Blood on Copperhead Trail

by Paula Graves

  “I realize that when it comes to mountain living, I’m a novice. But they do have things like horses and hiking and camping in other places.”

  “I reckon I’ve been givin’ you a hard time about your strange, flatlander ways.” She laid on her drawl pretty thick.

  “You have. You really have.” He flattened his hand against the small of her back, the touch deliciously possessive. “Lucky for you, you’re too damned cute for me to take offense.”

  She glanced at the Brandywines and her sister, wondering if they had overheard.

  Doyle bent his head closer, dropping his voice to a whisper. “Are we keeping this thing between us secret?”

  She darted a look up at him. “For a little while.”

  “Until your work with the Bitterwood P.D. is done?”

  “I think that would be wise.”

  He nodded and edged away from her, robbing her of his body heat. The morning chill flooded in to take its place.

  “How good are you with horses?” James Brandywine asked Doyle. “How much riding have you done?”

  “I played polo for several years back in Terrebonne,” he answered, a hint of a smile curving his lips. “Did a lot of trail riding as a kid. One of my fellow Ridley County deputies owned horses and I’d ride with him and his wife and kids pretty regularly. I know how to ride.”

  “Then you can take Satan.” With a grin, James handed over the reins of a powerfully built black gelding. “I brought extra helmets. You don’t have to wear one, but it’s probably a good idea.”

  “Better safe than sorry.” Doyle took the helmet.

  Janelle had already mounted the gentle chestnut mare Sugar, her favorite horse in the Brandywine Stables and the namesake of the stuffed horse Laney had given her at the hospital. Carol led the third horse, a bright-eyed Appaloosa, down the ramp. “This is Wingo,” she told Laney.

  Laney recognized Wingo from her last trip to the Brandywine Stables almost a year earlier. Wingo seemed to recognize her, nuzzling her hand when she patted his velvety nose. While James closed the trailer, Carol gave Laney a leg up into the saddle. “We’ll wait down here with the trailer until you get back.”

  “I hope we’re not keeping you from work,” Laney said, apology in her tone.

  “It’s our off-season—too cold for trail riders this time of year. Come spring and the warmer weather, we’ll be swamped. But our grooms can handle things back at the stables for now.” Carol patted Wingo’s side. “Y’all be careful up there.” She lowered her voice. “Don’t let Jannie get too worked up.”

  Laney wasn’t sure she could prevent it. This trip was about Janelle trying to recover some terrible memories her mind had, so far, not allowed her to access. Success almost guaranteed that Janelle would get worked up.

  It was Laney’s job to make sure things didn’t go too far.

  The sun was peeking over the top of the ridge by the time they reached the first trail shelter. Janelle, who’d ridden ahead a bit with the eagerness of youth and the excitement of being out of the hospital, pulled her horse up as she reached the shelter, her expression going from pink-cheeked energy to pale apprehension.

  Laney drew Wingo up beside her, reaching across to touch her sister’s shoulder. Janelle’s startled jerk elicited a nervous response in her mount; the chestnut twitched sideways for a couple of steps before Janelle brought her back into control. “You sure you want to do this?” Laney asked.

  Janelle nodded, swinging her leg over the saddle to dismount. Holding the reins, she walked the horse to the front of the shelter, where there was no fourth wall. She gazed inside, her lip curling as she seemed to remember something.

  Laney dismounted, as well, walking Wingo over to the post that held the logbook, looking for somewhere she could tie the reins. But she stopped midstep as she saw a triangle of white sticking out of the logbook.

  She flipped open the acrylic cover that protected the logbook from the elements and tugged the triangle from between the pages of the book. It was a photograph, she saw with a sinking heart. A photo of a woman lying in a hospital bed, asleep. And another woman sitting in a chair beside the bed, her hand entwined with that of the woman in the bed. She was asleep, as well, her blond hair tousled and her face soft with sleep.

  Someone had taken a photo of Laney and her sister at the hospital and left it here in the logbook for her to find.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Janelle’s already pale face whitened further as she looked away from the trail shelter and met Doyle’s concerned gaze. “I was reaching into my pack for my camp knife,” she said in a strained voice. “I don’t know why I thought a knife could be any sort of protection against a man with a gun. Just instinct for survival, I guess.”

  She leaned her head against the horse’s neck. The chestnut mare snuffled softly but didn’t move away.

  Doyle looked at Laney to gauge her reaction. But Laney wasn’t looking at her sister. Instead, she was looking at something she held in one shaking hand, her face as pale as her sister’s.

  Dismounting from the black gelding, he crossed to her side and looked at what she was holding. It was another photograph. Of Laney and her sister in the Knoxville hospital.

  “I want this son of a bitch taken down,” she growled, shoving the photo at Doyle and walking her horse over to Janelle’s side.

  He and Laney were both wearing gloves, but he still held the photo by the edges in case the photographer had left fingerprints, though the other two photos had been clean of any prints or trace evidence. He took a closer look, realizing the photo had to have been taken during the period of time between Delilah’s departure from the hospital and his arrival. Laney had mentioned falling asleep then.

  That was the time the man in the scrubs had shown up on the hospital security cameras. The man he was now certain had been carrying a camera.

  “What’s wrong?” Janelle picked up on the sudden tension.

  “Nothing,” Laney said. “This was a bad idea. Let’s go home.”

  Janelle pulled away from her sister and crossed to Doyle. He briefly considered hiding the photograph from view, but doing so would only upset her more, as she’d wonder what they were keeping from her.

  “Doyle,” Laney warned as he started to show the photograph to Janelle.

  He ignored her, feeling a certain kinship with Janelle. The accident that had killed his parents was still, to this day, something of a blank space in his memory. He hadn’t been there, of course, but even the secondhand version of their accident was a blur in his mind. He’d been twenty, just like Janelle, old enough to join the army if he’d wanted to, or get his own place, but the authorities had glossed over so many of the details that he wasn’t even sure, to this day, what had really caused his parents’ car to go off Purgatory Bridge into the river gorge below.

  “She has a right to know everything that’s happening to her,” he said. “Good or bad. She’s old enough to make a choice how she wants to handle it.”

  Janelle stared at the photograph, her lower lip trembling. “Who could be doing this now? Richard Beller is dead. We saw him on television.”

  “I don’t think Richard Beller has been doing anything since shortly after he killed Missy and shot you,” Doyle confessed.

  Janelle’s look of horror made his stomach squirm, but he held her gaze. Laney muttered a low profanity and hurried to her sister’s side, grabbing the photograph away from Doyle and wrapping a protective arm around her shoulders.

  Janelle shrugged her sister’s arm away. “I’m not a baby. And this is crazy. Where the hell is Joy? If Beller’s gone, why haven’t we found her?” She pushed away from Laney and mounted Sugar, giving the mare a light kick in the ribs that spurred her into an uphill canter.

  “Jannie, what are you doing!” Pocketing the photo before Doyle could get
it back from her, Laney hurried to catch the reins of her own mount, which was sidestepping energetically as if ready to sprint off after the mare.

  Doyle grabbed the reins of the black gelding before Satan could dart off after them. Hauling himself on the horse’s back, he tried to catch up, but despite his assurances to the Brandywines earlier that morning, he wasn’t nearly as good a horseman on uphill, rocky trails as he was on flat land. Satan seemed to be sure-footed as he navigated the winding mountain path, but Doyle’s own unease with the terrain kept him moving at a slower pace than Satan wanted to go.

  Laney and Janelle seemed to have no such caution, putting distance between themselves and him at an alarming pace. He lost sight of them where the trail curved around a large shale boulder, and by the time he rounded the outcropping, they had disappeared from sight completely, though the trail ahead was visible for several hundred yards.

  He looked off the path and thought he caught a glimpse of Janelle’s bright orange riding helmet, but the trees on this part of the mountain were young growth evergreens, survivors of the blights and pests that had hit so many of the trees in the Smoky Mountains. How Janelle and Laney were even riding through this thicket, he had no idea.

  “Laney!” he called, but the ever-present wind blowing down the trail seemed to whip his voice backward into his face.

  He tried to lead the black gelding off the trail, but the big horse balked, as if he knew he wasn’t supposed to wander off track. Growling a curse, Doyle dismounted and wrapped the gelding’s reins around a nearby tree. “If you run off, you stubborn piece of rawhide, I’ll have you arrested. You hear me?”

  Satan rolled his eyes with annoyance, clearly unimpressed with Doyle’s show of authority.

  Doyle started to thread his way through the underbrush, trying to follow the trail of broken twigs and flattened plants Janelle and Laney had left in their wake, but no matter how far into the woods he walked, he never seemed to catch sight of them. Worse, he began to question his own tracking skills, which had been honed in swamps and marshlands rather than a rock-infested alpine rain forest.

  He’d lost sight of the hiking trail longer ago than he liked to think about, and if he didn’t start backtracking, he might end up lost in these woods for hours if not days. Unlike Laney, he hadn’t thought to bring trail markers, nor had he dropped any bread crumbs to show him how to get out of the woods. He was, to his utter dismay, a complete greenhorn when it came to hiking the Smokies.

  But he did have the map he’d stuck in the pocket of his jeans before they left the police station, he remembered with relief.

  As he reached into his pocket to retrieve the map, he felt two sharp stings in his back and his right thigh. Simultaneously his whole body seized up, every muscle bunching in a symphony of pain. Losing all control of his limbs, he fell forward into the underbrush, hitting the ground face-first with a thud, saved from a bone-shattering impact only by the bill of his riding helmet.

  He screamed with pain, except he was pretty sure that the cry ringing through his brain hadn’t made it out of his mouth. Then, after what seemed a lifetime, the cramping, zapping pain went abruptly, blessedly away.

  But he still couldn’t move.

  Taser, his buzzing brain deciphered.

  But knowing what had just hit him didn’t help. He knew from past experience that his limbs might not work for another few seconds, and that was all his attackers needed.

  First, rough hands jerked him up by the collar of his shirt, nearly choking him as they pushed off the riding helmet and shoved a musty-smelling cloth sack over his head. A different set of hands grabbed his limp arms and secured his hands over his head. His tingling limbs wouldn’t cooperate with his attempt to fight back, twitching more than moving in response to his brain’s commands.

  By the time the feeling came back to his body, he was trussed up and being dragged through the bushes. His shouts earned him a sharp kick to his ribs, knocking the breath right out of him as pain blasted through his side.

  By the third kick, he decided to bide his time and see where his captors were taking him. He just hoped, wherever he was going, Laney and her sister were far, far away.

  * * *

  “WHY DID YOU do that?” Laney tried not to shout at her sister, but after hurtling headlong into the thick woods, more adrenaline than blood seemed to be pumping through her veins. “Have you lost your mind?”

  Janelle had finally pulled the mare to a stop, sobbing like a hopeless child. She slid from the panting horse’s back and met Laney halfway, wrapping her arms around her sister’s waist and pressing her tearstained face against Laney’s neck. “I’m sorry. I just—I freaked. I’m sorry.”

  Laney stroked Janelle’s hair, murmuring soothing words as she tried to figure out just how far off the trail they’d come. Fortunately, they were still in the middle elevations, a long way from the snowy top, and a cursory glance at their surroundings convinced her they hadn’t come nearly as far as she’d thought from the hiking trail. She saw Widow’s Walk, the bald rock face near the summit, and estimated they were a good three miles from there. Widow’s Walk faced south, so if she kept moving due west, they should find the trail sooner or later.

  “Who killed Richard Beller?” Janelle asked a few moments later, as her tears subsided. “And if Beller’s dead, who left that photo of us?”

  “I don’t know,” Laney admitted. “Right now, we need to get back to the trail and find Doyle.” She forced a smile. “You know he’s a flatlander. He might be lost and need us to find him.”

  “Nah, Satan won’t let him go off trail,” Janelle said confidently, wiping her eyes and grabbing Sugar’s reins.

  Laney gave her sister a leg up to the saddle. “I forgot about that. You’re right. He’s probably stuck on the trail with that stubborn horse, cussing us both.”

  Sure enough, when they reached the hiking trail, Satan was still there, his black coat dappled by the midday sun peeking through the trees overhead.

  But apparently Doyle hadn’t let Satan’s recalcitrance stop him, because he was nowhere in sight.

  “Uh-oh,” Janelle murmured, slanting an anxious look at her sister.

  Laney looked around, spotting only the tracks of their own horse ride into the woods. But if Doyle had gone in search of them on foot, he’d have probably tried to stick to their trail, wouldn’t he?

  Then why hadn’t they run into him on the way back?

  “Should we go look for him?” Janelle asked.

  Laney glanced at her sister, alarmed to see that her face was pale, dark circles forming under her eyes. “He’ll have to fend for himself for a while,” Laney said, even though her guts were starting to twist with worry. “It’s time to get you back home and in bed for some rest.”

  “I’m okay,” Janelle said, but she wasn’t able to infuse her protest with any conviction.

  “You just got out of the hospital. You’re going home. Carol and James can run you by the house on their way back to the stables.”

  “So we’re taking Satan with us?”

  “Yes.” No point in leaving the horse up here, Laney thought. If Doyle made it back to the trail, he was strong enough to walk back down the mountain. And if he didn’t make it back to the trail, Satan standing there tied to a tree would do him no good.

  Carol and James were surprised to see Laney and Janelle return with three horses and no chief of police, but Laney’s terse explanation sent them into action. “Should we contact the other search teams?” Carol asked as she settled Janelle into the front seat of the truck while James started leading the horses into the trailer.

  “Not yet,” Laney answered after a brief pause for thought. She didn’t know for sure that Doyle was in trouble. He was just, for the moment, lost. And the last thing he needed, as the new chief of police, was to become the butt of jokes around the
watercooler at the police station. “He may still be out looking for us. If I don’t run into him pretty soon, I’ll call for help.”

  She crossed to the truck to talk to Janelle while Carol went to help James with the other horses. Her sister sat with her head back against the car seat, her eyes closed. She looked up when she heard Laney’s footsteps nearing the truck. “You’re going back to look for him.” It wasn’t a question.

  Laney nodded. “Flatlanders,” she said with a forced smile.

  Janelle wasn’t smiling. “You’re in that photo, too, Laney. You shouldn’t be out there by yourself.”

  “I’ll be okay.”

  “You can’t know that.”

  Laney didn’t bother arguing. Janelle was right. She couldn’t know whether or not she’d be okay. She only knew that Doyle was out there somewhere in the woods, quite possibly lost. On the mountain, it was easy enough to step off a blind drop and break an arm or leg or, God forbid, a neck. He could run across a bear up early from its winter slumber. Or step on a copperhead or a timber rattler.

  She turned to Carol, who was approaching the truck. “If I don’t call you in two hours, contact the search teams and tell them what’s going on. Tell them I’m looking for the Bitterwood chief in the woods off the hiking trail just past the first trail shelter. But give me two hours, okay?”

  Carol looked alarmed but nodded. “You sure you don’t want James or me to go up there with you? Or maybe keep one of the horses?”

  She might be slower without the horse, but she could go more places on foot. And neither Carol nor James was nearly as good a hiker as she was. They’d just hold her back. “I need y’all both to take care of Jannie. If there’s not a policeman parked outside my mom’s house, please go check with my mom to find out why. And don’t let Jannie go in by herself. One of y’all walk her in.”

  “Laney, for Pete’s sake,” Janelle grumbled.