Stray Narrow (An Imogene Museum Mystery Book 7)

by Jerusha Jones

  The technique that was so effective at rousting gophers out of their burrows had the same effect on Burke. He struggled to free his arms from the cocoon, blinking and bleary-eyed, his shaggy hair a tousled mess.

  Pete adjusted him on his lap but kept the boy secure in a strong embrace. “You hungry?” he asked, his voice thick and scratchy.

  Burke nodded sleepily and slumped back against Pete’s chest as though exhausted.

  Just like that he seemed recovered. I had so many questions burning on my tongue. So many things I needed to know. But Pete was right to address Burke’s physical needs first.

  Hot cocoa and a roast beef sandwich for Burke. Coffee and a roast beef sandwich for Pete. Coffee for me. In that order. Slabs of pie to follow shortly for the man and the boy. I had no appetite.

  For the first time since I’d known Burke, he ate slowly—tentatively even—casting worried glances at me out from under his long eyelashes.

  “Can you tell us what you were dreaming about, Burke?” Pete finally asked in a soothing rumble.

  Burke swiped a blob of mayonnaise with the sourdough crust of his sandwich and stuck it in his mouth. “Missing my dad,” he whispered around the wad of bread.

  Understandable, definitely. But was that all?

  Pete was on my wavelength, because he tried again. “Are you worried about anything?”

  I bit my lip and nodded at Pete over Burke’s head. He hadn’t suggested the words afraid or scared even though Burke’s subconscious behavior had indicated absolute terror far beyond the expected grief. It seemed like it would be better to let the boy acknowledge his own feelings, if we could get him to. But I was no therapist, so I toyed with the handle of my mug and tried to wait patiently.

  Burke swallowed the big lump of dough, his eyes watering with the effort. “Where will I live?” he asked in a small voice.

  “With Meredith and me,” Pete replied promptly. “If you want to. That part hasn’t changed. We have lots of room here.”

  I was tearing up again. What was it with me and waterworks lately? Surely it wasn’t hormones? Maybe it was the sight of my husband being so gentle. That wasn’t a surprise—he was gentle with me too, but to see him with a child in his arms…I scrubbed my face with the lapel of my robe, pretending my eyes were itchy.

  “Burke, you can talk to us,” Pete carried on, holding that low, mesmerizing tone that usually makes me want to spill my guts. I hoped it worked on Burke too. “You were up on Gifford Mountain by yourself for a long time. That had to be difficult. You’re a brave kid.”

  Pete couldn’t see Burke’s face, but I could. And he’d hit something with his prodding. Those mineral blue-green eyes darted and hollowed out, as though retracting into themselves with fear, the pupils huge. Burke’s body followed suit, curling deeper into Pete’s chest.

  There was no safer place to be. Pete’s arms tightened around the boy as we shared another knowing glance.

  I got up and went around to kneel beside Pete’s chair so I could be at eye level with Burke. “We hope you can be happy here,” I said, rubbing the knobby little knee closest to me. “And you can tell us anything. You’re not in trouble. You didn’t do anything wrong. Sheriff Marge, Harriet, Frankie, Jim Carter”—I tried to remember all the people he’d met so far in Platts Landing—“are all here to help you. We really like having kids around,” I added with a smile.

  And got nothing.

  I didn’t want to distress him further by continuing to stare at him, so I rose with creaking knees and started clearing away the dirty dishes. Tuppence was still glued to the edge of Pete’s chair, whiskers quivering and ears alert, remarkably untempted by the promise of new crumbs on the kitchen floor.

  And Pete just held our frightened boy. Solid, strong, steady. Have I mentioned lately how much I love my husband? He always seems to know exactly what to do. His sheer presence should count tenfold for the amount of quiet confidence it conveys.

  I had my hands in sudsy water by the time anyone spoke again. There’d seemed no point in rushing back to bed since I was certain Pete and I would just lie there staring at the ceiling, wondering what else we could do for Burke, and Burke risked a return to his nightmare. Besides, I find washing dishes to be a therapeutic and pacifying task.

  “Do bad people always go to jail?” Burke’s faint whisper held a tang of pleading.

  My hands froze in the warm water, but I was loathe to turn around and face those earnest eyes. Because the truth wasn’t the answer I wanted to give him.

  But Pete said it anyway. “No. Not always.”

  I was boring a hole into Pete’s reflection on the window above the sink, willing him to add some reassurance to that purely factual statement. Clearly, Burke had something heavy on his mind.

  “The police do their best,” Pete added on cue, in his deep rumble, “but they don’t always know everything. Their job is to find all the pieces that prove someone is guilty, and sometimes that’s not possible.”

  “There are a lot of bad people out there,” Burke said, his words muffled by the quilt that had crept up around his chin.

  “Yep,” Pete agreed.

  What could I add to that? Nothing. I was overwhelmed with sadness that our boy already had such a close acquaintance with the evils of this world.

  oOo

  Pete informed me that he was going out with Sheriff Marge and her crew to help with the search for the Brightbill cabin on Gifford Mountain while we were still stretched under the quilts in our bed.

  “But you had a job scheduled for today?” I said in the pre-dawn gloom, not really meaning it. Of course Pete could take care of himself, so why was I suffering a twinge of worry and nerves over the idea that he’d be traipsing through the forest in a remote corner of the county—along with a whole contingent of armed officers of the law—on a frigid winter day?

  “We need answers,” he rumbled in my ear, pulling me closer in our warm nest. “Whatever it takes to set Burke’s mind at ease. The kid’s terrified.”

  I pressed my face into Pete’s shoulder, inhaling the yummy licorice and dusty wheat scent that lingers on his skin even after he’s showered. “I know,” I whispered.

  “Besides, that derelict barge has been anchored outside the main channel for ages. As long as it’s not sinking, Paulson Lumber won’t care when I tow it to the scrap yard. Until the Coast Guard gets on their case, that is.”

  One of the perks of being self-employed—a flexible schedule. So he was free to swap things around so he could offer assistance in resolving a far more important matter. I slid my hand around the back of his neck and pulled him in for a warm, deep, drowsy kiss. “Be careful,” I whispered. “Things happen on Gifford Mountain.”

  CHAPTER 9

  Same old, same old—sort of. Providing a routine for Burke seemed like a good idea. I didn’t tell him where Pete had gone, and he didn’t ask as he stumbled sleepily into the kitchen and hauled his bony little self up onto a chair for the big, hot breakfast I was dishing up.

  From the way she staggered wearily, her front and back halves working their syncopated and only loosely affiliated way down the stairs at Burke’s heels, I assumed Tuppence had spent the remainder of the night with him after Pete had carried him upstairs once he’d fallen asleep again. Not just in Burke’s room, but up on the bed and stretched out beside him, like a canine nanny. Officially against the house rules for pets, but I wasn’t quibbling, as long as Burke didn’t mind her snoring.

  If it was possible, my hound was more worried about the boy than I was. She parked herself under the table by his dangling feet instead of imbibing in her usual habit of licking fresh bacon grease splatters off the floor in front of the stove.

  So it was a good thing preparations for the wedding reception were ramping up at the museum. I’d been anticipating a hectic day even before I’d had the additional worry about the search on Gifford Mountain ratcheted into the back of my mind.

  Pete had warned me that most of Gifford Mountai
n had spotty cell phone reception at best, but he’d promised to call or text when he could—when or if anything was discovered.

  Lingering seemed pointless. Small talk wasn’t an option. So Burke and I moved like automatons through our morning preparations and ended up at the museum’s locked front doors two hours before opening time. Even so, Frankie had beat us there.

  I found her in the mansion’s kitchen, which doubled as a staff breakroom, chewing the eraser end of a pencil and frowning mightily at her clipboard, a mug of steaming coffee at her elbow. She looked as though she’d slept about as much as I had, and pitched her brows at me without comment as I pointed Burke in the direction of the hot cocoa packets. Soothing the kid with sugar, or something like that, but he was a long way from being pudgy. And he’d returned to the weighty silence of his early time with us.

  I tipped my head toward the door. “Want to look at the seating chart one last time?” I asked.

  Frankie took the hint and shoved her chair back from the table.

  She followed me to the gift shop and spoke first. “Henry’s on the search team. He told me Pete’s going too?” She fiddled with the jeweled zipper tab on her knit jacket. Her hands always revealed the energetic state of her mind. She might be amazingly efficient, but the woman could not sit—or stand—still.

  I nodded, surprised and pleased to hear that her suitor was lending his expertise—if not his helicopter—to the search. Gifford Mountain was too heavily wooded for aerial viewing to be of much benefit.

  “Who else, do you know?” I asked. I hadn’t wanted to bother Sheriff Marge with silly questions about her methods just to appease my worried imagination.

  Frankie was a font of information. She ticked names off on her fingers. “Herb Tinsley, Julian Joseph, Amos Stanley.”

  I let out a breath I didn’t know I’d been holding and nodded. Adding Pete and Henry to the list, it was an excellent roster—knowledgeable, experienced men; some were older, but all quite spry for their ages and incredibly dedicated. Sheriff Marge was tapping into their collective wisdom, and I was grateful for their willingness to help.

  Frankie stretched out a hand and squeezed my forearm. “The main concern is the weather,” she said, seeming to echo my thoughts. “A storm front’s moving in. They’re predicting two to three inches of snowfall by midnight—more at higher elevations, plus another few inches tomorrow. It’ll dip down into the teens overnight up on Gifford Mountain,” she added, her brown eyes wide.

  “They won’t get stuck up there,” I said, louder than I’d meant to—probably trying to reassure both of us. “Or lost. They have GPS, radios, and decades—no, centuries—of common sense among them.”

  Frankie cracked a little chuckle. “Well, when you put it that way…”

  “So, you’re going to keep us busy today, right?” I blurted, getting down to business. I explained briefly about Burke’s nightmare, and added, “I hope he’ll sleep better tonight if he’s absolutely exhausted. Me too, so put us to work.”

  “That,” Frankie replied, tapping her clipboard with a rueful shake of her helmet hair, “will not be a problem.”

  oOo

  They hit pay dirt with the seventh cabin they investigated. Stumbled upon would probably have been a better term, but admitting that degree of pure chance in an official police report wasn’t exactly standard protocol. Deputy Owen Hobart figured his boss just might do it anyway. If anyone stuck to the unvarnished version of the truth, it was Sheriff Marge.

  The first three cabins they’d rifled through had been obviously abandoned years ago. The fourth had a family of disgruntled owls in residence. The fifth showed signs of recent—and hastily vacated—use, but no indicators that one of the occupants had been (or still was) a minor. Sheriff Marge had a philosophy of live and let live in that situation—although she’d carefully noted the cabin’s GPS coordinates in her notebook for possible future reference—so they’d resumed their roving search, making sure to create a great deal of noise as they left the vicinity. The sixth cabin also fit into the long-abandoned and holes-in-the-roof-so-big-you-could-see-the-stars category.

  Who knew so many hidey-holes of a human nature were tucked into camouflaged hollows and against jagged knolls in the deep woods? Owen was certainly surprised, although he wasn’t going to be flapping his gums about it anytime soon.

  Hard to, at any rate, because his teeth were ground together to keep them from chattering. There was something else he’d never tell anyone—that he was wearing two layers of silk long underwear under all his other gear. Better than the highly engineered synthetic stuff that was all the rage among his buddies. Moisture-wicking properties, his ass. But even the silk wasn’t quite doing the job of cushioning his ballistic vest today, and he could feel a blister rising at the edge of the vest under his right armpit.

  But compared to the extra weight of the ceramic plates he may or may not have inserted into his vest when he went on nightly raids in Afghanistan, his current situation was tolerable. The plates worked—mostly—but they’d added a cumbersome bulk that slowed you down, especially if you were trying to be stealthy, which was all the time out in that godforsaken wasteland. A place he never wanted to return to—a place many of his friends had returned from in body bags.

  Today’s search was more his style—the dripping, towering trees and the thick canopy of needled branches over his head; the silent duff of rampant moss and ivy tendrils under his boots; the slick, rocky crags of volcanic basalt that seemed to rise out of nowhere, left behind by a massive cataclysmic event; and the twittering little birds that were mostly invisible in the dense foliage. A man could get accustomed to this.

  He’d been scrambling up and down over steep, tumbled boulder fields and following icy freshets since sunup along with the other searchers. Sitting in a patrol car most of his days was certainly taking its toll on his otherwise ripped physique. Hitting the weights hard couldn’t compensate for a steady diet of sedentary vigilance. So he was panting—subtly—and reveling in the strenuous movement, sucking in that good burn in his quadriceps, hamstrings, and calves even if it was temporarily uncomfortable.

  Sheriff Marge emerged from the cabin and stood on the stoop—if one could call the artfully concentric pad of round river rock that fanned out like a mosaic on the ground in front of the doorway as a stoop—blinking against the slash of cold, gray daylight that shafted in through the tree branches, and tipped her chin at him.

  He’d known it before she’d rapped on the door and then stuck her head in and then disappeared fully inside and stayed there for twenty minutes. Because none of the other cabins had been decorated in the slightest, none exhibiting anything beyond pure functionality and, in most cases, even the functionality had been subject to interpretation.

  But this was the right cabin, the recent abode of one Burke Brightbill and his now deceased father. Sheriff Marge had obviously seen what she needed to inside. So the little squirt had been telling the truth. Pretty good, really. Thinking back to when he’d been eleven years old, he’d had a lot of survival reasons for stretching the truth. The Army had been his saving grace, coming in just the nick of time. So it was refreshing to learn of a kid who had no such need or compunction to lie, no such rough background—figuratively. Because literally, it was still rough, the decorative stoop notwithstanding.

  Owen returned Sheriff Marge’s nod and signaled to his assigned team—Henry Parker and Pete Sills. They’d check a widening perimeter, see what they could find, if anything, while Sheriff Marge and her crew combed through the cabin for clues and packed up any remaining personal belongings.

  Little crystal ice granules were falling from the sky, a precursor to the snow in the forecast. They were melting upon impact and then refreezing, coating the rim of his knit cap and the flaps of the pockets on his chest. Wouldn’t be long before their footing became even more treacherous. Good thing the guys working with him were experienced.

  Owen knelt on one knee and spread the Forest Service
map on his broad, meaty thigh as though the surface was a portable writing desk. Henry and Pete huddled over him, and they quickly parsed the search area into segments.

  “We’ll overlap if we have time,” Owen reminded them. But dusk fell quickly in January, and even quicker in the dense forest. “Watch your step.” He didn’t need to tell them, but he felt better doing it anyway.

  Twenty minutes later, he found the first thing he wasn’t expecting. A rutted track that wasn’t on the Forest Service map. Too narrow for log trucks, and this part of the national forest wasn’t under concession anyway. Any logs dragged out of here were essentially poached.

  But somebody had been driving a pickup along the muddy track, and not that long ago. The tread marks were still fairly clear in a few sections where the track was protected by dense overhanging branches. Nothing unusual about the marks—standard sized truck tires, not those gargantuan, extra-knobby ones favored by off-road enthusiasts. Even though that was the typical person Owen imagined would be prowling through the woods with enough observant attention to find this track in the first place—they were a pretty die-hard bunch, those off-roaders. The driver had been somebody who knew the area well—or who was almost irreparably lost.

  That second scenario worried him the most.

  He had his phone out and was snapping reference photos of the tread-imprinted mud when Pete Sills shouted his name.

  CHAPTER 10

  It was a woman. She’d shaved her legs.

  Not that Owen was an expert in female personal hygiene, but it seemed to him that if a woman lived in a cabin like the ones they’d spent the day sweeping through, she probably wouldn’t have taken the care or had the proper amenities to indulge in that degree of grooming.

  Owen had no idea why he noted that particular fact first. Maybe because she’d had nice legs—runner’s legs with muscular calves and slender ankles. Still did, even though they were now rather worse for wear, having been gnawed on.