Dead Ringer. B.J. Daniels

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      “Jim, if this is about legal business—”

      The attorney swore. “It’s about the kidnapping. You might recall that we originally used my number to screen the calls about the twins. Well, I am apparently still on the list. I was contacted.” He paused, no doubt for effect. “I have reason to believe that Oakley has been found.”

      “Found?” Ledger asked, his heart in his throat. The twenty-fifth anniversary of the crime had come and gone, but after their father had hired a true-crime writer to investigate and write a book about it, new evidence had turned up.

      That new evidence had led them all to believe that his father’s gut instinct was right. The twins were alive—and probably adopted out to good families, though illegally. The McGraw twins had been just six months old when they were stolen from their cribs. The ransom money had never been spent and had only recently turned up—with the body of one of the kidnappers. That left whoever had helped him take the babies still at large.

      Ledger was thankful that he’d been the one to answer the phone. His father didn’t need this kind of aggravation. “All those calls are now being vetted by the sheriff’s department. I suggest you have this person contact Sheriff McCall Crawford. If she thinks—”

      “He has the stuffed toy horse,” Waters interrupted. “I’ve seen it. It’s Oakley’s.”

      Ledger felt a shock wave move through him. The stuffed toy horse was a critical piece of information that hadn’t originally been released to the public. Was it possible his little brother really had turned up? “Are you sure? There must have been thousands of those produced.”

      “Not with a certain ribbon tied around its neck.” The information about the missing stuffed animal was recently released to the press—sans anything about the ribbon and other things about this specific toy. “Oakley’s stuffed horse had a black saddle and a small tear where the stitching had been missed when it was made, right?”

      He nodded to himself before saying, “You say you’ve seen it?” It was that small detail that no one would know unless they had Oakley’s horse, which had been taken out of his crib along with him that night twenty-five years ago. “Have you met him?”

      “I have. He sent me a photo of the stuffed horse. When I recognized it, I drove down to talk to him. Ledger, he swears he’s had the stuffed horse since he was a baby.”

      Letting out a breath, he dropped into a nearby chair. A few months ago they’d learned that the babies might have been left with a member of the Whitehorse Sewing Circle, a group of older women quilters who placed unwanted babies with families desperate for a child. The quilting group had been operating illegally for decades.

      Not that the twins had been unwanted. But the kidnapper had been led to believe that was the case. The hope had been that the babies had been well taken care of and that they were still alive, the theory being that they had no idea they’d been kidnapped. His father had made the decision to release more information about what had been taken along with the babies in the hopes that the twins would see it and come forward.

      And now it had happened.

      “What’s his name?” Ledger asked as he gave himself a few minutes to take this all in and decide what to do. He didn’t want to bother his father with this unless he was sure it wasn’t a hoax.

      “He goes by Vance Elliot. He’s in Whitehorse. He wants to see your father.”

      * * *

      “ABBY DOESN’T REMEMBER ANYTHING,” Wade said as he walked past his father straight into the kitchen to pull a can of beer out of the refrigerator.

      He popped the top, took a long swig and turned to find his father standing in the kitchen doorway frowning at him.

      “I’ll pay you back,” he said, thinking the look was because he was drinking his old man’s beer.

      “What do you mean she doesn’t remember anything?”

      “I was skeptical at first, too,” he said, drawing out a chair and spinning it around so he could straddle it backward at the table. “But when I told her she fell off a ladder in the garage, she bought it. She couldn’t remember why she would have been on a ladder in the garage. I told her she was going to get jars to put up some peach jam.”

      Huck Pierce wagged his head. “Where in the hell would she get peaches this time of year?”

      “How should I know? It doesn’t matter. She’s not putting up any jam. Nor is she saying a word about anything.”

      “You are one lucky son of a gun, then,” Huck said.

      “Don’t I know it? So everything is cool, right?”

      “Seems so. But I want you to stay by your wife’s side. Keep everything as normal as possible. Stick to your story. If she starts to remember...” He shrugged. “We’ll deal with it if we have to.”

      Wade downed the rest of his beer, needing it even though he was technically on duty at the sheriff’s department. He didn’t want his father to see how relieved he was. Or how worried about what would happen if Abby remembered what had really happened to her.

      “Great, so I get to hang out at the hospital until my shift starts. That place gives me the creeps.”

      “You’re the one who screwed everything up. You knew what was at stake,” his father said angrily.

      “Exactly.” Wade knew he couldn’t win in an argument with his father, but that didn’t stop him. “So what was I supposed to do when she confronted me? I tried to reason with her, but you know how she is. She was threatening to call the sheriff. Or go running to her old boyfriend Ledger McGraw. I didn’t have a choice but to try to stop her.”

      “What you’re saying is that you can’t handle your wife. At least you don’t have some snot-nosed mouthy kid like I did.”

      “Yeah, thanks,” he said, crushing the beer can in his hand. “I’ve heard all about how hard it was raising me.” He reached in the refrigerator for another beer, knowing he shouldn’t, but needing the buzz badly.

      Before he could pull one out, his father slammed the refrigerator door, almost crushing his hand. “Get some gum. You can’t have beer on your breath when you go back to the hospital, let alone come to work later. Remember, you’re the worried husband, you damned fool.”

      * * *

      LEDGER HAD JUST hung up with the attorney when he got the call from his friend who worked at the hospital.

      “I shouldn’t be calling you, but thought you’d want to know,” she said, keeping her voice down. “Abby was brought in.”

      “That son of a—”

      “He swears she fell off a ladder.”

      “Sure she did. I’ll be right there. Is Wade—”

      “He just left to go work his shift at the sheriff’s department. The doctor is keeping Abby overnight.”

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