The Timeless Love Romance Collection

by Dianne Christner

  “Sure. Under a ridge, sorta outta the snow. Although it’s comin’ down so hard in all directions that they might as well be in the North Pole.”

  Justin groaned. “What’d ya do, leave ’em there as bear bait?”

  “Mr. Parker fell and hit his head on the rocks, and that other dame slipped on a ridge. I was a fool to bring ’em up here. I just wanted to show Cynthia …” Frankie’s voice trailed off into another bawl. “So I decided it was better to go and get help than stick around and let us all freeze.”

  “Lia’s hurt?” Justin bristled again. “If anything happens to that gal, Frankie, or her friends, I swear I’ll …” He clenched his jaw. “You just better pray like the dickens that everybody’s okay when we find ’em.”

  He shook the snow from his hair and started to pull Frankie toward the trail when he suddenly stopped, glancing up through the woods. “Say, if you were goin’ to get help, then why’d you come this way and not toward the camp?” He pointed. “Camp’s over that way. This trail leads down to the road, and it’s a doggone lot farther away than the camp.” He narrowed his eyes. “Were you runnin’ out on ’em like that fool Charlie?”

  Frankie flinched, blinking faster. “N–naw. I swear. I thought I’d … I’d flag down a car or somethin’.”

  “In this storm?” Justin narrowed his eyes. “There are shelters down at the ponds by the road. You knew that, didn’t you? You could dry yourself off and weather out the storm then stick out your thumb and hitchhike back to Ohio. Vanished. Eaten by a mountain lion. Everybody’d think you’re a martyr—a hero.”

  Frankie’s eyes darted back and forth away from Justin. “What … what ponds? What are you talkin’ about?” His Adam’s apple bobbed nervously.

  For a split second Justin felt like throwing Frankie White headfirst down the mountain. His gut churned, not sure what to believe. Justin stood there, hands on his hips, feeling his arms and shoulders clamp tight with anger.

  And then he shoved Frankie back toward the mountain trail, nearly knocking him down. “Git on up there, Frankie, and show me where they are before I knock your block off.”

  Frankie trotted ahead through the snow-sodden underbrush, sniffling. “I’ll show ya. I swear, I left ’em in the best place I could. They’re gonna be all right.”

  “They’d better be.” Justin started forward like a bull, steam practically snorting from his nostrils.

  Then he jerked Frankie to a stop. “And gimme those doggone stupid shoes a yours.”

  “What?” Frankie wiped his tear-streaked cheek.

  “Your shoes. Give ’em to me.” Justin bent down and started to unlace his boots.

  “You ain’t gonna …” Frankie’s eyes widened, and his breath shuddered. “Naw. I ain’t takin’ ’em off.”

  Justin shook a finger in Frankie’s face, losing patience. “You get those fool things off in ten seconds or I’ll pound you into next week, hear me?” he bellowed. “And quit stallin’ ’cause we ain’t got no time. And put this on. You’re gonna catch pneumonia out here dressed like this.” He shrugged off his backpack and threw his coat at Frankie. “Put it on. Now. You squeak so much as a word and I’ll deck you flat out. And I ain’t haulin’ your sorry tail down the mountain. So hurry up.”

  Frankie hastily grabbed the coat and stuck his arms through, double time, not daring to protest as Justin tugged off his boots and threw them at Frankie.

  Justin stuck his feet into Frankie’s own cracked, river-sodden shoes. One broken sole flapping.

  When they reached the top of the trail, snow poured down so hard they could barely see. The temperature had dropped, and a thick layer of icy white crust, beaded like glass pellets, coated the pine boughs and rocks.

  Justin dug in his bag and pulled out an army surplus flashlight—cold, cylindrical metal—and flipped on the weak beam. His toes had grown numb stuffed into Frankie’s too small, battered shoes, ice leaking through the broken sole. Wind cut through his wool shirt, stinging his arms and shoulders.

  They mounted a rocky clearing, the boulders slippery with snow, and struggled through the jagged openings to a wide field. Low clouds boiled overhead in a soupy fog. Justin held on to a group of boulders with one hand and his hat and flashlight with the other arm, trying to keep his balance in the thickening storm—and slowly losing hope that he’d find the others alive.

  “We came up here to pick bellflowers and look for the gold.” Frankie sniffled back a runny nose, gusts nearly snatching the words out of his mouth. His lips were ringed with purple, and he shivered even under Justin’s thick coat. “Cynthia’s uncle said the letter might be real, and he thinks Jeremiah Wilde is a relative of some lawyer named Kelly—who swears he saw the gold with his own eyes.”

  “A lawyer.” Justin’s eyebrows made an angry line. “You believed a stinkin’ lawyer? I wouldn’t trust one farther than I could throw him.”

  “I dunno. It sounded legit.” Frankie sniffled and wiped his nose with the back of his hand. “But we shouldn’ta come up here like this. I know it now.”

  Justin was too tired and cold to respond with an insult, although several raced to the surface of his cold-leaden brain. “Where’d you go from here?”

  “Behind the falls.” Frankie pointed a trembling finger. “Mr. Parker got some swell pictures, too, and we were about to head back when the storm started brewing. The rocks got slippery, and …” He swallowed hard, looking like he might cry again. “I left everybody under a ledge and sorta outta the snow. Over this way.”

  Frankie hobbled through the snowy meadow, Justin’s heavy winter boots sticking in the white muck. He linked arms with Justin to brace himself against the heavy gusts.

  Frankie said something in low tones, his face turned down as if ashamed, but the wind snatched it.

  “Huh?” Justin maneuvered around a boulder, trying to keep the snow out of his pant legs and bare ankles. He’d stripped off his wool socks, too, to warm up Frankie’s frozen feet. If he got frostbite, he’d let Frankie work to pay off his medical bills, the stinker.

  “I said, ‘How’d ya know about my ma?’” Frankie turned to him.

  “What?” Justin screwed up his face, wiping sleet from his brow and eyes with the back of his wrist. “You lost your marbles, Frankie? I don’t know the first thing about your ma.”

  “No, I mean what you said the other night in the barracks.” His lip trembled. “About somebody back home prayin’ for me.”

  A blast of wind hit hard, kicking up a wall of snow, and both boys turned to cover their faces. When Frankie got his breath back, shaking the snow from his hair and finding another solid step through the thick layer of white, he sniffled again. “My ma’s real into all that God stuff, ya know. Says He’s watchin’ out for us, and all this crazy mess about Jesus dyin’ on the cross.”

  His words tumbled over themselves, fast as snowflakes. “I don’t believe a word of it. I mean, what’s a good God gotta do with me, first of all, the biggest dunce you ever seen—and second, why’d He let my pa get some kinda crazy disease?” His voice choked with emotion. “I watched him die, Fairbanks. He was a good man. And now my brother’s got the same thing. Docs say it’s some kinda genetic thing, and ain’t no cure. All of us outta work. No jobs, no nothin’. Life is rotten, you know? I say there’s no God up there who’d let all this happen to us, and if there is, I sure don’t want nothin’ to do with Him. My ma’s a fool.” He drew in a shuddering breath. “But how’d you know she was prayin’ for me? Tell me that.”

  “You watch your mouth about God.” Justin boiled up, raising his voice over the howl of wind through the rocks. “And your ma, too. Show some respect for once in your life. Maybe your ma’s right, and you’re the one who’s a fool. After all, your own way hasn’t done ya so swell, has it?”

  Frankie didn’t answer, pushing his way between some crystallized ferns. His breath smoky in the downpour.

  “Has it?” Justin rattled Frankie’s shoulder, softening his voice just a touch.
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  “I reckon not.” Frankie’s words carried a note of despair, like the barren sky over a whitening field.

  “And I don’t know the first thing about your ma prayin’ for you. I was just guessin’, is all. Seems like so many folks out there are runnin’ from the very thing that’ll straighten out the mess they’ve made. Drinkin’ themselves to death to forget, or laughin’ to cover the pain. But that road’ll kill ya.” Justin blinked back snowflakes. “You’ll hurt other people, too—just like I did.”

  He braced his arm against Frankie’s shoulder as they came to a low ridge, stepping carefully to keep from turning an ankle. “It ain’t too late to straighten your life out, Frankie. Go to chapel and listen to what the old man says. Read the Bible your ma’s always talkin’ about. Shoot, read mine if ya want. But do somethin’ to get right with God. Before you mess up worse than ya already have.”

  Frankie didn’t answer for a long time, bending against the wind and stepping carefully. When he did speak, his voice sounded choked again. “You’re pretty swell, Fairbanks. Ya know that?”

  Justin lifted his head but didn’t reply. Thinking of Reverend Summers’s battered hand resting on his head amid the wreckage. The eyes that held love and pain, bright as stars, until their life ebbed away. Leaving them in a horrible, cold stare. Lashes still half open.

  “No I ain’t,” Justin grunted. “Ain’t nothin’ swell about me. All I’ve done with my life ’til now is screw things up. You don’t got any idea the things I’ve done.”

  “Don’t matter. You’re still as swell as can be.” Frankie sniffled. “I hope I can be … well, like you one day.”

  Justin felt his throat contort so tightly he could hardly breathe. A sudden rush of emotion stung his eyes, and for a second he couldn’t see.

  “Aw, knock it off, bonehead,” he growled, turning away and blinking faster. “You’re full of it.”

  And then he raised his hand to Frankie’s head in an unexpected tender gesture, ruffling his windblown hair. Resting it there for a second as if in blessing.

  “Over here!” Frankie called, pointing to a snowy decline clogged with boulders. Half hidden between a thickly forested clump of pines. “I brought ’em down this way.”

  Frankie offered his arm, and Justin grasped it, nearly losing his footing on the slippery, snow-coated stones. “Is this where Mr. Parker fell?” he gasped, catching himself on a pine limb and hauling himself upright. Scrambling for footing on the spongy, frozen ground.

  “Yeah. It’s real rough. Steep, too.”

  Justin’s pack shifted, and the flashlight slipped out of his hand, dropping and rolling between the rocks. He choked back one of the old curses that used to fly from his lips. He hopped two boulders and followed its faint beam down through a clump of ice-glassed ferns, where it finally wedged itself against a stone. Justin got down on his knees and strained to reach it, but his arm still came up short.

  “I can’t believe it,” Justin snapped, slapping his thigh. “Of all the times to lose a light! I don’t got another one, and that battery ain’t gonna last long in the cold.”

  “Let me help,” sniffled Frankie. “I’ll get it for ya.” He crawled around the other boulder and stuck his bony arm through, grunting with effort. He poked a stick through the crack, managing only to push the flashlight farther into the rocks.

  Justin hollered at him to stop and finally threw down his pack in disgust. “We’re sunk without that light, Frankie!” he bellowed, kneeling on the cold ground. “We gotta think of somethin’.”

  “A shovel?” Frankie blabbered through chattering lips.

  Bone-tired and cold, soaked to the skin, Justin felt like decking Frankie again. “Something I got in the pack, genius.”

  He looked up at the cobalt sky, black trees framing a jagged circle over their heads. Gray flakes flitted across his vision and into his lashes as he tried to jog his brain to think, think.

  “Pray,” Justin finally said. “You’d better get down on your knees right now and pray that we can get that light, or we’ll be stuck up here who knows how long. No tellin’ when this snow’s gonna stop.”

  “Me? Pray?” Frankie’s voice came out hesitant and squeaky. “I ain’t never really prayed before, but if ya think it’ll do any good, I can try. What do I say? Do I need to cross myself or somethin’?”

  “Just pray to God, Frankie.” Justin felt desperate, his last hope shredding like the tiny filaments inside the metal flashlight tube. “Tell Him we need that light. I’m gonna pray, too, hear me?”

  “I’ll do it. I’ll do it.” Frankie affected a pious posture on one knee, hands folded together. Eyes closed, lips moving. “A’ight.” He shifted back up to his feet and brushed off his muddy pants. “I told Him. Don’t know as He’s gonna answer me though. Most of the time I use Jesus’ name it’s for a swear word, and I don’t reckon He likes that too much.”

  “Well, quit doin’ it then.” Justin felt his patience slip another notch. “And I don’t care who He answers so long as we get that light.”

  Justin scooted around to the other side of the massive boulder and tried to heave it off, but it didn’t budge. Its outline too dark to follow in murky nightfall. “Get up here and help me, will ya?”

  Frankie scrambled up beside him, and they pushed at the rock, grunting and straining. Nothing moved, save a few clods of dirt and rock that clattered down the ridge.

  “Not enough,” Justin grunted, feeling blind as blackness settled, thick as tar. He had to blink to make sure his eyes were still seeing. The only light came from a dull overhead glow from the blustery sky, faintest gray, and the weak glimmer of light from the flashlight beam shadowed against leaves under the rocks.

  When Justin moved a hand in front of his face, he saw nothing. He had no idea how big the boulder was, or how far it stretched to the other side.

  “God, gimme that light,” he pleaded under his breath, worried for the first time that he and Frankie might catch hypothermia before they could even get to the others. His feet were freezing in Frankie’s flimsy shoes, and he couldn’t seem to stop shivering. He’d lost most of the feeling in his fingers long ago, and when he tried to move a stone out of the way, he fumbled and dropped it down through the hole, clogging it even more.

  “C’mon, Frankie. Help me.” He put his back and shoulders into the boulder, grunting and shouting, and Frankie joined in on the other side.

  “This ain’t movin’, Fairbanks! I can’t even get my arms around it.”

  “Push, or I’ll knock you in the jaw!”

  And then Justin felt the boulder shift slightly. Rolling back just enough to wedge his hand in and nearly reach the light. His fingers stretched black shadows across the bumpy earth in the bright beam but still came up short.

  “Here. Lemme try.” Frankie squeezed in close.

  “You?” Justin spoke without thinking, not pulling his arm out.

  “Sure, why not? We prayed, didn’t we? Hurry up, Fairbanks. You’re freezing. Move it.”

  Justin hesitated then backed away from the crack. Oh Jesus, have mercy, he thought wryly, licking his stinging lips, which started to crack with cold.

  Once, and nothing. Twice. Frankie dug sideways, straining, and suddenly Justin’s eyes dazzled with light. The flashlight lay there in Frankie’s upturned palm, gleaming red through cold fingers.

  Justin hollered and slapped his shoulder then threw his arm around him in an awkward hug.

  Just as an eerie shout rose through the trees, wispy and faraway as a coyote song.

  Justin shushed Frankie. “You hear that?”

  They held their breath as the sound came again through the soft silence of falling snow. The low creak of pines bending under the weight of sleet and ice.

  A cry for help.

  Justin snatched up his backpack and scrambled across the rocks, Frankie holding out the flashlight like the glow of a skinny lighthouse. Its weak beam bobbing across snow and boulders in a blessed golden circle.

&nb
sp; Chapter 8

  Frankie gestured through the trees, his cheeks red from cold in the flashlight’s pale glow. They ducked under pine boughs, powder falling from the needles, and scrambled over boulders studded with frozen moss.

  When Justin turned his head he heard a tremulous rushing—the musical roar of water over stones, and its echo against rock—which he figured must be the waterfall Frankie spoke of. On a cloudless day, with streams of blue bellflowers and a waterfall crashing in a thousand streams of crystal, it’d be a swell place for photos.

  But now the rocks hung craggy and dark, slippery with wet snow. In the distance, Justin heard the wail of a bobcat—its eerie scream high and mournful, deceptively vulnerable.

  He’d seen bobcats slink through the trees in the Kentucky forests like black velvet, rippling and disappearing and barely rustling leaves. A blink to check the eyes, and the shadow had vanished. But when one big she-cat tried to carry off their hound Mutt, who’d been guarding Beanie, it took both Justin and a hired farm hand to beat it off with rifle stocks and fence planks. And not before it took a sizeable chunk out of Mutt’s flank and nearly killed her with jagged puncture wounds.

  If that was a Kentucky bobcat, Justin couldn’t imagine the size of one grown in the vast forests of the Rockies, raised on a diet of muscular pronghorn antelope and furry-eared mule deer.

  “What if Mr. Parker’s dead?” Frankie quivered, tucking his chin tighter into Justin’s wool coat as he hugged himself to keep out the cold. “What if we’re too late? I’ll die, Fairbanks. I swear I will.”

  “Quit talkin’ about dying. We’re almost there.” Justin’s voice came out snappish, but his heart quivered a moment, too, wondering if an unconscious man, bleeding from a head injury, could make it long in this breath-snatching cold.