The Perfect Outsider. Лорет Энн Уайт

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ covered for June on all the other nights and days she spent working at the cave house in the mountains. The ranch was likely the first place Fargo might go looking for June when she didn’t show up for the search party or answer this page. Fargo might see June’s truck still in the driveway, start asking questions. Hannah could come under scrutiny, as well.

      June cursed to herself—she was going to need a damn fine explanation to satisfy Fargo.

      This community with its seemingly picture-perfect facade was like a ticking time bomb. June just wished the FBI would hurry up and get something they could actually use to take Samuel down and prosecute him before the whole place blew sky-high, Waco-style.

      She hooked her pager back onto her belt and tried to get her patient moving again, but his legs were buckling under him and he appeared to be fading in and out of consciousness. Worry speared through June—he might need a hospital. But it was too late even to consider trying to make it all the way back into town with him in this condition. And then there’d be questions.

      The cave house was closer, safer.

      “Hey, you,” she whispered, lightly slapping the side of his rugged cheek with her palm. “Can you hear me?”

      He moaned. His complexion was deathly pale and blood was seeping into the white bandage on his head. The sutures must be pulling loose.

      “Listen to me—I’m going call you Jesse, okay? Jesse, can you hear me?”

      His eyes flickered, as if with sudden recognition.

      “Good. Now, stay with me, Jesse. We’re almost there.”

      June’s muscles burned as she maneuvered Jesse through the narrow rock crevasse. At the end of the crevasse there was an apparent dead end hidden by a tangle of creepers. June moved the curtain of vegetation aside, exposing the opening to a large cave. These mountains were riddled with them. She clicked on her headlamp, and helping Jesse bend over, they entered the gloom.

      “Where are we?” he said.

      “A cave. At the back is a tunnel that leads to a valley on the other side. We’re going to a shelter built into more caves on that side.”

      The tunnel was wide, but the roof was low, which meant Jesse leaned even more heavily on June as he was forced to bend double. June’s energy began to sag under the weight of well over six feet of Marlboro Man. In close proximity, his stubble rubbed against her cheeks, and June realized peripherally that she had not had a man like this in her arms since Matt had died.

      Her pilot had been all rugged brawn and macho power, as well, an A-type personality in total command of his life. Until the one rescue mission that had burned him.

      There was always the one mission, thought June. Post-traumatic stress disorder was a little-acknowledged aspect of rescue work, and it often went undiagnosed, as it had in Matt’s case. She should have seen it.

      She should have given Matt the benefit of the doubt—she should have realized he was incapable of leaving the cult on his own and she should never have given him the ultimatum that had sent him over the edge.

      June braced her hand against the cold cave wall as she struggled to catch her breath. She thought she’d managed to put the guilt from the past in perspective, but now it was haunting, so very real again, in the shadows of this cave. It was this stranger—he was doing this to her. Something about his physical presence reminded her too much of the only man she’d ever truly loved. And now the ghosts were coming back.

      She glanced at Jesse—when his memory returned, if it returned, would he be friend or foe?

      He slumped suddenly to the floor of the cave, trying to grab onto the wall as he went down. June dropped to her knees besides him. His breathing was shallow, his skin cold, clammy. Urgency bit into her.

      “Jesse, hang in just a little while longer. We’re almost there.”

      She struggled to help him up, and as they shuffled along, the tunnel grew narrower, darker. Her headlamp started to flicker, the battery dying. Shadows leaped and lunged and the air grew dank, musky. A bat fluttered past her face, making a soft wind.

      The journey through the crevasse and tunnel combined was less than a mile, but tonight it felt endless. June’s breath was ragged and she was perspiring with the effort. Then suddenly she saw faint light ahead. Relief washed through her body.

      They were almost through into Hidden Valley, a narrow delta on the other side of this mountain range. It was inaccessible by road—the only way in was via this secret tunnel or by foot over the mountains, or to fly in by chopper. It was where an eccentric architect-turned-survivalist had chosen to build a large house into a deep warren of caves, and it was in this house the architect had lived, quietly and off-grid, until his death. He’d left everything he owned to his sister, who’d helped turn it into a safe haven for escapees from Samuel Grayson’s lethal cult.

      The front of the cave house had been walled in with locally sourced rock. Large tinted windows looked out over Hidden Valley, and a stone porch, partially shaded by a rock overhang, ran the length of the house. A narrow boardwalk led from the tunnel entrance and hugged the rock face all the way to the porch and front door. A creek cascaded from a fissure in the rock face and ran under the boardwalk before meandering out into the valley.

      The rooms deeper inside the caves had no windows but were vented via stone flues to the ground on top, and the chill inside, even during summer, was eased by a great stone hearth in the central living area and by smaller cast-iron wood-burning stoves in the rooms. When the architect had left the house to his sister, she’d had no idea what to do with it and had let it stand empty; the place had faded from the memory of those who had known about it. When she found out that Hannah Mendes, a relative by marriage, needed a safe house to help cult victims escape, she had offered the cave house as a perfect solution because of the hidden-tunnel access to the valley on the other side.

      As June and her injured stranger reached the boardwalk, Jesse passed out. She struggled to hold him, but he slid from her grasp and slumped with a dull thud onto the wooden slats of the walkway. Adrenaline thrummed through her as she checked his pulse. It was steady, and he was still breathing. She worried now about intracranial swelling pressuring his brain.

      Laying him in a prone position on the boardwalk, she ran to the house and banged on the door.

      “I need help! Can someone come out here and help me!”

      The door swung open. Molly, an eighteen-year-old whom June had brought to the safe house last week, stood in the doorway, pulling on her sweater, eyes wide circles of consternation. “What’s going on! Did they find us!”

      God, I hope not.

      “I found a man down a ravine while I was searching for Lacy. He’s got a Devotee tattoo, and he’s hurt—”

      “Is he a henchman?” Molly peered nervously down the boardwalk. “Why did you bring him here! Does he know what happened to Lacy?”

      “I don’t know who he is. He doesn’t remember anything—”

      “You shouldn’t have brought him here!”

      “Molly, calm down and help me carry him. We’ll lock him in my room until we stitch him up and learn more.”

      Molly СКАЧАТЬ