If I Didn't Care

by Kait Nolan

  Inez met him inside the door. “Everything’s been passed out and set up as you asked.”

  “Thank you, Inez. Has there been anything else?”

  “We’ve made calls to all the hospitals and doctors in the area. And Raines thought to call all the pharmacies to be on the look out for anybody buying up large quantity of wound care supplies.”

  Because Autumn was hurt, bleeding. “That was good thinking,” he choked out.

  “Darius found someone else at the motel who is reasonably certain that Jebediah left sometime between 6:45 and 7:30 this morning. He’s working on finding corroborating evidence.”

  “Maybe this will shake some out.”

  “Wait, Judd.” The older woman laid a hand on his arm. “Your family is in the conference room.”

  He’d have to deal with their shock and grief and fear. He was barely keeping his own in check. But he’d do what had to be done.

  “I’ll see to them after.” Judd took a breath and stepped back outside.

  The roar of questions began again. He just stood, glowering, until they silenced themselves.

  “My name is Judd Hamilton. I am Chief of Police here in Wishful, Mississippi. There will be no questions. As of approximately 8:30 this morning, local woman Autumn Buchanan was run off the road in her 2010, white, Toyota Camry on County Road 384 in Wachoxee County. She was pulled from the wreckage of her car and abducted. It is believed she is in the company of Jebediah Buchanan, who is in direct violation of a restraining order. You should all have been provided with recent pictures of them both. He is a convicted felon, recently paroled. He may be armed and should be considered dangerous. Do not engage him yourself. If you have any information on the whereabouts of either of these individuals, please call either the Wishful Police Department or the Wachoxee County Sheriff’s office. That’s all.”

  Despite his proclamation, questions burst out the moment he stopped speaking. Ignoring them all, Judd stepped back into the station.

  “Spence, the incident board is in my office. Please bring Marshal Greer up to speed.”

  “Got it.”

  The two men disappeared, and Judd braced himself for what was coming.

  Conference room was really a misnomer. The space served as meeting room, interrogation, storage, and break room, housing a mini fridge and a microwave. And right now it housed his family, who’d be out of their minds with worry.

  He opened the door.

  His mother was weeping on his father’s shoulder. God. He had to hold it together for her. Both the twins looked ready to break some heads.

  “How bad is it?” Owen asked.

  “We don’t know yet.”

  “How could he get to her?” Patty asked, and Judd felt the question like an accusation.

  He kept his voice as level as he could. “It seems he ran her off the road.”

  “And no one saw?” Eli demanded.

  “She wasn’t on the highway. We don’t know why yet.”

  “Oh God,” Patty sobbed.

  “What can we do?” Leo asked.

  Judd thought of the six hundred square miles of territory they needed to cover and their total lack of leads. He wouldn’t tell them that, wouldn’t take away their hope.

  “Call Nanna. Get on the phone to Aunt Annabelle and Uncle Nathaniel. You’re going to organize a family reunion.”

  They all stared at him.

  “Everybody,” Judd continued. “All the cousins. All the aunts and uncles. At the farm, for, say, weekend after next, if you can pull it together. You’re going to organize a family reunion and we’re going to celebrate. Because I’m bringing her home.” If it’s the last thing I ever do.

  Chapter 19

  Mark had finished the third book. He’d taken the partial draft she’d written, when she’d intended for Darcy to end up with Fletcher, and he’d finished it out. Over the past twelve hours, she’d read it. Narratively, his solution to the plot problems that had been plaguing her wasn’t bad. It certainly wasn’t what she’d have done, but it was an interesting twist. The objective writer in Autumn could see that and appreciate the creativity involved.

  The rest of her was trying not to flip out because the man was bat shit crazy—a fact made more difficult to cope with because she lay on the bed, trapped between him and the wall.

  He’d insisted on sleeping on the outside to keep himself between her and anybody who might burst through the door. More likely it was to keep himself between her and the exit. Not that she was in any shape to make a break for it. Her ankle was banged up pretty badly. Mark said it’d been pinned in the car. She was actually grateful for her injuries. Without them, he might’ve tried to get intimate. Darcy and Fletcher had been lovers, after all.

  Over the course of the day, she’d carefully poked at the edges of his delusion, trying to sort out the extent of his fantasy. He’d had some kind of break with reality. He’d cast her as Darcy, himself as Fletcher, and Judd as a secretly corrupt Cooper. She’d worried initially that this was some kind of twisted Misery scenario. But he’d been kind, gentle, loving even. In the books, Fletcher truly loved Darcy, and it seemed Mark had embraced that. No matter what other lunacy was going on here, she was reasonably confident he wasn’t going to hurt her. For now.

  She recognized crazy. Her entire childhood had been spent trying to cope with it from her father, so she understood that no matter how docile Mark seemed now, saying or doing the wrong thing could flip the switch. Every suggestion she’d made about seeking help or relocating to somewhere safer was met with determined refusal and an escalating agitation that reminded her far too much of her father when she’d questioned the “word” of the Holy Spirit. He could and would keep her safe right here. He had no intention of letting her go. When pressed to lay out their assets and forms of protection against Manigault and his cronies, he’d produced a crossbow. No doubt the one he’d used to shoot at Judd. He also had a hunting rifle and enough ammunition to last at least a few days in the zombie apocalypse.

  The only way out of this was to actually be her heroine.

  What would Darcy do?

  The refrain echoed through her head.

  She could just see a stretch of water through the trees when she’d looked out the window. Was it Hope Springs? She’d been unconscious for less than three hours. Given her location at the time of the accident, the amount of time it would’ve taken him to pull her from the car and treat her wounds when they’d reached the cabin, Hope Springs seemed the most likely. But that was a several thousand acres of water, many miles of shoreline. Mark hadn’t let her go outside, saying it was too dangerous. Did that mean they were near enough to someone else to be spotted?

  She gave some thought to trying for the cast iron skillet, dropping him as she had her father all those years ago, and making a run for it anyway—ankle be damned. But Jebediah had been drunk and slow. Mark was neither. And if she failed…she didn’t want to trust his delusion of affection would survive an attempt to crack his skull.

  The cabin had no TV, no radio. Mark had a cell phone, but there was no reception. He had a laptop, but what good was that without internet? Even with her considerable ability to lose herself in story, she didn’t think the book was going to get her out of this mess.

  Or would it?

  For Mark, the books were all a part of a complicated plot to expose the machinations of Vincent Manigault to the world, and Mark’s answer to beating the villain at his own game, was to get the third one published and into the hands of the public. In order to do that, he’d have to get to an internet connection. He’d never let her do something like send an email, but maybe she could embed some kind of message or clues into the book itself. She had a rabid and often clever fanbase. But how could she hide clues in the story that they’d actually act on?

  The question and the pain kept her awake through the long hours of the night. By dawn, when Mark stirred beside her, she had the answer.

  “I think we should go ahead and push t
he book out.”

  He blinked at her. “What?”

  “You’re right. It’s the best way to stop Manigault. Expose him and take away his power. The sooner the better.”

  Mark frowned, pushing himself up in bed. “Have you been up all night?”

  “Most of it. Hurt too bad to sleep.”

  “Baby, why didn’t you wake me up to get you some pain killers? I’ll get some ibuprofen.”

  “That’d be great. But think about it, Fletcher. The sooner we expose him, the sooner everybody is safe.”

  He came back with some water and a few pills. “You make a good point, but I can’t think about saving the world until I’ve had coffee.”

  “Go make coffee, but bring me the laptop. I’ll get started on the formatting.”

  “Formatting?”

  “Of course, formatting. You didn’t think you just uploaded a Word file and were done with it, did you?”

  “I hadn’t thought that far,” he admitted.

  Thank God laymen don’t generally know how self publishing works.

  “I have. I’ve done this before, and I’m good at it. It’s just code. Give me the laptop and I’ll get it done.”

  He brought her the laptop and started on the coffee. She made a normally formatted file first. She’d have to show him the alleged final product before he’d be willing to do it. Then she started on the real file. Proper ebook formatting could absolutely be done without coding, but hiding it from Mark? That necessitated diving into the terrifying looking language of HTML. She just hoped Mark didn’t understand how to read it.

  ~*~

  Twenty-four hours since Autumn was kidnapped and they had no leads.

  Judd didn’t know what to do with that. Every avenue he’d tried had resulted in a dead end. Jebediah had no remaining property in the county. A search had been made of any places he might’ve spent time growing up, but no sign of him or his car was found. Any extended family had long since left the area, estranged from Jebediah and his religious extremism. Those they’d managed to track down denied having had any contact with him. Despite the calls coming in on the hotline, no other tips had panned out.

  With every minute that ticked past twenty-four hours, the chances of finding Autumn alive shrunk exponentially. Judd wanted to scream. To beat something. To rewind to yesterday morning and forbid her from going to Nanna’s alone.

  He sat in his office, the bottle of her heart meds in his hand, as if it were going to miraculously open a telepathic link so she could tell him where she was. How far past her last dosage was she? Was she managing to control her blood pressure? Or was he actively beating or torturing her until her fragile heart gave out?

  “Whatever you’re thinking, stop.”

  Judd looked up to find Ethan Greer with two to-go cups of coffee in his hands.

  “You’re obviously going down a dark road. That won’t help her. So stop.” The other man held one of the cups out. “Here. I’m told it’s called a zombie killer. A woman from the coffee shop—purple streaks in her hair—dropped off a tray of them.”

  Judd rubbed at his aching eyes and took the coffee. “Cassie.”

  Ethan sank into a chair and sipped his own coffee, humming in approval. “Damn sight better than the sludge I’m usually drinking during investigations.”

  “Cassie’s good about that.”

  “Nice woman. Nice town,” Ethan remarked.

  Judd said nothing, just held the coffee and remembered the one Autumn had brought him at FountainFest.

  “Nothing useful has come back from the regional team,” Ethan reported. “The maroon Tauruses that were spotted belonged to other people, and no one has seen anyone matching Jebediah Buchanan or Autumn’s descriptions. I think you’re probably right that he hasn’t left the county.”

  “Not that that’s done us any good.”

  “You’ve eliminated some places. That’s not a waste. Has there been any activity on their finances?”

  “No activity on any of Autumn’s accounts. Jebediah has little money and hasn’t been working more than the occasional odd job since he got out of prison. Most of those were for cash. No one around here wanted to hire him.”

  “Has anyone talked to the people he did those odd jobs for?” Ethan asked.

  “Yesterday. They all reported he did the job, said little, and caused no problems.”

  “Sounds pretty different from the man you described.”

  Judd flicked a glance at him. “He spent a large portion of the time drunk when we were growing up. He didn’t get to stay that way in prison and hasn’t seemed to pick it up again since he got out.”

  “He in AA?”

  “Not here. Was going over in Chapel Springs. Sheriff’s Department talked to some of the members. All he talked about, when he talked at all, was trying to make amends with his daughter.”

  “Pretty tall order, considering,” Ethan observed.

  “I don’t know if he was serious or not. I wasn’t planning on letting him close enough to give him the opportunity.” And all his planning, all his precautions had been for naught. Judd scrubbed both hands over his face, feeling the rasp of stubble.

  Ethan kicked back in the chair and studied the incident board. “I’m the outsider here and I don’t know all the players involved, the history, so I may be way off base, but are you up for going through this without Jebediah Buchanan in the equation?”

  Judd simply nodded. At this point he was willing to try anything.

  “Okay, so to start at the beginning you have an unknown person set fire to Autumn’s house. Remnants of graffiti on one wall suggest that person was aware of her secret pen name. A pen name she claims no one was aware of.”

  “Correct.”

  “After the fire, she moves in with you. A couple of days after that, someone tries to break into your home and leaves a copy of her first book pinned to the porch with a hunting knife, slicing through a scene wherein a fictional you was shot. Whether that was meant to be a message to you or Autumn, either way, it seems likely to be an implied threat to your life. Could be our prowler didn’t like the fact she moved in with you. Now, maybe that was simply because your presence limited his access to her.”

  “It’s personal,” Judd said flatly. “No matter who it is, it’s personal. That knife was driven through a good fifty pages and at least a half inch into the wood of my porch. That takes considerable strength and likely considerable rage. Someone didn’t like her being with me and knew that I was her weak spot.”

  “Which is, again, borne out by the fact that a week later, somebody took a shot at you with a crossbow. He wanted you out of the way.”

  “I would’ve been if Autumn hadn’t tackled me.”

  “Lucky.” Ethan paused. “Why a crossbow? What’s the significance there? Less accuracy. Less distance.”

  “Silent weapon, one you don’t need any kind of permit or background check to acquire—though this is Mississippi, so firearms aren’t that hard to obtain. But more likely because of the message. You can’t inscribe a message on a bullet and expect it to be received.”

  “‘I’ll keep quiet, but you’ll have to cut me in.’ It’s from one of her books?”

  “The third one that was on the laptop lost in the fire. It was the first clue we had that any of her files were copied.”

  “Everything is coming back to the books. What are they about?” Ethan asked. “I know at least the first one is, to some extent, autobiographical. I haven’t had time to read any of them to catch up.”

  “The autobiographical stuff is in the backstory of two of the main characters, Darcy and Cooper. Autumn used it to work through some of her issues from what happened to us. Her portrayal of the day I was shot was nearly spot on, as were some of the details of her father’s trial. But that’s where the similarities end. Darcy is an investigative journalist. Cooper’s FBI. The pair of them get embroiled in a murder investigation and it ultimately brings them back together, forces them to work through the
ir shit while they work the case from opposite sides. The murder ends up tied to a series of kidnappings in the second book, and in the third one, it comes out that all of it is tied to a human trafficking operation being run through the university in the fictional town where the books are set.”

  “I read the blurbs. There’s a third character, right?”

  “Fletcher. College prof. Not based on anybody in reality.”

  “And they’re set up in some kind of love triangle, right? Both men vying for her affections.”

  “Yeah.”

  Ethan chewed on that for a bit. “You’re the primary love interest. Or Cooper is, right?”

  “Right,” Judd admitted, even now unable to ignore his discomfort at having his private life on display. “The first book brings Cooper back into Darcy’s life and also introduces Fletcher. Toward the end of the first book, Cooper fucks it up again, and she turns to Fletcher. So she’s with Fletcher in the second book, but there’s definite evidence that Darcy’s not ready to let go of Cooper and take the next step with Fletcher. In the third, she’s going to end up with Cooper. Although Autumn said originally it was going to be Fletcher.”

  “Why?”

  Judd sighed. “Because I’d fucked things up.” And she didn’t believe I’d come around. I came that close to losing her.

  Ethan’s next comment brought him back. “So backstory isn’t the only area of truth.”

  “It wasn’t in the same way, but yeah. There’s a lot of us in there. A lot of what we might’ve been sooner if I’d managed to pull my head out of my ass. We didn’t get together until after the fire. Since she lost her laptop and everything she had of the third book, she started over and planned to end it with Darcy and Cooper together.”

  “I notice a lot of people in town opining about how much of the books are truth and how much are fiction. It surprised me how widely talked about it is.”

  Judd almost wanted to laugh. City boy had no concept of the small town grapevine. “Ethan, if you’re looking to possibly make Wishful your home, go ahead and prepare yourself for the fact that everything you ever do is considered grist for the gossip mill. As to the rest, what happened to Autumn and me was the biggest scandal to rock this town in the past fifty years. Anybody who was here at that time will remember what happened, will remember the trial. So yeah, they’re all reading it and trying to figure out if any of the juicy stuff is true.”