Authors: Nancy Bush
“Okay.” Jordanna hadn’t expected such full-service cooperation.
“I told the cops, y’know. I told ’em where he was and stuff. They thought I came from the field side? Well, I did. I wasn’t really on the road . . . much.” He scolded the dog, “Now you stay down. DOWN,” then released his grip on the Lab’s collar. The dog came over and snuffled Jordanna, who stood perfectly still. It seemed friendly enough, but you never knew. Meanwhile, the kid had taken off toward a gate in the fence that surrounded the field on the northern side of the driveway. Dixie, seeing him, wheeled away from Jordanna and raced after him, barking some more.
“Wait. Is it far?” Jordanna yelled.
Zach stopped. “Shush, Dixie. Well, yeah. Kinda.”
“Would it be better to take my car?”
He mulled that over, throwing another look toward the house. Jordanna eyed the field he’d been about to cross. How many acres were they talking about between here and the site where Zach found the body? He’d pretty much alluded to the fact that he’d been on the road at least some of the time. Whatever the case, she was glad she was in her sneakers and jeans, the staples of her wardrobe, in case she was about to be trudging across damp field grass. She threw a look to the heavens. Dark clouds were scudding across the sky, portending more rain.
“It’s on the government property.” He waved an arm to indicate way, way away. “It would be faster by car.”
“Do you want to tell your father that you’re taking off with me?”
“Nah. I’ll take the ATV and meet you there,” he decided.
“How will I know where to stop?”
“Follow the fence line.”
She was glad of the enthusiastic help, but wasn’t quite certain if this was going to help her. Zach jumped onto one of the ATVs and fiddled for a little while, inciting Dixie to more barking, and then the engine roared to life. He backed out and then bumped toward the field, where he’d already opened the gate. With a quick wave, he churned down a little wallow and up the other side, Dixie bounding beside him, still barking.
Dance settled on Excedrin and aspirin instead of a prescription painkiller. The pain in his head had receded and it was better than feeling drugged and dull. He got up from the couch and put weight on his injured leg, gritting his teeth as his nerves screamed messages to his brain. Not as bad as the headache though.
I am healing
, he thought grimly.
He should have asked Jordanna for her phone. He had some calls to make, some that couldn’t be put off any longer. He didn’t believe that the bomb had been placed to blow apart the safe and destroy the audiotape, but it was a possibility. Max had known what was on the tape, and though he hadn’t known whose voices he was hearing, and Dance hadn’t told him, it was damning stuff.
Worth killing you over?
He pushed his hands through his hair and ran them to the back of his neck, squeezing. Feeling off balance, he walked carefully back to the couch and sank back down. If that were true—definitely a big “If”—then the man who’d recorded the audiotape was in danger, too.
If
Max found out who the speaker was, and
if
Max should decide to take matters into his own hands. Ten days ago, he wouldn’t have believed his friend capable of such treachery, but ten days ago he hadn’t had possession of the audiotape.
You should go to the police.
He’d resisted alerting the authorities. He’d wanted to believe in Max—and all of the Saldanos, come to that—but that may have been a grave mistake.
He wished he’d gone with Jordanna. He wanted to be with her, talk to her, work out problems with her. She’d wanted someone to be here when Kara showed up and he’d felt punk anyway, but he still wished he was with her. He wasn’t good at staying behind and waiting. He needed to be in the vanguard, the first line of offense. Damn his injured leg and weakness.
He also thought about that kiss with Jordanna, those heated moments. He’d wanted nothing more than to bend her backward onto the couch, strip off her clothes, and make love to her. She’d wanted the same thing. He’d seen it in her eyes. Or, maybe not? She’d admitted to following him, an obsession that had more to do with her hunger for the job than for him. Maybe what he’d seen was a carefully orchestrated seduction, a means to an end.
His own cynicism brought him up short. No. Jordanna was too much of an open book to manage that level of deception. It was too easy to push her buttons over her relationship with her father to believe she could hide her true feelings. She’d wanted him, and he’d wanted her. That was a fact.
So, what’re you going to do about it?
Absently, he rubbed his left leg. He’d seen the damaged flesh when Jordanna’s father had unwrapped the bandage. The march of black stitches across his bruised and battered skin had made his stomach clench. It was a minor miracle that his thigh bone was intact. But he could stand putting weight on it, and he intended to get rid of the crutches ASAP.
The sound of a car approaching brought him to sharp attention. He twisted to look out the window, felt a jab of pain from his leg at the sudden action, but stared out the window, on full alert.
Was this Kara?
Jordanna followed the wire fence line as directed and finally came to the point where it met at a corner and turned ninety degrees east to delineate the end of the Benchley property.
This must be government property, under the Bureau of Land Management
, she thought, surveying the fields north of the Benchley property and along the east side of Summit Ridge, expanses of unfenced land that ran into the Cascades for thousands of acres. To the west were the rear limits of original farms that ended at the road. She’d driven past her father’s property long before she’d reached Zach Benchley’s house, and now, as she pulled off to the right shoulder, just past the Benchley fence line, she glanced toward the western side of the road, wondering whose farm she was looking at. All of this property had once been owned by Benchleys, she recalled. She’d paid little to no attention to her neighbors when she was growing up; it simply hadn’t interested her.
Her right tires were in a low, wide ditch, leaving the car at an angle as she pulled on the emergency brake and cut the engine. Clouds were gathering, darkening the landscape around her. She got out of the car and walked a bit further north, following the line of Summit Ridge. She’d driven this road a number of times when she was young, but there was nothing beyond but fields and fir trees and rocky switchbacks into the mountains, not much of interest to her teenaged self.
She stopped short, wishing she’d brought a jacket with a hood. Up ahead, she saw the way Summit Ridge curved around a cliff. Not that many more miles ahead was where her sister, Emily, had slid off the road into one of the homestead farms, caught up in the stand of firs at the back side of their property. As she gazed north, her eye caught on an area of trampled grass toward the west, as if a vehicle had gone off the road, much like Emily had. She was considering walking up that way and checking it out when she heard the buzz of Zach’s ATV, which grew louder as he appeared, coming toward her in a straight line. The dog had fallen behind, apparently, as she was nowhere to be seen.
She waved at him, and he drove right up to the fence line. She tramped over to him and realized there was a gate of sorts, as he undid a section of the wire fencing from a metal post and pulled it back.
“This is where government land starts?” she asked.
“Yup.”
“Do you know who owns the land directly across from us?” She pointed west, to land that was undoubtedly one of the homestead farms that couldn’t be cut up into smaller sizes, per land use laws. It was a few farms over from the Treadwell homestead.
He followed her finger. “Used to be all Benchley land.”
So, he knew that, too. “Are you the last of the Benchleys?”
“Nah. The old people are still there, at least some of ’em. You know them? How crazy they are?” He slid her a glance.
“Not really.”
“My dad was adopted. He’s not a real Benchley, which is a good thing because they’re all nuts. His sister was adopted, too, ’cuz they knew they were going crazy and needed someone to take care of ’em, so that’s why they adopted them. That’s what Dad thinks.”
“I’ve never heard that.”
“Oh, yeah, they’re all ‘fuckin’ lunatics,’ my dad says.”
“I’ve heard of the Treadwell Curse,” Jordanna responded, wondering if he’d gotten it mixed up.
“What’s that?” He was gazing over the area where they were standing, as if getting his bearings.
“It’s the unofficial name for an unofficial genetic disease that affects the brain. It sounds kind of like what you’re talking about.”
He nodded as if they were discussing fact. “The Benchleys for sure. I don’t know about any Treadways.”
“Treadwells. A lot of Treadwell families settled around here, too.”
“All I know is my dad says the Benchleys have brain problems, and he should know, ’cuz his dad, my grandpa, was one of ’em.”
Jordanna thought that over. She saw that she was going to have to connect with her father sooner, rather than later. He would know what this kid was talking about. Aunt Evelyn had mentioned the Benchleys, too, she recalled.
Zach had turned off the ATV and now he forged out in a diagonal line from the road. “Over here,” he called back to her.
Jordanna followed after him. As she approached, she saw a small, wooden marker shoved into the ground with HM crudely written on it. She doubted it would be seen by the casual motorist driving by.
“What’s HM stand for?”
“Homeless man.”
“You left the marker here?”
He nodded solemnly. “I almost ran over him,” he said, sounding still worried about it. “Dixie found him, so I just missed him.”
“What makes you think he was homeless?”
Zach seemed nonplussed for a moment. He blinked at her a few times, then said, “Nobody knew him and we all know everybody around here, pretty much.”
“Wonder how he got out here. It’s not really near anything. Food, shelter . . .”
“Dad says lots of hobos go out on government land,” he said, lifting his shoulders and letting them drop. “Ours is the last farm on this side of Summit Ridge till you get to Fool’s Falls. After that it’s all public land.”
Jordanna squinted toward the trampled grass up ahead on the west side of the road. “What’s over there?” she asked.
Zach’s face shuttered. “That’s Fowler property.”
The name rang a distant bell. “I think I remember them,” Jordanna said, trying to recall the names of all the families nearby her own. Mostly she recalled the properties had been owned by Benchleys. “Is that access to the Fowler’s property?”
“Maybe.” His tone was flat.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“Nothin’.” When she kept her gaze on him, he shifted on his feet and said, “Old Lady Fowler is mean, although she’s really, really old now. I thought maybe she shot the homeless guy. I wouldn’t put it past her, but my dad said no. And anyway, he didn’t have any gunshot wounds.”
“Where are the old Benchleys that you mentioned?”
He hooked a thumb south. “Right next to us. The only farm on the east side besides us.”
“But this land is owned by Mrs. Fowler. Is her husband deceased?”
“Yeah, but I don’t think he’s in the old cemetery. It isn’t used anymore.”
“The old cemetery?” Jordanna asked.
Zach sighed, as if having a conversation with her was a trial. “It’s a Benchley cemetery, but it’s really old, and no one uses it anymore. Now it’s on Fowler land, though, so . . .”
“Where exactly is the cemetery?”
He glanced toward the area she’d been looking at. “I don’t know.”
“Could it be near that flattened grass up ahead?” When Zach didn’t answer, Jordanna added, “Maybe someone drove to it. It looks like something heavy was there.”
“Nobody uses it.”
“You’ve seen it, though,” she guessed.
“My dad would kill me if he thought I was trespassing. I’d better start heading back. Dixie!” he called to the Lab, who was now once again in sight. The dog looked up and came bounding back.
“I’d like to take a look at it,” Jordanna said.
“Why? There’s nothing there but some old broken-down tombstones. I didn’t see anything.”
Jordanna was trying to get a bead on him, figure out what was driving him. Clearly he thought the cemetery was anathema, and she’d bet it wasn’t just because his father might come down on him for trespassing. She thought about the cemetery, and a distant memory flitted across her mind. Nate Calverson talking with friends in the hall between classes. “. . . so scared she almost peed her pants. I told her it’s just a bunch of dead people. They can’t hurt you.” Jordanna had thought he meant Everhardt Cemetery, though she’d mostly remembered how he’d caught her gaze and held it as she walked by.
But if he’d taken a girl to a cemetery, could it have been to this one, which was far more private?
“Did you see a couple making out at the cemetery?” she called, for Zach was already at the wire fence, yanking the gate into place. When he shook his head, she yelled, “I don’t care. I just want to know. Is it kind of a place kids go to be alone?”
“I told the police about it,” he hollered back, raising his voice over the revving of the ATV. “They didn’t think it had anything to do with the guy I found.”
“But it is a make-out spot.”
“I haven’t seen anybody in a long time,” he said. Then the ATV leapt as if it were in a race and Zach, with Dixie running behind, bumped rapidly over the field and raced away from her.
“Well, okay,” she muttered, stepping into the road and looking both ways before quickly crossing. She hurried up the road at a jog. She probably should have gotten back in her vehicle and driven, but it wasn’t all that far.
When she got there, she saw that the grasses were flattened in all directions and there was a broken-down fence with a rusted gate, the gate having been pushed back into overgrown blackberry brambles. Beyond, she could clearly see where a vehicle or vehicles had driven across a road of sorts that curved to the north and disappeared into a stand of Douglas firs and pines, a small forest that appeared to have grown in all directions over the years.