Driving fast, Ben hurtled the truck in record time down the long driveway to the house.What they saw there was even more shocking than the open gates.
A news van with antenna on top beside two passenger vehicles was parked head in.At least eight people filled the yard.A couple of men in khakis and loud shirts sat on the corral fence like they owned the place.Another with a Mohawk dyed purple snooped into the open barn doors.Three young women sat on the porch petting the dogs and another man hefted a television camera.The last man, older than the others and wearing a loudly striped suit and fedora, turned to smile at the approaching truck.
Ben stared.“What the hell?”
“Oh no,” Sarah breathed.“The press.This is the first time they found the ranch.”
“Know any of them personally?”
With a sinking heart, she looked at their faces and didn’t see anyone familiar.But she recognized the breed.
Eagerly, they spotted her in the cab, and with avid expressions common to their kind, they pointed and a few started for her, the man in the striped suit leading the way.
“Stay in the cab,” Ben growled.“When I get out, lock the doors.”
“Wait, Ben!”She grabbed his arm.“Don’t tell them I’m being stalked.”She sure didn’t need to see that headline in the tabloids.
Ben slammed out of the truck.He came around the hood.He met the three men who approached Sarah by standing between them and the vehicle.
With her window cracked, Sarah could hear everything.
“It’s her.It’s Sarah.There she is,” one called out, grinning.He carried a clipboard and a pen.“Super Sarah, when are you coming back?Your public needs you.We love you!”
The man with the camera raised it to his shoulders.
Ben stood, legs spread, hands on his hips.“This is private property and you’re trespassing.”
“Please forgive the intrusion,” the man in the suit said, his smile never abating.Appearing to be in charge, he halted before Ben.“I’m Yancy, senior editor of the news magazineStarstruck!Perhaps you’ve heard of it?”
“No.How’d you get past the security gates?”
“We just want a word with Sarah.”Yancy took off his fedora and used it to gesture at her in the truck.“It’s such a thrill to find her.Since she’s fallen off the face of the earth these past months, our readers have been demanding news.And here she is, hidden away in this quaint place.”He raised both arms, encompassing the clapboard house, the corral, the alfalfa field.“Imagine!The old-timey country.”
Behind him the camera started whirring, capturing everything for the cable television edition ofStarstruck!When Yancy moved to do an end-run around Ben headed for Sarah, Ben stepped in his path.He grabbed the man by the front of his fancy suit.
Showing a ferocity she hadn’t seen in him before, Ben shook the other man like a rag doll.“I said,how’d you get past the gate?”
Yancy’s face turned pink, then purple.He sputtered, choked, dug at Ben’s hand to no avail.On the porch, the women made little screams of protest and came down the steps.
“It—it was open,” Yancy got out.“Unlocked.”
Ben shook him again, rattled his brains.“You’re lying, Yancy.That gate is always locked.”
The three women had by now reached Ben.They were both tattooed and scantily dressed.“No, it’s true,” one girl cried out.“Through some Internet digging we found out about this place—that Super Sarah grew up here.The last time we came looking for her we went to the local town.They told us she’d moved to Australia to train crocodiles.Of course we didn’t believe them, and this time we were determined to find her.And we did!The gate wasn’t closed, so we drove up.”
Letting Yancy go with a little shove, Ben returned his hands to his hips.“All right,” he said.“Get off the property.Now.”
The man with the clipboard braced Ben.“Look, we just want a word with Sarah.To see if she’s all right.She’s a public figure, you know.She owes the world an explanation for her sudden disappearance from the public eye.”He flicked a glance at Sarah.
“She doesn’t owe you or the world shit.Now, get off.”
The man stepped forward, nose-to-nose with Ben.“Not until we hear from Sarah herself that she—”
That was the last word he got out.
Ben grabbed him by the shirt collar just as he’d done to Yancy, but he didn’t just shake the other.He slammed the man into the truck’s hood, making it rattle.His body bounced off, and Ben followed up that move by getting in his face.Ben’s features solidified, his eyes turned pitiless.
Watching from inside the truck, even Sarah was frightened.
