“I don’t love him, but he touches me and something deep inside me moves. And he says he loves me. We’ll live on his brother’s ranch at the foot of the mountains. I’ll join him there, and we’ll rebuild the old house. One day, it will be a good home to raise our children. I do want children. On their walls I’ll draw princesses and pirates.”
So Gerard lived at the ranch where the girls were held. One answer fell in place. I felt a devastating rush of disappointment, questioning again how I could have zeroed in on Evan Barstow and never considered his brother. I’d been fooled.
I wished I had time to read the entire diary. When I fled, I’d lost so many years with Sadie, time I could never get back. Her words brought her to me. But the day would break soon, so I concentrated on mentions of Gerard, anything that might help.
In the very last entry, dated a day before Sadie disappeared, I found it.
Forty-Eight
Sunlight crept through the darkness and day arrived. The woods transformed slowly, channeling light between the trees. I woke the men. I handed out energy bars and water, and told them what I had planned. “We’re going to ground the helicopters and find Gerard on our own.”
“How?” Mullins asked.
“Using this.” I held up Sadie’s diary. “There’s a notation that could refer to the location of a cave.” I opened to the page and read it to them. “He whispered his plans to me at the bee shack. When he came to me, he said that I should be his wife, his only wife for eternity. I again confessed that I don’t love him. Sometimes I see things in him that frighten me, but then I have never known a man in this way. Perhaps that’s why I am afraid. I know he wants me. I see it in his eyes.
“I am to tell no one of our plans. We will meet where we have before. From high on the mountain, halfway between Samuel’s Peak and the hump, we’ll look down on the world we’ve known. By the time our families discover we’re gone, we will be man and wife.”
For a moment, the men remained quiet. Then Max asked, “Samuel’s Peak and the hump, she’s talking about the camel’s hump on the east, the one closest to the peak, right?”
“I think so,” I said. “In our family, Father told the legend every Christmas Eve, explaining how the two lesser mountaintops resemble humps and Samuel’s Peak the head of a camel. We’d stand out in the cold while he traced the mountains with his hand. He said one of the three wise men, Balthazar, carved his camel there for us to see.”
“Halfway between,” Conroy mused. “You think…” He paused and raised his hand up and pointed east of where we stood. Most of the mountaintops were obscured by the trees; we could barely see the ridges. “Right about there?”
“It’s too hard to plot a course from here,” I said. “I’ll cancel the choppers but ask them to stand by in case we need them. If the dogs are able to lock onto the point where Gerard took the girls into the woods, we’ll be able to call Stef and get our bearings based on our position and the mountain.”
My nerves on edge, fearful I’d misread the clues and we’d squander more time, I took some comfort from the men. They all seemed more hopeful as we hiked back down the trail, the dogs and Rodgers in the lead. About twenty minutes later, one dog appeared to pick up the scent on a narrow dirt path. The other kept ambling down the trail.
“I don’t know,” one of the trainers said. “When it’s a sure thing, they both lock on. Not happening here.”
Max and I scanned the waking forest with binoculars, while Rodgers ventured a few dozen feet into the woods. He walked back to whisper to us, not risking a shout. “Looks like this might be it, but I’m not one hundred percent. Lots of rock. The ground’s hard as cement from the drought, and I can’t see human footprints, but there are broken branches and a handful of indentations that may be horse prints. Since the one dog likes this, I’d say it might be right.”
I looked at Max, who shrugged and said, “Clara, this is your call.”
The others waited for me to decide. I got on the radio. “Stef, can you see us on the computer screen?”
“Yup. I’ve got you.”
“Figure out what direction we need to hike from here to get to the upper tree line at a point where we’ll be halfway between the peak and the closest hump, the one farthest east.”
“Hump?” Stef questioned. I’d forgotten that she’d just moved to Alber a year earlier.
“Ask someone, maybe the deputies who grew up around Alber. They can show you where the camel’s humps are. We need to set a course that’ll end up approximately halfway between the eastern hump and Samuel’s Peak.”
For a while, silence. Then Stef clicked back on. “I’ve never heard of this camel thing, but I found someone who did. It looks like you want to hike so that you end up about twenty-five degrees east of your location. The sheriff’s looked it over, too. He agrees.”
“Okay, thanks,” I said. “Monitor us and let us know if we wander off course, or if it looks like we’re heading in the right direction to hit our mark.”
“You’ve got it,” she said.
We tied the horses’ reins on trees and said goodbye to the trainers and the dogs. “Keep your guns handy. We don’t know where this guy is,” I warned them. “And listen in on the radio, in
