A Dark Lure

by Loreth Anne White

  He found the building on the corner of Poplar and Main and pulled into an off-street parking space next door, beside the old museum, which was filled with gold rush memorabilia. Displayed in the window of the Forbes Development Corp offices were slick artist’s renderings of a major development. Cole left his father’s Dodge parked on the side of the street, and, shrugging deeper into his jacket against the cold, he walked up to the windows. Another jolt of surprise ran through him when he made sense of the images and renderings. They depicted a high-end boutique hotel and a private plastic surgery clinic right on the shores of Broken Bar Lake where the campsite now lay. Clustered around the main clinic building were patient “cottages.” There was another building marked as a spa, another as a fine dining restaurant, another as a gym. He whistled through his teeth. This was massive.

  Literature beneath the renderings detailed a private clinic that would attract “guests” from around the world who could fly in, or drive, to seek discreet “treatment” in the “clean Cariboo country air” where they could thereafter recuperate in the privacy of their cottages. “Medical tourism” was the catchphrase. There would be horseback trail rides, swimming, birding, guided hikes, and in winter there would be sleigh rides, snowshoeing, and cross-country skiing for those who desired. A shard of irritation sliced through him.

  He moved to the next window, which displayed the rest of his family’s ranch carved into long estates of several acres each, some with lakefront, some with lake views. Prices for the smallest parcels of acreage started in excess of one million.

  What the fuck had Jane gotten him to sign on the dotted line for? This? His father would have a heart attack if he saw this shit. Was Forbes already securing deposits for land that was not his to sell?

  He pushed open the glass door to Forbes Development Corp. The interior was plush in comfortable tones of blue. His next shock was recognition of the woman at the reception desk.

  “Amelia?” he said.

  She looked up, smiled, then her eyes went wide, and she lurched to her feet.

  “Cole? My God, I . . . How are you? What are you doing back here?” Her cheeks pinked. “Heavens, I can’t believe it. I’ve read all your books. Seen your movies.”

  As she was talking, Forbes came out of a door behind her desk. He stalled dead in his tracks. “Good Lord. It’s McDonough. In the flesh.” A flicker of something sharp chased through his eyes, but it was followed by an easy smile with a row of whitened teeth as he came around the reception desk.

  “How are you, man?” He reached out and clasped Cole’s hand with his right, placing his left on Cole’s forearm. “Good to see you.”

  “Clayton,” Cole said as he glanced at Amelia—the woman he and Clayton Forbes had once tussled over in the barn. The first woman Cole had ever kissed. And the body language that passed between Amelia and Forbes did not escape his notice. Old-history dynamics were still at play. And it told Cole these two still had something going on. His gaze went to Forbes’s wedding band. He noted Amelia did not wear a ring. He wondered why she was here, working alone with Forbes on a Sunday.

  “You better come into my office,” Forbes said, holding his arm out, leading the way. His suit was slick, a slate gray with faint pinstripes, ice-blue dress shirt, red tie. Pointed designer shoes.

  A large flat-panel television was recessed into a shelving unit along the left wall of his office. The television was on mute and tuned to the news channel. It showed satellite images of the storm closing in. A ticker tape of text across the bottom informed of an official storm warning. Behind the desk was expensive-looking art showing a ranch scene with rolling gold hills.

  Forbes indicated one of the leather chairs in front of his desk. “Please, take a seat.” He closed the door, went around to his side of the massive, gleaming wood desk.

  Cole remained standing. His gaze went to a framed photo on the desk of a blonde woman and two young kids. “Married?”

  Forbes moistened his lips, and his gaze wavered, almost imperceptibly, toward the closed door behind which Amelia sat. It confirmed Cole’s thoughts—Amelia had not become the bride. Just the mistress. He wondered which was the closer confidante to Forbes. He wondered why Amelia had settled for this.

  “Indeed,” Forbes said. “And loving it. How about you?”

  “Never married.”

  “Look, about your call last night—” Forbes started to say,

  “I’m not going to waste time on a preamble. I came in person to tell you there’s no deal.”

  Forbes’s smile remained unchanged, but his complexion paled slightly and his eyes flattened. Cole understood why—judging from the display in his storefront windows, and from the election banners blaring down the main street, Forbes had a helluva lot riding on a Broken Bar Ranch sale. Cole even felt a small twinge of guilt. He had, after all, signed papers helping pave the way. Then he thought of Olivia. And his father. And the land itself. He thought of the McDonough legacy, his ancestors who’d homesteaded the place.

  “Look, I have a legal document signed by both you and Jane—an official letter of intent to enter into good-faith negotiations with me on the sale of Broken Bar Ranch if and when it comes into your hands. It’s as good as a legal option on the property. Something I have taken to the bank.”

  “I’m sorry. I’m retracting my end of the bargain.”

  He laughed, then his smile died. “You can’t do that.”

  “You can’t do what you’re doing—preselling a development on land that is not even yours?”

  “Yet.”

  “Even if we did sell to you, Broken Bar Ranch falls into the Agricultural Land Reserve. By law it must be used for farming. It cannot be zoned for commercial development. The back half of the property is also environmentally sensitive wetland. I don’t see how you can even begin—”

  “I have assurances from the minister of the environment that the rezoning process for the property will be smooth. Approval to remove Broken Bar from the ALR will be forthcoming, as will impact assessment approvals from all the necessary departments for rezoning.”

  Cole stared at him, a darkness growing in his gut. “And how can any minister give that kind of assurance without the proposal first going through the assessment studies, appeals, public hearings, due process?”

  Forbes leaned his knuckles on his desk, barely masking the fact that his patience was wearing thin. “This is in your interests, McDonough. Don’t push it. You stand to reap a bonanza, and the way Jane tells it, you wanted nothing to do with that run-down hovel of a ranch to begin with.”

  Cole inhaled deeply. “You’d best start damage control,” he said quietly. “Because that development is not going to happen on my watch.”

  “I’ll fight you in court over it. I’ll break you. Mark my words.”

  Cole gave a dry smile. “You might have to wait a long while to get your day in court, because as things stand right now, the ranch will go in trust to my father’s manager.”

  “Not if she leaves. If she leaves, it reverts to you and Jane.”

  “So you do know about the changes to the will?”

  Forbes’s eyes narrowed.

  “Who told you?”

  “That’s immaterial. If—”

  “Was it Adele Carrick? Or Tucker?”

  Forbes’s brows lowered farther, and his eyes turned to flint. A muscle pulsed in his neck.

  Cole leaned forward, palms pressing flat on Forbes’s desk. “Because that’s the other thing I came to say. If you’re trying to scare Olivia off the ranch with those stunts, if you or your people set one foot on McDonough land, or you go anywhere near Olivia, you’re dead, mate. I’m going to see that you’re buried by the full brunt of the law on this one.”

  Forbes raised his chin, looked blank. “What stunts?”

  Something shifted in Cole. “Stalking. Leaving . . . things.”
r />   “What in the hell are you talking about?” He truly looked ignorant.

  On the wall to Cole’s left, the television news segued to the Birkenhead murder. A banner across the top said the broadcast was coming live from a police press briefing. A female cop took a podium in front of a bank of microphones. A photo of a middle-aged woman came up in a window to the left of the screen. They’d identified the victim. The name underneath the photo said Mary J. Sorenson. Cole’s attention was momentarily distracted from Forbes. There was something familiar about the woman. The ticker tape underneath was saying that the photo had been shot in Arizona by her husband and sent to her children via cell phone. It was the last picture taken of her alive.

  Cole frowned, something faint ticking against his memory. Mary Sorenson looked average enough. Squarish face. Nice eyes. Healthy and tanned. Brown hair flecked with gray framed her face. She was dressed in a black tank top, with a soft scarf in tones of gold and yellow and bronze around her—

  “I don’t know what the fuck game you think you’re playing, but hear this—if your father leaves his ranch, even in trust, to Olivia West, Jane and I will drag her backward through the courts. And I will see to it that you are held to your end of the deal.”

  Cole was filled with a sudden sense of urgency as his attention flared back to Forbes. If Clayton Forbes was not messing with Liv’s head, someone else was. And she was out there alone on that ranch with the storm coming.

  “I’ve said my piece. And I’m telling you, back out now of your own volition and start damage control before I talk to the press about my intentions not to sell the ranch. That’ll give your investors serious cold feet. And journalists will have a field day when I tell them about the prime acreages you’ve promised in government kickbacks for rezoning approvals of environmentally sensitive land.”

  Forbes paled. “Who told you?”

  He snorted. “That, my friend, was a good guess. Thank you for confirming it. Quit while you can still avoid prison.” He turned and made for the door.

  “That a threat, McDonough?”

  “A promise.” He reached for the door handle.

  “This is some stupid-ass vendetta—is that what this is about?” Forbes called after him. “You’re trying to take me down because of that day in the barn. It’s about that truck. You couldn’t let that go, could you? You’ve gone and addled your brain like some wasted old fool in Cuba, and this is all you’ve got left?”

  Cole stilled, hand on doorknob. He swung around.

  Forbes’s face had turned thunderous, his skin stretched tight across his cheekbones, his shoulders rigid. He had the look of a coiled serpent. Lethal, as his gaze pinned Cole’s.

  “What truck?” Cole said, voice low, level, cold.

  Forbes quickly began to backpedal at Cole’s pulsating intensity. “Look, whatever Tucker and I did, it’s buried history. Let it go.”

  Cole surged across the room, reached over the desk, and grabbed the man’s collar and tie. He hauled Clayton Forbes halfway across the desk.

  “What truck?” he growled. “What did you and Tucker do?”

  Forbes’s gaze darted around the room, his face going puce. “You can’t prove anything now—”

  “Did you and Tucker Carrick mess with my truck that day?! Did you touch the brakes? Was this because of Amelia?”

  “Unhand me. Or I’ll call the cops.” His hand fingered along the desk, reaching for his phone.

  “Oh, I’d like the cops to hear this. That you and Tucker Carrick sabotaged the brakes on my truck, right before they failed and I lost control on that bend and drove my mother and kid brother into the river!”

  “You going to tell them you’d been drinking, too?”

  Cole shook inside.

  Tucker had always done Forbes’s bidding, since school. He’d lived in the shadow of Cole on the ranch. It was likely him who’d told Forbes about his father’s new will, about Olivia getting the ranch.

  “Is he still your grunt? He messing with Liv now, too? Trying to scare her off Broken Bar so he can get the piece of the land he thinks he and his mother deserve? Is that what you’ve promised him?”

  Another photo came up on the television screen to the right of the cop behind the podium. An image of a man with close-cropped white-blond hair. Cole barely registered it, his attention focused solely on Forbes. Yet a subterranean stirring started deep somewhere in his brain.

  “Where is Tucker now?” he said through his teeth.

  Forbes laughed. “What’re you going to do? Go after him? Kill him? Beat him to a pulp? Bury me? Maybe you should, huh? After all these years. All that blame carried on your shoulders. For little Jimmie and your mother. Drowned in an icy river.”

  Rage blinded him. Almost.

  It took extreme power to hold back. It was what Forbes wanted—for Cole to lose it, assault him. Cross the line of law. He was goading him, and Cole couldn’t be certain it wasn’t a lie, that he wasn’t being set up. He held Forbes’s gaze for several long beats, then slowly released him. Forbes scrabbled back over his desk, pulling his tie straight. Fury crackled in his face.

  “You’re a dead man,” Cole whispered. Then added, “Metaphorically.”

  He stepped out of the office, closing the door behind him.

  “Cole?” Amelia said as she got up. He brushed past her and pushed out the glass door into the cold. The entire framework upon which his world had been constructed was on its ear.

  Was it possible? That he had not been totally responsible for the truck accident? For his mother’s and brother’s deaths? Or was Forbes just messing with his head, trying to goad him?

  Snow was coming down heavily now. Big fat flakes. It was settling on his father’s black Dodge. He thought of Olivia. Urgency mounted. He needed to get back. To her. To his father. Because another thought niggled him as he climbed back into the Dodge and fired the ignition. What if it was Tucker scaring Olivia? Doing Forbes’s dirty work? Could he do worse? Kill?

  People had died for lesser things than a multibillion-dollar medical tourism development, and the political careers that hinged on it.

  Olivia galloped through the snow on Spirit, heading around the west end of the lake on her return to the lodge. There’d been no one at the campsite. Cabins were all cleared out. Winter had come, settling a white hand over the dry grasses, red berries, gold leaves. And for a while the wind had stilled, and everything felt frozen and eerily silent and isolated.

  Mist rose off the black water as Spirit’s hooves thundered on packed earth, and the mare’s snorts crystallized white in the air. Olivia felt focused, emotionless. It was as if she’d come over the mental hump of autumn and now had clear direction into the new season, and little was going to sway her.

  Her next step was to stable Spirit. Already she’d spoken to Brannigan. Her mare would be in good hands. She had enough time to say farewell to Myron and hit the logging road before too much snow had accumulated. She could be in Clinton two hours from now, where she’d refuel her truck, then drive southeast for the Rocky Mountains. The bad weather was heading north. If she was lucky it would still be dry to the east. She could make Alberta by nightfall.

  She caught sight of tracks in the fresh skiff of snow. Smallish footprints. And bigger ones alongside. She reined in Spirit, an eerie sensation crawling over her skin. The bigger boot prints seemed to be about the same size and stride as the ones that had followed her when she’d laid a trail for Ace to follow. The same size as had led into the swamp through the cut fence. She looked up, could see no one. But the tracks were fresh, given the falling snow.

  She detoured her horse, following the prints toward the water. The big prints veered abruptly off into the trees while the smaller prints continued to the dock in the isolated bay at the west end of the lake. As Olivia rounded a clump of brooding evergreens that grew tightly along the shoreline, she saw a small
dark shape huddled at the very end of the long, narrow dock that jutted out into the lonely west bay. She squinted through the mist and softly falling crystals.

  Tori?

  Olivia’s gaze chased quickly across the dock, water, treeline. No sign of anyone else. Perhaps the big prints had been Tori’s father’s tracks. She dismounted, tethered Spirit, made her way along the dock, foreboding sinking into her bones.

  “Tori? Is that you?”

  The girl turned.

  Olivia felt a gut punch. The child’s face was ashen in this light, her eyes black holes. She’d been crying.

  “What’s the matter? Where is your father?”

  “Sleeping.”

  Olivia lowered herself to her haunches beside Tori, who was sitting with her jeans in wet snow, feet dangling over the side of dock, boots almost in the water.

  “What’s the matter?”

  She picked at a thread along the end of her jacket. Snowflakes grew thicker, prettier. They settled on the dock, on Tori’s black hair, on her jacket.

  “Come, let me take you inside. We can ride on Spirit. Would you like that?”

  No response.

  “Tori, talk to me.”

  Wind gusted, sending a dervish of swirling snow over the water. It was beginning to settle fast now. Olivia’s window to get out was closing. Fast.

  “Please, let me take you inside and get you something warm to drink. I’ll find your dad. Was he with you earlier?”

  “He’s not my dad.”

  “Excuse me?”

  Tori’s lip wobbled. “I think it’s all a lie. They were lying . . .” Emotion pooled suddenly and glimmered in her green eyes.

  “Who was lying?”

  Tori reached down the front of her jacket and pulled out an e-reader in a pink cover.

  “I was reading my mom’s last work in progress. She was a writer. She wrote ripped-from-the-headlines fiction. Thrillers and mysteries. Dark books. She didn’t let me read them, but I got them out of the library. She was writing this one before the accident. She dedicated it to me. It says in the front, ‘For my dear Tori, a story for the day you are ready.’ I . . .” Her voice hitched. She bit her lip so hard it drew blood. Shock twitched through Olivia.