Redemption (10 page)

What was she so afraid of? That Nettie would find fault with her work? Was the girl that insecure? Then how was she going to make it at art school?

All her instincts told her that Tiffany had lied about her reasons for wanting to rent the apartment over the store. Beartooth was twenty miles from Big Timber and even farther from the kind of shopping girls her age liked to do.

Nettie was mulling all this over as she straightened canned goods on the middle aisle when she heard the creak of a floorboard behind her.

She spun around, startled to find the girl standing directly behind her. “Tiffany,” she said, her hand over her thundering heart. “Don’t sneak up on me like that. I’m an old woman. You’ll kill me.”

“Sorry, Mrs. Benton.”

“And don’t call me Mrs. Benton. That’s my ex-husband’s mother. Nettie will do just fine.”

The girl nodded. She had her sketch pad under one arm and a large shoulder bag draped over the other. “I just wanted to let you know that the faucet in the bathroom upstairs is dripping. You said to tell you if there were any problems.”

“Right. I’ll fix it.” Her heart rate was only starting to drop back to normal. What was it about this young woman that felt so...off? “Are you going to the fair?”

The girl nodded almost shyly.

“Well, you have a nice time and don’t worry about the faucet. I’ll see that it gets fixed,” Nettie said as Tiffany left. She watched her drive away, headed down the road toward Big Timber in her cute little car, a girl who had everything. Or so it seemed.

Maybe she’s just what she says she is.
It was Bob’s damned voice. Nettie wondered if she would ever get him out of her head.

Just like Kate LaFond is just a woman running a café.

Nettie harrumphed at that. Kate LaFond was a mystery, one that had consumed her since the day the young woman had shown up in Beartooth.

Kate had just appeared one day not long after the former owner, Claude Durham, died. She’d moved into the upstairs apartment and reopened the café only days after Claude’s funeral, a funeral Kate hadn’t attended.

Nettie couldn’t imagine how the sale could have taken place so quickly. For that matter, she’d never even seen the café advertised for sale.

It was odd enough that a woman in her mid-thirties would be interested in a business in a near ghost town like Beartooth. Add to that the fact that no one seemed to know anything about her....

Kate had been living over the café and running the place now for months and no one knew any more about her than they had the day she’d shown up in town.

As far as Nettie could tell, and she’d been watching out the window, Kate hadn’t made one friend or had any old ones visit.

Admittedly, Nettie wasn’t one to make a lot of friends herself, but a woman Kate’s age? Not only did she keep to herself, Nettie had also seen her digging in the middle of the night. Just last fall, she’d seen Kate sneaking around in the middle of the night with a shovel and later digging over by the old garage next to the café.

Just to fool with you, Nettie.

Bob might have been right—that one time,
Nettie thought as she squinted through the dusty storefront window at the café across the street. When she’d done some sneaking and digging of her own, she’d found nothing buried in the garage or any sign that anything had been dug up. Worse, she’d been caught by a smirking Kate LaFond.

Now across the street inside the café, Kate looked up from a table she was serving to give Nettie one of those tight, knowing smirks.

Nettie quickly stepped back into the shadows, hating that she’d let the woman get to her. Kate LaFond was hiding something. Nettie felt it in her bones.

And now you suspect your renter has a secret as well? I worry about you sometimes, Nettie.

“Shut up, Bob,” she said as she went to get the toolbox from the office to fix the leaky faucet—and get a peek at the apartment without the girl in it.

* * *

A
FTER HIS VISIT
with Arnie Thorndike, the sheriff returned to his office. He checked to see if he’d heard from the warden at the Yuma prison. No message.

He hadn’t had much sleep since the discovery of the murdered man—and the photo—near the river. Common sense told him the two might not be connected. He could be wrong about the photo having been dropped by the dead man. He could be wrong about a lot of things.

Mostly he was trying not to let his imagination run away with him.

It had given him an eerie feeling to find a photo of a family that had, in effect, disappeared as if whisked off the earth thirty years ago. He’d known it was the Ackermann family the moment he’d put the magnifying glass to it. Nettie had, too. He’d been watching her face and had seen the instant she recognized the faces in the snapshot.

A photo like that didn’t just blow into the weeds by the river without some connection. Not when there was a murdered man in the undergrowth only yards away.

With an exhausted reluctance, he drew out the evidence bag and held it under his desk lamp as he had done so many times since this case had begun.

The photograph was of a tall, gangly man. Next to him was a skinny woman holding a toddler. Around her were four boys, all with the same dour expression as their father, all in their teens or preteens.

The family was dressed in clothes most people would have thrown out. The children all looked dirty and underfed. The Ackermanns were a sad-looking bunch. Frank remembered as a boy only getting glimpses of the brothers—and only when he and his friends had braved going near the hollow where they lived.

Cullen Ackermann was an antigovernment survivalist who’d settled in the area after coming into some money. He’d bought a bunch of property up one of the canyons deep in the Crazies and proceeded to fence and post his property with Trespassers Will Be Shot signs.

Rumor around town was that Ackermann was growing marijuana and that’s why the compound was heavily armed and even had booby traps and land mines for anyone stupid enough to step on his land.

Frank’s father had been sheriff at the time. “I don’t want you and your buddies going near that place. You understand?”

He had. He’d seen the young Ackermann boys, boys much younger than him at the time, carrying what looked like machine guns. And yet he and his friends had still gone up there a few times. They’d just never been brave enough to cross the fence.

Frank shifted his gaze from Cullen to the man’s second wife. Teeny, as she was known, was much younger. Few people had ever seen her except for the day he’d brought her home. She homeschooled his children and never came into town, even on the occasional trips her husband made for supplies.

The Ackermanns had apparently grown and killed their own food, that self-sufficiency isolating them even further from the community. Not that the no-trespassing signs didn’t keep locals at a distance. Whatever was going on up in that hollow, everyone figured it was none of their business and just left them alone.

But after some complaints about the boys running wild and getting into neighboring ranches’ gardens and livestock, Frank’s father had gone out there only to be met by an armed and angry Cullen Ackermann.

Cullen swore his boys had nothing to do with any stealing. Frank’s father had said he’d be back if he had any more complaints. To most people, the Ackermanns were simply an oddity that few gave any thought to. That was until the day more than thirty years ago when Frank’s father had come home with the news. Frank had been in his room and sneaked down the hallway to listen, knowing something was going on.

“We rushed the compound,” he heard his father say. “One of my deputies was wounded, another practically had his leg cut off in a bear trap that damned fool Cullen had set.”

“Did you find her?” his mother had asked in a whisper.

From where Frank stood, he couldn’t see his father, but he heard him say, “She’s alive, but just barely. She was locked in a root cellar dug into the mountain behind the house. Been there probably for years. It was horrible, Sadie.”

“What about the Ackermann children?”

“They weren’t there. Probably took off up into the mountains. We haven’t been able to find them.” His father sighed. “We should have stormed that compound sooner. I hate to even think what’s been going on up there.”

“Thank God Loralee Clark came to you when she did. I know you thought she was just being a nosy neighbor and talking crazy. What about the woman she called Teeny? Did you find her?”

He couldn’t hear his father’s answer, but he heard his mother begin to cry.

His father, as if sensing his presence, had looked over his shoulder and seen him standing there listening. “You go on now. This isn’t for your ears.”

He’d had no choice but to leave. But plenty of wild gossip circulated, sweeping through the community like any horror story. Then shame had stilled the voices. As a community, people blamed themselves for letting it happen right under their noses.

Frank didn’t learn the full extent of what had happened until years later when he’d read his father’s report. In it, he’d learned that Cullen’s first wife had been kept prisoner in a hole dug back into the mountainside for years. She was so malnourished and in such bad shape she died shortly after she was freed.

Frank and his friends had sneaked up there to see the root cellar. It was more like a cave in the mountainside. It still gave him chills when he remembered what he’d glimpsed back in that hole.

Cullen’s so-called second wife, only known as Teeny, had been killed by one of the booby traps on the property. Cullen had been arrested on numerous charges, including two counts of manslaughter and endangerment to children, after the deaths of the two women. He’d gone to prison on what became a life sentence when he died recently of cancer.

The county had seized the land for back taxes and brought in the military to remove what booby traps and land mines they could find. The property had never been put up for sale. Instead it remained fenced and posted against trespassing.

While Frank now knew the gruesome details of the day his father and his deputies had stormed what they called the Ackermann compound, one big mystery had never been solved.

What had happened to the children? He knew they had taken off up into the Crazies that day, because a year later the remains of one of the sons had been found at a deserted campsite. The bones were strewn across a wide area, leading them to believe animals had carried off the remains of the others or even buried them to eat later.

So, for over thirty years, the Ackermanns had been forgotten.

Until now, Frank thought as he stared at the photo.

His computer screen beeped letting him know he had a response from his earlier inquiry. He stared at the name on the screen, then grabbed his keys and hat and headed for his patrol pickup.

* * *

K
ATE COULDN’T SHAKE
the feeling that she’d been followed. Not just this time, either. She watched her rearview mirror. Earlier she’d seen a pickup behind her as she’d left Beartooth, but when she’d looked again, it was gone.

“Just my imagination,” she said, and concentrated on driving up a narrow dirt road that skirted the Crazies. After she’d left the fair, she’d dropped by the post office. Her infrared camera had arrived, along with a state-of-the-art metal detector. With the equipment in her hands and the clock now ticking, she had no excuse.

Her pickup rumbled over a narrow wooden bridge, the snow-fed creek below moving in a roar of high water. The land along the edge of the Crazy Mountains was lush with new spring growth. Pale green aspen leaves fluttered in the breeze against a backdrop of deep, dark green pines.

Miles out of Beartooth, on a narrow, obviously seldom-used road, she slowed as the fence came into view. Checking her mirror, she saw no one and yet she couldn’t shake the feeling that she wasn’t alone and hadn’t been since she’d gotten to Beartooth.

The signs on the razor-wire fence had rusted with the years, but the lettering was still clear enough. Danger. Live Ammunition Area. No Trespassing. In smaller letters were warnings of the legal penalties of crossing the fence onto the property.

Kate kept going up the road. She’d discovered another road that abutted the back part of the posted land. She headed there now, although she would have much preferred cutting the wire and driving up the weed-choked road into Ackermann Hollow, as Claude had called it.

While she’d never seen another vehicle on this particular road, she didn’t doubt that one of the ranchers who lived farther out this way used this road occasionally and would notice a cut fence and report it.

She turned onto what locals would call a two-track. Tall weeds grew between two nearly indistinguishable tracks. They brushed the undercarriage of her pickup as she shifted down and bumped along through thick cottonwoods, until the trees opened to give her a view of the Crazies towering over her.

It always gave her the creeps coming here, but she steeled herself for what had to be done. At first she’d come armed only with a shovel and a map. Both had proved fruitless given the size of the hollow.

She slowed, checking her rearview mirror again. Dust billowed up behind her pickup, but the road was empty of any other vehicles. She was miles from Beartooth, completely alone.

And yet, as she pulled in so her pickup was hidden from the road behind a stand of pines, she couldn’t shake the feeling that someone was watching.

Shoving away those thoughts, she slung the infrared-camera bag over one shoulder, pulled her metal detector from behind the seat and strapped on her small digging tool. She could always come back for the shovel.

When she’d first gotten to town, she’d gone down to the county office and gotten maps of the area, saying she liked to explore.

“You don’t want to explore anywhere in this area,” the woman had warned her, pointing to the exact area she
did
want to explore in the worst way. “It’s off-limits, for your own good. Some kind of government property they must have used for training purposes. Apparently they left land mines and booby traps behind.”