A Dark Lure

by Loreth Anne White

  A whip of panic hit him. He tamped it down.

  Panic was a mug’s game. It would kill them. If they died, Olivia died. Their staying alive was her only hope right now. But his fear continued to ride his back like a dragon.

  Without fear, there cannot be true courage . . .

  Did he not write those lines himself?

  Reaching for his mike, he keyed his radio, put out a call.

  No response.

  He fiddled with the frequency, tried again. Still nothing. He replaced the handset. He’d try again farther north. If he could get through on the radio, he might find someone who could get word to the Watt Lake police. He also had his cell in his jacket pocket. Once they were closer to Watt Lake, there was a chance of reception.

  He spoke to Burton through his headset. “You’re certain that Tori is Olivia’s child?”

  Burton was strapped in the seat behind him, Ace wedged tightly between his legs. Myron had given Cole a tracking line and harness for Ace, which Olivia kept in the lodge.

  “There’s no doubt,” came the voice through his headset. The man sounded defeated.

  Another blast of wind slammed them across the flank. They seesawed wildly. Heart jackhammering, Cole struggled to bring his bird back under control. But he was still droning blindly forward into dense fog and cloud.

  “I did it because I love her,” said the voice in his earpiece. “I brought Tori here because she has nothing else. It was the right thing.”

  The man was trying to convince himself.

  Cole clenched his jaw. The things one does for love . . .

  What he and Holly had done for Ty was done out of love, too. They both thought at the time that they were doing the right thing by taking him on their travels, homeschooling him in exotic places. Dangerous places . . .

  A dark shape loomed suddenly in front of the plane, rushing toward them. Cole’s heart leaped to his throat. He opened the throttle, pulling the nose back into a sharp climb. Too sharp. The engine whined. They went up, up, but the black shape rushed closer.

  Shit. They were heading into a cliff, they weren’t going to make it—

  Can you pinpoint the exact instant your life first starts on a collision course with someone else’s? Can you trace back to the moment those lives did finally intersect, and from where they spiraled outward again . . .

  Tori stared out the window, thinking of words in her mother’s manuscript. The world outside was like a crazy-mad snow globe. Not much different from how she felt inside, her thoughts swirling like those fat, cold flakes settling white over the ground and trees and changing the way everything looked.

  She rubbed her arms despite the warmth in the library. Her jacket was hanging over a chair, drying beside the fire, which crackled and hissed.

  Myron hunkered in his wheelchair beside the hearth, his gray head bent forward as he read her mother’s manuscript. She’d had to show him how to turn the e-reader on, and how to turn pages—he’d never seen an e-reader before.

  Tori glanced over her shoulder.

  He sensed her eyes on him and glanced up over the top of his reading glasses. He looked uncomfortable.

  “You want to put another log on?” he said.

  In silence she went over to the fire and drew back the grate. She took a split log from the giant copper scuttle at the side of the hearth and tossed it into the flames.

  “You could put a couple more on,” he said.

  She placed two more logs onto the fire. It hissed and spat and smelled like pine resin. She drew the grate closed.

  Myron studied the flames, deep in thought, then said, “Your mother is a good writer.”

  Her lip started to wobble. She wanted to say that Melody was not her mother, but couldn’t.

  He scratched his beard. “Can you make us some tea? And sandwiches?”

  She nodded.

  “I take my tea black, strong, with three sugars.”

  She got up and found her way down into the kitchen. There was a bread box, a kettle. In the fridge there were cold meats, cheeses. She found mugs. She boiled the water and buttered the bread, feeling numb. The house felt big and empty all around her. Outside it seemed to be growing darker.

  She carried the tray upstairs, balancing carefully so as not to spill, and placed the tray on the buffet in the library.

  Myron reached for the pills on the table next to him, tipped four into his palm.

  “You should have two,” she said.

  His gaze shot to hers, held.

  She suddenly felt hot inside, but stood her ground. “Cole said so. He said it was important.”

  He hesitated, put two back. He swallowed them with water, wincing as they went down.

  She brought him a plate with two sandwiches and a mug of hot tea.

  “What kind are these?” He lifted the top off one sandwich.

  “Cheese and salami with some lettuce,” she said, taking a seat opposite him.

  “You like that kind?”

  She shook her head. “Yes. I dunno. My dad likes cheese and salami.”

  He gasped suddenly and doubled over in his chair.

  She lurched to her feet. “You okay?” Her gaze darted to the table. “Do you need more pills?”

  He waved his hand, his eyes watering. He was trying to breathe.

  Panic kicked through her. She placed her hand on his shoulder. “Mr. McDonough, please . . . what can I do?”

  He gasped, coughed, sucked in a great big wheezing breath, and struggled to sit up straighter in his chair.

  “Tea,” he managed to say. “Hot tea would be good. It’ll melt those damn pills faster.”

  She handed a full mug to him with both hands, ensuring his gnarled fingers were wrapped safely around it before she let go. Her eyes met his. He sipped. The warmth seemed to aid him, because color returned to his face.

  “This is damn fine tea, Tori Burton.”

  She said nothing, just slowly backed up to her chair and reseated herself, nervous that he was going to die or something with her all alone here in this big hollow log house in the wilderness.

  He studied her a while. “You not going to have some?”

  She shook her head.

  “You know something? This is going to be rough.” He nodded to the e-reader on the little table beside him. “No one can kid you otherwise. It’s going to take time, lots of time, to assimilate all this. But your dad did something incredible by bringing you here. Do you know why?”

  She shook her head.

  “Do you know what happened to Sarah Baker?”

  “No,” she said softly.

  “I think I know what happened to her.”

  She waited, her heart quickening. But he turned and stared into that fire again, and he rubbed his whiskers. He shook his head slowly, his bushy brows lowering over his deep, gray eyes.

  “Sebastian George died in prison,” he said slowly, quietly, as if picking his words very carefully. He met her gaze again. “He was the one who took Sarah Baker.”

  She nodded.

  “Well, when he died over three years ago, I received an application for employment from a young woman. She was a special person. I could see that right off. Don’t ask me how.” Creases folded around his eyes as he smiled a sad sort of smile under his whiskers. “I had grown into a crusty old codger who didn’t care for much, but somehow she got to me. She had these really bad scars on her wrists.”

  Tori’s heart beat faster. She held his eyes, intent.

  “It looked to me as though this woman had tried to kill herself. She also had a beat-up-looking German shepherd, and I thought to myself, these two have been through the wars. Well, I checked out her résumé, and it all added up, but only to a point. Everything about this woman seemed to go back only as far as eight years. Do you know why?”

&nb
sp; Tori shook her head.

  “Do you know who I am talking about?”

  “Olivia,” she said quietly. “And Ace.”

  He nodded. “And I think her records went back only eight years because that’s when she changed her name from Sarah Baker.”

  Tori stared. She tried to swallow.

  Myron leaned forward in his chair. “I never asked her about her past, or her family, or where she was raised, not until recently. But I suspected terrible things, and slowly it’s all started to add up. And you know what else? I think that’s why your father brought you here. To meet her.”

  Tori’s insides started to tremble. Her eyes started to pool with moisture. She wanted to look away, but couldn’t. She held the old man’s eyes.

  “Olivia—Sarah—is one of the finest people I have ever met. A heart as big as those woods and wilderness out there. A brave and powerful woman. Courage like a mountain lion. All of that is inside you, Tori Burton, if what this book says is true. And that is why your father brought you here. To meet your mother. For you to see how much good is inside you, what kind of blood and heart runs through your body.”

  The moisture in her eyes slid hot down her cheeks. She couldn’t breathe.

  It took several minutes before she could speak again.

  “I hate him.”

  “Who?”

  “My dad. My . . .”

  “I don’t know exactly what is happening with that terrible murder news, Tori. Or who exactly has taken Olivia, but”—he glanced at the e-reader—“from the words in there, your father is a decent man. A man with principle. A man prepared to stand against the fierce current of a river when everyone else is trying to go the other way. Whatever your father has done now, I think he’s trying to set it all right. For you.”

  “He’s leaving me. He’s dying. I have no one.”

  “All the more reason to set the world right for you, then. All the more reason to bring you home to your biological mother.”

  She rubbed the knee of her jeans, anger, fear darkening her thoughts, tightening her face, her neck.

  “I know it’s easier to throw up angry walls, kid. By God, do I know. Much easier to strike out at the world and cling to the bitterness. But it cost me. Instead of opening my heart and trying to build something stronger upon the foundations of a tragedy, I tightened up and cut off my own children, my own family. Look at me now.”

  Slowly she raised her eyes.

  “An old badger with no friends. No family around him. No grandchildren. No legacy for my farm. What’s it all worth . . .” His voice faded. He cleared his throat. “Sometimes life gives you a second chance.”

  “Like those nymphs,” she said quietly.

  He frowned. “You mean—”

  “Damselflies. They get a second life.”

  “Olivia told you that?”

  She rubbed her knee again. “You think she’ll come back?” she whispered. “You think she’ll be okay? Ace, Cole . . . my dad . . .” Tears pricked into her eyes again. She swiped at them angrily with her sleeve.

  Myron was silent for several long moments. Wind moaned up in the chimney. She couldn’t look at him. She felt his discomfort.

  “There’s a white plastic box in my study,” he said suddenly. “It looks like a construction worker’s toolbox. It’s got a slate-blue bottom and a blue handle. It’s on the bottom shelf nearest the window that looks over the lake. Bring it to me, will you?”

  “Why?”

  “I want to show you something.”

  She found the box and brought it to him. He asked her to move a bigger table closer and to draw up a chair.

  She did.

  “Now, pour me a whisky—from that bottle there. Not too much.”

  She went to the bottle. There was a glass beside it. She unscrewed the cap, poured.

  “Yes, that’s good,” he said.

  She brought the glass to him. He swallowed the whole lot in one gulp, inhaled, eyes watering. He wiped his brow with his sleeve.

  “You in pain?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Old age, that’s what. My time on earth is done. Wasted bloody time.” He struggled to open the clasp of the box with gnarled fingers, blue veins standing out on the backs of spotted hands.

  She watched him wrangling with the clasp for a few moments, then reached over and did it for him.

  The box opened to reveal shelves that concertinaed out in stepped layers like a sewing box her mother once had. Lots of little compartments tucked into each shelf were filled with sparkling beads, a rainbow selection of shimmering threads on wooden spools. Hooks, gleaming silver, of different sizes. Feathers and animal-hair swatches, some of it dyed bright colors.

  He reached for his reading glasses and set them askew on his craggy face.

  He affixed a metal clamp device onto the table, and twisted the screw on the bottom to hold it steady. With trembling fingers he inserted a tiny silver hook into the pincer at the top, and tightened another screw, securing the hook.

  He looked up, over the rim of his reading glasses. “’Nother whisky might help. For the pain, mind. A dying man’s purview. Not every day, you understand.”

  She smiled. “I’m almost twelve.” It just came out. A need to say it. Share something of herself.

  “I know.”

  She topped off his glass, adding a wee extra splash for good measure. She brought it to him and he took another sip, smaller this time.

  She angled her head, watching him. He was crusty. But she decided she liked him. He said things like they were. Tori placed a high value on this.

  “How old are you anyway?” she said.

  He chuckled. Then his smile faded. “Old enough to have had a good run on this earth, kid. Take a seat next to me here.”

  She did. “What if they don’t come back?”

  “They will.”

  “I don’t believe that you know it for certain.”

  “Kiddo, you need to believe. Now come, we’re going to tie a fly.”

  “What kind?”

  He peered over his glasses. “A damselfly.”

  He showed her how to pick the colors and wrap them tightly around the hook, forming the body with shimmering blue bars with black bands. He showed her how to make the wings. He let her have a go at winding thread and picking eyes. They made several flies, some really bad, but she was getting the hang of it. They worked and she copied, and the grandfather clock ticked. He drank more whisky, and she fed the fire.

  “Do you think they watch down on us, Tori—the dead?”

  “I . . .” She inhaled deeply. “I think my mom does.”

  He nodded. “Grace, too. My wife.”

  “I think the dead see everything. And from up there in the stars, everything makes sense. It has a design.”

  He crooked up a hairy gray brow. “Do they forgive you, do you think? From up there?”

  She thought on this a while. “Yes. They do. They know that you don’t have the same perspective that they do, so you make mistakes. You make wrong decisions even though you think they’re right.”

  “You’ll forgive your father, then? For any mistakes?”

  She looked down at the shimmering gossamer blue thread in her fingers. In her mind’s eye she could see the damselfly alighting on her jeans . . . but before she could answer, a great big booming thundered up the stairs.

  She tensed. Myron’s head snapped to the door, his eyes going wide.

  The banging continued. Voices reached them. Men outside. Yelling, screaming.

  Myron quickly rolled his chair over to the wall, took down his shotgun from a bracket. “Stay there.”

  “Where are you going?”

  The banging sound boomed up the stairs again, reverberating through the big empty
lodge house. Her heart raced.

  Myron flung open the window, peered down.

  Voices reached in through the open window. “Clinton RCMP. Police! Open up!”

  CHAPTER 24

  Cole braced for impact as he fought to pull the nose higher. Suddenly, wind slammed the Cub along the flank and they were thrust sideways, forcing him to bank sharply to the left. Another force of wind, big downdraft, hit them from the top, and the plane plummeted like a rock.

  Just as he thought they were going to enter a death spiral, they were flung upward again by a rush of air deflecting off the mountain in front of them. It shot them way up, like a cork in a wild waterfall current. He struggled with the controls to keep his wings level, opening the throttle, racing with the wind, riding it like a wave, and abruptly, they popped out above cloud.

  His heart hammered.

  His skin and shirt were drenched.

  The engine droned loudly in the sudden quiet. Behind the tail of his plane he could see the gray—a roiling, churning hump of air—the storm they’d just punched through. It curled and crawled behind them like deadly smoke trying to reach out and grasp them back in as they headed north. All he had to do was keep outrunning it now.

  Yeah, right. And he had to find that truck and camper before the weather monster swallowed them up again.

  He wiped his brow with his sleeve.

  “Shit,” came the word through his headset.

  He gave a snort. “Got that right.”

  Below them lay a shining ribbon of road yet to be covered by snow. The northern highway. Vehicles moved steadily back and forth along it. Cole banked, descended, and began to follow the strip of road, watching for a camper on a gray truck. He figured whoever had Olivia would have ditched the boat and trailer long ago.

  He tried to calculate distance from Broken Bar versus how fast the camper could conceivably have been traveling along the snowy logging roads. If Olivia had been abducted three hours ago, at a max speed of sixty kilometers per hour for the most part, then faster once the camper hit the highway, the bastard who took her could have made it well over 180 klicks north by now.