Cassie McGraw Box Set: Books 1-3

by David Archer

  “Amen,” we all echoed. Mom was looking at Dex and beaming with pride, and Daddy simply looked at him approvingly.

  I whispered a little prayer of thanks of my own.

  After breakfast, Daddy asked Dex if he’d ever done any farm work, and Dex admitted that he had not. I joked that it was good that he hadn’t, since it meant there was something I could do that he couldn't.

  That might’ve been a mistake. Ten minutes later, he followed my dad out the door and got a quick lesson in how to drive the old Oliver tractor. It wasn’t hard to drive, since you basically just put it in one gear and let out the clutch. Ten minutes later, Dex pulled the manure spreader in under the big hopper and Daddy filled it up, and then they headed for the field together.

  Mom and I were left alone in the house, and we knew that the menfolk would not be back until lunchtime. We got ourselves each a cup of coffee and went out onto the front porch, to enjoy the sunny Sunday morning.

  “Your Daddy likes him,” Mom said. “He said Dex is a good man, probably the best man you could have found.”

  I smiled. “I can’t argue with that,” I said.

  Mom seemed to hesitate. “Your father said—he said Dex has burn scars, too? On his chest?”

  I nodded. “Not just his chest,” I said. “They go all the way down, from the middle of his chest to his ankles. It happened when he was a teenager.”

  She looked closely at my face. “Does it bother you that—that he can hide his scars?”

  I laughed a bit. “No, not at all,” I said. “I’m glad he can, because people don’t shy away from him the way they do me. He confessed it to me once it’s one of the reasons he asked me out the first time. He figured that, if we ever got to the point where it would matter, I wouldn’t suddenly get all grossed out when he took his clothes off. I guess he’s had that problem in the past.”

  I knew what the next question was going to be before she had the chance to ask it, but at least she had the good grace to turn pink. “Cassie, if he was burned all the way down, does he… I mean, is he able to… Does everything work okay?”

  She turned even redder when she saw my smile. “Oh, yeah,” I said. “A lot better than okay.”

  “I’m not trying to be naughty,” she said. “I was just wondering if, you know, someday, if you decided to have children…”

  I whipped my face around to look at her, my one eye big and wide. “Children? Mom, I guarantee you there won’t be any children unless we decide to get married. As far as whether it’s possible? I would think so, I mean, as far as I can tell everything seems to be intact. It isn’t something we’ve ever talked about. For that matter, I don’t even know for sure if I can have children. There are issues with burned skin having enough plasticity, not to mention the spots where the artificial skin was used. It might not stretch enough for me to carry a baby.”

  She nodded. “Yes, I thought about those things. I never mentioned it to you, but I asked your doctor once about it. He said you probably wouldn’t have any trouble conceiving, but that burn victims sometimes miscarry. I guess they’re not really sure why, but it seems to happen in a small percentage of cases. As far as being able to carry a baby, he said there’s no way to know in advance, but there are things your doctors could do if you did run into a problem.”

  Actually, I knew those things, as well, and more. One of the things that is fairly common for women who suffer major burns is that we often stop having periods. I had one after I woke up from my initial coma, but then nothing. My doctors told me it was possible that I was going into early menopause because of the trauma, but I never showed any other signs of it. Then, about the time I finished college, they started up again. They were sporadic at first, but for the last year I’ve been as regular as clockwork, so when Dex and I decided to be “friends with benefits,” I went straight to my doctor and asked for birth control. I had used Depo-Provera, the shot, when I was with Mike; it had worked, so I just went back on it.

  The thing is, I also knew that my parents had always dreamed of the day my little ones would call them Grandma and Grandpa. A part of me wished I could give her hope that that day might still be coming, but I wasn’t ready to make any kind of decisions like that.

  Besides, I’d have to know how Dex felt about it. He was raised by his mother, with only occasional appearances from his deadbeat dad. He might have his own concerns about having children that would be completely unrelated to my scarring.

  Luckily, Mom decided to move on to another topic.

  “So, what are you going to do, now that the Outreach clinic is gone?”

  I told her about opening my own office, and that I intended to keep right on doing it for free. She told me she was proud of me, but then she wanted to know about the investigation into the bombing itself. She’d heard about New Beginnings, and I had actually remembered to call her briefly when the Kia got blown up. I told her that the investigation was continuing, but she could tell I was holding something back.

  “Cassie? What is it you’re not saying?”

  I sighed. “Well, we kinda know who the bomber is,” I said. “It turns out that it’s Mike’s kid brother, Danny. I guess he went a little nuts back when everything happened, and instead of getting help, he’s gotten worse and worse. He blames me for the fact that Mike ended up dead, and that’s why he’s doing things that seem to be connected to me.”

  I told her about the phone calls from Danny, and about what happened with Toni Denham the morning before. She did her best to stay calm, cool, and collected, but I could tell I was scaring her half to death.

  “Oh, Cassie,” she said finally. “Sometimes I wonder how you can be as strong as you are. You take things like this in stride, you just act like it’s all part of your day. I pray, almost every day I pray that God will give you a normal life, but it seems like He must have designed you especially for some of the hardest things anybody could do.”

  “Mom,” I said, “I get scared. Sometimes, when these things are going on, I think maybe I should just give up and stop working, stop trying to help people. The last case I worked on was dealing with people who felt women who chose to escape abuse should be punished. This guy, Danny, he just wants to hurt innocent people because he knows that will hurt me.” I reached over and laid a hand on her arm. “The problem is, Mom, that there are so many women out there, women and kids, who need my help. They need to know that the abuse can actually become horrible, and I’ve already helped over a hundred women make that first, hard step. If I don’t do it, who will?”

  She nodded. “I know,” she said. “I know.”

  TWENTY-FIVE

  We went into the house a little later to start lunch, and Mom surprised me.

  “I think we’re going to just do a leftover spread,” she said. “We put on the dog a bit yesterday, and we got a lot left from both lunch and dinner, so there’s no point in cooking up a big Sunday meal. Let’s go ahead and start getting it all set up, so we can sit down to eat when the men get cleaned up.”

  I could hear the tractors coming back toward us, so I knew it was getting close to lunchtime. Mom and I got out the roast beef, chicken, all the veggies, potatoes, gravy, and everything, and started heating it up. It would take Dad and Dex at least an hour to clean and put away all the equipment, so there was still plenty of time.

  Heck, I’ve seen my mother put on a meal for twenty people in no more than an hour. Heating up leftovers was nothing!

  And then my phone rang. I didn’t know the number, so I stepped out on the porch while Mom was busy reheating the mashed potatoes.

  “Cassie McGraw.”

  “Where the hell are you?” It was Danny Kendall.

  “That’s none of your business,” I said calmly. “I decided to take a break from you for a day or two.”

  “You don’t get to do that, Cassie! The game is running, you don’t get to just check out and not play.”

  “Hey, Danny, you know what? This isn’t a game. Games are not something you
play with people’s lives. Like I told you more than once, you want me? Then you bring it to me.”

  He laughed. “Little late for that, isn’t it? Well, your little vacation came at a really bad time. Have you even heard the news today?”

  A sinking feeling hit the pit of my stomach. It hadn’t occurred to me to look at any of the news websites, and since nobody had called, I simply assumed everything was okay back home.

  “Danny? What have you done?”

  “Me? I just left you another chance to be a hero. Too bad you’re not going to be there to save the day.”

  The line went dead suddenly, and I quickly went to my news app and scanned through the headlines. I saw the usual stuff about local politics, headlines about problems in certain neighborhoods, a dozen other topics that didn’t seem to be related to anything important at all, and then I spotted the one that had to be what he was talking about.

  Local Women Reported Missing

  Three Tulsa area women have been reported missing by their families, and police are calling the disappearances suspicious. Connie Kirby, Wanda Sparks and Candace Lawson all failed to come home yesterday, but this isn’t the first time. A few months ago, all three of these women were among those who were abducted by Frank and Michael Rawlings. They were found alive by a Tulsa private investigator, Cassie McGraw, and both Frank Rawlings and his son Michael were killed during the rescue. Currently, police do not believe there is a connection to the previous case, but anyone with any information is urged to call the Tulsa Police Department.

  I dialed Jim Pennington and put the phone to my ear. “It’s Cassie. Danny just called me and said something about setting up a chance for me to be a hero again, and I just saw that some of the women from the last case seem to have disappeared. That’s got to be what he is talking about, Jim.”

  “Whoa, whoa, what? Who’s disappeared?”

  “Wanda Sparks, Candy Lawson, and Connie Kirby. I worked with Detective Niles on that case, but they were three of the women who were abducted by the Rawlings. That case was all over the news, so Danny would have no trouble getting their names. Apparently he’s tracked them down and decided to use them to set me up again. You didn’t even know about this?”

  “No, I hadn’t heard anything about it. If it is missing persons, that’s another whole department. Let me check into it, and I’ll get back to you.”

  The line went dead and I turned to go back into the house. Mom was standing in the doorway, just looking at me.

  “Cassie? What’s wrong?”

  I told her quickly what had happened, and followed her back into the kitchen. I was trembling with a combination of fear and rage. If those women died because I wasn’t there to do whatever Danny wanted, I was going to feel like a monster.

  Mom fixed me a cup of coffee and I sat down at the table. I was trying to guess just what it might’ve been that Danny was after from me, trying to figure out what he would’ve wanted me to do to try to save them. Unfortunately, without knowing any of the circumstances, I was flying blind.

  My phone rang just as Dad and Dex were coming into the house. I snatched it up and saw that it was Pennington.

  “Jim? What did you find out?”

  “Not a whole lot,” he said. “All three of those women went out sometime yesterday and never came back home. Their families reported them missing, but it wasn’t until this morning that anyone put it together with what happened with Rawlings and his son. Cassie, I think you’re probably right about Danny being behind this, but I don’t have any idea what he meant about giving you a chance to be a hero. So far, we don’t have any leads on them at all.”

  “Damn, damn, damn,” I said. “I really didn’t think he would do anything again this quickly. Jim, we’re going to be on the way back within the hour. Call me if you find out anything else, okay?”

  “You got it. But drive safe, okay?”

  I promised we would, and then explained to Dex what was going on. He sat down beside me and put an arm around me, and I leaned against him.

  “Cassie, we can grab something to eat on the way,” he said. “If you think we need to get started back now…”

  “At this point, I don’t think saving half an hour would make any difference. Get cleaned up so we can eat, and then we can go. I already packed our stuff up this morning.”

  He gave me a squeeze, then went and washed up. I noticed that he had an earthy smell, the same kind of smell my dad always had after a day in the fields. It was different, on him, and it made him smell masculine and strong.

  Lunch was ready, so we sat down to eat. I’ll confess that we hurried a bit, despite my insistence that we didn’t need to, but we still managed to enjoy that last half-hour with my folks. Both Dex and I ate heartily, because we knew we weren’t likely to stop again before we got back to Tulsa.

  Mom must have figured that out, too. As Dex and I carried our bags out to the car, Mom came out with an old picnic basket and handed it to me. I opened it up to find roast beef sandwiches and several pieces of chicken inside, and I hugged her tight.

  Daddy was standing on the other side of the car, shaking hands with Dex. The two of them were smiling at each other, and I got the impression that something had happened out in the field that bonded them together, somehow.

  I let go of Mom and she hurried around the car to throw both arms around Dex. He returned her hug with a big smile, and even leaned his face down so she could give him a kiss on the cheek. She let go, then, and stepped back. Dex and I got into the car, and Mom and Daddy waved as we drove away.

  We got back to the interstate and headed toward home. We were just crossing the bridge over the Mississippi, passing the famous Gateway Arch in St. Louis, when my phone rang again. I had it connected to the car stereo, some Bluetooth thing that Dex figured out, and the display on the dash told me it was Pennington calling.

  I poked the answer button. “Go ahead,” I said.

  “Cassie, we found all three of them. They’re okay, just a little shook up.”

  I looked at Dex, shaking my head. “What in the world? Was it Danny?”

  “Yeah, it definitely was. He approached each of them yesterday with some line about not knowing how to get a little kid out of a car seat, then stuck them each with a needle that knocked them out cold and took them to someplace similar to the one he kept Marsha and Angie in. Just like them, he fed them and treated them decent, and he told them that you were going to come and save them again. A couple of hours ago, apparently, he went back and put hoods over their faces so they couldn’t see anything, loaded them up in some kind of a van and took them out to Mohawk Park and let them go.”

  My mind was racing, trying to figure out just what Danny was up to. “Jim, you should probably take them to the hospital to get checked out. Make sure they haven’t been drugged or given some kind of infection or something.”

  “That’s where they’re at now,” he said. “Don’t worry, I’m just as suspicious as you are. There was one more thing, though. He told them to tell you that this is the only reprieve you’re going to get. He says you better be ready to play tomorrow. Any idea what that’s supposed to mean?”

  “Yeah,” I growled. “He thinks this is some kind of game, and he wants me to play by his rules. The only problem is, I don’t know what they are.”

  “Okay. Listen, I’ll let you know if anything more comes out of this, but I have a feeling he’s being straight on this. He let them go because you weren’t available to do whatever he wanted, almost like he’s trying to show you there’s still something good in him. I’m not sure that’s true, but I’d take him at his word that you won’t get another break.”

  “Thanks, Jim,” I said. “Believe me, I won’t be taking any more vacations until this is over. He wants to bring this game to its end, and so do I.”

  I hit the button to cut off the call and continued driving through St. Louis. Dex was quiet, but he was just looking at me.

  “What?” I asked.

  “
I was just thinking,” he said. “I remember you said he told you that he wanted you to figure out how to find him, right?”

  “Yeah. He said he wants me to stop him, but I had to figure out how.”

  “And there is supposed to be clues for you in the things he’s doing, right?”

  “That’s the way I understand it, yeah. You got an idea?”

  He shook his head. “I’m just trying to look at everything he’s done so far and find something that could be called a common denominator. The only thing I’m seeing, though, is that it’s all tied to your work as an abuse counselor. I mean, he blew up the Outreach; left Marsha, who you work for, in your dumpster, probably thought she was dead; he blew up your car while you were visiting her at the hospital; he beat up Angie and threw her out in a way that was designed to get your attention; he blew up New Beginnings, a shelter where you put people before; how did the Denham girl fit into it?”

  “She’s a client,” I said. “She’s been coming to see me for about a month, once or twice a week. Her husband likes to slap her around a lot, and he’s the kind that threatens to kill her if she leaves. I’ve been trying to help her get up the courage.”

  “Okay, so she’s part of it, too. Then we got this latest escapade, with some of the women from the Rawlings case. The only common thread in all of it is your work as an abuse counselor.” He shook his head. “I’m just not seeing the clues he’s talking about.”

  I shrugged. “Me neither,” I said. “I guess we just have to wait and see what he does next.”

  We drove on through the afternoon, and finally got back into Tulsa at about six thirty. I called Pennington to let him know we were back, but he didn’t have anything new to report. The women had checked out okay at the hospital, and had been allowed to go home.

  We got to the house and went through it together, but found no sign that anyone had been there. I jokingly suggested that we should buy one of the security systems like we had for the shop and install it in the house. That way, we could literally look through the house from our phones before ever going inside.