Hard Rain (12 page)

“A
YEARBOOK
?”

Harper ignored Brody’s tone and opened the book almost reverently. Her hope was that this was what Collin had been looking for, which would mean there was something in here that he was afraid might incriminate him.

It had been her idea to go to the truck stop. This time of night, it wasn’t busy. Brody had followed her there in his pickup. Once inside, they took a booth in the far corner, ordered coffee and, sitting side by side, she opened Collin’s senior yearbook and began to read what his friends had written in it.

Most of what was scrawled on the pages was what could be found in any old yearbook. “Have a great summer... So glad we got to know each other this year... Stay cool... Keep in touch... You rule!... We’re free!”

Those were mostly notes from girls Collin had known. Karen Jones now Parker had signed “Friends Forever.” So maybe that was all there was between the two of them.

The male classmates had written less poignant mementos. “You suck!... Keep it in your pants... You owe me $10... Dork!... Up yours.”

Disappointed, Harper started to close the book. On the back page, someone had written, “Take it to your grave. Or wish you had, Buddy.”

“Do you recognize the handwriting?” she asked Brody. The script was distinct. So was the pen he’d used, a wide black one.

Brody took the book from her and flipped through until he found several other spots where the student had signed with the same pen. Most of what he’d written was silly stuff.

But under his own photo he’d written with the same pen “I know, I’m awesome. :)”

“Will Sanders?” Harper said. “Do you know him?”

Brody shook his head. “You do realize that something as cryptic as ‘Take it to your grave. Or wish you had, Buddy’ could mean just about anything.”

She nodded.

“Nor do we know that this yearbook is what Collin was looking for earlier.”

“I know what you’re saying.” Harper agreed. “But it does make you wonder, doesn’t it? I wonder if Maggie had a yearbook?”

CHAPTER TWELVE

JD
HELD
HIS
breath as he neared Mirror Lake. It had been a long winter. Now he hoped that Maggie would be waiting for him. All through last fall, their visits had become something he looked forward to. She made him laugh. He felt alive up here with her.

The days he couldn’t ride up to the lake seemed interminable. Grace had been getting steadily worse as Sarah’s second pregnancy had progressed. He’d done his best to keep peace in the family, but Grace’s insistence that Sarah wanted her dead had finally made him explode and storm out.

He let out the breath he’d been holding as he spotted Maggie’s horse in the clearing by the lake.

Dismounting, he found her sitting on a rock looking troubled.

“Anything I can do?” he asked as he joined her.

She smiled, her face lighting up as if she was just as glad to see him. “I just needed a friendly face.”

They sat and talked. She’d be graduating soon, but she didn’t know what she wanted to do with her life. She said she’d just hang around for now, riding her horse, swimming in the lake.

“Everyone I know is getting married.” She shook her head.

“Isn’t there a boy you’re interested in?”

She laughed. “Boy, exactly. They are so immature. So boring. So single-minded.”

He could well imagine and said as much. “I used to be one.” They laughed, then fell silent, the only sound the gentle lap of the water against the rocky shore.

“You can talk to me,” Maggie said as she distractedly brushed dried pine needles from the soles of her bare feet. He could see that she’d already been in the icy water. Her hair was wet and there were spots on her Western shirt where her wet bra had bled through.

“I thought I was talking to you.”

She looked over at him. “You can tell me what’s wrong.”

He smiled at that. “And bore us both to death? No, thanks.”

“I’m a good listener.” She had begun to replait her hair.

“Where does your family think you go on the days you ride up here?” he asked. He knew that Maggie was Flannigan McTavish’s only child. She lived with her father on the ranch that he and his younger brother, Finn, owned. Both men were blacksmiths and kept to themselves.

“You’re asking if they know about you?” Maggie finished braiding her hair, tying off the end with a rubber band she’d pulled from her cutoff’s pocket. “They don’t know where I go or what I do. Does that make you feel better?”

“I wasn’t trying to hide the fact that we see each other.” It was a lie and her look called him on it. No one would understand their connection.

“What if they did know about you?” she challenged.

“They wouldn’t approve. I’m a married man old enough to be your father.”

She smiled. “If you say that to yourself enough times maybe you will quit riding up here to meet me.” Before he could object, she said, “I look forward to our visits as much as you do, so please don’t deny that you come up here to see me.”

He didn’t. He couldn’t. He looked out at the lake. A weak spring sun cast a patina over the surface as a hawk circled above them.

“I like this,” he admitted, feeling the pinch of guilt and telling himself he could live with it. “I like being here with you.”

She rested her shoulder against his. “So tell me what’s wrong.”

He closed his eyes, hesitating only a moment before he opened his heart to her.

* * *

T
HE
NEXT
MORNING
, no one was more surprised to see Brody than Harper was. “You’re
still
determined to play detective, right?” He didn’t give her a chance to answer. “Fine. Come on. At least when you’re with me, I know you aren’t getting yourself into trouble. There also might be a way to find out what was going on with Maggie before she died without you stirring up the whole town.” He turned and headed for his pickup.

She wanted to dig in her heels and demand to know where they were going. But as she watched him stride to his truck, she found herself hurrying to catch up. Wherever he was going, she was going with him.

“I don’t like doing this,” he said as they both climbed into his pickup. “I feel disloyal to my cousin. Worse, to my uncle.”

“Now you know how I feel, especially knowing how much my father has to lose if I’m wrong.”

He glanced over at her and had the good grace to look chastised as they drove out of the ranch and down the road toward Beartooth. “No matter how this ends, it’s going to be bad.”

She looked up and saw where he was headed. “What are we doing?”

“My dad and uncle were meeting with the sheriff to see when Maggie’s remains will be released for burial. So there won’t be anyone on the ranch—at least for a while.” He glanced at her. “My uncle left Maggie’s room exactly as it was the day she disappeared.”

“Seriously?”
Harper felt a shiver.

“So if there are any clues as to where she went that night...”

“Or if there was someone else...”

He nodded. “But I wouldn’t get your hopes up. I’m sure the sheriff searched the room thirty-five years ago. By now, Sheriff Curry has probably already been there, as well.”

“It won’t hurt to look, though, right?”

His expression was doubtful. “We just can’t let my uncle catch us.”

Brody pulled up in front of a small older house. As Harper got out, it felt as if an eerie silence had fallen over the place. She knew that both Brody’s uncle and father had houses on the ranch. After college, Brody had built his own house miles down the road from the two brothers. But she’d never been on the ranch before.

She had to run to keep up with Brody as he hurried to his uncle’s front door. Like most houses in rural Montana, the door wasn’t locked.

“Are you sure we should be in here?” Harper asked, hanging back in the doorway, suddenly worried they would get caught.

Brody didn’t answer as he moved deeper into the dim light of the old farmhouse. Harper glanced over her shoulder and then stepped in. The house felt cool and smelled of what could have been last night’s roast beef dinner. Brody had gone down a short hallway and stopped to wait for her.

She followed, feeling that she was trespassing. Brody had made it clear that there would be hell to pay if they got caught. Worse, because he was in Maggie’s room with her, it would be much worse if he was caught with a Hamilton.

Harper joined Brody as he opened the door to his cousin’s room. The scent that escaped was one of age and dust and a faint smell of a sweet perfume. Her stomach roiled. “We shouldn’t be here.”

“No, but now that we are, let’s do this.”

She stared at the horse posters on the walls, the straw cowboy hat hanging on the bedpost, a worn guitar leaning against the wall.

“Harper,” Brody said, getting her attention.

She nodded and moved cautiously to the desk, not wanting to disturb the dust any more than necessary. There was a thick layer of it on everything. It seemed that Flannigan McTavish had closed the door and not opened it again in all this time.

“So the room is exactly like it was the night she disappeared?” Harper asked. She could see that Brody wasn’t anxious to disturb the dust or anything else in the room. “It doesn’t look as if Frank Curry or anyone else has been here,” she said, pointing to the undisturbed dust on the floor.

“I guess not,” Brody said. “But I would assume that the former sheriff searched the room thirty-five years ago. Apparently he didn’t find anything.”

“So what makes you think
we
will?” she had to ask.

“Because he wasn’t looking for a murderer. We are.”

“Your uncle will know someone’s been here.”

“I’ll deal with that when I have to.”

Harper didn’t like the sound of that as she took in the room.

“Start with the desk drawers, I’ll look under the bed and the top shelf of the closet. We’re looking for her yearbook—or anything else that might give us a clue to what was going on with her before she was killed.”

Harper moved cautiously to the desk. Grasping the knob of the bottom drawer, she pulled it open.

Notebooks and three-ring binders. She opened one after another only to find schoolwork, nothing else.

She tried the next drawer. This one had what appeared to be mementos. Report cards, numerous dried flower corsages, a plastic tiara, Halloween masks, and under it all was a small wooden box.

Carefully, she pulled out the box and opened it. Inside was a bundle of what appeared to be wildflowers. Most of the petals had fallen off the stems. The flowers had been tied together with a thin piece of hair ribbon. Clearly they had meant something to be placed alone in this box. But unfortunately there was no card or note. Who had given them to Maggie? she wondered.

“Any luck?” Brody asked.

“Not much.” She closed the box, put it back and opened the last drawer.

There were a few cards and papers in this drawer. Several drawings that, even to Harper’s amateur eye, looked as if they’d been done by someone with talent.

“Was Maggie artistic?” she asked.

“Not that I know of, why?”

“Oh, I found some drawings. They’re quite good.”

She pulled out all the papers and went through them but found nothing that could be considered helpful. No love letters. No notes that girls often did as they tried out a boyfriend’s name to see how it looked with her own. No appointment book with plans for the week or even the next day.

As she started to close the drawer, it caught on something. Pulling it all the way open again, she saw what had kept it from closing—a framed photo of two girls of about twelve. One was a beautiful redhead, the other a dark-haired brunette. Both appeared to be early teens. They stood squinting into the sunlight, their arms locked around each other, both smiling broadly. Best friends, Harper thought, recognizing times in her life when she’d taken a photo like this.

She held the photo up for Brody.

“Maggie and...” He took the framed photograph from her and looked at the girlish writing at the bottom. “Amber? The only Amber I know of is Amber Jenkins.”

“Ty Jenkins’s sister?” Another boy she’d seen in the yearbook. “Wouldn’t her friend know what was going on back then?”

“I guess it would depend on how close they were at the time Maggie disappeared.”

“Or how close Maggie was with her brother. Didn’t Ty Jenkins kill himself?” Harper took the photo back. She’d found no other photographs of the two young women. Had they still been friends when Maggie was murdered? And where did Collin Wilson fit into the picture? Or did he?

“I’m beginning to realize how different things were thirty-five years ago,” Harper said. “We would know if they were friends if Maggie had had a cell phone back then. There would be text data, phone numbers and appointments, and possibly even GPS to track the last few places she went.”

As Harper started to put everything back in the drawer, the light caught on something small and metal in the very back.

“With us knowing nothing about her, it’s impossible to know what we’re even looking for,” Brody said as he continued to search. “You’re right. If this had been recent, everything, including photos, about her would have been posted on Facebook. Thirty-five years ago—”

“She would have kept a diary.” Harper held up the tiny gold key she’d found in the back of the drawer.

Brody turned from where he’d been going through the closet. “How do you know that’s what it is for?” he asked, stepping to her to take the key.

“Are you kidding? I had five sisters. The only way I could keep anything to myself and secret was a locked diary. I would hide the key—and then hide the diary somewhere else.”

He looked around the room. “We’ve looked most every place. Without tearing the room apart...”

“Wouldn’t a diary have been the first thing that was found after she disappeared? Either the sheriff found it after the missing persons report was filed or...”

“Or my uncle did.” Brody pulled an item out from under the bed. “I found her yearbook from senior year.”

Harper hurried over to him as he flipped it open. There were a few places where it had been signed, but very few. What was written under photos of girls Maggie had gone to school with was innocuous enough. “Best of luck in the future... Stay cool always... Keep the faith... Have a great summer.”

Under Maggie’s photo, though, someone had printed the words: “Bitch. You deserved it and worse.”

Brody shook his head and started to close the book. Harper took it from him and opened it again to the photo of Bobby Barnes and Maggie in some class where they sat next to each other. Under it, he had written, “Not over by a long shot.” The other boys Maggie had dated hadn’t commented in her book.

* * *

B
RODY
DROVE
OUT
of his uncle’s place through the back way. The last thing he wanted was for Flannigan to find them in Maggie’s room—let alone be caught with Harper. It would be bad enough when he saw the footprints. His uncle would know Brody had been there—and not alone.

He looked over at Harper, mentally kicking himself for getting caught up in her quest to find out the truth. The sun shone in through the side window of his pickup, lighting up her beautiful face and making her long blond hair shine like summer wheat.

After waiting years for Harper to return to Montana and the ranch... He’d never wanted any other woman the way he did this one. If anything, her stubborn determination to face all of this head-on had made him fall even more in love with her.

She was strong and he liked the way she stood up to him. The woman knew her own mind, no doubt about that. But for the life of him, he couldn’t see how they could ever be together—not if they had any hope of their families being a part of their lives. It had been bad enough before, but once they’d found Maggie’s remains on Hamilton Ranch...