“But the girl. Her family. You can’t just hide the fact that she’s dead.”
“They hunt runaways, druggies, kids without families or friends to miss them when they disappear. She was already dead, so she didn’t care.”
Jack saw the girl’s face pressed up against his windshield. So terrified, so aware that she was about to die. “You said they hunt runaways. What do you mean ‘hunt’.”
Lonetree waved the question away. “We’re getting ahead of ourselves here. My turn for questions. Has Huckley been in contact with you? Shown up in a dream? Anything like that?”
Jack pressed his lips together in frustration. This man knew too much about him and he knew nothing. He was getting sick of playing catch-up. “Who are you?”
“Has he been in contact with you?” Lonetree insisted.
“Yes, yes he has. The bastard was in my head. Laughing at me. Almost made me take a baseball bat to my family. Now who the hell are you? What do these bastards want with my family?”
“I don’t think you’d believe me right now if I told you what was really going on. Let’s just say there are good guys and bad guys. I’m one of the good guys.”
“Not good enough,” Jack said. “I want the whole story.”
“Well, you’re in luck. That’s exactly why we’re out here.”
“What is this place?”
“This place? This place is where the bad dream starts, Jack. A really bad dream. To make you believe what I have to tell you, I have to show you the proof. It’s the only way you’ll buy into it.”
“Try me.”
Lonetree shook his head. “No dice. You come along for the whole ride or you get nothing. Your decision.”
“Why should I trust you?”
“Because your little girl is in real danger. Huckley should never have taken the chance he did which tells me there’s something special about your daughter these guys want. And when they want something, they won’t stop until they get it.”
“But what could they want with her?”
“I haven’t figured that out yet. But make no mistake, when they do get her, they’ll kill her. That I know for certain.”
Jack’s mind reeled. A few days ago he would have reacted differently to what the man had just said. He would have declared the man crazy, used the gun to demand the keys to the Bronco and headed home to call the police. What Lonetree was saying was insane. Nate Huckley was in a hospital bed in a coma. How could he harm his family?
But the last few days had provided Jack with a thorough introduction to the surreal. He lacked the confidence to declare with certainty that Lonetree was lying.
Hadn’t everything that had happened over the last few days been impossible? That was the problem. It was, but it had still happened.
He didn’t know if it was stress induced or something else, all he knew was that somehow Nate Huckley was hardwired into his brain. Lonetree thought he knew what was going on. Whether delusion or reality, Jack decided it might shed light on what was happening to him. Amazingly, he found himself ready to listen to the man in front of him.
“O.K. Let’s say for a second that you’re not some delusional psychopath, why do you care what happens to my family?”
Lonetree shrugged. “I don’t. Your problem is my opportunity. That mess you made on the highway has brought some rats out of the sewer, ones that I’ve been hunting for over a year. But the head rat is still hiding. He’s the one I want. Our working together is a matter of convenience, nothing more. If I have to choose between saving your family and getting my revenge, I won’t think twice about the decision.”
Jack squared his shoulders to the huge man. “If you get in my way of taking care of my family, I won’t think twice either.”
Lonetree broke the tension with a broad grin. He was starting to like this guy. “O.K. Pissing match over. We don’t have much time and it takes some work to get where we’re going.” Without waiting for an answer he headed up the trail leaving Jack behind.
Jack hesitated. Even though he still had the gun in his hand, he was reluctant to blindly follow this strange man into the woods.
Then again, his other option was to fill the prescription for lithium still in his pocket and pretend none of it had happened. Faced with a choice between action and medication, Jack knew what he had to do.
Jack followed Lonetree down the trail. He laughed out loud when the Robert Frost poem popped into his head, something he used to have on a plaque in his office.
I chose the path less traveled and that has made all the difference.
In the back of his mind, he wondered at his choice. On what path was it that he now traveled?
That of discovery?
Or the path of madness?
He worried that the two had somehow become one and the same.
FORTY-THREE
The nurses at Midland General rotated floors every few weeks. Officially it was for cross training, but Anna Beaufort didn’t care what they called it, as long as she got to be on the third floor every so often. Most of the nurses thought this was the worse rotation because nothing ever went on, except when someone died, of course.
But Anna loved it. Being on the third floor gave her time for her real passion, reading. She always had a book with her, tucked under the pile of charts as she did her rounds or hidden in the drawer of her desk when the docs showed up unannounced to check on a patient. With her books she went on journeys across the globe, fell in and out of love several times a week and, best of all, solved mysteries. Her new discovery was Catherine Coulter. Not enough graphic sex for her taste but the quality of the writing more than made up for it.
Down the hall from the nurse’s station where Nurse Beaufort sat solving the latest murder in her book, old Mrs. Haig was dying. It was the cancer. In her lymph nodes this time, they told her. A few years before, she gave a breast to the disease, but it hadn’t been enough. The voracious disease wanted all of her. And this time she had decided to give it.
With her husband dead six months now, Ruth Haig no longer felt the pull of the world to keep her alive. There were her children and grandchildren, all healthy and loving, but she missed her Daniel. And she was tired. So tired. She had endured the pain and sickness that went with the chemotherapy treatment for breast cancer. Endured it to stay with Daniel. She couldn’t stand the thought of leaving him behind and making him manage without her. But now it was almost time for her to go. Time for her to meet her husband and the let the new generations go on without her.
So when the cancer was discovered a month ago, she refused treatment. Both of her sons begged her to change her mind, but eventually they came to understand her decision. Or at least accept it. With the decision came a sense of peace that Ruth hadn’t felt in months. It was a familiar sense of comfort. The feeling of being curled up next to Daniel, his arms wrapped around her. She knew she would be in those arms again soon.
Ruth smiled in her sleep, tucked under her blankets, deep into a dream where she and her lover were together, young, with a lifetime ahead of them. It was the younger version of Daniel that came to her in these dreams. But she had always seen him that way when he was alive too, even in the last days when he walked with a bent back and shuffling feet. For her, he was always the youth that courted her, romanced her, loved her. She could stay forever in this dream world if she were allowed.
But the pain would not allow it. Always her constant companion, the pain scratched on the door of her mind, demanding entrance. She blocked it out, not willing to leave her delicate fantasies. But the scratching became a knock. And soon the impatient visitor was banging on the door as waves of pain wracked her frail body.
Her eyes flitted open, the sweetness of her dream lingering for only a second before it evaporated under the heat of the pain. She lolled her head to the side. Her left hand moved automatically, stiffly patting the bed until her fingers closed around a round plastic pad with a large button on it. Her thumb pumped away at the button, signaling the device next to her bed to pour morphine into her system.