Twenty minutes…too long. But going out there alone was stupid. Eric would be the first one to tell her so. Now it was a matter of fighting her will, because everything inside her wanted to run for the door and not look back. The deeper sense inside her, though, the sense Eric had put there, was holding her back, forcing her to finally do
this the right way. Because it was Eric’s life on the line. Eric…“I’ll be waiting.” Waiting the longest wait of her life.
Neil ran the effort without a hitch. A dozen people were at the hospital door in a matter of minutes, still dirty from the night’s earlier rescue, ready to go back out, ready to find Eric. In those few minutes while she waited, Dinah tried his cell phone over and over. Tried to get through to Ella Clark, to see if Eric’s truck, driven there earlier by Jess Weldon, was still there, but Ella wasn’t answering. Neil said she took off her hearing aid at night.
Various people from town called in, all reporting no sign of him. Apparently, there was a foot search going on. People were walking the streets, looking for his truck. Not that Eric was the type who would be so irresponsible as to simply wander off this way. He wouldn’t, and Dinah was biting her nails with worry. “The first thing I’m going to do when we find him is hug him and tell him how much I love him,” she said on the cell phone to Angela. “The second thing I’m going to do is…tell him again how much I love him.”
“He’s going to be fine,” her sister reassured her. “He probably has a flat tire.”
Or he’d fallen off the side of a mountain somewhere. “Look, I’ll call you. Neil’s got everybody ready to go out so I’ve got to run.” And run was what she did. To the truck, to climb into the front seat with Neil. To the site where they’d last seen his truck at the landing strip the instant Neil had stopped his own truck. To the place in the woods where they’d found Fallon, to make sure he’d cleaned the site. Which he had. By the time Neil had caught up with her, she already knew everything there was to know at that particular site. Eric wasn’t there.
“I have people tracking him down the road,” Neil explained.
“Driving it, taking the side roads. Walking it, to look for any indication of where he might have gone over.”
“And that’s it? That’s all we can do?”
“Eric’s not given to doing stupid things. He knows how to leave signs if he’s in trouble, and he knows how to take care of himself until we can get to him.”
Words meant to calm her down, but it wasn’t working. “Look, I’m going to get out and walk down the main road like the others are doing. Maybe I’ll see something…” She shrugged. “Maybe I won’t, but at least I’ll be doing something other than sitting.” Something was better than nothing.
So she climbed out of Neil’s truck and began her descent down the road leading away from the middle Sister, thinking about the Ute Indian legend. If ever there was a time when the Three Sisters needed to protect someone in their shadows, this was it. Looking up to the oldest Sister, which towered over this, the middle Sister, she prayed for the three of them to work their magic, and work it fast.
Rescuers in front of her, sweeping the road with their flashlights, walked slowly, looking everywhere. It was a methodical search as they hunted two by two, darting off the road into the underbrush every now and again then returning to the road, dejected. Coming up behind them, having a second look at everything the way she was, was probably a waste of time, but she was trying to think like Eric now. He had been going to clean up and go to the girls. He might have been in a hurry…Had the girls called him? Or had he called the girls, like he’d promised? Flipping open her phone, she wondered. “Hello, Janice,” she said when Eric’s sister answered.
“Did you find him?” Janice choked.
“No, not yet. But we’ve got a dozen people out on the
mountain, and at least that many in town. There’s a good chance he’s had trouble with his truck.” No one knew that, no one had even speculated, but Janice needed to hear something reassuring, although Dinah wasn’t sure if she’d said it for Janice’s sake or for her own. “But what I need to know is if he called the twins. I remembered him telling me that he’d call them when he got out of here, so I was wondering…”
“Just a minute,” Janice interrupted, then dropped the phone. Almost immediately, she was back on. “He did call them. Told them he was on his way home, and to get the cookie dough ready.”
“And that’s all?”
“That’s all they said, except they wanted more chocolate chips.”
Wanted more chocolate chips.
The words kept coming back to her, nagging, not letting go, for the next several minutes on her trek down the road. More chocolate chips…“Neil,” she said when she called him on his cell phone. “If I were on the middle Sister and wanted to go and find a bag of chocolate chips, where would I go?”
“What the hell are you talking about, Dinah?” he snapped.
“Chocolate chips. Where would be the best place to find them on my way home from the middle Sister?”
“Is there a point to this?”
“I don’t know…maybe.” Would he have gone for chocolate chips?
“You’d go to Bertie’s Convenient Store, open all night. At the fork, halfway down the main road, you’d take the road to the west, go about a mile, and if you knew the short cut, you’d come to the giant boulder—it looks like an old lady with a crooked nose—and take the dirt road around it…more like a wide, dirt path.”
“Would Eric know the short cut?” she asked.
“Would Eric have gone to Bertie’s for chocolate chips?” Neil asked, gunning his engine. Before Dinah could answer his question, he’d pulled up alongside her. “Get in,” he said, barely stopping.
She was in, door not quite shut when he took off, but not before he’d radioed his position to several of the rescue team. “It makes as much sense as anything else does.” Dinah fastened her seat belt. “Everything he does is for the girls, and if they wanted chocolate chips, I think he’d go out in a blizzard to get them.”
“Well, apparently he’s more predictable for you than he is for me, because there’s no way I’d have put chocolate chips together with him going missing.”
“Let’s hope he’s predictable this time.” Gripping the side of the seat as Neil took the turn at the fork, all she could do was stare out the window, hoping to see something…anything. But all she saw was a dark, nearly starless night, where glowing eyes stared out from their bushy hiding places, and bugs darted in and out of the truck’s headlights. Truth was, there was nothing to see. Without light it was hopeless. But waiting until morning was unthinkable. Neil knew that, every rescue worker out on the hunt knew that. Yet they were there, doing what they had to do, breaking Eric’s own rules about this kind of night search, to find Eric. “So, how much farther to this boulder?”
Neil lifted his hand from the steering wheel at the same moment he stepped on the brake and pointed to it. “Right there.”
In the night shadows, it did resemble the profile of an old woman with a hooked nose. “Should we drive, or walk?”
“Eric’s truck is heavier than mine so he might have gone
this way. But I can’t drive it because after all the rains and flooding we’ve had recently, my truck will get bogged down.” He stopped the truck directly under the old woman’s nose. “So we’ll walk for a while and see what we can find.”
Words said to no one, as Dinah was already on her way out the door.
Together, they walked about half a mile down a rutted, muddy path, slipping and sliding, most of the time hanging on to each other to keep themselves upright. “The tracks look fresh,” Dinah said, shining her flashlight on the road.
“Kids in town like to come down this way. They use it for a lovers’ lane.”
“Well, it’s isolated enough.” Too isolated, she thought, while trying to extricate her boot from a particularly deep rut…one that looked like it could open up and swallow the whole town of White Elk. Stopping, she bent to help her foot slip back into the boot and dropped her flashlight. It plopped, more than rolled, and its beam fixed on a little grassy patch off to the side of the road. She didn’t pay attention until after she’d got her boot back on and was going to get her flashlight. That’s when she saw it. A pink shoelace.
Dinah gasped. “He’s here,” she whispered, then immediately yelled, “Eric, can you hear me? Eric!”
“Eric!” Neil yelled, not sure why or how Dinah had decided this was the place. But he yelled again, and began frantically sweeping his light from one side of the road to the other.
“Eric,” Dinah yelled again. “Where are you?” She grabbed up the shoelace, tucked it into her pocket, and studied the spot for a moment. “I think the tracks are his,” she said, looking on down the road, still seeing nothing.
“I think he came this way, something happened, and he tossed a pink shoelace out the window as a sign.” “A pink shoelace?”
“Long story,” Dinah said, moving on ahead in mud halfway up to her knees now. Neil was flanking her on the right, keeping his distance and keeping his eyes peeled for anything on that side of the road. But Dinah was the one who found it…found the spot about three hundred yards away when the tire marks veered off…“Here,” she choked, running straight into the waist-high prairie grass, following tracks that had flattened the grass. “Eric, can you hear me?”
In response, a honk. Which brought immediate tears of relief as she followed the trail until it came to the overturned vehicle. It was on its side. Lights still on, shining into the trees. “Eric,” she choked, dropping to the ground to look into the cab.
He smiled at her. Cut, bloody. Half-strangled by the seat belt. Beautiful. “I thought you’d never get here,” he choked, his voice hoarse.
Well, the first thing she wanted to do—hug him—wasn’t going to happen right now. He was too injured. A quick assessment revealed a broken leg, as best she could tell without moving him. Probably a dislocated shoulder, too. So no hugs from her. But in her heart she was hugging him forever. However, the second thing she’d said she’d do…“I love you,” she whispered, crawling in and cutting away the seat belt while Neil radioed their location to his teams. Muddy tears were streaking down her cheeks. “I love you more than anybody I’ve ever loved in the whole world, and if you ever do this to me again, I’ll…” She sniffled, cut through the shoulder part of the seat belt, and pulled away the remnants of the air bag which Eric had already punctured and deflated.
“You’ll what?”
“I’ll love you more than anybody I’ve ever loved in the whole world.”
He was coming home today. It had been a crazy seven days, subduing the twins who would have surely injured Eric in their enthusiasm to hug him, and trying to get his house ready so he wouldn’t have to go home to Janice’s cottage. He was going to need a medical bed for a while, and she’d had it set up right in the front room of his new cabin. Dr. Kent Stafford, one of White Elk’s full-time orthopedic surgeons, had actually recommended Eric to a rehab facility for a couple of weeks, but Eric had refused. Said he wanted to be with his girls. Said over and over he wanted to be with Dinah.
So she was busy making sure that would happen.
As it turned out, he
had
been going after chocolate chips that night. In a hurry. Taking the short cut. His truck had slipped out of control in the mud, the brakes wouldn’t hold it, and it had picked up speed in its descent. On a flat surface, nothing would have happened. But rolling down the side of a foothill…The Three Sisters had been watching over him because, by rights, he should have been killed.
And the pink shoelace…he’d tossed it out the window when he’d realized he was going to take a long, bumpy ride to the end.
“In the middle of the front room?” Those were Eric’s first words when the medic rolled him in the door. His broken leg, now in a cast, was elevated. A pink cast at Pippa and Paige’s insistence. He was shirtless, but the brace supporting four broken ribs covered most of his chest. And his arm was in a sling. A mess, but such a handsome mess that tears welled in Dinah’s eyes.
“In the middle of the room,” she said, smiling so widely it almost hurt.
“I was hoping for some privacy.”
She waved to George Fitzhenry, who’d brought him home and was on his way back out. “In your condition, Eric, privacy’s the last thing you need. Especially if you’re thinking what I think you’re thinking.”
Eric sighed. “So how are you going to lift me into bed?”
“I have a few friends coming by later. And you’re getting a full-time nurse. Hired the best one I could find.” “That would be you.”
“That would be me. And I’ll be full-time nurse at White Elk Hospital as soon as my private duty is over.”
“Meaning?”
“You know what it means.”
“But I want to hear you say it. No, I need to hear you say it.”
Yes, he did, and she wanted to say it to him. “I’m going to stay, Eric—here in White Elk, here with you and the girls. With my sister.
I want to stay here.”
“Do you know how good that sounds?”
“It couldn’t sound any better to hear it than it feels to say it. Because it’s what I truly want to do. I mean, I kept telling myself that if I walked away from everything I’d found here in White Elk I’d be fine. Better to be alone, keep myself hidden, than open myself up to getting hurt again. I wanted you so much, but I was scared…scared I wasn’t enough, scared I’d let you down, scared you’d be disappointed. So it was easier to push you away, even run away…”
“To Costa Rica?” he said, smiling.
“It was never about running to someplace. It was always about running away from something…in this case, you.”
“But I wouldn’t have hurt you, Dinah.”
“Not intentionally. But what happened if we woke up one morning and you decided that I wasn’t…”
“Patricia?”
She nodded. “And the thing is, it wasn’t even about Patricia. I’m so glad you had her, so glad you had such a wonderful marriage with her. I just didn’t feel like I could be enough for you after you’ve already had perfection. For me, it’s always easy to hide behind excuses, which is what I’ve been doing, Eric. The men in my life leave, I’m too emotional to be a nurse, Charles betrayed me…excuses. And I wanted to turn you into another excuse. But you wouldn’t let me. And I know I was forcing you into that position by distancing myself, as you called it. Getting close then shoving you away. Even resigning from the hospital.”