The Salt Maiden (Leisure Romantic Suspense)

by Colleen Thompson

  Spoiled ass, she thought—the polar opposite of Jay Eversole, a man tempered by both family tragedy and war. A man who understood firsthand that real life could get messy but hadn’t allowed that knowledge to turn him cruel or bitter.

  So go and see him while you still can. At the very least she could thank him for his help, make sure he had her contact information, and then get back on the road.

  And at best? She smiled to herself as she took the turnoff that would take her to Jay Eversole’s place. At best she might end up delaying her drive home until morning and pushing her troubles to the back burner for one more night.

  She didn’t allow herself to imagine anything more than a brief respite. Didn’t—couldn’t—think about the yawning loneliness that awaited her back home, despite the presence of her friends, her dogs, her work, and a mother who would need—but couldn’t offer—her support as they both waited for the other shoe to drop.

  From the purse beside her, her phone began to ring. Pulling over on the dark road, she started digging. By the time she found the phone it had clicked over to voice mail, but the number on the screen identified the caller as her mother.

  Had there been some news? Had Angie’s body been officially identified, perhaps even released so they could plan the funeral? Dread rose like bile, though in Dana’s heart she had known this news was coming. Impatiently she waited for the voice mail to come through.

  Before she could retrieve it, the phone rang again. UNKNOWN CALLER, the display said, and Dana nearly let this one, too, go to voice mail, figuring it was another loathsome pitch from a reporter.

  But after the second ring she answered, eager to dispose of the irritation and clear the line as quickly as she could.

  “If you’re looking for a story,” she said without preamble, “you can damned well look somewhere else.”

  Instead of the polished plea she had expected, she heard only parched-sounding laughter through static that crackled in time to another flash of distant lightning. “Dana—same as always.”

  Dana froze, eyes flaring and both hands tightening reflexively as her stomach dropped down through the floorboard. She knew that laugh—she would swear it. But before she found her own voice, the caller started speaking.

  “How far would you go,” rasped Angie, “to give a girl a lift?”

  Not long after Jay had finished taking out his frustrations on the bedroom floor of the house—where he’d found no trace of hidden money—Special Agent Emil Tomlin called him on his cell phone at the RV. “We have an ID on the body, and it isn’t what you think.”

  Jay glanced down at the copy of the sobriety journal, which he’d been studying at the table after kicking off his boots. “It’s not Angie Vanover?”

  On the floor at his feet Max rolled over, clearly hoping his master’s distraction would net him a belly rub.

  “No, sir,” said Tomlin. “The woman is Delilah Lawrence-Goldsmith—better known in your county as Miriam Piper-Gold.”

  “The scam artist from Haz-Vestment?” The image of the woman in her green bikini flashed through his mind, juxtaposed beside the withered, browned flesh of a corpse with half its face blown off. “I understood she was a redhead.”

  “In her business,” Emil told him, “hair color changes often. We found several sets of colored contacts and different-styled eyeglasses, too, at her house, which has been empty for a couple of months, at least. No sign of the husband, either—though now we’re more interested than ever in his whereabouts.”

  Jay’s mind immediately sketched out two scenarios. Whether victim or killer, Goldsmith definitely needed to be found.

  “So how’d this ID come about?” he asked Tomlin. A fair question in view of the condition of the corpse.

  “When the partial on the dentals didn’t match Vanover, we started thinking, and then got a rush on DNA to confirm it.”

  Jay was impressed. Because of the backlog of requests, DNA matches normally took months. Tomlin must have pull.

  “So this means that Angie Vanover’s still missing.” As Max pawed at his ankle, Jay’s thoughts leaped to Dana. Would she be relieved or disappointed to have the possibility of closure snatched away?

  “What this means,” Tomlin confided, “is that Angie Vanover is also very much a person of interest in this case.”

  “You’re thinking she’s a suspect?” Considering Angie’s background and her reaction to Haz-Vestment’s proposal, it made sense, though the lack of violence in her history and the journal entries he’d read made Jay skeptical.

  “I’m thinking that the FBI is going to move mountains to find Ms. Vanover—whether she’s dead or alive.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  In the desert

  I saw a creature, naked, bestial,

  Who, squatting upon the ground,

  Held his heart in his hands,

  And ate of it.

  I said, “Is it good, friend?”

  “It is bitter—bitter,”he answered;

  “But I like it

  “Because it is bitter,

  “And because it is my heart.”

  —Stephen Crane,

  “The Black Riders and Other Lines”

  The Hunter was watching the reporters when he spotted her. Watching them and swearing, all but spitting in his fury.

  She had led them here, where they would dig and prod like the scavengers they were. Where they would destroy the future finally coming his way—a future he had risked everything to secure.

  His hatred focused on the blonde behind the car’s wheel, despising her for drawing them but hating her far more on account of what her sister and the desert had made him.

  For two months the bitch had eluded him, though he knew damned well she was nearby: laughing, mocking, and always a step beyond his grasp…with every penny of his money hidden in some secret cache. And all the while he was living like an animal, driven so far from the person he remembered that he barely recognized himself.

  He longed to catch her in his rifle’s scope. Longed to take her down like the diseased bitch that she was.

  But since that wouldn’t lead him to his money, he would move in on her sister. Only this time he didn’t mean to kill her.

  For he’d thought of a better use for Dana Vanover. A use that would bring her sister out of hiding and deliver both his money and his vengeance.

  When Dana saw the headlights pull onto the road behind her, she first thought of Jay and then suspected that some reporter must have recognized her and decided to give chase. But as the tiny town fell away, the driver dropped back into the distance. Smiling nervously, she said, “At last, someone whose life doesn’t revolve around mine.”

  But it was impossible to relax. With her mind racing and her convertible rocking, jolting, and sometimes bouncing on the rutted dirt road, she had to focus every bit of her attention on getting to the rendezvous in one piece.

  Barely audible over the car’s rattle, her phone once more rang from where it had slid onto the floor mat. Unable to reach it—and unwilling to delay even a moment—Dana ignored the noise.

  If she’d thought Devil’s Claw was dark, this stretch of road was far blacker. Dead ahead, the upper half of the rising moon disappeared into a cloudbank that blotted out the stars. Hemmed in by obsidian, her headlights reached into the void, illuminating nothing but a creosote-lined dirt road and a handful of fluttering white moths. She hunched forward, straining to watch for the mile marker her sister had described.

  Her sister. Angie. Alive and waiting for her.

  As a bruised glow pulsed through the low clouds, the tiny hairs on Dana’s arms stood at attention. A sick chill snaked through her before suspicion sank in its fangs.

  What if I only heard what I wanted? Pressed by grief and desperation, had her mind sifted sounds from random static, then shaped them into the voice she remembered?

  On TV she’d heard a withered old black man once who had claimed his dead wife spoke to him through the static on his radi
o. He was pitiful, with childlike belief shining from his clouded eyes—a terrible contrast to the puffed-up condescension of the program’s narrator. Though Dana had been quick to switch the channel, she still remembered the jab of embarrassment she’d felt on the poor old man’s behalf.

  At the thought that she could be as unhinged by her own grief, her foot slipped from the accelerator. After braking slowly, she leaned over to retrieve the phone where it had fallen and whispered, “Dear God, please let her be there. Please let this be real…”

  Dana scrolled back through the last calls and blinked away the threat of tears so she could read the tiny screen. On the list, sandwiched between a pair of missed calls from her mother, she spotted an unidentified number. She didn’t recognize it, save for the 432 area code that encompassed a broad swath of West Texas, including Rimrock County.

  With the first fat raindrops popping against her windshield, she pushed the button to connect. As much as she hated to delay her journey, she had to reassure herself she wasn’t hurtling into the desert darkness to meet with a delusion. Breath held, she listened to a few clicks, followed by the sound of ringing.

  “Damn it, pick up,” Dana ordered at the sixth ring. By the twentieth she hung up before trying once again. But it was no use; no one answered. She tried to call Jay, too, but heard only a recorded message asking her to try again later because of some problem with the circuits.

  Which left her with only one choice, as far as she could see.

  Max growled at a thunderous rumble while the RV shuddered with the gusting wind. As a few drops of rain pinged off the skin of rusted metal, Jay flipped the last page of Angie’s journal, disappointed that rereading it had yielded no further secrets.

  “Come on, dog.” He stood, stretching, and spoke through a yawn. “You’d better go out one more time before bed.”

  And one more time before the clouds burst. Desert thunderstorms might be infrequent, but they more than made up for their rarity in fierceness. On those occasions when the tropical moisture of a Pacific storm collided with the arid heat, the resulting lightning struck fear into the stoutest hearts, and rain ran off of earth baked too hard to absorb it. The summer Jay turned fifteen, his uncle had shown him the rotting carcasses of half a dozen head of cattle drowned when such a storm caught them grazing in the grassy bottom of a narrow-walled arroyo. With the water long gone, the bodies lay bloated, baking in the sun as buzzing flies swarmed in the shimmering stench.

  Jay opened the door for him, but Max only tucked his tail between his legs and whined, clearly unnerved by the thunder.

  “Last chance, you big sissy,” Jay offered, but the dog slunk off and hid beneath the table. “Suit yourself, then.”

  Before Jay could close the door, something fluttered through the rectangle of light that spilled out through the opening. He turned, following the motion, but the object had already vanished in the darkness.

  Then another something flew past, and, as he watched, yet a third thin shape twisted through.

  “What the hell?” he asked as he pulled a flashlight from a kitchen drawer. Hurrying back, he leaned out the open doorway and shone the strong beam outward.

  “Son of a bitch,” he burst out, eyes wide as his light scanned a flock of green bills tumbling on the wind. There was no telling how much money had been snagged among dry grasses or caught on the barbed spikes of a yucca. Most, however—at least a score of loose notes—simply blew past to skim along the desert floor, save for one caught on the open door—a hundred-dollar bill that he peeled off and shoved into a pocket.

  Racing outside, he resisted the temptation to chase after them, instead turning his light in the opposite direction of the strange migration. If only he could find the source, maybe he could stop whatever cash remained from following its companions.

  With the wind whistling around him, he trotted upstream of the flow as fast as his bare feet would allow him, pausing to curse as a lechuguilla’s leafy daggers scraped his ankle and a sharp stone bruised his heel. Unwilling to waste time getting his boots, he rounded the corner of his uncle’s house…

  …and found the shrinking pile lying in a shallow dug-out hole, perhaps two feet across and not even half as deep. To save what he could of the contents, Jay tore off his shirt, then threw it over the bills as lightning streaked across the sky and thunder shook the air.

  That quickly the spattering became a torrent. Raindrops stung his bare skin, exploding in a kamikaze assault against the land. Jay knelt, raking loose clods of sandy dirt over the fresh excavation. Gritty mud gloved his hands when at last he crowded beneath the eaves in an attempt to save his hide.

  But the overhang was too narrow to offer him much shelter, so he decided to make a run for cover, back to the RV to call for help. With a violent tattoo pounding the ranch house roof above him, he glanced at the nearest window to get a bead on his position.

  And sucked in a startled breath as inside his uncle’s bedroom, the red glow of a cigar butt caught his eye.

  Hunched over the steering wheel, Dana struggled to see through the driving rain. She’d had no choice except to slow down to avoid mistaking a gap in the scrub for the single-lane road.

  Yet as the miles spun away behind her, her speed gradually crept higher while she recalled the voice she’d taken as her sister’s.

  “If you take the right branch, where it splits off past Lost Lake, you’ll come up on an old mile marker, painted white.” The line had crackled loudly then, so that something could have been missed. Once the sound cleared, the last words followed. “I’ll be waiting near there, off the road where you can’t see me. But I’ll be watching for you, so pull over and I’ll come out.”

  “Where are you calling from?” Dana had asked. She remembered the wild leap of her heart, the murmur of her tires on the hard-packed surface, the very texture of the silence as the line went dead.

  She remembered in such detail that she told herself that it had to have been more than her imagination. That it had to have been Angie, leading her into the night.

  “How far would you go…?” the echo asked her—just as a shuddering flash strobe-lit a human figure that stepped into her path. Head ducked against the silvery nails of rain, it raised an arm as if blinded by the glare of her approaching headlights.

  Dana took in the sight the instant before her right foot all but slammed through the car’s floorboard and her arms twisted the wheel to avoid impact.

  The convertible fishtailed, its front brakes biting into the dirt road a critical half second before the rear tires grabbed hold. Thrown against her seat belt harness, Dana felt herself losing control, felt that at any moment she’d lose contact with the desert and flip onto the convertible’s roll bar.

  But instead the car came to a stop with a bone-jarring lurch that threatened to fling her stomach worlds away. More concerned with whether she had struck the pedestrian, Dana twisted her head around but could see nothing but rain slanting across the empty field.

  Unfastening her seat belt, she threw open the car door and leaped into the downpour.

  “Angie,” she cried as she stepped out into the darkness. “Angie—”

  “Dana,” came the answer an instant before cold, wet arms grabbed her from behind.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Patient Name: Nikki Harrison

  Patient Number: 9360277513

  Date of Admission: 6/07/2007

  Texas Children’s Hospital, Houston Medical Center

  Nursing Entry

  Date: 7/03/2007

  Time: 1600

  Patient reports feeling cold, warm to touch. Rigors severe, shivering throughout PM. IV site warm to touch, red with darker line spreading proximally from right hand to elbow. Informed Dr. Ybarra @ 1542. Lethargic, difficult to initiate eye contact. Mottled skin. Mother unable to engage with favorite stuffed toy.

  0400 tympanic temp. 103.7º F at 1538. Continue alternating acetaminophen with ibuprofen every two hours. IV antibiotics to continue every fo
ur hours as ordered. Use cooling blanket. Continue to do lab work as ordered every 12 hours and change IV to left arm. Reassess 2X per hour and report further temp. increase or change in mental status to Dr. Ybarra ASAP.

  Jay burst into the house’s back door and clicked on the mud-room’s light switch. Nothing happened, and when he followed his flashlight’s beam into the kitchen, only darkness greeted him instead of the glowing time display on the newly installed microwave.

  Power outage from the lightning, he decided. Which made the red light he’d seen even more alarming. Since he’d left his weapon in the RV, Jay picked a stubby section of two-by-four from the pile of discarded construction remnants. Steeling himself to the task, he dripped a slow path down the hall. Each time he reached an open doorway—first the bathroom, then two bedrooms—he paused to listen but heard nothing except the storm’s assault. When he sniffed he smelled only new paint and sawdust, along with the vaguest suggestion of charred wood.

  Neither the murmur of his uncle’s voice nor the odor of cigar smoke lingered. Just that ghostly red glow that had buried him in memory.

  Jay took a deep breath before approaching the final closed door at the hall’s end. As he reached the master bedroom, he wondered if the shock of his discovery and the wild night had prompted yet another hallucination. Had the bomblike thunder launched another flashback? Had the wind’s howl reminded him of Baghdad’s cries of anguish?

  Or could he have been fooled by more mundane emotions? As he’d torn up the flooring earlier, Jay’s thoughts had been full of the uncle who had died here. The man who’d burned to death inside this very house. Probably as a result of his late-night smoking habit.