Secret of Deadman's Coulee

by B. J Daniels

  She gripped the edge of the table, shaking violently with anger and fear and enough regret that she thought she might drown in it.

  Please, God, let Eve be all right. Don’t punish her for my mistakes. Give me a chance to make things right with her.

  But even as she prayed it, Lila Bailey knew there was no way she could make any of this right with Eve.

  CARTER SADDLED up with the search party. After the storm, there would be no passable roads to the south. There were few roads to begin with. A couple of Jeep trails when the weather was good. One road that petered out a couple of miles out near his family’s old place.

  His father had sold out a while back. Carter’s brother Cade hadn’t had any interest in ranching and Deena had flat out refused to live on a ranch. She thought Whitehorse was the end of the earth as it was.

  So his father had sold the homestead. Not that Loren Jackson had ever had any interest in ranching. He’d always leased the land. No, Loren had wanted to be a commercial pilot, but for some reason hadn’t left Phillips County so he’d ended up crop dusting with his father, Ace Jackson.

  That was until he’d up and decided to move to Florida.

  Carter had never understood his father. Loren Jackson had always seemed…unfulfilled.

  So it felt odd to be here and realize that the old place stood empty just up the road. The Cavanaughs had bought the land, but no one had a use for the house, so it had been boarded up.

  Carter rode east to avoid seeing the place, going past Bailey property and the house where he’d heard Eve was staying. One of the search party checked to make sure Eve hadn’t returned.

  She hadn’t. And McKenna had come along to get a change of clothing for Eve to wear when they found her. Then they all rode south, leaving behind farm and ranch land for cactus and sagebrush.

  Titus had divided the men into groups, each armed with a two-way radio. Ward Shaw had brought along a saddled extra horse for Eve to ride when they found her. Everyone was optimistic they would find her alive.

  Or at least they pretended to be.

  The thunderstorm the night before had wiped out any trace of her tracks, but her horse had returned this morning, leaving deep gouges in the wet gumbolike mud that were easy to follow.

  The sheriff rode with Errol Wilson and Floyd Evans. The others fanned out, hoping to catch sight of Eve’s footprints since she would be on foot.

  Although Carter had grown up here and known Errol and Floyd all his life, the three rode in silence with little to say to one another. Both men were older by at least twenty-five years and while Errol and Floyd lived within miles of each other, Carter had never known them to be friends.

  In fact, few people in and around Old Town particularly liked Errol Wilson. There was something about the man that put Carter off, as well. Something behind the man’s dark eyes that seemed almost predatory. Errol radiated a bitterness for which Carter had never known the source.

  As a boy, Carter remembered overhearing some of the men talking about Errol. There was some concern that Errol might be a Peeping Tom. Carter hadn’t known what that was at the time. And he’d never heard any more about it. He just figured that men like ErrolWilson generated those kind of stories because they didn’t fit in.

  Carter gave no more thought to either man as he rode. His mind was on Eve and the argument she’d had with her mother. What had sent Eve riding deep into the Breaks without food or water or proper clothing? Her horse coming back without her was a very bad sign. He was worried what they would find. If they managed to find her at all.

  The sun moved across Montana’s big sky, drying the mud, heating the air to dragon’s breath. No breeze moved the air. Nothing stirred, but an occasional cricket in a clump of brush.

  An hour later, Carter reined in as he lost Eve’s horse’s tracks in a rocky area. “Let’s spread out. Holler when you pick up the tracks again,” he told the two men.

  Errol rode off to the west while Floyd went east, kicking up a bunch of antelope. Carter watched the antelope run across the horizon, disappearing as the land began to drop, funneling forward to the riverbed.

  To the west Carter saw one of the other groups from the search party had stopped to clean the mud from their horses’ hooves. A hawk soared overheard, picking up a thermal, and nearby a mule deer spooked, rising up from a rocky coulee, all big ears as it took off, kicking up clumps of dried earth. No sign of Eve Bailey.

  Carter rode straight south to where the flat, high prairie broke into eroded fingers of land that dropped precariously to the river bottom. He kept to the higher ridges in hopes of seeing Eve’s blue T-shirt. The problem was that too much of this land looked exactly the same. That made it extremely easy to get lost. During the storm, Eve could have gotten turned around. If she’d tried to walk out on foot last night she might be anywhere.

  At one point, he stopped and realized he could no longer see either Errol or Floyd. He hoped to hell the search party didn’t have to find them before the day was over.

  He’d just reined in his horse on a narrow ridge, the sides falling dangerously toward the old river bottom when he caught sight of something light blue in the rocks far below him.

  REPORTER GLEN WHITAKER couldn’t believe his timing. He made it to the Whitehorse Community Center just as Arlene Evans was unloading the pies from the front seat of her pickup.

  “Let me help you with those,” he said.

  Arlene was a gangly woman with an elongated horsy face and laugh that was more donkey’s bray. That alone would have put off most people, but there was also a nervous energy that at best made him jittery and at worse made the hair stand up on his arms.

  “Violet, say hello to Glen,” Arlene ordered.

  “Hi, Glen,” said a shy and bored voice behind him.

  He turned to see Arlene’s daughter, Violet.

  While better looking than her mother, Violet was still plain to the point of pitiful. Next to her mother, Violet seemed almost catatonic. “Hey,” he said.

  He’d always suspected that Arlene fed off other people’s energy because, like her daughter, Glen found that after a matter of minutes around Arlene he barely had enough energy to escape. And right now escape was exactly what he wanted to do.

  “Violet and I can get the pies if you’ll open the front door,” Arlene said, handing off a pie to her daughter then picking up another before kicking the pickup door shut in one smooth movement.

  He had to almost run to get the community center door open before Arlene. They both had to wait for Violet, who moved like sludge.

  “Violet, why don’t you get Glen a piece of the coconut-custard right away,” Arlene said. “He looks like he could use it.”

  Violet nodded as she wandered off to do as she’d been told. Already trained to obey, she’d make someone the perfect wife, Glen thought. Just not him. At forty, he’d never married. His mother said it was because she’d spoiled him.

  “Any news on Eve Bailey?” he asked.

  “Apparently not,” Arlene said, as she shot a look at the somber group of women waiting in the community center.

  All the women looked in his direction, then went back to visiting among themselves or occupying themselves with the needlework in their laps. Glen had never understood it. He was nice enough looking, but for some reason people didn’t seem to pay any attention to him.

  Feeling like the invisible man, he drew out his notebook and pen as he and Arlene took a seat in a quiet corner and waited for Violet to bring the pie.

  “It’s a shame,” Arlene was saying in a hushed voice so the others couldn’t hear. “She has been through so much and now this.”

  “Eve?” Glen asked, wondering what was keeping Violet.

  “Lila,” Arlene whispered, glancing in the woman’s direction. Lila was cleaning the sink near the back door, stopping periodically to look out, as if she hoped to see her daughter.

  Glen wasn’t interested in Lila Bailey. No story there.

  “Her husband left h
er, you know. Oh, she tells everyone he moved into Whitehorse to be closer to his job, but we all know the truth.”

  Arlene took a breath and Glen jumped in, hoping to get some background material, “So what brought Eve Bailey back here?” He watched Arlene shift gears. Apparently she was just getting warmed up on the Lila and Chester Bailey story.

  “A man,” Arlene said flatly. “It’s the only thing that brings a woman her age back to the ranch. You know she’s thirty-two. Just two years younger than my Violet.”

  An old maid in Arlene’s eyes.

  “I heard she became an interior designer.” Arlene lifted a brow as if to say what a waste of time and education that was. “You can bet some man broke her heart and she came running home with her tail tucked between her legs.”

  Glen wrote on his notepad a new headline: Jilted, Whitehorse Woman Returns Home Only To Die Alone In Missouri Breaks.

  Violet slid a plate with a large piece of coconut-custard pie in front of him and sank into a chair as if the chore had spent all of her energy.

  He glanced at her as he picked up the fork. “Thanks.” She stared back with large, liquid, colorless eyes, but with just enough expectation in them to make him nervous. It hit him then that she would want to get married even more than her mother wanted her to. Marriage would be the only way to make her mother stop trying to hoist her off on men. Any man.

  As he took a bite of pie, he noticed Arlene had stopped talking and was staring toward the front door.

  A man in his early thirties who Glen had never seen before stood in the doorway as if looking for someone but not seeing them, turned and left, letting the door close behind him.

  “Who was that?” Glen asked, seeing Arlene’s obvious interest.

  “The fella who’s renting the old McAllister place,” Arlene whispered. “Bridger Duvall. Sounds like the name of an actor. Or a name he just made up. No one knows anything about him. Or why he rented that old farmhouse, since he hasn’t shown any interest in raising a thing. He was downright rude when Violet and I went out there to welcome him to the area.”

  Glen could well imagine what Arlene’s welcome visit was all about—and no doubt the man had, as well, the moment he laid eyes on Violet.

  “I wonder,” Arlene said slowly. “You know he showed up about the same time Eve returned to town.” Her eyes widened. “What if he’s the man who broke Eve Bailey’s heart?”

  And this, Glen thought, was how rumors got started.

  SHERIFF CARTER JACKSON felt his breath catch in his throat as he stared down into the ravine. The spot of light blue hadn’t moved and, from this angle, he couldn’t tell what it was but he had a bad feeling it was Eve Bailey.

  He raised his binoculars. The light blue moved. He felt his heart lift like helium. Eve Bailey rose from where she’d been almost hidden in the rocks. He watched her work her way slowly up the slope head down, oblivious to him standing high above her. She climbed the rocks with fluid if exhausted movements.

  Carter found himself grinning, overjoyed that she was all right, glad he would be able to take good news back to the Whitehorse Community Center.

  Now that he knew she was alive, though, he wanted to wring her neck. What the hell had she been thinking riding out like that yesterday afternoon? Maybe more to the point, what was she doing down in that ravine to begin with?

  “I’ve found her,” he said into the two-way radio. “She looks like she’s all right. I’m going down to get her out. Bring the horse to the top of the ravine.” He gave a reading from his GPS.

  Titus Cavanaugh came back over the radio an instant later, sounding equally relieved. “We’re not far from you. Glad to hear the good news.”

  Carter dismounted and, taking his pack with his rescue gear, started to work his way down the rocky slope. His earlier exhilaration at seeing that she was alive was dampened at the thought of what her reaction would be to seeing him. It had been years, but he doubted she would have forgotten the way things had ended between them.

  Eve had taken off for college right after high school graduation and he hadn’t seen her since. He knew she’d come back for holidays to see her parents and sisters, but she’d made a point of avoiding him. And since he lived in Whitehorse, he’d had no reason to go out of his way to see her.

  In fact, the way even the mention of Eve set Deena off, he’d stayed as far away as he could from Old Town—and Eve Bailey.

  He was pretty sure Eve hated him. Not that he could blame her. Or maybe she hadn’t given him a thought since the day she left.

  He wished he could say the same.

  As he cut off her ascent up the rocky ravine, he realized he was nervous about seeing her. This was crazy. Hell, it had been years. She’d probably forgotten that night in the front seat of his old Chevy pickup behind her parents’ barn.

  Just then she looked up and he knew Eve hadn’t forgotten—or forgiven him.

  Chapter Four

  Eve Bailey looked up at the sound of small loose rocks cascading down the side of the ravine. For a moment, she was blinded by the sun and thought she had imagined the dark silhouette of a man working his way down the slope toward her.

  But she would have recognized Sheriff Carter Jackson just by the way he moved even if she hadn’t seen the glint of the star on his uniform shirt. Her breath caught at the sight of him. Surprise, then that old chest-aching pain kicked in before she could vanquish it with anger.

  “Stay there,” he called down to her in a deep voice that had once done more than made her poor heart pitter-patter.

  She defied her heart to beat even a second faster at the sound of his voice as she stopped to get control of herself. Wasn’t that just her luck? Rescued by the one person on earth she’d never wanted to lay eyes on again.

  She leaned against one of the large rocks, not wanting to admit how glad she was to see another human being, though. She felt weak with relief. That and hunger and dehydration and exhaustion. She hadn’t let herself even consider what she would do once she reached the top of the ravine. She’d have had miles more to walk and, the truth was, she would have never made it, and she knew it.

  She wanted to sit down and cry, she was so relieved. But why did her rescuer have to be Carter Jackson? When she’d come home, she’d known she would see him eventually. Whitehorse was too small for her not to run into him.

  But the last thing she wanted was for him to see her like this, at her most vulnerable. With Carter, she needed all her defenses, and right now she couldn’t have felt more defenseless.

  She pushed off the rock, determined not to show any weakness as she started to climb again.

  Moving had kept her alive. She was cold and hurt and barely able to keep going. But she’d known that with her clothing still damp, if she’d stopped she would have died. It had been a realistic fear given the temperature earlier this morning and the fact that even with the sun now blazing down, she couldn’t seem to get warm.

  But there was another reason she’d kept moving. She didn’t want to think about what she’d discovered down in the ravine. She shivered at the memory of what she’d had to do to survive. That was her, Eve Bailey, the survivor. Isn’t that what she’d heard her whole life? Just like her mother, she thought bitterly.

  The climb down the cliff from the plane had been harrowing. She’d fallen more than once, her hands raw, her left ankle killing her.

  All she’d known was that she had to find a way down, then back up out of the Breaks no matter how long it took. Given that the crashed plane had apparently never been discovered, she’d figured there was little chance of anyone finding her unless she got off that rock ledge.

  She’d been sure it would be days before anyone even realized she was missing, since she lived alone and doubted anyone had seen her ride out yesterday afternoon. Mostly, she worried about her horse. The mare would have gotten out of the storm, but where was she now? Eve loved that horse and couldn’t bear it if something had happened to her.

  A sha
dow fell over her. She stopped climbing and looked up, having lost track of time again.

  Sheriff Carter Jackson stood on the rocks just above her, his hand outstretched. She didn’t look at his face as she reluctantly took his hand and let him pull her up onto a large flat rock, too tired to protest. Her legs gave out and she sat down hard, no longer strong enough to even pretend she was tougher than she was.

  Without a word, Carter slipped off his backpack and, opening it, handed her a bottle of water.

  “Have you seen my horse? Is she all right?” Eve asked before taking a drink, a catch in her throat.

  “Your horse is fine. She returned to the ranch this morning. That’s what started the search for you.”

  “Just like Lassie,” she said, near tears, and took a long gulp of the water to hide her relief.

  “Just like Lassie,” he said with a smile. “Her tracks led us to you.”

  She kept her focus on the water bottle, furious that all it took to transport her back to their senior year in high school was his smile. She could feel him studying her, his look gentle, concerned. Just as he’d been the night he took her virginity in his old pickup behind her family’s barn.

  Her hands were shaking, legs trembling, the past twenty-four hours taking their toll. Behind her eyes, she could feel tears welling up. She hurt all over, some of those bruises from years ago and her last encounter with Carter Jackson.

  She bit her lip and took another drink as she heard him dig in his pack again. Was he thinking about that night in his pickup? More than likely he was thinking what a fool she’d been to ride so far without water or food, let alone proper clothing.

  “Here,” he said, and handed her a candy bar.

  She took the candy, struggling with the wrapper, her fingers refusing to work properly.

  Covering her with his shadow, Carter leaned down to take the candy bar from her, ripped the paper open and handed the bar back to her without a word.

  “Thanks.” She’d known Carter Jackson all of her life. They’d gone to the same one-room schoolhouse through elementary school before being bused into Whitehorse for high school.