Last Resort

by Hannah Alexander

  “We can tell Greg to do that as soon as he finishes with Pearl, but let him do it. You don’t need to go back to Cedar Hollow tonight.”

  “Yes, I do, and would you lighten up a little? Taylor Jackson’s there.” She glanced down the hallway toward the waiting room, then decided to use the rear exit. She wasn’t up to facing family right now.

  Nathan followed her. “I’m not going to stay here while you traipse off to the hollow alone.”

  “Don’t be so overcautious.” She suppressed a smile at his glare of outrage. She reached up to touch his shoulder. “Nathan, nobody’s going to attack me, not with Taylor Jackson on duty. I’ll be okay.” Still, she couldn’t deny the warmth that spread through her at his protest. “Look, if you and I both take off, Carissa will think we’ve abandoned her. You heard her in there. She’s still terrified, and she’s not covering it that well. What happens if she feels we’ve left her alone?”

  “You stay with her and let me go. Just tell me where to search,” he suggested.

  “I’m the best candidate for the job, since I know the house so well.” She could read his inner conflict by the worry in his eyes, and she clasped his right hand in both of hers. “Thanks for caring. It’ll be dark before too long, so I’ve got to get going now if I want time to search.”

  He held her gaze for a long moment. “I’m not going to talk you out of this, am I?”

  “No. If you don’t let me use your truck, I’ll find some other way to get out there.”

  He pulled his hand from hers and touched her cheek. “Be careful, Noelle.”

  Impulsively, she stood on tiptoe and kissed his chin, scratchy with two days’ growth of beard. “I’ll be back, don’t worry.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  The rain had ended by the time Noelle drove through the gate onto Cooper land and splashed through the rising level of water that gurgled over the low-water bridge. A noisy duet of crickets serenaded her from the woods with a high-pitched cree-cree, a sound that always accompanied autumn dusk in the Ozarks. It created a minor-key harmony with the song of tires on damp pavement and reminded Noelle of gentle autumn evenings when she was a kid, walking with Nathan along this lane, talking late into the night—or until someone called to them across the hollow to get their homework done or to go to bed.

  The breeze felt good, filtering through the window. The scent of freshly washed earth and the living green forest drifted through the cab of the truck. If not for the sense of loss that Noelle associated with this place, she could almost miss it. One could be seduced into believing this was a place of peace and rest; one could be fooled.

  She crested the final rise before the descent into the small valley and caught the outline of the sawmill roof against the gray sky, surrounded by the forest. The last of the daylight faded and gloom deepened around her. The breeze grew cooler, and Noelle closed the window.

  She allowed her foot to slide from the accelerator. The truck hesitated before coasting down the incline, as if drawn by some invisible force more deeply into the hollow. The closer Noelle came to the mill, the more alone she felt, and the more she wished she’d let Nathan come with her.

  Cedar Hollow covered a lot of territory, after all, and even as she caught sight of Taylor Jackson’s light-green, mud-spackled Jeep parked in front of the sawmill, Noelle knew the ranger might be almost anywhere.

  Perhaps she and Nathan should have told Cecil everything. Couldn’t he, at least, be trusted? Hadn’t she grown up with him? Hadn’t she known Melva since they were kids? Perhaps Carissa’s sense of familiarity with her attacker could be explained by a scent—a cologne, or shampoo, maybe, the same brand used by someone in the family, or a friend.

  The truck drifted to a stop at the bottom of the hill, and Noelle stepped on the gas and continued. She had come here to search.

  But for what?

  Did the past hold some clues? Was there a connection between the deaths ten years ago and her young cousin’s abduction last night? Carissa had been doing research on that past when she was taken.

  A hoot owl called an invocation over the shadowed evening as Noelle drove past the mill and entered a tunnel of green where the pavement ended and muddy gravel began. This lane led to Cecil and Melva’s house. She hadn’t gone far when a loud honk startled her so badly she slammed on the brake and cried out. Glancing out her window, she saw two geese stalking out of the woods toward her, flapping their wings in a show of bravado.

  Noelle slumped against the headrest, adrenaline surging through her body. The blare of the noisy geese underlined the tension that sang through her like tight dulcimer strings.

  “Back off,” she told the glaring geese, waiting for the dogs to enter the fray. They didn’t.

  She drove past the white picket fence, then around to the backyard. Anyone arriving in the hollow wouldn’t see the truck unless he or she drove to the back. And the geese down on the driveway might alert Noelle to any approach. She wouldn’t count on it, but she’d listen for it, just in case.

  Cecil’s house was unlocked, like all the houses and buildings on Cooper land, and she glanced over her shoulder with guilty nervousness as she opened the front door on silent hinges. She knew the disarray in the living room was unusual for this household. Cecil’s insistence on tidiness had been a family joke since he’d inherited this place in his twenties—when his parents, Aunt Harriet and Uncle Todd, ripped a branch from the family tree and moved to Texas to follow Todd’s dream of owning a dude ranch. In fact, they had left only a few months before the accident that left Cecil in charge of the property and sawmill.

  Noelle went to Carissa’s bedroom and pulled open the same dresser drawer that Melva had opened this morning. Shuffling through Carissa’s papers, she realized her young cousin’s creative writing had improved over the past months. There were several school test papers marked with big red A’s, and a five-page story about her relationship with her horse. Noelle skimmed the story, then folded it and set it aside.

  She still felt Carissa could have stumbled across some incriminating information during her research for her report. She certainly hadn’t kept her investigation quiet. Maybe she’d spoken to others besides family—such as employees, past and present? Hideaway locals? Friends of the family?

  Could the tragedies in their history have been something more than accidents?

  Noelle found the poem Melva had shown her earlier and pocketed it. Leaving the room, she glanced out the kitchen window. The sky, low with clouds, had darkened to gunmetal. She quickened her steps up the staircase to the master bedroom.

  Noelle’s grandfather had built this house with his own hands. He had lovingly carved the oak handrail for the stairs and fitted the molding to the door casings. When Uncle Todd married Harriet, Grandpa and Grandma graciously gave them the house and moved to town, where they purchased the Victorian-style house in which Jill now lived. Although it had been Pearl’s right to move into the house in town after the deaths of her brother Joseph and his wife, she’d opted to remain in her house on Cooper land, where she’d lived all her life. “It’s where I belong,” she’d told the rest of the family.

  Noelle felt a swell of empathy for her great-aunt. The shock of loss must have affected her even more deeply than it had the rest of the family, secluded as she had been in this hollow for most of her sixty-seven years. Jill had always contended that Pearl stayed so she could keep watch over the operations, make sure the ranch and the sawmill were running smoothly.

  The last of the day’s dreary illumination crept through the wall of windows in the master bedroom, the apricot sheers at the window lending their color to the light. The bedspread, too, was apricot. The delicate ornaments that decorated the elaborately carved dresser and chest of drawers showed no sign of male influence.

  Noelle felt like a voyeur as she took in her surroundings. Melva had a taste for ultrafeminine decor.

  She opened the dresser drawers and methodically worked her way through feminine underclothing,
winter sweaters, scarves. No papers, no clues. Next she searched the bureau, glancing warily out the window, listening for any sounds of approach. She could imagine Melva’s hurt reaction if she suddenly arrived home and found Noelle snooping through her private things.

  The problem was, sound didn’t carry well up here, not through closed windows to an upstairs bedroom. Aunt Harriet used to brag about how well the triple-paned windows blocked the sound of the whippoorwills in the wee hours of the morning.

  Noelle was reaching for the headboard of the queen-size bed when a sound stopped her. Had one of the geese honked? She held her breath, listening, and heard another honk. Definitely a goose.

  She opened the sliding door in the headboard, revealing a shelf that contained a stack of papers, old envelopes and a dog-eared paperback romance novel crowded into the corner. She reached for the stack of papers, only to stop, listening. The lone goose honked again.

  Noelle took the papers with her to the window and peered out, praying Cecil and Melva had not decided to return home for the night.

  Only silence greeted her. She could see no sign of an automobile on the muddy lane and heard no splash of tires in the slick mess. She couldn’t let fear stop her now—she had to finish her search tonight, for there might not be another chance.

  Remaining at the window for better light meant no need to turn on a lamp and announce her presence to anyone who might be in the hollow. She shuffled through the papers in her hand.

  She stopped at Harvey Sand’s return address on one of the envelopes. It was addressed simply to “Mrs. Cooper.” No street address, so it obviously had been hand-delivered. The envelope was empty. Noelle shuffled through the rest of the papers and found nothing more of interest. After returning the stack to the headboard, she made a brief check of the remaining papers. Picking up the romance novel to put it back, she noted the corner of a folded sheet of paper tucked into the middle of the book. Probably just a marker. But Noelle pulled the sheet out.

  It was a photocopy of a ten-year-old cashier’s check in the amount of $100,000, made out to Frazier Logging Company, signed by Cecil Cooper. Across the top, someone had neatly printed: This is just the appetizer. You’ll get the full course when you pay for it.

  “What on earth…?”

  The sound of a muffled clunk startled Noelle. The paper slipped from her fingers to the bed as she jerked toward the window. A car door? She shoved the photocopy back into the book and put the papers back where she’d found them.

  She raced silently out of the bedroom and down the stairs, expecting at any second to encounter her cousin and his wife walking through the front door. But no one came. And no cars were parked outside. So what had she heard?

  Brush rustled beneath the trees at the edge of the backyard, and Noelle froze. She turned toward the sound and spotted a cow rubbing against the fence to get at the edges of grass that extended from the yard.

  Impatient with herself, Noelle returned to the truck. She had another house to search; she couldn’t afford to panic now and go speeding back to town.

  The track to the old house was crowded with blackberry brambles and weeds that scraped along the muddy sides of the truck like fingernails on a chalkboard. Noelle parked, opened Nathan’s glove compartment and found a hefty battery lantern. She flicked it on and blinked at the brightness, then glanced out the window at the sky. A sunset of pink and mauve cirrus clouds drifted across a section of horizon. Good. That meant the cloud cover was lifting, and the weather would clear.

  The family cemetery between the old house and Noelle’s parking spot was well-tended. Fifteen gravestones, dating back to the late 1800s, were clean and free of grass. Pearl had taken care of the cemetery for the past ten years, inheriting the job from her brother, just as she had inherited control of the property from him.

  Noelle stepped over to the waist-high black marble monument her father had selected when her mother died. Now he lay beside her. Noelle put her hand on the smooth corner of the stone. She’d been so young when her mom had died—far too young to have the presence of mind to consider how her daddy had been affected by the loss of his wife.

  Now she realized that he’d dealt with his pain by burying himself in work. Typically male. Typically Cooper. It had become a habit he’d never broken. Until his death, he spent most of his time at the mill, leaving Jill to tend to Noelle. It had been a mistake for all of them.

  When Jill’s classmates left for college, she had stayed home to care for Noelle, and her firm hand remained planted on her younger sister for the next three years. Even after she’d enrolled in nursing school in Springfield, Jill insisted on coming home every weekend, denying herself any extracurricular activities. In fact, Jill’s rock-hard determination to oversee the nurturing, education and discipline of her little sister had led to more than one failed romance…and a broken engagement. In spite of all Jill’s efforts—or because of them—Noelle had rebelled with a vengeance. And she was still paying the price for that rebellion, suffering the ongoing fallout from a broken marriage and a failed career.

  Before going on to the old house, Noelle glanced at the inscriptions on some of the other monuments. Grandma’s read: She gave all she had to the family. Grandpa’s: The gifted die young.

  That was a chilling thought, considering Nathan felt Noelle was gifted.

  Pearl had not always seen eye-to-eye with her brother, but the epitaph obviously bore testament to the esteem in which she’d held him.

  The well-worn footpath to the cemetery twisted between two tall towers of cliff, extensions of a mother cliff behind the cemetery. In the deepening dusk, shadows as dark as blackberries stained the imposing walls of dirt and rock. A knobby boulder at the edge of the left cliff seemed to stand as a sentinel over the gravestones.

  As a little girl, Noelle had once been nervous about this stretch of pathway, her imagination peopling it with all kinds of monsters despite how much she and Nathan loved playing here, precisely because it inspired imagination. For Noelle, at times, it inspired too much. For some reason, this evening she was walking beneath the shadows of the cliffs with the same quickened heartbeat she’d felt all those years ago.

  Her heart rate refused to slow down, even as she approached the old home place. She stepped up onto the wooden-planked front porch that encircled three sides of the wood-frame house. The back nestled into the face of the cliff, with barely enough room to walk.

  She pushed open the front door, resisting the urge to switch on the battery lantern as she stepped inside. This had been her home for almost eighteen years; she had nothing to fear.

  She needed to keep reminding herself of that. This roomy, three-bedroom house had withstood many storms in the shelter of the sturdy, clefted mountainside that abutted it. Built nearly a century ago, it had housed generations of Coopers, as had Pearl’s house a few hundred feet to the east. The hardwood floor, now buckled with age, creaked and rocked as Noelle stepped through the front room toward the bedroom. As she had expected, memories assaulted her. She remembered how empty the house had felt when Jill left for college.

  The house darkened with night, and she switched on the lantern. The electricity had been disconnected after her father’s death.

  Carissa had found that strange poem up in the attic, and Harvey’s box of records was up there as well. What else would Noelle find? For generations, Coopers had stored their surplus clothing, furniture and every other kind of junk in this attic. Could someone have stashed something that Carissa should never have discovered?

  But why would anyone do that? Why not just destroy any evidence?

  Noelle pulled the rope that released the sturdy attic steps, each one unfolding and falling into place with a creak-thunk-creak-thunk. Holding her lantern high to penetrate the black depths, she climbed up to the attic floor and peered around the familiar, cavernous room, with its shadowy corners and dormer windows. Wax-coated storage boxes lined the low walls. An old bedside stand, top drawer half open, beckoned from b
eneath a window that shimmered in the purple-black hues of a dying sunset.

  The floor creaked as she crossed to the stand and peered into the drawer. It held papers, scattered in an untidy mix, as if someone had quickly and carelessly shuffled through them. She sifted through old checks, deposit slips and two paperback novels before she found a folded bundle of ledger sheets, familiar because the sheets matched the ledger that she and Nathan had studied in the sawmill this morning. Noelle unfolded the papers and studied the neat, small printing. The dates were last year’s, and the bottom line showed a good profit.

  In the middle of the stack, Noelle found an envelope from the Hideaway Bank, postmarked three months after the last entry in the ledger sheets. It contained a copy of a cashier’s check, signed by Melva, made out to Frazier Logging for fifteen thousand dollars. Why did Frazier Logging receive cashier’s checks when the other outfits received their fees in company checks?

  The trail ended, so Noelle stuffed the folded papers into the pocket of her jeans and burrowed through a storage box filled with assorted personal effects. She found one small, cloth-bound journal, containing pages of dated entries written in a familiar, barely readable script. Then Noelle spied the file box from Harvey’s office. Someone must have moved it, since Carissa had recalled tripping over it, and it was well out of the way now.

  Had someone checked out the contents of the box since Carissa had been here?

  A downstairs floorboard creaked. Noelle stiffened, freezing in place. Someone was in the house.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Nathan stood in a shadowed corner of the clinic ward absently staring out the window. Lights along the shore shimmered on the surface of the lake. This large room had previously been a clothing shop next to the clinic, but earlier this summer, the building was donated to the city to be used as a medical facility.