They had escaped somehow. Although half of Camden Crossing thought they’d fallen to foul play, that the accident hadn’t been an accident. That a predator had caused the crash, then abducted Peyton and Ruth.
Just like a predator had taken two girls a year before that from a neighboring town.
Bannister cleared his throat, his voice gruff. “He was sick for a while, but I guess you knew that already.”
No, she didn’t. But then again, she wasn’t surprised. His drinking and the two-pack-a-day cigarette habit had to have caught up with him at some point.
“Anyway, I suppose you’ll want to be here to oversee the memorial service.”
“No, go ahead with that,” Tawny-Lynn said. Her father wouldn’t have wanted her to come.
Wouldn’t have wanted her near him.
Like everyone else in town, he’d blamed her. If she’d remembered more, seen what had happened, they might have been able to find Peyton and Ruth.
“Are you sure? He was your father, Tawny-Lynn.”
“My father hated me after Peyton went missing,” Tawny-Lynn said bluntly.
“Sugar, he was upset—”
“Don’t defend him,” she said. “I left Camden Crossing and him behind years ago.” Although the crash and screams had followed her, still haunted her in her dreams.
A tense heartbeat passed. “All right. But the ranch... Well, White Forks is yours now.”
The ranch. God... She bowed her head and inhaled deep breaths. The familiar panic attack was threatening. She had to ward it off.
“You will come back and take care of the ranch, won’t you?”
Take care of it as in live there? No way.
She massaged her temple, a migraine threatening. Just the thought of returning to the town that hated her made her feel ill.
“Tawny-Lynn?”
“Just hang a for-sale sign in the yard.”
His breath wheezed out, reminding her that he was a heavy smoker, too. “About the ranch. Your father let it go the last few years. I don’t think you’ll get anything for it unless you do some upkeep.”
Tawny-Lynn glanced around her small, cozy apartment. It was nestled in Austin, a city big enough to support businesses. A city where no one knew her and where she could get lost in the crowd.
Where no one hated her for the past.
The last thing she wanted to do was have to revisit the house where her life had fallen apart.
But her conversation with her accountant about her new landscape business echoed in her head, and she realized that selling the property could provide the money she needed to make her business a success.
She had to go back and clean up the ranch, then sell it.
Then she’d finally be done with Camden Crossing and the people in it for good.
* * *
SHERIFF CHAZ CAMDEN glanced at the missing-persons report that had just come in over the fax. Another young girl, barely eighteen.
Gone.
Vanished from a town in New Mexico in the middle of the night. A runaway or a kidnapping?
He studied the picture, his gut knotting. She was a brunette like his sister, Ruth, had been. Same innocent smile. Her life ahead of her.
And according to her parents, a happy well-adjusted teenager who planned to attend college. A girl who never came home after her curfew.
They thought someone had kidnapped her just as he’d suspected someone had abducted Ruth and Peyton after that horrendous bus crash.
Not that New Mexico was close enough to Camden Crossing, Texas, that he thought it was the same sicko.
But close enough to remind him of the tragedy that had torn his family apart.
The door to the sheriff’s office burst open, and he frowned as his father walked in. Gerome Camden, a banker and astute businessman, owned half the town and had raised him with an iron fist. The two of them had tangled when he was growing up, but Ruth had been his father’s pet, and it had nearly killed him when she’d disappeared.
“We need to talk,” his dad said without preamble.
Chaz shoved the flier about the missing girl beneath a stack of folders, knowing it would trigger one of his father’s tirades. Although judging from the scowl on his aging face, he was already upset about something.
Chaz leaned back in his chair. “What is it, Dad?”
“Tawny-Lynn Boulder is back in town.”
Chaz stifled a reaction. “Really? I heard she didn’t want a memorial service for her father.”
The gray streaks in his father’s hair glinted in the sunlight streaming through the window. “Who could blame her? Eugene Boulder was a common drunk.”
“Guess that’s how he dealt with Peyton going missing.”
Unlike his father who’d just turned plain mean. Although he’d heard Boulder had been a mean drunk.
“Don’t make excuses for that bastard. If Tawny-Lynn hadn’t faked that amnesia, we might have found Ruth a long time ago.”
Chaz started to point out for the hundredth time that the doctors said the amnesia was real, but his father didn’t give him time.
“Bannister handled the will. The ranch is hers.”
Chaz sighed and tapped his foot under the desk. “That’s no surprise. Tawny-Lynn was his only living relative. It makes sense he’d leave her White Forks.”
His father’s cheeks reddened as he leaned forward on the desk, his anger gaining steam. “You need to make sure she doesn’t stay. This town barely survived that girl years ago. We don’t need her here as a reminder of the worst thing that ever happened in Camden Crossing.”
Chaz had heard enough. He stood slowly, determined to control the anger building inside him. Just because his father was a big shot in Camden Crossing, he refused to let him push him around.
“Dad, I’m the sheriff, not your personal peon.” His father opened his mouth, his hands balling into fists, but Chaz motioned him to hear him out. “My job is to protect the citizens of this town.”
“That’s what I’m saying—”
“No, it’s not. You all ran roughshod over a sixteen-year-old girl who was traumatized and confused. And now you want me to make her leave town?” He slammed his own fist on the desk. “For God’s sake, Tawny-Lynn lost her sister that day. She was suffering, too.”
She’d been injured, although someone had pulled her free from the fire just before the bus had exploded, taking the driver and three other classmates’ lives. The other teammates would have probably died, too, if they’d ridden the bus.
At least they’d speculated that someone had rescued Tawny-Lynn. But no one knew who’d saved her.
And no one else had survived. So how had she escaped?
“She knew more than she was telling,” his father bellowed. “And no one wants her here now.”
An image of a skinny, teenage girl with wheat-colored hair and enormous green eyes taunted him. Tawny-Lynn had lost her mother when she was three, had adored her sister, Peyton, and suffered her father’s abuse.
“You don’t know that she even wants to stay. She probably has a life somewhere else. But if she does decide to live at White