What if the driver was the maniac from that night fifteen years before? What if he’d gleaned that she was returning? What if he’d been lying in wait? She’d had the eerie feeling that night that she’d known him. What if he was still here? Oh. Dear. God!
No. He was dead. He had to be. Right? Just because a body had never been found didn’t mean he’d survived. All these years she’d believed the unnamed psycho was dead, and she wasn’t going to let some testosterone-driving, macho pickup driver freak her out now. At the far edge of town, she hit the gas, glanced in the rearview and saw that the driver was now backing off, a cell phone to his ear. Well, good. She put some distance between her and the dented rig, then squinted through the Explorer’s bug-spattered windshield as she closed in on the ramshackle ranch where she’d grown up. Her insides tensed, and the hunger she’d felt for the past two hours dissipated as her hands sweated over the wheel.
Her mother’s last phone call had been the impetus that had forced her to pack an overnight bag and hit the road.
Shiloh had been working with a particularly ornery gelding, and afterward, dusty and parched, she had walked into the house and noticed that Mom had called three times in an hour. Seized with trepidation, Shiloh had taken a deep breath and phoned back.
Faye hadn’t even greeted her. “You need to come back. Come home,” she’d rasped in a barely recognizable whisper.
“I don’t think so.”
“Now.” There was a new urgency in Faye’s weak voice.
“What? Why?” Geez, it had been a decade and a half, and though Faye had often asked to see Shiloh, it had never happened. She just hadn’t wanted to return to the scene of the crime. Even when Faye had wheedled and begged—tossing out the guilt trip that Faye wanted to see her and that it was way past time she met her sister—Shiloh had resisted. Sure, she’d been tempted, but of course, Larimer Tate had always been around. Shiloh had declined, even when her mother had used her favorite ploy: “The police still don’t believe me that you’re okay.”
“After all these years?” Shiloh had snorted her disbelief. Faye had been known to use any angle available to get her prodigal daughter to return home. Okay, so it was true that Shiloh had never officially checked in with the authorities, but she just didn’t want to open that particularly distasteful can of worms.
“Yes. They think you might be . . . well, like those other girls who went missing.” Shiloh had heard it then, that little telltale lisp that indicated Faye had drunk more than a couple of glasses of wine.
“Maybe I am like them. They probably all just ran away.”
“They’ve never turned up, and, God, what those poor parents have gone through, worrying and not knowing.”
“Well, at least you don’t have that. You know.”
“Oh, for the love of God. Please, Shiloh, come back. I, we, could use the help around here. You’re so good with the livest . . . livest . . . the oh, you know, the horses and cows.”
“No, Mom. Not happening. Not now.”
“Your sister needs you.”
That whispered phrase had caused something inside her to break, her conviction to erode. It happened whenever she thought of the girl who was so much younger than her, her half sibling.
The sister you’ve never met . . . never wanted to meet.
Shiloh swallowed hard and remembered another phone call, the fateful one that had once, years before, nearly caused her to return.
Faye had been pleading with Shiloh to return when she’d dropped the bomb.
“Your sister needs you.”
“My sister?” she’d repeated in shock.
“Her name is Morgan,” her mother had said twelve years ago, and there had been a swell of pride in her voice as she’d told her eldest of the pregnancy and birth, while Shiloh, for once, had been silent, dumbfounded, and more than a little horrified that at thirty-eight, Faye had been pregnant with Larimer Tate’s child. The thought had sickened her. And if she did the math, that meant that the girl was twenty years her junior. Hell, Shiloh was old enough that Morgan, age-wise, could have been her own kid.
“Are you still with Tate?” she’d asked when she’d finally found her tongue.
“He’s my husband.” Again that ring of false pride.
“Then you’ve made your choice,” Shiloh had declared and clicked off, refusing to answer when her mother had called back not once, but six more times that evening.
Now Shiloh felt heartless. She’d made a mistake. She should’ve returned to Prairie Creek before it was too late. She was an adult. Strong. Knew her rights. Tate couldn’t hurt her.
But what about Morgan? His own kid? Would he have used that skinny little leather belt on her?
She’d asked, of course, several times over the years, and after each inquiry her mother had sounded horrified at the thought, that no way would the little girl’s father do anything the least bit harsh to the girl. They were, after all, a loving family.
“Yeah, right,” she muttered now as she spied the end of the lane with the mailbox, bashed in on one side, the letters reading L. TA E, as it had for years. She suspected no one had bothered to find another “t” to make it read TATE. Clearly no one cared enough to pound out the dent.
Dry grass and weeds grew tall around the fence post supporting the mailbox, and the curving lane leading to the ranch house was in serious need of fresh gravel to fill the potholes and combat the pigweed and thistle that grew in abundance.
Shiloh’s insides tightened at the sight of the house: a long, low structure built on a rise and surrounded by outbuildings, most of which were going to seed. The house itself was in sad shape, as it had always been, though a few fresh shingles appeared in the roof and the sagging porch had been shored up, propped by fresh 2x4s, and a few new floorboards were visible against the weathered original planks.
That surprised her.
She cut the engine and sat behind the wheel for a second, needing to brace herself. She’d never met her half sister, so there would be that emotional ride, and then there was Mom, her time running out, no longer a vital woman, now a sorry case. Guilt consumed her, and she silently berated herself for her own stupid pride, her stubborn self-righteous streak when it came to returning to these weedy acres. Her hatred of Larimer Tate had overridden her love for her mother or even her curiosity about her half sister.
She yanked the keys from the ignition. So she’d made mistakes. So what? She couldn’t fix what had happened now, could she? She’d just have to live with the errors, move forward, and count them among the flotsam of faults that was forever flowing under the bridge that was her life.
She’d expected the place to be run-down; Larimer Tate had never been one for maintaining it, and now that her mother was ill, no way could Faye be repairing roof shingles or setting posts or putting in new floorboards.
She cut the engine.
Then she took in several deep breaths. The last time she’d actually seen her mother, Faye had been cowering in a corner, hands over her mouth, appearing horrified as Larimer had slipped his belt from his pant loops with a hissing sssst.
A cruel grin pinned on his unshaven jaw, he’d jerked on the worn leather.
The belt had snapped like a bullwhip.