A Killing Frost

by Hannah Alexander

Oh, yes, he remembered. While Amy went tearing through the house, then out to the garden, searching for Mom to come and make everything better for Jama, Tyrell had decided he would rush to the rescue.

  “You introduced me to your dog,” she said.

  “Gladys.”

  “And I told you that was a weird name for a dog, while I wiped my nose on my sleeve.”

  “I don’t remember the nose wiping.” He closed the door, handed her a bottle of water and stepped ahead of her to follow the narrow path that led to the Katy Trail just over the rocky rise pelted with cedar trees. “What I remember is a pretty little girl, lost and scared, who spoke her mind about everything.” He loved that she still spoke her mind.

  She also still looked lost and scared more often than Tyrell wanted to see. When a man loved a woman, he liked to think he could make all her fears go away. For some reason, Tyrell seemed to have escalated Jama’s fears with his proposal. Not a good omen for a relationship, but he’d beaten that horse to death. Time to get past it.

  Jama fell into step behind him, and he could tell by her footsteps that she was once again focused on their mission. He could feel her wariness.

  He glanced over his shoulder, and saw her gaze darting toward the trees, the road, the bridge over the creek. She shivered.

  “Cold?” he asked.

  Her spine stiffened. “Not in this coat. It’s double-lined.”

  “Remember the game we played that afternoon we met?” Tyrell asked.

  She skipped up to walk beside him. He stepped aside on the narrow trail, made sure she was walking on the actual beaten path so she wouldn’t trip in those shoes-should’ve grabbed some of Amy’s hiking boots from the attic. But then, how was he supposed to know he’d be picking up Jama?

  “You’re doing it again right now,” she said. “Using your distraction technique.”

  “Isn’t that what doctors do with little kids when they’re scared?”

  “Sure, but I’m not a little kid.”

  “But it still works, right?”

  She allowed her silence to tell him that it did.

  “I’ve forgotten what I called the game that day,” he said.

  “I Spy. You had Gladys sit beside me on the porch steps, and then you sat on my other side.”

  He remembered. He’d put his arm around her shoulders and told her about a game Gladys loved to play. He would name a landmark, and she would go to it and bark. Gladys was some smart dog. Of course, “fence,” “tree” and “grapevine” were easy commands for a dog with such a large vocabulary.

  “Your arm felt so good around me,” she said quietly. “I didn’t want you to move away.”

  As if he would have. But she couldn’t have known that then. Did she know it now?

  That night, when Mom had taken Jama back to her parents, Dad had helped Tyrell to understand what Jama was enduring with her mother’s rejection.

  He smiled, remembering seven-year-old Jama’s outspokenness.

  “Now you’re doing it again, sweetheart,” he said, trying to imitate his father’s favorite actor. Bogart.

  Jama stumbled, nearly fell. Tyrell caught her by the elbow, then drew her close to his side, once again feeling his protective instincts rise.

  “What am I doing?”

  “You’re falling under my spell,” he said, then chuckled softly.

  The white of her teeth flashed in the growing dusk. “You big goof.” But her tone told him she didn’t think he was goofy at all.

  What was it, Jama? What went wrong between us? How can anything be wrong when we’re so good together like this?

  He glanced through the trees to their left, and saw the barest reflection of the waning sunset over the river. “I spy something ever-changing but never-changing.”

  She frowned, then looked around. It took only a few seconds for her to tune in to his wavelength. “The water particles are never the same from second to second, but the river is always there.”

  “You got it.”

  The light slowly disappeared, and Jama fell behind him again, which allowed him access to the trail once more. Smart woman. She knew how easily a rock could blend into the ground and trip a person when the shadows melded into blackness.

  “You seemed so grown-up to me back then,” she said. Her voice was soft, thoughtful.

  “And I don’t now?” he teased.

  “Well…” There was a smile in her voice. He loved that sound.

  “That’s the curse of the birth order, oldest sibling and all,” he said.

  She didn’t reply, and a companionable silence stretched and grew between them as they reached the Katy Trail.

  Every time Jama stepped on this trail, she felt as if she was a part of history, connected to the many others who walked or biked this rails-to-trails state park that stretched more than two hundred miles across Missouri.

  It reminded her of the moment she’d stepped from her car this morning and her hometown had enveloped her in a magical sense of connection and nostalgia. But the day’s events had shocked her back to the cold reality of the present. There was never a way to go back.

  She and Tyrell walked less than a quarter mile before he pointed to a diverging trail that led to Highway 94. They took it. At the road, Tyrell pointed to tire marks on the pavement that led to the other side, where something large had obviously torn through brush and rammed into a sapling before continuing down to the swamp.

  Jama’s shoe squished into mud. She peered into the swamp, studying the square shape of a pickup’s cab-the only part of the vehicle above water.

  “I wonder when the search-and-rescue dogs will get here,” she said.

  “No telling.”

  Without another word, Jama and Tyrell skirted the swamp counterclockwise. The powerful beam of Tyrell’s flashlight showed multiple footprints in the mud. Disturbing the evidence as little as possible, they continued slowly along the swamp’s edge.

  Jama focused on the ground in front of her, on the swish of the underbrush against the material of her scrubs-the air had more of a bite to it now that the sun was almost gone. She was glad she had worn this coat and her thick wool socks for extra cushioning.

  “I see something.” Tyrell aimed his flashlight at a thorn tree and illuminated a small piece of purple cloth caught by a long, wicked-looking barb.

  “It looks like cloth from the hooded jacket Doriann got for Christmas.” Jama reached for it, but Tyrell touched her arm.

  “Leave that for the FBI,” he said. He aimed his light at the ground, revealing three sets of footsteps, a single set curving one way, two other sets veering in a slightly different direction.

  Jama rushed forward, following the single set of prints that came from a smaller shoe. “Tyrell, you know what this means?”

  “I’m not ready to jump to conclusions.”

  “It looks like Doriann escaped from the truck and the swamp first, and ran away from her captors. They came after her, but must not have seen where she went. They followed a different path.”

  “How can you tell she got out first?” he asked. “What if the kidnappers saved their own hides first and ran away, leaving Doriann to drown?”

  Jama gave him a long look. “That’s the wrong attitude, you know?”

  “They’re killers, Jama. And on drugs.”

  “Do you think these people would go to all the trouble to abduct Doriann specifically, because she’s Mark Streeter’s daughter, then just leave her?”

  “In a situation like this, they would think of themselves first. Why don’t you follow the one set of tracks, I’ll follow the others. That may help us determine if Doriann got away. Try not to leave your own trail.”

  “Of course, I’m watching my steps.” She pulled out her own flashlight and made her way forward. She moved slowly, methodically. Doriann had obviously headed in the direction of the river.

  Excitement made Jama clumsy, and she nearly stepped off the side of a steep, washed-out mud bank. A ledge crumbled beneath
her feet, and she scrambled backward to more solid ground. As she straightened, she saw evidence that Doriann might have done the same with less fortunate results. Small shoeprints told the tale from the bottom of a collapsed slope of loose mud and earth.

  But then, it appeared that the girl had climbed back up the steep slope. Using more caution this time, Jama continued to follow the tracks, and ended up standing beside Tyrell.

  “Um, I think we have a problem here,” Jama said.

  He studied the tracks, frowning. “I don’t get this. They turned around at this point. Two larger sets of prints, probably a man and a woman. Had to be the kidnappers, right? There are indentations in the mud that might indicate a fall.” He gestured to a place where someone’s hands and knees might have landed in the soft earth.

  “Or someone was knocked down,” Jama said.

  “So they stopped looking for Doriann at this point?”

  “But why?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe they heard someone coming and were afraid they would get caught, so they got out of the area.”

  “But, Tyrell,” Jama said, stooping more closely to study the prints, “it appears as if our little spitfire followed them.”

  Chapter Thirty

  Doriann scrunched onto her side in a ball, wishing she could feel safe in this tiny cave above the creek. Unfortunately, her teeth chattered so hard she could probably be heard all the way to River Dance.

  There were lots of dry, crackly leaves on the floor of the cave that rustled when she moved, so she tried to stay still. The leaves had either been washed here with flooding, or had been carried by some animal for a bed. From the smell, Doriann figured it was an animal that had never been potty trained, but she didn’t care much right now. Leaves were warmer and softer than rock.

  As the darkness deepened in her hiding space, her fear returned. She couldn’t breathe very deeply, no matter how hard she tried.

  Pray, Doriann, pray.

  “Oh, God, please send someone besides evil Clancy to find me,” she whispered. “And would You warm up the weather tonight? That way, Grandpa and Grandma’s crops won’t be ruined, and the killers will live to be arrested and justice will be done, and I won’t freeze to death out here. You know how that would break Aunt Renee’s heart…and Mom’s. And Dad’s.”

  Doriann realized that she mustn’t fall asleep. She’d read stories about people falling asleep and never waking up, freezing to death. They lost consciousness and just drifted off.

  And so she prayed harder, calling to her mind everybody she’d ever known. She prayed for Aunt Renee, who had her hands full with so many things in her life right now, and sometimes threatened that she was “going to lose it!”

  She prayed for Mom and Dad to make it through their residency training so they would stop fighting so much, and be home more and get the jobs of their dreams-but only if that meant they could be home more often.

  Was that selfish? Yeah, probably.

  She prayed for more patience with her cousins, and for Grandma to get flowers for Mother’s Day again this year, because last year she was so happy to get them she cried.

  She prayed for God to forgive her for being such an ornery kid.

  And as she prayed, she realized that she was thinking of reasons to keep praying, because she discovered that she felt closer to God. Safer. It made the fear go away for a little while.

  “And, God, please help me forgive my enemies…You know who they are…because Aunt Renee says I have to before You’ll answer me. I’m sorry I don’t feel very forgiving right now, but I’m willing to try if You’ll help me.”

  She was so sorry she’d decided to try to follow Clancy and Deb in the first place. She’d be halfway home by now if she hadn’t. Funny how things looked a lot more possible in the daylight, when at night they seemed so crazy.

  As she struggled to stay awake, she thought she heard voices. She held her breath. The rustle of the wind? Birds? Coyotes?

  No, not animals. They were human voices, softly whispering. A man and a woman.

  Suddenly, Doriann was wide-awake again. Clancy and Deb?

  Tyrell signaled for Jama to wait at the last sighting of Doriann’s tracks. He then went ahead to search for the next track. He found two sets of larger prints, but not Doriann’s. His first objective was to find his niece and get her to safety. Her prints were vital. The Feds could deal with the abductors.

  “Branch to your left,” Jama said softly, aiming her flashlight at a stand of cedar saplings.

  There was a small, broken branch on the nearest sapling, and behind it her flashlight illuminated a muddy patch with the imprint of what looked to be Doriann’s shoes all over it.

  “Was it her?” Jama asked.

  “I think so.”

  “Any other tracks?”

  “Not that I can tell. If she was following them, she could have stepped back here to hide.” But he still couldn’t understand why his niece would follow her abductors. It made no sense. Did she have some kind of superhero complex? He knew Renee had a way of making people believe they were stronger, wiser, smarter than they actually were, but what on earth could his sister have taught Doriann that would make the girl think she was capable of taking on two criminals?

  He searched for more tracks, and finally found a partial at the far edge of the little copse of cedars. The girl still seemed to be following her abductors.

  Jama was staring off into the forest, to the other side of the track, her flashlight aimed in that direction. “Over here,” he called to her in a whisper.

  Jama hesitated, then joined him, stepping carefully in an obvious effort to avoid making her own tracks.

  “I don’t get it,” Jama said.

  “We don’t have to get it, we just need to get Doriann.”

  “And fast, from the looks of it.”

  “We can’t rush this or we may lose her trail. Just keep your light steady and keep trying not to disturb any evidence.”

  The larger tracks were straightforward, following an old lane that led to a field up ahead. Tyrell knew this place. It belonged to a friendly neighbor of Andy Griswold’s. The field ahead was Andy’s.

  The smaller prints did not follow a straight path, but darted behind bushes and trees along the way. The mud was soft, and that path wasn’t hard to follow.

  He glanced at Jama in the dim glow of their flashlights. So many mysteries hovered around her, even though they had known each other for most of their lives.

  “You never let anyone know where you went after Amy died.” Tyrell kept his voice gentle.

  Jama’s steps faltered briefly. “No.”

  “Why?”

  She didn’t reply. It was the first time he’d ever asked her this question. He’d steered clear of the subject after Amy’s death, but now, in this crisis, the time seemed appropriate to raise such a touchy topic.

  “I called Monty and Fran from time to time and let them know I was okay.”

  “But you never told them where you were.”

  “That’s because I was an adult, and they respected my privacy too much to press the issue.”

  “Are you saying I’m not respecting your privacy?”

  “Well?” Her voice let him know he’d hit the mark. “Had you or your brother and sisters known where I was, you might have come barreling across country to find me and drag me back.”

  “Is that a problem?”

  No answer.

  “Really? You went across country?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where?”

  “Maybe I shouldn’t tell you. I might want to disappear there again someday.” There was a teasing note in her voice.

  Tyrell was not amused. “Even after you returned, you hardly ever visited.”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “Twice a year?”

  “I came more than that. Just because you didn’t see me doesn’t mean I didn’t come. You weren’t exactly a permanent fixture around here back then. You were living your ow
n life in another town.”

  They paused at a barbed-wire fence. The tracks led through it. Another little fluff of purple showed them Doriann did not emerge on the other side unscathed.

  Tyrell held the wires apart for Jama, and she stepped through. They were entering Andy’s property again.

  “You disappeared for six months after Amy died.” Tyrell joined Jama on the other side. “Then you avoided us afterward. I know you were hurting, dealing with survivor’s guilt, whatever, but families stick together. You didn’t have to withdraw like that.”

  “You don’t know what I had to do, Tyrell. You may not know me as well as you think you do.” Still looking at him, she stepped into mud. “Oops. I’ve left a track.”

  “It’s hard not to in this open field.”

  She turned off her flashlight, and Tyrell immediately knew why. She was feeling exposed.

  “Tyrell, after all this time, why are you suddenly blasting me like this?”

  “I’m not blasting you, I’m just trying to figure out why you did what you did.”

  “Perhaps you could trust me to be mature enough to know what I needed to do for myself and not pull the big brother act.” She turned on her flashlight again.

  “Count on it, Jama, being your big brother is about the furthest thing from my mind.” For a few moments, they searched side by side in the dark, their beams skimming, stopping, focusing, then passing on while he smarted at her words.

  “I never wanted to hurt Monty and Fran,” she said at last. “I never meant to. I think I made that clear to them. We all deal with grief in our own ways. Don’t castigate me for mine.”

  Her voice echoed too loudly from the trees that surrounded this field. He shushed her. Her movements stilled for several seconds.

  “Okay,” he soothed. “You’re right. I’m an interfering lummox.”

  “I didn’t mean that, Tyrell. I just-”

  “I’ve known you for most of your life, and though I realize it’s impossible for one person to truly know another, I did think I was pretty tuned in to everything about you. You’re a puzzle to me, but I used to think I at least had all the pieces. I’ve discovered lately that I don’t.”