BIG MOUNTAIN

by Penny Wylder

  He chuckles and kisses my cheek. “All right. I’ll write down the type of finish we need.”

  I practically skip all the way to the hardware shop. “Tell Tommy I sent you,” Gil added when he gave me the paper with the exact type and style of varnish written on it. “He’ll give you a discount.”

  I head into the shop with a huge, stupid smile on my face, my body buzzing with energy. With pleasure. I can’t wait to get back to the workshop. To see Gil again, and find out what his fantasies entail.

  God, I can’t get enough of that man.

  Meanwhile, in the hardware shop, the guy behind the counter looks up at me like he’s seen a ghost.

  “Hi,” I say, with a bright smile, hoping to ease whatever he’s worried about. “My name’s Jenna—I’m a friend of Gil’s. He said to tell Tommy I’m running an errand for him?”

  The surprise fades from the guy’s face at that. “That explains it,” he replies, looking gloomy now. “For a minute I almost thought I had a new customer.”

  I wince in sympathy at that. Then forcibly maintain my smile. “I, um, I need some…” I check the list again. “Ebony finish? And cherry?”

  Tommy sighs and extends a hand. I pass him the note, on which Gil has written the actual paint codes for each one. I can’t say my man isn’t precise. “Yep, I have these in stock,” Tommy replies, and then he disappears into the back for a while. I hear distant muttering, and a faint crash, then a curse.

  “You okay?” I call out.

  “Fine, fine.” He reappears, grumbling. “Damn stacks of paint. Look, here we go.” He stacks the tins on the table and lists a price.

  I take out my credit card, but Tommy winces.

  “Got cash?”

  I have to fish through my wallet, but eventually I find a twenty, which covers the bill. “How’s business been?” I ask, mostly to make small talk.

  He grimaces. “Worst in the fifteen years since I opened this store.”

  I frown. “Is it because of the murder?”

  He sighs. “Partly, I think. Though honestly, it was bad even before that. Hell, maybe the murder has even helped a little bit—that detective was in here earlier buying some light bulbs for her apartment. Maybe if she sticks around town to investigate, I’ll get a little more—are you okay?”

  He asks, because I inhaled in a sharp gasp at the sound of detective. “Stacey’s back?” I nearly shout.

  Tommy swallows, then bobs his head. “Just got back from the city this morning, she told me. Why, are you looking for her?”

  “Yeah,” I practically yell, grabbing the paint buckets from the counter. “I’ve got some photo files I need to give her, for the investigation. I’ve been waiting over a week.” At that, I dash for the door.

  “Don’t you want a bag or something to carry those?” Tommy shouts after me.

  “I’ll manage,” I call back, because the containers aren’t too big, and they each have handles. I stack them up and scurry out of the door, which makes a faint tinkling sound overhead. Then I make beeline straight for my hotel.

  In the lobby, I’ve practically reached a sprint.

  “What’s the rush?” Merill calls over his desk good-naturedly.

  “Got an errand to complete,” I call back, still grinning. As I race by, his phone rings, and I hear Merill murmur into the receiver. Then I take the steps up to my room two at a time, and push open the door. My camera equipment is right where I left it, all except the camera itself, which I obviously keep on me at all times. I dive for the desk and grab the file I saved all the photos onto.

  I deposit the paint cans on my bed, figuring I’ll come back for those later. Then I shove the file into my pocket, and spin back to the door.

  And freeze.

  Standing in the doorway is Merill.

  I blink. I don’t remember leaving the door open. But I guess I must have, in my rush to get in here and grab this file. “Hey,” I tell him, with a faint nervous laugh. Because something about the way he’s standing, leaning toward me, blocking the whole door, sets my nerves on edge. “Um, I was just headed out…”

  “No, you weren’t,” he says. That’s when I see it. The length of rope in his hand.

  I dive across the room, putting my bed between us as I dig in my pocket for my cell phone.

  But Merill is faster. He leaps across the room after me, grabs the phone from my hand and tosses it against the far wall. I hear it crack and shatter as it lands on the carpeted floor. But I don’t waste time mourning—I leap over the bed, sprinting for the door.

  Merill catches my arm as I jump, though, and whirls me back around to face him. Almost before I can react, he’s wound the length of rope around my wrists and yanked it tight. I inhale sharply, open my mouth to scream.

  He stuffs a balled up sock inside. I gag against it. Try to spit it out, but he winds another rope around my face to pin it in place.

  “Don’t you remember what I told you?” he says in the kind of voice a schoolteacher would use to scold a naughty child. Not the way a grown man should speak to the woman he’s tying up and kidnapping. “When you first arrived in Bailey, what’s the first thing I said to you, at the end of our first conversation, Jenna?” He clicks his tongue and shakes his head, like I’m a pupil who’s gotten an answer wrong on a test. “I told you locals know when to keep their mouths shut and lie low. Why couldn’t you have behaved like a proper local? Why couldn’t you just have stayed out of this?”

  He looks at me with genuine regret in his eyes, and that scares me more than anything.

  “Now, Jenna.” He reaches for my camera. I squeal through the gag. “Let’s see about these photos your cop friend wants so badly…”

  19

  Gil

  This is going so much better than I dared to hope. Jenna loves the crib. And she seemed to genuinely believe me this time, now that she’s seen proof of how much I want her. How much I want to make things work between us.

  As I sit in my workroom and work on the finishing touches to the carving of leaves along the back rail of the crib, I feel happiness swell inside me, until my whole body feels light with it.

  I’ve never felt like this before. Nobody has ever set me on fire like this, with one simple glance. Every moment with Jenna is like discovering a whole new side of me, a whole new way to experience the world. I hum under my breath as I work, carving away at the last few branches on the tree I’ve built.

  I finish faster than I expected to—Jenna isn’t even back yet. Which is fine, that gives me time to finish sanding the newest carvings, to make sure there are no rough edges anywhere on this crib for our baby to get injured or find a splinter. But when I manage to finish all the sanding, and tidy away some of my tools, and there’s still no sign of Jenna, then I really do start to worry.

  I check my watch. It’s already been an hour since she left. How long does it take to walk down to the hardware store and back?

  But Tommy has always been a chatty guy. And he’s lonely in that store all by himself every day. They probably got to talking a while. Maybe Jenna stopped by Erin’s for some coffee too, since we’d planned to do that this morning, but never got around to it.

  Relax, I tell myself, in spite of the jangling panic in my nerves. I’m sure she’s fine.

  Still, I’m not about to sit around here waiting for her. So I pen a quick note, just in case I miss her on her way back. Headed for coffee at Erin’s, I lie on the note, because really, I’m planning to go and find her. Just like I followed her home last night—at a safe distance, because I could tell she didn’t want me following her. But I’m not a crazy man. I’m not about to let my pregnant girl and our baby wander around a town with a murderer in it, alone at night. When she finally texted me from her hotel lobby, I was just a block away, leaning against a doorway and seeing her in safely.

  To some it might sound creepy, I realize. But what was my other option? Force her to let me accompany her when she clearly wanted time to herself? Leave her unprotecte
d with the weirdos in this village? Couldn’t do that.

  But today… Today is different, I tell myself. It’s broad daylight. Even the crazy person who murdered Bradley Myers and set that fire near his gravesite wouldn’t be nuts enough to attack a pregnant woman in broad daylight. The town would riot. So I didn’t think anything of letting Jenna wander down to the hardware store by herself.

  Not until now.

  I call her phone, but it goes straight to voicemail. Nevertheless, I text her anyway. Call me when you get this. The text sends from my end, but I don’t get the little Delivered notification I normally do, to indicate it went through on Jenna’s end.

  Service around here is spotty, I tell myself. Hell, I’ve had whole weeks where my cell barely receives messages or calls at all.

  But this has never happened before when I’ve texted or called Jenna.

  I grab my coat after I tack the note onto the workshop wall, and then I head down the slope into town. I make a beeline straight for Tommy’s place. Inside, the bell tinkles politely overhead. I spy Tommy in his usual position at the back of the shop, feet kicked up on the desk, halfway through a magazine.

  “Hey man.” I wave. “You seen Jenna in here this morning?” I realize I’ve never introduced Tommy to her. “Ah, cute girl, about yea high, from outta town—”

  “The one you’ve been stepping out with lately?” Tommy replies, with a smirk.

  I forget how fast word gets around this small town. “That’s the one,” I reply, half-smiling.

  But then Tommy shakes his head, and my pulse doubles. “Nah, man. Haven’t seen her in here. Did you check Erin’s down the road? I saw you two getting coffee there a couple days in a row; maybe she needed a caffeine fix.”

  “Thanks…” I trail off, glancing around the shop, as if Jenna is going to magically materialize out of the wall and run into my arms to reassure me she’s fine. “I’ll try that,” I add, absently, as I meander back toward the entrance.

  “Hey, Gil?” Tommy calls when I reach the door.

  I glance back at him. The way he’s leaned back in his chair, his beer belly protrudes over the desk. He’s squinting at me like he’s sizing me up. “What’s up, man?” I ask, impatient, wanting to be out the door and on my way already. I need to find Jenna, now more than ever.

  “Everything all right?” Tommy’s squinting at me. “You look a bit peaky.”

  “I’m fine,” I snap. “I just need to find Jenna.” With that, I push out of the door and let it slam behind me, the bell tinkling rather louder than usual, given how hard the door slammed.

  I storm up the street. I pass Erin’s, but there’s nobody inside except Erin, who waves at me cheerfully from behind the counter. I force a fake smile and a wave back, because the last thing I want is her chasing me down the street asking what’s wrong, and then starting a public outcry if I do tell her. I mean, I’ll resort to forcing this whole damn town to look for Jenna if I need to, but not until I make sure she’s not anywhere obvious first.

  I try to call her phone again. Same thing. It rings once, then straight to her voicemail box. “Hello, you’ve reached Jenna Walker. I can’t come to the phone right now, but—” I hang up without leaving a message.

  Shit.

  Something is wrong. I can sense it in my gut. It’s just instinctual. I know when my girl is in trouble.

  I reach the hotel and practically sprint through the lobby. The front desk is empty, which is weird. It’s not like Merill to just take off—normally he’d at least get one of the bellhops to cover the desk. Still, no time to worry about that now. I climb the steps up to Jenna’s floor two at a time, too impatient to wait for the damn elevator.

  At her floor, I peel off, count doors until I find the room she’s in.

  I needn’t have bothered with the doors. The moment I reach the doorway, I know this is the right room. I know, because her door is hanging wide open for the whole world to see.

  My stomach sinks faster than an anchor off a charter boat. I step inside and my head spins, trying to take everything in.

  There’s her cell phone, lying next to the wall, the front screen shattered, the whole casing cracked. That explains why it was going to voicemail. My gut churns. Whoever threw that threw it hard.

  And then there’s the mess. Her camera equipment scattered all over, some of it broken. Fuck. I know even before I look that her camera itself is gone, as is the little hard drive file she’s been carrying around every single day, in the hopes of running into Detective Hartman to hand it off.

  Fuck, fuck, fuck. Where could she be? Who could have done this?

  If that fucking murderer harms a single hair on her head, I swear to god I’m going to rip him limb from fucking limb.

  And then my eyes land on it. One more item, half-buried under a sheet that’s fallen off the bed. One that gives me a clue as to who to hunt down for this whole mess. Because right there by the foot of the bed are the cans of wood finish. The exact ones that I asked Jenna to buy from Tommy.

  Tommy lied. He told me he hadn’t seen Jenna all day. My fists clench. So do my teeth—hell, my whole body feels like one giant fist.

  I am going to fucking kill him.

  I should go to the police first, I know. Some distant voice in the back of my skull yells at me to at least stop by the precinct, tell them what’s going on. But the bigger part of my brain, the animal part that’s screaming THEY TOOK JENNA, tells me I don’t have time to waste by grabbing cops. I need to find her, now, before anything bad happens.

  Or, anything worse than being kidnapped from her own hotel room, along with the photographs she took of the murderer.

  A murderer I know. A murderer I’m fucking friends with. That’s the only explanation for why Tommy would have lied to me about seeing Jenna. He’s the one who did this.

  I storm out of the hotel and back up the street. Mrs. Grant and her damned purse dog are strolling along toward Erin’s. One look at the fury on my face, and Mrs. Grant practically strangles her dog, yanking the little thing out of my way and leaping off the sidewalk to avoid me. I don’t give a fuck. Let them think whatever they want. I’m a man on a goddamn mission now.

  I fling open the door to Tommy’s hardware shop hard enough to put a crack in the glass window of said door. The bell dings so hard it rips off its string and lands with a clatter at my feet.

  Doesn’t matter. There’s nobody here for it to alert. I can tell the moment I lay eyes on the chair and desk at the end of the shop, and I don’t see Tommy’s lazy ass propped up in them, like I have every other day that I’ve lived in this town.

  I storm through the store, straight through the storeroom in the back. No sign of Tommy there either. But there’s a back door; I’m familiar with it since I’ve helped him unload shipments before, for something to do on a slow day when I didn’t have any orders to work on.

  Out back, I see fresh prints in the soft, damp ground. They lead straight across the muddy yard out back of the storeroom and into the woods.

  I follow them.

  I have Grandpa to thank for this skill. He taught me a lot of things. Not just how to hike and hunt and camp and fish. He also taught me how to follow prey. How to pick up a trail and pursue it until whatever you’re hunting tires first. “That’s the one thing humans have over other animals,” Grandpa always told me. “Persistence. Where deer or rabbits or even wolves and bears get tired eventually, need to rest… Humans don’t. Not if we put our minds to it. If we put our minds to it, we can out-persist anything.”

  That’s exactly what I’m here to do. Out-persist Tommy. Because if there’s one thing I know, it’s that I’m not leaving these woods until I have Jenna safely back with me, alive and well. Or so help me god, I will bring down every single person who touched her. Even if it kills me.

  20

  Jenna

  I twist against the ropes binding my hands. No use. Merill tied them so tight I can hardly feel my fingers, let alone work up some wiggle-room.

/>   As for my ankles, those are bound now too, and there’s a sack over my head, as if the gag around my mouth wasn’t enough. I breathe through my nose, glare at the sack around me with murderous thoughts, and try to listen to wherever it is we’re going.

  We’ve been walking for what feels like miles. Maybe that’s just because I’m thrown over Merill’s shoulder, though, and unlike that time Gil carried me down to his cabin, Merill is not being gentle about it. I bounce along, my teeth gritting with every hard step, and his body shoulder digs into my ribcage. I want to puke. I pray I don’t, because I don’t know what puking into this dirty sock gag in my mouth would do, but it can’t be good.

  Somewhere outside the sack, I hear voices. Some other guy has joined Merill, and something about his voice is oddly familiar. I can’t quite place it though, but I know I heard it somewhere else, and recently, too.

  “I can’t believe you fucking did this,” the other man is saying.

  “What was I supposed to do, just let her hand her evidence over to the cops?” Merill says, his chest humming underneath me as he speaks.

  To judge by the crunching sound his steps make, and the distant tweet of birds overhead, I’m guessing we’re in the woods now. Great. Probably headed to the spot where these two assholes buried their first body. Or maybe not, since they set that place on fire last I heard.

  My stomach seizes again, and I breathe in deeper, trying to calm my nausea. It’ll be fine. You’ll be fine. They definitely aren’t going to strangle you like Bradley Myers, or set you on fire the way they did the evidence in his grave. Oh god.

  I squeeze my eyes shut, to stop a tear from leaking out. I won’t give these assholes the satisfaction of knowing how fucking terrified I am.

  “I told you to stop her, not to fucking kidnap her,” the other man is hissing in reply. “Jesus Christ, I wouldn’t have told you at all if I knew this was how you’d react.”