Echoes of Danger

Chapter One

“He’s dead, Dana. Murdered. He’s murdered!”

Dana Barlow looked at her twelve-year-old brother Stephen’s tear-streaked face and wondered how life could be so cruel. She’d always been honest with Stephen, while trying to make allowances for his physical problems. She’d have to be honest with him now.

“I know, Stevie,” she said, looking down at the bloody carcass of one of their two prize Brangus breeding bulls. Thinking of all the money wasted, of all the time spent in caring for this eleven-hundred-pound animal, she wanted to sit down and cry like a baby. But she couldn’t do that. Stevie was watching her; she was the only family he had and she had to stay sane for his sake.

Why, God? she asked silently.

“Who’d go and do a thing like that, anyway?” Stephen said in a voice edged with pain and anger. “Don’t nobody around here act like that, Dana. Everybody knows Otto was my favorite. He won the Grand Championship! Otto was Stephen’s favorite!”

Dana watched as her brother rocked back and forth, holding his hands to his stomach, repeating that same phrase over and over, his mind recoiling into its own little world. A world of autism.

Dana looked around the stark, flat Kansas prairie, her eyes scanning the rippling waves of bluestem for any signs of intruders, but the wind, dancing and prancing with unabashed boldness, was the only thing moving through the tallgrass. Stephen, highly intelligent and highly perceptive, was right. Prairie Heart, Kansas, was about as mid-America as you could get and none of the five hundred or so residents would be so mean-spirited and uncaring as to deliberately kill a prize bull, especially when the whole town knew how important the animal was to Dana and Stephen’s livelihood. Who would commit such a crime?

Dana’s green eyes shifted to the west, where thunderclouds darkened the sky with an ominous intensity, to the distant steeple of the Universal Unity Church. The religious complex bordered her hundred acres of land on two sides. And the church’s leader, a woman named Caryn Roark, had been badgering Dana for months. Caryn wanted Dana’s land.

Only, she wasn’t going to get it.

Could this be Caryn’s way of trying to nudge Dana into selling? Why would the woman resort to such a thing? When the church had taken up residence a few years back in an old farmhouse on the neighboring Selzer place, Dana hadn’t paid much attention to the comings and goings. She was a Christian, and a firm believer in the live and let live theory. As long as the strange cult members left her alone, she’d do the same by them. But lately, Caryn’s followers had been harassing several of the local farmers. And now, many of the small struggling landowners living around Prairie Heart had given in to Caryn’s tempting offers to buy their land.

“We’re the only ones left,” she said out loud, her words flying on the rising wind.

Stephen looked away from Otto’s bloated, bullet-ridden body. “You’ll find them, won’t you, Dana? Dana will find the bad guys.” He rose, sniffing back tears, smearing his dusty face in the process. Jerking his green-and-white Kansas Co-op cap down over his green eyes, he stalked to his sister. “You already know who done this, don’t you?”

Dana kicked at the tallgrass at her feet, scaring a concealed walking stick out of his hiding place. Stephen automatically tried to catch the spindly bug, but the creature sauntered away, so he turned back to his sister.

“Tell me, Dana.”

Dana sighed long and hard. The school counselor and his former teachers at Prairie Heart School, where Stephen had attended before she started homeschooling him, might think Stephen was a slow learner, but sometimes Dana thought the boy was smarter than any of them. His autism was mild, a form of what the doctors termed Asperger’s syndrome. In spite of his odd social behavior and awkward motor skills, he had a way of seeing through the clutter right to the truth, and he was very clever at picking up signs or figuring out puzzles. Since the night three years ago when their parents had been killed in a car accident along the long stretch of state Highway 56 that had once been the Santa Fe Trail, Dana had never lied to him.

But she didn’t have any easy answers for something this awful.

“No, Stevie, I don’t know who did it. But I’m sure going to find out. I’m going into town to talk to the sheriff, then I’ll send Doc Jeffers around to take Otto away.”

Stephen glanced down at the big, dark-skinned animal. “I’ll sure miss you, old fella.”

Trying to find any excuse to take the boy’s mind off his loss, Dana tossed back her chin-length reddish-brown curls and playfully snatched her brother by one ear. “Hey, remember why I was headed to town in the first place?”

Stephen smiled then, his green eyes matching a lone cottonwood tree’s rustling leaves. “Yeah, sure. You gonna buy my new Ruby Runners, right? I get to stay with Mrs. Bailey.”

“That’s right,” she said, leading him to the old Chevy truck that had belonged to their daddy. “They’re on order and should be here today, and thanks to that pig you sold at the spring fair, we’ve got the money now.”

Stephen gave her a lopsided high five. “Yeah, and I’ll run twice as fast, I bet, huh, Dana? I’ll be ready for that track meet over in Kansas City, won’t I, Dana?”

As usual, Stephen’s mind wandered from current pain to future pleasure, so for a brief time, he forgot that big Otto had been brutally murdered. Dana hadn’t forgotten, though. She planned to make a stop on the way to town. It was high time she paid the devout folks at Universal Unity Church a little neighborly visit.

An hour later, Dana waited in the whitewashed reception room of the newly built offices of the Universal Unity Complex, which now consisted of a magnificent glass-and-stone chapel, a long white row of three-storied dormitories and Caryn Roark’s own private quarters—a modern, stark white mansion setting where old Hiram Selzer’s 1885 farmhouse had stood for over a hundred years. The farmhouse was long gone, old Hiram was long dead, and this rambling complex seemed out of place in rural Kansas.

Eyeing her surroundings with distaste, Dana shifted in the white leather chair where a young girl in a flowing blue dress had guided her. Everything in this place was a stark, crisp white. White-on-white carpets and tiled floors, white drapery and heavy silken sheers, white leather and wood furniture. Even the flowers were white—azaleas and gardenias growing in stone pots, petunias and roses cascading out of huge planters—except for one lone, stark amaryllis sitting on the table near Dana’s chair. That heavily blooming flower was white with threads of red and pink stripes shooting out over its lush blossoms. The lily looked strangely out of place.

Dana felt out of place herself in her T-shirt, faded jeans and heavy work boots. But, hey, why should she feel disoriented? This was her home, not theirs. She’d been born and raised here—born in the house she now lived in, and raised by two wonderful, loving people who had met their Heavenly Maker on a rain-slick road in the middle of a cold, dark night. No, she didn’t have any reason to feel out of place, but she had a whole lot of reason to feel cheated and fighting mad.

When she looked up to see Caryn Roark approaching her down a sweep of wrought-iron spiral stairs, she wondered if she’d somehow stepped into the twilight zone. The woman was downright spooky.

Caryn had platinum-blond hair that was coiled up on top of her head and threaded with brilliant golden braids of rope. She wore all white—of course—a flowing sweater-type material that looked comfortable but would probably be hot if she decided to venture out of the cool confines of her air-conditioned palace. Overall, Dana supposed Caryn was an attractive woman, until you looked into her eyes. They were a clear, cold blue, and coupled with the woman’s long, beaked nose, presented a chilling countenance.

Evil. Dana didn’t know why the word popped into her head, but it did. And it stayed with her the whole time Caryn glided toward her to extend a bejeweled hand complete with silvery painted fingernails.

“Hello, Dana Barlow. So good of you to come by. Now, what can I help you with today? Are you interested in attending some of our enlightening services here at Unity?” Caryn stood back, her hand trailing over the amaryllis while she waited, her gaze expectant.

Dana knew instantly that this was no ordinary church, not at all like the small wooden church she’d attended all her life on the outskirts of Prairie Heart. She got the feeling Sunday school here would take on a whole new meaning.

Clearing her throat, Dana got right to the point. “No, Ms. Roark—”

“Caryn, please.”

“Caryn, I’m not here to attend services, but thanks for asking. I came because I’m concerned about something I found on my land today.”

Caryn settled herself on a thronelike chair by a ten-foot window, her face serene, her eyes keen, her slightly foreign accent held in check. “Oh, and what might that be?”

“A dead Brangus breeding bull.”

Caryn looked appalled. “Oh, how dreadful. We’re all vegetarians here, so I do not tolerate hurting God’s creatures.” She gave an exaggerated shudder. “What does this horrible crime have to do with me, my dear?”

Dana leaned forward in the squeaky leather chair. “I believe it has everything to do with you. I think someone from your complex deliberately shot my animal.”

Caryn’s eyes lifted slightly, the only sign that Dana’s direct accusations had affected her. “Tell me who did this, and I will take swift action!”

Dana gave her a skeptical look, wondering if she practiced that stilted, phony voice in front of the mirror each day. “Will you really? Or did you order this slaughter?”

The other woman didn’t move a muscle, but she looked as dangerous as the rolling clouds floating by on the horizon. “Why would I order such a thing?”

Dana tapped the fingers of one hand on the arm of her chair. “Oh, maybe to convince me that I need to sell my land to you after all?”

Caryn rose to stand behind her chair, so she could look down on Dana. “You really should attend one of our services. You seem to be holding a lot of anger inside, young lady.”

Dana rose, too. “I’m angry. That’s a fact. But I’m not one to hold anything inside. And I’m warning you, if I find one more dead head of cattle on my land, I’ll have Sheriff Radford investigate this whole place.”

With that she turned to leave, but Caryn’s shout halted her.

“Miss Barlow, you’ve just made a grave error in misjudging me.”

Dana turned in time to see the look of pure malice shaping the woman’s flawless complexion. “Are you threatening me?”

“I am the law here,” the woman said in a rasping voice. “How dare you talk to me that way!”

“I’m not one of your groupies!” Dana shouted back, her own anger and frustration matching that of the other woman. “You don’t fool me, and you’ll never get my land.”