A Dark Lure

by Loreth Anne White

  “I don’t understand, Tori.”

  She sniffed and swiped at her eyes. “I think . . . I think . . . in the story . . . in the hospital. Up in Watt Lake . . .”

  “Watt Lake? Your mother set a story in Watt Lake?”

  She nodded.

  “What’s it about?”

  “The character in the story . . . it’s not her baby. It’s the baby of a terribly bad man. A serial killer. And the victim’s husband doesn’t want to look at it . . . and . . . she gives it away, up for adoption. Because she doesn’t want to look at it either. She’s confused. The journalist brings the baby to the mother’s bed in an incubator thing . . . and she, the mother holds it, and breast-feeds it, and asks God to help it. And then the journalist goes to her husband, who’s a cop, and says she wants to adopt it. I don’t think it’s fiction. My dad was the cop there.”

  Olivia went cold. Her memory spiraled violently back to the day she’d lain in the hospital bed and Melody had brought her baby daughter in. And she’d held the infant in her arms.

  “A cop? Where?”

  “Watt Lake. He was the staff sergeant, like in the book. And my mom was a journalist before she turned to fiction. All the stuff—it could be about them. And . . . I’m scared because they told me I was born in Fort Tapley.”

  Olivia couldn’t breathe. The curtain of snow and mist grew thicker, time leaking away.

  “What . . .” She cleared her throat. “What was her name? Your mother, what was her full name?”

  Startled at her intensity, Tori glanced sharply up, met her eyes, and said, “Melody. Melody Vanderbilt. She used her maiden name for her job.”

  Olivia’s stomach lurched bile up her throat. Sweat prickled over her skin. Snow wet her face. Confusion tightened around her, closing, encircling, trapping, time folding in on itself, inside out.

  “Did . . . did the victim in the story have a name?”

  “Sarah Baker, like the lady in my father’s newspaper.” Tori held Olivia’s gaze, wide-eyed, vulnerable. “Sarah’s baby . . . the journalist and cop adopted her and took her up to Fort Tapley. But it has to be fiction, right? My mom was just drafting this thing. She always worked in drafts. She used ideas, true things from the headlines, from reality, and she braided them with fiction—that’s what all the write-ups and reviews always said. She’d use facts as a base, and then wove her own stories around them. That’s what she was doing, right? She was using that situation in Watt Lake as inspiration.”

  “Show me.”

  Tori flinched slightly, then tentatively held out her e-reader.

  With shaking hands Olivia brushed snow from the cover and opened the e-reader. Sliding the “On” button, protecting the screen with her body, she began to read.

  It started, as all dialogues do, when a path crosses that of another. Whether in silence, or greeting, a glance, a touch, you are changed, irrevocably, by an interaction. Some exchanges are as subtle as the touch of an iridescent damselfly alighting on the back of your hand. Some are seismic, rocking your world, fissuring into your very foundations and setting you on a new path. That moment came for Sarah when he first entered the store.

  The bell chimed, and in came a cool gust of air. Sensing something unusual had entered, she glanced up.

  From across the store his eyes locked on to her face—the kind of full-on stare that made her stomach jump. Ordinarily she’d smile, offer a greeting, but this time she instinctively averted her gaze and continued with her bookkeeping. Yet she could sense his eyes on her, rude, brazen . . .

  Her words. Her story. The one she’d told Melody Vanderbilt.

  Olivia’s gaze shot to Tori. She stared, her mind wheeling. Tori’s green eyes looked back. Mossy green, like her own. Blue-black hair, the color of Sebastian’s . . .

  “You’re Melody’s daughter?”

  Tori nodded, confusion in her eyes.

  “You’re an only child, their only child?”

  She nodded again.

  “Melody was married to a cop?”

  Tori swallowed, fear darkening into her eyes. She started to shiver. “My dad is—was a cop.”

  “Not a consultant, for security?”

  “He lied.”

  Olivia’s voice came out hoarse, thick. “When is your birthday, Tori? How old are you?”

  “I’ll be twelve on July seventeenth.”

  Twelve years ago, on this day, the day before Thanksgiving, Sarah Baker was taken by the Watt Lake Killer. Their baby was born the following summer. A hot muggy day in July.

  July 17 . . .

  He watched close by from the trees. The woman and the child’s words carried clear like crystal on the cold, fragile air, through the stillness of snow. That child was his. It was her likeness that had brought to mind his mother as he’d watched them in the boat earlier. He could see it fully now, in his mind’s eye, in his memory of the old photographs that his mother kept of her youth. Her straight black hair.

  The cop had raised his baby. And now the cop had brought her back here, to her mother’s arms.

  A sickening oiliness slicked through his belly and bowels. Had he been lured here by the cop? Was the Internet adoption site a ruse? Was the cop using Sarah Baker as the lure? Why?

  To catch him?

  For how long had the cop been playing this game? Since he’d taken in the child?

  Gamos. A lure has to be something important to the prey . . .

  Adrenaline thrummed into his blood. Excitement. Thrill. Finally, a real hunt. A fitting challenge to the very end. All were on stage now. As if by supernatural design, all paths predestined to lead here.

  So where was the cop now? Watching? From the shadows?

  Awareness crackled through him as he listened for the telling crunch of footfalls in scrub, dead leaves breaking under the snow, the action of a weapon. He could sense an ambush. He swallowed slowly. He had to move now. The snow was getting thicker, closing them in. He must act while it would cover his tracks, and while he could still get out.

  He stepped from the shadows and started down the long, narrow dock toward the two of them perched on the end.

  It was time.

  Time to go home.

  As Cole drove the return trip to Broken Bar his mind reeled with the possibility that he had not been responsible for the faulty brakes. Snow was already an inch or two thick on the logging road as he crossed the halfway point between Clinton and Broken Bar Ranch. The wipers battled to carve arcs into the snow accumulating on his windshield. He could feel the tires beginning to slip every now and then.

  His mind circled back to the conversation with Forbes in his office, then further back to the fight in the barn with Tucker and Forbes all those years ago.

  Tuck and Forbes had driven up from Clinton together to confront Cole over Amelia. The animosity between Cole and Forbes had been thick over the rest of the summer and into winter. They’d had two more physical dustups; the last, right after Christmas, had been particularly violent. Forbes had jumped him, and Tucker had provided backup. That time Cole had broken one of Forbes’s bones. Tucker had lived with his mother and father in one of the ranch houses at the time. He could have gotten into the barn anytime and tampered with the brakes. Cole smacked the Dodge steering wheel with his hand and swore.

  He knew he couldn’t have screwed up the brakes. He’d been forced to doubt himself. Then to finally believe he’d killed his mother and brother. That some sick twist of fate had saved him while it took them.

  Sure, he’d had a few drinks, but at the time he’d felt fine. He wouldn’t have driven his mom and Jimmie if he’d thought he’d had too many. Still . . . while it might explain the brakes, it didn’t excuse him. But it made him ask, what if. What if the brakes had been fine?

  Can’t prove a thing now . . .

  All these years, and it could have been sab
otage? Because of a girl? All that grief, the loss, the guilt, his family dynamics crumbling as a result—Cole’s father sinking into a bitter shell. Cole and Jane becoming who they were now, the ranch business failing.

  Anger fisted Cole’s hands around the wheel as he negotiated a curve on a steep decline. Wheels slid sickeningly sideways at the bottom of the turn. His heart faltered. He steered into the slide, tapping brakes, controlling the skid. He brought the truck back in line just before the edge of a ditch.

  Focus.

  His worry now was that Tucker might be handling not only Clayton Forbes’s questionable investment deals but that he could be involved in scaring Olivia. Who else could it possibly be? If Cole was a betting man, he’d put money on the fact that if things went to shit, Tucker would also take the fall as Forbes’s scapegoat.

  This man—these men—were dangerous.

  The truck radio segued from a country-and-western tune into a news jingle followed by a weather alert. The first wave of the storm was hitting the plateau. There could be several feet of snow before nightfall. Cole’s tires slid again. If he’d left any later, he’d have been stuck back in Clinton.

  The news switched to the Birkenhead murder.

  “At a press briefing this morning, police released the identity of the victim, Mary J. Sorenson, aged fifty-three, a resident of Blaine, Washington.” Cole reached over and turned up the volume, his mind going to the image of Mary Sorenson that he’d seen on the television in Forbes’s office.

  “We now have additional breaking news to bring you. CBC has learned that Mary’s husband, Algor Sorenson, crossed the US border into Canada alone in the couple’s AdventureCaper camper and trailer at the Peace Arch crossing five days ago using a NEXUS card. The camper is mounted on a gray Ford F-150 pickup truck with a long bed. Police have released their Washington State plate number, and are asking anyone who sees the camper, or Sorenson, to immediately call 911.”

  Cole’s mind raced as the anchor read out the plate number.

  Sorenson. The name was vaguely familiar. Something about the woman’s image had also seemed familiar. AdventureCaper camper . . . His heart stopped. He negotiated another bend, his body going hot. What was the name of the guy Olivia had checked in the other day? He’d had an AdventureCaper camper mounted on a gray Ford F-150. Long box. But his truck had BC plates. Cole had a near-total-recall memory for these things—honed from years of journalistic, on-the-spot observation in tense situations. Then it hit him.

  The ham radio plate on the back—it had been issued in Washington State.

  Snow came down in a heavy curtain, and he was forced to slow as he headed into another bend on the logging road. His heart jackhammered suddenly.

  The scarf.

  That was what had felt familiar! The scarf around Mary Sorenson’s neck in that photo taken in Arizona looked identical to the one he’d seen in Olivia’s cabin last night. It was the scarf she said had been dropped on her tracks by someone she’d thought was following her. The scarf of a slaughtered woman. A woman whose body had been displayed with similar signature mutilation to the Watt Lake victims.

  All of a sudden there was nothing that felt innocent or coincidental about the newspaper with her name on it, the lure inside, the berries. The scarf. The scrawl on her bedsheets. Nothing.

  He reached for his phone in his pocket, hit 911. He could recall the number on the ham operator’s plate. If the cops had that, they could look it up, see if the amateur radio operator’s license was registered to the Sorensons from Blaine, Washington.

  But he had no bars, no reception. He cursed. He was already out of Clinton cell-tower range. He was over halfway to Broken Bar. Going back to town would take too long, and he might not even make it in this storm now. He hit the gas. He had to reach Olivia, stat.

  He drove fast along the dangerous logging roads, snow coming down heavily, the dead pines spearing like ugly, blackened skeletons into the mist.

  “Why did your father bring you to Broken Bar? Why now?” Olivia demanded, her voice coming out low, urgent, as she thought of the recent murder, the fact Burton had left her the newspaper, the lure. Trickier, more painful and poignant emotions surged under her sense of biting urgency. Her child. Her baby girl. Right here in front of her. After all these years. It all felt as fragile as delicate glass.

  “Why did he bring you fishing, Tori?”

  “He’s dying,” Tori said quietly. Snowflakes melted on her hair, face, lashes. “He’s got a brain tumor, melanoma. He . . . he said we had to come here and finish something. He told me they can operate and fix him . . . but I don’t believe it now.”

  A creak and sudden motion of the dock made them both look up.

  Approaching them was a black figure materializing through the gauzy gray snow and mist.

  His face was obscured beneath a ball cap, his jacket hunched up around his neck, his hands deep in his pockets. He blocked their escape route off the narrow dock. Irrational panic, claustrophobia whipped through Olivia.

  Then came relief as she recognized the man. Algor Sorenson from the campsite.

  She got to her feet. Flustered, she pushed wet hair back from her face. “I thought you’d left,” she called out to him. “There was no one at the site when I went round.”

  “Olivia, hi,” the man said as he neared. “I’ve been looking for you. You have a German shepherd, right?”

  Ice dropped like a stone through her stomach. “Yes. Why?”

  “Is he missing?”

  “I . . . why?”

  “My wife and I saw one chasing something along the trail into the marshland. We heard a yelp, and then crying.”

  Ace.

  Where was Ace?

  CHAPTER 22

  “Where exactly did you see him last?” Olivia demanded, adrenaline stampeding through her. She’d left Ace outside her cabin, snuffling about in the willow scrub along the shore. Ordinarily Ace wouldn’t wander far. He’d be waiting on her deck, on his raised bed outside the door.

  “My wife and I were hiking through the otter marsh—a last walk before we headed out. We’re all packed.” He dug his hands deeper into his pockets, looked up at the sky. “It’s really coming down now.”

  “Where?!” she demanded.

  “Near the marsh trailhead. We heard excited barking. Then we saw what looked like a German shepherd chasing after something. Then a cry. Whining. I think he might have gone over the bank somewhere on the east side. We went in a little way, but couldn’t see. We need to leave now, but I wanted to find you and let you know.”

  Shit. Ace’s eyesight. She’d been worried about something like this.

  “Will you show me?”

  “We’re worried about getting out now before it’s too thick and—”

  “Please.”

  He looked conflicted.

  “Tori,” she said quickly, putting her arm around the child’s shoulders. “Where is your father now?”

  “In the cabin. I left him sleeping.”

  “Okay, you’re coming to the lodge with me. I’m going to leave you there with Myron while I go find Ace. Okay?”

  “I want to help,” she said, gripping Olivia’s arm, a desperation swelling into her green eyes. Her eyes. Her child. Olivia’s throat closed in on itself. She looked deep into Tori’s eyes.

  “No. I want you with Myron. Algor can help me.” She glanced up at the tall man, his ball cap shading his eyes, snow settling along the bill. “You show me where Ace is,” she said. “You can wait for just a few minutes before driving out. It’ll be fine.”

  He glanced up at the sky again, then at the deck with the settling snow.

  “Please,” she said. “If you could just point the way. I’ll only be a minute. I need to get Tori to the lodge.”

  “Sure. Okay. I’m parked around the trees, all set to leave. I’ll let my wife know.�
�� He glanced at Tori. “I’ll wait at the trailhead for you.”

  Myron pulled the piece of paper closer to him and tried to put his pen to it. He was attempting to write to Cole, to say good-bye. To say he was sorry for never stopping trying to punish his boy. To say he loved him, and that he forgave him. But he doubled over in excruciating pain, sweat thick on his brow in spite of the cold snow and wind coming in through the wide-open window.

  Shivering, he dropped the pen and grasped for his pills. It was time. He had to do it now before they took him into a hospital, before he became incapacitated and they hooked him up to machines, and he’d be unable to say he forgave his son. If he took some pills first, he might stop shaking long enough to write his note. He’d opened the window in an effort to let Grace in. He ached to feel her presence on the cold wind. He wanted to feel her arms calling out to him.

  “Myron!”

  Shock, confusion raced through him. He glanced up. It was Olivia. With the Burton child. Both wet. Standing in the doorway to the library.

  “Myron—what’s going on?” She rushed over to him.

  “Are you okay?” Her hands were on him, helping him. “You want medication?”

  He nodded.

  She opened the bottle, tapped two pills into her palm, put them in his mouth, and brought a glass of water to his lips. He swallowed. “Another . . . two . . . please.”

  She hesitated, looking deep into his eyes. Then she tapped out another two and helped him drink them down.

  “Tori,” she said briskly. “Can you shut that window?” She crouched down, hands on his knees. The beautiful Olivia he’d come to love. He wanted to touch her face. Couldn’t move from pain.

  “I need you, Myron. I need your help. Can you help me?”

  Something in her features pulled him into sharper focus. He slid his gaze to the girl. She stood by the window. Shivering. White-faced. Something was wrong. Very wrong.