by Lisa Childs
She found herself on her feet without consciously deciding to rise. “May I help you?”
He took off the dark glasses, folding them away as he continued moving between the desks. The look in his hazel eyes pinned her to the floor and she all but stopped breathing as her throat closed.
And then he was right beside her, taking her hands, looking at her as though he’d never seen her before. He brought her right hand up to his face and laid her palm against his hairy cheek. His eyes sparkled with tears.
“Alex?” she murmured, searching his face with a disbelieving intensity. “Oh, my God. Alex?”
His nod was almost imperceptible. His tears moistened her fingertips. “Are you real or am I dreaming?” she mumbled.
“If you’re dreaming, then so am I,” he said, his voice choked with emotion.
She forgot to wonder how she would feel or react and just flung herself against him. Tears of relief filled her eyes as he held her. She finally pushed herself away. “How is this possible?” she asked. “Where have you been?”
He pulled her back against him, burying his face against her neck, holding her tight as if he’d never let her go. “I crashed in the Bitterroots,” he said. “I’ve just been trying to stay alive until the snow melted so I could get back.”
“I thought you were dead,” she said. “Or maybe even worse, that you…”
She stopped short.
“I can’t believe I’m holding you,” he whispered.
She leaned back to gaze up at him, smoothing his hair away from his brow with trembling fingers, trying to find the man she married under the scars and hair. “Are you all right? You’re limping. And your poor face.” She searched his eyes for answers.
Instead of providing them, he tugged her back to his chest, and this time his lips landed on hers. Even when times were tough between them, the physical connection had been quicksilver and so it still was, all the sweeter for the fact that until a few minutes before, she’d thought she’d never see him again.
A woman’s voice cut in from the open doorway and they both turned to find the school’s principal, Silvia Greenspan. “I’m sorry to interrupt you guys,” she said. It appeared she knew Alex was at the school, had probably spoken to him when he came onto the campus. She smiled at them both fondly as she added, “There are tons of reporters outside. Alex, I think someone in the office got excited and alerted the local television channel that you’d reappeared here at the school. I don’t know how long we can hold them back.” She turned and left, her footsteps clicking in retreat as she hurried back down the hall.
“How did you get to Blunt Falls?” Jessica asked.
“Doris and Duke Booker brought me. They’re the people who more or less rescued me.”
“Rescued you! Alex, what happened?”
“Later, okay?” He looked at her longingly. “There’s so much I need to tell you.”
“I know,” she said, her mind still grappling with his offhand comment about being rescued. “Me, too.”
“I’m sorry about the fight we had before I left. It was my fault.”
“Not now,” she said, straightening his collar. “You have to go talk to the press.”
He shook his head. “No.”
“What do you mean, no? Everyone is going to be so relieved to hear you’re home safe and sound.”
“They can wait,” he said. He gestured at her cluttered desk. “Anything here need to go home with you?”
“These tests,” she said, picking up the math papers she’d been grading. He retrieved her briefcase from the closet and held it open for her as she deposited the papers. “Why are we running away?”
“Because,” he said, sounding like one of her students. “There’s a back way out of here through the gym, isn’t there?”
“Yes, but—”
“But nothing,” he interrupted as he took her jacket from her chair and draped it over her shoulders. “Where’s your purse?”
“I’ll get it,” she said as she unlocked the desk drawer where she kept it during classes. “Why don’t you want to talk to the newspeople? What’s wrong?”
“Nothing is wrong, not like that. I just think we have the right to reconnect before the blitz. Don’t you?”
“Yes,” she said, nodding, suddenly realizing he was right. There were so many things she had to tell him about the past three months, things he needed to understand, things that would redefine what he thought he knew about the world, things she didn’t want him hearing from someone holding a camera on his face. And, she realized with a jolt of panic, there were things she needed to take care of, too. Things she didn’t want him to see.
She followed him toward the door, his limp a visual reminder of the struggle he must have endured. “Hurry,” she added as they raced down the hall and out the back of the gym toward the baseball field, which they could circle to access the parking lot.
It was a tremendous relief to slide behind the wheel of her car. “Duck your head,” she muttered, driving out of the lot. Their path led them past two or three television vans with satellite dishes on their roofs and a growing crowd of people milling about. Alex didn’t sit up again until they were half a mile away and she gave him the all clear. Their gazes met and he smiled but she knew it wouldn’t be long before reporters figured out they’d slipped away.
And it wasn’t as though they’d be hard to find.
*
“NOTHING MUCH HAS CHANGED,” Alex said in wonder as he followed Jessica into the house and closed the front door behind them. It seemed surreal that for the past one hundred and three days he’d been living in the most primitive of conditions while his wife, his house, his job—his world—existed right here as it always had. At the time, emerged as he was in basic survival, all this had seemed like a distant fantasy he’d never live to revisit, but here it had been all along, chugging away without him, apparently none the worse for his absence.
The same thing had happened when he’d been deployed in the army, only then he’d been shot at, as well. On the other hand, he hadn’t been alone and there was a lot to be said for companionship.
The house was a newer one, built in a cluster of similar houses located in a small wooded area a few miles outside of Blunt Falls. They’d bought it with plans to fill the rooms upstairs with their children and had pictured them running through the trees and splashing in the shallow stream at the bottom of the gulch with the neighborhood kids as playmates. But that had never happened. Oh, the neighbors’ families grew all right, but theirs didn’t and now, in some ways, the houses all around them, strewn with tricycles and sandboxes, formed a painful reminder that things didn’t always work out the way you thought they would.
Now the house welcomed him back with years of memories, and he stood by the big rock fireplace just trying to center himself. Meanwhile, Jessica closed the drapes and turned to face him. She’d deposited her purse and briefcase on the chair nearest the door, much as she always had and now stood looking up the stairs as though she wanted to dash up to their room.
He reached for her hand. “We won’t have long before they track us down,” he said.
She looked at him and nodded. “Good point.”
“I’m a little beat,” he said with a smile. “Let’s go sit at the table like we used to. Let’s talk.”
“Yes,” she said, nodding. “Okay.”
He claimed the chair facing the living-room door and patted the one beside it. She entered the dining room behind him, her brown eyes velvety, enhanced by the oversize cream tunic she wore over slim black jeans.
She looked good, her aubu
rn hair longer than it had been in a while, combed straight back from her oval-shaped face which was devoid of makeup as it almost always was. He’d been afraid he’d find her worn-out and grief stricken, but instead she seemed almost luminescent. His disappearance didn’t seem to have hurt her.
Well, why should it have? They’d been whisper close to a separation for most of the past year, so caught up in their different lives that they’d become like that old saying, “Ships passing in the night.” In fact, for the past three months his greatest fear had been that she would be relieved he’d vanished. No more fights, no more disappointments, no stress. Just over. And who was to say that that isn’t what happened? Maybe she’d moved on, maybe she’d even found someone else.
Maybe he should stop borrowing trouble….
“Are you hungry?” she asked, standing behind the chair he’d patted. It provided a good view of the garden and he’d already noticed the plethora of bushes and flowers that bloomed with an intensity he didn’t remember ever seeing before. Some plants were absolutely covered with buds, promising radiant blossoms in the weeks to come. She must have spent hours out there tending that garden, loving it.
“The Bookers stuffed me,” he said, a bit distracted by the beauty sweeping across the yard toward the doors. He pulled his attention back to her. “They grow or hunt just about everything they eat. My poor digestive tract is probably struggling to cope after existing on three-plus months of pretty much nothing but fish.”
She slid a basket of clothes across the table and started folding them. He got the distinct impression she was keeping her hands busy. Either that, or she was creating a barrier by positioning the basket between them. “Where did you meet these people?” she asked.
“I literally stumbled into their garden and collapsed in their asparagus patch.”
She stopped folding a lacy bra and stared at him. He tore his gaze away from the undergarment and all the memories it provoked as she said, “You’re not making any sense. Where have you been for three months? What exactly happened to you?”
He told her about the storm and the dead engine, ending with the crash far off his reported route and the immediate sinking of the plane. He touched on his nightmare crawl across the lake to the relative safety of the shore and how he’d managed to live through the first night by digging out a trench around the base of a tree and covering it over with evergreen boughs.
“I can’t believe you survived,” she said when he paused. “Did you ever see a search plane?”
“Once,” he said, all but wincing at the memory. “I woke up to the sound of an engine and scrambled out of my hole like a crippled badger.”
“When was this?”
“Two days after the crash. I had to grab the makeshift crutches to get out into the clear where they could see me. The emergency beacon I carried went down with the Cessna.”
She almost rolled her eyes and he smiled. “I know, I know. You asked me to update my equipment a hundred times.”
“Two hundred,” she said.
“Well, you were obviously right. Anyway, by the time I got out from under the trees, they were gone and they didn’t come back.”
“That must have been horrible,” she said, visibly shuddering. “How is your leg now?”
“Pretty good. I’ll probably limp for the rest of my life, but considering everything, that’s not so bad.”
She nodded. “Okay, now tell me how you ended up in an asparagus patch.”
He shrugged as though it was all no big deal. The actuality of it was a whole different matter. “I waited until the snow started to melt, smoked a bunch of fish, broke camp and stared downhill, following a stream that fed from the lake. After a few days, I ran into tended land, though I didn’t see a house. There was this big, tall fence surrounding some seedlings so I went through the gate to see if anything was mature enough to eat yet. I found a few strawberries, gobbled them up and must have passed out or fallen asleep because the next thing I knew, an older woman was shaking me awake. She told me her name was Doris and that she and her husband, Duke, had built themselves a place just over the rise. They nursed me for a day or so and then they insisted on driving me home and that took another two days.”
“Thank heavens she found you,” Jessica said. “You should see a doctor about your leg.”
“I will. Right now, it’s enough just to be sitting here.” He ran a hand across his hairy chin and added, “I need a shave and my own clothes. Duke lent me these.”
“They sound like incredibly kind people. But, Alex, why didn’t you phone me?”
“They don’t have a phone,” he said. “No television, no internet, no electricity. They’re the back-to-nature type. I did call my parents on the way, though.”
“But not me.”
Did that bother her? Was she thinking that in the months before he disappeared he’d often not reported in as often as he should because it always seemed to come with an argument or apathy, either one of them hard to take? “I didn’t want you to find out about me over a phone,” he said gently. “I wanted to see you. I wanted to look in your eyes, to know if it mattered to you that I was alive.”
“Of course it matters to me,” she said, brow furling. “What a terrible thing to say.”
“You know what I mean, Jess.”
She nodded as she bit her lip and took a deep breath.
“Still,” he continued, gesturing at the wall phone. “I’m kind of surprised that thing isn’t ringing off the hook. Mom has had time to tell all the relatives by now.”
“I have it switched to message only,” she said. “I had to. It felt like every call was a possible ambush. I had to be able to deal with people on my own terms, at least once I was inside this house.” She met his gaze and smoothed back her hair. “I’m sorry, Alex, that must sound selfish to you.”
“No,” he said gently, patting the chair again as she finished folding the laundry. “No, it sounds like survival, that’s all.”
She sat down next to him, their knees all but touching. He ached to fold her in his arms. He wanted to tell her that he’d been thinking of little else but her for weeks and weeks and that he wanted them to be together, to make things work. But she was distant and jittery and he wasn’t brave enough to admit his feelings and have them dashed in his face.
For that matter, dare he trust his feelings? The past several days had been a roller coaster of a ride, exhausting on all levels. Being back was strange and wonderful and truth be known, scary as hell.
He caught her studying his face and wished he’d taken Duke Booker up on his offer for a shave and a haircut so he’d look a little more like he had before.
“There are things you need to know,” she said.
He braced himself. Here it came. She’d moved on.
She shook her head as she added, “Maybe you should call Nate and get him to tell you.”
“Nate?” What did his best friend have to do with her?
“He’s been so concerned about you,” she said.
“I can imagine,” Alex murmured, trying to imagine what it must have been like for Nate to keep waiting for a plane that never arrived. They’d met in the army, had both ended up with careers in law enforcement, Nate as a deputy in Arizona and Alex a police detective in Blunt Falls. Now they were fishing buddies when the opportunity allowed.
“What does Nate need to tell me that you can’t?” he asked.
She shook her head. “Okay, I’ll try to explain. Before people start asking you questions, you’ve got to know a few things. There are a lot of people, Nate included, who don’t think your plane crash was an acciden
t.”
He frowned. “What?”
“Right around the time your plane disappeared, Nate was almost killed. That’s why he couldn’t join the search to try to find you. Worse than all that, though, is that Mike Donovan was murdered.”
“Mike is dead?”
“Yes. I’m sorry.”
Mike wasn’t a close pal, like Nate, but Alex had cared for him all the same. Head spinning, he murmured, “Nate thinks all three of us were targeted by the same person?”
“Yes, a man in Shatterhorn who sang your accolades after the mall incident. Everyone refers to him simply as The Shatterhorn Killer and not by name, a tribute to those he killed or caused to die. Anyway, he’s dead now, thanks to an unidentified driver Nate saw purposefully run him down with a car. This same man was also behind the shooting at the Shatterhorn mall and apparently, him and others like him have been responsible for all sorts of mayhem occurring on national holidays around the country. Remember that incident in Hawaii last Pearl Harbor Day where some angry kid shot and killed those off-duty soldiers on the beach? Things like that. Everyday events shattered by violence. And everyone is certain something is going to happen this Memorial Day, too.”
Alex stared at her a moment, trying to make sense of all this. “But you said the guy was run over.”
“There are apparently others. Even if this man wasn’t in Blunt Falls when your plane was sabotaged, he could have hired someone to help him do it.”
Alex simply couldn’t wrap his head around any of it. The lonely austerity of the mountains suddenly seemed like the epicenter of civilization and this place a jungle. “Why would anyone do this?” he asked.