And then he heard voices.
Arguing.
Near the garage where the tractors and heavy equipment was stored.
Rather than shout his arrival, he eased slowly along the edge of the stable and under the overhang where the horse trailer was parked. From there he looked across an expanse of parking lot to the shed.
“I told you not to panic,” one male voice said in a harsh whisper. “Just stay cool.”
Who was it? He should know.
“But we have to do something! Who knows who could be next?” A female voice. But again the hissing whisper disguised the true tenor of her voice, making it impossible for him to identify her. Should he show himself and demand answers? Or wait?
“Just be patient, okay? I won’t let anything happen to you. I promise.”
“How can you promise me? This is getting out of hand. I mean, when I agreed to this, to be a part of it, I thought it would be fun, a thrill. And I believed in him. But now … Oh, God, I don’t know. I just don’t know!”
“Shh! You have to have faith,” the male voice insisted.
Trent decided to sneak closer when he heard a sharp neigh from the other direction, on the far side of the stable.
“Oh, no! Someone’s coming!”
The horse let out a high whinny again, but Trent was already crossing the parking lot to the garage. He heard footsteps running frantically on the other side of the building. He gave chase, keeping close to the garage and rounding a corner.
No one.
The back of the garage area was undisturbed, the snow piled on its asphalt apron, unmarked, the huge, rolling doors shut tight.
Trent dashed to the far side and once again was faced with an empty expanse of parking lot, though tire tracks and footprints were visible in the snow. Whoever had been meeting here was long gone, and the tracks he found—two sets of bootprints, one smaller than the other—led toward the heart of the campus. He followed them until he hit the shoveled sidewalk, where they disappeared.
Students?
Counselors?
Who?
He looked toward the dorms and saw someone pass under the lights between buildings, a glint of gold showing, as if the person were wearing a yellow cap or had blond hair. From this distance, he couldn’t be certain. Nor could he prove that the person was either of the two he’d heard whispering behind the garage. Even if he could, so what? They were talking. Breaking curfew if they were students, not so if they were TAs or members of the staff.
The horse neighed again, clear and harsh in the night air. Other animals responded. One dog in the kennels started barking and was joined by others, but the noise was muted by the walls of the kennel. As were the answering neighs of the horses.
Knowing that he’d lost his quarry, he backtracked around the garage and crossed to the stable. On his way there, he spied a yearling named Nova for the star burst of white on her forehead. The filly whinnied, shivering in the cold. She was locked out of the building.
“Son of a bitch,” he muttered under his breath. He opened the door and found a lead, then snapped it onto the filly’s halter. “Come on, girl,” he said softly, clucking his tongue and leading her inside the stable. Warm air that smelled of horses, saddle soap, and urine greeted him. Horses shuffled in their stalls, hooves swishing in the straw, an occasional nicker reaching his ears.
“You caused a stir, Nova,” he told the sorrel filly, who tossed her head and nervously danced. “Hey, come on. You’re okay. Here ya go.”
Other horses stretched their heads over the rails of their boxes, and he rubbed the gray’s nose before he settled the sorrel into her stall. After filling her manger with a ration of grain and hay, he brushed her shivering coat until it gleamed red under the stable lights. That seemed to have calmed her. “Better?” he asked kindly, though inside he was burning, pissed as hell that someone had left the filly outside when the temperature was well below freezing. Idiot!
The dogs were going crazy now, their soft woofs having escalated to serious barking.
“No!” a man said firmly, and the noise stopped instantly.
Flannagan.
Several horses raised their heads and looked expectantly at the door.
It opened a second later, and Bert Flannagan, his face set in a scowl, a rifle gripped in his right hand, strode in. “What the hell is going on?”
“Nothing that requires a gun, Bert.”
“You never know.”
“What were you gonna do? Shoot someone, probably a student, in the stables, and maybe hit a horse or two? Scare the rest of them so that they kicked out of their boxes and injured themselves? Put the damned thing away.”
Flannagan hesitated, glaring at Trent as if he wanted to shoot him on the spot, but he set the rifle, butt on the floor, near the door. “Okay, so I asked before, what the hell’s goin’ on?”
“You tell me. I found Nova outside.”
“Outside?”
Trent explained how he’d found the filly in the field while heading to his cabin. He left out the part about the voices he’d heard for now, until he got a bead on Flannagan. But as he told the older man about the filly, Flannagan’s face grew hard. His nostrils flared, his mouth stretched tight over his teeth.
“That’s the problem with leaving kids in charge,” he said through lips that barely moved. “They have no sense of responsibility, no sense of purpose.”
“Isn’t that what we’re supposed to be teaching them?”
“Impossible with the mambie-pambies that we get—rich kids whose mommies and daddies don’t want them to suffer the consequences of their actions. Just ship ‘em out, pay a buttload of money, and have someone else teach ‘em how to grow up.” He eyed the filly and shook his head, his short silvery hair in deep contrast to his tanned face. “I’ll tell ya what. If the parents would let those damned kids face up for what they did, let ‘em go cool their jets in jail for a while, it would save them all a whole lot of money and you and me a whole lotta time.”
“And you wouldn’t have a job.”
Flannagan threw him a dark look. “There are better jobs, believe me. I didn’t put in twenty years with the marines to end up here, wiping the noses of these kids. For the love of God, who leaves a horse out in the middle of the winter?” He walked into the filly’s stall and ran knowing hands over her muscles. She flicked her ears but otherwise didn’t object.
“Who was in charge tonight?” Trent asked.
“That’s the hell of it.” He rubbed the horse’s forehead and she snuffled loudly. “Bernsen and Rolfe were in command, but they had kids from your pod, that girl who’s always with her damned guitar.” He snapped his fingers and the filly snorted.
“JoAnne Harris.”
“She’s the one. Along with the Asian girl with spiky hair—Yang—and Bell. And I don’t care if it’s PC or not, but Bell doesn’t know a damned thing when it comes to horses.”
“I don’t think it’s because she’s black.”
“‘Course not. It’s cuz she grew up in the middle of godforsaken Detroit! How many horses you think they got in the Motor City?”
“Wasn’t Missy Albright supposed to be part of this group?”
Flannagan nodded. “Always thought she was all right, aside from that annoying voice. Hell, she’s smart, that one, good with animals.”
And a blonde. As was the person he thought he saw dash between the dorms. What had the woman said? We could be next. She sounded frightened and had been told not to “panic” by her companion, but Trent didn’t know what “next” meant. It could have been anything from disappearing like Lauren Conway to failing a class. He hadn’t heard enough of the conversation to come to the right conclusion.
Besides, Missy was not the only blonde at Blue Rock. Off the top of his head, he came up with half a dozen, and that was just the students. The school nurse and the cook could be added to the group.
Even if he could identify the two people he heard outside the garage, so what?
“I’ll deal with Bernsen in the morning. He was the TA who should have been in charge.”
Another blonde. “Let me talk to him,” Trent said. “Most of the students he was overseeing were in my group.”
Flannagan was already walking to the door of the stable. “Fine with me. Just make sure he understands the severity of leaving a horse outside.” He grabbed his rifle at the door, then looked over his shoulder with some final, sage words of advice. “And don’t take any lame-ass excuses that he delegated the work. Doesn’t mean jack shit. He was in charge; it’s his ass on the line.”
CHAPTER 11
“Look, there’s nothing more I can tell you,” Cheryl Conway said over the wireless connection. Jules had tried one last time to reach the missing girl’s parents before leaving for work. Finally, Lauren’s mother, who lived in Phoenix, had taken the call. “Lauren’s still missing, but we’re holding out hope that she’s okay, that we find her soon. Oh, God.” Cheryl Conway’s voice broke at the thought of losing her child, and Jules felt like a real jerk for having forced the woman to talk about it.
“I’m sorry,” she said, gesturing with her free hand, though she knew the other woman couldn’t see her. “I hope she comes home soon.”
“We all do.”
“I’m calling because my sister’s a student at Blue Rock Academy, and I’m concerned about her.”
“I … I don’t know what to say.” Jules heard another voice—deeper and definitely male—say something in the background, but she couldn’t make out the words, just the admonishing tone. Was it Lauren’s father? Or an older brother? Some authority figure.
“Mrs. Conway?” she said.
“Uh … please … Look, I’m sorry …” Cheryl’s voice became a squeak as she tried to control herself and failed. “I … I really can’t talk about this. I shouldn’t. If you have any other questions, take them up with the sheriff’s department.”
Cheryl Conway hung up, and Jules stood in the hallway near her front door, her cell phone still clamped to her ear, feeling that she was missing something. Cheryl Conway had wanted to tell her more, but her husband had admonished her.
Why?
She slipped her phone into her purse.
What had she hoped to learn by tracking down beleaguered, frightened parents who, though “holding out hope,” were worried sick that their daughter was already dead? The phone call had provided little information. It just reaffirmed Jules’s fears about the school.
“Nancy Drew, I’m not,” she told Diablo. Aside from working for a collection agency as a file clerk while going to college, she had no skills at being a detective of any kind.
Still, she felt an urgency to spring Shay from Blue Rock, and some of her anxiety sprang from Shay. Lord knew she was manipulative. Jules snagged her keys and checked her reflection in the narrow mirror by the front door. Her hair was piled on her head, her white blouse pressed, black skirt straight. Her makeup hadn’t smeared, so she was ready for work at a job she really didn’t mind but wasn’t in love with. There was always Tony, the manager, with his sexual innuendos to deal with. Then there was Dora, a whiny waitress who loved to complain. “But it pays for Tasty Treats,” she told the cat before grabbing her coat for the night shift at 101. The hours were long, the crowd noisy, the prices steep, and the tips great. The best thing was that it was a night gig, so if a migraine interrupted her sleep, or the nightmare returned, she could ignore the alarm clock in the morning.
She was lucky to have the job. “I’ll see ya later,” she promised the cat, then, outside, waved to her neighbor Mrs. Dixon before dashing through the drizzle to her sedan. The car, sometimes stubborn, started on the first try, and she was halfway to work when her cell phone rang. She wouldn’t have picked it up and risked a ticket for driving while talking on a cell, but she recognized the out-of-area number as the one she’d last dialed—Lauren Conway’s parents in Phoenix.
“Hello?”
“This is Cheryl Conway again,” the woman whispered. “I couldn’t talk earlier, not really. My husband doesn’t approve. He wants to do everything by the book, but I can’t stand to think that someone else’s daughter might end up missing if I don’t help. The sheriff’s department … it’s not enough; they don’t have the manpower. Sometimes you have to do more.”
“Do more how?” Jules asked.
But Cheryl ignored her question and just kept talking. “I don’t know you or your sister, but trust me, something’s very wrong at that academy. They have a program that breaks kids down or builds them up or something, but the students are left alone in the wilderness to find themselves and learn to rely on themselves. Sometimes for days. You know, some of the schools do that, leave the kids to fend for themselves for twenty-four or forty-eight hours in the forest to teach them to survive. I … I can’t help but wonder if that’s what happened to Lauren. If she was left in the forest and there was an accident, and the school’s decided to cover it up.”
“They wouldn’t,” Jules said automatically, not really believing that the school would cover up something so horrid. Not the school, but someone in the school. It just takes one person with a secret agenda or an owner who could lose millions in a scandal and a lawsuit. Jules thought of the huge mansion on Lake Washington. Worth millions. Someone was living the high life and wouldn’t want to risk it.
Suddenly Jules felt as cold as death.
“Who knows what ‘they’ would do?” Cheryl said. “All I know is my daughter is missing, and the last time I talked with her, she confided that the school wasn’t what people thought it was, and she was going to prove it. She isn’t a teenager, you know. She was recruited, yes, but not to be a student; it was to be a part of some counseling program, a teacher’s aide of sorts. She’d get her college paid for while helping troubled kids, and she jumped at the chance.
“I tried to talk her out of it, to stay here at the university, but Lauren was always looking for an adventure, a challenge, pushing herself to the edge. That’s why she was recruited and I think … I mean, it’s possible that the very reasons she was chosen are the reasons she’s missing.” There was desperation in the woman’s voice. “Reverend Lynch insists that she left by choice, of course, but I know my daughter. She wouldn’t let us worry like this.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“We’re going to find her.” There was a renewed conviction in her tone. “No matter what it takes, we’re going to find her. I’m not trusting the sheriff’s department or that Reverend Lynch to do what it’s going to take. Just because Lynch is supposed to be a man of God means nothing these days.”
Didn’t Edie say the house on the lake was owned by a preacher? No, that wasn’t right. The school owned the property and a preacher lived there part-time. She’d mentioned Lynch by name.
“I’m serious,” Cheryl continued. “If you value your sister’s life, then get her out of Blue Rock Academy. But do not call my house again. My husband is very upset.”
For the first time since she’d heard of the school, someone was confirming Jules’s worst fears.
“I have to go,” Cheryl said.
“Wait! If I need to get in contact with you—”
“I have a cell phone.” Cheryl rattled off the number, then hung up. Repeating the number over and over again, Jules found a pen and wrote the ten digits on a gas receipt she’d tossed into her empty cup holder. After she parked her car on the street three blocks from the restaurant, she would punch the number into the contact list of her cell phone.
She thought about everything Cheryl Conway had told her, and her blood ran cold. Shay was at the academy, alone. Remembering Shay’s last phone call, her desperate plea, Jules knew she had to do something; she couldn’t just let her sister meet with the same fate as Lauren Conway.
Jules glanced at her watch. Late again! As Jules fed the meter for the next few hours and hurried into the restaurant, Cheryl Conway’s warning chased after her: If you value your sister’s life, then get h
er out of Blue Rock Academy.
Jules would.
And she knew just how she would go about it.
“And you left your last teaching job because the school was cutting positions?” Dr. Rhonda Hammersley asked over the soft sound of classical music wafting through the room.
“I was one of the last teachers hired, the first to be let go,” Jules said, and she felt her palms begin to sweat. She sat across from the dean and kept her trembling hands under the polished wood table to hide her nervousness.
After taking Cheryl Conway’s advice to heart, Jules had applied to Blue Rock Academy online. Within two days, she’d been called for an interview, not at the school, but, here, at the house on the lake where the two poodles were lying by a fire, heads on their paws, dark eyes staring at her as if silently accusing her of lying. This had been a quick process, with the people interviewing her flying up from southern Oregon. “The district was also eliminating art and music in the school with the budget cuts. Since my major was in art, I was let go.”
“Oh, yes, there’ve been so many job losses with the falling economy. Your minor was in history and you have a credential to teach it, according to your résumé.” With short brown hair and a runner’s build, Hammersley struck Jules as a serious woman, though a hint of compassion shined through.
“That’s right.”
Hammersley studied Jules over the top of her reading glasses, then glanced down at Jules’s application and credentials spread out on the table. “I have to admit, I like what I see, though I’m just part of the committee.”
The committee had been interviewing Jules for more than an hour. Hammersley was the third person to come to the polished table. First she’d been grilled by Dr. Burdette, the dean of women for Blue Rock Academy. Wearing a smart black suit, Burdette had been all business, crisp and distracted. She looked at her watch three times during the interview and wound a finger in her kinky reddish locks before catching herself and stopping abruptly. Permanent frown lines were beginning to form at the corners of her mouth and between her eyes. Jules had guessed that Adele Burdette, Ph.D., was not a happy person.