High-Caliber Christmas

by B. J Daniels

  Their drinks arrived, and he excused himself to go to the men’s room. He felt a little unsteady on his feet, but nothing to worry about. If there was one thing he could do, it was hold his liquor.

  When he returned, Eva had already consumed half of her drink. He admired the devil out of her. The woman sure could hold her booze. She didn’t even look tipsy.

  “Drink up, Ty,” she whispered as he slid onto his stool. “The night is young. I have something special I want to do with you.”

  By the time they left the bar, he was feeling no pain—and the winter storm had blown in, already dropping a good six inches while they’d been in the bar. Not only that, it was getting dark. Ty hadn’t realized it was so late. He had a nagging feeling that he’d forgotten something.

  “You’d better let me drive,” she said and took the keys from him.

  He was about to protest, when he had to grab the side of his pickup to stay on his feet. “Whoa, you might be right about driving. You ever drive in a snowstorm, though?” Huge flakes pelted them, the wind blowing the snow horizontally across the road. “The visibility is going to be bad.”

  “Not to worry. There isn’t much I can’t do,” she assured him.

  He believed it.

  She opened the pickup door, and he managed to climb into the passenger side. He couldn’t believe how dizzy he felt, and the blinding snowstorm only made him feel more disoriented.

  “You never told me,” Eva said as she climbed behind the wheel. “What were you doing hiding in the trees by Kayley Mitchell’s that night?”

  “She and I used to date,” he said, slurring his words. He lay back, having trouble focusing as she started his pickup engine and hit the windshield wipers.

  As she pulled out onto the highway, snow whipped past in a white blur. He couldn’t even be sure they were going in the right direction.

  “You sure you can see the road?” he asked. Or at least he thought he did.

  When she didn’t answer, he glanced over at her. She seemed intent on her driving. Good. He closed his eyes, telling himself he would just take a little rest.

  As she’d said, the night was young, and Kayley Mitchell was just a distant memory. It was the last thought he had before Ava woke him a while later.

  Chapter Ten

  “Ty Reynolds’s pickup was found north of town in a ditch,” the dispatcher said. “A neighbor just called it in. The truck cab’s empty. No sign of him.”

  McCall shook her head. It had been like that all morning, one call after another of someone off the road, fender benders, people stuck. This always happened the first big snowstorm of the season.

  “No sign of Ty?” she asked.

  The dispatcher shook her head as she handed the sheriff the location of Ty’s pickup. “Everyone on duty is out on a call.”

  “I’ll take it,” she said, surprised to see where he’d gone off the road. “What the devil was he doing out there in a blizzard?” The sheriff sighed and radioed the two deputies who’d been on call all morning because of the storm.

  “Ty Reynolds’s pickup was found north of town in a ditch,” she said. “We need to find out if anyone has seen him or if we need to start looking for him in a snowdrift out that way. I’m going to make a few calls. Let me know if you hear anything. The closest farmhouse is a good five miles up the road.”

  Ty lived alone on one of his ranches outside of town. There was no answer at his house. She called a couple of places in town where he often had coffee in the morning, but no one had seen him.

  She’d just hung up when she got a call from one of her deputies.

  “I just talked to my friend who bartends out in Saco,” he said. “Ty’s kind of a regular out there. He was in yesterday afternoon drinking margaritas. He left just after dark. With a woman.”

  McCall swore under her breath and hoped they weren’t looking for two bodies in a snowbank. Most everyone knew to stay with their vehicles if they went off the road in a storm like this one. Ty should have been that smart, but if he’d been drinking…

  “Did your friend give you a description of the woman?” She listened with growing concern as he described Ava Carris.

  “Isn’t this the woman we have an APB out on?”

  “It sounds like it. What about her vehicle? Is it still at the bar?” McCall didn’t have to describe the silver SUV—that information had already gone out to law enforcement.

  The deputy left the line but returned a few moments later. “No sign of the SUV, but she was driving it when she arrived at the bar. She left driving Ty’s pickup, though.”

  A NIGHT TERROR WOKE AVA. She jerked up in bed feeling as if she were climbing out of a dense fog. Why had she been sleeping so much lately? And drinking? She dragged herself out of the bed and staggered to the bathroom to be sick.

  As she turned on the shower, thankful not to find Evie either sitting on the edge of her bed or soaking in her bathtub, Ava felt the affects of a night filled with nightmares. She remembered that her father had night terrors. She had been told by her psychiatrist at the institution that they were a neurological condition that ran in families. Genetic.

  Her head ached, her mouth dry as a cotton ball, her stomach queasy again as she stepped into the shower. Had Evie drugged her again?

  The thought terrified her. If Evie had needed to get her out of the way, then she must have been doing some thing awful.

  She showered quickly and turned off the faucet. As she drew back the shower curtain, Ava was terrified she would find her sister standing there.

  The bathroom was empty. She breathed a sigh of relief. Maybe Evie had gotten tired of tormenting her and really left. Ava knew that she could never get well as long as Evie was hanging around.

  As she came out of the bathroom, she felt a little better. It was cold in the small old house she’d rented. She turned up the heat and had a vague memory of it storming last night, snow blowing across the road. She frowned. How did she know that? Had she looked out the window?

  That’s when she saw her boots. They sat just inside the front door—in a puddle of water.

  Her heart skipped to a stop. Had she gone out last night?

  No, she wouldn’t have gone out in a storm like the one that had blown in. She’d stood at the window and watched the snow come down.

  Then how did her boots get wet?

  She backed away from the sight of her wet boots and bumped into the table. Something rustled behind her. She turned slowly, fear making her breath come in gasps.

  Ava stared at what sat in the middle of the table. A paper sack. She didn’t remember putting it there, and the sight of it filled her with fear that she might have done something regrettable last night. Why had she listened to Evie?

  Ava had wanted to leave town and forget about Jace Dennison, but Evie had stopped her.

  “You go ahead and leave, but I’m staying.”

  She’d known from the way her sister had said it that she wasn’t going to leave Jace alone. “If I stay, will you promise to behave?”

  She tried to calm down. Maybe Evie had stopped by and brought her donuts from the local market. Or a quart of orange juice like Jace had bought.

  Fingers trembling, she pinched the top edge of the paper sack and pulled it down to look inside.

  A scream caught in her throat. She jerked back, dragging the sack with her. The contents tumbled onto the worn carpet at her feet.

  Ava stared at the bloody knife with a horrifying sense of déjà vu.

  KAYLEY REGRETTED HER plan almost at once. Hiding out from Jace made her feel like a coward. She’d always been honest about her feelings for him—at least with herself.

  When the phone rang, she saw it was Andi and quickly picked up.

  “I sent Cade over to tell Jace for you.”

  “And?”

  “And they ate the tamales I sent, and Jace left to go sign papers to sell the property. I’m so sorry, Kayley.”

  Kayley nodded to herself. “So I shouldn’t
have bothered to pretend to leave town.”

  “Jace did ask if Ty was going with you.”

  She wasn’t surprised. “Yeah, his interest in me increased substantially when he thought there was someone else.”

  “That means he still cares about you. Look, I said I’d help you, but I think this is a mistake. Go to Jace. Tell him how you feel. Cade says he doesn’t think Jace wants to leave. He’s really torn. If you talk to him—”

  “Andi, I know he’s having second thoughts, but he has to work this out on his own. I tried to stop him from leaving twelve years ago. This time it has to be Jace who wants to stay badly enough that he can put the past behind him. Things are worse here for him than they were the last time he left.”

  “Nothing is worse than losing your father, then your baby,” Andi said.

  “Maybe not. But learning that Marie wasn’t his mother and all of that about his uncle….”

  “Jace is strong. Cade said he thinks he’s having trouble forgiving himself for leaving you when you were in as much pain as he was.”

  That sounded like Jace. “This really has to be his decision. He has to want to stay more than…more than taking his next breath.” There was a knock at the door. “Listen, I have to go, someone is here.” She hung up. Another knock, this one more persistent.

  She glanced out and saw a silver SUV parked in front of her house.

  Jace!

  Her heart raced at the thought. Was it possible he’d come by to tell her he was staying? Not just staying, but that he wanted the two of them to start over?

  Isn’t this what she’d dreamed? That he would realize the mistake he’d made and come sweep her off her feet?

  But as she opened the door, Kayley saw it wasn’t Jace.

  She frowned, at first not recognizing the slight, dark-haired woman standing before her.

  It was only when she saw the gun that Kayley remembered that this had been the woman she’d seen following her and later watching her at the school. By then it was too late.

  MCCALL GAVE JACE a call and was relieved when he answered on the first ring.

  “You found Ava,” he said hopefully.

  “No, I’m sorry.” She told him what she knew about Ty.

  “You don’t think…”

  “I’m going out to where his pickup was found and look for him,” McCall said.

  “Kayley hasn’t heard from him?” Jace asked.

  “I hadn’t thought to call her.”

  “I think she left yesterday before the storm to go to Billings to stay with a friend for a few days, but I might run by there just in case,” Jace said.

  McCall hung up. She hadn’t told Jace to be careful since she knew he would be. Wasn’t he trained for this sort of thing?

  She drove north, the landscape a mask of brilliant white. The sun had come out, making the new snow sparkle like diamonds. It was blinding and beautiful and deadly if you ended up out in it without the proper clothing.

  Last night’s storm had been a blizzard with freezing temperatures and a wind-chill factor down to twenty below zero. If Ty was out in it for very long, she was looking for his body.

  But was she looking for just him? she wondered as she headed down the narrow road where his pickup had been found in the ditch. Why would Ty drive down this way?

  The bartender had told her deputy that Ty wasn’t driving. Ava had been driving. She didn’t know the area. Maybe she turned down the wrong road.

  She found Ty’s pickup in the ditch and, leaving her patrol SUV running, got out to look inside it. The driver’s-side door was open. She took a look inside, hoping to find something that would give her a clue what might have happened on this road last night.

  The first thing that hit her was the distinct smell of perfume. She reared back at the strong scent and noticed that the keys were still in the ignition. Her pulse quickened. Ty wouldn’t have left his keys.

  Finding nothing else in the pickup to help her, McCall climbed back into her patrol SUV and, bucking snowdrifts, drove slowly up the road.

  She hadn’t gone far when she saw the birds.

  They were feeding on something a dozen yards off the road, the black birds stark against the pristine snow.

  She parked and got out to survey the landscape for a moment before she started through the drifted snow.

  Several of the birds flapped a few feet away from whatever they’d been pecking, but several turned beady dark eyes on her and refused to be frightened away from whatever they’d found half buried in a drift.

  McCall stopped for a moment, again surveying the frozen expanse. Any sign of footprints would have been destroyed by the blowing snow. Even wearing sunglasses, her eyes hurt from the sun reflecting off the snow. The sky was a pale light white. Everything glistened, including the birds as she advanced on them.

  One of the birds let out a squawk, and McCall saw what they had been feeding on. The body lay facedown in the snow. Down feathers lifted into the air from holes pecked in the jacket the victim had been wearing.

  McCall called for backup, shooing away the birds and finally firing her gun into the air to scatter them.

  As she stepped closer, she saw that among the holes the birds had made there were short slices in the jacket fabric.

  Her heart began to pound. Stab wounds?

  Chapter Eleven

  Kayley hurt all over. She licked at her split lip, knowing her problems were much worse than a few cuts and bruises.

  She had underestimated this woman, she thought, studying her. She wouldn’t make that mistake again.

  Not that she would get the chance.

  When she’d opened her door, recognized the woman and seen the gun, she’d reacted instinctively by slamming the door and trying to get it closed and locked.

  But the woman was stronger than she had looked for her size and had forced her way in before Kayley could get the door closed all the way.

  She’d left Kayley no choice but to make a run for it, tearing through the house toward the back door off the kitchen. All the way, she’d expected to hear the sound of gunfire and feel the burn of a bullet.

  But the woman hadn’t shot her.

  She had come after her, though, before Kayley could get to the back door. They had struggled, with Kayley grabbing anything she could to use as a weapon to hold her off, pulling down whatever was on the kitchen counter.

  But the woman was tenacious, with a freakish kind of strength that terrified her. She’d fought for her life, seeing something in the woman’s eyes that told her just because she hadn’t shot her didn’t mean she wasn’t still planning to kill her.

  At one point in their struggle, the woman had backhanded her with the pistol. Kayley had blacked out, only to surface to find her hands duct-taped behind her and the woman standing over her with the teapot and pouring cold water into her face.

  “Jace didn’t tell me you were such a fighter,” the woman said.

  Kayley licked her lip and tasted blood. Her headed ached and her nose was bleeding. “You know Jace?” She realized she shouldn’t have been surprised. The woman had shown up about the same time as Jace, and she was driving a vehicle like his. Kayley had thought several times that it was Jace’s rental SUV only to realize it was the woman—a woman who’d followed her one day and spied on her the next.

  Kayley had felt so safe in Whitehorse that she hadn’t thought that much of it. Until now.

  “Of course I know Jace,” the woman said, smiling. “He’s my husband.”

  Kayley thought she must have heard wrong. “That can’t be true.”

  “Just because he didn’t tell you about me?” The woman laughed. “Maybe he’s been trying to find a way to tell you since he came home.”

  That struck her like another blow. Did this explain the battle she’d felt going on in Jace?

  “It’s been very difficult for him. He knows how close you and his mother were, and with his mother dying—”

  “He told you Marie and I were clos
e?”

  “He told me everything,” the woman said. “Jace is dealing with a lot of guilt. He didn’t just leave you when he left Whitehorse. He feels bad about not getting home before his mother died. Then there is the guilt he feels over you.”

  All these things were true; Kayley knew because she knew Jace, knew him in a way that had always been a special bond between them. She stared at the woman, her heart breaking. “Who—”

  “I’m sorry, I should have introduced myself. I’m Ava Dennison. I hate to have to be the one to tell you all this. Jace… Well, you know how he is. His mother knew he was running away when he left. I’m sure she mentioned that to you. She did to Jace. He’s told me how he ran away from the pain twelve years ago.”

  Kayley wasn’t sure what shocked her more. That this woman knew all these intimate things about Jace and her and the family. Or that the woman Jace had married had beaten her, bound her and was now holding a gun to her head.

  Her head ached, but her mind rebelled at even the thought that Jace could have married this woman. And yet how did she explain this otherwise?

  “I can imagine how heartbroken you were when Jace left you, especially since you’d just lost your baby,” Ava was saying.

  Kayley felt tears well and spill from her eyes. Jace had told her about the baby? Only a few people knew about her miscarriage. Or how heartbroken they had both been.

  “You can understand why he couldn’t find the words to tell you about him and me,” the woman was saying. “But now that I’m having his baby….”

  No. Kayley shut her eyes tight, fighting the tears. This wasn’t happening. “What do you want with me?” she asked, feeling all of the fight go out of her.

  “You have to let him go.”

  She opened her eyes and looked up at the woman standing over her. “I have.”

  “No,” the woman said with a rueful smile as she knelt down in front of Kayley. “Sleeping with him isn’t letting him go. As long as you are always there for him, he only feels more guilty about what he did to you. You can’t be there for him anymore.”