Nowhere to Run

“Yes.”

Joe looked up. “Do you know the name Terri Wade?”

Jenna looked back quizzically. “Of course I do. She was our housekeeper when Diane was growing up. Diane loved her, we all did. But she left us years ago. She and Brent had a disagreement. . . .”

Joe’s jaw and shoulders dropped. He flashed back to that moment when he saw the faces reflected in flame.

Jenna saw his reaction, said, “What?”

“Mrs. Shober—I saw Diane. She’s using the name of your old housekeeper,” he said. “A name she’s comfortable with. She let her hair go brown and she dressed frumpy so I wouldn’t recognize her. But at one point outside that burning cabin, she turned away and then turned back. The angle of her face or the way the fire made her hair look lighter and her face look younger and resembled the photo on all the flyers. It made me think there were two women when there was only one.” He thought back again to that scene in the woods, that one quick glimpse of the “fourth face.” Wade turning away into the darkness, then the flash of one he’d thought was a different woman. Except it hadn’t been. It had been Diane all along. He shook his head in amazement. “And she’s got the brothers thinking her name is Terri Wade because they used it when they talked to her. I told you earlier I was probably mistaken but I don’t think so now. She was alive when I saw her last. So you need to know that. But . . .”

Her expression didn’t change but her eyes glistened with tears. “So you won’t help us?”

He couldn’t look into her eyes any longer. He handed the photo back and said, “I’m sorry.”

She started to say something, but her throat caught with a sob and she snatched the photo back and turned angrily away.

As she shoved the photos back into the envelope, Joe stared at the ceiling, the window, the floor. Anywhere but at her.

“Joe?” It was Marybeth, from behind him. He hadn’t heard her come into the house from the garage and place her briefcase on the kitchen table. And he didn’t know how long she’d been there in the doorway to the kitchen, or how much she’d heard.

He turned.

“Go,” she said. “Go find her.”

A MINUTE AFTER a sobbing and grateful Jenna Shober left their house, Joe said to Marybeth, “But I promised you.”

“You promised me when we didn’t know it was really Diane up there,” she said. “And when I put myself in Mrs. Shober’s shoes, if Sheridan or April or Lucy were missing . . .”

Joe nodded. “If you’re sure . . .”

“Take Nate,” she said.

“Of course.”

WHEN THE DOORBELL RANG, Joe expected either Brent or Jenna Shober, not the FedEx driver. He signed for a medium-sized box that wasn’t as heavy as it looked.

From the kitchen, Marybeth said, “What is it, Joe?”

“Dad,” he said.

22

THEY WERE RIDING BLIND, STILL BEARING WEST TOWARD THE high rim of the last cirque, Parnell in the lead, when Farkus said, “So all this time we were tracking a deer?”

Parnell didn’t answer. He glowered, though. Farkus thought the man was humiliated but didn’t want to show it.

Farkus said, “What I gather is these guys are the Cline Brothers? Of the Cline Family? What was their mother’s name? The one in the news?” It came to him and he answered his own question: “Caryl Cline. I remember seeing her on TV. She had a following out here, you know. But why did the game warden say their name was Grim?”

“Because I’m sure that’s what they told him.”

“Why would they do that?”

Parnell started to answer as he approached the edge of rim, but he suddenly reined his horse to stop with a violent pull. “My God! There’s someone down there.”

“Is it one of the Clines?” Smith asked. “Did you see him? Did he see you?”

Parnell shook his head slowly, “It isn’t one of them. You are not going to believe the scene down there.”

Intrigued, Farkus, Campbell, and Smith nudged their horses forward. As the horse walked, Farkus stood in his stirrups and strained to see over the rim. With each step of the horse, he could see a little more terrain below as it opened up to him. He was careful not to expose any more of himself than he had to. He was certain that the rim dropped away into a sheer rock wall. On the other side of the cirque, the wall wasn’t as steep. There was a trail through scree on the other side of a pure blue mountain lake. And then he saw her.

“It looks like a naked woman,” he said, a smile stretching across his face. “Finally, something good has happened.”

IT TOOK HALF AN HOUR for the four horsemen to circumnavigate the last cirque to the trail down to the lake. Occasionally, as they rode near the rim, Farkus would rise up and catch a glimpse of the woman. It was too far to see her clearly, but what he could see was as interesting as it was baffling. She was swimming. He wondered if the water was as cold as he remembered. He caught flashes of pale white skin, long dark hair fanning in the fantastically clear water, a glimpse of bare shoulders and small breasts and long limbs. There was a pile of clothing in the rocks near the shore of the alpine lake.

“I feel like I died and went to heaven,” Farkus said. “I been hunting up here all my life just hoping to see something like this. D’you suppose she’s alone?”

“Don’t let her see you,” Parnell said. “There’s something oddly sirenlike about this situation.”

“Sirenlike?” Farkus said. “You talk in code, Parnell.”