Blood Trails (7 page)

A middle-aged woman looked up as Holly entered the office. She smiled politely as she gave Holly a once-over.

“Good morning. How can I help you?”

Holly leaned across the counter. “I need some information. When I was five, I began kindergarten at this school. I think I was here for a year before I left. Would it be possible to get a copy of my records? I go by Holly Slade now, but I was enrolled here as Harriet Mackey, daughter of Harold and Twila Mackey. This is the address where I lived.”

She slid a piece of paper toward the receptionist.

The receptionist frowned and looked back up at Holly. “You do know we can’t give out school records to anyone who walks in without proof of ID?” She looked back at the piece of paper and asked, “How long ago was this?”

“Twenty years.”

“Oh, my, I’m not sure where those records would even be kept. Sorry.”

Holly sighed. It had been worth a shot. “I understand. I don’t suppose there’s anyone still here who was teaching back then? Someone who might remember me?”

The receptionist frowned. “Actually, there is. Only she’s no longer a teacher. She’s the principal now. Her name is Mrs. Baronne.”

“Do you think I might be able to speak with her?” Holly asked.

The receptionist picked up the phone. After a brief conversation, she nodded.

“Mrs. Baronne has a few minutes before she has to leave for a meeting. She said she’d be happy to speak with you. Her office is down that hallway, first door on your right.”

“Thank you so much,” Holly said, and hurried down the hall.

She knocked twice, and then the door opened abruptly. The woman standing in the doorway was tall and stately, with short gray hair and soft brown eyes.

“I’m Mrs. Baronne,” she said, and shook Holly’s hand. “Come in, please…have a seat.”

“Thank you for taking the time to talk to me,” Holly said.

“Certainly,” Mrs. Baronne said, as she resumed her seat at her desk. “Now, tell me a bit about this search you’re on.”

Holly told her story, leaving out all the ugly details and mentioning only that she was here for a short while and hoping to reconnect with her past. It wasn’t until she mentioned the name Harriet Mackey that she saw the principal’s expression change from polite attention to shock.

“You’re Harriet Mackey?”

“Yes, ma’am, only I have no real memory of the first five years of my life. As I said, I’ve lived as Holly Slade for the past twenty years. Trust me, this has been quite a revelation for me to handle.”

“I definitely remember the name. You were in Miss Peach’s kindergarten class. It was only a few days before the end of the school year when you and your mother disappeared. The police questioned all the teachers and staff. We were shocked by the entire situation.”

Holly’s heart skipped a beat. “Really? Did you ever talk to my father?”

“Not personally, but I remember reading in the paper that he’d filed a missing persons report on the two of you. Oh, my, oh, my! This is such a shock! What happened? Where did you two go?”

Again Holly had to be careful about what she said and how she said it.

“That’s part of the mystery I’m trying to solve,” Holly said. “My mother sent me away with her friends, and in a few days she was planning to come and get me, so we could start a new life somewhere else, only she never showed up. To this day, we don’t what happened.”

The principal gasped. “How awful for you!”

Holly shrugged. “I guess, but I don’t remember the incident…or her.”

“Not at all?”

“No, ma’am, not at all. By any chance would it be possible for me to get a copy of my school records? I realize I was only here for a year, but I thought there might be some information there that would help me figure out where to search next.”

“Have you been to the police? Do they know that you’re in town?”

“No, ma’am, but I plan to speak to them in the next day or so.”

“You definitely should. They might even have some information about your mother, you know.”

“Yes, ma’am, I know.”

Convinced that she’d covered all her bases, Mrs. Baronne turned to the task at hand. “Do you have some ID?”

Holly nodded, and fished out her driver’s license.

“It’s protocol when it comes to giving out records,” the principal said, as she quickly made a copy and handed it back to Holly. “Where are you staying while you’re in town?”

“At the Jameson, near the Arch.”

The older woman made a note of the address. “I’ll see what I can do,” she said, and picked up the phone. After a brief conversation, she told Holly the older records were stored off-site.

“I’ve put in a request for a copy of your file to be couriered to you at the hotel. This is such a tragic story. I hope there’s some information in it that helps.”

“Thank you so much,” Holly said.

“We also have group photos of our students that are taken every year. I’m not sure how far back they go, but there are a large number of them hanging in the lobby of the main hall. Let’s go see if we can find your year.”

“That would be great!”

Holly followed Mrs. Baronne back out to the lobby.

“They begin here,” the principal said, pointing to the far wall. She began scanning the pictures as they passed, counting back twenty years, and then stopped midway down the long hallway. “This would be the kindergarten class from twenty years ago.”

Holly moved closer, scanning the tiny faces. Suddenly she gasped, then pointed. “That’s me! I can’t believe it! I have no memory of any of this, and yet there I am.”

The principal eyed the photo, then Holly. “You’re sure this is you?”

Holly nodded as she began digging through her purse. “A neighbor from back in the day just gave me some old photos of myself. I’ll show you.”

She pulled out a couple of the snapshots Ida Pacino had given her and handed them to the principal.

“That’s certainly the same child,” Mrs. Baronne said, and then handed them back to Holly. “Do you remember any of the other children?”

Holly hesitated briefly, then pointed to the little girl sitting to her left. “She looks familiar, but I can’t remember her name.”

Mrs. Baronne took down the picture, then popped the back off the frame and took out the photo. “We always write the names on the back. Let’s see…Harriet Mackey, Harriet Mackey…ah! Here it is! You were right, that little girl is Harriet Mackey, and the girl next to her is Billie Jo Peoples.”

“Billie Jo,” Holly repeated, trying out the name on her tongue. She couldn’t say she remembered, but it felt good to be putting some of the pieces of her past together.

Just as the principal was replacing the photo, her cell phone rang. She glanced at caller ID, then at Holly.

“I’m sorry. I’m going to have to take this call, then leave for my meeting. I hope I’ve been able to help you.”

“You’ve been great,” Holly said.

Holly shook the woman’s hand, then left, buoyed up by the unexpected success.

Still reluctant to go to the police with nothing but her vague story, and without a specific place to go to next, she decided to go back to the hotel. At least there she could get warm, eat some lunch and wait for her school records to show up.

It was almost one o’clock and raining again by the time Holly got back to the hotel. Her stomach was growling, and her feet were wet and cold. Soup seemed like a good idea. She went back to the familiar hotel restaurant, and was thankful for the warmth and comfort as she was being seated.

After ordering, she tried to call Maria, but it went to voice mail. Then she tried Savannah and got the same result. She felt the need to touch base with her sisters, to hear what was going on with them and find out if they were having difficulties, too, but it wasn’t happening.

Disappointed, she dropped the phone back into her purse and picked at the bread the waiter left at her table. She thought about calling Bud. He would most certainly answer, but she hated to talk to him in this frame of mind. He would instantly know that she was feeling down, and she didn’t want to have to explain herself. Not yet. Not until she had some answers.

It was late afternoon at the Triple S. The snow was beginning to melt, but not fast enough for Bud. He’d been counting cattle all afternoon, trying to ascertain if there were any more missing. They’d already lost two spring calves, along with a cow trying unsuccessfully to give birth, to the freezing temperatures since the snowfall. That was four head of Triple S cattle lost in less than two days. Damn weather. It had only added to his growing concerns. Earlier in the day he’d slipped on ice and caught himself with his bad hand. It was still throbbing inside his glove, but he’d refused to take the bandage off and check the damage. He didn’t have time to baby himself. There were too many fires to put out at the Triple S.

Andrew’s death had stirred up a mess from which the Slade family might never recover.

And then there was Holly… He’d always heard that absence made the heart grow fonder. He wondered if there was a saying for absence and unrequited love, because he ached for Holly like he never had before.

He glanced at his watch. It was nearly five. Sunset would be here before he was ready if he didn’t get a move on. He still had to feed the livestock penned up in the corrals near the barn before he could call it a day. The thought of a roaring fire and a bowl of hot stew sounded good, so he put the truck in gear and headed for home.

It was nearing dinnertime, and still no papers had arrived from the school. Holly was just getting out of the bath when the hotel phone rang. She reached for a towel as she hurried to answer.

“Hello?”

“Miss Slade, this is the front desk. A courier just dropped off an envelope for you. May we send it up?”

“Yes, please!” Holly said. She hung up the receiver and quickly dried herself off, then grabbed some sweats.

The knock at the door sounded just as she was getting money out of her purse. She traded the bellman a tip for the envelope, then shut and locked the door. Her pulse was racing double-time as she carried the envelope to the bed and settled comfortably against the headboard before pulling out the contents.

The pages were few and the information sparse, which was not a surprise. There wasn’t all that much information a five-year-old could accumulate in her first year of school. Still, it was more than a little shocking to see the photocopy of a school photo of the face she’d come to accept as hers beside the name Harriet Mackey. The address and home phone numbers listed were the same ones she had, but there was another name on the form she didn’t recognize. It was the name and number of a person to contact in case of emergency if her parents couldn’t be reached. Someone named Cynthia Peters.

She reached for the house phone and dialed the number on the form. After twenty years and numerous prefix changes, getting a not-in-service message didn’t surprise her so she searched through the phone book. There were quite a few people with the last name Peters, but no Cynthia or C. Peters listed. Well aware that the woman could be long gone, or married or remarried, with another name entirely, she laid the phone book aside and went back to her school records.

What surprised her was learning where her parents had worked. Her mother had worked in a dry cleaners and her father for a company called Parks Wholesale. There was a copy of her immunization records, a mention that she’d won a coloring contest at Christmas and a notation of a trip to the emergency room after falling off a slide and injuring her leg. She pulled up the leg of her sweatpants and fingered the small white scar just below her knee. So that was where it had come from. It was beyond strange to put together her past this way.

She wasn’t surprised there wasn’t anything else useful in the file, but even so, it was something of a letdown. Out of curiosity she searched the yellow pages for dry cleaners, just to see if the place where her mother had worked was still there, and to her surprise, it was, complete with the same phone number. It was, however, past closing time, so calling the number now would be useless.

After making a quick note of the address and phone number for another day, she looked for a listing for Parks Wholesale, but found nothing. Satisfied that she’d checked all she could for now, she tossed the phone book aside and slipped the pages from her school file into the back of her journal for safekeeping.

The silence in the room was mocking—as empty as her knowledge of her past. Determined not to get maudlin, she slid down onto the bed with a dejected sigh and closed her eyes.

The rain was still hitting the windows. She wondered what Bud was doing. Had the snow melted? Was his hand healing? Did he miss her as much as she missed him?

She kept remembering her last day at the ranch, seeing the blood-soaked towel wrapped around his hand and the pain on his face. She couldn’t get past the memory of his hard, flat belly when he’d stripped off his shirt, or the warm, musky scent of his body as she’d covered his bandaged hand with a plastic bag to keep it from getting wet. Startled by how it made her feel, she rolled over onto her belly in an attempt to stall the growing ache between her legs, and willed herself to cease and desist.

Just as she was about to conquer the longing, her cell phone rang. She rolled over to grab it from the bedside table, saw the caller ID and tried to ignore the fact that her heart was suddenly in her throat.

“Hey, I was just thinking about you.”

Bud exhaled softly as he cradled an ice pack against his throbbing hand.

“That’s the best news I’ve had all day,” he said lightly, as he kicked back in the recliner and turned his boots toward the fire.

“Are you okay? How’s your hand?” Holly asked.

Bud ignored the fact that the fall had popped a stitch, causing it to bleed.

“It’s fine.” It wasn’t really a lie. It wasn’t messed up enough to go back to the doctor. He’d had worse injuries and treated them with less care, and recovered just fine. It would happen again. Besides, the sound of her voice had put his world back on an even keel.

“So you were thinking about me and I was thinking about you. How’s that for timing?”