small room at the back of the community center and closed the door. Lila Bailey was a tall, stern-looking woman with long gray-blond hair she kept in a knot at the nape of her neck. At one time, she’d been beautiful. There was still a ghost of that beauty in her face.

With her were her daughters, McKenna and Faith, both home from college. Chester Bailey, Lila’s husband, was living in Whitehorse, working for the Dehy in Saco. Apparently, he hadn’t arrived yet.

“Any idea where Eve was headed?” Carter asked. The women looked to McKenna, the second oldest Bailey sister.

“I was just coming home when I saw her ride out late yesterday afternoon,” McKenna said, and glanced toward her mother.

Carter couldn’t miss the look that passed between the two women. “Was that unusual for her? To take a horseback ride late in the afternoon with a storm coming in?”

“Eve is a strong-minded woman,” Lila said. “More than capable of taking care of herself. Usually.” The last word was said quietly as Lila looked to the floor.

“Where does she generally ride?” he asked the sisters.

Both shrugged. “Depending what kind of mood she’s in, she rides toward the Breaks,” McKenna said.

“What kind of mood was she in yesterday afternoon?” Carter asked, watching Lila’s face.

Faith made a derisive sound. “Eve’s often in a lousy mood.” Lila shot her a warning look. “Well, it’s true.”

Faith and McKenna were in their early twenties. Eve was the oldest at thirty-two.

Lila apparently hadn’t expected to have any more children after Eve. Both McKenna and Faith had been surprises—at least according to Old Whitehorse gossip. The local scuttlebutt was that Lila’s husband, Chester, had been heartbroken they’d never had a son and their marriage strained to the point of breaking.

But Chester had only recently moved out of the house, taking a job in Saco. While as far as Carter knew the couple was still married, word was that Chester hardly ever came home. His daughters visited him up in Whitehorse.

One of the joys of small-town living: everyone knew everyone else’s business, Carter thought.

“You should tell him,” McKenna said to her mother in a hushed whisper.

The look Lila gave her daughter could have cut glass. “He’s not interested in family matters, McKenna.”

“On the contrary, I’m interested in Eve’s state of mind when she took off yesterday,” Carter said, looking from McKenna to her mother.

“It was nothing,” Lila said. “Just a disagreement. Why are we standing around talking? Eve could be injured. You should be out looking for her.” She shot Carter a look that said she wasn’t saying anything more about her disagreement with her oldest daughter. “Now if you’ll excuse me I have to see to the potluck. Everything needs to be ready for when the men return with my daughter.”

She left the room, Faith looking after her, plainly curious about what was going on between her mother and sister.

“If you wouldn’t mind,” Carter said. “I’d like a word with McKenna alone.”

Faith shrugged and left, but with obvious reluctance. When the door closed behind her, Carter asked McKenna, “Why don’t you tell me about the disagreement your mother and sister had yesterday and let me decide if it’s relevant.”

“You mean what they were arguing about? I don’t know. I heard them yelling at each other when I came home. Eve stormed out to the barn, riding off a few minutes later. When I asked Mother what was going on, she said it was just Eve being dramatic.”

He’d seen Eve angry on more than one occasion, but he’d never thought of her as the dramatic type. Deena on the other hand… “The last time you saw your sister, how was she dressed?”

McKenna shrugged. “Jeans, boots, a T-shirt. I don’t think she took a jacket. It was pretty hot when she left.”

“What color T-shirt?” he asked, attempting to keep his growing concern from his voice. Eve hadn’t been dressed for a night out in the weather—especially last night with that storm that had blown through. For some reason, she’d taken off upset, without even a jacket, and that alone he knew could have cost her her life.

“Light blue T-shirt,” McKenna said, sounding close to tears as if realizing that her sister might be in serious trouble.

“Don’t worry, we’ll find her,” Carter said, shocked to think that after all these years he would be seeing Eve Bailey again. He just hoped to hell he’d find her alive. But as he joined the search party, he feared they were now looking for a body.