Broken Trust by Leigh Bale

whatever
might be inside.
    “Hey! What’s going on here?” Hank
came up the trail with Inez close beside him.
    “What happened here? What a mess,”
Inez exclaimed.
    Mac waved to his parents. “Take a
look inside. Someone did this while Toni and I were down at the lake.”
    Inez crossed the deck while Hank
studied the ground.
    “What are you looking for?” Toni
asked.
    “That.” Hank pointed at fresh
tracks in the dirt showing ridges and half-moons from the sole of someone’s
shoes.
    Frown lines creased Mac’s brow.
“You recognize the prints?”
    “Nah, they’re new,” Hank said.
“It’s not the man that shot at Toni last night, and it’s not your friend
Hooper. We passed him down below on the trail. He said he’d been up here
visiting you. Whoever ransacked our cabin is one man, wearing boots. See how
the impression of his footprint is too large to be a woman’s, and it cuts
deeper into the soil? This man is about thirty pounds heavier than Hooper. I
could follow the trail easy enough.”
    Mac shook his head. “I think he’s
long gone. Let’s see what’s missing, first.”
    The print looked like any other
boot track to Toni. How Mac and Hank could tell a person’s weight and gender,
then follow him simply from his foot print, seemed like a rare art form. No
wonder the military hired Hank to train recruits for the special forces.
    They went inside the cabin and she
gawked at the mess. Bedding and mattresses lay askew. Drawers had been pulled
open and emptied onto the floor. Papers littered the room.
    “My purse.” Toni snatched up the
stylish handbag from where someone had tossed it on the floor. The contents lay
scattered all around and she expected to find her money and credit cards
missing.
    Mac joined her as she inspected her
wallet. “How odd. Everything’s here.”
    “I don’t find anything missing,
either,” Inez called from the doorway of her bedroom. “They didn’t take our
cash or valuables.”
    “But why trash the cabin and not
take anything?” Hank asked.
    Mac shrugged. “Maybe it was
someone’s idea of having fun. Remember we had some teenaged vagrants at the
lake two years ago. They were hiding out and stealing from campers when they
left their campsites to go hiking. It took the forest ranger several weeks, but
he finally caught them.”
    He didn’t look convinced and Toni
felt more uneasy. She didn’t understand any of this. What was going on?
    “They had fun, all right,” Hank
spoke in a sarcastic tone. “When we got to Toni’s car, we found the tires
slashed. She’s not going anywhere in that vehicle.”
    “The man with road rage must have
done it.” Toni couldn’t believe someone would actually do such a thing. A heavy
foreboding settled over her and she pressed her fingertips to her temples,
trying to calm the pounding in her head.
    “We’ll notify the sheriff as soon
as we get into town.” With effort Mac bent over and picked up a packet of
photographs of him and Eric in Afghanistan. The pictures had spilled from
Toni’s purse. He sat in the recliner and stretched out his long legs as he
gazed intently at them, one-by-one.
    “I think I’ll go see if I can find
out where the culprit got to,” Hank said.
    “You’re not going alone.” Inez took
her husband’s arm.
    “Just be careful you two,” Mac
cautioned.
    Hank grinned and indicated his gun.
“Now, son, you know what a careful man I am.”
    Turning, Hank stepped outside with
Inez and they followed what appeared to Toni to be an invisible trail into the
trees.
    She watched them go, worried,
unable to shake an ominous feeling. “You think they’ll be okay? I know your
father’s got special training, but he can’t stop a bullet.”
    She shivered at the thought.
    “Don’t worry. Dad knows how to
handle himself. And he’d die before letting anything happen to Mom.”
    “Do you really think a kid made
this mess? They didn’t even steal my money.” Toni held up her wallet and fanned
the