Praise for bestselling, award-winning author
JOAN JOHNSTON
and herNew York Times bestseller
THE PRICE
“Johnston knows how to weave a captivating tale.”
— Sun Sentinel(Ft. Lauderdale, FL)
“Truly memorable…. Compelling, masterful storytelling…. Cover to cover, nailbiting, edge-of-the-seat reading! The Price is Joan Johnston’s best book to date. Filled with intrigue, sex, greed, and murder… The Pricewill be on my list of the ten best books of 2003.”
—AOL Romance Fiction Forum
“Johnston writes sprawling, sensuous romance that will keep readers avidly reading.”
—Booklist
“With a story that could have been ripped out of the headlines, Johnston expertly blends facts, romance, and suspense with poignancy.”
—Romantic Times
“Johnston writes brisk romance chock full of compelling conflicts and strong local color.”
—Publishers Weekly
Other Bitter Creek Novels by Joan Johnston
The Price
The Loner
The Texan
The Cowboy
Texas Woman
Comanche Woman
Frontier Woman
Also by Joan Johnston
Colter’s Wife
No Longer a Stranger
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
An Original Publication of POCKET BOOKS
POCKET BOOKS, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
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Copyright © 2004 by Joan Mertens Johnston, Inc.
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.
For information address Pocket Books, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020
ISBN-10: 1-4165-6179-X
ISBN-13: 978-1-4165-6179-8
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Acknowledgments
I had the joy of doing on-site research in Jackson Hole, Wyoming—the most beautiful place in the world, really!—in the course of writing this book. I’m deeply indebted to a number of people for sharing their time and expertise.
My thanks and appreciation go to Detective Cindy Leeper, who generously and patiently answered all my questions, and to Sergeant Lindsey Moss (retired), both with the Teton County Sheriff’s Office. To my friend, Judie Schmidlapp, for helping me to locate Bear Island and for helping me to decide where I could hide my yurt. And to Captain Gaylen Merrell for giving me a tour of the Teton County Jail and explaining how a murderer gets arrested.
Much thanks to Teton County Circuit Court Judge Timothy C. Day for taking time to explain the intricacies of a bail hearing and to Teton County Clerk of the Court Jeannine Hawkins and District Court Clerk Carol Hammond for their kind assistance. My thanks also to Rod Newcomb with the American Avalanche Institute for the quick class on avalanche blasting.
Finally, thanks to Jeffrey Miller at the Jackson Hole Historical Society for helping me figure out where my modern-day Forgotten Valley should lie.
Any mistakes are mine.
My move to Colorado has brought many joys, not the least of which has been the new friends I’ve made, including Libby Howard, who runs a tow service with her husband in Coal Creek Canyon; Claire Collins, who’s always willing to see a movie with me; and my hiking partner Barb McCleary.
I also want to thank my writing friends Roberta Stalberg, Gloria Dale Skinner, Sally Schoeneweiss and Margie Lawson for their continuing support.
This book is dedicated to
all the booksellers
over the years
who’ve put my books into a
new reader’s hands
and said,
“I think you’ll enjoy this one.”
Contents
Acknowledgments
Prologue
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
Epilogue
Prologue
“My dad is going to flip when he finds out I’ve skipped out of school in the middle of term,” the young woman said to the attractive man sitting on the barstool to her left.
“Where is your dad?” he asked.
She took a sip of her cosmopolitan and stared out the window of the ski lodge at the snowboarders racing down the steep, powdery slopes. “He lives back East,” she said at last. “We have a…strange…relationship.”
The handsome man smiled indulgently. “Strange?”
She met his gaze and said, “Sometimes I think he wishes I’d never been born.”
“You don’t get along?”
“I didn’t say that,” she said. “We just…I hardly ever see him. When I do, he just…” She turned to stare wistfully at the happy families making the most of the new snowfall on the majestic Tetons, trying to remember the last time she and her father had gone skiing together. A long time ago. Ages ago.
“Why is that?” he asked.
“What?” she said, distracted from her memories by the warmth in his voice.
“Why don’t you get along with your father?”
“I don’t know.” She shrugged. “It doesn’t matter now. I’m a grown-up. If I want to take off and bum around the ski slopes, that’s my business, not his.”
“I see,” the handsome man said. “I have to admit I wondered if you were old enough to order that drink.”
She grinned conspiratorially, leaned close and said, “I have a false ID. I’m really eighteen. Well, seventeen-and-three-quarters.”
She felt woozy and almost fell off the barstool. She wrapped her ankles around its unique ax-handle base, struggling to sit upright. She yawned, squinted at the setting sun through the wall of windows framed by enormous logs, and said, “I didn’t realize it was so late. I’d better get going.”
“Let me walk you to your car,” the man offered.
“No thanks. I can manage.” But as she stood, shrugging her backpack onto her shoulder, her knees buckled. “No sleep last night,” she muttered. “One drink and—”
Strong hands were there to rescue her.
She smiled up into the handsome face. “Thanks. I guess I will take that hand. I don’t have a car. Would you mind calling a cab for me?”
“It’ll be my pleasure,” he said in a husky baritone. He took her backpack and slid it over his shoulder, then wrapped a strong arm around her slender waist as they headed for the door.
She felt nauseated as the heat from the moose-calf-high stone fireplace assaulted her, and she turned her face into his shoulder. He smelled good, some piney aftershave.
The frigid February air did nothing to revive her, and when she stumbled down the steps, he picked her up.
“I’m sorry,” she muttered, her tongue thick. “All of a sudden, I can hardly keep my eyes open.”
It had been a long flight from Virginia, and she’d felt relieved to finally be home, as the American flight circled its way down amid the Tetons and landed like a nesting bird in Jackson Hole. She’d called her mother from Chicago when she’d change
d planes, but no one had been home, nor had her mom answered her cell, so she’d left messages both places.
Once on the ground, she’d called her mom again—and gotten no answer. She’d called her uncle North, who owned the ranch where she and her mother lived—and gotten no answer. She’d even called her father in Washington, D.C., and been told by his secretary that he wasn’t taking calls—from anyone.
By now the Ethel Walker School in Charlottesville would have called her mother to report her missing. She’d felt too antsy to go home and sit in an empty house and wait, so she’d hitched a ride to Teton Village, the resort community at the base of Wyoming’s Grand Tetons. She’d rented a snowboard and taken the tram all the way to the top of Rendezvous Mountain—10,450 feet up—and raced down the treacherous double diamond slopes with defiant, life-threatening speed.
No wonder she was so exhausted.
She felt herself being laid down and opened her eyes long enough to realize that she was in the backseat of an extended-cab pickup. She tried to rise, but her body felt as though a couple of boulders had tumbled onto her chest. She stared up in confusion at the handsome face looming over her. “This isn’t a cab,” she whispered.
He smiled at her and said, “No, my dear, it isn’t.”
1
Because of the shadows at dusk, Libby saw the patch of ice on the curve too late to downshift. Hitting the brakes on her Subaru Outback would have sent her into a skid. With mountains to her left and the icy Hoback River on her right, the winding two-lane road didn’t allow for mistakes.
She’d been speeding twenty miles over the limit ever since she’d left Cheyenne, racing for the past five hours, west through Rock Springs, then north through Pinedale, despite the ice and the terrifying fog, trying to stay ahead of a threatening snowstorm.
She had to get home. What could have caused her daughter to leave her boarding school so precipitously and fly home? The tremulous message Kate had left on Libby’s answering machine had said only, “I have to talk to you. It’s important.” Not a word of what disaster had befallen her daughter.
Libby’s immediate thought had been, She’s pregnant . She’d felt her heart sink. She knew what it was like to be an unwed teenage mother. She’d been one herself. She wouldn’t have wished that fate on her only child.
Why, oh why, hadn’t she checked her messages sooner? Libby loved her work as a back-country guide because it kept her out-of-doors. But being in the mountains—or the middle of nowhere—often meant her cell phone was out of service.
Her three hunting dogs, one bluetick and two redbone coonhounds, whined anxiously in their cages in the rear of the car.
“You can tell I’m upset, can’t you?” she said, knowing the dogs would understand her comforting tone, if not the content of her speech. “It’s just that Kate is my whole world. When something goes wrong in her life, I want to rush in and rescue her. Only, you know Kate. She insists on doing everything for herself. Self-sufficiency personified, that’s my Kate.”
She’d left several messages on Kate’s cell phone once she’d gotten back to civilization, but her daughter hadn’t returned her calls.
Where could Kate be? Libby had called her brother North, hoping Kate had contacted him, but he refused to take a cell phone with him when he worked his cattle, and she’d been forced to leave a message for him to call her as soon as he got her message.
The worst part was knowing Kate wouldn’t hesitate to hitch a ride home from the airport with some stranger. Her daughter was foolishly fearless.
Libby’s knuckles whitened as she steered into the opposite lane of traffic to avoid a treacherous patch of ice, uneasy because there was always a chance someone would be coming from the other direction on the deserted highway.
Ohmigod. Someone was.
Libby hissed in a breath and jerked the steering wheel, but her tires didn’t hold when she hit a patch of ice, and she skidded directly into the path of the oncoming vehicle. She tried to stay calm, turning the steering wheel into the skid and keeping her foot off the brake.
When the oncoming pickup swerved to avoid her, it also hit a patch of ice and began to spin out of control. A head-on crash seemed inevitable.
Libby could see the driver’s grim face for a single instant in her headlights as his speeding pickup raced across the ice on a deadly T-bone collision course with her car.
Libby watched, amazed, as the pickup suddenly accelerated with a loud roar and shot sideways across the nose of her car, barely missing her right front fender before taking a flying leap into the Hoback River. She could hear the rumble of crumpling metal behind her as the pickup landed, and then a horn blaring.
A second later, Libby was past the patch of ice and hit the brakes. The dogs tumbled in their cages as she screeched to a halt on the narrow berm. Her head fell forward onto her hands, and she took a shuddering breath as she slowly sat up and shoved her blond curls out of her face.
“Ohmigod,” she whispered. “That was close.”
She opened the window on the river side and listened for any sounds from the other vehicle. The truck’s blaring horn had stopped, but her dogs were barking excitedly, making it hard to hear anything else.
She kept her voice low and calm as she said, “Quiet Magnum.” The older dog stopped barking immediately. “You, too, Snoopy. Doc, quiet.”
It took a moment longer for Snoopy, the youngest of the three hounds, to obey her command, but suddenly the car was silent. All she could hear was the frigid river rushing on its way.
She bent and peered out the passenger window, but the truck was too far below and behind her to be seen from where she was. There was no human sound to be heard.
Her legs were trembling so badly she was afraid they wouldn’t hold her as she stumbled out of her car. A quick word reassured the dogs before she hurried back to the steep incline where the pickup had left the road. The river wasn’t deep, but if the pickup had overturned, the driver might very well drown.
There was no guardrail. She could make out the tracks on the edge of the road where the pickup had taken off and looked to see where the dark-colored truck had landed. The headlights were on, and the pickup appeared to be upright.
But no one emerged from the vehicle.
The winter sun had disappeared behind the mountains, and Libby realized she was going to need a flashlight to make her way down to the partially submerged truck. “I’m coming!” she shouted, hoping the occupant of the pickup could hear her over the burbling water. “I’m going to get a flashlight. I’ll be right back.”
Her legs still felt wobbly, and she could hear her heart pounding in her ears. “Stay calm,” she told herself. “You can do this.”
Libby shivered, then remembered that the digital sign she’d passed on the Pinedale First National Bank building had said it was five below zero. She’d taken her parka off while she was driving, and she opened the passenger door and grabbed it. The dogs barked excitedly, and she said, “That’s enough, Magnum. Quiet, Doc. Settle down, Snoopy. Everything’s fine.”
Her fiber-filled coat was still warm from the heater, and she reached into the pockets for her gloves and put them on before reaching under the passenger’s seat for the flashlight she kept there.
She turned it on, grateful the batteries were working. She’d checked them in the fall, but it was February. She breathed a prayer of relief as she turned back toward the river.
As she skidded down the hill of shale toward the riverbank, she realized she wasn’t going to be able to call 911 on her cell phone. She’d driven this road often enough to know the mountains prevented her from getting a signal.
Which made her even more anxious. What if the driver was hurt? They were at least thirty minutes from the hospital in Jackson. Luckily her car was still on the road and running.
In her mind’s eye, Libby had a fleeting glimpse of Kate’s worried face as she wondered where her mother was, and why she hadn’t returned her calls. She was going to be even late
r getting home, with the delay caused by this accident.
“Hello? Can you hear me?” she yelled as she stumbled down the slope to the river. It wasn’t more than fifteen or twenty feet down, and there was enough brush on the hillside to give her feet purchase, but she wondered how well the other driver had survived the sudden drop. “Are you all right? Can you answer me?”
To her surprise and relief, the window rolled down and the man inside said in a calm baritone voice, “I can hear you fine.”
Libby stopped at the edge of the frigid river, uncertain how strong the current was, reluctant to step into its rocky depths in the dark. One slip, and she’d be sopping wet. With the temperature below zero, it wouldn’t take long for hypothermia to set in. If both of them were incapacitated, the situation could quickly become life-threatening.
She aimed her flashlight at the pickup’s occupant, who put up a hand to deflect the beam from his eyes. She could see blood streaming from his forehead. “Can you make it out of there on your own?” she called. “Do you need me to come and get you?”
As he lowered his hand to peer at her, she suddenly recognized him.
“Drew?” she said incredulously. “Drew DeWitt? Is that you? What are you doing here? I thought you were practicing law with your family’s firm in Texas.”
“Who are you?” he said. “I can’t see you.”
“It’s Libby Grayhawk,” she said. “How badly are you hurt?”
“I’m more angry than hurt, Libby,” he said in that same tranquil voice. “What the hell were you doing in the wrong lane?”
“I was—” Libby realized there was no excuse for the risk she’d taken. “I’m sorry. I can see blood on your head, Drew. Are you sure you’re not hurt?”
He touched a hand to his head and seemed surprised when it came away red. “I bumped my head when I landed.”
“You might have a concussion,” she said. “You must be freezing. How much water is there under your feet?”
The Rivals Page 1