The Disappeared (Joe Pickett Book 18) Read online

  She wondered how many times her dad had been in the same situation before: high in the mountains alone as a storm moved in.

  She thought: a lot.

  It was obvious that the road she was on had been tracked within the last few days and she presumed it was from Lance’s truck. Very few recreational snowmobilers favored that area of the Snowy Range because there were scores of better trails and more spectacular rides above Encampment in the Sierra Madres and on Highway 230 farther south.

  Sheridan rounded a corner with lodgepole pines tight to both sides and came upon a cow moose standing in the middle of the road. The moose was wedge-shaped and jet-black and long-legged for moving easily through deep snow. But instead of moving on, she just stood there staring. Finally, Sheridan tapped her brakes and honked her horn.

  The cow ambled into the timber and vanished so quickly it was as if she were never there. A shiny brown pile of moose pellets steamed in the snow to prove she had been.

  Now you’re gonna find out why we call him Lance Romance.

  What did that mean? Were they just messing with her head?

  *

  LANCE’S OLD RED Ford F-150 pickup was parked where it should have been in a wide alcove in the trees. His snowmobile trailer was attached to the rear bumper and his machine was gone.

  Sheridan parked next to Lance’s Ford and climbed out and checked the cab of his truck. It was unlocked, as always. He’d left his keys under the driver’s-side floor mat next to his cowboy boots. No doubt he’d exchanged his everyday boots for a pair of snowmobile pacs before he left for his cabin.

  There was nothing else inside the cab that was unusual or suggested that anything strange had happened.

  The only thing in the bed of his pickup was a light dusting of snow from the night before and a few old empty beer bottles that always rattled around when he drove it.

  She backed the Titan off the trailer and secured the pack she’d assembled into the tub with bungee cords.

  Sheridan pulled on a snowmobile suit that was too large and a helmet that was a size too big. She wished she had spent a few more seconds in the Activity Center garage making sure she got the right fit.

  Before she took the narrow trail that would lead to his cabin, she lashed the .30-30 in its scabbard to the side of her snow machine.

  *

  SHE WAS SOMEWHAT assured that he’d be at the end of her journey in one way or another because the trail was packed down into the light powder snow by a previous machine. In the summer, it was a twenty-minute ride through thick timber to Lance’s cabin on an ATV. Snowmobiles traveled at approximately the same rate of speed.

  She took it slower than that because she’d never driven there by herself in the winter. That, and the oversize helmet kept twisting to the side and she had to adjust it to see out the clear plastic shield.

  It was through that slightly foggy face shield that she saw the curl of smoke from the chimney of Lance’s cabin and his snowmobile parked out front. The snow around the structure had been trampled down by boots.

  She breathed a sigh of relief.

  The cabin was small and made of logs with a green metal roof. She’d heard Lance complain that he wished the roof had been pitched steeper because sometimes two or three feet of snow gathered on top and threatened to collapse the trusses.

  Like most people who owned high-mountain cabins, Lance spent his free days in the summer re-chinking the logs and getting it in shape to last the coming winter. Two cords of fresh-cut and -split pine were lined up in a kind of wall against the southern tree line. She could see a well-worn path from the door of the cabin to the stack of fuel, and another to an outhouse half-buried in snow.

  But what was he still doing inside? Had he lost track of the days of the week?

  *

  SHERIDAN LOOPED AROUND the small clearing in front of the cabin so the tub was close to the front door before turning the engine off. That would make it easier for her to load him if he was hurt or sick.

  She stood up on the sideboards of the snowmobile and slid her visor back. It was suddenly still without the high whine and vibration of the motor. The sky had darkened even further and there was the anticipatory stillness in the trees that usually signaled coming snow.

  “Lance?”

  Nothing.

  “Lance?”

  Flickering yellow light from his kerosene lantern played on the frosted glass of the window next to the door.

  Her boots squeaked in the packed snow as she approached the cabin.

  “Lance?”

  As she reached for the rusted iron door handle, the door swung out and she had to step back so it wouldn’t hit her.

  “Oh, thank God you’re here,” Kate Shelford-Longden said in her clipped British accent. She was without makeup and wearing jeans, ankle-high slippers, and an oversized fuzzy sweater. “Lance is in bad shape and he needs to get to hospital. I tried to take him there myself but I couldn’t get his snowmobile started.”

  Sheridan closed her eyes for a moment, then reopened them.

  Kate was still there.

  “Come inside quickly,” Kate said. “You’re letting the cold in.”

  Sheridan rocked back, then shoved Kate with both hands so hard that Kate fell over backward and struck her face on the tabletop on the way down.

  Sheridan stormed into the cabin and slammed the door behind her.

  Lance was on the iron-framed bed naked from the waist down except for his underwear. A white shard of thighbone poked out from the discolored flesh of his upper leg. His body gleamed with sweat from a fever. He was unconscious and his mouth gaped open.

  “What happened to him?” Sheridan asked Kate, who was scuttling backward across the floor using her feet to propel her. She raised both of her hands to her face and blood trickled out from between her fingers from her broken nose.

  “He was scooping the snow off the roof when he slipped and fell early this morning,” Kate said. Her voice was muffled from behind her hands. “I went outside and found him like that.”

  Sheridan looked around the inside of Lance’s cabin. She recognized it, of course, but what struck her was the woman’s touch that wasn’t there the last time. Instead of the sets of antlers and old fur traps on the walls, there were nice curtains, a clean floor, plastic flowers in a vase on the table. An actual tablecloth.

  Kate had been there awhile.

  Sheridan said, “We need to get him out of here so he can recover. So I can kill him myself.”

  Kate’s eyes widened even farther. She said, “I’m staying here, if you don’t mind. But please get him to hospital.”

  “We say the hospital, lady,” Sheridan said. “And you’re coming with me.”

  To back up her words, Sheridan took a quick step toward Kate, and Kate recoiled.

  Point taken.

  *

  ALTHOUGH SHERIDAN HAD a dozen rage-fueled questions to ask of Kate they couldn’t talk. The whine of the snowmobile was too loud.

  After binding a thick compress from the first-aid kit to Lance’s leg to prevent further bleeding—he moaned while Sheridan wrapped it tight—Kate helped her half-carry and half-drag him toward the door. While Sheridan lashed him tight into the tub, she looked around for a sign of the silver 2017 Jeep Cherokee with Colorado rental plates hidden in the trees behind Lance’s cabin.

  It wasn’t there.

  *

  KATE SAT BEHIND Sheridan on the machine and grasped her around her waist to hold on. As she drove back through the trees, Sheridan frequently looked down at the pair of British arms locked on her beneath her breasts and grimaced as if they were radioactive. She also shot glances back at Lance wrapped in blankets and lashed in the tub. He’d moaned and stirred while they did it, but he hadn’t woken up even though Sheridan had jostled him around more than necessary.

  She considered taking a turn extra-wide and letting the tub thump against the trunks of trees, but she didn’t.

  . . .

  WITH LANC
E STILL unconscious in the backseat of the pickup, Sheridan retraced her route down the two-track back to the state highway. She’d left the snowmobile and trailer at the trailhead to retrieve later.

  Sheridan drove as recklessly as she dared to get out of the mountains, while Kate was obviously scared for her life. She hung on to the safety handle above the passenger window with one hand and braced herself against the dashboard with the other. Her broken nose was red and swollen, although the bleeding had largely stopped.

  Sheridan didn’t speak until they turned onto the blacktop of the highway.

  After taking the truck out of four-wheel-drive she said, “Do you know how many people have been looking for you? Do you even care?”

  “I haven’t been following the news,” Kate said.

  “You created an international incident.”

  “That wasn’t my intention,” Kate said defensively.

  “What the hell was your intention?”

  Kate relaxed a little and let go of the handle above her head. She placed both of her hands on her lap and stared at them.

  She said, “Until I got on the ranch, I’d forgotten what it was like to simply unplug from the modern world—to go through the days not looking at my phone, not answering constant emails and texts, not looking at Facebook or Twitter. It was like I was feeling myself slow down in real time. A weight was lifted. I had no idea what kind of pressure I was under until it started to melt away.”

  Sheridan looked over but didn’t respond.

  “You have no idea what it’s like to be in a job like mine,” Kate said. “The stress is incredible and there are hundreds of people—even people who you think are your friends—who are just waiting for you to say the wrong thing or make the wrong move. Especially in the age of social media, when you’re in the public eye. Everyone wants you to fail in the most spectacular way possible so they can feel superior to you and comment on it. Anonymously, of course.

  “I realized I craved a simpler life,” Kate said. “For the first time in my life since I was a little girl, I could see things for what they were and not just out of the corner of my eye as I was dashing from one place to the other. I could watch the sun come up in the morning and see it set at night. Then I could see a whole universe of stars so bright in the sky they almost hurt my eyes. I could smell things—flowers, sagebrush, pine trees, water. I could hear again without the background white noise of traffic and people.

  “I read real books again instead of watching video clips on my phone,” she said. “I started a journal, writing in longhand. With a pen! I do want to go back and get my journal. I left it in the cabin.”

  “We’re not going back for it,” Sheridan said.

  “But I need it. I’ve kept it for me. I wanted to chart my own course on the voyage of self-discovery.”

  “Self-discovery! You worried a lot of people. You’re the most selfish human being I’ve ever met.”

  “That’s not fair,” Kate said with a sniff that was no doubt painful. “I don’t owe anyone my presence in their lives and I didn’t ask anyone to search for me.”

  “But that’s what people do,” Sheridan said. “They help each other. Someone disappears, and of course they’re going to look for her. You’re such a pathetic narcissist, you can’t even get that through your head. Why, even your sister came all the way here looking for you.”

  Clearly stung, Kate said, “Sophie is a resentful and vindictive cow. She’ll do anything to get attention—including playing the role of the grieving sister. I’m sure every little tearful speech she gave was covered by the press.”

  “I don’t know,” Sheridan said.

  “You can count on it,” Kate said. “What you don’t realize is Sophie broke up my marriage and has moved in with Richard. The two of them are colluding to push me out of my own company. Now they can have it. She didn’t come here to rescue me. She came here to confirm I was dead.”

  Sheridan had no response. But she now knew one reason for Kate’s troubled expression when she thought about going back.

  *

  SHERIDAN TOOK THE EXIT to I-80. The highway was clear and dry and she accelerated to ninety-five miles per hour. It was a straight shot to Rawlins and the hospital.

  “You’re speeding,” Kate said.

  “Let the Highway Patrol pull me over,” Sheridan replied. “Once they find out who’s sitting beside me, they’ll give me a police escort into town.”

  Kate shook her head ruefully.

  Sheridan asked, “How did you get Lance to let you stay in his cabin, anyway?”

  “He pointed his cabin out to me when we were on a trail ride. He said he never locked it, which I found charming. So when I left the ranch after that week I drove straight there without telling him. I was there for two weeks before he even found me, and when he did I made him promise not to tell anyone. I’m sure he regrets that promise now, but he kept it. He’s a very honorable man. He probably thought I’d stay at his cabin for a few days and then leave and go home. I might have thought about it then as well. But every week I found the prospect of returning more and more daunting.

  “I don’t think he even knew what he did for me,” Kate continued. “When he helped me up in the saddle or tipped his hat and called me ‘ma’am.’ He just didn’t know...

  “Why would I ever trade long lazy walks in the forest to going back to traffic, bad air, and insipid ‘men without chests,’ to quote from a C. S. Lewis phrase I read recently.”

  Then she recited a line.

  “‘We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.’

  “In fact,” Kate said, her voice wistful, “I did try to leave once. I drove all the way to Fort Collins in Colorado, toward the Denver airport, when I nearly had a mental breakdown. I just couldn’t return to England. I just couldn’t. I’d left everything behind that I’d come to care about. So I called Lance and he drove down to pick me up. I left the car with the keys in it and we both thought someone would report its discovery and I’d be forced to come clean. But apparently someone just stole it and drove it away! I’m sure Lance wishes he hadn’t driven down to pick me up, but he’s a rare gentleman.”

  “He’s an idiot,” Sheridan said. “He knew what an uproar you’d caused, and he still said nothing.”

  “Yes, well,” Kate said, “it’s not his fault. I was... a little naughty. When he told me I had to leave, I said I’d tell the authorities he’d held me there against my will—that it would be his word against mine.” For once, Kate had the good grace to blush. “I wouldn’t have done it, of course, but Lance didn’t know that.”

  Which explained his growing anxiety and his reaction when he met her dad, Sheridan thought. What a bitch!

  Kate continued. “He didn’t know what to do, and the longer I stayed, the more difficult it was for him. I could see it on his face when he showed up hoping I was no longer there. And I was there so long there was no way he could tell anyone about it!”

  She slid her eyes to Sheridan. “He loves you, you know.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “Oh, he does. It became a problem. We were never lovers. I know that’s what you’re worrying about. Sadly, it never worked out that way.”

  “Sadly,” Sheridan echoed bitterly under her breath. “If he truly loved me, he would have told me he had a missing woman stashed away.”

  “Really?” Kate asked. “Tell me, what would have been your reaction if Lance had told you a woman had been living in his cabin—with his knowledge—for months?”

  Sheridan didn’t answer because Kate had a point.

  Kate chuckled at that and then turned serious again. “I don’t think I can ever go back. Can you imagine the insurmountable wall of questions, the hateful comments on social media about where I’ve been and why? I just couldn’t face it.”

  “You have no idea how much trouble you’ve caused,” Sheridan said. “Now please quit talking so I
can call my dad.”

  “Lance really likes him, you know,” Kate said.

  “Shut up, Kate. I’m not as fascinated with all things Kate as you are.”

  As she fished her phone out of her snowmobile suit, she heard Lance moan in the backseat and saw in her mirror that he’d pushed himself painfully into a seated position.

  When he saw who was in the front, he said, “Oh no. I think I’m in big trouble.”

  31

  “I’M GOING TO THE HOSPITAL TO CONFIRM IT’S HER,” JOE SAID TO Marybeth as he neared Rawlins. The massive steel hulk of the Sinclair Oil Refinery dominated the southern view out his passenger window. In the frigid dusk, clouds of steam from the refinery hung above it in the shape of a mushroom cloud. The heater in his pickup couldn’t keep up with the icy wind whistling into the cab from his damaged passenger door.

  “Joe, don’t hurt that boy.”

  “I can’t promise that.”

  After talking with Sheridan and hearing the flat sadness in her tone, all he could think about was clubbing Lance Ramsey, whether he had a broken leg or not. Joe could endure humiliation of his own—the fact that he was still working the case was evidence of that—but his vision turned red when it came to the betrayal of one of his daughters.

  “I’m worried about our girl,” Marybeth said. “She hasn’t had many serious boyfriends... and now this.”

  “She’ll be okay,” Joe said, having no idea at all if Sheridan would be okay. “She’s tough like you. And she solved the big mystery.”

  “Does the governor know?”

  “I haven’t called him,” Joe said. “I wanted to make a positive identification first and send him a photo of Kate to back it up. We can’t afford to make another mistake.”

  “I’d like to see his face when he sees it. I wonder how he’s going to spin it so he can take credit for finding her alive.”

  “That’s what Hanlon is for,” Joe said.

  *

  HE ENTERED THE HOSPITAL for the second time in two days and the receptionist directed him to the surgical suite on the second floor. Joe took the stairs and found Sheridan, Mark Gordon, and Kate Shelford-Longden sitting in a spartan lobby. Sheridan and Gordon sat on one side of the room and Kate sat on the other.