Rescue At Cedar Lake

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It had been ransacked.

* * *

Theresa’s cry was faint and yet to Alex’s ears it seemed to rise above the sound of the wind and the static hissing in his ear.

“Theresa?” He turned back. For a moment he couldn’t see her, just snow swirling around the empty place he’d left her standing just moments ago. He ran back three strides and burst through the open door. The cottage had been turned inside out. Drawers hung open. Furniture was tossed. They’d theorized the carnage at the Rhodeses’ cottage had had something to do with Josh’s second cousins and maybe something expensive one of them owned. But why ransack a neighboring cottage? Theresa stood in the clutter. Her hand rose to her lips.

“The poor Pattersons,” she said.

He slid his helmet off. Theresa still had her back to him. His hand reached up instinctively to slide around her shoulder. At the last moment, he caught himself and brought his hand back down, just before his fingertips brushed the back of her neck. He set the helmet down and slid his hands into his pockets.

“We knew Castor and his buddies were looking for a trunk,” he said. “Maybe they’re going door to door looking for it.”

“Mandy’s brothers have done well for themselves financially, and Castor mentioned her by name. So I could at least come up with some theories why somebody would rob them. But the Pattersons are just a really nice, low-key, modest family who never did anything to anyone...” Then she turned back suddenly and he could see the same question crossing her mind that had just crossed his.

“Except for Corey,” he finished.

Corey Patterson was four years younger than Alex and had gotten in trouble with the law for drug possession at sixteen. Alex wasn’t sure of all the details. But sometime around the time they’d been getting engaged, Josh’s dad, who was a cop, had smelled marijuana on Corey and threatened to turn him in. Rumor had it that Corey had been in trouble with the law off and on after that. Then, around the time their engagement had ended, Corey had been charged with possession.

“Whatever happened to him?” Theresa leaned against the wall.

“I honestly don’t know,” Alex said. “I kind of checked out of what was going on up here after you and I broke up. Last I heard, he’d been sent to a youth rehabilitation facility. All my mom would say is that every family had their problems. I just can’t imagine anyone doing this to their own grandparents. I hate to say this, but if they’re ransacking small cottages then they probably hit your family’s cottage, too.”

“My family doesn’t have a cottage here anymore. I thought you knew that.” She crossed over to where a jumble of smashed pictures in frames littered the floor. “They sold it years ago to pay off their business debts.”

She said it so calmly. Like she was pointing out the color of the sky or the existence of dirt on the ground. Like it was a given and he should know. But he hadn’t. And that irked him.

“No, I didn’t know,” he said. He watched as she bent down and carefully brushed the glass out of a broken frame. “I had absolutely no idea. How’s the business doing now?”

“It’s gone, too. They sold it at a loss.” Now there really was a hint of reproach in her voice. “A long time ago. Remember there was a big fire shortly after we got engaged? Well, when they lost the battle with the insurance company they were forced to sell the business, the cottage, our house—all of it—to settle their debts.”

What? His mind spun. His sister, his family and Josh all had to have known about this. Had he been so determined to shut down any conversation about Theresa that they’d never brought it up with him? Or, worse, had they presumed he’d already known?

“There was a huge auction.” She stood up slowly, the picture still in her fingers. “You must know this.”

“Well, I honestly didn’t.” Heat rose to the back of his neck. His voice sounded louder than he’d meant it to. While he’d been on the video call with Theresa he’d wondered why Zoe hadn’t relocated them to the Vaughans’ cottage at the mouth of the lake. He’d never imagined the Vaughans no longer owned it. “When exactly was all this?”

“The end of the summer we were supposed to get married. I told you, my parents were having problems—”

“Money problems. Not ‘losing everything’ problems—”

The lines around her mouth set hard, like she was biting something back.

“Well, at the time we broke up it wasn’t public knowledge,” she said. “They put the cottage up for sale at the end of that summer and held an auction for the furniture and the stock left in the store that the creditors didn’t take back. Don Patterson took over the lease of the actual store building for his business. But sadly it wasn’t enough to keep them from losing the house. The whole thing was a slow, painful death that took a very long time.”

He ran his hand slowly over his jaw. “I’m sorry.”

The words seemed so inadequate, but he didn’t know what else to say.

“Thanks. It was a long time ago. Now, can you do me a favor and take a cell phone picture of this?” She bent down and picked up a glossy photograph in a broken frame, changing the topic before he could press any further. “It would feel wrong to take it with me, but I think it might be helpful to have while we’re trying to figure out what’s happening here.”

She held it up and for the first time he saw what she’d rescued from the glass. It was a group picture of the Cedar Lake barbecue, taken the summer he was twenty. Almost fifty people between the ages of two and eighty clustered around the warm rocks that jutted out into the lake in front of the Vaughan’s family cottage. Half of them were kids or teens, many of whom had been his friends. He was sitting off to the side in a huge wooden Adirondack chair. He, Theresa, Zoe and Josh had won the Cedar Lake scavenger hunt for the very first time that year, beating out the stronger group of Emmett, Kyle and their friend Paul Wright.

The gold, spray-painted coffee mug that served as a trophy was clutched in Alex’s left hand. Nineteen-year-old Theresa sat on the arm of his chair, her back leaning against his shoulder. The sun soaked her long tanned limbs. Her head was tossed back, caught midlaugh, no doubt at whatever he’d been whispering in her ear, which, judging by the grin on his face, he’d thought was pretty funny.

A huge diamond dazzled on her finger. He’d proposed to her that day, on the edge of the rock in front of her cottage, while they’d been out together scavenging for whatever treasures had been hidden in the woods. The ring was even bigger than he remembered. It’d been so far beyond what he was able to afford that Theresa’s father had pulled him aside later that night to ask how he was going to pay for it.

He could still remember the moment that picture was taken. He’d never been happier than he’d been the moment she’d said yes. He’d never wanted anything in life as much as he’d wanted to marry her. His eyes slid from the cell phone camera up to Theresa’s face, as years’ worth of words he never got to say suddenly smacked inside him like a tidal wave.

Lord, what happened to us? How did something so amazing get so destroyed?

He swallowed hard. “Look, Theresa, I—”

“Break, break.” A child’s voice buzzed from the CB radio on his belt, and it was only then he realized the channel was open. “Bee to Hive. Come in Hive.”

Was there another family up at Cedar Lake? He yanked the radio from his belt and raised it to his mouth. “Hey, kid. I don’t what you’re doing on this line. But a radio isn’t a toy, especially not with a storm coming. Where are your parents? Because if you’re in a cottage right now they should really pack up and head for town.”

There was a pause. Then the child said, “Copy. Negative. I’m in a house. I’m not at a cottage and you’re rude. Over and out.”

The line went dead.

“In my experience, little kids hate being spoken to like little kids,” Theresa said mildly.

“I was worried his family might be up at a cottage around here and not know about the weather situation,” he said. “But it seems your radio’s getting a decent range. There are any number of houses on the highway that boy might be in. But I don’t know what his parents were thinking, letting him play with a CB radio.”

“It was a girl. I’m guessing somewhere between the ages of eight and ten.” A slight smile turned up the corners of her lips. “And we used to play on CB radios when we kids all the time. Remember? Paul Wright’s father was a trucker and got us all hooked. We used them during the scavenger hunt. Or whenever you wanted to talk to me late at night without risking my parents answering the cottage phone.”

True. He hadn’t gotten a cell phone until he was eighteen and cell service at the lake had always been nonexistent. Life had been one big adventure back then: slipping through the woods, hiding together from the other scavenger hunt teams and whispering coded messages to her over a walkie-talkie, as if how they felt about each other was a secret they needed to protect from the world.

The ironic thing was that now he was living the kind of life he’d only played at back then. Stopping evil and protecting people from danger was no longer just some unattainable dream. It was his job and his calling. But did Theresa even see who he’d become? Or did she still think he was some reckless boy running through the trees playing at being a hero?

He set the radio down on the table, fished his useless cell phone out of his pocket and took a picture of the group photo.

“Kenneth Brick was obviously using his last name as a nickname,” Theresa said. “But that doesn’t mean Howler and Castor are. One or both of them could be someone we know using a nickname to hide their identity.”

He nodded. “Agreed.”

“If Kenneth Brick is twenty-three, then he’d have been about fourteen around the time this picture was taken, right?” Theresa asked. “If we assume that Howler and Castor are in their twenties, too, and that one of them is in this picture, then we’re looking at anybody in the picture between the age of, say, eleven and twenty.”

He scanned the picture. He spotted Mandy quickly. She was eleven back then and sitting cross-legged in the sun between her older brothers. There were ten people in the picture who’d be in their twenties now. Six he dismissed immediately. Theresa, Zoe, Josh and Alex himself could be struck off the list. So could Mandy’s twin brothers, Emmett and Kyle, not just because they were slightly too old, but because it was hard to imagine the owner of a successful car dealership or a local politician hiring somebody to ransack their parents’ cottage. But, still, he couldn’t discount the possibility one of them was Castor’s target.

That left just four people.

“Natalie Patterson, Corey Patterson, Tanner Mullock and Paul Wright,” he said.

“Paul would be about twenty-seven now,” Theresa said. “I don’t know where he is, but I know he was always big into hunting and won the scavenger hunt with the Rhodes twins every year, until we finally took the trophy. All I know about Tanner Mullock is that he came up to the lake to stay with his grandparents a couple of summers because his parents were going through marriage problems. He’s probably in his midtwenties now. There wasn’t a woman on the crew, so Natalie’s out. Although we can’t dismiss the possibility she could be romantically linked to Castor or someone on his crew.”