by Ann Simas
He threw back the sheet and stalked through the house toward the back door. He stepped outside onto the patio, still warm from the sun, and wandered out to the grass. His golden retriever, Midas, trailed behind him. The dog stretched out next to him and sniffed the night air.
Luca tilted his head back, gazing up at the night sky. A sliver of moon sat like a Cheshire Cat grin in the eastern sky. Other than that, the blanket of darkness was lit with an unfathomable number of twinkling stars. He also caught sight of two satellites, one headed northwest, the other in a south-easterly path.
Where the hell was Sunny? Had she found a hiding place that would keep her and the kids safe? Doubtful. By turns, he was angry and frustrated that she didn’t have enough faith in him to keep them out of harm’s way.
As if he sensed his owner’s anguish, Midas nuzzled his leg and whined. Luca dragged his eyes away from the sky and reached down to scratched between the dog’s ears. “That’s the way I feel, too,” he murmured.
The dog let out a low, commiserative woof, which made Luca smile. Aside from a good woman, a dog really was a man’s best friend.
Luca straightened and stared out over his small yard. It was nothing like Sunny’s, which was bigger and much better landscaped. Overall, hers was a great place for kids to romp.
It hadn’t been a bad place to make love, either.
With Sunny, any place would be a good place for that.
He allowed himself a few minutes to remember what it felt like to touch her, to kiss her, to be inside her.
She hadn’t uttered the three magic words to him, nor had he said them to her, but it didn’t matter. They were meant to be together. Instinctively, he knew that Sunny thought so, too.
So why the hell had she run away?
What could he be doing right now that might help find her?
He swore softly into the quiet night air, pushing thoughts of sex out of his mind, and concentrated instead on what he might have missed.
One possibility hit him like a sledgehammer.
It was late, but he hoped not too late, to call Libby.
. . .
Day four in the cabin had passed with all the speed of a snail making its way up Longs Peak.
Sunny cleaned up the remains of their small dinner, which consisted of mac-and-cheese with one sliced hot dog added, canned Mandarin oranges, and two cookies each. She also made the kids a small glass of powdered milk mixed with water. To make the beverage more palatable, she’d squirted in Hershey’s syrup.
Afterward, they settled in front of the small TV to watch one of the videotapes containing seven episodes she’d recorded of Mickey Mouse Clubhouse. As she had every night for the previous three nights, she worried that it might be too upbeat right before bed, but neither Carson nor Maisie complained when an episode was over and she announced it was time for bed. Must be the mountain air, for she was feeling pretty tired herself.
Carson liked that he was allowed to sleep in the top bunk, but for the storybook, he snuggled on the lower bunk with Sunny and Maisie. When he fell asleep, she remembered how difficult it had been to get him up there the night before, so he left him snoozing next to his sister, who had zonked out half-way through the book.
Sunny turned on the baby monitor and made her way back down to the safe room with the companion monitor. It took her an hour to clean and oil the last gun. She silently thanked Zach and her dad for taking the time to teach her about the proper care of firearms.
Upstairs again, she took a quick shower, checked the children, then fell into bed, completely exhausted.
Her slumber was filled with dreams of Luca.
She awoke on the fifth morning feeling refreshed after a good night’s sleep, but aware, too, of a deep longing inside her that could only be satisfied by the man she’d grown to love in such a short time.
. . .
Luca sat at his kitchen table, reading the letters Zach had written to Sunny. There was no doubt the guy had loved his wife and children, but he sensed that the only real passion in Zach Fyfe’s life had been his Navy SEALs unit.
With each page, Luca tried to read between the lines. He focused on the parts Sunny had shared earlier that dealt with her husband’s family and their involvement with cults.
Around ten, Trey arrived. “Making any headway?”
“No, but he wrote a lot of letters, and I’m going slow, so I don’t miss anything.”
Trey nodded and dropped down into a chair. He tapped a pile to his left. “This the first of them?”
“Yeah. Thanks for giving them a second pair of eyes.”
“No problem. I would’ve been here earlier, but I was being interrogated by Libby.”
Luca’s mouth quirked up with amusement. “Not surprised, being that she’s Sunny’s sister.”
They read in silence for another forty-five minutes when Luca realized he may have found something. He went back and reread the previous letter, then switched to reread the current one again. “Bingo!”
Trey’s head came up. “What’ve you got?”
“‘I knew you’d understand about Still Waters. It will always be something just between you and me, but if I’m not there with you, you’ll still have it.’”
“Sounds pretty vague.”
“It is, but coupled with something he said in the previous letter, it’s something.” He picked up the other letter. “‘Still Waters run deep, Sunny, and so does our place. It has to.’”
Trey blew out a breath. “I’m not on your wavelength, man. You’re gonna have to spell it out for me.”
“I may be on the wrong track here,” Luca admitted, “but from what I’ve read in Zach’s letters, he was paranoid about his family harming Sunny and the kids.”
“Justifiably so.”
Luca nodded. “Sunny once mentioned to me that Zach was a planner.”
“Planner, as in developing urban areas, or planning parties?”
“Neither. He planned for emergencies.”
“As in Armageddon.”
“Or for cults trying to steal children.”
Trey grunted, studying the pile of letters. When he looked up, he said, “‘Still Waters run deep.’ Like a cabin deep in the woods.”
“That’s what I’m thinking.” He reached for his phone and dialed Harry Keene. After he identified himself, he got right to the point. “Do you know of any place outside of town where Zach might have set up a place he and Sunny and the kids could run to if the shit hit the fan?”
After a startled pause, Harry said, “You mean like an alien invasion or something?”
“Or something.”
“No, I…wait! Bebe, come here! Hang on a minute, Luca. I want to pick Bebe’s brain.”
Luca put his phone on speaker, so he and Trey could hear the discussion between Sunny’s parents.
“Honey, do you remember anything about a cabin or hidey-hole that Zach had?”
Bebe said, “No, but…hmmm. Now that you mention it, I think Sunny did mention something once, but it’s been so long ago, I might be remembering wrong.”
Harry spoke into the phone. “Why are you asking, Luca? Have you found something?”
“I don’t know. It may be something, it may be nothing. It’s a reference to Still Waters, both words capitalized. I found it in a couple of Zach’s letters to Sunny.” He read both passages, hoping to jar either Harry or Bebe’s memory.
“Still Waters!” Bebe cried. “That’s the name of a song that the BeeGees released on an album of the same name. She played that CD over and over and over again when Zach died.”
That was a tie-in, but not necessarily the one Luca was looking for.
“Hold on,” Harry said. “Libby just walked in. Let me ask her if she knows about a cabin.”
The conversation got further away, so it was difficult to follow, but suddenly Libby spoke, her voice laden with hope. “Zach did have a cabin. Sunny mentioned it to me the day of Zach’s funeral, then she told me to forget about it, because sh
e’d promised Zach she’d never tell anyone else about it.”
“For God’s sake, Libby,” Trey muttered, his tone harsh, “why didn’t you tell us about this before?”
“I honestly didn’t think of it until just now!” Libby said, her tone defensive.
Hope surged through Luca. “Where is it?”
“I…I don’t know, except that it’s up the Poudre Canyon, at the north end of the Park.”
With the vastness of the Rocky Mountain National Park, it was helpful to know a general location. Larimer County property records would be a good place to start a search.
“Do you think that’s where she is?” Libby asked.
“Maybe. Put your dad back on.”
“You’re still on speaker,” Libby shot back, sounding a little peeved.
“Yes?” Harry asked.
“Does Grandma Addison’s cabin have a bunker attached to it?”
“God, no! It started out as a one-room structure back in the early nineteen hundreds, and it has a rabbit warren of additional rooms, but everything’s on the surface, nothing underground.”
Libby spoke again. “Still Waters. That’s what Zach named his cabin. I remember because Sunny kept that damned song on repeat the day of his funeral and when I asked her why, that’s when she told me about the cabin.” She mumbled something to her parents Luca couldn’t make out, then said, “You’re thinking Zach’s cabin has a bunker and that’s where Sunny’s taken the kids.”
Again, Luca said, “Maybe. Do any of you know where Sunny keeps her legal documents?”
“We all do,” Bebe said. “They’re at her house.”
“Can one of you meet me there in twenty minutes to let me in?”
The three of them answered at the same time in the affirmative.
Luca disconnected, staring hard at the letters.
“What are you thinking?”
“If there’s no paperwork at her house for the cabin, we’ll have wasted valuable time looking for something that’s not there.”
“I have no problem heading down to the Recorder’s office to do a property search under Zach’s name. You can call me if you find something at Sunny’s place.”
Luca pushed away from the table. “Let’s do it.”
. . .
The mama moose and her two calves returned around lunch time. Sunny and the kids watched from the screened back porch as the trio sauntered past. Mama cast her sideways dark-eyed glance at them, but it was almost as if she had signed a peace treaty—no moose would bother the humans, if the humans didn’t bother the moose. Sunny grabbed her camera and got some pictures of the four-legged critters. She didn’t want to be accused of fabricating a moose sighting sometime down the road and the little family had given her another idea for a children’s book.
While Carson and Maisie stood on chairs so they could see out, she made peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, which they munched while watching their own personal wildlife show.
After she put the children down for a nap, a strange sense of uneasiness crept over Sunny. She double-checked all the doors and windows, then for good measure, closed the blinds.
Back in her bedroom, she withdrew her pistol from its holster and sat in the middle of her bed, waiting. She strained her ears, trying to distinguish the normal forest sounds from any that didn’t belong there.
A twig snapped outside her bedroom window. The twitter of birds ceased. The hush that settled outside the cabin seemed almost deafening.
Sunny prayed her children would keep on sleeping.
She slid off the bed and tiptoed to their room, which faced west. A shadow moved across the closed blinds. Clearly, it was a human form.
Sunny sucked in air, then reminded herself she had to maintain silence.
The shadow paused for countless seconds, as if it had heard her and glued itself in place.
Sunny held her breath.
The shadow moved on, to the north.
She slipped off her sandals and moved quietly to the front of the cabin. Would whoever was out there think it strange that the front windows had been blocked, but not the side or back windows? Was it just some curious camper, wondering who owned the place? Or maybe a homeless transient, looking for shelter?
Or, could it be someone from…Vale Luna?
The possibility that Zach’s family had tracked her and the kids down almost flattened her. Fear snaked up her spine, sending her heart into overdrive. She took the safety off the .22 Glock, wishing she had the .45 Glock from the gun safe instead. All the better to blow a big hole through whoever might storm through the door or crawl in through one of the windows.
The unknown person circled the cabin one more time. She tracked the footsteps by sound, finding it both ironic and troublesome that he—or she—made no effort to disguise the fact that he was there.
She went back to check on her children. Both slept soundly.
She returned to her bedroom and sat in the only chair in the room, tucked in the corner.
Bedtime for the kids was hours away, which meant she wouldn’t have an opportunity to review the security footage until then. Zach had assured her that the two cameras weren’t noticeable to the casual, or even the learned observer.
Being part of a covert ops team, Sunny assumed he’d known what he was talking about.
With any luck, whoever had been wandering outside hadn’t managed to avoid being recorded. She murmured a short prayer that the person skulking around outside had unknowingly looked right at the lens.
. . .
Luca was surprised, and yet he wasn’t, that three Keenes awaited him at Sunny’s front door. “You didn’t all have to come,” he said, keeping his tone even.
“Luca, even a blind man could see how you feel about my daughter,” Harry said, “and when she’s missing and you don’t know where the hell she is, the three of us are going to show up when you call for help.”
Luca leveled a blank look on Sunny’s father, then grinned wryly. “I’m that transparent, huh?”
“As is Sunny,” Bebe informed him. “We’re ecstatic for both of you, but we want our daughter and our grandchildren back alive, so you can have a nice long life together.”
Libby sniffled. “The Vale Lunatics are not going to get them.” She swiped at her eyes, then turned and inserted the key into the door lock. Everyone followed her to the room Sunny used as both an office and a studio. A two-drawer wooden file cabinet, with a bookcase above, was built in at one end of the counter. A portion of it had been designated as a desk, and the remainder was used for a space to create the images for her children’s books. Another built in bookcase bracketed the other end.
Luca pulled out the rolling chair tucked into the knee space of the desk part of the counter and wheeled it over in front of the file drawers. He opened the top one and finger-walked his way through the tabs. He found what he was looking for near the back. Sunny was one organized woman. Everything was filed alphabetically, in this case under P for PROPERTY RECORDS.
He foot-walked the chair back over to the counter and opened up the three-inch-thick file folder.
Harry, Bebe, and Libby crowded behind him and peered over his shoulder. The were so close, he could feel their individual breaths whispering against him.
The top file was for the property Sunny currently inhabited.
The second held paperwork for a lot she’d purchased near where her parents lived.
The third was labeled STILL WATERS.
Before he could open the manila folder, his phone rang. The screen identified the caller as Trey.
“I found it,” his partner said. “Where are you?”
“At Sunny’s. I found some paperwork, too. We’re just getting ready to look at it.”
“I’ll be there in about ten minutes. You’re not going to believe this.”
Chapter 32
. . .
The minutes ticked by with agonizing slowness. Sunny glanced at the clock, surprised that the kids had only been
asleep for thirty minutes. It seemed like an eternity had passed since she put them down and the person outside had circled the cabin.
She decided she had time to venture down to the safe room and check out the images that had been captured by the security cameras. Why on earth had she disconnected her laptop? She should have anticipated that someone might come snooping around!
She shoved the baby monitor into her shorts pocket. With a flashlight in one hand and the Glock in the other, she made her way down the stairs. Once she reached the bottom, she withdrew the key to the door from her pocket. Inside the room, she went directly to the laptop.
She checked it daily to make sure it was recording. The day before, the lens had caught the moose family foraging behind the cabin and a small herd of deer had passed through at twilight.
She turned on the baby monitor and placed that and her gun next to the laptop. She raised the lid and entered the password. The split screen that popped up showed the front and back views being picked up by the security cameras. She chose the screen that ran the front camera footage and hit REPLAY for the past hour.
The intruder was definitely a man, but though he faced the camera at least once, his features were in shadow. All she could really tell was that he was large, well-muscled, and vaguely familiar.
She switched to the rear camera and repeated the REPLAY process. The first time around, the camera caught him, but he was looking away. Sunny shuddered. Why was he so familiar?
On the second go-round, he stopped, turned, and looked straight into the camera, as if he knew he were being recorded. No saying cheese for this man. He had a mean, determined look on his face. Maybe meaner than he’d appeared to her when he’d tried to beat the crap out of her.
Sunny grasped the edge of the narrow desk unit with white-knuckled ferocity. She saw stars for several moments and all rational thought fled her mind.
When her vision cleared and she could think again, she reran the video to confirm what she had seen.
When had Boyson escaped incarceration? And how had he escaped?
Sunny hit several keys on the laptop and brought up the Google search engine. Zach’s hide-in-plain-sight method of remaining obscure had resulted in locating the cabin just east of a large RV/tent campground that was already serviced with wifi and cable. An underground fiber optics line had gone in the year before Zach built the cabin, which he’d tapped into.