What had happened? She clung to the hope that when they reached the camp, they would find Branch sitting outside his sheepherder wagon whittling on a piece of pine, his dog, Lucy, at his feet, and all two thousand sheep in a grassy meadow behind him, safe and growing fatter.
It was conceivable that the boy had gotten scared when he couldn’t find Branch. When he found a dying lamb, just as he’d said, he would have foolishly thought he could save it. Failing that, he’d panicked and hightailed it out of there. It could have happened just that way, she told herself.
Which meant that when they reached the sheep camp, Branch would give her hell for hiring Dewey, something she had to admit she deserved. She’d take the deputy back down out of the mountains and get Branch a new tender, someone older, someone with experience.
Even as she thought it, she knew how hard it was going to be to find a tender. No one wanted to spend three months back in the wilds. Even sheepherders were hard to find, for that matter. Good thing Branch enjoyed it, but he was getting old—just a few months short of his sixty-eighth birthday. It wouldn’t be long before he couldn’t make the trek, she thought, refusing to let herself accept that this might be his last year—no matter what they found back in the mountains.
All good reasons to give up herding the sheep to high grazing pasture each summer season, she told herself.
She heard the deputy roll over again and felt a stab of guilt. She shouldn’t have mentioned grizzlies, but smiled even as she chastised herself for purposely trying to scare him. He was probably worried about bears and wouldn’t get a wink of sleep.
Maddie thought about telling him that she had her shotgun as well as her .357 Magnum pistol within reach. Also, she could mention that with two thousand sheep not far away, the grizzlies would rather have lamb than either one of them.
But a moment later, Jamison seemed to settle down, and as he did, she heard him snoring softly.
Irritated he could fall asleep so quickly, she snuggled down in her sleeping bag and prayed. It had been so long since any of her prayers had been answered, though, that she didn’t have much hope these would be, either.
* * *
FRANK KNEW HE should call for backup, but the last time he’d caught someone going through his things it had turned out to be his daughter.
He moved cautiously up onto the porch. The front door was ajar. He hadn’t noticed when he’d driven up because he’d been grieving for the loss of his crows.
But now he was paying attention. He glanced back over his shoulder. Where had the intruder parked? Not by the barn or he would have seen the vehicle when he drove in. Whoever it was must have used the back road, parked behind the house and sneaked around to the front to get inside.
That meant the person knew about the back way into the property. It was no leap to assume whoever was inside his house knew him and knew he never locked the front door.
Standing to one side, Frank eased the door all the way open. The living room was dark, but a light was on down the hall. It cast a faint yellow glow that weakened as it reached the living room. But it was enough light to see that the place had been ransacked.
A thief would have gone straight for the guns in his den or the television and stereo, even the old laptop he kept on the small desk in the spare room. A thief wouldn’t have bothered tearing up the living room, which was only sparsely furnished and clearly had nothing of any real value.
As Frank stepped in, he was pretty sure he wasn’t dealing with a thief—but a vandal with a grudge. He’d made enemies as sheriff, but not that many in his career. Avoiding the floorboards that creaked, he moved through the house toward the sound of the racket going on in his bedroom. He could hear his vandal destroying everything within reach.
Frank had never gotten very attached to things, so he had little regard for the furnishings in his home. All were replaceable. Maybe his intruder didn’t know that about him. Or care. It sounded as if the person was working out some anger issues on his house. As he moved closer to the open door to his bedroom, he was anxious to know just who it was.
Nearer the open door, he stopped. He listened to things breaking for a moment. Then cautiously, he peered around the doorframe.
Frank almost dropped the gun in his hand. As it was, he hadn’t been able to hold back the shocked sound that escaped his lips.
His intruder turned. In the single light glowing overhead in the room, a woman stood holding a baseball bat. He felt his knees go weak as he stared in shock at his ex-wife.
He hadn’t seen Pamela Chandler in almost twenty years. Nor had he given any thought to her—until February when he’d found out they had possibly conceived a daughter she hadn’t mentioned. Since then, whenever he did think of Pam, it was only with one desire: to kill her.
He stared at her as if seeing an apparition. When they’d married, she’d been fifteen years younger. She’d been too young for him, too young period. He felt he’d since grown into his age. He couldn’t say the same for Pam.
The past two decades hadn’t been kind to her. She looked stringy thin, her pale skin stretched over her facial bones. Her hair had grayed without her putting up a fight with a dye job. But the eyes were the same—a fiercely bright brittle blue—much like her daughter’s.
She stood with the baseball bat in both hands, caught in a backswing after smashing his bedside lamp to smithereens. She didn’t look surprised to see him. Hell, she was even smiling. It was that smile he’d thought of most recently and how he would wipe it off her face once he had his hands clamped around her throat.
“Hello, Frank.” She said it as if she’d merely seen him in passing on the street and not standing in the middle of his bedroom surrounded by the destruction she’d caused. She said it as if they were old friends—not like a woman who’d poisoned her own child with her lies and bitterness.
When he finally spoke, his voice didn’t sound like his own. “What the hell, Pam?”
“Isn’t it obvious?”
He shook his head, shaken by how surreal this felt. He’d dreamed of finding Pam, of catching her off guard and cornering her somewhere, stopping her from terrorizing Tiffany. Of making sure she never hurt anyone again.
Late at night, he would plan her murder, her disappearance. He’d been in law enforcement long enough that he knew how to get rid of her for good. No one would ever know what had happened to her. She would just be...gone.
Four strides. That was all it would take to reach her and take that baseball bat away from her and—
“What’s the matter, Frank? Can’t pull the trigger?”
He’d forgotten he was holding his gun. It hung at his side, his hand having dropped with his shock at seeing his ex-wife vandalizing his house.
Still smiling, Pam took a step toward him. She clutched the baseball bat in her hands, evil intent glowing in those blue eyes as hot as the hell she brought with her. Her smile dared him to lift the gun and shoot her.
In his fantasy of murder, Pam was always afraid. Maybe even a little sorry. Not like the woman now moving toward him.
Frank felt his hand slowly rise until the barrel of his weapon was pointed at her heart. She kept coming, the baseball bat cocked back, ready to swing.
He saw himself emptying the gun into her. But even as he envisioned it, he wondered if it wouldn’t take a wooden stake to put this woman down.
“Well, Frank?”
He realized he was shaking his head. “Don’t,” he heard himself say as she kept moving toward him. He felt his finger on the trigger. Another step and—
The blow caught him in the back of the head. Until that moment, he’d been too surprised to think clearly. But in that instant, he realized his mistake. If