SEARCHING FOR STARDUST

by

Lorena McCourtney

Chapter One

Jan yanked on the handle of the umbrella, ripping it free from the tangle of thorned blackberry bushes guarding the steep trail. She raised it over her head, but the umbrella was useless now, rain drizzling through a dozen puncture holes and a ragged tear in the taut blue fabric. She let the tip droop to the ground and uneasily surveyed the rocky trail ahead.

They’d told her she’d have to walk, but she’d never expected anything like this. Fifty feet ahead, where a rickety footbridge crossed a ragged ravine, misty spray rose from unseen waters roaring down the mountainside. Beyond the bridge the trail disappeared in a maze of trees with tops lost in the foggy mist, giving an eerie feeling of world’s end just above her.

Hastily she turned to look back the way she had come, seeking a reassuring glimpse of her car below. Yet from here she could see nothing of the sleek silver Mercedes, only the battered front end of the hulking truck parked in the brown-watered mudhole where the road ended.

She glanced at her watch. Almost four o’clock. Back home, in the manicured yard encircling her Portland house, daylight lingered past six on these late March days. But here on this rain-shrouded, southern Oregon mountainside, early darkness lurked in the canopy of heavy branches overhead, waiting to trap her on the trail. An earthy scent of moldering leaves and damp forest, fir and pine and madrone, hung in the air. Perhaps she should turn back, return and make a fresh start in the morning…

Perhaps she should turn back and not return, abandon all this as foolish and pointless. She had no idea how far it was to the cabin, no idea what hostile reaction she might encounter. Did this isolated trail actually lead anywhere?

Perhaps the couple in the second-hand store, who’d looked like ragged holdovers from some ‘70s hippie commune, had deliberately given her false information. Perhaps they were even now laughing gleefully about sending the city woman with her fancy car and stylish boots and expensive suede jacket on some wild goose chase in the woods.

Yet, even as she stood there undecided, fresh questions joined the other questions that had haunted her for the past three months. Had Tim once walked this very trail, crossed this precarious bridge, felt cousins of these raw raindrops on his lanky frame? She closed her eyes, desperately seeking some remnant of his presence, but all she could feel was the cold drizzle on her upturned face.

Firmly giving herself a mental shake, she snapped the useless umbrella shut. No, she wasn’t turning back. She’d come this far, both physically and emotionally, and she wasn’t giving up now.

She looked down only once as she crossed the shaky bridge, saw an explosion of tumbling white water through the cracks, and then grimly clutched the metal cable that served as a handrail until she reached solid ground beyond. Beyond the next twist in the trail, around a rocky outcropping, the roar of the creek oddly faded, leaving only the uneven patter of rain punctuated by the heavier plop of drops falling from the wet branches. And something else…

Her neck and shoulder muscles tensed as she strained to hear the faint rumble. The sound became louder as she listened, and then its identity was unmistakable: a vehicle winding up the narrow canyon road below where she’d parked her car. She’d seen no nearby houses, no roads turning off, so it had to be coming here. And now she felt trapped, caught between the unknown ahead and the unknown behind. Perhaps suspecting the couple in the store merely of laughing at her was dangerously naive. They’d directed her to this remote trail, where she was now alone and isolated and vulnerable.

If she speeded up, perhaps she could reach the cabin before whoever was in the car caught up with her…

She rejected that desperate idea. Even if she could outrun someone stalking her, the cabin and its inhabitants were not necessarily a haven of safety.

Carefully she left the trail on a slope strewn with loose rocks where her tracks couldn’t be seen. She was panting by the time she hid behind a screen of brush on the rocky outcropping overlooking the trail, her clothes damp from rain and perspiration, her usual sleek blond hairdo a tangle of wet strands and twigs.

The moments passed with glacial slowness. Cold rain dribbled down her neck. A deer peered at her with liquid dark eyes, then fled in elegant, stiff-legged leaps. A muscle in her leg cramped, and she cautiously changed position to relieve it. From here the growl and crash of the creek was again audible, and she strained to catch some giveaway sound of human activity over it.

No sounds, but-- There he was! A broad-shouldered figure in khaki pants and heavy boots, the hood of a clear plastic rainjacket loosely draped over his head, obviously better prepared for the weather than she was. She scrunched down behind the brush to make herself smaller. Yet there was something oddly familiar about that determined stride…

A moment later she knew why. In disbelief she watched as he paused almost directly below her, the familiar dark hair revealed when he threw back the hood.

He studied the trail and hillside warily, as if he sensed an unseen presence, and a peculiar and totally unexpected pang flooded through her. How many times had she told herself she didn’t miss him, didn’t need him, didn’t want him, didn’t love him? Yet if that were really true, why did she have to keep repeating it to herself, why did she feel this inexplicable yearning as she watched him?

He turned, as she had, to look back toward the cars below, his edginess almost palpable. A few months ago she’d spotted him at the mall and ducked out of sight. Another time, when an encounter was unavoidable, she’d simply nodded coolly to him. Times when he’d called her since the divorce, she’d determinedly held herself remote from him. Yet three months ago, wrapped in mutual anguish, she’d silently clung to him, desperately grateful for the strength of his presence…

Now he flipped the hood over his head and started up the trail again, and a peculiar panic that he’d soon be out of sight made her cry out. “Mark!”

He didn’t jump nervously at the sound of her voice, but he turned in momentary confusion before he identified it as coming from above. He stepped back, neck craned to look up at her as she wriggled out from behind the bush. “You okay?” he asked, his tone filled more with concern than surprise.

Belatedly, she realized her presence on the isolated trail probably wasn’t as much of a shock to him as his presence was to her. He’d no doubt recognized her Mercedes back there in the mudhole. Although the very fact that she was in the area must surely be as much of a surprise to him as his being here was to her.

Sliding down the side of the outcropping was more precarious than the upward climb, and he caught her as she skidded through the last few feet of loose rocks. She automatically clutched his outstretched arms, but instantly let go as soon as she regained her balance. For some strange reason, she didn’t trust herself not to wrap her arms around him. Instead, not giving him time to question why she was hiding alongside the isolated trail, she leaped to the offensive.

“What are you doing here? Why aren’t you at Linhurst?”

“Spring break. No classes this week.”

Spring break. She’d lost track of such events after Tim dropped out of school two years ago. But timing wasn’t the big question, of course. “Why are you here?”

“Why are you here?” Mark countered. He wasn’t tan, given a winter lived where the old joke was that Oregonians don’t tan, they rust, but he still bore a rugged aura of the outdoors. Although he’d somehow maintained that aura even when he was working fourteen-hour days in his legal practice. Or, she reminded herself, telling her he was working fourteen hours.

Irrelevant, she chided herself sharply. Meaningless as the till-death-do-us-part words they had once uttered. And now she realized that even though their questions used identical words, the results were as different as Beethoven’s Fifth played by a child plunking piano keys and a concert pianist giving a command performance. He may have changed occupations and lifestyle, but he hadn’t lost the slash-to-the-bone technique that had made a reporter observe during one of his high-profile trials, Could you tell a lie or dodge the truth with Mark Hilliard’s laser blue eyes nailing you to the witness stand? And then to add in sly reference to the questionable character of some of his better known clients, Maybe that’s why he seldom puts the clients he’s defending on the stand to question them.

“I was told that a man called Red Dog might know something about Tim’s death,” she said.

She expected Mark to pounce on her for foolishly coming here alone, but instead he simply said, “What do you hope to learn from him?”

She started to backtrack, to hide behind the masquerade of a mother’s simple need to find closure after a son’s death, but instead she defiantly burst out with the truth, uncaring if it sounded melodramatic or paranoid. “I want to find out what really happened to Tim! Because I don’t think he killed himself. I don’t think he sat down and put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger. I think someone deliberately shot him at close range and then made it look like suicide. I think he was murdered.”

The words hung like suspended raindrops. This was the first time she’d let them escape the grief-torn landscape of her mind and said them aloud to anyone. Now she expected Mark to scornfully suggest she had an overactive imagination, but instead he simply studied her thoughtfully.

She also studied him. The years between his transformation from teenage rogue to high-powered attorney to professor in a small Christian college hadn’t eroded his ageless good looks. His jaw was still clean-cut and angular, his skin youthfully taut over strong cheekbones, his hair still the black of some Native American ancestor far back on his mother’s side, his masculine appeal still potent. But no matter how attractive he might be, she’d never allow herself actually to be attracted to him again.

Finally he asked in a tone markedly more controlled than her passionate outburst, “Why do you think that?”

“Because I remember that when Tim was a boy, and the two of you went hunting, how he hated guns and never wanted to go again.” She didn’t go into how disappointed Mark had been with that non-macho attitude and the fact that Tim turned vegetarian not long after the trip. “I just can’t imagine him using a gun for anything. Especially to … kill himself.”

“The report said the gun belonged to him,” Mark countered with his old lawyer-logic.

“Someone else could still have pulled the trigger!”

Again he studied her, and she wondered what he was thinking. Was he seeing her through the eyes of the lawyer he had once been, weighing her credibility, dissecting each word, preparing a ruthless counterattack? Or was he seeing her through the eyes of an ex-husband? Noting the tiny lines at the corners of her eyes and mouth, and the hair that wasn’t the rich brown it had been on their wedding day. The highlights she had started using when the brown turned mousy had taken over, and now it was all the sophisticated blond her hairdresser called “champagne dawn.” Was he also noting that she’d lost a dozen pounds since Tim’s death, pounds her already too-slender figure didn’t need to lose?

Angrily she discarded those thoughts. She didn’t care how Mark saw her, she reminded herself. She did care that he apparently thought her suspicions were irrational figments of her despair. Yet arguing that Tim hadn’t killed himself because she believed he hated guns was not a particularly strong line of reasoning, she had to admit. Defensively she added, “And there are other things, too. He called me from down here a few times, and once I thought he sounded afraid.”

“Afraid of what?”

“I don’t know. He didn’t actually say he was afraid,” she admitted reluctantly. “It was just something I sensed, something in his voice.”

“But what reason would someone have for killing him? Tim wasn’t exactly your confrontational type tough guy who went around making enemies.”

Mark’s logic about Tim’s death and the type of person Tim was … kind, caring, gentle, a boy who preferred tending his collection of exotic plants to guns and hunting! … suddenly angered her.

“No, he wasn’t tough or confrontational, and he didn’t belong in an environment like this! Don’t you read the newspapers, Mark? This is the marijuana-growing capital of the state! Is your head buried so far in your Bible that you don’t know that there have been a half dozen drug-related murders in this area in recent years? This isn’t some innocent wonderland just because there are wildflowers and deer and waterfalls instead of crack houses and gang wars.”

Something in his eyes told Jan that her harsh words didn’t simply bounce off him, and she felt a momentary shaft of guilt for striking out at the faith he’d found since their divorce, because she knew her real anger was with her own feelings of despair and helplessness over Tim’s death. She half expected him to lash back at her outburst, but, unlike the Mark of bygone years would have done, he held his temper. “I’m sorry,” she muttered.

He nodded, letting her explosion pass, an unexpected compassion in his eyes. “Even if Tim was involved with drugs, that doesn’t necessarily means he was murdered.”

“But there’s something else, something I didn’t find out until I started poking around here, asking for information about Tim from anyone who’d talk to me.” Jan combed a shaking hand through the wet, shapeless strands of her hair. “Usually all I’d get were unfriendly shrugs or negative headshakes—“

“I know.”

She paused, briefly curious about that sympathetic response, but she didn’t detour to question it. “But occasionally someone would leak a minuscule bit of information, or bring up the name of someone I should talk to, and finally one rough-looking guy gave me a little smirk and said, ‘You mean ol’ Talkin’ Tim?’”

“Talkin’ Tim?” Mark repeated doubtfully. “Tim was never much of a talker. What did he mean by that?” Then his head snapped up so sharply that his dark hair flung raindrops in her face, and she knew he had made the same connection she had.

“You think the guy meant talking as in informer. That maybe Tim went to the authorities about some criminal activity—“

“And was murdered for it. Murdered because he talked.” She paused, considering. “Or perhaps murdered because he’d let someone know he was going to talk.”

“This guy suggested you come out here and see Red Dog?”

Jan shook her head. “No. When I asked what ‘Talkin’ Tim’ meant, he got an odd look on his face, as if he thought maybe he’d already said too much, and walked off. But this afternoon I approached a couple in a second-hand store and gave them my usual story about wanting to talk to someone who’d known Tim, wanting to find closure after his death—“

“Did you ever tell anyone that you suspect it wasn’t suicide, that you think Tim was murdered?” Mark’s tone suddenly sharpened, like the freshly honed blade of a knife.

“No. I didn’t think that would be a good idea yet.” She hesitated. “Although I suppose what I was thinking may have been obvious from the questions I asked.”

Mark’s gaze flicked back the way they had come on the trail, then ahead, like a hunter suddenly wary that he might be prey as well as predator. He clamped a hand on her arm, and she recognized it as an instinctive protective gesture, so he could shove her behind him if he spotted danger from any direction.

She resisted an unwanted urge to melt into the shelter of his arm and settled instead for not jerking away from the protection he offered. “Why do you ask if I told anyone?”

His gaze returned to meet hers. “Because I also have doubts Tim killed himself. I also think he may have been murdered.”

The knowledge that she wasn’t alone in her suspicions felt like a door opening on an icy room filled with dangerous shadows. Because if Mark, sharp, shrewd, competent Mark, thought it too, perhaps it was true. Murder.

Once upon a time their thoughts had been so meshed, so linked, that they could finish each others sentences, know what the other was thinking from a mere meeting of glances across a room; back then, when they were so much in love, when they shared such ambitious, glowing dreams, their thoughts spooned together as sweetly as their bodies curved together in sleep at night. But for so long now, even before the hostile divorce five years ago, they had seemed to leap automatically to opposite sides of any question, any issue.

And now, now their thoughts were linked again, and that lost love rose in a bittersweet cloud…

No, she would not let old feelings rise up to confuse her. Instead she said, “That’s why you’re here, to investigate Tim’s death?”

“Yes. From the moment I first heard it, that official ‘death by self-inflicted gunshot wound’ didn’t ring true to me. By the time Tim was a teenager I seldom knew what he was thinking. We were almost strangers. But I don’t recall him ever being self-destructive. I want to know what really happened.”

“His mental state may have been affected by drugs,” Jan suggested reluctantly. For a long time she hadn’t wanted to admit Tim was even involved in the drug culture, but he was, of course. “The report said there were traces of marijuana and methamphetamines in his system.”

Mark nodded. “But I want to know the full truth. And if someone murdered him, I want to know who.”

“Do you think the investigation of his death was perhaps not as thorough as it could have been?” Jan suggested tentatively.

“I certainly don’t think the authorities would deliberately call it suicide to avoid the bother of a murder investigation simply because Tim was part of the drug culture. But murders have been disguised as suicides before, and the authorities may have been fooled.”

“And maybe we’re both wrong, and he really did kill himself.”

“Yes. But I intend to find out.”

“How did you happen to come out to this trail?” she asked.

“Same way you did. By asking questions.”

“I wonder why we haven’t run into each other before this, if you’ve also been in the area talking to people?”

“I just arrived yesterday afternoon.”

Wryly she acknowledged his superior investigative abilities. He’d acquired a lead to Red Dog in less than twenty-four hours; it had taken her almost four days.

Mark’s gaze swept the canyon below, where treetops poked through the misty fog like islands of dark spikes. Then his eyes snapped back to hers as if he’d just reached a decision. “I’ll take you back to your car and help you get turned around so you don’t get stuck in the mud. Then I’ll hike on up to the cabin.“

“You can’t send me back to the car as if this were some college field trip and I were one of your students! I’m going too.”

“Jan, if someone realizes we suspect murder we could both be in danger. Especially if we get too close to the person who pulled the trigger. This is no time to play some amateur detective game—“

“Game? You think anything about Tim’s death is a game to me?”

A muscle in his jaw ticked. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that the way it sounded. I know how you feel. I just think it would be better if I go alone. I can let you know this evening what I find out. Where are you staying?”

Jan wasn’t even tempted to retreat to the warmth and security of her motel room. She shook off his hands. “I came to investigate for myself, and I intend to do it.”

He eyed her smooth-soled boots, more suitable for mall shopping than trail hiking, and her bare head. Vaguely she realized she must have dropped the umbrella behind the brush where she’d hidden.

His voice softened. “Jan, you’re already soaking wet. I just don’t want you getting sick from exposure, or slipping and hurting yourself on the rocks or taking unnecessary chances with whatever weirdos or outlaws may be up there at the cabin—“

She heard honest concern in his voice, but she lifted her head defiantly, ignoring the hair plastered shapelessly to her scalp and the squish of her wet boots. “Your concern for my welfare is admirable, but I’ve managed to take care of myself for quite some time now, and I can do it here.”

His heavy brows tightened in obvious frustration at her stubbornness. But what she said was quite true; she had managed to take care of herself quite well. Top listing agent at Morganton Real Estate two years in a row, second-highest agent in sales last year, headed toward the top spot this year. Speaker on alternative methods of financing at a recent seminar, award winner for a sales video she’d produced last fall. She’d also managed to keep up payments on the expensive Portland house and paid half cash for that Mercedes sitting down there in the mudhole.

That she hadn’t managed to take care of herself quite so well emotionally, that sometimes her life felt empty and pointless, she had no intention of admitting to him.

Now, after a long moment staring into her defiant gaze, he made no comment either derogatory or complimentary about her hostile claim of self-sufficiency. He simply turned on his heel and started up the trail, leaving her to follow or retreat, as she chose.