Heartbreaker

by Karen Robards

  “Awesome.” Rory glanced at her—and smiled. To Lynn, the beauty of that smile—the first genuine one she had had from her daughter in some time—put the rainbow to shame.

  “Like totally.” Jenny, on Rory’s other side, glanced at Lynn and smiled too.

  The group stood together on the rim of the mountain, just above a drop-off that plunged perhaps two hundred feet straight down before gentling into pine-robed slopes that ended in a valley far below. Icy-white water twisted across the center of that valley, looking slender as the output of a garden hose as it rushed through a canyon formed by jagged gray cliffs that fit together like interlocking fingers.

  Directly overhead, the rainbow soared.

  They could have been standing on the edge of the world.

  Rory stepped forward, presumably to get a better view.

  Behind them a male voice shouted something, the tone urgent. The words were unintelligible.

  Lynn frowned, glancing around inquiringly.

  The ground heaved beneath her feet. Distracted, Lynn looked down. Hair-thin cracks were shooting at lightning speed across the granite ledge on which she stood.

  Cracks in granite?

  In front of her, Rory seemed to teeter. Lynn’s heart missed a beat as she realized that Rory was too close to the edge.

  “Rory!”

  The rock shelf her daughter stood on was shifting, buckling. In the split second after Lynn grasped what was happening, she grabbed at Rory’s poncho and missed. Rory lurched out of reach.

  “Mommy!”

  Rory’s cry was high-pitched, filled with fear. Her arms windmilled, and her boots scrabbled audibly for purchase on the rock as she seemed to topple sideways. Lynn grabbed for her again. Her fingers closed around Rory’s. Her hand was damp; Rory’s hand was damp. She couldn’t hold on.

  Lynn lost her grip just as the ground gave way. Rory screamed. Lynn cried out as her daughter slid straight down through collapsing layers of rock and mud as though she were on an amusement-park slide, arms flailing wildly as she tried to regain her balance.

  In less than an instant she was gone.

  It happened so fast that Lynn’s foremost emotion was disbelief rather than terror. Her mouth was open, Rory’s name on her lips. Her eyes were wide. Her stomach felt as though she were in an elevator, descending fast.

  “Rory!” Lynn cried even as the ground fell out from under her. She was sliding down too, along with Jenny, who was shrieking, and God knew who else. Lynn knew that she was in trouble, but never, not ever, by any stretch of the possible did she understand that she was falling off a two-hundred-foot cliff—until her feet shot out into space and her sliding back and desperately grasping hands lost their last contact with anything solid, and her horrified eyes encountered the vast whirling grayness of endless cloudy sky and granite mountains and the rainbow shining like an epitaph overhead.

  As she plunged downward, Lynn screamed.

  8

  BEING ALIVE HURT. That was Lynn’s first conscious thought as she opened her eyes. Her body ached from head to toe. She was staring straight up into a broody sky. Fine droplets of water soaked her face, her hair, her eyes, making her blink. Remembrance came in a blinding flash. The fall. Rory.

  Rory!

  The rainbow was gone, vanished as thoroughly as if it had never been.

  Lynn was afraid to move, afraid to put to the test how badly she might be injured. Surely she could not have fallen so far—she remembered how far away the ground had looked from the top of the cliff—without causing herself severe harm.

  Maybe she was dead.

  Maybe Rory was dead. The thought was so painful that Lynn couldn’t even entertain it. If her daughter were dead … she would want to die too.

  The recent turbulence in their relationship was suddenly meaningless. All that mattered was that Rory was her beloved child.

  “Ohhh!”

  The moan, if indeed it was a moan and not some cruel trick played by the wind, was enough to galvanize Lynn into movement. Her head swung around, her gaze searching.

  At first she saw nothing but gray: gray sky, gray mountains, the sheer vertical rise of the gray rock cliff in front of her face. The summit, where they had been standing not long before, was snapped in two like a broken cookie. The outermost part hung straight down, parallel with and resting against the bulk of the mountain.

  A pair of curious goshawks circled, surfing the wind currents, eyeing the damage.

  A girl crouched on a ledge just beneath the crumpled granite shelf, about thirty feet above Lynn’s head. Her torso was twisted to press tight against the mountain. Her arms were spread wide as though to embrace it.

  Not Rory. Jenny. Lynn recognized the lime-green poncho, the black hair, and was glad the child was alive. But her heart and soul were focused on another girl: her daughter.

  Where was she?

  “Rory!” Lynn’s cry was hoarse with fear.

  There was no answer. Lynn tried again, screaming her daughter’s name until her throat ached and her voice weakened to no more than a croak. Still no reply.

  Lynn forced herself to stop, to lie still, to take deep, calming breaths. Panicking would not help Rory. Panicking would not help either of them.

  As she absorbed more details of her surroundings, Lynn grew cold all over. The skin at the back of her neck prickled as the tiny hairs there jerked to petrified attention. Her own situation was impossible; Jenny’s wasn’t much better. She couldn’t even bring herself to contemplate what might have happened to Rory.

  Was her daughter sprawled lifeless in the canyon below?

  Lynn refused to even consider the possibility. Instead, she focused on her own situation.

  Growing awareness was accompanied by deepening horror. Lynn discovered that she had landed in the outermost branches of a stunted fir that grew out in gymnastic convolutions from the rocky face of the cliff. She was lying faceup, spread-eagled, her splayed limbs at least a foot higher than her torso. Her position was gravity-defying. Only a delicate-feeling web of slender brown branches and flat green needles stood between her and death. She was afraid—terrified—to move. Every time she breathed the branches swayed. If she dislodged herself or if her weight uprooted the small evergreen, she would plunge the remaining hundred and fifty or so feet to the hardscrabble ground below.

  At the realization, her outstretched hands closed convulsively on the sturdiest limbs within reach. They were about the thickness of a gentleman’s walking cane and felt terrifyingly supple as her fingers curled around them. The branches were soaking wet, icy cold, and not, Lynn feared, very strong.

  From somewhere below and to her right came a low keening sound. As if someone whimpered, or cried.

  Rory?

  Holding tight, Lynn turned her head. Out of the corner of her eye—Lynn was afraid to move enough to get a clear view, because she had a sinking feeling that dislodging herself was a matter of shifting ounces rather than pounds—she caught just a glimpse of her daughter’s hot-pink poncho. And there was movement.

  Thank God!

  Rory was below her, tangled like herself in a tree that grew at a near-ninety-degree angle from the vertical rock wall. There were several trees, in fact, a small, irregular copse of spindly firs, and they had saved her life and Rory’s.

  For now.

  “Don’t move, Rory!” Lynn cautioned, the words barely audible to her own ears. Then, putting as much force behind her voice as she could: “Rory, can you hear me?”

  “Mommy!” Rather than an answer it was a faint, teary moan. It sounded as though, in extremis, a much younger Rory were calling for her mother.

  Icy terror gripped Lynn. What if Rory was hurt? Lynn couldn’t get to her; she couldn’t move. No one could get to her, to them. They were no more than dust specks barely clinging to life on the side of a mountain, with a huge unknowing infinity stretching out below and above and all around.

  What if Rory, only half-conscious, did not realize the precariousne
ss of her position and flailed about? The child could fall so easily. Even if she didn’t, her injuries might be such that she would die, alone, suspended in cold, wet space fifteen stories above the ground.

  Despite the chill and the damp, Lynn felt herself begin to sweat.

  One way or another, they both could die.

  Oh, God, please, Lynn prayed. Protect my baby. Protect us both. And Jenny too.

  “Rory!” Lynn tried again, sheer terror giving her voice volume. “Rory Elizabeth, do you hear me?”

  The rustling of branches as the wind blew through them was the only reply.

  “Rory Elizabeth, do you hear me?” The echo bounced back at her again and again. Mother-love overrode her sense of self-preservation. Lynn twisted, desperate to see her daughter better. As her weight shifted, the branches bearing it shifted too. Her stomach shot clear up into her throat as she dropped.

  “For God’s sake, don’t move!”

  The roar came from above, but Lynn was too busy holding on for dear life to note the source. Her butt and legs had fallen almost all the way through the fragile net. Only her death grip on the branches saved her—but the branches had bent now with her weight.

  Lynn had a scary feeling that there was nothing but gray sky at her back.

  One ankle was hooked over a branch approximately half as thick as the ones to which she clung. The other dangled in space.

  Lynn was afraid to breathe, much less move.

  “Just hang on!”

  This time Lynn looked up, moving her eyes rather than her head. What she saw gave her a glimmer of hope.

  Jess Feldman balanced like a tightrope walker on the ledge beside Jenny. A rope secured him to the top of the cliff. He had shed his poncho somewhere. Clad in a red flannel shirt and jeans, he was in the process of tying another rope around Jenny’s waist.

  Of course, there were plenty of hands topside to pull Jenny to safety. There were plenty of hands topside to pull herself and Rory up too—if Jess could get to them, and in time.

  He was trying. Lynn clung to that thought.

  From all indications Jenny had slid, rather than fallen, about twenty feet. The granite slab on which the group had been standing had apparently been an overhang. It had broken off even with the face of the cliff, then plowed a few feet down the mountain. Its underside was caught on a lip of granite much like the one on which Jenny had landed. Jenny was going to have to go up and over the flat slab of fallen rock to reach the safety of the summit.

  The slab was about fifty feet long by twenty feet wide, and it must have weighed tons. Lynn, Rory, Jenny, and Jess were directly in its path if it should become dislodged. If it didn’t crush them in passing, it would sweep them to their deaths. All except possibly Jess, who was tethered to the top of the cliff.

  Lynn felt cold all over again.

  Jess shouted something to someone on top. Owen, Lynn presumed, and the Adventure, Inc. crew. Moments later Lynn watched, transfixed, as Jenny came to her feet, drawn by the rope around her waist. Steadied by Jess, Jenny was pulled by inches up the vertical rock until she was just beyond the reach of Jess’s outstretched arms. Jess stood alone on the ledge as Jenny, head flung back so that her black hair hung down the back of her lime-green poncho, clung to the rope for all she was worth and was hauled upward at what seemed from Lynn’s perspective to be a snail’s pace.

  Jenny’s shoulder caught on the edge of the slab as she was pulled over it. The slab protruded about ten feet from the face of the cliff, and getting past the ragged edge looked tricky. Jenny cried out in apparent pain, pushing herself out from the rock with one hand, and then was up past the trouble spot. Dangling at the end of the rope, she inched across the smooth granite face with agonizing slowness. Seen from below, her feet bicycled in what appeared to be a frantic dance to defy death. Lynn realized that Jenny was scrambling to find footholds.

  The child was a third of the way to safety … halfway …

  With a frightening roar and a shower of rubble, the slab slipped sideways.

  Lynn cringed, ducking the debris that pelted her. A rock the size of a bowling ball bounced past her shoulder, causing her to cry out and almost lose her grip. A few inches to the left and it would have struck her. She would have been knocked from her perch; she would have been killed.

  She could still be killed. Her gaze fixed on the slab itself. If it fell …

  Time seemed to stop. Jenny froze in midair. Hanging motionless at the end of a rope that looked about as substantial as spider silk, she was as helpless in the face of disaster as Lynn or Rory below her.

  Lynn’s throat went dry. She realized that she was holding her breath.

  Please, God. Please. God.

  After what seemed like an eternity the slab stopped moving. It posed, precariously, its sharp nose caught on a narrow rock shelf.

  It looked about as secure as a cow on a glacier.

  Jenny was once again rising, swiftly now, being drawn up over the unstable shelf as if her life depended upon her unseen rescuers’ speed—which perhaps it did. This time her feet did not move. She hung motionless from the rope, her hands gripping it for all she was worth, her face tilted back so that she might see where she was going rather than where she could still end up.

  Where they could all end up.

  In a matter of minutes hands were reaching down to grab her, and she was lifted up and out of sight.

  Jenny was safe.

  Now for Rory—and herself.

  Lynn had been so caught up in watching Jenny’s drama that she had all but forgotten about Jess. Now she realized that he was on the move, rappeling down the side of the cliff toward her and Rory. She would insist that he send Rory up first, and then she would go. The slab could shift again at any moment—but she wouldn’t think about that.

  “Rory!” she called urgently. “Rory, hang on, help’s coming!”

  There was no answer. Glancing sideways, Lynn found that she had no better view of Rory than before. She could catch the merest glimpse of the bright pink poncho tangled in branches about six feet below her and to her right. Thankfully, Rory seemed to be unmoving.

  Thankfully, that is, unless she considered that perhaps Rory was not moving because she was badly hurt. Or unconscious. After all, they had fallen about fifty feet. Who knew what Rory might have hit before fetching up in the tree?

  Oh, God. Please.

  “Lynn! Lynn, are you hurt?”

  Lynn glanced up to find that Jess Feldman was almost directly above her and only eight feet or so away. He had descended very fast, she thought, noting that he wore gloves to protect his hands from the blue-and-yellow braided rope that was his—their—lifeline. He appeared almost to be walking down the cliff, his booted feet braced against the gray-shingled rock, the rope passing around his waist and between his legs in a kind of jury-rigged climber’s harness. More blue-and-yellow rope, maybe several hundred feet of it, was looped around his body from his shoulder across his chest to under the opposite armpit, much as a woman who feared being mugged might carry her shoulder bag.

  Lynn was so certain of the color of the rope because a dangling loop snaked past her, just beyond her reach.

  Lynn considered, and rejected, letting go of a branch to grab for the rope. Don’t panic now, she told herself. Just wait.

  “Damn it, woman, answer me: Are you hurt?” Jess was looking over his shoulder at her, his body twisted, his voice grim.

  “N-no. I don’t think so.” Lynn stared up at the tight, blue-jeaned butt that Rory and the other girls so admired, at the hatless tawny hair that was blowing up toward the precipice, at the tanned, handsome face serious now with concentration, and felt despair.

  He looked as if he belonged in an ad in a glossy magazine: the Marlboro Man as mountain climber.

  She and Rory needed a real hero, not a phony one.

  A sneeze exploded from her body out of nowhere, shaking her grip, shaking the tree, sending her plummeting another couple of inches closer to death
. Lynn gasped, holding on for dear life.

  “For God’s sake, stay still!”

  Jess shoved off from the side of the mountain. Riding the rope, he swooped down to land about a foot to the right of her tree.

  Lynn decided that a phony hero was better than no hero at all. Much better.

  “H-help,” she said faintly.

  “It’s all right. I’ll have you safe in a couple of minutes. Just don’t move.”

  The caution was unnecessary. Lynn had no intention of moving, if she could help it. The misting had stopped at last, but the small fir was as soaked as she was and the branches she clung to were growing increasingly slippery beneath her death grip.

  Her nose itched.

  The thought of sneezing again filled her with terror. Grimly, she willed herself think of something else.

  “Rory,” she said, her voice stronger. “Get her first. Please.”

  “I’ll get her, don’t worry.” He bunny-hopped across the rock toward her. The evergreen grew about fifteen feet out from the face of the cliff, and Lynn lay along its outermost branches. That put her some nine feet beyond his reach. Dangling as she was above a drop of approximately fifteen stories straight down, those nine feet might as well have been nine miles.

  “I think … I think Rory might be hurt.” The conversation was conducted at a near shout as Jess jockeyed for position at the base of the tree.

  “She’s alive; I saw her move.” His noncommittal answer told Lynn that he, too, suspected Rory was hurt.

  “I want you to rescue Rory first!”

  “I don’t give a damn what you want. You’re higher up than she is, which means I got to you first, so you get rescued first. If you’ll just shut up and do what I tell you, I’ll soon have you both safe.”

  “Rory—”

  “The longer you argue, the longer it is until I get to her.”

  That silenced Lynn.

  “How sturdy does that tree feel to you? Do you think it’ll support my weight as well as yours?”

  Lynn realized what he was thinking: that he could walk out along the tree trunk to reach her.

  “No!” she cried, clinging tighter as rising wind currents made the branches shake. Near though Jess was to her, if the fir uprooted now there was no way he could catch her before she plunged to the ground. For Lynn, who weighed about 110 pounds, the tree was a precarious perch. Add Jess’s approximately 170 pounds to the equation, and Lynn feared the probable result.