Last Resort

She grinned, flooded with relief at this glimpse of her old friend. “Okay, fine. You don’t tell them I’m psychic—”

“You’re not psychic, you’re gifted. They’re two totally different—”

“—and I won’t tell them about the stray marbles you’ve apparently been losing because you believe me. Has Cecil fired someone at the mill or the ranch recently?”

“Not in over six months, and the last man wanted to get fired so he could draw unemployment insurance.”

“No motive for a kidnapping, then. Could Carissa have gotten lost?”

“That’s very possible. Cecil found her flashlight in the mud last night. He’s thinking that she might have gotten turned around and panicked.”

“But Carissa doesn’t panic easily,” Noelle said.

“And besides, you have a definite impression that someone is a threat…”

“I’m not willing to put my faith in some stupid impression,” Noelle said.

“Not stupid,” he insisted. “Let’s not dismiss any possibility.”

Nathan pulled up to the sawmill. The paved parking lot surrounding the huge, barnlike building was crammed with cars, trucks, SUVs and trailers, which had apparently carried all-terrain vehicles.

Ordinarily, Cecil wouldn’t thank anyone for tearing up his pastureland and traumatizing more than a thousand head of cattle and horses, but if the volunteer searchers found his little girl, he would most likely be willing to give them permanent rights to the land—if those rights were his to give. Though he managed all of the Cooper enterprises, he hadn’t yet inherited.

Nathan parked between a van and another truck, then turned to Noelle again. “Are you sure you’re okay?”

“I told you, I’m fine. A little rattled, but what would you expect? I want to focus on finding Carissa.”

“We’ll do that.”

Noelle stared at the corrugated aluminum siding on the huge building. Even after ten years, the sawmill brought back the memories of the accident that had killed Dad and Grandma and Grandpa. Carissa’s disappearance only resurrected those memories more distinctly.

“We might as well walk from here,” she said. “We’ve got to start looking somewhere.”

They climbed from the truck to be greeted by the music of the crickets and the scent of moist earth. Noelle took a deep breath, her gaze traveling over the mossy green of the cedar trees, the splashes of orange and apricot on the tips of maple trees and the rippling green of the hay field, punctuated by huge, silver-gold bales stacked side by side in the field to the right of the lane.

This lane led around the side of the building to the Cooper settlement about a quarter of a mile away. Noelle’s ancestors had lived and farmed here for generations, expanding this property into a valuable asset that, combined with the successful sawmill, generously supported family members and dozens of employees. As a Cooper family member, Noelle received a sizable check every six months, even though she didn’t work on the property.

Noelle avoided looking at the sawmill, allowing her memories to carry her back to a safer time. She loved country life, especially the privacy and peace of this hollow in the hills. Though she also loved living in Springfield, every time she came home to Hideaway she felt a distinct tug of the heart. She loved the town of Hideaway. Even though she wouldn’t admit it to Nathan, the idea of working at the clinic appealed to something inside her that she thought had dried up and died when she’d lost her last nursing position.

Still, too many memories attacked her here on Cooper land.

“Did anyone search the mill for signs of a possible problem?” she asked. “Maybe a struggle of some kind?”

“They checked, but all they found was the ledger alongside the lane, covered in mud. Carissa obviously had been to the mill and gone, and if there’d been a problem at the mill, she certainly wouldn’t have bothered with the ledger.”

“Could Cecil and Melva have heard a car engine from the house?”

“Not necessarily, but the dogs are usually pretty quick to pick up on the scent or sounds of a stranger, and they never sounded an alarm.”

Noelle reached into the back of Nathan’s truck, where she’d placed water flasks and a backpack with supplies, including a first-aid kit. “Want to hike from here?”

“I’d love to,” he said. “But let me carry the backpack. It looks heavy.”

She strapped herself into her pack. “Think I can’t carry my own load?”

“No,” he said dryly. “I just thought, after all these years, that competitive streak of yours might have mellowed a little.”

“I’m not competitive.” She shifted the shoulder straps. “You should know that by now.”

She gazed along the lane. She wasn’t in the mood to talk to anyone in her family right now, especially since no one had called her about Carissa. Still, the lane was the quickest and safest route into the rest of the hollow, with connecting lanes and cattle trails beyond Cecil’s place. “Maybe we’ll get lucky and make it past the houses without anyone noticing us,” she said as they set off.

Nathan sniffed the tealike scent of early autumn leaves and listened to the crickets chirping from the forest on either side of the lane. Cedar Hollow—two thousand acres of fertile farm valley settled deep in the tree-lined hills—had changed little since he’d grown up here. His family’s dairy cows had grazed just across the road from the Cooper beef cattle. He and Noelle had played along Willow Creek, which followed the curve of the land until it reached Table Rock Lake, a little over two miles away.

Noelle turned and glanced over her shoulder at the field to the south as the sound of an all-terrain vehicle reached them. “That’s Carissa’s favorite place to ride Gypsy,” she said.

“It’s where we loved to ride, too,” he reminded her. “The field is level with amazingly few rocks to trip the horses.” He and Noelle had often played in the field and along the creek when they were growing up.

“Why do some things stay the same, when other things change so drastically?” Noelle murmured.

“I’ve asked that enough times myself,” Nathan said. “Remember how many times we walked down this lane when we were kids?”

“Or rode our bikes.”

“And tried to hide from my little sisters.”

“And my big sister.” Noelle chuckled. “I felt so secure, so protected then. I mean, I had family all around me, and my best friend lived right down the road.” She glanced sideways at Nathan.

He nodded. How many times in the past few years he had thought about those days, wondering if he would have done things differently, given the chance.

“Two thousand acres of Cooper property, joined by Trask property,” Noelle said. “The searchers couldn’t have covered everything yet, could they?”

“Not every inch, of course, but—”

“But Carissa knows this hollow so well. All she has to do is find Willow Creek and follow it down.”

Nathan glanced at Noelle. “Maybe Carissa’s done just that. She might be home by the time we get to the house.”

“You don’t sound convinced.” Noelle pulled the cell phone from her pocket, punched numbers again, asked whoever answered about the status of the search without identifying herself, and then expressed thanks. “Not yet,” she reported to Nathan, kicking a rock to the side of the track. “Carissa knows this land as well as we did at her age.”

“That’s true, but everything looks different in the dark. My friend Taylor Jackson thinks it’s possible she got lost, and he’s working on that premise while others are searching farther afield.”

“Taylor’s the ranger who’s dating Karah Lee Fletcher at the clinic?”

“Yes. He’s been helping coordinate the search. The sheriff suggested Carissa might have run away for some reason.”

“Ridiculous. Greg should know better.”

“That’s what Cecil and Melva keep insisting,” Nathan said. “But you know Carissa can be headstrong, and she and her parents did have a little confrontation yesterday.”

“What about?”

“Gladys.”

Noelle’s steps slowed. “What about her?” she asked quietly.

“She wants to see Justin and Carissa again.” Gladys had given up any right to see her children when she had abandoned them and their father. Her lack of concern for their suffering had outraged the whole community. “Carissa wants to see her, and Melva’s pitching a major fit.”

Noelle stepped around a mud puddle and ducked beneath a tree limb. “Does Gladys think she can just suddenly walk back into their lives and stir everything up again? When she left, Carissa was devastated. For at least a year, I think she continued to hope her mother would come back to them.”

“As you said, Carissa’s strong-willed,” Nathan said. “So it could be possible that she’s in hiding somewhere, maybe protesting.”

“No.”

“But if she were hiding, where do you think she’d hide?” He gestured around him, indicating the expanse of ground they would have to cover. “Where would you hide?”

“Not around here, and no, I’m not feeling any kind of leading.”

“But just for the sake of a place to look, where would you hide?”

“Does that old dirt track still wind through the woods to the national forest a couple of miles back?” she asked.

“I think so. I heard Pearl complaining about people trespassing on Cooper land from the logging trail in national forest land. Why? Do you—”

She turned and looked up at him, and he glimpsed an interested quickening in those intelligent eyes. “Where did we go when we were kids? You know, when we got in trouble.”

“The caves?” he asked. There were at least four in the vicinity that ranged from mere indentations in the rock to caverns that cut deeply into the hillside.

She gave him a look of approval. “Exactly. Is Bobcat Cave still sealed?”

“I think it is. At least, I hope it is.”

She bent over and tucked the cuffs of her jeans into her socks. “We may be beating some brush. Still ticks and chiggers here, I suppose.”

“Not in this section, there ain’t.” A deep, strong female voice suddenly spoke from the trees a few yards ahead.

Chapter Six

Pearl Cooper’s tall, rawboned figure emerged from the woods along one of the wildlife trails that intersected the lane. Her hand patted her chest in a long-familiar gesture—Aunt Pearl had claimed heart palpitations for as long as Noelle could remember. The family affectionately accused her of using sympathy to get what she wanted. She never denied it. Aunt Pearl could always charm people into giving in to her, and when she couldn’t charm them, she pulled rank—though Cecil and Jill had incorporated the business to save on taxes, Pearl owned the property and everything on it. It had passed to her through the Cooper family trust.

Pearl’s iron-gray hair stuck out in haphazard tufts, straggling over her forehead to frame deep-blue eyes—Cooper eyes that saw more, sometimes, than one wanted them to see. She seldom wore anything other than jeans and old plaid flannel shirts, even in summer, and now she had the legs of her jeans tucked into a pair of well-used hiking shoes—she’d been the one to teach Noelle this practical trick for warding off tiny, biting varmints.

“Can’t swear to it,” she said as she neared them, “but I think the geese running free and the pennyroyal I planted did the trick. No ticks in the yard or this part of the woods all summer. Of course, you’ve gotta watch close or you’ll be ankle-deep in goose poop, but it’s better than ticks, to my notion. The backwoods are another problem, though. That where you’re headed?” Without pausing, she grabbed Noelle in a fierce hug, wrapping her in the pungent aroma of rosemary that always clung to Pearl from her herb garden.

Noelle’s great-aunt Pearl lived in the same house she’d been born in, a sturdy, sprawling rock dwelling that had changed little since it had been built in the early nineteen-hundreds. For as long as anyone in the area could remember, Pearl Cooper had gathered herbs and made her old-time medicines, distributing them to anyone who needed them. She’d protested loudly when the general store in Hideaway had opened a pharmacy, and she’d been only slightly mollified when she discovered Nathan would be the pharmacist.

“Good to see you, girl,” she said to Noelle now. “I’ve been expecting you. Come to search for Carissa?”

“Yes, but I don’t know what I’ll find that others haven’t.” Noelle gave Nathan a look of caution over Pearl’s shoulder, and was reassured by his small nod of understanding.

“I thought since Carissa and Noelle are such good friends,” Nathan said, “that Noelle might have some fresh insight.”

Pearl was frowning when she stepped back from Noelle’s embrace. “All those searchers probably turned up the same rocks and looked behind the same trees two or three times. Seems this holler’s been scoured from top to bottom and end to end. If she’s any where near here, a feller’d think we’d’ve found something.”

“It seems that way, Aunt Pearl,” Noelle said. “You haven’t seen any strangers hanging around out on the property lately, have you?”

Pearl shook her head. “There’s strangers and tourists swelling the town to three or four times its normal size, but nobody ever wanders this far from the fun.”

Noelle nodded. It was unlikely that any stranger would have ventured this far into the wilderness on the off chance of happening across a twelve-year-old girl to abduct in the dead of night—if Carissa had been abducted. Noelle prayed it wasn’t so, but she couldn’t dismiss the conviction—Nathan might call it a message from God—that someone with sinister motives was involved in Carissa’s disappearance.

Pearl gestured with a loose-jointed shrug. “Seems like the loggers, mill workers and farmhands are here all the time.” She hesitated, her eyes narrowing at Noelle. “Did you hear about poor Harvey Sand? Died from that fall he took last week. I heard tell Greg’s investigating foul play there.”

Noelle shifted impatiently. Pearl could be a talker when she was in the mood, and this wasn’t the time to stand around making idle conversation.

“I don’t know what’s come of Hideaway lately,” Pearl continued, “what with all the new folks moving in and taking over. Mind you, there was no love lost between Harvey and me—heaven knows we went round and round about the price he charged for a couple hours of work every month—but the guy was just a kid, still in his forties. Such a tragic loss.” She shook her head. “That new secretary of his had all our files delivered to the shop at the sawmill on Monday. Can you believe it? Fifteen years’ worth of tax records she just dumped on us, without even offering to help us find another accountant.”

Noelle rubbed her tightening neck muscles and rolled her shoulders.

Pearl noticed at last. She patted Noelle on the shoulder and nodded at Nathan. “You two can look as far and as long as you want. I’m going back out myself after I rest up a bit and give my heart some time to catch up with the rest of me. Melva should be back to the house by now after her latest foray into the woods.” She grunted. “Surprised me to see her scrambling through brush so much. She’s not exactly the outdoorsy type, if you know what I mean.”

“Aunt Pearl, give Melva a break.” Noelle kept her chiding voice gentle. Sparks had flown between Pearl and Melva in the past—Melva had taken over the bookkeeping for Cooper Enterprises from Pearl several years ago, and Pearl was not an easy person to please when it came to the family business. “She loves Carissa. I hope you’ve been nice to her.”

“I’ve been nice as I had to be,” Pearl replied grumpily. “Guess you know Jill’s here, too. She’s been searchin’ all night. We all have. I told her to take a break.”

“Thanks, Pearl.” Nathan took Noelle’s arm and stepped along the road. “We’re headed in that direction, so we might see them.”

“When all this craziness settles down,” Pearl called after them, once more tapping her fingers against her chest, as if the rhythm of her heart would regulate better that way, “you come by my house for some iced sassafras tea. Been too long since we visited last, Noelle.”

“I know, Aunt Pearl. I will.” Noelle fell into step beside Nathan. Pearl returned to the trail through the trees, taking the shortcut to her own house nestled at the foot of the hills that formed Cedar Hollow.

“I should get down here more often,” Noelle said. “Last time I saw Aunt Pearl was at Jill’s a few months ago. I haven’t been to the hollow for a couple of years.”

“Why is that?” Nathan asked.

“Too busy, I guess.” She broke off a twig from a nearby branch and rubbed it between her fingers, deep in thought.

“Or still avoiding it for some reason?”

“Could be. Pearl implied she thought I was still stuck in the past.”

“I disagree,” Nathan said. “You wallow in guilt over the past, but I don’t think you’re stuck there.”

Noelle gave him a look of aggravation.

“So what did she say?” he asked.

“She said, ‘Noelle, you’ve got a lot goin’ for you now, kiddo. Just keep on lookin’ forward, and don’t look back so much. The past can’t hurt us if we stay away from it.’”

Nathan walked beside her in silence. The crunch of their boots against gravel matched, as if they were marching in cadence toward the house where Cecil and Melva lived with Cecil’s children, seventeen-year-old Justin and twelve-year-old Carissa.

Whenever Noelle returned to this hollow, she felt as if she were stepping back in time. She also felt as if she were returning to old, dysfunctional family dynamics. Maybe, deep down, she feared she would once again become the rebellious teenager who’d made so many wrong choices. She knew better, of course. She had a tendency to be oversensitive.

Pearl was right. The past couldn’t hurt her if she stayed away from it.

She navigated around a puddle the circumference of a small car, in which the mud had been churned up into a slick mess with tire tracks. Obviously, there had been dozens of cars in and out of this place since last night, and Noelle glimpsed several vehicles still parked out in the cleared hayfield behind the house.

In addition to the number of automobiles that she and Nathan had seen parked at the sawmill, she judged there might be as many as sixty or eighty people currently searching the place. In the field she counted three pale-green Jeeps with ranger insignias, and seven white police cruisers, all splattered with mud.

“I don’t suppose there was a chance to check for strange footprints before the searchers arrived?” she asked, gesturing toward the mud puddle.

“The police looked, but they found nothing out of the ordinary.” Nathan skirted the puddle on the other side. “Cecil needs to get some gravel in here before someone loses a car.”

Noelle’s steps slowed as they drew near the white picket fence that encircled the house and yard. There was a rumble of growls, and two black and white Australian sheepdogs came running from the backyard, barking as if a herd of cattle had suddenly descended on them.

Noelle groaned. “Just great. I’d hoped to slip past the house without stopping.”

“Not with Butch and Sundance on high alert. You haven’t been around often enough for them to be familiar with your scent or the sound of your voice. They only bark at strangers.”

“We can visit later, after we’ve found Carissa.”

Nathan tapped her on the shoulder and she looked up at him. “Relax, grumpy. It’ll only take a few minutes. Your family needs you.”

“Sorry,” she muttered.

The racket of the dogs set off the geese at the pond below the house, and the honking commenced.

Noelle gave Nathan a look of exasperation. “And I thought we’d sneak in? What could I have been thinking?”

He grinned at her.

“Speaking of dogs, is the search-and-rescue unit bringing any search dogs in?” she asked.

“They’ve got three already out in the field, more on the way, but the ones they’ve got are new, not very experienced.”

They reached the white fence that circled the yard around a big, two-story white house. The dogs finally recognized her, and their barking turned to excited whines of welcome. Noelle reached through the slats of fence to pet the animals and quiet them.

The front screen door opened, and Jill, eight years older than Noelle, stepped out onto the broad concrete porch. Jill was a couple of inches taller than Noelle, with stronger features and a more voluptuous figure—and a familiar, piercing blue gaze.

“Noelle Cooper, what on earth?”

“Hi, sis.”

Jill glanced at Nathan, disapproval—annoyance? irritation?—sharpening her gaze.

“I came to help search.” Noelle followed Nathan through the front gate and braced herself for the rambunctious dogs as they leapt forward in welcome. “Any more word about Carissa?”

Jill shook her head, shading her eyes from the warm October sun. Her thick brown brows almost met in the middle as she squinted, and Noelle noticed the shadows of fatigue around Jill’s eyes as she stepped into her sister’s tight embrace.

Jill held her for a long moment. “This is like a nightmare, sis. I didn’t want to drag you down here. You’ve already got so much on your plate right now.”

“I didn’t come down here to cause you worry, I came to help with the search.”

Unfamiliar voices spilled from the house as Jill released Noelle. The aroma of frying bacon drifted through the screen door. Apparently some of the weary searchers were taking a much-needed break.

“So tell me,” Noelle said, “what have they found?”

“One of the sheriff’s deputies found fresh horseshoe prints in the mud at the edge of the lane,” Jill said.

“Maybe one of the horses jumped the fence,” Nathan said.

“None of the horses are even on the front forty right now,” Jill said. “They’re pastured half a mile in the other direction. That means someone may have come onto the property last night, because we had a lot of rain yesterday, and the print would’ve been washed away if they’d come earlier.”

“Surely they can’t think someone carried Carissa away by horse,” Nathan exclaimed.

“Can you think of a better way to carry someone through miles of wilderness trails without making a lot of noise?” Jill asked. “The fact that the dogs haven’t found Carissa yet probably means she was taken elsewhere, and it’s unlikely she walked there herself. They could have followed her scent.”

“What else did the searchers find?” Noelle asked.

Jill closed her eyes for half a second, then opened them and held Noelle’s gaze. Sorrowful. Suddenly gentle. “Taylor Jackson, one of the rangers, he found blood on the sawmill floor. Looks like someone was injured.”

“Maybe one of the employees was injured yesterday,” Noelle said.

“Taylor asked all of them, and no one was.”

“Okay, but that doesn’t automatically mean it was Carissa,” Noelle said.

“We’ll find out before long.” Jill lifted her hair from her neck and stretched her muscles. “I know we can’t go jumping to conclusions.” She said the words quickly, as if she’d been repeating them over and over to the others. “We can’t let ourselves get discouraged and stop searching.”

“Speaking of which,” Noelle said, “that’s what I came here to do. I’d better get to it.”

“Okay, but first will you let Melva know you’re here?” Jill asked. “She’s been wanting to call you since last night—as if one more person searching would make any difference.” The lines around Jill’s shadowed blue eyes deepened with concern. She touched Noelle’s shoulder. “You okay?”

“I’m fine. I just wish you’d called me last night.”

“We kept thinking we’d find her quickly. I didn’t want to upset you over nothing.” Jill frowned and pushed at her short brown hair—which had grown out a couple of inches, and no longer resembled a hard hat as much as it did a lion’s mane. “Cecil’s still blaming himself for sending her out for the ledger. Silly, I know, but I’ve struggled with the same problem. We let her go out there after dark.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Noelle said. “Nathan told me she was going out there anyway. She’s twelve years old, not a little child. Where were you when she disappeared?”