LITMIR.BIZ

       FOUR

      The high trill of Wade’s voice brought back all the horror in one flash of skin-rippling nausea. Though Mitch had desperately wanted to deny the accusations against his brother, he’d known deep down that every terrible detail was true. Wade Whitehorse was a psychopath, capable of unspeakable evil.

      In spite of the respite he’d found working at Uncle Gus’s Roughwater Ranch, part of him had always known this day might come, the day his brother returned to destroy him.

      Mitch could feel Jane’s hands clutching the back of his shirt. Terror, it could not be anything else. So now she was scared of him? After being married to Wade and turning a blind eye to his brutal treatment of other women? It was incomprehensible. He bit back the rage and urged Rosie deeper into the woods.

      “Where is he?” Jane hissed.

      “At our ten o’clock, on foot, unless he’s got a horse.”

      “We have to get out of these woods.” Her panic transmitted clearly as she grabbed his waist and pressed her cheek to his back. “Please.”

      Please. An odd word for a killer’s wife to choose. He pressed Rosie to go deeper into the screen of trees. The branches shuttered out the moonlight, leaving them in inky gloom. Now her breathing was coming in frightened pants.

      “He’ll find us here—he probably has tools, night-vision goggles, military equipment.”

      I know, he wanted to snap at her. Tools he used to imprison women while you stayed quiet and let him. He clucked to Rosie encouragingly, urging her around a fallen oak, squeezing between clefts of rocks into what looked like a wild tangle of overgrowth.

      He could not see, so instead he let himself feel, turning his face until he caught the whiff of air that smelled of wet granite, cooled as it swept down from the mountain. He turned the horse east.

      Jane clutched him tighter. “There’s no path. We can’t hide. He’ll find us.”

      He’ll find us. Mitch had felt this showdown would come since that moment he’d seen his brother smile as he was taken to prison, but it could not happen now, not when Mitch was dizzy and weak, with Jane clinging to his back.

      “What are you doing?” she whispered.

      He didn’t answer, merely guided Rosie along, following the trail of chilled air. The ground was moist, muddy in some places, which caused the horse to slow. Mitch smiled. The more mud, the better. They had to push through dense thickets, which proved no trouble for Rosie, though the branches scratched at him and probably Jane a few times. The thicker the screen, the deeper the layer of muck under Rosie’s hooves, the better he felt. If Wade was on horseback, there was a slim chance he could follow their trail in the darkness, but if he was on foot, he would wait until daylight. One thing he knew about his brother—Wade could not stand to be dirty, not even for one moment.

      He recalled his own laughter as a high school senior when he and his girlfriend Paige Lynn came upon Wade, staring at the brown smear on his palm from the front door they’d just painted at their parents’ dilapidated house in Arizona. They’d offered Wade a rag, but he’d been so enraged he’d thrown it back at them, along with a vile diatribe that brought the neighbors outside. Wade had finally composed himself, and Mitch and Paige Lynn repainted the marred spot on the door. The next day Mitch found the front windshield of his car smashed, the interior ruined with paint.

      A thorn scratched his arm, but he hardly felt it through the cold. Pushing through a heavily forested area over the mucky ground would not be an option for Wade and might be the only thing that kept them alive.

      Jane had given up trying to question him, finally, which was a relief since they were both shivering fit to beat the band. He tried to blink away the waves of dizziness that hit him. If he fell from the horse...

      Grasping the reins tighter, he stiffened his spine. Only another quarter mile, he figured. At one point he stopped Rosie.

      Jane clutched at him. “What? Did you hear him? Has he found us?”

      “Quiet,” he commanded.

      Surprisingly, she obeyed.

      He heard nothing but the branches rattling in the wind like the sound of dried bones. A light rain had begun to fall. Her fingers were dead cold on his back. If they did not get to his cabin soon, they would both fall victim to hypothermia.

      Rosie responded eagerly to his click of the tongue and picked up her pace. Again they passed through an area of dense foliage, and he heard Jane cry out once when something pricked her. She sank back into silence until they emerged at his cabin, tucked in a cluster of pines.

      He stopped one more time and listened for a full minute before he was satisfied. Jane was already sliding to the ground, landing with a hard jolt. She tipped her head up to look at him, still on the horse, and he was struck by how small she was, backed by the sprawl of forest behind her. The monster’s wife had seemed bigger in his memory, stony faced at the trial, insistent that she knew nothing, stalwart in her lies.

      “Go inside,” he said.

      “Where...? What will you do?”

      “See to the horse.”

      She hesitated only for a moment and then walked to the wood-sided cabin, letting herself in through the unlocked front door. He climbed off Rosie and set about removing her saddle and letting her into the fenced area where Bud, the placid gelding, greeted her from the three-sided shelter. Though every muscle in him screamed its displeasure, he took the time to dump some feed into Rosie’s bucket and quickly wipe her down and tend to the scratch on her flank.

      “Thanks, girl,” he said. “You got us out of a real mess.”

      As he limped to the cabin, he saw Jane watching him through the window, standing back a bit as if she was afraid. Of him? Or the creature she’d been married to?

      And what exactly was he supposed to do with her? Everything in him wanted to toss her out into the woods and let her work out her own reconciliation with Wade. She’d made her choices; she should live with them.

      But the other part of him, the small part that was still clinging to some sort of goodness and decency, would not allow that. During one of her infrequent moments of sobriety, their mother, Phoebe, would kiss her three children—his older sister, Claire, Mitch and Wade—and tell them, “You all got more than enough goodness in you.” He was

Скачать книгу