Chapter 3
Nash
“There has to be some way to find her,” Nance says, frowning as she smooths down the front of her white half-apron.
“Hard to do when the whole town hates us, and we have no clue where she came from.” Makhi leans against the wall of my office beside the patio doors.
“Because you forced her out.” Vonn hasn’t stopped glaring at Makhi in the three days since Makhi fired Byrdie and slammed a door in her face.
That doesn’t seem likely to change soon.
“I thought she was a thief,” Makhi grinds out, avoiding Vonn’s gaze.
“Because you never stop to use your fucking—”
“Nance, maybe you can get back to whatever you were doing before,” I cut in, trying to save my housekeeper from this next round of arguments. She’s been with me since I was a baby. I’m twenty-four now, and at this point, Nance is more family than my housekeeper.
“I’ll stay,” Nance says from her seat on the other side of the antique walnut desk. “I might be able to help, Mr. Gabriel.”
“Nash,” I quietly correct her. “You are family. Please start calling me Nash.”
She gives me a long, thoughtful look and nods once. “If you insist… Nash.”
Nance doesn’t seem to notice Vonn’s dark glare pointed at Makhi, or she doesn’t care.
I have my money on the latter. Nance is observant.
She sees everything. Just because she’s choosing not to respond to Makhi and Vonn, who can’t go an hour without fighting like two cats in a bag, doesn’t mean she’s not aware of it.
On my desk is the bag that Byrdie left behind when Makhi told her to leave. I’m just as angry at him as Vonn, but Vonn was in the army; he's wanted to be a hero since before he joined. He has stronger protective instincts than I do, and he growls louder when someone he protects is threatened.
There’s not much in the bag.
A change of clothes. A stolen driving license that belongs to Jessica Bradley, aged twenty-three.
The young woman has shoulder-length brown hair and blue-gray eyes.
Byrdie is only eighteen, though looking into her eyes, you’d think she were older, probably a result of the trauma she ran to Massey looking to hide from.
The owner of the ID bears a slight resemblance to Byrdie if you don’t look too closely at the picture. Byrdie’s natural hair was white-blonde before she dyed it dark brown, and her eyes are dark blue.
Vonn said Byrdie stole the ID at a bus station. And there’s an envelope of money. I counted it out days ago. $1,000. It was her pay for working these past two weeks as our maid.
There’s no bus ticket stub or anything that might tell us where she came from.
When I look at Vonn, he’s scowling at Makhi.
Makhi has peeled his back from the wall and sits slumped in one of the office chairs across from my desk. He’s taking a risk putting himself so close to Vonn’s right fist, but maybe he’s tired of the scowling and growling over the last three days, and has decided to do something about it.
It wouldn’t surprise me.
I pull my attention from Makhi to focus on a still-scowling Vonn. “What else did she tell you other than her name?”
Vonn lets out a deep sigh of frustration and rubs a hand over his shaved dark blond hair. Muscled arms covered with tattoos flex with the action. “We’ve already been over this. We’re wasting time.”
I arch my eyebrow at him. “And how did going into town to hunt out answers work out for you?”
His mouth flattens, but he doesn’t answer.
On the first day, we spent over an hour searching for Byrdie in the pouring rain. The front gate was opened when it shouldn’t have been. Tire tracks from a large vehicle leading away from the gate showed that whoever had been out there was no longer there.
Nance doesn’t know how the gate came to be open.
An older-sounding man pressed the intercom, looking for their wife, and Nance, confused, came to ask me about it.
I’d been with Byrdie in the music room when she turned white and rushed upstairs.
Then someone shot at me, or near me, when I went out to find out who was missing a wife.
But at no point did Nance open the front gate.
So how did they get onto the property?
Once we’d dried from our thorough soaking, and argued about how we could find Byrdie, Vonn decided the best course of action would be to head into town to see if anyone had seen her.
I warned Vonn that it wasn’t a good idea. This town hates us too much to want to help us with anything, even finding a woman in trouble. He refused to listen, so I went with him, already knowing things were likely to blow up.
At the grocery store, we ignored the stares from the few people standing outside the diner, talking or smoking under umbrellas as the rain continued to fall.
Before Vonn got one question out about Byrdie, Douglas, the owner of the grocery store, was ordering us out. It’s why Nance or Lydia has always picked up the weekly groceries. When one of us goes into town, it always leads to trouble.
Usually, we walk away.
This time, Vonn was stubborn, which led to a standoff and a warning to leave or the sheriff would be called. It was a threat swiftly followed by Vonn reaching for his gun before I convinced him to return to the house.
It was late, and the bus station was closed; otherwise, we’d have gone there instead to ask if any of the staff remembered which bus Byrdie had been coming from the day she arrived in Massey. Even if the bus station had been open, we’d probably have faced the same refusal to help us find Byrdie.
The people in this town hate us, and that will never change.
“The bus station is open now,” Vonn stops scowling at Makhi to say. “We can try there now.”
“No one will tell us shit,” Makhi says, head down and eyes fixed on his boots.
When Makhi leaves the house, he rides his bike.
He goes for hours, which pisses Vonn off even more.
Makhi says he needs time to think. Vonn snaps at him that he should be doing more to find Byrdie, given that he was responsible for her being gone in the first place.
I think if Makhi hadn’t gone on those rides, he and Vonn would be wearing black eyes by now.
Or maybe it’s smoking on the roof that makes it easier for Makhi to deal with the guilt I’ve caught brief glimpses of when he thinks no one is watching.
“Byrdie had to come from the bus station,” Nance says. “She walked up to the house, and she saw the sign we were hiring in the grocery store. She wouldn’t have seen it if she’d been driving.”
Nance burst into tears when she heard Byrdie was missing, and every morning, she asks if we’ve found a way to save her. It feels like a million years ago, not a handful of weeks, since she was pushing me to pay Byrdie to go away when she first turned up asking for a job.
“I still can’t believe he let you put a sign in his shop window,” I say to Nance.
She makes a sound in the back of her throat. “I knew Douglas would have a problem doing anything for you, so I just asked for something from the back of his store, and when he went back to get it, I put up the sign myself.”
I shake my head at my nearly sixty-year-old housekeeper. Sometimes I wonder how well I really know her. “You lied to his face.”
I thought she had convinced Douglas to put up a sign in his shop, but I had no idea she had it in her to be so deceptive.
She doesn’t look the least bit sorry. In fact, I swear she’s secretly pleased she got away with it. “You needed the help, and it was the only way to get it done. And I didn’t lie. I needed that bottle of lemon Lysol.”
“To go along with the three boxes we have delivered to the house every month?” I ask dryly.
She picks a piece of lint off her skirt and doesn’t say a word.
Makhi would have laughed or joked about her hidden dark side, but he’s quiet. That’s never a good sign. When he’s silent, it usually means something is brewing.
“I could have sworn she said something about New Mexico,” Vonn mutters, rubbing a hand over his stubbled jaw.
Makhi snorts and says sarcastically, “I know army folk aren’t the smartest tools in the shed, but even you must know how big New Mexico is.”
Vonn is on his feet and drives his fist into Makhi’s jaw before I can intervene.
A chair goes skittering across the room, and Makhi crashes to the ground with a grunt. Vonn must have been too angry to strike where he intended, or he pulled his punch, because Makhi is up again. Usually, when Vonn hits, people stay down.
It turns into a one-sided brawl, and not because Vonn was trained to fight by the government. Makhi does nothing to defend himself or even fight back. He gets up, prolonging the fight, and lets Vonn hit him again and again.
Vonn realizes Makhi isn’t fighting back before I can shove myself between them, pulling his next punch.
With blood dripping from Makhi’s nose and light gray eyes filled with rage, he steps up to Vonn and shoves. “Hit me. Go on. Fucking hit me.”
Vonn lowers his arm to his side. “No.”
Makhi shoves him. And again. When Vonn doesn’t retaliate, he swings a fist at Vonn’s face. Vonn catches Makhi’s wrist before he can land his blow, and nudges him back a step.
Makhi snarls in Vonn’s face. “I know what I did. I pushed her out of the door. She was afraid and hiding, and right this fucking second, she could be being raped or hit or whatever the fuck some piece of shit did to her that had her flinching and hiding in shadows.”
He’s breathing hard, and the room is silent as he squares up to Vonn and shoves him again, sending Vonn back a half-step.
Vonn grasps him and holds him. “Stop.”
I should have known Makhi was about to blow. He’s been too quiet.
I take a step toward him. “Makhi…”
He rips himself out of Vonn’s grip, growling and cursing. "Fuck!" He kicks the desk. Then a chair. There’s as much rage as there is pain in the curses that fall from his lips.
I move toward him. "It's okay, she--"
"I. Slammed. The. Door. In. Her. Face." He grabs the front of my shirt and shakes me with each snarled word, then shoves me away. "In her fucking face."
He moves to punch the wall. Vonn grabs his shoulder, drags him back, and into his chest. He wraps his arms around Makhi in a bear hug, holding him as Makhi curses and fights to get free.
“Fucking stop,” Vonn growls. “Just… stop.”
It takes five minutes before Makhi stops fighting Vonn.
“We’ll find her,” Vonn says. “We will find her.”
Makhi looks at him, and his eyes are bleak. “And if she’s dead?”
Vonn hardens his expression. “We’ll make whoever hurt her pay. Let it go now. You fucked up. Do it again, and I’ll fucking kill you. Call me stupid, and I’ll stop pulling my punches.”
Nance, who calmly sat through the brawl on the other side of my desk, looks from Vonn to Makhi and arches her eyebrow. “Now that you’ve gotten that out of your system, can we get back to the task at hand?”
It’s hard not to smile at that.
With blood dripping from his nose, even Makhi cracks a smile. Vonn shakes his head and looks away, but not before I spot the flicker of amusement in his amber gaze.
And the tension that has been growing over the last three days pops.
A germ of an idea takes root in my mind. “Other people would have been on the bus.”
Everyone looks at me.
I explain. “It’s a long shot, but maybe someone got on at the same stop she did. Nance, you know more locals than we do. Who do you know in town with relatives from New Mexico?”