Twelve-Gauge Guardian

by B. J Daniels

  He wondered how many times this woman had been forced to find that strength. Cordell couldn’t bear the thought of what she’d been through.

  “When Emily was found more than two hundred miles from Whitehorse, she was near death. No one knows how she got there. She didn’t speak for two months and when she did, she had no memory of what had happened to her.”

  “My God,” Cordell said and hoped with all his heart that she would never have any memory of what had happened to her. “We have to go to the sheriff.”

  “If we do, he’ll kill Lara right away. You have to trust me on this. If you go to the sheriff, it will cost Lara her life and I fear it will be the last I hear from the person sending me the information.”

  Cordell didn’t doubt she knew what she was talking about. But what if she was wrong? “What are you saying? The person who sent you those pages just got you back here to kill you.”

  She shook her head. “Why would they do that? Orville Cline had already confessed to Emily’s murder.”

  “Maybe they’re worried that your memory has come back and are afraid you can identify them.”

  RAINE HESITATED, then said, “I still believe that one of them wants this to stop and is helping me to bring the child abductor down.” She told him that her friend and partner Marias Alvarez called the person CBA or Crazy Bastard Abductor. “I think Crazy Bitch Abductor might be closer to the truth. I believe it’s the wife sending me the information and that she got me back here because she knows she can’t stop him without help.”

  “That’s some theory. I hope it doesn’t get you killed.”

  “What choice do I have? There’s a little girl out there missing. I have to find her before it is too late,” she said, her voice breaking. The news about the latest little girl had chilled her to her very bones. She knew exactly what Lara English was going through.

  But she couldn’t give in to her emotions. She had to be strong. “I have to put all my energy into finding Lara.”

  “And you believe this CBA will help you do that,” he said, sounding more than a little skeptical.

  “Now that he’s taken Lara, I have to believe it,” she said.

  Cordell studied her for a long moment and she could see he was considering her argument. “You do realize that he knows someone leaked you the information. That’s how he knew where you’d be last night when he took Lara.”

  She nodded solemnly. “That means the woman could be in as much trouble as Lara. Another reason we have to find them and Lara before it’s too late.”

  “How do you suggest we do that?”

  “The Crazy Bitch Abductor sent us a map.”

  “I HOPE THIS MAP MAKES more sense to you than it does to me,” Cordell said as Raine stared at her computer on the way to Whitehorse.

  The wind dried the top of the road bed. As long as he avoided the mud puddles, the rental car got enough traction to keep them out of the ditch.

  Before they’d left the ranch, he’d called to have a wrecker pull out his brother’s pickup. He planned to pick it up in town. For these Montana roads, a truck worked much better. He’d also called the hospital. There was no change in Cyrus’s condition.

  “I would assume it’s a map to the house where my abductors took me sixteen years ago,” Raine said.

  The map was crude at best, hand-drawn as if by a child. He felt a chill the first time she’d showed it to him back at the ranch. He’d had to agree with her when he’d seen it. Maybe someone was trying to help her. Or not.

  “I still think we should go the sheriff,” he’d argued when he’d seen the map. “McCall needs to know what’s going on.”

  “Your cousin is already searching for Lara. She’s a cop. Don’t you think she’s already considered that Lara might have been abducted? Especially after what went down behind the Whitehorse Hotel last night?”

  He’d agreed that she was right and he didn’t want to take a chance with Raine’s life any more than he did Lara’s. The problem was he didn’t trust whoever was sending her this information.

  Raine was the only one they knew of who’d gotten away from her abductors in this area. Orville Cline had confessed to her murder. Raine was living proof of his lie—and knew that he hadn’t taken her.

  Wasn’t that more than enough motive to get her back to where it had all happened to tie up the loose end in the cruelest of all ways? By making her relive her abduction through Lara English?

  His heart broke for the child Raine had been just as it did for Lara. He swore he would see that these people paid—or he’d die trying.

  “You don’t think this house is where he took Lara, do you?” Cordell asked.

  “No. The CBA would be too afraid to give that up—if she even knows. No, I think there is something at the house on the map that she wants me to find, though.”

  He glanced over at her, hearing the fear in her voice she was trying hard to hide. “You never told me what happened after you were found miles from Whitehorse,” he said, not comfortable with his own thoughts right now.

  But he needed to know everything about Emily Frank if he planned to help Raine. When she didn’t answer, he glanced over at her. “I’m sorry, if you’d rather not tell me—”

  “No. I want to tell you. If I had come forward before this, maybe Lara English wouldn’t have been abducted.”

  “You can’t remember what your abductors look like,” he pointed out. “And as you said, these people are chameleons, blending in with society. All you would have done was put yourself in the line of fire earlier.”

  RAINE COULDN’T ARGUE THAT, but the truth was she hadn’t been ready to face this. She wasn’t sure she was now.

  But she knew she had to be honest with Cordell if they hoped to find Lara before it was too late. Together they might stand a chance, a slim one, but at least a chance. And she knew he had a lot of questions. Anyone would.

  “I told you Emily didn’t remember anything. That wasn’t true.”

  “Raine, you don’t have to—”

  “I don’t remember what they looked like. Either I didn’t see their faces or I didn’t want to remember them.

  That night while the thunder and lightning boomed around me, I wrote the pages in my notebook to keep myself calm. I guess that’s when the idea came to me how I could escape.”

  “You didn’t try before that?”

  She shook her head and smiled over at him.

  “I can’t imagine having the presence of mind to do that. Not at age ten. I would have cried and screamed myself hoarse.”

  “You never know what you would do in a situation like that,” she said. “I was a foster child. I’d been thrown into so many uncomfortable situations, I don’t think I was as terrified as a child who’d never known adversity. Also I was used to being alone and pretty much taking care of myself.”

  “What happened after you escaped?”

  “I found my way to the highway, followed it until I came to a farmhouse. It was early in the morning. I hid in the back of a pickup that was running in the yard. After the truck pulled out of the yard, I fell asleep curled under an old tarp and when I woke up I was in a town I had never seen before.

  “As it turned out, I was in Williston, North Dakota, not even in Montana any longer, hundreds of miles away from Whitehorse. When the driver went inside a store, I climbed out of the back of the truck. I must have been a real mess when a nice woman found me. I was running a fever, sick and weak. They were afraid I wouldn’t survive.”

  “They didn’t know you and how strong you are,” he said, his voice filled with admiration.

  Raine felt her face heat from it and hurried on with her story. “The Chandlers took me in. It was Mrs. Chandler who’d found me and got me medical attention. They say I didn’t speak for months and by then I was smart enough to make up a story so I never had to go back to that foster home in Whitehorse. I think I knew I would be abducted again or sent away to possibly somewhere worse.”

  “The Chandler
s were nice to you?”

  “Tom and Minnie Chandler were in their forties. Their only son was away at college. I think they were thankful to have a child under their roof. They adopted me after a time. They let me chose my own name. Raine seemed appropriate since the storm was what had saved me.”

  Cordell shook his head, awed by her story. “They never put it together that you were Emily Frank, this girl missing from a town just across the hi-line a few hundred miles?”

  “Emily was believed to have run away. There wasn’t much of a network for missing children sixteen years ago. That was before Amber Alert. And as I’ve said, from my experience, foster children often run away or fall through the cracks. I’d only been with the Ambersons in Whitehorse one night. They didn’t know anything about me except that I’d run away from the last two homes I’d been in.”

  “You’re saying they weren’t invested in looking for you.” He couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “So there wasn’t much of a search for you. Still you would think that someone in Williston would have heard about the missing girl. The Chandlers had to wonder why no one was looking for you.”

  She smiled. “When Minnie found me, I was wearing a hand-me-down worn dress that was too big for me and no shoes. I think she realized when no one came looking for me that I was better off with her and that’s why she didn’t try to find out where I came from.”

  Cordell’s thought exactly. “I’m glad they were good to you. They must have been relieved when Orville Cline confessed to abducting and killing Emily Frank. They probably thought you were safe.”

  “We all did,” Raine said. “I was at college when I read about Orville Cline’s arrest and his confessions. I wanted to believe he was the one. It was easier than believing that the people were still out there, still taking little girls. I thought he lied about killing…” her voice caught “…Emily because he didn’t want anyone looking for me. It never dawned on me that he could have made a deal with my abductors.”

  Cordell heard the pain in her voice, the guilt. “You can’t blame yourself. After what you’d been through, you had to know that if you did anything, they could find you.”

  “But they still found me, didn’t they?”

  “How? That’s what I don’t understand,” he said.

  “I’ve been asking myself that. I assume someone put two and two together in Williston.”

  “Is it possible the truck driver saw you when you got out of the back of his pickup?”

  “Maybe. I jumped out and ran and hid. But wouldn’t you think he would have told someone?”

  “Maybe he did. Maybe he told your foster parents back in Whitehorse, but since it appeared you’d merely run away…”

  Raine nodded. “I’ve known all along I would have to talk to them eventually. But first I have to see where this map leads me.”

  Cordell could hear how anxious she was as he looked down the road they’d just turned down and wondered where they were being led—and, more to the point, by whom?

  He saw Raine glance at her watch. She’d told him that if Lara could be found within seventy-two hours, she stood the best chance of being found alive.

  They’d already lost precious hours. He could almost hear the clock ticking.

  Chapter Eight

  Cordell looked out at the growing darkness, his anxiety growing.

  “According to the map, it’s just a little farther,” Raine said in the pickup cab next to him. “He wouldn’t want the house to be too far from town and yet far enough away and remote enough that he knew no one would accidentally stumble across it.”

  Cordell had insisted they stop in Whitehorse long enough to trade the rental car for the pickup. The moment he’d realized the roads would be passable that they could leave the ranch, he’d called a towing service in town.

  The wrecker had gotten to the pickup in the ditch, just minutes before they did. They’d followed the tow truck driver into town and made the switch, losing only a little daylight.

  From Highway 2 they’d turned off a dirt road, then another, each road getting smaller and less used until now they were in a creek bottom of narrow ravines, rocky bluffs and twisting juniper-choked coulees.

  “The next turn should be up here on the right,” Raine said.

  “I don’t see a road,” he said, squinting through the twilight. Deep shadows hunkered in the underbrush along the creek.

  “There it is.” Just then a whitetail deer bolted from the brush and ran directly in front of the pickup, startling them both. He hit the brakes. Raine let out a breath as the deer swept past unhurt.

  Cordell didn’t like the closed-in feel of this river bottom. Nor did he trust that whoever had sent Raine the map was interested in confessing and ending this. Ending this, maybe. But with someone dying and he feared that someone the informant had in mind was Raine Chandler, aka Emily Frank.

  The road dropped down into a thicket of stunted aspen trees along the creek bottom. A perfect place for an ambush, he thought as he pulled a pistol from under his brother’s seat, checked the clip and rested the weapon next to him as he turned down the road.

  He noticed that Raine had apparently thought the same thing as she already had her gun resting in her hand, no doubt loaded and ready to fire. It made him feel a little better to realize that she wasn’t putting all of her trust in this CBA.

  She’d tucked away the computer and lowered her window. The air smelled of summer, the grasses tall and green. A wisp of cloud floated along on the breeze against the pale twilight.

  It was one of those perfect Montana summer evenings. He wanted to breathe it all in, to stop by the creek and watch stars come out in the awe-inspiring big sky. He wanted more than anything to not go around the next bend.

  Instead, they were on the hunt for monsters, the worst kind, the kind who hurt children. Just knowing the man and woman who’d hurt Raine were so close by made him homicidal. He feared if he didn’t get them first, they would get Raine.

  As he drove around the bend in the road, he saw the house. Raine saw it, too. She let out a heartbreaking sound. This, he knew, was where her abductors had brought her sixteen years ago.

  RAINE THOUGHT SHE WAS prepared. For so long the abduction had been buried deep enough that she really hadn’t been able to remember anything. Parts of it had come back over the years.

  But there were still holes in her memory, holes she wasn’t so sure she shouldn’t leave empty and dark.

  Unfortunately, her instincts told her that the only way she’d be able to find Lara was if she remembered everything.

  As the pickup’s headlights swept over the abandoned old farmhouse, the past washed over her, taking her breath away, sending her heart hammering as she smelled the dank darkness, felt the aching cold, heard the sound of the door opening. And closing. She knew this house. “Stop!”

  Cordell hit the brakes as she threw open her door.

  She heard him call to her to wait, but the house pulled her to it, metal to magnet. It was as if she no longer could hold back the nightmare. Sixteen years ago she’d believed she would die in this house.

  Behind her, she heard Cordell running after her.

  As she neared the house, she thought she tasted blood.

  The cut lip. She’d forgotten about that, but not about the woman who’d smacked her and told her she’d better do everything the man told her if she knew what was good for her.

  The door to the old place was partially open, a sliver of darkness gaping behind it.

  Cordell caught up with her, shoved a flashlight into her hand. She looked over at him, grateful. He wasn’t going to try to stop her. He knew nothing could, not even him.

  He played the light over the front step with his flashlight, then into the dank musty interior. She turned hers on and moved up the creaking steps. Her fingers ached as she touched the door. It swung open with a creak that sent a blade of ice into her heart. A blast of cold, putrid air rushed out at her.

  “Let me go in first,
” he whispered as he stepped past her.

  The door yawned all the way open. The smell triggered thoughts and feelings and fears that made her pulse pound in her ears and legs weak beneath her. She clutched her gun in one hand, the flashlight in the other and told herself she could do this. She was the little girl who’d survived. She was Emily Frank.

  She’d put off facing this all these years. Now she had no choice. The clue to where they’d find Lara English was here. Why else lead her here?

  To kill you?

  No, she thought as she followed Cordell inside the house. Taunt her, maybe. Terrify her, absolutely. But ultimately, the answer was here.

  The house seemed full of whispers and skittering sounds, creaks and groans. One dark room after another appeared in the beam of their flashlights until she reached the stairs that dropped down into the partial basement.

  “Hell, no,” Cordell said beside her.

  PEPPER WINCHESTER STOOD in the third-floor room in the dark. She didn’t want to turn on the lights. This evening she wasn’t up to reading what her children had scratched in the walls.

  She’d been coming up here for weeks now. As some form of punishment for her sins? Or just because she had nowhere else to go?

  In this room was where she’d let her husband, Call, send their children. It was small and always made her feel closed in. There was a window that faced out toward the ridge where her youngest son had been murdered.

  She looked out it now, barely able to make out the ridge in the growing darkness. It came to her why, after so many years, she’d begun to frequent this horrible reminder of her failure as a mother. It was also a reminder that one of her children had betrayed her in the worst possible way.

  One of her children had helped with the murder of his—or her—youngest sibling. And to make matters worse, she feared one of her own grandchildren had witnessed it from this very room—and kept quiet all these years.

  A rustling sound startled her. Her hand went to her throat before she realized it was only the party hats that had ended up huddled in the far corner. There must be a breeze coming up from the elevator shaft.