by B. J Daniels
“Are you all right?” Nikki had asked as she started the car.
“I just remembered something I promised Mrs. McGraw I would do today.”
“I thought it was your day off,” Nikki reminded her.
“Since I started living on the ranch, Mrs. McGraw gets confused about what days I’m actually off,” Frieda said, turning away to look out the side window.
Nikki backed out onto the dirt road. “Whose idea was it for you to move in?”
“The first Mrs. McGraw thought it would save me time driving back and forth from Whitehorse and save me money on a rental when I spent most of my time at the ranch anyway. It was a kind gesture on her part since my husband, George, is a truck driver who spends a lot of time on the road.”
Unlike Patricia, who treated her like her private servant, Nikki thought. “I’m surprised you’ve stayed with the McGraws all these years,” she said carefully as she drove away from Old Town.
She couldn’t shake the feeling that Patricia was holding something over Frieda. Why else would the cook put up with the way the woman treated her?
Frieda remained quiet.
“Patricia must be a hard woman to work for.” Still nothing. Nikki looked over at her. “Frieda, either you are working on sainthood or Patty is holding something over you. Which is it?”
All the color drained from Frieda’s face again. “I don’t know what...you’re talking about,” she stammered.
“Given the way she treats you and how wonderfully you cook, why haven’t you quit? I know there are other ranches that would snatch you up in a heartbeat.” Nikki looked over at the woman in her passenger seat.
“I can’t leave Mr. McGraw. Or the boys,” she mumbled, and looked embarrassed.
Nikki thought that might have something to do with it, but not everything. “You know what I think? I think the woman is holding something over your head. I think it might have something to do with a man. Wouldn’t you feel better to get it off your chest? To get her off your back?”
She let out a bitter chuckle. “You have no idea.”
“Let me help you,” Nikki said.
Frieda merely stared out the side window.
Nikki’s attention was drawn away from the woman as she caught movement in the rearview mirror. She’d been driving down the dirt road through the wild country and hadn’t seen another car the whole way.
Now, though, an old rusty truck had come roaring up behind her. Nikki looked for a place to pull off, but there was nothing but a ditch on both sides of the road. She sped up a little since she had been going slow.
The truck stayed right with her, riding her bumper. She couldn’t see the driver because of the glare off the cracked windshield of the truck.
Frieda had noticed something was wrong. She sat up and was watching in her side mirror. “I was afraid this would happen,” she said, her voice breaking with fear. “He’s going to kill us.”
Nikki shot her a surprised look. What was she talking about? “No one’s going to kill us.”
“You have no idea what you’ve done by coming here, asking all these questions, digging up the past,” Frieda said, sounding close to tears.
“What have I done?” she asked, speeding up as she looked ahead for a place to pull over so the truck could pass.
The woman shook her head. She looked like a woman of seventy, her blonde hair appearing gray, worry making her face look haggard.
“Frieda, I’ve known something was wrong since I got here. You can tell me.”
The woman turned to look at her, eyes shimmering with tears. “I knew it would come out one day. It isn’t like I ever thought...” Her voice broke.
Nikki couldn’t see a place to pull over and the truck driver seemed determined to get past even though there was only the one lane and no shoulder to pull off on.
“This has something to do with Harold Cline, doesn’t it? The reason you let Patricia treat you so badly.”
Frieda let out a cry and covered her face with both hands as the pickup slammed into the back of the rental car. “I told you he was going to kill us.”
Fighting to keep the rental car on the narrow road, Nikki demanded, “Who is that driving the truck?”
Frieda said nothing and hunkered on her side of the car as the truck came up fast and crashed into them again.
The back of the rental fishtailed and for a moment Nikki feared she would lose control. “Get your cell phone out. Call the sheriff!” Frieda didn’t move. “Frieda!”
They were coming to one of the rolling hills and a curve. Nikki hated to go any faster but she had no choice. She pushed down on the accelerator, hoping to outrun the truck. But the driver must have anticipated her plan.
The truck came up with so much speed that when it hit the back of the rental there was no controlling it any longer. The car tires caught a rut and the next thing Nikki knew they were sideways in the road. But not for long.
The tires caught another rut and she felt the car tilt.
“Hang on!” she cried as the rental car went off the road and over the edge of the hillside. It rolled once, then again and again until it came to rest at the bottom of the hill in a gully.
Chapter Seventeen
“IS THERE A PROBLEM?” Cull asked as he glanced to where Patricia was slamming pots and pans around in the kitchen, before he took a stool at the breakfast bar. Kitten had her head in the refrigerator.
“Frieda isn’t back to make dinner. I’m going to fire her. I’ve put up with that woman long enough.”
“It’s her day off,” Cull said, but Patricia didn’t seem to hear. She appeared nervous and overly upset over something that happened once a week. Usually, though, Frieda gave in and cooked.
“Do we have any celery?” Kitten was asking. “You think it’s true that it takes more calories to eat celery than it has in it?”
Cull didn’t bother to respond. “Have you seen Nikki?” he asked even though he knew that would be a sore subject and the woman was already in a foul mood.
“She took off with Frieda,” Kitten said, coming out from behind the refrigerator door with a stalk of celery in her hand.
Patricia slammed down a pot. “Who knows what that fool woman might tell her about all of us.”
“I hope you aren’t planning to cook or we are all going to starve,” Cull said. “Or wish we did,” he added under his breath. “So where did Nikki go with Frieda?”
“To that old lady quilt group,” Kitten said between bites of celery.
Patricia cussed under her breath and looked at her watch. “Shouldn’t they be back by now?”
Having enough of this, Cull headed toward the living room. Looking up, he saw the sheriff and two deputies coming down the stairs. They headed toward his father’s office. Travers McGraw was behind his desk. He looked as if he’d aged in the last few minutes.
“What’s happened?” Cull demanded, his heart in his throat. Had there been an accident? Was it one of his brothers? Was it their mother? Was it... His pulse began to pound. Nikki? With a start he saw that one of the deputies was carrying what appeared to be an evidence bag. Cull realized that the lab tests must have come back—and that Nikki had been right.
“Where is your stepmother?” Travers asked as he came out of his office. McCall gave him a nod, and Cull saw the pain in his father’s expression before he answered.
“She’s in the kitchen with Kitten. I don’t believe she heard you arrive.” The sheriff and deputies started in that direction. “Please don’t handcuff her. Not in front of her daughter,” Travers said.
Cull turned to his father. “It’s true? She’s been poisoning you?”
He nodded. “Just as we suspect she did your mother twenty-five years ago.”
“Patricia McGraw?” he heard the sh
eriff ask.
From his vantage point, Cull watched as Patty turned. Her eyes widened as she looked from the sheriff to the deputies and past them to her husband.
“If you could step out into the living room,” the sheriff said to her.
Patty looked as if she wanted to make a run for it. “What is this about?”
“If you could please ask your daughter to stay in here,” the sheriff said as she took Patty’s arm and led her out of the kitchen.
Kitten started to follow, but Travers wheeled past the deputy to keep her in the kitchen. “What is going on with Mother?” the teen demanded.
The sheriff was saying, “Patricia Owens McGraw, you’re under arrest for attempted murder. You have the right to remain silent...” McCall continued reading the Miranda rights as Patty argued that she didn’t know what the sheriff was talking about.
One of the deputies showed her something they’d found upstairs. Arsenic? Cull hoped they put her under the jail. If all of Nikki’s suspicions were true... He fisted his hands at his side.
“Call my lawyer!” she barked at Cull as she was handcuffed, a lawman holding each of her elbows as they steered her toward the front door. “Call Jim. It’s all a mistake. That poison was planted in my room.”
“No one said we found it in your room,” the sheriff said.
“It’s all lies! I’m being framed! It’s that writer. She did this!” Patricia looked over her shoulder at Cull. “Why would I poison your father? I love him.”
“Where are they taking my mother?” Kitten cried as she tried to get past her stepfather’s wheelchair. A moment later, the front door closed, car engines revved and Travers rolled out of the kitchen with a crying Kitten.
Ledger and Boone both came in then, both looking worried. No doubt they’d seen the sheriff’s patrol cars out front and Patricia being led away.
“I’ll explain everything,” Travers said as he asked them all to sit down. Cull listened as his father explained that lab tests had been taken of his hair. Patricia had been poisoning him for some time, which no doubt was why he’d been so sick.
“Not just sick. She almost killed you!” Boone cried. “How did you figure it out?”
“Nikki St. James suspected it and went to the sheriff,” their father said.
Cull glanced at his watch, worry burrowing in his belly. “Kitten said that Nikki and Frieda had gone out to Old Town.” His father nodded. “Shouldn’t they have been back by now? I’m going to drive down there. Let me know if you hear from Nikki,” he said and he was out the door and driving toward Old Town Whitehorse.
* * *
NIKKI CAME TO SLOWLY, as if she’d either been stunned or knocked unconscious. For a moment, she didn’t know where she was or what had happened. It came back to her in a rush. To her surprise, the car had landed right side up in a gully.
She looked over at Frieda, who thankfully appeared to be shaken but not injured. “Are you all right?”
The woman nodded. “You’re bleeding.”
Nikki touched her temple, her fingers coming away wet with blood. “I’m all right,” she said, more to assure herself than Frieda as she dug out her cell phone. She prayed there would be enough coverage out here to get the sheriff. She looked back up the hillside they had rolled down, half expecting to see the pickup truck idling there.
The road above them appeared to be empty.
Nikki was glad to see she had a few bars on her phone and quickly tapped in 9-1-1. When the dispatcher answered, she told her what had happened. “I’m not sure exactly where we are.”
“Near Alkali Creek,” Frieda said.
She gave this information to the dispatcher. “No, I don’t think we need an ambulance. But please hurry.” She disconnected and tried to open her door. It was jammed. She thought she smelled gas. “Can you get your door open?”
Frieda didn’t seem to hear her. She’d begun to cry.
Nikki reached across her to open the passenger-side door. “We need to get out of the car, Frieda.”
As if in a fugue state, the cook climbed out, staggering against the hillside before sitting down hard. Nikki climbed out the passenger side and reached for Frieda’s hand.
“We need to get away from the car. Gas is leaking out. I don’t think it is going to blow, but it could catch fire. Do you hear me?” She stared at the woman, worried that maybe she was injured more than she’d first thought.
When she looked up at Nikki, there were tears in her eyes. “I told you he would kill us.”
She took Frieda’s hand and pulled her up, leading her away from the car to an outcropping of rock before letting her sit down again.
“He’ll come back,” Frieda said. “He can’t let us live. He thinks we know too much.”
“Who?”
The cook shook her head. She could see that the woman was terrified. Nikki had been so focused on making sure Frieda was all right and getting them away from the car that she hadn’t let the full weight of what had happened register.
“Frieda, if you know who that was who ran us off the road, you need to tell me. Does this have something to do with the kidnapping? Frieda, talk to me. I can help you. Whatever is going on, you can’t keep it to yourself anymore. This is serious.”
“It’s all my fault,” the cook said and began to sob.
Nikki was trying to imagine Frieda being part of the kidnapping. The woman had been living in the house at the time of the kidnapping and could have drugged the babies and then handed them out the window to her boyfriend, Harold Cline. But that would mean that Frieda had been the mastermind behind the plot. That seemed doubtful.
“Frieda, please tell me. Whatever it is—”
“I was thirty-nine. Thirty-nine! Old enough to know better.”
Nikki guessed at once that she was talking about Harold Cline. She felt her skin prickle. She tried to keep her voice calm, consoling. “You fell in love?”
She seemed surprised that Nikki had guessed. “He was funny, made me laugh, and he really seemed to like me.”
Nikki feared what was coming. “You thought you’d found the man for you,” she said instead of asking what the man had conned her into doing.
“I would have done anything for him.”
And did, Nikki feared. She wanted to ask but waited as patiently as she could for the rest of the story to come out. She could still smell gas leaking from the car nearby and wondered if they should move farther away, but didn’t want to interrupt Frieda now that she had her talking.
“I would sneak him into the house at night,” Frieda said between tearful jags. “He’d come to my room and...” She looked away. “He wasn’t the only one sneaking in at night.”
Nikki thought of her father.
“Patty had her own boyfriend.”
She felt another wave of relief wash over her as she thought about the argument she’d witnessed the first night. “Jim Waters? Or Blake Ryan.”
“Blake.”
“Is it still going on?” she had to ask.
The older woman merely gave her a look.
“So you left the door open on the night of the kidnapping,” Nikki guessed, still not sure yet where this was going.
Frieda began to cry again. “He didn’t show up. I was so stupid. I really thought he was the one.”
“Did you see him again after that night?” Nikki asked.
The woman only cried harder.
She took a breath, warning herself to tread softly. “Patty found out you’d been letting him in.” It wasn’t a question. It had to be what Patricia was now holding over the cook’s head. Unless it had something to do with the kidnapping. “Did she tell the sheriff and FBI about your boyfriend?”
Another look that said she hadn’t.
Nikki’s heart began
to pound. “I don’t understand why Patty didn’t tell the sheriff and FBI. Unless she was already using it against you.” She glanced over at Frieda and saw that was exactly what Patty had been doing.
Patty had known the man was sneaking in and was using it against Frieda even twenty-five years ago. But if the sheriff and FBI found out that Patty had known all this before the kidnapping, then she would be under even more suspicion than she had been at the time, so she’d kept her mouth shut and used it to keep Frieda under her thumb.
“She said she was protecting me and that I owed her,” Frieda said between sobs.
Nikki had thought she couldn’t dislike Patricia more, but she’d been wrong. How could Patricia keep something like that quiet all these years? Even now, it would be Frieda’s word against the new Mrs. McGraw’s.
“Was this man ever questioned by the authorities?” Nikki had to ask even though she knew the answer already, if indeed Frieda’s lover had been Harold Cline, as Tilly had told her.
Frieda shook her head as she wiped at her tears. “I don’t care what the sheriff does to me. I deserve it, but do you have to put it in your book?”
“I won’t put in anything until I have the whole story.”
That seemed to relieve Frieda. “I never told. Marianne was already locked up and so was the horse trainer. I figured they had the kidnappers and that it wasn’t my...lover.”
“I’m going to need to know the name of the man, Frieda.”
She hesitated but only a moment. “Harold Cline.”
Her mind was racing as she tried to understand what it was Frieda was telling her—and wasn’t telling her. “You’d want to know why he hadn’t shown that night. Maybe he’d seen the horse trainer stealing the babies,” Nikki said. “You would have gone to see him.”
Frieda looked away again.
Nikki felt her heart sink. Tilly was wrong about one thing. Harold Cline had kidnapped the twins and Frieda knew it. Knew it because she’d seen him with the babies?
She was frantically trying to put the pieces together. Frieda had said it was all her fault. “Was there any reason to fear for the twins’ safety in that house twenty-five years ago?”