Colder Than Ice (4 page)

She dug into hers, as well. Poor stupid woman.

J
oshua Kendall walked into Maude Bickham's house in a state of shock. The woman, Beth Slocum, the resemblance…No, no, it was more than a resemblance. She was identical to the girl his bullet had torn apart eighteen years ago. The girl who'd lain in a deep coma as he sat by her bed, wishing he could change places with her. The girl he'd been told had no chance of surviving.

She was older, of course. The eyes he'd only seen closed in mindless slumber had a few lines at their corners that hadn't been there before. God, how he'd longed to see them open, to know their color.

He knew it now. Emerald green, like the Gulf of Mexico at midsummer.

The round cheeks of youth had been replaced by sharper angles, but there was no question she was the same person.

He stumbled into the house, barely seeing where he was going, so many questions were whirling through his mind.

“Well, there you are. My goodness, I almost lost it out there. I have to tell you, son, I'm not used to telling lies.”

“You, uh…you did fine, Maude.”

“Well, it's well worth it, if it's to help protect Beth from whatever shadows she's been running from. Like I always say, ‘You have to crush some tomatoes to get any sauce.' This won't wash for long, though. There are folks in this town have known me far longer than Beth has. Oh, I can put 'em off for a while. Sam and I were old enough when we bought this place that any kids we might have had would have been grown. Most folks don't know we never had any. All but Frankie, anyway. She won't be so easily—what is it, Joshua? You look as if you've seen a ghost.”

“I…” He gave his head a shake and forced himself to pay attention to the woman. “It was a long drive. I guess I'm tired out.”

“Well, then, go on up to your room. I've put you in the blue room, and your boy in the one beside you. Go left at the top of the stairs. It's the second door on the right.”

“Thanks.”

He took her advice and sought out the privacy of his bedroom. And the first thing he did was to make a phone call to Arthur Stanton, his longtime mentor, former superior officer, and the man who'd hired him for this job. Arthur was out. His machine told Josh to leave a message.

Josh held the phone to his ear, staring out the bedroom window. Down there on the scraggly lawn, a ghost was talking to his son. A woman who was supposed to be dead. He should know, he thought. He'd killed her himself.

“Arthur, it's Joshua. Call me back and tell me what the hell
is going on. Is this woman—is she—Jesus, Art, what are you doing to me here?”

He couldn't take his eyes off her. Not even when the image of the girl she had been when he'd seen her last overlaid the scene below in his mind. He saw her as she had been: pale, far too thin, barely seventeen. Wires taped to her temples and forehead, and running from underneath her clothes. Tubes in her wrists and mouth. White sheets, white hospital gown, white skin. The damned incessant beeping of the heart monitor that sounded sluggish and slow.

A lot of kids had been caught in the cross fire when federal agents raided the Young Believers' Compound eighteen years ago. But most of the bodies burned in the holocaust that followed.

Hers hadn't.

Josh had been an ATF agent then, overzealous and eager to be a hero. And maybe a little too quick to fire back at the muzzle flashes coming from the compound. Ballistics matched the bullet that took her out with Joshua's own rifle. When Josh had gone to the hospital to see her, they'd told him she wouldn't live out the week.

She'd been haunting him ever since.

It couldn't be her. It couldn't be. Not like this, strong, older…alive, running now down the tree-lined lane, her strides powerful and confident. It couldn't be her.

There was a knock on his door. “Dad?”

He shook himself, opened it. Bryan stood there with a large red-white-and-blue envelope in his hands. “Mailman was just here. Left this for you. It came express, so I figured it was important.”

He took it, eyed the return address.

“It's from that guy who hired you—Arthur Stanton.”

The man who was like a father to him. The man he trusted, had always trusted, even after the raid.

“He was your boss when you were in the ATF, you said.”

Josh nodded. He'd been fired, because the nation needed a scapegoat. Not that he hadn't been guilty—just no guiltier than every other man on the strike team that day. Art had been too well respected to be fired; he'd been moved, instead. Lost his command, gotten stuck behind a desk pushing papers for the rest of his career. Put to work for the Federal Witness Protection Program. If she was who Josh thought she was, she must have been one of Arthur's first cases.

Jesus.

“So what was really going on down there?” Bryan asked.

Josh tried to focus on his son. “What do you mean?”

“With that woman. First you looked at her like you were seeing a ghost, and then you tried to cover—lamely.”

Josh pursed his lips. “I wasn't trying to cover. She really does remind me of someone.”

“Yeah, so much you nearly lost your lunch.”

He averted his eyes.

“I mean it, Dad. I thought you were going to blow it out there. I mean, you're the one who's supposed to know what you're doing here, the one who spent three straight days lecturing me on not blowing our cover. So I figure this is something major.”

He forced himself to meet his son's gaze. “You might be right.”

“Then you know Beth Slocum from somewhere?”

“I don't know yet.”

“But you think you might?”

He didn't say anything, his gaze dragged as if by force to the envelope again.

“Right,” Bryan said. “It's none of my damn business, anyway. You should have just said so. I'm going out.”

The tone jerked Josh back to the present. “Going out where?”

“Hell, Dad, I don't know. I'm not sure what my options are around here, so I can hardly answer that one. Around, I guess. I'm taking the pickup.”

“Just be careful. And call if you're going to be late.”

Bryan didn't answer, just headed out of the bedroom. He didn't quite slam the door, but he didn't shut it any too gently, either.

Josh sighed, wishing to hell he knew how to be a decent father to his son. He probably shouldn't have let him go, but hell, the boy was almost eighteen. It wasn't like he needed baby-sitting.

He didn't know what to do. He knew his son was in pain and acting out in anger, but he didn't have the first clue what to do about it. And frankly, given the shock he'd just suffered, he was in no state to figure out the answer today.

He sat down on his bed and tore open the envelope. It contained a complete dossier on Elizabeth Marcum, aka Beth Slocum, beginning when she'd awakened from a coma eighteen years ago. When he read the hell she'd been through because of his bullet, he wondered if it might have been better if he had killed her after all.

She'd awakened with no memory, no life, facing years of rehabilitation and physical therapy. She'd lost all of it…because of him.

He was sure of only one thing: he owed her. And this assign
ment hadn't come out of the blue. Arthur had chosen him deliberately, knowing he would protect Beth Slocum better than anyone else ever could, because of that debt.

 

Bryan thought he probably shouldn't hate his father for keeping secrets from him when secrets were a part of his job. He
did
hate it, though. He hated just about everything his old man did these days. Every word out of his mouth seemed unreasonably irritating and made Bryan want to snap back, even when it wasn't altogether warranted.

Bryan wasn't stupid. It made sense to resent his father for not giving a damn about his mother's death. Josh hadn't shed a single tear. And it made sense to hate him for dragging Bryan out of his school, away from his friends, his home, and making him live in an apartment the size of a closet in Manhattan.

He thought maybe Joshua was starting to get that. He thought maybe that was why, when his dad's former boss from his days in the ATF, days before Bryan was even born, contacted him about this job, he'd accepted so fast. He knew Bryan detested the city. He probably thought this middle-of-nowhere town in Vermont would be better for him.

But Bryan didn't want to be here, either. He just wanted to go home.

He drove the pickup, which he secretly loved, into the tiny town of Blackberry, which was all of two miles from the old woman's run-down house. He spent the entire drive trying to locate an alternative or punk station on the radio, with no luck at all. Nothing out here but easy listening, country and talk radio.

God, he was going to die of boredom inside a week. He pulled off when he found a park, walked the entire thing, and
found a fountain, a basketball court, a hot-dog stand. He bought a dog and continued on. The town was packed, way more people than could possibly live in a place this small. Must be the tourists his dad had told him were liable to be around. God, there were a lot of them, walking around with cameras, or driving with their heads sticking out the windows, pointing at the trees.

It was pretty here. He had to give it that.

Just at the edge of town there was a library, and he spent a couple of hours there, using their Internet connection and playing video games.

He'd killed the rest of the morning and was working on the afternoon when he pulled into the blacktop square beyond the ornate little sign that read Blackberry Public Parking. It was smack in the middle of a strip of road that was lined on either side with businesses. They all had awnings, and all the awnings were color coordinated—green or white, or green-and-white stripes. The stores—shops, really—had old-fashioned lettering on the windows, and they all looked like something out of one of the Norman Rockwell prints his mother used to have hanging all over their house. If not for the tourists, Bryan would have felt as if he'd walked right into one of them. The barbershop had an actual barber pole.

He pocketed his keys and took to the sidewalk. It was clean, unbroken, no weeds springing up in between the blocks. Oak trees grew from circular holes in the concrete, with red mulch covering their bases. Almost every building had a flag on display—not all of them American flags, though. Some were Canadian, some Italian, and some bore peace signs or rainbows.

He scanned the shop windows. Drugstore, grocery, ice
cream “shoppe,” hardware, electronics…“Now we're getting somewhere,” he said.

He went through the swinging doors of the tiny electronics store, nodded hello to the woman behind the counter and started perusing the shelves. There was only one other customer in the place, an absentminded professor type in a baggy suit.

The woman behind the counter said, “Can I help you find something, young man?”

“Yeah, I'm looking for a set of headphones for my MP3 player.” He pulled the tiny device out of his pocket as he spoke and held it up, but as he did, the other customer placed his purchases—a video camera and several tapes—on the counter.

“They're right over there, son,” she said, pointing at a pegboard right beside the counter, where about twenty different sets of headphones hung.

Bryan went over and began looking for one that would fit his player.

He noticed the guy at the counter taking his purchases and turning to go. A twenty lay on the floor at his feet. As the man walked toward the door, Bryan hurried to grab it. “Excuse me, mister, I think you dropped this.”

The man turned as if surprised, saw Bryan holding out the twenty and smiled. He had thick, unevenly cut black hair that looked as if he'd combed it with an egg beater, thick-lensed glasses with black plastic frames, and the kind of pointy beard you'd expect to see on the villain in an old movie.

His smile was warm, though. He quickly pulled out his wallet and checked his cash. “You're right, I did drop it. Thank you, young man. That was very thoughtful of you.”

“No prob.”

The guy took the twenty, tucked it into his wallet and tugged out a five. “Here, for your honesty.”

“No, really. It's okay,” Bryan said, holding up a hand.

“You're sure?”

He nodded. “My mother was always telling me if you can't be honest for the sake of honesty, you're not really being honest at all.”

The man tipped his head to one side. “Your mother sounds like a very wise woman.”

“She was,” Bryan said. He turned back to the rack of headphones beside the counter.

The stranger cleared his throat, and Bryan turned again, surprised to see him still there. “I don't mean to pry, but, uh…do you go to school around here?”

Bryan shook his head. “I'm taking a semester off, but I have a private tutor so I won't fall behind.”

“Ah. A private tutor, is it? That's very wise. One of the teachers, I assume?”