She stopped where she was, to give him a moment of privacy. That little bit of exertion had completely exhausted her and she closed her eyes. The realization of how sick she was swept through her—not deathly sick, but enough so that she felt frail, and that was unsettling. Between the fever, the cold, the altitude, and the lack of food and water, she wasn’t capable of doing a lot today. It was a damn good thing she didn’t need to do a lot. They could eat another candy bar, melt some more snow to drink, and rest in the shelter while they waited for a rescue team to locate them.
Justice was better than he’d been yesterday. He’d managed to take a few steps under his own steam, but he still looked terrible, with that huge bandage covering the top half of his head, two black eyes that were almost swollen shut, and all the other scrapes and bruises he’d sustained. His physical capability didn’t run to much more than lying in the shelter either.
She was a little indignant at the injustice of her having the fever when he was the one with the nasty cut on his head, a concussion, and the recipient of some inexperienced field doctoring, while all she had was a small puncture wound. Where was the logic in that? In retrospect, though, she should have poured some of that mouthwash on her arm, too.
“You can open your eyes now,” Justice said, and slowly she did so.
He was leaning against the tree for support, his posture telling her that even that much effort had wrung him out. White vapor formed in front of his face with every breath he puffed out, and he was visibly shivering. His only shoes were the black lace-ups, and they did nothing to keep out snow. His pants were his suit trousers. He didn’t even have a T-shirt to layer under his white dress shirt. He had wrapped a couple of her shirts around his shoulders and neck for extra warmth, but there wasn’t much more that he could do to protect himself from the elements. Seeing him merely reminded her that she was the one who’d have to take care of their needs.
Slowly, cautiously, she made her way on rubbery legs down the slope to him and pulled his arm around her shoulder while she put her arm around his waist and grasped his belt to hold him in case he began toppling over. “Let’s get you back in the shelter. How’s the head?”
“It hurts. How’s yours?”
“About the same. Are you seeing double, feeling nauseated?”
“No, nothing like that.” Using her for support on one side, and bracing his other hand against trees as he came to them, he labored to take each step. Sometimes he wavered and she had to grab him, hold him until he could get his legs steady again, but overall the process wasn’t nearly as exhausting or time-consuming as it had been the day before.
He stopped once, lifted his head to survey the mountains around them. She could tell he was listening for something, but she heard nothing other than what she’d heard from the beginning: the wind whistling through the silent mountains. “Do you hear anything?”
“Nothing.”
She caught the grim note in his voice. “We should hear helicopters or something by now, shouldn’t we?”
“I hoped we would, but not necessarily. The weather could have delayed them. We know it snowed up here, so there was some sort of weather system moving through. A more realistic guess would be around noon, at the earliest.” He shivered, his entire body tensing against the cold, then he said prosaically, “There’s no sense in standing out here freezing our asses off when there’s nothing we can do.”
Bailey agreed wholeheartedly with that and helped him the few remaining feet to the shelter. As he half crawled, half dragged himself inside, she said, “Give me the bottle and I’ll fill it with snow again. Are you ready for breakfast?”
“What are we having?” Swollen and blackened as they were, his gray eyes still glinted with humor as he held the mouthwash bottle out to her.
“The same thing we had for dinner: a candy bar. I actually have three more, so we can each have a whole one if you want.”
He paused, the humor fading from his expression. “We’d better ration them,” he finally said. “Just in case.”
Just in case they weren’t rescued today, he meant. The idea was almost overwhelming. Another night on the mountain, in the dark and the cold? The darkness hadn’t been absolute, but they’d used her little book light sparingly. Not knowing how long it would take a rescue team to reach them was unnerving. What if no one came tomorrow either?
Silently she took the bottle and moved to a clean patch of snow. She wore a pair of socks on her hands now, which made scraping snow into the bottle with the poker card a little clumsy, but no way did she want to let herself get as cold as she had the day before.
The task was a small one, a minuscule one compared to the herculean labors she’d faced the day before, but it was almost more than she could handle. Wearily she crawled back into the shelter, welcoming the protection from the wind. The air inside the shelter definitely felt warmer than that outside, whether just from the absence of the wind or from their body heat it really was making a difference. She didn’t care what made it feel warmer, just that it did.
Light crept through tiny crevices; the interior was dim, but not dark. There was no need to turn on the book light in order to find where she’d put the candy bars. She was starving, but when she began chewing the first bite off her half of the bar, her appetite suddenly fled and the candy began growing in her mouth. She fought back the nausea and managed to swallow it, but folded the paper around the remainder of the candy and put it back in the plastic zip bag.
“Aren’t you hungry?” he asked, frowning at her.
“I was, until I started eating. I’ll take another bite in a little while.” Her mouth felt grungy, so she rooted around until she found the pack of disposable foam toothbrushes. She took two from the pack, stuck one in her mouth, and extended one to him. “Here.”
“What is this?” he asked, frowning at the pink circle of cut foam as if it were alive.
“A disposable toothbrush. It doesn’t need water. This shelter’s too small for morning breath on top of yesterday’s and last night’s breath, so take it and brush.”
His mouth quirked in a smile as he took the small stick and began swabbing the foam around in his mouth. Bailey was pleasantly surprised by the minty taste, and by how much cleaner her mouth felt when she finished. Now if she could just have a nice, hot shower…
Dream on, she told herself as she relaxed her aching body on the cushions and dragged a pile of clothing over herself. The clothes would cover them better if the garments were straightened out and layered, but she was too tired and felt too sick to deal with it just now. Justice stretched out behind her, then he pulled her close and rearranged the pieces of clothing so nothing was between them except what they wore.
How odd it was, she thought, that in just one night they’d already established a sort of routine. They already knew, and automatically sought, the positions where they fit best together and were most comfortable. He was a good six inches taller than she, maybe more, so with her back to him they spooned together almost perfectly. His arm draped over her waist, and his hand slipped up under her shirt for warmth, so his hand was resting on her stomach. It was odd, she thought, how fast the situation had forged a sense of familiarity, even intimacy, with him, but she supposed that was a survival mechanism. Together they had a better chance of making it off this mountain alive than they would have alone.
“We could play cards, I guess,” she said, thinking of the hours ahead of them.
“Or we could just lie here,” he countered.
“Sounds good.” Just lying there was honestly all she felt like doing. After another moment of silence, she felt herself drifting to sleep.
CAM DIDN’T THINK Bailey’s fever was any higher than it had been before, but she was obviously sick. When she woke, he would check her arm to see if red streaks had begun radiating out from the wound. He hoped the antibiotic salve and her fever were doing the job, though, because if sepsis had begun then their situation had gone from serious to critical. In the
meantime, sleep was the best thing for her—for both of them. They would burn fewer calories, and need less food and water.
He had really thought the ELT would have led a helicopter to them by now, but the weather was a complicating factor. A helicopter couldn’t land in this terrain, of course, but it could pinpoint their location for the rescue team, as well as drop much-needed provisions. Thanks to Bailey’s ton of clothing they weren’t doing too badly keeping warm, but a camp stove would have been nice, as well as some bottles of water and energy bars.
Thinking of energy bars reminded him of the trail mix bars he’d put in his coat pocket yesterday morning. He didn’t know where the coat was now, but he’d definitely like to have it, and the trail mix bars could be a godsend. The problem was, neither of them was capable of searching for his coat, and even if they found it the bars might have fallen out. Of course, if they were rescued today, then he didn’t care about either the coat or the trail mix bars.
He figured he was basically okay, physically. He was weak from blood loss, the concussion made his head hurt like a son of a bitch, but he evidently didn’t have any injuries to either his brain or anything internal. If he had, he expected he wouldn’t have lived through the night. He didn’t have any fever—or if he did, it was so slight he couldn’t tell. A day or so of rest, some food and water, and he’d be good to go.
He was worried about Bailey, though. Altitude sickness wasn’t something to be taken lightly, and neither was an infected wound. The hell of it was, she was having problems with both because she’d concentrated on taking care of him instead of herself.
So, because there was nothing else he could do, he held her as she slept. He listened to her breathe, and he stayed alert for any rise in her fever. He also listened for the beat of helicopter blades, and he prayed they came soon.
17
BRET HAD STAYED IN THE OFFICE ALL NIGHT, OCCASIONALLY putting his head down on his desk for a brief nap. Karen had gone home to change clothes and pick up some food; she came back wearing jeans and a T-shirt and carrying Chinese takeout. When she came back she was also accompanied by her leather-wearing, tattooed, pierced, and bearded boyfriend, whose name, it turned out, was Larry.
Larry was evidently there to take care of Karen, because he brought her coffee when she wanted it, massaged her neck and shoulders, held her when she cried. Karen, who was usually the toughest of the tough, was shattered by the possibility of Cam’s death.
The small airport usually shut down at midnight, but the news that Cam’s plane had disappeared kept some people around. It simply seemed impossible to go home as if things were normal, to do anything routine, until they found out for certain what had happened. The head mechanic, Dennis, paced around with a drawn look, wondering if there had been something he’d overlooked during routine maintenance.
The situation was thoroughly discussed over the Chinese takeout. Everyone seemed to think something must have gone mechanically wrong; there had been a weather system that would have produced some rough air, but nothing drastic enough to cause the plane to go down. Cam didn’t make mistakes in the air; he didn’t misread his altimeter or forget how high a mountain was. He didn’t hotdog. He was thorough and calm. So either something had happened that had caused him to lose consciousness, or something had gone mechanically wrong with the plane.
A small plane crash warranted a search-and-rescue operation, but not a wholesale investigation by the NTSB the way the crash of an airliner would. The search wouldn’t even be based out of Seattle, so Bret had no idea what everyone was doing hanging around the terminal, unless, like him, their nerves wouldn’t let them sleep, so they figured they might as well be here.
He knew the routine. The first step was to find the plane. Until the wreckage was located, no one knew what they were facing. No search teams were sent out blind, because the area to be covered was too vast. But waiting was agonizing—waiting to hear, waiting to know for certain.
Around nine that morning, when they were all running on fumes they were so exhausted, Karen fielded a telephone call. Whoever the caller was, her features sort of crumpled before she swallowed and regained control of herself. “It’s for you,” she said to Bret, her voice subdued. “It’s Mrs. Wingate’s brother.”
Bret winced, and went into his office to take the call. “This is Bret Larsen.”
“I’m Logan Tillman, Bailey Wingate’s brother. What the hell is going on?” roared the voice in his ear. “We can’t find out anything here, and when I called Bailey’s house to see if anyone there had any news, her stepdaughter answered and all but laughed at me, said my sister got what was coming to her. What did she mean by that? Do you suspect the plane was tampered with, that this was deliberate?”
The questions came too fast and furious for Bret to answer. He said, “Whoa. Whoa! No one has even mentioned the possibility that the plane could have been tampered with. I don’t know what Tamzin meant, but it wasn’t that.” Out of the corner of his eye Bret saw Karen standing by his office door, not even trying to hide the fact that she was listening. Neither was Dennis, or the two other people currently in the office checking to see if there had been any news.
“She all but came out and said it.” Logan Tillman was furious; his voice blasted over the phone line. “Something about only fools crossed her brother.”
Bret pinched the bridge of his nose. “Tamzin isn’t the, ah, tightest lug nut on the wheel. She says whatever pops into her head, whether it’s based on reality or not. At this point we don’t suspect foul play, or sabotage, or anything else. Ah, where are you now?”
“Denver, where we were supposed to meet Bailey.”
“Have you checked into a hotel?”
“No, we’ve been here at the airport all night, hoping—” Logan’s voice broke on the word.
“Yeah, we’ve been here all night, too. Listen, check into a hotel, get some rest. Wearing yourself out won’t accomplish anything. Yeah, I know, I should take my own advice. Give me your cell number, and I’ll call you myself the minute we hear anything. I’ll give you mine, too. Call me at any time.” He rattled off his cell number, then jotted down Logan’s. “Look, don’t give up hope. Cam, that’s my partner, has come through some tight situations before. He’s the best.”
When he hung up, Bret propped his head in his hands. God, he was exhausted. If only there was something he could do, anything, that would keep him occupied. Waiting was a bitch, yet that was all he could do, all any of them could do.
“It’s a possibility,” Karen said from the door.
Bret raised his head. “What is?”
“That the plane was tampered with. You know Seth Wingate called day before yesterday asking about Mrs. Wingate’s flight, when she was leaving. He’s never done that before.” Her jaw was set, and her eyes radiated fire.
“Be careful what you say,” Bret warned. “There isn’t a shred of proof that anything was done to the plane. If it really had been tampered with, do you think Tamzin would be telling people about it?”
“Like you said, boss, she isn’t the tightest lug nut, now is she? She could have been under the influence of any number of substances, legal or illegal, when she said it. That doesn’t mean it isn’t the truth.”
Boss. The word hung in the air like a flaming sword. That was a title she’d reserved for Cam, the better to skewer Bret in their long-running joust. Bret’s hands clenched, and he turned to stare blindly out the window.
THEY HAD DOZED off and on all day, emerging from the shelter only when necessary, to get more snow to melt or to take care of their physical needs. Every time Bailey woke it seemed as if Justice was making her drink water, though she insisted he drink his share, too. At some point he also insisted that they swap places in the shelter, that she take the side against the wall, while he was in front of the lopsided opening. She didn’t see what difference it made, but she crawled in first and let him take the other side.
She realized the difference it made when he was the
one to crawl out to get more snow.
“I should be doing that,” she protested when he returned. “Swap sides with me again.”
“No,” he said calmly. “I’m okay, just weak. You should stay quiet, let your body adjust to the altitude.”
She started to ask why, when they were going to be rescued, but hesitated because they still hadn’t heard those helicopter blades they’d been listening for. The hours were getting short again, and she was beginning to accept that they faced another night on the mountain. The realization made her want to cry, but that was pointless, and she couldn’t afford the moisture loss.
“You’re concussed,” she pointed out to Justice. “You should stay as quiet as possible, too.”
“I’m not jogging around, believe me. And I don’t have a fever.”
Bailey groused about that a little, because being the one with the fever still seemed like a gross injustice to her, but she was still really tired and in a short time she was asleep again.
Late in the afternoon Cam said, “I need to check your arm while it’s still daylight.”
She gave him a narrow-eyed glare, because if daylight were involved, that meant being out of the shelter. “You want me to pull my shirts off out there?”
“Yep. The bandage needs changing. You can take a bunch of this stuff with you, keep it wrapped around you so everything except your arm is covered.”
He crawled out, taking the first-aid kit with him. Bailey struggled halfway out of her three shirts while she was still inside the shelter, pulling her right arm from the sleeves. She tried to look over her shoulder at her triceps to see if there were any red streaks, but in the dimness it was impossible to tell. Draping a bunch of other clothes around her so she didn’t flash her breasts at him, she crawled out, too.