“What happened, exactly?”
“The light came on on the dash, and then it sputtered and died.”
“Let’s try to push it to the side. Can you do that?” Treasure asked. There was a tiny bit of a downhill grade to the pull over spot Treasure assumed Vanessa had been aiming for.
“I can’t. My doctor said I can’t exert myself right now. Things are precarious.” She placed her hand on her lower stomach.
Treasure’s exasperation rose, but she kept her composure. Pretend she’s a patient and you don’t know anything about her, she told herself.
“Fine. You steer and I’ll push.” The coupe was small and Treasure was strong. She would try it alone. After they moved the car, she could find cell phone reception to call a tow truck.
Vanessa glanced at the road and the curve blocking the view of who or what was coming unseen. “That seems dangerous, Treasure.”
“Do you want to do this or would you rather have your fancy little car smashed to bits?”
“I guess we can try.”
Vanessa wrapped her arms around herself as if she were cold. There was no sunshine in the canyon and the warmth of the day was fading fast. The drop in temperature didn’t penetrate through her thick leather jacket and jeans, but she could tell Vanessa’s gauzy cotton dress was little better than wearing nothing. Vanessa checked for oncoming cars and climbed behind the wheel. Treasure did her best to listen for approaching vehicles over the sound of the river and then took her place behind the coupe.
“Roll your window down and put it in neutral,” she called out. “And let off the brake!” She thought this last part would be obvious, but the brake light glowed until she made this last suggestion.
With a heave, Treasure dug in her boots and the car rolled into the narrow pullover spot. No semitrailers roared by and relief washed through her. The car hung into the lane a few inches, but it was much safer. Treasure could jump back on the BMW and find a cell signal to call roadside assistance. She would go home and sleep, knowing she did what she could. She envisioned opening a bottle of Pinot Noir or pouring a healthy shot of Irish cream in a cup of coffee and checking her online messages for sales. Relaxing after this taxing day suddenly sounded like heaven and she couldn’t wait to get back to Granite Lake. She walked around to the side of the car and saw Vanessa holding her phone in the air.
“Pop the hood and I’ll take a quick look to see if I can figure out what’s wrong,” she said, shocking herself. What she meant to say was, ‘Give me a number so I can get out of here. And see ya’ later. Like maybe in another lifetime.’ Instead, her mouth betrayed her and offered additional help. What is the matter with me? She knew her random acts of kindness and need to help others came from her father. Morton Vogle may have drunk too much and partied more than most respectable parents, but he always stopped for strangers in need of assistance alongside the road. Vanessa was in a tough situation and Treasure could help. The crystal clear realization of where Treasure acquired her selflessness from made her ache for her dad. Her jaw tightened and impatience grew as Vanessa searched the dash and the floorboard for the latch to the hood.
Treasure’s eyes ached to roll around their sockets. She took another steadying breath. “Move and I’ll do it.” Vanessa didn’t know how the hood of her car opened.
Vanessa grabbed a light jacket off the seat of the car and stepped out. “I’m going to see if I can get a signal over there.” She pointed at the raised embankment next to the rushing river.
Treasure glanced over and saw the spot where the ground rose about four feet higher than where they stood. Who knows, maybe there’s a nearby tower.
“Good luck,” she mumbled and pulled the lever to release the hood.
Vanessa teetered on high heeled sandals toward the river as Treasure looked for an obvious mechanical problem. As she suspected, every vital component of the engine lay beneath a black shield. If she wanted to figure out what was wrong, she needed to remove the engine covers. At this point, it would be an exercise in futility. New cars aren’t meant to be worked on by a layperson. Chances were high the problem couldn’t be resolved by a loose wire or hose anyway. A thought occurred to her. “Did you run out of gas?” She rested her hand on the raised hood ready to slam it closed.
“I’m not that ditzy,” Vanessa said as she stared at the screen of her phone.
Ditzy or not, the girl didn’t know how to open the hood. The possibility of letting the tank run out wasn’t out of the realm of probability. “Just asking. It’d be a simple fix.”
“I’m not stupid, Treasure. I don’t know what Bodie said about me, but I can read a gas gauge. If you must know, I’m more educated than either of you. I have a master’s degree.”
Vanessa’s high and mighty card was the final straw. Patience and tolerance forgotten, Treasure turned around and left the car behind. “Do you really want to go there with me right now?”
“What?” Vanessa said, hinging backward on her ridiculous platform sandals. Her eyes widened, but she didn’t take anything back. “You were asking and I answered. Listen Treasure, neither of us care for the other. I’m not blind. And I forgive Bodie for whatever happened or is happening between the two of you.”
This last declaration stopped Treasure from advancing and knocking Vanessa off her perch of dirt and rocks and making her eat it. “You forgive him?” she asked, trying to clarify Vanessa’s meaning and hoping she would dig her grave a little deeper, so Treasure wouldn’t feel quite so bad for what she was about to do.
“Bodie will forgive me for my time with Jason. I guess I have to overlook his slip with you. It’s obvious the way you look at him, that you, um, had a physical relationship.”
Treasure balled her fists. “Oh, yeah? We have. And he’s fucking amazing. In fact, he’s phenomenal. He’s the best I’ve ever had. And I’ve been with a ton of men. I mean, I’ve wrapped my legs around hundreds of guys, but Bodie is a smokin’ hot muscular sausage with moves that make a girl scream in ecstasy.” Treasure laid it on thick, wanting Vanessa to squirm with discomfort. Who the hell does she think she is? Of course, Treasure hadn’t slept with hundreds of men, but she didn’t care about Vanessa’s opinion of her. “You’re a needy, high maintenance piece of work. If I were you, I’d regret dumping Bodie, too. You’ll never find someone like him again. And you know what else, he deserves better.”
Vanessa’s cheeks flamed. Treasure’s announcement rendered her temporarily speechless as she stood there wide-eyed and mouth hanging open.
“Do you think he’s going to take you back?” Treasure’s final question shook Vanessa loose from her rigid stance above the river. Treasure’s doubts about Bodie being back together with Vanessa didn’t matter now. She only focused on Vanessa’s mortification.
“I made a mistake and I’m paying for it, but I love him. And I know he cares about me. He’ll forgive me because he is a good person. Better than most and better than me.”
Tears leaked from her expressive and compelling eyes. Her face blotchy with emotion, she swiped away a tear and stepped forward as if to come down from the rise. The river roared behind her and Treasure felt another drop in the temperature as a breeze moved through the canyon.
Treasure let out an exasperated huff. The absurdity of this argument left her incensed. Rather than follow the urge to do something she hadn’t seriously wanted to do since elementary school — make some snotty girl eat playground dirt — she said, “You know what? I didn’t stop along the side of the road to get into this with you. Bodie will do what’s best. Whatever it is.” Treasure started heading in the direction of her motorcycle. “Good luck finding your way back to civilization. And have a nice life. And for the love of God, leave me out of it,” she tossed over her shoulder.
“You’re going to leave me out here?” Vanessa accused.
Treasure kept walking. If she turned around, she would forget her years of self-control and handle the situation in a way that would leave her in a jail cell. An unexpected whooping s
ound followed by a screech echoed through the canyon. Not wanting to be assaulted from behind, Treasure whipped around. Crazy hormonal women could be extremely dangerous and spontaneous. She lived and worked in Reno, Nevada. She’d seen a lot of crazy, and she wouldn’t take any chances of being blindsided.
What she saw wasn’t what she expected. One white platform sandal lay on the mound where Vanessa had been standing. She was nowhere to be seen. Serves her right, Treasure thought and took another step toward her BMW. If she toppled down the embankment all the better. Vanessa hadn’t even thanked her for helping move the car off the road. Then she heard the gurgled scream for help from the direction of the water. Hair rose on the back of her neck from the familiar sound of panic. Her training kicked in and she ran for the small rise separating the pull over spot from the water. Shoe forgotten, her gaze fell to the rushing river. It took too many seconds to find Vanessa bobbing among the rapids. A blood-curdling scream shoved Treasure into action.
“Holy Mother!” Treasure took off down the bank. The river’s edge was intermittently rocky or thick with dense shrubs. She found herself in the water a few yards later. Wet up to her thighs, she thanked the unseen forces of nature that made humans capable of inhuman feats of strength and endurance, otherwise known as an adrenaline dump. She sprinted down river around boulders and bushes all while keeping one eye on Vanessa. Vanessa picked up speed, stuck in the swift current running down the middle of the river.
The hard winter and high snowfall count combined with an unusually warm spring, had the river running with beastly strength. The melt-off this year caused multiple problems for the mountains, including the broken and flooded water lines in Granite Lake. One look at any of the rivers in the Sierra Nevada’s showed how deadly they were this season.
“Get over! Swim!” Treasure screamed as Vanessa continued to be swept away.
It became more and more obvious Vanessa couldn’t escape the roaring current. The water moved faster than Treasure could run. With bone chilling dread, she watched Vanessa head straight for an enormous boulder in the center of the river. Water rushed to either side, but she had no way of knowing which way Vanessa would go. The unthinkable happened and Vanessa hit the rock and disappeared into the churning depths. A fringe of white-capped waves swelled around the boulder, but Vanessa didn’t reappear. Treasure dove in and let her body be sucked into the freezing water that held Vanessa captive.
She came up sputtering from the jade depths on the near side of the rock in time to see another boulder coming at her fast. Managing to get her legs up she kicked off the rock before being slammed into it. The force of hundreds of pounds of water shoving her into the rock was staggering, but she skimmed by, only her hip scraped an unseen part of the granite below the surface.
The world whirred by. Waves and swells splashed her face as she fought for breath and her life. The riverbank seemed a million miles away even though it was more like twenty feet. Inside the chaos, she saw no sign of Vanessa.
River water continued to shoot up her nose and splash into her eyes. The boulders seemed to sprout out of the water in all directions. Treasure’s instincts screamed that the next one would knock her out or suck her into its eddy like what happened to Vanessa. The thought made her wonder if Vanessa was upstream. She looked upriver and was overtaken by a huge swell that crashed over her head and pushed her below the surface for what felt like a millennium. With her head above water again, a flash of white caught her eye. Somehow different than the blue-green tinge of the caps of white water, Treasure kicked, heaved, and swung her arms lifting herself up enough to get a better view. Vanessa lie face down, floating like drift wood.
Where strength comes from in moments like these, Treasure didn’t comprehend. She assumed something greater than herself powered her determination to stay alive and do what was needed to rescue a person in grave danger.
Treasure collided with Vanessa. She flipped her over onto her back. The only thing she could do next was keep herself and Vanessa afloat and not get tangled with any more rocks or boulders. Drifting down river head first wasn’t ideal, but she couldn’t manage to get turned around. It became a bigger problem when Treasure smacked a rock with her shoulder. Her leather jacket protected her skin but the impact was brutal. Her head whipped into the same rock and her eyesight stuttered and went black for a frightening second. By some miracle, she held onto Vanessa’s unconscious body.
Blessed with a second miracle, Treasure bounced away from the last assaulting boulder and toward the riverbank. A decrease in the powerful current allowed her to kick and paddle one-armed toward the shore. With every remaining ounce of her energy, and their lives on the line, she knew this was her chance to pull herself and Vanessa from the tumultuous water. The drive to make it to shore alive kept her moving one agonizing inch at a time. Finally, her boots kicked against uneven ground and a burst of hope kept her moving closer to the bank. Treasure tripped and stumbled over the uneven river bottom. Her boots caught on rocks and she twisted her ankles repeatedly, but she kept pulling and fighting and never let go of Vanessa.
Treasure dragged Vanessa’s inert body through the shallows and onto the rocky bank. She ignored all of her own discomforts and laid Vanessa out on the ground. She checked for a pulse but it was not to be found. Vanessa drowned. Every cell of her being refused to accept the cold truth that lay before her. With her experience guiding her, she knew Vanessa’s heart could start again with a little coaxing. Treasure began pumping Vanessa’s heart for her. She alternated the chest compressions with breaths of air and kept count. Time slipped away from her as swift as the river flowed, as she became Vanessa’s heart and lungs. But her training made her fully aware of the precious seconds ticking by.
During the second cycle of chest compressions, Vanessa took a breath. Treasure rolled her on to her side as Vanessa started to expel river water. She hacked, moaned, and whimpered for a long time as Treasure watched over her. Treasure remained vigilant, but her own injuries were starting to speak up.
“Treasure,” Vanessa croaked through a broken voice. She reached over and wrapped her freezing cold fingers around Treasure’s forearm.
“What? Are you hurting badly?”
“My head,” Vanessa barely managed to say and then she vomited.
Treasure inspected her scalp in the fading light of dusk. Vanessa had a mass of dark hair and it was difficult to see if it was matted with blood or only tangled and wet. She palpated the injury and the lump. Parting Vanessa’s hair revealed the gash. It didn’t bleed profusely, but the wound needed stitches. Treasure had a throbbing lump above her right temple. She explored the injury with frozen fingers and was fairly certain the scrape wasn’t deep, unlike Vanessa’s.
“You saved my life,” Vanessa said, turning toward Treasure after her latest and hopefully last round of purging water.
Treasure used her fingers to hold Vanessa’s wound closed and keep pressure on it. “I need you to tell me where else it hurts,” she said, quickly glancing at their landing zone.
Treasure’s heart sank. They were on the wrong side of the river from the road. They were on a slice of land with a towering cliff of granite on one side and a few pine trees and a lot of rocks. Treasure glanced downriver and saw the cliff above them angled toward the water, completely blocking the direction as an escape route. She peered upriver and saw the cliff tumbled down to the water, leaving a steep landscape of broken boulders. It might be possible to climb over them given enough time to search for a safe path, but with her throbbing ankles and the onset of full dark in the next half hour, a climb of that scale wasn’t an option. They were in an alcove next to a raging river with the road on the opposite side.
“My head. My back. I’m having a hard time… speaking.” Vanessa reached up, touched Treasure’s hand, winced, and lowered her shaking arm. She cringed again.
Treasure suspected she cracked a rib or two as well. “Can you move over here?” she asked, desperately wanting to get off the rocky
beach and onto the slightly less uncomfortable surface beside the trees. Vanessa could stretch out on grass and pine needles. Then Treasure would assess their injuries and do what she could. Vanessa tried to stand up and fell down, crying out.
“My knee,” she said.
Vanessa couldn’t bear any weight on it whatsoever. She made a quick assessment. Vanessa had a concussion with an open wound, possible broken ribs, and a severe knee injury. Treasure grit her teeth and held Vanessa’s weight against her side, moving them ten feet farther from the water. They collapsed to ground and Treasure decided she too had a concussion, one to three sore ribs, and an ankle that definitely needed the support of her boot. Vanessa lay on the ground huddled into herself and shaking violently. Treasure realized she also shook from head to toe with the agonizing cold. There was something she could do about that, she hoped. Treasure wandered toward the nearest pine tree and gathered wood, bark, and pine needles near the base of the trunk.
“I’m going to die of hypothermia,” Vanessa said through chattering teeth. “I won’t make it. I can’t walk. We’re going to die.”
Treasure found the driest bits and pieces of plant matter available. She glanced over at Vanessa and saw her squeezing her eyes shut and appearing as pale as milk.
“Stop talking about dying, but keep talking. I’ll have a fire started in a minute.”
“A fire? How?”
“Because I ride a motorcycle and my former military father was an emergency preparedness expert.” The words were barely understandable as Treasure’s teeth chattered so badly she thought they might rattle out of her head.
Vanessa didn’t reply so Treasure barked an order at her. She didn’t want Vanessa to slip into unconsciousness. If her ribs were broken, there was a chance of other internal injuries, plus the head wound scared her. “Tell me how you fell in the water. Tell me right now! Do you hear me? Say something.”
“I… I slipped in my heels. You… think… they’re impractical and ugly, but… I like them.”
Chasing Treasure: Granite Lake Romance Page 14