He held his rifle and satchel down by his side and slowly started moving forward. Owen and I tightened our grip on our own weapons and bags, stooped down, and followed him. The three of us crawled up to the top of a stone ridge, then got down on our bellies and slithered forward so that we could peer over the edge of the rocks.
Harley Grimes’s camp lay below us.
This particular ridge dipped down into a steep, rocky hillside that ran for about two hundred feet before flattening and spreading out into a clearing in the middle of the forest. The camp looked to be about half a mile wide from west to east and also that deep from north to south before the trees took over again on the far side of the clearing.
A large rectangular building perched on the far west end of the camp, and the gray cinderblock structure had the low, squat, utilitarian feel of a barracks. From what I remembered from Fletcher’s file, that was where most of Grimes’s men stayed, each one with his own little cot, like they were in the military instead of a vicious mountain gang. Another building to the right was made out of the same cinderblocks, although it was a much smaller square. Steam escaped from a couple of metal pipes set into the roof. I breathed in deeply, and a whiff of cooked meat and some sort of stewed vegetable drifted over to me. Grimes’s version of a kitchen or mess hall.
My suspicions were confirmed a few seconds later when a couple of men pushed out of the double doors that fronted the building. Both were carrying tin cups and matching plates of food that they took over to some wooden tables that had been set up between the kitchen and the barracks.
Like the rest of Grimes’s men, they wore old-fashioned suits, and they took the time to remove their hats and shrug out of their jackets before they sat down to eat. Murmurs of their conversation drifted up the ridge, but the words were indistinguishable, so I examined the rest of the area, comparing it with the maps in Fletcher’s file.
Not much seemed to have changed since the last time the old man had been up here to spy on Grimes. A couple more cinderblock buildings dotted the landscape, some used to store the guns that Grimes ran, while others housed the cash, gold, and valuables that he took in exchange for them. At least a dozen men moved in and around the structures, chopping wood, hauling boxes here and there, and doing whatever other chores they’d been assigned. I even spotted two guys tinkering with a rusty old jalopy that had been parked to one side of the kitchen, as though they were trying to get the ancient car to rumble to life.
At the east end of camp was another, larger building
made out of gray clapboard, with snakes of copper wiring peeking out from the sides and back like the quills on a porcupine. More steam drifted up from that area, and I breathed in again. This time, I got a whiff of something sour. No doubt, that was the spot where Grimes and his men brewed up their mountain moonshine. It didn’t surprise me that they made their own hooch. In fact, it seemed to fit in perfectly with Grimes’s old-fashioned gangster mentality, and I was willing to bet that his homegrown moonshine was stout stuff, all the better to rile up his men when they went down into Ashland on one of their tears.
But it was the structure in the center of the camp, directly across from us, that held my attention, a three- story plantation house. Unlike the other plain, faceless structures, it was a beautiful building, with an elegant, airy design. The white paint gleamed like a pearl in the midday sun, while the glass windows glimmered like diamonds next to the black shutters. A porch wrapped around the front of the house, which was surrounded by a wide, grassy yard and a white picket fence. A variety of pink, red, and white roses twined through the fence slats, their delicate petals and thick green vines providing vivid splashes of summer color.
If it hadn’t been for the plain, grim, depressing look of the rest of the camp, I would have thought the house was a beautiful mountain hideaway. But the more I stared at the structure, the more something about it bothered me, like I’d seen it somewhere before.
Three stories, plantation style, white paint, front porch. My stomach turned over at the wrongness of it . . .
“Is it just me, or does that house in the middle look like Jo-Jo’s place?” Owen whispered.
“It’s not just you,” I replied in a low voice. “I wonder when Grimes built
According to Fletcher’s maps, there had been a house in that spot the last time he’d been up here, but he’d sketched it as a much smaller structure, and he hadn’t made any mention of it resembling Jo-Jo’s. That wasn’t the sort of thing that he would have overlooked.
“It certainly wasn’t here the last time Fletcher and I were,” Warren chimed in. “But that was some fifty years ago. It’s definitely new—in fact, it doesn’t look to me like it’s more than a few months old. See how fresh the paint still looks? And how thin the yard is in places?”
“Do you think . . . do you think that he built it for Sophia?” Owen asked.
That was exactly what I thought, that Grimes’s sick obsession with her had led him to do that very thing. I wondered how long he’d been planning to kidnap Sophia again and when he’d started construction on the house.
If Warren was right, and the structure had only been finished for a few months, then Grimes must have started building it as soon as he heard that Fletcher had died back in the fall.
I kept scanning the clearing, fixing the locations of all the buildings in my mind and watching the men go about their chores. No one glanced up at the ridge, and no one realized that we were watching them. No doubt, they felt perfectly safe and secure in their mountain camp. Well, that was going to change—and soon.
I was about to tell the others to draw back down away from the edge of the ridge, when the front door of the plantation house opened. I put the maps away, then rustled around in my backpack, grabbed my pair of binoculars, and held them up to my eyes so I could get a better look at things.
Harley Grimes stepped out onto the front porch, then ambled down the steps and out into the yard. He’d traded in his gray suit for a fresh one in an off-white. A white fedora with a black feather stuck in the brim topped his head, and I could see the shine of his black wing tips from all the way up here. Once again, he was dressed like some gangster straight out of the Prohibition era. According to Fletcher’s file, that’s when Grimes had grown up. Apparently, he enjoyed clinging to his youth. That, or he just liked his look to match his occupation.
The door opened again, and a woman stepped outside.
She hesitated, then followed Grimes down the porch and out into the yard. I recognized her, but this person was the exact opposite of what I
She wore a short-sleeved white sundress patterned with tiny pink roses—instead of her usual black jeans and T-shirt.
A black ribbon was cinched around her waist, and black patent-leather heels gave her a few more inches of height—instead of her old, battered black boots.
Her black hair was pulled back into a high ponytail tied with a long white ribbon—instead of the colored streaks and glitter that usually highlighted her hair.
Pale pink lipstick covered her lips—instead of the darker, bolder colors that she normally wore.
Grimes held out his arm. The woman hesitated again, then stepped forward and took it.
Sophia.
Chapter Fifteen
I blinked and then blinked again, wondering if I was really seeing what I thought I was. But the picture didn’t change, no matter how I much adjusted the focus on the binoculars or how hard I squinted through the lenses.
Sophia standing with Grimes, wearing a dress, dolled up like a gangster’s moll from some old-fashioned mob movie. It was
It was wrong. Just . . .
After a few seconds, I lowered the binoculars and passed them over to Owen.
“Is that . . . Sophia?” he asked, peering through the lenses. “What’s she doing? Why is she wearing a dress?
And why isn’t she trying to get away from him?”
