Page 61 of High Country Escape

“Brianna Davidson,” Andi said. “She had been in the foster system less than a year when Ledger kidnapped her. Her mother was jailed for drug possession. She died of an overdose shortly after being released. Her father had deserted the family the year before and was killed in a shooting the same month Brianna disappeared.”

“Rough life,” Dalton said.

“It sounds wild, but Ledger gave her a kind of stability she hadn’t had before,” Andi said. “Still a truly awful life, but I can see how it would twist something in a vulnerable child.”

“Do you know what happened to her after Ledger was convicted?” Dalton asked.

“She was thirteen by then. As far as I know, she was still in the foster system, like Roxanne. I didn’t keep track of either one of them. I’m sorry I don’t have anything else for you.”

“Thanks,” he said. “This gives me a place to start, at least.”

“Now you need to tell me what’s going on there in Eagle Mountain.”

For the next fifteen minutes, he told her about Roxanne’s arrival in the town, the man in a truck who had run her off the road, the break-in of her home and her disappearance the day before. He told the story quickly and dispassionately, betraying nothing until he told about searching for her and finding her gone. “What is your relationship to Roxanne?” Andi asked.

“We’re . . .friends,” he said. “Good friends.”

“I hope they find her soon,” Andi said. “And I hope she’s all right.”

“I hope so, too.”

He hung up the phone and spent a few minutes pulling himself out of the dark place that talking about Roxanne and Ledger had sent him. Andi’s words “he tortured those girls” shook him, but he forced them away. He had work to do. He had to find Alice—Brianna Davidson.

Chapter Sixteen

Roxanne lay propped against pillows, still tied to the bed. Her attempts to persuade Kara to release her had been ignored. At one point Kara had stuck her fingers in her ears and sung “La-la-la, I can’t hear you” as if they were in elementary school. It seemed as if the grown woman who had been her tiny-house neighbor had reverted to the bullying twelve-year-old who had tormented Roxanne alongside Ledger.

Right now, Kara sat in the room’s only chair, knitting a sock out of pink-and-orange striped yarn. The sight of her manipulating needles and yarn struck Roxanne as jarring, given their circumstances.

Roxanne had had time to take stock of her surroundings. They weren’t in a house, she had concluded, but some kind of mobile home or even an RV, in a small bedroom with two boarded-up windows. She avoided looking at those plywood-covered windows, which were too reminiscent of the ones in the room where Ledger had kept her and Alice captive all those years ago.

The room had a single bed and a single chair, a single light fixture in the ceiling. The air smelled stale, like old French fries and body odor. Matted gray carpeting covered the floors and the walls were painted flat white over some kind of wall board.

The pop of gravel beneath tires made Kara sit up straight. She gathered up her knitting and stowed it in a bag she shoved beneath the bed. “That should be Billy,” she said, and turned expectantly toward the door.

The trailer shook as someone opened the door and entered. Heavy footsteps moving toward them filled Roxanne with dread. The same feeling had sickened her as a child, waiting for Ledger’s next “visit.”

A key scraped in a lock, then the bedroom door opened.

This was the face that had looked into Roxanne’s car the day she was run off the road—graying blond hair cut short, full cheeks, bulbous nose, carefully tended mustache. A Billy Ledger who had been left out in the sun to soften and thicken.

He came to the bed and leaned over her. “Hello, Mary,” he said. His breath smelled of cigarettes. “It’s good to see you again.”

She said nothing. Kara hovered at the other side of the bed. “She was sick, but I think she’s feeling much better now,” she said.

“Go in the other room,” Ledger said and pointed with his thumb at the door.

Kara scurried away, shutting the door softly behind her. Roxanne tried to hide her fear. She remained still, though inwardly she shrank from him. She had two arms free. If he came for her, she would fight with everything she had.

He sat on the end of the bed and put one hand on her leg. “You’ve grown into a very pretty young woman,” he said. He squeezed her calf, and her stomach turned. “Isn’t it nice to have our little family all back together?”

She said nothing, but continued to stare, refusing to look away from him.

“You’ve been very naughty,” he said. “You deserve to be punished for making things so difficult for me.”

Roxanne clenched her teeth against the whimper that tried to escape. Ledger had liked to frighten her. She didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of thinking he had succeeded now. He stoodand removed his belt. She needed to distract him. “What did you do with Sarah Michaelson?” she blurted.

He stilled, the belt half on. “Sarah is being taken care of,” he said. “That’s none of your concern.”