CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
MAGGIE WATCHED AS Clark went back over to the stove. He returned with a sandwich for himself before he went around behind Jenna and released her left hand from the restraints. When he put down Jenna’s dinner in front of her, Maggie let out a cry of shock.
Jenna, though, merely looked down at the dead mouse on her plate for a moment, then raised her gaze to look at him as he took his seat again. “Clark, how long are you going to do this?”
“As long as it takes. Eat your dinner, Mommy. You don’t want your daughter to see you punished, do you?”
“You know I’m not going to eat this,” Jenna said. “You’re just looking for an excuse to hit me, so get it over with.”
He reached across the table and backhanded Jenna so hard that she almost fell out of her chair and would have if she hadn’t still been partially restrained.
“Don’t!” Maggie cried.
“See what you’ve done?” he demanded. “You’ve upset our daughter.” And just as swiftly as he’d hit Jenna, he turned on Maggie. “You don’t speak unless you’re spoken to or you’ll get some of this.”
“No,” Jenna said. “Don’t take it out on her.”
“Why not?” he demanded. “You took everything from me. Well, now I have it back and by damned you’re going to play along or I’m going to beat you senseless. Do you understand?”
Jenna rubbed her cheek. “It was taken from me as well, Clark, or don’t you want to hear the truth?”
“And now I have it back.” He smiled then, cheerful again. His mood swings terrified Maggie. She had no idea what he was going to do next. She wasn’t sure he did.
“We can’t get it back,” Jenna said. “And this...this is...ridiculous and you must know that, unless you’re crazier than I remember.”
Clark looked hurt. He and Jenna had locked gazes. Maggie could hear the hum of a motor somewhere in the building, the tremulous pounding of her heart. What did any of this have to do with her?
“I don’t understand what’s going on,” she whispered into the deadly silence that had fallen between Clark and Jenna.
“Why don’t you tell her, Jenna?” he said without looking at Maggie. “This is all your fault, after all.”
She looked to Maggie, her eyes filling with tears that spilled down her cheeks. “He’s right. This is my fault. You wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for me.”
Clark laughed. “I had a little something to do with it back then—and now.”
Jenna shot him a pained look, then swallowed as if trying to find the words. “Thirty-three years ago, Clark...” She glanced over at him again. He shook his head back and forth very slowly, that mean warning look back in his eyes. “...we had sex and I became pregnant...with you.”
“What?” Maggie stared at her, telling herself all of this was a lie to appease this crazy man. “That’s not possible. My mother died. I was raised by my aunt.”
“The woman who raised you wasn’t your aunt. She was my aunt Edna Burns’s best friend.”
Maggie blinked. Her eyes felt itchy under the bare bulb overhead, her throat dry. She felt sick to her stomach. She’d known an Edna Burns growing up, a kind lady who lived down the block who’d taught her to bake and sew and—
“I was fourteen when I gave birth to you. I desperately wanted to keep you, but my parents would never have allowed it. So everyone was told that you died at birth. It was a lie we all lived with for years.”
All this was too much. Maggie shook her head. “Why are you saying these things? If he’s making you—”
“Clark didn’t know I’d had a baby,” Jenna said. “When he found out...” She glanced in his direction. “...he was very angry and determined to find not just you, Maggie, but me to make us a family.”
“And he did,” Clark said with a laugh. “And now we’re together, just as we should have been all those years ago.” He glared across the table at Jenna. “If you had told me—”
“What would you have done?” Jenna demanded. “I was fourteen, Clark. I went home to parents who couldn’t even look at me. I left home at sixteen, unable to stand another minute in that house.”
“You knew our baby hadn’t died.”
Jenna let her gaze drop. “I couldn’t even take care of myself. Let alone a child.”
He sneered at that. “You could have contacted me for help.”
“Right. How much help would you have been in prison?”
The meanness came back into his eyes and Maggie feared he would strike Jenna again in the tense silence that followed. Her mind was racing. All of this had to be a lie and yet...
“You knew about me when you came into my salon?” Maggie asked, feeling betrayed when she saw Jenna’s guilty expression. “Why wouldn’t you have told me who you were?”
Jenna looked again at Clark, her eyes narrowing. “Because I didn’t want Clark to know about you. Everyone had been told that you died at birth. It was...safer that way.”
Clark shook his head, shoving his plate with his half-eaten sandwich away in obvious disgust. “Safer? Safer that I was kept in the dark about my own child?”
“You were in prison. My parents didn’t want people to know that I was pregnant, especially given the circumstances,” she said. “I’m sure even you can understand why.”
“You wanted me,” Clark bellowed as he pushed off the table to get to his feet. The dead mouse on Jenna’s plate flew off and onto the floor. Plates clattered.
For a moment Maggie thought he would throw himself across the table at Jenna.
“You wanted me,” he repeated in a low voice strangled with emotion. “I loved you. You knew I loved you. If you and my bitch of a sister hadn’t gotten me arrested, I would have married you. We would have been a family. This family!”
He swung his gaze to Maggie. “Finish your food.”
She obeyed, quickly scraping her plate clean as he came toward her, afraid of what he would do now. He lifted the tray to let her out of the chair and she stood, her gaze going to Jenna.
Jenna was her mother and this crazy man was her father? Her mind reeled. It wasn’t possible. Just when she thought the nightmare couldn’t get any worse.
“Say good-night to your mommy,” Clark said.
Her throat constricted and for a moment she couldn’t get the words out. She looked at Jenna, silently pleading with her to tell the truth and not make up things to appease this man.
But as her gaze met Jenna’s, she saw that this was the truth.
Maggie looked away. They had to get out of there. But it seemed hopeless given that they were both captives of a madman who wanted to play house.
“Good night, Mommy,” she said as Clark grabbed her arm, his fingertips biting into her flesh.
“That’s my good girl.”
As he steered her toward her room, Jenna began to cry in gut-wrenching sobs.
“Please don’t hurt her,” Jenna called after him. “Please, Clark. I’ll do whatever you want.”
* * *
WHEN FRANK CALLED, the news no longer came as a shock. “Maggie is Jenna’s daughter,” Frank said. “That’s the connection, along with the brown van. Also, I talked to Clark Terwilliger’s sister Dana again, hoping she might know of a place he would take them.”
Flint had been hit by so much since that phone call from Maggie saying she was moving in. “Did she come up with anything?”
“Not yet. But we’ll keep trying. We’re checking out some places around here,” Frank said.
“Thank you.” He disconnected and looked to Mark. “We have to find Terwilliger.”
“We haven’t gotten a hit on his brown van even though we have the plate number now,” Mark said. “He’s holding them somewhere. Otherwise, he would have surfaced by now.”
Or they were both dead and Terwilliger had dumped the van, gotten another ride and was on the move far from there.
“He’s gone to a lot of trouble to find Jenna—and their daughter,” the undersheriff said, clearly trying to assure him. “He wouldn’t do that just to kill them.”
Flint raked a hand through his hair. “I hope you’re right. At some point, they are going to become more trouble than they’re worth, though.”
“At least now we know the connection. You had no idea?”
“None,” the sheriff said. “Maggie couldn’t have known. When Jenna went missing, she would have said something. She would have shown more concern.”
“I guess we won’t know until we find them. Jenna disappeared before Maggie was taken. Where around here could he hide them and himself?”
* * *
MAGGIE LET CLARK take her back into the bedroom and help her into her cage. She’d thought about trying to get away, but he was too big and strong for her. Even if she could escape him, there was Jenna. But the biggest reason for not trying anything was the strong feeling that he was expecting it.
She’d seen the way he’d slapped Jenna. He liked to hurt people and Jenna was afraid he wanted to hurt the daughter he’d said he’d wanted so badly.
That thought sent a dagger to her heart. She told herself that Jenna couldn’t be her mother because that would mean that Clark was her father. She shuddered at the thought, since from what Jenna had tried not to say outright, Maggie knew that Clark had forced himself on her.
But it answered a lot of her questions growing up. That feeling of being flawed. Of people talking behind her back. They knew about Jenna’s pregnancy, about the rape. They knew that Clark’s blood ran through her veins.
The thought made her shudder again as he locked her in and left, closing the door behind him. She listened, hoping he didn’t hurt Jenna any more than he already had. But she didn’t hear anything. No raised voices. No cries. No sound for a long time until she heard a door slam. Shortly after that, the lights went out and whatever made that humming sound went out, as well. A generator?
Exhausted and still hungry, she lay down on the bed, curling into a fetal position, feeling like a child again. She’d never felt loved until Flint. That thought brought the tears she’d managed to hold back during dinner.
And now she might never see him again.
It tore her heart out.
When Clark didn’t return at the sound of her crying, she let it all out. Sobbing for what might have been. Sobbing out her fear and her regrets. Crying mostly for the childhood she could have had—but didn’t. Life could be so unfair. She’d always just pulled up her bootstraps, determined not to let it get her down. But this?
Finally, she couldn’t cry anymore. She sat up sniffling. That was when she heard it. A scratching sound, then a voice.
“Maggie? Can you hear me?”
She turned to look at the vent near the floor next to her bed. The memory of hearing someone else crying rushed back at her. She wiped her eyes and lay down on the bed so she was closer to the vent. “I can hear you.”
“I’m so sorry.”
Maggie was too choked up to answer for a moment, her emotions all over the place. “I still don’t understand why you didn’t tell me,” she said finally.
“I was...ashamed. And you were doing so well at the salon. I was so proud of you.”
She had to swallow the lump in her throat. She’d never heard those words from the woman who’d raised her. Now she realized that the woman she’d thought was her aunt had always looked at her sideways as if waiting for her to turn out like her father.
“Do you know where we are?” Maggie asked.
“No. I was out most of the drive.”
“What are we going to do?” Her voice broke.
“I have a plan, but I’m going to need your help.”
“Anything. Just tell me what to do.”
“Shh,” Jenna whispered. “He’s coming back.”
* * *
MARK HAD GONE home this morning to change clothes when he got the call that a letter with no return address, no stamp, had apparently been left for him. He’d been wondering when he was going to hear from the kidnapper again.
He grabbed a quick bite, since he’d pretty much been living at the sheriff’s department and hadn’t been home in days.
As he ate standing up in the kitchen, he thought about Flint and Maggie. He’d been so happy when he’d realized the sheriff had fallen in love. Everyone in town knew about the sheriff’s first marriage and the trouble he’d had with Celeste since then. Mark had thought that Flint was finally going to get a chance for happiness.
Being a confirmed bachelor himself, he had wondered how love would change Flint. Now he knew. Love had definitely taken the starch out of the man. Having Maggie abducted had left Flint bereft. He tried to imagine loving a woman with that kind of intensity and couldn’t. Maybe it was just as people said, that he hadn’t met the right woman yet.
He scoffed at that as he finished his sandwich, anxious to get back to the office and open the letter that had been left for him. As he drove back to work, he hoped the letter writer and the kidnapper were one and the same and that Flint Cahill got the happy ending he so deserved.
Unfortunately, he’d been in law enforcement long enough to know that happy endings often only happened in fairy tales.
His office called again. Deputy Harper Cole needed to see him immediately. He swore and said he was on his way.
At his office, he carefully opened the letter and read the contents before turning it over to one of the lab techs to check for fingerprints. If these were coming from Clark Terwilliger, then they might be able to find some of his DNA. And since his DNA was available because of all his run-ins with the law...
But all of that took time.
He reread the copy of the note he’d made, thankful to see that a drop site and date and time had been included. Tonight he would find out who was behind the ransom demand.
Mark called Flint and caught him before he left his brother and sister’s saloon. “I’m going to need some money—not all of the fifty-thousand-dollar demand. Just enough to catch a kidnapper.”
“Where is the drop?” Flint asked.
“Sorry. I can’t let you in on this.”
“When?” Flint asked.
“Tonight. So one way or another, it will be over soon.”
“If it’s him and he’s arrested, then what happens to Maggie and Jenna if he refuses to tell where they are?”
“Don’t buy trouble. This could be what we need to find them.”
“Or not.”
Mark could hear the pain in his friend’s voice. “At least now we’re pretty sure who has Maggie and why. We’re going to find them. You have to keep believing that.”
“I’m trying, but as the days go by...”
“I know. Maybe you could have one of your brothers bring the money by. Stay away, okay? I’ll call you later.”
* * *
FLINT COULDN’T STAND to sit around and wait for the call. It was still early in the day. His brothers had promised to get the money to Mark. He couldn’t bear simply killing the hours until the ransom drop. He’d done too much waiting. He had to look for Maggie. If Clark was the kidnapper, then he would have to leave Maggie and Jenna to come pick up the money. It would be the perfect time to get them out while he was gone.
But he had no idea where Clark might be holding them. The winter storm had dumped over a foot and a half of snow. Many of the roads were impassable, several closed to through traffic.
“Maybe that’s why Clark’s van hasn’t been seen,” he said to himself as he left the saloon and climbed into his pickup. “Maybe he can’t get out. Which means he can’t get out for supplies, either.” But how could he pick up the ransom money if he was the one who’d sent the kidnapping demand?
He tried not to think about that as he looked to the mountains. The simplest explanation was that Clark had them in a house somewhere. He could have rented one. But that would have taken some planning in advance. Also, it would leave a paper trail.
He tried to think like a man determined to kidnap his daughter and the woman he professed to love. Once Clark knew where Jenna was, it was just a matter of abducting her and taking her to wherever he planned to keep the both of them. Flint reminded himself that he was assuming Clark would have wanted to keep them both alive. At least for a while.
Once Clark had Jenna, he would want to put her under lock and key as quickly as possible so he could go to Gilt Edge and get Maggie.
His heart began to pound a little faster. He wouldn’t drive Jenna all the way back to Gilt Edge. Too much of a chance someone might see her bound in the back of his van, especially if she was conscious. No, he would want a place close to Sheridan, where Jenna had been staying with Kurt Reiner.
All this time, Flint had been looking around Gilt Edge. If he was right, Maggie and Jenna were being held closer to Sheridan. He told himself that he should wait until he heard from Mark tonight, but he would go crazy waiting for the call.
He swung by the ranch and threw some clothes and supplies into a duffel bag, and then, taking his rifle and several small firearms, he headed for the door.
“I hate to ask,” his brother Cyrus said when he saw him come out the door with the rifle.
“I’m going looking for Maggie.”
Hawk came up from the barn just then. “We should go with you.”
“No,” Flint said. “I appreciate it. But it’s too dangerous. I can’t involve you. It’s enough that you’ve put the ranch up to raise the ransom. Anyway, you need to stay here and take the money to Mark.”
They both started to argue.
“I need you both here to make sure that the rest of the family is safe,” he said. “Also to get me out of jail if I call since I have no authority to be doing what I’m about to do.”
Cyrus laughed. “Anyone seen my by-the-book brother Flint?” he joked. “You know, the one who’s arrested our father how many times? I don’t know about you, Hawk, but I like this new Flint Cahill. Also, I have to admit, there is something about seeing him behind bars that has its appeal.”
Hawk shook his head at his brother as if this wasn’t the time for humor. “Call if you need help. You don’t always have to do things alone.”
Flint placed a hand on his brother’s shoulder. “I know. I’ll call. Mark said you were bringing him the ransom money? Thanks again.”
He brushed past them, wading through the deep snow to his pickup. It was a six-hour drive to Sheridan and he had no idea where to look when he got there. He just had a feeling in his gut that told him he was on the right track and that he’d know what he was looking for when he saw it.