Chapter Seventeen
“And I’ve got your jacket,” Bethany said. She tossed him the blue-and-yellow jacket with SAR across the chest and back.
Dalton looked down at the jacket bunched in his hands. “I’m not going tonight,” he said.
“The meeting is mandatory,” Carter said.
“You’re not helping anyone, holed up in this room moping,” Bethany said. “Come with us and get out of your own head for a while.”
He wanted to protest. To shout at her, even. It would feel good to be angry with someone besides himself. But he couldn’t summon the strength. Instead, he followed his brother and sister out to Bethany’s Subaru. “I’ll wait in the car when we get there,” he said.
But when they arrived at search and rescue headquarters, he followed his siblings inside.
His fellow volunteers greeted him when he entered.
They didn’t stare or murmur expressions of sympathy or ask him what had happened the day before in the mountains.
They treated him the same way they treated him every time he saw them—as another member of the team.
As if they trusted him with their lives and the lives of others.
“Tonight’s topic is assessing and treating compound fractures.” Danny spoke from the front of the room.
But before he could elaborate, alerts started going off all over the room. Dalton pulled out his phone and stared at the message from the search and rescue app. “This says someone reported a distress signal from the cliffs over by Cub Creek,” Caleb said.
Danny was on the phone. When he ended the call, he said. “Someone saw SOS flashing from the cliffs above Cub Creek about 6:00 p.m.,” he said. “They tried to spot whoever it was through binoculars, but the terrain in there is so heavily wooded, they couldn’t make out anything.”
“Where is Cub Creek?” Dalton asked. He thought he knew the area around Eagle Mountain pretty well by now, but this was a new one to him.
“East of here,” Grace said. “There’s a trailhead at the end of Forest Road 4624 for a couple of trails in that area, but I don’t think they’re very popular. It’s pretty dense forest in there.”
“I have the details about the location of the person who called this in,” Danny said. “We’ll have to go around the long way. The sheriff’s department says they’ve closed off the forest service road because of an incident.”
“What kind of incident?” Carter asked.
“Don’t know. But we can get to where we need to go if we cut over on County Road 7, then across the Everson Ranch. We’ll start there and see if we can see anything.”
Chairs scraped and papers rustled and everyone present prepared to respond to the call.
Dalton put on his jacket, slipped on his pack and joined the line of volunteers transferring rescue gear to their vehicles.
He rode with Carter, Bethany and Caleb to a ranch gate, where a man in a buff-colored Stetson unlocked the gate and let them in.
From there they followed a narrow dirt track up a slope and into the woods, and stopped beside a shallow creek.
Danny pulled out a portable spotlight, equipped with a movable cover.
“From the description the caller gave, they saw the signaling up there somewhere,” he said.
He switched on the light, then aimed it at what to Dalton looked like a steep, tree-covered slope.
Three short bursts of light. Three longer bursts. Three short bursts.
They waited. A cry rose up when a light flashed in answer. Three short, three long, three short.
Someone pulled out a map and spread it on the hood of the rescue vehicle. Tony sketched out a route to take them to the ledge. “We’ll need to cross the creek and bushwhack up the slope,” he said.
“We need a couple of people in front with chain saws, with people behind them to move the brush out of the way,” Danny said. “Tony and Harper, you get the medical gear and be ready to hustle up to that ledge. The rest of us will follow. And be careful.”
Something in his voice made them all freeze and look at him. “Something wrong?” Sheri asked.
“I’m just thinking there’s still a fugitive loose out there,” Danny said. “We don’t want to risk walking into a trap.”
Dalton walked over and pulled a chain saw from the back of the rescue vehicle. “I’ll go first,” he said. If William Ledger was up there, he’d welcome the chance to be the first to confront him.
It took an hour of cutting and clearing brush to reach the ledge where the light continued to flash periodically.
Dalton remained at the front of the group, still carrying the heavy chain saw, when they emerged at one side of the ledge.
At first, he didn’t see anyone. Then someone stepped from the shadows. “Dalton,” Roxanne said.
He dropped the saw and reached for her. She wrapped her arms around him tightly, and began to sob. “It’s okay,” he murmured and rested his face against her hair. “You’re safe now. You’re safe.”
Roxanne managed to pull herself together and reassure the search and rescue volunteers who gathered around her that she was all right. “I’d like some water,” she said, and someone handed her a bottle.
“Is anyone else up here with you?” Danny asked.
“No one,” she said. “I’ve been signaling for hours.” She held up the little headlamp she had taken from Kara’s knitting bag. “I was afraid the battery was going to run out soon.”
“Where is William Ledger?” Dalton asked.
“I don’t know.” She turned to him. Though her knees threatened to give way, she kept her voice defiant. “I stabbed him in the eye with a knitting needle and ran away. I didn’t care if I was lost in the middle of the forest. At least I got away from him.”
Danny radioed that they had located Roxanne. “She’s okay,” he said. “She says she stabbed William Ledger with a knitting needle.” He cleared his throat. “In the eye.”
The person on the other end of the line chuckled. “So that’s what happened to him. Ledger is in custody, along with his accomplice.”
“His accomplice?” Dalton asked.
“Kara Lee,” Roxanne said.
It took Dalton a second to place the name. “Your neighbor?”
She nodded. “She was Alice.”
“Her real name is Brianna Davidson,” Dalton said. “Then she changed it to Betty Josephs. And now I guess she’s going by Kara Lee. She was helping Ledger?”
“She put a tracking device on my car so she could follow me around town,” Roxanne said. “She led Ledger to me. She . . .she’s not right. I think the things he did to her, when she was so young—they destroyed her.”
Dalton pulled her close once more. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s go home.”
She pushed away from him, agitated. “I almost forgot.” She turned to Danny. “You need to tell the sheriff to go to Kara’s rental—the tiny home on County Road 3. They need to look for Sarah Michaelson there.”
“I’ll tell him,” Danny said.
“Ledger really did take Sarah?” Dalton asked.
“Yes. He wouldn’t tell me where he was keeping her, but things he said made me think she was still alive. I thought Kara’s tiny home might be a good place to stash the girl until Ledger was ready to bring us all together.”
Dalton turned to look her in the face. “How are you really?” he asked. “Did he hurt you?”
She shook her head. “He tied me to a bed, but I got away before he could do anything more,” she said.
“Where did you get a knitting needle?” he asked.
“Kara knits. I took them from her knitting bag.”
“Huh.”
“I’ve been afraid to ask,” she said. “What happened to Debra?”
“Ledger hit her and threw her off a cliff, but she’s going to be okay,” he said. “She’s recovering in the hospital.”
“That’s good.”
“I thought for a while she might have been Alice,” Dalton said. “She was so fixated on you.”
“I wondered about that, too,” she said. “But I think she really was just wanting very badly to find out what happened to her sister.”
“I don’t guess Ledger said anything about Bettina?”
“No. But it is odd that he had Alice—Brianna—change her name to Betty. I’m sure the name was his idea.
I got the impression Kara didn’t do anything he didn’t tell her.
She told me he even paid for her to have a nose job.
” She leaned against him. “I don’t want to talk about her anymore. I just want to go home.”
Dalton started toward the Ameses’ house, but when he signaled for the turn, Roxanne put a hand on his arm. “Can we go to your place instead?” she asked. “I’m not really ready to see a bunch of people yet.”
“Sure.” He drove on, to his apartment, and led the way up the steps to the front door.
The air smelled musty, like a place that hadn’t been open for several days. “I’ve been staying with my folks,” Dalton said. He moved ahead of her, picking up dropped socks and an empty soda can along the way. “Do you want something to eat or drink?” he asked.
“I want a shower and a nap.” She yawned. “I’m exhausted.”
Fatigue dragged at Dalton, too. “The bathroom is here,” he said, and led her down the short hall. “The bedroom is across from there.”
“Maybe you have some clothes I could borrow,” she said.
“Sure.”
He came up with a T-shirt and a pair of athletic shorts. He handed her these, along with a pair of socks. “They’ll be too big for you,” he said.
“It doesn’t matter.” She took the clothing and shut the door gently. He hurried away to change the sheets on the bed, glad for once of his mother’s insistence that he needed two sets of sheets at all times, a belief he had considered overkill until now.
When Roxanne emerged from the shower she was pink-cheeked and smelling of his shower gel.
Her wet hair curled around her face and her nipples tented the front of the T-shirt.
His response was immediate and he turned away, hoping she didn’t notice his erection.
“You can sleep in here,” he said, pointing out the freshly made bed. “I’ll sleep in Carter’s old room.”
Roxanne took his hand. “I’d rather if you slept with me. I’d feel safer.”