The small car accelerated and shot past the van. It just managed to clear the front end of the tanker in front of her. But the tanker braked so hard that it lost control. Near the end of the bridge where it rejoined the steep cliff and became road again, the tanker jackknifed. The back cylinder twisted off, rolled, and instantly burst into flames. The van barely cleared the tanker. Abigail had nowhere to go but forward; she’d never stop in time.
She pulled the steering wheel as hard as she could to the left, missing the rear bumper of the van as it passed her. She skidded around the fishtailing, blazing tanker. For one horrifying second, the spinning front cab of the tanker was right in front of her, facing the wrong way, and she looked into the terrified face of the driver.
His mouth was open in a scream. His hands twisted the wheel in vain.
Abigail hit the far left guardrail as she slipped her truck between it and the tanker cab. She corrected her steering, cleared the end of the bridge, and made it to the roadway. Behind her, through the open window, she heard the sickening sounds of metal crashing, shrieking, as the SUV failed to avoid the tanker.
Flames exploded higher in her rearview mirror.
Then, with a noise louder than anything she’d ever heard, the end of the bridge collapsed entirely behind her. It took down with it the fiery tanker, its cab, Samuel’s SUV, the horse trailer, the small car, and the van.
Abigail careened to a stop on the shoulder, just off the bridge.
She leaped out of the truck, cell phone in hand. She dialed 911 for the third time that day, and gave the dispatcher all the details she could, as she stood on the edge of the cliff and watched the metal beneath her burn.
“How many people are injured, ma’am?” asked the dispatcher.
“I don’t know! At least five. Maybe more! Just hurry! The bridge fell…”
“The bridge fell? You didn’t say that, ma’am! How much of the bridge?”
“The last half, the, uh, eastern half, I guess. Just get out here.” Abigail flipped her cell phone closed and closed her eyes, unable to feel anything but the heat rising from below.
Then she heard a scream, followed by another. The flames, fast to rise, were dying down. She could see at least one person—no, there were two—stumbling between vehicles.
She had to help.
She started down the cliff, carefully bracing herself against the slipping rocks.
Almost at the bottom, she called out, “Help is coming! Hold on! They’re on their way!” The intensity of the heat terrified her, but she kept going.
A man wearing overalls and bleeding from the head waved her over to a small car. He fell to his knees.
A huge sound, terrible in its volume, came from above her. Abigail looked up.
The whole side of the cliff was coming down. Oh, God, her pickup truck was coming down with it. She saw the back end of it tilting, sliding on the moving rocks, and now the whole hill was moving toward her, carrying the truck, deafening in its roar.
She ran, toward the fire, toward the man, as fast as she could. She’d never make it out of the way in time.
Chapter Thirty-nine
Life is too short to be bothered knitting something you don’t love.
—E.C.
On his way up the driveway, Cade tried to slow his breathing. He’d cleared the whole ranch with Tom’s help. If Samuel was hiding here, he was invisible. He was out there somewhere, and Cade was going to find him. Tom was in charge of watching for Abigail to return, and Cade had made him swear on his life that he would keep Abigail safe if she beat Cade home. He felt both foolish and dead serious asking Tom to agree.
Cade didn’t deserve her. But maybe he could begin to earn her love. Starting right now.
He hit the main road and slammed the gearshift into fourth.
So what if Eliza had some grand plan in place? So what if she’d wanted him to get together with Abigail, to set them up? Eliza had been about love. She had loved Uncle Joshua with every last bit of her heart, and she wouldn’t have expected him to be with Abigail unless he loved her.
Which, dammit, he did.
But he’d hurt her, because he was the biggest idiot that had ever lived, and she’d never trust him again. He didn’t blame her.
Cade rolled down the window to try to cool his mind.
Wasn’t this the way? He finally fell in love, and he couldn’t have her, wouldn’t ever be with her because he hadn’t been able to see who she really was, in time.
He snapped the radio off. He wasn’t in the mood for music.
Maybe he’d listen to the scanner. It was good for picking up the fire channels to monitor medicals and house fires, and sometimes he liked to be nosy about what was going on in town. Cops were fun to laugh at when they got hyped up on the radio.
And man, they were hyped right now. So was the dispatcher.
“David-two, David-seven, Adam-four and all other available units, code three for the bridge. Code three for Mills Bridge. Total six ambulances enroute, reports of multiple casualties, MCI initiated, three helos enroute. Proceed with caution, eastern span is out. Repeating, eastern span is down. Need road blocked on eastern end. Repeat, road is not blocked on eastern end. Four casualties transported by ground so far from western end, unknown status of remaining victims.”
Mills Bridge? He was almost to the eastern end of it. He hit the brakes as he came out of the last curve before the bridge started. He knew that doing so had saved his life.
Nothing. A sheer drop into nothing.
He kicked the truck into reverse. He had to set up a roadblock, to set up something. Someone else was going to come around fast and fly off the edge like he almost had.
A hundred yards up the road, he yanked the emergency brake and skidded into a turn that placed his truck squarely across the middle of the road. At least they’d only hit it and not fly over. He grabbed four flares from his tool box, lit them all and threw them up the road as far as he could. Then he turned and raced for the cliff’s edge.
It was bad. He could see at least five vehicles down there, some people moving around. Something was on fire, but it looked like it had almost burned out. A fire-patrol rig had four-wheeled down the other side and looked like it was pumping water. At least eight cop cars were flashing their lights on the other side, and he watched as uniforms scrambled down. Two ambulances were loading their crews up the hill on the other side. It looked as if they were carrying patients up on Stokes stretchers.
Thank God the river was low, barely ankle deep at this time of year.
He stood on the edge and tried to ascertain if it was safe to descend. Rocks skittered down, but it looked like the part that had gone down was the shale, and all that was left up here was solid rock. It should be okay.
He started down, his boots slipping immediately. He hit the dirt with his backside and bounced back up.
Then he saw it.
Abigail’s truck. At the bottom, halfway covered in rock, a tangled mess. It wasn’t near the tanker and the other vehicles—it was closer to the cliff’s edge. It was on its side, and he could hear the mangled engine still ticking under the rubble as he got closer.
He stopped breathing.
If she was in that thing when it went down…
No.
If she was in that truck…
If she had been anywhere near that truck when it went over…That stupid, little no-good couch-carrying truck.
Still barely breathing, his mind exploding with terror, he went down faster. He wouldn’t, couldn’t fall.
Everything depended on this.
Everything.
All that he was, depended on her.
“Abigail!” His voice was too quiet. He gathered air into his lungs as he launched himself down the few remaining feet and at the truck. “Abigail!”
He peered into the wrecked cab.
She wasn’t there. Thank God, she wasn’t there.
But where was she?
“Abigail!” His voice sounded as hysterical
as he felt.
Paramedics knelt over someone near a horse trailer that was almost in splinters.
A woman.
They were working on a woman.
Cade tripped and fell to his knees once and he used his hands to scratch at the rocks, to push himself back up so he could run again.
Not her, it couldn’t be her. He would die, too.
A startled-looking paramedic, way too young for the job, yelled as Cade pushed between them to look.
The woman they were working on was a blond, not a brunette. Covered in blood. She was breathing: the medics had been positioning her on the board to get her up the other side.
It wasn’t her.
“Sorry,” Cade mumbled and pushed his hands into his hair.
“Where?” He choked. “Where are the others?”
“The worst were transported first. If you don’t see someone here, they’ve gone to County Hospital. Now get the hell out of the way.”
Cade couldn’t seem to make his feet respond to his wishes.
“Move!” yelled the paramedic.
He stumbled out of their way, and approached an officer who looked bewildered by the chaos.
“Have you seen a girl? Brown hair that curls at the ends, blue eyes? Slim?”
“Think she went out with the first batch…”
“How bad?”
“Don’t remember, buddy, we seen a lot in the last half hour. They’re all pretty bad. I’m sorry, I didn’t notice.”
Cade started running.
This was everything.
She was everything.
He ran through the low river, not letting out the sob that threatened to rip from his chest. He ran up the other side of the hill, not allowing himself to fall when he stumbled.
At the top, he saw the officer that had ticketed him.
“John! Have you seen her? Abigail?”
He looked at Cade blankly. Then nodded. “Yes. She’s at County.”
“How bad is she?”
“I don’t know, someone just told me that’s where she’d gone, with the driver of the tanker. Don’t think he’ll make it though.”
“Drive me.”
“I can’t leave!”
“Look, two more of your guys are pulling up, over there. I’m begging you with all that’s holy, if I don’t get to County—” Cade’s voice broke.
John nodded. “All right. I need a report from a medic there anyway. Let me tell the sergeant…”
“Tell him later!” Cade roared.
As they raced up the coastal highway, Cade kept his forehead pressed against the glass of the passenger-side window.
If this was love, if this is what fear felt like when you loved someone, he didn’t know how so many people made it through life.
What had Aunt Eliza done with this fear, when Uncle Joshua was so sick?
What did anyone do?
He couldn’t live without her. It wasn’t possible.
At County Hospital, the emergency room was a battlefield. Every nurse and doctor was yelling, every intern racing from bed to bed. Two more ambulances pulled up behind the cop car, but Cade beat them inside.
A nurse yelled at him to stop, but he pulled sheet after sheet aside, looking at bloody faces, bodies. A horribly burned man turned haunted eyes to him as he yanked aside another curtain. This must be the tanker driver. He looked alert, though, and he was breathing.
“What the hell are you doing?” shouted the nurse. Cade was gone, pulling aside the next curtain.
The sheet was pulled up over the body in the bed, blood staining red against the white. The face was covered. Cade used every ounce of willpower he had. He yanked back the sheet. A man’s face. Eyes open, still, staring. The left half of his face was burned to blackness, the skin rippling and charred, peeling back against white skin. The right side of his face looked undamaged, white and pink. The name on the slip of paper next to his head read, “ID: Samuel Collins.”
Cade had never prayed before, but he sent something up with all his heart, and he didn’t stop to analyze what it was.
He went through the entire emergency room twice. They were too busy to stop him.
She wasn’t here.
If she wasn’t here…
She had to be here.
A firm hand grasped his upper arm so hard that it hurt. A small nurse with blood on her scrubs said, “Out. Now. I mean it.”
“But…”
“Out.” She dragged him into a large waiting room. “Stay. If I see you in there again, I’ll have you arrested.”
Being arrested was the least of his worries, but he couldn’t think of a single other thing to do.
Her cell phone. Yes.
Cade dialed.
He waited. It connected.
And then he heard her ring tone play, faintly, around the corner.
He stood. His legs shook, but they bore his weight.
As Abigail answered, he’d already made the turn and was standing in a small hallway.
She sat in a brown plastic chair, the color gone from her face. Her clothes were ripped, and it looked like she was getting a black eye. One to match his.
“Hello?” she repeated into the phone. “Cade? Please?”
Then she looked up at him.
He looked down at her.
Abigail burst into tears.
Cade’s arms went around her. He wrapped her up, making sure he cradled every part of her. He kissed her face, her hair, her cheeks.
“You’re alive. You’re alive.” He murmured the words over and over. She said words, too, but he couldn’t understand them, at first. They didn’t sound like English through her tears, and then she stopped making any noise at all and just shook in his arms.
He hoped she couldn’t tell how much he was shaking, too.
After long, long moments, Cade felt her take her first full breath. He released her only enough to look into her face.
“My love,” he said.
And he watched that light, that light that he thought he had extinguished, come back on.
“But Samuel…”
“Is his last name Collins? Dark-haired? Suit?”
“Yes,” she whispered.
“He’s dead.”
She sagged against him, as if all the air had left her lungs. “I’m not sorry,” she said. “It’s so awful. But I’m not sorry.”
“Nothing matters without you,” Cade said against her hair. “Nothing. And I didn’t know, I didn’t understand that until I thought I lost you.” The hot tears that had been threatening finally filled his eyes. “When I saw the truck…When I couldn’t find you there, or in the ER…I thought…”
“I was with the tanker driver. No one but me knew CPR before they got there. He was so burned. His lungs were burned. He couldn’t breathe. I did CPR until the ambulance got there. I wouldn’t leave him, so they took me in the ambulance. But I don’t think he’ll make it.”
“I saw him. He didn’t look great. But he was breathing. He was breathing, honey.”
Now her eyes were the ones to fill.
“And you’re alive,” he said. “You’re alive. You’re here.”
She pressed her lips against his, softly. “I’m not going anywhere, cowboy.”
He used the back of his hand to swipe away the tears rolling down his cheeks. He wasn’t ashamed of them. They were for her.
As gently as he could, he released her from his arms, and set her back on the hard plastic chair. And he slipped off the chair, onto the ground and onto his knee.
“Might not be the best time or place, and I don’t have anything to give you, except myself. And some sheep. But Abigail, will you marry me?”
He was startled by her laugh. “Eliza would be so proud of you!”
“But,” he said, “is that a yes?”
“Hell, yes, that’s a yes. You’re my heart.” Her smile radiated light—light that he would make sure never dimmed, not for the rest of their lives.
Epilogue
—E.C.
On a cool Tuesday morning one year later, Abigail turned the “Open” sign to “Closed,” and then locked the door of the store. She packed a picnic lunch. She put on her favorite red polka-dot dress and pulled her hair back. She put on lipstick. She put on a new red angora lace cardigan she’d just finished making.
She’d lose money today. Tuesdays were usually good days, customers having missed her on Monday tended to wait impatiently for the next open day. But that would have to be okay.
She got in her blue Nissan pickup truck, the replacement one, and drove up to the barn. Tom and Cade were in the rafters, rigging ropes for something they were doing down below.
“’Lo, boys!”
“Watch out below,” hollered Cade, and then he slid down a rope, his gloved hands smoking a little as his legs hit the ground.
“Show-off,” she muttered, and kissed him.
“Get a room!” yelled Tom as he slid down the rope. When he got to the bottom, he said, “You should tell Janet I did that. That’s cool.”
“Tell her yourself tonight, when you go home.”
“It’s better if you tell her how cool I am. Sliding down a rope.”
Abigail raised her eyebrows at him.
Tom grinned, and then asked, “How’s the book going?”
“I’m done. I just finished, right now! I just typed ‘The End.’ And it’s time to celebrate with my guy.”
Cade smiled, but he said, “Honey, I still have to…”
“No, you don’t. You get two hours off.”
“Who says?”
“Your wife. Come on, I have something to show you.”
“This gonna at least be rated R?”
“Cade!”
Tom laughed. “See you later, boss. Have fun.”
Abigail drove, Cade complaining good-naturedly the whole way.
“I bet you didn’t even bring the turkey sandwich I like.”
“Brought it.”
“And the Hershey’s kisses?”
“You can have my kisses, if you want.”
“I always want. They taste better anyway.”
How to Knit a Love Song Page 29