She nodded. “How long have I been sleeping?”
“A few hours, but don’t worry. I’ve been awake. Listening to the weather and trying the radio from time to time.”
Misty stretched and yawned beside her, fanning her tail hopefully. Ignoring the dog, Liane asked, “Did you reach him?”
He shook his head. “Sorry, no, but I did pick up a distress call. Two backpackers, trapped by fire. They were panicking, disoriented, said they’d started off on the trailhead back at Smuggler’s Gulch.”
“That’s a good distance from here.” She wondered by what trick of the airwaves their words could have made it this far.
“After a while they stopped transmitting.”
“Who was it? Did you get a name?”
“No name, and I have no idea. I only wish there was something, anything, I could’ve done.”
Hearing his haunted tone, she asked, “Then you think they’re...?”
“Dead? Probably. And I can’t even contact search and rescue to send them for the bodies.”
She began to tremble, imagining her own family ringed by flame, her children crying for her. Imagining that her best efforts, even with Jake’s help, wouldn’t be enough. Closing her eyes, she struggled to force back the images. But their terrified voices echoed through her mind. Her children’s voices, ringing through a hostile wilderness.
“We don’t know there’s fire in Elk Creek Canyon,” Jake said, giving her hand a lingering squeeze. “But we’re nearly to the ridge already. We need to climb up above the tree line and see what we’re dealing with.”
“Sounds like a good idea.” She coughed again, the sound raspy.
He pulled out a canteen. “Most of my water was on the horse, but here, have some of this.”
“Thanks.” Grateful for his generosity, she drank sparingly, just enough to calm her burning throat. Handing the canteen back, she admitted, “I had everything in my saddlebags. Everything except my stupid cell phone, for all the good it does us.”
Pulling it out, she checked the time. “It’s a little after 4:00 a.m. Sunrise comes at...what would you say, this time of year? Five? Five-thirty?”
“Sun might not make much difference, depending on the smoke.”
“Then we may as well get moving.”
Jake led the way back into the smoky darkness, moving toward the rocky spine that overlooked Elk Creek Canyon.
Liane stared past him, a lump tightening her throat. “Kenzie will need her inhaler. This bad air’s going to play hell with her asthma.”
“Your dad’s got her medication, right?”
She nodded. “If he—yes, he has it.”
“Then he’ll take care of her,” Jake assured her.
As they continued walking, she held on to the certainty in his voice, using it to tamp out the embers of panic whenever they threatened to ignite. For two years, even after her ex-husband’s arrest and conviction, she had taken medication to help her with anxiety. Since coming home, she’d quietly weaned herself off the pills, preferring to rely on long walks and focused breathing to keep her fear in check, training that stood her in good stead now.
She tried to concentrate on the quiet rhythm of their footsteps, on the ebb and flow of oxygen as she filled and emptied her lungs. Still, her eyes pooled with tears, anxiety gnawing at her ability to function.
After they’d been hiking uphill for a few minutes, he pulled something from his pocket and tore into its wrapper. “Here, try one of these. They’re not greatest tasting, but they’ll give you energy.”
“I’m not hungry.” Terrified of what they might see when they looked down into the canyon, she couldn’t think of food.
“You need to eat.” He pushed one into her hand. “Whether we end up hiking back out or moving forward, we’ll be burning tons of calories. And I’m in no mood to carry you when your blood sugar crashes.”
She sighed but didn’t argue. “Here I thought you firefighters lived for that sort of thing.”
“And here I thought you’d lost your sense of humor,” he said dryly.
She forced herself to smile. “Just goes to show how little you really know me. The grown-up me, I mean.”
Dutifully, she bit off a hunk of the energy bar. It tasted a little like honeyed, freeze-dried sawdust, but she forced herself to keep chewing anyway.
“I might get the chance to know you better,” Jake told her, “if you wouldn’t run for the house every time you catch sight of me.”
“I don’t run from you.”
“Come on, Liane. You want to kid yourself? Fine, but I’m not buying it for a minute. After the hundredth time, it gets to be painfully obvious that a person’s pretending not to see you and then scurrying for cover.”
“I wave back when you wave at me.” She hated how defensive she sounded, but she kept remembering the long hours they’d once spent talking about their dreams and ambitions...and how every one of his had revolved around creating the family he lacked. As a teenager with plans of her own, his intensity had scared her. Considering all she’d been through, the memory of that intensity had frightened her even more when she’d come home. “And I know we’ve spoken.”
“When you absolutely can’t avoid it.”
“I’ve sent cookies, brownies, even pies, and cards from the children while you were still in rehab.”
“And I’ve appreciated all of them. But I can’t help wondering, why is it I have to resort to leaving thank-you notes when we live less than a hundred yards apart?”
“I—I’m a busy person. I work full-time, have two kids—”
“Never mind,” he told her. “You don’t have to make excuses. I just wanted to see if I could figure out if there was something I’d said or done to—”
“Not lately,” she blurted, hating the reminder of her very worst decisions, along with everything that her mistakes had cost her. But even so, those same choices had given her the children she treasured, children whose existence was worth any price.
“What?” he asked. “Come on, Liane. Just tell me. Tell me what I’ve done to—”
“You’re imagining things,” she insisted, wincing at her own curtness. But better he should think her rude than force her to explain the memories triggered by his size, his build and that deep, masculine voice that scared her even though he, like those thankfully few male hotel guests who elicited the same reaction, had never done a thing to warrant her fear, not even for a moment. She hated feeling like a frightened mouse instead of the calm, competent professional she usually managed to portray at work, but she had no idea what to do other than avoid what the counselor called her “trigger points.”
Someone should have told that to her father before he’d gone and invited Jake, the man he’d always thought she should have married, to move in. A good man of her own age, a local man who would never hurt her. An inescapable reminder that, even at thirty, she couldn’t yet be trusted to make her own choices. Worried as she was about her father, that slap in the face still made her furious.
Her appetite gone, she fed the last half of the energy bar to Misty when Jake wasn’t looking.
He grew quiet as he moved from one flattened boulder to the next, focusing on his footing to scale a natural formation that looked almost like a staircase built by giants. The elevation had her breathing so hard that she still managed to fall behind, despite his cautious progress.
He had pulled substantially ahead when a smaller rock shifted beneath his prosthetic foot. He lost his balance, then cursed as he went down on hands and knees.
“You okay there?” she asked.
But he was staring to his left, through a gap between the squared shoulders of two huge rocks. “Wait!” he warned sharply. “Don’t come any closer.”
“What is it?” she asked, unable to see from whe
re she was.
Misty bounded up the rocks to reach Jake. At first the dog tried to lick him, evidently considering it her duty to encourage him back up, before she abruptly flattened herself to the rocks, cowering and whining.
“What’s there?” she asked, thinking of bears and snakes and bobcats. “What is it, Jake?”
He raised a palm, indicating that she should keep back. “It’s—oh, God, no. It’s—” For all his earlier calm, his voice was shaking now, hollowed out by horror. “You don’t—Liane, you don’t need to see this.”
More than his words, his tone launched her into motion. Climbing to his level, she came up behind where he remained on hands and knees, only now he was leaning forward, reaching toward something between the boulders.
Her every heartbeat crashed like thunder. Her lungs seized even before she consciously registered the pair of khaki cargo pants, the bent knee and the booted foot.
Jake’s back and Misty’s bulk blocked the rest, but still, she knew that she was looking at the crumpled form of a man. A man half-hidden by the rocks he’d fallen down between. A man wearing the same clothing, the same style and brand of boot, as her...
But that was impossible. It couldn’t be the father who’d served as her bedrock, her lodestone. The father who’d invited his broken daughter and two scared kids to come home after the trial was over, brought them home and coaxed them patiently back to life.
“Dad!” she shrieked, tears stinging as she tried to push into the narrow space beside Jake. “Out of the way, Misty!”
She shoved the dog aside and saw red, the red of blood covering the torn neck and soaking through his shirt. Her dad’s plaid shirt, one of his favorites.
“No,” Jake warned, taking her by the shoulders and turning her away. “I told you to stay back. He wouldn’t want you seeing him like this.”
“But we have to help him,” she cried. “Move! You have to let me see.”
With Misty pacing and crying piteously behind them, Jake shook his head. “I’m sorry, Liane. I’m so sorry. But your dad—your father’s gone.”
At his confirmation of her fears, Liane began to sob. Half for what she’d seen already and half for what she hadn’t. Because as frantically as she looked around, she found no sign of her children. No indication of whether whatever wild beast had done this to her father had dragged them off, as well. Or had the two of them, both unfamiliar with the area, run blindly on their panicked mounts? Or were her babies trapped or lost in some remote corner of the canyon?
The nightmare image replayed itself, her vision of her children surrounded by flames and crying for her. Her son and daughter dying, frightened and alone.
She screamed her children’s names, and when no answer came, her calls morphed into keening, like a wounded animal’s cries. Grief and terror mingling and reverberating from the rock.
“Liane, please.” Rising, Jake reached for her and pulled her into his strong arms. Pulled her close against him. “Please, don’t...”
Unable to bear being touched, she struggled free. “Don’t tell me what to do. What to feel. He’s—he’s my father. They’re my children.”
“That’s right. And now your kids are going to need you to find them. Your dad—your dad would want you to—” His voice broke, but he quickly pulled himself together. “You know damned well he’d tell you to pull up your bootstraps and get yourself in check. He’d kick your rear if he had to—just the way he did mine after last year’s fire—and remind you to attend to what needs to be done.”
She stared at him, allowing his words to filter past her shock. Her father was gone. With his body lying so close, there was no way to deny it. But Jake was right about what her dad would say, what he’d said to her after the shooting.
Cody and Kenzie needed her, more right now than ever. And without their grandfather to rely on, they had no one else. No one except her and the help Jake Whittaker had offered. It was little enough to stand against a wild animal’s hunger and an even more dangerous forest fire.
“We’ll find them,” she vowed. “We’ll bring them home alive.”
Because she would go mad if she considered any other possibility.
* * *
Despite his exhaustion, Cody jerked awake, heart pounding, at the sound of Kenzie’s coughing. He had no idea how long he’d been asleep, or how late it had been when he and his sister had sunk down into a hollow thick with scratchy pine needles just to rest a minute. Huddling together for warmth, they’d dropped off almost instantly.
Now Kenzie was wheezing and needed her inhaler. But the first aid kit was packed on Grandpa’s mule, and he had broken free with both the horses and run off, after...
Blinking back tears, Cody started coughing, too, the smoke nearly choking him. Smoke that had gotten so much thicker while they’d been sleeping.
And smoke meant a fire somewhere. He couldn’t see one anywhere around them, but that didn’t mean it wouldn’t find them if they didn’t move.
“C’mon, Kenzie, wake up,” he urged, reminding himself that he was the big brother, so it was up to him to take care of her, to get his little sister home and back to their mom. “We’ve gotta go. We have to hurry.”
She murmured, rolling away, and he heard her burrowing deeper into the dry needles. That was one thing about Kenzie. She could make a nest and conk out absolutely anywhere.
“Get up,” he ordered, trying to sound as stern as Grandpa when they didn’t wake up for school after the first two times they’d been called.
At the thought of Grandpa—of the moment he had taken his eyes off the bad man and shouted “Run!”—Cody’s stomach pitched, and he thought he might throw up.
But he didn’t, couldn’t, just like he couldn’t let himself cry. Because crying would make his eyes sore and his throat hurt, but it wouldn’t do a thing to help them.
Still, he couldn’t stop remembering, couldn’t help thinking of what he’d glimpsed or how he’d grabbed Kenzie by the hand and dragged her into the thickest woods, sticking his palm over her mouth to keep her from screaming....
To keep him from finding them. From taking them away and maybe hurting them, too, because he’d sounded so mad when they hadn’t answered his yells.
Scary mad, just like Cody remembered from two years ago, even if Kenzie had been too little to know what he was like.
Wiping his hot eyes with his sleeve, Cody gave his sister a shake. “Come on, Kenz. You’ve gotta move now, or you’ll be late and we’ll both be in trouble.”
“Wanna sleep!” she burst out. “Leave me ’lone, Cody. It’s still dark.”
“It’s the smoke,” Cody said. “It’ll make your asthma real bad if we stay here. And Grandpa said to get home, to find Mom and tell her what happened.”
Kenzie jerked her skinny body upright, her short sparkle-polished nails digging in as she clung to him. She hiccupped a little, the way she always did when she cried, and her breathing came in noisy little gasps.
“Cody, we hafta go back and find Grandpa so he can take us home on Buttercup and Arrow.”
“I don’t know where they are,” he said, wishing so hard that they still had the fat and fuzzy palomino or Arrow, his favorite. Or even Grandpa’s giant mule, but there had been no time to do anything but run and run, then crawl beneath the low branches of a laurel and make themselves as small as two mice, wishing that Grandpa would come and find them. But they were alone, which meant he was in charge. Which meant he had to make Kenzie listen, whether she wanted to or not. “We’re going to have to walk.”
“How far?”
“Not too far,” he lied.
“No. I want Mommy,” she whined, then started coughing again.
“If you come with me, I’ll take you to her.”
“But we’re lost. How will you find her?”
“I just will,” he swore. “You’ll see. And then she’ll tell Mr. Jake to get his hotshot friends to go help Grandpa.”
“Buttercup, too?”
“All the horses,” he said, and it seemed to calm her down a little.
Peeling his sister off him, Cody felt around for the fat stick he’d picked up yesterday. A walking stick, like Grandpa might use. Then he took his sister by the hand and started moving forward blindly.
Listening to her wheezing grow worse with every step.
* * *
Jake sucked in a breath through clenched teeth and dragged his gaze from Liane’s father. There was nothing he could do for Deke. Nothing beyond getting Liane’s family—the family the older man had undoubtedly defended to his last breath—back to safety.
“We have to go,” Liane said. Clearly in shock, she slipped off the red jacket she was wearing, her movements stiff and jerky as she thrust it toward him.
“Cover him with this, please,” she said. “Cover up his face.”
Jake shook his head. “You’ll need it. It’s still chilly. And there could be burning cinders, too.”
“I can’t—we can’t just leave him out here like this. What if it comes back, whatever did this to him? What if it decides to—”
He laid a hand on her arm. “A jacket wouldn’t stop an animal, but the lack of one could stop you.”
As she peered down toward the body, Jake shifted to block her view. He didn’t want her seeing Deke’s face, didn’t want her to remember the way death had caught him, midscream, terror written in his blue eyes.
It must have been a bear, possibly startled during feeding or separated from its young, that tore into his throat. But try as he might, Jake couldn’t remember any other cases of the area’s black bears actually killing anyone, and there hadn’t been a grizzly seen around here in decades. Maybe a mountain lion, then, one that had set its sights on Deke’s mount, but those attacks were incredibly rare, too, and other than the fatal neck wound, he’d seen no other bite or claw marks.
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