Stranded

Stranded

B
OOK
4

Stranded

Lorena McCourtney

© 2006 by Lorena McCourtney

Published by Fleming H. Revell
a division of Baker Publishing Group
P.O. Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287

Printed in the United States of America

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.

                            Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
McCourtney, Lorena.
      Stranded / Lorena McCourtney.
          p. cm. — (An Ivy Malone mystery)
      ISBN 10: 0-8007-3138-7 (pbk.)
      ISBN 978-0-8007-3138-0 (pbk.)
      1. Malone, Ivy (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Women detectives—
   Fiction. 3. Older women—Fiction. I. Title. II. Series: McCourtney,
   Lorena. Ivy Malone mysteries ; bk. 4.
   PS3563.C3449S77 2006
   813'.54—dc22                                              2006017014

Contents

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

1

Squawk. Scr-e-e-e-ch.

Not good.

Thud. Thump. Thunk.

Worse.

Clankety, clunkety, clank-clank-CLANK!

The clanks vibrated right up through the driver’s seat of the motor home, jarring my teeth and rattling my bones. Only one sound is worse, and it came next, right after a dying wheeze of engine.

Silence.

I’d automatically braked at the screech, but it was an unnecessary gesture. The motor home was dead on the highway. Motionless as a dinosaur fossil. Lifeless as roadkill.

Abilene woke and jolted upright in the passenger’s seat. She’d been traveling with me since Oklahoma. “What happened? What’s wrong? Where are we?”

She shook her head and blinked, looking disoriented and bewildered as she peered out at the heavily forested mountains rising into a whiteout of falling snow on either side of the road. Where were we? We’d been in a Wal-Mart parking lot when she’d fallen asleep, after being awake most of the night with a toothache. Now we were smack in the middle of a narrow, winding highway somewhere in the mountains of Colorado on a winter afternoon. With falling snow rapidly obliterating the yellow dividing line ahead.

“When did it start snowing?”

“About half an hour ago. The engine just quit—”

I broke off as lights shot out of the veil of falling snow behind us and blazed in the rearview mirror. Panic froze my hands on the steering wheel. The car barreled straight at us.

With no more than inches to spare, the driver squealed his brakes, screeched around our stalled vehicle, skidded across the highway, and careened back into the right lane. The angry blast of a horn trailed the red taillights as they disappeared into the falling snow.

“Thank you, Lord,” I whispered gratefully. I used the fingers of one hand to pry the cramped fingers of the other off the steering wheel. My possum-gray hair felt as if it were standing on end.

Abilene’s knuckles gleamed white as she clutched the armrest beside her seat. “We’ve got to get out of the middle of the road before someone hits us!”

Right. This had all the makings of a demolition derby. I tried the starter. Maybe those weren’t fatal clunks. Maybe they were just warning twinges or a temporary glitch.

Wishful thinking. The engine momentarily made a sound like a garbage disposal trying to chew up a stray spoon, and I quickly turned the key off again.

But we did have lights, at least until the battery gave out, and I turned on everything from turn signals to warning blinkers so other vehicles could see us.

Abilene unbuckled her seat belt. Koop jumped from her lap to the ledge below the windshield, lone eye alert, orange stub of tail twitching.

“Maybe we can roll backward to a turnout and at least get off the road,” she said. “I’ll run back and see what’s there.”

She grabbed a jacket, and an icy flurry of snowflakes swirled inside when she opened the door. Another car came up behind us but spotted our carnival of lights in time to pull around. I offered another thanks that traffic was not heavy on this mountain highway, and that it was only midday. But where was a patrol car when you needed one? One had showed up quickly enough to give us a warning ticket when a taillight had gone out a few days ago.

I slid out of the driver’s seat and went back to turn on lights within the motor home in hopes they’d help make us more visible.

When I returned to the seat I spotted something I’d been too shaken to notice before. A red light on the instrument panel, a red light where no light should be. A red eye glowing like some evil messenger of doom.

Abilene returned a minute later. “Nothing back there. The shoulder is barely wide enough to stand on.”

“Look.” I pointed to the red light. She leaned over, and we studied it together.

“It’s the oil pressure,” she said.

“Right. There isn’t any.”

“We’d better call for help on the cell phone.”

Yes, the cell phone! We’d bought it only a couple of weeks ago, one of those prepaid kind where you purchase so many minutes and use them as you need them. This was exactly the kind of emergency for which we’d bought the phone. I congratulated myself on our foresight.

Abilene grabbed the phone from the drawer and handed it to me. I yanked up the little antenna and hit the “on” button. After a series of blips, the two words I got on the tiny screen were both chilling and final: no signal.

The reason was fairly obvious. We’d been on a downhill stretch, but the road rose steeply ahead of us. We were deep in a valley here, surrounded by high mountains, modern cell phone technology zapped by geography. At this point the cell phone was no more useful than a battery-powered salami. Foresight, shmoresight.

“Now what?” Abilene asked. She peered ahead. “Maybe I should start walking. How far since we went through a town?”

“I’m not sure. Twenty miles anyway.”

“How far to the next town?”

“I’ll have to look at the map.” I was stalling, of course. The idea of Abilene hiking even a mile or two along the narrow shoulder of this mountain road in the swirling snow gave me cold shudders.

She grabbed a map out of the pocket behind the driver’s seat, and we studied it together.

“At least ten or fifteen miles,” I said. The map showed the next town as a minuscule dot with the unlikely name of Hello.

Abilene peered out the windshield, but she didn’t rush off to start walking. I was relieved she could see that even with her youthful strength and energy, hiking off into the snow was not a wise course of action.

“I take it this is one of those times we’re supposed to pray and depend on the Lord?” she suggested finally, her tone on the disgruntled side.

Since Abilene has joined me in my travels, with a reason as good as my own for keeping on the move, we’ve had several discussions on Christian matters. Sometimes she seems to be heading toward the Lord, but the path is definitely circuitous and potholed.

“I think that’s a good plan.” The Lord has seen me through a good many problems and trials over the years. His promise never to leave or forsake us was surely good here on this snowy mountain road. I offered the prayer.

We sat there. Abilene impatiently rubbed a forearm across a steamed-up window. A few more cars detoured around us, some quietly, some blasting complaints. The motor home was already beginning to feel chilly. Abilene turned up the thermostat, and the propane heater kicked on. The fan would run down the battery fairly quickly. I clicked the switch that turned on the generator to provide electricity and keep the battery charged.

“The Lord seems to be taking his own sweet time,” Abilene muttered.

True, I had to admit. How long had we been stuck here? Logic said a few minutes, nerves screamed hours. But God, I reminded myself, isn’t tied to time the way we in this realm are.

Several more hour-long minutes passed. The motor home warmed comfortably. The propane tanks had been filled only yesterday. We had food in the refrigerator and gasoline for the generator. In the wilderness, disconnected from modern services, we could probably survive for a considerable length of time.

How long we could survive stranded in the middle of a mountain road with cars and trucks coming at us from both directions was another matter.

2