Whispers Under a Southern Sky

by Joanne Rock

  She fell back from her crouch, landing on her butt on the cold ground.

  “Shh,” she urged, terrified that whoever had followed them would hear.

  What had the psycho woman done to Officer Stallworth? Had she shot him? Bailey hadn’t really taken it seriously when her mother had warned her that someone had threatened her. Who would want to hurt her besides her cruel ex-boyfriend?

  “Bah!” The baby made another little noise that might as well have been a cannon shot for the way it carried through the quiet woods.

  Bailey pressed her knuckle gently to Aiden’s lips, where he gummed it happily for a moment. Squeezing her eyes tight shut for a moment, she prayed for a clue of what to do. It wasn’t just her at risk here.

  What if that crazy woman hurt Aiden? Her heart hurt at the thought. Who could hurt a helpless little baby?

  Dawson’s words from the other night echoed in her ears...about how much it sucked to watch someone else be hurt and not be able to do anything about it. She couldn’t imagine that kind of pain—so different from being the target of someone’s abuse. Awful in a whole different way.

  Her stomach curdled around the granola bar she’d eaten after school. She swallowed hard. She couldn’t throw up now; it would make too much noise.

  Another good one to share with Meg. She’d write her next descriptive essay for AP English on why puking was too loud when a homicidal maniac was chasing you.

  She looked down at Aiden in her arms. Were they better off running to put more distance between them and whoever chased them? Or was it safer to hide?

  She decided to listen a while longer. See if she could catch her breath, get her bearings and come up with a plan. But already she had one small part of her plan set.

  If she was lucky enough to get both her and Aiden out of here alive, she wasn’t going to be keeping her secret about J. D. Covington anymore. Dawson had said telling the truth would keep her safe. And never in her life had she wanted to feel safe more than she did right now.

  She’d go to the sheriff and file a complaint. That might also help ensure J.D. didn’t hurt another girl down the road.

  The fierceness of that new realization straightened her spine as she looked out over the forest. Maybe she really had channeled some of that damn archer queen after all.

  * * *

  GET TO ONE of her brothers’ houses?

  Not happening.

  Amy might not want to make her teenage encounter with a sexual predator public, but that didn’t mean she was going to cower in fear every time trouble lurked. She was already in her car on her way to the Hasting home. She’d listened to the police scanner long enough to find out Aiden and Bailey were missing from the home. While Amy had been gathering that bit of information, she’d double-checked the contents of her purse for her pepper spray and her baton.

  She’d drop-kicked a post beam she’d installed in the kitchen, testing her fighting skills. It made her feel strong, though she doubted she’d be able to drop-kick anyone who dared to hurt Aiden Reyes. Although she might.

  It amazed her how much stronger she felt when she focused on protecting a child she cared about as opposed to protecting herself. There was no comparison. She’d already lost her own baby. She wouldn’t let anything happen to Sam’s.

  And if that sounded like a maternal thought...

  It was. She acknowledged, even as she turned her beat-up old car into the Hasting driveway along with what must be every emergency vehicle in town, that she already loved his son as much as if the boy were her own. He’d captured her heart the moment she’d seen him cradled in Sam’s strong arms.

  She might not be ready to think about what that meant for her feelings for the sheriff himself. But with Aiden missing, her love for his child was a clear, shining, immutable thing, filling her with a sense of purpose.

  She wasn’t sure what she could contribute at the scene, so she parked her car out of the way of the emergency vehicles. She just knew she couldn’t sit around and do nothing. A couple of uniformed officers were working at the front of the house, searching the bushes by the windows and examining the flower beds. Another officer sat in the back of the ambulance with a couple of EMTs working on him. She didn’t see Sam as she shut off the ignition.

  Her aging vehicle backfired, making every head swivel her way. Two of the cops straightened, hands moving for their weapons, perhaps thinking a gun had discharged. Amy held very still, just in case, silently cursing her car.

  “She’s cleared.” Sam’s voice boomed over the yard, and the man himself suddenly stood in the front doorway.

  The rest of the first responders quickly went back to whatever they’d been doing. She raced toward Sam, her feet taking off before she even thought about what she was doing. She knew without question, no matter how stern and serious he looked looming over the site, that he felt the same strangling fear inside that she did. Maybe that was the only reason she was here. To hold on to him just long enough to share that panic for his child and somehow give it less power by facing it together.

  “I told you to go somewhere safe.” He opened his arms to her and squeezed her hard. Fast.

  No matter what else happened between them—no matter if he couldn’t forgive her for not testifying against a man who’d cost them both so much—she was glad she’d been in Heartache for this. To lend Sam her faith in him right now.

  “He’s fine. I know it.” She said it softly as he released her. “What have you found out so far?”

  “No sign of forced entry.” He drew her into the big, rambling house she remembered from their youth. It echoed now with brusque conversation between officers through open doors and windows that chilled the rooms. “The front door was probably unlocked since Stallworth was posted out front. He was hit on the temple with a rock—possibly by slingshot through the open car window.”

  “Slingshot?” She frowned, surprised a twenty-year-old woman would be carrying around something like that.

  “We found one on the ground nearby, probably a kids’ toy, and the attacker put it to good use.” Sam brought her into the kitchen, though his focus was on his phone that was buzzing nonstop with messages and alerts. “Lorelei has her phone off, but we spoke to a neighbor who is watching the younger boys. She said Lorelei had a meeting with the guidance office for Dawson’s school admission.”

  Amy took in the scene in the kitchen, where another officer was looking through a leather handbag that, she guessed, must belong to Bailey McCord based on all the purple accessories and the white feather fringe on the bag. The officer used gloves to check the girl’s phone. It was in a purple case that said “I love my Irish setter” and showed a picture of a dog’s profile.

  “Bailey didn’t take her purse with her.” Her unease grew seeing the cop handling the girl’s personal belongings with those gloves on.

  “We’re still trying to determine if she left with the intruder or not. We haven’t found any signs of a vehicle parked in the driveway, and none of the neighbors saw anything. But then, the closest house is three-tenths of a mile up the road.” Sam’s jaw flexed, his whole body radiating tension and frustration.

  “We got a fresh print out here, sir,” a young man wearing jeans and a sweater shouted through a back window.

  Sam didn’t invite her to join him, but then again, he didn’t duct-tape her to the kitchen chair, so Amy rushed out into the yard with him.

  “Did you call Cynthia?” she asked, her brain firing off a hundred thoughts at once as her sneakers crunched through dead leaves from a nearby tree.

  “I’m calling in five minutes.” He picked up his pace toward a young woman bent over something in the grass behind a metal shed. “Maybe we’ll know something by then.”

  She prayed so. As worried as Amy was about Aiden, what would the news do to the boy’s mother, who was already su
ffering from postpartum depression?

  “We have a clear Nike imprint,” the blonde crouched on the ground said, waving Sam closer. “It’s size seven, heavy on the toe like she was running.”

  “Good. That’s Bailey.” Sam shoved his phone into a leather strap at his waist. “Linda, I need you to organize the search parties. Groups of two, canvass the woods in a mile of each direction from here.”

  The younger woman stood. In her uniform and with her hair tightly pulled back, she had that all-business look of someone who could marshal the troops.

  “I’ll have them rolling in five. With your permission, I’ll also ask some of the neighbors to take the outer flanks. Everyone wants to help.”

  “However you want to handle it. You’re in charge until I’m back.” Sam took Amy’s hand and pulled her forward with the momentum of his hope.

  “How do you know the print is Bailey’s?”

  “I’m pretty sure the person after her is Patience Wilkerson. Her sister informed us that she wears a size-nine shoe.”

  “Oh no! Poor Faith. Should we call out to Bailey, then? Or do you think Patience is with her?”

  “Patience left a boot print outside a front window. We think she exited that way and is heading in a different direction.” Sam jogged deeper into the woods, his phone still buzzing with messages while they searched the area. “So I don’t think they’re together. But the question is—which one of them has Aiden?”

  Her stomach churned with the sick feeling of not knowing. This had to be killing Sam.

  “After meeting Faith, I find it hard to believe her sister would be such a monster as to...hurt them.” Her eyes roamed the trees and low undergrowth, searching for any sign of someone having been through the area. A dropped baby toy. A piece of torn clothing or a broken branch.

  “She could have killed Stallworth with the rock to the head.” The steel in Sam’s voice only chilled Amy more.

  In her adrenaline-fueled rush to leave the house, she’d forgotten her jacket, and now with the sun going down and the trees shading her completely, she felt the full impact of the cold.

  “If she truly found the slingshot on the lawn, she probably didn’t realize it could be lethal.” Amy, on the other hand, would have known. How often had she studied ways to hurt an attacker in her self-defense classes?

  They’d taught her to use any means at her disposal to incapacitate someone. Her pepper spray was in easy reach and so was the baton as they rushed through the dense brush, past rotten logs and a discarded, rusted washing machine someone had been too lazy to haul to the dump.

  Her chest ached to the point of pain as Sam stopped to open the washer and look inside it. She thanked God it was empty except for a chipmunk that scurried out.

  “Criminal intent or stupidity doesn’t matter to me if she hurts my son.” The words were so evenly spaced, so deliberately articulated, that they revealed a wealth of emotion seething just beneath the surface.

  She reached out to run a hand over his tense arm, never taking her eyes off the ground as they searched.

  His radio crackled with static and a sharp tone, making her realize he had more communication equipment on him than just the phone.

  “Sheriff, we have a reported sighting of Patience Wilkerson on Partridge Hill Road, near your house.” The voice belonged to Linda.

  “No word about an infant accompanying her?” Sam asked, his voice sharp.

  “No, sir.”

  “Then send a car over there with whoever you can spare, but keep the bulk of the resources focused on the woods.” Sam’s gray eyes met Amy’s over the black handheld device as he released the button. To her alone, he asked, “What in the hell do you think she’s doing on the street where we live?”

  “Maybe when she didn’t find Aiden, she started to doubt Aiden was at Lorelei’s?” Amy couldn’t make sense of any of it, still not believing Faith Wilkerson’s sister could be so evil. “She might still be searching for Aiden if Bailey has him.”

  “Either that or she already has Aiden and she’s looking for you.”

  “Me? No one else knows what happened to me that night,” she reminded him, unwilling to consider the idea that Patience Wilkerson might have Aiden.

  Or worse.

  “No one but your attacker. Jeremy Covington.” Sam walked with slower deliberation, his gaze sweeping the terrain with methodical care. “He could have told his new girlfriend to silence anyone who might speak out against him. Jeremy wouldn’t know you aren’t planning to testify. He might have simply heard you were back in town and assumed that you would come forward.”

  Anger simmered. At herself for letting shame and fear keep her silent for so long. At Sam for reminding her of it now, when she needed all her strength focused on the search for Aiden.

  But at least that was better than the icy grip of fear.

  “Right. Because he doesn’t know that I’m too weak willed to help you with a case that means everything to you,” she fumed, her emotions getting the best of her as she bit out the ugly words.

  “You know that’s not what I meant.” He kept his own emotions in check, but she could see the tension in his body. Focused. Immovable.

  Lifting his hands to his mouth, he shouted Bailey’s name into the dim forest ahead.

  “It’s been five minutes,” she informed him, because it was past time he notify Aiden’s mother. “Cynthia should learn about this from you before she hears it on the news.”

  He paused, his body going still for the first time since her car had backfired and she’d seen him across the Hastings’ front yard.

  “I didn’t want to call until I found him.” The tortured look in his eyes was obvious to her even in the growing darkness. Or maybe she heard it in his voice.

  She could feel his hurt and regret. She understood it, even as she had to wonder what it meant.

  Cynthia was still the mother of his son. They shared something Amy could never fully be a part of, no matter how much she loved Aiden. The pang in her chest now was different from her fears for Aiden. It was smaller, because it was her own hurt. But she knew it would ache long afterward since it was the dawning of a new realization that would affect her future. Her forever.

  She needed to give Sam and Cynthia a chance to heal. To be a family. Cynthia shouldn’t have to suffer and miss Sam for ten years before she had the chance to patch things up with him, the way Amy had. Maybe if Amy was out of the way, the two of them could put their rocky start behind them.

  “You should call her.” She pushed the statement past dry lips. “I’ll...keep looking.”

  Turning, she stalked deeper into the forest, giving Sam a moment of privacy while her heart broke. Only now, with everything else stripped away from her—the attack, the fight with her mother, her own miscarriage—could she truly make sense of what she’d been feeling these past few days with Sam.

  What a horrible time to fully appreciate how much she loved him. But that truth was as clear to her as what she’d realized she felt for his son earlier. Love like that made a person strong.

  Love like that could make a person better. Help them do the right, noble thing.

  Even, she feared, walk away.

  “Aiden, where are you?” she said quietly into the fast-darkening woods, shivering at the wind, which was growing colder by the minute. “Please be safe.”

  A rustling sound nearby made her pause. She looked back, seeing only the glow of Sam’s cell phone by his ear now that the sun had set.

  “Bailey?” She said it tentatively, hoping it wasn’t just another chipmunk or squirrel. “Are you out there?”

  Holding her breath at another rustle of leaves, she spotted movement near a pile of logs. A glint of blond hair reflecting a patch of moonlight.

  “Who are you?” a girl’s voice came back.
/>
  “Sam!” Amy shouted, relief almost taking her knees out from under her. “Bailey, I’m Amy Finley. The music teacher’s sister.” She babbled words, not sure how this teenage girl would know her. “I have the sheriff with me. Do you have Aiden?”

  A baby’s cry was her miraculous answer.

  Behind her, Sam’s footsteps vibrated the ground, a welcome sound even if it might be the last time those feet headed her way. Amy had to hold a hand out to a tree to steady herself, not realizing how dizzy the swell of relief could make a person.

  “Bailey.” Sam’s form took shape in front of her, his broad arms wrapping around both the girl and, Amy could now see, the small bundle that must be his son. “Cynthia?” Sam barked into the blue glow of a cell phone. “We have him. He’s safe.”

  Amy swallowed hard and stepped closer, sliding an arm around the girl’s shoulders. She remembered the feeling of being alone and terrified in strange woods at night. The confusion and shock that came with the aftermath of a traumatic event. She recalled wanting someone’s arm around her, to lead her out of the dark, so she offered what she could to this brave girl who had sheltered a defenseless infant.

  Sam held his son now, ignoring his phone and the police radio for a moment longer to cradle the child to his chest.

  “Are you okay?” Bailey McCord asked Amy suddenly, her pretty young face close to Amy’s in the dark.

  “Am I okay?” A crazy sort of laugh bubbled free. “Of course. I’m so relieved you’re both okay.”

  “You’re crying so much.” Bailey pulled her shirtsleeve over the palm of her hand and swiped Amy’s right cheek, then her left. “I’m fine. We’re both fine,” she assured her, crooning to Amy as if she still cared for an infant and not a grown woman.

  Wordless in the face of her strength, Amy could only nod.

  “Here.” Sam turned to her then, his powerful presence affecting her deeply. “Can you take him while I call in?”

  “He’s really hungry,” Bailey explained, patting the wailing boy’s back while Amy settled him against her chest. “I didn’t have time to get the diaper bag. I just ran when I heard someone in the house.”