If You Loved Me (10 page)

She had lived in the kind of home where people made rules and kept them. He'd had no business helping her break those rules. No business at all. She hadn't a clue about the world he lived in. She'd thought his cupboards were empty because he hadn't bothered to shop, had talked about a trip the year she was fifteen, a month spent in museums while wishing she could have a summer job instead of following aunt Carrie around Europe. She'd ached to live, but she hadn't a clue about life.

She'd had a dream and he'd done his damnedest to destroy it, demanding she choose between him and her father's rules. He knew it was insanity, knew as he asked her to live with him that it was wrong. He had no resources to pay her way through medical school and he knew her father wouldn't if she was with a man. If he was going to tear her dream away from her, he'd damned well better be ready to give her something in its place.

Like marriage and a stable home.

Images of a picket fence and neighbors that stayed the same year after year scared him rigid. He couldn't do it, but she wasn't the sort of girl a man took without promises, and he wasn't the sort of man to make promises.

At eighteen, Emma Jennings was a force he couldn't seem to pull away from. Even now he had the same overwhelming urges. Fantasies and memories of Emma had kept him awake all night—that and planning the most effective search pattern, trying to think of places the boys might be and not be seen, ways to penetrate those places.

He pulled off another piece of paper filled with names, and then wrote more names on the blank piece underneath. He told himself to remember the kids every minute and forget the woman.

When Bob and the boys burst in through the door, Gray grabbed the paper from Emma's hand and added the one on top of the pad to it. He handed them to Bob.

"I've written down a description of Chris and Jordy and their kayaks," he told Bob.

The other man's brows shot up, and Gray realized his voice held all the anger he felt at the thought of his own kid growing up not knowing the truth, not knowing his own father.

He frowned and said more quietly, "Here's a list of contacts based on their route... Carey in Klemtu... Mike on the
Julie II.
Get to the radio and see if you can find someone who remembers them. Concentrate on the fishermen first, then the places a couple of kayaks might have put in for supplies."

"I can add to this," offered Bob. "More names."

"Good. I'll be in the seaplane. I'll be monitoring channel sixteen for the Coast Guard bulletins, but I'll check in twenty minutes after every hour. Keep me posted by radio."

He was aware of Emma's head raised slightly. She was listening, storing every word. She'd always had an incredible memory for details, could recall conversations without a word missing, took tests at school turning the pages of the textbook in her head.

Ed pushed forward. "My uncle is fishing down Arthur Passage. I can call him on the radio."

"Good." Ed's uncle was an elder in his village. Gray had met him once at a meeting with Ed's probation officer when he arranged for Ed to come to the camp. "Maybe your uncle could check around his village."

Ed shoved his hands in his pockets and frowned agreement. "He'll do that. We've maybe a hundred fishermen in our village."

Gray's eyes found Emma. She was watching, waiting. He thought this might be the way she looked just before she went into surgery. Alert, with tension and determination running under the surface.

"We'll head out now," he said abruptly. "It's light enough."

He saw Emma nod, then forced himself to look away as she forced a smile.

"Thanks," she said. "All of you. Thank you for helping me."

"Everybody helps," said Ed. "Big country. Not many people."

"That says it all," muttered Gray as they headed back to the plane.

He glanced at Emma with critical eyes. She was already limping slightly as they went down the slope of the boardwalk. Her leg would be killing her after an hour motionless in the plane, but she'd never admit it. That much hadn't changed about Emma.

"We could be searching for a long time," he said quietly. "If you don't relax, you'll be exhausted in an hour."

She nodded and flexed her fingers as if testing them for surgery.

He wondered if he should have tried to talk her out of coming with him in the plane, but with her son out there somewhere she'd go nuts inside, pacing the rooms and wondering. Better for her to be out looking. He would need her eyes, even though they were untrained.

"Chris's kayak is fluorescent orange. That's one thing in our favor. There aren't a lot of fluorescent trees on die coast. Was the color your idea?"

"Chris thought of it." She blinked and he could
swear
there was moisture in her eyes.

"Smart kid." He stared directly into her eyes, wanted to ask her if Chris looked liked his father.

The Emma he remembered had been a poor liar, but that might have changed. Last night she'd repeatedly denied Chris was his child. Was she afraid if he knew the truth he'd try to take the boy away? That didn't make a hell of a lot of sense when they were dealing with a seventeen year old, a young man with a mind of his own. But maybe it didn't have to make sense. Emma had always been passionately impulsive. Maybe the new layers of control weren't effective when it came to something as basic as the mothering instinct.

The kid had to be his. Her sending Chris to Outward Bound was a dead giveaway. Emma still didn't know a tree from a fire hydrant. A wilderness adventure was the last thing she'd provide for her child. A computer camp maybe, or a trip to Europe. But wilderness adventures would make sense only if she were feeling guilty about keeping an old secret, if she felt she owed the boy the chance to see something of his father's world.

Damn the woman! She'd no right to keep that secret all these years. He could scrub all his old memories of Emma into nothing. The woman beside him wasn't the girl he'd once been obsessed with. She was a woman who could steal a man's child away and still look him in the eye without flinching as she lied about it.

He would find the kid. He'd turn over every damned tree between Klemtu and Prince Rupert and he'd find the two kayaks that had eluded the Coast Guard and the rescue helicopter and pray to God that the kids weren't badly hurt.

Or dead.

Chris would be alive. He had to be. And when Gray saw him, he would recognize himself in the boy's face. Then Emma would have to stop denying the truth.

* * *

They turned southeast after they took off. Gray explained he was going to fly directly south to Klemtu first, because the Indian village had provided the one valid piece of information the Coast Guard had received. Chris and Jordy had left the village a couple of hours after Chris placed his last call to his mother.

"We'll keep an eye out as we fly down there, but mostly I'm going for speed. The Coast Guard has been searching from the north end, so we'll start at the south."

Emma nodded. There were no words worth saying. They were flying south over channels that had looked straightforward on her map, but from the air she could see only water twisting between masses of green vegetation. She didn't know how high they were flying, maybe a couple of hundred feet over the water, maybe more. There was nothing to give her perspective. They were high enough that she couldn't make out details on the dark green trees, low enough to see there were no gaps between the trees on shore.

Dense forest, Gray had said, but she hadn't really understood the significance of that density. Now, looking down, she realized Chris could be anywhere in those trees and she'd have no hope of seeing him. There wasn't a scrap of earth showing. If Chris and Jordy were on shore, Gray could fly right over them and see nothing.

If they weren't on shore, if they were in the water with their kayaks, surely they'd have been spotted by now.

Gray and Emma had been flying about half an hour when Gray showed her where the charts were located.

"Find the one that's called
Approaches to Chatham Sound,
" he instructed.

She sorted through the big charts and pulled out one. Gray showed her the lines of longitude and latitude on the chart, then pointed to an instrument bolted to the ceiling of the plane, numbers glowing on its green screen.

"That's the GPS—Global Positioning System. The numbers are longitude and latitude readouts for our position, accurate to within ten feet or so. The map in that screen isn't a marine chart, so use that parallel rule and the dividers to figure out just where we are on the chart."

It took her some time, and Gray had to show her how to use the parallel rule and the dividers.

"Good," he said, glancing at the chart to check where she'd put the X. "Every half hour, I want you to log our position. Write the time in pencil beside the mark on the chart. We'll patrol the west side of Grenville Channel going south. It's less likely than the east, because there are fewer anchorages. Coming north, we'll search the east side."

He began teaching her how to recognize landmasses from the details on the chart. The three-dimensional land didn't look at all like the two-dimensional chart, but by the time they landed on the glassy water of Klemtu's tiny protected harbor, she was getting the hang of it.

"It's like learning to relate the bones of a human foot in an anatomy book to what I see when I make an incision on a live child in the O.R. The perspective's so different."

Gray stared at her for a long second as the plane wallowed in its own wake.

"Is being a children's surgeon everything you hoped it would be?"

She thought of Gray as she'd seen him at the camp, the work he did with troubled young boys, of the way he flew the plane, easy and competent, just as he'd driven a car when she first met him. She recognized the line of his frown, the dark intensity of his eyes. Now, with maturity and insight, she might learn to know this man in a way she hadn't when she was a teenager.

"I used to imagine myself as some kind of magician, using a scalpel to make broken and bent bodies whole." She brushed her hair away from her eyes. The village ahead barely disturbed the dense growth of dark green trees. "The magic can take a long time, and sometimes... sometimes, it just doesn't work. Sometimes there's nothing I can do to help."

"You love it."

"Yes." She thought of the boy she'd operated on Wednesday morning. "Sometimes I hate it when things go wrong, but I couldn't do anything else. I couldn't stop."

"It's where you belong."

"Yes. Yes, it is."

* * *

In Klemtu, Emma stood beside Gray as he talked to the mother of the First Nations fisherman who'd spoken to Chris and Jordy only days ago.

"No one from here has seen them since," said the woman. "They talked to my son about the weather and the rocks for a long time that night. They had good charts and a radio for the weather reports." She nodded slowly and Emma felt her sympathy, one mother to another. "They are careful boys."

"Thank you," said Emma.

Gray insisted on stopping for coffee and a sandwich at a small restaurant near the wharf. Then, after they took off again, he circled and dropped down to fly low over the passage. They flew more slowly now, north along the twisting route through the inland passages, the fjords of northwestern Canada.

Time began to blur as she traced their route north. Fishing boats... trees and more trees... green mountains and the steep lush shores of the coastal rain forest. Water and trees and wind and boats. Emma blinked and shifted to ease the stiffness in her leg. More trees. They rounded a curve in the passage and the water was wild ahead, the wind suddenly strong enough to make the plane tremble in the air.

Emma gasped and pointed at a flash of orange on the shore.

Gray put one hand over hers as if to caution her optimism. He banked the plane and swooped down lower over the water. A scrap of orange washed up against a log. Just a scrap. Suddenly she saw it clearly, an old tarp floating twisted on the water, one end caught on the log.

Emma felt dizziness crawl over her. Not Chris, just an old scrap of tarp.

They flew on endlessly. Gray swooped down to check on an orange inflated fisherman's float, then gained height again. Emma made another X on the chart, then reached for the adjoining chart as they flew farther north.

Time crawled. The world below seemed empty and unreal. She lost track of the number of times Gray reached up to the radio, switched channels, and called to check in with the camp.

Three times she heard the Coast Guard radio announcer call out, "Pan, pan, pan. All stations. All stations. All stations. Would mariners please forward any information known about two kayaks..."

She had memorized each word of that notice to mariners. Chris and Jordy. Overdue.

Gray talked to the Coast Guard helicopter that had patrolled the entire route between Prince Rupert and Klemtu and was now flying west to drop supplies off at one of the lighthouse stations. The pilot told Gray they'd resume the search after the lighthouse run.

How long would the Coast Guard search for Chris and Jordy? Occasionally, Emma had heard reports of searches on the news. Missing airplanes, missing skiers in the mountains. Sometimes the search was called off without the missing people being found.

Beside her, Gray studied the land ahead, his hands easy on the controls.

Emma turned her head back to her side of the channel, her eyes straining for a glimpse of Chris and Jordy.

"Gray, how did you learn to fly?"

"I took lessons." From the corner of her eye, she saw his arm move. "When I bought the property on Stephens Island, I could see I'd be chartering a lot of seaplanes for trips to town. My first book was doing better than I'd expected, so I had a talk with Dave Saunders at North Reach Air. He agreed to help me find a good used plane with amphibious floats."

She stroked a bead of condensation on the window. Ahead, she could see the glimpse of white she knew must mean a navigation light on the shore. She ran her finger along the channel on the chart, located the lighthouse symbol.