Willing Hostage (2 page)

Leah ate another piece of bread, poked her fingernails through the plastic cover of the Velveeta and peeled a slice off the loaf.

“But what will you do there, Leah? After the funeral expenses there won't be much left for travel.”

“I'll have to get a job, won't I?” she'd answered flippantly and changed the subject.

The narrow asphalt led straight to the mountains, peaceful pastures on either side. A river flowed languidly to her left … a hint of pine soap in the air … the bell-like trill of a meadowlark.

Then the road rose, curved, twisted, and the river roared ahead of her.
CACHE LA POUDRE
, the sign next to the bridge told her. The river raced now, dangerously close to the road. Canyon walls swallowed up the Volkswagen. Leah wished she could get to the milk but needed both hands on the wheel.

A man stood on a rock in the river, a fishing pole in his hand, intent and as serene as the blue heron on its pole at Ted's Place.

There was no serenity for Leah. Monster mountains crushed in on either side of the cleft while the river roiled and crashed against rocks and rock-cliff banks. The sun would sink to the bottom of the canyon at one point and then she'd round a curve to gloomy shadow. She hoped it wasn't like this all the way to Walden.

The Volkswagen crawled as the grade steepened even though she pressed the accelerator to the floor. Danger signals from her mind kept shooting warnings at her senses. This canyon was so different from the canyons of the city.

At the outward edge of the next curve, the canyon widened to include a small treed area with picnic tables and trash cans and sunlight. She pulled over to eat and drink and calm tired nerves.

The sun felt cooler here than at Ted's Place. She sat at a picnic table and drank awkwardly from the tri-cornered fold-out of the milk carton … and pondered why it was that going back seemed such a sign of failure to her. Perhaps because she failed so often. Or because she'd had to return to her mother's house after her one real fling with freedom?

A car passed going downhill and soon another with a camping trailer going up. Leah felt less alone.

She'd even failed at being a daughter and fled guilt this time, guilt at not realizing how desperate her mother had become … guilt at her own relief at being free of the poor woman at last. How else would she have come to be in this deserted little park next to a roaring maniacal river?

Leah looked over her shoulder. There were probably few muggers in the mountains. But what about bears? She looked over her other shoulder.

A scrubby bush to the right of the picnic table moved, rustled.

The sun went down behind the mountain. It lit the tops of the cliff walls on either side of her, but Leah sat in shadow below.

The bush moved again.

Something fawn-colored uncoiled at its base. Leah stood and backed away as brakes screamed behind her. A car skidded around the curve, its rear tire biting gravel at the road's edge. And then it was gone.

A dark-gold car. Whoever sat at the wheel was alone. The sound of its engine had died suddenly. Had it stopped up ahead? Or was its sound drowned in the river's roar?

She turned again to the bush but the fawn-colored thing sat on the picnic table now, next to the food.

Leah shrugged. Just a cat. Wasn't it?

It had the color and markings of a Siamese but she'd never seen one that big. She'd never seen any cat that big.

“You aren't a cross between a house cat and a … a bobcat, are you?”

The cat answered her with a yowl instead of a meow.

“You sound like a Siamese.” She reached for the food and the animal rubbed its neck against her arm, purring like a muffled machine gun.

“Hungry? Well, run on home and get your dinner. Be glad, you've got a home.” Leah started for the car.

The cat gave a pleading and extended yowl. But the luminous blue eyes were cold, impersonal. There hadn't been a house for miles. “You do have a home? You weren't dumped?”

No answer. The cold eyes didn't waver. They reminded her of her sisters' eyes. Cats usually didn't look people eye to eye. Her mother's cats never had.

“I've got my own problems but”—Leah found a fairly clean plastic margarine bowl in the trash can—“you can have some milk.”

The cat rubbed against her as she poured it. “I didn't like the looks of that last car, for one thing. Good heavens, you
are
hungry.”

She broke up some bread and added it and more milk to the bowl. “Any cat who'll eat bread and milk is starving but you certainly don't look it.” Her mother's cats ate nothing but liver or fish.

“You would have loved my mother, kitty. Too bad no one else did. Well, it's been nice,” she said to the hypnotic eyes.

Leah put the food in the car and stood for a moment at the open door, looking up the lonely road and then down. Which way?

Was the gold car parked somewhere ahead? Waiting for Leah Harper? She was getting neurotic … the last few days had been too much … her mother, the funeral, the endless driving.…

Leah had been alone before and liked it. She was just tired. And the sun wasn't getting any higher. Walden lay ahead and she refused to go back … anywhere.

She slid behind the wheel and the Volks worked hard just to get her up the incline to the road. Her stomach felt better and she was
not
going to worry about that gold car. It, like the giant Siamese, was not her problem. It had nothing to do with her.

But her conscience pricked her enough to look as she passed. The picnic table was empty except for the little margarine bowl. The cat's home probably lay somewhere ahead. Cats wander.

Leah set a course for Walden, hoping the anemic Volkswagen could make it. She forgot the hungry cat … but not the dark-gold car with one passenger.

Chapter Three

“But you'll be gone for your birthday, Leah,” Suzie said with a knowing glance at Annette. “After all this sadness, we'll need something to celebrate. Won't we Ed?” She leaned against her husband in that proprietary way.

“Yeah. Remember last year, Leah?” Ed's leer indicated that even a death in the family hadn't stopped the open season on spinster sisters-in-law.

Their mother had been alive then and had brought her liquor and her cats.

The air moving through the car window was cold now. And strangely fresh.

But her mother never got drunk, just sadder, emptier.

Leah had romped with Suzie's little boys and sidled away from their father's hands. Ralph and Annette had quarreled in their married way.

Suzie whispered to Leah, “It's just that they don't have any children. That's what makes Annette so pinched and old. Children keep you young.”

And later Leah had overheard Suzie tell Annette, “Leah's twenty-nine and no husband in sight. I'm worried for her. That's what makes her so nervous, the ulcer and everything.” At one time Leah had wanted a husband, a home. Now she wanted freedom. From what she wasn't sure.

The canyon opened into a wide valley. Twilight illumined the side of jagged trees, rumpled mountains, of water spilling over rocks.

Well, she wasn't twenty-nine anymore. This very day she'd turned thirty!

Tents, trailers, and campfires along the river, children chasing each other, mothers pulling things from boxes on picnic tables, fathers carrying firewood. That would have been a cheap way to travel, but Leah, the city girl, wouldn't have known how to handle it … alone.

“You've been independent long enough, Leah,” Ralph, the doctor, had said one year ago today. “The time will come when you'll wish you had a man to take care of you.” Old Ralph didn't grab for her like Ed. “You've still got your looks and figure, the grace you had as a model. It's your damned independence that turns men off.”

Ralph wasn't the first man to mistake Leah's flippancy for independence. If only she were as independent as people thought her. Now that Iris Harper was dead, Leah had a real chance to prove that she could be. Not like the last time she'd fled the family and gone to New York, only to be called back two years later to help care for her mother. But the New York experience hadn't been a success either. All she had to show for that was a scrapbook.

No dark-gold car. But it was harder to distinguish the colors of cars that came up behind the Volks and invariably passed it.

A ranch and two brown horses with white flashes stood at the fence with their ears back, glaring at her, reminding Leah that she was an alien.

And finally a lake, long and narrow, with more campers around more fires. Leah felt alone in the little car surrounded by darkness. The road rose away from the lake in curves that twisted back on themselves.

“Well, I want to be alone. To start fresh, new.…”

A yowl came from the back seat. Leah's start forced the car off the road and up the side of an embankment. Headlights stared into space. The engine died.

“Damn you!” she yelled at the luminescent eyes suspended above a suitcase. “I thought I left you back at … are you trying to kill us both?” The Volks slid down off the embankment and stuck. She revved the engine but couldn't back up. The motor stalled again.

The Siamese purred behind her.

Leah set the emergency brake and stepped out to peer over the embankment. She thought she saw the tops of trees far below. Her stomach lifted breathlessly at the thought of the Volks flying out and over the bank, falling down as if from the sky in a sickening free flight.

“Sorry, kitty, but you're going to have to go.” She reached into the glove compartment for the flashlight. “No hitchhikers allowed.” She swiped the flashlight at the glowing eyes.

The cat swiped back, its claws making a scratching sound on metal. The eyes disappeared and the narrow beam of light could find nothing in the jumble of luggage that had upset when they'd climbed the embankment.

“Look, kitty, I'm so tired. I'm a stray, too. I can't help you. You're too big to lose yourself in this tiny car.” But it had. It either moved every time she moved a suitcase or a dress bag or had crawled under the front seat.

She gave up and flashed the light on the back tires. They sat in a small indentation with water running down it. A car came up and passed without slowing. “Nobody helps strays,” she muttered.

Strange rustling sounds in the darkness.…

Leah jumped back into the car, put it in reverse, and tried rocking her body and the Volks. She put the gear in first and the front end lowered as part of the embankment gave way.

Into reverse again … the door ajar … one hand on the handle in case she had to jump. Tires whined, then buzzed … then caught. They all backed onto the road.

“I don't know what I'm going to do with you, cat, but if I don't get to Walden soon I'm liable to twist your neck. You picked the wrong stray.”

An answering rustle behind her.

The Volkswagen groaned up and around curves. Shadow pines tried to block the stars, crowded in on the road.

No houses, no campfires. Just the headlights that seemed to be keeping a constant distance behind her. Why didn't that car pass her like all the others? Was it dark-gold?

Slow, grinding mile after mile. Her bottom ached with the flatness of the seat, her back with fatigue. Her vigilant stomach began its sour burning.

Sleep and nausea waved through her alternately.

A sign loomed in the dark,
CAMERON PASS
. Surely Walden was near.

Stars winked on one side of the sky and lightning on the other before trees closed in on the road once more. The lightning revealed a strange nature world with which Leah could not identify.

The cat crawled to the back of the seat next to her and purred in her ear.

“I wish you'd go away. You remind me of Mother.”
Her mother with the long tapered fingers hanging over the side of the tub, blood oozing off the nails to drip to the floor
.…

The pavement ended and Leah fought gravel. Enormous road machines slept in a hollowed-out space in a mountain. Over two hours since Ted's Place and still no Walden.

The gravel ended finally, and the bump as she hit the pavement knocked the big cat onto the seat beside her.

Still the headlights showed only trees and road. Still the headlights behind her kept watch.

She was half asleep by the time they passed a lighted sign that she thought said Pair-O-Vancy. A motel?

“Kitty, let's see if that car is following us.” Leah pulled over and turned off the lights. “Or maybe I'm as neurotic as I think I am.”

Lights appeared behind her, moving slowly. The car passed in the dark.

Leah waited.

“It doesn't look like it's coming back. Should we go see what a pair-o-vancy is? What do I mean, we? You're getting dumped again the minute I get a chance.”

The sign, at closer, slower inspection, read
PAIR-O-
, with a picture of two dice burned in the wood followed by the word
CABINS
.

Leah turned into the drive. “Paradise. That I can use right now.”

A gas pump directly in front of her …
STANDARD. OIL. GAS. SORRY, NO GAS
.

Shadow cars and unlit cabins and in the center a log house with a light over the door.…

The rustling of a mountain night settled over her as she walked to the house. A heavy chill wrapped Leah and the smell of pine and dirt in a dark bundle. She knocked.

No sound from within. She knocked again.

Leah decided to sleep in the car, here in this oasis of civilization. But as she turned away, the door opened and a man stood on the step tying a rope around his bathrobe.

“I'm sorry to get you up, but the sign said there was a vacancy.”

“Don't matter.” He had a beautiful warm smile that was missing two teeth. “Thought we were done for the night so I turned in. But there's a cabin left.” He looked toward the Volks, sitting dimly beyond the porch light. “You alone?”