by Diana Palmer
“Ludie,” she began, not knowing what to tell her.
“He loved Gimpa,” she added, using the name she’d always called her grandfather.
“We all loved him,” Colie managed.
“My real daddy will make the bad man leave us alone.” Her eyes closed. “I like my real daddy...”
Her voice trailed off.
Colie sat with her, fingers loosely touching the blanket that covered her child, with the weight of the world on her shoulders.
* * *
THE NEXT MORNING, she made breakfast and fed Ludie, who was still far too quiet. As soon as they finished, and she cleaned up her father’s kitchen, she was going to call the law firm where she worked and ask them to send the investigator.
She never made the call. Before she could put away the breakfast dishes, she heard the sound of a key being inserted in the locked front door. The chain latch was on, but a hard shoulder broke it. Colie barely had time to gasp before two men had her cornered, with Ludie, in the kitchen...
* * *
THE SNOW WAS coming down on Skyhorn, Ren Colter’s Wyoming ranch. J.C. Calhoun drove through it without blinking an eye. It reminded him of wild days in the Yukon Territory, when he was a child. He wasn’t from Wyoming, but an ancestor was from nearby Montana. He thought about the ancestor with a grin. He’d have to tell Ludie about him one day, about the Blackfoot warrior who rode with Crazy Horse, an Oglala Lakota, in the Battle of the Rosebud up in Montana.
Ludie. His child. He sighed. He wondered if Colie would ever tell him the truth. He had suspicions, but no facts. He hoped she still had Lucy with her, and that Rod hadn’t shown up with his friend. Later, he was going over to check on them, to make sure.
He spotted a big white blob near the ranch road, next to a fence bent down by a broken tree. Probably the weight of snow and ice had brought down the lodgepole pine. He pulled the truck to the side of the road and got out. Snow peppered down on his short, jet-black hair. He hated hats. Ren was always on him about it. But J.C. had grown up in Yukon Territory, the only son of a Blackfoot father and a redheaded Irish mother. He was something of a rebel. He’d never really tried to settle down. Not until now.
* * *
IT STILL HURT J.C. to remember poor Colie, when he’d confronted her three years ago with what Rodney said she had done. She hadn’t said a word. She’d just sighed and looked at him with those soulful green eyes that could say so much in silence. She wasn’t a forceful woman. Perhaps that was why he’d become involved with her in the first place. She simply accepted what little affection he was capable of, without wishing for more. She’d wanted marriage, but an engagement was all he’d been willing to give her. It was his terms, all the way.
Since childhood, it had been that way. His adoring little Irish mother had protected him from his father’s rages. She loved his father, alcoholic binges and all. Sad to see an educator, a brilliant man, end up so addicted to whiskey that he couldn’t even function in the world. He’d given up teaching for mining, because there was more money in it. And the money and a child, J.C., had killed his dreams of a ranch of his own. No matter how bad it got—and it got bad—his mother wouldn’t leave him. You didn’t desert people you loved, she told him once. You stood by them, no matter what, and never gave up trying to save them.
J.C. had survived a horror of a childhood. He’d grown up and tried to settle into the military, but he was too much of a maverick for the regular Army. He ended up in spec ops. He was working in Iraq when he met Ren Colter, an officer, after a devastating incursion against militants. They’d become friends. Ren had offered him a job, which he accepted.
He liked Ren. The man was as much a maverick as he was, himself. Of course, Ren had married, so the occasional bar fight was now going to become a thing of the past. He liked Ren’s wife. She had an unnatural affinity for animals. Like Colie.
His face tautened as he remembered Colie, weeping without making a sound, tears rolling down from her green eyes like silent streams while he raged at her. Colie, her wavy, dark brown hair soft in the light of his cabin, her pale face drawn from the ravages of morning sickness. He’d finally run out of names to call her. She never said a word. Not even when he put her on the porch in the snow and closed the door.
He shook himself mentally. Looking back accomplished nothing. It only made him sadder. He hadn’t looked at a woman since Colie. He probably never would again. He could see himself as he would be in a few years, grizzled, living alone, at war with the world and himself. It was a lonely life, but it suited him. He had a small cabin on a few hundred acres of land that adjoined Ren’s property, and a few head of purebred Black Angus cattle of his own. Ren paid him a princely salary for heading up the security of the ranch, but he had a sideline of his own. Twice a year he still went overseas to train policemen in some of the most dangerous areas in the Middle East. What he earned, he invested. He was quite comfortable now. But he kept the job, because it challenged him. It was about the only thing in life he still enjoyed.
He got out of the truck and went down on one knee near the cow. She was one of the pregnant heifers, a first-time mother. He grimaced. She was tangled in the wire.
“Just sit still, Bessie, I’ll get you out,” he said, his voice soft and deep. He patted her softly on the head. He went back to the truck to call in her position on GPS and get a pair of wire cutters.
“Better send the sled out,” he told Willis, the foreman. “She looks okay except for the cuts, but better safe than sorry with purebreds.”
“I hear that,” Willis chuckled. “I’ll send Grandy.”
“I’ll wait for him.”
He cut the heifer out of the wire and eased her to her feet. She was wobbly. He felt for breaks in her legs, but he didn’t find any. She was very pregnant. He scowled. He hated the memory of pregnant human females. It brought back so much pain.
He hadn’t thought he cared that much. Not until it was too late. He drew in a breath, feeling the icy fingers of it as it went down his throat.
“You’ll be okay,” he told the heifer in a soft voice. “Just stand...”
He stopped abruptly. He heard a sound. It was an odd sound. Like a child whimpering. He shook his head. He was hearing things. Maybe Ren was right, and he did spend too much time alone.
He went back to put up the cutters. That was when he saw it. Tire tracks. He frowned. Why would there be tire tracks here, on a ranch road, when he knew that nobody had come this way all day? They weren’t covered with snow, which meant they were recent.
He went down on one knee and studied them. Car tires. He knew the difference. He’d worked as a police officer before he went into the military. One of his duties had been accident investigation. He scowled as he saw something else. Blood!
He looked around, alert now. He went back to the truck and opened the pocket, pulling out the .44 Magnum he always carried around the ranch. He stuck the holster on his belt and shoved the sidearm into it. His odd, pale silver eyes narrowed in his olive tan face as he looked around for signs.
There were tracks, leading off the road, near where the cow had tangled herself in the downed fence.
He followed them. Strange tracks. Very small, like a child’s. What the hell would a child be doing here, on a ranch road in the middle of a blizzard? He was getting fanciful. Probably it was some small animal. Still, there were the blood traces...
It came again. Just a whisper of sound, a whimper.
His ears were as keen as his eyes. His head turned. He closed his eyes, so that all his attention was focused on what he heard. There. To the left.
There was a small stand of baby lodgepole pines and snow covering a bush. Under the bush he spotted a white hooded jacket, puffy, like those made with goose down that he’d seen on Colie’s little girl. It was the blob he’d thought was a pile of fallen snow.
He went closer and knelt. He reached out a hand and lightly touched the shoulder of the bloodstained jacket. Eyes the pale gray of a winter sky looked up into his, in a frame of curly reddish-gold hair, in a pale face with red, rosy cheeks and a rosy mouth that looked like a little bow. Tears had rolled down the cheeks.
“Ludie!” he exclaimed. “Dear God, what happened? What are you doing out here, baby?” he asked huskily.
She bit her lower lip. She had eyes that should have held no place in a tiny child’s face. They held the same horror he’d seen in combat veterans’ eyes.
“Can you tell me?” He noted the front of the jacket, where blood was smeared. He scowled. “Are you hurt?”
“N-no,” she whispered. She shivered.
He felt a sudden coldness. “Where’s your mother?” he asked suddenly.
“I don’t know.” The tears came again, hot and copious. She brushed at them with a tiny fist. “Mommy put me out of the car and told me to run and hide. That was before.”
“Before what?”
She sobbed. “Before he...shot her.”
His breath caught. “Who shot her?”
She didn’t answer him. She shivered.
“Who shot her, baby?” he repeated softly.
She seemed to be in shock. “He shot my mommy. I ran and ran. He shot my mommy!”
“Dear God.” There was trace evidence all over her. He didn’t care. No human with half a heart could have left her sitting there in the snow. He pulled her up into his arms and rocked her, kissing her red-gold curls. “It’s all right, honey,” he whispered. “It’s all right, you’re safe.”
He jerked his phone out of the holder and called the county sheriff, Cody Banks.
“Good God!” Cody exploded when J.C. told him what he’d found. “I’ll be right there. I’m less than two miles from your position. Thank God you have GPS. Don’t touch anything. I’ll have Davis meet us here.” Davis was his investigator.
“She said someone shot her mother,” he added. “You have to find Colie!”
“We’re on it. Is the child all right? Should I send an ambulance?”
“Please.”
“We’re on the way.”
J.C. hung up. He brushed back the child’s hair while his heart felt as if it had turned to stone as he thought about what she’d said, about Colie. “You’re going to be okay. Nobody’s going to hurt you. I promise.”
She was still biting her lower lip and the tears hadn’t stopped. “I want my mommy,” she sobbed.
“We’ll find her, Ludie,” he said in a soft, deep tone. “I promise, we will.”
She looked up at him with his own eyes. “Uncle Rod helped the bad man.”
He consigned Uncle Rod to the devil. There would be retribution. God help Rod if Colie was dead.
J.C. stood up with the child in his arms, looking around warily. He’d seen the direction the tire tracks went, toward the Thompson place. How in the world had the child ended up here, and where was Colie? The child said she was shot. What if she was dead? His eyes closed. He felt a shudder go through him.
The child seemed to sense his pain. Her small hand touched his lean, hard cheek. The pale gray eyes, his eyes, looked up at him. “Oh,” she said. She hesitated. “Okay.” She nodded, shaking the long, red-gold curls. She reminded him so much of Shirley Temple dolls he’d seen. She was a beautiful child. “Okay. Mommy’s okay.”
He remembered at the airport when Colie and the child had come back for Reverend Thompson’s funeral. Ludie had been crying. She’d told her mother that her grandfather was dead even before she arrived and J.C. had to break it to her.
“You know things, don’t you?” he asked very softly.
She nodded again. Her small hand was still on his cheek. “You’re my daddy,” she said in her clear, pretty little voice.
His caught breath was audible. She cocked her head and looked up at him. “Bad man hurt my mommy,” she said. “She’s at the house. The house where Gimpa lived.”
J.C.’s heart jumped. He pulled out the phone and called Banks back. “Can you check at Reverend Thompson’s house and see if Colie’s there?” he asked. “Never mind how I know,” he added, glancing at Ludie, who was clinging to him. “Just check.” He sighed. “Sure. Thanks.” He hung up again.
“I want my mommy.” Her little voice broke.
He drew her closer, held her, rocked her, kissed the damp red-gold curls and fought a mist in his pale eyes. Please, God, let Colie be all right, he thought. Please!
Her little arms curled around his neck and she held on for dear life. “I’m so scared,” she whispered. “He hurt my mommy. He said he would hurt me, too...!”
His arms tightened. “Nobody’s ever hurting you. Not while I’m alive. I swear it!”
He felt her relax, just a little, but she was still sobbing.
Sirens burst like bombs onto the snow-muffled silence of tall pine trees and distant mountains.
Sheriff Cody Banks slammed out of his patrol car, followed closely by his undersheriff, Matt Davis, in a second car.
Cody grimaced when he saw J.C. holding the child.
“Don’t you say a word,” J.C. muttered, standing with the child still close. “There’s trace blood by the road, in the depression there where she’s been lying, and on her jacket. More than enough for evidence, despite the fact that I moved her from her hiding place. She says a man shot her mother. She was crying.” He swallowed. Hard.
“I wasn’t going to say anything,” Cody replied gently, wincing as the child lifted her face and he saw the tears and the swollen redness of those pale wintry eyes. “The EMTs are right behind me.”
Even as he said it, the ambulance rolled up with its lights flashing and two uniformed men exited the vehicle with a case.
They examined Ludie while the sheriff’s investigator gathered trace evidence and took photos of the scene, including the tire tracks and evidence that the child had exited a car there.
“She seems okay,” one of the EMTs said, smiling at the child. “But it would be a good idea to take her to the emergency room and get her checked out...”
“No!” Ludie clung to J.C. when the EMT reached for her.
J.C. felt a jolt of possession all the way down his body when she did that. He, who hadn’t ever wanted children, wanted this one with his whole heart.
“I’ll take her there,” J.C. said.
“We can place her in a temporary home,” Cody tried again.
“No!” she wailed, and started sobbing and clinging even closer.
J.C. took a deep breath. “Her mother and I were engaged once,” he told Cody. “I’m family, as near as not. She can stay with me for the time being.”
The child’s arms tightened.
“We’ll work it out with the court,” Cody said, laughing softly as he noted the interaction between the child and the man who hated children. “We’ll need to get her to a psychologist as soon as possible, too. She’s been traumatized. Davis, let’s get to work.”
“Have you checked at Reverend Thompson’s house yet?” J.C. asked.
“My deputy headed there when I started over here,” the sheriff said. “We’ll know something soon.”
J.C. just nodded. He felt sick all over. He couldn’t picture a world without Colie. He didn’t want to.
* * *
THEY FOUND ENOUGH evidence for the crime lab to begin with. By the time it was collected, Cody had the model and make of the car Colie Thompson Howland was in. A surveillance camera that was placed near the highway, on Ren’s land, had recorded the car stopping, the child running away from it. The car belonged to Rodney Thompson, J.C.’s best friend.
Since he and Rodney had parted ways, he’d heard plenty of gossip about the man. The ex-military man ha
d gone from a responsible salesman at the local hardware store to a worthless layabout, a man who dealt drugs and had multiple arrests for possession. J.C. had loved him like his own brother when they first became friends. So quickly, that closeness had disappeared.
Who had shot Colie? The child hadn’t said so, but it was painfully obvious. She’d come out of her uncle’s car. Presumably her mother was still in it, somewhere, dead. Had Rodney shot his own sister? His face hardened. He wanted the man locked up for life. He didn’t realize he’d said it aloud, or with such passion, until Cody answered him.
“My idea, exactly, if we can prove it. I’ve got a man headed at his house right now, in fact,” Cody said quietly. “I want to impound the car before he has time to remove any evidence. And there’s still the issue of finding...” He stopped when he noticed the child looking at him. He didn’t want to add “...the woman’s body,” in front of Ludie.
“I’ll take Ludie to the emergency room,” J.C. said curtly. He wanted desperately to go to the house, to see if Colie was there. But she might not be, and Ludie had to come first. “I know I can’t have any part in the investigation, but her mother and I were engaged.” He bit down hard on his emotions as the words slipped out. “I played chess with her father every Friday night for almost two years. First him, now her... God, it’s just too much!” He drew Ludie closer and looked over her head at Banks. “Call me, as soon as you know something. Will you?”
“I’ll do that,” Cody promised gently. “I’m sorry,” he added, wincing as he looked at the child’s tearstained face.
J.C. was trying hard to contain his own fear and it wasn’t easy. “We’ll go on to the hospital.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
COLIE HAD BEEN making breakfast when she heard a key in the lock of the front door.
Ludie looked up at her mother and winced. “Bad man, Mommy, bad man!” she said urgently.