by C. J. Box
“No,” Marybeth said, lowering the phone. “I’m going to tell her to come home right now. This can’t be happening. Someone is going after our daughters, and we need a plan.”
—
FIVE MINUTES LATER, Marybeth reentered the house with the phone in her hand and walked with determination to where Missy was comparing the food and hotels of Paris and Dubai.
“Joe and I just had a discussion and we’ve come to an agreement,” Marybeth said to her mother. “You say your house has a gate?”
“Yes,” Missy said, taken aback.
“Does it have alarms?”
“Yes.”
“Full-time security?”
“Of course. Marcus needs to be cautious. He’s made a lot of people very angry over his career.”
Lucy asked, “Mom, what’s going on?”
“That was Sheridan who just called. She saw the same woman today who went after April and Joy.”
Lucy’s eyes got big, and April cursed.
Marybeth said to her mother, “So, when Sheridan gets here tomorrow, we’re coming for a visit.”
“Tomorrow?”
“Yes,” Marybeth said, looking over at the surprised faces of April and Lucy. Then to Missy: “I thought you missed us terribly. So we’re going to spend some time with you and heal that damned hole in your heart—at least until this woman is caught. Joe will join us as soon as he’s done testifying at the trial.”
Joe hooked his thumbs in his belt and beheld his wife and swelled with admiration. She was something. Especially when it came to protecting their family.
One of the few things Missy had always been right about was Marybeth could have done a whole lot better than him.
“Jackson Hole?” April said, then shrugged, which meant “Okay.”
“I’ll call your principal,” Marybeth said to Lucy.
“Just one restriction,” Missy said as her eyes glanced off the dog dishes on the floor near the back door of the kitchen. “No animals. We don’t have an animal-friendly home. They’ll have to stay here.”
—
MISSY LOOKED from Marybeth to Lucy to April as they discussed the arrangements they’d need to make in order to leave the house and Saddlestring as quickly as possible. She looked slightly terrified, Joe thought. He enjoyed that.
Finally, she rose from where she was sitting on the couch and sighed. “Obviously, we’re doing this to protect your family, since Joe’s not capable of it.”
Marybeth started to argue, but Joe held his hand up. He didn’t want his wife defending him to her mother.
But it stung, because she was right.
11
Wanda Stacy was rimrocked.
She had done it to herself an hour before, and the enormity of it was just starting to sink in. It had happened as she’d been walking along the edge of a striated ridge looking for a way down the mountain. The full moon had lit her way, bathing the granite in dull light blue. The stars could be seen in such quantity that they appeared almost creamy in the sky, and they provided additional ambient light of their own.
She didn’t know where she was or where she was going. All she knew was that somehow she had to go down.
Wanda didn’t like the mountains, and she didn’t really like being outside by herself, for that matter. She considered herself a people person. It’s what she’d told Buck Timberman when she applied for the bartender job at the Stockman’s Bar, and the reason he’d given for hiring her. That, and he said she had a nice rack.
Buck hadn’t gotten the memo that it wasn’t appropriate to say things like that anymore, even if what he said was true. Especially if it was true. Wanda liked to be looked at, even though she pretended it meant nothing to her, and it bothered her that as she aged and got heavy, there weren’t as many gape-mouthed stares from men as there used to be. She felt guilty when she thought about how much Dave Farkus had lusted for her and how blithely she’d ignored him. She was sorry he was dead, especially since he’d been murdered the day after she’d last seen him in the bar. Farkus was kind of a lovable loser, but he had told some pretty good stories she assumed were at least half true, and he was devoted to her in a way that only a drinker can be to their bartender. She could have been a little nicer to him, she thought, and she would have been if she’d known he was going to go out and get himself killed.
So when she looked out and saw the twinkle of lights that she assumed was a ranch far off in the distance, she was determined to descend and walk in that direction. She vowed to make the trek, knock on the front door of that ranch down there in the valley, and get home in time to sleep in her own bed after the nightmare was over.
She’d never been so miserable. She was hungry, thirsty, and sore from how rough they’d been with her when they took her from town, as well as the walk itself after she’d escaped. She thanked God that her Ariat Fatbaby cowgirl boots had held up and she didn’t have blisters on her feet, but it was cold and getting colder. She could see her breath. She wished she’d thrown a coat out the window when she’d pushed it open.
Those lights were a long distance away. She couldn’t guess how far the ranch was. Five miles? Ten? She’d never been good at estimating distances.
Unfortunately, the terrain conspired against her. Rather than working her way down the mountain like she wanted to, the ridge stopped her descent and made her circumnavigate the side of the mountain. In fact, walking along the edge of it made her climb a little in elevation.
At some point, she hoped, there would be a natural break in the wall. When she found it, she’d crawl through.
—
EVERY TIME A RABBIT or marmot scooted out of the scrub and shale in her path, she lost a few years of her life. And when a great horned owl took off from a branch in the timber and flapped away into the night sky a few feet from her face, she’d nearly voided herself.
Wanda had breathed a sigh of relief when she saw a finger of grass extend from the tree line on her left and run through a two-foot crack on the top of the ridge to her right. The dried grass was pale yellow in the moonlight. She cautiously stepped on it to make sure the turf was firm and then followed it to the edge.
The grass covered a steep pathway that snaked down through the rocks and vanished in moon shadow.
She stood there a long time. She wished she had a flashlight—or it was morning—so she could see if the path led all the way to the foot of the mountain.
But when she heard a shout in the timber behind her and a deep bass voice respond to the shout, she knew she had no choice. Those two kidnappers were tracking her. She had a pretty good idea what they’d do if they found her.
So she crossed herself for the first time in her life, said a prayer for the first time in her life, and sat on her butt and eased down the chute.
The grass was slick, so Wanda used the heels of her boots to dig into the turf to keep from sliding out of control. She descended ten feet from where she’d started, then twenty. There were no branches or roots to grab on to if she got into trouble, only smooth rock walls on either side. But she was making progress. She was getting away.
Twenty-five feet down the chute, it simply ended on a narrow shelf of rock. When she reached the shelf, she stopped her momentum and stood up on it with shaky legs. She kept one hand back on the grass to steady herself and bent forward, hoping that the pathway resumed beyond the precipice. Instead, there was darkness. Far below, a band of moonlight illuminated slabs of shale the size of her car. There was a terrifying drop between where she was and the shale.
She couldn’t go any farther down, and there was no way she could climb back up the pathway she’d come down. It was too steep and there were no handholds.
“Rimrock” was a term she’d heard hunters use before. It was a situation unique to the mountains that resulted in either rescue or death.
She closed
her eyes and said, “Shit.”
This, she thought, was no place for a former Miss Saddlestring Rodeo to die.
—
WANDA HAD NOT always hated the mountains. Up until she was twelve years old, she’d been ambivalent about hiking and camping and other outdoor activities. She was a tomboy then, with an eye for horses; boys held no interest for her. When her stoic and tight-lipped father asked her if she wanted to go fishing with him and her uncle Les that August, she’d agreed, because she was having a fight with her mother about some now-forgotten incident and she wanted to punish her with her absence.
They’d taken Uncle Les’s pickup into the Bighorns. Wanda sat in the middle. The winding gravel road they used afforded spectacular views of the Twelve Sleep River Valley. It was cooler up in the trees than it had been in town, and she liked that, and she enjoyed being with her dad. He, like Uncle Les, drank can after can of beer on the trip up. Uncle Les would stop in the middle of the road so her dad could get out to pee or retrieve two more cans from the cooler in back. She smiled to herself to see her dad loosen up and joke in a way that was completely unfamiliar to her. At first, she liked it.
Uncle Les worked in the oil fields around Midwest and Casper. He’d been married once previously and he married again to a woman with two kids. Wanda had met her step-cousins at the wedding. They were weird, and Wanda didn’t like them. Jay, a year older than Wanda, was into sci-fi and fantasy, and he spent all his time reading creepy novels and playing complicated first-person-shooter video games. Tina, a year younger, was spoiled and demanding and would fall to the ground and wail if she didn’t get her way. Wanda was glad Uncle Les had left them at home.
When they’d arrived at a shaded campsite, her dad and Uncle Les set up the tent and unfolded lawn chairs around a fire ring. She was fascinated to watch her dad assemble his fly rod, string it with line, and pull on a fly-fishing vest and creel. He seemed excited to get going and almost boyish about it. It was a side—a happy side—of him she wasn’t familiar with at home. She remained in camp when they went fishing on a stream near the campsite and regretted her decision within an hour. There was absolutely nothing to do.
If she sat out in the sun, it burned her skin red. If she retreated to the shade of the trees, she was bitten by mosquitoes and deerflies. If she went in the tent, she baked. There was nothing to read, nothing to watch, and nothing to listen to except the low hum of bees and other insects in the wildflowers.
As she sprayed herself from head to toe with greasy insect repellent, she wondered why people went camping when they had perfectly fine houses to live in.
Her dad and uncle returned before dusk, and each had a stringer of small brook trout. She watched and cringed as they fried a pound of bacon in an iron skillet and then laid the fish—with their heads and tails still on—into the sizzling hot fat. While they did it, they laughed and told jokes and drank more and more beer.
She made herself eat a couple of the small fish and tried not to look at their cooked white eyes. Uncle Les urged her to eat the crispy tails and fins, and claimed that, when salted, they were just like crunchy potato chips. He was approaching her with a palmful of curly black tails when he stumbled and his leg caught the pan handle and he knocked the skillet into the fire. There was a whoosh of flame and black smoke, and the last of the fish tumbled into the fire pit. Her dad and uncle laughed as if it were the funniest thing they had ever seen. It was the first time she’d ever seen her dad dead drunk.
Wanda crawled into her sleeping bag early just to get away from them. She was gritty with dirt and sticky from the insect repellent, and she hadn’t brushed her teeth or washed up. It was horrible.
Her dad and uncle drank around the fire and told stories late into the night. Her dad told one long story about a coworker he didn’t like, and he used the word fuck so many times, she was shocked. She’d never heard him curse so much or so easily. Uncle Les said his stepson Jay was “a little pussy” and that Tina was “a high-maintenance future welfare queen.”
Wanda wanted to go home.
—
SHE AWOKE a couple of hours later clasped in a bear hug, with Uncle Les’s tongue in her mouth. It tasted of stale beer and tobacco.
He held her tighter as she struggled, but she was able to turn her head and scream. A few moments later, there were heavy footfalls outside the tent and the flap was thrown open.
“Les—what in the fuck are you doing?” Her father’s voice was thick and slurry.
“Nothing.”
“Nothing? Get away from her now.”
Uncle Les released his grip on her. She didn’t realize he had thrust one of his hands into her sleeping bag, and it was hot against her thigh. He sighed as he withdrew it.
“Wanda, honey, are you all right? I’m sorry—I must have passed out in my chair.”
She couldn’t get a word out. Her mouth tasted terrible, and she turned her head and spit onto the floor of the tent.
Uncle Les clumsily got to his knees and crawled out of the tent.
“Sorry, Wanda,” he said over his shoulder.
Until then she hadn’t known that his pants were loose and his belt unbuckled. But when he stood up unsteadily, his jeans fell and pooled around his ankles. His fat legs were colored orange by the firelight.
There was a heavy blow of flesh on flesh, and Uncle Les said “Oof” and toppled backward, causing the tent to collapse. Wanda felt his weight on her again through the fabric, and heard several more thumps and “Oofs” until her dad quit hitting and kicking his brother.
“You can sleep in the truck,” her dad said to Les. “I’ve got your keys, so you can’t take off without us.”
“I don’t know what I was thinkin’.”
“If you hurt her . . .”
“I didn’t!”
“Wanda, did he do . . . anything?” Dad asked.
“No,” she said. “But he was getting ready to, I think.”
She felt more blows rain down on Uncle Les through his body on top of her.
Finally, Dad said to Les, “Now get up.”
“If you’ll stop pounding on me, I will, big brother.”
—
SHE SPENT THE REST of the night staring at the stars in her sleeping bag next to her father. They lay side by side in the grass, using the fabric of the broken tent as a ground tarp. Luckily, it didn’t rain on them. When the stars got too bright and piercing, she closed her eyes, but she could see them through her eyelids. Her dad eventually fell to sleep and snored. She could hear Uncle Les snoring the same way inside the truck.
The next day, they didn’t talk about what had happened and it never came up again. Uncle Les got divorced again and moved to Texas.
And since then, Wanda Stacy had stayed away from the mountains.
Until now.
—
DIRECTLY ABOVE HER IN THE DARK, the big one named Rory Cross said, “Luthi, get over here.”
She’d heard them use each other’s names when they drove her out of Saddlestring.
In the distance: “What?”
“Come over, I’ll show you.”
“I’m coming.”
Luthi’s voice sounded pained, she thought, like he was injured.
Cross said, “Look at this.”
An orb of light rose above the rocks from the top of the rim. She guessed that one of them had turned on a flashlight. She flattened herself against the grass of the chute, just in case they turned the beam that far down and saw her.
“See where that dirt is churned up?” Cross said. “I think she tried to take that all the way to the bottom.”
“Think she made it?”
“A big girl like that? Hell no. I think she slid down there and flew into the rocks.”
After a long pause, Luthi said, “I think you’re probably right. Where else could she go?”
/>
“She’s a big ol’ splatter mark somewhere down there.”
“I wish we knew for sure.”
“We can come back tomorrow in the light. Find the body and whatnot.”
“You can come back. But I’m all for getting back to the cabin. My foot is killing me.”
She thought for a second about calling out. Maybe, just maybe, they’d drop a rope through the chute to her and pull her up. Maybe she was more valuable to them alive than dead? She still couldn’t figure out why they’d even targeted her in the first place, but she assumed it was a case of mistaken identity. No one she knew had any money for a ransom payment, except maybe Buck Timberman, but he was so tight she could see him refusing to pay up. And all of her friends were as broke as she was.
Then Cross said, “You won the game, but didn’t get the prize.” And then, faux dramatically: “I think our work here is done.”
“I wish we knew for sure,” Luthi said. “We don’t want her telling anyone about us.”
Cross chuckled and the flashlight was turned off. Apparently, the conversation was over.
She didn’t cry out. For whatever reason, they wanted her dead and gone. So even the idea of ransom was out. She tried to think of who she could have offended to make them so angry with her they’d do something like this. She could think of no one.
Sure, she’d seen them with that handsome cowboy Dallas Cates and the tattooed woman in the Stockman’s that night. But they’d barely exchanged words.
Maybe it had something to do with that?
It made no sense.
—
SHE DIDN’T HEAR THEM LEAVE, but a few minutes later Luthi cried out, “Rory, slow down. I can’t keep up.” Then: “Damn you! Slow down.”
—
WANDA SAT on the outcropping with her back to the chute and looked out into the night. The ranch house was still out there, but a few of the lights had gone out.
Above her, those relentless stars were back, and just like twenty-six years before, she could still see them when she closed her eyes.