Hearth Song

by Lois Greiman

  “Then we’ll take her back.”

  He straightened, feeling stronger. “Ai. We will—” he began, but the rumble of an engine interrupted his words. He snapped his attention to the yard, where Vura was already slamming the door of her pickup, already fishtailing on the loose gravel.

  He rasped a curse.

  “Go,” Hunter said. “I’ll do what I can.”

  Chapter 36

  Vura’s heart battered like a jackhammer against her ribs, but she couldn’t fail, couldn’t falter. Not now. “Good morning,” she said, and found that against all odds, her voice still worked, her lungs still functioned.

  The girl behind the front desk sported a fake copper name plaque that said Ashley and a slightly more genuine smile. “Welcome to the Drop On Inn. How can we make this your best day ever?”

  Vura forced a smile. Her cheeks ached with the effort. She clenched her teeth. Beneath the counter, her fingers tightened and released. “I’m here to see Sherri.”

  “Who?” The girl’s smile didn’t slip an iota.

  Vura laughed and raised her left hand to fiddle with the business cards confined to a clear plastic holder. The muscles across her back and shoulders were stretched as tight as a snap line. “I’m sorry. Sher’s such a character. I guess I thought everyone would know her. I called her cell before I came here, but she didn’t answer and we’ve got an appointment.”

  “An appointment?”

  “For a … a mani-pedi.”

  “At Twila’s?”

  She managed a nod, though she didn’t know how.

  “Ohhh, I love that place. Have you ever tried their watermelon facials? They’re to die for.”

  “That’s what I’ve heard,” Vura said, and braced her knees lest they buckle like folding sawhorses. “But listen, we’re supposed to be there in”—she glanced at the clock behind the desk but couldn’t decipher the numbers—“ten minutes.”

  “You’re gonna have to hustle.”

  “Don’t I know it.” Her hands were shaking. She shoved her left behind the counter to assist her right. “If that girl doesn’t change her ways, she’s gonna be late for her own funeral.”

  Ashley laughed. “Mom says the same thing about me.”

  “Listen …” It was hard to breathe, almost impossible to speak. “I’m sure you’ve got tons of stuff to do, so if you’ll just tell me what room she’s in, I’ll hike on up and shake her out of bed.”

  “Ohhhh …” Ashley’s chipper expression crumpled. “I’m sorry. That’s against our policy.”

  “I know.” Vura smiled, lips pulling away from her teeth like a snarl. “But she’s going to be so disappointed if we miss—”

  “Wait,” Ashley said, eyes lighting up as she lifted her gaze toward the hallway. “There she is now.”

  Vura’s breath caught in her throat. She turned.

  And there she was, just exiting the exercise room. Dressed in latex and running shoes, she carried a half-empty water bottle and tittered at her balding companion’s latest witticism.

  He chuckled, adoration in his eyes.

  Bravura steadied her hands, calmed her heart, and approached them. Footsteps rustled eerily against the carpet. It was impossible to know if they were hers.

  “Where is he?” Her voice sounded hollow.

  Sherri turned, painted brows arched high, smile fading slowly. Beside her, Male Pattern Baldness wiped his face with a hotel towel and glanced from one to the other.

  “Excuse me?” Sherri’s voice was as Minnie Mouse high as Vura remembered.

  “Dane.” The name sounded guttural, torn from Vura’s throat like cockleburs from wool. “Where is he?”

  “I’m sorry.” She took a step back, face darkening, boobs jiggling. “I don’t think I know you.”

  “Tell me,” Vura’s voice was rising. Anger roared through her, surfing on a wave of terror, skidding on a raft of frustration.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Sherri said, and bumped against the wingback chair behind her.

  “I’m talking about my husband.” Vura tightened her fingers, clenched her teeth. “The man you’re screwing. The—”

  “You’re crazy.” Sherri glanced to the side, giving a tentative smile to her balding hero. “I don’t know what she’s talking about, Robby.”

  “I’m talking about Dane Lambert,” Vura said, and leaned closer.

  Cornered, Sherri lowered her voice and her painted brows. “Listen, lady, it’s not my fault if you can’t hold on to your man,” she said, and turned away.

  But Vura caught her by the arm, swung her back.

  “Hey!” Robby complained, but Vura failed to notice. Instead, she leaned in to the other woman’s face, teeth gritted, blood roaring.

  “You can have him if you want him. But you’ll tell me where he is,” she growled and raised her right hand. The nail gun felt solid and ready against her palm, as comforting as a plush toy. “And you’ll tell me now.”

  “Whoa!” Robby breathed and took one foolish step toward them. Releasing Sherri’s arm, Vura pivoted toward him, Walt chest-high. “He took my daughter.”

  His eyes widened, big as saucers. “Wh … what?”

  “He took Lily.” The words were a snarl from between clenched teeth. “I’m taking her back.”

  “Oh …” He nodded, held up his hands, palms out, placating. “Okay. But listen …” His wide eyes skittered to the left. “I think she’s getting away.”

  It took a moment to recognize his words, longer to assimilate their meaning. By then, Sherri was already ripping open the door, already lurching outside.

  Adrenaline pulsed like venom through Vura’s veins. She spun without thinking, leapt without intending to. Blond hair snagged between her fingers. She ripped. Sherri shrieked, tumbled backward. She tried to scramble away, but Vura was already atop her, one palm pressed to her chest, the other steady as the sun against the cool grip of the nail gun.

  Sherri watched it with popping eyes.

  “Tell me where he is.” Bravura’s voice was hard, low, a little raspy.

  Sherri’s was none of those things. “Help!” The word emerged as a strangled squeak from her glossy lips. “Help me. She’s crazy!”

  Ashley, still trapped behind the front desk like a hapless bunny, squeaked something in return.

  “Tell me!” Vura snarled and pressed the gun to Sherri’s neck.

  “Bravura.” Tonkiaishawien’s voice barely registered in her brain. She neither knew nor cared when he had arrived. “Bravura, let us talk about this.”

  “Tonky!” Sherri rasped. Fat tears had squeezed from between her quick-blinking lids. “Help me.”

  Vura ignored her plea, ignored everything but the woman sprawled beneath her. “Where did he take her?”

  “I don’t know …” She was crying in earnest now, plump tears that left her makeup magically unsmudged. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “You’re lying,” Vura snarled and tightened her finger on the trigger.

  “I’m not!” She was breathing hard, chest heaving. “I just came along for kicks. He said his old lady …” She licked her lips, careful now, as if she’d nearly stepped into a trap from which she would never extricate herself. “He said he was in for a big inheritance. It was only supposed to take a couple of days, then we’d hit the road for Vegas or something.”

  Vura eased back half an inch, remembering to breathe. “He kidnapped my daughter.”

  “I didn’t …” She tried to shake her head, but there was no room between the soft flesh of her jaw and Walt’s unrelenting steel. “I didn’t know that. I swear.”

  “What do you know?” Vura asked, and adjusted the angle of the tool a little.

  “Bravura, do not do this,” Tonk warned.

  “What do you know?” she asked again.

  “He called me last night. Said we was going to be rich, richer than God. But I just thought he had some hot tip. He likes to play the ponies at—”
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  “You were supposed to pick up the money, weren’t you?”

  “What? No! I just—”

  “Weren’t you?” she rasped, and shifting the muzzle a scant millimeter, slammed a nail into the industrial-strength carpet.

  Sherri screamed. “Okay. Yeah! But I didn’t know he was going to kidnap no kid!”

  “Where is he?”

  “I don’t know.” She shrieked the words. “I swear. He didn’t tell me.”

  “Then you’re no use to me,” Vura said, and tipped the gun back toward Sherri’s ear.

  “Hotshot’s cabin!” The words spurted from her lips.

  “What?”

  “He’s got a friend.” She was sweating now, sweating and crying and stuttering. “A … a smarmy tagalong creep. Always trying to cop a feel. Trying to get me to go with him to his ‘hideaway.’ But I ain’t that hard up. Even spending half my nights alone in this crappy motel without room service or—”

  “I swear I’ll nail your mouth shut if you keep babbling,” Vura said.

  Sherri pursed her lips, fell silent, nodded carefully. “I think he’s there,” she whispered.

  “At his hideaway.”

  She gave a cautious nod.

  “Where is it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Think hard,” Vura suggested.

  “I told you, I’m not into those creepy—”

  Shifting the tool, Vura slammed a nail alongside Sherri’s throat. It scraped away a peel of skin and bled profusely.

  Her shriek was almost all air this time, a breathy rasp followed by almost inarticulate babbling. “Beaver Road. He said something about Beaver Road. We thought it was …” She was gasping for breath, fingers spread like spiders’ legs against the floor beneath them. “Dane and me … we laughed about how livin’ there was the only way he was ever gonna get any.”

  Vura shook her head, but Tonk stepped up from behind. “Beaver Road? Up by Crazy Horse Pass?”

  “Tonky!” She jerked her gaze to his. Blood, red as rubies, was smeared in her bleached hair. “For Christ’s sake! For Christ’s sake, get her off me.”

  “Is that where it is?” he asked. “Up by the pass?”

  “How would I know? Do I look like someone who’d rough it in some nasty shack somewhere?”

  “I am not sure,” he admitted and tilted his head toward her tormenter, “but Bravura is angry, and she has many nails left.”

  “He said nobody’d get hurt.”

  “Tell us what you know so no one will,” he suggested, voice soft, almost soothing in the pulsing tension.

  “I’m bleeding,” she whined, and lifted a shaking hand halfway to her neck.

  “But you are not yet dead,” he reminded her.

  She swallowed, nodded, perhaps understanding the stakes for the first time. “He said he had a good hiding place. Somewhere nobody’d find. Said he’d have to hike in. Rough it for a few days, but after that we’d be rich. I just wanna … I just wanna be rich,” she said, and started to sob. “I just wanna—”

  “Could be one of those hunting cabins up by White Deer Ridge.”

  Vura turned woodenly toward Sherri’s erstwhile admirer, Robby. “What?”

  He blinked owlishly, shifted his gaze from her to Tonk. “Up on White Deer Ridge past Crazy Horse Pass, there are half a dozen cabins strung out over ten thousand acres of government land.”

  “Does one of them belong to a man called Hotshot?”

  “Yeah, I think …” He shook his head, already backpedaling. “Maybe.”

  “Would you know it if you saw it?”

  “Listen …” He sidled sideways. “I got kids, too, but I don’t want to get messed up in this.” They were his final words before he sprang away, fumbled for the door, and lurched outside.

  “Is it?” Vura asked, and turned her attention back to the woman beneath her.

  “Wh … What?”

  “Is one of those cabins Hotshot’s?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She shot another nail into the floorboards, almost casually now. Terror had receded, leaving nothing but rage in its chilly wake.

  Sherri screamed. “I swear to God I don’t know. I swear it. I swear. I …”

  Tonk curled a hand around Vura’s arm. “Let us go.”

  “Answer me!” Vura ordered, but Tonk tightened his grip.

  “She waits.” His voice was little more than a murmur, barely audible.

  Bravura turned toward him, breath held.

  “The flower,” he said. “She waits for our arrival.”

  Vura eased off her prey. “What about her?” she asked, and nodded toward Sherri. She was already scurrying backward, hands and feet scrambling frantically. “What if she calls Dane? Warns—”

  “Vura!” Quinton Murrell burst into the lobby. His eyes snapped wide when his gaze fell on Sherri, disheveled, sweaty, still bleeding from the neck. “Holy spit! Honey, what did you do?”

  She blinked at him, rose to her feet. “We can’t let her warn Dane.”

  “What? Warn—”

  “Don’t let her make any calls,” she said and, pushing the nail gun into his hand, rushed into the parking lot.

  Inside, Sherri ran her experienced gaze up Quinton Murrell’s rugged form. Taking in his confident stance, his capable hands, his salt-and-pepper hair, she pushed herself to her feet. “Hi,” she said and, taking one lung-expanding breath, blinked hopefully into his eyes.

  Chapter 37

  It was the longest drive of Vura’s life … as if Tonk’s Jeep stood still and the world lumbered apathetically past. She gripped the dashboard in one hand, the overhead handle in the other.

  “How will we know which cabin is his?”

  “I do not know.” His tone was low. His tendons looked stretched tight and straining through the dark skin of his wrist.

  “What if she was lying? They could be anywhere by now.”

  He shook his head, attention riveted on the road that tangled through the pines toward the robin’s-egg sky.

  “If he sees us coming, he could take her. Could take her and …” Her voice broke. “What—”

  “Which way?”

  It took her a moment to realize they had come to a halt. The road split, arching off to the right and left.

  “You must know this Hotshot guy.” Her voice sounded raspy to her own ears.

  “I do not.”

  “You must! You know everyone! Everyone—”

  “I don’t!” he snapped and closing his eyes, exhaled carefully. “She will be okay, Bravura.”

  “What if she’s not?” The words came out as nothing more than a whimper, a shadow of hopelessness on a ribbon of terror.

  “She’s smart and strong and …” His voice cracked. “We’ve just got to think.”

  She nodded, but fear was a blade in her gut, slicing away any hope of coherency.

  “About what Lily said.” He scanned the hills ahead. “Maybe she gave us a clue. She’d do that. She would—” His words stopped. He frowned, leaning toward the windshield.

  “What?” Vura ripped her gaze from his, scraped the tree-dotted skyline with aching eyes. “What is it?”

  “I don’t …” He narrowed his gaze. “Is that …” He blinked, shook his head, and stared again. “Is that smoke?”

  “What?” Her lungs ached with anticipation. “Where?”

  “There.” He pointed, and if his hand shook a little, who could blame him? “Above the bluff there. Is it smoke or are they clouds?”

  She stared, straining, then blinked when her eyes stung. “I don’t know.” Hope, she needed hope, but she knew nothing.

  “I think …” he began and froze as a third wispy cloud bubbled over the treetops.

  “What?”

  “She speaks,” he breathed and pulling off the road, slammed the Jeep into Park.

  “She’s …” Vura shook her head. “You think she’s signaling us?”

  His jaw bunched with hope too deep to be vo
iced.

  “But what about Dane? He wouldn’t … How could she get away from him?”

  “How could she find Courage in the dark of the night? How could she bring her home when no other could?”

  She nodded, hope surging stronger. “We’ll follow the smoke.”

  They were out of the Jeep in a moment, climbing in a matter of seconds.

  They scrambled upward. Their breath came hard, frosty in the unruffled air. Grasping a root, Vura hoisted herself up another few inches.

  “Can you still see the smoke?” Her throat ached with the effort to speak.

  “Not from here.” Exhaustion or angst made his voice raspy. “But the red bluff remains to our right.”

  She nodded and climbed again, mind spinning. “She must be alone.” She kept her voice low though they were still, by her wild calculations, a quarter of a mile from the source of the smoke. “She must have gotten away.” She scurried upward on hands and feet, not noticing the blood already oozing from a dozen scrapes. “Must have snuck out while—” she began again, but suddenly her boot slipped, dislodging a chunk of granite. It teetered, then tumbled nosily downward, gathering stones and debris as it went. She caught herself, steadied her balance.

  Their gazes met with a clash. “We must be quiet,” he said.

  She nodded. They climbed again. The first scent of fire found them, just a ghost of woodsy fragrance cranking Vura’s muscles tighter with every inch they ascended. And then, off to their right, a faint feather of smoke lifted through the treetops. They scanned the hillside with frantic eyes; there was nothing but trees and boulders, scruffy underbrush, scraggly roots.

  But there! A momentarily flash of motion.

  Tonk raised a finger to his lips, and though every instinct, every aching maternal need in Vura longed to scream Lily’s name, she remained silent. Fortifying her strength, she exhaled softly and pointed to the left. He nodded and motioned in the opposite direction. So they parted, creeping through the brush on hands and knees, dropping to their bellies at any hint of movement. It took a lifetime to reach the tiny campsite. The fire was nearly extinguished. Curls of smoke rose lazily from a trio of charred logs. But there was no other sign of life.