Officially the two constables were the law in Mountainside, but as sheriff Alistair was accustomed to assisting them. “Check out the prints, Rick,” he said. “But I’ve got to get back to the lodge.
The way he saw it, he had a delusionary wife and a young constable who was thrilled to think he had something more interesting than a bunch of partying kids on his plate. He had to get back to his real work, which right now meant finding Bobbi Lawrence before she managed to get herself into real trouble.
“I’ll get back to the lodge,” he said. “Come on, Hart.”
She looked around as though not sure what she should do. “Nothing you can accomplish here right now,” he told her patiently, then as a sop to her fears, he added, “Serena Hudson needs you out there, she’s some upset. And Rick can call in his partner to begin a search here in Mountainside.”
She nodded, accepting that, and went with him.
Chapter Seventeen
They’d tied and gagged her, apologizing for any discomfort, and put her in the back seat of their pickup truck with Mrs. Harris beside her. They made Mr. Jeffers ride in the front between them, Terry driving and Bill turned to watch them. He didn’t hold that long gun on them, but she knew he had it in place out of sight where she couldn’t see.
Mrs. Harris held her so that she rested against the elderly woman’s shoulder.
They drove for what seemed a long time through country totally unfamiliar to Bobbi, though, of course, she didn’t know any of the area well. Still she knew they were neither heading toward Medicine Stick Lodge or out toward where the Redhawks lived.
She guessed they were mostly traveling north, though the day was once again so thick with rain that she couldn’t see much of anything, though she was aware when they went across a river bridge.
Mrs. Harris looked drawn and weary by the time they bumped down a dirt road and finally pulled into a drive to come to a stop in front of an old house.
From the outside it looked abandoned and it wasn’t much better inside. Bill allowed Mr. Jeffers to untie her and once her hands were free nobody stopped her when she took off the gag. Apparently they were so far out in the boonies they figured she could yell all she wanted because nobody would hear.
The house displayed few belongings and what it had seemed a hundred years old. Unlike Mrs. Harris’ attractive antiques, these looked like castoffs that probably had been mail order items in the first place.
There was a faded green living room suite that wouldn’t have been good looking even when it was new, two bedrooms with cast iron bedsteads and clothes hung on bare, exposed rods.
The kitchen had an old-fashioned cupboard that looked like it had been painted a pale green long ago. Now the paint was half peeled away.
The dishes and pans were more recent, cheap, mismatched items that were barely utilitarian. The table and chairs were rickety and insubstantial.
There were no cushions or pictures or any of the small amenities that could make even the most modest dwelling homelike. The windows were dirty and boasted neither curtains or shades.
It was bare and depressing, a four-room boxy house lost in long ago sadness. Bobbi felt like it wept.
Mrs. Harris and Mr. Jeffers sank down on the old sofa, causing dust to rise in the air. They reached for each other’s hands and stared bleakly at each other. They clung to each other against all the dreary things around them.
Bill Maxwell sat down in a chair, looking old and shaky, placing his rifle on the floor nearby, while Terry went into the kitchen and started rustling around. Soon she smelled coffee in the air.
She glanced at the door, wondering if this was the time to make her getaway. Bill reached for his gun and called, “Don’t you even think about it, Missy.” So she went to stare out a small, dirt smeared window, trying to see what lay around her.
The river, churned with water tinged red by the soil, was a thread in the background. She saw a few trees between the house and its bank, not enough to obscure the view, and above the river to where the red lines of erosion dug canyons and scattered, scrawny mesquites struggled to survive. No doubt these two men knew the ground around them well and would quickly find her if she tried to run away.
A fierce wild scream froze her in place and her eyes widened as she saw a large cat creep out of a wide open barn door to stare at the rain with huge amber eyes.
She gasped. “What is that?”
She felt Terry come up behind her, a cup of coffee in his hand. “That’s only Mitten. She don’t like the rain and she’s telling the world so.”
“Mitten! I never saw such a big cat outside a zoo.”
“Just a bobcat,” Terry said. “Me and Bill raised her since she was a cub and she always hangs around somewhere close. Almost like a pet, she is.”
She kept her gaze on the admittedly beautiful animal. “She’s not dangerous then?” she asked, wanting reassurance.
“Oh, I couldn’t guarantee that. A wild creature stays a wild creature, no matter what. I reckon she’d have to be considerably riled to attack either me or Bill, but she might look on a stranger as a threat. You might scare her.”
Well, Mitten sure scared Bobbi. She gave up all hope of escaping to the wilderness around them.
Old Bill chuckled. “Mitten is real handy to have around. She pretty well guarantees our privacy, don’t she, Terry?” His brother nodded agreement.
Bobbi stared in horror at the big cat. ‘Hart,’ she said in a silent plea. ‘Hart, please hear me.’
She had no sense of communication. Whatever her connection with Hart Redhawk was, it didn’t come easily or automatically. It wasn’t anything like making a telephone call.
Alistair and Hart met Serena Hudson halfway down the road between Mountainside and the Medicine Stick Park. They pulled to the side of the road to confab and Bobbi’s grandmother struck Alistair as being close to breakdown as she greeted Hart, relieved at her safe return, but her gaze quickly searching the back seat for signs of Bobbi.
He listened grimly as Hart gave a quick account of what she believed to have happened inside the B.J. Harris’ home. He didn’t correct his wife, but when she’d finished, he told them he was taking them back to the lodge while he continued the search.
Seeing that neither woman was fit to drive, he pulled Serena’s vehicle safely out of the way, and took them on in his car, listening as they chattered about possible ways to find the girl. He tried to tune them out and lay out plans for a realistic search. An alert was out to the public about the missing girl and officers all over the state were on the lookout for her. Police would be at the airport in Lawton and at Will Rogers Field in Oklahoma City in case she tried to fly back home.
Though it might be best if she accomplished her own safe return to her home. That would give him a chance to concentrate on getting Hart the help she needed.
He listened to Hart telling Serena how she couldn’t seem to contact Bobbi, but that didn’t necessarily mean she wasn’t safe. Serena urged Hart to keep trying and he wished the older woman would act with the wisdom of her years and focus on the real problem instead of encouraging his wife in what he increasingly thought of as madness.
Well, he’d see that they were established at the lodge with a deputy to guard them and then he’d be free to get on with his work of realistically trying to find the girl.
Hart would have been furious at Alistair for stranding them without transportation at the lodge if she’d not been so worried about Serena. The woman she thought of as her niece, even though the years between them were off balance, looked gray and ill. Once they were settled in her room, she put in a call to her daughter in California even though Hart knew she dreaded breaking the news to her and her husband.
Hart offered to leave her in privacy for the call, but she shook her head, indicating she would like the support of the young woman’s presence.
Trying to not seem focused on that call as Serena obviously talked to a third party and then was connected with her daughter,
Hart drifted over to the floor length mirror on the bathroom door, studying the woman who appeared there as though she were a stranger. Thought dark-haired, blue-eyed Hart had never been a real stranger. She and Stacia had spent too much time in each other’s worlds as they were growing up.
Still, she would never be entirely comfortable seeing that other face looking back from her reflection, blue eyes instead of brown, black hair instead of red, elegant slenderness instead of curves. She supposed as she aged in Hart’s body, it would seem more familiar so that if she lived to be old, she would almost feel like Hart.
She heard Serena telling her daughter what had happened, trying to reassure her without being less than candid. And then the voice in the room drifted away and instead she saw a large, beautifully marked cat, a young bobcat framed in the doorway of an old barn. She felt as though it were her own, the terror that the sight of the animal induced in Bobbi.
‘Bobbi,’ she whispered internally.
‘Hart! Oh, thank God. I felt so alone.’
Hart knew she had no time for assurance, but had to gain information as quickly as possible about how to find Bobbi.
‘Where are you?’ Her view removed from its focus on the bobcat and broadened to see the girl standing over by a window in a bare and unadorned room. Not far from Bobbi stood the same elderly man she’d seen before, sipping coffee from a mug and staring fondly out the window at the big cat. Further back in the room, the old woman who must be Mrs. Harris sat on a couch with Mr. Jeffers. She let her gaze linger on her friend and her heart stirred as she saw the expression on his handsome old face as he looked at Mrs. Harris.
The other person in the room was the other elderly man, more aged than the other but looking enough alike that he must be his brother. He still had his rifle. It lay within easy reach on the floor next to his chair.
Bobbi looked drowsy and unkempt. Hart could feel her fear and frustration, but she seemed safe enough for the moment. ‘Where are you?’ she asked again and saw Bobbi shrug.
‘Near a river. I can see it through the window. A cat, Hart. There’s a cat.’
And then it was all gone and she could neither see or hear the girl.
Instead she was hearing Serena’s voice, gently calming her daughter and after a few more remarks, ending the call. “Stacie’s coming here as soon as she can get on a plane. Her husband will stay there in case that’s where Bobbi shows up.” She smiled weakly. “They’re so busy with their work that at times I wonder if they give more than a stray thought to their daughter. But they’re so alarmed now, they’re frantic. They really do love her.”
Hart tried to smile, but couldn’t. Nothing was quite like having a child in danger, she realized. “I made contact with her, but only for a moment. She’s alive and well.”
“Thank God. Thank God,” Serena murmured the words halfway between hysteria and a prayer. She came over to where Bobbi was sitting to grab her hands. “Tell me,” she demanded.
“She couldn’t tell me where she is. I don’t think she knew. But it was a bare little shack near a river. She was looking out the window at a bobcat.” She didn’t think it necessary to mention how frightened the girl had been of that cat.
And she knew herself how strange it was that the cat would remain so close to a house that contained people. Normally the animals were shy of humans and stayed in hiding when they were around.
“Was the man with a gun still there?”
Hart nodded. “Him and the other one and Mr. Jeffers and the woman we think is Mrs. Harris. They were sitting around drinking coffee and looking exhausted. They must have traveled during the night.”
Serena went over to sit on the edge of the bed, drooping wearily. “They could be hours away.”
Hart shook her head. “These seem to be local men,” she surmised, “they’ve probably holed up down by the closest river.”
Serena straightened. “The Red River between Oklahoma and Texas?” Obviously her mother had brought her up with some familiarity of her home territory.”
“The Red, but the branch that lies a little way north of here, the North Fork. It winds through the country to the west, miles of rough country where outlaws used to hide out.”
“Then we can find her?”
Hart hid her own lack of optimism. Few people knew those rough, red-canyoned river miles with their abundance of wildlife. They had an annual rattlesnake drive down there and people came in with sacks of the scary creatures. So many places to hide, abandoned dwellings and even caves that crawled deep underground. The few who lived down there were mostly half-wild men who loved its privacy and often greeted intruders at gun point.
Only the sheriff’s officers could search that river area and Alistair didn’t believe her. At this moment she felt hopeless and helpless.
When Dr. Stacie Hudson-Lawrence arrived in Medicine Stick that night, the first person she wanted to see was the sheriff of Wichita County.
The tall, red-haired woman who bore little resemblance to her mother found Alistair in the lodge office which had been turned into a control room for the local search for her daughter.
“Your mother will be in her room,” Alistair told her in a reassuring voice, feeling that Bobbi’s mom must be close to panic after a long flight and then a second short one into Lawton, followed by a drive in a leased car. She had been in regular contact with her husband at home and with one of his deputies and he could imagine that her fears for her daughter had risen as the minutes ticked by without any word of encouragement.
“I’ll talk to her in a few minutes,” she said. “First I want details of what’s being done to find my daughter.”
Responding to her business-like manner, he efficiently detailed everything from the work of his own deputies as they searched the county, to the involvement of state and federal authorities and the alert being regularly sent out to the public.
“And there’s been no sign of her?” she asked.
He shook his head, guessing she knew as well as he did that statistically every hour that passed meant there was less chance of finding Bobbi unharmed.
But fourteen-year-old Bobbi Lawrence was a whole lot more than a statistic. He was betting on that resourceful young woman.
“What does my mother think? She knows Bobbi better than anyone; does she think this is a runaway?”
He found himself being more honest than he intended. “That’s not her opinion. She thinks Bobbi was taken away by an armed stranger.”
Oops! He really shouldn’t have said that. How could he explain the source of Serena Hudson’s conviction?
He could hardly say that his own wife believed she had a psychic connection with the girl. Just this afternoon, he’d had to insist that Serena and Hart be kept to the lodge under protective custody when he’d caught them about to leave in a second car they’d rented to go looking on their own. He’d had to put one of his deputies in charge of them so that he was free to run the real search.
“My mother isn’t a woman to panic,” Dr. Lawrence sounded almost belligerent, but he’d learned long ago that people with missing children could react in a variety of ways.
“I’m not accusing her of anything, but if you’ll just sit quiet and allow us to do our job . . .”
“Not likely,” she snapped. “This is my daughter and my business, Sheriff. You won’t leave me or my mother out of the search for Bobbi.”
He smothered a sigh and led her to the lodge room where Hart and Serena rested, a guard outside their door.
Chapter Eighteen
Serena seemed calm and poised. She’d eaten a few bites of her lunch as though willing to keep up her strength and even talked about ordering dinner. Unexpectedly she’d pulled out knitting needles, mentioning that her grandmother had taught her to knit when she was a little girl, and began work on a sweater she was making for her granddaughter.
Hart suspected she had to keep busy and could feel in spite of the quiet face and the composed behavior, the tension that radiated fro
m Serena Hudson.
She felt and sympathized with that anxiety. She suspected that the man who held Bobbi, the two men actually, were not in their right minds. No telling what they would do to her and their other captives.
She’d seen a trace of the little boy she’d once known in the gunman’s face and figured out who he was. She was fairly sure that the two men were Terry Maxwell and his brother Bill and that this was all about the long ago murder for which Nolan Jeffers had gone to prison.
She didn’t know how to knit, had nothing in the lodge room to occupy mind or body, and Joey Harding, the deputy outside the door, couldn’t be cajoled into letting her leave, not when his boss had given him orders to the contrary.
She would have to think of a plan soon, even if it was as awkward and dangerous as knotting sheets together and escaping out the window and down the wall. The only thing was that she was afraid Serena would insist on going too and no woman so stressed about her granddaughter should start climbing down multi-storied walls.
“I don’t suppose you’ve heard any more from Bobbi?” Serena queried as though she were asking about the weather.
Hart shook her head. She’d tried to force the contact until her head screamed with pain, but it hadn’t happened. When she felt the past creeping up on her again, visions she could only see out of the corner of her eye flashing into reality, she reached out eagerly, lying flat on the bed for greater security. “Don’t worry, Serena,” she said abruptly, “I’ll be back.”
And then she was in the bed where she’d slept from her teen years, her sister Helen asleep in the bed next to hers. “Wake up, Helen,” she said. “We’ve got to talk.”
Helen was a sound sleeper. She had to raise her voice and call out several times before the girl stirred.
She blinked bleary eyes, regarding Stacia-Hart with disfavor. “For goodness sake, Stacia. It’s the middle of the night.”
“Doesn’t matter. We’ve got to talk. It’s about your granddaughter.”
Wakening the Past: A Time Travel Romance (Medicine Stick Series Book 2) Page 11
