It had hit Wes pretty hard, too, when he’d first seen it. It had been battered to bits against the rocks, and he couldn’t help but wonder how her sister’s body could have withstood the same treatment. He figured she was probably wondering the same thing about now.
Flyte took his map and went to join the soldiers who had arrived, so Wes walked over to Selene, stood beside her.
“I just keep seeing it, feeling it in my mind,” she said softly. “Mel being lifted by the water, then smashed down against the rocks, lifted and smashed, over and over. Plunged beneath the waves and held down, pummeled some more, her lungs starving until she finally broke the surface and…” She gasped out loud, clutching her chest and sucking in all the air she could hold.
Wes grabbed her shoulders in a firm grip. “Easy, take it easy.”
Flyte looked up from where he was, spoke quickly to the men and hurried to join Wes and Selene at the water’s edge.
Straightening, Selene stared hard at Wes, though he got the feeling she wasn’t really seeing him. She said, “She’s alive. It’s hot. God, it’s so hot, and she’s tired. And she’s hurting. Her head. Her back. One foot is sore. There’s this weight…on her back, and her throat is dry and…” Selene wiped imaginary sweat from her forehead. “She’s with Alex. Yes.” Then finally she focused. The distant look left her eyes, and she looked from Wes to Flyte and back again. “I think the call was legitimate,” she said finally. “I think my sister is walking through the desert right now with Alex.”
“Well, there’s no military base and there’s no store on the map, so there’s no way for us to tell where to begin looking for them,” Flyte said.
“There’s got to be a mistake,” Wes said. “Look, Flyte, you said yourself how good Alex was, how sharp. If he said he was calling from a store, then he was. Maybe it’s not on the map, but it’s there. It has to be. We find that little store they made that call from, and we go due west, just as Alex said he was going to do.”
“The store had to be within walking distance from here,” Selene said, nodding. “Is there anything on the map? Anything at all? A town, or even a crossroads?”
Flyte shook his head. “No town. But there are only a couple of paved roads within any reasonable distance. Not the one he gave on the phone. That’s fifty miles south. Still, let’s check them out, drive over them, see if we can find this store that didn’t make the map. I can’t think of a better idea than that right now. Can you?”
Wes shook his head, and Selene did, as well.
“Then that’s the plan,” Flyte said. “I’ll have the troops head into the desert to search for signs of them while we look for the store.”
Mel wasn’t walking so much as dragging her feet along the ground, weight on the left, pull the right, get it underneath, shift the weight, drag the left. Her legs were heavy, leaden, and one foot was still sore from the blisters she’d developed while wearing feedsack wrappings for shoes. Her entire body was wet. Every time she stopped for a drink of water, she felt she was only refilling her sweat ducts so they could keep soaking her. Her head pounded mercilessly, and it was maddening to keep fighting the urge to pull off her clothes in deference to the heat. She kept telling herself it would be hotter without them, but her body didn’t really believe that. She’d given up reapplying sunblock hours ago. It swam off her skin as fast as she rubbed it on. Besides, she didn’t want to move anything more than was absolutely necessary.
“Here. Over here,” Alex said. His voice was odd, kind of hoarse as if he had a bad cold. He took her arm gently, urging her to the left, where a giant prickly cactus created a pool of shade on the parched ground. The shady spot was small. Alex made her sit down there, then took a spot beside her, but he wasn’t shaded at all. He took her backpack off for her, then his own, and then he brought out the canteens, handing one to her and tipping the other to his own mouth.
She took off her sunglasses and bathed her nose in cool water. The shades kept sliding down, because of the sweat, and she kept pushing them back up until the friction had worn sore places on either side of her nose. It hurt. Everything hurt.
“I don’t understand, Alex. We’ve been walking due west for hours. We have to have come fifteen miles by now.”
He twisted his wrist to look at his watch, then remembered he’d taken it off. She knew why. It had gotten too hot for him to bear having the metal touching his skin. Hers was in her pocket for the same reason. He pulled the watch from his pocket, looked at it. “It’s been almost six hours. Even crawling, we’d have been there by now.”
“Do you think we got off course?”
He looked at her, and she could tell he had an idea but didn’t want to say it.
“What, Alex? Come on, just tell me.”
He sighed. “I don’t think there is any military base. I think our friend at the store lied through his teeth.”
Her heart sank to somewhere near the region of her stomach. “But why?”
“I don’t know.” He shook his head slowly. “Things have been hitting me for the past hour. Maybe my brain had to get baked before it started working properly, Mel, but didn’t it seem to you that all the stuff in that shop was awfully new? I mean, for an old rundown place like that, so far off the beaten track, shouldn’t the stuff have been dusty? Even a little out of date?”
She blinked her eyes. They felt gritty. “The water was rusty. As if…it hadn’t been run in a long time. And the cooler, the one with the bottled water and soft drinks…looked brand new.”
Alex heaved a deep sigh. “I’m sorry. I should have seen it. I mean, come on, it’s a pretty unlikely coincidence that we just happened to wander into the one place where Katerina and Thomas had been. And I fell for it like a rookie. That old man sent us exactly where he wanted us to go.”
“He…sent us out here to die, didn’t he?”
“Maybe. We’re not gonna oblige him. There’s no point in continuing. We need to think about turning back, Mel.”
She closed her eyes; the very thought of hiking another six hours back the way they had come was too painful to bear. She tried to hold her emotions in check, but they came bubbling out anyway. A sob broke first and her shoulders quaked and her breath hitched in her throat.
“Don’t cry,” Alex whispered, sliding his arms around her shoulders, pulling her close to his chest. “You’re wasting water.”
She tried to laugh, but it hurt too much. “We aren’t going to make it back, are we?”
“Sure we are.”
“We don’t have enough water, Alex. You know that as well as I do. We don’t have enough water.”
“All that means, honey, is that we’ll be damn thirsty for the last few miles. But we will make it.”
She glanced up at the sky. “Maybe. Maybe if we wait until the sun goes down, walk during the night when it’s cool.”
“You’re reading my mind.”
She nodded. “How long till sundown?”
“Two hours, two and a half.”
“We can’t stay here. We need to find a better place to rest. We’ll just bake if we stay here.”
Nodding, Alex got to his feet, looking around. “There are some boulders and a few scrub trees over there.”
“Any shade?”
“I’ll let you know when we get there. Come on.” He reached down a hand. She took it and let him pull her to her feet, every muscle in her body screaming in protest. She picked up the backpack, which she was beginning to hate with a passion that was utterly wasted on inanimate objects, and slung it over her shoulder. She swore she was getting sunburned right through her clothes.
“Lead the way,” she said.
Alex shouldered his pack and started off. When they reached the spot, about two hundred grueling yards away, he sighed audibly. “I’m sorry. This is no shadier than where we were before.”
“No,” she said, looking around. “But it will be. Take off your pack, Alex. Rest a minute while I think about this.” He did, setting his pack aside,
watching her intently. Mel looked at what she had to work with. There were three boulders and two skinny, leafless trees. The boulders had their backs to the sun and cast a modicum of shade in front of each of them, but they were a few feet apart, so the fiery sun blasted in between them like a flame thrower.
“How far apart would you say the two closest rocks are at the top?” she asked Alex.
“I don’t know. Four, five feet?”
“Can you break that dead tree off, do you think? As close to the base as possible?”
Alex nodded. “Maybe. I think so. Do you have some kind of a plan?”
“Yeah. Get me that tree. Snap off the branches.”
Alex dug the pocket knife out of his pocket. He’d added it to their purchases at the store and wondered aloud if he would ever have call to use it. “I wonder if one of the blades has saw teeth.” He went to the tree, knelt at its base, took hold with both hands and bent it.
The tree was only about two inches in diameter, but that was still tough to break with your bare hands, Mel thought. Yet she heard the cracking sounds that told her Alex was succeeding. She would have given her right arm for a small chain saw.
She left him to his work and took off her backpack, tossing it down, then she went to his and removed the sleeping bag, unrolling it, unzipping it. She looked around for scattered rocks, smaller ones, gathering them up into two piles, one in front of each boulder. Then she glanced back at Alex.
The tree had broken off except for some stringy, stubborn bits in the center that he was currently sawing at with the pocketknife. They finally gave way, and he took off his hat to swipe the sweat from his forehead, then got to his feet and snapped off the small dry branches. He piled the refuse in the center of the area, then brought the stripped-down tree over to her.
“Over here,” she said, moving to the first boulder. “I need you to boost me up on top. Then hand up the tree. Okay? I’m gonna make us a curtain.”
He looked at the boulder, then at her. “It’s too hot up there. You’ll burn your hands.”
“It’ll be fine.”
“No. I’ll go.”
“I can’t boost you up, Alex, you’re too big.”
“Try.”
Sighing, she bent down and laced her fingers together.
“Not like that. Drop down on one knee. Pretend you’re about to propose marriage.”
“Oh, I get it. You’ll be so eager to escape me that you’ll fly up onto the boulder, right?”
He made a face. She dropped down on one knee, and he used the other as a step stool to boost himself onto the boulder. He sucked air through his teeth when he got to the top on all fours, and Mel knew his palms must be burning. He scrambled to his feet as fast as possible. “Okay, toss me up our curtain rod.”
She did. He laid the pole across the two boulders, skinny end toward him and a good foot of it on the rock, with less of the other end balanced on the other boulder. “Now how do you suggest we keep it here?” he asked.
“I thought we could pile rocks around and over each end. Here.” She picked up some of the stones she’d gathered, reaching up to him. Alex had to kneel on the sizzling-hot boulder to reach them, but he did it, then piled them carefully, until the pole was fairly secure. Then he jumped down, and they repeated the entire process on the other boulder.
Finally she handed him up the sleeping bag. He used the ties attached to one end of the sleeping bag to tie it to the pole. The other end had no ties, so he weighted it to the top of the boulder with a few of the rocks.
“Good thinking,” Mel called, nodding approval.
Alex jumped down. A large pool of shade spread over the ground now. “You’re one smart woman, you know that, Mel?”
She didn’t answer. She wasn’t smart. She’d done two years at a community college, and she worked at her mom’s saloon. She didn’t know what wine went with what meat, and she didn’t know why anyone would want or need more than one fork to eat their dinner. She didn’t know about foreign policy or opera or designer clothes or society rules. What’s more, she didn’t want to.
Sighing, she dragged her backpack closer. Then she lay down in the shady area, using it as a pillow.
Alex followed suit, stretching out beside her. “You want a drink?” he asked.
“Yes, desperately, but maybe we should save it.”
“We won’t be so thirsty at night. Go ahead.” He managed to get the canteen off his backpack without getting up, removed the cap and held it out to her. She took a drink, fighting with herself and her need to gulp, just sipping, letting it soak into her lips and mouth and tongue before swallowing the precious fluid. Then she handed it back to him.
He took a small drink, too, then capped it and set it down.
“I love water,” she said. “I don’t know if I ever knew how much until right now. I think I preferred nearly drowning in the river to baking slowly in the heat.”
“Yeah, me, too. Almost makes me wish I didn’t live in a condo, so I could have my own pool.”
She lifted her brows and turned her head sideways on her makeshift pillow to study him in profile. “You live in an apartment?”
“Mmm-hmm. You sound surprised.”
“I am. I guess I expected you to live in someplace like…like where we were staying. Lap of luxury.”
“Well, it’s a nice condo.”
“But there’s no pool?”
“There’s a pool. A nice pool. Just not my own.”
“Mm.” She relaxed a little. The heat was drugging. “We have a pond. It’s down the hill behind the house. You follow this path that meanders through a little copse of woods. Cool and shady woods. Green and moist all the time. The path leads to a small clearing, with this wild pond right in the middle of it.” She sighed. “The water is so clear you can watch the fish swim by. The deer come out to drink just at dusk. They like the grass there, cause it’s always new and tender. We mow it a few times a year to keep it from going to weed. If you get there before them and sit real quiet, you can watch them come out to graze and sip the cool water.”
“No chlorine smell, I’ll bet. No fellow tenants. No filter pump running to disturb the peace and quiet with its hum.”
“The only things humming are the bees. And there are crickets whirring. And birds singing. Frogs croaking real deep just before dark. The fish jumping up to nab a passing mosquito and then splashing back into the water again. There’s nothing like a wild pond in the dead of night. It’s like something mystical. A whole world comes to life out there when the sun goes down.”
His voice was slower, softer when he spoke again. “I want to go there with you, Mel. As soon as we get out of this mess. I want to see your magic pond.”
“Maybe go for a swim?”
“So long as it won’t bother the bullfrogs.”
She smiled very softly, thinking about taking him there, to her favorite spot. Sharing it with him. She was thinking of slipping into that cool, clear water with Alex Stone when she fell asleep.
They found a building. It was a weathered, unpainted shack with a red gas pump in the front. And it was empty. Abandoned, but according to Wes and Mick Flyte, there were signs someone had been there recently. The dust on the shelves had been disturbed, as if items had been stacked on them and then removed again.
Selene knew it had been occupied, too, but her methods were less mundane. She felt the energy. “My sister has been here. Right here, in this building. I can still feel her.”
“There was food, too,” Wes said. “Can’t you smell that? Some kind of meat. Ham, maybe a sandwich.”
“There’s water on the floor here, and a big square shape in the dust.” Wes went to the back door, stepped out and came back in again. “Tire tracks out back,” he said. “And boot tracks, lots of them. A number of men made several trips in and out of this building today.”
Flyte shook his head. “So if this is where Alex called from, it was a setup. Someone here fed them, probably sold them supplies, told
them to give me a location of fifty miles away and sent them out into the desert toward some nonexistent military base. Why?”
“So they would die out there?” Selene asked.
“No. I think they went to far too much trouble for something as simple as that,” Wes said. “If they wanted them dead, why not just kill them here? They must have spotted them coming this way across the desert. They must have known this was the only building in the area and acted fast to make it look real. They wanted them out in that desert for a reason. We just don’t know what it is yet.”
“I’d say it would be best for us to find them before that reason makes itself apparent,” Mick Flyte said, yanking his phone from his pocket and punching buttons. “To hell with all this tiptoeing around. I’m going to get some choppers out here and see if we can find them before it’s too late.”
Chapter 11
W hen Alex woke some time later, it was full dark. The darkest night he could imagine. He was lying on his side, with his arms wrapped around Mel and her body spooned so tightly with his that it was tough to tell where he ended and she began. The only parts of him that were warm were the parts that were touching her. His back was colder than midnight.
Mel rolled completely over, so she was facing him. She tucked her face against his neck and burrowed closer, and he automatically tightened his arms around her when she settled into comfort. He thought that was what she’d been doing for however long they’d been sleeping here—snuggling one side against him, then turning to warm the other side. God, he loved holding her this way, being this close to her. If she only knew how he felt whenever he touched her or looked at her, she would—
She lifted her chin, and her eyes blinked open, meeting his, still dazed with sleep. She laid her lips against his, and he knew she was only partly awake, but he really didn’t care. He wanted to kiss her, needed to kiss her. He slid his hand up her back to cup her head, so he could cradle it and move it just so, and he moved his lips over hers, teasing them open. When they parted, he kissed her harder, deeper, seeking and taking all she would let him, and wanting more. And when she responded, his entire body came alive. It was a hungry kiss. It held all the heat the sun had baked into him throughout the day. He kissed her with his entire being, every part of him. His legs rubbed over hers, his hips pressed to hers, and his torso melded with hers while his arms held her close and his fingers tangled in her hair and his mouth explored. She was meeting and reacting to everything he did, coming awake and seeming to catch fire. Her body strained against his, her hands held him to her, and her mouth opened wide to receive him.
Secrets and Lies Page 14
