Operation Mountain Recovery

by Justine Davis

  He was right in front of her.

  For a moment she thought a brand-new facet of her mental problem had manifested; think of someone and poof, imagine they were there. But he reacted when he saw her. Almost a double take, which told her how bad she must have looked yesterday.

  And told her he was real.

  “Ashley,” he said, staring at her. “Ms. Jordan,” he corrected himself. Why? she wondered. Perhaps he thought it was no longer appropriate for him to use her first name. Now that they weren’t in danger of dying together on a steep mountainside. Her gaze darted to his cheek, where she was glad to see only a faint red line where he’d been bleeding that day.

  “Ashley, please,” she said. “Let’s not go backward at this point.”

  He smiled. It truly was a wonderful smile, just as it had been out on the mountain. He’d come out of the cell phone store, although empty-handed. Perhaps they’d had a theft.

  “You look...like you feel better today.”

  She smiled back at him. It seemed the very least she could do. “That was very tactful. I know how I looked Friday.”

  It was out before she remembered her earlier worry. What if it hadn’t been Friday? What if she really had lost more time, as she had on occasion? But he didn’t look at her as if she were crazy, or even confused, and his smile—no, she couldn’t have seen this smile before; it wasn’t the kind she, or any woman, would forget—just widened.

  “You did look a little ragged. Understandably.”

  “It was those pills, I swear. I’ve felt better ever since I quit them.”

  That smile again. “You seem to be moving okay without them.”

  “I am. Or maybe it’s just that I’m so glad to be free of the fog, I don’t care about a couple of aches and pains.”

  “Good.” He nodded toward the cell store. “If you were headed in there, they’re pretty busy. They had an attempted break-in last night and got backed up dealing with it.”

  “Oh. Thanks for the warning.”

  “Phone didn’t survive the crash?”

  “No, it’s fine.” She grimaced. “Thankfully, since my mom already had to replace the one I lost. I only wanted to see if they could retrieve my contacts from the cloud, since I couldn’t get them to transfer to the new one.”

  The walkie-talkie on his belt crackled, and he said something into the microphone clipped to his shirt. Ten something. Then he looked at her.

  “I was going to stop for coffee while I get this report organized. May I buy you a cup?”

  She drew back, a little startled; she hadn’t expected that. “Seems I should be the one buying you coffee,” she said, and then, driven by that overwhelming need for normalcy, she added, “But I’d like that. Thank you.”

  And that easily, she was in a place she’d never thought to occupy again. Sitting in a coffee shop, across a table from a very handsome man, feeling as if perhaps, just perhaps, she wasn’t really going crazy after all.

  Chapter 8

  Ashley Jordan was in much better shape. She was moving well, and it looked as if her cuts were well on the way to being healed.

  She also did not seem in the least bit crazy. Not that he was an expert. He had some training in handling the most common types of issues he came across, and he did his best to get people who needed it help, but that was it.

  But she didn’t seem like anyone with active problems he’d ever encountered, on the job or off.

  She was funny, amusing and rather sharp. Quick. Steady.

  This was the woman he remembered from the crash—scared, but thinking clearly.

  Scared.

  There was still a trace of that, a vibe he could feel in the moments when she seemed distracted, something he caught glimpses of in those vivid, now thankfully clear again green eyes. And she yelped when the barista dropped a pot and it shattered. But hell, that had made him jump, too. By the time he’d checked on the guy and made sure he wasn’t hurt by flying glass, she seemed perfectly calm once more.

  “Does your job run to rescuing everyone?” she asked in a commendably light tone when he came back to the table.

  “Funny,” he said. “I spent some time the other day trying to figure that out—if it’s the job or just a misguided rescue complex on my part.”

  He was a little startled that he’d said that. He didn’t usually discuss the things he thought about during those times at the lookout. Especially with a near stranger.

  Especially one with mental issues?

  But she tilted her head and gave him a smile that did...something. He wasn’t sure what, except it was odd. New. “You’ll pardon me if I dispute the misguided part. As a personal recipient, I mean.”

  He found himself giving her a crooked grin at the way she put it. “You’re allowed a special dispensation, then.”

  The smile turned almost teasing then, and his insides took a crazy tumble. “Thank you,” she said with an exaggeratedly gracious nod.

  By then he was grinning so stupidly he made himself look down at the notes he’d scribbled about the attempted burglary. But he couldn’t seem to focus on them and gave it up. His laptop was out in the unit—he’d finish it up there, later.

  She took a sip of the latte she’d ordered, basic, no frills or extras—one of the cheaper offerings, he noted, except for his plain black—and studied him over the rim of the cup.

  “How did you end up here, Deputy Crenshaw?”

  He opened his mouth to ask her to call him Brady, but stopped himself. It would not do to get too personal, not with her.

  “I was born here,” he said. “Literally. Snowstorm, and my folks couldn’t make it down the mountain.” His mouth quirked. “In fact, I was born in the back of a sheriff’s unit on the way.”

  Her laugh was a light, lovely thing. And it echoed in her voice when she asked, “So your calling was decided that early on?”

  “Maybe. My mother thought I’d just heard the story so often it planted the idea.”

  She tilted her head again as she seemed to consider that. “Does she ever regret that? It’s not the safest profession. She says with definitive certainty,” she added with another one of those smiles and a glance at his healing cheek.

  He nearly shivered. Damn. What the hell was wrong with him? Was he getting sick? He never got sick. And he felt better in winter than any time of the year.

  He gave himself a mental shake. “She felt better about it when I got hired here right out of the academy. It’s a quiet place, and most of our problems come from mother nature, not human nature.”

  She grimaced at that but then smiled as she said, “I’m sure they snapped you up. Local boy, knows the territory, not to mention great PR with the whole born-in-the-back-of-a-unit thing.”

  He laughed. He couldn’t help it—he just liked the way she phrased things. “They did like that,” he admitted. “In fact, I was sworn in on the day the deputy who delivered me retired, so they had him do it as his last official act.”

  “What a wonderful story,” she said, smiling widely now. “Are your parents still here?”

  “Mom spends winters in Arizona since my dad died five years ago, but she comes back every spring for the rest of the year. This place is in our blood, I think.”

  “That sounds like a great compromise.” She lowered her eyes to her latte, took another small sip. “I’m sorry about your father, though,” she said quietly.

  He wasn’t sure why he’d even told her that, so he only shrugged. But again, he had the thought of how different it must be, for a parent to give up on life—and you—and make that exit by choice. How horrible must it be to feel that lost, that hopeless, that there seemed no other way to end the pain.

  “He was the best,” he said simply, as he always did. Because it was true.

  She gave him a curious look. “Did they ever fight?”

&
nbsp; “They disagreed now and then. Everybody does. But really fight? No. Did yours?”

  “Sometimes. I think more than I really remember, because... I don’t want to. I’ve always wondered—”

  “Ashley! How wonderful to see you out and about!”

  A thin, rather round-shouldered man in an expensive suit strode over to them, a wide smile on his face. Brady felt himself go wary the moment he saw—and recognized—him. He didn’t care for Dr. Joseph Andler. He’d been called as an expert witness in a trial Brady had been involved in, and trial results aside, Brady’s private assessment was the man was both pretentious and arrogant, two qualities he despised more than most.

  “Deputy,” the man said with barely a glance at him, and in a much cooler tone. Okay, so maybe he hadn’t kept that assessment quite as private as he’d thought.

  But a glance at Ashley shoved all that out of his mind; it was as if the woman he’d seen on Friday was back, her eyes wide and fearful, her posture slumped, as if all the bright cheer and energy had drained away like melted snow.

  Belatedly, it hit him. Andler was a psychiatrist. And he doubted very much if there was more than one in a town the size of Hemlock, or maybe even Eagle County. So it followed that this was who her mother had meant when she’d told him Ashley was seeing a psychiatrist. Andler was her shrink.

  He used the term purposely in his mind, remembering the man hated it. He remembered the time in court when another witness had used it, and the man had jumped up and called out “Objection!” as if he were one of the lawyers withstanding in the case. Judge Clarence, who was a good guy, had slapped him down hard, and Brady had enjoyed every bit of it. Small of him, perhaps, but he had.

  But what kind of doctor had this effect on a patient? Ashley had practically crumbled the instant she’d seen him. She’d gone from cheerful, outgoing, even happy to a cringing, fearful, broken soul right before his eyes. She mumbled something to Andler so quietly he couldn’t hear it even from just across the table.

  “You just enjoy your time outside,” the man said with a little too much cheer for Brady’s taste. “We’ll deal with everything at your next session. I’ll see you a week from this Friday, as scheduled. Don’t forget, now. Do you have the reminder card taped to your door, as we discussed? An alarm set on your phone? We don’t want another problem like last time, do we?”

  Brady felt himself frowning and relaxed his expression before the man noticed. He was talking to her as if she were a child. And Ashley was reacting like one, chastened, looking as if she wished she could disappear.

  “What happened last time?” he asked after the man left. Warnings chimed in his mind even as he asked, reminding him he’d vowed not to get involved in her personal troubles.

  “I...got the day mixed up.” He hated the way she sounded. So...tiny. As if she were in fact disappearing. “I put it in my phone. I had the little reminder card he gave me taped up, like he said, where I saw it every day. Every time I looked at it, I noted the day in my head. That day, I couldn’t believe I’d gotten it wrong. I ran all the way home to look at that damned little card that I swear said Wednesday. But it was Tuesday. It was right where it had been all week, saying Wednesday, but now it said Tuesday!”

  Her voice rose a little at the end. Instinctively he reached across the table and put a hand over hers. She went quiet and still. Raised her eyes to his. And the sheer terror he saw there gouged deep, somewhere low and gut-level. A bloody sort of pain swirled in him as he realized the full extent of what she was facing, the sheer horror of a mind slipping further and further out of her control. He’d feel the same way. As her father apparently had. And understanding crashed in on him.

  Get off your high horse, Crenshaw. You’d blow your brains out, too, facing this.

  And in that moment it felt suddenly all too real to him. He’d had himself half convinced in was a mistake. That there was no way the woman he’d just spent the last hour talking with was crazy, or anywhere close to it.

  But the woman he sat across from right now? Maybe.

  Probably.

  He wouldn’t go through this again. He couldn’t. He’d dealt once with a woman who used her supposedly fragile emotions to manipulate him time and again. And while he had no doubts Ashley’s problems were real, not manufactured to that manipulative end as Liz’s had been, it made no difference. He was not going there.

  Not. Going. There.

  No matter how much he liked her when she was...in balance.

  No matter how much she made him smile and laugh.

  No matter that she sparked something in him that he’d never felt before.

  Chapter 9

  Ashley sat with her legs curled up in the big leather chair, staring out the window. The carefully landscaped yard looked clean, almost pristine after the fresh snow overnight. It hadn’t been much, maybe an inch. Certainly nothing that ever would have kept her inside before. But now it seemed a good excuse to stay inside, as her mother had suggested.

  On the thought, her mother came into the living room, holding the two mugs of the tea she prepared every morning. She handed Ashley one, along with her morning medication. Ashley didn’t care for tea and would rather have had coffee, but it was a ritual her mother had begun with pleasure, saying what a delight it was to have her here to share it with her, and she didn’t have the heart to refuse. Her mother’s schedule was so full it was one of the few times they had to spend together, and so Ashley drank the brew.

  “You can have a nice, quiet day,” her mother said, sitting opposite her on the matching leather couch, shifting slightly to adjust the jacket of her neat pantsuit. “Read, perhaps. You’ll be fine.”

  “Yes.”

  She took a long drink from her cup. “Or you could watch movies. That would be a lovely snowed-in day, wouldn’t it?”

  Ashley didn’t bother to point out that they were hardly snowed in, since her mother would be leaving momentarily. She glanced outside again, the new snow just enough to make everything look bright white.

  “It’s lovely,” she murmured. And had she thought that before—for that’s how her life seemed to be divided now, into before the nightmares and after—she would have been happily donning warm clothes and boots and going out for a walk in it, loving every aspect of how things looked, smelled, felt.

  Her mother took another long drink. As if she were in a hurry to finish. And who could blame her? Why would she want to be here with a daughter who was apparently going the same way as her father?

  “Or you could think more about your room, how you’d like to redo it.”

  “The room is fine, Mom.”

  “But it’s not yours,” her mother said briskly. “I was thinking perhaps a lovely pale yellow. Very cheerful.”

  Also, Ashley thought, the color her room had been in childhood. Sometimes she felt as if her mother was trying to go back to that era. As if she wanted Ashley a child again.

  And who wouldn’t, if your adult child is going insane?

  “Thank you, Mom,” she said quietly. “I’ll think about it.”

  As if that was all she’d been waiting for, her mother stood. “I’ll see you this evening, then. I’ve got that meeting with the Chamber of Commerce, so I may be late, but there are meals in the freezer. Only the microwave,” she cautioned.

  Ashley flushed. “I know.”

  “And don’t forget your medication, now.”

  Ashley nodded, and picked up the pill her mother had put on the table beside her. She had been quite upset when she realized Ashley hadn’t been taking them since the accident, although she gently forgave her because of the accident and the confusion from the pain pills.

  Her mother still stood there watching. Like I really am that child, and she has to make sure I do what I’m told. She popped the pill in her mouth and picked up her tea.

  “See you later,” her mother s
aid and swept out of the room in that regal manner she had. She always had had it, Ashley thought. She’d just let it show more since she’d been elected mayor, and more so since she’d been reelected last year.

  Ashley lifted the cup, grimacing at the thought of the big swallow it was going to take to get that pill down. She hadn’t missed that in the days since the accident.

  A cascade of images and thoughts flowed through her mind. She lowered the mug. Spat the pill out into her hand. Stared at it.

  When she’d been taking the pain pills, she hadn’t been taking these. She hadn’t really decided on it—it was just that they made her so groggy she hadn’t been thinking at all. And when she’d decided that morning to stop the pain pills, she’d felt so wonderful, so clearheaded again, she hadn’t taken these. She knew that many of the medications for mental conditions caused such things—fogginess, a disconnected feeling—but she hadn’t realized how much they’d affected her until she’d missed them for a few days. And if she’d had any withdrawal problems, they had been masked by the aftermath of the crash and the powerful medication.

  And then she’d had the most wonderful day in recent memory.

  Her fingers curled around the pill. In her mind she was back in the coffee shop, looking across the table at Deputy Crenshaw. Kind, brave, handsome, strong, humble, with a grin that could knock down trees...what more could a woman ask?

  She could ask to be normal, so something might come of it.

  And no matter how loudly her common sense clamored that he was just feeling...responsible for her or something, as if saving her life wasn’t enough, or as if it connected them somehow, she couldn’t seem to stop herself from wondering, if she was normal, if something really might come of it.