A Dark Lure (34 page)

“What truck?” Cole said, voice low, level, cold.

Forbes quickly began to backpedal at Cole’s pulsating intensity. “Look, whatever Tucker and I did, it’s buried history. Let it go.”

Cole surged across the room, reached over the desk, and grabbed the man’s collar and tie. He hauled Clayton Forbes halfway across the desk.

“What truck?”
he growled. “What did you and Tucker do?”

Forbes’s gaze darted around the room, his face going puce. “You can’t prove anything now—”

“Did you and Tucker Carrick mess with my truck that day?! Did you touch the brakes? Was this because of Amelia?”

“Unhand me. Or I’ll call the cops.” His hand fingered along the desk, reaching for his phone.

“Oh, I’d like the cops to hear this. That you and Tucker Carrick sabotaged the brakes on my truck, right before they failed and I lost control on that bend and drove my mother and kid brother into the river!”

“You going to tell them you’d been drinking, too?”

Cole shook inside.

Tucker had always done Forbes’s bidding, since school. He’d lived in the shadow of Cole on the ranch. It was likely him who’d told Forbes about his father’s new will, about Olivia getting the ranch.

“Is he still your grunt? He messing with Liv now, too? Trying to scare her off Broken Bar so he can get the piece of the land he thinks he and his mother deserve? Is that what you’ve promised him?”

Another photo came up on the television screen to the right of the cop behind the podium. An image of a man with close-cropped white-blond hair. Cole barely registered it, his attention focused solely on Forbes. Yet a subterranean stirring started deep somewhere in his brain.

“Where is Tucker now?” he said through his teeth.

Forbes laughed. “What’re you going to do? Go after him? Kill him? Beat him to a pulp? Bury me? Maybe you should, huh? After all these years. All that blame carried on your shoulders. For little Jimmie and your mother. Drowned in an icy river.”

Rage blinded him. Almost.

It took extreme power to hold back. It was what Forbes wanted—for Cole to lose it, assault him. Cross the line of law. He was goading him, and Cole couldn’t be certain it wasn’t a lie, that he wasn’t being set up. He held Forbes’s gaze for several long beats, then slowly released him. Forbes scrabbled back over his desk, pulling his tie straight. Fury crackled in his face.

“You’re a dead man,” Cole whispered. Then added, “Metaphorically.”

He stepped out of the office, closing the door behind him.

“Cole?” Amelia said as she got up. He brushed past her and pushed out the glass door into the cold. The entire framework upon which his world had been constructed was on its ear.

Was it possible? That he had not been totally responsible for the truck accident? For his mother’s and brother’s deaths? Or was Forbes just messing with his head, trying to goad him?

Snow was coming down heavily now. Big fat flakes. It was settling on his father’s black Dodge. He thought of Olivia. Urgency mounted. He needed to get back. To her. To his father. Because another thought niggled him as he climbed back into the Dodge and fired the ignition. What if it
was
Tucker scaring Olivia? Doing Forbes’s dirty work? Could he do worse? Kill?

People had died for lesser things than a multibillion-dollar medical tourism development, and the political careers that hinged on it.

Olivia galloped through the snow on Spirit, heading around the west end of the lake on her return to the lodge. There’d been no one at the campsite. Cabins were all cleared out. Winter had come, settling a white hand over the dry grasses, red berries, gold leaves. And for a while the wind had stilled, and everything felt frozen and eerily silent and isolated.

Mist rose off the black water as Spirit’s hooves thundered on packed earth, and the mare’s snorts crystallized white in the air. Olivia felt focused, emotionless. It was as if she’d come over the mental hump of autumn and now had clear direction into the new season, and little was going to sway her.

Her next step was to stable Spirit. Already she’d spoken to Brannigan. Her mare would be in good hands. She had enough time to say farewell to Myron and hit the logging road before too much snow had accumulated. She could be in Clinton two hours from now, where she’d refuel her truck, then drive southeast for the Rocky Mountains. The bad weather was heading north. If she was lucky it would still be dry to the east. She could make Alberta by nightfall.

She caught sight of tracks in the fresh skiff of snow. Smallish footprints. And bigger ones alongside. She reined in Spirit, an eerie sensation crawling over her skin. The bigger boot prints seemed to be about the same size and stride as the ones that had followed her when she’d laid a trail for Ace to follow. The same size as had led into the swamp through the cut fence. She looked up, could see no one. But the tracks were fresh, given the falling snow.

She detoured her horse, following the prints toward the water. The big prints veered abruptly off into the trees while the smaller prints continued to the dock in the isolated bay at the west end of the lake. As Olivia rounded a clump of brooding evergreens that grew tightly along the shoreline, she saw a small dark shape huddled at the very end of the long, narrow dock that jutted out into the lonely west bay. She squinted through the mist and softly falling crystals.

Tori?

Olivia’s gaze chased quickly across the dock, water, treeline. No sign of anyone else. Perhaps the big prints had been Tori’s father’s tracks. She dismounted, tethered Spirit, made her way along the dock, foreboding sinking into her bones.

“Tori? Is that you?”

The girl turned.

Olivia felt a gut punch. The child’s face was ashen in this light, her eyes black holes. She’d been crying.

“What’s the matter? Where is your father?”

“Sleeping.”

Olivia lowered herself to her haunches beside Tori, who was sitting with her jeans in wet snow, feet dangling over the side of dock, boots almost in the water.

“What’s the matter?”

She picked at a thread along the end of her jacket. Snowflakes grew thicker, prettier. They settled on the dock, on Tori’s black hair, on her jacket.

“Come, let me take you inside. We can ride on Spirit. Would you like that?”

No response.

“Tori, talk to me.”

Wind gusted, sending a dervish of swirling snow over the water. It was beginning to settle fast now. Olivia’s window to get out was closing. Fast.

“Please, let me take you inside and get you something warm to drink. I’ll find your dad. Was he with you earlier?”

“He’s not my dad.”

“Excuse me?”

Tori’s lip wobbled. “I think it’s all a lie. They were lying . . .” Emotion pooled suddenly and glimmered in her green eyes.

“Who was lying?”

Tori reached down the front of her jacket and pulled out an e-reader in a pink cover.

“I was reading my mom’s last work in progress. She was a writer. She wrote ripped-from-the-headlines fiction. Thrillers and mysteries. Dark books. She didn’t let me read them, but I got them out of the library. She was writing this one before the accident. She dedicated it to me. It says in the front, ‘
For my dear Tori, a story for the day you are ready.’
I
. . .”
Her voice hitched. She bit her lip so hard it drew blood. Shock twitched through Olivia.

“I don’t understand, Tori.”

She sniffed and swiped at her eyes. “I think . . . I think . . . in the story . . . in the hospital. Up in Watt Lake . . .”

“Watt Lake? Your mother set a story in Watt Lake?”

She nodded.

“What’s it about?”

“The character in the story . . . it’s not her baby. It’s the baby of a terribly bad man. A serial killer. And the victim’s husband doesn’t want to look at it . . . and . . . she gives it away, up for adoption. Because she doesn’t want to look at it either. She’s confused. The journalist brings the baby to the mother’s bed in an incubator thing . . . and she, the mother holds it, and breast-feeds it, and asks God to help it. And then the journalist goes to her husband, who’s a cop, and says she wants to adopt it. I don’t think it’s fiction. My dad was the cop there.”

Olivia went cold. Her memory spiraled violently back to the day she’d lain in the hospital bed and Melody had brought her baby daughter in. And she’d held the infant in her arms.

“A cop?
Where?
”

“Watt Lake. He was the staff sergeant, like in the book. And my mom was a journalist before she turned to fiction. All the stuff—it could be about them. And . . . I’m scared because they told me I was born in Fort Tapley.”

Olivia couldn’t breathe. The curtain of snow and mist grew thicker, time leaking away.

“What . . .” She cleared her throat. “What was her name? Your mother, what was her full name?”

Startled at her intensity, Tori glanced sharply up, met her eyes, and said, “Melody. Melody Vanderbilt. She used her maiden name for her job.”

Olivia’s stomach lurched bile up her throat. Sweat prickled over her skin. Snow wet her face. Confusion tightened around her, closing, encircling, trapping, time folding in on itself, inside out.

“Did . . . did the victim in the story have a name?”

“Sarah Baker, like the lady in my father’s newspaper.” Tori held Olivia’s gaze, wide-eyed, vulnerable. “Sarah’s baby . . . the journalist and cop adopted her and took her up to Fort Tapley. But it
has
to be fiction, right? My mom was just drafting this thing. She always worked in drafts. She used ideas, true things from the headlines, from reality, and she braided them with fiction—that’s what all the write-ups and reviews always said. She’d use facts as a base, and then wove her own stories around them. That’s what she was doing, right? She was using that situation in Watt Lake as inspiration.”

“Show me.”

Tori flinched slightly, then tentatively held out her e-reader.

With shaking hands Olivia brushed snow from the cover and opened the e-reader. Sliding the “On” button, protecting the screen with her body, she began to read.

It started, as all dialogues do, when a path crosses that of another. Whether in silence, or greeting, a glance, a touch, you are changed, irrevocably, by an interaction. Some exchanges are as subtle as the touch of an iridescent damselfly alighting on the back of your hand. Some are seismic, rocking your world, fissuring into your very foundations and setting you on a new path. That moment came for Sarah when he first entered the store.

The bell chimed, and in came a cool gust of air. Sensing something unusual had entered, she glanced up.

From across the store his eyes locked on to her face—the kind of full-on stare that made her stomach jump. Ordinarily she’d smile, offer a greeting, but this time she instinctively averted her gaze and continued with her bookkeeping. Yet she could sense his eyes on her, rude, brazen . . .

Her words. Her story. The one she’d told Melody Vanderbilt.

Olivia’s gaze shot to Tori. She stared, her mind wheeling. Tori’s green eyes looked back. Mossy green, like her own. Blue-black hair, the color of Sebastian’s . . .

“You’re Melody’s daughter?”

Tori nodded, confusion in her eyes.

“You’re an only child, their only child?”

She nodded again.

“Melody was married to a
cop
?”

Tori swallowed, fear darkening into her eyes. She started to shiver. “My dad is—was a cop.”

“Not a consultant, for security?”

“He lied.”

Olivia’s voice came out hoarse, thick. “When is your birthday, Tori? How old are you?”

“I’ll be twelve on July seventeenth.”

Twelve years ago, on this day, the day before Thanksgiving, Sarah Baker was taken by the Watt Lake Killer. Their baby was born the following summer. A hot muggy day in July.

July 17
. . .

He watched close by from the trees. The woman and the child’s words carried clear like crystal on the cold, fragile air, through the stillness of snow. That child was his. It was her likeness that had brought to mind his mother as he’d watched them in the boat earlier. He could see it fully now, in his mind’s eye, in his memory of the old photographs that his mother kept of her youth. Her straight black hair.