Dangerous Sanctuary

by Shirlee McCoy

  None of them were good.

  He’d seen her two days ago, and they’d discussed the case. He’d assured her, just as he knew Wren had been doing, that the agency believed the threat against her had been neutralized when Absalom died. He’d had no guarantee of that, no proof, and he’d known it when he’d spoken the words. He’d been honest. He’d given her the facts they’d gathered, but he hadn’t told her to be careful, he hadn’t reminded her that they weren’t sure of anything yet.

  He hadn’t said that he worried about her. That he enjoyed spending time with her. That he missed her when they weren’t together.

  He hadn’t wanted to break the vow he’d made to himself. He hadn’t wanted to repeat the mistake he’d made with Mackenzie. Neither of those reasons seemed important now.

  The only thing that mattered, the only thing he cared about, was finding Honor and making sure she was okay.

  ELEVEN

  She dreamed of icebergs and snowmen, of building forts out of old fence posts and making snowballs with ungloved hands. In her dreams, she was cold, her body stiff, her feet numb.

  Move! her dream-self kept demanding. Move or die.

  And she tried, but her body didn’t work, and she realized she was covered in snow, frozen in place. In this dream everything was blue and white ice and shaking agony, the blanket of snow building and building, covering her chin and her cheeks and then her mouth and nose.

  She inhaled, sputtering and gasping, coughing and gagging, the snow replaced by water.

  And she realized she was no longer dreaming.

  She was awake, lying in a dark space filled with water and cold.

  Not a dark space.

  A well.

  The well. The one she’d been tossed into.

  Fifteen feet deep. Four feet in diameter. Not a good place to die, but she knew it was intended to be her tomb.

  For a moment, she was so panicked she couldn’t think. She could only act, jumping up, clawing at the walls, screaming and screaming and screaming. Breaking nails, scraping palms, trying to muscle her way from the bottom of the well to the top of it. Yelling until her throat was raw, her voice hoarse, her head pounding with the effort.

  Or from the bump she’d received when she’d fallen.

  She could feel it throbbing at the back of her head, and she touched the area, probing the bump. No blood. No broken skin. She didn’t feel dizzy, light-headed or disoriented, so she’d work under the assumption that she didn’t have a concussion or a brain bleed; that her biggest, most pressing problem was that she was trapped in a well with just about no hope of escaping it.

  “No hope? You’re alive. You didn’t break your neck or your skull, so stop panicking and think,” she muttered, the words echoing hoarsely.

  She had no idea how long she’d been there, but she could see the sun gleaming above the well. It was at its zenith, a bright yellow orb against the robin’s-egg-blue sky, endlessly far away. Absolutely unreachable.

  But the crumbling edge of the old well was not.

  She refused to allow it to be, because she refused to die on her grandmother’s property, a few hundred feet away from safety.

  She shivered, sloshing through knee-deep water, her clothes soaked, her teeth chattering. She wasn’t going to give whoever had tossed her the satisfaction of knowing he’d succeeded. She wasn’t going to let him have the final words in the story of her life.

  She was finding a way out, she was going to figure out who’d shoved her in and she was going to make him pay.

  She just hoped God agreed with her plan, but she’d need a miracle to achieve her goal, superhuman strength that would let her scale the wall like Spider-Man, fly out of it like some avenging wraith.

  Of course, she didn’t expect to be zapped with either of those abilities, but divine inspiration would be nice; some finite and feasible plan that would get her out.

  “Come on, Honor,” she muttered. “Think. There has to be a way.”

  The words echoed hollowly, mixing with the splash of her legs through the water. She touched the wall, sliding her hands along the cool stone. It was slick with algae, rough with lichen. If Radley were there, he’d probably have some handy tool tucked in a pocket that he could use to crawl out. She didn’t have anything. She’d left her purse in the SUV, her cell phone with it. Even if someone found the Explorer, it would take time to find her.

  The sun would probably set before then.

  Hopefully not for the last time in her life.

  She wasn’t afraid to die, but she’d like to live a while longer.

  She surveyed the interior of the well again, looking for anything that could help in her effort to escape. She slid her feet through the murky water, but there were no old boards or planks lying beneath the surface. She’d checked again and again, and then once more, because she refused to believe there was nothing. No boards. No rope. No whistle or siren or alarm. No handy ladder that would lead her up and out. Hope was like that—unreasonably certain of a good outcome. Even in the face of evidence against it.

  “Of course, you’re going to have a good outcome. You have meetings today. At some point, someone at work will realize you’re not there. People will be dispatched to find you. They’ll search the property, discover the well and pull you out,” she told herself.

  It made sense. It was a reasonable expectation, but she’d been in the well since before dawn, and if the position of the sun in the sky were any indication, it was after noon.

  People at work should have already arrived.

  The police should have been here long ago.

  She should be out of her tomb, free from her grave, sitting at her desk trying to figure out why the voice of her attacker had sounded so familiar. It had to have been one of Absalom’s guards. Or maybe someone she’d met at the compound. She couldn’t put the voice to a face or a name, but she would. She had to. She wanted this over. All the danger, the fear, the worry. She wanted to go back to the office—just like she’d planned—and get back to work solving other people’s problems, because she was tired of living in the midst of her own.

  Because it was hard. Not just being attacked, thrown in a well, targeted for death. That stuff was difficult, scary and daunting. It was the not knowing, though, that was eating at her. Not knowing why. Not knowing who. Not knowing whom she could trust and whom she couldn’t.

  Not knowing where the next moment would lead, because she had no idea what was motivating the attacks or how to stop them. She wanted her life back.

  In all its boring routine and simplicity—the long days at the office, the nights in her apartment, the weekends on the farm. She wanted church on Sunday and prayers in the wee hours of the mornings. Long hikes and lazy evenings, and Radley sitting by her side.

  The thought brought her up short, and she tried to push it away. This wasn’t the time to think about Radley or to worry about what their relationship might be. Could be.

  What she wanted it to be.

  This was the time for coming up with a plan. She couldn’t stay in the well overnight. She was already shaking with cold.

  Please, God, she prayed silently. Help me find a way out of this.

  She’d seen online videos of young kids scaling walls by pressing their backs against one side and their feet against the other. It had looked easy enough. Of course, they’d been in hallways that were narrower than the mouth of the well. She had to try anyway, because she wasn’t going to stand around waiting for rescue.

  She leaned her shoulders against one wall, put a foot on the wall across from it and inched upward. It wasn’t easy. It wasn’t quick, but she was doing it. Slowly creeping upward. Her feet slipped in thick algae, and she couldn’t catch herself. She fell with a splash, scrambled upright.

  She could hear Wilbur squealing. He had to have escaped his pen. Usually, he’d wander over to
the neighbors. But this time, he seemed to be hanging out close to the well.

  “Wilbur, go get help!” she shouted as if he were a beautifully groomed collie wandering around looking for people to rescue rather than a huge lumbering pig who’d rather take a chunk out of someone than help them.

  “Wilbur, I feed you, remember?” she called. “I bring you pieces of Dotty’s apple pie. If I die down here, who’s going to do that?”

  Wilbur grunted a few more times, then went silent. Knowing him, Honor was sure he’d found some sweet grass shoots nearby and was nibbling them while she died.

  “You are not going to die,” she growled, facing the wall, hands on slippery rocks. She stepped back, stretching until her feet were touching the opposite wall, and then she tried to climb up again. One hand at a time, one foot at a time, perched over the water, bowed like an inchworm. If the walls hadn’t been so slippery, she might have made it, but she couldn’t get enough leverage, and she fell again, her head slamming into rock.

  Stunned, she lay in the water, breathless, disoriented.

  She thought she heard someone shouting. At first it seemed like a figment of her imagination, maybe a trick of her auditory system. The well produced strange echoes of sound, and she thought she might be hearing her breath amplified a dozen-fold.

  But the sound had more substance, and she stood, straining to hear.

  There it was again! Someone shouting. Maybe her name. Maybe something else. It didn’t matter. They were close enough for her to hear. If she could get their attention, she’d be free.

  She crouched, sliding her hands through the water, searching for the loose rocks that were lying at the bottom of the well. She found one, hefted it from the water and began slamming it against the wall, trying to mimic Morse code for SOS. Dot-dot-dot. Dash-dash-dash. Dot-dot-dot.

  Over and over again.

  Her fingers went numb from the force of the blows. Her arms went numb. Her muscles strained and trembled, but she couldn’t quit.

  If someone was up there, she wanted to be heard.

  She wanted to be rescued.

  She wanted to find the person responsible for tossing her down there and make him pay, and then she wanted to go back to her job, her beautiful life, to Dotty.

  And to Radley, her heart added.

  She ignored it and continued pounding the code, praying that someone would hear.

  * * *

  It had taken too long to get to the farm. By the time Radley arrived, the local police had been on the scene for two hours. They’d combed through the evidence left at the Explorer, shouted for Honor over and over again, walking into the fields that bordered the driveway, searching for signs that she’d been there. They’d found no evidence of a struggle, no indication that Honor had been attacked near her SUV. The police had concluded that she’d run out of gas, gotten out of the vehicle and disappeared.

  Only people didn’t disappear.

  They walked away, went into hiding, started new lives. They were abducted by strangers or friends, held captive, hidden away. They were mistreated, abused, kept in captivity or released, allowed to live or murdered.

  There were dozens of possibilities when a person was missing, but no one just fell off the face of the earth and disappeared.

  Honor was somewhere.

  They just had to find her.

  He searched the grassy areas around the Explorer, looking for anything the police might have missed. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust their work. He knew they’d been thorough, but he had to see for himself, he had to check every possibility.

  “See anything?” Wren called as she strode up the driveway. She’d been interviewing Dotty, talking to neighbors, trying to find out if anyone had heard anything.

  “Nothing.”

  “The local police believe she was transported off the farm. There is evidence that a vehicle was parked off the road a few yards from here.”

  “I know.” He’d spoken to Sheriff Ethan Cartwright. The guy had a good head on his shoulders and about twenty more years of law enforcement experience than Radley. Cartwright had made his position known. He felt strongly that Honor had been taken off the farm, that she was with her attacker, heading away from the scene of the abduction. He and his deputies were focusing on the area surrounding Honor’s SUV, trying to put together a clearer picture of what had occurred.

  “Did you know they found blood evidence near there?”

  He stopped searching the grass and met Wren’s eyes. They both knew that changed things. That the situation had just gone from serious to dire. “No.”

  “Just a few drops in the grass.”

  “Any amount of blood is concerning.”

  “I agree. I’m calling in the department’s evidence team. The sheriff has agreed to it. If we had a description of the vehicle that was parked near where the blood was found, we could issue an APB.” She shook her head, looking more worried than he’d ever seen her.

  “How about K-9 teams? Does the sheriff’s office have them?” he asked.

  “They’ll be here shortly. It’s a long shot, though. The sheriff said the dogs have been able to track vehicle-carried scents, but not for a very long distance. If Honor was taken by car, it’s going to be difficult for them to follow her trail.”

  He nodded, walking back to Honor’s SUV. The doors were closed. The engine was off. She’d left it that way. She’d also left the keys in the ignition, her purse on the seat.

  “What I can’t wrap my head around,” he murmured aloud, “is the fact that there’s no evidence of a struggle here and none on the road. We’ve got no scuff marks on the driveway. No tamped-down areas of grass.”

  “We have blood down the road in an area where another vehicle was parked. Don’t downplay that evidence.”

  “Is there a sign of a struggle near the blood?” he questioned, and she frowned.

  “What are you thinking?”

  “That Honor isn’t the kind of person to allow herself to be taken without a fight. If someone approached her here, there’d be some sign of it.”

  “I agree, but as I keep mentioning, blood has been found. That’s an indicator of struggle.”

  “No scuffed earth. No broken grass. There’s nothing, Wren.”

  “There may be at the other scene. How about we walk over and take a look?”

  “But, how did she get from here to there without putting up a fight?” he asked, still not willing to leave the scene. Something was niggling at the back of his mind, telling him that things weren’t what they seemed, that Honor might not be far as they were all imagining.

  He couldn’t ignore that.

  He wouldn’t.

  “Radley, I know you don’t want to believe she’s been kidnapped—”

  “There’s no doubt she’s gone, but we don’t know how far she’s been taken. For all we know, she’s somewhere nearby. The area where the other vehicle was parked is in that direction, right?” He pointed toward the road.

  “Right, and she’d have passed it if she were heading toward town to get gas.”

  “Why would she go for gas without her purse or phone? And, why walk? Dotty has a vehicle. Why not go back to the house, grab the keys and drive herself to the nearest gas station? Or even take Dotty’s car to work and get gas on the way home?”

  “Good question. And, you’re right. It doesn’t make sense. If she were abducted here, she’d have struggled. If she were abducted up the road, she should have had her purse and phone with her.”

  She turned so she was facing the farmhouse. It was less than a quarter mile away. Two-story and quaint, the roofline steep, the eaves decorated with gingerbread trim. He’d spent a lot of time in the house. He’d spent time on the wraparound porch, watching the sunset as he listened to Honor and Dotty chat.

  He could have spent a lifetime there, and it wou
ldn’t have felt like enough. Not if Honor was there with him.

  “It’s an easy walk back to the house. If I were here, that’s where I’d have headed. So, what happened between here and there? Was she approached from behind? Surprised? Carried away?”

  “Or, not? What if she wasn’t taken from the farm?” he asked, and Wren frowned.

  “You’re suggesting this was staged?”

  “I’m not suggesting anything. I’m tossing out questions, hoping there will be answers that make sense.”

  “Answers would be good, but in lieu of them, I’d like to have a lot more manpower on the ground here.” She pulled out her cell phone and sent a quick text. “I’ve asked Jessica and Henry to meet us here. We can fan out and do a more thorough search of the area. If she was taken somewhere on the farm, there should be some sign of that.”

  “Right,” he agreed, as if they were talking about taking out the trash or tossing out an old piece of furniture.

  But they weren’t.

  They were discussing Honor. Vibrant. Funny. Smart. Energetic. Beautiful.

  He couldn’t think of her without thinking about those things, and he wished he’d told her that the last time he’d seen her. And the time before that and before that. He wished he’d let himself go to that place where he could admit to himself and to her that she took up space in his mind, in his life, in his heart.

  But he’d wanted to protect himself, wanted to avoid trouble, wanted to play it safe. And he hadn’t said what he could when he should have. He could only pray it wasn’t too late.

  A marked police car turned onto the driveway, rumbling toward them and parking nearby. The driver and passenger doors opened in tandem, a female sheriff’s deputy and Bennett Remington emerging from the vehicle. The deputy opened a back door, and Mary Alice stepped out. Tall and thin, dressed in fitted black pants and a light purple sweater set, she had her hair pulled back into a tight bun, her face makeup-free. She’d been crying. He could see that immediately. Her eyes were red-rimmed and swollen, her lids puffy.