The Missing Colton Read online

  Mia checked her watch again. He been in there for almost for almost an hour now.

  Her thoughts turned to what it might feel like to not know who you were. Did she believe he was Cole?

  It was possible.

  Did that matter?

  She dragged her hand over her hair. She was no longer sure what mattered. What she did want was the truth, to know. Once they had that, they could take the next step.

  Baby steps, she thought, and almost laughed at the absurdity. She’d already taken a giant leap and fallen for him. A perfect stranger. And here she was thinking in terms of “they.”

  The door opened and he came out. He looked pale as he gripped a large envelope in his hand.

  Mia’s heart skipped a beat at the expression on his face. She went quickly up to him.

  “What is it? What did he say?”

  Something cool had shifted into his eyes. He seemed different. “There’s no swelling,” he said. “No physical damage. Just evidence of a previous skull fracture.”

  “Yes, that’s good, right?”

  He snorted softly. “And he referred me to a psychiatrist.”

  Mia was silent for a beat. “Meaning?”

  “Meaning my memory loss is all in my head. He did a whole bunch of tests and Dr. Singh thinks my amnesia is psychological. Possibly a result of post-traumatic shock of some kind. A protective mechanism that my mind is using to block something terrible out.”

  Mia thought of his nightmares. His screams. His scars.

  Her heart clutched.

  A psychological reason didn’t make the problem any less real. Or easier to deal with. She knew from her nursing experience that psychological scarring could sometimes be more complicated to treat than tangible, physical damage. It could also be permanent.

  He dragged his hand through his hair.

  “Are you telling me everything?”

  “Yeah. He said my amnesia could have been induced by being attacked on the farm, but it more likely stemmed from some prior traumatic experience and the farm attack was a mental straw that broke my mind. It’s all in his report in here, apparently.” He raised the brown envelope. “This is for Levi. Dr. Singh said he’d be in touch with Levi by phone.”

  He looked worried.

  “Do you have an appointment already with the psychiatrist?”

  “No.”

  “Do you want to make one, while we’re here?”

  “Mia, can we just leave it for a few days?”

  She held his gaze. In his eyes she could read real anxiety. She reached for his hand.

  “Cole. It’s okay. Seeing a psychiatrist is nothing negative, it’s—”

  “Please, don’t patronize me, Mia.” A spark of something crossed his features, warning her back. “I know exactly what psychiatry is about.”

  “How do you know, Cole?” she asked quietly.

  His eyes narrowed. “What are you implying?”

  She heaved out a big breath of air and hooked her arm through his.

  “Come, let’s get a coffee before we drive back.”

  * * *

  They stepped out into bright sunlight. The air was crisp and cool, the sky endless blue over the skyline.

  Jagger closed his eyes, inhaled deeply. Inside he felt cold, tight. He’d been through this, too many times. He’d arrived stateside with a big chunk of his memory missing. He’d had some brain damage. When the memories did return, the flashbacks started. They’d sent him to shrinks. In the end, he’d hit the road, figuring he had to do this himself.

  Now this. It was all so real, so close to the bone that he suddenly had a fierce and desperate urge to lean on Mia. To share, offload, tell her everything that he’d been unable to share with therapists and that was eating him up inside. He gritted his jaw, hating the fact that he needed anybody at all. That he wasn’t man enough to just suck this up by himself.

  She reached up, touched his face.

  “I’m here for you, Cole. I said I’d help you, and I will. We’ll do it together, we’ll figure out why you came to Dead River. And the DNA—a paternity test—will prove who you are and whether you’re Jethro’s son.”

  His eyes burned sharply with such a sudden surge of emotion it scared him. Her touch, what it did to him. The power she had over him.

  Her eyes also shone. With care. Warmth.

  She was throwing aside her suspicions, trusting him with her heart, if not her head. The healer in Mia Sanders wanted to help. She knew that he had dark and hidden shadows in his past, that he could even be dangerous, a felon. Yet she was not leaving him alone.

  And suddenly Jagger had no idea how Brad Maclean could have left this woman at the altar. Not only did Jagger understand Mia on some fundamental level, he also knew he could love her.

  And that scared him more than anything he’d ever been through. Because Jagger didn’t know how to love, had not allowed himself to love. Truly love. Since he’d been ripped out of life as he knew it at nine years old.

  He looked over the skyline, toward the horizon. The landscape—his reasons for being here—all tilted drunkenly on its axis.

  “Come, let’s go get that coffee. Then we’ll drive to Dead River, report the truck incident to Chief Drucker. After that we’ll go look at the field where I found you.” She hooked her arm through his again and drew him close as they crossed the parking lot.

  “We must look at this as good news, Cole. If we know for certain that there’s no physical reason for the amnesia, we can start working to unlock your memory in other ways. That field is as good a place as any to start—it might trigger something.” She looked up at him. “You already remembered a black horse.”

  Chapter 9

  Cole took the highway off-ramp at the sign for Dead River. Mia had taken off her boots and her sock feet were propped against the dash as she jotted names down in the notebook she’d found in the glove compartment.

  She was making a list of people who were either on Dead River Ranch or connected to it thirty years ago when Cole Colton was kidnapped.

  “So far we’ve got Jethro, of course. We’ve also got Bernice Black and her husband, Horace. Agnes the head cook. Mathilda the housekeeper.”

  “What does Horace do?”

  “He’s a general handyman and an ordained minister. He gives services from time to time in the small church on the ranch. They live in a cabin on the property—they basically predate Jethro’s tenure on the ranch. He kept them on when he bought it, from what I understand.”

  “Hmm. And Agnes—she was a cook back then?”

  “She worked as kitchen help. Mathilda said something once that made me wonder if Agnes and Jethro might have had an affair.”

  Cole gave a soft whistle. “This is one tangled setup. What about Mathilda—what’s she about?”

  “Mathilda has basically run the house for the past three decades—she’s been like a mother to the three Colton sisters. She’s very protective of Jethro and his kids.” Mia laughed. “She’s like a mother bear—I wouldn’t want to cross swords with Mathilda Perkins. There’s also an old ranch hand, John Selwick, who’s still around. He used to be a top wrangler back in his time but he had some kind of injury and just handles small jobs now. And there’s Hilda Zimmerman who lives in town but shows up several days a week to work as a maid. She and Mathilda don’t seem to get along.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know. Agnes told me that Hilda doted on the Colton girls when they were babies, in part because she could never have her own children. Maybe there was rivalry there because of it?”

  Jagger shot her a look. “You think she was, or is, obsessed with babies? Enough so to have paid Duke Johnson to kidnap Cheyenne Colton?”

  “Hilda?” Mia dusted dirt off her knee from whe
re she’d knelt on the rock outcrop. “I don’t know, Cole,” she said thoughtfully. “If so, how would she connect with the attack on you, the truck incident, the other murders?”

  “She’d need a partner—a male. Someone with enough strength and skill to handle Midnight, and who could have driven that truck today.”

  “Who could also shoot Jenny Burke in the face?”

  “What if she did that herself? A 9 mm handgun is an easy weapon for an older woman to handle.”

  A chill darkness ticked at Mia’s mind, something coming to the surface. She turned and looked at Cole. “How did you know Duke Johnson was responsible for the kidnapping?”

  His jaw tightened, ever so slightly. “You must have told me.”

  “I don’t think I did.”

  He glanced her way. Her eyes were dark and cool.

  “You must have.”

  Mia turned to watch the road. After about another mile, ranchlands unfolding on either side, fences keeping land apart, she said quietly, “You know, whatever brought you to Dead, it can’t be good.”

  Jagger kept his eyes dead ahead, hands firm on the wheel.

  “How so?”

  “Either you came in search of your biological father and the answers to an old crime, and something buried in your lost memory is threatening someone here. Or you came here in connection with the old kidnapping. Because you had that photo with you when you arrived in Dead, you were asking questions about the Coltons and looking for work on the ranch. Your being here is not random.”

  Tension whispered through Jagger. She was getting close. Mia was nobody’s fool. And the closer she got, the more he felt required to come fully clean with her. Jagger swore softly to himself. She was going to hate him when she found out the truth. It was already too late. How had he gotten himself into this bind?

  “If I’m not Cole, what do you think I might have come for?” he said quietly.

  His gaze shot to her.

  “I don’t know,” she said, turning to watch the land flashing by. “Answers. Either for good or bad.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Well, you could have wanted to use what you’d come to learn to blackmail someone in the family. Maybe you got the idea from seeing all the news coverage. Or...maybe you wanted justice for some reason.”

  “Would that be a bad thing?”

  She frowned. “I believe in retribution, Cole.” She hesitated. “But I like it to be done through the legal system.”

  Jagger turned off the highway onto a smaller road, following the signs to Dead River. Clouds had started blowing in from the north. “Can you think of any more names for our list?”

  Mia returned her attention to the notepad, chewing the back of her pen. “Well, Desiree Beal, Brittany’s sister, was on the ranch at the time,” Mia said, thinking of more names. “She’s the one who embroidered the blue blanket, but she’s dead now.”

  “What happened to her?”

  “She left Dead River after her sister’s funeral and went to Jackson where she got a job in a diner. She was shot dead in her Jackson home almost a year later. They never found her killer.”

  Cole whistled quietly. “Now there’s something interesting.”

  He made a mental note to look up and contact the detective who was on that case.

  “Put her name on the list, Mia.” He paused. “Was Drucker also around back then?”

  “He was the rookie who helped with the initial investigation.”

  “Put his name down, too. And what about Darla, Trip and Tawny—why does Jethro keep his ex and her kids around when clearly no one enjoys their company?”

  “Mathilda has intimated that Darla has something on Jethro.”

  “As in something from his past that she could use as blackmail?”

  “Possibly—that’s the idea I get, but it might just have come from staff speculation.”

  “What happens to her when Jethro dies, which won’t be long now?”

  “Either he’s written Darla and her kids into his will, or he dies and there goes her blackmailing power. Unless she’s got—or gets—something else she can use, the Colton kids will probably evict her. And there goes her Botox and cushy life.”

  “Ouch.”

  Mia gave a shrug. “They’re hard to like, Cole. I don’t think anyone on the ranch really gets on with them.”

  “Well, you better add Darla, Trip and Tawny to the list, then. Trip could have driven that truck, and that could’ve been my bag that you caught him with in the employee wing. Put Jared Hansen down, too. Who knows where he got that duffel bag before Trip got his paws on it. Either he or Trip could be doing someone’s bidding.” He hesitated. “And put Dylan Frick down.”

  “Oh, no, not Dylan. I just don’t see it. I mean, the guy’s mother was killed. He’s grieving, deeply. He’s not involved in all this.”

  “Still, he’s the most likely to have ridden Midnight, especially in the dark. We might find out when we get back that Dylan’s truck has gone AWOL.”

  “Doesn’t mean he was driving it. Like I said, he loans it out. Besides, what would his motive be?”

  “Protecting the memory of his mother. Perhaps Faye was involved in the abduction of Cole herself.”

  “Faye arrived after Cole was abducted.”

  “So did Darla—still, they might have learned something that implicated Jethro, or someone else, after the fact. And think about this possibility—what if Faye’s death was not an accident? Maybe, like Jenny Burke, Faye Frick came across something incriminating and someone needed to silence her.”

  Mia reluctantly wrote down Dylan’s name. “Damn,” she said softly. “There are so many people on this list. It’s more a case of who doesn’t have motive of some sort.”

  “Well, it’s a start.”

  Mia rubbed her face, looking suddenly tired. She turned and grabbed her purse from the back, found her water bottle inside and took a deep swig.

  She held the bottle out to him

  “No, thanks, I’m good.”

  She closed the cap and leaned her head back against the seat.

  Jagger turned into the small town of Dead River and stopped at the first red traffic light.

  “You need to take a right here,” Mia said. “The police station is just down the road.”

  He put on the indicator.

  “Mia,” he said carefully, watching the light. “Back in the suite you mentioned there had been talk about how Jethro came about his wealth. You said there were rumors.”

  She looked away from him again and began worrying her ring finger, as if deciding how much she wanted to let him know or how much she could trust him.

  “I guess the rumors are common enough knowledge around these parts,” she said. “So I don’t feel I’m stepping over the line by saying that he’s had what some would call questionable business dealings. And I can’t imagine he made billions from ranching alone. He has mineral rights on the land...but...” She turned to face him. “The emotion I saw in Jethro’s eyes, when you walked in through his bedroom door, Cole, that was real. I’ve known this guy for over two years now and believe me, he’s not a sentimental sort. Those tears were genuine. It means everything to him right now to have his son back.”

  “Guilt, relief, absolution before he dies?”

  The light went green. He took a right.

  “That’s harsh.”

  “Is it?”

  She glanced away, still debating something internally, then looked back into his eyes. “Jethro said something to Levi last month. I overheard them talking about Desiree. Levi had learned that when Desiree first arrived in Jackson, she’d been seen with a baby.”

  Jagger’s pulse quickened. Desiree again.

  “Levi asked Jethro about that incident and the ol
d man clammed up, clutching his chest and going into apparent medical distress. But when Levi left to get medication, I saw Jethro sit up just fine and reach for the phone. I didn’t hear who he called.”

  Jagger’s instincts prickled the hair up his neck.

  “After she was murdered, the Jackson police along with the FBI investigated this claim, but there was no sign of any baby, if there ever was one. They began to believe the initial report had been false or in error.

  “Jackson,” he said, frowning, thinking. “What was Levi’s interest in Desiree?”

  “I think it had something to do with his mother, but I don’t know what.” Mia was quiet for a while. “I shouldn’t really say this, but it’s become too key not to. Levi appears to have suspicions about his own father’s involvement in the kidnapping of his son.”

  Jagger’s brows raised. “Why?”

  “Because of the way Jethro avoids certain questions, the way he reacted to that question in particular. Levi thinks, at the very least, Jethro knows something about what happened. Over there.” She pointed. “Dead P.D. station. Next to the fire hall.”

  Jagger turned into the parking lot.

  No clouds of dust in Dead River today. Brown leaves rustled across the cracked paving in the breeze, and a United States flag flapped above the building.

  Two police cruisers were parked outside.

  * * *

  Inside the station, a receptionist sat behind a counter. Behind her was a small bull pen with metal desks. The chief’s office was at the back, glassed in. Drucker was in there, working at his computer.

  “Let me do the talking, okay?” Mia whispered.

  Jagger wondered why—protecting his fragile mental state? Or something deeper? He let her go with it.

  The chief caught sight of them immediately, got up, opened his door and swaggered past the empty desks toward them. His voice boomed against the walls. “It’s okay, Elaine. I got this.” Drucker came up to the counter.

  “Miss Sanders.” He nodded at Jagger but did not call him by any name. “What can I do for you?”

  “It’s Ms. Sanders,” Mia replied with a false smile. “Or you can call me Mia, if you like.”