At the street, she stopped, opened the window and, after snatching out the cash, tossed his wallet in the dirt.
She might have hit bottom, but Jerilyn Larch was no thief. The three hundred and seventy-eight dollars she’d taken was money earned from putting up with him.
As for the car, well, she’d call him once this was over and let him know where to find it—no doubt abandoned beside some road where the engine had quit for good.
In her rearview mirror, she could see that Earl Ray was up on his feet and stumbling after her. Jerilyn hit the gas and didn’t look back again. She knew he couldn’t call the police to report the car stolen, not in his line of work as a thug between illegal crime jobs.
Maybe he wouldn’t even come after her. Maybe all those threats had been nothing but bluster. Either way, she’d have to move quickly, staying one step ahead of him until she could escape the country.
She would ditch the car once she reached Mon-tana—if the car made it that far. Otherwise, she’d hitchhike. It wouldn’t be the first time. She just hoped it would be the last.
Montana. Jerilyn hadn’t realized she’d made a decision where to go until that moment. She’d promised herself years ago that she wouldn’t use what she considered her ace in the hole unless she was truly desperate.
Well, she was desperate now, she thought, as she reached into her shoulder bag and removed the small, beaded purse her grandmother had given her. Most of the beads were missing, the fabric beneath gray with age.
She nearly ran off the road as she unzipped the purse and pulled out the piece of yellowed paper.
She had to hold it for a moment just to make sure the note was still there and that she hadn’t made it up like she had that rosy future she dreamed about all the time.
The writing had faded from age and too much handling, but as she held it up to the light, she saw with relief that she could still make out the words.
Guilt pierced her conscience, but she cast it aside as quickly as she had Earl Ray at the motel and the man before him. Jerilyn returned the note to her purse just as carefully as she had twenty-six years ago.
A male orderly had handed her the note the day she’d given birth. Sixteen and pregnant. Just a baby herself. Her hips were too narrow, and the doctors had to take the baby, leaving her sterile and scarred in ways that had never healed.
Her mama had made it clear from the start that she couldn’t keep the baby. Jerilyn was too young, too immature, to raise a child.
“You’d just mess up the poor baby’s life as you have your own,” her mother had predicted. “I’m doing that baby the biggest favor of its life.”
Jerilyn hated her mother for those words. She knew the real truth. Her mama didn’t want the Larch name tarnished by some illegitimate baby. That’s why she made Jerilyn go away to Montana before anyone knew she was pregnant.
After the birth, she’d gotten only a glimpse of the tiny pink toes peeking out of the blanket before her mama handed the infant off to some old woman down the hall.
That same night, there was another young girl in labor. Later, Jerilyn had heard her crying as if her heart was also breaking.
“Your baby is with a good family, a family with money and status, a family like ours was before you disgraced us all,” her mama had said when Jerilyn begged for information about her baby. “The less you know the better. Just forget you ever had it.”
As if her mama had ever let her forget. The Larch family seemed to be cursed after that. Her father made some bad investments and everything went downhill from there. Of course, her mother blamed her although no one knew about the tiny little baby girl she’d been forced to give up.
That was the first time Jerilyn had known heartbreak, but definitely not the last.
The adoption had all been done in secret. There was no paperwork and no chance of Jerilyn ever finding out what had happened to her little girl.
At least that’s what her mama had thought until her dying day.
But her mama had no idea what she was capable of when she put her mind to it. Jerilyn had paid the sympathetic orderly to get her information, and he came back with a scrap of yellow paper.
On the paper was written:
Baby girl: Madeline “Maddie” Cavanaugh to Sarah and Roy Cavanaugh, Old Town Whitehorse, Montana.
Now Jerilyn was about to right the terrible wrong her mother had forced her to commit.
“I’m finally going to find my girl,” she said as she steered the Buick north toward Montana. Jerilyn hoped that her mama had been right about one thing—that her baby had gone to a good family, a generous one with money and status.
Being a friendly family would help, too, but if not, Jerilyn imagined they would pay to get rid of her. Jerilyn hated what she was about to do, but in a way she’d felt as if it was out of her hands, as if it had been destined since she was sixteen.
EARL RAY LISTENED to the knock of his old Buick’s engine as it faded away in the distance. What the hell was the woman thinking? No one was that stupid, were they?
He waited, hoping the car blew a rod before it disappeared from view, or that Jerilyn had the good sense to turn around and come back.
Otherwise there was going to be serious trouble.
Earl Ray accepted partial responsibility for the situation. Last night at the bar he’d seen a man he’d thought he recognized. Worrying that it was someone after him and the little black book, he’d slipped the leather notebook into Jerilyn’s shoulder bag.
When he’d realized there was nothing to worry about, he decided to leave the book in her purse until he could retrieve it without Jerilyn being any the wiser. Jerilyn was the last person he wanted knowing anything about the book—or its contents.
Unfortunately, he’d let himself drink too much and had forgotten about retrieving it. Now the stupid broad had taken off with the book, not even realizing that she had it.
At least he didn’t think she did.
Either way, she had something equivalent to a bomb in her purse. That book was his ticket out of this miserable existence he’d been living. There was only one problem. If the book fell into the wrong hands, he was a dead man.
Earl Ray let out a string of expletives. If he could have gotten his hands on Jerilyn, he would have wrung her neck. The good news was that she couldn’t get far in that pile of rusted junk.
As he started back toward the room, he realized he should have known she was going to take off. In the past when she became weepy drunk, she’d take out that little coin purse of hers and look at a scrap of faded paper. Lately, she’d been looking at it more and more.
The first time he’d seen her crying over the note, he’d waited until she passed out and dug the damned thing out of her purse, thinking the dumb broad was crying over some man.
It didn’t take a genius to figure out what the note was about—or where Jerilyn was now headed. This had been coming for some time, and Earl Ray prided himself on knowing women.
He limped into his motel room and closed the door behind him. Luckily, he knew where he could scrape up some money and help. He picked up the phone and dialed his associates Bubba and Dude, his anger ebbing a little as he realized the three of them could beat Jerilyn to Montana.
Earl Ray smiled. He couldn’t wait to see her face.
Chapter Two
“I say we settle this with a horse race.”
“The hell we will,” Dalton Corbett said, pushing his brother Jud out of the way in order to get to the bar