Broken Bonds

by Karen Harper

  2

  As she made the next sharp turn, Char gasped. A white truck with Lake Azure, Inc. painted on its side was tipped nearly off the cliff, right where the school bus stopped for the kids who lived above. She’d heard a horn honk long and loud a few minutes earlier. Maybe the truck missed the last turn and spun out, since its rear, not its front, was dangling over the edge, propped up by two trees. No other vehicle was nearby to help.

  She put her emergency blinkers on and pulled as close to the cliff face as she could. She jumped down from her truck and ran across the road toward the truck. A man was inside!

  “What should I do?” she shouted, her voice shrill. It sounded like a stupid question. She had to get the man out of his truck before it crashed over the edge.

  The bitter, strong wind ripped at her hair and jacket. What if a blast of air tipped him off? Or maybe even if he moved. She’d swear the two tree trunks that held his truck were shaking as hard as she was.

  She could hear the engine was still running. The driver opened an automatic window.

  “A guy in a truck shoved me off,” he shouted. “Meant to. I don’t have any traction. I’m afraid if I shift my weight or open a door to jump out, I’ll send it over.”

  The fact someone had done this on purpose stunned her. What was going on? If her cell phone worked up here, she’d call her brother-in-law, the county sheriff, for help, but she was on her own. It wouldn’t help to go back up for help from Elinor and Penny.

  “Don’t move until I get something you can hang on to if the truck goes. I have some jump ropes I can tie together. Those trees are shaky.”

  “I’m shaky. Hurry!”

  She ran to her truck and knotted together the three jump ropes she had, tying square knots because she knew they would hold. But she’d never be able to balance the man’s weight if the truck went over the edge.

  “I’ve got ropes here, but I’ll have to tie the end to a tree. I don’t dare drive close enough to you to tie it to my truck. It would never stretch that far.”

  She knotted it around the trunk of a pine tree that looked sturdy enough, though that almost took the length of one rope. This wasn’t going to work.

  A grinding sound, then a crunch reverberated as the truck seemed to jerk once then settled closer to the cliff edge.

  “Now or never!” he shouted and opened his door fast.

  Desperate, Char wrapped one end of the rope around her wrist and reached toward the man as he lunged at her. A scraping sound bruised the air. The man was tall. She clutched the collar of his leather jacket, scratching his neck. He grabbed her. She held him tight as the earth seemed to break, and the truck disappeared followed by a crunching, crashing sound below.

  They were sprawled on the ground, near the edge, clinging to each other. He was big and strong but shaking. He sat up and unwound the tight rope from Char’s wrist to free her hand which was going white.

  “Sorry—I couldn’t help,” she told him as they gaped at the patch of sky where the truck had been.

  “You did,” he said, wiping the back of his hand across his mouth and blinking back tears. “You did. You saved my life, thank God, because someone wants me dead.”

  * * *

  Char drove Matthew Rowan down the mountain road toward town. He explained he was not a worker, but part owner and manager of the Lake Azure properties. His hair was cut short, as if he were a military man. It was raven-black, though it was dusted with roadside dust. And he was really good-looking, despite cuts and scrapes and dirt on that solid-jawed face. His jeans, shirt and leather jacket were scraped, a mess, but she, too, looked as if she’d been rolling in the dirt.

  “So, you’re a Lockwood,” he said when she introduced herself. “The third sister, the one who lived out West.”

  “Everyone knows the Lockwoods because they keep getting their names in the news,” she admitted as she carefully, slowly navigated another turn. “Tess years ago when she was kidnapped, and Kate lately with all the chaos at the Adena burial mound.”

  “At least you know where to find the sheriff’s office, since you’re related to him,” he said, flexing his arms and legs as if checking to see if he could move everything. “A good guy, Gabe McCord. I...I still can’t believe someone would do that to me.”

  “So you don’t know why or who pushed your truck? Was he after you specifically, do you think, or just anybody he came across? Like, do you have any enemies?” She realized how upset she was for him. Her sense of right and wrong—and the temper she had to keep under wraps—flared again just as it had when she’d had problems dealing with some of the people out West. She’d also felt angry when she’d returned to Cold Creek and learned about the horrible religious nut con man, who had her cousins in that cult out by the old insane asylum. But Bright Star Monson got her blood boiling in a far different way from this.

  “With all those questions, are you sure you’re not working for the sheriff?” he asked. She was surprised he could kid her right now, and it calmed her. He turned to face her again, watching her closely, making her blush under his intense scrutiny. “I’d better save all that for him. Listen, I’m not thinking straight. Now that we’re down low enough, I’ve got to call my office, tell them what happened, that I’m okay. My cell phone went down in the truck, so could I borrow yours?”

  “Sure—of course,” she said, pulling over on a straight stretch of road and putting the truck in Park. “It’s in my purse, behind my seat. It doesn’t work farther up in the mountains, but I think we’re low enough now.”

  He reached down and lifted the bag onto her lap. “Heavy.”

  “That purse is more or less my office. I keep everything in there—my files on home visits, presents for children. Here,” she said, handing him the phone, then hefting her bag onto the backseat.

  She drove again as he called his office and talked to someone called Jen, explaining what had happened. The woman was upset, and her voice was so loud that Char could hear most of what she said. “Yes, I’m all right,” he said. “I’m heading for the sheriff’s office to report it.”

  “But he meant to do it?” the woman shrilled. “To kill you? But who, Matt? I can’t believe it. Thank heavens you got out.”

  “Let’s just say a Good Samaritan came along and saved me. I’ll explain later.”

  At that, he turned to look at Char. Tears in his eyes, he pressed his lips tight together and nodded at her. The moment was somehow intimate, as if he had embraced her. Char cleared her throat and turned back to the road.

  “Yeah,” Matt told Jen, to answer another question. “You’d better call Royce, let him know, though he’s due in tomorrow. And check the insurance papers on the truck. No, I’ll call you later or be back when I can. Calm down. I’m okay. Right. Bye.

  “Thanks,” he told Char, ending the call and putting the phone in the storage space between the two seats. “For the phone and for everything. I appreciate your being much calmer than she is.”

  She was tempted to ask if Jen was his assistant or—or what. He didn’t have a ring on his left hand, but you never knew. And “Good Samaritan” or not, it was none of her business. Then, past the next curve downward, something caught her eye.

  “Oh! Look, down there! I think that’s your truck in that rocky ravine.”

  They had looked over the edge from the crash site, but the jutting rocks and trees below had hidden the wreck. He unfastened his seat belt and leaned toward her to look. “You’re right,” he said, so close his breath fanned the loose strands of hair by her right earlobe. “Can you pull over, so I can look down? I hope that didn’t start a fire. Just got it filled up with gas.”

  She stopped the truck, and they both got out to peer over the rim of rock. He reached for her wrist, then her hand, whether to keep her safe or himself sane, she wasn’t sure. When they saw the battered truck be
low, she gasped, and he swore under his breath. A fire had blackened the foliage around it like an ink spill. A crooked finger of dark smoke pointed upward from the wreck.

  “Thank God it didn’t hit a house, or start a rock slide,” he said, his voice rough. “Maybe the guy who pushed it off was just looking for trouble with anyone, but what if someone wants me gone—down there in that?”

  He shuddered and gripped her wrist harder, until she pulled him gently away from the precipice. “No, it’s not the vehicle I always drive,” he said, as if trying to reassure himself. “My senior partner and his driver sometimes use it, but they’re out of town.”

  “Then maybe he was the target. I mean, isn’t he the one helping to finance all the fracking around Cold Creek? Not everyone’s in favor of that.”

  “Don’t I know.”

  Char tried to remember things he said so that she could tell Gabe if Matt didn’t recall everything later. He did have a scrape on the side of his head, though he seemed clear-minded. “Sorry I didn’t get there sooner,” she murmured, almost to herself, as they climbed back in her truck.

  “Glad you didn’t, or you could have been hurt. What a way to meet.”

  There was another strange, silent moment between them as she put the truck in gear and they started down again. “There is a Navajo saying, ‘If you save someone’s life, you feel responsible for them.’ But I didn’t really save yours. You got out on your own and—”

  “But I had you to give me courage and to hold on to.”

  To have and to hold from this day forward. The words to the wedding vows danced through Char’s head, since she’d been helping her sister Kate memorize them for her December wedding.

  They both jolted when a black truck drove toward them just where the one-lane road became two near the foot of the mountain. It was fracking rig workers heading up, two in the cab and four in the truck bed. They tossed beer cans out into the bushes as they roared past. Some folks around here were afraid these people would hurt the natural environment, corrupt the rural way of life. But even before the fracking hit here, Char knew some locals resented the so-called rich folk who built luxury getaway homes or weekend places at Lake Azure. As the face man for that ritzy area, Matt Rowan could have a lot of enemies, and black pickup trucks were thick as thieves around here.

  “The guys in the back of that truck are wearing black stocking caps,” Matt said, craning around to look back at them. “I’m pretty sure my attacker wore a ski mask, but it could have been almost anyone who nearly sent me over the edge. And I’m going to find out who and why if it’s the last thing I do.”

  Char wished he hadn’t put it that way. Back on curves and hilly roads instead of hairpin turns on peaks, she drove them toward town.

  * * *

  “Again, I can’t thank you enough,” Matt told her as he got out of her truck and hurried around to open her door in the small parking lot next to the sheriff’s office on Main Street in Cold Creek.

  He was feeling worse—a sudden limp caused by a leg cramp, sore muscles all over, maybe from holding himself so tense as well as his leap for life. He was also mad as hell, but he was trying to control his fury around this woman, not take things out on her.

  He figured that Charlene Lockwood was probably midtwenties to his midthirties. She was so petite next to his six-foot height. Slender, almost delicate looking, and yet she seemed as sturdy as they come, despite hands gripping the steering wheel all the way down the mountain. She emanated determination, but seemed strangely vulnerable, which, as bad as he felt, hit him like a sledgehammer. She was a looker in a saucy way with her pert nose, blue eyes and full mouth framed by sun-streaked windblown brown hair. She had a heart-shaped face and, obviously, a big heart. And no ring on her left hand, though he had more important things to worry about right now.

  Sheriff McCabe came barreling out the front door of the police station as they started toward it. “Hey, Char,” he called. “Thought you were visiting mountain kids truant from school. Listen, Tess and I don’t want you to move out, really. Oh, Matt. Things okay out at Lake Azure? You look— Are you okay, Matt? Are you and Char here together?”

  “Gabe, someone shoved his truck off a cliff on Pinecrest Mountain where I was visiting a family. I found him just before it went over.”

  Matt looked at Char. He suddenly felt dizzy. Yeah, that had happened to him. He was not someone else watching it from afar. “I’d better sit down,” he said, taking Char’s arm because that seemed natural now. “Sheriff, maybe she can come in with me—to tell at least the part she saw. I like to think I would rescue a fair maiden in distress, but it was the other way around.”

  Matt realized he was staring only at Char, too long, too close. She stared back at him. The sheriff cleared his throat.

  “Let’s go inside. You just caught me in time, but what I had to do can wait. How about I talk to you first, Matt, and then interview Char for her perspective on all this after? Do you need a doctor?”

  “Not right now. I need answers.”

  “Let’s work on that,” the sheriff said as he put his hand on Matt’s shoulder and opened the door he’d just exited. “Are you claiming it wasn’t an accident, but intentional? Did you get a license plate, a description of the driver?”

  Matt shook his head, then looked back to make sure Char had come in, too. She was talking to the receptionist, sinking into a chair.

  “It had to be a planned attack,” he told the sheriff. “I’m not certain if I was the target or my senior partner, since I was in the company truck he and his driver sometimes use when he’s in town and visits his fracking sites. I’ve never been so shocked or scared in all my life—which I almost lost.”

  He took a last glance at Char down the hall, just as she looked up at him and their eyes met again. A terrible day, he thought, but something good had come from it, too.

  3

  Matt turned down Sheriff McCabe’s offer of a doctor but did take him up on using the restroom down the hall. He leaned stiff-armed on the basin and stared at himself in the mirror. A mess. But blessed. Blessed to be alive. And, despite the terrible situation, to have met the only woman he’d felt an instant attraction to for a long time. And to have looked like this. Oh, hell, worse than that. Some local lunatic might be out to kill him and he didn’t have a clue who.

  He washed up with water and the metal dispenser’s liquid soap and dried his face and hands with paper towels. If that idiot in the black pickup with the half-hidden face had been after him, why? He must have been followed. Maybe he was being watched.

  Matt walked into the sheriff’s office and sat down in a chair across the cluttered desk from Sheriff McCord. “You still okay?” the sheriff asked. “Here, I got you some coffee and, sorry if that doughnut’s stale, but thought you might need to eat something.”

  “What about Charlene? Is she okay?”

  “As you may know, I’m married to her younger sister, and let me tell you, the Lockwood girls are tough cookies. Char said she was glad she was there for you.”

  “She’s been great, though I can tell she doesn’t like driving up there. She lived out West, but not in the mountains, I guess.”

  “She was a social worker near the Navajo Reservation for several years, an advocate for juveniles and families in the outlying areas. She left recently, still misses it, I think, though she’s glad to be back with her sisters and helping kids here. At first, she worked for my wife, Tess, at her day care center. She also helped her other sister, Kate, with her archaeological dig at Mason Mound, sifting soil for ancient Adena bone fragments.”

  “So, she lives with you and Tess but is moving out?”

  Gabe nodded and took a swig of his coffee. “Charlene Lockwood’s stubborn as they come. We tried to talk her out of it but she’s got a cabin rented, not so far from your area.”

  Matt sat u
p straighter. That sounded good. He didn’t want to seem too pushy. He owed her dinner at the very least. Probably he owed her his life. If she hadn’t arrived and tried to help him, he might not have tried to get out when he did.

  “So,” Gabe said, pulling out a piece of paper and taking a pen off his desk, “tell me from the beginning what happened today up on Pinecrest, any and every detail. Then, as soon as my deputy runs you home, he and I will find the site of the wreck and take a good look at it. I’ll interview Char later.”

  “Char spotted the wreck. I ought to hire her as a bodyguard— Just kidding,” he added when Gabe’s eyebrows shot up. “You evidently think she’s the one who needs that at her new cabin.”

  Gabe leveled a long look at him. “With all the outsiders in town, right. She’s very idealistic, out to help anyone, especially poor kids.”

  Maybe he had overstepped, Matt thought. He was a far cry from poor kids, and he hadn’t felt idealistic in years. Nose to grindstone, eye on the stock market and building up a big investment in the people and places of Lake Azure. He supposed, especially compared to the locals around here, he was a driven workaholic.

  “Okay. Let me tell you what happened from the beginning,” he said, and figured he’d start with the fact he was taking things he’d bought for Woody McKitrick’s family, things that were now so much ash at the bottom of a ravine where he could have ended up the same way.

  * * *

  Char was disappointed when Gabe called his receptionist in the main office to say that she should go home and he’d get her story tonight. She wanted to see how Matt was doing now, maybe drive him to Lake Azure. But Gabe was going to take Matt and Jace Miller, his deputy, to see the burned wreck of the Lake Azure truck, then he’d see that Matt got home. Matt had insisted on going to the collision and crash site, too.