RaeAnne Thayne Hope's Crossings Series Volume One: Blackberry Summer\Woodrose Mountain\Sweet Laurel Falls (8 page)

She seemed to drift off again and he knew it was important that he keep her conscious and alert.

“Claire. Claire!”

Her eyes fluttered open with obvious reluctance.

“Tell me about String Fever.”

“My store.”

“I know. I saw it today, remember? I never expected you to be running a bead store. I thought you were going to be a teacher, like my mother. Isn't that what you went to college to do?”

She nodded a little. “I taught for a few years. Third grade. When…Macy…was little.”

“So how did you go from that to running a bead store?” He didn't really care—okay, he found every
thing about her unexpectedly fascinating—but he mostly just needed to keep her talking.

The tactic seemed to be working. He saw a little more clarity in her eyes and maybe even a hint of pride. “Worked for Katherine Thorne before…the divorce. Not for the money, just for fun. After…Jeff left…she asked if…wanted to buy it.”

He pictured Katherine Thorne, sixty-six years old and a five-foot, ninety-eight-pound dynamo. Although tiny in stature and deceptively fragile in appearance, she packed a powerful force of will. Had Katherine really wanted to sell the store or had she only offered it to Claire to give a newly divorced, struggling mom something solid to hang on to? Knowing Katherine's generosity, he wouldn't be surprised.

He also hadn't missed Claire's phrasing.
After Jeff left,
she had said. He had assumed her divorce had been a mutual decision. He didn't know why he'd jumped to that conclusion, but Claire's subconscious at least didn't view the end of her marriage that way.

Although he was completely focused on Claire's precarious situation, some tiny corner of his brain couldn't believe any man could be such a moron that he would walk away from someone like Claire for a twentysomething bimbo.

Right now, it was a toss-up whether he was more furious with Jeff Bradford or the stupid little prick who caused the accident.

Her eyes flickered closed again and he cursed to himself. Where the hell were the paramedics?

“How do you like being a businesswoman?”

“Wh…what?”

“Your store. Do you like running it?”

“My store was robbed.”

He didn't like how disoriented she sounded. “I know. The good news is, I think it's safe to say we found the bad guys.”

He would have preferred a thousand unsolved crimes in his first month on the job to this outcome and he was kicking himself all over again for his handling of the pursuit when the flash of red lights finally heralded the arrival of paramedics on the scene.

Through the hazy filter of snow, Riley watched impatiently while the paramedics conferred on the bank of the reservoir before they finally returned to the ambulance for the gurney.

He spoke nonsense words to Claire while he waited for them. He couldn't have told anyone what he said. Something about how his mom and his sister were both going to kill him for making Claire stay out here in the cold water this long and about the house he was renting down the street from hers and about the trip he wanted to take somewhere hot—maybe down to the bowels of the earth at the bottom of the Grand Canyon—when this was all over.

Finally, just when he could feel her slipping back into unconsciousness and he was pretty sure he could no longer feel his legs, a couple of paramedics in wet-suits waded through the frigid water toward them.

“It's about damn time,” he growled. “You stopped for coffee first?”

“Sorry, Chief.” The first paramedic to reach him was some kid who looked barely old enough to drink, with blond streaked surfer hair and the raccoonlike
goggle tan of a die-hard skier or snowboarder didn't look thrilled to be reamed by the new police chief.

“Took us a while to make it around the other accident scene,” the older one, dark with a bushy dark mustache, explained. “What have we got here?”

Riley put away his irritation to focus on Claire. “Female, age thirty-six, possible head, arm and leg injuries. Definitely in shock. I'm concerned about hypothermia, obviously, and also the head injury. She's been in and out of consciousness for the last ten minutes. Because I couldn't get a proper assessment of her injuries, I didn't want to move her without a stretcher, but if you guys had taken much longer, I would have figured something out on my own.”

“We're here now.” The older paramedic looked inside and Riley saw his eyes widen.

“Hey, there, Claire.”

She opened her eyes slightly and then Riley realized why the guy looked familiar. It was a cousin of hers, Doug Van Duran, a couple years behind him in school.

“Hey, Dougie.”

“You're in a real mess, Claire.”

“I know.” Her eyes were wide with confusion and panic as the paramedics' powerful flashlights shone into the vehicle. “My kids?”

“They're okay,” Riley told her again. “Remember, I told you we got them to shore. Just relax and let the guys here take care of you.”

He had to admit, despite their late arrival at the party, the paramedics seemed competent. He stood by and watched while they assessed her condition,
stabilized her neck and back and then prepared to carefully remove her from the vehicle and transfer her to the gurney.

“We've got this under control, Chief, if you need to head down the mountain to the other scene,” Van Duran said after a moment.

“I'll stay until Claire and the kids are in the bus before I check out the situation down there.”

In the gleam of the other kid's flashlight, he didn't miss the careful look Doug aimed at him. “You sure about that? I mean, Claire's got some pretty bad injuries but they seem to be fairly straightforward and her kids are just banged up, from what I understand.”

“Yeah. So?”

“I'm just saying, that's an ugly scene down there. One DOA and two serious injuries. While we were there, the sheriff was calling in Medivac.”

Fatality. Damn it. He closed his eyes. How many kids had been inside that pickup truck? Yeah, they were robbery suspects and had stupidly chosen to run instead of facing the consequences, but nobody deserved to die because of a chain of idiotic choices.

“We can certainly use another man getting her out of the water, but we can make do without you if you need to head down to the other scene.”

He should be on the scene of a fatal accident in his jurisdiction, especially one he'd been involved with, however inadvertent, but he couldn't leave Claire. Not yet.

“No, let's get her into the ambulance. I promised her and her kids I'd stay with her.”

Over the next few moments, he was forced to retract
every negative thought he'd had about the paramedics as he watched their quick, efficient efforts to extract her safely from the vehicle. But it still seemed like a lifetime before she was finally loaded onto the gurney and they began to wade back through the icy water.

The trickiest part—besides making his painstaking way through the water with legs that no longer felt attached to his hips—was safely maneuvering the rack up the slick, snow-covered slope from the water's edge to the roadway. When they finally crested the top, one of the passenger doors opened and a moment later, Macy Bradford rushed to them, her face white and scared in the snow-filtered light of the headlights and her eyes trained only on Claire.

“Mom!” she exclaimed.

Claire's eyelashes fluttered in the icy snowflakes as she tried to remain alert. “Macy. My brave girl.”

“Are you okay?”

“I will be. You and Owen and Jordie?”

“I'm fine. We're okay. Some people wanted to take us to the hospital, but I…we wanted to wait for you.”

Claire had been through hell and back and she was bloody and broken. But when she still managed to muster a smile for her daughter and reach for the girl's hand, Riley felt like something sharp and hard had just lodged against his heart.

“We've got to get her inside so we can roll,” Claire's cousin Doug said, not unkindly, and they pushed the gurney up into the back of the ambulance.

Without warning, the moment the doors were closed behind her mother, Macy suddenly burst into noisy sobs. Even though Riley was exhausted and soaking
wet, frozen to the bone, he placed a comforting hand on her shoulder. “She's going to be okay, you hear me? She'll be okay.”

The girl drew in a deep, shuddering breath. “I was so scared.”

“I know, honey. You've been a champ about this. Now we need to get you and the boys to the hospital. I'm going to see if I can round up another ambulance for you.”

“We've got the boys safe and warm here. Do you want us to take them down the canyon to the hospital?”

He looked up at the voice and found the woman he had seen on shore standing beside her big Suburban, along with the boy who had waded out to help him. “I'm Barbara Redmond. I work at the hospital E.R.”

Riley considered his options. If the other accident was as serious as the paramedics had indicated, it might be a while before another ambulance crew could make it for the children. Transported in a private vehicle, the kids could already be in a treatment room at the E.R. at the small Hope's Crossing Medical Center before the other crew could make it back up.

“Thank you. That will help.”

The people of Hope's Crossing banded together in crisis situations, with everyone pitching in to help. He'd forgotten that in the years since he'd been gone. In some of the neighborhoods he worked in Oakland, accident victims faced a crapshoot, whether would-be rescuers would call for help or loot their pockets.

Riley made sure the children were safely buckled and settled and watched the SUV slowly pull back onto
the road. Just as they made the first turn, he saw the brown and white of a Peak County sheriff's vehicle pull to a stop.

He estimated a half hour had passed since the accident, maybe an hour since he'd left the elementary school. For the first time in his life, he understood what people meant when they talked about living a lifetime in a few moments. He felt as if he'd aged at least twenty years since he sat and listened to the Spring Fling pageant with his older sister beside him.

The cold sliced through his wet clothing and Riley fought shivers as he watched a figure climb from the sheriff's department SUV. The sheriff himself, he realized. Evan Grover.

He tensed and instantly felt kickback from his already-aching muscles.

Evan Grover hated him and had since Riley was a punk-ass kid always in trouble and Grover was a wet-behind-the-ears deputy looking to make his mark. From what he understood, the sheriff had thrown his support behind J. D. Nyman and wanted him to be wearing the chief's badge.

The man headed toward him, his brown parka open over his beer belly. All he needed was a cigar clamped between his teeth to complete the Boss Hogg imagery.

He shook his head. “Hell of a mess.”

Riley ground his teeth together to keep his teeth from chattering. No way would he show that particular sign of weakness to the sheriff, even if he had frostbite in every appendage. “You could say that.”

“The other scene.” The sheriff whistled through his teeth. “Nasty.”

He was a professional, Riley reminded himself. He'd been a cop a long time and had dealt with much worse than a two-bit sheriff who used to have it in for him. “I'll have to take your word. Haven't seen it yet. I'm heading down that way myself to assess the scene.”

“No rush. Go ahead and change into dry clothes. My guys and the Colorado State Patrol have things in hand.”

“Thanks,” Riley gritted out. “I appreciate it.” Neither department had jurisdiction because this road and the canyon were all part of the Hope's Crossing city limits, but this wasn't the time to be pissy over boundaries, not with a fatality.

The sheriff was acting entirely too conciliatory, which should have tipped Riley off that something was disastrously wrong. But he was still caught completely unaware by Grover's next words.

“I'm real sorry about your niece and all.”

Everything inside Riley seemed to freeze. He didn't think it was possible for a person to be even more cold without turning completely to ice, but somehow he managed it. “Sorry, what?”

Grover stared at him for a minute, then he cursed, looking uncomfortable. “You didn't know yet.”

“I've been standing in the middle of the reservoir for the last twenty minutes. I don't know a damn thing. What are you talking about?”

The sheriff looked apologetic, his wide, weathered face a little more red than it had been a moment ago.
Despite their history together, there was no malice in his eyes now, only sympathy.

“Thought you knew. The fatality in the other wreck. They're saying she's your niece. Your sister's kid. The one with the bookstore who was married to that rock star. Chris Parker. Sorry to break it to you so hard.”

Layla?
Not Layla. He pictured her the last time he'd seen her at his mother's house a week ago for dinner: her nose piercing and her battered combat boots and her choppy black hair. She was funny and smart and seemed to think he was among her cooler relatives because he'd lived out of the valley for so long.

He sagged a little, shaking violently now, and had to reach for the open door of his patrol car to support his weight.

He couldn't think, couldn't process anything but shock.

“Are you sure it's her?” he asked, then couldn't believe he sounded like every other victim's family he'd ever had to notify. He was aware of it on some level, but he couldn't help hanging on to whatever fragile, pathetic thread of hope he could find that maybe some terrible, cosmic mistake had occurred.

“Sorry, man. It's her. No question. You didn't hear the chatter on the radio?”

He remembered that moment he had turned it down out in the water. “No, not a word.”