Blood Trails

by Sharon Sala

  Bud saw the tension on her face and a thin bead of sweat on her upper lip. He feared she was holding on to her sanity by a thread.

  “Are you okay?” he asked.

  She nodded, but the grip she had on his hand was almost painful.

  Carver approached. “As soon as they get all the equipment in, you can go down. Fairfield said when they bought the house from Mackey the basement had a new concrete floor.”

  Whit glanced over his shoulder as the last of the crew disappeared. “I’ll take you down long enough to see if anything stands out as suspicious to you, and then you’re free to come back up here or go outside, whichever suits you best.”

  Holly took a deep breath as they moved to the stairs. She paused at the doorway, and for a moment she was a child again, and something bad was waiting down below.

  Bud was behind her. He leaned forward and whispered near her ear, “I’m here.”

  Holly looked over her shoulder. It was the calmness on his face that got her past the fear.

  “Easy does it,” Whit said, and went down ahead of her to steady her descent.

  On the first step Holly began to hear the jackhammers, and the farther down she went, the louder they became. It wasn’t until she was all the way down and standing beneath the lights that she realized no one had started any machinery. What she’d heard had been in her head.

  “So what do you think?” Whit asked.

  She set her jaw and looked down. There had been nicks in the concrete and a low spot beneath the stairs, but now everything was smooth and even. It was definitely a newer floor. She turned around, then gasped.

  “Wait! That’s new, too! It wasn’t there before!” She ran to the wall, slapping her hands against the bricks. “There used to be a door here that led to a small room. That was where I saw the scalps. It was me walking into that room that started this whole nightmare.”

  Bud had to pull her hands away from the wall to make her look at him. “That’s bull, Holly. Don’t even go there. He started it when he began to kill.”

  Her eyes were wild, her body shaking from the stress. “All I know is, the door is gone, which means he didn’t bury my mother under the floor. I’m saying she’s in that room behind that brick wall.”

  Whit stepped forward, defusing the moment.

  “Then the wall comes down.”

  The news immediately changed the work plan. The men abandoned jackhammers for sledgehammers and pry bars as they attacked the wall with energy. The bricks had been stacked and mortared loosely, as if they’d been put up too quickly and without a great amount of skill. They began falling in chunks of two and three. The wall was definitely coming down.

  Holly moved to the far side of the basement, then sat on the steps, refusing to leave. Bud was on the steps above her. She sat between his knees, taking comfort from the pressure of his hand on her shoulder, watching with mounting horror as the bricks gave way to the onslaught of men and tools. Blow by blow, brick by brick, the original wall and the old metal door were soon revealed.

  There was a long, awkward moment of silence as the crew stared at the door, each of them struggling with the idea of what was behind it.

  “Let’s get this over with,” Whit said, but when he reached for the doorknob, there was a hand on his arm.

  It was Holly.

  “Please?”

  His first thought was hell no. He looked over her shoulder to the man behind her. Tate wasn’t happy about it, either.

  “No, ma’am…Holly…you don’t understand what’s in—”

  Holly’s chin jutted. “Yes, I do. It’s my mother. She’s been waiting a long time for someone to find her. It needs to be me.”

  Whit heard someone in the back of the room blowing his nose and felt like crying himself.

  “It might be stuck,” he said.

  Holly pushed past him without comment and grabbed the doorknob in a quick, frantic gesture, almost as if they were fighting a battle of life and death, when in truth death had come a long time ago.

  The doorknob turned, and to their surprise, the door actually swung inward, slowly and with a considerable amount of squeaking hinges, but it was open.

  Holly had been in a state of high panic during the demolition, but now that it was done, an odd calm had settled within her.

  The interior was as dark as Harold Mackey’s heart. She flipped the switch, but nothing happened.

  “Flashlight! Someone hand me a flashlight!” Whit yelled.

  As they waited, Holly’s eyes began to adjust. Even before the flashlight was put in her hands, she’d seen something—something small and crumpled toward the back of the room.

  “She’s in there,” Holly whispered, and then the flashlight revealed the truth. She stared for a moment, her heart breaking with the final proof of her greatest fear, then covered her face and turned away, too devastated to cry.

  Bud had seen enough to give him nightmares, and pulled her out of the doorway and away from the room, leading her upstairs and then out of the house, so concerned for her that he barely registered the fact that the media were on the scene.

  Apparently someone had tipped them off that the police were at the Hunter’s old house, and that they were looking for a body. Camera crews and newsmen lined the street on both sides, interviewing neighbors to find anyone who’d known the Mackeys.

  Holly looked horrified.

  “Don’t look at them,” Bud said. “Sit down before you fall down.”

  There were two wicker chairs on the porch. She sat in one, while Bud took the other. The cameras might be aimed at them, but at least the police were keeping the intruders in the street.

  The men filed past the skeleton at the back of the room like mourners at a funeral. The clothing she’d died in was in tatters, while bits and pieces of mummified flesh still clung to the bones. What was left of her hair verged on disintegration, but it was quickly obvious that she had not been scalped.

  “Lord have mercy,” Whit whispered, and walked away, leaving the rest of what had to happen to the coroner and the techs from the crime lab.

  He came out of the basement to find Cecil sitting at the kitchen table staring at a cup of coffee.

  “Was she down there?” he asked.

  “Yes. But your basement floor is still intact. There was another room he’d bricked off.”

  “It doesn’t matter. We’re putting the house up for sale, although after all of this, it will be a miracle if it ever sells.”

  There wasn’t anything left to say. Whit exited the house, then stopped short when he saw the growing media circus.

  “Well, hell.”

  “They’re everywhere,” Holly said. Her eyes were wide with panic.

  “I’ll get you out of here, don’t worry.”

  “Do they have to know about me?”

  “No, they do not. For all intents and purposes, Mackey confessed to murdering his wife and we just found her body. End of story.”

  Holly looked at Bud. She needed to get him back to bed, but there was another roadblock she needed to face.

  “I can’t have her body yet, can I?”

  “No, I’m sorry, Holly,” Whit said. “Not yet. But you can set everything you need to do in place before you leave, and when the coroner is finished, we can ship her remains directly to Montana, if that’s what you want.”

  “Yes, that’s what I want.”

  “So let’s get you two back to the hotel. I’ll give you the numbers to call and the names of the people you’ll need to see to get this done, so…this is where we part company.”

  Holly stood up, but instead of shaking his hand, she hugged him.

  “You have no idea what all this means to me. I can’t thank you enough for believing my story and forgiving my blunders. You kept us safe and alive, and we’ll be forever grateful.”

  Whit was embarrassed by her praise. “When it came down to it, you two pretty much kept yourselves safe.”

  Then they noticed a commotion at the
end of the front walk. An elderly woman was trying to reach the house, but the police wouldn’t let her.

  “That woman is my old babysitter, Ida Pacino,” Holly told Whit. “She’s the one who gave me the photos, remember? I need to talk to her.”

  Whit waved at the officers, and they let the elderly woman pass.

  Ida was red-faced and wide-eyed by the time she reached the porch steps.

  “Come sit down,” Holly said, and helped her into the chair she’d just vacated.

  “What’s going on? Someone said they’re looking for a body. Is that true?”

  Holly squatted down beside the chair, then took Ida’s hands.

  “I’m going to tell you something, but I’m going to ask that you never tell anyone else.”

  Ida gripped Holly’s fingers. “You know how much I loved you. I wouldn’t do a thing to hurt you.”

  “You know they arrested my father?”

  “Yes! I couldn’t believe it. All that time women were dying and the Hunter was living across the street from me.”

  Holly didn’t bother to point out the obvious, that she and Twila had been living with him, which was immeasurably worse.

  “Yes, and I found out. I was five years old, and I stumbled onto his secret. I told my mother, and it got her killed. We just found her body in the basement.”

  Shock swept through Ida so fast that Holly thought the older woman might faint.

  “Oh, no, no, I can’t bear to think it. All these years he led us to believe you two ran away.”

  “Mother saved my life when she sent me away. I came back to St. Louis to find her. We finally did, and soon I’ll be taking her home.”

  Tears began rolling haphazardly through the road map of wrinkles the years had left on Ida’s face.

  Holly patted her hand. “This leads me to the favor I need to ask. Please don’t mention anything about me, and what I saw and did back then, to anyone. Right now the media doesn’t know who I am, and I want to keep it that way. All they know is that the cops found the Hunter’s wife. My fiancé and I are leaving soon. We’re going home, and hopefully, with time, we’ll put this hell behind us.”

  “I won’t say a word. I swear,” Ida promised.

  Whit frowned. “What are you going to tell the media? You know they’re going to question you when you walk away from here.”

  “I’ll say that the police talked to me because I’m the only one on the street who remembers them living here. End of story.”

  “Thank you,” Holly said, as her focus shifted to Bud. He was tense and sweaty, which meant he was in pain. “Detective, may we please go back to the hotel now?”

  As predicted, when Ida left the premises, the news crews waylaid her in the street. Whit walked his passengers to his car. As Holly settled back in the seat, she looked out at the gathering crowd of onlookers and then stifled a gasp as she recognized a face. It was Lynn Gravitt, Twila’s friend from the cleaners, and she knew who Holly was.

  The woman was crying, and when their gazes met, she lifted her hand once, as if to brush away a fly, but Holly knew she was saying goodbye. Holly put a finger to her lips, as if to beg her for her silence, and the woman nodded, then laid her hand on her heart in a silent promise.

  “Who’s that?” Bud asked.

  “Another angel from Mother’s past,” Holly said.

  Two days later Bud and Holly were packed and in the lobby, waiting for their car to be brought around. When they’d gone to check out, the manager had been waiting with the news that because of the trauma she had suffered under their roof, her entire stay had been comped.

  It had been a nice surprise, for which Holly thanked him. As they got in the car to go to the airport, it began to rain.

  It had been raining when she began her search. It seemed only fitting that it would end in the same weather.

  It was late in the afternoon when they landed in Missoula. To Bud’s disgust, Holly insisted that he be taken to baggage claim in a wheelchair, and he was still in it as they exited the terminal to passenger pickup. They tipped the attendant with the chair and the redcap who’d helped them carry out their luggage, then joined the throng of travelers with the same intention as theirs: to catch a ride to somewhere else before dark. They hadn’t been there more than a couple of minutes before they heard someone honking.

  “There’s Uncle Delbert,” Bud said, pointing at the black Lincoln Town Car from the Triple S that was coming their way.

  “I will be so glad to get home,” Holly muttered. “Even the air smells better here.”

  Bud winced when the car just missed sideswiping a taxi. He should have had one of the ranch hands come get them.

  “You drive, okay?”

  Holly grinned. “Sure, but we don’t want to hurt his feelings.”

  “I’ll tell him I want him to update on what’s been happening on the ride home. He won’t care.”

  The car came to a skidding stop fairly close to where they were.

  “I think that’s about as good as it’s going to get,” Bud said.

  “Do not touch a single bag,” Holly warned. “Delbert and I will get them loaded, then you get him in the backseat with you.”

  “Will do.”

  The ruse worked. Anxious to talk about everything that had been going on at the ranch, as well as curious about the incident that had put Bud in the hospital, Delbert was grateful to turn the car keys over to Holly.

  “Oh, hey, girl, before we get out of here, just drop me by the old folks home,” Delbert said. “I had a couple of the hands follow me into the city, one with my truck, the other in one of the ranch pickups, so he could take the first guy home. Figured you two would want some time to yourselves.” Then he eyed the ring on Holly’s finger. “Looks like my guesswork was right.”

  Bud laughed. “Yes, we’re engaged. Buckle up and I’ll tell you all about it. Holly, honey, do you remember where Big Sky Assisted Living is?”

  “I think so, but if I get lost, one of you will tell me.”

  As she drove away from the airport, it felt as if she were leaving the weight of the world behind. After they dropped Delbert off at the retirement center, she stopped at a supermarket long enough to pick up some quick items for dinner and breakfast. Tomorrow she would make a real list and come back into town, but this would suffice for now.

  Bud waited in the car. He kept wondering when this was all going to catch up with her. Obviously she’d already gone into her caretaker mode by thinking of groceries. But sometime in the next few days, reality was going to hit. She was going to have to cope with her emotions—both ugly and sad. He would be watching, waiting to pick up the pieces.

  The sun was just setting as they drove through the Triple S gate and then down the long driveway toward the ranch house. Delbert had left several lights on inside. The simple gesture did not go unnoticed.

  “Look,” Bud said. “The welcome lights of home.”

  Holly’s vision blurred; then she blinked back the tears.

  “I wasn’t always sure I’d ever see this place again.”

  Bud heard the tremor in her voice, but he wouldn’t let her go there.

  “Me, either, but we made it, and I have to say, I am a whole lot happier now than when I left.”

  It made Holly smile. “Am I going to get any credit for your wonderful change of heart?”

  “You get all the credit,” he said, then opened the garage door with the remote, breathing a huge sigh of relief as the car came to a stop.

  Before they could shut the garage door, Monty, one of the hands, headed inside.

  “Welcome back, ya’ll,” he said. “Thought you might like a little help carrying in your bags.” He eyed Bud’s careful exit. “You okay, boss?”

  “I’m good. I’ll get better.”

  The cowboy grabbed a suitcase in each hand as soon as Holly popped the trunk lid.

  “Thanks a lot, Monty. I’m going to get Bud inside and settled. Just put those bags in the hallway. I’ll tend
to them later.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said, and quickly carried in their luggage, then bade them good-night before going back to the bunkhouse.

  Holly put away the groceries, somewhat surprised at how neat Delbert had kept the place, then went through the house room by room before locking up for the night.

  When she got to her bedroom, she realized Bud wasn’t there. He’d gone to his own room, just like he’d done all the years before.

  She kicked off her shoes and then padded down the hall in her sock feet, looking for her man. His door was open, and he was sitting on the side of the bed, trying to get his shirt over his head. From the pain on his face and his cursing, Holly could see she wasn’t a moment too soon.

  “Hey, I lost you,” she said, as she eased his shirt over his head.

  Bud breathed a quick sigh of relief as he used his good arm to pull her close against his chest.

  “You couldn’t lose me if you tried.”

  “So, about sleeping arrangements…if you’re exhausted and want a bed to yourself, I certainly understand, but if not…is it going to be your bed or mine?”

  Bud laughed out loud, then swooped, kissing her hard and swift. “Mine’s king-size.”

  “You win,” Holly said. “I’ll go get changed.”

  Bud sat down on the side of the bed. “I’ll be right here, waiting for when you get back.”

  Holly eyed the gleam in his eyes and then shook her head.

  “There will be no messing around until you’re better.”

  “I am better.”

  “As long as you have stitches, you are on a sexual diet.”

  She strode out of the room, leaving Bud with smile on his face. He’d heard of all kinds of diets, but that one was a first for him.

  God, but he loved her—every fiery inch of her. He’d seen her face down the devil and come out a winner. He wasn’t about to argue about a little sex.

  Eighteen

  Three days later Savannah called. She and Judd were planning to come home within the next couple of weeks, and they wanted to get married at the ranch.