Especially if it was as infested with rats and spiders—or even snakes—as its appearance suggested.
Her stomach crawled at the thought, but she forced herself to trot out her best intrepid young reporter act. “Flashlights are in the back. You ready?”
“Ready for what?” Henry asked. “You can’t mean we’re going in there. This is private property. If the owner doesn’t outright shoot us, that sheriff will throw us both in the hoosegow for the sheer pleasure of it.”
“Hoosegow?” She grinned, wondering when the last time was she’d heard someone refer to a jail by that name. But then again, Rusted Spur was an outdated place, its sweeping plains reminding her of the Spaghetti Westerns her father had once loved.
At the thought, her imagination conjured the image of Zach Rayford, long and lean and tough as nails as he scowled down from the saddle aboard a coal-black stallion. As the soundtrack whistled a cinematic warning, sheeplike townsfolk scurried out of sight. Still, she couldn’t help thinking about how handsome the guy was. How smoking hot, despite the glower.
“You think I’m kidding?” Henry went on. “Because I’m telling you, the sheriff wasn’t. He wants us gone from here, and I’m starting to think that’s a damned good idea.”
She frowned, wishing she’d left her cameraman in Dallas. But that would have meant bucking her news director, and Jessie had no intention of losing her job, not when she was so close to breaking a story she had risked so much to chase down. So why didn’t Vivian run the piece live before I left? Could there be another reason she’d seemed relieved when I asked to leave town right before the date we had agreed on?
Unfortunately, she was afraid she already knew the reason; she simply didn’t want to believe it could be true.
“Quit worrying so much,” she said, hoping a display of girl-reporter spunkiness might move him. “Seriously, who’s going to see us?” She gestured at the rolling rangeland all around them, its bleakness broken only by a smear of rose and orange that stained the western horizon. “Maybe you could get some footage for your— You brought an extra memory card, right?”
“Of course I did, but it’s too dark now. We’d only have to come back later, anyway. So let’s wait till tomorrow.”
“We can’t afford to, Henry. You know as well as I do, by the time Rayford and Canter get through laying down the law around here, we won’t be able to buy so much as a glass of water, let alone a tank of gas or a scrap of information. And I’ll never find my sister, at least not before our mom’s—before she’s too sick for it to make a difference.”
“If we started now,” said Henry, “we could reach Marston before nine. That’s where you made our reservation, isn’t it?”
“Closest lodging I could find.”
“We can rest up and make a new plan for the morning.”
“I’m not going anywhere until we take a look inside that house,” she said, “before somebody hightails it out here to clean up any evidence.”
Henry frowned. “Evidence of what?”
“Whatever really happened to Haley.” A chill crawled down her neck like some many-legged insect. “Whether it’s a forwarding address or—or something worse.”
“Like what? You don’t seriously think a tiny little thing like Mrs. Rayford’s done something to your sister?”
“Not her, but what about Hellfire’s brother, Frankie?” Jessie shook her head and climbed out into the breezy chill, not wanting to think about the kind of damage a violent man could inflict on a woman. Beatings, strangulations, shootings—she’d covered nearly every brand of bad news on the night beat.
Haley couldn’t be dead; it was impossible. Close as they had once been, Jessie would have felt the void.
Wouldn’t she? Or had Haley’s choices—and Jessie’s own—forever severed the connection? The questions whistled past her on a hollow wind, eliciting a shiver.
Leaving the headlights on and the car idling, she retrieved two flashlights from the rear and then passed a rusted barbecue grill on her way to the porch. As her foot creaked on the first step, she heard Henry coming up behind her.
“Think it’s safe?” he asked. “The last thing we need is for one of us to fall through.”
“Just a little noisy, that’s all,” she said, grabbing the wooden railing as she turned to look at him.
With a loud crack, a section of the railing snapped off in her hand.
“Or maybe not,” she said. “Be careful, Henry.”
“My middle name,” he joked, accepting the flashlight she offered with a shaky hand. “At least that’s what my wife claims.”
On the porch itself, they found a sand-filled coffee can bristling with ancient cigarette butts. Broken pieces of beer bottles lay scattered, along with a few crushed cans. Beneath a rough-hewn bench, she spotted a soiled wad of cloth. Using the broken length of railing, Jessie poked at the cloth, then jumped reflexively as a couple of scorpions disappeared into the crevices between boards.
Jessie shivered, but she forgot the nasty little things as she turned her attention to what turned out to be a worn T-shirt.
As she poked and then lifted it with the piece of railing, the torn and holey shirt’s design sent a jolt of recognition through her. With its feminine scooped neck and its red-and-white Texas Rangers logo, she felt certain it had to be her sister’s.
Seeing her face, Henry frowned. “You recognize it, then?”
“Haley’s favorite team.” A memory of a family trip to the stadium in Arlington—of a time they’d still been a real family—froze the breath in Jessie’s lungs.
She shook it off and said, “You see the stains here?” With her flashlight’s beam, she indicated darker splotches. Large splotches.
“Mold?” he asked.
“Or blood.” She used her on-air voice, its calm confidence belying the panic that gripped her, the desire to scream or cry or pray her way out of this possibility. It could be Haley’s blood here, right here, the DNA so close to mine it would take a team of scientists to tease out the differences.
“Should we call the sheriff?” Henry asked.
“Are you kidding?” she asked. “Like you said before, he’d just arrest us for trespassing, and nine chances out of ten, this shirt would disappear before it could get tested. We’ll bag it before we leave, get an independent lab to check it out.”
“But it could be—I’m sorry to say this, Jessie, this being your sister—but this might be evidence of a crime. You can’t take it.”
“What else would you suggest? Leave it here and run home to tell my mom some fairy story? Because I’m not going to do that. And I’m not trusting Canter with this.”
“What about someone else?” He pointed at the shirt’s logo. “Maybe the real rangers?”
“Great
