Chapter Twenty-Seven
When Nate woke up, it took him a moment to figure out where he was. It wasn’t the ceiling of his bedroom, the bed wasn't as comfortable, and it certainly wasn't as wide.
Plus, there seemed to be an immovable force on either side of him.
He blinked and rubbed his eyes, finding he could move only one arm and his neck was stiff. How long had he been lying in this position?
He looked to his right and saw the back of Rachel’s head. She was turned away from him, breathing slowly as she slept, a slight snore coming from her. The fire had died down, and there were practically no embers left. She was using his arm as a pillow, and it was making his fingers tingle.
That was when he remembered they’d been lying together as they watched the fire dance.
Neither of them had wanted to go to bed, and Rachel had been reluctant to use Nate’s bed while he slept on the settee.
At some point, they’d fallen asleep, the feel of Rachel cradled against him feeling like the most natural thing in the world.
Nate didn’t want to get up, but he knew that he had to.
Slipping his arm out without waking her, he managed to stand up without Rachel stirring.
Snatching a blanket from around their knees, he laid it over her, brushing her hair out of her face.
Her features were softer like this, almost childlike.
There were tear stains on her cheeks, but she looked the most content she’d been in a long time.
He turned away and began to lay the fire again. She was going to need it when she woke up. While he didn’t want to, he had to go to the marshal’s office to check over things and get back to work. Nate didn’t want to leave Rachel and Daisy behind, but he had to.
Tiptoeing upstairs, he looked into Rachel’s bedroom and saw that Daisy was still asleep.
She was barely visible under the blankets, a hand and the top of her head showing against the pillow.
Loud snoring was coming from under the blanket.
He smiled, surprised to hear the loud snores coming from a nineteen-year-old girl.
He couldn’t dither for too long. He had things he needed to get on with.
After washing and dressing, Nate left the house, managing to get his coat and Stetson without knocking anything over. Then he had second thoughts and took the keys to the doors, locking the kitchen door and then the front door. Out here, nobody locked their doors, but things had changed.
Putting both keys into his pocket, Nate hurried to his office. There were a few things he needed to look over there, and he didn’t have much time.
But first, he needed to pay a visit to someone.
As he expected, Isabelle and Jack were already awake.
He could hear his nephews laughing and squealing.
Going around the back, Nate saw the boys running in the snow, Jack joining in as he picked up snow and threw it at them.
The boys did the same, bombarding Jack until he begged them to stop because he was so cold.
Isabelle stood on the porch, a shawl around her shoulders and a steaming mug in her hand. She looked at the scene with pride.
“Nate!” Her eyes widened with pleasure when she saw him walking toward her. “I wasn’t expecting you this morning. How did you find the dance? Not as bad as you thought?”
“Something like that,” Nate muttered. He glanced at Jack, who was chasing his sons in a circle. “Can I talk to you and Jack in private? I need your help.”
Isabelle knew him well enough to know that something was off. Her smile faded, her expression becoming solemn. Nodding, she turned and called for her sons.
“Get inside and have your breakfast!” she shouted. “It’s going to get cold.”
The children trotted inside, giving Nate a hug around the waist as they went past. Soon, his trousers and the bottom of his coat were soaked. Jack chuckled as he stepped onto the porch, his clothes even more sodden.
“It’s going to be a while before that dries,” Jack said.
“I’ll deal with that later. I need your help, Jack.” Nate looked at Isabelle. “Both of you. I really need it.”
Jack and Isabelle glanced at each other, both clearly concerned.
“What can we do for you?”
“I need you to go to my house and make sure Rachel is safe.” Nate paused. “A young woman came to the house last night. She’s in trouble, so she’s at the house.”
“What?” His sister’s eyes widened. “You’ve got someone else in the house?”
“It was late, and I wasn’t about to throw her out. Either way, I want you to be there to know they’re all right.”
Isabelle nodded.
“Of course. I’ll go over straight away. My neighbor Hyacinth is taking the boys today once they’ve had breakfast and they’re going to school together. I’ve got the time until they get home.”
“Thank you.”
“And what do you need me to do?” Jack asked.
“I need you to come with me to the office. I need to fish out some old documents, and a second pair of eyes and hands would help.”
Jack didn’t even hesitate, nodding before Nate had even finished speaking. He gestured at himself and his wet attire.
“Just let me get changed, and I’ll be right with you. What are you looking for?”
“I’ll explain when we get there. We just need to go.”
Nate knew both of them had a lot of questions but he couldn’t sit about waiting for them to catch up. They had to move quickly.
He hurried around to the front of the house and waited impatiently until Jack left, dressed in fresh clothes and looking like he’d been sitting out in the cold for several hours.
Teeth chattering, he followed Nate back to the main street and into the marshal’s office.
It took a few minutes for the stove to warm up, but soon it heated up the whole room.
Jack sighed with relief as he raised his hands to it.
“Now that’s better. I felt like an icicle.”
“You should’ve thought about that before you had a snowball fight with your boys,” Nate shot back.
“It’s not as bad as when you and I would get into snowball fights, and you tipped snow down the back of my neck.” Jack turned to him. “So, are you going to tell me what’s going on? And who’s this girl at your house?”
Nate gave him a quick rundown of things, and by the end Jack was looking as stunned as Nate had felt the night before.
“So you think this has been happening for several years,” he said slowly. “That Vane and Pike have been kidnapping girls to supplement their various brothels.”
“One of their establishments is at the bottom of the mountain, Jack. was not the first one.”
“Has anyone been taken since you became the town’s marshal?”
Nate frowned.
“I know there are a couple of people who went missing, but there was nothing to indicate it was anything other than running away.”
“And you think there’s more going on, don’t you?”
“There’s got to be. And it can’t be just here as well.” Nate gestured toward a door at the back of the room. “You remember the previous marshal, don’t you?”
Jack nodded.
“Yes, Marshal Briggs. He was a diligent man despite barely having anything to do around here.”
“And he kept notes about everything,” Nate added. “Which he kept in a trunk in the office. I saw it when I first started here. I didn’t have the heart to move it, so I shoved it into the back of the cupboard.”
A light was flickering in Jack’s eyes. He straightened up.
“You think there might be something there that indicates people were being kidnapped from here?”
“We’re not that far away, so it would only make sense to take women now and then from Mercy Creek. Not too many, or there would be a lot of raised eyebrows. The people were carefully chosen. Otherwise, we would’ve heard about it before now.”
“That’s a good point.” Jack tapped a finger to his mouth.
“Marshal Briggs passed last year so we’re going to have to rely on his notes. Nate headed toward the door. “And I’m going to need your help. You’ve got better eyes than I have.”
“I’ll do whatever I can.” Jack followed him. “
“We’re going to have to look through all of his notebooks.” Nate unlocked the door with a key on his belt and opened it. “Whatever we find has to stand out, something that doesn’t quite fit. We’ll be able to figure it out pretty quickly.”
They had to if they wanted to keep Rachel and Daisy safe. Nate knew it was a long shot, but it was all they had. Mae and Daisy’s testimony had to be backed up by facts, or it wouldn’t stand up in court.
The trunk was huge, both of them struggling to carry it. Nate opened it and saw the books neatly stacked inside. It was going to be a very busy day.
He took a handful of diaries and handed them to Jack.
“You’d better get going on this,” he said. “I’ll take the next stack.”
“Wouldn’t it be better to ask around and see if people remember them?”
“That’s the second thing I want to do if I can’t find anything. But Briggs was meticulous. He would’ve recorded something that could help us out.” Nate staggered under the weight of the notebooks as he dropped them heavily onto his desk. He hadn’t expected them to be so heavy.
Jack frowned as he gathered another load of notebooks.
It was going to take a long time. Nate could see the amount of notebooks piling up in front of him, and he knew it would take at least all morning, if not all day.
He wondered if he should’ve left a note instead of sneaking away. He couldn’t do anything about it now. Hopefully, Rachel would understand.
“Well,” Jack said as he sat cross-legged on the floor by the fire. “We’d better get a move on, then.”
“Just don’t block the heat going into the room. I don’t want to freeze in my own office.”
Jack simply shifted a bit closer to the fire with a smirk. Rolling his eyes, Nate began to read the books piled before him. Briggs’s handwriting was easy to decipher, written neatly and in straight lines across the page.
It wasn’t long before Nate found something.
One of the girls at the school had gone missing when she’d headed out after her lessons to walk home.
She never got back. A search party had been carried out, but there was nothing.
She had just vanished. Briggs noted that the parents didn’t seem to care much that she’d gone, and they were very laid-back about it despite their eldest daughter having disappeared.
He even wrote that he suspected that they’d paid someone to take their daughter away so they didn’t have to deal with her.
Another came up in the third book. Sandra Hughes.
She’d been Nate’s age, and they’d even been friends.
There had been talk that she and Nate might end up married due to their closeness, but Nate had never seen Sandra like that.
They both had rough childhoods, and they just bonded over the fact they had fathers who were cruel.
She was the only one, other than Isabelle and Jack, who knew everything about his life.
One day she was there, and the next she was gone. Just disappeared without warning.
Nate had known at the time that something was wrong, but everyone else just assumed she’d run away from her father, a man who didn’t care about her. Nate was certain he had something to do with it.
According to the notebooks, so did Briggs.
He wrote that Sandra’s father was seen with a man matching Isaac Vane’s description at the restaurant, and that an exchange of money was witnessed by the owner.
Had he sold his daughter off? Nate wouldn’t be surprised.
Not that he could ask; Hughes had died shortly thereafter in a bar fight when he hit his head on the counter and didn’t wake up.
This had been happening for at least fifteen years, if he could guess. He needed to check any books further back, but the two he’d already found were worrying.
“Have you got anything?” he asked, looking over at Jack. “I’ve found two disappearances that were suspicious.”
“And I’ve got three here.”
“Three?”
Jack gestured at the pile scattered before him.
“These are from when Briggs was younger, before he became town marshal. He must’ve picked up the habit of writing everything down in childhood. And he records three girls disappearing in the space of twelve months twenty years ago. All of them sisters, vanishing at different times during the year.”
Nate stared.
“Really? Anything to go on it?”
“Other than a mysterious stranger visiting their house on various occasions until the last sister vanished, nothing really. The neighbors didn’t even get a good look at him. He was being careful not to show his face to anyone.”
“Well, it’s like he’s gotten more brazen since,” Nate said grimly. “I’ve found two that happened when we were younger, and there are descriptions that match Isaac Vane attached to both of them around the same time. Violet Miller and Sandra Hughes.”
Jack’s eyes widened.
“Sandra? She used to do everything with us. I remember she said her father was a drunk like yours. Used to beat her a lot. I thought she’d just run away.”
“Evidently not.”
Nate felt cold knowing that a friend of theirs had been kidnapped as well, and they’d not been able to do anything about it. This was good information but not enough.
Whatever evidence they could get, they were going to have to get it inside the Silver Lantern itself.