Dark Sky

by Carla Neggers

  Ethan’s cell phone rang, or tried to. He answered it, but, with the lousy coverage, could barely hear Nate Winter on the other end. “Mia O’Farrell didn’t show up for her meeting,” Nate said. “We’re checking her hotel. Has she been in touch?”

  “I left a message for her. I haven’t heard back.”

  Winter said something, but Ethan only made out Juliet, New York and Tatro.

  “Her niece took off out the attic window.” Ethan had no idea if Winter could hear him. “Once we find her, we’re heading to New York.”

  “We?”

  The senior marshal’s skepticism came through just fine. “I think she doesn’t want me out of her sight.”

  “Told you she’s got a good career ahead of her.” But, with the bad connection and work to do, he didn’t linger. “Let me know if you hear from O’Farrell.”

  Ethan tucked the cell phone back into his jacket pocket, noticing Juliet on the grass, stepping over the array of pumpkins. She looked as impatient as he felt. “Joshua’s on his way.”

  “How’d he react?”

  “As you might expect. Exasperated, pissed off, worried.”

  “I’ll help you all look for your niece.”

  She nodded, her thumbs hooked on the pockets of her jacket, as if to control some of her restlessness. “Makes sense to check the lake first. We can walk. We’ll cover more ground we would driving, and if we find her sitting under a tree writing poetry, I can pack up my tent. My truck’s still there.” She squinted out at the sun-washed hills surrounding the picturesque spot where she’d grown up. Without looking at him, she asked, “Who were you talking to?”

  “Matt Kelleher—”

  Juliet shifted her gaze to him, clearly aware he’d known what she meant. “On the phone.”

  “Nate Winter.”

  Winter was a senior deputy and one of her champions in the USMS, but also a man she admired and respected. Her expression didn’t change. “And here I was thinking you’d come clean and told me everything.”

  “He and I bonded in May when we saved you and Sarah Dunnemore from certain death.”

  That drew a roll of her blue eyes. “You didn’t save us from anything. What did he want?”

  “He says O’Farrell didn’t show up for her meeting this morning.”

  The cop expression was back. “Do they know each other?”

  “Sort of.”

  “I swear, Brooker, if I thought thumbscrews would work on you—” Juliet sighed, dropping her hands to her side. “Let’s go.”

  She spun around so hard, her heels kicked up little stones in the driveway. Ethan let her lead the way to the barn, where two hens had escaped their pen and were pecking in the grass, and onto a grassy lane, an apple orchard up to their right, woods and hills and the lake to their left. Juliet walked fast, bearing left, maneuvering comfortably over exposed rocks and tree roots, tall grass and wildflowers slapping against her jeans. She had strong legs. She worked to stay fit. For the past year, Ethan thought, he’d mostly worked at finding fresh distractions to keep him from thinking about Char’s death and life without her, to keep him from acknowledging that he hadn’t been a good husband and their marriage had sputtered and faltered long before she’d ended up in an Amsterdam morgue.

  “Does this remind you of Texas at all?” Juliet asked abruptly, with a quick wave of her fingers that seemed to take in all of her surroundings, the hills, the orchard, the fields and woods and stone walls, the vibrant fall colors against a cloudless sky.

  None of it was like west Texas at all. Ethan smiled. “No.”

  “I have a friend from the Midwest who says Vermont makes her claustrophobic. She likes nice, flat, straight roads. She says the roads around here are narrow and twisting and that the trees grow too close to the road.”

  “I don’t get claustrophobic.”

  “Probably wouldn’t have made it into the Special Forces if trees overhanging a road got to you.” Even as Juliet continued along the lane at a healthy pace, distracting herself with her talk of Texas and Vermont roads, Ethan could see that she was scanning constantly for any sign of her niece. “Do you have barbecues with the Carhills?”

  “They’re not that type.”

  “Is Texas their sole residence? With that kind of money—”

  “It’s their main residence. I don’t even know what else they own, but west Texas is definitely home.”

  “Could Ham have gone to another of their properties to recuperate? Maybe his mother got on his nerves.”

  “I don’t know where he went.”

  She gave Ethan a sideways glance. “Are you worried about him, especially now with Tatro on the loose?”

  “Ham goes his own way. He doesn’t fit anywhere that easily, which makes it hard to know whether I should worry or not.”

  “An unlikely spook.”

  Ethan didn’t bother with a denial.

  “The thought of that creep Tatro—” Juliet tightened her hands into fists and picked up her pace, the lane in the woods now, taking them along the bottom of a hill. “Let’s hope Wendy doesn’t know he escaped. If she’s off on a little adventure, throwing pebbles in the lake or catching frogs or writing poetry—maybe an hour or two on her own in peace will do her good.”

  “Maybe,” Ethan said, neutral.

  She stopped when they came to the dirt road, postcard perfect with the morning sun and the autumn foliage, the sprinkle of freshly fallen red, orange and yellow leaves. The fog had burned off, and an intermittent breeze cooled the air. She stood next to Ethan and sighed at the quiet scene. “There are a million places she could be.”

  “We can split up. Just point me in the right direction.”

  “Sam’s gone up to the orchard to look. We know she didn’t take a car, and her note says she’ll be back soon. We’re all probably overreacting, but we’ll find her.” Juliet cast him a wry smile. “In the meantime, the Marshals Service can conduct a manhunt without me.”

  Ethan knew he didn’t need to remind her that it was a manhunt for Bobby Tatro this time.

  “I wonder what she was wearing,” Juliet said, half to herself. “It’s warming up now, but it was cold when she—”

  “Wendy knows Vermont. She’ll have dressed for the weather.”

  “Ethan—I don’t like this. Your Texan’s missing. Mia O’Farrell’s missing. Tatro’s escaped. Wendy picked a bad time to sneak out.” Juliet glanced up the road, toward a cabin tucked on the wooded hillside. “What did Matt Kelleher say when you talked to him, before Nate called?”

  “Not much. He said he hasn’t seen your niece.”

  “Apparently he and Wendy have hit it off.” Juliet thought a moment. “If Wendy thinks he understands her and the rest of us don’t, maybe whatever it is she’s up to involves him. She could be sitting in his camper writing poetry. I’m not suggesting he’s aware—”

  “Let’s have a look,” Ethan said, heading up the road to the steep driveway.

  The cabin was built into the hillside amid tall evergreens and a few birch trees, their yellow leaves and white bark a contrast to the pines and hemlocks. Stone steps led up from the driveway to a deck and sliding glass doors. Huge rhododendrons had taken over the front windows. And the Longstreets were landscapers, Ethan thought, amused. Kelleher’s fifth-wheel camper stood in front of the one-car garage. His truck, an older vehicle with Arizona plates, was parked alongside the camper, in the shade of a massive hemlock.

  Juliet knocked on the dented camper door. “Mr. Kelleher? It’s Juliet Longstreet.” When there was no answer, as expected, she tried the door, but it was locked. She stepped back down onto the driveway. “Wendy! Are you here?” She sighed, nodding to the cabin. “I’ll check up there, just in case. You’d think she’d know to turn up before her father gets back. Never mind worrying the rest of us.”

  But she left it at that and mounted the steps to the cabin, trying the slider, but it, too, was locked. “I guess she’s not here,” Juliet said, disappointed.

>   Ethan had remained by the camper. “Your brothers check out this guy, Kelleher?”

  She headed back down the steps. “I doubt it. He hasn’t been here that long.”

  “He just shows up out of nowhere and asks for work, says his wife died?”

  “It happens—” But she frowned, her eyes reaching Ethan’s as she joined him on the driveway. “But maybe not this week.”

  “Yeah, maybe not.” Without asking her permission or telling her what he was about to do, Ethan raised his right leg and gave the camper door a hard, snapping kick with the heel of his boot. It popped open. Easy. He shrugged at the federal marshal next to him. “The door’s dented. I’m buying him a new one. Have to take the old one off first.”

  “You don’t trust anyone, do you, Brooker?”

  “Do you?”

  Not answering, she climbed into the camper ahead of him. The interior was shabby but immaculate. Wendy wasn’t tied up in a corner. There was no kiddy-porn laid out on a stained mattress. Juliet checked the refrigerator—no alcohol, not so much as a six-pack. The shelves were crammed with protein bars, soy milk, carrot juice.

  “No wonder he gets along with your niece,” Ethan said.

  She ignored him and pulled open the door to the tiny bathroom. He noticed two mugs and two plates in the strainer, not enough to sound any alarms, but curious.

  He heard Juliet suck in a sharp breath and swear. She backed out of the bathroom, her expression grim, her color off. “Tatro’s here,” she said tightly, on her way to the door.

  Ethan checked the bathroom himself. Shaving gear for two men, two toothbrushes and cargo pants and a T-shirt hanging on a hook on the door.

  He joined Juliet outside. “Recognized the clothes?”

  “It’s what he wears. Whoever helped spring him must have had clothes for him. The pants are the wrong size for Kelleher. And the smell—Tatro has this smell.”

  “What do you want me to do?” Ethan asked her quietly.

  She fixed her eyes on him and thought a moment. “Check down by the lake. Check my tent. If Tatro knows I spent the night there—” She abandoned that train of thought, too disciplined to let herself spin out of control. “I’ll take my truck and head back to the house. Joshua should be back by now. He needs to know.”

  Time to call out the troops, Ethan thought.

  “You’re not—are you armed?”

  “No. It’s okay, Juliet. Go.” He winked at her. “I’ll be stealthy.”

  “There’s a spring—” She held her breath a second, as if pushing back her emotions. “It’s through the woods—you’ll see the path near my tent. There’s a picnic area. It’s one of Wendy’s favorite spots. And if she didn’t bring water with her and got thirsty—”

  “I’ll take a look.”

  “Kelleher—”

  “He said he was going back to work. I saw him head toward the barn, but I didn’t see if he went inside.”

  Her gaze focused on him. “Who is he?”

  “We’ll find out.” But Ethan thought of Mia O’Farrell, her tips, her fear, and wondered if, somehow, the Longstreets’ recent hire was the reason she was on her last nerve, hanging by a thread.

  Juliet had walked over to Kelleher’s truck and raised the hood. “Do you know how to disable a truck? I don’t want this bastard going anywhere.”

  “I’ll take care of it. Go on. Go raise the alarm with your family.”

  Her eyes shone. “Ethan—damn.”

  “It’ll be okay,” he said, although he had no idea whether it would or not, just wanted to cut through her palpable sense of dread. “Wendy handled herself well in New York, and this is her turf.”

  “Tatro—” She shut her eyes briefly. “Let him come after me. Not her.”

  Ethan kissed her, and she brushed her fingertips along his jaw, their eyes connecting, just for an instant, before she pulled away and headed back down the driveway. But that split second of eye contact was enough, a wire tripped, launching them onto a different plane. It was as if he’d seen into her soul.

  She turned, walking backward. “Stay safe, Brooker.”

  Then she spun around and trotted down the road, out of sight. He returned to the camper and got a sharp knife from Kelleher’s tool kit.

  In less than two minutes, he had the ignition wires on the truck cut.

  When he reached the path to the lake, Juliet’s truck was gone—he’d seen her head up the dead-end road, undoubtedly to see if she could spot Wendy before turning around and heading home. He ducked onto the narrow path, noticing the play of light and breeze and shadow on ferns and wildflowers, and tried to think like a seventeen-year-old girl with too much on her mind.

  Before leaving that morning, Juliet had zipped her tent up tight. Ethan unzipped it now and crawled inside, thinking that it was small for the two of them. But not, as he recalled, too small. Wendy wasn’t taking a nap atop the sleeping bag, nor did he see any sign that she’d been there. As he crawled back out, he took one of Juliet’s gold-wrapped chocolates with him. Juliet could operate just on caffeine. He needed food.

  He walked down to the lake, glistening in the morning sun, the water rippling with a cool, steady breeze.

  “Hell.”

  The cracker tin. Ethan made his way over to a three-foot boulder just into the woods and took the tin, pulled off the lid. The dog’s ashes were still there.

  He carefully replaced the lid and set the tin back on the boulder.

  Okay, so Wendy had been there. Where was she now? Hiding? They’d met for only a few seconds in New York—she wouldn’t necessarily recognize him. If he was a teenage girl and saw him marching through the woods, he’d hide, too.

  “Wendy? It’s Ethan—Ethan Brooker, your aunt’s friend.”

  Nothing, just the rustle of leaves in the breeze.

  He’d check the spring. He found the path, less used than the one from the road to Juliet’s clearing, but it was a short walk through the woods to another clearing, with a picnic table, some kind of red-leafed bush, and a wooden sign, which just read, prosaically, Spring.

  But no Wendy Longstreet, sitting in the shade with a book of poetry.

  If she was out here, she was being damn quiet about it.

  Ethan got his chocolate out of his pocket and unwrapped it, popped it into his mouth. It was dark chocolate, filled with gooey caramel. Thick.

  He didn’t know Vermont. He didn’t know the Longstreets. Teenage girls. He was so damn far out of his element, he was eating Vermont-made chocolate.

  A flutter of paper caught his attention, and he picked it up, then saw a wallet—a man’s wallet. And tracks in the grass and mud. A canoe or a kayak had been there, and recently.

  The paper was a boarding pass for Ham’s flight from Dallas to LaGuardia.

  And the wallet belonged to him.

  Ethan took a breath. A red squirrel chattered at him from a hemlock branch. Somewhere in the thickets, a duck squawked. Ham was a genius, but he was also a romantic and an idealist. If he believed his parents had paid off his kidnappers on the sly and in so doing had endangered others, he’d want to make up for their narrow-sightedness, their willingness to put themselves ahead of anything—anyone—else.

  Ethan tucked the boarding pass and the wallet into his jacket pocket and walked out to a pine tree on a rocky point where he had a better view of that end of the lake.

  He stood under the pine tree.

  The squirrel had quieted. He’d scared off the duck.

  Something bobbed in the water out by a small lake house tucked on the shore.

  A kayak.

  Ham sank onto his knees in the tall grass and waited for another poke from Tatro’s walking stick. They’d left the path to the spring and had taken another one, less well-traveled, up to an old board-and-batten barn. It looked empty, long abandoned. They were behind it, on the side overlooking the lake, in what had once obviously been a small field but now was overgrown with briars, grapevines, barberry, honeysuckle and poison sumac�
��probably poison ivy, too.

  The blow came, hard to the small of his back, but Ham didn’t moan or make any noise at all. The last time he’d collapsed, Tatro had threatened to knock him out cold or kill him. Ham had no reason to doubt him. The bastard enjoyed inflicting pain.

  Soundlessly, Ham staggered to his feet. As it was, he’d be pissing blood for a week.

  Tatro leaned in close to him, his foul breath on Ham’s neck. “I want my emeralds.”

  “I’m here to see Juliet Longstreet. The marshal. I told you.” Ham kept his voice low, just as Tatro had. “I’m not lying.”

  “That bitch. Did you give her my emeralds? Did Brooker give them to her? I know you stole them, you asshole. Left me with rocks. What did you do, use them to pay Brooker?” Tatro snorted. “I like that. Stealing from me to pay for your rescue.”

  “That’s not what happened.”

  “I know people who can make you talk.”

  “Yeah? Well, remember, they’re willing to die for the cause. I bet you’re not. You’re just in this for the money. They’re using you. Don’t you see that?”

  Tatro shoved the stick into Ham’s kidneys again, but grabbed him by his waistband to keep him on his feet. Ham’s head spun. No way would he ever tell this bastard that the emeralds were in his kayak. Thank God he’d left his hip-pack behind, after all. Taking Tatro back down to the lake, trying to buy himself time, was out of the question. Too risky. He didn’t want them to run into Wendy. Let her get to safety. Let her get to the cops.

  And once Tatro got the emeralds, Ham would be floating facedown in the lake or dead and buried in some rocky Vermont hole.

  A door to the barn opened. It was a regular door, to Ham’s left toward the far end of the barn. In the middle was a wide door—for animals and wagons—but it was boarded shut.

  “Hang on, Bobby.” Another man’s voice came from inside the barn, quiet and soothing, with an undertone of authority. “Let’s think this through.”