Chapter 14
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
“ D ad’s been a wreck all week,” Lily said. “But Ethan has him laughing out loud.” She spoke softly, so her father wouldn’t hear in the front seat of Ethan Brand’s gigantic pickup truck. It occurred to Harrison that his sister would never call Maria’s singing cowboy cousin by his unwanted nickname. She’d known him as Ethan Brand because Spotify knew him as Ethan Brand.
She was a serious girl, Harrison’s baby sister. She always had been. She put her head down and did the work, whatever the work of the moment happened to be, from learning to write her name to earning her pin. She sat beside Harrison in the back seat, looking so much like their mom it was almost as if she was there, too, peeking out from inside her daughter’s blue eyes every once in a while.
Ethan had been in lighthearted conversation with their father the entire time.
Harrison’s initial impression of “Bubba” had been big. Then, talented, when he’d heard him playing by the campfire. And later, kind, when he was the only one who called him by his actual name. It turned out he was also a gentle and caring sort of man. He felt a little bad that it surprised him. But the big guy had talked Hyram right out of being scared and had probably lowered the older man’s blood pressure while he was at it.
“I can’t wait to see the ranch,” Hyram said. “The way you describe it, it’s obvious you love it.”
“We’re already on it, actually,” Ethan replied. “This here road cuts right through Brand land.”
“Amazing. Oh, if only it were daylight.” Hyram was looking out his window, but it was hard to see much besides shapes in the darkness. “Do you take after your mom or your dad, Ethan?” Hyram asked at length.
“Oh, well, that’s a whole other story, Hyram. A whole other story. My birth mother passed when I was knee-high to a grasshopper. Before she died, she left me on the doorstep of the Texas Brand with, she said in her note, the kindest family she’d ever met. They’d taken her in once, when she was in trouble. Helped her so much she named me after the head of the family. My mother’s sister, my aunt Chelsea, came lookin’ for me, and wound up stayin’. She married Garrett and they adopted me.”
“That’s a helluva story!” his father said. “Left on the doorstep!” Then he coughed for about a minute and a half.
Ethan hadn’t mentioned his birth father, but Harrison had heard the rest of the tale from Maria. His birth father had murdered his mother and was serving life in prison. That was probably the cause of the uneasiness behind his eyes. There were unseen depths to Ethan Brand.
Harrison glanced behind them, but he didn’t see the headlights of Maria’s van back there. He pulled out his phone to text her and tapped her contact, which was just her initials in a blue circle. He didn’t have a photo of her to his name. He’d have to remedy that. When he thought of her, his heart twisted into a knot of pleasure and pain that was impossible to untie. They went hand in hand. He wanted to be with her, but he couldn’t be with her, and it was killing him.
That was when something broadsided them out of nowhere. Lily screamed as they were plowed off the pavement and into some trees, and the truck crumpled inward around them. Harrison threw himself over his sister, and when the grinding stopped and he looked, the spot where he’d been sitting no longer existed.
Up front, Ethan got his door open, got out, and helped Harrison’s father out behind him, picking him right up. “He’s fixin’ to ram us again,” he shouted. “Everybody out, fast!”
The rear passenger door was mashed against a tree, impossible to open. Lily scrambled over the back seat, and jumped out of the truck through the open driver’s door. Through the shattered passenger side window, Harrison saw a big black truck with an oversized, after-market bumper, surging toward him. He dove over the seat and out, as the killer rammed the truck again. Racing into the thick woods, he caught up to his sister, encircled her shoulders with his arm and kept running as the attacker rammed the truck yet again.
The revving and smashing continued. Ethan was up ahead, carrying Hyram piggyback.
Harrison still had his phone in his hand. He wondered if it had been an error turning it back on when they’d landed. Maria’s contact was still open. He tapped the word AMBUSH and kept on running.
The deer let her approach, but when Maria got close, it sprang up, leapt away on three legs, then lay down again. She tried a second time, and the same thing happened. The third time, the animal kept on going, it’s gait uneven, but rapid as it vanished into the woods.
She sighed, shaking her head. “This one’s up to you, Mother Nature,” she said as she turned. Willow was shining her phone’s flashlight onto the front of the van. When she got close enough, Maria could see a small dent in the fender.
“It’s fine,” she said. “Just hope the deer is.”
“Looked pretty peppy to me,” Willow said. “Want me to keep driving?”
“Yeah, if you don’t mind.” She was exhausted, worried, and maybe it was just because she was tired, but she didn’t feel very hopeful about things with Harry. Now that she’d spent time with his family, she didn’t blame him for not wanting to move away from them. Or for wanting to keep his promise to his mother. It kind of made her love him even more.
Oh, dear Lord, I love him, she thought. I love him, and he’s fixin’ to break my heart. She couldn’t even be angry about it. He’d been honest from the start.
Her phone pinged, and she picked it up.
Harrison: AMBUSH
“Oh, Lord, somethin’s wrong.” She showed Will the one-word text, and Willow stomped the gas pedal. “Tell the family he’s in trouble,” she said, then she told her own phone to call dispatch, while Maria texted. Dispatch answered, and Willow talked on speaker. “It’s Deputy Brand. We’ve got trouble. Possibly another attempt on Harrison Hyde.”
“Location?”
“North Brand Lane,” Willow said. “Start looking around the five-mile mark.”
“Dispatching deputies now.”
They rounded a curve, and the headlights illuminated devastating wreckage. Maria thought her heart stopped. The smashed-in vehicle was red. Other than that, you could barely tell it was a truck. It was flattened against some trees. Willow shut the headlights off and stopped where she was, pulling off the road a good distance ahead of the scene.
Maria yanked the door handle, but Will grabbed her arm then pointed. Off the opposite side of the road from Bubba’s ruined pickup, there was a large black truck with some kind of metal grill on the front. Willow opened the glove compartment and pulled out a handgun only she could have put there.
“No plates. Son of a gun. There’s a shotgun in the back,” she said. “I brought it along in case of trouble. Box of shells beside it. Get ’em. Load it. Move slow. I’ll watch.”
“If they were in that truck?—”
“If they’d been in that truck, Harry couldn’t have texted, right? Get the shotgun.”
Maria scrambled into the back of the van and found the shotgun, an old Ithaca 20-gauge pump model. Not police-issue. A family heirloom. She loaded in four shells but did not chamber one. Instead she dropped the fifth slug into her pocket. Her forefinger brushed across the safety, ensuring it was on.
She turned, but Willow was gone, and she spotted her, creeping up on the passenger side of that black truck with her gun in both hands, its barrel angled downward. Maria got out of the van, using the side door. With the shotgun ready, she crossed the road to back Willow up, and moved to the passenger side of the black truck.
Willow yanked open the driver’s door and checked inside. Maria did the same from her side. The truck was empty, so she moved to the back.
“Tailgate’s down,” Maria said.
“Ramps, too,” Willow noted. “Had a four-wheeler in the back. Maybe more than one. Listen.” In the distance there were faint motor sounds.
Maria crossed the road to Bubba’s truck. The only door open was the driver’s door, so that was where she climbed partway in. The truck had been compressed to half its width. There was broken glass everywhere, but she didn’t see anyone inside. And she didn’t see any blood. She looked over into the truncated back seat, but no one was there, either.
Her sigh was so heavy her neck went limp, and she dropped her chin to her chest. And then she saw the crimson puddle of blood on the floor.
“Maria?”
She backed out of the pickup, still carrying the shotgun. “No one inside, blood on the floor in back. Harry or Lily, they were the ones sittin’ there.”
“I spotted a little blood out here, too. They left a trail. Bad guy could’ve followed. Maybe not, though. He might not’ve seen it from his ATV. There’s only a few drops here and there.” She pulled out her phone. “No signal. You?”
Maria looked at her phone. “No. But there must be one nearby. Harry got a message out to me.”
“Might have a different carrier.”
“The family will spot that blood,” Maria said. “But we might as well make it easy.” She snapped a slender limb at eye level as she passed.
“Here, hold up here,” Ethan said. “I think we lost him.” He set Hyram on his feet in little clearing within the woods.
Harrison looked around. There was a low, stone wall forming a boundary around gravestones. “This is a cemetery.”
“Family plot,” Ethan said. “Highest point on the property. Prettiest, too.”
As he spoke, clouds moved away from the face of the moon, allowing its white light to spill down. The well-tended graveyard overlooked a small pond that reflected the moonlight. A couple of stone benches, and a birdbath had been placed near its edge. There was a small shed made of large stone blocks. Plants grew all around the pond and from every grave, old or new. Their buds nodded. Some of the headstones illuminated by the moon were centuries old. Some were much newer. And because the spot was elevated, and the moon was full, the view was stunning. Rolling meadows, woodlands, darkening layers of landscape. In the daytime, he thought, you could probably see the whole place.
“Well, I’ll be…” Hyram looked around, blinking. “I’ve seen this place before.”
“This is my mamma’s spot, right here,” Ethan said, laying his big hand on a rose granite tombstone. “Uncle Garrett had her moved here. Aunt Chelsea said it was what she’d want, to be where I was.”
A lump formed in Harrison’s throat. He started to say something, feeling a shared loss with Maria’s big cousin, but the buzz of a motor cut him off, growing louder alarmingly fast. Lily released a shriek of alarm as an ATV burst from the trees, and she took off running. Harry and his father both lunged after her, but his dad fell, and then an ATV bore down on him. In the dark woods, the driver wouldn’t see him to avoid hitting him, even if he wanted to. Harrison flung himself on top of his dad, wrapped his arms around him and rolled him out of the way, winding up in a thick patch of brush. The ATV roared past them. Ethan raced past them, too, trying to catch up with Lily as she screamed like Harrison had never heard before.
He lunged to his feet to go to her, but the ATV sped right at Lily, and the man driving it grabbed her, pulled her across the seat, and gunned it.
“No!” Harrison lurched after them as Bubba chased the machine on foot, but it was gone. And then a second ATV sped toward Harrison from behind, and he turned and ran right at it. Just before it smashed into him, he bent his knees and leapfrogged right over the hood and handlebars, smashing into the driver’s head, helmet and all. He held onto the guy, taking him off the machine and onto the ground. Straddling, the guy’s chest, he ripped off his helmet. “Where the hell is he taking my sister?”
The man didn’t answer, and Harrison punched him in the face so hard it hurt his hand. He was like a passenger watching his own body acting without his consent. He drew back to punch him again, his entire body shaking. “Tell me, dammit!”
“Harry, don’t!” That was Maria’s voice, and it worked like cool water on his anger.
He turned his head to look at her. She and Willow had arrived, somehow, on the scene. Willow said, “I’ve got this,” and pushed him off the guy then rolled the man over. Harrison looked at the guy’s bloody face. He’d done that. None of this seemed real.
Willow cuffed the guy’s hands behind his back. “Get up,” she said, yanking until he was on his feet, then she patted him down.
Maria moved closer to Harry. It had taken her a beat. Maybe she’d been shocked, too, to see him pounding on another man’s face. She hooked her arm around his waist, and he put his around her shoulders. She pressed so close to his side there was no space between them. She held a shotgun by its stock in her free hand.
Willow pulled a folded sheet of printer paper from the attacker’s shirt pocket. She took it out, unfolded it, and then turned the sheet around so he and Maria could see what was on it. A photo of Harrison. Underneath it, an itinerary. “Brighton Private Airstrip to Texas Brand via North Brand Lane. 12:00 - 1:00 a.m.”
He took it from her. “They knew exactly where I’d be,” Harrison said.
“He ain’t gon’ hurt her,” the handcuffed man said. His beard glistened with blood from his nose and split lip.
Willow spun him around. “Where’s he taking her?”
The guy spit a mouthful of blood on the ground then said, “I want a lawyer.”
Within a short time, there were cops surrounding the woodlot. So was every member of the Brand family. Harrison, Maria, Ethan, and Hyram had been driven back to Maria’s van on a UTV. There were flares blazing and pulled-over police vehicles with lights flashing. Maria’s mother, Jessi, ran to wrap her daughter in her arms. Then she turned to Harrison and Hyram.
“We’re gon’ find her,” she promised them both. She nodded in the direction of the wreck, where the flashing yellow lights of a wrecker joined the strobing red and blue of the police cars. Then she looked at Maria and said, “I’m s’posed to drive you back to the ranch where it’s safe. But uh… I heard that little Agent, Hofstadler— ain’t she cute as a button?— sayin’ the forensics team would arrive by noon. ’Til then, nobody’s allowed to lay a finger on that truck that rammed you.”
Harrison saw the way Maria’s face changed. She looked right at her mother and there was no doubt in his mind that the two were having a private conversation nobody else was in on. Maria said, “They takin’ it to the impound yard?”
“Seems likely,” her mother said.
The wrecker was humming loud and lifting the front of the black truck. Then the driver made a few more adjustments, got behind the wheel, and towed the thing away.