Raeanne Thayne Hope's Crossings Series Volume One

He’d forgotten how bitterly cold spring storms could turn in the high Rockies. It was the third week of April, for crying out loud, but the temperature had to be in the twenties, with a windchill making it feel much colder.

Claire was already shocky. She seemed to be fading in and out of consciousness and the wound just above her left temple where she must have hit the window was bleeding copious amounts. She needed to get the hell out of the water fast. All his protective instincts were urging him to pluck her out of the car and haul her to safety and it was killing him to just stand here helplessly. But given the extent of her injuries, he couldn’t take the risk of injuring her worse. The best thing, the only thing, was to offer whatever comfort he could until the ambulance crew arrived with a gurney to transport her safely.

Her eyes closed again, and he grabbed her scarf for a makeshift compress to the cut on her forehead. “Claire, honey, you’ve got to stay with me. A few more minutes, that’s all.”

She moaned a little and he brushed her hair away again. “I know, sweetheart. I’m going to get you out of here. Just hang on.”

He thought of how bright and lovely she had looked in her store earlier, even amid her distress at finding her store burglarized. Seeing her like this—scared and injured, like a frightened child—was heartrending.

She seemed to drift off again and he knew it was important that he keep her conscious and alert.

“Claire. Claire!”

Her eyes fluttered open with obvious reluctance.

“Tell me about String Fever.”

“My store.”

“I know. I saw it today, remember? I never expected you to be running a bead store. I thought you were going to be a teacher, like my mother. Isn’t that what you went to college to do?”

She nodded a little. “I taught for a few years. Third grade. When…Macy…was little.”

“So how did you go from that to running a bead store?” He didn’t really care—okay, he found everything about her unexpectedly fascinating—but he mostly just needed to keep her talking.

The tactic seemed to be working. He saw a little more clarity in her eyes and maybe even a hint of pride. “Worked for Katherine Thorne before…the divorce. Not for the money, just for fun. After…Jeff left…she asked if…wanted to buy it.”

He pictured Katherine Thorne, sixty-six years old and a five-foot, ninety-eight-pound dynamo. Although tiny in stature and deceptively fragile in appearance, she packed a powerful force of will. Had Katherine really wanted to sell the store or had she only offered it to Claire to give a newly divorced, struggling mom something solid to hang on to? Knowing Katherine’s generosity, he wouldn’t be surprised.

He also hadn’t missed Claire’s phrasing. After Jeff left, she had said. He had assumed her divorce had been a mutual decision. He didn’t know why he’d jumped to that conclusion, but Claire’s subconscious at least didn’t view the end of her marriage that way.

Although he was completely focused on Claire’s precarious situation, some tiny corner of his brain couldn’t believe any man could be such a moron that he would walk away from someone like Claire for a twentysomething bimbo.

Right now, it was a toss-up whether he was more furious with Jeff Bradford or the stupid little prick who caused the accident.

Her eyes flickered closed again and he cursed to himself. Where the hell were the paramedics?

“How do you like being a businesswoman?”

“Wh…what?”

“Your store. Do you like running it?”

“My store was robbed.”

He didn’t like how disoriented she sounded. “I know. The good news is, I think it’s safe to say we found the bad guys.”

He would have preferred a thousand unsolved crimes in his first month on the job to this outcome and he was kicking himself all over again for his handling of the pursuit when the flash of red lights finally heralded the arrival of paramedics on the scene.

Through the hazy filter of snow, Riley watched impatiently while the paramedics conferred on the bank of the reservoir before they finally returned to the ambulance for the gurney.

He spoke nonsense words to Claire while he waited for them. He couldn’t have told anyone what he said. Something about how his mom and his sister were both going to kill him for making Claire stay out here in the cold water this long and about the house he was renting down the street from hers and about the trip he wanted to take somewhere hot—maybe down to the bowels of the earth at the bottom of the Grand Canyon—when this was all over.

Finally, just when he could feel her slipping back into unconsciousness and he was pretty sure he could no longer feel his legs, a couple of paramedics in wet-suits waded through the frigid water toward them.

“It’s about damn time,” he growled. “You stopped for coffee first?”

“Sorry, Chief.” The first paramedic to reach him was some kid who looked barely old enough to drink, with blond streaked surfer hair and the raccoonlike goggle tan of a die-hard skier or snowboarder didn’t look thrilled to be reamed by the new police chief.

“Took us a while to make it around the other accident scene,” the older one, dark with a bushy dark mustache, explained. “What have we got here?”

Riley put away his irritation to focus on Claire. “Female, age thirty-six, possible head, arm and leg injuries. Definitely in shock. I’m concerned about hypothermia, obviously, and also the head injury. She’s been in and out of consciousness for the last ten minutes. Because I couldn’t get a proper assessment of her injuries, I didn’t want to move her without a stretcher, but if you guys had taken much longer, I would have figured something out on my own.”

“We’re here now.” The older paramedic looked inside and Riley saw his eyes widen.

“Hey, there, Claire.”

She opened her eyes slightly and then Riley realized why the guy looked familiar. It was a cousin of hers, Doug Van Duran, a couple years behind him in school.

“Hey, Dougie.”

“You’re in a real mess, Claire.”

“I know.” Her eyes were wide with confusion and panic as the paramedics’ powerful flashlights shone into the vehicle. “My kids?”

“They’re okay,” Riley told her again. “Remember, I told you we got them to shore. Just relax and let the guys here take care of you.”

He had to admit, despite their late arrival at the party, the paramedics seemed competent. He stood by and watched while they assessed her condition, stabilized her neck and back and then prepared to carefully remove her from the vehicle and transfer her to the gurney.

“We’ve got this under control, Chief, if you need to head down the mountain to the other scene,” Van Duran said after a moment.

“I’ll stay until Claire and the kids are in the bus before I check out the situation down there.”

In the gleam of the other kid’s flashlight, he didn’t miss the careful look Doug aimed at him. “You sure about that? I mean, Claire’s got some pretty bad injuries but they seem to be fairly straightforward and her kids are just banged up, from what I understand.”

“Yeah. So?”

“I’m just saying, that’s an ugly scene down there. One DOA and two serious injuries. While we were there, the sheriff was calling in Medivac.”

Fatality. Damn it. He closed his eyes. How many kids had been inside that pickup truck? Yeah, they were robbery suspects and had stupidly chosen to run instead of facing the consequences, but nobody deserved to die because of a chain of idiotic choices.

“We can certainly use another man getting her out of the water, but we can make do without you if you need to head down to the other scene.”

He should be on the scene of a fatal accident in his jurisdiction, especially one he’d been involved with, however inadvertent, but he couldn’t leave Claire. Not yet.

“No, let’s get her into the ambulance. I promised her and her kids I’d stay with her.”

Over the next few moments, he was forced to retract every negative thought he’d had about the paramedics as he watched their quick, efficient efforts to extract her safely from the vehicle. But it still seemed like a lifetime before she was finally loaded onto the gurney and they began to wade back through the icy water.

The trickiest part—besides making his painstaking way through the water with legs that no longer felt attached to his hips—was safely maneuvering the rack up the slick, snow-covered slope from the water’s edge to the roadway. When they finally crested the top, one of the passenger doors opened and a moment later, Macy Bradford rushed to them, her face white and scared in the snow-filtered light of the headlights and her eyes trained only on Claire.

“Mom!” she exclaimed.

Claire’s eyelashes fluttered in the icy snowflakes as she tried to remain alert. “Macy. My brave girl.”

“Are you okay?”

“I will be. You and Owen and Jordie?”

“I’m fine. We’re okay. Some people wanted to take us to the hospital, but I…we wanted to wait for you.”

Claire had been through hell and back and she was bloody and broken. But when she still managed to muster a smile for her daughter and reach for the girl’s hand, Riley felt like something sharp and hard had just lodged against his heart.

“We’ve got to get her inside so we can roll,” Claire’s cousin Doug said, not unkindly, and they pushed the gurney up into the back of the ambulance.

Without warning, the moment the doors were closed behind her mother, Macy suddenly burst into noisy sobs. Even though Riley was exhausted and soaking wet, frozen to the bone, he placed a comforting hand on her shoulder. “She’s going to be okay, you hear me? She’ll be okay.”

The girl drew in a deep, shuddering breath. “I was so scared.”

“I know, honey. You’ve been a champ about this. Now we need to get you and the boys to the hospital. I’m going to see if I can round up another ambulance for you.”

“We’ve got the boys safe and warm here. Do you want us to take them down the canyon to the hospital?”

He looked up at the voice and found the woman he had seen on shore standing beside her big Suburban, along with the boy who had waded out to help him. “I’m Barbara Redmond. I work at the hospital E.R.”

Riley considered his options. If the other accident was as serious as the paramedics had indicated, it might be a while before another ambulance crew could make it for the children. Transported in a private vehicle, the kids could already be in a treatment room at the E.R. at the small Hope’s Crossing Medical Center before the other crew could make it back up.

“Thank you. That will help.”

The people of Hope’s Crossing banded together in crisis situations, with everyone pitching in to help. He’d forgotten that in the years since he’d been gone. In some of the neighborhoods he worked in Oakland, accident victims faced a crapshoot, whether would-be rescuers would call for help or loot their pockets.

Riley made sure the children were safely buckled and settled and watched the SUV slowly pull back onto the road. Just as they made the first turn, he saw the brown and white of a Peak County sheriff’s vehicle pull to a stop.

He estimated a half hour had passed since the accident, maybe an hour since he’d left the elementary school. For the first time in his life, he understood what people meant when they talked about living a lifetime in a few moments. He felt as if he’d aged at least twenty years since he sat and listened to the Spring Fling pageant with his older sister beside him.

The cold sliced through his wet clothing and Riley fought shivers as he watched a figure climb from the sheriff’s department SUV. The sheriff himself, he realized. Evan Grover.

He tensed and instantly felt kickback from his already-aching muscles.

Evan Grover hated him and had since Riley was a punk-ass kid always in trouble and Grover was a wet-behind-the-ears deputy looking to make his mark. From what he understood, the sheriff had thrown his support behind J. D. Nyman and wanted him to be wearing the chief’s badge.

The man headed toward him, his brown parka open over his beer belly. All he needed was a cigar clamped between his teeth to complete the Boss Hogg imagery.

He shook his head. “Hell of a mess.”

Riley ground his teeth together to keep his teeth from chattering. No way would he show that particular sign of weakness to the sheriff, even if he had frostbite in every appendage. “You could say that.”

“The other scene.” The sheriff whistled through his teeth. “Nasty.”

He was a professional, Riley reminded himself. He’d been a cop a long time and had dealt with much worse than a two-bit sheriff who used to have it in for him. “I’ll have to take your word. Haven’t seen it yet. I’m heading down that way myself to assess the scene.”

“No rush. Go ahead and change into dry clothes. My guys and the Colorado State Patrol have things in hand.”

“Thanks,” Riley gritted out. “I appreciate it.” Neither department had jurisdiction because this road and the canyon were all part of the Hope’s Crossing city limits, but this wasn’t the time to be pissy over boundaries, not with a fatality.

The sheriff was acting entirely too conciliatory, which should have tipped Riley off that something was disastrously wrong. But he was still caught completely unaware by Grover’s next words.

“I’m real sorry about your niece and all.”

Everything inside Riley seemed to freeze. He didn’t think it was possible for a person to be even more cold without turning completely to ice, but somehow he managed it. “Sorry, what?”

Grover stared at him for a minute, then he cursed, looking uncomfortable. “You didn’t know yet.”

“I’ve been standing in the middle of the reservoir for the last twenty minutes. I don’t know a damn thing. What are you talking about?”

The sheriff looked apologetic, his wide, weathered face a little more red than it had been a moment ago. Despite their history together, there was no malice in his eyes now, only sympathy.

“Thought you knew. The fatality in the other wreck. They’re saying she’s your niece. Your sister’s kid. The one with the bookstore who was married to that rock star. Chris Parker. Sorry to break it to you so hard.”

Layla? Not Layla. He pictured her the last time he’d seen her at his mother’s house a week ago for dinner: her nose piercing and her battered combat boots and her choppy black hair. She was funny and smart and seemed to think he was among her cooler relatives because he’d lived out of the valley for so long.

He sagged a little, shaking violently now, and had to reach for the open door of his patrol car to support his weight.

He couldn’t think, couldn’t process anything but shock.

“Are you sure it’s her?” he asked, then couldn’t believe he sounded like every other victim’s family he’d ever had to notify. He was aware of it on some level, but he couldn’t help hanging on to whatever fragile, pathetic thread of hope he could find that maybe some terrible, cosmic mistake had occurred.

“Sorry, man. It’s her. No question. You didn’t hear the chatter on the radio?”

He remembered that moment he had turned it down out in the water. “No, not a word.”

“She’s been positively ID’d. A couple of the kids in the accident have only minor injuries and they confirmed the fatality was Layla Parker. The responding paramedics, uh, recognized her, too.”

Maura. Poor Maura. How would she ever survive? And his mother, losing a granddaughter. His family had already suffered a vast rift. Did they have to endure this unspeakable loss, too?

“You probably need medical attention,” the sheriff said after a moment, with surprising concern. Maybe he wasn’t a complete asshole after all. “The paramedics said you’ve been in the water basically since the Bradford car went in.”

Riley scrubbed at his face, unable to focus on anything but the crushing pain. “I’m all right. I just need to change my clothes.”

“You need something dry to put on? I can probably find something in the back of my unit. Wouldn’t come close to fitting, but I don’t suppose that matters at this point.”

“No, I should have something. Uh, thank you, Sheriff.”

The words clogged in his throat, given their track record, but Grover only nodded.

“You should be with your family right now,” he said. “Someone needs to tell your sister and your mom. Between my people and the state patrol, we should be able to take care of both scenes.”

He was right. Damn it, he was right. Dread lodged in his chest as he gazed after the sheriff, who returned to his vehicle for crime scene tape and the digital surveying equipment necessary to document the accident scene.

Riley had made a few notifications in his career. Not many, but a few back when he was a beat cop. Nothing like this, though. Never in his worst nightmare had he envisioned this scenario, having to tell his sister that her daughter was dead, his mother that she had lost a grandchild.

Numb to the bone, he climbed into the patrol car and turned over the engine. Air blasted him from the heater, prickling over his wet skin, but it did nothing to warm the icy ball in his gut.

He thought of Claire and her children, frightened and cold and hurt, and then of the incalculable, inconceivable pain he was about to inflict on people he loved. Claire had been hurt—Layla was dead, for God’s sake—because of him, because for a few heedless moments, he had been focused on taking down a suspect at the exclusion of all else.

The few whispers he’d heard around town since he’d been back seemed to ring in his head. Those who didn’t want him in Hope’s Crossing were right.

He didn’t belong here. He never should have come home.

A TERRIFYING SEA CREATURE clutched at her legs, yanking hard, tugging her down, down toward the inky, icy depths of Silver Strike Reservoir.

Her children. She had to get to her children. She fought the creature with all her might, pitting all the strength of a mama bear protecting her cubs. The creature howled, clamping down hard on an arm and a leg and tangling seaweed in her nose, around her face. He could have her, but damn it, she would not let him have her children. Claire fought harder, struggling against the constriction around her arm, gasping for air, fighting for her children’s lives….

A sudden clatter and a muttered imprecation pierced the nightmare and Claire blinked awake, her heart still pounding in her chest.

She was disoriented for a moment and couldn’t figure out why she hurt everywhere. Her mouth felt as if she’d been chewing newsprint and she had the vague sense of something being terribly wrong. For a long moment, she couldn’t quite remember what.

“Oh, good. You’re awake.”

Her mother’s face suddenly loomed large in her field of vision and Claire instinctively drew in a sharp breath.

For a moment, she couldn’t figure out what was so different and then it hit her. For the first time in Claire’s recent memory, her mother wasn’t wearing makeup—not even the lipstick she seemed to put on just for a trip to the bathroom. Ruth looked haggard, her eyes red-rimmed and shadowed.

“The kids. Where…are they?” Her throat felt scraped raw and that tangle of seaweed tickled her nostrils again. A nasal canula, she realized dimly. She was in a hospital bed, hooked up to monitors and machines, on oxygen.

“They’re fine,” her mother said calmly. “Owen has a broken arm and Macy needed a couple stitches in her forehead and has general aches and pains, but other than that, they’re just fine. Don’t you worry about them right now. They’ve been staying with Jeff and Holly since the accident.”

The single word triggered a sharp burst of memory, that snowy night after the Spring Fling, headlights flashing straight toward them in the darkness, her panicked jerk of the wheel to avoid a head-on…

And then, that terrible moment of sliding out of control, seeing the gap in the guardrail, knowing they were going over.

“Owen has a cast on his arm but that’s all. Macy cut her forehead just a little, but Jeff doesn’t even think she’ll have a scar.”

“Jordie?”

“Wrenched a shoulder, that’s all. Nothing broken.”

Claire sagged against the pillow. How much time had passed since the accident? A few hours? She glanced down and saw her left leg was in traction, a cast running from her toes to just below her knee. Her left arm sported a cast as well, a vivid purple against the white of the hospital sheets.

“You definitely had the worst of it,” Ruth said. “Sheriff Grover figures your car landed on the front driver’s side when it hit the water and your body absorbed most of the impact. That’s how you came to be so banged up while the kids are okay, for the most part.”

Claire closed her eyes, a little prayer of gratitude running through her head. All she remembered thinking in that split second that had seemed to drag on forever was that she’d killed her children.

“They’ve been begging to come see you,” Ruth said, fussing with the wrinkled edge of the blanket. “But I think Jeff has convinced them to wait until tomorrow, at least until you’re not so disoriented from your surgeries.”

“Surgeries?”

“Technically only one, I guess, but they did two things at once. They had to put pins in your arm and your ankle. You really did a number on yourself.”

Usually Ruth would have made that sort of statement in an accusing sort of voice, as if Claire had given herself a bad perm or pierced her eyebrow, but her mother’s quiet tone tipped Claire that something was off.

In addition to the hollow look in her mother’s eyes, she was acting far more nurturing than normal. She hadn’t yet made one complaint about how her knees were bothering her or how inconsiderate the nurses had been or about the bad food they served in the cafeteria. What wasn’t Ruth telling her?

Had she broken her back or something? She tried to wiggle her toes and was almost relieved when that tiny movement—plainly visible at the edge of the cast—sent pain scorching up her leg.

“Ow.”

“There, honey. Don’t try to move. Let me call the nurse. You need pain medication. Trust me on this.”

Before Claire could argue, Ruth had pressed a button on the remote cabled to the bed. Almost instantly, the door opened and a young, fresh-faced nurse with a streaky blond A-line haircut and flowered hospital scrubs pushed open the door.

I used to babysit Brooke Callahan, Claire thought with some dismay. Could the girl really be old enough to legally operate that stethoscope?

“Hi, there.” Brooke smiled sweetly and Claire felt about a hundred and sixty years old. “Look at you, sitting up and everything. That’s so awesome! I can’t believe how much better you look tonight than you did this morning when you came out of surgery.”

Right now she felt like she’d just combat-crawled through heavy artillery fire. How bad must she have looked this morning?

“You’re a popular person. The phone out at the nurse’s station has been ringing off the hook all day with people who want to know if you can have visitors.”

She didn’t want visitors. She didn’t want nurses or doctors or even her mother. She just wanted to lie here, close her eyes and go back to that moment when she’d been standing in line at Maura’s place for coffee, when her biggest worry had been whether to use the fire-polished or the cone crystals on Gen Beaumont’s wedding dress.

“She’s nowhere near ready for visitors,” Ruth said firmly, and Claire knew a tiny moment of ridiculous, obstinate contrariness when she wanted to tell little Brooke Callahan to let in whomever she pleased, especially Macy and Owen.

“Could I have a drink of water?”

Brooke was fiddling with the IV pump. She pressed a few buttons, then gave that cheery, toothy smile again. “Why, sure you can.”

She scooped up a big clear plastic mug from the rolling hospital tray and held the straw to Claire’s mouth.

“I could have gotten you that,” Ruth said. “You should have asked.”