Page 66 of High Country Escape

He dropped the saw and reached for her. She wrapped her arms around him tightly, and began to sob. “It’s okay,” hemurmured and rested his face against her hair. “You’re safe now. You’re safe.”

Roxanne managed topull herself together and reassure the search and rescue volunteers who gathered around her that she was all right. “I’d like some water,” she said, and someone handed her a bottle.

“Is anyone else up here with you?” Danny asked.

“No one,” she said. “I’ve been signaling for hours.” She held up the little headlamp she had taken from Kara’s knitting bag. “I was afraid the battery was going to run out soon.”

“Where is William Ledger?” Dalton asked.

“I don’t know.” She turned to him. Though her knees threatened to give way, she kept her voice defiant. “I stabbed him in the eye with a knitting needle and ran away. I didn’t care if I was lost in the middle of the forest. At least I got away from him.”

Danny radioed that they had located Roxanne. “She’s okay,” he said. “She says she stabbed William Ledger with a knitting needle.” He cleared his throat. “In the eye.”

The person on the other end of the line chuckled. “So that’s what happened to him. Ledger is in custody, along with his accomplice.”

“His accomplice?” Dalton asked.

“Kara Lee,” Roxanne said.

It took Dalton a second to place the name. “Your neighbor?”

She nodded. “She was Alice.”

“Her real name is Brianna Davidson,” Dalton said. “Then she changed it to Betty Josephs. And now I guess she’s going by Kara Lee. She was helping Ledger?”

“She put a tracking device on my car so she could follow me around town,” Roxanne said. “She led Ledger to me. She...she’snot right. I think the things he did to her, when she was so young—they destroyed her.”

Dalton pulled her close once more. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s go home.”

She pushed away from him, agitated. “I almost forgot.” She turned to Danny. “You need to tell the sheriff to go to Kara’s rental—the tiny home on County Road 3. They need to look for Sarah Michaelson there.”

“I’ll tell him,” Danny said.

“Ledger really did take Sarah?” Dalton asked.

“Yes. He wouldn’t tell me where he was keeping her, but things he said made me think she was still alive. I thought Kara’s tiny home might be a good place to stash the girl until Ledger was ready to bring us all together.”

Dalton turned to look her in the face. “How are you really?” he asked. “Did he hurt you?”

She shook her head. “He tied me to a bed, but I got away before he could do anything more,” she said.

“Where did you get a knitting needle?” he asked.

“Kara knits. I took them from her knitting bag.”

“Huh.”

“I’ve been afraid to ask,” she said. “What happened to Debra?”

“Ledger hit her and threw her off a cliff, but she’s going to be okay,” he said. “She’s recovering in the hospital.”

“That’s good.”

“I thought for a while she might have been Alice,” Dalton said. “She was so fixated on you.”

“I wondered about that, too,” she said. “But I think she really was just wanting very badly to find out what happened to her sister.”

“I don’t guess Ledger said anything about Bettina?”