by Julie Miller
Had Lily endured dinners in this setting? Chance, who had grown up with four other men and a rotating roster of stepmothers, couldn’t imagine the numbing silence and the thought that Charlie might soon eat a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich in this mausoleum was just flat-out depressing.
Farther along, he found a living area that looked as though it had never been lived in, and then popped his head up to find himself peering into a smaller room that seemed to be a den or a home office. It, too, appeared empty and he was about to turn away when the chair in the corner suddenly spun around and a man appeared.
Chance immediately ducked out of sight, but the impression of the man stayed vivid behind his eyes: late forties, stern, arrogant. Blue eyes like Charlie’s. He held a cell phone in one hand and avidly tapped a pencil against the wooden arm of the chair with another. The window was slightly open, but try as he might, Chance couldn’t make out what was being said. He scampered away, careful to keep his head down.
That had to be Lily’s husband. But where was Lily? And where was McCord? He decided to skirt the entire perimeter of the house. The harvest moon that had seemed to illuminate the world on his ranch in the middle of the night was subdued here by the massive size of the house and the shadows it cast. Maybe in a couple of hours it would rise high enough to overcome this obstacle, but Chance fervently hoped he and Lily were back in the motel room by then.
And maybe Charlie, too. Maybe Jeremy Block would come to his senses and be reasonable.
Sure. And pigs could fly.
Careful to avoid the patches of light that shone through the windows, he almost tripped when he turned the corner and came across something in the grass. He knelt down to investigate. Someone had left a metal ladder lying on the grass. By the feel and heft of it, a long one.
Why would anyone leave a ladder lying on the grass? He looked up at the bank of windows overhead and saw two lights placed far enough away from each other to suggest two different rooms. Probably upstairs bedrooms; one of those might be Charlie’s. He played around with the possibility of raising the ladder and checking it out but decided against it.
Besides, maybe someone had been washing second-story windows today and got lazy or put the ladder down flat so a small boy wouldn’t be tempted to climb it and fall. Who knew?
Like a moth drawn to a flame, he retraced his steps to the office window and chanced another peek. This time the door was opening. He shrank back against the rock siding, then slowly inched his face close enough to see inside. Lily stood in front of the desk, her body so taut she almost vibrated. Block stayed seated and managed to look bored as she spoke.
Did he dare nudge the window open farther? No, he decided, too risky. Besides, he could pretty much guess what they were saying. One thing was clear: there was no love lost between them.
After several minutes, Lily turned on her heels and rushed to the door. She ripped it open and slammed it behind her. That was his girl, temper, temper. But Block was out of his chair in a flash, hurrying after her and the look on his face chilled Chance’s blood. The door swung closed behind them so whatever happened next occurred without Chance witnessing it. And in his gut he knew nothing good was going on inside that house.
Self-preservation kicked in and he began to wonder where McCord was. If the older man did carry out a cursory patrol of the yard every once in a while, shouldn’t he be showing up soon? And exactly how was he going to get out of this yard when the time came to escape? He found the answer to that when he literally ran into a tree growing close to the tall fence. He could shimmy up the trunk and jump down on the other side.
Desperate to know what was going on, Chance crept around to the garage side of the house and smelled smoke. The lights were still off, but he stopped short when he saw the glow of a cigarette as someone sucked on it. Squinting, he could just make out the figure of a man leaning against a white car, an acrid pale cloud hanging in the air around him.
A door opened from the house into a nearby carport. A woman stood framed in the light. “Mr. McCord?” she called with an edge of panic in her voice. She flipped on a weak outside light and McCord pushed himself away from the car and swore.
“Turn the damn light off,” he said.
“The little boy is missing! There’s a note and everything. Mr. Block said you should find out how the child was taken or if he’s still on the grounds. And we’re to tell no one about this.”
“Have you called the cops?” McCord asked as he emerged into the light. He was a stocky man with an almost bald head.
“Mr. Block insisted no police. He’s furious with me.”
“What about the kid’s mother?”
“Is that who she is? He’s furious with her, too. I think he hit her. I better get back inside. Hurry, check the grounds.”
She ran back inside the house. Chance expected McCord to turn on the outside floodlights if they had them and sure enough, within seconds the yard jumped from black to living color. He moved at once into one of the few remaining shadows but he had the feeling McCord had witnessed the movement. The older man would come looking and chances were he packed a firearm.
Even more to the point, Lily was apparently trapped inside the house. The maid said Jeremy had hit her. His fists clenched. How badly was she hurt? How could he get her out of there?
Slinking behind a grape arbor still thankfully covered with drooping yellow leaves he could hide behind, he pulled his gun, but paused to try to think.
Who in the world had taken Charlie?
* * *
LILY GRASPED OVERHEAD for a light cord to pull. She couldn’t find one and there was nothing on the wall. Then she remembered the switch outside the door. The shelves behind her felt like they were covered with office supplies. What could she do when Jeremy returned? Give him a bad paper cut?
She kicked at the door until her foot hurt. She pounded her fists against the heavy wood panel to no avail. She yelled and shouted and had the horrible feeling no one could hear her or that if they did, they would simply ignore her.
Who had taken Charlie and what did they want with him? Her stomach clenched into a knot as she pictured his eyes filled with fear. How could Jeremy be so cavalier about his child’s safety? If Jeremy wasn’t blowing smoke, then going to the police might prove deadly for Charlie... How did she chance that her lying, cheating husband might actually be telling the truth for once?
She swore under her breath.
A sound on the other side of the door froze her solid for a second and then she frantically started patting the shelves again, feeling for something, anything she could use as a weapon. Her fingers brushed the cool metal of an aerosol can. She grabbed it and another one next to it. She depressed the nozzle sprays and was rewarded with nothing but puffs of air. That’s what they were: compressed gas meant to blow the dust from a computer keyboard. Their contents were useless, but they were heavy enough to buy her a moment or two if she used them as projectiles.
The lock clicked and she jumped. This was it. Raising the cans to face height, she squinted against the sudden infusion of light and threw the cans as hard as she could. She opened her eyes in time to see one strike a dark head while a tanned hand caught the other.
“Damn!” Chance said. “Ouch.”
“Chance! I’m sorry, I thought you were Jeremy!” She threw herself against him and he caught her, hugging her close for a second, then he raised a hand and gently touched the uninjured part of her cheek. “When I get my hands on that man—”
“Not now,” she said. “How did you get in here?”
He gestured at the window. The yard beyond was brilliantly illuminated. “But I don’t know how we’re going to escape,” he said. They heard a yell from outside. “I bet they found the ladder over on the far side of the house. Is that how they took Charlie? Through the window?”
“Yes
.” She wasn’t sure how he knew Charlie was missing but now wasn’t the time for conversation.
“We’ll have to make a dash for that tree over by the fence. Are you up to it?”
His gaze studied her face and she could imagine what he saw. She knew one eye was swollen because she could feel it with her fingers and she suspected the warm sticky substance on her cheek was blood from Jeremy’s last punch. “Don’t worry about me,” she said. “But Chance, if I’m stopped and you’re not, promise me you’ll find Charlie.”
“Lily...”
“Promise me.”
“I promise. Come on.”
He stuck his head out the window, then turned to look back at her. “The tree is about twenty feet to your right. Can you climb trees?”
“If I have to.”
“Then go. I’ll be behind you. I have something to do here.”
“What?”
“Lily. Go.” He picked her up, and swung her outside.
“See if you can find my purse,” she whispered. “It has the car keys.”
“Will do.” He released her. She dropped to her feet and took off at a dead run. She found the fence and kept going until she got to the tree. Chance showed up earlier than she’d anticipated and hoisted her onto a limb over her head. She scrambled along until she got close to the top of the iron fence and threw herself to the ground on the other side, landing facedown, all but knocking the wind out of her lungs. Chance landed a few seconds after her, but he came down on his feet and absorbed the shock in his legs. He immediately stood and pulled her upright. She saw with relief that he held her purse in one hand.
They ran across the street, thankful to be out of the light.
“I don’t know how we avoided being seen,” Chance said as Lily led them to the nature trail.
“I don’t, either. What did you do in Jeremy’s office besides find my purse?”
He pressed her bag into her hands. “Wiped my prints away and kicked in the closet door from the inside. I didn’t want your husband knowing you had outside help. You didn’t tell him I was with you, did you?”
“No,” she said as she extracted the car keys. Would Jeremy believe she was capable of kicking open a door? Maybe, maybe not, but at least he’d wonder.
Lily took the passenger seat. A few seconds later, Chance directed the car onto the quiet road. “Where’s the nearest police station?” he asked. The moon illuminated the pavement and they drove without lights for several seconds before they’d turned away from Jeremy’s neighborhood and traffic began to appear. The headlights went on and they sped up.
“We’re not going to the police,” she said.
“But the man hit you, Lily. He locked you in a closet...”
“I’m not important. It’s Charlie we have to worry about. Jeremy says if the police get involved, the kidnappers will kill Charlie.”
“And you believe him?”
“I don’t know what to believe,” she said. “But for now, no police. I have to find out who took Charlie. It’s someone named White, I think.”
“We’ll find him,” Chance said.
Too caught up in her thoughts, she didn’t respond. A son for a son... That implied revenge. It had to be tied to Jeremy.
CHAPTER FOUR
“Jeremy knows who took Charlie,” she said. “And for some reason, he’s keeping it to himself, which to me implies he has something to hide.” They were digging through the papers Lily had gathered before leaving her husband. The former neat stacks were now in a state of disarray as she grabbed one reprinted article after another. “Look for the death of a man,” she coaxed.
Her voice was too highly pitched and the papers seemed to slip through her fingers. Chance wanted to tell her to calm down but he knew better than to even suggest such a thing.
“There was no demand for ransom, right?” Chance asked.
“No.”
“Is it possible Jeremy staged the kidnapping to throw you off?”
“Why bother? I’m just a pesky gnat to him.”
“Don’t underestimate yourself,” Chance said. “You can be a hell of a lot more than pesky when you put your mind to it.”
“Thanks,” she said with a sudden smile.
“What’s to keep us from calling the cops?”
“Jeremy said—”
“The man lies as easily as a duck quacks.”
“But this time he may be telling the truth. I can’t risk it until I know more.”
Chance stopped arguing. All it took was one glance at her bruised and bloodied face to make the veins pop in his forehead. No one knew better than he how focused and relentless she could be, but the fact that Jeremy felt he had the right to strike her made his blood boil.
Boiling blood aside, the bigger issue was Charlie. Little Charlie, stolen from his bed, held...well, why? As a hostage? As retribution? What did a five-year-old kid have to make retribution for? Who in the world would take out their hatred for a man on his very young child?
No one sane. Ergo, a lunatic had Charlie. And a lunatic might harm the boy if threatened.
“Here’s something,” she said, holding up a piece of newspaper. “A man Jeremy prosecuted died of cancer while serving a life sentence. It says, ‘Levi Bolt, 68, expired Wednesday—’”
Chance cut her off. “His parents would have to be in their eighties. Keep looking.”
They fell silent as they searched. “Look at this,” she said a few minutes later. He glanced at her face to find that the blood had congealed and her eye had swollen almost closed. He stood up.
“Lily, let me help you clean those wounds.”
“Not yet,” she said. “Read this to me. It’s not long.”
He took the paper from her hand and read the article aloud.
“‘Police today reported an inmate apparently committed suicide early Saturday morning by hanging himself in his cell. Darke Fallon, estimated age eighteen, was found at 3:25 a.m., January 14. He was being held pending proceedings that were to have started on Monday to determine competency. Prison medical staff attempted life-saving measures before transporting him to Charity Hill Medical Center where he was pronounced dead. Results of toxicology tests were unavailable for review.
“Fallon is accused of the January 10 murder of Mr. Wallace Connor, 21, of Greenville, Idaho, who was found knifed to death in a Boise motel where he had reportedly traveled for a job interview. Twenty-four hours later, police spotted Connor’s truck. The driver, Darke Fallon, confessed to the murder but shortly after arrest, ceased cooperating with police. He claimed Connor picked him up while Fallon was hitchhiking from his home in Bend, Oregon, but that could not be confirmed. State appointed attorneys swore to fight demands for hypnosis to establish identity. It is unknown if Mr. Fallon leaves any survivors. The prosecutor’s office, headed by Jeremy Block, refused comment.’”
“How could the police not find a trace of him?” Chance mused aloud. “Apparently no fingerprints, no family stepping forward, no Social Security number, no one has ever seen or heard about him before? That seems so unlikely in this day and age.”
“I know, I know,” Lily said, “But his parents would be young enough to steal Charlie.”
“If he had any. Did Jeremy talk about this suicide to you?”
“I’m not sure. What’s the date again?”
“January 15.”
“That’s right around the time Jeremy finally knocked me out and I decided to leave. I told you there’d been a suicide at the jail in a cell before he came unglued. This must have been the one.”
“Was there a follow-up investigation after his death?”
“Probably.”
“There must have been fallout over the suicide,” Chance said. “Did you ever hear why the kid killed himself before his
trial?”
“No.”
Chance skirted through other clippings. “There’s nothing else here.”
“I’ll search the internet,” she said, and picking up her phone, went to work. After a half hour they knew a little more but not much.
“Wallace Connor came from Greenville, right? That’s pretty close to an area called White Cliff,” she finally said. She sat for a moment, then looked up at him. “White. Maybe the word white in the note wasn’t a name of a person but a place.” She scanned the screen. “White Cliff appears to be a survivalist community.” She groaned and closed her eyes. “Talking kind of hurts,” she admitted. “I must have bitten down on the inside of my mouth when Jeremy hit me.”
“Wait here,” Chance said, and taking the ice bucket, walked to the machine near the outside stairs. Back in the room he gave her a cube to suck on and made a compress by wrapping the rest in a hand towel she held against her face. “I’ll take over the search,” he added.
“There’s a lot in here about that survivalist community you mentioned,” he said after he’d continued reading. “One reporter tried to find out if Fallon had ever lived in White Cliff but got nowhere. Apparently the police had the same lack of success.”
“How about Wallace Connor?” Lily garbled around the ice cube.
“They say he left behind his parents and a younger sister. Robbery was the supposed reason for the murder because his wallet was empty and a lapis lazuli ring the desk clerk noticed when he checked in was missing from his hand. The police caught Fallon the next day. He was driving Connor’s truck. He told the cops his name, admitted he killed Connor and then shut his mouth and never said another word to anyone about anything. His lawyers were court-appointed. His competency hearing was scheduled for the Monday after he died. His suicide seems to have been the end of it.”