The Reckoning

by Jana DeLeon

  “I know,” Holt said, and smiled.

  “Oh.” She blushed. “That advice must sound stupid to someone who’s been at war. I’m sure you’re well versed on all the medical risks associated with a bullet wound.”

  “It’s good advice.” He stepped closer to her, knowing what he was about to do was a really bad idea, but unable to come up with one good reason not to.

  He pulled her close to him in one sudden motion that made her gasp. Before he could change his mind, he lowered his lips to hers.

  Her lips were soft, as he’d remembered, but her body was different, better. The curves that pressed against him screamed woman instead of girl, and his body responded in kind. It was as if ten years had melted away and they were again teenagers who’d skipped class to spend time alone at the cabin.

  Immediately she pushed back and stared at him, her eyes wide. “I think I’ll wait in the truck,” she said as she whirled around and fled the bathroom.

  “It’s not safe out there,” he said, following her into the living area.

  “It’s safer than being in here.” She slipped out the front door and back into the raging storm.

  * * *

  ALEX SLAMMED THE TRUCK DOOR and crossed her arms, shivering. Stupid, she chided herself as she stared into the downpour. You’re running like a teenager.

  But she couldn’t shake the unnerved feeling she had from the kiss. Her skin was still on fire everywhere Holt’s body had made contact with hers. Her pulse raced and she felt as if it would leap from her chest. If asked, she’d swear she’d been less stressed when someone was shooting at her.

  Minutes later Holt slid into the truck, fully dressed and wearing a rain slicker. He handed Alex a blanket and started the truck without even a glance in her direction. Alex cast a sideways look at him, trying to gauge his mood. The anger she expected to see wasn’t there. Instead, he looked pensive and worried.

  She sighed, annoyed with herself.

  Her niece was missing and Holt had been shot, but here she was, worrying that he was busy dwelling on her rejection of him. What an ego she’d developed as an adult.

  Holt made the short drive in complete silence, and Alex wasn’t sure whether to be disappointed or relieved that he wasn’t going to talk about the obvious issues that still lingered between them. She finally settled on relieved, already having entirely too much to process for the day.

  He pulled up to the curb of Sarah’s house and walked around to open her door.

  “I’ll look into some things in the morning,” he said. “Make sure the house is locked up tight.”

  She nodded and hurried up the walk to the house, afraid to say a word lest things she didn’t want to address came falling out. She slipped inside the house, locked the door and drew the dead bolt. Lifting a slat of the miniblinds, she peered out the front window into the storm and watched as the taillights of Holt’s truck faded into the distance.

  She, of all people, had the skill set to handle conflict. From now on she’d concentrate only on finding Erika. When she was safely back in New Orleans, she’d have plenty of time to address her apparently unresolved feelings for Holt Chamberlain.

  * * *

  ALEX WALKED OUT OF Sarah’s guest bathroom, still toasty from the steaming hot shower she’d taken. Sarah was perched on the edge of the bed, anxiously awaiting a recount of the day’s events, and she jumped up when Alex exited the bathroom.

  “I made gumbo,” Sarah said. “Too nervous to rest, I guess, and it’s a good thing, since you showed up looking like a drowned rat. Are you okay? Do you need warmer clothes?”

  Alex placed one hand on Sarah’s arm. “I’m fine. Take a deep breath. We’re going to go downstairs and fix two bowls of your fabulous gumbo, and I’m going to tell you everything.”

  Sarah blew out a breath. “I know you are. I’m sorry, Alex. I’m just so jumpy.”

  Alex gave her cousin a hug. “I know, honey. You have every right to be, but we’re going to fix this. We’re going to find Erika.”

  Sarah gave her a small smile and nodded. “I trust you. You know I trust you. All our lives, you’ve always been the one to fix things. It’s just that this is so much bigger than anything else.”

  Alex placed one arm around her cousin’s shoulders and pulled her out of the room and into the kitchen. “So we’ll work harder.”

  They fixed bowls of gumbo and sat at the small table in the breakfast nook. Alex recounted to Sarah how they found the dock and then the cabin. She described what they’d found in the cabin, leaving no detail out of her story. The truth was scary, but Sarah deserved to know everything.

  “As we were leaving,” Alex said, “a jar on one of the shelves over the door fell right in front of us.”

  Sarah’s eyes widened. “How?”

  “I don’t know and don’t even want to guess.” Alex took a deep breath. “There was a pink barrette inside the jar. Just like the ones Erika was wearing.”

  Sarah sucked in a breath. “Oh, my God. My poor baby. She’s there with that witch woman. I knew it. I told you there was no other explanation.”

  “It looks suspicious,” Alex said, trying to keep her cousin from getting worked up to the point of uselessness. “We followed a trail away from the cabin until the storm hit, and then we had to turn back. I’m sorry, but the barrette is all we found.”

  Sarah stared down into her gumbo for a couple of seconds, then frowned. “That’s it? Then why did Holt bring you home in his truck? Why didn’t you return to the dock and get your car?”

  “Holt docked at his cabin to get us out of the storm. We were too deep in the swamp to beat it.”

  Sarah narrowed her eyes at Alex. “You’re not telling me something. I know you. You’re not lying, but you’re leaving something out.”

  Alex sighed. “Someone shot at us as we were leaving the bank of the island. One of the bullets grazed Holt’s arm, but he’s fine.”

  Sarah jumped up from the table, her eyes wide with fear. “Someone tried to kill you? You walked in my house, took a shower and sat here eating gumbo knowing that someone tried to kill you just hours before? Are you sure I’m the one with mental problems?”

  “What do you want me to tell you—that I’m moving through a logical, rational routine hoping to make sense of it all? Hoping that it will prevent me from breaking down at a time when you need me to be a rock?”

  Sarah slid back into her chair and Alex reached across the table to cover her cousin’s hand with her own.

  “I’m scared, Sarah. Really scared. When we were trying to get away, I didn’t have much time to think about it, but afterward…well, let’s just say I’m not the rock you think I am.”

  Alex’s mind flashed back to Holt’s cabin. His hard, muscular body pressed against her. The touch of his lips on hers. The heat between them that wasn’t coming just from their contact.

  A killer and Holt Chamberlain.

  She wasn’t sure which scared her more.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Holt stepped into the sheriff’s office the next morning, still cursing himself for the day before. The whole thing had been one giant mistake, beginning with going to that island and ending with kissing Alex. But if he was going to be honest with himself, he’d do it all over again if he had to. Finding Erika was a priority. Kissing Alex wasn’t nearly as important as finding a missing child, but the urgency he’d felt when he kissed her in the cabin the day before had been no less than that he’d felt when fleeing the shooter.

  Which was rather appropriate when he considered that loving Alex was just as deadly as being shot. He hadn’t even been in her company for a full day, and he’d already made a move on her. Ten years in the desert and it had all been a waste of time.

  Since he was early, he started a pot of coffee and headed to his office. He nee
ded to do some research on the island. With any luck, he’d be able to find out more about the old woman who lived there. Even if she’d been born in the bayou with no hospital records, the land had to be deeded to someone. He also needed to pull all the files from the cases thirty-six years ago.

  He hadn’t even been born when the girls went missing, but the story had been passed down through generations of families in Vodoun. The police would have investigated the old woman back then. Maybe he’d be able to find something in the old files that he could use. Some clue to help him find Erika.

  He turned on the computer and began a search of the land records. By the time he’d finished his first cup of coffee, he had his answer. The name on the deed was Mathilde Tregre. He let himself into the storage room, pulled the boxes from the old kidnappings and carted them back to his office. The interview with the woman was in the first box.

  The woman wasn’t listed as Mathilde or Tregre. She’d claimed her name was t’Mat. That made sense, given the old custom of naming a daughter after her mother and using the t in front of the name or shortened name to mean “little.” In this case, “Little Mathilde.” Holt poured himself another cup of coffee and settled into his chair to read over the interview.

  Mathilde had been clear from the start that she hadn’t seen the girls on the island or anywhere else, despite personal items belonging to the girls that were found on her property. She also claimed that this visit to the sheriff’s department was the first time in over a year that she’d been off the island. Based on the question marks drawn in pencil around the typewritten transcript, it was clear that the old sheriff hadn’t believed her, but he didn’t have any good reason to hold her.

  So he’d let her go.

  According to his mother, the people in Vodoun had made their displeasure more than apparent. She said the anxiety level in the town was unlike anything she’d ever seen. She’d been a teen herself at the time and remembered not being allowed to go outside unless her mother was with her. The shops in town were almost empty, the streets vacant. Some people even kept their kids out of school and church.

  As the weeks passed, and no more children went missing, the town slowly returned to its normal routine. And the case went cold.

  Had Mathilde Tregre taken those girls? And if she had, why wait thirty-six years before claiming another victim? Everything in him screamed that this was wrong—that they’d missed something then and he was missing something now. But he had no idea what.

  He closed the folder and sat back, frustrated with all the information that only created more questions. The facts of the cases were simple: thirty-six years ago, three girls had disappeared from Vodoun, and now Erika. There was no reason, save the doll and the past presumption that Mathilde was somehow involved, to assume the two were related. But if one did assume they were related, then the logical explanation was that the same person had committed both crimes.

  If he assumed that the same person had committed both crimes, and that person wasn’t Mathilde Tregre, then that meant the perpetrator had either moved away and just returned or had been in prison and was recently released. If they’d been living somewhere else for thirty-six years, Holt had no doubt that similar cases would crop up in the national database.

  He accessed the national database for missing children and put in the case information for Erika and the girls from thirty-six years before. Then he ran a query on all inmates that had been released from prison that year that had been in for crimes involving children. The national database would take a while to process, but his prisoner query was back in minutes, listing two men recently paroled after serving on pedophilia charges. Both were listed at New Orleans addresses. A quick query returned the name of the parole officer that both men shared.

  Holt checked his watch. Only seven a.m., but there was still a chance the PO would answer a call. On the fifth ring, he was about to give up, when a sleepy voice answered. Holt explained to the man who he was and why he was calling and the sleepiness left his voice almost immediately.

  “Give me a minute to get to my computer,” the man said.

  Holt heard the sound of doors opening and an office chair squeaking. A couple of minutes later, the parole officer was back on the line. “Both men clocked into their construction jobs every morning this week at

  eight a.m. and didn’t leave until six p.m.”

  “How reliable is the foreman tracking their time?”

  “Very. The guy was a fourth-generation cop who retired into his uncle’s business. If the cons have any construction skills, he puts them to work for me, hoping they’ll turn around and not go back in when they see they can make a good living with honest work. He’s been pretty successful.”

  “Lunch hour?”

  “Only thirty minutes and they bring food in for the workers. And the job they’re working is on the south side of New Orleans. They couldn’t even make it to Vodoun in thirty minutes, much less back to the site to clock in.”

  Holt sighed. “I agree. Thanks for the information.”

  “I’ll ask around. If I come up with anything, I’ll let you know. I’m really sorry you caught this. I hate the kid cases.”

  “Me, too,” Holt said, and hung up the phone.

  He stared out the window and frowned. Just because those two guys were accounted for didn’t mean it wasn’t an ex-con. It could have been one paroled outside of the area. Someone with a friend or relative to visit close by that had run across Erika by chance and took her.

  But that didn’t explain where the doll came from.

  And that was the big fly in the investigative ointment. That doll implied planning and plotting. That doll meant everything had been premeditated, and that meant someone had been watching for a while, just waiting for the right opportunity.

  Which meant someone local.

  Holt shoved the chair back and left the office, certain he needed another cup of coffee before he compiled a list of every Vodoun resident and started crossing them off one at a time. He’d barely made it back to his desk before the phone started ringing. One glance at the display told him he wasn’t going to like the call. It was his uncle, and Holt could think of only one reason why he’d be calling the sheriff’s department this early.

  “Morning, Jasper,” Holt answered.

  “What the hell were you thinking taking the department’s boat and running around the bayou over some nonsense cooked up by a crazy woman? I called the office trying to find you and the dispatcher told me

  everything, so don’t even try to deny it.”

  “I’m not trying to deny it. Sarah is convinced her daughter was taken by the woman on the island. Either I checked it out or she was going to.”

  “Then let her do it. It’s not your job.”

  “No, it’s yours. Last time I checked, the department was supposed to investigate the disappearance of children. That’s what I’m doing. I’m assuming you wouldn’t want two missing people in Vodoun, and that’s exactly what we’d have if Sarah went into the swamp alone.”

  “That woman is a waste of this town’s time and resources.”

  “It wasn’t a waste.”

  There was dead silence for a moment, then his uncle responded. “Don’t tell me you found something.”

  “We found a barrette. Like the ones Erika was wearing when she disappeared.”

  “So what? Dime-store barrettes are hardly evidence that the girl was there. It could have been dropped by anyone.”

  “Yeah, but this particular barrette happened to be in a glass jar on a shelf in the old woman’s cabin. That seems awful strange to me.”

  His uncle cursed again, and Holt knew he was more than pissed that the whole thing hadn’t been the exercise in futility he’d assumed it was. With this evidence, his uncle had no choice but to authorize a full search of the island. Of course, a full search
in Vodoun meant Holt and whoever else he could muster up to help. But there was the not-so-small issue of someone shooting at them to be taken into consideration before he started letting people volunteer.

  “There’s more,” Holt said.

  “What now?”

  Holt told him about the shooter, glossing over just how close their escape had been.

  “It must have been the old woman, right?” his uncle asked.

  “That’s the logical answer, but what if it wasn’t? We don’t really know all that much about the woman. All these years she’s been out in that swamp, and yet people in Vodoun have only seen her a handful of times and her mother a handful before that. Some have never seen her at all. How do we know she doesn’t have a husband or kids or other family living out there with her?”

  “We don’t, which is all the more reason not to run out into the swamp half-cocked and with a civilian. Especially that particular civilian. What were you thinking, bringing Alex with you?”

  “It was the only way we could get Sarah to stay put. With her emotions running high, Sarah would have been a big liability. Alex was the better choice if one of them had to go.”

  “And what about Bobby? I still think he took the girl. Surely someone’s got a line on him by now.”

  “He hasn’t been sighted at the border, and there’s been no activity on his bank account or credit cards.” Holt recounted the story Bobby’s neighbor had told him about the movers. “It doesn’t feel right.”

  “Well, if he was going to kidnap his kid and make a run for it, he’d hardly do it in the middle of the day when someone could easily see him and mention the moving truck to Sarah.”

  “I guess,” Holt said, still feeling that Bobby was the wrong direction to look. “I’ll follow up. Try to find the moving truck.”

  “I don’t suppose I have to tell you not to set foot on that island again without a warrant. And it’s going to take at least a day to get one. I mean it, Holt. Not one foot, or I’ll get out of this bed and toss you in jail myself.”