Chasing the Sunset(49)

slow rhythm of his breaths. She began to match her breathing to his, unconsciously, and her body relaxed, too, the last of the tension draining away.

Duncan and Kathleen were back in what seemed like only minutes. When Maggie questioned them about it, she was surprised to find they had been gone an hour. She waved off Duncan’s offer of an escort to the hotel. It was only three buildings away, after all. No one would hurt her here.

After bundling up and wrapping around her head the scarf that Kathleen insisted she take, Maggie stepped out into the frigid weather, looking around in awe. A couple of inches of snow had already fallen and it was as yet largely undisturbed, so a blanket of white lay everywhere she looked. It was starting to get dark already, and the light from the moon made the unsullied snow gleam. It was beautiful and pure, and Maggie blew out a long plume of breath in admiration.

Smiling, she stepped off the walkway to cross the alley, into a pile of snow. She lifted her boots and shook them off. The cold seeped right through to her feet and she thought absently that she needed a sturdier pair of shoes.

She heard the sound of running feet and turned to look inquiringly down the alley just as a hard fist smashed into the side of her face. She dropped like a rock into the drifted snow, stunned and bleeding. Uncaring hands dragged her deeper into the alley. Maggie moaned.

“Bitch,” a voice said malevolently. “I am going to hurt you much more than that puny little blow ever did. I am going to make you pay.”

Maggie turned her head fitfully, her jaw throbbing and her head whirling. She tried to

force herself to open her eyes and confront the man who bent over her now, though nausea threatened and her head ached abominably.

“Open your eyes, and look at me,” sneered the man, and Maggie knew that voice, she did, it was a voice right out of her bad dreams . . .

She made a valiant effort and opened her eyes . . . and looked straight into the feral eyes of her dead husband. Maggie tried to scream, but her vocal cords would not cooperate and she could only stare in silent horror at the face of the man that she thought she had killed. She lost her battle with consciousness and slid down, down, down into the welcoming darkness.





ELEVEN



When an hour and a half had passed and Maggie still had not returned, Duncan went looking for her, leaving a worried Kathleen with Ned. No one at the restaurant or the hotel remembered seeing any lone woman fitting her description, and they would have remembered. Duncan walked quickly back to the surgery.

“Where could she have gone?” he wondered aloud.

This felt wrong to him; no matter that Duncan had been raised with white men, the blood of Celtic mystics and Indian shamans ran strongly through his veins, and he was more finely tuned to his environment than most people ever are. He had a fine level of intuition accented by good observational skills, and he also had a little something extra, a . . . knowing, if you would, that he had come to trust.

Something was wrong. He felt lingering traces of evil here in this place. This evil had touched Maggie somehow, and it had something to do with her disappearance.

He did not know what it was, he did not even know how he knew, but he knew. Duncan tramped back through the snow, his piercing eyes alert and scanning his surroundings. He stopped in the alley, knelt beside a trampled snow drift. Boot prints were all around it–a woman and at least one man. He tore off a glove and touched his finger to something he saw there, then brought it to his nose. Blood. It was Maggie’s; he knew it with a bone-deep certainty that he could not ignore.

Duncan walked back farther between the two buildings and saw drag marks on the ground, and more boot prints from the same man–he could tell it was the same track by the wear pattern of the boots. He headed for the sheriff’s office at a fast run, his well conditioned body performing as he expected it to. He was not even breathing hard when he got there . . . but his heart was pounding furiously, not from the exertion, but from fear for Maggie.

The sheriff and Duncan had already formed a friendship of sorts, enough of one so that the man trusted Duncan’s judgment. Without hesitation, he sent a deputy out to Nick’s, telling him what had happened, and began a systematic search of the town.

But Maggie was nowhere to be found.

The only thing that they discovered was that a man traveling alone had checked out of the hotel and departed a day earlier than he had planned. The man was the only stranger who had passed through Geddes as far as anyone could tell. He may or may not have had something to do with Maggie’s disappearance, and he had not even left a hint as to where he was headed.

Duncan chafed at the delay; he could not leave his patient, and Doctor Fell was still out at the Booker farm helping with the delivery. Sheriff Vanderiest had someone out looking for the man who had been staying at the hotel, but his deputies were not trackers, they mainly broke up fights and such, and the drifting snow was fast covering up tracks which might have led them to Maggie.

Duncan knew that he could find her. He could track a flea over a mile of rock; when he was seven he had tracked and brought home a two-year-old who had been lost for days. Everyone involved in the search, even his father, had already given up the boy for dead and was planning to go home the next morning.

Duncan knew somehow that this was not the case; he felt that he had some mysterious union with the boy, some invisible thread that bound him irrevocably to the small child. He was still too young and inarticulate to explain this with any coherence to his elders, so he did the only thing that he felt he could do. He left his father sleeping and quietly slipped from the camp. He knew that his father would not leave him there, and the entire party would be forced to wait either until he came back or until they found him.

He had dreamed that the boy was alive and in a small cave halfway up the side of a canyon–and when he found the child, that was exactly where he was.

He refused the praise that was offered him upon his return to camp because he did not feel he deserved it; the boy himself had called Duncan to him, somehow. When he tried to explain this to them all, everyone laughed except his father, who took him aside when his hurt showed on his face and then was quickly hidden behind a mask of indifference.

“There are more events in this world than just those that are readily explainable and easily understood,” he told Duncan in his thick brogue. “You scared them, that is why they all laughed. What cannot be explained must be untrue, to them. You can see things that others cannot, feel things that they never will, and this will always be so, son. You were given a gift, though you might not consider it that at one time or another in your life and it comes to you both from my people and from your mother’s.” His father had looked off into the mountains, his profile outlined against the harsh beauty of the peaks. His expression made him seem as if he were very far away from where Duncan was right now.

“I am the seventh son of a seventh son, and your mother was the seventh daughter of a seventh daughter. This is a powerful sign, and your fortune was foretold to me by my granny who was a great seer, when I was but fourteen years old. It was the reason I came here to this strange land, never to see Scotland again. You will be a healer, she told it to me long ago, and you will be a great one. You will be gentle yet strong, a giant of a man, and you will have the gift of sight, and you will never know when this gift will manifest itself.”

At this point, his father had turned to him and smiled a broad, loving smile. “She also told me that my son would know a wondrous love and that his wife would bear him seven children, and that all these children would have the sight in varying degrees . . . but the strongest would be the seventh, and she would have an amazing destiny. She would begin the first step toward this destiny on her third birthday, and many would witness it. She said much more than that, but I dinna think you will be old enough to hear it all just yet.” He winked at Duncan. “Fair burned my ears off, it did.” His father had clapped a hand to Duncan’s shoulder. “Let’s be goin’ back to yer mother, boy. I have a hankering to see her pretty face.”

Duncan had disbelieved this prophecy of his ancestor, though he never said so out loud. He did not want to be disrespectful of his father’s ancestors; they were undoubtedly sacred and wise, and were owed much respect. But this prophecy could not be true. He was not a giant and was not likely to become one; he was skinny and small for his age and he had so far showed no signs of becoming anything else. And if this ancestor of his was wrong about the one thing, then it stood to reason that she could be wrong about the rest of the prophecy as well.

When his mother died and they moved away from his beloved mountains, Duncan thought for a time that he would die, too. He did not, of course, for grief rarely kills children, and in his tenth year, he began to grow . . . and grow, and grow. When he finally stopped growing, he was eighteen, and at least a foot taller than any man he stood beside. He believed his great-granny’s prophecy—and he could still track anything that moved over any terrain.

Duncan paced with Kathleen, reminding her of some big cat who had been caged by mistake and now could not be still until he found his way out. Ned, mercifully, had come awake only long enough to take a drink and another dose of laudanum. Duncan was glad that he did not have to explain to the old man that his niece was missing and that the only ones looking for her so far were a couple of green deputies that could not find their rear ends with both hands.