The Christmas Target. Shirlee McCoy

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СКАЧАТЬ wasn’t sure why that made her feel resentful. Maybe because she often found herself doing the wrong thing. Or maybe because he’d done so many right things the few times they’d dated, and she’d still managed to chase him away.

      She stood, her toes curling as her feet hit cold wood.

      No sense lying in bed fretting about things she couldn’t change. She’d be better off making a pot of coffee and finishing up the last of the three hundred thank-you notes she’d been writing out since Granddad’s funeral. Keep busy. It had been her motto for as long as she could remember. Especially this time of year.

      Wind rattled the old wooden panes and whistled beneath the eaves, the sounds nearly covering another more subtle one. Floorboards creaking? A door opening?

      Beatrice?

      Had she woken already?

      Stella stepped into the dark hall, not bothering with the light. She’d walked through the drafty house thousands of times during the years she’d lived there. She’d memorized the wide hallway, the landing, the stairs and the banister. She knew how many doors were on each side of the hallway and which ones creaked when they opened.

      Beatrice slept in the room at the far end of the hall, and Stella went there, knocking on the thick wood door. When Beatrice didn’t answer, she turned the old crystal knob and stepped into the room.

      “Nana?” she whispered into the darkness, shivering as cold air seeped through her flannel pajamas.

      Cold air?

      She flicked on the light, her heart stopping when she saw the empty bed, the billowing curtains.

      She yanked back gauzy white fabric, nearly sagging with relief when she saw the window screen still in place, the mesh flecked with fat snowflakes.

      “Nana!” Stella called, throwing open the closet door. Just in case. Her grandmother had gotten lost walking through the house recently. One day she hadn’t been able to find the kitchen. Another day, she’d stood in the hallway, confused about which room she slept in.

      “Nana!” Stella yelled it this time, the name echoing through the house as she ran out of the room. She could hear the panic in her voice, could feel it thrumming through her blood. She never panicked. Ever. But she felt frantic, terrified.

      “Beatrice!” She yanked open the linen closet, the door to the spare room, the bathroom door.

      She thought she heard a faint response. Maybe from the kitchen at the back of the house.

      She barreled down the stairs and into the large foyer.

      The front door was closed, the bolt locked. Just the way she’d left it. She could feel cold air wafting through the hallway, though, and she spun on her heel, sprinting into the kitchen.

      The back door yawned open, the porch beyond it covered with a thin layer of snow. She thought she could see footprints pressed into the vivid white, and she shoved her feet into old galoshes, ran outside.

      There! Just like she’d thought. Footprints tracking across the porch and down into the yard. She should have called for help. The practical part of her—the part that was trained as a trauma nurse, who knew protocol and statistics and the necessity of using the brain instead of the heart during stressful times—understood that. The other part, the part that only cared about finding Beatrice as quickly as possible, was calculating just how far an eighty-one-year-old with Alzheimer’s could go in the time it took to make a phone call and get the police involved.

      Pretty far.

      Especially when going just a couple of hundred yards would mean entering thousands of acres of forest.

      “Nana!” Stella screamed, sure that she saw a shadow moving at the back edge of the yard. The woods began there—deep and thick, butting up against the state forest, crisscrossed with tributaries of the Patuxent. An easy place to get lost and hurt. Especially if a person was elderly and frail, and probably not dressed for the weather.

      Stella ran toward the trees, hoping the shadow she’d seen had been her grandmother. Praying, because that’s what Beatrice would have wanted her to do. It’s what Henry would have expected her to do. Granddad had been a retired preacher. After watching his son take over the pulpit, he’d planned to spend time going on mission trips, traveling with his wife, enjoying the fruit of a life well lived. He’d ended up raising Stella instead.

      He’d never complained about that.

      He’d never accused God of unfairness, never said he’d been given a rough shake.

      He’d believed that everything happened for a reason, and that good could be found in the most trying circumstance if a person took the time to look for it. He’d been an eternal optimist, because he’d believed that God’s will trumped all else.

      Stella was a pessimist. Mostly because she believed the same thing.

      She reached the edge of the yard and found footprints in the snow there, nearly covered by a fresh dusting of white. She should have grabbed her cell phone on the way out. She should have grabbed a coat. A flashlight. Warmer clothes.

      Rookie mistakes, but she was committed now. She couldn’t let Beatrice get any farther ahead. She plunged into the thick foliage, branches catching on her hair and tugging at her skin. She thought she heard a car engine, was sure she heard voices coming from the front yard.

      No one should be anywhere near the house. They were too far from town for random strangers to show up and none of Beatrice’s friends would be out at this time of morning.

      Stella would have checked things out, but she had one goal—finding her grandmother.

      “Nana!” she shouted.

      To her left, branches snapped, and she turned, certain Beatrice would be there.

      “What are you doing out—”

      Someone lunged from the darkness. Not an eighty-one-year-old; this person moved fast, flying toward Stella, swinging something at her head.

      She had a second to react, one heartbeat to duck. The blow glanced off her temple, sent her reeling. She fell into a tree, slid to the ground, but all she could think about was Beatrice. Out in the woods. Near the creek.

      She scrambled up, blocked another blow. Dizzy from the first, disoriented, fighting because she’d been trained to do it. Blood in her eyes, sliding down her cheeks, blinding her in the swirling snow. Nana, Nana, Nana, chanting through her head.

      She landed one blow, then another. She felt something behind her—someone. No time to duck, just searing pain, and she was falling into darkness.

      * * *

      Something was wrong. Chance Miller felt it the way he felt the frigid air and the falling snow. He rounded the side of the huge old house, Simon Welsh at his side, Boone Anderson still at the front door, ringing the bell. For the tenth time.

      There was no way Stella had slept through the noise.

      She didn’t sleep. Not much. When she did, she slept lightly, every noise waking her. He’d learned that during long flights across the Pacific Ocean and long journeys СКАЧАТЬ