by B. J Daniels
EVE FOUGHT as hard as she could while being dragged into the dark barn. She could tell by his strength that he was a man. The perspiration smell of him made her nauseous.
Swearing as she connected the heel of her boot with his shin, he threw her down hard. It took her breath away, but she scrambled to her feet, ready to run.
Errol Wilson blocked her escape. He had pulled a gun and now held it on her. “I told your mother to do something about you or I would.”
She felt the nausea rise in her throat. “What did my mother ever see in you?” she demanded angrily.
“The bitch did this to me,” he said, gingerly touching the bandage on the back of his head with his free hand. “I warned her she’d be sorry. She thought she could string me along, paying me off with money, holding back what I really wanted.”
A light burned in his eyes. Eve saw both lust and hate. “You weren’t lovers.” She couldn’t believe the sense of relief she felt.
“Your mother is one coldhearted bitch,” Errol said angrily. “I told her she’d regret it. But then she never knew what was at stake. She was so busy trying to protect everyone else.” He smiled smugly. “Come on.” He motioned to the back of the barn. “I have a little present for you.”
Eve glanced into the cool darkness, afraid of what he planned to do. “Why don’t you tell me what it was my mother didn’t get.”
He sneered at her. “You’ve been watching too many of those shows on television. If you think you can distract me by getting me to talk, think again.” He motioned once more with the gun. “I can kill you here if you like, but then you’ll never see your surprise. It’s waiting for you in the car just outside.”
Carter. It was her first thought. “What did you do with the deputy?”
“He won’t be saving you. If you know what I mean.” Errol laughed. His face quickly turned ugly. “Don’t make me tell you again.” He pointed toward the back of the barn.
Eve moved slowly, searching the darkness for a weapon. But she saw nothing she could get to fast enough to defend herself before he shot her. She didn’t doubt that Errol would shoot her. Probably not to kill. He wanted her to see her surprise first.
Bracing herself, she pushed open the door at the back of the barn and blinked. Bridger Duvall’s large black car was parked a few yards away, the trunk open a crack.
Errol shoved her forward, knocking her into the side of the car. He reached into the back seat. “Here,” he said, “hold out your hands, wrists together. That’s right.”
Still holding the gun on her, he awkwardly wrapped the tape around her wrists with his free hand.
“That’s too tight. You’re cutting off the circulation,” she said.
“Boo hoo for you,” he said, and ripped the end before tossing the roll into the back again. He lifted the lid of the trunk all the way up.
Eve stared down at Bridger Duvall curled in the large trunk. His ankles were taped, his wrists taped behind him. He had a gash on his forehead that had bled but stopped. His eyes were wide. Scared. Just like her.
“Get in,” Errol ordered.
Eve reared back. She hated cramped spaces. “Please, don’t—”
Errol slapped her across the face. “Get in. Lie down. You cause me any trouble and I’ll tape your ankles and your mouth.”
He shoved her into the back next to Duvall. “You two make yourselves comfortable. We’ve got a long ride ahead of us.” He slammed the trunk lid.
Eve tried not to scream in the total darkness of the trunk. She couldn’t catch her breath.
“Breathe normally,” Bridger ordered. “There’s plenty of air. Your eyes will adjust and you’ll see some light. You’re all right.”
She wasn’t all right. Errol had gone mad. Who knew what he’d done with the deputy Carter had left with her. Or what he planned to do with her and Bridger.
The car rocked. The engine roared. The radio came on as the car began to move.
Bridger was right. She could see light, faint, the opening small. At least they wouldn’t die of asphyxiation.
“Who is this guy and what does he want with us?” Bridger asked.
“Errol Wilson. I don’t know.” She could barely make out Bridger’s features even though she was only inches away.
“You all right now?”
No. “As all right as I can be under the circumstances.”
“So you’re not part of this?” he asked.
Obviously not. “You know what this is?”
“Haven’t you guessed what you and I have in common? Other than the obvious,” he added.
“We’re burglars?”
He smiled a little at that, his teeth flashing in the dim light. “We were both looking for files in Dr. Holloway’s office. Why is that?”
“You tell me.”
“February fifth, 1975.” He must have seen her reaction. “The day you were born.”
“How do you know that?” The car must have reached the main road. It sped up. Her wrists ached from the tape and her body from the jarring ride.
“I came to Whitehorse looking for you.”
His words stunned her. She recalled him coming out of her grandmother’s room pocketing a photograph she was sure he’d stolen of her as a baby. Her fear, already off the charts, spiked. “Me?”
“What did you find out the other night in the archives?” he asked. “Come on. We don’t have much time.”
“I found evidence that I was adopted.”
“You didn’t already know that?” He sounded surprised.
She shook her head, not wanting to admit her mother had lied to her.
“I always knew,” he said. “But it wasn’t until my adoptive mother was dying that she told me the rest.”
She held her breath. “The rest?”
“It wasn’t a legal adoption. They knew someone who knew someone, a woman doctor in Great Falls who found babies for couples that were ineligible to adopt for whatever reason. With my mother, it was poor health.”
Eve felt her heart begin to pound as she recalled the funeral her mother had gone to yesterday. Could it be the same doctor?
“It was all done in secrecy. The couple would get a call in the middle of the night,” he continued. “They’d go to the designated spot and would be given a baby and a birth certificate.”
She knew even before he spoke what was coming.
“My parents came to the original Whitehorse Cemetery the night of February seven, 1975.”
Chapter Fifteen
Carter came roaring up next to Deputy Samuelson’s patrol car. Through the curtainless windows, he didn’t see Eve or Deputy Flynn Samuelson as he jumped out of the SUV and ran toward the house.
Something was wrong. He could feel it as he pounded up the steps and across the porch. He could see into the house, past the living room, something spilled on the floor in the kitchen.
“Eve! Flynn!” he called, as he raced inside. “Eve!”
The house echoed his cries and his footfalls as he dodged paint cans to reach the kitchen.
A pool of broken eggs lay next to the carton. Near it lay a butcher-wrapped package. His attention flew to the empty kitchen and, beyond it, the open back door.
Eve. He was on his phone as he ran out. No sign of Eve in the yard or the barn. The dispatcher answered on the first ring.
“I need the other deputies out to Old Town Whitehorse right away,” he said into the phone. “Eve Bailey and Flynn Samuelson are missing. Tell the deputies to begin a search of the area.”
He disconnected, glancing down the road toward the Bailey ranch. Lila’s pickup sat out front. Next to it was a rental car. The same color and make as the one his father had been driving.
EVE FELT her heart lodge in her throat as she looked at Bridger Duvall. “You think you were the baby on the plane that crashed in the Breaks?”
“I know I was.”
She felt her heart drop. She’d been so sure it was her. “How can you know?”
“My
mother told me that they got me from an elderly woman at the old Whitehorse, Montana, cemetery the night of February seven, 1975. These women placed babies. The way it worked was that if you wanted a baby you let someone know. Then you’d get a call, often in the middle of the night. You drove to the cemetery.”
“The cemetery?” She remembered stories about strange lights in the cemetery at night, which persisted to this day.
“You waited until someone showed up with a baby and a birth certificate, no questions asked,” he continued. “My mother and father desperately wanted a child. They would have done anything.” He smiled ruefully at that. “They did. They drove all night to get here and waited in freezing temperatures. And just when they thought they’d been duped, an elderly woman tapped on their window and handed them me and my birth certificate.”
Not her grandmother. Someone else. Because Grandma Nina Mae had a broken leg. Was it possible Bridger was wrong about the date? She felt the car slow. Errol turned onto another road, this one paved. The car sped up.
“It was the wrong birth certificate,” Bridger said, making Eve start. “The woman had to go back and get the right one. The first one was for a girl, born the same day as me. The name on her birth certificate was Eve Bailey.”
Eve began to cry silently. She’d known the moment Carter told her about the possibility of a baby being on that plane that it was her. She’d never imagined, though, that there had been two babies.
“Why didn’t you come to me with this information?” she demanded.
“Why would I? I had to assume that you knew, that you were in on it. My mother warned me that I might never know the truth because the whole operation was run by a close-knit group of women who, according to the lady Great Falls doctor, planned to take the information to their graves.”
She didn’t know what to say.
“We look enough alike and, given the fact that we were both brought in on the same night, there’s a chance you’re my sister.”
“That’s not possible.” She remembered how much her father had wanted a son. Grandma would have known that. She wouldn’t have split up a brother and sister. “They wouldn’t have split us up.”
“My parents had been on the waiting list for years, but they could only afford one child,” he said. “We had a small ranch down by Roundup. My father needed a son if he hoped to hang on to it.”
She was angry with whoever had done this, but sympathetic to what Bridger’s parents must have gone through knowing there was a sister they couldn’t take. “Do they still have the ranch?”
“My parents are buried there. Your grandmother was the woman who met my parents that night in the cemetery, wasn’t she?”
“No. She was on the plane. But she broke her leg that night. She couldn’t have been the one. She wouldn’t have split us up. Not for any reason.”
“Then who? You’re from here, you must know.”
She shook her head. “It was so long ago, if the woman was elderly, she might be dead by now.”
“Someone around here knows. If there was a waiting list then someone has to have kept track of the adoptions, the birth mothers, which families got which kid. There has to be a record. Some proof.”
She felt numb. Her mind kept telling her none of this was happening. “Where does Errol Wilson come into all this?”
“I don’t know. I’ve just been trying to find out who I am,” he said quietly.
Better to worry about how to find his birth mother than what was going to happen when Errol got them wherever he was taking them, she thought, no matter how futile it might be.
Was it possible they were brother and sister? For so long she’d yearned for someone who looked like her. Bridger Duvall definitely did. Her throat tightened, eyes filling again with tears. A brother? One she might never get to know.
“If, when, we get out of this, I’m going to find her,” Bridger said. “And I’m going to find where they recorded the names.”
“What they were doing was illegal, why would they keep a record?” she said. “It’s been such a well-kept secret I doubt there is any way to prove who was behind it.”
“Except there’s a murdered man in that plane, right?” he said. “And that’s why we’re in this trunk. Seems pretty obvious that someone’s scared we know too much.”
“Who told you about the murdered man?” she asked.
“Errol.”
Errol slowed, turned and the road got much rougher.
“I don’t understand this,” she said. But she doubted it would be long before they found out what he had planned for them.
“I suspect it has something to do with the dead man in the plane,” Bridger said. “There’s no statute of limitation on murder. What’s a couple more murders if there’s a chance of covering up the first?”
CARTER’S FATHER LOOKED up in surprise as Carter stormed into the Bailey kitchen. Loren Jackson sat at the kitchen table. Lila Bailey sat across from him. They both had mugs of coffee in front of them and somber expressions on their faces. A stack of photographs had been pushed to one side.
“Carter?” Loren said in surprise.
“I thought you were at a funeral in Great Falls?” Carter said to Lila, hating the accusation he heard in his voice.
“It was a short sunrise funeral. Only close…friends,” she said, as if his storming in was nothing out of the ordinary.
“I need to know what the hell is going on and I need to know right now,” Carter said. “Eve’s missing. And so is the deputy I left with her.”
Lila rose halfway out of her chair. “She’s probably taken off into the Breaks again—”
“She didn’t go for a horseback ride,” Carter snapped, voice rising. “She’s in trouble because of that damned plane, because of your lies. I just got the ID on the victim in the plane. It was Charley Cross, your father.”
She stood, her hand on the back of the chair shaking. “None of that matters. We have to find Eve and—”
“You knew.” Carter swore and looked at his father and saw he, too, knew. He swore again. “All these years the two of you have been covering for a murderer?”
“My father wasn’t murdered,” Lila said. “He was killed in the crash.”
“When Eve found the plane, he had a knife sticking out of his chest.”
All the blood drained from Lila’s face. Loren reached for her, but she shooed him away and lowered herself back into the chair. “Oh, God. I didn’t know. I swear I didn’t know,” Lila said, sounding near tears. “Mother said Daddy died in the plane crash.”
“Who was the pilot?” When neither answered, he slammed his fist down on the table, unable to control his anger or his frustration or his fear for Eve. The photographs that had been stacked near the edge started to tumble off. Lila reached for them instinctively. He grabbed them first, spilling them across the table.
“You have to tell me. It’s the only hope I have of finding Eve, of stopping this before…” Carter couldn’t voice his worst fear. “Who was the pilot?”
Lila shook her head, her eyes filled with fear. “I don’t know. I swear. The fewer people who knew the specifics the better, so Mother never told me.”
“Knew what? Damn it. Tell me what the hell your parents were doing on the plane that night.”
“They were bringing in babies. Flying them in,” Loren said. “I knew about the babies, but I never flew for them, neither did your grandfather.”
Carter stared at him. “I don’t believe you.”
“I had Cade, and your mother was pregnant with you. I didn’t want anything to do with it,” Loren said more forcefully.
Why didn’t that ring true? And then it hit Carter. “You were afraid if you got caught you would lose your pilot’s license. That’s all you’ve ever cared about.”
“Not all.” Loren glanced across the table at Lila.
Carter turned to Lila. “Your mother just left her husband in the plane?”
“She had to protect the babies,”
Lila said, her voice thick with emotion. “He was dead. If she told anyone, there would be an investigation. She would never betray the babies. Not even for the man she loved.”
“Wait a minute,” Carter said. “How many babies are we talking here?”
“Dozens,” Loren said, looking at Lila for confirmation. “It started back in the 1930s when the CCC was up here building Fort Peck Dam—all those men turned loose on Montana.”
Carter had heard about the red-light district outside of Fort Peck. He had a pretty good idea where some of the babies came from.
“Many of the girls were from good families, even distinguished families,” Lila said. “They couldn’t keep their babies because they were too young or poor or because their parents wouldn’t allow it. With other women desperate for children, someone had to find those babies good homes.”
“I thought that’s what adoption agencies were for,” Carter retorted.
“These were Montana women and men, often with little resources. In my mother’s case, it was her age, her economic bracket, the fact that she lived so far from a hospital,” Lila said.
Carter stared at her in disbelief. “You were one of the babies?”
She nodded. “My mother and father couldn’t have children. It was one of the reasons they dedicated their lives to what the circle had started.”
“The circle?” he asked, frowning.
“The Whitehorse Sewing Circle,” she said. “That’s where it began years ago. One of the women heard about a pregnant girl who couldn’t keep her baby. The circle decided to help her and made arrangements for the baby to go to a good local family. That’s how it started. Later we had the help of several doctors.”
Carter stared at her. “That’s how you got Eve.”
Lila nodded. “And McKenna and Faith.”
“They were adopted, too?” He raked a hand through his hair and checked his watch. He had to find Eve. “What about the drugs?”
Lila looked at him in surprise.
“The pilot of the plane was smuggling in marijuana along with babies,” Carter said.
