Markov asked, “And he was conscious when you found him?”
“Yup. Asked ’im what he et, and he showed me his hand. But he’s a good little rider from way back and got up into the saddle okay, with a boost from me. Didn’t pass out until we were halfway here.”
“Why did you come this way? Was this the closest route back to the airstrip?”
“There’s other roads, but they don’t lead nowhere near the search camp. I come across the creek where I showed you, followed the cutline and come out when missy over there was driving by. Not more’n twenty minutes. My old Rebel is a good goer.” Susan glared at the constable. “I yelled for help all the way. What’s the point of having searchers traipsing over my land if none of them comes when I yell?”
When it was Lacey’s turn, she described seeing the rider waving at her. “I turned off the road, thinking it was someone who needed a ride back to the SAR base. I recognized Susan from halfway across this meadow and saw she had someone up in front of her. I didn’t know if he was unconscious or dead.” That word cost her a moment’s deep breathing before she kicked her brain back into report mode. “When she came closer, I saw it was Tyrone. We got him onto the ground, and I did a quick first aid check. He was wheezing. He had a rash around his mouth. There wasn’t much I could do for him except put him into the recovery position, monitor his breathing and pulse, and hope like hell that help got here fast.”
Her helpless feelings she didn’t tell him, or how she’d counted the seconds sitting on the hot, dusty field, listening for each breath, watching Ty’s hand whiten in hers, seeing his lips turn bluer than a day-old bruise.
“You didn’t try to do CPR?”
“With his airway swollen shut, breathing for him would do nothing. I was prepared to do chest compressions until the paramedics got here. Of course I was hoping it wouldn’t come to that. It would have been devastating to find him alive and then watch him …” She couldn’t bring herself to say the word.
Susan said, “Buck up now, missy,” and handed her a leather-wrapped flask from a saddlebag.
Lacey didn’t know what to expect, but she took a slug, anyway. It was lukewarm tea, stronger than tar and sweeter than pancake syrup. She took a second swallow. Susan had probably made it that way in case she found Ty and Orrin in shock. The sugar was just as welcome to Lacey at this moment, although she might have to sand-blast the tea off her teeth later. As she handed it back, she saw noticed that Susan’s patient old horse was loaded down with a Western saddle, a rifle in its scabbard, a pack, and a bedroll tied on behind.
“You were camping out?”
Susan sniffed. “Waste of daylight going home and back every day.”
“So you’ve been searching your land the whole time?”
Susan held out her hand for the flask. “Gotta get back to it. Still old Orrin to find. Not that he’s any loss.”
Markov held up the map. “You’re sure this is the area you found the boy in?”
Susan gave him a look that should have shrivelled him where he stood. “My land. You think I don’t know where I was?”
“Right.” Markov backed away. “I’ll show the search teams so they can mark off a new grid.”
Susan took a slug from the flask and passed it back to Lacey. “Want some grub? Gotta trail mix in here somewhere.”
“No, thank you. I had lunch just before I left.” Lacey didn’t mention that her bacon-wrapped scallops might be coming back up any minute. That green barf of Ty’s had been smelly and frothy and altogether disgusting.
Susan looked away to the east at the cutline she’d come out of. “Thing is, that boy was not more’n a mile from where I found his big brother that time.”
“You found one of the boys after Orrin dropped him off?”
“Yep. Young Earl, near the same age as Tyrone is now. ’Course, he’d only been out one night. Going in the wrong direction he was, when I found him, hungry and scared spitless. I took him up yonder, but he wouldn’t let me bring him in his gate. Said his old man would beat him if he knew Earl needed help.”
“He would have, too,” Lacey said. “By all I’ve heard he was an abusive old bastard.”
“Was? You think he ain’t coming back?”
“I don’t know. Ben and Bart have gone over all the places they can remember being dumped by him and come up empty. They’ve asked Earl everything he can remember, too. But I bet he didn’t tell them you brought him home that time he was lost overnight.”
“Your money’s safe there.” Susan’s eyes narrowed. “Young Earl never told me where he started from. How far you figure a boy that age can walk in a day?”
“In the forest? I’d be surprised if he could cover five kilometres. Maybe more if he stuck to the cutlines and off-road vehicle trails.”
“That’s what I reckoned, too. Four days at four miles is only a sixteen-mile range. Less, considering young Tyrone likely wandered around some. Earl, now, he was only gone a day or thereabouts.”
“Thirty hours.” Lacey gazed northward toward the undulating lands that would some day belong to Bart and Ben. Where Orrin had been last seen. “Are you thinking Orrin might have dropped Ty off at the same spot as Earl? And then something happened to Orrin before he made it back to the main road?”
“You ain’t stupid, I’ll give you that.” Susan crammed her hat back over her grey hair. “Earl only coulda walked maybe ten miles from where he started. If I can figure that out, I can find the crazy old man.” She went back to her patient horse and swung into the saddle. “I’d be obliged if you’d leave a message at my gate when you find out how the young lad’s doing.”
She swung the horse’s head around. Soon she had vanished along the cutline.
Markov came running. “Where’s she going?”
“She thinks she can backtrack Ty’s wandering to his father.”
Markov blotted his forehead on his sleeve. “I hope she gave us the right coordinates, because we can’t follow her trail that fast. Off-road vehicles are coming to take the search teams in. They’ll fan out across the creek.”
Lacey nodded. “I’m supposed to be meeting my boss in Cochrane. Do you need anything else from me right now?”
He shook his head. “Thanks, McCrae. You did good.”
“All the credit goes to old Susan. Imagine, at her age, sleeping on the ground in a forest where cougars and grizzlies prowl, rather than waste an hour of search time going home and back. She hates Orrin, but she’s going to go find him, anyway.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Jan struggled upward through the weight of sleep, her thoughts tumbling over each other like rocks in a grinder. She’d kept it together through the drive home, turning Michael over to his father, telling Jake Tyrone had been found, but not Orrin. Then Rob had brought her home, dragged her into the house, and sent her to bed. Now she lay in her darkened room, her aching eyes protected by her sleep mask and her whole body immobilized by the blankets like a truckload of gravel had been dumped on her bed. Her skin hurt. Her hair hurt. Her limbs wouldn’t respond to her mental commands. She was paralyzed, and even the pulse of blood in her veins rasped on her over-wired senses. Somewhere nearby, a cement mixer was running. She drifted through the fragments in her head, wondering why the house wasn’t finished yet, or were they building an extension and she had just forgotten?
After an age, the noise stopped. Her mouth was dry as the Drumheller Badlands, and she had to pee. She wiggled her right arm out from under the gravity-enhanced covers. Her left arm came slowly up after it. As her long nerves began at last to wake up, she experimentally wiggled her toes. From there to rolling over on her side was another eternity. Her joints grated like C-3PO’s when he had come through a sandstorm. She managed to push up her sleep mask, and the thin lines of light around the curtains told her the sun had moved west. How late was it? The sound of the distant cement mixer came again, and this time she recognized it: the blender in the kitchen. There was no smell of cooking, no sound of mu
sic, just a quiet house with the intermittent thunder of a distant appliance. After more self-coaxing, she managed to get herself out of bed and eventually groped her way along the walls to the living room.
Rob appeared in the kitchen doorway. “Oh good, you’re up. Go straight to the couch, and I’ll bring your meds. You’re about an hour overdue, as near as I can figure.”
An hour? That explained why her limbs wouldn’t move easily. Without the new medication, every cell in her body was struggling to draw nutrients from her bloodstream. Limited fluids, sugars, and oxygen meant every muscle was stuck in a brownout. She’d be better physically in a few minutes, if not mentally. She settled into her pillows on the couch, accepted the water glass from Rob, and turned her head so her weak throat muscles could get the pill down. Then she lay back and closed her eyes again, covering them with her hands to hide from the primrose glow of sunset. Soon …
As the drugs worked through her system, she wiggled her toes more freely and squished her shoulders back amid the pillows until her neck and head were more comfortable. Sounds ceased to hurt her ears, but the light still stung her eyes.
Rob came back. “Phase two: carrot ginger smoothie with that medicinal food powder in it.”
“Oh, gross. I hate that chalky taste. You would, too, if you’d had to live on it for three years.”
“Not the way I do it.” He handed her the glass of bright orange goop. “You know when you’re this crashed, your stomach doesn’t have the energy to digest real food. So get that down you and see how you feel.”
Just lifting the glass was a workout, but as the smoothie flooded her starving cells with nutrients, she experimentally flexed each muscle group. She winced. “Photographing those few pictures was too much for my arms on top of the bits of driving I did before you met us.”
“The emotional wallop was probably the worst part,” he said. “Having to hunt for Michael used up most of your energy too early, and you were running on fumes from that point on. But you got through, you did your job, and you didn’t let Michael know how destroyed you were.”
“I was afraid he’d think me as frail as his mother and start worrying I would die on him, too.”
“He’s more resilient than you might think.” Rob took the empty glass from her. “If Tyrone pulls through, it will help a lot.”
“Is there any word from anyone?”
“I heard your phone ping, but I didn’t look.”
Jan groped on the coffee table and checked her messages. One from Terry: not home tonight. A second from Lacey: Ty is responding to treatment. He can’t speak yet but he’s out of the woods, pardon the pun.
Tears washed the remaining grit from Jan’s eyes.
“Bad news?” asked Rob.
“No.” She repeated the message. “I’ll let Michael know. What a relief! Now all I have to do is get my head back in the video analysis game. Every time I look at those videos I feel like Sisyphus, rolling the boulder up a hill, knowing it’s going to come rolling back down with absolutely nothing to show for all my efforts.”
“Then leave it,” said Rob. “There’s nothing you need to do until morning.”
She lay back for another while, marking time by Rob’s puttering around as he cleaned up the kitchen. When he returned with tea for them both, she said, “I could be looking at that picture from Jake’s garage-cam again. There’s something about the shape of the head that keeps bugging me. Like I’ve seen it elsewhere.” She dictated a text to her phone: Lacey, have you got more stills or video footage of that person from Jake’s garage? I’ll look at them as soon as I’m fit for duty again. If you can round up staff head shots, or the backs of their heads from any other cameras, that would help me make comparisons. It wasn’t much, but it felt good to have a next step planned.
She was lying there in a half doze, her brain skipping from thought to image to half-formed plan, when feet thumped on the deck. Hammering started on the patio door.
Rob came running through the room. He opened the door and said, “Shut the fuck up, man. Jan’s resting.” He went outside, closing the door after him. Murmurs came through the kitchen window farther along the deck. Okay, nothing to do with her.
She was drifting off again when a man’s voice said loudly, “I have to see her. I have to explain about this afternoon.”
Oh, crap. Chad. Please don’t let Rob let him in.
Rob said, “She’s had enough of your fucking drama for one day.”
After a bit he returned. Jan opened her eyes. “Was that Chad?”
“Yup. I told him —”
“I heard. Fierce.”
“Did you want to talk to him tonight? Because I told him to come back tomorrow.”
“Oh.” Jan yawned. “That’s fine. I suppose I’ll have to tell him he’s not —” Almost too late, she thought better of mentioning Michael’s paternity. “Not ever to take Michael off the grounds again. Do you know, I briefly wondered if he was in league with Kitrin’s mother? She knew him almost as well as we did, and if she thought she could use him to get her grandson … it would be ugly, is all.”
“No shit.” The front doorbell rang. Rob stalked toward the foyer. “If that’s him back, I swear I’ll get violent.”
When he returned, though, Lacey was behind him. Jan struggled to sit up. “What are you doing here? Not bad news?”
Lacey slid to the carpet and propped her back against an armchair. “Everything’s okay, as far as I know. Wayne gave me the night off. He’s going to stay at the ranch instead.”
Rob looked her over with a critical eye. “You’ve been through the wars all right. Tea, or something cold?”
“Beer?”
He nodded and went out. Jan stretched out and pulled her afghan up to her chin. With Lacey there was no need to pretend she was anything but flattened. “I’m glad you weren’t hurt last night and thrilled that Ty is safe in hospital. So Wayne gave you the night off to recuperate?”
Lacey nodded. “Or he’s been adding up how much he has to pay me for being there twenty-four-seven.” Her hand went to her throat, as it often did when she was stressed. “Good news: he offered to put me on staff as of September first. He was going to wait until I pass my private investigations exam, but he’ll take my word for it that I can do it by Christmas and is making me staff now so I can get benefits. I haven’t had benefits since I left the RCMP.”
That was something Jan had never considered about her single neighbour’s existence: no spouse with a generous benefits package. In Alberta, with the country’s highest rates for dental and massage and a whole lot of other services, that was a significant handicap. “Great news! What are you going to do first?”
“Get my teeth cleaned. They feel disgusting.” Lacey rubbed her throat again. “And maybe find a therapist who deals with PTSD.”
Jan nodded sympathetically. Years of witnessing traumatic events on the job could leave someone with PTSD, all right. Plus there was Lacey’s ex-husband, whom Dee had warned her never to ask about. Then Lacey had almost been killed last summer at the museum, right on top of finding her best friend near death in a ditch. Just yesterday she’d been beaten up, and today she had snatched a child from the very brink of death. If anyone needed therapy, she did, and yet she still got up every day and helped people to the best of her ability. The RCMP had lost a valuable asset when she quit.
Rob came back with a beer for Lacey and a whisky for himself. He said, “I’ll be outside if you need anything,” and went to the deck, closing the patio doors behind him.
Jan watched Lacey take a first appreciative swig. “Did you get my message about video from Jake’s? That picture you sent me doesn’t match anybody I know on the staff. I enhanced the colour and contrast and blew it up big to look for a birthmark or something unique to help with identification. If I had more footage I might be able to measure the ear cartilage or hazard a height estimate from the person’s stride.”
“You can gauge the stride from a few seconds of video show
ing part of a head?”
“Sure. The head moves up and down with the movement of the feet. In my life-drawing classes, we had to pay attention to how all the body parts were positioned during a step.”
“I never would’ve thought of that.” Lacey’s admiring look was balm to Jan’s steamrolled self-image. “I can go up to Jake’s tonight and send you as much video as you can stand. Also staff photos from the files. You know, I’m starting to think that person must have a hell of a reason for not coming forward already.”
“Like they might have been the one who killed Kitrin?”
Lacey shrugged. “There’s not a shred of motive that I can see for anyone who works there to murder her. And there are no hallmarks of a stranger murder. For one thing, a stranger would be noticed, and for another, impulse killers almost always leave clues. This was a surgical strike by someone who knew the pool camera was down.”
“God, I didn’t think of that.” Jan frowned. “Who all knew about that camera?”
“Everyone who was at the supper that night, probably. I told Jake about it on the terrace.” Lacey thumped her forehead gently with her open palm. “I know better than to reveal security information in public. But it’s a bit confusing, being both a social guest and a worker around the same people. I’ve got that problem up at the ranch, too. Now that I’m in on Andy’s secrets, she and the twins treat me like an old pal. But I’m no closer to figuring out who tampered with the Rover.”
“I’ll get on it first tomorrow.” Jan glanced toward the patio doors. “Can you see Rob?”
“Yep.” Lacey leaned sideways for a better look. “He’s got what we used to call a thousand-yard stare. What happened to him today?”
“Um … apart from getting no answer from lover-boy about his alibi, he learned for sure he’s not Michael’s father. I guess now he’s facing the fact that he’ll probably never be anyone’s dad.” Jan bit her lip. “Especially hard while he’s involved with a married man whose wife is trying to get pregnant. Bart surely wouldn’t leave her after they’ve gone to all that trouble to have a child.”
Why the Rock Falls Page 24
