Twelve-Gauge Guardian

by B. J Daniels

  She felt confused and unsure. Trust came hard for her. But in her job she’d become good at reading people. Did she still believe Cordell and his brother had been hired by someone to set her up?

  She sank down deeper in the tub. She was starting to trust him and that scared her more than she wanted to admit. What if she was wrong?

  That answer was simple. She would never leave Whitehorse, Montana.

  In the other room, she heard the sound of another e-mail alert.

  The map? With a chill she sank deeper in the water, terrified of what might be waiting for her at some remote house used by the child abductors.

  SHERIFF MCCALL WINCHESTER wasn’t surprised when Cordell called to say he’d found Raine Chandler and gotten his brother’s pickup back. She was surprised, though, to see he was calling from a landline—at the Winchester Ranch.

  “I still want to question her about your brother’s assault,” she told him, suspecting that her private investigator cousin had already done that.

  “It sounds like it was an accident. Cyrus was just at the wrong place at the wrong time,” he said.

  “Uh-huh. Still… Do you know where I can reach her?” She heard him hesitate.

  “We’re waiting for the roads to dry out,” he said finally.

  “Oh?” McCall said. So there was more to this story, just as she’d suspected.

  “After what happened last night, Raine was upset. I thought coming out here would get her mind off it.”

  Raine, huh? “Did Ms. Chandler say what she’s doing in Whitehorse?”

  “She’s a journalist. Doing a story up this way.”

  “Know what about?”

  “Didn’t really get into that much.”

  McCall bit her tongue. “Could you ask her to stop by my office when you get back to town? Or better yet, let me ask her.”

  “She’s in the bathtub across the hall in her room,” he said, making McCall smile at how careful he was to make it clear she had her own room.

  “Well, then why don’t you have her stop by my office,” McCall said. “I heard your father is coming to the ranch tomorrow. Grandmother invited me out for dinner. I hope you’ll be there. I assume Aunt Virginia is still there?”

  “Haven’t seen her.”

  “Dinner should be interesting.”

  “More like pure hell. I wouldn’t count on me being there. Is there anything new on the dark-colored van and the man driving it?”

  “We found the van. It had been stolen from Havre. Forensics will be coming in tomorrow to see what they can find. I’ll let you know if they come up with anything.” McCall hung up, irritated with her cousin but sympathetic.

  Earlier she’d stopped by the hospital. Cyrus was still in a coma. She picked up the report the deputy had given her on the altercation in the parking lot behind the hotel, anxious to talk to Raine Chandler.

  Something was definitely wrong. McCall hoped her cousin knew what he was doing taking Raine to the ranch. She feared he didn’t have a clue who the woman was—or what she was capable of, for that matter.

  After all, he believed she was a journalist up here on a story.

  IMPATIENT AFTER HIS CALL to the sheriff, Cordell turned on the television but he couldn’t find a channel that could hold his attention so he just left it on the news and turned down the volume.

  He began to go through the information again that Raine had collected on missing children. It was shocking and he suspected it was only the tip of the iceberg.

  He found an article from a psychologist who dealt with the children who were recovered from child molesters. “Trust is devastated. Often the victim is made to feel responsible for what happened. They feel powerless, trapped. That sense of learned helplessness can last a lifetime.” He skimmed the rest, words jumping out at him. Humiliation. Alienation. Trauma. Vulnerability. Psychological shock. Postvictimization.

  He got to his feet. He couldn’t read anymore. He had so many questions he wanted to ask Raine. What was taking her so long? She hadn’t seemed like the kind of woman who would lounge around in the bath this long.

  Picking up the Emily Frank file, he saw that she’d been a foster child. He realized he knew nothing about foster care. Sitting down, he began to read.

  A line jumped out at him. “Children in foster care live in an uncertain world. They lack the stability and permanence that other children take for granted and are often moved at a moment’s notice, all of their belongings fitting into no more than a plastic grocery bag.”

  He could relate to that. He and his twin had moved constantly from the time they were seven until they were able to go away to college. His father, Brand Winchester, was a quiet, taciturn man who worked as a ranch manager, moving like the wind from one job to the next. He’d never remarried after the twins’ mother had left them when the boys were babies.

  Brand never blamed his mother for the failure of his marriage or his life, but it was unspoken.

  Cordell and Cyrus had been old enough to remember the day their grandmother had kicked them all off the ranch where they’d lived since they were born. He and Cyrus had learned at an early age to give their grandmother a wide berth, spending their days outside as much as possible with the horses or playing in the barn or outbuildings.

  The family had scattered like fall leaves after that, none of his father’s siblings keeping in touch except once in a long while. At least he and Cyrus had each other and had never been abandoned by their father.

  Looking back though, Cordell realized how they could have ended up in foster care if things hadn’t worked out for his father once they’d left the ranch and the only life his father had known.

  His gaze settled again on the words in front of him. “Foster children’s lives are about leaving behind things and friends and places they know, their lives haunted by neglect and child abuse. In foster care they often lose their sense of identity.”

  He picked up a grainy newspaper photograph of Emily Frank. The girl was wearing a dress that was too big for her. She looked gangly and a little too thin, but she wore a beatific smile.

  He saw something he hadn’t noticed before. A tiny silver horse pin. Even in the photograph he could see that it was in an odd place because of a small tear in the fabric that not even the pin could hide.

  His heart ached for the little girl. According to the foster home paperwork, Emily had been kicked around from one foster home to another since she was two and had only been at the new foster home in Whitehorse one night. Before that she’d run away from her last foster home.

  He could see how the foster parents might have thought she’d run away this time, too. They wouldn’t have acted right away, a huge mistake.

  He wondered how she’d ended up in foster care to begin with. Maybe Raine would know. He glanced toward his door, wondering how long before she finished her bath. He was anxious to find these monsters and hoped to hell Raine had a plan other than using herself as bait.

  The tap at his door startled him. He quickly put everything back in the satchel and went to answer the door.

  Raine stood out in the hall, her hair damp, her face glowing from her bath. She hadn’t taken the time to put on that awful white makeup or the dark eyeliner. He marveled at how young and clean and fresh she looked without it. Like a different woman.

  It struck him that she used the makeup almost like a mask—or a disguise. Was it possible Raine had known this girl Emily Frank? He felt his pulse quicken. Was it possible she’d been a foster child at the Amberson house when Emily was taken?

  That, he realized in a flash, would explain why she wrote about these abducted children, why she knew so much about foster children, why she’d come all this way to do a story on Emily Frank.

  “Is everything all right with your grandmother?” she asked, and he realized he must have been frowning as he wondered about her. “Is she upset about me staying here?”

  “No, she is more interested in the past than the present. I don’t want to talk a
bout her, if you don’t mind.” He sighed and motioned for her to come in, reminding himself that it didn’t matter if Raine had a connection to Emily Frank or not.

  All that mattered was finding the bastard who’d put his brother in a coma.

  The moment the door closed behind her, he demanded, “How do we find these people?”

  RAINE HAD SEEN THE WAY he was looking at her and regretted that she hadn’t taken the time to put on her makeup.

  But she wrote off his behavior as impatience the moment he spoke. He just wanted to find the man who’d hurt his brother. On that they could agree.

  “Emily had just come to Whitehorse the night before so only a limited number of people knew about her,” she said. “From her diary, I think it is clear that her abductors knew she was a new foster child. They might even have been tipped off by the foster parents or possibly the social worker.”

  “You can’t really believe they were in on this?”

  Did she? “Everyone is a suspect and they knew Emily had run away from her last two foster homes. Emily Frank had unknowingly made herself the perfect abduction victim.”

  “Last two foster homes? I only read about one that she ran away from.”

  Raine sighed. He’d been studying the material while she was gone and was just looking for discrepancies. “The other foster family kept it quiet. It reflects poorly on the foster family if the children run away, but you’ll find it in the social worker’s report.” She stepped to the table and pulled it out of the stack of papers to hand it to him.

  He looked chastised. “How did she end up in foster care anyway?”

  “The way a lot of them do. Single mom. Dad never in the picture. Mom deemed unfit. The state takes the girl in the middle of the night and puts her in foster care with complete strangers.”

  “Why was the mother deemed unfit?”

  “All it said on the report I was able to get was child endangerment. Could have been anything.” She glanced from him to the television and froze.

  “I have to admit I knew nothing about foster children until I started reading the material you’d gathered…”

  His voice trailed off as he finally noticed that she was no longer listening. “Raine?”

  She groped blindly for the remote, unable to take her eyes off the newscaster and the words streaming across the bottom of the television screen.

  CORDELL SAW HER REACHING for the television remote and turned to look at the television screen. A woman newscaster was standing in the Whitehorse Hotel parking lot. He thought it must be a story about last night’s hit-and-run—until he caught the words running along the bottom of the screen and felt as if he’d been punched in the stomach.

  Raine turned up the volume an instant later, the news commentator’s voice filling the room.

  “The girl disappeared from her home last night.”

  Out of the corner of his eye, Cordell saw Raine drop onto the edge of the bed with a sound like a wounded animal.

  “Lara English had been playing hide-and-seek with her foster siblings at the time of her disappearance behind the Whitehorse Hotel. One of the children re ported seeing a dark-colored van leaving the area shortly before hearing sirens.”

  “What the hell?” Cordell said under his breath. It couldn’t be a coincidence that a child had been abducted from behind the hotel—the same area where Raine had nearly been run down and his brother struck by someone driving a dark-colored van.

  “The foster mother, believing the child was hiding or had run away, didn’t call the sheriff’s department until late today.”

  An angry-looking woman came on the screen. “You don’t know this kid. I do. So of course I thought she was just hiding from the other kids and refusing to come out or that she’d run. What was I supposed to think? You have no idea what some of these foster kids are like. No idea.”

  Lara English’s photo flashed on the television screen.

  “Hell,” Cordell said on a shocked breath. He stared at the photograph that came up on the screen. The girl was blonde, blue-eyed and grinning into the camera. He felt his heart drop like a stone. The girl looked enough like Emily Frank to be her sister.

  The news report ended with the usual. “If anyone sees this nine-year-old girl, please call the sheriff’s department.” The number flashed on the screen.

  His cousin McCall came on in uniform and encouraged anyone with information to contact her immediately.

  As the news changed to the construction of a new bridge in Great Falls, he took the remote from Raine’s trembling fingers and turned off the television.

  “Okay, no more lies. What the hell is going on?” he demanded even though he could see she was in as much shock as he was. “And don’t tell me it doesn’t have something to do with you.”

  RAINE STARED AT THE blank television, her heart racing as if she’d just had to run for her life. She tried to breathe but couldn’t seem to catch her breath.

  She could still see the little girl’s face that had only moments before been on the television screen. Emily Frank. No, she thought with a mental shake, only a child who looked enough like Emily to—

  “Raine? Raine!”

  She blinked and dragged her gaze away from the now blank television screen.

  Cordell handed her a paper cup half full of cold water. “Here, drink some of this.” She took a sip, hating how weak and afraid she felt, how helpless. He motioned for her to finish it.

  She did and he took the empty cup from her trembling hand. Her mind seemed scattered as she watched him ball up the cup and throw it into the trash. He came back to kneel in front of her.

  “These are the same people who took Emily Frank, aren’t they?” he said, taking both of her hands in his.

  She was aware of the warmth of his hands and how her cold ones seemed to disappear in his. She looked up into his dark eyes and wondered how she’d ever thought them cold and unfeeling. There was heartbreak in them.

  Raine wanted to pull back from the pain she saw there. It too closely mirrored her own.

  “Talk to me,” he said quietly. Of course he’d seen the resemblance between Lara English and Emily Frank. He knew it had been no coincidence they looked so much alike.

  Raine felt sick to her stomach. Cordell knew, just as she did, that this was about her. It had been from the moment she’d received the lined pages torn from Emily’s school notebook. “They took that girl because of me.”

  “Why would they do that?” Cordell asked. “It can’t be because of some magazine article. You were a foster child, weren’t you?”

  With her gaze locked to his, she knew she didn’t have to answer. He’d seen the answer.

  “You knew Emily Frank?”

  Raine shivered and dragged her gaze away to look toward the French door she’d left partially cracked open earlier. A cool breeze blew in. She watched it stir the row of tall old cottonwoods flanking the massive log lodge. Beyond them was a huge red barn and horses in a summer-green pasture.

  Not even that picturesque scene, though, could lift the horrible weight resting on her chest. How was it she could feel for these lost children, but she couldn’t appreciate beauty or feel love? Because something had died in her sixteen years ago the day Emily Frank was taken.

  She turned back to Cordell, surprised at the tears that brimmed in her eyes and the sobbing ache that hitched in her chest. “I am Emily Frank. That’s why they took that girl. Because of me.”

  Chapter Seven

  Cordell stared at her in disbelief. “That can’t be. Emily Frank is dead.”

  “That’s what a lot of people believed especially after Orville Cline confessed to her abduction and murder,” she said, slipping her hands from his as she rose to go to the window.

  Cordell shuddered as he recalled the graphic description in Orville’s confession as to how he killed her and what he did with her body.

  “Emily escaped,” she said, her back to him. “They never found her. Then a week ago I got the pages
from Emily’s notebook.”

  He rose to his feet, unsure what to do or say. He couldn’t help noticing the way she was talking about Emily as if she was a separate person from her. He suspected that was the way she thought of her. But now, at least, he knew the connection.

  Outside, a fierce warm wind howled across the eaves. In this part of the country, the weather changed in an instant, often with huge ranges in temperature, as well.

  The roads would be drying out. For once, luck was with them, he thought, since this latest news had changed everything.

  “Emily was one of those foster kids bounced from home to home from the age of two,” Raine said. “She never knew her father. She could barely remember her mother, a teenager who dumped her at strange people’s houses so she could go out partying with her friends. From such a young age, it makes a kid resilient.”

  “Still—”

  “It’s amazing the way we’re able to accept what happens to us,” she said. “We don’t know any differently. It isn’t as if we have that much contact with kids from normal families.”

  Cordell couldn’t believe that. She would have seen other children at school or in the neighborhood who had a father and mother, families, secure lives that didn’t change in an instant.

  He frowned as it all began to sink in. “You’re not a journalist on a story.”

  She shook her head, her gaze settling on his. “I’m a private investigator in L.A.”

  “A private investigator?” Small world. But that explained a lot, including the gun she carried and how she’d managed to get away from him at the hotel this morning.

  “If you don’t believe me you can call my partner, Marias Alvarez.”

  “I believe you.” He realized he did. Just as he’d believed her confession about being Emily Frank. “How did Emily get away?”

  She stood silhouetted against the afternoon light, her back to him. Earlier she’d looked defeated, but now there was a new strength to her, a new determination as she turned suddenly to face him.