Dead Ringer & Classified Christmas

by B. J Daniels

  As her vision cleared, she stared at the only door out of this room and saw where someone had cut a narrow slot under the door. The footfalls stopped. In the silence, she heard something metallic connect with the floor just an instant before a metal tray came sliding under the door and into her room.

  “Wait!” she cried as she heard the footfalls begin to retreat. “Wait!” But whoever it was didn’t wait and soon she heard nothing at all.

  Her stomach rumbled as she crawled over to the tray, half afraid the food had been poisoned. But if the person had wanted to kill her, he or she certainly could have at the tackle shop.

  The tray held a carton of milk, a small tub of butterscotch pudding and a heated frozen dinner of turkey, dressing, mashed potatoes, gravy and green beans. Beside it was a plastic spoon.

  The food smelled wonderful, which told her she must not have eaten for a while. She had no idea how much time had passed or even if it was day or night.

  She picked up the spoon, telling herself that she needed to regain her strength. As she ate, she watched the door, wondering who her captor was and why that person didn’t want her to see them.

  * * *

  CADE BRACED HIMSELF, afraid just how bad the news would be. Just don’t let it be about Andi.

  “I’m at your apartment,” Carter said. “Where are you?”

  “At the cabin,” he lied. “Why? What’s up?”

  “Maybe I should drive out. I’d prefer to tell you this in person.”

  “Just tell me, please,” Cade said. He knew he sounded dog-tired, emotionally drained and scared. He was.

  “Okay,” Carter said hesitantly. “The exhumation took place this morning at daybreak. We wanted to get it done at a time that caused the least amount of interest.”

  Cade walked over to a straight-backed chair that was missing most of the back. He righted the chair and sat down, leaning it against the wall for stability since he wasn’t sure his legs would hold him.

  “According to preliminary DNA tests done locally, the body in the grave, Cade, is Starr Calhoun.”

  “What?” How was that possible? He’d heard from Starr just last night at the shop. It had definitely been her voice. “That can’t be right.”

  “It’s her, Cade, and there’s more. The coroner was examining the body while we were waiting for the DNA results. She was murdered. Like her brother, the slug was lodged in the skull. The wounds are almost identical. Whoever killed her covered it up with the fire, making it look as if she’d lost control and ended up down in that ravine. They must have cut the gas line to make sure the car burned.”

  The room began to swim. He could feel the sweat break out even though it had to be below zero in the boarded-up room of the old house.

  “The slug was a .45 caliber—just like the one taken from her brother’s body,” Carter said. “We’ll have to send the bullet to the crime lab to be positive that they came from the same gun, but I think it’s a pretty good bet they did.”

  Cade couldn’t speak. Starr murdered. Starr and his baby. Not Starr. Grace. He remembered the call from Billings, her news, her excitement. She’d sounded so happy. She’d thought she’d put her past behind her, but it had caught up with her on the highway.

  “Are you all right?” Carter asked.

  “Yeah.” He’d never been less all right. Except maybe the day he’d gotten the news of Grace’s car accident. Both Grace and the baby gone.

  “Maybe I should come out to the cabin,” Carter said. “You shouldn’t be alone now. Or I guess, you aren’t alone. You have Andi.”

  You have Andi. “Yeah. I’ll be okay. It just comes as such a shock.”

  “You realize there will be a double murder investigation,” Carter was saying. “The state bureau will be involved. I’ve got to tell you, it doesn’t look good. I know you didn’t kill them. But—”

  “Yeah,” he said. “A judge might think I’d found out who Starr really was and did something crazy.”

  “Anyone who knows you knows that isn’t like you,” Carter said. “But with the money still missing...”

  Yeah, Cade Jackson, the stable one of the family, doing something crazy. Not a chance.

  “I gotta go,” Cade said. “Thanks for doing this and letting me know.” He hung up and sat for a moment, too stunned to stand.

  Starr was dead. Murdered. And he was a suspect. It would have been funny if someone didn’t have Andi.

  Not Starr, anyway. But who?

  He got to his feet, but stumbled and sank back down. The chair cracked, one leg barely holding as he held on for dear life. He felt as if he would explode. Turning his face up to the high pale yellow ceiling, he felt the anguish rising in him, choking him as all his pain and anger and fear came out in a howl.

  Grace and the baby. He cried for what could have been. The child he never got to know. The life he and a woman named Grace had shared. A life they never could have had even if she’d made it home that night. Grace could never have outrun her past. It would have caught up with her. If not that Christmas six years go, then this one. Blindsiding him, destroying anything they might have built.

  Damn her. How could she have done this to him? And now someone had Andi, all because of Starr and her family.

  Spent, he stumbled to his feet and tried to clear his head. He couldn’t save Starr or the baby, but he had to save Andi. He had to find these people who had killed Grace and the baby before they killed the woman he was falling in love with.

  He didn’t look at the words Grace had left on the wall. Grace was his past. Her memory was fading like the walls of the old Cherry House.

  The voice on the phone last night had been Starr’s. That’s why Carter’s news had floored him. But the more Cade thought about it as he hurried down the stairs to his pickup, the more he realized why the call last night had bothered him.

  The first few sentences sounded exactly like Grace, but the rest was stilted, oddly disjointed.

  He drove the five miles north, going under the railroad underpass as he went through town to get to his shop.

  The tape recorder and tape that Andi had left with him just days ago was right where he’d hidden it. He pulled it out and listened to the tape. He’d been right. The first two sentences were Starr talking to her brother about plans for the bank robberies. The other words had been taken from the tape, spliced together and no doubt put on another tape that was played when he answered the phone.

  That meant that the person who had Andi also had a copy of the tape.

  He took the message that had been left for him and read it again. All he could think about was Andi. Another storm was coming in bringing both snow and cold. Andi wasn’t used to this weather. He prayed she was somewhere warm if not safe.

  He told himself that he’d known Grace. He should know where she would hide the money.

  Bull, he thought. If he’d really known his wife, then he would have known she wasn’t who she said she was, that she was lying through her teeth, that she had three million dollars hidden somewhere.

  Why hadn’t she just given it to her brothers?

  But he knew the answer. She would have kept it. Her ace in the hole in case the day came that someone found out who she was and she had to run.

  He read the note again, then balled it up and threw it across the room. The paper rolled under an end table. He started to get up to retrieve it, when his gaze fell on a framed photograph on the wall.

  When had Grace put that there? It was in such an odd place that he’d never noticed it before. His heart began to pound. She must have put it there shortly before she died. He’d been in such a fog the last six years, he’d never even noticed since they had lived out at the cabin and never spent any time in the apartment.

  He reached to take it down, his fingers trembling. The frame slipped f
rom his fingers, fell, hitting the floor, the glass shattering. He swore as he carefully picked it up and carried the frame into the kitchen to dump the broken glass into the wastebasket.

  It was one of Grace’s photographs. As he shook off the rest of the shards of glass, he frowned and walked back into the living area. Just as he’d suspected, this was the only photograph that Grace had put up in here.

  He felt a strange chill as he stared down at the photo and recognized where it had been shot from—the property where he’d started the house they were to live in as a family.

  Heart racing, he pried at the frame. Grace had always dated her photos and written down the locations on the back.

  You know my heart, she’d written on the pale yellow wall.

  If he’d known her, really known her, then she’d left him this photo because she knew...

  He carefully removed the back of the frame to expose the back of Grace’s photograph.

  There it was. Written in her meticulous hand. The date, the place and under it, taped to the back, was a small white envelope with his name on it.

  Chapter Fifteen

  CADE PLUCKED THE envelope from the back of the photograph and dropped into a chair.

  Cade,

  I hope you will never see this. I plan to come back and destroy it if everything goes well. But if you are reading it, then I never got the chance. Which also means I am no longer with you.

  I understand if you can never forgive me for not telling you the truth. Just know that I loved you with all my heart. I was never happier than in the time I spent with you.

  I hope you will never have to use this because if you do, then I have failed you, failed us.

  I am so sorry,

  Grace

  Printed in small letters under it were a series of numbers and letters. Latitude and longitude coordinates?

  He glanced at the clock. The person who had taken Andi had given him twenty-four hours. It was only a little past noon. He had time if he hurried.

  * * *

  ANDI FELT BETTER after she ate. She hadn’t heard another sound from her captor, but she had found a note under the pudding cup telling her to slide her tray back under the door to get more food in the future.

  She tested her legs and found herself much stronger. As her mind cleared, she looked for a way out. There was just the one door out. No windows.

  The old door was made of thick wood. She realized the lock was also old and required a skeleton key. With growing excitement, she saw that the key was in the lock on the other side.

  She looked around for something to use to push the key out. The plastic spoon was too large.

  She hurried into the bathroom and removed the top on the tank. The mechanism that made the toilet flush included a long piece of small-diameter metal. Hurriedly she took it apart and armed with the piece of thin metal, went back into the other room to listen.

  No sign of her captor.

  She dumped everything off the tray but the napkin and carefully slid the tray through the slot under the door. Her fingers were shaking. She knew she would get only one chance.

  She poked the metal rod into the keyhole, heard it hit the tip of the key. She pushed slowly and gently and felt the key start to move. Easy. Not too fast. Her fear was that the key would fall out of the lock, but then bounce out of the tray and out of her reach.

  She felt the key give, and with her heart in her throat, heard it drop. It made a slight thump as it hit. Praying it had worked, she pulled the tray back into the room.

  At first she didn’t see the key. Her heart fell. But there it was, partly hidden under the napkin where it had landed. She snatched the key up and, holding her breath, listened.

  No sound from outside the door.

  She started to discard the thin rod from the inside of the tank, but it was the only thing she had for a weapon, although not a great one.

  Then carefully, she fit the key into the lock, took a breath and let it out slowly, and turned the key, praying it would open the door.

  It did. The door creaked as she opened it a crack and listened. Still no sound. She eased out into the narrow hallway and saw that she was being kept in an old, abandoned house.

  At the top of the staircase, she glanced down. The house was empty except for a thick layer of dust. Her room had been cleaned. She knew she should be thankful for that.

  It seemed odd that her captor had gone to the trouble as she began the slow, painful descent down the stairs, working to keep each step from groaning under her weight.

  Where was her captor? Was it possible the person wasn’t even in the house?

  She reached the bottom step. The front door was just across the room. With the windows boarded up, she had no idea where she was or if it was even day or night.

  It didn’t matter. If she could get through that door and out of here...

  She inched across the floor, noticing where the dust had been scuffed with footprints. Holding her breath, she grabbed the doorknob and turned, praying it wouldn’t be locked.

  It wasn’t.

  She flung the door open, ready to run and stopped short at the sight of the person standing on the other side.

  “Hello, Andi.”

  * * *

  CADE HAD A FRIEND who was into geocaching and not only owned a GPS, but also knew how to use it.

  “You’re sure it’s easy?” he said after Franklin showed him the basics.

  “Nothing to it. If you have any problems, just give me a call.”

  Franklin had written down basic directions on how to find a certain longitude and latitude.

  “Hell, Cade, the next thing you’ll do is computerize that shop of yours,” Franklin had joked.

  As Cade left, the promised winter storm blew in. The wind took his breath away as he ducked his head and made his way to his truck.

  Once on the highway north, the wind blew the falling snow horizontally across the highway. He couldn’t see his hand in front of his face. The going was slow, but nothing like it would be once he reached the rocky point by the house site. He’d have a hell of a time finding anything in this storm.

  It wasn’t the cold that chilled him, though, as he drove. It was the thought of Andi and the fear that she was out in this weather. He wouldn’t let himself consider that even if he found the money, it might not save Andi.

  Snow blew across the highway, the whiteout hypnotic. He kept his eye on the reflectors along the edge of the pavement. Otherwise he wouldn’t have known where the road was.

  Occasionally he would see lights suddenly come out of the storm as another car crept past. But travelers were few and far between.

  Once off the main highway, the going wasn’t much better. He plowed through the drifting snow, the GPS on the seat next to him. A gust of wind rocked the pickup and sent a shower of fresh snow over the hood.

  He was almost on top of the bare bones of the house before he saw it and got the pickup stopped. Through the blowing and drifting snow, he stared at the weathered wood that his brother and some friends had helped him build. Why had he left it like this?

  But he knew the answer. Inertia. He’d been paralyzed by his loss. Until Andi had come into his life. He wouldn’t lose another woman he’d fallen in love with. This time he knew what was at stake. This time he would fight.

  He picked up the GPS from the seat and turned it on, watching the screen as it searched for a satellite.

  “Come on,” he said and glanced at his watch.

  * * *

  ANDI FROZE, SO startled that the last thing she could have done was run. She was momentarily so stunned that she forgot about the weapon she had hidden in the back waistband of her jeans. “Bradley?”

  He smiled and she might have misunderstood and run into his arm
s, thinking he’d come to Montana to save her. But the gun he pointed at her cleared that up at once.

  “What...?”

  He motioned her back and she stumbled into the house, not even aware that her teeth were chattering from the cold coming through the open doorway.

  Bradley’s heavy coat was covered in snow. So was his blond hair. She stared at him, realizing that his eyes were no longer brown—but a pale blue.

  She felt off balance and wondered if it was the drugs. This couldn’t be real. She had to be tripping. Or asleep and all of this, including her almost escape, was just a dream with a nightmare ending.

  “I don’t understand,” she managed to say.

  “Don’t you, sweetie?” he asked, sounding like his old self. “Why don’t we go back upstairs and I’ll explain it.”

  She didn’t move.

  “Please, Andi, I really don’t want to have to hurt you.”

  She stared at him. “I thought you were my friend?”

  “That was the idea,” he said with a chuckle. “I’m surprised how well you’ve taken to Montana and Cade Jackson. Ice fishing, Andi? Really?”

  He knew she’d gone ice fishing? “You’ve been in Montana all this time? But when I called you...”

  “The joy of a cell phone, sweetie,” he said.

  “The TV station gossip?”

  “Please, you weren’t the only person I befriended at the station. I have my sources.”

  “You did befriend me, didn’t you?” she said, remembering the times he’d gone out of his way to talk to her.

  He nodded smugly. “It wasn’t easy, either.”

  She couldn’t believe she’d been so stupid. “I told you everything.”

  “And I greatly appreciated that.”

  “You took the research job to get close to me.”

  He laughed. “Sweetie, that sounds so egotistical.”

  She was shaking her head, backing up until she stumbled into the wall.

  “Andi. You should be flattered. I’d seen you on TV. It was that big story you broke about a woman who killed her husband. Hell, you did all the footwork for the police and solved the damned murder. I was so impressed. I said to myself that woman is really something. And, truthfully, that’s when I got the idea. I knew I didn’t have a lot of time with Lubbock getting out soon.”