Winchester Christmas Wedding

by B. J Daniels

  “Janie, if you go through with this, you are only going to hurt yourself. Look where this kind of hatred and retaliation got your mother.”

  “Yes, look where it got my mother,” Janie said and swung the butt of the pistol.

  TD didn’t see the blow coming. There was a moment of intense pain, then nothing at all.

  LIZZY SCREAMED AND SPUN on Janie, but Janie had anticipated her reaction and backhanded her.

  Falling back, Lizzy crashed into the side of the shed and slid to the floor. She saw stars dance before her eyes and for a moment thought she was going to black out. Janie leaned over her and bound her wrists quickly with a piece of tape.

  “Try that again and I will blow your boyfriend to kingdom come,” Janie warned. “Do you understand me?”

  All Lizzy could do was nod. TD had fallen over against the leg of the makeshift table, his eyes closed, a trickle of blood running down the side of his face. She could see the rise and fall of his chest. He was still alive, but for how long? Anything could set off this shed. Maybe that’s what Janie had planned.

  “Get up,” Janie said grabbing her shoulder and hauling her out through the door. “Make a run for it and I kill you and your boyfriend.”

  Lizzy heard her padlock TD inside the shed, but there was nothing she could do but bide her time. She could tell Janie wanted her to try something. She wanted to kill them both, but for some reason was holding off.

  “We’re going to walk up to the house. I sent the hired help home for the holidays, so there is no one here who can save you.” She smiled as if way ahead of Lizzy.

  “You really think Anne would help you even if she could?” She laughed at that. “Let’s go.”

  “Even if she could? Janie, have you done something to Anne?”

  In answer, Janie shoved her toward the house. The walk through the cold winter night seemed endless. Lizzy still felt dizzy from the blow to her temple. But it was TD and Anne she was worried about.

  Janie didn’t bother to turn on the lights as they entered the house. She shoved her toward the open door to the basement. Lizzy almost fell down the dark steps.

  “Sorry, wouldn’t want you to hurt yourself,” Janie said with a chuckle as Lizzy caught herself.

  Janie turned on the light to the basement. For a moment Lizzy was blinded as Janie forced her down the stairs. Then she saw Anne sitting in a dark corner of the room. Her wrists and ankles were bound with duct tape. Her eyes were wide with fear.

  “Look who’s joining us,” Janie said to her sister. “And you thought she left.”

  “Lizzy, I’m so sorry,” Anne cried. “I should have listened to you.”

  “Shut up,” Janie ordered. “Or I will put you out of your misery before I’m ready.”

  “Janie, my God, your own sister?” Lizzy cried.

  “My own sister,” Janie mimicked. “For a spy I would think you would be smarter than you are. You and I are the true sisters, Lizzy. Don’t look so surprised,” she said with a laugh. “I’ve known Roger Collins my whole life. I even knew his mistress, the one he got pregnant with you after having me with my mother.”

  Lizzy fought to take her next breath. “You’re lying.”

  “Will and your mother were too old to have children. A baby was the only thing missing in their lives,” Janie said in a mocking tone. “Remember how your father doted on you, Lizzy? Well, guess what? He made a deal with the devil for your soul. Now what do you think of your perfect father?”

  “He wouldn’t have done that,” she said but there was no force behind it. Hadn’t she suspected something the moment she’d seen the photograph of her dad and Roger Collins?

  “He made the deal, but he tried to get out of it,” Anne said, glaring at her sister. “The day your father died from a fall from his horse, he wasn’t alone. I saw Roger ride out after him.”

  Lizzy felt sick to her stomach. “You’re telling me Roger killed my father?”

  “You were Roger’s daughter and he was determined you would follow in his footsteps.”

  And she had, just as Roger had planned.

  “You weren’t Roger’s only daughter to go into the spy game. My position is just more special ops,” Janie said with a laugh.

  Not on the books, Lizzy thought with horror. Roger Collins had set all this in motion years ago. Her, TD, Janie. What had Roger had going in Montana? He was gathering his own select source of children who he would make sure became his private force. Was that another reason TD’s adoptive parents had been murdered? They’d discovered what Roger Collins had going on?

  “Daddy is so disappointed in you,” Janie said to Lizzy, who cringed at the thought that Roger Collins’s blood ran through her veins. “I told him you didn’t have what it took to work for the agency. You were too soft, too sentimental, too weak. But he was so sure you would do whatever he ordered you to do.”

  “Is he ordering you to kill the Winchesters?” Lizzy demanded. “Or is that all your doing? Don’t you realize what Roger is doing? He’s using you to clean up the mess he’s made of things. Just as he tried to use me and TD. But we didn’t fall for it.”

  “How can you speak of our father like that?” Janie demanded.

  “My father was Will Calder, an honorable man.”

  Janie glared at her.

  “He’s going to throw you away, just as he planned to do with TD.” But Lizzy could tell that her words were falling on deaf ears.

  “It’s almost daylight and I have a wedding to attend,” Janie said. “It’s time to say goodbye.” She lifted the gun and pointed it at Lizzy’s head. “’Bye, little sis. I’ll just tell Daddy that you tried to stop me.”

  “Janie, please,” Anne said. “I’m begging you, don’t—”

  Before Lizzy could react, Anne threw herself in front of Lizzy. The report of the gun filled the basement like a sonic boom.

  “No!” Lizzy screamed as she felt Anne fall back against her and begin to slump to the floor.

  Janie was already part of the way up the stairs when she fired two more shots. Lizzy fell beside Anne and lay still. She could feel blood running in her right eye and knew she’d been hit. A few moments later, she smelled the smoke.

  Chapter Thirteen

  TD woke, head aching, to sunlight streaming through a crack in the side of the shed. He moved and felt the weight of the bomb materials shift above him. He froze.

  Careful, he warned himself as he managed to move away from the table. It wouldn’t take much to set this whole shed off.

  He tried to clear his head. Where was Lizzy? He prayed she was all right and found himself again wondering at the immediate pull he’d felt toward her the first time he’d seen her. At least now he knew that he hadn’t been wrong about her recognizing him. But had he known on some level, even then, that it was no coincidence they’d crossed paths?

  Last night he’d looked around the shed just moments before Janie had appeared. He remembered seeing some old tools in the far corner. He worked his way over to them and, spotting some rusty wire cutters, turned to grasp them with his hands bound behind him.

  Working to get the cutters beneath the tape, he began to saw against the dull blade. He couldn’t tell what time it was. Late enough that the sun was up. Everyone might already be at the Winchester Ranch by now. The wedding was to be this afternoon, but the family would be gathering long before that.

  The tape finally gave. His hands free, he hurriedly went to work on the duct tape binding his ankles.

  That’s when he caught the first whiff of smoke. Getting to his feet, he tried the door and heard the clank of the padlock. No surprise; Janie had padlocked it again.

  He glanced around quickly. Janie had put cardboard over the windows. Tearing off a piece, he saw that the one window was large enough that he should be able to get through it. Using the wire cutters, he broke out the glass, hurrying now as the smell of smoke grew stronger, reminding him of another house on fire years before. Collins liked to destroy all evidence, he
thought as he glanced back at the bomb supplies in the shed, knowing there were more already at the Winchester Ranch. These had been a decoy.

  The window opening was small but after he was able to tear out the sill, he managed to squeeze through and drop to the ground. His head still ached but all he could think about was Lizzy as he ran toward the burning house. The front door was standing open and smoke poured out.

  LIZZY WIPED THE BLOOD from her eye and sat up. Janie had set the house on fire. She could hear the flames and smell the smoke. It wouldn’t be long before it filled the basement. She touched her temple, felt where the bullet had grazed her and realized how lucky she’d been.

  With a cry of both physical and emotional pain, she checked Anne’s pulse and found none. Pushing her friend’s body off her, she stumbled to her feet, tears blurring her eyes. Her wrists were still bound. She looked around for something to cut off the tape, but seeing nothing, knew she had a more serious problem. Smoke poured from the cracks around the door at the top of the stairs.

  She had to get out of this basement—now. She found what had once been an old coal room and found the chute opening. It was now covered with tin. Climbing up on some boxes, she managed to kick a hole in it. She kept kicking, the smoke getting thicker around her as she tried desperately not to think about Anne or worry about TD.

  She had to stop Janie from blowing up the Winchester lodge with all of the Winchesters there for the wedding. It was just as TD had feared—Janie planned to take everyone out. Janie was Roger Collins’s daughter, and she and Janie were sisters? She felt sick at the thought. Was it true what Anne had said about Roger killing her father?

  Anger and pain boiled up inside her. She thought of her boss and the power the man wielded. Too much power and too many people who were at his beck and call.

  Finally, the hole was large enough that she could crawl through. She thought again of Anne, dead in the other room, but there was nothing she could do for her.

  Lizzy slipped through the hole and dropped into the snow. As she ran around the side of the house she saw flames leaping at the windows—and TD running from the shed. He pulled her to him, holding her so tightly she couldn’t breathe.

  Then they were racing across the snow to where they’d left TD’s pickup. The sun had risen over the Montana prairie, setting the fallen snow ablaze. They saw no sign of Janie as TD drove away. Behind them a huge plume of smoke rose into the perfectly blue sky as the house she’d once thought of as home burned to the ground.

  “WHAT ARE YOU doing up here?”

  McCall Winchester turned to see her grandmother framed in the doorway of the infamous third-floor room. “I could ask you the same thing.”

  Pepper stepped in, leaning heavily on her cane. “You should be getting ready for your wedding.”

  “I wanted to see this room for myself.” She raised the small pair of binoculars she’d found tucked into a space below the windowsill. Turning, she put them to her eyes again and looked out the window toward the ridge where her father had been murdered.

  “You know who Sandy Sheridan meant when she said someone in the Winchester family was involved in Trace’s murder,” her grandmother said behind her.

  “Yes.” McCall didn’t turn. She thought for a moment of Sandy, her father’s girlfriend whose heart he had broken when he’d taken up with McCall’s mother, Ruby—not just taken up with her, but gotten her pregnant with McCall. Sandy had never stopped loving Trace Winchester…or let go of the pain and embarrassment he’d caused her. It had become a love-hate relationship for Sandy.

  Probably much like the relationship her father had had with his siblings.

  “Which one of my children is it?” Pepper’s voice wavered and McCall could hear the fear there.

  “It wasn’t any of your children.”

  “But why kill him in sight of the ranch of someone in the family—”

  “Sandy Sheridan inferred that someone in the family was involved, but none of them were on the ridge that day,” McCall told her, still not looking at her. “They weren’t involved, even though you’ve had them suspicious of each other for months now.”

  McCall finally turned from the window. “Sandy was referring to you.”

  Her grandmother frowned and then realization came into her eyes an instant before they flooded with tears. “No!” It came out a cry filled with pain and anguish. “No,” she repeated as she slowly slid to the floor.

  McCall didn’t move to go to her. She had told herself she wasn’t going to feel sorry for Pepper. She wasn’t going to feel anything, but over the past nine months she’d come to love her grandmother.

  She had seen how the past had embittered her, trapped her in this lodge with no one who cared about her—and one person, at least, who had done her harm.

  But neither was she going to try to spare her feelings. “You would have done anything to break up my father’s marriage,” she said. “I suspect you told Sandy that Trace still loved her, that he was trapped in a loveless marriage, whatever it took to make her think she could get him back if she broke up that marriage. You sent Sandy after my father.”

  Pepper shook her head, as if denying it would make it all go away. “I didn’t know Sandy Sheridan would…” She dropped her face into her hands. Sobs shook her body but no sound came out.

  “I couldn’t understand why Sandy told my father to meet her on that ridge and killed him there,” McCall said, knowing she had to make her grandmother own this. No more hiding in this lodge. No more lying and keeping secrets. It was time for the truth to shine its light not only on her, but also on the rest of the family.

  “When he rejected her a second time, she blamed you for putting her through that again,” McCall said, remembering the look on Sandy’s face just before she died. Now her words made sense. “That’s why she killed him on that ridge across from the ranch. Apparently my father had given her the idea because she knew he would be there antelope hunting that day. She was hoping you would see what you had done. She believed that his siblings hated him and wanted him dead as well, but ultimately Sandy was a sick, unhappy individual looking for someone to blame for what she’d done.”

  Her grandmother raised her head, steel coming back into her spine. Her dark eyes shone from her tears but her voice was strong when she spoke. “I wanted to believe one of my own children capable of murder before I would believe that I had…” She shook her head. “You must hate me.”

  “No,” McCall said as she walked over and sat down next to Pepper. She reached over and took her grandmother’s hand. “Have you ever read what is written up here on these walls?”

  Her grandmother shook her head. “I couldn’t bear it.”

  “You should read it. I think you’ll be surprised and it will help you understand your children better.” She rose.

  “By the way, Janie McCormick has been blackmailing Worth, Brand and Virginia since word got out about your suspicions that one of them was a coconspirator in my father’s murder.”

  “Why would they pay if they didn’t have anything to hide?”

  “Isn’t it obvious? If Janie came to you and said she’d seen one of them on that ridge that day, you would have believed her because you wanted to. Better than the alternative, right?”

  Her grandmother had the good grace to lower her head.

  “They recently met over on the ridge and realized they’d all been blackmailed and none of them had anything to do with their brother’s murder.”

  “I always said you made a fine sheriff,” her grandmother said. “I was right.”

  McCall took little satisfaction in the fact that she finally knew the whole truth about her father’s murder. Sandy Sheridan had loved Trace Winchester—in her own twisted way. True, she probably hadn’t needed much encouragement from Pepper to go after him. But when she’d realized she’d been used…

  “No more secrets, all right?” McCall said to her grandmother.

  “In that case, there is one more thing I sho
uld tell you, then.” She sighed and leaned her head back to meet her granddaughter’s gaze. “Losing your father wasn’t the only reason I became a recluse twenty-seven years ago,” Pepper said. “I was pregnant.”

  McCall couldn’t hide her surprise.

  “I was forty-five. I never dreamed I could still conceive a child. Hunt McCormick was the father.”

  “What happened to the baby?” McCall asked her grandmother, her heart in her throat.

  “Enid and her sister delivered it. I told Enid to get rid of it.”

  McCall cringed at the thought of what Enid might have done with the baby.

  There were tears in her grandmother’s eyes again. “Enid told me the baby had died, but I knew better. Her sister left with it. I watched her from the upstairs window. She took the baby to the Whitehorse Sewing Circle.”

  “How do you know that?”

  Pepper merely smiled.

  “So I see why you haven’t fired Enid. The keeper of your secrets,” McCall said.

  Her grandmother nodded solemnly.

  “Did Hunt know about the baby?” McCall asked, already suspecting the answer.

  “No. He had asked me to run away with him.” Her old eyes filmed over. “I wanted to, but I was pregnant and I knew Hunt, he’d want us to raise this child. I’d already made such a mess of my other children, I just couldn’t.”

  “You were in love with him,” McCall said.

  Pepper laughed softly. “He was the love of my life. I met him the first time when I was sixteen. It truly was love at first sight. We would have run away together then, but Hunt was only seventeen and determined to make his fortune. And my father did everything he could to keep us apart. Hunt was headed for the West Coast. But he promised that he would find me and we would be together one day.”

  “By the time he found you, you were married to Call Winchester.”

  She nodded. “I had given up that Hunt would ever come for me and by then Joanna McCormick had tricked him into marrying her and refused to give him a divorce. Joanna and I have known each other since we were girls. She was always jealous of me and Hunt and would have done anything to keep us apart. Twenty-seven years ago, I felt it was too late for Hunt and me. The night the baby was conceived was a moment of weakness.”