by Jamie Begley
“Isn’t there?” Greer mentioned a topic that they had never discussed before. “You and Jessie used to be thick as thieves when you were little and Pa had to put a stop to it.”
“That was a long time ago.”
“Don’t kid a bullshitter. I saw your face when you found out Jessie was missing, and I thought you were going to pass out when I came down to the laundry room.”
“Greer,” Knox called out.
Dustin and Greer hurried back to where he was standing.
“They found more clothes. Virgil was on his way to work at the jewelry store when he saw them from his car window. When he got out, he found a bra and a shirt.”
“Fuck. Virgil lives on Pine Mountain. We’re going to need more searchers.” Greer reached for his phone. “I’ll call Tate and Cash. If she’s there, they’ll find her. Tate and Cash could track a white rabbit through a winter’s storm.”
“I’ll go home and change.” Dustin held his hand out to Greer. “Give me your truck keys. We’re going to need the four-wheelers.”
“Cash and Tate got trucks,” he protested.
“Neither of their trucks can hold two four-wheelers, and I’m going to need mine.”
Greer tossed him the keys. “You better not put a scratch on it.”
“Text me if the canines find anything.”
Dustin left Greer and Knox, refusing to believe Jessie was dead. His mind played and rewound the last time he had seen her at the daycare.
Every breath he took since the night he had heard the screaming was like a fish out of water—his lungs trying to find oxygen when there wasn’t any. That was Saturday night. If Jessie had died in the laundry room on Friday night, he wouldn’t have heard the screams in his head, which he was now sure were Jessie’s. That meant there were two scenarios that could have played out. Either Jessie was hurt and still alive and he only had the nightmares because he and Jessie had been close as children, or there had been two people who were in the laundry room where the blood was found.
Dustin brought his car to a squealing stop in the parking lot. Leaving the keys under the mat, he got inside Greer’s truck and called Greer as he drove home.
“Kinda busy trying not to get bit by this fool dog.”
“Greer, ask Knox to check with the techs if they think there is enough blood for one or if there could have been two people.” Dustin quickly pressed the gas down to run a red light.
“Hang on.”
A loud yelp came from the static on the other side.
He was almost home before Greer came back on the phone.
“It was a large amount, so it could have been two. What you thinking?”
“I think there were two, and Jessie is still alive. I think it was her I heard screaming.”
“I ain’t gonna tell Knox that. He’ll think we’re as crazy as a coon dog. Besides, you hear them last night?”
“No, but something tells me she’s still alive.” Dustin didn’t know if it was true or if he wasn’t able to face the fact that Jessie could be dead.
“Yeah? I saw the laundry room after you left. I don’t know how many people died in there, but I doubt either of them is still living.”
Dustin hung up on his brother, throwing the phone onto the passenger seat. Putting on his blinker, he turned into his driveway, dirt flying out when he took the turn too swiftly. Going up the rutted road, he almost hit his head on the roof when he hit a rut, hearing the muffler scrape. Not slowing, he stopped beside Tate’s truck as he loaded his four-wheeler onto the bed of his truck.
Tate jumped down, slamming the tailgate. “Get changed, and I’ll load yours.”
Dustin quickly went inside, changing his suit for an orange hunting shirt, thick jeans, and boots. He was back at Greer’s truck as Tate finished buckling the four-wheeler down.
“I made sure you have everything you need in the saddle. You got your radio?”
“It’s in my jacket. You ready?”
“Ready. Cash is meeting us where Virgil found the clothes. You can follow me.”
Dustin slid into the truck, then followed Tate as they drove to the main road leading toward town. There, they had to take a secondary road to get out of the congestion that was created by the volunteers. The community was coming together to find Jessie, just as they had when Logan had wandered off.
Dustin accelerated when they left the city limits, keeping up with Tate’s truck. At the base of Pine Mountain, Tate slowed, letting Cash pull out in front of him as they made their way upward.
As he drove, Dustin looked out the windshield, seeing houses scattered across the mountainside. The higher they went, the fewer and farther between the homes were, but you could still see some scattered throughout the trees.
Cursing, Dustin pulled over to the side of the road when he found a spot wide enough. Staring down at his shaky hands, he rested his head on the steering wheel. He could hear whimpers of pain in his head.
Combing his fingers through his hair, he gripped his head. When he finally collected himself, he grabbed his cell phone and called Tate.
“Where’d you go?”
“I pulled over.” Rolling his window down to let fresh air inside, he heard the whimpers fade away. “She’s not here.”
“How do you know?”
“I don’t. I just know she’s not up here.”
“Greer called. They found her body near Dryden. A farmer was out checking his field and found her in the cornfields.”
“It’s not her.” Dustin didn’t know who it was, but it wasn’t Jessie. “Has she been identified yet?”
“No, Knox and Greer are on their way.”
“Brother, I don’t know who’s been found, but it’s not Jessie,” Dustin exclaimed empathetically.
“What do you want to do?”
The blunt question was why he loved his family. They would take their say-so, despite being told facts that would have everyone else shoving them in their face.
“You and Cash keep going to where Virgil found the clothes and make sure Jessie isn’t there.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to call Greer. There is nobody in the state of Kentucky who knows this area better than he does.”
“Make sure you keep in touch.”
“Will do.”
Hanging up, he called Greer.
“It’s Dustin.”
“No shit. Tate call you?”
“I called him, and he told me. It’s not Jessie. Has she been identified for sure?”
“Not yet. Knox and I are about ten minutes away, but from the description, it’s the same hair color and size as Jessie.”
Dustin’s hold on phone nearly slipped. Holding it tighter, he had to ask the question he didn’t want to know. “They can’t tell if it’s her from her face?”
“No, it’s too fucked.”
“Don’t let Knox call the search off for Jessie. The searchers will lose time trying to regroup. Greer, I know Jessie isn’t on Pine Mountain. Don’t ask me how, I just know it,” Dustin said to prevent him from asking the same question Tate had. “Where would you get rid of someone you didn’t want found?”
“Give me a minute to think.”
Dustin wanted to yell at him, but he waited, letting Greer think it through. His brother was the only one with a cunning mind that could figure out how to help find Jessie.
“We know Jessie was taken from the laundry room. The bastard could be trying to put us off track by using the clothes to have us looking there. If you’re damn sure she’s not on Pine Mountain, and none of the other searchers have found Jessie, that leaves a lot of other mountains and fields to dump her.”
“Where would you go?”
“If I knew who Jessie was, I would hide her where she would never be found. Everyone in town knows that the Hayeses are just as mean as us.”
“So, where should I look?”
“That’s easy. Black Mountain.”
8
Dustin
scanned the side of the two-lane road as he drove slowly up Black Mountain, looking for any spot where the gravel on the roadside had been disturbed. He had gotten out of the truck several times to meticulously look over the guardrail, searching the mountain below before getting back in and driving on.
The whimpers in his mind returned when he was halfway to the peak, nearly spurring him to search faster. However, he’d been taught to hunt when he was barely out of diapers. Benefiting from the skills he learned from his pa and brothers, he knew to take his time, not wanting to miss something that would lead to finding Jessie.
Coming around a hairpin curve, Dustin spotted a wider part of the shoulder where a vehicle could pull over to view the majestic mountains.
Before pulling off the road, he saw where tires had disturbed the gravel. Turning the steering wheel, he steered the truck, expertly missing the grooves of the previous tire tracks.
His heart in his throat, he got out and glanced down to see the vehicle had pulled onto the shoulder in the same direction he had come from, but the wheel had been cut to leave in the opposite direction—back down the mountain.
Striding toward the guardrail, Dustin started praying, wanting to find her, but not wanting to find her lifeless. Leaning over as far as he could, becoming frustrated at the sight of the cliff, he swept his eyes over as far as he could see from right to left.
His breath hitched when he saw a large patch of soil that had been disturbed and a darker color surrounding the dirt. Narrowing his eyes, he tried to look down farther, but the tree branches kept him from seeing the bottom.
If Jessie had been thrown from the edge of the cliff, there was no way she could have survived. But if she had landed on the side, Jessie was experienced enough to have made it.
Opening the passenger door, he reached inside for his cell phone.
“Yeah?”
“Greer, I think I found where she went down.” Dustin had to keep repeating himself since the reception went in and out. He couldn’t hear Greer’s reply.
“Dammit.” Lowering his phone, he looked at the time. He only had three hours until it started getting dark. He had to get moving if he had any hope of finding Jessie before nightfall.
The four-wheeler would be useless to him—the cliff too sheer. Instead, opening the tailgate, Dustin collected what he needed and shoved everything into the backpack that Greer kept in the metal box under the cab.
Sparing precious minutes, he tried to make another call, this time to Tate. The call failed, and so did the mass text he sent to his family.
“Fuck it.” Finding an envelope and ink pen in the glovebox, Dustin wrote a note, saying he thought Jessie was down the cliff and he was going to search for her. Placing it on the windshield, he then tied a rope to the guardrail.
Dustin straddled it, looping the rope around his waist to gradually lower himself. Gloves protected his hands as he went down. When he got to the point with the dark soil he had seen from the railing, he moved faster, seeing where shoes and handprints had dug into the dirt and the groves of rocks marking a clear path down the cliff.
“Jessie!” Dustin unwound the rope, leaving it behind as he started scouring the area where Jessie had gone after reaching the bottom.
Looking for signs of her, Dustin steadily began walking, intermittently bending down to pick up a broken twig or crushed leaves. A couple of times, he had to backtrack to track Jessie. He’d seen several specks of blood on the cliff and at a spot where she must have rested against a tree trunk. As he drew deeper within the trees, the sun started sinking, disguising the blood trail he was following.
“Jesus, how far have you gotten?”
His heart picked up its pace when he saw a ramshackle log home ahead of him. He started running through the leaves, nearly tripping and almost sinking through the floorboards when he rushed through the open doorway.
Opening his backpack, he took out the LED torchlight, surveying the floor. Bending down to the side of the door, he saw a patch of dried blood. Standing, he used his boot to tap a tree branch, quickly realizing she had used it to hold the door closed.
“Which animal were you trying to hide from, Jessie? The animal that threw you down the cliff or the ones that live in the woods?”
Unzipping the outer compartment of the backpack, he took out the revolver, tucking it inside the back of his belt and hiding it under his camouflage jacket. Going outside, he circled the old cabin before finding which new direction she had gone.
Every step he took brought him closer to her, his senses going into overdrive.
While moving quicker, he took lighter steps, not wanting to alert others that were stalking her. The last thing he needed was to walk into a trap. So far, though, he hadn’t found anything that would suggest anyone but him was trailing her. Still, he didn’t want to make a deadly mistake that would cost them both their lives.
He was about to bend down to look at a small plant, pointing the flashlight at the area, when he caught a splash of color out of the corner of his eyes. All sense of caution deserted him as he ran, realizing someone was leaning against a tree. He couldn’t see who it was, but from the color of the material, it could be Jessie’s shirt.
“Jessie?” Going to the front of the tree, Dustin found the woman the whole town believed to be dead.
He had to bite back the scream of rage at what had been done to her.
Tearing the backpack off and dropping to his knees, he checked for her pulse, thanking God when he felt the faint beating under his fingertips.
“Jessie?”
Unconscious, she didn’t respond, not even when he shifted her into a sitting position.
Unzipping the backpack, he took out a thermal blanket and placed it over her. Then he took out the flare pistol before finding a space where the flare would make it through the tree branches. Setting off two flares, Dustin knew that Greer or Tate would know that they meant Jessie was alive and he needed help getting her out.
Returning to Jessie, he gathered what he would need for a fire so that she could feel its warmth and would be able to see him in the dark … if she could with both eyes swollen shut.
Her face was a grotesque mask of bruises. One side had been scraped raw, and her lips were so bloated that they had split in several places. But the part that infuriated him the most was that the only clothes she wore were a pair of panties, a shirt, and tennis shoes.
“So help me, God, Jessie, whoever did this to you is going to die.”
Pulling a bottled water and the first aid kit out, Dustin did what he could to keep her alive until help arrived.
“Don’t you dare die on me. Holt and Asher won’t be worth a plug nickel without you.” Carefully raising the blanket, he searched her body, making sure she didn’t have any open wounds. She was scraped and bruised all over, but it was the dried blood on her thighs that had him hoping to hell and back that he was mistaken at the cause.
He wrapped her back up when he was done. “Come on, Jessie, open those pretty eyes for me.”
He did what he could for her face, pressing a damp cloth to her mouth and letting drops of water slip between her puffed-out lips.
Checking his cell phone, he saw there was still no service.
“Hang in there, Jessie. Help is on the way. I’m going to get you out of here as soon as I can. Come on, Peanut, wake up,” he croaked out as he tried to pull strands of her blood-soaked hair away from her eyes.
Whimpers came from her lips as she shook under the blanket.
Not knowing what else to do, he sat down, pulling her onto his lap and rocking her gently. He continued to croon to her the way he had when he held Logan when he was little.
“If your brothers come and see me holding you, how are you going to protect me if you’re not awake?” he coaxed.
“You remember when we were little and used to make mud balls and throw them at Holt and Asher and blame Tate and Greer? And remember when we were playing in my pa’s truck, and he was passed out in the
barn, and it rolled backward off the mountain? I told him he had done it when he was drunk, and he believed it. We used to get in so much trouble.
“My ma knew I was sneaking out to play with you when Pa was gone, and she never told on me. She would get us a Reese’s Cup on the way home from work, and we would share it. I begged her to buy different candy, and she would always bring the same thing home. I asked her one time why. You want to know what she said?” His voice cracked as he stared down at the face he had loved since before he knew what love was. “She said we’d never have to fight over who got too much or not enough. There was a piece for each of us, and she was right.
“We never fought until I let our fathers come between us. I look back now, and you don’t know how much I regret how I acted after Duke died. I was an ass, but truthfully, there hasn’t been a Porter born who wasn’t one. You don’t know how many times I wished I could go back in time and play that day differently. Still, if I were only given a day to turn back, it would be this past Friday, and I would have been there when you needed me.”
Dustin was still rocking her when a flash in the sky showed that help was coming.
Tugging the blanket tighter around her, he reached inside the backpack and took out the walkie-talkie, hoping that Greer or Tate were finally in range.
“Greer? Tate?”
“Tate. You find Jessie?”
“Yes. Who’s with you?”
“Cash. Knox is on the way with the rescue squad. What kind of shape is she in?”
“Bad enough that you want to keep Holt and Asher away. They shouldn’t see her this way, not until she’s cleaned up. Jessie wouldn’t want them to see her like this.”
“Greer is driving them to the hospital. Told them that they could wait for her arrival. Rescue squad is going to send two EMTs down to her. Then we’ll life flight her the hell out.”
“The trees are going to cause some problems.”
“Don’t worry. You did the hard part. Let us handle the rest.”
“Okay. We’ll be waiting. Don’t take all night.”
Dustin saw Jessie struggling to get her arm out from underneath the blanket. With her hands, she blindly searched for her eyes as he set the two-way radio down.