Secret of Deadman's Ravine

Her head jerked up, her dark eyes hot with indignation. “You know darned well I haven’t been thrown from a horse since I was—”

“Nine,” he said. “I remember.” He remembered a lot of things about her, including her stubborn pride—and the moonlight on her face their last night together.

Her eyes narrowed as if she, too, remembered only too well things she would prefer to forget.

“McKenna told me that you and your mom had words just before you rode out yesterday,” he said.

“McKenna,” Eve said like a curse. “Did she also fill you in on what it was about?”

He shook his head. “Apparently she didn’t hear that part.”

Eve gave him a wan smile. Nothing more.

“How’d you come to be way down there? It’s not like you to end up without your horse in the bottom of a ravine.”

“You don’t know what I’m like anymore,” she snapped, looking back down the steep rocky slope.

“Okay, if you don’t want to tell me…” he said as he slung the pack over his shoulder.

“I found something.” She said it grudgingly.

He looked down at her, hearing something in her voice that instantly set his heart racing. She was biting down on her lower lip, looking scared. “What?”

“Hey down there!” Errol Wilson called from the top of the gulch. “Everything all right?” A shower of small rocks cascaded down just feet from them.

“She’s fine,” Carter called back, irritated at the interruption. “Make sure everyone stays back. The ground is unstable and breaking off up there.”

“Sure.” Errol sounded disappointed, either that the rescue adventure was over already or that Carter had shooed him away.

When Errol stepped away, disappearing from the edge, Carter turned again to Eve. He’d seen Eve Bailey vulnerable only once before. He shoved aside the memory of her in his arms, her bare skin pressed to his, the windows steaming up on his old Chevy pickup….

“You found something?” he repeated.

She rubbed her ankle, wincing as if it hurt. “I found a body.”

He felt his stomach clench even as he told himself she had to be mistaken. He’d had his share of calls from residents who’d uncovered bones and erroneously thought they’d found human remains.

Eve shook her head as if she still couldn’t believe it herself. She drained the contents of the second water bottle before she spoke. “It was in a plane that had crashed in the ravine.”

“An airplane?” he echoed as he looked down into the deep gorge and saw nothing. If there’d been a plane crash out here, he’d have heard about it.

“It was a small one, a four-seater,” she said, her voice sounding hollow. “It’s been there for a long time.”

“Where?”

She glanced to the west. “Back that way. I’m not sure how far. I lost track trying to find a way out of there. But I’ll know the ravine when I see it.”

He hoped so, but the ravines all looked alike and in the state she was in… “The pilot was still in the plane?” he asked, thinking about the body she’d said she found.

“Not the pilot,” she said without looking at him. “One of the passengers.” She raised her eyes, locking with his for just an instant before she looked away again.

She’d found a crashed airplane in a ravine with the body of one of the passengers still in it and she hadn’t said anything about it until now? The old Eve Bailey would have blurted it out the moment she saw him.

But then he and the old Eve Bailey had been friends. Lovers. The old Eve Bailey would have trusted him.

Maybe she was right. Maybe he didn’t know her anymore. But he knew that wasn’t the case. Because just looking into her face, he’d seen that she hadn’t wanted to tell him about the plane.

The realization shocked him. Why would she keep something like that to herself?

He took a breath and let it out slowly. “You say the plane looked as if it had been there for a while?”

“Thirty-two years.”

He sat down on a rock across from her so they were eye to eye. “What makes you think it’s been there for thirty-two years?”

She continued rubbing her ankle for a moment before looking up at him. “There was a logbook in the cockpit. The last entry was February seven, 1975.”

Carter couldn’t believe this. His grandfather and father, both crop dusters, lived and breathed airplanes. They would have known about a missing plane. There would have been a search for the plane and, when found, the body removed even if it was impossible to get the plane out.

Unless the plane had never been reported missing.

He looked at Eve and felt a jolt. There was more.

“The passenger in the plane,” she said, her voice almost a whisper. Her gaze met his. “He has a knife sticking out of his chest. At least I think it was a man.”

From above them came the sound of more voices, the whinny of horses and more small rocks showering down.

Carter rose, shaken. “I’m going to ask you not to say anything about this to anyone,” he said to her.

She looked up at him and nodded slowly.

“Do you think you can tell me where you found the plane?” he asked.

She shook her head. “It’s hidden. If not for the storm, I wouldn’t have seen anything down there. I’ll have to take you to it.”

“No, you need to go back with the search party so you can get medical treatment, food, rest.”

“I’m fine.” She rose to her feet with obvious difficulty. “I assume you brought me a horse?”

“Titus has one up on top for you, but Eve—”

“I told you, I’m fine.” She glanced toward the canyon far below them, then at him as if she could read his mind. “Don’t worry, I can find the plane again. Maybe you’ve forgotten, but I grew up here. I know this country.”

Unlike Deena, the woman he’d dumped her for. The woman he’d stupidly married, divorced and was still trying to get out of his life. Deena didn’t know one end of a horse from the other and she could get lost in the city park. Deena would never have survived five minutes out here last night.

“Eve—”

“I really need to get moving.”