His Motherless Little Twins (10 page)

“The brother and father were with him,” Redmond called from across the lobby. “And no one has seen them come back. We've sent someone down to the village to find Troy's mother and sister. I've got a cell phone number for them, but I thought having someone tell them in person was better than a phone call.”

“Well, I'm going on ahead to find the trail.” In the whole scheme of a search-and-rescue operation, it would probably be a small contribution, but saving time had to be good. Especially with only a few hours of light left.

“Use this,” Redmond said, handing her a walkie-talkie. “Dr. Ramsey has his own communication, but it doesn't hurt to have a back-up. And you won't get cell reception once you're too far away from the lodge. But these carry for quite away.”

“Are you sure you know what you're doing?” Angela asked. She'd wandered down to the lobby, where Wallace was already scooting a chair in her direction.

“No, I'm not sure. But the one thing I do know is that I can't sit around and do nothing. Eric needs me to find the trail, and if there's a chance that Troy has a brother or father out there, and they need help…” She ran to her sister, gave her a quick kiss on the cheek. “Let Redmond know if you need me…one twinge, Angela, and I'll be back. Promise?”

Angela lifted her hand to wave, but Dinah was gone before
she saw it. Running across the lawn, she discovered at least a dozen different trails, all starting at approximately the same place, all leading to vastly different areas. Suddenly she wasn't so sure where she'd seen Troy. At least four of the trail heads seemed likely, which meant she was going to have to go further. See if she could find traces of anything…blood, something he might have dropped.

Half way across the lawn, her cell phone jingled. “We've got Troy in the emergency room, and I'll be back in a few minutes. Any luck finding the right trail?”

“When I find the trail, will you let me go out with you?” she asked.

“We'll talk about it.”

“I want to go, Eric. I feel…responsible. If I could have kept Troy talking, I might have discovered where his brother and father are. Or, if I'd noticed him sooner, gotten to him quicker…” So many things bothered her, but the thing that bothered her most of all was thinking about someone else being lost out there. “I want to go, and I don't want to talk about it.”

“On my rescues, you follow my orders, Dinah.”

“I'm a nurse, Eric. I always follow orders.”

“But you're not experienced in mountain rescue.”

“Then send me back if I get in the way or impede the rescue. But give me a chance. I need to…need to do this. The idea that a young boy is out there somewhere…” She shut her eyes, trying to not picture all the possibilities of trouble that boy, and his father, could be in. But in the dark of her eyelids, she saw bad things. “I have to do this, Eric.” But she wouldn't, if he didn't want her. Because she was a good nurse. Because she knew how to take orders.

“Find the trail, Dinah. Just find the right trail.”

The first two trail heads turned up nothing. She went some way on each, looking for clues that Troy might have come
that way, and found nothing. It was on the third trail she discovered fresh drops of blood…probably from the gash on Troy's head. “Hello,” she shouted, on the off chance that the Dawson family was within hearing distance. Of course, no one answered, not that she'd really expected them to. But on impulse, before she headed down that trail, she tied a pink shoelace to a tree branch so Eric would know where she was starting. Then she plunged into the woods, looking for more signs that Troy had come this way.

There were signs everywhere. Scuff marks in the dirt indicated he'd been dragging himself exactly where she was tracking. And she found more blood droplets, and other larger marks in the dirt…handprints? Perhaps where he'd stumbled and fallen?

But there were only signs of one person coming through here. She'd hoped for more, hoped that a few feet into the woods she'd find Troy's brother, or dad. Maybe with a broken leg. Something incapacitating, but not too serious. Of course, that didn't turn out to be the case, but she refused to allow early discouragement to get her down. Rather, she followed the obvious trail, one that was easy to read. Bargaining with God for an early success.

Everything reminded her of a giant jigsaw puzzle, and she was the only one there to solve it. “Solve it,” she whispered, bending down to have a closer look at the broken frond of a fern. Nothing. It wasn't broken. Just not fully developed. And nothing else around her gave her a clue, which meant, to the untrained eye, the trail had run out not far after it had started. Maybe she'd gone the wrong way? Or taken a wrong turn?

Maybe she was letting the Dawson family down the way she'd let Molly down.

Suddenly a cold chill swept over her. What was she doing,
thinking she could be of use out here, as a nurse, as…anything? In the distance, through the trees, she could still see the lodge, and the search activity mounting in the parking lot. It was time to go back. Raw, bitter discouragement
was
beginning to overtake her because she wanted to make a difference and she wasn't.

“It's not easy,” Eric said, suddenly stepping up behind her. “It's never about strolling through the woods until you come across your victim.”

“But I thought that if I found the trail…”

“You did find the trail,” he said, holding up the pink shoelace marker. “This is it.”

In her mind's eye, the scenario played out happily. She and Eric would turn the next bend in the trail and find Troy's dad and brother sitting there, waiting for someone to find them. They'd be alive, slightly damaged, but good. Except the story she saw etched on Eric's face told her something altogether different. “Worst-case scenario?” she asked.

“We run out of daylight without finding them. Or we find them and they're…”

This was going to be a long, hard search and the hard lump in her stomach was telling her the outcome might not be the one she wanted. “I'm right behind you,” she whispered, as Eric took the lead. Instinctively, she looked up to see the sky, but the canopy of leaves overhead totally blotted out all but a few splotchy patches of light. “And I can run, Eric. I won't slow you down.”

She followed him for the next twenty minutes, alternately running and stopping to assess the trail. Words between them were spared in order to conserve breath, but she did what Eric did. She observed everything, looking off to the sides of the trail, looking up, looking down. Once, when they stopped to take a drink of water, she
asked the question she feared asking. “What happens if we have to go back?”

“We could lose the trail. It could be wiped out by a light rain, or a good wind. Since it's spring, that's highly likely.”

“And you don't stay out after dark?”

“It depends on the situation. Normally we don't keep the volunteers out. Too many people out in the dark becomes a risk factor itself. But I have some specialists who go out at night, and Neil's getting them ready to go right now. He'll send them on an alternate trail, one that parallels us.”

“All I can think about is that if we have to turn back, what if Troy's brother and father are only over the next hill? How do you make the decision to quit, and start again tomorrow, when you could be so close?”

“Judgment…experience. I don't ever like to quit, but if I'm leading the field team, I have to think about their safety first. Neil and I have a good group of volunteers who'll put their own lives at risk to save someone else, and it's up to me to make sure they don't put their lives at risk.” He took one more swig of water from the plastic bottle, held it out to her, and when she refused another drink he capped it and clipped it to his belt. “It's only going to get rougher up ahead, Dinah. We need to cover more area, faster, because daylight is getting to be a huge factor now.”

“Am I slowing you down so far?” she asked.

“No, but I don't want to make this miserable for you, since you've never done this type of thing before.”

“What makes me miserable is knowing that…” She swallowed hard, trying to fight back the emotion. Eric didn't need her to be emotional out here, didn't need her thinking with her heart when a search and rescue such as this followed logical, ordered procedures. “I can do this, Eric.” She trusted that completely.

Actually, she trusted Eric with all her heart. Too bad her heart hadn't found him when she could have given it to him. Because now, there was nothing left to give away except tatters. But, then, Eric had a few tatters of his own. So maybe knowing she couldn't have him was part of the attraction she felt for him. If nothing else, it was safe.

Safe. Yes, she wanted to be safe. But how safe? “And I'm ready to run.”

He reached out and squeezed her hand. “When this is over, remind me to tell you how amazing you are.”

 

“I've got part of the team going up to the ridge, looking for a vantage point,” Neil relayed to Eric. “We might get lucky and find them by looking down, if we have enough daylight left. Oh, and Redmond's just heard from the boy's mother. She said her husband and the boys were going out to camp, but she didn't know where, except they'd mentioned renting a rubber raft. Troy is eighteen, by the way, and his brother, Shawn, is twelve. William, the father, is forty, and in good health.”

“Where is she right now?” Eric asked.

“She's gone to the hospital to be with Troy. He hasn't come round yet, and it's not looking good. Scan shows a skull fracture, and they're getting ready to fly him down to Salt Lake City for surgery. He's got a subdural hematoma, too. Mrs Dawson will be going with him.”

“Damn,” Eric muttered. It would have been so easy to let the concierge know where they were going. But people came out here and did…foolish things. Foolish, like taking two sons and going off God only knew where for an adventure. Skilled outdoorsmen left word, drew their course on maps and left them behind as a reference. They checked in with the national park authorities. Told their wives. But amateurs went
and assumed things would work out. Sometimes they prepared properly as far as the gear they took, sometimes they didn't. More often than not, they didn't do the proper research, didn't tell anybody anything. More often than not, they were the ones he was sent to rescue. When there were fatalities, they were the ones who usually died.

No, he didn't have a good feeling about this at all. Then he thought about Dinah again, and had to smile. For an amateur in outdoor rescue, she'd done it all right, sort of. Her inexperience taken into account, she'd left her markers for him, kept in touch, gathered up odd, but good supplies, according to the security guard. Good instincts. Untrained, but with a natural knack. Someone to train properly in rescue later on. If she stayed…

“Is Dinah keeping up with you? Because I could get someone from the hospital to run the base camp and come in to pair up with you. Or…” Neil chuckled. “Maybe you'd rather be pairing up with her?”

Eric studied her for a moment, standing off by herself, looking in every direction, studying, taking it all in. “What I'd rather be doing is having a nice quiet dinner—”

“With Dinah?” Neil interrupted.

“With Dinah,” Eric admitted. “But right now we're taking a water break, eating protein bars, and getting ready to run another mile or two.”

“Toward the river,” Neil said. “If they were carrying a rubber raft…”

“Then they wouldn't have gone too far.”

“Maybe the rapids?”

Eric cringed at the thought. Inexperience on the rapids equaled tragedy. “Let's hope they were smarter than that.”

“Well, I've got twenty people out, and another group ready to go. Let me know what you need.” With that, Neil clicked
off and suddenly it was just the two of them, alone. No civilization around to buffer them.

“Ready to go again?” Eric called. Damn, he admired her. He was working her hard, pushing her far more than he should push anyone without the kind of experience he needed from a volunteer out here, yet he knew she wouldn't let him down. There was nothing in Dinah he didn't trust and he only wished she trusted herself half as much as he did.

“Ready,” she called, slinging her pack back over her shoulder. “How are we doing on daylight?”

He glanced up at the sky. It would be dark too soon…a sobering thought. He hated the night because that's when victims died most often. Maybe because with sunlight there was hope. Maybe because with the night came the feeling of cold, lonely desperation. “Not good. But the river's not too far off and we should make that in good time, and hope they didn't go much farther than the first entry point we'll come to.” He glanced down at the ground, at a speck of blood splattered against a brown leaf. “Damn,” he muttered. They were running out of time. Everything inside him was screaming that, loud and clear.

“Well, I'm up for a nice, hard run. Ready whenever you are.”

Dinah Corday was intense, dedicated…like no other woman he'd ever encountered, and he wasn't sure how to handle her…or handle himself around her. But the one sure thing amidst all his confused feelings was that he felt more alive around her than he'd felt in years. After Patricia, he'd spent so much time feeling lost, feeling alone. Feeling like he'd lost his only chance at true happiness when she'd died.

But Dinah stirred things in him. Familiar things as well as things he'd never felt before. Things that made him want to crawl up in a ball and pray they would go away, and things
he wanted to shout about from the top of the older Sister. He was happy. He felt disloyal. Mostly, though, he liked being with Dinah, however it happened.

He fingered the shoelace in his pocket as he headed off down the trail they'd been following for the past hour. Couldn't help but smile as he twisted the shoelace around his index finger.