Last Resort. Hannah Alexander

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      “Surely they can’t think someone carried Carissa away by horse,” Nathan exclaimed.

      “Can you think of a better way to carry someone through miles of wilderness trails without making a lot of noise?” Jill asked. “The fact that the dogs haven’t found Carissa yet probably means she was taken elsewhere, and it’s unlikely she walked there herself. They could have followed her scent.”

      “What else did the searchers find?” Noelle asked.

      Jill closed her eyes for half a second, then opened them and held Noelle’s gaze. Sorrowful. Suddenly gentle. “Taylor Jackson, one of the rangers, he found blood on the sawmill floor. Looks like someone was injured.”

      “Maybe one of the employees was injured yesterday,” Noelle said.

      “Taylor asked all of them, and no one was.”

      “Okay, but that doesn’t automatically mean it was Carissa,” Noelle said.

      “We’ll find out before long.” Jill lifted her hair from her neck and stretched her muscles. “I know we can’t go jumping to conclusions.” She said the words quickly, as if she’d been repeating them over and over to the others. “We can’t let ourselves get discouraged and stop searching.”

      “Speaking of which,” Noelle said, “that’s what I came here to do. I’d better get to it.”

      “Okay, but first will you let Melva know you’re here?” Jill asked. “She’s been wanting to call you since last night—as if one more person searching would make any difference.” The lines around Jill’s shadowed blue eyes deepened with concern. She touched Noelle’s shoulder. “You okay?”

      “I’m fine. I just wish you’d called me last night.”

      “We kept thinking we’d find her quickly. I didn’t want to upset you over nothing.” Jill frowned and pushed at her short brown hair—which had grown out a couple of inches, and no longer resembled a hard hat as much as it did a lion’s mane. “Cecil’s still blaming himself for sending her out for the ledger. Silly, I know, but I’ve struggled with the same problem. We let her go out there after dark.”

      “Don’t be ridiculous,” Noelle said. “Nathan told me she was going out there anyway. She’s twelve years old, not a little child. Where were you when she disappeared?”

      “I’d gone up to our old house to find some other ledgers upstairs.” Jill glanced over her shoulder through the screen door, lowering her voice. “We’ve been entering this year’s records on computer and trying to justify them with the records from the accountant—you knew he died, didn’t you? Anyway, there’s a discrepancy of fifteen thousand dollars, and we can’t seem to find it. That’s why we asked Carissa to get the ledger from the office at the sawmill. Turns out she had the wrong one, anyway. It was from ten years ago.”

      “I’ll go have a word with Melva, then hit the trail.” Noelle gave her sister’s shoulder another squeeze, then opened the screen door and stepped inside.

      Nathan leaned against the porch railing, arms folded across his chest in an automatic gesture of self-protection as he watched Jill pace the length of the porch. The chilled morning air hung heavy and thick in the sunlight that gleamed on her dark hair.

      “You didn’t tell me you were going to get Noelle,” she said at last.

      He glanced toward the Coopers’ open front door. “I wasn’t sure she could get away from the store, but I felt she needed to know about Carissa.”

      Jill’s boots made little noise on the concrete porch. She turned to face Nathan across the half width of the house. “I had reasons for not wanting her here. She had a bad time right after the accident.”

      “Of course she did. The whole family did. Why single out Noelle?” Nathan had to struggle to keep his voice low. “She’s a grown woman, and she needs to be treated like one.”

      “Oh, for pity’s sake, I know that, but why should she have to trudge all the way down here when half of Hideaway’s already out looking for the child?”

      “Noelle is family. She needs to be treated like family, or you’ll be wasting your time trying to get her to move back here and work at the clinic.”

      Jill paused, gazing down the lane again. “Maybe she shouldn’t come back here,” she said slowly.

      This was a drastic about-face. “But I thought you were trying to—”

      “Never mind what I was trying to do.” Jill stepped to the end of the porch, away from the screen door, and gestured, with a jerk of her head for him to join her.

      He obeyed.

      “After the sawmill accident, the grief almost killed her,” Jill said softly.

      “Of course it did. We were all stricken.”

      “But it was worse for Noelle. She went into a deep depression, had awful nightmares, told me she woke up screaming every night for the first month after the funerals.”

      “She had a lot of other things on her mind at the time, and besides, she’s not the same person she was ten years ago.” He hesitated. “Did she say what the dreams were about?”

      “She kept reliving the accident, as if she were one of the victims watching the logs tumble onto her. She had to quit her job, which really threw that ex-husband of hers into a tizzy, because at the time they were dependent on her income to support them—and his drug habit.” Jill’s voice dripped with disdain.

      “Did she get professional help?”

      “Oh, she went to her family doctor, and he prescribed an antidepressant. She took it for three weeks, then flushed the rest down the toilet. She said it made her ears ring. You know how independent she can be.”

      “She takes after her sister.”

      Jill gave him a half-hearted scowl.

      “Did the antidepressant help her at all?” he asked.

      “Are you kidding? After just three weeks?” Jill snorted. “I even got some of that herbal stuff Pearl’s always trying to push off on everyone. Noelle still had the nightmares for a long time afterward.”

      “She told me a little about that time,” Nathan said.

      “Now it’ll start all over. What’s she going to do when she wakes up in the middle of the night and finds herself alone?”

      “Jill, Noelle is a big girl. She can take care of herself.” He studied Jill’s expression for a moment. She didn’t look at him, but kept her gaze focused on the trees across the road.

      There was something about her behavior that caught his attention. She stood with her shoulders hunched forward, arms crossed, head bowed slightly. What wasn’t she telling him? He knew better than to ask.

      “You can’t shield her from pain by building a wall around her,” he said.

      “I’m not building a wall, I’m just—”

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