Tami Hoag - Down the Darkest Road

The Gracidas were not wealthy people. They made their living from their ranch, from Maria’s teaching and training business and Felix’s polo school. They couldn’t afford to lose a fussy wealthy client because Maria was a no-show for a lesson. And the last thing Leah wanted was to be the cause of more trouble.

“I’m going to call and check on you,” Maria said, reluctantly moving toward the door. “I want your mom to call as soon as she gets home. Okay?”

Leah promised.

She locked the door behind Maria Gracida as she left.

The house was quiet. The tension that had filled the air that morning was gone. Leah welcomed the calm. She felt a little better since she’d had her meltdown. The pressure inside her had gone. Now she mostly felt empty and tired.

Maybe she would do what she had told Maria—just go to bed and sleep, and hope the world looked brighter when she woke up. Although she dreaded having to face her mother again after all the rotten things she’d said that morning, now she just wanted to apologize and beg forgiveness, and pretend it never happened.

She went upstairs and lay down across her bed, too tired to change out of her riding clothes other than to let her clogs fall off her feet onto the floor. She still had sugar cubes in the pocket of her breeches, and her steel hoof pick hung from a snap attached to a belt loop.

The Gracidas’s farrier had given it to her to clean the horses’ feet. He had forged it himself, and he gave one to every groom who worked with the horses he shod. Lauren unsnapped it from her belt loop and looked at it just to occupy her attention for a few moments.

The slender steel had been formed into a unique curve that mimicked the number 5. The top bar of the 5 had the sharp end designed to dig the debris from the crevices of the horse’s foot. The curve of the 5 shape fit perfectly in the hand to give just the right leverage. All the grooms at the Gracidas’s wore their picks clipped to a belt loop, at the ready. No horse came out of a stall in their stables with dirty feet.

Leah clipped hers back onto the snap.

She wanted to sleep. She wanted to sleep but not dream. She wanted her mom to come home. She wanted not to be alone.

If Leslie hadn’t been taken, she wouldn’t have been alone, she told herself. Even when they hadn’t been together, they had still been sisters. She had known that no matter what happened during the day, at the end of the day Leslie would be there for her, and they would talk, and everything would be all right.

“I’m sorry I said I wished you were dead,” she murmured now as she stared at the photograph she kept on her nightstand—of the two of them sitting together on one of Daddy’s horses with Daddy, so handsome, standing holding the bridle. Leslie had been nine at the time, Leah five and missing two front teeth. Leslie sat behind Leah with her arms wrapped around her. She remembered how safe it made her feel to have her sister’s arms around her. How sad it made her feel now to think that she would probably never have that again.

She shivered as the emotions began to rise inside her once more. She got up and began to pace, wrapping her arms tightly around herself.

She wished her mom was home. She wondered where she’d gone. What if she’d done something crazy again? Leah had been terrified to see her attack Ballencoa at the tennis courts. It had seemed like something out of a terrible movie, like her mother had been possessed or something. What if something like that happened again? What if she’d gotten arrested?

The idea made Leah angry. No one had arrested him . No one seemed to care that he’d taken Leslie. No one seemed to care about what was right. They only cared about what they could prove. It was like a game, and he knew how to play it better than anyone.

Frustration and anger rejoined her other emotions, and the pressure inside her built and built. She wanted it to go away. She thought about the razor blade hidden in the book on her nightstand. She could cut herself. She didn’t want to, but she hated this feeling so much. It scared her so badly. But what would happen if she cut herself and the pressure didn’t go away? Then what? Would she cut herself again and again? Would she cut herself so badly she might bleed to death?

It scared her that she would even think that could happen.

Why couldn’t her mom come home?

Suddenly the telephone rang and Leah jumped a foot in the air. It wasn’t the normal ring of a phone call. It rang three times in quick succession, which was the intercom for the front door.

No one could come to the door without first coming through the gate. Only people with the code could come through the gate. But no one with the gate code would ring the doorbell.

Leah stared at the telephone on her nightstand, afraid to answer it. But as it rang again, she thought again of her mother. What if something had happened to her?

On the third ring she picked up the phone. The man on the other end spoke with authority.

“Leah, I’m with the sheriff’s office. There’s been an accident. I’m here to take you to the hospital.”

The sheriff’s office probably had some kind of code to get through gates, Leah thought. That made sense.

“Was it a car accident?” she asked, thinking a million things at once. Was her mother dead? Was she alive? Had she been drinking and driving? She drank too much. Leah had told her.

“Yes, a car accident,” the man said.

She could hear her mother’s voice from just hours ago: You know you would never be left alone, her mother said. If something ever did happen—and I’m not saying that anything will—but you need to know you will always be taken care of, sweetheart. Your aunt Meg would take care of you—

“Oh my God,” Leah said, fear grabbing hold of her like a hand closing around her throat. She wasn’t supposed to open the door to strangers, but he was from the sheriff’s department and he knew her name. He wouldn’t know her name if he was a stranger. Someone had to have told him.

“She’s in pretty bad shape, Leah,” he said. “We need to go now.”

Her mother needed her. What if she died? What if she died before Leah could get to her and tell her how sorry she was for all the hateful things she’d said that morning?

She had to go.

50

“Ballencoa had to know she was here,” Tanner said. “Since when do we assume he ever tells the truth about anything?”

“The time line doesn’t lie,” Mendez said. “He moved here the beginning of May. How could he know Lauren was going to move here a month later? She didn’t send him a change of address card ahead of time.”

He remembered Lauren saying that very thing to him when he had pulled her over that first afternoon.

Do you have any reason to think he might know you’re here?

I didn’t send him the ‘We’re Moving’ notice, she had snapped. Do you think I’m an idiot?

Had Ballencoa seen her by chance—as Lauren had claimed she had seen him by chance in the Pavilions parking lot? Was it dumb luck that he had come across her?

“I don’t believe in coincidence,” Mendez muttered. “And if Lauren thought he knew she was here, she would have been looking over her shoulder. She would have noticed his vehicle when she came out of the shooting range that day.

“She didn’t think he knew she was here,” he said. “That’s why she was so freaked out when she found that photograph. If she was the one hunting him, how did he know where to find her?”

A bad feeling scratching at the back of his neck, he went to the phone and called Latent Prints.

“Did you guys lift anything usable off that photograph I brought you a couple of days ago?”