A Match Made for Murder Iona Whishaw (pride and prejudice read .TXT) 📖

continued, and someone was ineptly yodelling along. Now she could feel the rope binding her ankles.

Closing her eyes, she tried to remember what must have happened before this moment. She’d been having lunch with Darling and said she was going to look into the nearby shops. She struggled to recall the exact trajectory of her movements. She had looked at the shops along the street the restaurant had been on and then turned the corner. She tried to bring to mind the name of the street she had turned onto but then discarded the effort as not essential. She had gone into a small dress shop and looked at a shawl. There was a black and white one with a beautifully woven fringe. She had been told it was a traditional Mexican r-something. Then that was it. She had come out of the shop, intending to look at other shops for shawls and then return for the black and white one. That was all that would come. No, wait. She opened her eyes. She remembered a sudden feeling of being closely followed, perhaps by two figures?

Judging by the pain, she must have been coshed and bundled into this car. She moved her legs onto the floor and struggled into a sitting position. The pain in her head surged. The yodeller was now singing, playing a guitar. Someone was sawing on a fiddle. The driver, who’d been singing along, stopped at Lane’s sudden appearance in the rear-view mirror and reached up to adjust it so he could see her better.

“Where are you taking me?” Lane leaned forward with some difficulty to talk to the driver. At least her voice still worked. He was wearing a cowboy hat and sported a bushy moustache. He looked like someone who ought to be easygoing and kindly, except for the coldness in his blue eyes.

“Good morning! Where am I taking you? Well now, that would be telling, wouldn’t it?” The driver had an easy delivery as if he plucked people off the street every day of the week and spirited them out of town—for out of town they were going.

Lane felt a momentary dismay. Was it morning? No. Late afternoon. Probably not long after she’d been at the shop. She was in the thrall of a sarcastic kidnapper. Wonderful. She looked with alarm at the passing landscape where the final sparse smattering of houses was disappearing. She could see the Catalina Mountains, where their riding expedition had gone just a few days before. So, they were going north, climbing a ridge that skirted the foothills. To Phoenix? But no. The driver turned east along a winding road.

“You’ve no right to take me anywhere. Who are you?”

“Would you shut up? Don’t make me sorry I didn’t throw a gag on you,” the man said loudly over the radio. He reached over and turned the radio down. The yodelling song was ending. Lane leaned back and watched the passing scene out the window. She could see the town, maddeningly down the hill, its small compact centre of office buildings rising like beacons in what was otherwise a vast sea of flat desert. Somewhere down there, Darling must be going absolutely mad, she thought. It was pointless to imagine rescue. She had been a block away around the corner from the restaurant when she’d been struck and bundled unceremoniously into the car. It was done in moments. She imagined it must have taken two people to get her into the car and tie her so quickly. Now there was only the driver. “That was Mr. Hank Snow with “Lonesome Blue Yodel,” here on kvoa from the Grand Ole Opry. Stay tuned for the nbc news.”

Irritated, the driver turned the radio off, leaving only the sound of the car on the gravel road. Lane considered another approach.

“Why have you kidnapped me?”

“That’s a little strong, isn’t it?” the driver said, looking into the mirror with a touch of a smirk.

More sarcasm. “Not from where I’m sitting.” She turned her head away to look at the city way below and then winced at the sharp pain at the back of her head.

The smirk turned into a chuckle. “Pretty and funny. You got it all.”

Lane, not wanting to indulge this type of conversation, fell silent again. They had moved far enough east that they appeared to be above the outskirts of the city. Abruptly the driver turned north again, and began a winding climb into the mountains. Lane looked out the rear window, trying to orient herself, but the city had disappeared behind the folds of mountains.

The saguaros gave way to a few deciduous trees and then to evergreens, a sign that they’d driven up into a more temperate zone. The car slowed and performed a hairpin turn onto a smaller, very bumpy road. They were headed west again, dropping slightly as they moved slowly parallel to the road they’d left. It seemed interminable. Lane kept her eye on the south, but the descending hills and the thicker cover of trees was making it difficult to calculate how far away from the city they were.

Finally they came to a stop. The sudden silence after the jarring ride made Lane feel as if something were pressing against her ears. The man leaned back, took out a pack of cigarettes, rapped one out, and stuck it in his mouth. Lane looked around, moving her head gingerly, trying to ascertain why they’d come to a halt. There was a cabin some fifty feet away, surrounded by pine trees that threw shade on a porch that ran the length of the front. Two rocking chairs gave an air of domesticity and comfort. Hardly the prison she thought she might be bound for. Still, she was bound.

“Are you going to untie me?”

The man took a long drag on his cigarette then exhaled, filling the closed car with a choking smoke. With a sigh he opened the door and got out, stretching and then spitting. “Come on then,”