B.J. Daniels - Dead Ringer

“Why can’t I remember what happened?” she asked.

“You can’t remember anything?” He sounded hopeful, fueling her worst fears that one of these days he would go too far and kill her. Wasn’t that what her former boyfriend kept telling her? She pushed the thought of Ledger McGraw away as she often had to do. He didn’t understand that she’d promised to love, honor and obey when she’d married Wade—even through the rough spots. And this she feared was one of them.

At the sound of someone entering the room, they both turned to see the doctor come in.

“How are we doing?” he asked as he moved to the foot of her bed to look at her chart. He glanced at Wade, then quickly looked away. Wade let go of her hand and moved to the window to part the drapes and peer out.

Abby closed her eyes at the shaft of sunlight he let in. “My head hurts,” she told the doctor.

“I would imagine it does. When your husband brought you in, you were in and out of consciousness.”

Wade had brought her in? He didn’t call an ambulance?

“Also I can’t seem to remember what happened,” she added and, out of the corner of her eye, saw her husband glance back at her.

The doctor nodded. “Very common in your type of head injury.”

“Will she get her memory back?” Wade asked from the window, sounding worried that she would.

“Possibly. Often not. I’m going to prescribe something for your headache. Your ribs are badly bruised and you have some other abrasions. I’d like to keep you overnight.”

“Is that really necessary?” Wade asked, letting the drapes drop back into place.

“With a concussion, it’s best,” the doctor said without looking at him. “Don’t worry. We’ll take good care of her.”

“We can talk about it,” Wade said. “But I think she’d be more comfortable in her own home. Isn’t that right, Abby?”

“On this, I think I know best,” the doctor interrupted.

But she could see that Wade was worried. He apparently wanted to get her out of here and quickly. What was he worried about? That she would remember what happened?

If only she could. Unfortunately, the harder she tried, the more she couldn’t. The past twenty-four hours were blank, leaving her with the terrifying feeling that her life depended on her remembering.

Chapter Two

When the phone rang at the Sundown Stallion Station late that afternoon, Ledger McGraw took the call since both his brothers were gone from the ranch and his father was resting upstairs. They had been forced to get an unlisted number after all the media coverage. After twenty-five years, there’d finally been a break in the McGraw twins kidnapping case.

“I need to talk to Travers,” Jim Waters said without preamble. “Tell him it is of utmost importance.”

Ledger groaned inwardly since he knew his father had almost fired the family attorney recently. “He’s resting.” Travers McGraw, sixty, had suffered a heart attack a few months ago. He hadn’t been well before that. At the time, they hadn’t known what was making him so sick. His family had assumed it was the stress of losing his two youngest children to kidnappers twenty-five years before and his determination to find them. His father was convinced that they were still alive.

“Do you really think I would be calling if it wasn’t urgent?” Waters demanded. The fiftysomething attorney had been like one of the family almost from the beginning—until a few months ago, when he and Travers had gotten into a disagreement.

“Jim, if this is about legal business—”

The attorney swore. “It’s about the kidnapping. You might recall that we originally used my number to screen the calls about the twins. Well, I am apparently still on the list. I was contacted.” He paused, no doubt for effect. “I have reason to believe that Oakley has been found.”

“Found?” Ledger asked, his heart in his throat. The twenty-fifth anniversary of the crime had come and gone, but after their father had hired a true-crime writer to investigate and write a book about it, new evidence had turned up.

That new evidence had led them all to believe that his father’s gut instinct was right. The twins were alive—and probably adopted out to good families, though illegally. The McGraw twins had been just six months old when they were stolen from their cribs. The ransom money had never been spent and had only recently turned up—with the body of one of the kidnappers. That left whoever had helped him take the babies still at large.

Ledger was thankful that he’d been the one to answer the phone. His father didn’t need this kind of aggravation. “All those calls are now being vetted by the sheriff’s department. I suggest you have this person contact Sheriff McCall Crawford. If she thinks—”

“He has the stuffed toy horse,” Waters interrupted. “I’ve seen it. It’s Oakley’s.”

Ledger felt a shock wave move through him. The stuffed toy horse was a critical piece of information that hadn’t originally been released to the public. Was it possible his little brother really had turned up? “Are you sure? There must have been thousands of those produced.”

“Not with a certain ribbon tied around its neck.” The information about the missing stuffed animal was recently released to the press—sans anything about the ribbon and other things about this specific toy. “Oakley’s stuffed horse had a black saddle and a small tear where the stitching had been missed when it was made, right?”

He nodded to himself before saying, “You say you’ve seen it?” It was that small detail that no one would know unless they had Oakley’s horse, which had been taken out of his crib along with him that night twenty-five years ago. “Have you met him?”

“I have. He sent me a photo of the stuffed horse. When I recognized it, I drove down to talk to him. Ledger, he swears he’s had the stuffed horse since he was a baby.”

Letting out a breath, he dropped into a nearby chair. A few months ago they’d learned that the babies might have been left with a member of the Whitehorse Sewing Circle, a group of older women quilters who placed unwanted babies with families desperate for a child. The quilting group had been operating illegally for decades.

Not that the twins had been unwanted. But the kidnapper had been led to believe that was the case. The hope had been that the babies had been well taken care of and that they were still alive, the theory being that they had no idea they’d been kidnapped. His father had made the decision to release more information about what had been taken along with the babies in the hopes that the twins would see it and come forward.

And now it had happened.

“What’s his name?” Ledger asked as he gave himself a few minutes to take this all in and decide what to do. He didn’t want to bother his father with this unless he was sure it wasn’t a hoax.

“He goes by Vance Elliot. He’s in Whitehorse. He wants to see your father.”

* * *

“ABBY DOESN’T REMEMBER ANYTHING,” Wade said as he walked past his father straight into the kitchen to pull a can of beer out of the refrigerator.

He popped the top, took a long swig and turned to find his father standing in the kitchen doorway frowning at him.

“I’ll pay you back,” he said, thinking the look was because he was drinking his old man’s beer.

“What do you mean she doesn’t remember anything?”

“I was skeptical at first, too,” he said, drawing out a chair and spinning it around so he could straddle it backward at the table. “But when I told her she fell off a ladder in the garage, she bought it. She couldn’t remember why she would have been on a ladder in the garage. I told her she was going to get jars to put up some peach jam.”