The Ex Who Glowed in the Dark (Charley's Ghost) (8 page)

She waved as Amanda got out of the truck. Her long, curly red hair, so much like Amanda’s except for a few white strands, was pulled back into a braid, the same as Amanda’s. Not a sign of the mother-daughter connection. Just the optimum style for motorcycle riding. But they had both chosen to wear their hair long.

Amanda returned the wave as she strode toward Sunny, a smile tilting her lips in spite of her distress over Dawson’s situation. Sunny had that effect on her, made her feel that, even if something was wrong, it could be fixed. 

“Get your real name back?” Sunny asked.

“Sure did, and I’m never giving it up again.”

Sunny smiled, and for just a moment she looked like a mother, a wise, caring mother who knew her daughter would encounter a lot of unknowns in the future that could jeopardize any utterance of the word
never
.

How different her life could have been if Sunny had raised her. She was pretty sure this woman would never have planned a baby shower with a cardboard cake and engraved invitations to be sent out to a group of people whose personalities matched the cake.

“Irene sent you some cookies.” Sunny withdrew a plastic container from the bag on the back of her bike.

A beam of warm Texas sunshine wrapped around Amanda's heart as she accepted the container prepared by her mother-in-law.
“Irene. She and Herbert are the only good things that came out of my marriage to Charley.”

“Hey!” he protested.

“I have the absolute best in-laws in the world.”

“You do,” Sunny agreed. “Take your cookies upstairs, get your gear, and let’s hit the road.”

“First we need to talk. We have to do more than a fun ride today. We have a mission. Dawson’s little brother has been kidnapped.”

Sunny frowned. “Dawson’s little brother? I didn’t know he had one.”

“I didn’t either. Come upstairs with me and I’ll tell you all about it.”

They walked up the steps to Amanda’s apartment over the bike repair shop while she recited the events of the morning.

Sunny turned as they entered the apartment, a frown creasing her brow. “How awful for Dawson and his brother. You did the right thing, calling in the police. They’ll find him.”

Amanda set the container of cookies on her lamp table. “You say that like you’re reciting lines from a book. You don’t really believe it, do you?”

Sunny bit her lip. “Actually, most kidnappings are resolved successfully within the first twenty-four hours. But since this one involves people who’ve already committed murder and they’re asking for something so strange as a ransom—” She shook her head. “I don’t know. It’s a scary situation.”

That wasn’t what Amanda wanted to hear, but she appreciated the fact that Sunny was honest with her, that she treated her as an equal. They had thirty-two years to make up for and total honesty, even when it might be painful, was a good start.

“Do you think we have a chance of finding something by riding around today?”

Sunny met her gaze. “We might. It’s a long shot, but we won’t know until we try.”
More honesty. Damn.

Amanda nodded. “A long shot is better than no shot.
Which reminds me, I need to get one more thing.”

She went to her bedroom and took from her nightstand drawer the .38 she’d bought in Silver Creek from Charley’s friend Dub. She checked to be sure it was loaded then returned it to the holster.

“You’re taking a gun?”

Amanda jumped and whirled around. She hadn’t realized Sunny had followed her into the bedroom. “Better to have a gun and not need it than need a gun and not have it.”

Sunny studied her for a long moment, concern flickering in her eyes, then she nodded. “Good point.” She turned and left the room.

Amanda released a sigh. For a brief instant she’d feared there’d be a battle. Her mother had never approved of her learning to shoot or having a firearm around. If she’d been there, they’d have had a “discussion.” Of course, Sunny owned several guns and had, in fact, saved Amanda’s life a couple of months ago.

Yeah, her life could have been very different.

She shoved the gun into her purse, retrieved a helmet, gloves and jacket from the closet and headed back to the living room.

Sunny grinned as she entered with her gear and the gun in her purse. “We don’t need a DNA test to prove you’re my daughter.”

It was a simple statement, but it made Amanda feel warm inside.

*~*~*

Out on the highway going seventy miles an hour the rush of air dissipated the summer heat and Amanda was comfortable even in her leather jacket and helmet. They stayed on the interstates until they reached the outskirts of Dallas, then Amanda exited and slowed as they rode past businesses and along streets with open fields on both sides.

Charley suddenly darted in front of Amanda then back again, waving his arms. That was strange. Usually he chose to hover on the back of her bike, pretending he was riding.

But he had done that same thing one other time, the time in Silver Creek when somebody had been following her. She pulled over to the side of the road and stopped.

Sunny followed suit and lifted the shield on her helmet. “What’s up? Bike trouble?”

“No. I—” Amanda looked at Charley. “I think somebody’s following us.”

“Yes,” Charley confirmed. “There’s a beige minivan that’s been on your tail since you left your shop. I thought at first it was a coincidence, but when he followed you off the highway, I knew.”

“Somebody’s following us?” Sunny repeated. “How do you know that?”

Amanda flinched. She could tell Sunny that she’d seen something in her rear view mirror, but that would be a lie. She and Sunny didn’t lie to each other. However, she couldn’t very well say Charley had told her.

A beige minivan drove up behind them, pulled off the road and stopped.

Chapter Seven

Amanda yanked off her helmet and gloves, reached for her purse which was strapped to the sissy bar of her bike, and wrapped trembling fingers around the grip of her gun. She got off her bike, holding the gun behind her, and turned to face the van. Her heart pounded so loudly she felt sure
Sunny would hear it and know what a coward she was.

The ominous minivan was probably completely innocent. They had only Charley’s word that it had been following them. Though he had lost the ability to lie in his current state, he was often mistaken and had a tendency to be melodramatic in his efforts to garner attention.

“They’re getting out!” Charley warned, hovering just behind Amanda.

Sunny swung off her bike and strode toward the van. She was tall and slim and at that moment she looked ten feet tall.
A mother defending her child. A burst of happiness shot through Amanda in spite of the situation as she hurried to catch up with Sunny. She was, after all, the one with the gun. She would defend Sunny.

Both van doors opened and a man and woman got out.

“Get back,” Amanda said as she walked faster, trying to pass Sunny.

Sunny stepped in front of her. “You get back. I’ve got this one.”

“You ladies need some help?” the man asked, stepping away from the door and closing it. He didn’t look like a serial killer. Average height, a little overweight, bald. The woman coming out the passenger side door was small and mousy.

But if serial killers looked dangerous, nobody would ever get in the car with them. Amanda moved to stand beside Sunny so she could get a clear shot. Not that she thought it would be necessary to shoot anybody, but it was always good to be prepared.

“I’ll go check it out.” Charley darted through the roof of the van.

“Thanks, but we’re fine,” Sunny assured the couple.

The man nodded. “Saw you stopped and thought you might be having bike problems. I used to ride. I know how tough that can be, stranded miles from nowhere.”

“No problems. Just stopped to take some pictures,” Amanda said.

The man glanced around them at the flat landscape dotted with mesquite trees and scrub oak.

Even Sunny gave Amanda a questioning look.

“It’s a stark kind of beauty.” Amanda shifted her grip around the gun. Her fingers were starting to sweat.

“I do a little photography myself.
Just a hobby. What kind of camera you using?” The man walked closer to them. Though his stomach was rounded, his legs beneath his shorts were thin and pale. Not an intimidating figure, but Amanda felt somehow intimidated.

Ridiculous, she told herself. She was overreacting to Charley’s melodrama.

“Just the camera in my cell phone.”

Sunny took a step closer to the man, and Amanda took two steps.

“Thanks for stopping to see if we need help,” Sunny said. “We’re fine and really need to get on with our ride. We want to get back to Dallas before dark.”

Charley burst through the windshield of the van, his eyes wide. “It’s them! It’s the kidnappers! They have blankets they could have wrapped him in and rags that probably have chlorophyll on them!”

“Chlorophyll?” Amanda repeated.

“Chlorophyll?”
Sunny sounded even more astonished than Amanda.

The man from the van halted a few feet away and looked puzzled at the odd turn the conversation had taken.

Charley settled beside Amanda and pointed to the van. “You know. That stuff they use to knock people out.”

Chloroform.
Amanda doubted that the frumpy couple had kidnapping tools in their van, but she made a mental note of the license plate anyway. Charley wasn’t always wrong. Most of the time but not always.

Sunny turned to Amanda.
“Ready to get on the road again? Think you have enough pictures?”

Amanda gave a final glance at the man and woman standing beside the van. The woman was watching them with a strange expression. An expression of guilt because she had blankets and chloroform in her van or just curiosity about why Amanda suddenly blurted out the word
chlorophyll
?

“I’m ready. I have enough pictures.” She turned, moving her gun around to the front to keep it out of sight of the couple in the van, and followed Sunny across the dusty shoulder of the road to their bikes.

“What are you doing?” Charley waved his arms wildly as he floated beside her. “Don’t let them get away!”

Sunny lifted her helmet but paused before putting it on and looked back toward the van. “That was a little strange.”

Amanda studied the vehicle with the man and woman back inside, consulting a map spread out on the dash. “Yeah, very strange. I thought everybody had GPS. Maybe they’re looking for something that isn’t on GPS, some place that doesn’t have an address.” Or maybe they were pretending to look at a map so they had an excuse for not leaving until Amanda and Sunny did.

“I wasn’t talking about their map. I was talking about the way you suddenly shouted
chlorophyll
.”

“Oh, yeah, about that—” Amanda searched her mind for an explanation that didn’t sound insane. “It’s a form of Tourette Syndrome.” She flinched as the words came out of her mouth.
So much for total honesty. The lie she’d just told Sunny seemed to hang between them like a visible shadow.

“No, it’s not.”

Amanda grinned. “No. It’s not. We’ll talk about it later. Let’s get moving before those creepy people back there get on the road again.”

“They were trying to be nice.”

“Okay, they were nice creepy people. He just happened to be a former bike rider and he just happened to be a photographer. If we’d said we raised rats for fun and profit, I wonder if he’d have said he did that too?” She settled her helmet onto her head. “We’ve got a lot of ground to cover before dark.”

As they rode away, Amanda looked in her rearview mirror. The van was still sitting there.

She was becoming paranoid and it was Charley’s fault, but she had no idea how to get rid of him. She didn’t think even Google could find divorce forms for a dead man.

*~*~*

The afternoon sun was getting low on the horizon when Amanda and Sunny pulled to the side of the dirt road and parked for what seemed like the hundredth time.

“What do you think?” Amanda asked, pointing to the tumbledown shed a couple of hundred feet from the road. After riding around the area for over two hours, up and down side roads, stopping to peer into the occasional barn or out building but passing up structures surrounded by fences, she understood why Jake hadn’t been wildly enthusiastic about finding Grant from the possible clue. The area to be covered was daunting.

Sunny considered the dilapidated building. “If anybody was in there, they’d have to be holding up the roof with both hands.”

Amanda sighed. “We might as well head home. This has been a wasted day. We haven’t accomplished a thing.”

“Yes, we have accomplished something. We covered a lot of ground. We know where Grant isn’t being held.”

Amanda thought that was a pretty lame attempt at encouragement, but she let it go and mentally gave Sunny an A for attitude.