Willing Hostage

by Marlys Millhiser

  Leah drank the last of the Maalox and wolfed sausage, cheese, and rye as if she’d eaten nothing for days. She sat, as once before, between his legs with her back resting against his chest and one kidney against his gun. His body protected her from the cruelty of the wind but not from the razor rocks on which she sat.

  The view was staggering, vaster than the one from their first camp on the rim. But she still couldn’t see the third person on the Flat Tops, the shepherd, too tiny and insignificant a being to show up on the incredible panorama that finally reduced Leah to a need for confession.

  She babbled to her sheltering spy about her mother and the view became comfortably distorted through tears.

  “Christ.” The hard voice produced warm breath on the part in her hair. “And you found her?”

  “I was just coming in to tell her that I’d lost another job. My mother was so fastidious … she took her clothes off before she got into the tub to slit her wrists. What I remember most is my own scream. It bumped off the tile and came back at me …”

  “I thought you were in New York modeling underwear.”

  “I’d quit that and gone to work as a secretary at a publisher’s. But secretaries stayed secretaries in that company. Annette and Suzie kept complaining I wasn’t doing my fair share so I transferred to the Chicago branch of the same publisher. I was still a secretary but we agreed to take turns living with Mother for one year each and that would give us two years off.”

  The twin lakes looked like mere puddles. Clouds rimmed the sky white all around them, spilled like thin milk over flat-topped monsters in the distance.

  “And then Suzie married Ed. That left two of us. And then Annette married Doctor Ralph. And Leah had Mother all to herself. I was fired from the publisher’s because typing and filing bore me and they finally noticed it. I took a job as a sales clerk at a boutique—”

  “And were fired because that bored you, too.”

  “It went out of business. I was just going to break the news to my mother when I found her … dead.”

  “So far your life does not sound like a roaring success.” There was no sympathy in his voice.

  “I keep wondering how much farther down I can get. I did until I met you, that is.”

  “Well, now you can get down a mountain.”

  Before leaving the summit, they peered over the other side into a canyon lost in clouds. The sheer drop turned Leah’s stomach. Something shiny under a corner of rock caught her eye and she bent to pick it up. “Coors Beer,” the label said. A strange thing to find at the top and the end of the world.

  “What did you expect? The Ten Commandments?” He reached out to take the can from her. But it dropped to the ground between them as a new sound in the air came to them both at once.

  “What is it? A plane?” she asked as they stumbled down the rocks and raced for the grotesque pine shelter.

  “Helicopter.”

  “After us?”

  “I’m not taking any chances.”

  Leah lay flat on her stomach and wiggled into a depression under curved branches. Glade crawled in behind her and they lay horizontal to the view and to the line of pine bush. She could just see the twin lakes over his dark head … and the military-looking helicopter as it cleared the side of Big Marvine.

  It flew low over the plateau, circled the lakes, and angled gradually away toward the rim on which they’d camped that first night. Milk-thin clouds seeped in a slow tumble toward the helicopter. They could no longer hear its sound.

  Leah felt Glade’s body tense against her side as the copter turned and flew back toward them.

  “What if they find our packs?”

  “We’ve had it”

  The helicopter, resembling a dragonfly in the distance, settled finally in the air … and then descended, landing beside the white tent of the shepherd. The miniature horse bucked and pulled at an invisible tether. Glade Wyndham made a nasty choking sound in his throat.

  “Is there another way off this mountain?” she asked.

  “No. We’ll have to wait.” The fist next to her shoulder tightened until the black hairs on his fingers stood erect.

  Now that she was out of the direct sunlight, the mountain’s chill crept through her wind-shirt.

  Two minuscule people moved from the stilled helicopter to the tent and then off toward the white specks of sheep.

  “Maybe the shepherd didn’t see us,” she said through chattering teeth.

  “Not likely, but just hope, Leah. Hope hard.”

  The two people disappeared. “Maybe the helicopter just came to bring the shepherd some food.”

  “Anybody with an ounce of sense or knowledge about mountains wouldn’t have brought a chopper in here now.” He put an arm across her chest and snuggled his warmth close against her. “It’ll rain soon … at least fog. They won’t be able to get it off the ground if they don’t move fast. They’ll be trapped up here. But so will we.”

  The horse had settled down. Clouds trickled closer to the sheep. Leah thought of Sheila and the burning Volks. Her troubles with work and family suddenly seemed petty. “Glade, all those thing I said about my life.…”

  “I know.” He nuzzled his hot face under her chin and kissed her neck. “You’ve had rough luck. Meeting me didn’t make it any better. I’m sorry.” He slid sideways to lie on top of her and his weight and heat stopped her trembling. “You feel like a piece of ice.”

  “I keep dreaming of that parka at the bottom of the mountain. What if Goodyear didn’t go back to the packs?”

  “He won’t go near the shepherd because shepherds have sheep dogs.” He relaxed again and flattened her body into the depression in the earth.

  She drew heat from him but felt the strangeness again at being here with this man at all. “Don’t call me Leah Harper anymore and.…” She meant to add, “Don’t kill me,” but his lips stopped her.

  The horse and the helicopter stood motionless in the sun below, but milky mist shrouded the sheep and slithered toward the lakes.

  “Your moods change so abruptly, it’s hard to trust you.” Her legs, on either side of his, still felt the cold. Pine needles pricked through her jeans into her knees.

  He chuckled and his ribs pressed against her. “What do you bet someone in Langley is saying that same thing about now?” He slid his arms under her, cradling her head in the palm of one hand, drawing back to look at her face. “You like your murderers to fit into the common mold, don’t you?”

  At the word “murderer” Leah squirmed beneath him but he settled more heavily, driving the hard earth into her back. When he turned sideways to glance at the plateau, she could see the pulse in his neck, feel his hardness against her leg. Leah was altogether too warm now.

  He turned back with a slow, not particularly warm smile. “Leah, I had great and wonderful plans for Big Marvine, but I’m afraid it’s time to go.”

  She couldn’t believe how quickly the cold moved in when he moved off. “Why?”

  “Look.”

  The plateau was gone … white with cloud … but no helicopter … no tent …

  “This may be our last chance.” He pulled her out into the wind and drew her so tightly against him she thought she’d crack. Then he released her.

  “Run, Leah,” he said gently. “Like you’ve never run before.”

  Chapter Twenty

  Milk-clouds leaked over the top of Big Marvine when they reached the head of the trail. Misty fingerlets lapped at their boots while sun still glared in their faces. Leah had never imagined clouds rising up the side of a mountain, had long taken it for granted that clouds lowered from the sky. But as they started down the trail they were soon muffled in chill, damp gray.

  Glade Wyndham loomed darkly ahead in the suffocating murk.

  “We can’t possibly make it down in this. I can’t see.”

  “It’s the only way. The fog will provide cover. Feel for the trail with each step. It’s a godsend for us, after all, Leah.”
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br />   The godsend laced her eyelashes with tiny drops, made her sinuses drain. It swirled white in some places and formed dark writhing shadow-shapes of things that weren’t there in others. Leah saw a horse and rider, distinctly, coming up the path, the horse’s head bobbing as it walked, but horse and rider evaporated as they neared.

  The reality of her aloneness had never been more apparent. She felt cut off and floating. The jarring of injured toes against boots as she jolted downward, the ache in her knees, and the fear of walking off into oblivion kept her panic just under control.

  Her mother’s dependence on her father had been disastrous. Her sisters acted like willing and pale appendages to their mates. And Leah had set out for Colorado to prove her own independence. But her vow to rely on no one but herself evaporated in the mist shrouding Big Marvine, like the phantom horse and rider. Her spy bobbed ahead like a shadowed safety buoy and when he stopped suddenly, turned and kissed her, she wanted to cry.

  The fog encrusting his beard was wet on her face. “I think we’re going to make it.” His whisper was jubilant “We’re almost down. Be quiet now, sound carries on fog.”

  With this warning, Leah realized how much she could hear … a tree creaking below, sheep bleating far away. The sounds of their boots and breathing seemed loud enough to give away their position to anyone within miles.

  The air smelled of moss and rotting wood and damp earth.

  At the bottom of Big Marvine, the fog had thinned enough to let them find their things. Goodyear lay under the flap of Glade’s pack and was allowed to ride that way as they skirted the base of the mountain. The fog lifted higher, and they caught a glimpse of the helicopter and the shepherd’s camp, and then all was hidden in a slow soaking drizzle that promised to last the day.

  Leah followed Glade for hours through the rain and hoped they weren’t getting lost. Her companion looked grotesquely humpbacked with the poncho covering the great lump of his backpack.

  A grove of live pine sheltered their tent that night and Leah awoke once to find the rain had stopped and Glade talking in his sleep. A few incomprehensible phrases in what sounded like Spanish with a guttural German accent.

  Sun warmed their breakfast rock the next morning. Leah gulped hot coffee gratefully. “I don’t want to know anything about it, but do you know you speak Spanish in your sleep?”

  He glanced up from the little stove with one of those brutal heart-stopping looks. “I have recurring nightmares.”

  “In Spanish?”

  “Chile.” He pronounced it Chee-lay.

  “Chile! When they—”

  “I worked for a copper company before Allende threw it out. But I stayed on for my other employer, melted in. People of Chile have little or no Indian blood, an American can infiltrate almost—”

  “Allende! Glade, you shouldn’t be telling me this. I mean, it was in the papers about … I don’t want to know.”

  He sighed and brought out the bottle of whiskey from his pack. She hadn’t seen it since that day in the pickup. “Have you ever stopped to thing Leah Harper”—he gulped from the neck of the bottle and shuddered—“what can happen when nobody wants to know?”

  He no longer looked like the savior she’d followed through fog and rain the day before. The gilt was tarnished, worn. They were both dirty and rumpled. She had no mirror to look at herself, but she could see the hopelessness on his unshaven face … and drinking whiskey for breakfast was somehow like a last act. He’d seemed so triumphant coming down Big Marvine.

  If he gave up now, she would have to depend on herself as she had once brashly set out to prove she could.

  Birds sang to the morning. A squirrel, pumping its oversized tail, cluttering its indignation at their presence from the safety of a tree limb. Wild columbine turned enormous blossoms to the sun, raindrops still glistening on delicately shaded lavender.

  Leah had another cup of coffee. “Do you know where we are … exactly?”

  “Yeah.” Glade took another drink of whiskey. “We’re lost.”

  The sun warmed Leah and dried the columbine. Still they sat. Still he drank.

  She threw her cup to the ground. He didn’t look up from the spot of earth he seemed to be trying to dig into with his eyes.

  Leah slid off her rock and grabbed the bottle from his hand. That got his attention, but he still had a faraway expression. “What’s the matter?”

  “Here we are lost and the whole world is after us and you sit drinking your breakfast.” She capped the bottle. “That’s what’s the matter.”

  “According to the map, if we walk west long enough, we’ll come to a marked trail.”

  “Oh.” Leah took the bottle back to the rock with her. If she had felt threatened at being alone in the wilds with an admittedly violent man, she felt more so with a drinking one. If his moods were unpredictable when he was sober.… “Well, liquor won’t help us find that trail or get out of here, will it?”

  “No, ma’am.” He pushed himself to his feet and walked toward Leah and the bottle, the faraway look gone, his focus steady on hers. “But it might help me get through another day in a very long ordeal.”

  Leah felt an awful but tantalizing prickle and couldn’t lower her eyes as he pried her fingers from the whiskey. “Drinking won’t help you get the papers to the press, to—”

  “What do you know about that?” He raised the bottle to his lips and his eyes turned cruel. “You’re in the middle of something important and all you can think of is your own little problems, whine about men because they beat you out of a job, feel sorry for yourself when you could get involved in something”—he waved the whiskey in front of her—“something more important than Leah Harper.”

  “You’re going to walk out on me, aren’t you?” Jason had asked, rage etching the lines of his face. “Because you’re afraid to really get involved, right?” Jason had towered over her. “Selfish is what you are, Leah. So go … sit around and feel sorry for yourself and be secretly glad that you didn’t give anything away. Go back to nursing your ulcer, flitting from one job or man to another so you can claim failure. Anything important happen to you”—Jason had been drinking, too—“you wouldn’t be around it long enough to know. You’re like a bee starving in a field full of flowers because it can’t decide which flower to molest first.” Mutt, the soft-eyed dog, always whimpered, cried when they fought.

  Glade Wyndham emptied the whiskey bottle. “They’re going to rip up a whole section of beauty that outshines even you, but you’re still back with your sucker of a sister’s abortion.” His laughter was hollow now as it had been when she first heard it.

  “Glade.…” She tried to sound soothing, reasonable.

  “Why aren’t you afraid of me anymore, Leah?” The bottle dashed to splinter against the rock beside her. “I think I liked you better when you were afraid of me.”

  Leah slid backward off the rock, putting it between them, looked away from the hard stare. “Because I don’t … really believe you can be all those things you say you are.” She held her voice steady but her mouth was dry.

  “Then you’re a fool.” He moved around the rock.

  “You can be so kind and gentle at times.…” She backed to a tree and then slid around it, leaving pine branches to whip back at him. Given the nature of this beast, how had she put it off this long? Could she stop it now?

  “She doesn’t want to get involved, our Leah,” he whispered and advanced with her to the next tree. “Because it’s disturbing. She might have to give up something. You’re a fake, Leah.”

  The treacherous, breathless urge to submit … the tickly sensation. Leah watched him draw closer … it was the size of him, the darkness, the mystery that froze her like fear froze a rabbit … it was.…

  “Oh, God. Glade!” Leah swiveled around the tree to run but was caught by the belt and swung back against him. “Glade, it’s just the whiskey. Please …”

  “I should never have brought a woman along.…” The detached, im
personal voice, the rough beard painful on her sun- and wind-scarred skin.

  “I’m not just a woman.…” She sank to the ground under his weight.

  He blocked out the sun.

  Leah found that she was still afraid of this man. And that struggle was useless. And that he was not necessarily kind and not necessarily gentle.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Leah hunched over the cat on her lap. Goodyear poked a chilly wet nose into her cheek as if in sympathy. But there was only cold-blue dislike in the slanted eyes. Still … Leah found such comfort in the crackling plush coat. She could almost leave her hand print in it.

  “Did I hurt you?”… the flat voice behind her.

  “Yes … no …” Leah closed her eyes and kneaded Siamese fur with the fingers of both hands. The spurty purring promised love and loyalty. Claws pricked her bare skin as they constricted, let go as they relaxed in a repeated feline rhythm.

  “Then what’s the matter?”

  Goodyear sprang from her lap, yawned, and stretched, as if to say, “That was nice, but I can take it or leave it.”

  “I don’t understand you,” Leah answered them both.

  “Neither do I.” He sat beside her. “You’re ashamed then?”

  “No … yes … I don’t know.”

  “You needn’t be,” he said with that finality of tone. “There wasn’t a thing you could have done about it.”

  “I don’t like being helpless.”

  “You sure could have fooled me.” He plucked a grass stalk and put it between his lips like a cigarette. The bitter-spicy stench of whiskey clung to them both. But she realized he wasn’t drunk now, if he had ever been.

  “And I’m not a fake.”

  “Oh, hell, Leah, you’d been asking for that for three days. And it’s not exactly like it was hermetically sealed or—”

  “Why, you overblown … egocentric male.…” She turned to the hard face and saw dark eyes laughing at her. “I hate you … I.…”

  “No, you don’t.” He ran the grass stalk to tickle along her leg. “You just want to.”