by Deirdre Dore
He froze, blinked, and then grinned, letting his eyes drift down her body. “Okay.”
“I don’t mean that.” Raquel shook her head, though his gaze had tightened muscles low in her body. “I meant what I said. I don’t want a relationship.” She turned toward the house, listening as he turned off the engine of his Jeep.
She walked to the door of her cottage, retrieving her key from a small pocket of her leather riding gear. She heard his footsteps behind her, and even as tired as she was, her body stirred in remembrance of touching him.
She’d grabbed him and kissed him in the rose garden of Tavey’s house. She’d sat on his lap and made out with him while his hands had gripped her ass, and later, she’d invited him back to her house. He’d carried her to her bed, and she had felt tiny in his arms.
She unlocked the door and stepped into a small entry hall. The living room was to the right, but she didn’t use it often. Same for the dining room to the left. Raquel continued past those rooms, past the kitchen, and down the hall to her bedroom.
There was a guest bedroom just before her bedroom. She opened the door and gestured him inside.
“It’s nice and dark. Sleep as long as you want, or there’s an alarm on the nightstand.”
“Really?” He sounded incredulous.
“Yeah.” Raquel smiled a little at his expression. “We need sleep.”
He scowled.
Raquel left him in the guest room and closed her bedroom door behind her. She tossed her helmet into the chair in the corner of her room and started pulling off her leather.
Brent knocked on the door.
“What?” Raquel found herself smiling a little.
“It’s just sex. I don’t even like you. I promise.”
“Go to sleep, Brent,” she called through the door.
Raquel heard him sigh and then his footsteps going back into the guest room. She changed into sleeping pants and a tank top and got ready for bed in the bathroom that adjoined her room. She heard the guest shower running on the other side of the wall.
Brent was built like a soccer player, with thick muscled thighs and a lean torso. He was tanned; wherever he’d been filming last had left him sun bronzed. She briefly imagined joining him, sliding her hand along his chest, losing herself in the wet and the heat and the touch of hard fingers.
Raquel closed her eyes for a second, remembering the details of him, but swayed on her feet she was so tired. She yawned.
Brent knocked again as she was about to get into bed. She sighed. He was wearing boxers and the T-shirt he’d had on earlier. His wet hair was mussed, and he hadn’t shaved, although there was a razor in the guest bathroom medicine cabinet.
“You found the toothbrush you used last time?”
“Yeah.” He nodded, looking at her. “I think you don’t want to sleep with me anymore because you like me too much and that freaks you out.”
Raquel managed a disinterested shrug. “Believe what you want.”
He bent down, lifting his hand to touch the side of her face.
Raquel knew she should pull away, but she was held, frozen, by the look in his dark brown eyes.
“I like you too much, too,” he told her gently, and then kissed her, sliding his firm lips over hers and taking her mouth. The taste of him was familiar, like toothpaste and Brent, and Raquel found herself lifting up on her toes for more. Just as she started to raise her arms to encircle his neck, he released her and stepped back.
He touched the tip of her nose. “I’ll see you in a few hours.”
Raquel nodded and shut the door again.
HER PHONE WOKE HER before her alarm. She sat up, confused, and picked it up to make it stop before she’d realized what she’d done. Blinking, bleary-eyed, she made out the number: Chris.
“Chris, are you okay?” Raquel looked at the clock on her nightstand. Nine a.m. She’d been asleep for only four hours.
“I’m fine,” Chris said hurriedly. “Ryan’s fine. Tavey and Tyler are fine.”
Raquel swung her legs off the bed. Something was wrong. She could hear it in Chris’s voice.
There was a sound from the other room; Brent was awake.
“So what is it?”
“I’m sorry, Quelly. They think they found Gloria Belle’s body. Ryan heard this morning.”
Raquel wanted to throw the phone at the wall. Damn it.
“Where?”
“Just east of Lake Altoona, in one of the creeks that run south. Cherokee sheriffs are already there.”
“Do Tyler and Tavey know?”
“Yeah. Ryan called Tavey. She’s calling Tyler.”
“You know the name of the officer in charge down there?”
“Yeah, Tyler works with her. It’s Shari Coopershawk. Tavey’s going to ask him to call her, see if she’ll let you on the scene.”
“You have her number?”
“No, but you can call Tyler for it.”
“Okay, thanks, Chris.”
Raquel walked over to the chair where she’d dropped her things the night before.
“I’m so sorry, sweetie. What do you need me to do?” Chris asked.
Raquel almost said Nothing, but then she thought about the house they’d been to last night. It was worth a shot, anyway. She picked up the jeans she’d been wearing yesterday and pulled the slip of paper Tristan had given her out of her back pocket.
“Do you have any access to real estate purchase records?”
“You mean something less public than property taxes? Yeah, don’t you have access?”
“I do. Ryan would as well. But I’m in a hurry.”
Chris didn’t always work within the framework of the law when she hunted for predators online. Occasionally she enlisted the help of some rather shady characters to help her hack into Undernet sites. Sometimes they helped her out with other hacks as well. Ever since she’d started dating Ryan, she’d cut back on the illegal activity, but Raquel knew she’d help this time.
“Sure, no problem.” She didn’t hesitate. That was Chris. Raquel read her the address.
“Cool. You want to tell me what I’m looking for?”
Raquel didn’t know. Shit. “A name? Anything weird? A cover-up. Something. Oh, and we should get the cops out there anonymously. I think it was being used as a distribution house, but also a holding area for kidnapped girls. Brent and I think the operation that was going on in eighty-six is still going on.”
“Why anonymously? Why not call it in?” Chris sounded pissed, which wasn’t unusual when it came to hearing about kidnapped children.
“Because Brent and I broke in and found a wig that I think is the one Gloria Belle was wearing when she was taken. We took it.”
There was a brief silence while Chris considered this, considered that Raquel usually followed rules to the letter. “Did you recognize a car or see anything else interesting?”
“No.” Raquel set the slip of paper on her dresser and dug through her drawers for a pair of clean jeans.
Brent knocked on her door and she opened it for him, holding the phone to her ear with her shoulder.
“Okay.” Chris sounded determined. “I’ll find out what I can. But, Quelly?”
“Yeah.” Raquel heard the hard edge in her own voice and knew what Chris was going to ask. Brent was looking at her with his eyebrows drawn together.
Get dressed, she mouthed to him. He nodded and disappeared back into the guest room.
“Are you okay?”
Raquel heard the question and felt like snapping, but she wasn’t going to snap at Chris, who didn’t deserve it. “Not really. I was going to ask Gloria Belle some questions. She knew Charlie. She knew what happened. Now we may never find out what happened to Summer.”
“We will.” Chris sounded really annoyed now. “I don’t know how, but w
e’ll find out. Jane knows more than she’s telling, I’m sure of it.”
“Yeah,” Raquel agreed. “But Jane doesn’t make any fucking sense. Have we heard anything about the ribbons we found? Has the DNA on the blood come back?”
“Ryan says it’ll be back in the next couple days. You don’t need to worry, Quelly, we’ll find her.”
“And stop the people who probably hurt her and all those other girls before they clear out of town? If they kidnapped and killed Gloria Belle, then they have something to hide and they’re covering their tracks. It’s that simple.”
“The police have questioned Jessop Chance. They don’t have any evidence that he was involved in anything in eighty-six, but Ryan is looking into his connections. We’ll find something.”
“Yeah,” Raquel agreed, though her gut told her otherwise. With Gloria Belle dead, they’d lost their best link to what had happened that night, to identifying who else had been involved. “Where are the Triplets? Have you seen them lately?”
“Yeah, they came to class yesterday.”
“Did they say anything weird?”
“Nothing weirder than usual. Why?”
“I just wondered. They warned you that someone was after you. They warned Tavey that people she loved were in danger. I thought maybe they’d known.”
“About Gloria Belle?”
“Yeah,” Raquel said simply. “I wouldn’t have spent all this time looking for her if I’d known she was dead. The dead don’t talk.”
Chris made a small noise of disagreement, almost a laugh but not quite. “Sometimes they do.”
11
WHEN GEORGE MILLS left the woods the previous evening, the sun was just going down, and there were fifteen voice mail messages on his phone, all from unknown numbers. Jessop.
George sighed and rubbed his sweaty head. He’d gone to check on their operation, on the girls they were keeping in a small cabin deep in the woods, and then he’d hiked several miles west toward the old Cherokee Paper Mill, close to where his half brother, Abraham; Tavey Collins; and the witches lived. There was no cell phone reception that deep in the woods.
The land was gnarled, valleys and ridges abounded, and when it rained, sometimes the ground gave way as the ceilings of limestone caves collapsed, opening underground worlds. He was looking for a place like that, a place where the earth had opened and fallen in on itself, but he’d been searching for years and hadn’t been able to find it.
Granted, he was no hiker. He should have lost weight, spending so much time searching through the forest, but he never had. He was glad about that, even made sure he ate enough so that he remained overweight, harmless, unthreatening. Being fat made him invisible, which is how George felt most comfortable. Not even those related to him recognized him as the scrawny bastard child of Abraham Jones’s mother. He’d been hidden, taken in by a cousin on the Haven side, because Abraham’s father was a violent man, but no one in the Haven family had really ever paid him any attention.
He hadn’t met his half brother, Abraham, whom he’d later served with in Vietnam, until he was nearly fourteen years old, sometime in the mid-1950s. He’d heard gunfire in the woods and he’d gone to take a look, figuring that it was probably hunters. He’d found an old man and two boys shooting at a huge oak tree in a clearing. A big hound dog paced behind them and would howl after every round of shots. They’d hung a rope from one of the limbs with a hook on the end and had taken turns shooting at various targets. The older boy was by far the better shot. George knew who he was; he’d heard stories about his half brother, Abraham.
George knew who the man and the other boy were as well. He could tell by their rich-looking clothes and the hound dog by their side—Mr. Collins and his son, Charlie. They lived on the other side of Abraham’s property, about two miles east on the hill. He hadn’t approached, and neither of the Collinses noticed him. Abraham had, though—he’d looked back at the tree line and seen George watching. It wasn’t but two days later that he’d found George in the woods and had taken him fishing. George had never understood why Abraham had done that. Had never asked.
It didn’t matter anymore, though. Abraham was dead, and George hadn’t seen him since the war, since the attack that had left Abraham unconscious and George wounded. Jessop had saved his life. Saved him and asked for one thing in return—that George not come back to the unit. He needed someone to handle some business for him back in the States, and he thought George was just about perfect for the job. So George had done as he’d asked. With Jessop’s help, he’d left the jungle with a shipment of heroin, and Jessop had told the authorities that he’d seen him killed in action. As someone who was considered MIA and then KIA, George had become, for all intents and purposes, a new person, KIA and anonymous, like he’d always been anyway. It had seemed like a good idea at the time, better than killing, better than watching everyone die all around him.
Still, he didn’t want to talk to Jessop now. He knew what the man wanted. Jessop wanted to know where his money was, what the hell had happened to his son all those years ago, and what role George had played in it. George also knew that Jessop was probably going to kill him when he got his answers. Or at least he would try. George didn’t intend to die. He was going to live forever, just like the girl in the woods. The girl who could be Summer.
When he reached his home, a sprawling cabinlike retreat built on the side of one of the hills east of the town of Fate, he was relieved to see that his nephew’s Jeep wasn’t in the driveway. He could call Jessop back without worrying that Brent or anyone else would overhear. George’s wife, Bea, had gone on a cruise with her sister—Brent’s mother—for the summer, and wouldn’t return until the fall.
He didn’t pull his Subaru into the garage; instead he left it parked on the drive, pulled the hose from the side of the house, and started spraying off the red mud that had collected on his tires and fenders. He focused on the task the same way he did everything, with careful—obsessive—attention to detail.
When he was finished with the car, he sprayed his boots and took them off, setting them next to the gate that opened to his backyard. Then he sprayed the driveway, rinsing the thick red mud down the sloped cement to the street. No one would notice the red-orange streaks left by the mud in the dark, but he didn’t like the idea of the mud being there at all. It was too red, too sticky, too much like dried blood.
He looked up at his home, at the large windows, the peaked eaves of the roof, and the tiered landscaping that he paid to have meticulously maintained. This was all his. Invisible George. Forgotten George. And he’d bought one of the most beautiful homes in Fate. He’d bought it after Robert Carlson had been sent to prison, right after everything had gone so badly in the woods, and had moved into it from Atlanta a few years later.
Buying Robert’s house had seemed appropriate to George. Robert had been stupid, scamming people about creating a golf course at the old paper mill, knowing that they were using it to meet and sometimes cook the meth, so George had turned him in to the Feds after the night Charlie died and everything had gone to hell. Robert had been a fool, and he’d gotten a fool’s punishment. Of course, Jessop had threatened Robert with death if he talked about what had happened in the woods and had backed that up with a couple of well-timed incidents in the prison. Jessop had made sure to tell George all about it, subtly hinting that George’s fate would be the same—if he suddenly decided to turn against Jessop and talk to the authorities.
Jessop didn’t seriously consider George a threat, though. No one did.
He didn’t return Jessop’s call until he’d cleaned up and changed and was sitting behind his desk in the study. It helped him feel official, sitting there, when he had to call the querulous man, who was only a decade older than George but seemed ancient.
“Where the hell have you been?” Jessop demanded.
George looked at his keyboard, noticing that there
were a couple of crumbs stuck between the keys.
“I went to check on the operation. I told you this morning.”
“The boys told me you didn’t show up till late afternoon and left in fifteen minutes.”
“You know I don’t like going there.”
It was true. George had never liked listening to the girls cry, had never liked the men who looked at him with hard, dismissive eyes. Jessop had looked at him like that from the beginning, since they first met in Vietnam. Even then it had been painfully obvious that George was nothing like Abraham, nothing like any of them, except that he had an uncanny knack for remaining invisible and keeping everything he did—including trafficking women, selling massive quantities of drugs, and laundering huge sums of money—for the most part hidden from the world.
“I don’t care what you like, George.”
George knew that very well.
“I thought you told me Belle said she hadn’t heard from Charlie.”
“She said she hadn’t.”
“You’re telling me she didn’t know he was dead and buried up on that hill?”
“She didn’t,” George said, answering the second part. Gloria Belle hadn’t known that Charlie had been buried in his own grave. She’d thought he was in an old caretaker’s house at the paper mill, where she and Mark and Jane had left him that night.
“What about Jane? I heard they’re questioning her.”
George hesitated. He hadn’t actually spoken to Jane, not since before her husband, Mark, had returned to Fate, but he’d figured out a way to do it. The psychiatric ward she was being held in was in Rome—no one knew him there.
“She’s in custody,” he told Jessop finally.
“I know that, dipshit. I want to know what she’s told them. I’ve already got plans to move that piece of the operation quietly out of that shit hole area, but I don’t want to call attention to anything, either.”
George mentally shrugged. “I can’t talk to her.” His left leg twitched. He needed to talk to her. Jane knew where the girl in the woods was hiding. She’d promised—before Mark returned—that this was the summer the girl would reappear.
