Wyatt smiled. It was the smile of a man who knew exactly what he was doing. It was the smile of a man who was about to win. “Those tires are expensive truck tires. Tires we don’t use on any of the ranch vehicles.”
“How do you know that this person was the one going into the barn to make explosives?” Colter asked.
“There was only one set of footprints when I came out here. They were leading to and from the side door of the barn, but nowhere else.” He motioned around them. “And whoever parked here must have realized that their truck couldn’t be seen by anyone unless they were out in the pasture areas. It’s a great place to park if you don’t want to be caught.”
“That’s all circumstantial,” Colter said, feeling like he was raining on his brother’s attempt to help.
Wyatt’s smile widened. “Sure... All except that.” He motioned over to the snow where there was a single beer cap lying only slightly sunken into the snow, almost as though it had simply fallen out of someone’s hand. On the cap was the distinctive red star of those that had been in the loft.
“Who do you know that drives a truck?” Wyatt continued. “Someone who has the money to drop into high-end tires? If you can figure that out, I think we may have just found our man.”
Chapter Fifteen
No matter what Sarah said, she had to be behind it. Whitney checked all the boxes. Motivation. Opportunity. New truck. Money. Whether or not Colter wanted to see the woman for who she really was and what she was capable of was up to him, but Whitney wasn’t falling for the woman’s games. She knew all too well how spurned lovers could do things that would surprise a person—and how little they cared about the truth or the cost their actions would have on others. All they saw was the person they loved and nothing else—it was what made them so dangerous, their lack of empathy and their disregard for consequences.
The thought made shivers run through her.
Maybe someday the ghosts of her past would leave her, but hoping for something so unrealistic seemed like an exercise in futility.
Colter and Wyatt were taking pictures of the tire tracks. She felt bad for the brothers, who were both in a terrible predicament. It was hard to be in a place where you couldn’t tell the truth out of fear it would affect the lives around you. She’d been there too many times. She thought back to when she had first realized that Frank was stalking her. It had been at the prom. She’d gone out with her friends and a boy whom she had known since grade school. The boy was gay but hadn’t told anyone except her.
When they were at dinner, Frank had looked in the window of the restaurant. Even without closing her eyes, she could still see him standing there, his warm breath fogging up the glass as he stared daggers at her date’s back. When they came out of the restaurant, her date’s car’s tires had been slashed and they’d had to call her mother and father to take them to the high school for the party. They hadn’t done much dancing. Her date had been consumed with trying to find a way to get his tires replaced and all she had been able to think about was whether or not she should tell anyone.
In the end, she hadn’t turned Frank in out of fear that he would strike again. She had tried to explain to him that her date was nothing but a friend when he threatened to come after him. Luckily, when she’d told him about his sexual orientation, it made things easier and he’d promised to lay off. Yet nothing about it had made her feel good. She had felt completely bound to the will of a madman. He had seemed unstoppable and capable of anything. And, if anything, her terror of him and what he was willing to do to hurt her had been well-founded.
She had made so many mistakes in her past. She couldn’t allow herself to make another in her present. Making her way to the parking lot, she noticed that Sarah’s truck was missing. Strange. Maybe the woman had seen them go into the barn, or overheard them and had hightailed it out of there before she could fall under suspicion.
Too late.
Whitney looked down at her watch. If she rushed into town she would still have time to do what needed to be done. For a moment she thought about going back to tell Wyatt and Colter where she was going and what she was thinking, but Colter would just come to Sarah’s aid. It was what he always did; he couldn’t be objective. As much as it should have annoyed her, that he would still have a soft spot for his former girlfriend—or whatever he would have classified her as—it didn’t. His graciousness of spirit was something that she admired about him.
He had been through just as much as she had, yet he wasn’t hardened by the world. Instead he always seemed to take it in stride and deal with things as they came to him without looking at all the pain and memories.
If only she could be more like him, and was able to learn to forgive and live for the present instead of being held back by the weight of her past.
It didn’t take long to grab the keys and hit the road. She passed by Colter’s truck as she made her way carefully down the road and to town. By the time she made it to Sarah’s shop, dusk had started to descend on the little town and its late-nineteenth-century-style buildings. The town was quaint and full of charm, a throwback to an era and a lifestyle that was completely different from now. She wondered what it would have been like to live in a time like that, when the West was still wild, lives revolved around mining and stripping away minerals and oil from the lands, a world where danger lurked around every corner.
Thinking about it, she wondered if maybe it wasn’t really so different from life now. Only the clothes and manners in which they went about mining had changed. In Kentucky, coal was their main source of mineral wealth rather than gold, silver and uranium. There, when she’d been growing up, the old-time miners had still been succumbing to black lung, while in Montana the workers were falling to a variety of cancers caused by the chemicals used in mining.
No doubt, in twenty years another generation of miners would succumb to some mysterious disease brought on by their livelihoods and the swords they had chosen to live by.
She got out of the truck. Since she had left the ranch and the sun had gone down, the temperature had fallen at least twenty degrees and the cold had taken on the same dangerous edge as the night before. As she thought about the hike and being stuck out in the cold with Colter, a certain warmth took hold in her belly. Even though it was a terrible situation, she wouldn’t have wanted to take it all back. It was one heck of an adventure; and life should be spent in adventures—the kind that made her want to hold her breath, the kind that made her heart hurt from happiness and joy, and the kind that could be shared with those she truly cared about.
Whether or not the time was right, or that it was a good decision, Colter was the man she wanted in her life. She couldn’t justify giving her heart away in any logical way, but there was something about him that made her thankful that she had come to this place, where life still spoke to bygone eras and intrigue. She loved this place almost as much as she loved him.
Making her way to the front door of the café, she stopped and stared inside. The place looked warm, and bits of condensation had started to collect at the corners of the front bay windows and frieze. It made the mural look as though it was painted on a layer of ice. Sarah was nowhere to be seen, but there was some metallic banging that sounded like pans coming from inside the kitchen.
She had no idea what she was going to say to the woman, or the kinds of questions she should ask.
A part of her wondered if she was even on the right track, or if she was a bit like Colter and unable to be objective because of the way she felt about the woman. She hated the thought that perhaps she was falsely accusing Sarah—she had been in those shoes, but the one doing the finger-pointing was the same woman in question. There was nothing like a little projection—when the guilty person was caught, he always had a way of pointing the finger away from himself.
Perhaps more than anything, what she feared if she was wrong was the fact that the guilt mi
ght fall to someone else whom she knew far better and who scared her far worse—Frank.
Just the thought of his being there made her stomach ache and a wave of nausea pass over her. She hated that the thought of him could still provoke a physical response. She hated that he still held the power of terror over her. It was so wrong. Yet there was no making it right. All she could do was hope that he hadn’t found out where she was, and that he wasn’t behind this.
Heck, if he was, it would be just like he had been a few years ago when he stuck his face in the window of the restaurant and ruined her night. He’d never been particularly sneaky when it came to her. If anything, he’d only been good at not getting caught—or at least penalized for his crimes.
She looked back over her shoulder thanks to the thoughts of Frank. He wasn’t there; he couldn’t be—unless that was who Sarah had been talking to. It would have made sense. He had always accused her of setting that fire—even in court he had told his lawyer that she was responsible for it. He was the king of gaslighting—so good, in fact, that his lawyer had ultimately taken his side and believed his lies and tried hard to prove that his client wasn’t guilty. He had nearly gotten him acquitted.
No one was on the sidewalks. Most of the stores were still open, but this was likely out of some desperate hope that people would come in for their Christmas shopping. There were a few cars parked along the road, but none she recognized.
She slipped into the café. The place always smelled so good, like warm bread and butter, but today it had something different in the air—almost musky like some kind of spice used in antiquity. She tried to put her finger on the smoky scent, but try as she might, it wouldn’t come to her.
“Sarah?” she called, hoping that she would just think of the right thing to say the moment the woman came out of the kitchen.
There was no answer.
“Hello? Is anyone here?” she asked, walking toward the back and the kitchen, where she had met Sarah’s cousins. There was the sound of glass breaking and she rushed toward the noise.
As she dashed into the kitchen, the back door slammed shut. Someone in a dark brown knit cap and heavy work coat sprinted to the left and out of sight.
“Wait!” she screamed. “Stop!”
She moved to go after the person, but was stopped by the heat. On the floor, and running up the wall, was a fire. Terror filled her. All she could do was stare at the blue base and orange curling tips of the flame. There was liquid. Accelerant. She had seen it before. She had felt the heat. The same heat.
She was going to die. This was the end. There was no way she could make it out of a fire again. Her luck was gone. This was the way she was meant to go.
She could be with Rudy.
Black smoke poured up from the flames, filling the kitchen with its spicy, acrid stench—the scent of burning motor oil and gas. Oh, God, she hated that smell.
She had to move. She couldn’t just stand here and let it have her.
Fight. She had to fight.
This time, there was no one to save—only herself—she had to make the choice. She couldn’t stay here.
Forcing herself to look away from the fire, she broke the spell it had cast upon her.
She ran toward the front door. There, the window that had only minutes before been covered in ice was now shattered on the floor like spent tears. At the center was a steadily growing circle of fire around a green Heineken bottle that thankfully hadn’t been broken when it was thrown through the glass.
Someone had tried to trap her.
They had trapped her.
She looked through the flames toward the door. She’d have to move quick to get out. The only way out was around the side of the room that was steadily filling with the black smoke.
The smoke. It always got a victim first.
She got down on her knees and started moving toward the wall and around the steadily growing pool of flames. The broken glass on the floor cut at her hands and pierced through her jeans and pressed into her knees, but she didn’t care. She simply kept moving forward. Another foot. Just one more foot. One more.
Finally, she found the door and pressed out into the night. As she spilled out on the steps and down to the sidewalk, she saw the reflection of red and blue lights coming from the distance. She closed her eyes and let her body fall into the snow and ice that littered the sidewalk.
She had fought—and once again, she’d won. She’d survived.
Chapter Sixteen
Colter’s buddies had called him the moment they saw the ranch truck outside the café, but they hadn’t needed to—he and Wyatt had heard the call on his radio while they were pulling his truck out of the snowbank.
He should have known where Whitney had gone. One minute she was with them, talking about the tire tracks, and the next she had disappeared. Just when he thought he knew the girl, she did something like this.
All he could hope was that she was really okay. His friend had said she had gotten out in time, just some smoke inhalation, but she would be fine. Though Colter knew his friend had been telling him the truth, his heart wouldn’t let him believe it until he saw her with his own two eyes.
He pulled the truck to a stop and got out. The building was engulfed in flames, and the fire crew was doing its best to stop the fire’s advancement into nearby buildings. These old places were built with brick and mortar, but they had enough wood in them that one bad fire could easily jump to the next building if they didn’t get on top of it quickly.
Whitney wasn’t anywhere to be seen. Where was she?
The battalion chief, his friend Turner, was standing next to the crew, giving an order to one of the men on the hose. Colter made his way over to them as the BC turned toward him.
“Why aren’t you in your gear?” Turner asked, from his tone only half kidding. “We could use an extra set of hands.”
“I was at the ranch, but if you want, I can—”
Turner waved him off. “We’re hoping to get another truck in here from rural. We’ll see how quick they get here.”
They were in dire straits if they were calling in reinforcements from the volunteer rural sector. Colter should have been working, but he couldn’t go get his gear and get back here—at least not until he found Whitney.
He glanced around, but couldn’t see her. However, across the street was Sarah’s black Chevy pickup.
There was a collection of people who had spilled out from the stores on Main Street and the nearby homes, no doubt all come to see the biggest source of gossip this week. This would at least keep them from talking about his family for a little bit, though... He was sure they would be tied back to this.
He stopped. What if this fire did have something to do with his family and the threat they had received?
“Was there anyone else in the building at the time of the fire besides Whitney?” Colter asked.
“I don’t know. Ms. Barstow hasn’t spoken to anyone.” Turner shrugged. “She’s with the EMTs now.”
Colter turned to leave, heading in the direction of the lights of the ambulance.
“Wait,” Turner said, grabbing him by the arm to stop him. “How well do you know this girl?” There was a look of deep concern in his eyes.
“Pretty well. Why?” Colter hated the way his friend was looking at him. It was like there was something more, something he was afraid to ask or tell him. “What are you thinking, Turner?”
He let go of his arm. “This fire was no accident.” He skidded his bunker boot around in the slushy, wet snow. “Sarah made a point of telling me that there had been some kind of incident between her and your friend. She seems to be of the mind that Whitney had something to do with this thing. And you know, if that’s the case...”
He didn’t have to say anything more.
“Whitney
wouldn’t do this. She’s innocent,” Colter said, meaning it with every ounce of his being. Yet, as he said it, a nagging feeling rose from his gut.
What if he was wrong? What if he’d been wrong about this woman all along?
No. He trusted her. She had revealed her past to him. She had told him about her past, and the pain that came with it. And her opening up like that, trusting him, was a gift. If he listened to the idle gossip and naysayers around him, what kind of person would he be? He needed to respect and appreciate her, and trust her for the person he knew her to be, not the person others were portraying her as. In the long run, the truth would come to light—he would look back on this and either be humbled or be proud of his actions.
Today, he would stand up for what he knew was right and for the love he held in his heart.
Today, he would fight for her.
“Colter, how can you be sure she’s not behind this?” Turner continued. “From what Sarah had to say, this girl has only been around for a couple of months. You notice that as soon as she started working here, trouble has been cropping up regularly.”
“You know just as well as I do she’s not responsible for everything at the ranch.”
He tried to stanch the anger that was boiling up inside him. Turner didn’t mean anything by it, and he couldn’t possibly know how Colter felt about her. If anything, he was just trying to make sure he was doing his job, but it didn’t make the contempt Colter was feeling for his friend any easier to bear.
“The last thing this girl would do is have anything to do with another fire. She is terrified of the damn thing. This just isn’t something she’s capable of. Trust me.”
Turner’s eyebrows rose and his eyes darkened. “What do you mean another fire? Is there something I need to know about? Something that pertains to this case that you aren’t telling me, Colter?”
He shook his head, wishing that he hadn’t opened his stupid mouth.
“If you don’t talk to me, Colter, you will find yourself in need of another job.” Whatever friendship they had seemed to fall apart with his words.
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