Murder on the Horizon (11 page)

Without warning, the boy commanded, “Whistle, Heather.”

The girl grabbed up a pink whistle hanging from a lanyard around her neck and blew it.

Then with well-practiced ease, the boy dropped one knee to the ground. In one fluid move, he lifted the assault rifle, aimed it at Gracie, peered through the scope, and yelled, “Freeze or I'll shoot!”

14

G
RACIE
froze, hand half-lifted, mouth agape. A warm breeze fluttered the ends of her hair. From somewhere above her head, a raven croaked.

Her heart boomed in her chest and her brain paddled furiously, like a duck's webbed feet below the surface of the water, trying to figure out how she was going to get out of this whole stupid mess without getting herself shot by a maniacal kid with a semiautomatic weapon.

The girl—Heather—was still blowing the whistle, shattering the silence with one long blast. Then a short blast. Then another long. Repeating the cycle. Over and over.

Minnie growled again. “Shhh, little girl,” Gracie whispered without moving, suddenly terrified not only for herself, but for her dog.

As if by predetermined signal, Heather stopped blowing the whistle. She unclipped the keep on the holster attached to her belt, drew out the pistol, and aimed it at Gracie.

The girl looked all of seven.

What the hell ever happened to My Little Pony?

A rustling drew her eyes to the hill above the road where a cluster of children were emerging from the trees and into the open. One by one, they jumped down out onto the road and walked over to stand behind the lead boy. An even mixture of boys and girls, the group ranged in age from what couldn't have been more than five years old to as old as sixteen, maybe seventeen. Down to the smallest child, all were holding some type of weapon, all but one pointed straight at Gracie.

The one child who wasn't aiming his gun at Gracie was standing off to one side—a skinny boy with white-blond hair and thick-rimmed glasses.

Baxter.

He and Gracie stared wide-eyed at each other, neither giving any indication they recognized the other.

The barrel of Baxter's weapon was aimed at the ground. “I don't think we should be—” he began.

“Shut up, you goddamned mama's girl!” the lead boy yelled. “She's an enemy combatant. She's now our prisoner.”

Baxter clapped his mouth shut, face blanching.

Gracie could see the lead boy's chest heaving, his breath coming in fast, short puffs. His being nervous wasn't doing a single thing to slow her own heart rate.

Seconds ticked by into years. Gracie's nerves stretched to piano-string taut, eyes flicking from one child to the next to the next. The hand clutching the pepper spray in her pocket was sweaty. Her arm, still raised, was growing tired. She could feel Minnie shivering against her leg.

She stared at the children and they stared back, as if waiting for something.

Finally Gracie inhaled and opened her mouth to say, “Enough is enough. I'm leaving,” when a group of adults, men and women, crashed out of the trees on the hillside above the road and dropped down onto the dirt next to the children.

Neck, arm, and thigh muscles bulged. Some of the men were heavily tattooed. Every male head was bared and shaved.

Skinheads
, Gracie's brain registered, eyes darting from face to face.

All were dressed head to foot in woodland camouflage. All wore face paint, some elaborate. All carried firearms—semiautomatic rifles and pistols, and shotguns.

In spite of the face paint, Gracie recognized one of the men as Lee, Baxter's father, the man who had tried to belt his son, instead striking his own mother so hard he had knocked her to the ground, the man onto whose back Gracie had jumped and who had elbowed her away with no more effort than swatting a horsefly.

Not looking good for the home team
, Gracie thought and took a slow, careful step backward.

“Freeze!” the large boy yelled again.

Gracie froze again.

A lone man emerged from the trees and jumped down onto the road between Gracie and the rest of the group. At six foot five or six, he looked like a life-sized G.I. Joe action figure on steroids. Gracie recognized him as Baxter's uncle who had dragged Lee away from his son and mother, practically carrying him across the yard to their truck. The man appeared the size of a yeti, with arms and legs and trunk and everything four times larger than Gracie's.

Taking in the scene in a glance, the huge man barked in an incongruously high voice, “Lower your weapons!”

Everyone obeyed the order except the lead boy, who hadn't moved a muscle since training his sights on Gracie.

The huge man walked over to the boy and pressed the end of his semiautomatic weapon toward the ground with his hand. “Never point your weapon at anyone, Jordan,” he said in a voice loud enough for Gracie to hear. “Until you're ready to fire. Until you're ready to kill.”

Then he turned to face Gracie and said in a mild voice, “There's no reason to be afraid. No one's going to hurt you.”

Gracie's fear drained away, laying bare the fury beneath.
“What the hell!” she yelled, shaking a clenched fist at the man. “They were pointing guns at me! What the
hell
?”

“We're conducting an enemy contact drill,” the man answered as if that explained everything. “But if it makes you feel better . . .” He lifted the weapon from Jordan's hands, ejecting the large-capacity ammunition magazine, holding it out so Gracie could see it was empty, then snapping it back in place. “Their weapons aren't even loaded.”

He said to the girl in the pink shirt, “Heather, may I have that, please?”

Beaming up at him, the girl strained to hold her heavy revolver up, holding it with both hands flat, as if it were an offering to the gods.

The man took the weapon as before, ejecting the clip and showing Gracie that it was empty. Slapping the clip back in place, he stuck the revolver in the waistband of his pants.

“We're in the national forest,” Gracie said, her entire body shivering as if with cold. “I'm pretty damned sure kids aren't supposed to be out here carrying weapons, loaded or not, much less point them at people.”

“We don't acknowledge the laws of the federal government,” Lee said.

“We deny the rights of the federal government to exist,” Jordan chimed in. “This is the people's land.”

“Well, if it's the people's land,” Gracie shot back, trying to keep her quivering voice from giving her away, “I'm one of the people, too, and you have no right . . .
no
right . . . to point a weapon at me.”

“It's our right as Americans and patriots to bear arms,” Jordan yelled. “As granted us by the Second Amendment of the United States Constitution. I'm willing to die to defend my Second Amendment rights. Are you willing to die trying to take them away from me?”

Gracie figured now was probably not the time to express the viewpoint that when the Founding Fathers constructed the Second Amendment to the Constitution to include “a
well-regulated militia,” they weren't talking about marauding gangs of children armed up the wazoo with AK-47s.

Her eyes moved back to the big man who was staring at her, head cocked, as if ciphering on something. “Don't I know you?” he asked.

“I think I would remember,” Gracie growled.

“Why are you so hostile?

“Why?
Why?
How about going out for a peaceful run with my little dog on a fine morning and finding myself in the middle of the
Lord of the
Flippin'
Flies
? How about having a gun—multiple guns—pointed at me?”

“I showed you they weren't loaded,” the man said in a mild voice. “You think we'd give loaded firearms to children?”

“How the hell do I know what you would and wouldn't do?” she snapped. She was so out of there she was already one of those little cartoon clouds with the whoosh marks off to the side. “Come on, Minnie.” She backed up another step and turned to walk away.

“Grace Kinkaid.”

Gracie stopped, mid-turn. “Wha . . . ?”

“Your name is Grace Kinkaid. You work up at that camp.”

Gracie suddenly remembered exactly when and where she had met the big man before. Several months before. Up at camp. At the memorial service of a friend.

What was his name?
An old-time cigarette brand. Pall Mall. Salem. Winston. That was it. Winston. Winston Ferguson. Baxter Edwards's Uncle Win.

Gracie remembered him, not only because he was larger than behemoth, but because he had introduced himself as her friend's fiancé when he had already been wearing a wedding band. And, she recalled, he had asked her, Gracie, if she was married.

Her eyes dropped to Winston's left hand, but he was wearing black tactical gloves.

“You were wearing a nice dress with a pretty paisley scarf,” Winston continued, his tone conversational, as if they
were shooting the breeze any old cloudy day. As if she weren't being stared down by a dozen pairs of eyes, most of which were looking like they wanted to have her as the main course at a wienie roast. “I remember because it's nice to see a beautiful woman wearing a nice dress.”

“Uh . . .”

“What do you do there?”

“I'm . . .” Her voice cracked. She cleared her throat. “. . . the manager.”

“That's a pretty big camp,” Winston said. “What is it? Hundred acres? Hundred fifty?”

“Two hundred ten,” Gracie answered automatically.

“Two-ten,” Winston continued, standing casually on one leg, semiautomatic rifle cradled in his arms like an infant. “That's a lot of land. Anyway, I'm really sorry if we scared you. That wasn't our intent by any means. We're just playing around. That's why we come out pretty early in the day—try to avoid running into people. Don't want to scare anybody.”

“I'm out of here,” Gracie growled, spinning around and stalking away as quickly as she could with Minnie trotting at her heels.

“Nice to see you again, Grace,” Winston said to her back.

*   *   *

BY THE TIME
Gracie walked in through the front door of her cabin, the adrenaline had bled off, leaving her feeling as if she had been fed through the rollers of a wringer washer.

Except when she sat down on the couch in the living room, she stood up again. Sat down again. Jumped right back up and stormed back and forth across the wooden floor.

Minnie had given up trying to follow her around, hopping up onto her end of the couch and keeping an eye on Gracie from there.

“Those . . . those
Neanderthals
!” she raged. “How dare they point guns at me? Those . . . goon squad . . . wing nuts!”

Three times she picked up the telephone to call the Sheriff's
Department to report the incident. Three times she hung up the phone. The last time she had called to report someone's illegal behavior, that same someone had snuck onto her property and almost killed her dog. No way did she want to risk Minnie's life—or her own—again. “Forget about it, Kinkaid,” she told herself. “Just don't jog out that way again.”

But she couldn't just forget about it. In fact, she couldn't stop thinking about it, mentally gnawing on it over and over like a dog with a bone, the images of children with glaring eyes and semiautomatic weapons tumbling about in her head like ice cubes in a blender. The image of Baxter's face, pale, wide-eyed and afraid. He alone of the children hadn't pointed his weapon at her. Was he forced against his will to participate in these so-called trainings? Were these types of trainings one more reason for him to want to run away? She now, at least, had a better understanding of any antipathy Baxter harbored for the older boy, Jordan—he was a bully, mean and angry.
Whose son was he?
Gracie wondered.
Lee's?
No. Baxter had said the boy was a cousin.
So Winston's? Or someone else's?

Was the group really only “playing around,” as Winston put it, or were they up to no good? Was the group some kind of weird cult, or were they just normal run-of-the-mill American gun owners with nothing better to do on a Saturday morning? How serious would the fallout be if she made a report to the Sheriff's Department and it turned out to be nothing? Or if she didn't report it and it turned out to be something horrible?

“Ralphie, I wish I could talk to you. Ask your advice. You'd help me figure out what to do.” She plopped down so hard onto the couch, she almost bounced Minnie right off. “Sorry, little girl,” Gracie said, putting a hand out to soothe the dog. “No,” she said, shaking her head. “Ralph wouldn't help me figure anything out. He would tell me not to jump to any conclusions. That I'm just being emotional. Not to let my imagination run away from me. Not to do anything impetuous. When the hell am I ever impetuous?”

Gracie put her feet up on the sea chest, dropping her head
back on the couch, trying to remember what she knew about Winston.

The winter before, her friend Jett had been dating Winston hot and heavy. Then, suddenly, she wasn't. With no real reason given except to say that he scared her.

Gracie sat up straight, plunking her feet onto the floor.

The journal!

She had forgotten all about it.

Jett had left Gracie a computer flash drive containing her journal, a sometimes excruciatingly detailed chronicle of her life, including at Camp Ponderosa where she worked as kitchen manager. After Jett's death, Gracie had handed the flash drive over to investigators. But not before copying the entire journal onto another flash drive of her own.

But where is it?

Deeming it too painful to read at the time, but vowing to retrieve it someday and read it all the way through, she had stashed it somewhere. But now she couldn't remember where.

She looked down at her watch. “Minnie!” she said, jumping to her feet and bounding up the stairs to the loft. “We're supposed to be at camp! Right now! Allen's gonna kill me!”

*   *   *

GRACIE LIFTED A
large, square tray of chocolate sheet cake from a shelf in the walk-in refrigerator, backed out into the kitchen, and nudged the door closed with her hip. She set the tray on the butcher-block table, picked up a sharp knife, bit the upper corner of her lip, and began slicing the cake into long, narrow rows.