“The proper paperwork you should be filling out for the wardens. Photos and recordings. Evidence that unequivocally ties Larson to poaching.”
Arnold paled as I spoke. “You’re going to get me killed.”
I shrugged and moved to stand. “I can take you in right now, then.”
He held up his hands. “Okay, okay. I can’t get you photos. I’m not allowed to bring a phone, camera, anything like that in on the job. But I can keep a record of each article of wildlife. I don’t know names, though. I just deal with the animals.”
“Does Larson tell you ahead of time what animals you’ll be processing?”
He hesitated. “This upcoming hunt is for grizzlies.”
“The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is trying to restore federal protections for grizzlies.”
A court ruling in 2018 stated the removal of the bears’ threatened status violated the Endangered Species Act. There was a massive outcry, both from ranchers claiming the predators were a threat to their livestock and from environmental groups and Native American tribes that knew the grizzly populations would plunge without protection.
I recalled an article I read in which Larson, ironically, publicly sided with the environmental groups and Native American tribes. The wily bastard was probably banking on the protections being restored. It would up the price tag on his trophy hunting trips.
“They haven’t made that ruling yet,” Arnold said. When my gaze sliced to him, his throat bobbed. “I’m going to need some protection after I do this for you.”
He would not be getting protection from me. I fully intended to hang his ass out to dry. But I said, “You get me what I need, and then we’ll talk.”
“The hunting party went out yesterday. He should be calling me sometime this week or next.”
I pulled a card from my pocked and handed it to him. “As soon as you hear from him, I want to know.” I stood and moved to the doorway. I glanced back and found him hanging his hand, scrubbing his hands over his face. “And, Arnold?” His head snapped up. “If you even think of not cooperating, I’ll bring the feds in and spread it far and wide that you were the leak in Larson’s operation. Understand?”
He nodded weakly. I called Frank to my side and strode through his shop, careful to avoid looking at the bugs swarming over the bones as I passed.
twenty
GRANT
Hunting was a waiting game, and the wait was even longer when I was accompanied by idiots. The two younger Boudreaux men bickered back and forth as if they were children, not grown men in their thirties.
I refrained from informing them that the noise they were generating was certain to keep our prey away. As long as there was a kill at the end, the longer it took, I reminded myself, the more I got paid. At the moment, though, the thought was little comfort.
The idea came to me forty years ago. I was in a constant battle with Yellowstone over the boundaries of the park and with the Indians over portions of my land they wanted to claim as their own and build a casino on. My horses were not on a winning streak.
I was frustrated, burning the candle at both ends, and losing money like a sieve. When I almost took a whip to a stubborn horse, I knew it was time to take a break and decompress. I headed out into the backcountry for a week of camping and living off the land.
I blamed the stress I had been under when I came across the pair of poachers on my land and shot them in cold blood. I left them to rot in the wilderness along with the carcasses of the adult mountain lion and two kittens they had killed.
The seed was planted, though. The only difference between poaching and trophy hunting was permission and money. I could give permission and arrange the hunts, and I desperately needed the money.
I made it work in the era before predators were reintroduced to Yellowstone. After the wolves, grizzlies, and cougars were reintroduced, business skyrocketed.
I was careful. Everyone who played a role in the trophy hunting side of my ranch was carefully selected, and our clients were top of the line. Presidents and princes, sheiks and businessmen. Vastly wealthy, well connected. Men and women who appreciated quality experience, knew how to keep secrets, and would pay big money for an American safari. Those were the requirements.
I had been on a hunt not unlike this one with the Boudreaux family when a bird cry drew my gaze to the surrounding hillside. I grabbed my binoculars and searched the area where the birds had been startled into flight. I thought I saw a flash of long, blue-black hair between the trees, but I could not be certain.
“There,” Laurence Boudreaux whispered suddenly, excitement tight in his voice.
He moved to raise the rifle to his shoulder, but I halted the movement with a hand on the barrel. “Wait until it’s closer. You’ll have a cleaner, more accurate shot.”
The grizzly lumbering toward the slaughtered horse was female. She was thin from hibernation, and, I soon saw, from birthing two cubs. They tumbled after her, clumsy and charming.
Truth be told, I did not have a problem with the predator reintroduction to Yellowstone. An ecosystem needed predators to remain healthy. The trophic cascade was essential for maintaining balance.
I enjoyed watching the predators. They were wily and intelligent, independent and collective thinkers all at once. Ruthless when needed, but not cruel. It was their misfortune that killing them represented a status symbol for so many men and women without conscience.
Laurence Boudreaux and his sons were almost trembling with excitement. “The trio is going to look magnificent mounted on the wall in my study,” Laurence whispered. The sow’s head came up at the sound, and her nose lifted as she scented the air. “Now?”
“Now,” I agreed.
I turned my head away when he pulled the trigger.
twenty-one
FAYE
When I surfaced to awareness, light played over my eyelids, creating a kaleidoscopic pattern of brightness and shadow. My eyes were too heavy to open, and my head was stuffed with the cottony feeling of drugs in my system. The quiet sound of beeping pulsed nearby. Panic tried to sink its claws into me, but a soft, low voice sang somewhere nearby.
The language and words were unfamiliar, but the tone soothed me and set me adrift once more.
A hum of activity buzzed around me, but I could not quite break the surface.
“Miss? Can you hear me? Can you tell me your name?”
I tried to form words, tried to force sound from my lips, but then I stilled as I remembered. I was not myself any longer.
Fear tried to cut through the haze, but then there was nothing.
There was pressure on my hand, someone’s fingers clasped around mine. Mary. I tried to grip her hand, but there was no strength in my fingers.
“You’re alright, Faye,” a voice said softly. “Everything is going to be okay.”
But the voice did not belong to Mary, and my name was not Faye. Confusion tried to permeate the fog that enveloped me, but darkness slipped in like the tide.
I knew where I was as soon as I opened my eyes. Hospitals all had the same piercing white light and cold, antiseptic smell. I lay blinking at the ceiling for an indeterminate time before my eyelids became too heavy to hold open. When next I woke, consciousness returned quickly, as did the memories of the accident and aftermath.
Awareness swept in. Machines hummed and beeped quietly around me. An IV line pinched the back of my hand. My head was muddled with drugs. A shard of pain slashed through my side when I tried to draw in a deep breath.
I must have made a noise, because I heard a scrape of a chair nearby and a rustle of movement. I sucked in a breath, bracing myself, but the face that appeared above mine swept away the surge of tension.
“You’re in the hospital in Livingston,” Evelyn said softly. “Sam is going to be okay. He’s in the bed beside yours.” I turned my head against the pillow to see past her and had to close my eyes in relief at the sight of the small boy lying so
still in the hospital bed. “You’re both going to be fine.” When I turned my gaze back to her, she said, “His arm is broken, and he was bleeding internally. They had to remove his spleen, and…” She touched my hand. “His brain was swelling.” My breath strangled in my throat. “The doctor told me this morning that with the oxygen therapy and medication, the swelling has been relieved enough that he’s confident Sam won’t need surgery.”
“I need to be closer.” My voice was a hoarse croak, scraping against my raw throat. I moved to push myself upright, but there was no strength in my arms.
“Don’t try to move,” Evelyn said. She left my line of sight as she dragged the chair she had been occupying out of the way. The hospital bed shifted as she popped the brake, and then she slowly rolled the bed across the room. She paused at intervals to drag the IV pole and the heart rate and oxygen monitor after us.
She positioned the bed so the bedrails touched. As she set the brake on my bed, I reached through the railing and gingerly touched the back of Sam’s hand. His skin was warm.
“He hasn’t woken up yet, but the CT scans and MRIs have come back normal.” I left my hand over Sam’s but turned my gaze back to Evelyn. “You have five fractured ribs, and your ankle and knee are sprained.” Evelyn glanced at the door and lowered her voice. “I told them I was your sister.”
“How long have we been here?”
“Betty Decker brought you to the hospital two days ago,” she said.
“We can’t be here.”
The panic must have crept into my voice, because she leaned close. “When they asked for your information, she told them your names are Faith and David Jones. She didn’t know your birthdays. She said you flagged her down on the road, and once you were in her vehicle, you lost consciousness.”
I closed my eyes, the adrenaline ebbing slightly. “We were forced off that mountain.”
“I know.” Her hand closed around mine. “Just rest now. I’ll keep watch.”
“If he comes,” I whispered, “save Sam.”
Her fingers tightened on mine. “Who?”
I tried to answer her, but the darkness drew me under.
I crept down the hallway, and the silence breathed around me. The hallway seemed to stretch forever, contracting and expanding around me as if echoing the breath of silence. I placed my hand against the wall to steady myself.
I glanced at the framed photograph hung on the wall immediately to my left. The glass in the frame was shattered, fractures spread in a corona from where a fist had been driven into our smiling faces. Behind the seams of glass, Sam, Mary, and I had been captured one day at Central Park. We were on a blanket in the grass dappled in sunlight. I was lying on my stomach on the blanket, and the timer on the camera I set up caught me mid-laugh as Sam leapt on my back. Sam’s head was thrown back with those infectious toddler giggles. Mary sat leaning on a hip, smiling at the pair of us.
As I stared at the photograph, Mary’s head turned and she looked straight into my eyes. Her smile was still there for a moment, and then it faded and her lips moved with a single word.
“Run.”
I lurched backward, gaze darting to the end of the hallway. It remained empty, but the light at the end of the dark corridor beckoned. The end of the hallway was a precipice, and it seemed as if I looked down on her sprawled body from a great height. She lay twisted, hips canted at an angle, her top knee drawn up, her shoulders flat to the ground and arms outflung. She looked as if she had fallen from a cliff and lay broken and bleeding on a canyon floor.
But the blood was in the wrong place. It was smeared across her face, not pooling below her head. And slowly, painfully, her face turned toward me, though the rest of her body remained deathly still.
She looked across the room and met my gaze. I stood frozen. Her smile was not there, and the blood on her mouth painted her teeth like smudged lipstick when her lips moved. They formed a single word.
“Run.”
A hand touched my face, and I lurched out of the darkness. I gasped as I woke, gulping a breath of air as if I had just broken the surface of deep, black water. The hand patted my cheek, and when I blinked, I found Sam’s face close to mine.
For a moment, I was still caught in the nightmare that was made of twisted memory, and a bolt of fear shot through me. I reached out to him to cover his eyes, but the IV line in the back of my hand caught my attention and brought me to full awareness.
I cupped his cheek instead of swaddling his eyes with my hand. My smile was shaky around the edges. “Sam,” I whispered. “How are you feeling, sweetheart?”
His eyes welled with tears, making my own burn in response, and he patted my cheek frantically. I placed my hand over his to still the movement when my face began to sting.
“I’m okay,” I reassured him. “We both are.”
“Oh good, you’re both awake,” a voice said, startling me. I twisted in the bed, wincing as the movement sent a stab of pain through my side.
Evelyn jolted awake where she was slumped in a chair beside my bed asleep as the nurse came into the room.
“I’ll go let the doctor know you’re awake,” the nurse said.
I turned to Evelyn. “The inn?”
“Don’t worry about the inn. I’ll head back to check on things.”
The day was filled with doctors and tests. I saw the concern in the doctor’s eyes when Sam did not answer her questions with anything more than a nod or shake of his head and a glance darted my way. After I explained that Sam was nonverbal, the doctor’s concern eased, and she assured me that the CT scans and MRIs showed the swelling in his brain had receded.
“Everything looks great,” she said. “I’m not concerned about any residual cognitive issues, though he may have headaches and some dizziness over the next couple of weeks.”
The orthopedist explained the break in Sam’s arm to me, and by the time the surgeon came by to discuss the surgery to remove Sam’s spleen, my eyelids were growing heavy. He repeated the news Evelyn told me. Sam was bleeding internally when we arrived at the hospital, the impact from the car wreck having damaged his spleen. He explained the importance of vaccines now that his immune system was compromised and prescribed a round of antibiotics for him to take once the IV was removed and we left the hospital.
As the surgeon left the room, I turned my head against the pillow and studied Sam’s face as he slept. Dark shadows marred the skin beneath his eyes, and there was a bruise on his forehead and a scrape on his chin. The cast on his arm was blue.
I closed my eyes when my vision blurred. He was so small lying in the hospital bed, and he was so very fragile. My own aches and cuts and bruises paled in comparison to the injuries that could have stolen him from me. I could have easily awakened and found him gone.
I trembled at the knowledge. Everything I did was in an effort to protect him and keep him safe. But I learned a long time ago that a mother could never shield her child from everything that would harm him. I discovered it was the curse of motherhood. A woman would fight and bleed and willingly trade her life for her child, and still the world snuck in blows she could not absorb or deflect. There was so much fury and heartbreak and agony bound up in the thorny burden of motherhood.
I was not certain if the pain I felt in my chest was from my heart breaking or from my broken ribs as I lost the battle with sleep.
When I woke again, Hector Lewis stood beside Sam’s bed. Sam was sitting propped up, and Frank, his standard poodle, was sprawled alongside Sam’s legs. I never had a dog of my own, and never thought to get a dog for Sam. The smile that wreathed Sam’s face, the gentle way his hand cupped over Frank’s head, though, made me rethink that.
“Frank recently had an injury, too,” Hector said. Sam’s gaze flew to Hector’s, his expression pinched with concern as he gently touched the bandage around Frank’s neck. “He’s starting to heal, though. He seems to be feeling fine now, but I knew he would want to come compare woun
ds with you.” Sam smiled and extended his arm, letting the poodle sniff the cast on his arm. Hector glanced up and caught my eye. “I need to talk with you privately.”
I had donned a pair of loose-fitting flannel pants earlier, so I pushed aside the sheet covering me and carefully eased my legs over the side of the bed. Hector rounded the hospital bed as I stood, but I waved aside the wheelchair when he moved to it. I needed to get my feet back under me as swiftly as possible.
I caught hold of the IV pole and tugged it after me as I limped to the doorway. Each step grated like a serrated knife through my ankle and knee, but I ignored the pain. Lying helpless in a hospital bed indefinitely was not an option. When I turned to face Hector once I reached the hallway, I found he had pushed the wheelchair after me.
He parked it beside me and set the brakes. “Sit here if you need to. I don’t want to have to pick you up off the ground.”
I stiffened my legs and clutched one of the handles of the wheelchair. “I’m fine.”
He did not peer at me closely to weigh the veracity of my words. He simply nodded and said, “I think your boy witnessed a murder.”
My gaze flew to Sam, and I moved around the wheelchair and carefully took a seat. “What? When?”
“The night at the Broken Arrow,” he said. Then he told me everything he discovered about Larson.
“Why do you think Sam saw…?” My gaze darted to him again, but his attention was focused on Frank.
“A man is missing. A taxidermist who was part of Larson’s poaching operation. The timing of his disappearance fits. And it explains why he wants the three of us dead.”
I blinked. “Three of us?”
The muscles in his jaw tensed. “His men lit my Airstream on fire and tried to keep me from escaping with Frank.”
HIDING PLACE by Meghan Holloway Page 13
