Shattered Secrets (Cold Creek #1)(36)



“Thank you for the invitation,” she said. “And I wish you well with your drilling of the well.”

As if she’d said something wildly clever, Monson laughed, displaying large white teeth and a pale tongue. Lee joined in. Tess said goodbye and made herself walk away slowly, but she really wanted to run.





12

With the scarecrow hidden inside two brown paper bags overlapping end to end, Gabe got out of his cruiser and strode from the parking lot toward the main entrance to Mason’s Lumber Mill. The large, loud place was a fourth-generation, family-owned business. It employed a lot of locals and he knew there were plans to expand and hire more.

The sprawling sawmill was now owned and operated by Grant Mason, who had been a good friend of Gabe’s since childhood. In second grade at the Cold Creek Elementary School, their teacher, Miss Sanders, had seated the kids alphabetically by first names, and he and Grant had been buddies ever since. Grant thought Gabe was nuts when he joined the service and was sent overseas and it had been a long time since the two of them had just cut out of town and chilled out somewhere together. They were both working way too hard without women or kids in their lives.

Gabe knew this place well since he’d had summer jobs here when Grant’s father owned it. He’d swept up sawdust after everyone from scalers to debarkers to the guys who ran the big frame saw. He was familiar with the huge lumberyard with tall piles of stockpiled timber and stacked pallets of wood out back waiting to be processed after the big trucks hauled their loads in. Ann’s brothers worked here now, three men he was determined more than ever lately would never be his brothers-in-law.

With a screech, screech, screech warning signal, a huge logging forklift started backing up in the parking lot. Gabe gave it a wide berth as he headed into the mill. He thought of Tess mentioning the corn harvester again. She might be right that it was a bad idea for both of them to go charging into Aaron Kurtz’s place to look at the machine. Besides, the guy was a deacon at the community church and had been a solid family man for years. Gabe couldn’t fathom Aaron not reporting seeing something strange in a cornfield, let alone snatching kids.

But then, since more obvious suspects like Dane Thompson, even Sam Jeffers and that taxidermist loner, John Hillman, hadn’t panned out before, maybe it was also time to start looking at long shots, including Kurtz and even Mayor Owens. Was Reese really a nervous wreck each time a kidnap case was investigated by local and state law officers just because of bad PR for the town?

“Yo, Gabe!” Ann’s brother Jonas shouted from his elevated position above the cutting line that fed logs into the debarker. He wore industrial earplugs that looked like earmuffs. A dust mask partly covered his face, but his voice was so loud the mask hardly muted it. “What’s happ’nin’, man?” Jonas shouted over the earsplitting din of the machine.

Gabe just waved and headed up the metal steps toward Grant’s elevated office from which he could keep an eye on the entire floor of conveyor belts and moving parts.

Grant was sitting on his desk, feet in his chair, working on a laptop balanced on his knees, probably so he could look farther down through his office’s glass windows. How things had changed since Grant’s dad used to oversee things with a pencil stuck behind his ear and a scratch pad in his shirt pocket.

Despite his dad’s wishes he stay home and learn the business after college, Grant had gone out to northern California and Oregon, hung out with loggers, taken a job operating a big debarker in the field, not a mill. When Grant took over the business, his father had finally admitted a couple of years of roughing it was the right thing to do. It allowed Grant to mingle easily with everyone from environmentally minded CEOs to senators in D.C. to brush cat loggers in these hills.

Grant looked up as Gabe closed the office door to mute the noise. “Got something I want you to see—to ID,” he told Grant, who put the laptop down and got up to shake his hand.

“Good to see you too,” Grant said, his tone part teasing, part critical. “But I know you’ve been nose to the grindstone over this latest abduction. Anything I can do to help?”

“Help’s exactly what I need,” Gabe said.

In junior high and high school, they’d been so close they’d either finished each other’s sentences or just answered without the other’s question being asked. Though they were both tall, Grant was lanky and blond with blue eyes—the marauding Viking look—whereas Gabe was broader and dark-haired, but they used to feel like twins anyway.

“Could this have been made or sold here at the mill?” Gabe asked, dragging the scarecrow out of the sacks. “This center piece of wood was sold here.”

“Yeah, for sure, that’s our sticker,” Grant said, looking through the plastic. “But it’s obviously old. Dad used to sell those scarecrows years ago, but we don’t carry anything like that now. We do, though, have bins by the door in the spring and winter of those squared-off stakes. People use them for staking up tomatoes, peppers, garden crops like that. In the winter, they string them together with wire to make snow fences. But the intact scarecrow for sale—not since about the time I was in college.

“But, you know,” Grant went on, cocking his head, “this outfit—I have seen that too. I’m thinking my mom used to sew these for decorative scarecrows, other homemade figures with wooden bodies too, like Christmas angels that people could put in their yards, wooden Easter bunnies—her mad money back then, I guess. Some friends from church helped her make the outfits.”

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