The Captive

by Fiona King Foster

  Soon Chlorine had pulled plastic bins out of the basement, from which she put together a bag of outerwear to fit Holly and Sal. There was a parka of Lorne’s for Milo to wear, and an old snowmobile suit of Chlorine’s for Brooke.

  Finally, Davey was ready. Outside, Maxwell had saddled the gray gelding and the roan, adding an extra strap to both saddle horns to help Brooke and Milo mount with their injuries.

  “Take care of yourself,” Chlorine said, embracing Davey. “Don’t do anything crazy.”

  “When have I ever?” he answered in his gravelly baritone. “You sit tight with Lynn till I come home.”

  Maxwell clasped hands briefly with her brother and gave his horse a pat, but she did not bid them goodbye or good luck, just watched them leave, much as she’d done a day and a half earlier, with her deputy by her side.

  14

  The night was clear, bright with stars and a full moon. The top layer of snow had melted in the afternoon sun and then frozen again when the temperature dropped after sunset, leaving a paper-thin crust of ice coating the surface. The horses’ hooves punched cleanly through, each hoofmark outlined as if cut from glass.

  Brooke’s shoulder jarred with the gelding’s steps. The injury had gotten worse with each successive dislocation over the years, and the joint was looser than ever now, more liable to fail. She’d strapped the rifle on the left side of her saddle; she’d never be able to lift it, let alone fire, with her right arm. If they found Cawley or Delia before the girls—or worse, if Cawley and Delia already had the girls—her only option would be a one-armed rifle shot. Left-handed. In the dark.

  They stopped a short distance outside town, where a set of tracks met the highway from the south: a messy trench through the snow, clearly visible under the moon.

  “That’s you,” Brooke told Milo, recognizing his gait. “You said you followed tracks back to town?” She turned to Davey. “If we retrace his steps, we’ll be close to the spot where I saw Cawley. I can find it from there.”

  “Hold tight,” Davey said, dismounting with his night vision goggles. “I’ll take a look.”

  Brooke twitched her reins with impatience.

  “Whose trail was I following, if it wasn’t yours?” Milo asked Brooke.

  From the gelding’s back, Brooke studied the snow. Milo’s steps had obscured whatever trail he’d been following almost entirely. Still, she thought she could see something underneath, a separate rhythm.

  “Was the trail definitely made by feet?” she asked.

  “I thought so,” Milo said. “I thought it was you and the girls.”

  “The drag is straighter with a horse,” Brooke said. “Longer.”

  Milo furrowed his brow in concentration. “They did seem long compared to my tracks, I guess. So it couldn’t have been someone walking?”

  Brooke shook her head. “And you’re positive it led toward town, not away from it?”

  Milo threw up his hands in exasperation.

  “There would be scatter,” Brooke prompted. “Each stride is scooped, like a wave; it’s higher on one side. Where the foot steps forward, a bit of snow scatters.”

  “I don’t know,” Milo said. “Everything had melted a bit. There might have been little shallow spots, on the higher places.”

  “Which side of the steps were the shallow bits on? North or south?”

  “South, I think.”

  “Aha!” crowed Davey. He was standing next to a guardrail post, bent double with his goggles. In the lea of the post, Brooke saw a single hoofprint, confirming what Milo had just described to her plainly enough: the trail he’d followed to Buffalo Cross wasn’t made by someone walking in front of him, but by a rider who had already passed in the opposite direction, heading for the woods.

  “Probably Lynn,” Davey said, gratified by his find.

  “Right,” Brooke said, holding back her irritation. The massive hoofprint didn’t belong to Maxwell’s chestnut. It could only have been made by a draft horse. “Regardless, Milo’s trail comes from the place we’re looking for, so can we can carry on?”

  Davey issued a derisive exhale that riffled his mustache, and led the way off the road.

  They followed the trail. Thin shreds of cloud passed like smoke over the moon. Twice, Brooke thought she’d found the slope down to the hemlocks where she’d seen Holly and Sal, only to watch the landscape twist as she passed through it—the forest too small, the hill too steep, the trees wrong.

  Finally, as the trail descended a rocky ridge, Milo’s tracks branched left, across the open slope, leaving the draft horse’s trail clear and open down the ridge ahead of them.

  Brooke’s pulse beat faster. She searched the horizon. The trees were so dark against the wash of stars they looked like they’d been cut out of the sky. Yes, there: to the east, in the lowest lap of the hillside, two tall hemlocks leaning together. The girls had been right there, before they’d hidden when they heard the shots. Any clues to where they were now would begin there.

  “I know where we are, Davey,” Brooke said. “Right before Milo was shot, I saw the kids down there, at the edge of the forest. I remember the trees.”

  “You remember the trees from the day,” Davey said, with a mollifying tilt of his head. “Things will tend to look different in the dark.”

  “Cawley’s trail is that way too. This is the place.”

  “All right,” Davey said grimly. “Show me, then.”

  Brooke led them toward the hemlocks. At the trees, she held her right arm against her chest and gripped tight to the extra saddle strap with her left, making to lower herself down.

  “No need,” Davey said, swinging to the ground ahead of her.

  “This is where the kids were,” Brooke objected. “I need to look for their tracks.”

  “Let me see what the ground has to say,” he said, hefting his goggles.

  “Don’t,” Brooke said, dismounting with difficulty. There was no light here, the moon blocked by the edge of the forest; it would be difficult enough to see anything without Davey blundering over the ground.

  “What do you mean, ‘Don’t’?”

  “It’s not a pissing contest, Davey. I know their tracks. Let me look.”

  “Excuse me? I’m looking for your children’s tracks right now. How about a little gratitude? Pissing contest.”

  “Easy, Brooke,” Milo said. “We know you’re worried about the kids. Cliven understands that. It’s natural she wants to see their tracks, Cliven.”

  “She can’t be flying into hysterics all the time,” Davey said with misgiving. It was exactly as Milo had predicted, Brooke realized. Davey would help only if he was in control.

  “I’m sorry,” Brooke said through gritted teeth. “I just want one quick look. I’ll be careful.”

  “Make sure that you are,” Davey consented, arms crossed. “I can’t have you disturbing the ground or there won’t be anything to see.”

  As Brooke moved under the trees, she felt Davey watching her, waiting to have his expertise called on. If there was ever a justification for night vision goggles, this darkness under the trees was it. Nonetheless, Brooke kept her back to him, resting her gaze on the dark bole of a tree trunk until her eyes adjusted fully to the shadows so she could see the ground.

  There it was. Snow had drifted over their footprints in places, and the melt and subsequent freeze had rounded the edges, but there was no mistaking it. Brooke thought the trail was fifteen hours old. From the hemlocks, it led back into the woods, clear as a freight train. The kids had no sense of how to cover their tracks; Brooke had never taught them.

  “Southeast,” she said, remounting the gelding painfully. “They must have seen me coming after Milo was shot, and tried to find me in the forest.”

  “Hold up,” Davey said, sweeping the ground with his goggles to confirm what she’d found. “We don’t know this is going to take us to Cawley’s trail.”

  “It will.” Brooke hauled her horse around to follow the girls’ trail. �
��He could have them by now. Let’s go!”

  Milo cleared his throat and made a gesture of caution behind Davey’s back.

  “If you agree,” Brooke said, gripping the reins until her fingernails dug into her palms. It took every bit of willpower she had to stay still.

  Davey sat, huffing like a bull. Brooke counted out the seconds in her head. He would go, she was sure—he wanted Cawley—but he would make her wait.

  Fine, Brooke thought. As soon as they had Holly and Sal, she and Milo would make a run for it. If Davey wanted to believe that Brooke was weak, that her purposes came second to his, that she would help him get to Cawley before she carried her own children to safety, or even that he would get his horses back at the end of this, fine. Brooke thought of the grasping deputy riding smugly to his death. If Cliven Davey believed that Brooke and Milo would leave their children in danger one single second longer than they had to, he wasn’t any kind of father.

  A QUARTER MILE into the woods, Holly and Sal’s trail merged with another: Cawley, mounted, and Brooke on foot, following. Davey led, demolishing the traces of the girls’ footsteps. Brooke was quiet, careful not to show him up again. If she kept the gelding to one side and a little behind, she found she could glimpse the ground before he trampled it.

  At a break in the canopy where moonlight beamed down on the snow, Brooke scrutinized the melted edges of Holly’s boot print inside her own. The girls had not been far behind her. Maybe less than an hour. Had they called out for her? Could she have missed that?

  As they rode, Milo drew Davey into conversation, asking questions about the woods, hunting, his tracking equipment. Brooke noticed that the more Davey talked, the less attention he paid to the trail. He was also starting to sound dozy now. It must be well past midnight.

  They ate Chlorine’s sandwiches on horseback as they pushed deeper and deeper into the woods, where scant patches of moonlight penetrated the trees. Wind knocked in bare branches. Owls sent up their chilly calls. Davey fell out of the lead, muttering something about the trail being obvious enough, and then began to lag behind. He was twice their age, Brooke considered, probably used to early nights and a warm bed, being babied by Chlorine.

  When Davey halted so that he could pee under a tree, Brooke brought her horse up close to Milo’s and whispered, “The trail’s going to split ahead. Cawley took the swamp, but the girls will have followed me east. If Davey wants to follow Cawley, we can’t go with him.”

  “Just take off?” Milo looked doubtful. “He won’t go for that. But he’s getting pretty sleepy, and he’s not as good a tracker as you. Even I can see that. He might miss the split.”

  “If we’re lucky,” Brooke said, ashamed of how much this small praise from Milo cheered her. “But if it comes to making a run for it, be ready.”

  Milo moved apart from her as Davey returned to his horse, and they continued on the trail. The moment, when it came, proved easier than Brooke had feared. By the time they reached the swamp, Davey’s eyes were watering from fatigue and he was completely unaware that the stallion’s tracks had disappeared into the water as Brooke turned them east.

  They moved through the cedars. Brooke watched the ground. No other hoofprints appeared. No indication that Cawley or Delia had found the girls’ trail.

  They reached the place where Brooke had veered into the swamp and doubled back to lose her pursuers. Now, she read the consequences of that choice on the ground all around her: a desperate jumble of footprints. Holly and Sal had followed Brooke’s false trail into the reeds, and there they’d lost her. They’d tried one way and then another, their confused trampling returning again and again to the place where her footsteps vanished.

  “It’s kicked up an awful lot here,” Davey observed with a yawn. “Some kind of scuffle?”

  “It must be where—” Brooke grasped for words, crushed by what she’d done.

  “Where Maxwell found you?” Milo suggested.

  “Right,” Brooke said. Never mind the obvious absence of hoofprints leading to this place or away from it. Davey had stopped even trying to read the ground.

  There was a flattened patch where Holly and Sal had stopped to rest. They would have been delirious with exhaustion, freezing in their wet clothes. But they had kept moving eventually: one trail resolved from the flattened spot, carrying on southeast, following the bend of the swamp.

  “Cawley won’t find much that way,” Davey said, falling into step behind Brooke. He was more asleep than awake now. “Probably trying to avoid the highway. Knows what’s coming for him.”

  “Why this way?” Milo whispered, when Davey had fallen far enough behind for Brooke to explain what had happened. “If they lost your trail, why wouldn’t they just go back the way they came?”

  “I don’t know,” Brooke answered. “They’re lost. They don’t know which way anything is.”

  “No . . .” Milo knitted his brows. “That’s not right. That hunting blind is next to this swamp.”

  “So?”

  “We always told them, if we got separated, to go back to the last place we were together.”

  “You think they’re looking for the blind?”

  “You know Holly. She wouldn’t quit until she came up with something. She would have a plan.”

  It was true. After a while, only the larger set of prints showed, the heel prints deeper than they had been before. Brooke’s heart lurched: Holly was carrying her sister.

  THE MOON SET and the stars faded ahead of the dawn. Davey sniffed awake and fell asleep again every few minutes, but his horse followed the other two faithfully. Brooke and Milo passed a jar of Chlorine’s cold coffee back and forth between them. They had left the forest and the swamp behind. If Holly was looking for the hunting blind, she had missed it. In the dark, it would have been easy to lose the branching and uneven edge of the swamp.

  The trail now followed a shallow gully through tufty flatland. They were gaining on the girls; the trail here was only eight or ten hours old.

  The snow lightened to ash and then glowed blue with oncoming daybreak. Suddenly, without warning, the footprints that had carried on for so many miles with astonishing endurance turned abruptly aside into a tangle of bushes. Another flattened patch, tucked under a shelf of juniper. The girls had hidden here.

  “Something scared them,” Brooke said. But when she and Milo looked around for the continuation of the trail, they couldn’t find it.

  “They can’t have just disappeared,” Milo said.

  “Up here,” Davey called sleepily. He had ambled on, half-awake, when they stopped to examine the girls’ hiding place, and now he gestured to them from a dozen yards up the gully.

  Brooke and Milo rode to meet him. He was standing in a horse trail.

  “What?” said Brooke, disbelieving. “Whose are these?”

  “Cawley’s, of course,” Davey scoffed, still unaware that they had ever left Cawley’s trail.

  “But the girls . . .” Milo looked back at the juniper bush.

  Brooke dismounted to examine the prints. They could be Cawley’s. They looked like the ones she’d followed to the swamp the day before. Brooke tried to gauge the timing of his passage. There were flat, hexagonal snow crystals in the stallion’s prints. Brooke hadn’t noticed any of those in the girls’ trail.

  “They missed him,” she said with relief. “The kids were here later than Cawley. Not much. Less than an hour, maybe.”

  “How do you figure that?” Davey asked, skeptical.

  But Brooke wasn’t listening. Mixed in with the smaller, more delicate steps of the stallion, she had noticed the plate-sized hoofprints of a draft horse, and there were none of the hexagonal flakes in them. Brooke dropped from the saddle and crouched, peering closely at the ground. Where one of the massive prints overlaid the stallion’s, it was clear that the first trail had already been frozen: a splinter of ice stood up from the stallion’s print where the larger hoof had crushed it.

  “Another rider was here after C
awley,” Brooke said with a sinking feeling. “Close to the same time as the kids.”

  “Two riders?” Davey sounded annoyed now. “Where are you getting all this?”

  “The prints are completely different sizes,” Brooke said, heedless of her tone. “The second one’s a draft horse.”

  “I think she’s right,” Milo said. “They look different to me.”

  “Well, now, it could be,” Davey said, grinding his eyes between a thumb and forefinger. “That burned-up woman at the Legion. She had a draft horse.”

  “That’s what scared them,” Brooke thought aloud. “Holly and Sal were here after Cawley, but then De— the second rider showed up and they hid.”

  “I forgot all about her,” Davey said. “Damn it, I’ll bet she’s after that bounty. She cleared out quick enough when she heard about Cawley passing through.”

  “She was here the same time as the kids,” Brooke repeated, her voice rising with anxiety.

  “Then where are the kids?” Milo blanched. “What happened to their tracks?”

  “Maybe she gave them a ride to the highway,” Davey said. “That horse of hers could carry an adult and two kids easy.”

  Brooke turned to hide her face. Holly and Sal had no way of knowing who Delia was. They would have climbed up willingly, glad for warmth and a rest from walking.

  She thought of Robin in the alley, lying where he fell. Then she pitched forward and vomited the little that was in her stomach.

  “We don’t know for sure it’s her,” Milo said, reaching down from his horse to touch Brooke’s back. “Not really.”

  Brooke stared up at him mutely, feeling the warmth of his hand, letting the din fade in her ears.

  “What’s the issue?” Davey asked. “You ought to be glad. They’ll be warmer on a horse. Plus, the extra weight will slow that woman down. Now let’s get a move on. She’s not getting Cawley if I can help it.”

  Brooke stood, wiping her mouth. The kids’ footprints were gone. It was the only trail they had.

  They rode fast through the morning and into the afternoon. The distance between them and their quarry began to shrink. Cawley and Delia had each been on the trail a full day longer than they had, and it showed, with the draft horse losing speed faster than the stallion—slowed, perhaps, by extra riders.