Corralled

by B. J Daniels

  She’d gotten away. No one knew where she was. But still she had to look back. The past had been chasing her for so long, she didn’t kid herself that it wasn’t close behind.

  There were no cars close behind them, but that didn’t mean that they wouldn’t be looking for her.

  For a moment, she considered what she’d done. She didn’t know this cowboy, didn’t know where he was taking her or what would happen when they got there.

  This is so like you. Leaping before you look. Not thinking about the consequences of your actions. As if you weren’t in enough trouble already.

  Her mother’s words rang in her ears. The only difference this time was that she wasn’t that fourteen-year-old girl with eleven dollars in the pocket of her worn jean jacket and her only possession a beat-up guitar one of her mother’s boyfriend’s had left behind.

  She’d escaped both times. That time from one of her mother’s amorous boyfriends and with her virginity. This time with her life. At least so far.

  That reckless spirit is going to get you into trouble one day. You mark my words, girl.

  Wouldn’t her mama love to hear that she’d been right. But mama was long dead and Jennifer Blythe James was still alive. If anything, that girl and the woman she’d become was a survivor. She’d gotten out of that dirty desert trailer park where she’d started life. She would get out of this.

  “WHO’S THE VICTIM?” Sheriff Buford Olson asked, sensing the Grizzly Club general manager hovering somewhere at a discreet distance behind him.

  “Martin Sanderson,” Kevin said. “It’s his house.”

  Buford studied the larger bloody footprint next to the body. At a glance, he could see that it didn’t match the soles of the two security guards or the general manager’s, and unlike the other smaller print, this one headed not for the door, but in the opposite direction.

  As he let his gaze follow the path the bloody prints had taken, Buford noted that the man had tried to wipe his shoe clean of the blood on an expensive-looking rug between the deceased and the bar where he was now lounging.

  Buford was startled to see the man making himself at home at the bar with a drink in his hand. How many people had those dumb security guards let in?

  “What the hell?” the sheriff demanded as he pushed himself up from where he’d been squatting beside the body. The “club” gave him a royal pain. He moved toward the bar, being careful not to step on the bloody footprints the man had left behind.

  Buford didn’t need to ask the man’s name. He recognized Jett Akins only because his fourteen-year-old granddaughter Amy had a poster of the man on her bedroom wall. On the poster, Jett had been wearing all black—just as he was this morning—and clutching a fancy electric guitar. Now he clutched a tumbler, the dark contents only half full.

  The one time his granddaughter had played a Jett Atkin’s song for him, Buford had done his best not to show his true feelings. The so-called song had made him dearly miss the 1960s. Seemed to him there hadn’t been any good music since then, other than country-western, of course.

  “Mr. Atkins found the body,” Kevin said from the entryway.

  Jett Atkins looked pale and shaken. He downed the rest of his drink as the sheriff came toward him. Buford would guess it wasn’t his first.

  “You found the body?” he asked Jett, who looked older than he had on his poster. He had dark hair and eyes and a large spider tattoo on his neck and more tattoos on the back of his hands—all that was showing since the black shirt he wore was long-sleeved.

  “I flew in this morning and took a taxi here. When I saw Martin, I called the club’s emergency number.” His voice died off as he looked again at the dead man by the fireplace and poured himself another drink.

  Buford wanted to ask why the hell he hadn’t called 911 instead of calling the club’s emergency number. Isn’t that what a normal person would do when he found a dead body?

  He turned to Kevin again. “How many people were in this house?”

  “Mr. Sanderson had left the names of six approved guests at the gate with the guard, along with special keys for admittance to all the amenities on the grounds,” Kevin said in his annoyingly official tone. “All of those keys have been picked up.”

  “Six people? So where are they?” the sheriff demanded. “And I am going to need a list of their names.” Before he could finish, Kevin withdrew a folded sheet of paper from his pocket and stepped around the sunken living room to hand it to him.

  “These are the names of the guests Mr. Sanderson approved.”

  Buford read off the names. “JJ, Caro, Luca, Bets, T-Top and Jett. Those aren’t names.” He had almost forgotten about Jett until he spoke.

  “They’re stage names,” he said. “Caro, Luca, T-Top, and Bets. It’s from when they were in a band together.”

  Stage names? “Are they actors?” Buford asked, thinking things couldn’t get any worse.

  “Musicians,” Jett said.

  He was wrong about things not getting worse. He couldn’t tell the difference between women’s or men’s names and said as much.

  “They were an all-girl band back in the nineties called Tough as Nails,” Jett said, making it sound as if the nineties were the Stone Age.

  “You don’t know their real names?” Buford asked.

  “They are the only names required for our guards to admit them,” Kevin said. “Here at the Grizzly Club we respect the privacy of our residents.”

  Swearing, Buford wrote down: Caro, Luca, T-Top and Bets in his notebook.

  “What about this JJ?” he asked. “You said he picked up his key yesterday?”

  “She.”

  Buford turned to look at Jett. “She?” he asked thinking one of these women account for the woman’s cowboy-boot print in the dead man’s blood.

  “JJ. She was also in the band, the lead singer,” Jett said.

  The sheriff turned to the club manager again. “I need full legal names for these guests and I need to know where they are.”

  “Only Mr. Sanderson would have that information and he… All I can tell you is that the five approved guests picked up their amenities keys yesterday. This gentleman picked his up at the gate today at 1:16 p.m.,” he said, indicating Jett.

  “Which means the others are all here inside the gates?” Buford asked.

  Kevin checked the second sheet of paper he’d taken from a separate pocket. “All except JJ. She left this morning at 10:16 a.m.”

  Buford glanced over at the body. 10:16 a.m. That had to be close to the time of the murder, since the dead man’s blood was still wet when a woman wearing cowboy boots appeared to have knelt by the body, then sprinted for the front door.

  Blythe pressed her cheek against Logan’s broad back and breathed in the rich scents on the cool spring air. The highway rolled past in a blur, the hours slipping by until they were cruising along the Rocky Mountain front, the high mountain peaks snow-capped and beautiful.

  The farther Blythe and Logan traveled, the fewer vehicles they saw. When they stopped at a café in the small western town of Cut Bank along what Logan said was called the Hi-Line, she was ravenous again.

  “Not many people live up here, huh,” she said as she climbed off the bike. A fan pumped the smell of grease out the side of the café. She smiled to herself as she realized how much she’d missed fried food. All those years of dieting seemed such a waste right now.

  “You think this is isolated?” Logan said with a chuckle. “Wait until you see where we’re headed. They say there are only .03 people per square mile. I suspect it’s less.”

  She smiled, shaking her head as she tried to imagine such wide-open spaces. Even when she’d lived in the desert there had been a large town closeby. Since then she’d lived in congested cities. The thought of so few people seemed like heaven.

  Blythe could tell Logan wanted to ask where she was from, but she didn’t give him a chance as she turned and headed for the café door. She’d seen a few pickups parked out front,
but when she pushed open the door, she was surprised to find the café packed.

  One of the waitresses spotted her, started to come over, then did a double take. She burst into a smile. “I know you. You’re—”

  “Mistaken,” Blythe said, cutting the girl off, sensing Logan right behind her.

  The girl looked confused and embarrassed. “I don’t have a table ready. But you look so much like—”

  Blythe hated being rude, but she turned around and took Logan’s arm. “I’m too hungry to wait,” she said as she pulled him back through the door outside again.

  “Did you know that waitress?” Logan asked, clearly taken aback by the way she’d handled it. “She seemed to know you.”

  She shook her head. “I must have one of those faces or that waitress has been on her feet too long. I didn’t mean to be abrupt with her. I get cranky when I’m hungry. Can we go back to that barbecue place we passed?” She turned and headed for the bike before he could press the subject.

  “You sure you’ve never been to this town before?” he asked as he swung onto the bike.

  “Positive,” she said as she climbed on behind him. It wasn’t until he started the bike that she let herself glance toward the front windows of the café. The young waitress was standing on the other side of the glass.

  Blythe looked away, promising herself that she would make it up to her one day. If she was still alive.

  She shoved that thought away, realizing she should have known someone would recognize her even though she looked different now. It was the eyes, she thought, and closed them as Logan drove back to the barbecue joint.

  It wasn’t until later, after they’d settled into a booth and ordered, that she tried to smooth things over with Logan. She could tell he was even more curious about her. And suspicious, as well.

  “When I was a little girl I used to watch old Westerns on television,” she said, hoping to lighten both of their moods. “I always wanted to run away with a cowboy.”

  “So you’re a romantic.”

  She laughed softly as she looked across the table at him. There were worry lines between the brows of his handsome face.

  “Or was it the running away part that appealed to you?” he asked.

  “That could definitely be part of it. Haven’t you ever wanted to run away?”

  “Sure.” His Montana blue-sky eyes bore into her. “Most people don’t have the luxury of actually doing it though.”

  “Good thing we aren’t most people,” she said, giving him a flirtatious smile.

  “Oh? You think we’re that much alike? So tell me what you’re like and I’ll tell you whether or not you’re right about me.”

  “No big mystery. I like to dance, drive fast, have a good time and I’m always up for an adventure. How else could I have ended up living that little-girl fantasy of running away with a cowboy?”

  “How else indeed,” Logan said, but he was smiling.

  “HAS ANYONE LOOKED IN this house for the four approved guests who are unaccounted for?” the sheriff demanded.

  Kevin was reaching for his phone to check with his security personnel when Buford caught a glint out of the corner of his eye. Turning toward Sanderson’s body, he saw something glittering on the lapel of the dead man’s robe that he hadn’t noticed before.

  Stepping over to the body again, he crouched down next to Sanderson and inspected the lapel. Someone had attached a safety pin to the left-hand lapel of the dead man’s robe. As Buford looked closer, he found a tiny piece of yellow paper still attached to it.

  The killer had left a note? Or was it possible that Sanderson had left a suicide note?

  The thought took him by surprise. He’d been treating this like a homicide. But what if it had been a suicide, complete with note?

  If so, then why would anyone take it? To protect Sanderson? To purposely make it appear to be a homicide?

  A history buff, Buford thought of a famous death that perplexed historians still. Captain Meriwether Lewis of the famed Lewis and Clark Expedition through Montana had suffered from depression that was thought to be the cause of his apparent suicide. But there were still those who believed he’d been murdered.

  Very perplexing, Buford thought as he moved to a small desk in the kitchen. On it was a yellow sticky note pad. The top sheet had been torn in half horizontally, leaving the glued piece and a ragged edge. The paper was the same color as the tiny scrap still caught on the safety pin.

  A blue pen lay beside the pad. Unfortunately there was no slight indentation on the pad. Whoever had written the note had ripped the scrap of paper off first before writing the note.

  “Did anyone remove something that had been pinned to the deceased’s robe?” he asked. Both Kevin, the two guards and Jett swore they hadn’t. From their surprise at the question, Buford suspected they were telling the truth.

  But someone had taken the note.

  Chapter Three

  “So tell me about your life in this isolated place where you live,” Blythe said, steering the conversation away from her as they waited for their barbecue sandwiches.

  Clearly Logan was itching to know who he’d let climb onto the back of his bike. Not that she could blame him. But she wasn’t ready to tell him—if she ever did. Better to split before that.

  “Not much to tell,” he said, as if being as evasive as she was. “I spend most days with cows. Seems I’m either chasing them, feeding them, branding them, birthing them, inoculating them or mending the fence to keep them in.”

  “Sounds wonderful.”

  He laughed. “You obviously haven’t worked on a ranch.”

  The waitress brought their orders and Blythe dived into hers. As she stole a look across the table at him, she thought about how he’d come looking for her at the Grizzly Club, how he hadn’t batted an eyelash when she’d suggested going with him, how he hadn’t really asked anything of her—not even what the devil she was doing taking off across Montana with a stranger. He probably thought she did this kind of thing all the time.

  A thought chilled her to her bones. What if it was no coincidence that he’d come into her life last night?

  No, she thought as she studied him. The cowboy had no idea who she was or what he was getting himself into.

  She jumped as her cell phone blurted out a song she’d come to hate. Worse, she hadn’t even realized she still had the phone in her jacket pocket. She’d thought she’d left it along with her purse and the keys in the car.

  Logan was looking at her expectantly. “Aren’t you going to take that?”

  She had no choice. She reached into her pocket. As she pulled out the phone, the scrap of wadded up yellow note paper fell out. It tumbled under the booth.

  The first few refrains of the song began again. She hurriedly turned the phone off without even bothering to check who was calling. She had a pretty good idea, not that it mattered.

  The song died off, the silence in the café almost painful, but she saw a girl at the counter looking at her frowning slightly as if trying to either place the song—or her. The girl, Blythe had noticed earlier, had been visiting with the cook.

  “What if that was important?” Logan asked.

  “It wasn’t.”

  She picked up her fork and began eating again, even though she’d lost her appetite. She could feel his gaze on her. She thought about the scrap of notepaper she’d dropped and what had been written on it. She had shoved it into her pocket earlier and forgotten about it.