Obviously his life was cursed.

  STILL UPSET with her aunt, Charity stopped by the hospital to find Florie sitting by Liam’s bedside. She cringed at the thought of what might happen should Emily drop by to see how her husband was doing. That was a confrontation Charity hoped to avoid. After Charity had talked to Roz, she couldn’t get Emily and Lynette Hargrove off her mind so she’d put in a couple more calls and was waiting to hear. Florie had to be wrong. And yet, Charity didn’t want to take any chances.

  And what was that business about bones? What bothered Charity was her friend’s reaction. Roz had turned three shades of white over some old bones in a dirt grave. Odd.

  Charity watched her aunt through the hospital room window and decided not to interrupt Florie’s visit. She left the flowers she’d brought for Liam with the nurse on duty and headed for the newspaper office in the relentless drizzle, windshield wipers flapping. Emily—or whatever her name was—was on her own if she came by the hospital while Florie was there.

  A block away, a large figure in a dark raincoat stepped off the curb directly in front of her car. She hit her brakes as Wade Dennison slammed down his palms on the front of her VW Bug, his glaring eyes huge with malice.

  Charity scrambled to lock her door, but Wade—for his age—moved too damned fast. He jerked open her car door, his face flushed with anger.

  “You meddling bitch!” he bellowed.

  Behind her, Charity fumbled for the cell phone in her purse, keeping her hand hidden from Wade’s view as she hit the On button, then speed-dialed Mitch’s number.

  “Listen, Wade—”

  “No, you listen to me.” Suddenly all the heat went out of him. He seemed to slump against her car, head down, the rain pattering on his raincoat to the sound of…crying?

  The unexpected, heart-wrenching sound chased away her fear. She stared at the broken man, suddenly wondering if she could be wrong about him.

  “I would never have hurt Angela. Never. I loved her.” He looked up, his face wet from the rain, from his tears. “I don’t care if she was my daughter by blood. Don’t you get it? I love Daisy. She was Daisy’s daughter. That’s all that ever mattered.”

  Charity realized now probably wasn’t the time to remind him of his words the night Angela disappeared from her crib. But hey, she was a journalist. “You were overheard telling Daisy that you would put her back on the street and take Desiree from her.”

  His jaw tightened, eyes hard again, and she hoped she wouldn’t regret her words. “Those things were said in anger. Daisy knew I would never…” He seemed to lose focus, his head coming up as if he heard something. Or saw something.

  Charity followed his gaze and saw a bright red sports car zip by. His daughter, Desiree.

  Wade pushed off the car, stumbling back as he turned and walked away, his gait slow and awkward, the movement of a defeated man.

  Charity watched him go, stunned by what she’d just seen and heard. Could she be wrong about Wade? But then how did she explain Bud Farnsworth’s final moments? It was clear with his dying breath that Bud had been trying to tell Wade something.

  She checked her cell phone. She’d reached Mitch’s voice mail. She wondered what kind of message she’d left. Mitch wasn’t going to like this any better than the newspaper article. She hoped it wouldn’t change his mind about that possible marriage proposal he’d started to offer her this morning at Betty’s.

  ROZ TURNED from the highway onto Maple Creek Bridge Road and followed the narrow, sheltered road until it ended in a small wide spot.

  She was glad to see there were no other vehicles parked at the end of the road. But as she looked around, she wondered where her dad’s truck and camper were. How odd that the pickup hadn’t turned up. Was it possible someone had stolen it? Or dropped him off? Then where were the pickup and camper? More to the point, where was that person and how come he or she hadn’t come forward yet?

  She realized it was possible her father had hidden his truck and camper—just as he might have hidden the bones he’d found. It didn’t sound like him. Liam wasn’t one to hide things, to deceive. And because of that, she doubted he would realize the danger of his discovery until it was too late.

  With a start, she wondered if someone had moved the truck, hidden it—after that person had pushed her father from the cliff so no one would be looking for him here?

  She got out of her SUV, loaded her backpack and tied on her tent and sleeping bag. She considered leaving her camera behind, but realized if she found any proof she’d need it to verify the find. Like her father, she never went anywhere without her camera. She wondered if he’d gotten his discovery on film and where his camera was now. His backpack wasn’t at the hospital. That was odd if he’d fallen or even been pushed off a cliff. He would have had it on.

  She put enough energy bars and drinking water into her pack to last her a couple of days. She would stay in the mountains tonight, a place where she felt safer than at the house with all its memories and the strange new family. She wasn’t taking any chances that she might end up on that widow’s walk again.

  And she would be a whole lot safer out in the woods than at the guest house with Ford Lancaster, she thought, remembering the kiss and the emotions it stirred in her. And to think she’d been afraid of lowering her defenses around him. What a joke! He hadn’t needed to scale the castle walls—she’d dropped the drawbridge.

  She shook her head at the memory, pretty sure she really had lost her mind. Because even knowing what a louse he was, she couldn’t help remembering the kisses and the feelings and aching for both. Fool woman.

  She clipped the can of pepper spray to her belt—not so much for a bear encounter as a human one. If anything Ford Lancaster had told her were true, she would be in danger until the bones were secure.

  And she now believed her father had found bones. She could just hear Ford if she told him she started believing it when a psychic saw her father—and bones. Ford would have a field day with that.

  But what were the chances that Florie would see bones in the tarot cards?

  Roz glanced behind her as she swung her backpack over her shoulder, feeling as if she was being followed. But there was no one in the small clearing and it was impossible to see into the thick growth beyond it. Nor had she heard or seen another vehicle on the highway.

  She’d noticed that the vacancy sign was back up at the Ho Hum Motel. The Bigfoot hunters were leaving town, giving up since there hadn’t been a sighting for several weeks now. Bigfoot sightings this time of year weren’t unusual in this area. The theory was that the snow in the higher elevations pushed the elusive creatures down to the rainy areas like Timber Falls.

  The Bigfoot sightings had something else in common: they were all on mountain ranges in rugged isolated country. The country beyond this road was unmapped, unexplored and inaccessible except on foot, and there were hundreds of square miles of it.

  On this side of the Oregon Cascades a lot of the country wasn’t even accessible on foot because of the dense foliage, steep mountain cliffs and numerous waterfalls, streams, lakes and bogs. It was the perfect place for a creature to live and avoid man.

  Roz looked up at the rock rims about halfway up the mountain and shivered. That’s the area where her father must have been. Whatever he’d discovered had to be fairly close around there, she would think.

  She knew she would have to find the bones before Ford Lancaster—and whoever else knew about them. She had no doubt that either would try to stop her.

  The moment she stepped from the small clearing where she’d left her SUV, she disappeared into the dark coniferous forest.

  She wasn’t surprised so few people had ever seen what they believed to be a Bigfoot-like creature. Another life-form could live just yards off the road and remain unseen especially if, as suspected, the creature was nomadic, rare in numbers and knew to avoid man whenever possible.

  As she walked, she couldn’t shake the feeling though that she wasn’t alone. She looked behind her but saw nothing except a dense wall of trees and underbrush. As far as she could tell, there wasn’t another human being for miles.

  A short way up the trail, she crossed a moss-covered log spanning a gushing stream. The water roared in her ears, reminding her of Lost Creek Falls and what she’d witnessed last night. She wondered if Mitch had found anything. Or if there had been anything to find.

  She walked, concentrating on the narrow game trail through the jungle. At one point, she tripped over one of the tree roots that grew across the path and almost fell. Resting her hand against a tree trunk, she tried to catch her breath. Her chest ached and she felt tears burn her eyes.

  A limb snapped off to her right. She froze, listening. She couldn’t see anything in the thick vegetation nor back down the trail behind her. She started walking again. A little faster. By now Ford would know she wasn’t meeting him at the guest house.

  Morning gave way to afternoon as she headed for the band of rocks, stopping only to take a drink or catch her breath.

  “Where had you been, Dad?” she said out loud as she looked up through the rain and mist at the steep rock cliffs over the tops of the trees.

  She wondered about his state of mind before the fall and realized she didn’t have a clue as to what her father might have been thinking. He’d married Emily, hadn’t he? That alone made her wonder if she still knew her father at all.

  CHARITY WAS STILL shaken by her run-in with Wade Dennison. She parked in front of her newspaper office and sat in her VW bug for a few minutes, trying to collect herself. As much as she suspected Wade was a murderer, she hated seeing him the way he’d been on the street.

  Worse, he’d made her wonder if she could be wrong about him. Sure, he would deny everything, especially now when it appeared his house of cards was coming down. But there’d been a ring of truth in his words. And Charity knew the power of love. If Wade really had loved Daisy enough to accept not only her affair but possibly the child from that affair—

  The passenger side door of her car jerked open and, in a flurry of rain and wind, Sheriff Mitch Tanner slid into the seat next to her.

  Charity tried to still her beating heart, this time from being startled out of her wits on the tail of her run-in with Wade. “Hey,” she said with less than her usual enthusiasm.

  “Are you all right?” Mitch asked, picking up on it.

  She told him about her recent encounter with Wade.

  “He sounds like he might be losing it,” Mitch said when she’d finished. “That could make him even more dangerous.”

  “I felt sorry for him,” she admitted.

  “Just don’t let your guard down around him, all right? And try not to find yourself alone with him.”

  She smiled at Mitch’s concern. “No dark alleys?”

  “Stay away from Dennison Ducks.”

  He was asking her to back off from her investigation. It was like asking her not to breathe and he had to know that.

  “I’ll be careful,” she said.

  He nodded, not looking happy as he opened his door and got out. No kiss. No “see you later.” No “how about a late lunch or a romantic dinner?” Or about that earlier proposal that she move in with him. No nothing.

  Charity sighed as he got back into his patrol car and drove away. She waited but he didn’t brake or turn around and come back. She opened her door and rushed across the sidewalk through the rain to the Timber Falls Courier. But as she opened her office door, she stopped dead. Wade’s estranged wife Daisy was sitting in Charity’s office chair, obviously waiting for her. Daisy had today’s paper in her hand and she was crying.

  ROZALYN WAS TOO EASY to find. And that’s what worried him. Anyone could figure out where she’d gone.

  Ford parked next to her SUV. He hadn’t seen any other vehicles on the highway but it would have been easy to hide one in this dense forest, especially with dozens of old trees partially grown in the logging roads. A car could be just a few feet off the road and completely hidden.

  Is that why no one had found Liam Sawyer’s truck and camper? Ford wished he thought that was the case. That Liam had hid it, but Ford’s intellect told him different. Liam wouldn’t know to hide his rig anymore than he would have known to hide himself. He wouldn’t have realized how much danger he was in until it was too late.

  Father like daughter, Ford thought as he got out of his pickup, slung his pack over his shoulder and started up at the mountain. The Cascade Range formed a wall of mile-high peaks from British Columbia to northern California, running the entire length of Oregon. Sixty million years ago this was seabed. The fossilized remains of ancient fish and tropical plants were entombed beneath these mountains and foothills by layers of accumulated lava and ash.

  He looked toward the mountains and the band of cliffs that could be seen over the treetops. Walls of columnar basalt, granitic intrusions, ash beds, building-size chunks of andesitic magma that cooled into granite rock.

  A scientist’s heaven. Or hell, Ford thought as he zipped up his raincoat and pulled up the hood, the drizzle falling around him.

  For months Pacific Ocean storms moved inland across the lower Coast Range mountains to the five-thousand-foot wall of the Cascade Mountains, clouds banking up and turning to rain—two hundred inches of the stuff falling each year.

  It was the rain that created the long growing season and the lush, jungle-like groves of deciduous and conifer trees, six-hundred-year-old towering Douglas fir, cedar, Western hemlock, vine maple, huckleberry bushes and understories of wild rhododendron tangles, more than thirty types of ferns, four hundred varieties of wildflowers, two hundred species of mushrooms, nine hundred types of thick mosses and twelve hundred species of lichens.

  It was a jungle of sorts and the last place on earth he wanted to be. But he had no choice. Rozalyn was up there somewhere and he feared she wasn’t alone—and didn’t know it.

  He followed the narrow animal trail and her tracks through the dense forest, brushing aside the gauzelike yellow drape of Old Man’s Beard that hung from tree limbs. The lichen grew up to thirty feet long and several inches thick up here.

  Ahead, he caught another glimpse of the band of rock cliffs that ran along the mountainside, and knew that was where Rozalyn would be headed.

  It was easy to understand what Liam had been doing up there. The majority of Bigfoot sightings were in places just like it. There were numerous accounts of huge, hairy creatures overturning massive boulders looking for food, stacking the overturned rocks into huge cairns. Another tale told of the creatures throwing the rocks down mountainsides to chase away humans.

  He sincerely doubted Rozalyn had to worry about Bigfoot. But who knew what else was in the woods today?

  Something else worried him. How the Bigfoot hunters had gotten Liam down. That was a long way to bring him out. True, it was the only way out. A helicopter couldn’t land near there. But still, it seemed improbable that some hunters had carried the injured man out because of the liability alone. Maybe that was why they hadn’t left their names.

  Ford quickened his step, his anxiety growing stronger as he caught glimpses of the cliffs shrouded in cold fog and drizzle. A stream trickled over stair steps of mossy granite. In these two hundred thousand acres of heavily wooded wilderness there were more lakes, ponds, marshes and sloughs than a man could count.

  He hated it all. The rain. The dark, dank rainforest of the Cascades. The memory it always brought back from his childhood. It was one of the few places he remembered his father bringing him. It had been shortly after the divorce. Before his father had completely disappeared from their lives.

  The memory still made his heart pound with the fear of the nine-year-old boy he’d been. His memory of his father and the Cascades was one of fear. And a knowledge of something he hadn’t wanted to know.

  Mist moved across the face of the cliffs. He concentrated on finding Roz. Then he’d look for the bones. Bones decomposed quickly in a rainforest. Those that didn’t became buried beneath the dense vegetation. If there was a Bigfoot, the theory was that he hid in a cave when he became sick and was about to die. It explained the lack of discovered bones. Because this country was full of caves.

  Roz’s tracks were easy to follow. Nor could she be far ahead of him. He lengthened his stride, anxious to catch up with her, his discovery at Lost Creek Falls this morning making him more nervous with each step.

  Not long after he crossed a huge fallen cedar that spanned a roaring creek, the trail opened into a cool green glen surrounded by the vast forest.

  The rain stopped as suddenly as it had begun. He pushed back his hood and stood in the glen, listening for Rozalyn. She couldn’t have had that much of a head start on him and still he’d yet to catch her.

  He glanced down at the muddy trail. Her footprints held only a little rain. If he kept moving he should catch her by the time she reached the nearest end of the band of rock cliffs.

  His cell phone vibrated against his hip, startling him. It surprised him he could get service here. Startled him even more since he’d given the number to only one person.

  He hurriedly answered it. “Hello?”

  “Mr. Lancaster, I have the results of that urine sample you asked me to put a rush on,” the lab tech said.

  IT HAD TAKEN Roz longer than she’d expected to reach the bottom of the band of rocks that ran across the mountain—and the old tree where she had often camped with her father.

  The rain had stopped momentarily. She took a breather under the tree, adjusted her backpack and stretched. Her body ached. In her career, she did a lot of hiking while carrying all of her camera equipment so she was in pretty good shape.

  But today she was trying to hurry. She was winded and tired and discouraged. What did she hope to find up here? If her father really had been pushed, the killer wouldn’t have left any evidence. And as for the bones her father had supposedly found, they could be anywhere. Especially if he’d had time to hide them.