Luna shrugged it off. “Just part of the job.” She left Avery to her attendants.

  Out in the hall, she shifted her case, hoping that Avery and Jory made it as a married couple. She had to admire him for not chucking the relationship.

  She kept thinking about what Tom Eaton had said. The government was involved in whatever trouble Owen had gotten into? She found a quiet corner and called her father.

  After quickly filling him in on what Tom Eaton had said, she asked, “What kind of trouble could he have gotten into that the government was involved—and kept it quiet?”

  “Let me see what I can find out,” her father said. “I’ll get back to you. But I’d suggest you get out of there.”

  She couldn’t have agreed more. Pocketing the phone, she didn’t hear anyone come up behind her. Didn’t register that anything was wrong until she felt the prick of a knife blade in her side and heard a voice whisper, “Make a sound and I will kill you.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  JAXSON HAD BEEN digging through Vi’s records for what seemed like hours when he found the hidey-hole in the wall with a metal box in it. He figured it was what Vera had been looking for since he was pretty sure at one time it had been full of money. Someone had emptied it.

  All that was in the bottom of the metal can was a sheet of paper folded in half. Maybe one of them had left an IOU, he joked to himself.

  He started to unfold the paper when his cell phone rang. It was the main number at the marshal’s office in the next town. Had Yarrow gone home for some reason? He hadn’t mentioned it earlier. He quickly picked up. “Gray, here.”

  “Deputy Jaxson Gray?” The voice on the other end of the line sounded official. He felt his pulse jump.

  “Yes?”

  “I’m calling about Acting Marshal Kenneth Yarrow?”

  “Yes, who is this?”

  “I’m with the state police. I’m calling to inform you that Marshal Yarrow has been shot and taken to the hospital. He is in critical condition. The doctors are afraid he isn’t going to make it. They’ve taken him into surgery. DCI will be contacting you regarding your ongoing investigation.”

  The Division of Criminal Investigations would be taking over. Jaxson hung up in shock. Yarrow was fighting for his life after being shot? By Vi’s killer? Someone else? What the hell?

  He’d forgotten about the paper in his hand until it slipped from his fingers and fluttered to the floor. As he reached to pick it up, still shocked at the news, he saw that a photograph had apparently fallen out of the folded sheet of paper.

  The paper was blank. He tossed it aside and looked at the photo. The shot had been taken from inside the store and some distance away, so it wasn’t that easy to make out the two figures. It was as if the person with the camera was hiding.

  He held the photo up to the light and felt a start as he recognized one of the two figures being photographed. Amy. She was wearing the clothing she’d been found dead in. She was looking in the direction of the camera—unlike the other person, a figure much taller in Western clothing with a dark bobbed haircut and a hammer in her hand.

  Behind the two he recognized the storage room—and the dark shadow where the flooring hadn’t completely been replaced. He drew the photo closer, his heart pounding. Bethany Eaton?

  * * *

  LUNA FELT THE tip of the knife blade cut through her shirt. A trickle of blood ran down her side.

  “We’re going out the side door,” Bethany whispered at her back. “Trust me when I say I have nothing to lose. I will kill you. At this point, what’s another dead body?”

  She could hear the music coming from the tent. The wedding would be starting soon. People rushed past them, no one paying any attention to the older woman who appeared to be leaning on Luna for support as they crossed the manicured lawn headed in the direction of the Price ranch house.

  But as they neared, Bethany pointed her toward the stables. The woman’s hand wasn’t steady. Luna kept feeling the bite of the knife, the trickle of blood, a constant reminder of how easy it would be for the the knife to sink into her if she tried to break free.

  “Why are you doing this?”

  “To protect my family.”

  “You’re going to miss your daughter’s wedding.”

  “I wasn’t going anyway. After you upset me, I told Tom I couldn’t possibly face all those people. You played right into my hand.”

  “You aren’t agoraphobic.”

  “No, but it has worked well for me for years. My family has gotten used to me not being around. They don’t question my movements and the house is large enough that I can come and go freely. Tom and Avery know better than to bother me. Deanna is busy running the ranch with her father. No one notices when I’m gone or if one of the older ranch pickups is missing as well. The ranch hands are constantly coming and going on a place like this. All I have to do is dress like one of them.”

  “People know I’m out here fixing Avery’s hair for the wedding,” Luna said.

  “It will be hours before you’re missed,” Bethany said and stuck the knife in a little harder, making Luna wince in pain as more blood ran down her side.

  Luna realized now that she’d seen the woman the morning of the murder and again standing outside her apartment. What’s more, Bethany had seen her. “Why did you kill Vi?”

  “She’d been blackmailing me for years. Said she was putting away a little nest egg separate from her businesses and probably Axel’s prying eyes. She wanted me to contribute to it.” Her tone reeked of bitterness. “She really thought I would keep paying her more and more as time went on.”

  “Blackmailing you? Because of your brother-in-law, Owen Henry?”

  They had reached the stables and Luna saw that two horses had been saddled. There was a Just Married sash tied to each. Apparently the wedding couple were planning to ride off into the sunset. Or riding into the reception.

  “Don’t call O.H. that,” Bethany snapped, giving her a jab with the knife. This one almost doubled her over. She pushed Luna face-first into the stable wall, using her weight to hold her there. Then Bethany shoved a pair of plastic zip tie handcuffs at her, the knife now digging into her back.

  Luna’s shirt was soaked with her own blood and now stuck to her side. She was afraid to attempt to try to wrestle the knife from the woman, telling herself to wait, that she would get a chance to free herself even as she put the cuffs on in front.

  She felt Bethany move behind her, the pressure of the knife coming off her back—but just for an instant as the loop of a rope was dropped over her head and pulled tight around her neck, cutting off her air.

  Luna instinctively grabbed for her throat to relieve the pressure. She felt the knife did deeper into her flesh.

  “Do that again and I’ll end this right here,” Bethany snapped.

  “What are we doing?” Luna asked as she fought for air but didn’t dare reach up again to try to get her fingers under the rope. The woman pulled the loop tighter. She could feel it digging into her neck as Bethany dragged her over to one of the horses and began to wind the other end of the rope around the saddle horn.

  “You’re going to get on your horse. If you do anything to try to get away, I will jerk you off your horse and drag your body until you wished you were dead.” She dug the knife blade into Luna’s back one last time before she swung up into the saddle with the other end of the rope attached. “Get on your horse,” she commanded, jerking the rope, throwing Luna off balance, the rough rope cutting into her throat. “Now.”

  She looked into Bethany’s face and reminded herself that the woman had put an ice fishing spear through Vi. Luna’s only chance of getting away was to bide her time and believe that she would get the opportunity to best the woman. Her story didn’t end here, she told herself as she thought of Jaxson. They’d only just begun. She couldn’t bear the thought that they would never get the chance to see where these feelings between them would lead.

  * * *

  ONCE IN THE SADDLE, Luna had fought to push away her fear and remain calm as Bethany led her up the road away from the ranch houses. She kept the rope around Luna’s neck taunt. No one saw them. Everyone was inside the tent at the wedding.

  She had to think. Bethany probably wouldn’t be missed—just as she’d said. She’d been a ghost for years. Why? It had to be more than Owen Henry coming back into the Eatons’ lives seventeen years ago.

  Bethany had loosened the rope on the saddle horn just enough so that Luna wasn’t being choked, but not enough that she could try to get the lariat off her neck. She realized she still had her cell phone. If she could call Jaxson... She eased the phone out of her pocket and tapped his number. With a silent cry, she saw it go to voice mail. Leave a message. She thought quickly of what to say.

  “Bethany, you let Vi Mullen blackmail you for seventeen years just so no one knew that Owen Henry was your husband’s half brother? That’s as silly as you stealing Price Ranch horses to take me up into these mountains to kill me. You really can’t think that you can get away with this.” She fumbled to pocket her phone, afraid she would drop it in her hurry to hide it.

  Bethany reined in, shaking her head, clearly angry. For a moment, Luna thought the woman wouldn’t answer. Worse, that she might pull her from her horse and make good on her threat to drag her to her death.

  “You have no idea what that man did to my family by coming back and bringing that horrible girl with him,” Bethany spat out as she slowed her horse next to Luna’s. “He swore he didn’t know her. That she was apparently a friend of his son’s.” She made a rude sound. “His son. Next another bastard would end up on our doorstep if it was up to that conniving little bitch. She was worse than O.H.”

  Luna felt a jolt. Blackmail. The blackmail notes Jaxson had found in Amy’s suitcase. “Amy Franklin?”

  * * *

  HIS HEART A hammer in his chest, Jaxson turned to quickly search for the flooring invoice and the note in Vi’s handwriting stapled to the back. The phone number. Bethany Eaton. His pulse clanging like a bell in his head, he quickly dialed the number, praying that he wasn’t too late.

  It rang three times and he was about to hang up when it went to voice mail and a female voice said, “This is Bethany Eaton, I can’t come to the phone. Please leave a message.”

  Luna. She was out at the ranch. He glanced at the time. She should have called by now. Maybe she’d gone to the wedding or the reception and couldn’t call because she hadn’t left. He tried to make excuses so he didn’t have to face his worst fear. He started to call her number when he saw that she’d left him a voice mail.

  She was fine, she had called, everything was okay, he told himself as he hit play. He listened, terrified by what Luna was telling him. Bethany had her. The message ended. She was taking Luna up into the mountains to kill her.

  Heart in his throat, he tried her number as he headed for the door. The call went straight to voice mail, but by then he was in his patrol SUV headed for the Eaton Ranch.

  * * *

  “I TOOK CARE of Amy and her schemes. AJ was overseeing the new storage room floor at the store so Vi had given him a key. I sent him and his crew home for the day, telling him Vi asked me to meet her there. But it was that foolish girl I was meeting to pay her off.” Bethany laughed. “It wasn’t quite the payoff she expected. I covered the floor joists to hide her body with a few boards I nailed down.” She glanced over at Luna. “You think I’m heartless?” She scoffed at that. “I’d never hurt anyone before that. I locked up the store and went to the bar. Tom came to get me later that night. The bar owner back then had taken my keys and wouldn’t let me drive in my condition.”

  “AJ didn’t notice the next morning that you’d added a few boards?”

  “Apparently not. Nothing was ever said. No one noticed the body. I knew I could find what I needed in the store to keep the body from smelling. I was married to a rancher, remember?”

  Luna thought of the set of keys the killer had dropped in the storeroom the morning of the murder. Jaxson had speculated that they were a spare pair. Then the originals had been found in a drawer at the bar. Dave said they could have been in that drawer for years. Seventeen years?

  “That’s when you became agoraphobic,” Luna said, just as Vera had speculated.

  “I couldn’t believe what I’d done and then Vi Mullen called me to tell me about her retirement fund she was working on. I didn’t know she was still in the store that night.”

  Luna felt sick to her stomach as they rode into the tall pines, the afternoon sun weaving its rays through the branches. As they began to climb the mountain, she listened to how Vi had hidden, taken one of her disposable cameras off a shelf and got a photo of Amy and Bethany—Bethany about to swing the hammer that killed the girl. “She didn’t try to stop you?”

  “She said it happened too fast, that she never dreamed I would do it.” She scoffed. “She told me that she would keep my secret. The floor was finished. No one would find the body, and no one would miss the girl. Unlike me, she’d been smart enough to take the girl’s purse from out of the hole so if she was ever found, no one would know who she was.”

  “Vi had the girl’s purse? If you had placed an anonymous call to the cops, they would have thought Vi killed her.” Vi would have realized that and gotten rid of the purse since she didn’t need it. She had the photo.

  Bethany rode in silence for a few moments. “Except for that damned photo and others of me dragging the girl’s body over to the hole and dumping her into it. Vi sent me copies of the photos and threatened to go to the police. I had no choice but to pay her blackmail for all these years.”

  Luna felt a chill move through her body even in the warmth of the afternoon. “Why did you wait seventeen years to kill her?”

  Bethany seemed confused by the question for a moment. “I should never have started paying her. As it was, I had to tell Tom the truth. How else could I get the blackmail money? He was so furious. He never forgave me. Said I should have paid off that girl the way he had O.H.” She scoffed. “We had a different way of dealing with things. I would have never given O.H. a dime.”

  “You would have killed Owen too?”

  Bethany swore. “I didn’t have to kill him. All I had to do was make an anonymous call to the FBI since I knew that he had a standing warrant against him for some antigovernment property destruction when he was younger. But that girl? She would have bled us dry. Tom still thinks it was the five-thousand dollars he paid O.H. that kept him away.” Her laugh was eerily frightening.

  Luna felt nauseous as she remembered the teenage deliveryman who’d found Vi’s body. “You tried to kill Johnny Berg.”

  “Who?”

  “The deliveryman who almost caught you the morning of Vi’s murder.”

  “Oh, him. He was merely a loose end.” She waved it away like a pesky fly. “That blow to his head should have killed him. If he ever comes out of the coma, I doubt he’ll remember anything. Unlike you, snooping around, asking questions.”

  “I don’t understand,” Luna said truthfully. “You know you can’t get away with this. Jaxson knows I came out here today. I promised to call him when I was finished with Avery’s hair. When I don’t call—”

  Bethany brought her horse up short with a curse. “I forgot about your damned phone. Give it to me.”

  Luna cringed at the error she’d made. She worked the phone out of her pocket again. Once Bethany knew that she’d called Jaxson... She fumbled the phone. It fell to the ground, making the ranch woman swear again.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, seeing the fury in the woman’s eyes as the rope was pulled tighter. “It’s these cuffs.”

  Bethany looked at the phone lying in the dirt for a moment, then spurred her horse. Luna had to quickly do the same to keep from being pulled from the saddle. If she ended up on the ground, she knew what would happen.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Bethany said. “It’s all going to come out. You asked why now? I was sick of everyone wanting a piece of what Tom and I have built. O.H., Vi and even Magda. After all these years, my housekeeper is threatening to tell what she knows.” Shaking her head, she said, “It has to end.”

  “Killing me won’t make it end,” Luna said.

  Smiling, she said, “You’re right. You’re simply a diversion.”

  They had reached an opening in the trees. Bethany brought her horse up short. Luna could see nothing but wide-open country and blue sky ahead at the edge of what appeared to be a cliff. “This is where we part company.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  JAXSON ROARED INTO the Price Ranch, coming to a dust-boiling stop just feet from the stable. As he jumped out, Tucker came out of the door to yell, “What the hell?”

  “Where’s Luna and Bethany?”

  “Probably still at the reception. I came over to see if the horses were ready for the bride and groom and—”

  “They were gone,” Jaxson finished, pushing past him into the stables. He could see that Tucker had a horse saddled and was working on another. “Bethany has Luna.” He grabbed the reins.

  “Wait, what? You can’t—”

  Jaxson pushed him aside and swung up into the saddle. “Luna is in trouble. Bethany plans to kill her. I’ve called for backup.” But he knew backup wouldn’t be able to get there in time. “Tell them where I’ve gone.”

  With that he spurred the horse and shot out of the stables for the mountains. He had no idea how long they’d been gone except for the message Luna had somehow managed to leave him. He rode hard down the wide path toward the mountains. He could see fresh tracks in the dirt. Two horses. Neither moving at a gallop. That meant he might have a chance to catch up to them, to get there in time.