A Dark Lure (17 page)

He stayed where he was, thank God.

She walked faster, leaves crunching under her boots, and she was shocked by the sudden wetness on her face as tears washed hot down her cheeks. She hadn’t cried in years. She’d dried up and died inside, becoming a hollow husk. But Cole had cracked something open in her. Emotion. Need. Desire for human contact. And it was killing her because it hurt. It hurt like all hell. And she couldn’t have it.

Cole stormed back into the library. His father was near the fire, nursing a tumbler of scotch. The pill container was on the table at his side, the whisky bottle next to it.

“Needed something stiffer than Carrick’s tea,” he said as he swallowed another two pills and chased them down with a heavy gulp of spirits.

Cole stared at the booze bottle. He could do with a shot himself. Instead he went to the buffet, poured a cup of tea, helped himself to a sandwich. He took a seat by the fire, opposite his dad.

“You need to tell me about her.” Cole took a bite, wolfing down half the sandwich in one go.

“Nothing much to tell, son.”

A knee-jerk spasm of irritation chased down all-too-familiar neural pathways that had been forged over time. He delivered the other half of his sandwich to his mouth, swallowed, and took a gulp of tea. “You leave her this ranch, this McDonough legacy that has been in the family since the mid-1800s, and you have
nothing to tell about the person you’re leaving it to?”

“You and Jane abandoned this legacy. I have no obligation to you—”

“Oh, spare me. This isn’t about me or Jane, and you know it. This conversation is about that woman and your relationship with her. Where is she from? What do you know about her?”

His father looked away, stared at the fire.

Cole washed down the last of his tea, set his cup down. He leaned forward, arms resting on his knees. “That’s rough stuff, that murder. A woman, disemboweled, eyes gouged out.”

Myron nodded.

“You believe Olivia tried to kill herself shortly before arriving here?”

His father took another deep gulp of scotch, nodded, his eyes going watery from the drink, drugs. Or something sneakier.

“You’ve seen the scar around her neck, too?”

Myron’s eyes flashed up suddenly.

“You haven’t? It’s like a choker right around her neck.” Cole paused. “As if she was rubbed raw by a rope, or a collar that cut deep and long.”

Myron stared. Several beats of silence swelled between them. “She always wears a bandana,” he said finally. “Or a turtleneck. I never knew.”

“She’s hiding it. I only saw because I took off her bandana to help ease her breathing when she fainted.”

“Shit,” Myron said softly. He took another deep sip.

“What do you remember about the Watt Lake Killer?” Cole said. “All I recall is that he was some sexual sadist who’d preyed on women up north, abducting and confining them over a winter, before setting them out for a spring hunt. The whole thing was just breaking when I was in the army, leaving for a peacekeeping tour in Sierra Leone.”

Myron pursed his lips. “After he hunted and shot them dead, he hung his victims like deer meat to bleed out. He carved out their eyes. Kept body parts in a freezer. Consumed some.”

“Like the Birkenhead victim was hung by the neck,” Cole said. “Eyes also missing.”

“But they got the Watt Lake Killer,” Myron said. “They arrested and charged a man
.
The trial was big news. He died in prison some years back. That was in the news, too.”

Cole sat back, inhaled deeply, exhaustion suddenly pressing down on him again. He closed his eyes for a moment and the sensation of Olivia in his arms immediately filled him—the way she’d resisted his embrace, then slowly melted into his body as if she needed him. It felt good to hold her. To be needed. To feel as though he could protect someone. Not let them down, like he’d let Holly and Ty down.

Shit.

Maybe it was him who’d needed that embrace, not the other way around.

“Well, whatever it was about the Birkenhead murder story and that fishing lure,” he said quietly, “it triggered something in Olivia, catapulted her right into some kind of a flashback out there. She went for me with her knife—thought I was someone else. My guess is she’s suffering from severe PTSD.”

“I know she’s got issues, Cole, but I’ve never seen her have a flashback. Nothing like you describe. Not in all the time she’s been here.”

Cole leaned forward again. “But you
were
worried she’d try to hurt herself again. What
has
she told you about her past, and where she’s from?”

His father regarded him intently, something inscrutable entering his eyes. “You like her,” he said quietly.

Oh, Jesus
.

“I’m curious.”

“That all?”

“Yeah, that’s all. I’m curious because you’re leaving this ranch to some whackjob who flips into flashbacks and threatens to kill me with a mean-ass hunting knife. What do you think?” Cole came to his feet. He set his cup and plate back on the buffet. “She has searchable references up until eight years ago. Before that she’s a blank slate, like she didn’t exist at all.”

“You checked?”

“Yes, I checked. Some strange woman calls my cell phone at midnight in Florida, tells me my father is dying? Of course I’m going to try and find out who she is.” He hesitated. “Besides, Jane asked me to follow it up. Like I said, she’s worried Olivia is playing you.”

Myron snorted. “Where in the hell did Jane get that idea anyway?”

“Forbes.”

“And Forbes got it from where, exactly? He’s full of shit.”

“Seems Forbes was on the money—you
are
leaving her the estate. I’m guessing this news is going to get right up both his and Jane’s noses, because
if
Olivia stays, this place is not for sale.”

Myron ran his tongue over his teeth. “She’ll stay.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure.”

His father’s eyes flickered. He drained the last of his scotch, setting his glass down with the careful concentration of a man on the fringes of inebriation and not wanting to show it. A state Cole knew all too well. His dad turned to look at the flames again. Silence shimmered into the library. The shutter banged in the wind. When his father spoke again, his voice was thick and distant, his words slightly slurred.

“When she first came here, I saw in Olivia a love for this wilderness, the fishing, the rivers, mountains, all echoes of Grace’s passion for this place. Olivia blossomed here, Cole,” he said, uncharacteristically gently, talking to the fire. “Like a desiccated flower on the vine she was when she arrived. This place healed her. Those scars on her wrists that were so red and angry, they began to fade.”

Cole’s stomach tightened. He was unused to this. He was programmed to lash back at his dad’s bellicose belligerence. He didn’t know how to deal with this evidence of compassion, or the fact his father had earlier admitted a role in destroying their family. It put Cole on the back foot, like he had to make the next move.

Myron looked up at his son with distant, clouded eyes. “She began to laugh. Her and that dog . . . they wormed their way right into this place. Into my goddamn heart. She became my friend. My only friend. And I . . .” He faltered. “Last night I thought that if I could do right by her, I would also do right by Grace.”

The specter of his mother again.

This was still all about Grace. About his father not letting her go. About the fact he’d killed her and Jimmie.

Now he was even trying to secure Grace’s dream from beyond the grave.

“It could be right for you, too.”

Surprise rippled through Cole. “What do you mean?”

“Leaving the ranch to Liv might give you time to see that this place is what you want. That without my presence, it could once again become something beautiful. A home.”

Cole felt hot. Awkward. A response eluded him.

He glanced at the pills and the bottle. It was the drugs talking. His old man needed some sleep—wasn’t making sense.

“I need to go,” he said, making for the door. His intention was to fire up his laptop and conduct a search on the history of the Watt Lake killings to see if they could shine any light on the Birkenhead murder.

At the door, he stopped. “You got any objections to me using the old barn in the east field for my plane? Wind is picking up. I need to stash it somewhere safe for when the storm hits.”

“You flew here? You still got the Cub?”

“Yeah.”

His father rubbed his whiskers. “The barn—no one’s been in there since . . .”

Cole’s stomach tightened. He waited for the next words:
Since the truck wreck was stored in there twenty-three years ago.

But the words never came.

“Use my vehicle if you need one.” He turned his wheelchair so his back faced Cole. “It’s the black Dodge Ram in the garage. Carrick will get you keys from the office. Not like I’m going to be using it.”

Cole stared at the back of his old man’s gray head, the gnarled, veined, liver-spotted hands on the armrests. His gaze lifted to the image on the fireplace above his father. The strong younger McDonough posing atop a conquered peak. The old McDonough crumpled with age and creeping death in his wheelchair below the image. Time elastic and twisting.

You’ll be just like him
. . .

Cole didn’t want to be just like him. Bitter and twisted. Shoring up his loss and pain because he was too afraid to open up, try again.

He left his father alone in his library and clomped down the stairs in search of the housekeeper with the keys.

Adele hunched over in the dark stairwell closet, her cell phone pressed to her ear, the door open a wee crack to let in some light.

“He’s going to leave it
all
to Olivia,” she whispered. “The whole damn ranch. I
told
you we couldn’t trust that woman. She’s been after the old man’s land since the day she arrived. She was snooping around his study the other night, too, where he had the will on top of the desk. I know what was in that will—I read it. And it wasn’t this.”

She stilled at a creak on the stairs. Someone was coming.

“We’ve
got
to stop this,” she whispered quickly. “If Olivia leaves Broken Bar, the place reverts back to his kids. You’ve got to find a way to get rid of her.”

Light suddenly exploded into the dark space.

“Adele?”

She blinked and jerked her head up, banging it on a broom. Pain sparked through her skull as Cole McDonough loomed in a black silhouette at the door.

Heat rushed into her face, heart banging. She killed the call and slid the phone quickly into her apron pocket.

CHAPTER 11

Tori got up onto her knees and peeked over the windowsill, making certain her father was gone. Satisfied, she curled back down onto the bed and opened her e-reader, keeping an ear attuned for the sound of her dad’s return. She began to read.

Can you pinpoint the exact instant your life 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, yet from that point they remained forever entwined, two lives locked one with another?

That moment came for the Watt Lake staff sergeant one cold November day up near Bear Claw Valley in remote Indian country, on a gravel bar at a fork in the Stina River, which wends its majestic way down from the interior to enter the Pacific under the Alaskan panhandle border.

The sergeant was somewhat young to head up a detachment for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, but he was a rising star on the federal force, and Watt Lake was a remote northern community, not a terribly large detachment. It was a good place to test the ropes of management after some acclaimed detective work in Alberta.

Unlike the meandering river, the sergeant had a straight life plan. He’d recently married a crime reporter from the
Watt Lake Gazette
. She’d been working her own way up a journalistic career ladder when she interviewed him regarding a court case. They’d fallen in love, tried to keep the affair secret. But when they decided to get engaged, she quit the town paper, gave up her dream of working one day for a big-city daily, and turned her talents instead to features for magazines, true crime stories, and she was trying her hand at a novel.

Then came the fated meeting on the river.

Tori’s heart beat harder, and something dark and invisible began prowling along the fringes of her brain.

The sergeant cast his line out, spooling it into hazy sunshine that danced with tiny insects like dust motes over the river. The sun had no warmth. Ice still covered rocks in the shadows, and moss crunched with frost. Towering Douglas firs, some as old as the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, hemmed in the green-gold water like omniscient gods watching over him. He set his fly at the edge of an eddy, allowing it to drift down with the current to a deeper pool where the water was mirror still. Perfect for big steelhead.

Gently, he tugged on the line, making his fly dart like a living thing atop the surface.

When the sergeant got no bites, he brought in his line, moved farther downriver. The November cold breathed out from the shadows between the trees, and his fingers felt frozen in his fingerless gloves.

He cast again and was letting his fly drift when he became aware of a presence. A sensation of being watched. His first thought was grizz. He’d seen a big one upriver yesterday, near his camp. The bear had given him the eye, then disappeared. It wouldn’t be the first time he’d been stalked by a bear.

Slowly, he shifted his gaze over his shoulder. A man stood in water about fifty yards down from him. He’d not made a sound in his approach. It was as if he’d simply materialized from the fabric of the forest.

The man wore a black jacket over his waders and a balaclava against the cold. The sergeant watched mesmerized as the man cast out his line. Perfect, languid loops rolled out above the water, doubling back one loop over the other, sending sparkling droplets into sunshine. It was mastery, sheer perfection.

The man landed his fly. Bam! He had a fish on. His rod tip arced down and the line went taut. The fish exploded from the surface of the water, leaping in a silvery flash against the line. It slapped down on the surface, running deep. The man let the fish take the line. The cop watched him play it until finally the fish was spent, and the man brought his catch in, flapping weakly.

The man crouched down, released his fish, then looked the cop’s way.

The sergeant raised his hand. Acknowledgment of mastery.

The man gave a brief nod. He waded a little farther downriver, repeated his cast. And bam, another one.

Tori turned the page.

This time the cop moved close to better see the fish as the man brought it in.

“That’s got to be close to thirty pounds,” the cop said as the man crouched down and opened the fish’s mouth, revealing rows of tiny sharp teeth.

The man glanced up at him. Through the slit in his black balaclava his eyes were the color of the water where it ran coppery over rocks and was filled with shafts of sunlight. And in his eyes was an intensity that gave the cop sudden pause. It was the kind of feral cunning one glimpsed in the eyes of things wild. He was suddenly cognizant of the fact that he was all alone in deep woods and mountains. People went missing in the wilderness all the time. Like Sarah Jane Baker, who’d simply vanished almost a month earlier.

The sergeant couldn’t quite articulate the chill that crawled suddenly under his skin.

The man reached into the glistening pink mouth and extracted the hook. The lure was a big gun. Larger than standard winter steelhead lures. Bigger even than some of the newer Intruder designs.

The man clubbed the fish on the head.

“You’re keeping it?” the cop said in surprise.

The man pointed to where the adipose fin had been removed. It was a hatchery fish in the Stina River system. The only kind of steelhead one could keep. Others were released by law.

“The fish,” he said very quietly as he came to his feet, “is my brother, and I love him. Yet I must kill him, and eat.”

The sergeant blinked. Then slowly, he smiled. “Like Santiago, in
The Old Man and the Sea
.”

The man’s eyes crinkled in the slit of his balaclava. “One of my favorites.”

It was a pleasant surprise indeed, he thought, to find a man’s man of a reader on the river wild.

“What are you using?” He nodded to the lure.

The man handed it to him.

The fly was tied with shimmering holographic thread and tufts made from shredded strips of lime tape. Three shining red beads for eyes.

“Surveyor’s tape?”

The man nodded.

“Three eyes?”

“One extra for additional weighting at the front.”

The cop examined the fly, the way the hook was tied to a leader and hid sneakily at the rear among the shreds of green.

“The Predator,” said the man.

“It’s a step up from the Invader concept,” the cop said, turning it over in his hand, committing the design to memory. “A three-eyed Predator.”

“Take it,” the man said. “It’s yours.”

The cop’s eyes flared up in surprise. The man met his stare with a placid steadfastness. He had the eyes of a mountain lion. Watchful, calm, yet calculating. With dark rims and dense black lashes. The cop returned his attention to the lure in his hand. Tying flies was an esoteric art, especially when it came to steelhead. There were always backwoods rumors about secret designs, and these were closely guarded by furtive anglers. They were not things you simply handed to a stranger, at least not in the sergeant’s experience. A soft suspicion began to uncurl inside him along with the sense that he’d be making some Faustian bargain if he took this fly. That he’d be beholden to something dark.

“I can make many more,” the man said, watching him closely.

“You designed this?” the sergeant asked.

“It was a gift.” The man paused, something unreadable shifting into his eyes. “From a special friend.”

A chill crawled over the sergeant’s skin. Was it something in the way the man said this? Or was it the sun slipping behind the peaks?

“Just try it.”

The cop tied the fly onto his line. He waded upriver, and within seconds the water exploded with a fish. His line zinged and his rod tip arced. He battled that sucker until the light started to fail. By the time he landed it, his arms shook and his skin was drenched with sweat. A whopping silver fighter close on forty inches.

Busting with exhilaration and pride, he looked up to see if the man was watching.

He was gone.

Just shadow and light. Dapples on the water. A ripple here and there. And a soft sigh of wind.

As silently as he’d appeared, the man had dematerialized back into the forest.

Gently the sergeant removed the Predator from the fish’s glistening mouth. He crouched down and cradled the fish in the cups of his hands, holding it upright just under the surface, allowing the gills to move, to circulate oxygen. He felt a mystic connection to this creature of river and sea. Then, with a sudden powerful flick of its tail, it flashed out of his hands and ran upriver into the green current.

Feeling blessed, he packed up his gear.

On that day, Sarah Jane Baker, a young wife from Watt Lake who helped run the local sporting goods store with her husband, had been missing for three weeks.

The sergeant didn’t know until the following spring that it was Sarah Baker who’d tied his three-eyed fly.

And that she’d given it to a monster.

“Everything all right, Adele?” Cole said as the housekeeper stepped out of the closet, hurriedly pulling the door closed behind her.

“Yes, of course, what can I do for you?” she said crisply, smoothing down her apron pocket, then her hair. Her face was flushed.

“I heard you talking in there.”

She gave a terse smile. “Cursing, more like. I was looking for the vacuum cleaner bags—someone has misplaced them.”

Cole’s gaze went to her pocket, where he was sure he’d seen her put a phone.

You’ve got to find a way to get rid of her . . .

Those were the words he’d heard Adele saying as he’d opened the closet door to investigate the sound. He gave her a measuring look, suspicion unfurling inside him.

“Can I help you?” she said.

“My father said you have access to the key cabinet in the office. I need the keys for his Dodge.”

“Oh
. . .
oh, of course.” She dug her hand back into her apron pocket and extracted a ring of keys. “His truck keys are with the other keys in the safe. Come this way.”

As they entered the office and Adele unlocked the key cabinet, he said, “How is Mr. Carrick?”

She cast him a sideways glance, selected the car keys. “He’s doing fine. Retired from his municipal job now.”

“Nice. He must be doing a lot more fishing and hunting, I bet.”

She hesitated. “He was on long-term disability before taking the retirement. He took a knock on the head at work, got a bad concussion.”

“He okay now?”

“He has his good days.” She handed him the set of Dodge keys.

“And how is Tucker? Last I heard he was studying for a business degree, I think.”

She smiled, and this time it reached into her eyes. “Oh, he got his master’s some years back. He’s back home, working in Clinton now.”

“In town? I’m surprised there are any non-ranching or logging jobs around.”

She closed and locked the key cabinet, cleared her throat. “He’s doing investment consulting and financial management. The Dodge is parked in the garage out back, where the ATVs and snowmobiles are kept. Mr. McDonough hasn’t used it in a while.”

“Thanks.” He hesitated, then called after her as she bustled out. “Adele?”

She paused in the doorway, turned to face him, a nervous flicker through her features.

“It must be unsettling, my father’s prognosis, the future of what’ll happen with Broken Bar and the staff.”

Unguarded emotion chased through her face, but she tempered it quickly. “Yes. I
. . .
” She sighed. “It’s been almost forty years here for me. A lifetime of memories. I’ve put everything into this place. I met and married my husband here. Tucker was born and raised on the ranch. But I suppose everything has its season.” She offered a rueful smile. “Anyway, it’s high time I retired, don’t you think?”

“You guys going to be okay, financially?”

Her features turned inscrutable. “I have a pension coming. Mr. Carrick has his. We’ll make do.”

“What if the ranch keeps running? Might you stay on longer?”

Her eyes widened. “I
. . .
It will be sold. Won’t it?”

He regarded her. “Not necessarily.”

“I just assumed that it would. A sale would be of great benefit to the whole region.”

“How so?”