Ben nodded. “Thought I heard his name. Some piece of luck, him being on the train and all. And in the same car.”
Jackson gave Thad a significant look that included an eyebrow arched halfway to his hairline.See?it said.
Thad ignored his friend. “Jackson was just saying something like that.”
“Not something like it,” the sheriff said under his breath. “Exactly like it.”
Ben leaned forward in his saddle and looked past Thaddeus to Jackson. “What was that, Sheriff?”
“Nothing worth repeating.” He backed off, let them ride ahead, while he marked their location and then waved to the other groups to go their separate ways. “Slow and steady,” he told Ben and Thad when he caught up. “We don’t want to give anyone a reason to shoot us.”
They reached Cooper’s Rock, a cliff with a broad face that overlooked a waterfall and a swiftly moving stream a dangerous distance below. Moonlight turned the rush of water into a silver ribbon. They tethered the horses a safe distance from the edge of the bluff and removed the money sacks.
“Should have brought a damn lantern,” said Thad.
Jackson snorted. “Sure, and make ourselves bigger targets than we already are. Let Ben look around. He’s got young eyes.”
Ben rolled those young eyes at both of them and went searching for the note that was supposed to be left for them. It did not take him long to find it wedged in a crevice, one white ragged edge sticking out. The piece of paper was the same size as the notepad. Jackson had predicted that when he saw a couple of pages had been torn out. The paper wasn’t folded, but Ben didn’t glance at it. He handed it to Thaddeus. “Figure it’s your right to see it first.”
Thaddeus took it, squinted at what was written, and handed it to Jackson. “Don’t have my damn spectacles either.”
Jackson had to squint as well, but he could make out the writing. “You know that cabin up at Thunder Point? The one that belonged to Old Man McCauley when he was prospecting in these parts?”
“I know it,” said Thaddeus.
“Can’t say I do,” said Ben. He took the note when the sheriff held it out to him.
“That’s a map from here to there,” said Jackson. “Waterfall. The stream. The cabin. Even drew a little smokehouse, though I would have figured that for having collapsed years ago.”
“So that’s where we’ll find her?”
“Yes. We leave the money here, and that’s where they’re telling us she’ll be.”
But she wasn’t.
Chapter Eight
Phoebe hit the back of her head against the tree trunk when she snapped awake. She rubbed her scalp and found thin scales of bark in her hair. She picked them out one at a time and flicked them away, wondering all the while how long she had slept. She could not remember nodding off, or even feeling the need to do so. One moment she was wide awake, and then she wasn’t. Afraid it would happen again, she stood, biting back a groan as she did. She was not merely stiff; she ached. There were kinks in her joints and knots in her muscles. Stretching cautiously, she turned at the waist until her spine cracked in a most satisfying manner. Something parted the underbrush, disturbed the branches, and she paused, head cocked, waiting. Remington had not told her what sort of animals she could expect to encounter while she waited for his return. Her experience with four-legged creatures was largely limited to the feral cats that managed the rat and mice population in and around the theater.
Phoebe softly cursed her rescuer, but there was no real heat in it. Her lips barely parted around the words. She couldn’t fault him for not warning her about wild animals when she had more to fear from the ones who stood upright and carried guns. Phoebe’s eyes wandered to the mare, which was still tethered exactly as Remington left her. The horse had not stirred in any significant way in the last several minutes. She took that as a good sign. Whatever had moved between the trees was not a threat. Phoebe breathed out slowly, relaxed.
She stepped out from under the canopy of pine boughsand stared up into the cloudless night sky. Turning her back on the moon, Phoebe cast her eyes across the deep blue dome that was an unfamiliar heaven. Stars glittered and winked. Some formed shapes that she knew from myth and literature and she marveled at their constancy.
When her neck began to ache, she lowered her gaze from the heavens to the horizon. Here, too, was a view she had never known before. The scale of the mountains had been unimaginable to her until now. She liked to think that she knew something about canyons and passes and trails after years of navigating the streets and alleys of Manhattan, but this,this, was something else again. These magnificent mountains, with their snowy slopes and icy peaks glinting in the moonlight, were a revelation, and Phoebe found herself grateful for this moment, no matter how it had come about, that she was witness to this stark, naked beauty.
She shivered, though not entirely because she was cold. The movement was enough to pull her out of her reverie. She returned to the deep shadows under the towering spruce. The blanket tempted her to sit. To avoid that end, she picked it up, drew it tight around her shoulders, and told herself to think about anything besides the cold in her marrow and the ache in her bones.
It was inevitable, then, that she thought about him.
Thaddeus had spoken at some length about his son, in part because he was proud, and in part because Phoebe was interested enough to ask him questions. While Fiona gave Thaddeus her polite attention, which did not involve actual listening, Phoebe hung on every word.
Thaddeus Frost was a natural storyteller, and Phoebe believed he deserved an appreciative audience. She was that. His accounts of his son’s accomplishments were not boastful, but they were told in the context of life at Twin Star. Phoebe knew herself to be fascinated by the vastness of the space he described—square miles, not square blocks—and the activities that were utterly foreign to her—roping, mustering, and branding. As Thaddeus told it, Remington was reluctant to head east to school, although “reluctant” was perhaps anunderstatement since there were arguments that included colorful language and violent threats, and on at least one occasion, a physical altercation that ended only after Thaddeus put his headstrong son in a watering trough.
“He was just a young’un then,” Thaddeus had said, smiling crookedly, even a little wistfully. “Needed to get it out of his system. Don’t know as I would try to take him down today. Don’t know as he would give me a reason.”
So Remington had gone off to school, started poorly in the hopes of being called back to Twin Star, but when Thaddeus remained dug in, Remington’s pride would not allow him to fail. Thaddeus credited himself for his son’s success, but he did so in an ironic way that conveyed the achievement was all Remington’s.
Until Phoebe met Remington Frost, she had imagined him in her mind’s eye as a younger version of his father, but it was obvious to her now that his mother had been the architect of his finer features. While his height and angular profile were likely passed to him from Thaddeus, his dark eyes and inky hair were not. Thaddeus had blue eyes and salt-and-pepper hair that had once been more brown than black. Remington had a slight slant to his eyebrows even when they were not being lifted in a sardonic manner. That slant was absent in his father. The bridge of Thad’s nose was broader than his son’s, and only part of that could be blamed on the fact that it had been broken in a bunkhouse brawl. Remington’s chin was set more narrowly than his father’s, the cheekbones higher and better defined. Their mouths were similarly shaped, each with a fuller lower lip, but Remington’s mouth curled slightly at one corner as if he were darkly amused or privy to a secret so profound that a gun to his head could not make him reveal it.
