Shattered Secrets (Cold Creek #1)(68)

The desk phone rang, and Peggy answered it. Gabe said a silent prayer it was Tess. Peggy handed him the phone.

“Sheriff Gabe McCord here.”

He heard a woman’s excited voice, though not the one he wanted to hear. It was Marian Bell.

“Sheriff, you were right all along! Thank God—and you—I just got a call from the private detective we hired! He’s located Amanda with Peter and the home-wrecker slut he’s been living with in South America! I’m going to get a lawyer, and I’m going to get her back, but she’s alive! She wasn’t kidnapped here like the others!”

“That’s great, Marian! Let’s get our congressman and the state department involved. You’ll need other kinds of help now. Call me if you need assistance from this office.”

He was relieved, happy for her, but he still felt the loss of the others pulling him down. After he hung up, Ann and Peggy cheered. Vic even cracked a smile. But Gabe knew he was the one who needed other kinds of help now. When he was in Iraq, his team had a superstition: if you got a gift when one bomb was a dud, you really had to fear what happened next.

*

Tess had to go clear around to the back of the old farmhouse in the rain. The side windows on the first floor were too high to look into without climbing on something.

The tall windows made her feel like a small child again. Was this place getting to her in another way—subconscious memories? Fighting that fear, she decided to move her position so she could hear more than a blur of voices muted by the sound of rain and the waterfall.

Her stomach cramped, but she’d come this far and she was going to look in. One peek, assess the situation, catch something said, more than what she’d overheard from Dane. Then she’d back off and phone Gabe, if there was more to report than kids who had to put their thoughts in black spray paint on places they shouldn’t.

Under a sagging porch ceiling held up by two crooked pillars, the back door was open! Maybe they wanted fresh air or just hadn’t thought to close it. Again, she heard a female voice and maybe more than one man’s. There was a sharp, acrid smell drifting out the back door. Holding her breath, she edged closer and peered inside. She saw a kind of mudroom. The kitchen must be down a short hall beyond where the people were. To the right, she saw back stairs that went upward.

The voices were clear now, though she couldn’t really follow what was being said—until she heard Gabe’s name.

“Far’s I’m concerned, McCord might as well be Barney Fife with one bullet in his gun,” a man said with a kind of hee-haw laugh. “This whole place is like that old TV show Mayberry R.F.D. He’s been lookin’ for us for years, his daddy too, but we keep movin’ the goods.”

“Who’s your daddy?” another male voice said. “If he ain’t the sheriff out chasin’ lost little chicks, he ain’t nothin’ around here.”

Tess’s stomach cramped. Could these voices belong to the kidnappers? Was that what they were mocking Gabe about? But what were they doing here? And why didn’t the girl or woman speak again? Had they gagged her, drugged her? Tess could almost picture that as if it was happening to her.

She edged in the door, sidling toward the staircase in case she had to hide. Then, on the stairs above her, she saw a small circle of light. Maybe there was a window into the kitchen, a vent perhaps.

Holding her breath, she tiptoed up a step, then another. In the kitchen, they were making so much noise they didn’t hear the stairs creak, and she had the waterfall and rain to thank for that too. The hole was where a vent must have come out into these narrow back stairs years ago, when there were wood fires in potbellied stoves.

Keeping her face as far back from the opening as she could, she peered into the kitchen. It looked as though they were cooking something on the counter and on a beat-up table. She saw no stove or refrigerator, but of course the appliances had been stripped out years ago. They were using a small generator that was making a low buzzing noise. No doubt the electricity in this place had been turned off when Marva left. These weren’t homeless people making dinner somewhere they could find shelter. They’d said Gabe had looked for them for years, and they knew about the kidnappings.

She glimpsed bottles, a big funnel, Pyrex-type dishes and a blender. She gasped. These people were mixing and cooking up meth. It could blow sky-high if something went wrong. A petite but tough-looking woman moved into view. Tess glimpsed two men; she heard a third.

“We oughta go to the one-pot method,” the girl said. She had dirty-looking hair pulled straight back in a long ponytail. “You know, shake-and-bake, toss the bottle out of the car when we’re done with it.”

“Too damn dangerous. You think this stuff can’t blow? One wrong shake of the bottle, a little air gets in and fireball.” The man clapped his hands together, and Tess jumped.

She had to get out of here. She’d call Gabe, but not about finding kidnappers. She was sure these people didn’t have the finesse, the smarts, to pull that off. But this old house, the sound of the falls, even the back stairs, seemed somehow familiar, and she’d have to tell Gabe that.

Holding her breath, she began to creep down the steps to get out the back door. She froze when a phone rang, but it wasn’t hers. She’d muted her ring, and that phone played “Dixie.” One of the men stepped into the mudroom to take the call, blocking her escape.