Broken Bonds. Karen Harper

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СКАЧАТЬ but can I do any sniffing around while I’m out and about for Royce? I’m thinking it could be a local redneck who hates the fracking but hit you instead of Royce since I’m guarding him.”

      “I only saw the guy’s eyes at a distance—through two windshields and my own panic. You’d better leave things to the police. But thanks for being concerned, Orlando.”

      “Well, sure I am. I know how much you mean to the boss, like the son he never had, he said. He keeps me pretty tight to him, but let me know if I can help—that’s all,” he said, and went out.

      Matt felt good Orlando had made the effort and the offer. Matt knew he thought Royce spent too much time here in the boondocks, as he’d overheard him call Cold Creek—that is, until everyone on Royce’s payroll except Matt, who had opted out, starting profiting from the local fracking boom. Matt wondered if Royce had offered Orlando a big piece of that action. But since Matt himself had turned that down, he decided not to ask.

      * * *

      After Char dropped off the arrow at the sheriff’s office—Gabe was out on a domestic dispute call—she headed for Grant Mason’s home, where Kate was overseeing the dig of an ancient Adena mound, practically outside her fiancé’s back door. Kate was always good at thinking her way through things, and Char knew she could use some help.

      As usual, there were several trucks and a car parked in the loop of driveway before the large, handsome house. The front door was locked, so rather than ring the bell, Char walked around back.

      “Hi, Kaitlyn. Is Kate here?” Char asked Kate’s right-hand woman, Kaitlyn Blake. The grad student resembled Kate in coloring, in personality—even in name. Sometimes Char was felt slightly jealous of Kaitlyn since Kate seemed like a big sister to her. But, just like Grant Mason’s love, Kaitlyn’s friendship had helped Kate get through some recent betrayals and hard times.

      “Oh, hi, Char. She’s sifting out some debris for teeth and bone fragments. And probably muttering under her breath about how much the undergrads working here have to learn, or about the cave-in, which set things so far back. I’ll go get her.”

      Char sat on a patio chair and watched the busy scene until Kate appeared, looking dusty and sweaty but happy. “We’ve got a complete female skeleton, the first one!” Kate greeted her, clapping dirt off her hands. “And we’ve found what I think are the charred remains of a young male, who was probably a slave sacrifice. So, you aren’t heading back out to try to face down the person I’d like most to sacrifice—Bright Star Monson?”

      “No. I’m going to give that a little time, but I am determined to talk to Grace alone somehow—when we’re not being spied on. Kate, I went out with Matt Rowan last night and—”

      “Great! That’s worth sharing,” she said, beaming at her. Big sister Kate had always worried that her two younger sisters wouldn’t be happy because of their tough childhood when Tess was taken and then Dad left them.

      “Just listen for a minute. Matt and I were standing outside the door of my cabin...” Char’s voice trailed off. Well, she might as well just spit it out.

      But before she could continue, Kate spoke. “You moved in. Okay, I didn’t think you should, but you’re a big girl now.”

      “Thank you! Anyhow, someone shot an arrow into the door right between us.”

      “What? On top of his almost going off the cliff? Are you okay? You look all right. I’d hug you if I wasn’t a mess. Who was it? Who did it?”

      “We don’t know or Gabe would probably have him—or her—under arrest. I thought I’d bounce some ideas off you if you have a second.”

      “Sure. Shoot—I mean talk.”

      Char explained about Henry Hanson being out hunting with a bow when she visited his family and that he might be angry with her for interfering in his daughter’s life. She figured he could be a stalker of people as well as game, maybe an abuser of his wife, at the very least. She mentioned the archery range at Lake Azure and the fact someone could still have been after Matt, not her. She told her they saw two deer shortly after the shot, so it could have been a hunter’s arrow that went awry. But she couldn’t bring herself to mention how it seemed to her that Matt had blinked his lights as if it might be a signal to someone—nor how he, like her own family, didn’t want her to stay in the cabin, wanted her to move down to an empty house at Lake Azure and had really pushed for that after the arrow hit.

      “So you went back to Tess’s,” Kate said when Char took a breath. “Told Gabe what happened and slept there.”

      “No, Matt insisted on sleeping on the couch and nothing happened—you know what I mean.”

      Kate rolled her eyes. “You know, you left out Bright Star’s possibly being ticked at all of us, but especially you after you discovered that peephole. The Hear Ye faithful are supposed to be peace-loving folk, but I wouldn’t put it past him to have weapons to ‘smite’ his enemy. You did see those Bible quotes about hunting on the walls of that room, didn’t you—could he be hunting people?”

      Char’s stomach went into free fall. “I saw them but didn’t read them, except for the one extolling himself. Hunting quotes—from the Bible?”

      “Right. You’ve heard that the devil can cite scripture for his own purpose, haven’t you?”

      “Can you recall what the wall plaques said?”

      “I looked them up. Just a sec, and I’ll get what I printed out. It was a pretty easy search.”

      While Kate darted inside, Char got up to pace. Too much was happening too fast, and she couldn’t just keep running to her sisters. She’d like to run to Matt but could she trust him? At least the way they met could hardly be a setup.

      Kate rushed back out with a single sheet of paper. “You know, we found a couple of intact Adena arrows in the tomb,” she said as she passed the paper to Char. “That’s apropos of nothing, just crazed archaeologist trivia. Check out that first quote from the book of Jeremiah.”

      Char read aloud.

      “I will send for many hunters and they shall hunt from every mountain and hill, and out of the holes of the rocks.”

      “Sounds like this terrain around here, doesn’t it?” Kate asked. She leaned in, looking over Char’s shoulder and pointed at the next one, from Psalms 140. She read it out.

      “Let not a slanderer be established in the earth. Let evil hunt the violent man to overthrow him.”

      “Creepy, huh? Bright Star probably considers all of us slanderers if we don’t support him and his lunatic ways.”

      “Or if we try to take someone like Grace and Lee away from him.”

      Char read the last one from Lamentations aloud.

      “They tracked our steps so that we could not walk in our streets. Our end was near, our days were over, for our end had come.”

      She shook her head. “Kate, I agree he’s crazy, but I can’t see him—or one of his hunters—whoever that would be—stalking me. They wouldn’t even know where to find СКАЧАТЬ