Ripples (16 page)

Jacob

The morning sun breaking through the trees means I better get moving, and if the sheriff’s crew got an early start, I’ve lost some of my time advantage. Aching bones, headache, and hunger aren’t a prescription for a good day, nor are they excuses to slow down.

Another bad omen raises its ugly head when I stand and brush off—a small tear in my weatherproof jacket. I must have snagged it on something along the way. Good thing the sky’s clear. Otherwise, weather would be high on my list of complaints.

Complaints? What the Hell. I’m starting to sound like a mid-level manager, more concerned about covering my ass than getting somewhere.

I’m barely two miles from the lake—that’s only 30-40 minutes ahead of the manhunt. My best bet is to get deeper into the chaparral, force the sheriff to widen the search grid, add manpower. With any luck, the girl is still out there somewhere, and they’ll be forced to sweep wide enough to flush her out, bring her home safe. I just have to point them in the right direction. When they find her, hopefully, she can lead Baker to the real killer. Then, I’ll be able to turn myself in.

Mercedes

I stand over RJ as he’s curled up on his side, lying on my pine needle mattress. I’ve been up since the first rays of sunlight streaked through cracks in the plywood siding. The last few cold beans from the bottom of the can are what’s left of my breakfast.

I nudge him with my foot. He grunts. When that doesn’t work, I plant my shoe in the small of his back and shove. He rolls over. “Get up, lazy.”

He props up on his elbows and shakes the cobwebs out of his head.

I glare down at him. “Cold beans or cold soup? Cans are in one of the sacks we brought over from the ranch.”

“Huh?”

I scoop out the last spoonful of beans. “We’ve got to get a move on.”

RJ rubs his eyes. “What time is it?”

“Who needs a clock?” I toss my empty can in the tub I use for washing. “It’s daylight. Get a move on.”

He gets up and stumbles over to the plastic sack of supplies we collected from Uncle Eric’s. “Cold soup? Why don’t we make a fire?”

“Not going to waste the wood or time. We’ve got to find Amy as quick as we can, or we may never …. Horse might’ve thrown her. She could be lying unconscious somewhere.”

“Okay. Okay. I’m on it.” RJ digs a box of crackers out of a sack and tears it open.

He races to the door, stuffing another handful of crackers into his mouth.

“Coming with me?” he asks with his mouth full.

When he’s saddled the two horses, he offers me the mare’s reins.

I step back and hold out my hands to my side. “What do you want me to do with those?”

He grins. “Climb on board.”

“You’re crazy. I don’t know how to ride.”

He mounts the stallion and tosses the mare’s reins at me. “Time for you to start pulling your weight.”

I catch the leather straps. “Real funny.”

RJ nudges the stallion with the heel of his boot.

“Wait, damn it!” I call after him.

He coaxes his horse to speed up.

“Damn it,” I mutter as I stick my foot in the mare’s stirrup and clutch the saddle horn, pulling myself up.

About twenty yards away, RJ pulls the stallion to a stop and looks over his shoulder.

“Good job,” he says.

I stick out my tongue.

He turns his horse back and guides it up to me. “Now, if you want her to turn to the right, just lay the reins over the left side of her neck like so. Want her to turn the left, do the opposite. To make her stop, pull back gently on the reins and say ‘whoa’. Goose her in the side with your heels to make her go. Goose her again to make her go faster. If she gets out of control, keep your head down and hang on. I’ll come after you.”

I grimace.

“We’ll start out slow.”

“Okay. I think we should go back to where we lost Amy’s trail. We should have kept going in that direction last night, instead of heading back to the ranch.”

“Fine,” he says.

He urges the stallion forward and watches over his shoulder. I try to keep up.

So far, so good.

Deputy Sheriff Baker

Chandler’s palace deck wouldn’t be a half-bad spot for your regular cup of morning Joe, if you weren’t waiting for a search party to get things in gear. And if you weren’t having to settle for a sniffer dog instead of real bloodhounds. We have to find Chandler’s trail now, not next week. A cooperative dog handler would be nice, too.

This lady dog handler says Edgar, her dog, doesn’t follow a specific person’s track on the ground; it just picks up any human scent or scents in the vicinity. She tells me you get much better results when the air isn’t packed with moisture. The rain squall was her reason for not staying out much past sunset last night. This morning her excuse is patches of early morning condensation trapped in a few low spots. That has cost us at least a couple hours.

As I’m cramming a stale donut down my throat, the dispatcher’s voice crackles over my radio. “Yeah, Baker here,” I grumble.

“State Attorney General’s office has a special team headed up to the Lamb ranch this morning to do extra forensic work.”

“Do you have an ETA?”

“About an hour from now. They started out from Sacramento first thing this morning.”

After signing off, I stride over to Deputy Grimes. “I’m heading over to Eric Lamb’s place. Let me know if this sniffer dog comes up with anything.”

Jacob

A dog barking spikes my adrenaline. The search party must be closing in. I have to come up with some kind of a diversion, something to confuse the dog, frustrate the sheriff into calling in reinforcements and expanding the search grid. The ammonia vials—they’ll do the trick. Dogs hate the odor.

Just ahead, I spot a granite outcrop, half buried in the base of a cliff. The bluff is more than a story above ground level. The top must be the starting point of a new, perpendicular ridgeline. A sturdy young pine, standing about six inches out from the sheerest portion of the rock face, is just the right height for a makeshift ladder.

I cut a low branch from another tree—far enough away to be unnoticeable—and sweep away my footprints from around the young pine. I empty the vials in an arc at the base of my ‘ladder’ and chest-high on the granite face. I shinny up the sapling, carrying my makeshift broom to dispose of up above. On top I take a moment to survey the surrounding landscape from my new vantage.

Amy

The bright yellow sun’s almost halfway up in the sky … it’s late morning. Tess would’ve rousted me hours ago, and Bryce would be having a conniption.

I rub sleep from my eyes. My stomach growls. Alone’s no good, but being back with Bryce and Tess would be worse. RJ and Mercedes are the best option I have. Maybe they’ll come now that it’s daylight. Should I try to find them, or sit and let them come to me?

My stomach growls again. I stand. Everything’s still damp and chilly under the trees, but the sun has already begun to dry out the meadow grasses. Did Mercedes live off grass and animal food ’til she made a home for herself in the old hut? The hut has to be fairly close. The mare didn’t bring me that far. I start out across the meadow, toward dense woods on the other side.

The wind picks up. Clouds get thicker, blacker. I follow a path across the meadow, into the trees. Dark shadows overtake everything … even the littler shadows that were there a couple minutes ago. Like Bryce’s shadow when he stands over me. I have to keep thinking, Bryce isn’t here.

The trail’s flat for a while, but soon starts uphill. When I stop to catch my breath at a level spot, it goes straight up … about as high as the neighbor’s cabin. How am I going to do that? Don’t remember Mercedes’ hut being so high up. Is this the mountain where people eat each other? I fall to my knees. Tears run down my cheeks. My whole body quivers. Can’t keep going. Bryce can have his way with me, if that’s what it takes to get out of this.

There’s more barking … sounds far off. If coyotes come, let them eat me. Bryce is right. He’s always right. Should never have let Mercedes set me free. A cool breeze whips up, and goose bumps spread over my arms and neck. Smells like rain. Storms scare me … Bryce scares me. I slump down and sit on the hard ground. Lean back against an old log. Pull my knees up to my chest and hug them.

RJ

Mercedes insists we go back to the meadow where we lost the mare’s tracks in the storm the day before. We find fresh human tracks, about the size of Mercedes’ shoes, leading down to the meadow from nearby woods.

Mercedes frowns. “If she headed out across that field, we may never find her tracks again.”

I point to the meadow. “If we’re lucky, it’ll be swampy in places.”

She stares at the horizon. It’s growing blacker by the second. “Storm coming.”

A sliver of lightning is barely noticeable in the heart of the darkest clouds. I scrunch up my face. “Looks mean.”

She points to the other side of the meadow. “Let’s hope she headed straight across. We don’t have time to sweep the whole field.”

“But straight across won’t take her back to your place.”

“No, she’ll need to angle a bit to her left. The trail cuts through some pretty thick woods and leads all the way to the ridge top. If she keeps on it she’ll miss the hut altogether.”

We mount our horses and ride to the other side where we find more tracks leading up into the woods. I coax the stallion ahead. Mercedes follows on the mare. As the storm closes in, shadows you could see when we entered the tree canopy are lost in growing darkness. Amy’s tracks get tougher to follow, but as far as we can tell, she stayed with the beaten path.

Deputy Sheriff Baker

This lady dog handler insists we’ve lost the trail. I clutch the back of my neck. “So you mean he just vanished in thin air?”

She looks away. “That seems to be our situation.”

“Does this happen often?”

“Enough to be frustrating.”

The granite out-cropping makes me wonder. “It just stops here?”

She shrugs.

“What makes you think he didn’t scale those rocks?”

She shakes her head. “Edgar, here, would be trying to paw his way up the rock face after him. He doesn’t show any interest. Keeps sniffing everywhere else.”

I turn to Grimes. “Heard anything of the status of those bloodhounds?”

“Not yet.”

“Damn.” I kick at the dirt.

“Sir—maybe if we widen the grid?”

I massage my temples. “Sure. Have someone call the surrounding jurisdictions to see what kind of manpower they can round up.”

Grimes turns to leave, then stops. “By the way, how’d that forensic team do at Lamb’s place?”

I purse my lips before answering. “They found a couple pieces of trace evidence we apparently missed. At least that’s their story. Suppose they had to come up with something to justify their existence.”

Tess

Roy turns off the highway onto the road that goes past Eric’s ranch. My heart beats faster. “Where are we going?”

“Just up the road a ways.”

How am I going to tell him I’m not going back to that place? Still can’t shake the sight of Eric’s mangled face. I stared at it the whole time Bryce was chasing after the girls. And when he came back for me, he glared at me with those coal, black eyes of his. His jaw was set, and he was spooky quiet like the eye of a storm, until he snarled, “Let’s get outta here—somebody might come snoopin’ around to see what all the ruckus was all about.” When I said we should bury the body, Bryce shook his head and said, “Let ’em rot.” Can’t believe that monster didn’t say another word … until we got close to the shack. And then it was like … he was just taking back what belonged to him.

I hold my breath as Roy drives on past the entrance to Eric’s place. A few hundred yards farther, he parks.

“Why are we stopping here?”

“There’s an abandoned hut tucked up in the woods a couple of miles from here. I noticed it when I was scouting the area for deer last fall. Looked like someone’s set up housekeeping there.”

“Do you think my girl could be holed up there?”

Roy takes his deer rifle off the rack mounted on the rear window. “Maybe, but if not, whoever’s using it might have seen her.”

An hour later, we crouch behind a granite outcrop on the ridge above the hut. Roy pulls out his binoculars and zooms in. He leans into me. “Let’s go down and see if anyone’s home.”

I nod. As we stand, Roy slips an ammo clip into his pump action 30.06, chambers a round, and clicks off the safety. He signals for me to keep quiet and follow him.

Jacob

I rap on the door of a rundown hut near the bottom of the ridge. No one answers. I stand to one side, my shotgun poised, and nudge the door open. “Hello, anyone home?”

No answer. I push the door open wider. I stoop down, pick up a pebble, and toss it in. Still no response. I hold my breath and step inside to check the place out.

It looks empty, but lived in. A box full of books in the corner is one of several clues. I recognize most of the titles—a couple that I pick up have my nameplate inside. The last time I saw them, they were lined up on shelves in my library. In fact, there’s a lot of stuff here that belongs to me, but all of it vanished long before the girl from across the lake went missing. So, she’s not the thief. I take the only chair in the place and sit facing the door, the Beretta across my lap. Can’t wait to see who shows up.

A few minutes later the latch starts to move. As the door opens slowly, someone pokes a rifle barrel through the opening. When the door swings open all the way, I yell, “Freeze!” Staring at the twin barrels of my shotgun pointed straight at him is a wiry cowboy. His rifle is angled away from me. I stand slowly, keeping my shotgun aimed at his chest, and demand. “Lay it on the floor and step to the side.”

The cowboy puts his gun down and raises his hands in front him. “Sorry. The name’s Roy. We didn’t know anyone lived here. We’re out searching for a missing girl.”

“So am I. You’re not alone?”

Roy glances over his shoulder. “Uh—no. I mean, there are others searching, but no one’s here—with me—now.”

“Step all the way in and close the door.”