25 Years

by Tara Taylor Quinn

  “No!” She had been. A little. Before she’d thawed and figured it out. “He couldn’t even keep his word to stay away for two days! His need to know about that test is so great, he’s driving himself crazy with it.”

  “He sure wasn’t himself the other day.”

  “I know!” Jolene wished she was sipping something a little stronger than hot chocolate. “This is precisely what I mean! He gets like this every time!” She could feel tears gathering behind her lids, and wished they wouldn’t. Tears made her feel so weak. “I just can’t live with that tension anymore.”

  “I know, hon,” Tina said, reaching over to cover one of Jolene’s hands with her own. Her thumb reassuringly stroked the back of Jolene’s hand. “I understand. I’ve only caught a glimpse of it and I don’t see how anyone could handle that for long. At least he left before we got back.”

  He hadn’t found them. Or an empty test box in the trash. Had he found the unopened one in her bag? Would he really go that far?

  “What am I going to do?” The cry was soft, but burned her inside.

  Tina shrugged, held her gaze. “You’re going to take that test in the morning, give Steve his answer, and move on with your life.”

  “Alone.” It sounded so final. So real. “Once I see that the test is negative.”

  “If that’s what you have to do to be healthy.”

  Healthy. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d associated that word with herself. She took a deep breath.

  “How would you feel about the two of us living together?” She’d been toying with the idea on and off for more than a year. Still, hearing herself voice it out loud…

  “You’re kidding, right?” Tina said, but there was a hint of energy about her, the almost imperceptible lifting of her shoulders, the glint in her eyes.

  And Jolene’s words came easier. “I’ve been thinking about moving to Roanoke.”

  “You’re serious?” Tina grinned, although she looked as though she was trying not to. “I mean, you really shouldn’t do anything rash….”

  “You want to live with me or not, Teen? We got along okay in college.”

  “We got along great in college!” Tina said, smiling outright. “Of course I want to live with you! There’s no one else I’d rather live with….”

  And suddenly Jolene was grinning, too. Finding within her friend’s unconditional love the peace and acceptance she’d lost over the past few years. Life would go on. And she would go with it. She knew that now.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  THE NEXT MORNING, Tina busied herself looking out at the horizon through the woods while her friend went behind a tree and took care of the personal business of conducting a home pregnancy test. True to her character, Jolene hadn’t wavered from her decision to get the test over with once she’d made up her mind. It was reassuring that something was normal.

  Jolene was going to be fine, either way. Her friend was resilient, a fighter. She’d never backed down from a challenge in her life, not from Tommy Borcher in fourth grade when he’d grabbed her and kissed her and she’d bitten his lip and kicked his shin. And not when Tina had been ready to give up her own fight for life after Thad had died and she’d lost the baby and Jolene had sat there day after day, fighting for both of them. She’d been so certain that love—the love of a best friend—would be enough to pull her through.

  And she’d been right.

  Tina’s love would do the same for Jolene now.

  She knew that. She knew they’d be okay. That Jolene would be okay.

  So why the hell was she shaking inside? Why was she so damned worried?

  Jolene would call out when she was done. She was going to leave the stick on the box and Tina was going to read the results. Jolene had planned it all when they’d gotten out of bed this morning. She’d rather hear the results from Tina than read them for herself. She’d looked at so many test strips she hated the sight of them.

  Tina waited another couple of minutes, trying not to pace. Jolene was nervous, probably having a little trouble making herself go. The least Tina could do was keep enough distance to leave her friend a little dignity. Not that they hadn’t shared a bathroom a hundred times before.

  Sixty seconds more, and Tina was hearing leaves rustle constantly. A squirrel. Or three. She glimpsed a cottontail scampering between the trees about halfway down the hill. The wind was blowing. She and Jolene had decided late last night that no fear was their new motto, unabashedly stolen from a famous tennis-shoe maker. They were going to town later that morning and both of them were going to buy shoes and a sweatshirt of the no-fear brand. They’d turned over new leaves.

  No pun intended.

  Tina tried to chuckle at herself, but the sound caught in her throat. She was afraid. Jolene was taking too long. Had her friend passed out? Was she feverish from her fall in the icy water the day before but hadn’t said anything? Had she seen the answer and done something drastic? Turning, Tina climbed quickly back to their sacred spot, frantically searching for Jolene. She wasn’t anywhere around.

  “Jo?” she called, hurrying over to the tree she’d seen Jolene heading for almost ten minutes earlier. “Jo?” She ran to the other side of the tree and stopped cold. The pregnancy kit was there. The little cup was full. The strip had been used.

  And Jolene was nowhere in sight.

  THERE HAD TO BE A TRAIL. Jolene would’ve left one. Their parents had always told them to leave a trail if they got lost. The girls had played the trail game countless times as kids.

  Yes! That twig wouldn’t have fallen like that naturally. It must be the first sign. Tina glanced desperately around, looking for the next sign, for any indication of which way to go next. She ran several yards in one direction, circled around, came back.

  Downhill and up, Tina scoured a half-mile radius.

  Maybe the twig wasn’t a sign. Maybe a deer had kicked it last night while roaming for food.

  Oh, God. Food. Bear.

  How could a bear have carried off Jolene without Tina’s hearing a thing? No—it was impossible. Running back toward their sacred spot, she tripped on her own foot and fell. She barely registered the bruise on her hip from the rock she’d hit. She scrambled back up. Kept running. She had to get home. Call the sheriff.

  And Steve.

  But first she had to get that stick. She shoved it in the back pocket of her jeans. She couldn’t leave it up there. It would be like leaving Jo.

  And she wasn’t going to do that.

  She had no idea what had happened to her friend, couldn’t think of a single reasonable explanation, a single thing that wasn’t horrible beyond words.

  Had she chickened out at the end? Been too afraid to hear what Tina would say? Had she run off?

  Would she be back at the cabin when Tina came bursting through the trees on the other side of the stream? She put all her hopes in that thought, strained to see long before the cabin was in view. And almost fell stricken when she arrived at an empty yard. An empty house.

  STEVE CHAMBERS STOOD at the foot of the cliff, staring up at the craggy rock and variegated browns and greens that covered the landscape just outside Edwina, Colorado. A man used to constant activity, to being aware of hundreds of emotionally intense lives unfolding around him all day every day, Steve was finding the self-imposed halt nearly impossible to endure with anything like his usual calm. Here he was, just two days after parking himself in a small hotel at the edge of town, ready to scale a wall that would challenge experts. And he’d never done any rappelling in his life. It was either that or hit something. Hard.

  How else did a man rid himself of a tension so great he felt he could incite an entire army to battle?

  The ringing of his cell phone was a relief, bringing him out of the private hell of his own mind to the outside world. His assistant principal was completing the week of new-teacher orientation for him. And she’d called about six times a day.

  Still, for her he had answers. Every time.

&nb
sp; “Steve Chambers,” he said, so eager to connect with a sane human being that he didn’t even notice the incoming call number.

  “Steve?”

  The voice was only vaguely familiar. The panic unmistakable.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Steve, it’s Tina!”

  Yes. Steve gritted his teeth. He should’ve known that. “What’s wrong?” he asked again, forcing himself not to holler.

  “Jo’s missing, Steve… I have no idea where she is… I can’t find her… There’s no trace… It doesn’t make sense… She went off to do it… She was there and then she wasn’t…” Tina laughed. Gulped. Sobbed. And continued rambling.

  “Okay, Teen, calm down,” Steve said, adrenaline kicking him into save-the-world mode. He strode to his car, climbed in, remembered to buckle his seat belt and then pulled slowly into traffic before accelerating to a higher-than-legal speed.

  “…peeing and I didn’t…a cottontail…and then…and a twig was…I thought…”

  The closer Steve got to the cabin, the more panic threatened to overtake his rational mind, and the more unintelligible Tina became.

  “I’m almost there, Tina. Calm down. You went up into the hills together?”

  “Yeah!” Tina’s voice rose on a wail. “And then…”

  “What time was that, Teen, do you remember?”

  “Morning.” She hiccupped. “It was morning.”

  It was still morning. He ignored the squealing of his tires as he took the next corner. Any cop who tried to stop him be damned. Or better yet, if a cop showed up, he could lead the way.

  “Did you call the sheriff?”

  “Yes,” Tina said, her enunciation too emphatic. She was rational enough to try to calm down. That was good.

  “Is he on his way?”

  “Yes.”

  Okay. The first problem was solved.

  “I’m almost there, Tina,” he said again, his heart beating so hard he didn’t think he’d make it unless he focused on her. Not himself. “Just stay on the phone with me until I get there. I’m sure there’s a logical explanation….”

  He had no idea what he said after that—just a steady stream of nonsense intended to keep him and Tina from going into shock.

  But in the back of his mind, as he drove the last miles in record time and blew through the trees and dirt of the private road leading to the cabin, was only one thought.

  He couldn’t live without Jolene.

  Period.

  WELL, HE’D TAKEN CARE of things. His angel wouldn’t lie on the ground and cry anymore. He’d made a miracle. He should probably do more. Honor the moment. Touch. Feel. Have pleasure.

  He’d touched himself before. Not often. On his birthday.

  He’d do something. Soon. For now, it was right to sit with his bottle. Drink. And know.

  TINA RANDOLPH REMINDED Sheriff Tom Hunter of his ex-wife. Except for the clingy part that had driven him not to fight her when she’d told him she wanted a divorce. Tina Randolph didn’t cling. On the contrary, she took charge of the world around her as if she owned every square inch of it.

  Or her best friend’s uncle did.

  “So let’s say she left a trail,” he said now as he and Tina and the missing woman’s husband, Steve, walked up to the hills where Tina had last seen Jolene Chambers. “What would she use?”

  “Twigs, her ponytail holder, tissue from her pocket…”

  “Jolene always has a tissue in her pocket,” Steve interjected. The poor guy looked wretched, tight-lipped, pale skinned, and he was climbing with enough brawn to move the whole damn mountain. He hadn’t said much, except to answer Tom’s questions about Jolene’s habits—and to produce a picture of his missing wife from his wallet—but Tom liked the way he’d been staying one step behind his wife’s friend, ready to catch her if she fell.

  “The search dogs and handlers will be here sometime tomorrow. Hopefully we’ll have found her long before then.” He stopped at a tree about halfway up the wooded mountainside. “Looks like someone slid here, saved themselves by grabbing the trunk of this tree.”

  “That was me,” Tina said, panting as they climbed. “When I was running home a little while ago.”

  The hills were vast, covering miles of woods—and she’d brought them to the exact spot she’d traveled earlier. Tom was impressed.

  “IS THAT ALL the drink she had with her?” Tom asked when, an hour into the search, they’d reached the tree where Tina had last seen Jolene and he saw the bottle of water Jolene had apparently left.

  Along with a box for a home pregnancy kit.

  Steve Chambers shrank visibly when he saw that box—raising questions Tom would need to ask. But not yet.

  “Yeah,” Tina said. “We didn’t plan to be up here very long.”

  “Did she have any food?”

  “No.” Tina couldn’t seem to stand still, walking over and over ground she’d already covered, as though her friend would magically appear from beneath the old leaves and summer ground cover. “That won’t be a problem. Jo could live out here for days. The water in the stream is crystal-clear, and she knows every edible plant and berry in the state.”

  “So what’s she going to do if we don’t find her by nightfall?”

  “If she’s still out here, you mean?” Tina sounded as if she didn’t consider that feasible.

  Avoiding Steve’s eye, Tom nodded.

  “She won’t be,” Tina said firmly. “No matter how lost she is, she knows to follow the stream until she eventually finds a cabin.”

  Tom didn’t like the feeling he was getting. No visible sign of a scuffle. Nothing to indicate that the woman hadn’t just disappeared into thin air. No clues at all.

  “She might have slipped, hit her head.” He hated the part of his job where he had to be the bearer of bad news. But if there was a hope in hell of finding the missing woman alive, he needed the help of her friends. His instincts told him they didn’t have much time.

  If any at all.

  “She might not remember to walk along the stream,” he muttered.

  Or to eat berries, not that starvation was a great concern at that point.

  “She’ll remember,” Tina and Steve said together, sharing a look, a brief, sad smile. “She caught pneumonia up here one summer,” Tina said, glancing at Tom. “She didn’t want to miss out on our time together, so she didn’t tell anyone she felt bad. We came up here the next afternoon, and I guess the climb was too much for her. We were reading and I drifted off to sleep and when I woke up, she’d wandered off. By the time I got down off the hill, she was home in bed, delirious with fever. I’ve never been so scared in my life.”

  Until now. Tom heard the unspoken words.

  “You said you were over there—” he pointed to the south of them “—so let’s head north and see what we find.”

  “SHE FELL in the stream yesterday.” Tom was only half listening to the intermittent conversation between Steve and Tina as they slowly canvassed the trees. Steve split off from them occasionally, but Tom kept Tina close. In just a few short hours, he’d begun to rely heavily on what Tina knew about her missing friend. People wandered off in the woods fairly regularly up here. Unless they were dealing with a small child, it usually took a twenty-four-hour disappearance to warrant a search party.

  “Just like last time?” Steve asked. Even a hardened cop like Tom, a total stranger, could hear the desperate note of hope in the other man’s voice. Hope that Jolene had wandered off in a feverish delirium and they’d find her any minute, bedded down in leaves.

  “No,” Tina said. “We got her right home and into the shower,” she said. “Back then we hid out until we dried so we wouldn’t get in trouble.”

  “And this morning? Was she well?”

  “Not even a sneeze.”

  Tom had already gathered that the two women had been up at the cabin alone—a celebration of twenty-five years of friendship. But he wasn’t sure why the Boulder high school principal had b
een so far from home—and just twenty minutes away.

  AROUND DINNERTIME, when her feet had grown as numb as her emotions, Tina’s heart suddenly stopped and then picked up at breakneck speed. “Look, that’s Jo’s!” she said, grabbing at the small piece of clear plastic that she’d almost stepped on. Only half an inch long, maybe an eighth of an inch wide…

  “Don’t touch it!” Tom said before she could pick it up. He pulled a clean handkerchief out of his pocket, collected the minute piece of plastic and put it in a plastic bag. That done, he held it up to the light, glanced at Steve—and then looked at Tina.

  “What do you think this is?” he asked her, doubt clear in his voice in case she’d missed the skepticism on his face.

  Tina took a quick peek at Steve. His eyes held the same near-pity the sheriff had just bestowed on her.

  “It’s that little plastic piece that goes on the end of a shoelace,” she said without wavering. Oh, ye of little faith. “I can’t believe I saw it,” she said, although she’d known that if she studied the ground hard enough, covered all of it, eventually she’d find a sign from her friend. That she’d been there, in that place. That she was alive.

  She stared at the contents of the bag, barely perceptible in the fading light. “The leaves shifted right as I was walking by and the sun glinted off the edge of the plastic.” She was talking too fast. And couldn’t stop herself. “When we were kids, playing the trail game, Jolene used to come up with the most bizarre things to leave behind. She talked one time about stepping on her shoelace, leaving part of it behind, because if you were in trouble and a captor had your hands tied and was watching you, you’d still be able to step…”

  Her voice trailed off as she heard her own words.

  A captor.

  Something bad had happened to Jolene. Someone bad.

  Tina would have fallen to the ground if male arms hadn’t slid around her from either side, holding her up.

  She supposed that the two men carried her down the hill as well. She didn’t remember much after that.