Delivering Destiny (River's End Ranch Book 23)

by Amelia C. Adams

  “Oh, my gosh!” she said. “It looks great! How did they make it?”

  “Jamal traced Nick’s foot onto a piece of paper, and then Nick scanned it and enlarged it, and they made a cast,” Reggie said. “They changed some of the proportions to make it look slightly less human—see how the toes are shaped here and over there—but it’s definitely humanoid.”

  “This is possibly the coolest thing I’ve ever seen,” Abby said. She crouched down to get a better look, but she didn’t get too close. Her reverence for their hoax was written on her face. “You guys are like . . . masters of deviousness.”

  “I’m going to have T-shirts made for us that say that,” Reggie replied, pleased that she was impressed. Her opinion mattered a lot to him. He didn’t know why it did—he’d think about that later. Right now, it was time for the next step. “Did you bring your phone?”

  “Here,” she said, digging in her pocket. “And I’ve got bars.”

  “Good. We chose this spot for that very reason. Can you call Wade and tell him what you just found?”

  “I can absolutely do that.” She wiggled her eyebrows up and down a few times, then hit a button. “It’s ringing . . . ringing . . . Wade! It’s Abby. Listen—you’ve gotta come. I’m on the right fork of the hiking trail, and this is going to sound crazy, but there’s a mammoth footprint up here . . . no, I didn’t say a mammoth’s footprint. I said it’s mammoth. Like, huge.”

  She shook her head in exasperation.

  “Anyway, can you come? It’s kind of freaky and kind of cool all at the same time, and I think you should check it out. Okay. Yeah, I can wait here. Nope, not alone—Reggie’s with me. We’re about . . .” She looked around. “We’re not quite to the restrooms yet. Just below them. Thanks, Wade.”

  She hung up and turned to Reggie with a grin. “That was probably more fun than the legal limit. Now, what about my surprise?”

  Chapter Eight

  Abby enjoyed doing exciting things. She loved action movies, galloping fast on a horse, riding on the back of a motorcycle—but nothing she’d ever done in her life had given her an adrenaline rush like lying to her boss about finding the footprint of a mythical beast on his property. That had been fun like no other.

  “You did great,” Reggie told her. “Is he coming right now, then?”

  “Yep, he said he’d leave his office in about ten minutes.”

  “Means we’ll have to sit tight for about an hour. Enough time for me to give you this.” Reggie reached into his bag and pulled out the package that had come in on the UPS truck that morning.

  “That’s for me?”

  “Yeah. I overheard you asking Melissa about it, and I know a few people, so . . .”

  What was he saying? He didn’t mean . . . She snatched it from his hand so fast, she startled him, and he took a step back. She wanted to apologize, but she’d take care of that in a minute. She had to see.

  She ripped the paper, and there it was. She stood there and stared at it, unable to breathe for a moment, and then breathing far too fast. “How . . . how did you do this?”

  “I used to work in my dad’s used bookstore when I was a kid, and now I do some online sales. I knew a guy who knew a guy.”

  “Melissa said it’s out of print.”

  “It is, but when you know who to ask, anything’s possible. Hey, you look a little pale. Come sit down on this log.”

  She walked over on trembling knees and managed to sit, but just barely. He sat down next to her. “I don’t even know what to say. Thank you for doing this for me. How much do I owe you?”

  He shrugged. “My friend owed me a favor. No charge.”

  Tears welled up in her eyes, and she hugged the book to her chest. “You don’t know how much this means to me,” she said. “This was my very favorite book. In fact, I have the whole thing memorized, and I shall now recite the first page for you.” She cleared her throat. “‘My mommy is a mongoose. We eat mangoes every day. Then we beat upon our bongo drums until the end of day.’ It’s not Shakespeare, but to a three-year-old, it’s pretty awesome.”

  “And did it break your heart to discover that mongooses don’t actually eat mangoes?”

  “Hey, in my world, they do. And there are great illustrations. Let me show you . . .” She flipped open the front cover, ready to find page four, her favorite, but then the entire world seemed to stop around her. She couldn’t hear the breeze. She couldn’t move. Everything, everything was frozen.

  “Abby? Abby?” Reggie’s voice, when she could finally hear it, sounded panicked. “Abby, what’s the matter?”

  She touched the writing on the inside of the book with a shaking finger. Reggie leaned over her shoulder and read it aloud. “‘To my little sunshine. Love, Grandma.’ Abby, tell me what’s wrong!”

  “This is my book,” she whispered. “This isn’t just a copy of it—it’s my actual book.” She looked up at Reggie, chills racing down her arms. “You found the book I thought he’d burned.”

  ***

  Reggie held a water bottle to Abby’s lips, helping her drink until she had stopped trembling a little and could hold it for herself. He had no clear idea what had just happened. All he knew was that for a moment, Abby looked like she had gone into a trance or was getting ready to have a seizure, and he’d never been so terrified in his life. He would be taking her to see Bridget, the on-site nurse, as soon as they got off this mountain. He wanted to leave right that minute and forget all about the Bigfoot prank, but Abby was in no condition to walk just yet. If he had to, he’d get Dani’s search and rescue team to fly her out.

  She clasped her fingers around the bottle and took another sip, then gave him a shaky smile. “You probably think I’ve lost my mind,” she said. “I’m wondering that same thing myself.”

  “Just start at the beginning,” Reggie said. “We’ll figure it out together.”

  “The beginning. Well. That was a long time ago.” She pulled in a breath. “My parents were in their first year of college when they got married, and they both dropped out. My father was a mess. He got involved in drugs and would stay gone for days at a time, and then he’d come home and drink and hit my mom. I wasn’t born until about four years later, and my mom put all her focus on me so she’d stay sane while he was off on his benders. Sometimes he’d pinch my arms really hard or grab my hair at the roots, stuff like that, but that was all minor stuff compared to what he did to her.”

  She shivered, and Reggie draped his sweatshirt around her. Hers was tucked under her as she sat on the log, and he didn’t want to disturb her by having her stand.

  “Things got worse and worse. His mother, Grandma Lila, tried to make things a little better—she’d bring me gifts and she’d get us groceries from time to time, doing what she could to take the edge off things. One day, she got really upset and she said, ‘I know he’s my son, but he shouldn’t be getting away with this. You take that baby and you go.’ She handed my mother some money, and she left. Then my father found that money somehow, lost his mind, and trashed the whole apartment.”

  Abby’s voice had gone into monotone as she stared at the cover of the book, but at least she was speaking now. Reggie wrapped his arm around her shoulders, trying to hold her together while she was so obviously falling apart.

  “One of the gifts my grandma gave me was this book, and my mother read it to me over and over again. I carried it around with me like some kids carry a blanket or a bear. When he came home that time, the time with the money, he started a fire in the oven, and he started throwing things in there that he knew meant something to us. He ripped the book out of my hands, but I was crying so hard, I couldn’t see what had happened to it.

  “The next thing I knew, he was passed out on the couch, and my mother was taking me by the hand and we were running out into the night. She’d grabbed a change of clothes for each of us, a hairbrush, and a few other things, but that was it, and we ran and ran for what felt like hours.”

  Abby stopped spe
aking, and Reggie swallowed. His mouth had gone totally dry. He never would have guessed . . . how could he have guessed? “What happened then?”

  “We ended up at a friend’s house. My mother got a job at a diner, and I’d sit in a booth and color while she worked her shift. We did that for . . . oh, I don’t know. Until I could start school. She’d managed to get us into an apartment, and a little bit at a time, we got on our feet. Her parents were both dead by this point, and I think she was scared to contact Grandma Lila because she thought my father would be able to find us through her.” She shook her head. “This sounds like a terrible TV show, doesn’t it? Welcome to my drama.”

  Reggie gave her shoulders a little squeeze. “Where’s your mother now?”

  “That’s one part of the story that has a happy ending. She married the owner of the diner, and they run it together now. She’s told me over and over again how much she wishes she could have given me a better childhood, and it’s true that things were pretty meager, but she did the best for me that she could, and she got me away from my father.” She paused and then chuckled. “Jaclyn says I need to buy a Furbie.”

  “Uh . . . what’s a Furbie?”

  She looked at him in surprise. “You don’t know what a Furbie is? Well, I guess they were kind of more of a girl thing . . . maybe . . . anyway, it’s not important. What is important is that she got me somewhere safe.”

  Reggie’s head snapped up as he heard voices approaching along the trail. “It’s Wade. I can send him away—I can tell him this was all a mistake.”

  “No. I can do this. We can’t let all this amazing planning go to waste.” She grabbed his hand. “We’ll talk more later, okay? And thank you for my book. You have no idea . . .”

  “You’re welcome.” Reggie had to wonder, though, if he really had given her a good gift, or if he’d just unlocked the door to a whole lot of memories she’d spent years trying not to relive.

  Chapter Nine

  Abby pulled in a deep breath as Wade and Wyatt Weston came around the corner of the trail. She was still a little shaky, and she felt like her brain had been put in a blender and cranked up to high and then poured into a hollowed-out pineapple with a little paper umbrella sticking out of the top. She had so many questions, she didn’t even know where to begin asking them, but all of that would have to wait. She had another job to do right now.

  “You guys aren’t going to believe this!” she said, coming to her feet. “We were up here for a picnic, and look!” She walked over to the footprint and pointed down at the ground. “Why was some huge guy running around up here with no shoes on? Does he even have shoes? If he’s homeless and trying to live out here, he’s in real danger—it’s super cold at night.”

  Wade squatted and took a closer look at the print. Wyatt pulled out his cell phone and snapped a few pictures. Reggie looked at Abby and gave her a huge smile—apparently, she’d done well.

  “This is definitely a footprint, but I can’t say for sure what made it,” Wyatt said at last. “It’s too big and misshapen to be human, but it’s definitely not a bear or any other large animal that lives around here.”

  “What if this patch of ground was muddy, and when the man stepped on it, he slid? That would create a larger footprint,” Wade suggested.

  “True.” Wyatt continued to look around. “I think we need to comb this mountain. If we’ve got someone trying to live up here, like Abby suggested, we need to get them to shelter.”

  Wade nodded, coming back to his feet. “I’ll put together a group of volunteers to start searching at first light. No need to involve the sheriff or search and rescue at this point—we don’t have much to go on.”

  “We have a little food left from our picnic,” Reggie said. “What if we left it here, and I’ll leave my sweatshirt, too? Maybe that’ll make the night easier for him.”

  “Great idea.”

  Reggie put his sweatshirt on the ground next to the footprint, then dug through the basket and pulled out the leftovers. “I guess that’s all we can do until the sun comes up,” he said, sounding regretful.

  “We’ll have everyone meet at my office at eight o’clock,” Wade said. “Don’t worry, Abby. We’ll find him and take care of him.”

  “Thank you, Wade,” she said. “I really appreciate you for coming up here.”

  He nodded and moved as though to step past her, but then he paused and looked into her eyes. “Are you all right? You look like you’ve been crying.”

  Okay . . . that was awkward. “I’m fine,” she said. “I’m just allergic to different kinds of fur and hair, and I think there might be some new dander or something in the air.”

  He gave her an odd look. “All right. If you’re sure.”

  “I’m totally good to go.”

  Reggie and Abby hung back to let Wade and Wyatt precede them down the trail, then Reggie caught Abby’s arm. “Dander? You’re brilliant!”

  “It was the first thing that popped into my head.”

  “Your head is brilliant.” He gave her a quick hug, then seemed to feel a little sheepish about it and dropped his arm. “Are you all right to head down?”

  “Yes, I’ll be fine.” She reached out and caught his hand. “Thank you for listening to me, Reggie.”

  “I’m here for whatever you need.”

  She looked down at his fingers, entangled in hers, and she smiled. He had her back. It was an amazing feeling, completely unexpected and very welcome.

  Chapter Ten

  Abby lay on her back on her bed, staring up at the ceiling and trying to process everything that had happened that day. One minute, she was working at the UPS Store and then the next she was discovering a Bigfoot track and then the next minute after that, she was jolted into the past and yanked back out again. How had her book survived the fire, and how did it end up in a place where Reggie could find it?

  She was never going to be able to sleep—that was obvious. She sat up, flipped on her lamp, and grabbed her laptop. She’d done everything she could for years and years to forget her father, but now, she was curious. She had to know.

  Before she could talk herself out of it, she typed Doug Meyers into the search engine. There were several, so she had to scroll a bit, and then she clicked on a link that seemed likely. When his picture popped up, she gasped at the pain that lanced through her chest. There he was, exactly as she remembered him, in his high school senior photo. It was that photo they’d chosen to use for his obituary.

  He’d died from an overdose the night she and her mother left.

  She lifted her gaze from the screen and stared at the wall. She’d always assumed that he’d died, and that it would have been an overdose or a drunk-driving accident or some other thing. But that very night?

  If she and her mother had stayed, would he still be alive?

  No. She absolutely couldn’t think like that. Leaving him was the best thing her mother could have done, and his choices were his alone. He’d had every chance to make a better life for himself, and he wouldn’t do it. He wouldn’t have gotten better if they’d stayed—he would have dragged them down with him.

  She looked back at the screen, at her grandmother’s name in the obituary. Survived by his mother, Lila Meyers. What were the odds . . .?

  Abby’s mother hadn’t contacted Lila because she was afraid of being found, but she didn’t know that Abby’s father was dead. If there wasn’t any harm in it now . . .

  Abby put Lila Meyers into the search bar and burst into tears when after five minutes of scrolling, she found an address.

  Her grandma was still alive.

  ***

  Abby was awakened to frantic pounding on her door the next morning. She sat up and pushed the hair out of her face, disoriented. What was going on?

  She stumbled to the door and opened it, looking with bleary eyes into Reggie’s worried face. Bridget was behind him.

  “Oh, hi,” she said, pressing a hand to her forehead. “Um, what’s up?”

  “
Are you all right?” he asked. “When you didn’t show up for work this morning, I kind of freaked out.”

  Abby’s eyes flew wide open and she glanced at the clock on the wall. It was ten thirty. “Oh, wow. Come in—this is crazy.”

  Reggie and Bridget sat on the couch while she plopped down on the loveseat. “I can’t believe I overslept. Yesterday was just really hard, and I was up all night, and I think I’m just worn out. I’m okay—I really am.”

  “I’d still like to take a look at you,” Bridget said. She held up a bag. “I brought all my instruments of torture.”

  “Reggie tried to get me to see you last night, but I was being stubborn,” Abby replied. “I still am, but yeah, maybe you’d better look at me.”

  Bridget ran through all the usual things—pulse, blood pressure, listening to Abby’s lungs. Then she sat back. “You’re in bad need of a day off,” she said. “There’s nothing identifiable wrong with you—everything’s coming up normal—but your energy is gone, you’re pale, and you’re just plain wiped out. You need to eat some good heavy comfort food, climb back in bed, and sleep until tomorrow morning.”

  “That’s an awesome prescription,” Abby said with a laugh. “If I’d known that’s what you were going to say, I would have come in last night.”

  Bridget smiled. “You’ve got to take care of yourself, Abby. You’re the only one who really can. I’ll call the office and let them know the UPS Store needs to stay closed today.” She stood up. “Call me if you feel dizzy, all right? And you.” She turned to Reggie and waggled her finger at him. “Get some food in her.”

  “Okay. On it.”

  Bridget slipped out the door and closed it behind her, and Reggie turned to Abby. “I’m calling in an order to the diner. What do you want?”

  The thought of food was both wonderful and nauseating. Weird how she could feel both ways at the exact same time. “I’ll have the chicken Malibu sandwich,” she said after having a discussion with her stomach.