Secret of Deadman's Ravine. B.J. Daniels

anything happen to you.”

      She gripped the edge of the table, shaking violently with anger and fear and enough regret that she thought she might drown in it.

      Please, God, let Eve be all right. Don’t punish her for my mistakes. Give me a chance to make things right with her.

      But even as she prayed it, Lila Bailey knew there was no way she could make any of this right with Eve.

      CARTER SADDLED up with the search party. After the storm, there would be no passable roads to the south. There were few roads to begin with. A couple of Jeep trails when the weather was good. One road that petered out a couple of miles out near his family’s old place.

      His father had sold out a while back. Carter’s brother Cade hadn’t had any interest in ranching and Deena had flat out refused to live on a ranch. She thought Whitehorse was the end of the earth as it was.

      So his father had sold the homestead. Not that Loren Jackson had ever had any interest in ranching. He’d always leased the land. No, Loren had wanted to be a commercial pilot, but for some reason hadn’t left Phillips County so he’d ended up crop dusting with his father, Ace Jackson.

      That was until he’d up and decided to move to Florida.

      Carter had never understood his father. Loren Jackson had always seemed…unfulfilled.

      So it felt odd to be here and realize that the old place stood empty just up the road. The Cavanaughs had bought the land, but no one had a use for the house, so it had been boarded up.

      Carter rode east to avoid seeing the place, going past Bailey property and the house where he’d heard Eve was staying. One of the search party checked to make sure Eve hadn’t returned.

      She hadn’t. And McKenna had come along to get a change of clothing for Eve to wear when they found her. Then they all rode south, leaving behind farm and ranch land for cactus and sagebrush.

      Titus had divided the men into groups, each armed with a two-way radio. Ward Shaw had brought along a saddled extra horse for Eve to ride when they found her. Everyone was optimistic they would find her alive.

      Or at least they pretended to be.

      The thunderstorm the night before had wiped out any trace of her tracks, but her horse had returned this morning, leaving deep gouges in the wet gumbolike mud that were easy to follow.

      The sheriff rode with Errol Wilson and Floyd Evans. The others fanned out, hoping to catch sight of Eve’s footprints since she would be on foot.

      Although Carter had grown up here and known Errol and Floyd all his life, the three rode in silence with little to say to one another. Both men were older by at least twenty-five years and while Errol and Floyd lived within miles of each other, Carter had never known them to be friends.

      In fact, few people in and around Old Town particularly liked Errol Wilson. There was something about the man that put Carter off, as well. Something behind the man’s dark eyes that seemed almost predatory. Errol radiated a bitterness for which Carter had never known the source.

      As a boy, Carter remembered overhearing some of the men talking about Errol. There was some concern that Errol might be a Peeping Tom. Carter hadn’t known what that was at the time. And he’d never heard any more about it. He just figured that men like Errol Wilson generated those kind of stories because they didn’t fit in.

      Carter gave no more thought to either man as he rode. His mind was on Eve and the argument she’d had with her mother. What had sent Eve riding deep into the Breaks without food or water or proper clothing? Her horse coming back without her was a very bad sign. He was worried what they would find. If they managed to find her at all.

      The sun moved across Montana’s big sky, drying the mud, heating the air to dragon’s breath. No breeze moved the air. Nothing stirred, but an occasional cricket in a clump of brush.

      An hour later, Carter reined in as he lost Eve’s horse’s tracks in a rocky area. “Let’s spread out. Holler when you pick up the tracks again,” he told the two men.

      Errol rode off to the west while Floyd went east, kicking up a bunch of antelope. Carter watched the antelope run across the horizon, disappearing as the land began to drop, funneling forward to the riverbed.

      To the west Carter saw one of the other groups from the search party had stopped to clean the mud from their horses’hooves. A hawk soared overheard, picking up a thermal, and nearby a mule deer spooked, rising up from a rocky coulee, all big ears as it took off, kicking up clumps of dried earth. No sign of Eve Bailey.

      Carter rode straight south to where the flat, high prairie broke into eroded fingers of land that dropped precariously to the river bottom. He kept to the higher ridges in hopes of seeing Eve’s blue T-shirt. The problem was that too much of this land looked exactly the same. That made it extremely easy to get lost. During the storm, Eve could have gotten turned around. If she’d tried to walk out on foot last night she might be anywhere.

      At one point, he stopped and realized he could no longer see either Errol or Floyd. He hoped to hell the search party didn’t have to find them before the day was over.

      He’d just reined in his horse on a narrow ridge, the sides falling dangerously toward the old river bottom when he caught sight of something light blue in the rocks far below him.

      REPORTER GLEN WHITAKER couldn’t believe his timing. He made it to the Whitehorse Community Center just as Arlene Evans was unloading the pies from the front seat of her pickup.

      “Let me help you with those,” he said.

      Arlene was a gangly woman with an elongated horsy face and laugh that was more donkey’s bray. That alone would have put off most people, but there was also a nervous energy that at best made him jittery and at worse made the hair stand up on his arms.

      “Violet, say hello to Glen,” Arlene ordered.

      “Hi, Glen,” said a shy and bored voice behind him.

      He turned to see Arlene’s daughter, Violet.

      While better looking than her mother, Violet was still plain to the point of pitiful. Next to her mother, Violet seemed almost catatonic. “Hey,” he said.

      He’d always suspected that Arlene fed off other people’s energy because, like her daughter, Glen found that after a matter of minutes around Arlene he barely had enough energy to escape. And right now escape was exactly what he wanted to do.

      “Violet and I can get the pies if you’ll open the front door,” Arlene said, handing off a pie to her daughter then picking up another before kicking the pickup door shut in one smooth movement.

      He had to almost run to get the community center door open before Arlene. They both had to wait for Violet, who moved like sludge.

      “Violet, why don’t you get Glen a piece of the coconut-custard right away,” Arlene said. “He looks like he could use it.”

      Violet nodded as she wandered off to do as she’d been told. Already trained to obey, she’d make someone the perfect wife, Glen thought. Just not him. At forty, he’d never married. His mother said it was because she’d spoiled him.

      “Any news on Eve Bailey?” he asked.

      “Apparently not,” Arlene said, as she shot a look at the somber group of women waiting in the community center.

      All the women looked in his direction, then went back to visiting among themselves or occupying themselves with the needlework in their laps. Glen had never understood it. He was nice enough looking, but for some reason people didn’t seem to pay any attention to him.

      Feeling like the invisible man, he drew out his notebook and pen as he and Arlene took a seat in a quiet corner and waited for Violet to bring the pie.

      “It’s a shame,” Arlene was saying in a hushed voice so the others couldn’t hear. “She has been through so much and now this.”