by Cindi Myers
He found her huddled in a thick growth of scrub oak, the baby clutched to her chest. “Are you all right?” she asked, her expression pale and stressed.
“I’m okay.” He crouched in front of her. He needed to touch her, to reassure himself that she really was okay. He smoothed her hair back from her face. “What about you?”
“I’m okay.” She put one hand to his cheek. “I heard gunshots and I was so worried.”
“Kiram fired on me, and I shot him.”
“Is he dead?”
“No. I hit him in the shoulder, but he should recover.”
“As long as you’re safe.” She pulled his mouth down to hers and kissed him hard, as if trying to drive away all fear and doubt. He gripped her shoulders and returned the kiss, not holding back any of the emotion he felt. He didn’t care that this thing between them was impractical and poorly timed and likely doomed—he was going to enjoy it now, for whatever time together they had.
Voices rose in the direction of camp and he pulled away. “We’d better go,” he said. “The more distance we can put between us and Metwater’s followers, the better.”
He stood and helped her to her feet. The baby began to cry. “I need to change her diaper,” Hannah said.
“Hurry.” He looked over his shoulder, the way they had come. Though he couldn’t see anyone headed toward them, Metwater’s enforcers were bound to pursue them as soon as they got the story from Kiram. When he turned back to Hannah, she had laid the baby out on the blanket and removed the old diaper, which she placed in a plastic bag and stuffed in the diaper bag. “I guess we can’t count on help from anyone in camp,” she said.
“Some of them, like Phoenix, might want to help, but I think Metwater has most of them firmly under his thumb. I don’t think we can risk it.”
She nodded and fastened the new diaper around the baby, who kicked her feet and babbled. Walt smiled and held out his finger for her to grip. “You’re going to be a great mom,” he said.
She stared at him. “Do you really think so?”
Clearly, his answer mattered to her. He patted her shoulder. “You already love her, and that’s what’s most important.”
Nodding, she rewrapped the blanket and zipped shut the diaper bag. “What do we do next?”
“We head for Ranger headquarters.” He stood and helped her to her feet. “We’ll have to travel cross-country. Metwater’s people are likely to be looking for us along the roads.”
They set out, trying to stay in cover as much as possible, alert to any sounds of pursuit, which didn’t come. The sun climbed overhead, the day already hot. Walt wished he had thought to bring water. The creek that ran alongside Metwater’s camp was the only water source he knew of around here and they couldn’t risk detouring back that way. But it should only take them a few hours to reach the main road. From there they might be able to catch a ride to Ranger headquarters or into Montrose. They could call for help from there.
They paralleled the road leading away from the camp, but the going was slow, the ground rocky and uneven. Every hundred yards or so they had to detour around a pile of boulders or a dry wash or an expanse of cactus. All signs of the previous night’s rain had vanished, the ground dry as powder beneath their feet, the air heavy with the scent of sagebrush and cedar.
Though they kept out of sight of the road, the rumble of passing traffic reached them, and dust clouds from the passing cars rose up in the air. “Do you think it’s Family members looking for us?” she asked.
“I can’t think who else it would be.” Walt followed yet another dust plume with his eyes. “These roads normally get hardly any traffic.”
“Maybe one of the Rangers will stop by the camp and someone will tell them we’re gone,” she said.
“We should have headed toward the grave site,” he said. “The forensics team might still be working there. I don’t know why I didn’t think of that before.”
“It was too close to camp,” she said. “It’s probably one of the first places Metwater will look. And you don’t even know if anyone is still there.”
“No.” He wasn’t even sure he could find the grave site now—not without returning to the camp as his starting point, and that was far too risky.
They had walked only an hour or so when he noticed Hannah limping. “What’s wrong?” he asked, stopping. “Are you hurt?”
She grimaced. “Blister.”
“Let me take the baby.” He held his arms out and after a moment’s hesitation, she handed the child over.
He settled the infant into the crook of his arm, a warm weight. She smiled up at him and he smiled back, enchanted.
“She’s just like her mother,” Hannah said. “Emily could always charm any man.”
“You’re pretty charming yourself,” Walt said.
“Ha! I’m a lot of things, but charming is not one of them.”
“All right, what about—alluring.”
Pink warmed her cheeks, but she said nothing, merely set out walking again.
He caught up with her. “Why does that catch you so off guard?” he asked. “Me saying you’re alluring?”
“Because I’m not,” she said.
“You can’t pretend you don’t know I’m attracted to you. And you’re attracted to me.”
“I don’t want to be.”
He recognized truth when he heard it. “I get that, but I don’t understand why.”
She glanced at him, then went back to focusing on the ground. “You don’t have to understand.”
“But I want to.”
She said nothing, only quickened her pace. He lengthened his stride to keep up with her. “When I first met you, I thought I had you figured out,” he said. “I saw a smart career woman, someone used to being in charge. You became the guardian of your dead sister’s baby and you threw yourself into preparing for motherhood the way you would any other project.”
She said nothing, so he kept talking, refusing to let her silence shut him out. “You had probably researched all the best products and techniques, maybe arranged for child care, found a pediatrician, furnished a nursery. You had a plan for what things would be like when you got back to Texas.”
“Is there something wrong with that?” she asked.
“Nothing. Except then we started working together and these feelings grew between us and I’m not a part of your plan.”
“I can’t be in a relationship right now.”
“Why not? You don’t think you can love that baby and me at the same time? People do it every day.”
“I’m not every person,” she said.
“No, and that’s why I love you.” He grabbed her hand, stopping her and turning her to him. He waited for her to rebel, to tell him he couldn’t possibly love her, she didn’t love him, they lived in different states, the whole situation was impossible...
Instead, she stared at him, eyes wide and shimmering with tears. “You can’t love me,” she said.
“Why not?”
“Because you don’t know me. You don’t know the awful things I’ve done.”
“Awful things? What awful things?” A chill crept into his chest as he studied her grave expression and read the mixture of pain and fear in her eyes. Had he misjudged her so badly?
Tears were streaming down her face now. She turned away, hugging her arms across her body. Walt shifted the baby to his other arm and moved up behind her, caressing her shoulders. “I can’t believe you’ve ever done anything so awful it would change the way I feel about you,” he said.
“Emily knew. It was one of the reasons why she ran away.”
“But she gave you her baby. That must mean she forgave you.”
She nodded. “Yes. Yes, I think she forgave me.”
“Tell me,” he said. “You
need to tell me or we’ll both always wonder what would have happened if you had.”
She sniffed, but a fresh wave of sobs shook her. He handed her his handkerchief and waited while she dabbed at her eyes and blew her nose. “I had a baby once,” she said.
He blinked. He had never expected this. She had a baby? When? With whom? But none of those questions spoke to the pain in her eyes. “What happened?” he asked.
“I was nineteen. I had just started college and I had a...a fling. Nothing serious. When I got pregnant the guy freaked out. We both agreed we couldn’t raise a child, so I decided to give the baby up for adoption.”
“I’m sure that wasn’t an easy decision. But it doesn’t make you a bad person. You gave someone else who badly wanted to be a parent the chance to do so.”
“It was the hardest decision I ever made.” She drew in a ragged breath. “I chose an open adoption, because I wanted to know what happened to my child. Everything went well. The couple was very nice. Then, when she was three months old, little Madison died.”
Another sob shook her. He gathered her close and held her tight. “I’m so sorry,” he whispered, stroking her hair.
“They said it was crib death—just something that happens sometimes. But I can’t help thinking, if I had been there, I could have kept her safe. If I had taken care of my own child, that wouldn’t have happened.”
“You can’t know that,” he said. “Terrible things happen sometimes, for no reason.”
“I know. That’s what the counselors I saw said, too. But it’s haunted me. It made me believe I didn’t deserve to be happy. I threw myself into my work because that was something I could control—something that didn’t depend on emotion and chance. And then Emily gave me this second chance to be a mother.” She smiled down at Joy, who lay sleeping in his arms.
“You’re going to be a great mom to her,” Walt said. “I believe that.”
“But I can’t take any chances,” she said. “I can’t let myself be distracted. Not even by you.”
He could argue that he wouldn’t be a distraction—that he could help her with the baby and everything would be all right. But he wasn’t the one whose baby had died. He wasn’t the one who was suffering.
And he couldn’t think of any argument that would change her mind. Only time and experience could do that. She stepped away from him and he let her go. “Just know you’re not alone,” he said. “I will be there for you if you need me.”
Her expression grew less bleak. “Thank you,” she said. “That means a lot.”
“Thank you for trusting me with your story,” he said. “Hearing it doesn’t change how I feel about you. If anything, it makes me admire you all the more.”
“How can you say that?”
“You suffered something terrible. But you didn’t let it defeat you. You came out the other side. I’ve seen the kind of courage you have and now I know some of what’s behind it.”
She studied his face, as if searching for something there. “I never met anyone like you,” she said.
“I hope that’s a good thing.”
The baby woke and began to cry. Hannah took the child from him. “She’s probably hungry,” she said. “We should stop and feed her.”
He looked around, then led the way to the meager shade of a stunted pinyon. Hannah settled herself against the trunk and pulled out a bottle of formula for the baby. Walt sat beside her and tried not to think about how thirsty he was.
A loud vehicle passed on the road a quarter mile distant, the rumble of an exhaust system with a hole in it echoing across the empty landscape. “Why are they pursuing us like this?” Hannah asked.
“Because Metwater knows we’ll go to the police,” Walt said. “We’ll tell them about him kidnapping you and assaulting me, stealing my motorcycle, lying about your sister—all the things he’s done. That will lead to more digging into his activities. My guess is that an investigation will turn up more crimes—things he doesn’t want us finding out.”
“He’s built a little kingdom out here and he thinks he can control everyone in it,” Hannah said. “He thought he was safe.”
“He wasn’t able to control us,” Walt said. “And that’s made him angry—and dangerous.”
“How much longer before we reach somewhere safe?” she asked. She stowed the bottle and zipped up the diaper bag, then rested the baby on her shoulder and patted her back. She looked so comfortable and natural with the infant—he started to point this out, but then thought better of bringing up what was obviously a painful topic.
“We’ve only got another hour or two to walk and we should be able to flag down a car,” he said. “Once we’re in the park, there will be more tourist traffic. Someone will help us.”
“I hope so.” She held up her hand and he pulled her to her feet and they set out walking again.
They hadn’t gone far when they came to a deep gash in the landscape—a narrow, rocky ravine. Walt peered into the shadowy, brush-choked canyon. “It’s too steep to climb down into and out again,” he said. “Especially with the baby.”
Hannah shielded her eyes and peered down the length of the ravine. “It looks as if it goes on for miles.”
“We’ll have to walk up to the road. There’s a culvert and a bridge there.”
Hannah drew back. “Is that safe?”
“We can hear and see cars approaching from a long way off,” he said. “We’ll hide until we’re sure the coast is clear, then make a dash for it.”
They turned and followed the ravine up toward the road. As they drew closer, the rumble of an approaching vehicle sent them diving for cover behind an outcropping of pocked rock. Heat radiated from the scarred red granite, but the ground on its shady side still gave off a damp coolness.
Walt peered over the top of the boulder and watched a faded brown Jeep move slowly past. A bearded man sat behind the wheel; Walt was sure it was Kiram, but was that even possible, considering how recently he had been wounded?
When the vehicle had passed, they moved forward again. The bridge over the ravine was a plank affair one lane wide, laid over a rusting metal culvert. No railings separated traffic from the chasm below, and only a single orange reflector on a post marked the beginning of the bridge.
“It didn’t seem this narrow when we were on the motorcycle,” Hannah said.
“All we have to do is walk across it and we can move away from the road again.” Walt held out his hand and she took it.
Their feet made a hollow sound on the wood planks, but the bridge was solid underfoot, and only about twenty feet across. Halfway across, the baby began to fuss and squirm. Hannah stopped and shifted her. “Her diaper’s soaking,” she said, feeling around one chubby leg. “No wonder, considering the way she sucked down that bottle.”
“You can change her in another couple of minutes,” Walt said. Standing out here in the middle of the bridge felt too vulnerable. The hair rose on the back of his neck, and he couldn’t shake the feeling they were being watched. A hot wind ruffled his hair and he squinted across the prairie, his unease growing.
“What was that noise?” Hannah looked up from tending the baby.
Walt didn’t have to ask “what noise?” He heard it, too—the low rumble of an engine turning over. He pivoted toward the sound, and saw what he hadn’t noticed before—an old wooden corral, the boards forming the sides almost obscured by several decades’ growth of sagebrush and prickly pear cactus. The corral made the perfect hiding place for someone in a vehicle to park and watch the bridge and wait.
The driver wasn’t waiting anymore. His vehicle—a faded brown Jeep—shot out from the screen of boards and brush, headed straight for the bridge, and Walt and Hannah standing in the middle of it.
Chapter Sixteen
Hannah froze, transfixed by the sight o
f the Jeep barreling toward them. She was like someone in a dream, wanting to move but unable to do so.
“Climb down!” Walt tugged on her arm. “Over the side. Into the culvert.” He pulled the infant from her and dragged her toward the edge of the bridge. He dropped to his stomach and pulled her down alongside him. “Go!” he urged.
She swung her legs over the side, clinging to the edge of the bridge, the boards shaking as the Jeep hit the bridge, the roar of the engine filling her ears. The baby clutched to his chest, Walt swung down beside her and dropped to the ground. She released her hold on the bridge as the Jeep thundered over them.
She hit the ground hard, the breath jolted out of her, but managed to roll into the culvert. Walt helped her to her feet and shoved the baby into her arms. “Get behind me,” he said, drawing his gun and moving into the shadows.
Tires skidded on gravel as the Jeep braked to a halt. Car doors slammed and footsteps crunched. Hannah shrank into the deepest shadows, heart thudding so hard in her chest she had trouble drawing breath. Walt guided her into the middle of the tunnel formed by the culvert, into a corner formed by wooden bracing. He settled her into this hiding place, then turned, his back to her, shielding her with his body. She stared over his shoulder toward the opening at the end of the culvert, a circle of bright light like a spotlight, blinding in its intensity.
Each footstep overhead seemed to echo through the tunnel. Obviously, their pursuers were making no attempt at stealth. The movement above stopped. “We know you’re in there, Walter!” Kiram shouted. “Come on out and we’ll go easy on you.”
Walt remained silent, still as a cornered stag—or a waiting lion.
Two heavy thuds signaled that their two pursuers had dropped into the ravine—one on either side of the culvert. Hannah stiffened. They were trapped now, caught between the two.
Walt reached back and squeezed her hand. The gesture shouldn’t have calmed her, but somehow it did. Without uttering a word, he was letting her know he had a plan. She had to trust him.