by Leona Karr
“Are you two and the baby ready?” Neil asked, as his warm glance of approval traveled over her.
She was startled at how handsome he looked in a tailored dark suit, white shirt with gold cuff links and maroon tie. His dark hair had been styled in a shorter, layered cut that emphasized his brown eyes.
“Oh, my aunt’s not going,” Courtney replied quickly. “She’s going to babysit Jamie.”
“That’s right.” Devanna nodded.
Neil slapped his forehead in an exasperated gesture. “Didn’t I tell you that Maribeth was planning on keeping Jamie? I bet I didn’t.” He groaned. “Maribeth’s going to blow a fuse. She wanted to help out. Everything’s been arranged to drop Jamie off there while we attend services.”
“Well, then, I guess we’d better pretend you told me,” Courtney said, smiling. “Just give me a couple of minutes and I’ll get his things together.”
Devanna’s face turned an ugly red. “Why haul Jamie around to some strange place when he’s fine here?” she lashed out. “There’s absolutely no need to take him anywhere. He’s better off staying with me.”
Courtney stiffened at her aunt’s aggressive behavior. This wasn’t the first time they’d clashed over her display of possessiveness. More and more Devanna had begun to ignore Courtney when it came to making decisions about handling the baby.
“Since Maribeth has made arrangements to keep him, we’ll leave him there,” Courtney said firmly and ignored her aunt’s seething displeasure.
“I’m sorry about that,” Neil apologized as they drove away from the houseboat with Jamie in his carrier in the back seat. “I didn’t mean to get you at odds with your aunt.”
“It’s not your fault,” Courtney sighed. “I guess I’m just not used to handling family relationships. Sometimes my aunt’s devotion to Jamie is too much of a good thing. I’m glad she loves him, and wants to take care of him, but I’m completely baffled why I can’t seem to establish any kind of a relationship with her. The few letters I got from her were so different. I can’t figure out from her distant behavior why she wanted me to come here in the first place.”
“I don’t know, but I’m glad she did,” Neil answered readily, smiling at her as he reached over and touched her hand. “This is where you say, ‘Me too.’”
The softness in his eyes sent her emotions on a roller coaster. His touch instantly wiped out all the lectures she’d been giving herself about keeping her distance during the outing. How could she resist his charm? He had a way of making her feel special. She smiled back and readily echoed, “Me, too.”
When they stopped at his sister’s house to leave the baby, Maribeth seemed sincerely delighted to see Courtney again.
“Now don’t you give Jamie a second thought. Hazel and I will treat him like His Royal Highness,” she promised.
Neil glanced at his watch. “We’d better get going. The steep road up to the Chapel on the Hill is a slow one.”
“But it’s a beautiful drive,” Maribeth assured her. “The view is spectacular. You can see clear across the lake to the far ridge of mountains. Takes your breath away.”
Courtney had to agree. As the winding road climbed the side of the mountain, every view out the window was awesome. When they reached a beautiful mountain meadow on a high bluff, she could see why Neil had chosen this place for Jensen’s remains. Quiet, serene, the setting was perfect.
Services were held in the white picturesque chapel, bordered by a cemetery landscaped by natural mountain beauty. Only a handful of people attended, most of them from Neil’s office, but there was a genuine expression of affection for the man who had met death by an unseen hand.
Neil remained for a few minutes after the service to speak to the funeral director, and they were one of the last to leave. Courtney could tell Neil was deeply affected by Harold’s death.
“Thanks for coming,” he told her in a strained voice. “I know Harold would have appreciated it.”
She slipped her hand into his, holding it tightly as they made their way back to the car. She blinked back a sudden fullness in her eyes. “I’m glad you asked me.”
“We could stop somewhere and have lunch before we pick up the baby.” The funeral had left him with a mixture of grief and anger, and he didn’t want to be alone. He knew he wouldn’t have to pretend, or entertain Courtney. He’d felt her sincere empathy during the services.
As they made their way down the winding mountain road, Courtney gazed out the window, drawing in the beauty of the dark green mountain etched against a cloudless blue sky. For the first time since arriving in Manitou, she was able to center in the peace of the moment, and—
There was no warning. Gunfire shattered the air as they came around a sharp curve. Tires on the car exploded.
“What the hell?” Neil cried as he lost control.
Courtney screamed as the car plunged off the side of the road, crashing down a steep rocky incline, bucking and groaning, and heading for a steep drop-off that fell hundreds of feet below. The car plowed into a thick stand of ponderosa pines edging the deep chasm. By some miracle, several thick trunks withstood the force of the plunging car. They bent and splintered but kept the car from dropping off the cliff into the rocky ravine below as a roar of crumpled metal and shattered glass filled the air.
Courtney’s breath was shoved back in her lungs as the force of the sudden stop ejected the air bags and pressed her and Neil back in their seats.
A weighted silence followed the ear-piercing crash. The only sound was the air bags deflating.
“Are you—are you—all right?” Neil finally stammered in a cracked voice.
After the horrendous scare, she wasn’t sure about anything. “I…I think so.”
Before Neil could straighten up and push the deflated air bag aside, a warning shiver of the car sent Neil’s adrenaline racing.
Were the thick tree trunks giving way under pressure?
Courtney cried out as the car suddenly pitched slightly forward. Any second the trees could uproot and send the car sailing over the high cliff into midair.
“We’ve got to get out now.” Neil struggled to open his door but it was wedged too close to one of the trees to budge. The side window was intact, but even if he could get it rolled down, he wouldn’t be able to climb out because the tree trunk pinned him in.
“Can you open your door?”
She’d already tried. “Not very far. Some huge boulders are in the way.”
Neil cursed his two-door car.
“Maybe I could squeeze out,” Courtney said doubtfully, eyeing the opening of a few inches.
The car shifted again.
“Try! Now!” Neil’s chest tightened. If even one tree trunk gave way, enough pressure could be put on the others to flatten them, and nothing else stood between the car and the edge of a thousand-foot drop to the rocky ravine below. Getting Courtney out was uppermost in his mind. As he looked at the narrow opening of her door, his heart sank. It didn’t look wide enough for a small dog.
With prayerful breath, he watched her push and turn her slender body as she forced it through the narrow opening. When she was finally outside, he was weak with relief.
“Good girl!”
“Now it’s your turn.” As the words left her lips, she realized in horror that Neil would never be able to get his muscular frame through her door opening, and the window was partially blocked by a large boulder.
Even with Neil pushing on the door, and her pulling as hard as she could, they couldn’t make the opening even an inch wider. She doubted that even a bulldozer would have an easy time of moving them.
“What’ll we do?” she cried in panic. He had to get out!
“Get away from the car,” he shouted back. If the car suddenly plunged forward, he didn’t want her near it. With all the windows and the two doors blocked, there was only one possible exit open to him—the windshield.
Neil jerked opened the glove compartment and pulled out a flashlight. It was th
e only thing of any size he had to break glass. Covering his eyes with one hand, he swung at the windshield. The glass shattered from the blow, and some of it fell away, but he needed a bigger hole to crawl through.
At that instant, with a warning groan, one of the largest trees began to bend forward in slow motion.
“Get out! Get out!” Courtney cried.
Broken glass littered the dashboard and hood as Neil pounded at the edges of the hole then eased through the shattered opening. He slid off the car just as it began to move.
Neil grabbed Courtney as the car lurched forward. They frantically climbed up onto the pile of boulders, and clung together as the car dropped over the edge. They watched it tumble over and over, searing a path down the mountainside, and ending up as a mangled mass of metal far below.
Courtney buried her face against Neil’s chest and he held her tightly. Her body shivered as if she had suddenly been dipped in ice. Her breath came in short gasps. Everything that had happened was like a runaway kaleidoscope in her mind. Shock coated the unreal, the unthinkable. It couldn’t have happened. She could hear Neil murmuring reassurances but they seemed to come from far away.
“It’s okay,” he said easing her down off the pile of boulders.
“Why…why?” she sobbed.
He struggled to find an answer. Was the shooting the carelessness of a hunter or someone target practicing? He immediately rejected that explanation. The shots were not random. The shooter had been aiming at the car’s tires. The target had been deliberate—and almost deadly.
“Some lunatic. It has to be,” Neil answered shortly.
“Why would anyone do such a thing?”
“I don’t know, but, by God, we’ll find him.”
“You’ve got a cut on your cheek. Your white shirt is bloody.”
“Just scratches. How about you?”
Amazingly, they had only suffered a few cuts and bruises. Courtney’s hair had fallen away from its pins, and her face was smudged with dirt. She had ripped her tunic when she squeezed through the door opening, but she was unhurt.
Neil’s hands were nicked with bits of glass, and he had blood spots on his black trousers, and a sleeve on his jacket was torn.
All in all, they had escaped near-death almost unscathed.
“It could have been a lot worse,” Courtney said, thankfully.
Neil refused to go there. What might have happened was a living nightmare that was going to be with them for a very long time. “Let’s get out of here.”
As he scanned the mountainside above them, he knew it wasn’t going to be an easy climb. The slope was steep, and the rugged terrain was covered with patches of thorny shrubs and huge gray boulders that lined shelves of rough rocks. The car had flattened some of the smaller trees in its path and dislodged some of the rocks, but the distance up to the road was daunting.
Neil looked at Courtney’s summer sandals, and silently groaned. Her feet would take a beating on the rough ground. His dress oxfords wouldn’t be much better. This wasn’t going to be a leisurely midday walk. They needed hiking boots to navigate the rough terrain.
“We’ll go slowly, and stop to rest any time you want,” he promised. “I’ll lead, and try to find the easiest way. We won’t be able to go up in a straight line,” he warned.
“I’ll keep up.”
The defensive way she said it brought a smile to his face. “I never doubted it for a minute.”
He wanted to thank her for not falling apart on him. He didn’t know what he would have done if he’d had a hysterical woman with him in the car. Courtney had kept her head, and both of them were alive because of it.
They were forced to move horizontally to find a climbable passage upward, and the distance back to the road was tripled. Surging adrenaline from their narrow escape kept them climbing at a steady pace.
The sun, directly overhead, beat down on their heads and perspiring faces.
When they finally reached the road, Neil put up a warning hand to keep Courtney behind him. What assurance did they have that the gunman wasn’t still concealed nearby?
“Do you think he’s still here?” Courtney asked with a dry mouth.
Neil didn’t answer. “There’s a car coming. You stay here in the trees. I’ll step out and stop it.”
She grabbed his sleeve. “What if it’s the shooter?”
“We’ll have to chance it. If something goes wrong—you get the hell out of here. Understand?”
He stepped out of the trees and waited at the edge of the pavement for the car to come around the curve. His knees nearly buckled with relief when the vehicle came into view. It was the black hearse from the mortuary.
Stepping out into the road, Neil waved down the startled driver and called to Courtney that the coast was clear.
The startled young man gaped at their dirty, bloody appearance. “What happened?” His eyes widened with disbelief as they told him.
“You gotta be kidding. Some bozo shot up your car? Why’d he do a dumb thing like that?” He asked the question as if he expected Neil to give him rhyme and reason for the whole thing.
“I don’t know, but we need a ride.”
“Sure thing. We usually don’t take live passengers in this buggy, but three people can squeeze in the front seat. Where do you want to go?”
Neil gave his address. On the drive back to town, he kept his arm around Courtney, thankful for the close quarters that kept her pressed close to him. He was feeling a little shaky himself.
“We’ll call McGrady right away and tell him what happened. If the bastard is still roving around up there with a gun, the police might be able to catch him.”
“Maybe I should go on to Maribeth’s?”
“No,” he said firmly. “We both need to get cleaned up first. If my sister sees us like this, she’d have a fit. I’m betting she’d call in the family doctor, and nothing we could say would stop her. You’re okay, aren’t you?” He searched Courtney’s face. “I mean, we can go straight to the hospital—”
“No. I’m fine. You’re right. No use getting her all upset. I’ll just call and warn her that I’ll be a little late picking up Jamie.”
Neil was glad he didn’t have any close neighbors to see him emerge from a hearse with a woman on his arm. Luckily he still had his wallet, and gave the young man a big thank-you tip.
Courtney’s heart sank when she realized her purse had gone over the cliff with the car. She’d just cashed a check a few days earlier, and the loss would throw her limited budget into a tailspin. Still, she was alive, and that put everything into a different perspective.
Once inside Neil’s fashionable mountain home, he headed straight for the phone. “I’ll call McGrady.”
Courtney quickly decided that the modern house was designed for the independent lifestyle of a single man who valued his freedom. A high-ceilinged living room was furnished with ultra-modern furniture, soft beige carpets and large picture windows framed with leaf-green draperies. There was a casual, comfortable air that Courtney found inviting and appealing.
She followed Neil into a den complete with bar, leather lounge chairs and sofa, and an entertainment center that took up a whole wall. She suspected that the upstairs quarters were just as spacious. She listened as he reported to McGrady what had happened.
“Some idiot shot out our tires on that big curve just below the chapel… No, we didn’t see anyone. Our car plunged off the road. Got caught by some huge trees or we’d be in the bottom of the ravine.” He listened a minute. “Good. He may still be up there somewhere.” He hung up and turned to Courtney. “He’s sending some men up there, and he’ll be right out to talk with us.”
She nodded and stood there as if too dazed to say or do anything and he quickly put his arm around her. She looked like a refugee from a battle zone. Her arms were scratched and bruised. Thank God she hadn’t been seriously hurt. Gently he brushed back the tangled strands of hair and smoothed the dirt smudges on her face.
&
nbsp; “Come on, I’ll show you the bathroom. You can freshen up a bit before McGrady gets here. I’ll call Maribeth and explain why we’ll be delayed in picking up Jamie.”
He led her upstairs to a guest suite at the front of the house. “My rooms are down the hall,” he said. “I think you’ll find everything you need. Come on down when you’re ready. I’ll fix a couple of drinks for us. God knows we could use one.”
The spacious sitting room, bedroom and adjoining bathroom were almost as big as the studio apartment she’d been renting in Cheyenne. Courtney took one look at herself in the fancy bathroom and groaned. Her face was scratched, her hair hanging in tangled strands around her face, and her best outfit dirty and torn. She cleaned up as best she could. She brushed her hair with a silver-plated brush and comb that had undoubtedly been used by more than one of Neil’s female visitors.
When she heard the doorbell, she took a deep breath and went back downstairs. Neil was in the den with a lanky homespun-looking man.
“I’m sure sorry about all this,” McGrady said as Neil introduced her. “Why don’t we sit down, and talk about what happened? Maybe we’ll be lucky and this will all be behind us in short order.”
“You hear about random shootings all the time,” Neil said as he sat down close to Courtney on the leather sofa. “But I never thought I’d be one of the victims.”
McGrady took a chair opposite them. He rested a notebook casually in his lap, as if he wasn’t concerned about recording every word they said. He asked a few leading questions that encouraged them to talk freely.
“So you think the gunman was just doing a little target practice.”
“It’s the only thing that makes sense,” Neil answered.
“There were quite a few cars on that road, weren’t there? Because of the funeral, and all?”
Neil nodded. “We were the last ones to leave the chapel.”
“He let all the other cars go by, and chose yours as his target,” McGrady mused in his slow way. “I wonder why?”