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Chapter 75 - Rescue Detail

Tamara had a dreamless night; at least she had no memory of any dreams. After breakfast Thursday morning, she took out the map she had been using and looked at the trails which led north. About two miles north, there was a small group of houses with a through road nearby. The terrain to the north of the cabin was very hilly with steep 800-foot elevation changes in places. Hiking that way, she realized, she would need to be very careful and stick to the trails. Packing her backpack with several sandwiches, four water bottles, and a few energy bars, she set out mid-morning, after mapping out about a four-hour hike. She found these hikes to be very calming to her spirit and allowed her to let her thoughts roam freely.

The scenery was incredible, especially when she topped a ridge line and looked out across the steep hills and valleys to the north of the ridge where she stood. She hiked on and had gotten about half-way in her planned route when something disrupted the peacefulness of her surroundings—it was the unfamiliar sense of the presence of emotion in this otherwise tranquil environment. The emotions were ones of fear and exhaustion, and they were strong. The source seemed stronger in the direction in which she was heading, so Tamara continued along the trail, which ran parallel to a ridge line as it descended into a glen where her map showed that a creek flowed.

She walked carefully here because the terrain dropped off steeply to her right and the vegetation to the left was dense and, she noted, was dominated by hawthorn bushes with their long, sharp thorns. When she got to the creek, she looked around.

Someone’s around here, she thought. Close by. But I don’t see anyone.

She walked a short distance further and could definitely sense that she had passed the location of the emotional source. Turning around, she carefully crept back, scanning the area first visually and then using her empathic sensitivity. There, concealed under a dense hawthorn bush, she could barely see a small figure hiding. The fear pouring from the figure became intense as Tamara stopped at the bush.

“Are you hurt? I mean no harm,” Tamara said softly. “I’m just a girl on a hike and I’m alone. You’re terribly scared, I can see, and I can help you. Are you injured? Hungry?”

Two eyes appeared, peering at her from inside the bush. Tamara realized that this person had the same chameleon ability to disappear in plain sight that she herself had; that’s why Tamara couldn’t visually see the person until she used her empathic senses too.

“You can come out. I can tell that there’s no one around here anywhere, for miles, except us. Watch those nasty thorns! How did you get in there without getting stabbed, anyway?”

Gradually the person carefully slid out and Tamara saw numerous little cuts on their wrists and hands.

“You’ve got a bunch of cuts and scrapes,” she said. “I have some antibiotic cream I can put on,” she said as the person began to stand.

When the person pushed back the hood of their sweatshirt, Tamara saw it was a girl, about five feet, four inches tall, and she couldn’t be more than fifteen years old.

“C... c... can you really help? I’m s... s... so scared...” she said, trembling.

“Oh, you poor thing!” Tamara exclaimed, taking out a tube of antibiotic and handing it to her. “Put this on those scratches. Tell me what’s wrong.”

“He’s chasing me. I... I think he knows this... this area ... and it was the only way ... way in here.”

“Okay, sweetie. I can tell that no one’s within maybe a mile or two of here right now, at least,” Tamara assured her. “Are you hurt anywhere? Can you walk?”

“Y... yeah. Th... thirsty though. I was g... gonna get a drink from the creek but heard you coming.”

“Oh! I have two water bottles and some energy bars.”

Tamara got them out of her pack and handed one each to her.

“Don’t drink it all at once, drink a little as we walk, sweetie. Let’s get you back to the cabin where I’m staying. And let’s go quickly; it’s a two-hour hike back and we’ll talk later. Save your breath for the hike. Oh, I’m Tamara. Tamara Alexandre. What’s your name?”

“It’s Awinita Nelsey. ‘Nita’ for short but Papa called me ‘Winnie,’” she said and began crying.

Tamara hugged her, and as soon as she made contact, Tamara immediately knew why she was crying. “I’m so sorry... you lost your daddy, right?” Tamara asked sympathetically.

Winnie wiped her eyes. “It was Granddad—Papa. I don’t remember my dad. Papa raised me.”

“Nita, I kinda sense that your name ‘Winnie’ is special to you. Can I call you that?”

She smiled weakly at Tamara and whispered, “Yes, I would like that.”

“Let’s talk more later. Walk now, okay?”

Winnie nodded, took a sip of water and a big bite of the energy bar, and the two set out.

The route Tamara had planned was a little shorter on the leg going back to the cabin, so they arrived back in less than two hours. Then, while Tamara began to put together a meal for dinner, she had Winnie sit at the table with a cup of hot soup and tell her story.

“First, sweetie, and most important, who’s chasing you?” Tamara asked.

“The group home witch sold me to this evil man,” Winnie began crying again. “I got away from him when he stopped at a convenience store so I could use the toilet there. I climbed out the window and got into the forest right behind the store. Then down a very steep hill. Then I followed the low areas till I got to where you found me.”

“Jeez. When was this? The closest store like that must be five or six miles from where you were.”

“I was in the woods two days,” Winnie told her.

“And two nights?”

Winnie nodded. “I know woodcraft. I ate berries and some mushrooms I found. Papa taught me all our traditions. I’m Cherokee. But Papa was the last of my family here and I have no relatives.”

“Oh right, your name. It’s Awinnie or...?”

“Awinita. Cherokee for ‘dove.’”

“Ah, pardon my ignorance, but don’t the Cherokee mostly live elsewhere? I thought they were in Oklahoma,” Tamara asked.

“My people had a very bad treatment by the government. Did you ever hear of the ‘Trail of Tears’?”

“Oh! Yes I did. That was your people?”

“Yes and the Chickasaw, Choctaw, Winnebago, Muscogee, Seminole nations, and others I can’t recall, were forced too. They were forced by the Army to walk to Oklahoma and maybe 50,000 people died on the way there. Some of the original Cherokees, families who escaped being forced to walk to Oklahoma, still live in places in our original territory—it was big, from Alabama to West Virginia, mostly in the Appalachians. Papa told me the Cherokee names that we use now for what happened then. One is ‘nu na da ul tsun yi’ which means ‘the place where they cried.’ But he said most Cherokee call it ‘tlo va sa,’ that’s ‘our removal.’ Papa thought that it was the Choctaw that first used those terms for being forced to leave our homes.

“I know that I have no relatives at all left in West Virginia although Papa knew of a couple other Cherokee families in the county. I never met them, though. Oh, there’s a Cherokee reservation in North Carolina; I recall him telling me about that.”

“All right then, so your papa passed away? That’s so sad. What happened?” Tamara asked as she came over to take Winnie’s hand.

She sent a small amount of a silver healing taste and a green calming taste to her and Winnie startled.

“Tamara? What did you do just then?” she asked, suddenly frightened.

“Oh shit. Did you feel that? I’m so sorry; I was trying to reassure you and calm you; you’re still on edge. Still scared deep down.”

“I am. But you did something that Papa taught me how to do and he said that it was a tribal secret, passed down by the medicine man. No white person was ever told the secret... um, you’re not white, but...” Winnie ran down.

Tamara pulled up the other chair and sat right in front of Winnie.

“True, I’m not a Caucasian. My ancestors are African, but I’m from Haiti—Caribbean, you know?”

Winnie nodded.

“So we have a religion in Haiti; it comes from Africa, and some of our priestesses know how to project certain emotional feelings. That’s what I did just then. Other cultures have people who can do that too, and when we have time, we need to talk about what you learned ‘cause it looks like we learned the very same things, but as taught by our own native cultures. Deal?”

Winnie nodded again and began to cry and Tamara got up and held her.

“Sorry for all the crying... It’s been an awful two years—more than two—and now finding someone who’s like me is overwhelming,” Winnie whispered.

Tamara urged her to get up and sit on the edge of one of the beds with her; then she put her arm around Winnie’s shoulder.

“Tell me what happened when your papa passed away, sweetie,” Tamara urged. “If you can.”

“It’s okay, I think I can. He was having indigestion for two days but wouldn’t go to the clinic,” Winnie said. “We lived in a little house and had an acre of land. Raised vegetables and that and Papa’s pension was our support.”

“Where was this?” Tamara asked.

“Randall County.”

“West Virginia?”

“Yeah. And the next morning, he wouldn’t wake up,” she sobbed.

“Terrible. Heart attack?”

“That’s what I heard. The county took me over and put me in a temporary home. The social worker said that they’d sell the homestead, we had no savings that they could find, and use the money to support me in a foster home.”

“I wonder whether that’s legal to do,” Tamara mused.

“It couldn’t have been worth much. We weren’t near any town, just on the road through a holler. Our place was on a lick, a little wider, with three little farms along it.”

“A remote area.”

“Yeah. But most of West Virginia is remote. All mountains. Then I got sent to a temporary foster home while they looked for something more permanent. After getting sent to another temporary one, I got put in this group home in the county and the case worker told me that the home had a good record of placements—what a crock.”

“Is that adoptions?” Tamara asked.

“That, or permanent foster homes with a real family. Anyway, the group home manager was a real witch. We had to do all of the housekeeping and cooking. When we came back from school, we got searched for any contraband—anything that she didn’t want us to have. And those placements...” Winnie shuddered.

“What? What happened there?” Tamara asked, alarmed now.

“We—the other girls—thought that they were selling the girls. Ones who were... the witch said were ‘placed’ ... they didn’t come back and we didn’t hear about them. Every month, the witch lined up us girls...”

“The group home was all girls?”

“Yeah. She took thirteen and up. So we were lined up and couples or sometimes single men would come in and look at us. They’d pick a girl to talk to, and sometimes, maybe a week later, that girl would be gone. The witch said she got placed. We thought the right word was ‘sold’ ‘cause none of the adults who looked at us were family types. They all had a evil feeling about them.”

“Damn, this sounds like a sex-trafficking operation,” Tamara mused.

“Or a slave? That’s what some girls thought.”

“I need to get the details from you, Winnie. Where the group home’s located, stuff like that. But what happened with you?”

“Yeah, this creepy guy picked me last week. We hadn’t seen him before—oh, not every one of the adults did select a girl. That only happened, um, six or seven times in the two years I was there. This guy picked me—must have been with my picture ‘cause he just showed up. He came to the home a few days ago and I swear that I could hear him discussing a price with the witch. I have really good hearing. So I began thinking about how to get away and if I had to get into the countryside, I needed layers of clothes. That’s what I’m wearing now—four layers.”

“That’s very resourceful, Winnie,” Tamara told her. “So do you think that he’ll try to find you?”

“I heard him shouting when I was climbing down that steep slope behind the store that he was gonna track me and that I couldn’t get far in these hills. He was right; there’s lots of impassible terrain here, and when I tried to use the road, I didn’t see any cars other than his and some locals. I didn’t want to chance their finding me and kept to the woods, but the terrain forced me to stay along that run—stream. Then this morning, I thought I heard hounds barking, so I think he is gonna try to track me. You found me as I was trying to head south to find a road into any town to the south of there.”

“Hmm, okay. Hounds are good at tracking, but we crossed two streams coming here, and your path joined up with mine. That should confuse them.”

“I crossed a stream too, several times.”

“That’s good, it helps. I’ll be moving from here on Saturday morning. I think that they can’t track us to here before that. Will you come with me? I know people who will be able to protect you and I have enough resources to make sure you’ll have a much better life. Please come with me, Winnie.”

She began crying again. “You can protect me? You promise?”

“Absolutely.”

“I can’t thank you enough, then.”

“I want to help those other girls in the group home too, Winnie. We have to stop terrible things like that from happening. Anyway, the owner of the cabin will be here on Saturday and that’s when we’ll leave. I live in the Baltimore area and that’s where we’ll go on Saturday. I’ll bet that the law says that you’d have to return to that county... no, don’t worry, I wouldn’t do that ever... I think that there’s a real problem in that county, so we’re getting you out of there.”

The rest of the evening after dinner, the two girls spoke and exchanged their stories, Tamara telling her about her life in Miami and then in college. Winnie spoke about her life, but especially the teaching her grandfather had done with her. He had been a game warden for almost thirty years and for the past ten or so, the state had renamed the position a “natural resources police officer.” He had taught his granddaughter the traditional woodcraft skills of living in the wild. Winnie’s grandfather’s own grandfather had been a medicine man and he had learned much about those traditional practices, passed down through his grandfather to her father, who taught them to Winnie. Tamara found out that Winnie, like her grandfather, had a superb memory; cultures with no widespread writing traditions tended to value good memory skills. Thus Winnie had been a very good student. They talked far into the night.

Tamara had a blanket in her SUV and Winnie went to sleep on one of the beds, wrapped in it. She was amused that Tamara still chose to sleep on the floor, but recognized something similar to her own traditions, in seeing Tamara following that practice now.

The following morning after breakfast, Winnie convinced Tamara that she should do her last planned day of meditation and Tamara told her that she meditated while hiking.

“I did that too, Tamara,” Winnie told her. “The lesser spirits live in the woods and I’m their friend. If I’m quiet, can I walk with you?”

“Oh sure. Oh my, we have so much to share about our traditions, Winnie,” Tamara said as she hugged her.

About two hours into the hike, they could hear the hounds.

“Shit,” Tamara hissed. “They must have run them all night long; I never expected that. That’s coming from the direction of the glen where I found you.”

Winnie began to tremble and Tamara took her arm.

“They’re maybe a bit more than two hours from the cabin,” Tamara told her. “We’re forty-five minutes away from there. If they do come, I’ve got a nasty surprise waiting.”

Winnie looked at her hopefully. “You mean that you won’t try to drive away in your car?”

“I could, Winnie, but I’d have to leave a bunch of stuff behind and your jerk might be angry enough to vandalize the cabin. Besides, I’m sure that the law would call him a kidnapper and this way, I’ll get him.”

“He’s a big lug, Tamara,” she warned, twisting her hands.

“So he’ll fall harder,” Tamara tried to joke but Winnie wasn’t convinced.

They hurried back to the cabin. When they got there, Tamara opened her backpack and took out a can of bear spray.

“Here’s a great weapon, sweetie. Bear spray in someone’s face is completely disabling, if the guy gets past me, but he won’t. I was kidnapped once myself and I handled them without getting hurt...”

Winnie grabbed her arm. “You were? Wow... okay, if you did, I can too. Give me the can.”

“I’ll take care of the kidnapper. But the dog handler, and I assume there must be one, might try to get to you. It’s not his fight so I don’t think that he’ll be a threat. If he does try to get into the cabin, shoot him with the spray. I’ll handle your tormentor.”

“I’m scared, so please protect me. But don’t let him hurt you,” Winnie cried and hugged Tamara.

Tamara got her into the cabin and showed her how to wedge a chair against the door; that would slow someone down for perhaps thirty seconds and Tamara felt that would be enough. She had two versions of a new device she had developed after the attack on her; each could restrain a person. She wondered about the dogs—were they just trackers or would they attack too?

Recalling just how sensitive hounds’ noses were, she thought she could deal with them at a distance. Since they were following a human scent, then they were sensitive to human hormonal secretions and those were mainly based on the steroid ring structure.

I’ll bet that I can overload the hounds’ olfactory tracts if I “push” some color tastes, she thought.

Tamara also recalled that some animals were sensitive enough that they could detect tiny concentrations of pheromones in the air, kilometers distant from their source. The hounds were much closer than that now. So she would wait outside the cabin until she could be sure that the breeze would carry the scent in the hounds’ direction.

Ten minutes later, she heard a change in pitch and volume of the braying and she figured that this signaled that the hounds had found a fresh trail. Looking in that direction, she gathered her energy and “pushed” in their direction the biggest cloud of greenish-brown streaked with yellow that she had ever tried to make before.

Let’s see how hounds handle confusion and fear and even whether or not it works on dogs. Hey, maybe I’ll try just fear too. That’s more primal.

She took another mass of energy—suddenly realizing that she was actually tapping the energy from around her—wow—and sent an even larger cloud of pale yellow toward the braying hounds. For good measure, she followed that up with a cloud of pink with streaks of brown.

We’ll see if nausea affects dogs too, she chuckled evilly.

Several minutes later, the sounds coming from the hounds had changed markedly; instead of the braying, the hounds were barking and yapping and their volume had decreased. And suddenly, into the cabin’s clearing, two men came through the tree line, one of them holding a number of long leashes. He was attempting to drag some hounds along with him and the hounds were apparently having none of that. The dogs were clearly pulling back against being dragged along and several were whining, whimpering, and snarling.

Something worked, Tamara thought smugly, as she “pushed” another cloud of pale yellow toward them.

About fifteen seconds later, four of the dogs broke loose of their leads and began to run back in the direction from where they came. The guy holding the leads turned and began to follow them and the other guy shouted for him to stop.

“Cain’t! Gonna lose ma hounds! They’s never done this befoa—som’tin’s spooked ‘em real bad!”

And he was gone. His other dogs followed him away quite willingly.

The remaining guy walked toward the cabin as Tamara started the voice recording app running on her phone.

“Hey, girl,” he called. “Lookin’ for a teen girl, a runaway. The hounds knew that she was close before they had a fit, or whatever. I know she’s gotta be around—in that cabin, I’ll bet.”

“What’s your relation to her?” Tamara called back. “You look nothing like her.”

“I’m her guardian—adopted her. She ran away from me and I want her back.”

“Oh, so you think that she’s a possession then?” Tamara answered.

“Listen, cunt, she’s my property and if you try to stop me from recovering what’s mine, you‘ll regret it!”

“I heard that you paid for her at a group home, true?” Tamara countered with a leading question.

“Said she was my property, so yeah, whatever, I bought her. Nothin’ you can do ‘bout that, bitch!”

“The recording on my phone says differently,” Tamara goaded him.

She was trying to get him to come closer so that she could lock eyes with him, but he was just too far away and his baseball cap brim was pulled down a bit too much. Outdoors, her “pushing” tastes would only work effectively if their eyes connected.

“You recorded me? You’re done, bitch!”

He started to walk toward her but he was watching Tamara’s hands as she brought up a tube that she was holding by her side, pointing it toward him but slightly down. The tube was eighteen inches long and had the diameter of a softball.

“Come no closer, mister,” Tamara warned.

Damn! He’s still watching the launcher and won’t look at my eyes! She thought.

“Is that a pop-gun or something? Looks like it’s a plastic toy. Okay, I’m coming for her and maybe I’ll just take the both of you!”

He had taken two steps toward Tamara before she raised the launcher to his chest level and pressed its release. A G-force projector in the launcher tube activated with a loud crump sound and an eight-inch-long plastic cylinder streaked out of the tube and, as it cleared the muzzle, its shell popped open and eight small G-force powered metal weights, all mutually repelling each other, flew apart. Each weight was attached to one of eight corners of a octagonal-shaped nylon net and as the weights pulled it open, it dropped over the man, fully enveloping him. Tamara’s device was a mega-sized net gun, far larger and more powerful than the ones on the market. It had an extra feature; Tamara’s design of the net employed a trailing line and a pull on that line, when the net stopped its forward motion, closed the net’s open side, similar to the way that the closure of a fishing purse seine worked, trapping whatever was inside.

Her quarry was now ensnared and the net’s rapid closing around his legs, together with his forward motion, caused him to trip and fall. He threw his arms forward to break his fall and as his body hit the ground face downward, Tamara pulled the net’s closing cord tighter, trapping the man’s arms against his sides. With a bellow of rage, he began cursing at her, threatening all kinds of creative punishments if she didn’t free him.

“You’re on ice, now, buddy,” she told him. “Let’s see if someone you might know can identify you.”

Tamara called to the cabin, “It’s safe!”

From the cabin, “I saw! That was so awesome!”

Winnie came out and over to where the guy was lying, prone on the ground, and Tamara asked for her help to roll him over.

“It’s not safe to let a person lie prone while being tied up,” she said. “The pressure on the diaphragm can make it hard to breathe. Although I wouldn’t mind suffocating him, but then we’d be the ones in trouble.”

Winnie looked at him. “Yeah, it’s him,” she said and hugged Tamara. They walked away from where he was lying because of his shouting. “I can’t believe how you did that!” She exclaimed. “I’ve never seen a thing like that. What was it?”

“A variation of a net gun. I’m developing it for law enforcement to capture and immobilize fleeing or threatening suspects but there are other uses too.”

“You invented that?”

“Not the concept but the propulsion and net deployment methods. Current net guns have mostly light-weight nets and those can’t really restrain someone effectively. The prime patent on the concept expired some years ago.”

“What do we do with him now?”

“Well, we’ll have help in the morning. We just need to keep him from wiggling out of the net.”

“How can ... oh, I know. During the Indian Wars, some of the northern tribes would stake a captive to the ground so he couldn’t move,” Winnie suggested. “Do you have rope? I know how to make stakes from tree branches if you have a knife.”

That’s what they did. Tamara recalled seeing an old tarp and several coils of rope in the shed where the extra propane tanks were stored, and after the man was staked out and tied down thoroughly using the rope, they covered him with several layers of tarp.

“You’ll probably be cold tonight,” Winnie told him, “but unfortunately you’ll survive, even though kidnappers like you don’t deserve it.”

He cursed her.

Later that evening as they prepared for sleep, Winnie told Tamara, “Thanks for saving me and letting me stake him out that way. It felt very traditional, although I’m sure that the Cherokee didn’t do that. I do recall that the tribes to the north, like the Mohawks, Seneca, and Iroquois had that practice. But doing that to him gives me closure in a way.”

“That’s important and I’m glad you feel like that. Maybe your dreams won’t be so bad tonight.”

“How’d you know that, Tamara? Are you a human dream catcher that you can know my dreams?”

“Dream catcher?”

“Ah, that’s a kinda talisman that the Ojibwa Nation used; I think that they were the first. The Cherokee knew of it through the Potawatomi, part of the Ojibwa Nation. Dream catchers are supposed to protect sleeping people from bad dreams and nightmares. Are you a dream catcher?”

“Ha, ha. No, I don’t have that talent. But I sense emotion and twice last night your emotional turmoil woke me. That meant bad dreams. Forgive me, but I sent a healing emotion to you both times and you slept better.”

“Oh, Tamara, I’m sorry to disturb your sleep...”

“Please, Winnie, sweetie. Don’t worry; I get plenty of rest and that was no bother, believe me. Now sleep well. Tomorrow will be exciting in a good way, I think.”

~~~~

They were up early the next morning, mainly because their captive had been shouting that he had to relieve himself. Tamara went outside and told him to hold it in or go in his pants; she wasn’t letting him loose. About 8 a.m., Don Davies, the cabin owner, and his son rolled in.

“What the hell...” he started when he saw the trussed-up figure on the ground.

Tamara explained and then played the recording for him.

“Fuckin’ bastard... y’all the gal he kidnapped?” he asked Winnie.

“Yeah. Took me from a group home in West Virginia.”

“Damn ... hey Bobby,” he called to his son who was looking down at the shouting, trussed-up captive.

“Yeah, Dad?”

“Take the truck down the hill to ol’ Monson’s place ‘n’ call the county sheriff. Tell ‘im we got a goddamn kidnapper hogtied up here. Give ‘im my name; they should know me, else tell ‘em we’s on the road in from 642.”

“Sure thing, Dad.”

Davies turned to Tamara. “Takes twenty minutes to Monson’s. Don’t know about the sheriff, how long that’ll take. Let’s see ‘bout gettin’ that guy standing. Did y’all see if he has a weapon?”

“No, didn’t want to touch him much after we got him onto his back,” Tamara replied as she pulled the tarp off the captive.

“All right. Let’s get the stakes and ropes off. Nice rope job, there.”

“Thank you,” Winnie said.

“How’d he get in a net like that, anyways?” Davies asked.

“I used a net gun when he tried to rush me. You heard his threats,” Tamara replied.

“Sure did.” Davies patted him down and found a shoulder holster under the guy’s left arm.

“Gal, y’all were lucky; he’s packin’ a 9-mil here. Okay, fucker, what’s yer name?”

“Go to hell, asshole,” was the reply.

“That’s where y’all’re goin’, I’m sure. He’s got a knife in a sheath in his boot here. Y’know, fuck him. No way I’m lettin’ this one up. But I’d feel better if the weapons weren’t on him.”

“Can’t leave our fingerprints, though. I have a pair of light driving gloves in my SUV,” Tamara offered.

“Doubt they’d fit my big paws, gal,” Davies replied.

“I could get the pistol out myself, I think...”

“He’d have to cooperate an’ move his arm. Hey! Will y’all let us get that pistol out?”

“Shove your cock up your ass!”

“I’ll just cut his coat away and then cut the holster straps,” Tamara suggested.

“That’s a right fine idea, there. Y’all don’t have to do that... I can,” Davies said.

He did, and then got the knife out by cutting away the pants leg. Their captive was howling with rage now.

When Davies was done, he asked Tamara, “Can we check out the cabin while we wait? Was everythin’ okay when y’all arrived?”

“It was in great shape except for a cracked window pane and some loose floor boards inside, near a corner. That water system is genius.”

“Daddy did a fine job right there, yeah. Thanks. I don’t recall any rain. Did y’all have any? Need to check the roof.”

“Nope. Good weather. Two chilly days and then it warmed up. I found a little waterfall and pool down the hill too; that was nice. You own that land down there?”

“Not quite that far. Have a hundred acres; a small part’s over the state line.”

He was checking the appliances as they spoke.

“I’m not doubtin’ that y’all took care of the place, Tamara. I’m checkin’ fer things that need t’be set fer winter. Sunday, bow season starts and Bobby and I’ll be here fer the week. See any wildlife?”

“Yeah, deer. There were...”

She was interrupted by a call from Winnie.

“Tamara, he’s trying to get out of the net!”

Tamara and Davies ran to the doorway and looked. The kidnapper was squirming around, trying to reach the tieoff line. He had gotten an arm through an opening in the net.

Davies looked at the net.

“It’s okay, gal; he’s goin’ nowhere. Jus’ makin’ it tighter ‘round hisself.”

Then they heard the noise of a vehicle coming up the hill. Bobby had returned.

“Deputy should be here, maybe ten minutes, Dad. They said they’d call a trooper too, seein’ that maybe West Virginia might be involved too.”

“Good. We’re gettin’ behind schedule, but I checked everything inside. Get the ladder so’s we can check out the roof’s condition.”

Tamara and Winnie watched while the two worked, going over the cabin’s roof.

“They take good care of it,” Winnie observed. “Like Papa did with our house. Every October, he went all over it to fix it up for the winter,” she said sadly.

Tamara put an arm around her. “You’ll never forget him, but eventually the memories will start to feel better. That’s what my mom says when she thinks of her mother.”

Winnie looked at her. “Thank you. It’s nice to be able to share private thoughts like that.”

“Didn’t you make friends at the group home?”

“It was hard; everyone was so different, and there was lots of distrust. Some girls wanted to take advantage of others. Like me, a newcomer.”

“That’s so sad, sweetie... oh, I hear something coming.”

Several minutes later, a huge SUV with sheriff’s department markings drove into the clearing, and a minute later, a state trooper vehicle drove in.

“Okay, Winnie, it’s show time,” Tamara said as she walked toward the two vehicles.

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