That afternoon they sat in the bookstore’s cafe, playfully ogling the man at the table next to them, who read Sebastian Junger’s The Perfect Storm, while drinking an Americano. His dark, windswept hair and serious eyes marked him as a tormented soul, they’d jointly decided. That and the book about people drowning.
“Apparently not here to ski,” Iris said.
“Who comes to Sapphire Ridge to ski?” Niki said with a wry twist of her lips.
“So...” Iris turned back to their discussion. “Are you ever going to decide what you want to be when you grow up?”
“I’m twenty-six,” Niki said.
“Doesn’t mean anything. You can be fifty-nine and still waiting for the day.”
“How would you know? You’re twenty-four.”
“I’m an old soul in a young body,” Iris said. “So, who do you want to be?”
“I already have a job. The website.”
“That’s an occupation. It’s not who you are.”
“I have Dante. I’m marrying him in March.”
“Again,” Iris said, “That doesn’t define who you are. What are your passions? What makes you want to, I don’t know, burst into song?”
“I don’t know.”
“You should know. You should figure it out.”
“Look,” Niki said, and a sprinkle of bubbles rose to the top of her coffee, popping loudly, the beverage suddenly boiling hot. The odd phenomenon surprised Iris and alarmed Niki. She sometimes lost control of her gift under stress. She pretended the sudden burst of heat hadn’t happened and continued. “I don’t know who I am and I doubt I ever will. I don’t have any interests. I never have. I’m not going to be anyone different than I am now.”
“You’re wrong,” Iris said. ”It’s going to happen. But you’ve got to open yourself to life first. Experience it. It’ll happen once you stop hiding who you are.”
You can’t begin to imagine what I have to hide, Niki thought, never telling her friend the truth.
Chapter 6
Damn Mr. Gung Ho Bryce for disturbing her back at the snack bar. She wanted to wallow in her grief, not mount a rescue. Even with what Dante had done, and how things had turned out, she missed her fiancé. She shouldn’t, she should let him go, but she wanted him so bad. She missed his egotistical sexcapades.
Still standing out front of the bookstore, she imagined herself inside, snug and cozy in a chair as sleigh bells on the door announced a new customer. Dante. With that feel-free-to-damn-me-to-hell-but-I’m-going-to-screw-you-in-the-travel-aisle leer. He wouldn’t stroll to her chair. He’d wait for her to come to him. And then he’d take. He always took. With a year’s distance separating them she now realized he’d rarely given, but he’d also trained her to never show she cared.
She wouldn’t care would she, if she got him back? It didn’t matter what he and Iris had done.
Oh, my God. Dante’s 1960s sweater. Hindsight gave her a flawless view into that last night the three of them had spent together. It was a gift from Iris. Her best friend who trolled thrift stores. Whose coat collar bore a vintage rhinestone owl pin. And the scent of his aftershave clinging to her. How could I have been so dense?
Or had it been desperation?
We’re family. We’re our own family, she’d declared when sitting with them by the fire.
Maybe. But maybe they’d only been family for her, to fill the void of never having had one.
She took a deep breath and frowned at Bryce’s retreating backside. Niki was tempted to ditch him, call 911 and turn his problem over to the pros.
When they entered the first parking lot and Bryce didn’t head for a car, but kept going north instead, Niki balked.
It took him several paces to realize she was no longer with him.
He halted with his back to her, the strong, silent, aggravated type, as if he didn’t want to take even the brief time required to return to her side.
“Where are we going?” she asked.
“I told you. Someone’s hurt. Buried under the snow.”
“I don’t think so.” Niki said, suspicious now.
“Pardon me?” His voice was terse.
“The avalanche is back that way.” She pointed back where they’d come from, even though he still faced forward and couldn’t see her.
“No, it’s not.”
“Yes, it is,” she said. “Witness the helicopters circling in the sky over the disaster back there? The news choppers? Medical evacuations?”
“What?” he said. He turned to face her at last. He glanced upward at the swarm of aircraft in the air behind her, and then at her. His brows, the most expressive part of his otherwise stoic face, drew together in a frown. “A second avalanche?”
“I’m sorry, Bryce, but were you stoned last night or something?”
Maybe still high?
“No,” he said, indignant. “I wasn’t out to it.”
Out to it? She assumed that meant wrecked off his ass wherever he came from.
“So you just slept through the whole thing?” she asked. “The entire freaking mountain shaking like a major earthquake?”
“No. Of course, not. I…”
“You…?”
“I was in the backcountry.”
His answer was evasive and didn’t ring entirely true. What was really going on here? What were his motives?
“We’re wasting time. He doesn’t have much left,” Bryce said.
“So call for help.”
“I would have, but I lost my cell phone.”
“No problem. I’ll call.”
She took out hers and tapped in 911.
“Iris.”
“Fine. Go.” She motioned him forward again. “I can talk and walk at the same time.”
Second avalanche? Sounds like total B.S.
Still, he didn’t try to stop her from calling 911, as she would imagine if his story was a lie.
A busy signal rang in her ear. She tried again, got the busy signal again.
“Are you flipping kidding me?” she said. “911 is ringing off the hook?”
“You’re surprised?” he said. “If what you say about another avalanche is true–”
“If what I say is true?”
Bryce refused to take the bait and argue. His long, powerful legs plowed through drifts blown up against shops and even under the covered walkways on the other side of the parking lot. They passed an ice rink. Usually jammed at this time of day, the rink was devoid of skaters, its surface grey and pitted without a Zamboni to groom it.
She gave up on 911 and stuck the phone in a pocket.
“Why me?” Niki asked. “Did you get my name off the list?”
“What list?”
“Okay. Not the list. So why cross the entire north end of the Village to ask me for help?”
“You were the first person I could find.”
He might have something there. North Village had virtually emptied out, tourists either having fled or gone to the disaster site. Still, he should have been able to find help closer, gone into one of the timeshare condos or hotels. Something wasn’t right.
“Bryce, stop. We need–”
“No. I will not stop.”
But he did exactly that. Stop, turning on her in frustration.
A frigid breeze lifted a thick lock of hair off the right side of his forehead, and that’s when she saw it. Blood.
“You’re hurt.”
Bryce raised his hand to his forehead and touched the ugly red gash.
Igh, that looks deep.
He pulled his fingers away and examined the tips. Clean.
“It’s just a cut. I don’t even feel it.”
“Only because the wound has frozen solid out here,” she said. Like meat in a freezer. She shuddered.
No wonder he hadn’t thought clearly enough to go inside a building and ask for help. Niki now discounted the existence of a second slide. Or that he’d walked from North Village all the way down to where she’d sat at the
café. He had to have come from the south. He’d been in an avalanche all right. The avalanche. Somehow, he’d escaped the notice of the rescuers. Probably because they hadn’t spotted his head wound and assumed he was just another gawker.
“We need to get you to a doctor ASAP,” she said.
It all made sense now. Bryce was in shock, and the victim with whom he was so concerned? Most likely one of the unfortunate dead lying under all that crap back there. He’d seen someone buried alive, maybe more than one. That mental trauma combined with the head injury explained his urgency, irritability, and the disorientation that sent him endlessly north. She had no idea how badly he was injured, but she knew head wounds could be tricky. An injured person might be walking and talking one minute, dead the next.
Desperate, she scanned the area, searching for someone she could call out to for help. Bryce was correct. Finding assistance in this part of the resort wouldn’t be easy.
“Stay here,” she told him.
She took off at a cumbersome slog through the snow toward two grey clad figures about 100 yards away.
Bryce, misunderstanding, thinking she was going for people to help his cause, shouted after her. “Iris! Wait. We don’t have time to explain.”
She ignored him for his own good, hoping he wouldn’t collapse before she could summon paramedics.
Chapter 7
Niki caught up with the two security guards on a walkway that meandered through artfully landscaped stands of pine and fir trees. She found the men climbing into their resort-owned SUV, parked at the end of the path.
“Hi! Hey!” She waved. “Help!”
Hearing her, they abandoned the vehicle and ran toward her.
“Please,” she said, “there’s someone injured over there. I think he was in the avalanche.”
Grim-faced at the news of yet another avalanche victim, but clearly willing to play the heroes, the two flanked her back the way she’d come. When the three of them cleared the pines, however, Niki ran only a few yards before coming to a bewildered stop.
Bryce was gone, the Village area now completely deserted.
“Where?” the eldest of the two guards, a pit bull of a man in his early 40s, said.
“I don’t know,” Niki said and pointed across the space. “I just left him over there.”
“I don’t see anyone,” his partner, approximately 20 years his junior, said.
She waded through the snow, heading for the place she’d last seen Bryce. The younger man tailed her; infected by the same urgency she felt, while the older man slowed the farther they went. She could tell he doubted her story.
“So where is he?” the elder guard asked once they arrived.
Niki pivoted 360 degrees, searching, but they stood at a natural crossing place and at least half a dozen sets of boots had trampled the snow since the night before.
“His name is Bryce. I left him right here.”
The older guard huffed, put out at being fooled into traipsing through knee-deep snow, far from his comfortably heated SUV.
“I think he may have kept going,” Niki said.
“What? Where?” the younger one said.
“North. He insisted there was a second avalanche.”
“A second avalanche? No, ma’am, there ain’t no second avalanche.”
“Ma’am, what kind of injuries did he have?” The older guard asked.
“He had a…” She made a slashing gesture at her forehead. “…a cut.”
“A cut?” he said. “That’s it?”
“It was really bloody.”
“Scalp lacs usually are,” he replied, “They often look worse than–”
“He’d been out in the elements too long. The wound was frozen.”
“Frozen?” the younger one said.
She nodded. “Frozen. He didn’t seem right. Maybe hypothermia? You’ve got to help me find him.”
The older guard pursed his lips sourly. He’d lost his patience minutes ago. “Look, the guy probably is fine and just went to his condo.”
“No, you don’t understand, he was–”
“Lady, you may have identified one victim, but we’ve got literally dozens at the site,” he said. “Last count, the death toll was up to thirty-two and they’re still pulling people out. Some of those people are alive and in real need of our help. Now we’ve got to get going. You find the guy? Bring him down to the triage tent. They’ll take care of him there.”
He motioned for the younger guard to follow him back to their vehicle.
Once more, Niki scanned her surroundings, the walkways, a nearby bandstand, and another parking lot a ways off.
There! She caught a glimpse of Bryce striding into a narrow delivery alley between an ski-in BBQ shack and a make-your-own candle shop. Predictably, he headed north.
“There! I see him,” she shouted to the departing guards.
The younger one stopped and faced where she pointed, but shrugged and shook his head. He didn’t see him.
“Right there!” she pointed again, but when she looked back at the alley, Bryce had already slipped between the two buildings.
The older guard grabbed the younger one by the shoulder and pulled him along.
“He’s walking, he’s good enough for you to get him there on his own,” the man said.
“How am I supposed to do that?”
“That’s your problem.”
Dejected by their abandonment, Niki sighed.
“Dammit,” she said.
Her conscience gave her just one choice. She took off after Bryce.
For a man with a head injury, he moved obscenely fast. She tried running, but the farther north they went, the less snow had been cleared, the clumsier she became. Infuriating her, he experienced no problems with the deep snow, pressing onward through it. The guard was right. He could take care of himself. Why, then, did she continue after him?
Because he asked for your help.
It wasn’t until they’d gone beyond the resort’s last major public areas, well past the tube sledding park and white, treeless expanse hiding the golf course beneath heavy snow pack that she caught up. In reality, she never did catch him. Her inability to match his pace forced him to wait for her at a ski patrol hut. The hut was deserted, patrol members likely gone to help with the emergency. Bryce stood on the hut’s shallow front deck, arms crossed, one foot tapping impatiently.
“Where,” she said, letting her own mounting irritation show, “…in the hell are you going?”
“I told you. Avalanche.”
“And I told you, the slide is that way.” She gestured back over her shoulder to the south. “People are hurt that way. That’s where your victim is going to be.”
For the first time, she noticed the color of his eyes, grey-brown, dark amongst all the reflected brightness surrounding them, like a hawk feather in the snow. Fiercely confident, they read hers, mined her expression for clues, and then the light bulb went off.
“You think I’m daft,” he said. “You think, since I got this little nick on my forehead it’s rendered me incapable of thinking straight.”
“Bryce.”
“I’m not doolally.”
“Doolally?”
“Ill, sick, mental.” He pivoted on his heel and stepped off into the snow on the forest side of the deck. “Now, shall we go? He’s likely dead by now, but we’ve got to try.”
“I repeat. Where?”
He’d stopped talking. Head down and focused, he forged ahead into the wilderness.
Bryce’s protests to the contrary aside, this trek was insane. She wasn’t outfitted or even trained for winter hiking. Yet she hesitated to leave him on his own. Though the guards may have been indifferent, Niki wouldn’t be responsible for someone’s death because she let him wander off on some fantasy rescue without doing all she could to watch over him. Hopefully, he’d realize his mistake before long, run out of that stubborn energy that animated him, and give up. If he didn’t, she would, if only to return an
d alert authorities to where he’d gone. This time, she wouldn’t let some fair-weather hero rent-a-cops deter her from seeking a doctor to check his injury.
“Okay. I guess we’re going.”
“Grab the snowshoes and strap them on,” Bryce shot back, but kept walking. “You’re going to need them out here.”
Snowshoes? She trudged around the entire hut before she found them. Someone in the patrol had either forgotten or purposely stowed a pair of peacock-colored snowshoes and matching poles under a rustic bench on the hut’s deck.
“Sorry. Borrowing. Not stealing,” she said aloud to the absent shoes’ owner. “I’ll put them back. I promise.”
She’d never worn snowshoes before and was surprised they looked more like backpack frames in the shape of mini-coffins, than the cliché tennis racket shape she’d seen in movies.
“What about you?” she called to Bryce.
He looked over his shoulder and the chagrined smile he gave her startled her. He’d yet to smile, and she could tell he wasn’t good at it. Lopsided, as if the facial muscles required had atrophied, his grin instantly endeared her to him.
“Big feet,” he said.
She smiled back, not knowing why.
“This is stupid,” she said under her breath. “Reckless.”
Figuring out the convoluted straps and how to maneuver in the shoes burned another five minutes she couldn’t spare. By the time she’d semi-mastered walking in them, Bryce was gone again.
Spirits of the Season: Eight Haunting Holiday Romances Page 24
