by Kate Morris
“Hm, yes, you could be right,” he says with a scowl.
“What is it?”
He shakes his head.
“Si? What’s going through your big brain, little brother?”
“Let me work this out for a minute,” he says and walks away. “We need to tell John and Kelly what’s going on, and I don’t want Sam sitting up there without us for very long. Someone just did this, just killed her. Her body is still warm.”
Damn Dog follows obediently after them as they climb the hill back to the horses.
“Let’s pick up the pace,” Cory suggests and receives nods of accord from them. Then he digs his left heel into the stallion’s side, and they fly over the ground. Twenty minutes later, and after following a fresh trail from an ATV that is not from Kelly, Cory is lead to the road where they quickly find John waiting for them next to the truck. “We found tracks. ATV.”
Kelly comes flying around the corner on his own ATV, one with different tires than the set they found in the forest on the trail leading to the road just now. He cuts the engine and joins them where Cory and Sam fill him in on what’s happening. Simon is quietly pacing, looking off into the distance, and occasionally brings his rifle to his shoulder to spy through it.
“I don’t understand why someone from Fort Knox would be down here on our property in the first place,” John questions.
“Me, neither,” Sam agrees. “That’s weird. Usually if Parker or one of Robert’s men is going to bring people here, they call it in to Grandpa on the radio first.”
“You wouldn’t call it in if you were going to kill the person you’re traveling with,” Cory says.
“Yeah, but usually they don’t travel with one person at a time,” Kelly reminds them. “When Robert sends a group, it’s usually at least six men. And only a few times has he sent a group that had a woman in it. That’s only because Marissa has experience in the military, too.”
“Yeah, she was cool,” John states, remembering her.
“But I’ve never seen that girl or her sister come with them. And why is she dead?” Cory speculates.
Simon walks over to them in a rush, “Maybe she came to warn us. Maybe she overheard me talking to Dr. Avery about figuring out who Angelica is and she knew. Maybe she didn’t feel comfortable coming forward with the information to me when I was there for some reason.”
A silence falls over them while they consider Simon’s theory.
“Sam, I…,” Simon starts but stops and frowns.
“What?” she asks.
Simon runs a hand over the lower half of his face in a universal sign of stress before saying, “I think I might have something figured out. I have a request.”
“What is it?” she asks more hesitantly this time.
Simon swallows hard, and his left eye twitches. “Would you be willing to draw her? The dead woman? Isabella?”
“What?” Sam says on a gasp. “Simon, gross. No.”
“I know,” he says and holds up a hand. “I know. And it is gross. I’m sorry even to have to ask. It’s just that…I can’t explain it. I think we need to have a drawing of her. She looks a lot like her sister.”
“So?” John asks.
Kelly even puts in, “Yeah, dude, that’s asking a lot. Sam doesn’t want to do that. And I sure as hell don’t blame her.”
“Why?” Sam asks, stepping closer to Simon and staring at him with a queer, speculative expression. It’s as if she is picking up on something in Simon that the rest of them can’t see. Cory sure doesn’t. He agrees with his brother. Drawing a dead woman is a pretty nasty thing to have to do.
“I just have a hunch. And half of a theory,” he explains. Then he shakes his head and makes to say something else when Sam stops him.
“Yeah, I’ll do it, Simon,” she tells them with a nod. “I trust you. I know you wouldn’t have me do something like that if it weren’t necessary.”
He nods solemnly and places a hand on the outside of her shoulder just briefly. “Thanks.”
“But who the hell killed her?” John asks. “We still don’t have an answer to that.”
“What if someone was chasing her or following her and realized she was coming here to tell us pertinent details about the President or the highwaymen or Angelica?” Simon puts forth.
Cory inhales and holds it while thinking it through. “Man, that’s a lot of effort to go to in order to stop someone from talking to us. And it’s murder.”
“What’s murder when you’ve already been responsible for so many others?” his friend asks.
“Good point,” Cory concurs with a single nod.
“Let’s see if we can find where this picks up,” Kelly says of the trail near their feet.
“I’m going high,” John states and walks around to get something out of the truck. He pockets the keys after locking it. “See you in an hour? Back here?”
“You know it,” Kelly says and bumps his fist to his best friend’s.
“Cor, you run south and east and meet Kelly near the old entrance to the farm,” John orders. “I know it’s a long ride, brother, but we need to see if we can’t pick up on something.”
“Oh, hey,” Sam says quickly. “Simon also found a patch of fabric. Show them, Simon.”
His friend pulls a two-inch by four-inch square of plaid fabric from his jacket pocket and shows them.
“Anyone recognize this from our own clothing?” Simon asks.
“Not mine, brother,” Kelly says, shaking his head.
John steps closer and looks at it, “Me, neither. I’ve got a blue flannel shirt, but it’s darker than that.”
“Not mine,” Cory also adds. “Where did you find that?”
“Closer to the farm,” Simon says with gravity. “Too close.”
“Shit,” Kelly states. “How’d they not hit any of our trip wires?”
They are silent a moment thinking about this when Simon states with clarity, “They know where they are. They’ve been here before.”
“Son of a bitch,” Kelly growls.
“Let’s move,” John orders and slings his rifle over his shoulder. His friend looks ready to murder. He’s seen this many times and figures his own face mirrors John’s.
“I’m taking Sam back,” Simon tells them, to which he nods.
Kelly steps in to say, “Good idea. Get her out of here in case whoever did that to that girl is still close.”
“Take Damn Dog with you,” Cory says, wanting his dog to offer them a better set of ears so that they don’t get ambushed.
Simon boosts Samantha into her saddle and instructs her to go ahead of him. Then he sends a nod over his shoulder to Cory, which he returns.
“Come on, girl,” Simon calls to the dog, who whines once and looks at Cory.
“Go on, go,” Cory says to her.
She immediately follows after Simon and then shoots ahead of them. Cory spurs his horse again and sends him into a canter along the muddy and gravel former backcountry road, the same fateful road he ran alongside his brother and Em and John when he first came to the McClane farm. His mind is racing even faster than the horse’s hooves beneath him. None of this makes sense. They are missing something here. And that one thing they aren’t linking is what could get them all killed like that girl back there, left to rot in the woods as if her life didn’t mean a thing to anyone. She meant something to her sister, and someone is going to have to get word to her of what happened to her only living relative. They will also need to bury her to prevent predators from coming around.
Cory catches sight of the ATV tracks again and knows that they aren’t from his brother. Kelly had come in from the opposite direction. They take a sharp left turn and veer up over a short mound of frozen mud and back into the woods. They sometimes run this route when they are returning from Clarksville or Coopertown and are trying to avoid the main roads. The path is wide enough for a truck, but most of the time ATV’s are the vehicle of choice in this area. Cory proceeds with caution and encou
rages the horse onto the path.
“I’m taking the CC path,” he radios in so as to avoid friendly fire. This is the nickname they’ve given this trail. It doesn’t lead directly back to the farm, but it does lead to a main road and then down to the freeway.
“Roger,” John’s response comes first. Then Kelly also answers.
One set of ATV tracks wider than the ones on their farm keeps on going right on their trail as if the person driving it knew of the trail’s existence and was familiar with the route. They can’t be that far ahead of him if they just killed the girl by the gunshots that Simon and Sam heard. Maybe ten minutes or so? He’d rushed the trail to get to Simon as soon as he could. Another ten minutes of finding the girl and talking with his brother and John. Maybe the perpetrator is twenty minutes ahead of him.
His horse spooks as the sound of far-off gunfire hits their ears at the same time. Cory pulls him to a stop and waits a moment.
“Did anyone else hear that?” he says into his radio.
“Yeah, it’s east of me, your direction, Cor,” Kelly returns. “I’m coming your way.”
“It’s northeast of my position. I think it might’ve been from the road,” John says next. “Everyone, meet there.”
Cory knows that is a distance off still and digs his heel into the horse’s side to make him jump into motion. They tear up the ground as they go and crash through brush and ground cover as they move out. He is less heedless of being shot at than he is of missing the action of whatever is taking place. The fact that someone was just killed near the McClane farm is enough to make him take a jump over a fallen tree at a pace that is probably too fast and not as safe as he should be.
He makes it to the top of the ridge and waits before going out onto the road. The gunfire has stopped, but he isn’t about to lose his cover by traipsing out into the open like an idiot and getting himself shot. From his current position, he can guess that the shots came from the east of him. His horse snorts once, and Cory has to place a gentling hand on his thick neck.
“I’m at the road,” he says into his radio.
“Proceed with caution,” Kelly warns. “You’re ahead of us.”
He backs Jett up a few feet and turns tight into the woods again. He’s going to have to push the horse through underbrush and around branches and fallen trees. He isn’t going out into the open. He’ll run parallel with the road until he can see what he’s up against. It isn’t their first time doing something like this. The horse is used to this sort of hardship. It’s just that when Cory used to have to push him into a dense, uncleared portion of forest, he would cover the front of him with a wool saddle blanket so that he didn’t get scratched up. This time, he didn’t get enough advance warning of what they’d be doing, so he takes his time and tries to pick carefully around pricker bushes and watches out for protrusions sticking out of broken trees so that the horse doesn’t get stabbed. He also doesn’t want him to cry out in pain and give them up.
“McClane base, come in,” Wayne Reynolds comes over his radio.
“Gotcha’ loud and clear, Wayne,” Cory answers immediately.
“Just took on some heavy fire up here on the road,” he returns. “Anyone else having trouble today?”
“What’s your position?” Cory asks.
There is a pause before he says, “At the end of our road. Someone went around the barrier, and I think I startled him.”
“Shit,” Cory says under his breath.
“Chased him off,” Wayne tells him. “Whoever it was, they’re gone now.”
“We’re coming to you,” John interjects.
Cory feels it is safe enough to ride on the road since the Reynolds farm and the Johnson farm is past them on the road. That makes sense. The fallen tree abatisse is the last thing on their shared, gravel road. They hardly use the road at all. They’ve created new roads, rehabbed old oil well access roads to use so that they could covertly move on and off of their farms without leaving a traceable trail to outsiders. It also narrowed down their points of ingress and egress to their farms. It has worked almost perfectly until now.
Within minutes they are gathered, the four of them on the road closer to the Johnson farm.
“What the hell’s going on?” Wayne asks as if they will know.
Kelly shakes his head, “Another dead body. Close to our farm in the woods. We’re not sure.”
“Did you get a good look at the person who took a shot at you?” John asks, cutting in.
“No, I don’t know who it was,” he answers. “He also had on a mask and some sort of hat or toboggan. It was hard to see. It happened so fast.”
“What happened exactly?” Cory asks.
He shakes his head and runs a hand through his hair before answering, “I don’t know, man. I was just up here running a morning patrol. Dogs seemed sort of antsy or something. I figured it was a predator. A fox or a coyote, you know.”
“But it wasn’t,” Kelly states.
“No, it sure as hell wasn’t. Just as I was walking back, some asshole comes flying out of the woods on a four-wheeler. Almost hit me. Son of a bitch,” he mutters. “I fell down and twisted my ankle. When I got up, the fucker was shootin’ at me. I shot back, but he got away.”
“What did the ATV look like?” John asks.
“Didn’t get a good look, really,” he replies. “Camo? Olive green? Not sure I can say.”
“And it was just the one and just the one driver?”
He nods. “Yeah, unless others already went through and he got separated and left behind.”
This makes Cory even more nervous. Could there have been a group of people on the farm other than the person who killed the poor woman in the woods? He saw two sets of tracks.
They speak with Wayne a while longer and decide to split up, gather more people, and do a more comprehensive search. By the time they depart, every family on their road is sending people out. It’s going to be a long day of tracking and hunting, but Cory is up for the task. Someone got close to the farm, and it’s not the first time. It’s also not the first time that people have turned up dead near their farm. Somehow it is all connected. Now they just have to figure out how.
Chapter Thirteen
Sam
“I hope you have some sort of a plan, Simon,” she complains as he leads the way back into the woods hours later on horseback again. The men have secured the area and set new traps and checked all the tripwires, none of which were set off or touched. “This is so gross I can’t even believe I agreed to it.”
“I know,” he says beside her as they cross the pasture again. “I’m sorry. I would never do anything to bring you discomfort. I know this is a horrible thing I’m asking you to do.”
She snorts indelicately, “No kidding!”
They are riding fresh horses, which is good because it gives the others a rest and gets the new ones the exercise they need. She has her art supplies stowed in a bag hanging from the horn of the saddle and is not at all looking forward to the task ahead of her. The men want this finished as soon as she possibly can because they want to bury the poor woman. With the ground being partially frozen, it will be a difficult job, and one she does not envy.
“I do have a plan, though,” he assures her. “I would never ask you to do this if I didn’t.”
“That really doesn’t make me feel any better,” she returns with a scowl.
Simon leads his mare closer to hers, causing his knee to bump gently against hers. She knows he is doing it on purpose. Simon is a better than average rider. He knows exactly what he’s doing. When she allows her eyes to meet his, she is confident that the knee brush is no accident.
“Sorry,” he says with little to no real regret. The crooked grin he’s giving her lets her know that he finds no remorse in his actions.
“Sure,” she says wryly.
They ride a short way further until she is slightly confused as to where they are. Riding off of McClane land is not something they usually do. Their peri
meter route is very clearly laid out for doing patrol rides.
“Do you remember where she is?”
“Yes, this way,” he says, taking the lead by bumping his mare into a trot until he is ahead of her. “Just up ahead.”
She follows and feels a sense of dread building in the pit of her stomach. Simon veers off to their right and comes to a stop. He hops down and ties his mare to a low branch on a maple tree. Sam pulls to a stop next to his horse but doesn’t get down. She’s not sure she has the nerve to get this done. It’s too much. She even jumps, startling her horse, when Simon touches her left calf.
“Ready?” he asks.
Sam shakes her head, not caring what he thinks of her.
“Wait here a minute, Sam,” he says and leaves.
This confuses her enough to strain to see him as he disappears into the forest around them with a backpack he’s brought. It is getting slightly darker being the middle of the day and is already gray and overcast. There are deep shadows and probably monsters lurking in those woods, she’s sure of it. In the distance, an owl screeches. Then an answering call comes from somewhere to her right. Another sound, probably some sort of deer or elk or four-legged creature trumpets out. The cold winter air causes her breath to plume out in gentle, silver puffs.
Simon bursts through the bushes and thickets in front of her causing her to actually yelp-scream.
“Sam!” he says and rushes to her. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you. Did I?”
Sam glares down at him with anger but can’t continue it because he’s reaching up for her. If fear is contagious, he certainly isn’t showing any signs of an infection. He seems calm as she takes his assistance and next forgets everything she was just thinking as her body slides down the front of him. Simon does not release her, either. As a matter of fact, he slips his arm more securely around her lower back.
“Everything’s going to be ok, Sam,” he says again with a nod this time. “I’ll be right there with you.”
