by Dianne Drake
Maybe she was letting the Dawson family down the way she’d let Molly down.
Suddenly a cold chill swept over her. What was she doing, thinking she could be of use out here, as a nurse, as…anything? In the distance, through the trees, she could still see the lodge, and the search activity mounting in the parking lot. It was time to go back. Raw, bitter discouragement was beginning to overtake her because she wanted to make a difference and she wasn’t.
“It’s not easy,” Eric said, suddenly stepping up behind her. “It’s never about strolling through the woods until you come across your victim.”
“But I thought that if I found the trail…”
“You did find the trail,” he said, holding up the pink shoelace marker. “This is it.”
In her mind’s eye, the scenario played out happily. She and Eric would turn the next bend in the trail and find Troy’s dad and brother sitting there, waiting for someone to find them. They’d be alive, slightly damaged, but good. Except the story she saw etched on Eric’s face told her something altogether different. “Worst-case scenario?” she asked.
“We run out of daylight without finding them. Or we find them and they’re…”
This was going to be a long, hard search and the hard lump in her stomach was telling her the outcome might not be the one she wanted. “I’m right behind you,” she whispered, as Eric took the lead. Instinctively, she looked up to see the sky, but the canopy of leaves overhead totally blotted out all but a few splotchy patches of light. “And I can run, Eric. I won’t slow you down.”
She followed him for the next twenty minutes, alternately running and stopping to assess the trail. Words between them were spared in order to conserve breath, but she did what Eric did. She observed everything, looking off to the sides of the trail, looking up, looking down. Once, when they stopped to take a drink of water, she asked the question she feared asking. “What happens if we have to go back?”
“We could lose the trail. It could be wiped out by a light rain, or a good wind. Since it’s spring, that’s highly likely.”
“And you don’t stay out after dark?”
“It depends on the situation. Normally we don’t keep the volunteers out. Too many people out in the dark becomes a risk factor itself. But I have some specialists who go out at night, and Neil’s getting them ready to go right now. He’ll send them on an alternate trail, one that parallels us.”
“All I can think about is that if we have to turn back, what if Troy’s brother and father are only over the next hill? How do you make the decision to quit, and start again tomorrow, when you could be so close?”
“Judgment…experience. I don’t ever like to quit, but if I’m leading the field team, I have to think about their safety first. Neil and I have a good group of volunteers who’ll put their own lives at risk to save someone else, and it’s up to me to make sure they don’t put their lives at risk.” He took one more swig of water from the plastic bottle, held it out to her, and when she refused another drink he capped it and clipped it to his belt. “It’s only going to get rougher up ahead, Dinah. We need to cover more area, faster, because daylight is getting to be a huge factor now.”
“Am I slowing you down so far?” she asked.
“No, but I don’t want to make this miserable for you, since you’ve never done this type of thing before.”
“What makes me miserable is knowing that…” She swallowed hard, trying to fight back the emotion. Eric didn’t need her to be emotional out here, didn’t need her thinking with her heart when a search and rescue such as this followed logical, ordered procedures. “I can do this, Eric.” She trusted that completely.
Actually, she trusted Eric with all her heart. Too bad her heart hadn’t found him when she could have given it to him. Because now, there was nothing left to give away except tatters. But, then, Eric had a few tatters of his own. So maybe knowing she couldn’t have him was part of the attraction she felt for him. If nothing else, it was safe.
Safe. Yes, she wanted to be safe. But how safe? “And I’m ready to run.”
He reached out and squeezed her hand. “When this is over, remind me to tell you how amazing you are.”
“I’ve got part of the team going up to the ridge, looking for a vantage point,” Neil relayed to Eric. “We might get lucky and find them by looking down, if we have enough daylight left. Oh, and Redmond’s just heard from the boy’s mother. She said her husband and the boys were going out to camp, but she didn’t know where, except they’d mentioned renting a rubber raft. Troy is eighteen, by the way, and his brother, Shawn, is twelve. William, the father, is forty, and in good health.”
“Where is she right now?” Eric asked.
“She’s gone to the hospital to be with Troy. He hasn’t come round yet, and it’s not looking good. Scan shows a skull fracture, and they’re getting ready to fly him down to Salt Lake City for surgery. He’s got a subdural hematoma, too. Mrs Dawson will be going with him.”
“Damn,” Eric muttered. It would have been so easy to let the concierge know where they were going. But people came out here and did…foolish things. Foolish, like taking two sons and going off God only knew where for an adventure. Skilled outdoorsmen left word, drew their course on maps and left them behind as a reference. They checked in with the national park authorities. Told their wives. But amateurs went and assumed things would work out. Sometimes they prepared properly as far as the gear they took, sometimes they didn’t. More often than not, they didn’t do the proper research, didn’t tell anybody anything. More often than not, they were the ones he was sent to rescue. When there were fatalities, they were the ones who usually died.
No, he didn’t have a good feeling about this at all. Then he thought about Dinah again, and had to smile. For an amateur in outdoor rescue, she’d done it all right, sort of. Her inexperience taken into account, she’d left her markers for him, kept in touch, gathered up odd, but good supplies, according to the security guard. Good instincts. Untrained, but with a natural knack. Someone to train properly in rescue later on. If she stayed…
“Is Dinah keeping up with you? Because I could get someone from the hospital to run the base camp and come in to pair up with you. Or…” Neil chuckled. “Maybe you’d rather be pairing up with her?”
Eric studied her for a moment, standing off by herself, looking in every direction, studying, taking it all in. “What I’d rather be doing is having a nice quiet dinner—”
“With Dinah?” Neil interrupted.
“With Dinah,” Eric admitted. “But right now we’re taking a water break, eating protein bars, and getting ready to run another mile or two.”
“Toward the river,” Neil said. “If they were carrying a rubber raft…”
“Then they wouldn’t have gone too far.”
“Maybe the rapids?”
Eric cringed at the thought. Inexperience on the rapids equaled tragedy. “Let’s hope they were smarter than that.”
“Well, I’ve got twenty people out, and another group ready to go. Let me know what you need.” With that, Neil clicked off and suddenly it was just the two of them, alone. No civilization around to buffer them.
“Ready to go again?” Eric called. Damn, he admired her. He was working her hard, pushing her far more than he should push anyone without the kind of experience he needed from a volunteer out here, yet he knew she wouldn’t let him down. There was nothing in Dinah he didn’t trust and he only wished she trusted herself half as much as he did.
“Ready,” she called, slinging her pack back over her shoulder. “How are we doing on daylight?”
He glanced up at the sky. It would be dark too soon…a sobering thought. He hated the night because that’s when victims died most often. Maybe because with sunlight there was hope. Maybe because with the night came the feeling of cold, lonely desperation. “Not good. But the river’s not too far off and we should make that in good time, and hope they didn’t go much farther than the first entry point
we’ll come to.” He glanced down at the ground, at a speck of blood splattered against a brown leaf. “Damn,” he muttered. They were running out of time. Everything inside him was screaming that, loud and clear.
“Well, I’m up for a nice, hard run. Ready whenever you are.”
Dinah Corday was intense, dedicated…like no other woman he’d ever encountered, and he wasn’t sure how to handle her…or handle himself around her. But the one sure thing amidst all his confused feelings was that he felt more alive around her than he’d felt in years. After Patricia, he’d spent so much time feeling lost, feeling alone. Feeling like he’d lost his only chance at true happiness when she’d died.
But Dinah stirred things in him. Familiar things as well as things he’d never felt before. Things that made him want to crawl up in a ball and pray they would go away, and things he wanted to shout about from the top of the older Sister. He was happy. He felt disloyal. Mostly, though, he liked being with Dinah, however it happened.
He fingered the shoelace in his pocket as he headed off down the trail they’d been following for the past hour. Couldn’t help but smile as he twisted the shoelace around his index finger.
CHAPTER SIX
ERIC clicked on his radio. “Look, Neil, I think he was coming from the river and got turned around. It’s easy to do up here, since this is close to where the river cuts in. What I’m not seeing though is any sign that three people came through here together recently. So I think Troy taking this trail was an accident. I don’t think we’re going to find anything on it, which means I’m going off trail and heading straight over to the river.”
Neil’s expletive was brittle and explosive. “Look, I’ve got the team on the ridge now, but they’re too far away, not going to get to the river before you do, and I don’t think you’re going to get to a point where you can meet up with them before I have to call them back in for the night.”
“Well, I’m betting that the Dawsons wouldn’t have gone too far upriver. Maybe as far as the rapids. It’s still a good hike up there, but I think can make it before dark, and I’m not inclined to turn around.”
“The rapids are another hour ahead of you, and I’m not happy having you and Dinah out there after dark, as Dinah isn’t experienced.”
Dinah listened to the exchange, following along behind Eric who was still going forward at a fast pace. He had an uncanny sense about this, like he anticipated what he was about to find before he found it. And he didn’t talk. Not a word, except when he reported back to Neil every few minutes. Every ounce of his physical energy, as well as his mental concentration, was spent on the search, and he was so pulled into it, Dinah didn’t dare speak lest she snapped his focus the way the twigs snapped under their boots. In fact, she was almost afraid to breathe in case that little distraction knocked him out of the moment.
It was an amazing thing to watch. This wasn’t Eric the doctor. It was Eric the hunter. The rescuer. A man who took away her breath each and every time he paused to look at something—a disturbed leaf, an imprint in the dirt. A man who took away her breath for no other reason than he was Eric Ramsey.
“We’re going to climb,” he continued to Neil. “That’ll cut off more than half the time, and I think we’ll still have enough light left to get us all the way down to the river. Why don’t you go ahead and send the second team out, have them come in from the north? Then we’ll be good for a while.”
“The second team?” Dinah asked, after he’d finished talking to Neil.
“My night crew. It still gets cold up here after dark, too cold if either of the Dawsons are seriously injured, so we’re going to stay out for a while. Are you up to it?”
“I’m not quitting, Eric. If you go on, so do I. But what if they’re not at the rapids?” One guess out of so many places scared her because right now, in the near-darkness, the woods around them seemed so much bigger than they did during the day, and trying to place Troy in one particular spot was such a daunting task. But Eric was experienced. His guesses…hunches…were based on such a solid foundation she had to trust him.
Trust. There was that frightening word again. It seemed to come up so much when she was with Eric.
“Sometimes you just have to guess. Three people and a rubber raft…inexperienced. The raft is heavy. If you want to put it in the water you’re not going to spend the whole day hiking, trying to find a good starting place, but you want to go far enough to feel that you’re really out in the wilderness. If they got as far as the rapids they wouldn’t have gone beyond that because even the most inexperienced outdoorsmen wouldn’t shoot those rapids in a rubber raft. So that would put them someplace downriver from there. Until now, the river was too far off trail, but it starts to cut back in just east of here, so I think they would have tried rafting somewhere between here and the rapids, hopefully closer to this point than the rapids.”
“Well, I’m prepared to stay out here all night, if that’s what we have to do. You know, I’ve packed food, water. A blanket and a pillow, too.”
“A pillow? You brought a pillow?”
“I thought I might need it. And it could come in handy, couldn’t it? I mean, my pink shoelaces did.”
“Don’t look down,” he said to Dinah. “You’ll get dizzy, so look up at me, do what I tell you, and you’ll be fine.”
Look down? It was hard looking anywhere with her eyes squeezed tightly shut. “Isn’t there another way to get to the bottom from up here?” As rockfaces went, this one was small. She knew that. But she’d never climbed anything more than a flight of stairs, and this was just plain scary. That, plus the fact she wasn’t especially fond of heights. She would have preferred letting Eric do the climbing while she took the long way down, walking. But he wouldn’t hear of it. Wouldn’t leave her alone. And time was running out. That was the winning argument. Shawn Dawson and his father needed help, and if they didn’t take this shortcut to the river, their rescue efforts would have to end for the day. Thinking about the young boy out there, hurt, scared…that’s what propelled her to the edge of the cliff, and had her standing there, toes over the edge, trying not to look down.
“So how do you just step off the edge?” she asked, forcing herself another inch forward.
“You trust me. I’ve got you tied, you’ll be fine. And this is a very easy beginner rock to climb.”
“If you want to climb,” she muttered, bracing herself for the inevitable.
“Turn around, watch me, and I’ll lower you over.”
“And if you drop me?”
“I’ve never dropped anybody before.”
If only he knew how much of an issue trust was for her. Of course, this was not a question of emotional trust. The worst she’d get from this would be some cuts and bruises. They healed. Emotional bruises didn’t, so this was a far easier trust to have. “OK, well…” She turned around, grabbed hold of her ropes and backed to the edge.
“You’re going to be fine, so just lower yourself over the edge and walk, don’t bounce, down the side. Trust me, Dinah, this is easy. You can do it.”
“Easy for you to say,” Dinah grumbled, then drew in a deep breath and took a big leap of faith over the edge. Literally.
The first step off was the worst. The immediate sensation was that she was falling…nothing between her and the ground but air, lots and lots of air.
“You’re doing fine,” he called. “Just don’t swing too much, and you’ll be down before you know it.”
“Trust him,” she muttered out loud, as her feet connected with the rockface and she was grounded again. “Trust him…trust him…” In a way, it was like falling in love—that first feeling of falling or floating, the eventual sure footing. Of course, in her case, she always plummeted hard after the first few steps. Never did find her sure footing. “Trust him…” Those two words were becoming her mantra.
“Keep going,” he said, looking down over the edge at her. “You’re doing a fantastic job.”
“Like you’d say an
ything else to someone who was dangling in midair.” When she finally gathered enough courage to take a look at that fantastic job he claimed she was doing, she saw she’d gone only a few feet. Problem was, it was a short forty-foot drop, total. Something that should take her only a couple of minutes, according to Eric. But those forty feet were insurmountable, and she was stuck swinging in midair, couldn’t get back up, couldn’t force herself to continue on down.
Suddenly, panic turned her lungs into lead. Nothing was moving in and out. Her head was getting light, her fingers and toes tingly. It had to be a panic attack coming on. She’d never had one, but she recognized the symptoms. Dangling off the side of a cliff in mid-panic. She had to trust him, there was no other way to get out of this, to get on with the rescue. The rescue…that’s where she had to focus her thoughts. Shawn needed her. His father needed her.
Eric trusted her to do this…trusted her.
About a minute into the ordeal, when her lungs finally gave out and forced her to breathe again, she realized she’d been biting down on her lips so hard they were bleeding. But something else was happening. Suspended there, as she was, a feeling of exhilaration was coming over her. Her slow progress was mounting into an unexpected victory, not only of will but of trust, and by the time she’d reached firm ground at the bottom, she was ready to have another go at it. But looking up, watching Eric scale down with the skill and grace of an aerial artist, she wondered if she’d ever have the chance to do that again. With Eric. Because it was his trust in her as much as her trust in him that had got her to the bottom.
“You OK?” he asked, as he hit the ground. Immediately, he grabbed hold of her arm and pulled her into him.
She went willingly, fell against his chest and caught her breath there. Lingered a moment longer as the adrenaline rush passed. “That wasn’t so bad,” she said, still a little winded.