Crazy Mountain Kiss by Keith McCafferty Read Free Book Online

he went missing at the same time.”
    â€œThey ran off together?”
    â€œThat’s one possibility. He was two years older than the girl, eighteen to her sixteen.”
    â€œI remembered reading something in the newspaper,” Sean said. He opened the folder and gleaned the bare bones of the teenagers’ disappearances as the skeletons of juniper trees marched past the side window, blackened reminders of last summer’s burn up the Bridger Canyon.
    Cinderella Huntington had been reported missing from the Bar-4 Ranch at 8:47 a.m. on Tuesday, November 7, about an hour and a half after she had failed to come downstairs for breakfast. Not finding her in the kitchen, her mother had checked her room, then the lot where the ranch vehicles were parked, thinking that her daughter had skipped breakfast and gone straight to school. Like many ranch kids, Cinderella drove a pickup to the gate at the county road, about a mile and half away, where she caught a bus to take her to school in Clyde Park. She’d been driving since she was eight and her mother had to tape boards to the clutch, brake, and gas pedals so her shoes could reach. But her pickup was still in the lot.
    Not overly worried, Huntington thought to check the stall where her daughter’s horse was stabled. The girl often retreated there after dinner to do homework and usually checked in on Snapdragon before going to school. The horse was asleep with her foot lifted; the electric oil heater Cinderella switched on during cold evenings was unplugged.
    While in the stables, Huntington met the horse trainer, Charles Watt, who did not live on the ranch but had a house a dozen miles away up the Brackett Creek Road. He told Huntington that he’d seen Cinderella the previous afternoon, after she’d returned from school and was mucking out Snapdragon’s stall. They had said hi to each other and he’d left the ranch to drive home shortly thereafter.
    Huntington then roused her husband from bed. Jasper Fey, the girl’s stepfather—it was a second marriage for both of them—had driven in to Bridger the evening before, Tuesday being poker night at the Cottonwood Inn. He’d seen Cinderella briefly before leaving the house, told her dinner was in the refrigerator. Six p.m., give or take.He didn’t get home until after midnight and had gone straight to bed. The couple had separate bedrooms, his on the ground floor. Loretta’s was upstairs, down the hall from the room where Cinderella slept. Fey told his wife not to worry—wasn’t she just saying how unpredictable her daughter had become?
    â€œTeenagers are like terrorists,” Huntington recalled him saying during her interview with Harold. “They live among us and we don’t know what they’re thinking.” She told Harold they’d had a row over Fey’s insensitivity, repeating a remark he’d heard somewhere, probably on the set of the television western he was a technical expert for and that was shot in eastern Montana. The row was just a short exchange of remarks. Fey had grasped the seriousness of the situation and joined in the search, riding the property lines behind the house in his ATV.
    Stranahan looked up. “There’s no mention of the last time the mother saw the daughter.”
    â€œThat’s Harold for you,” Martha said. “He likes to bury the lede. It’s in there, you’ll get to it, but she hadn’t seen Cinderella since the previous morning. She left early Tuesday to drive up to Helena to conduct a horsemanship school. She decided to eat dinner there, then waited out a snow squall and didn’t get back to the ranch till around eleven. The house was dark. She figured Cinderella was asleep and didn’t want to disturb her.”
    Stranahan turned his eyes back to the report.
    By eight in the morning, Loretta Huntington was thoroughly alarmed. Only one other person who lived on the sixteen