“I don’t know. I just don’t. Those women in—was it Ohio where that bastard held them for years? That wasn’t so isolated, and nobody knew.”
“I can’t figure it. Can’t figure why any man would want a woman he’d have to keep locked up. It makes me sick.” Filled with disgust, he tossed down his dishcloth. “I’m going to go on up. I can drive in early tomorrow, give Chase and Dad time to come home.”
“Mom’s going to want to go with you, and maybe she can talk Nana into coming back, even just for a change of clothes. If she can, I’ll bring Nana back.”
“We’ll make it work.” He turned to her, drew her in for a hug. “No matter how many times you annoyed the sheer hell out of me, I’d’ve been mighty pissed if you’d ever just taken off.”
“I feel exactly the same.”
“You get some rest, too.” He kissed the top of her head, proceeded upstairs.
She knew she wouldn’t settle, not yet. She told herself she needed a walk, and even though she knew exactly where she intended to walk, she didn’t admit it until she knocked on Callen’s door.
He answered so quickly she knew he’d been waiting.
“You heard.”
“Clementine.” He pulled her inside. “I went over hoping to mooch Sunday dinner. Are you okay?”
“I don’t know what I am, but that’s the least of it.”
“It’s on my list.” His hands rubbed up and down her arms as he drew her back to take a good look at her. “I didn’t call or text because I didn’t want to get in the way. Didn’t go over when I saw the lights come on in the kitchen for the same reason.”
But he’d waited for her, she thought. He’d waited. “Do you think you could just hold on to me a minute?”
“I can do that. Is Cora holding up?”
“She’s still at the hospital. Won’t leave yet. Callen, can we lie down—I don’t mean sex. Can we just lie down so I can tell you all of it? I’m too tired to stand and don’t want to sit.”
He hooked an arm around her waist, led her to the bedroom.
“Let’s get those boots off.”
She let him tug them away as she stretched out on the bed. “Thanks. I’ve been going at it all in sections, and in bits. I want to run through it altogether. Maybe it’ll finally make some sort of sense.”
He stretched out beside her. “Go ahead.”
“When I got home from work, Mom was crying.”
She took him through it all, step-by-step. He interrupted rarely, simply let her tell him what she’d seen, heard, felt, as it came to her.
“Mom’s going to bring her home to the ranch,” she concluded. “It may be soon, it may be months from now, but she’s made up her mind on it.”
“That worries you?”
“I worry how much stress it’ll add to Mom’s life, but she’d have the stress anyway. I worry they won’t catch the son of a bitch who did this, and it’ll just hang over us like a storm ready to break. I worry that somewhere close to home—close enough to home—there’s somebody who’d do this. Children, Callen. She had children. She could have one my age or Rory’s or have young ones. Are they being held and hurt like she was, or are they part of it? Like, I don’t know, a cult.”
He smoothed her hair back from her face. “That’s a lot of worry.”
“It’s like the bad shoved in. Two women dead, Alice. It’s like the bad shoved in and changed the world on me. Could you hold on again? I need to shut my eyes for a minute.”
“Sure.”
He held on, felt her fall away into sleep almost as soon as her eyes closed.
He understood her worries, every one of them. But there was one she hadn’t come to yet that leaped straight to the top of his pile.
Alice Bodine wasn’t dead. A live woman could, once her mind settled in again, identify whoever had kept her a prisoner, beaten her, raped her.
He worried a man who would do those things wouldn’t hesitate to kill the woman who knew his face, and anyone who stood in his way.
*
She woke with her head pillowed on his shoulder, and him still holding on. The comfort of that? She didn’t know how to express her gratitude for the simple comfort of that.
When she started to ease away, he held tighter.
“Get some more sleep,” he told her.
“I didn’t mean to sleep at all. I need to get back, in case they need me.” She sat up, shoved her hair back.
He sat up with her, stroked his hand down its length. She wanted to lean into him, lean on him, just another minute. But …
“Is that clock right?”
He glanced at it, read three-thirty-five. “Yeah.”
“It’s a late hour to bring this up, but we may need you to shuffle some between resort and ranch until we figure all this out. At least a couple of us need to be at the hospital. We’ll be taking shifts.”
“It’s not a problem.”
“Not tomorrow—or today, I should say.” She located her boots, pulled them on. “You’re visiting with your mother.”
“I can put that off.”
“No, don’t. I need to figure out some sort of schedule anyway, and your mother, she’ll be counting on it.” She leaned into him a moment. “Thanks for being a friend when I needed one.”
“I’m a friend even when you don’t. But next time I’m going to want sex.”
He made her laugh, as intended. “Me, too.” She cupped his face, kissed him. “Me, too.”
“Keep in touch about this, Bodine.”
“I will.” She pushed up. “I’m going to head to the hospital, since I got some sleep in me, relieve Dad and Chase whether they want me to or not. Chase is going to need a friend, too.”
“I’m his friend, needed or not. But I’m not having sex with him.”
Laughing again, she started out. “You and Alice both left, but you sure came back different ways. Get some more sleep, Skinner.”
Still fully dressed, he lay back when he heard the door close. But he didn’t sleep again.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Callen added to his already-packed day by pitching in with the stable horses. Hell, he was up anyway, he thought as he mucked out a stall.
He’d chosen that particular duty because he knew Chase’s habits as well as he knew his own.
Twenty minutes after he’d begun, Chase came in.
Looked tired, Callen thought, and worn around the edges.
“Are you on our roll today?” Chase asked him.
“Nope, just killing some time.”
“Because you love shoveling horse shit?”
“It’s my life’s work.” Pausing, Callen leaned on the shovel. “What can I do?”
“I haven’t figured out what anybody can do. We’re all just waiting. Not even sure for what right yet. I know one of us has to be there to catch Nana if she falls.”
His nana, too, Callen thought, and she had been as far back as his memory ran. “How’s she holding up?”
“She’s got steel in the spine. I guess I always knew it, but I never saw it so true as now. She pushed to stay the night in Alice’s room. I looked in a couple of times, Dad, too. It looked like they were both sleeping. Then Bodine walks in, about five-thirty this morning. She’d gone over to the grannies’ house, got Nana a change of clothes and whatever she figured was needed, and told me and Dad to go home. Wouldn’t take no.”