Branded

“No!” Colton bellowed. “That’s a lie. I didn’t know. She never …” His voice broke with emotion as it sank in. “I didn’t know,” he said more to himself than to the people in the room. He could feel Halley’s gaze on him. He doubted she believed him any more than Sid Granger did.

“As Mr. Chisholm said, your daughter wrote him a letter before the night she was to leave,” the deputy was saying. “That letter was lost and only delivered today. In the letter, she said she wanted him to run away with her. Do you know if she met him that night?”

“Why don’t you ask him?” Sid snapped. “He’s sitting right there.”

“I’m asking you. When was the last time you saw your daughter?”

Millie spoke up from where the rocker. “I saw her that afternoon. She said she needed to run an errand. I wouldn’t let her take the car so she had her friend Twyla pick her up.”

“Twyla?” Halley asked.

“Twyla Reynolds.” Millie looked to Sid. He had sat back down again and now had one arm over his face. “Sid, when was the last time you saw Jessica?”

“That evening after she came home,” he said, his words muffled. “She said she was going to bed. I just assumed …”

“You have to understand,” Millie said. “The letters … We wanted to believe that she was alive. If I noticed something different about the way she wrote, I just thought it was because she’d changed over the years.”

“Didn’t you ever wonder what she’d done with the baby?” Colton asked, still angry because something had been wrong in this house or Jessica would never have been at their secret spot that night. She would never have needed to run away. She would still be alive today.

He could see that Deputy Halley Robinson was asking questions as if she still thought Jessica might be alive. She was the only person in this room, though, who believed that now.

“I’d hoped that she had the baby and was raising our grandchild …” Millie looked away.

“I’d like to have a handwriting expert look at the letters that were sent to you,” Halley said. “If you get any more, please try not to handle them so we can dust them for prints.”

Millie nodded distractedly. “We weren’t due to get another one for almost a year. I would imagine they will stop coming now.”

Only if the killer finds out that Jessica’s disappearance is being investigated, Colton thought. But the way news spread in this county, if the killer was still around, he would know soon enough.

“Do you have anything Jessica wrote before she left that we could compare it to?” Halley was asking.

Millie pushed herself to her feet. “I’m sure there is something in her room. It’s just as she left it.”

Colton started to rise to follow the deputy and Millie upstairs to Jessica’s room, but Sid Granger stopped him.

“You aren’t going in her room,” Sid said, blocking his way. “If you hadn’t gotten her pregnant …”

“Why don’t you wait outside,” Halley suggested to Colton.

He could have put up a fight, but he didn’t have any fight left in him and there was nothing more to accomplish in this house, even if he could stand another moment in it. All he could think about was Jessica. She had been pregnant with his baby. But they’d been so careful. Not that any of that mattered now.

She must have been planning to tell him about the baby that night. Hadn’t she realized that he would have been excited about the prospect of being a father? He would never have deserted her. Never.

As he left the house, he tried to swallow the lump in his throat at the realization that if he was right and Jessica had never left the spot under the trees that night, then his baby had died with her.

“I think I have everything I need for now,” Halley said a few moments later as she and Millie came out through the screen door to the porch and started down the steps to where Colton was waiting.

As she headed for her patrol SUV parked in the yard, she shot him a look. He could tell that she’d found more of Jessica’s handwriting and it matched the letter he’d received fourteen years too late—not the ones someone had been sending her parents in the interim.

“I’ll let you know what we find out,” the deputy promised Millie who’d followed them as far as the vehicle and stood looking even smaller and even more terrified.

Colton saw her glance back toward the house. Sid stood in the doorway. Millie Granger visibly shuddered at the sight of her husband. As Colton looked toward the man in the doorway, he thought of the man’s temper, his obsession with Jessica, his hatred of Colton. What if Sid had followed his daughter that night and caught her at the secret spot on the creek?

“You all right?” the deputy asked as she started the SUV.

He could feel her gaze on him as he suppressed a chill at the thought of what Sid Granger might have been capable of when it came to his daughter—was still capable of doing when it came to his wife.

“You didn’t know she was pregnant.”

It wasn’t a question but he answered anyway. “No.”

“I assume the baby was yours?”

He looked over at her, anger hitting him again with sudden heat. “Why would you even ask that? You saw the letter. She wanted me to run away with her.”

Halley nodded, but said nothing until they were back at his pickup parked at the edge of the road where he’d left it earlier. As he started to get out of the patrol car, she said, “I’m going to need a sample of your handwriting.”

EMMA WOULD HAVE SAID she was the luckiest woman in the world if anyone had asked her just three seconds ago.

Moments before she’d been lying on the soft warm blanket on the pile of hay beside her husband, his arm around her, trying to catch her breath after their love-making. She’d been wondering if other people their age still felt like this, and felt bad for them if they didn’t.

But then Hoyt’s cell phone had vibrated on the blanket beside him and he’d snatched it up, checked to see who was calling, then he’d seemed to hesitate as if wanting to take the call and yet—

“Go ahead,” Emma had said, sitting up to stretch. She knew how he was about business. Running this ranch was what kept him young.

“I really need to take this.” He rose stark naked and walked down to the end of the hayloft.

Any other time Emma wouldn’t have paid any attention, but something in the way Hoyt was standing, his back to her, his shoulders slumped over slightly, his voice low …

Her heart suddenly took off at a gallop as she noticed something that hadn’t fully registered before. This wasn’t the first time he’d checked to see who was calling and said, “I need to take this,” and hurried out of the room. Or taken the call out on the porch. Or rushed downstairs. Or, like now, moved to the other end of the hayloft. These calls weren’t about ranch business.

Ice-cold fear moved through her. She couldn’t hear what he was saying but she could read his body language. There was secrecy in the way he spoke into the phone.

Emma tried to fight the terror that clutched her heart like a fist. She told herself that she was being foolish. Hoyt loved her. Only her. She had no reason to question his love.

He snapped the phone shut, turned toward her and she saw his face and knew. Her husband looked guilty as hell.

Emma had never thought she’d be one of those women who didn’t want to know the truth. But right now, she felt too vulnerable, lying naked on a horse blanket in a hayloft after making love to the man she loved.

Quickly she hid her own face so he couldn’t see her fear as she reached for her clothes.

HALLEY CALLED SHERIFF MCCALL CRAWFORD, who was in Great Falls tied up on a federal case, to update her on the Granger case.

“Sheriff Winchester, I mean, Crawford,” McCall said with a small laugh.

The sheriff wasn’t the only one who was having trouble getting used to her married name. Most everyone in town still referred to her as Sheriff Winchester. When Halley filled the sheriff in, McCall told her to let the state crime investigators take the case from here on out—and to wait for their arrival.

When the team arrived by small plane that afternoon, she drove them to the crime scene, which a deputy had cordoned off, and waited to make sure nothing was disturbed.