“Frank, Mr. Montvale passed away suddenly just over a week ago, and Devon and I are pretty torn up about it, as I guess you can imagine.”
Don’t ask for details, asshole, or I will slam my fist right into your windpipe – once I find a box to stand on, anyway.
Country Boy’s face fell, and I felt like shit for doubting him. “Well, that’s a damn shame – Mr. Montvale was a fine man and no mistake.” He shook his head as he slammed the SUV’s tailgate shut. “I guess the Lord comes for each of us in his own good time, but you’d think he’d let the decent folks stay a little longer, y’know?”
Devon surprised me by pulling himself together, shaking his shoulders free of dark thoughts, and turning to Frank with a smile that was forced but brave. “Adams, it’s my understanding Jeff Simmons helped you get the cabin ready – doesn’t Sonny Thorson usually assist you with that sort of thing?”
Frank nodded, and what was that naughty twinkle in his eye all about?
“Well, that he does, Mr. Killane, but when Sonny heard it was you coming up here today … well, I guess even after all these years, he’s still sore about that business with Darla, so it might be that he called you a name or two or three, and I ended up getting Jeff to help me with the cabin.”
Ooh, I had to hear more about this …
“So, big guy, this Darla was one of your cowgirl conquests, huh? Back in the days of long ago?” Because yes, I reserved the right, no matter how unreasonable, to be jealous of everything with two X chromosomes that had ever touched my guy, so there.
Devon’s smile turned wicked. “Back in the days when I was sixteen, and full of far more hormones than I had any idea what to do with – and as it happens, Darla was a friendly round girl who was more than happy to teach me just what I could do with those hormones.”
I rolled an eye at Frank. “So more than twenty years later, this guy Sonny is still all pissed and whiny about losing out to the better man?”
Frank chuckled. “Don’t hold it against him, Miss Ashley – Sonny is a pretty good fella about most things, he just has a way of hanging onto a grudge until long after everybody else has forgotten what all the fuss was about. Not to mention it ain’t his fault that he thought way more of Darla than she did of him, if, ah, you know what I mean …”
“She was kinda slutty, huh?”
The old guy burst out laughing, while Devon did a hilarious job of trying and failing to paste an offended look on his face. He settled for a charming grin that must have persuaded more than a few country girls to drop their Levis.
“I would prefer to describe Darla as … generous with her affections. She certainly taught me a few things that you seem to quite like, my lovely and passionate Ashley.”
Then both of those bastards laughed like devils, while I simultaneously blushed brick red and wondered what the penalty was in Montana for murdering billionaires and smartass cowboys.
I settled for not killing anybody on that particular day, and instead climbed behind the wheel of the SUV. The keys were in the ignition, I fired that baby up, and I eyed the half-hearted excuse for a dirt road – topped with an indifferent spattering of gravel – that left the parking area and snaked off into the forest.
The deep, dark forest …
Devon levered himself up into the shotgun seat, while I decided to delay things by pestering Frank for directions to the cabin, even though he’d given me a detailed play-by-play of how to get there when I’d talked to him on the phone a couple of days before. Hey, a triceratops could have eaten the road since then, right?
Cowboy Frank put on his best ‘let’s indulge the nervous round gal from the big city’ smile. “It’s just as I said on the phone, seein’ as how the cabin hasn’t moved – you follow this road straight on for maybe ten miles, ‘til you come out of the trees and hit the county highway. Then you turn right, head that way for another thirty miles …”
He went on like that for another minute or two, detailing turns at old barns and shot-up road signs that might or might not still be there, places where we’d have to ford creeks like ungodly heathen barbarians, and six miles that way and turn left there, and this or that road might be washed out but probably not, while my brain zoned out in an anti-rural panic.
Frank caught me looking at the GPS unit mounted on the SUV’s dash. “Like I’m sure you know, that thing’ll only pick up a spotty, in-and-out kinda signal up here, but take that as a good sign – in my experience, the best places a person can be ain’t never on a map, and satellites can’t see ‘em.”
“Ashley?”
I turned to Devon, who’d slid his seat all the way back and was trying to get his long legs arranged in something like comfort.
“Ashley, I feel I must point out that I have been to this cabin many times before with Uncle Sheridan, and I will be able to direct you if necessary.”
I stuck my tongue out at him, and his chuckle said he was on his way back to me. Well, now maybe the country wasn’t such a bad place after all, if it helped my guy find himself again – although I still caught myself pulling my iPhone out and holding it close for comfort, because no way was I ready to trust these trackless forsaken wilds, not yet.
Frank smiled like a patient dad. “And you know you won’t be getting any bars on that, right? Nearest cell tower is in the next county, and these mountains would block the signal anyway.”
No phone? That settled it – we were going to die out here, and vultures would pick our bones clean.
“Now, I can tell you that you’ll likely be able to get online out at the cabin – when we went to get the place fixed up for you, Jeff set it up with some satellite internet gear, and he said reception in that valley runs fair to decent.”
Frank’s relaxed smile said he didn’t consider it a big issue whether or not I would be able to access the precious life’s blood of the internet, but I heaved a big sigh of relief. Maybe I would survive being stuck in the back end of beyond for a few days after all.
If it weren’t for the bears …
“Sir, I know I’m probably worrying about nothing, but, well … aren’t there bears out here? Like, you know, giant slavering grizzly bears that will gobble us down like we’re potato chips?”
Frank shook his head, laughed right down into his belly, and then peered past me at Devon. “This is a right sweet little woman you’ve got here, Mr. Killane, but she’s just not a country sort of gal, is she?”
Devon’s eyes were half-closed, but his ears were open, and his smile … well, I couldn’t quite read that cryptic smile. “Adams, my Ashley is full of surprises, and I rather think she might yet learn to take to the wilds.”
Don’t hold your breath, big fella. “So, Frank – bears, or not?”
Before the old cowboy could say a word, Devon opened one eye all the way, and used it to look at me like someone trying to reassure a scared two-year-old that no, there was not one single monster under the bed.
“Ashley, Uncle Sheridan and I visited this location and many others in Montana over the years, and I swear to you on the fair name of civilization that we never once saw a bear. In point of fact, the only bears I’ve ever seen anywhere have been safely behind moats and bars at various zoos around the world.”
Frank nodded his agreement. “He’s right, Miss Ashley – we’ve got our share of grizzlies out here, but most of ‘em have already denned up for the winter, and the rest are likely to take off before you ever get a chance to see ‘em. There is one thing I do want you to look out for, though, and that’s the weather.”
Great – were any cyclones scheduled? Would a blizzard come roaring out of Canada at any second and bury us twenty feet deep?
“Now, like I said before, it’s been pretty mild up here so far this winter, but that won’t hold – and once a big storm hits, it can put you up to your neck in snow before you know it. So you watch the weather reports if you can get online, you keep an eye on the sky, and the second you hear about or see so much as one single snowflake c
omin’ down, you pack up and head back here straight away, all right?
“Don’t waste any time about it; your flight crew is heading to Missoula right about now to get that big pretty jet refueled and then wait until they get the word to come pick you up – but I guarantee they will not leave their nice warm hotel rooms if we get snowed in up here, seein’ as how they know as well as I do that we don’t have the equipment to clear snow off this runway.”
He added a casual cowboy shrug. “Then you’d just have to find your way down the far side of these mountains and pick up the interstate somewhere God knows how many miles to the west, while snow is barrelin’ down all around you – and unless I miss my guess, you prob’ly don’t have a single idea how to use the four-wheel-drive on that vehicle, do you?”
Busted. “You got me on that one, Frank – but I promise we’ll hustle back here in nothing flat if I see anything other than a clear blue sky, okay?”
“Fair enough – now, you two head out and have fun, and I’ll see you in a week or so.”
And with that he tipped his hat and stepped back, I put the behemoth SUV in gear, and Devon and I drove off down the dirt-and-gravel road into the woods. Bears or not, we had an appointment with a certain stretch of the Blackfoot River, and with a cabin where I hoped I could help my big, hurting man put himself back together.
I had my doubts about the woods – I figured that many unsupervised trees in one place had to be up to something – but we made it to the county highway without running into any ogres, witches, or granny-eating wolves.
Then we hit clear sailing – except for a couple of missed turns, some backtracking, and a opossum who ambled into the middle of the highway and sat down to scratch at one ear for a long, leisurely minute while I honked at him. We also encountered signs so spattered with buckshot they were unreadable, gravel roads where he-man Montana adventurers laughed at the very idea of signs, and potholes big enough to swallow a buffalo.
The clear sailing giggled and ran away once we hit the end of a jolting, bone-rattling dirt suggestion of a road that petered out in the middle of a meadow.
“Big guy?”
Devon peeled one eye open from the nap he’d been pretending to take. “Yes, my lovely and lost Ashley?”
“Your cowboy pal wasn’t serious when he said we had to leave the road here and drive on actual grass and rocks and stuff the rest of the way – was he?”
“Grass, rocks, a few small streams, and we’ll be fording an actual river. Don’t you just love the exciting, thrill-a-minute adventure of forging through the trackless wastes of the high country? Why, it’s a wonder cities were ever invented.”
I threw a folded-six-ways-wrong Montana highway map at him – damn thing was useless up here anyway – and turned to stare down all the unbridled nature that stretched away in front of us.
Then I nudged the gas pedal, and by god, we rolled forward onto the grass – the wild, untended, unmarked, totally-not-meant-for-driving grass. My hands clamped onto the steering wheel at ten and two in a white-knuckled death grip, and I hoped that cabin was worth all this.
And you know something? It was.
I closed my eyes when we squished across the creeks, yelped when we scraped over and around the rocks of a dry gully, and prayed to all available gods when we twisted and slid around one final turn up a rocky slope. Then the ground leveled out, we forged bravely through a group of particularly surly-looking trees, and there was the cabin.
It rose like a tiny island fortress above a swirling, wind-driven sea of highland grass. When we rolled to a stop after escaping the clutches of the trees, we were still over half a mile away from the cabin’s front door, with the long, narrow valley of the Blackfoot River between us.
Several hundred yards upslope to the right, the grass was swallowed alive by the Ponderosa pines on the lower slopes of a towering mountain that laughed at city girls; down a gentle, sweeping slope to the left, the grass disappeared into more pine trees that cloaked the lower reaches of an even more forbidding spire of granite and snow. Trees to the right, trees to the left, trees crowded us from behind, and the cabin stood just in front of a line of vaguely threatening trees that marked off the far side of the valley.
I couldn’t make out a lot of details at that distance, just that the wood planks, the stovepipe chimney, and honest-to-god porch looked all small and brave in the middle of that wilderness – and holy shit, was that a teensy little satellite dish clinging to one edge of the roof? Yes! Screw you, trees and grass and bears – civilization lives here, big and bold and digital, and you can all just bite me.
Did I mention the river? Um, yeah.
As previously noted, a lonely stretch of the Blackfoot River sliced through the heart of this grassy little Eden, right between us and the cabin, between us and that tiny outpost of the modern world, between us and our blessed lifeline to the most holy internet and hundreds of HD channels. This river was wide, loud, turbulent, and aggressive, splashing and churning over rocks as it plunged down the length of the valley, and it did not appear to be the least bit impressed by the modern technological wonders of satellite reception and four-wheel-drive.
There was no bridge.
I turned to Devon, looking for support or enlightenment, answers, something – but there was that distant, lost, glassy-eyed look again. He aimed his face at the river, but was he seeing it? If I asked Mr. Almighty Master of the Wilderness and Frisky Cowgirls for suggestions on how to proceed here, would he even hear my voice?
I watched him staring out the windshield at the river, or at phantoms or whatever, and I reminded myself – baby steps. He came back a bit, he talked, he laughed, and now he’s just taking one small step back again – he’ll come around and walk on with you when he’s ready, all right?
In the meantime, I needed to get it in gear. We had to get to that cabin and rest the hell out of ourselves, and since it was over there and we were here and this vehicle did not appear to have a ‘teleport’ setting, that meant driving from point A to point B, river or no river.
So call on your pioneer genes and cross this bastard, Ashley.
I tapped the gas pedal again, and we bumped forward over the grass, the long stalks of god knows how many species of weeds and stuff brushing against the fenders as we eased our way into the meadow. The occasional hidden rock crunched under our tires now and again, stray bits of gravel spanged off the undercarriage, and once I honked like a serious nut case when some anonymous brown bundle of feathers startled me by shooting up out of the grass right in front of us.
Chill out, Ashley – Chicago has birds too, and any one of those tough street pigeons could kick the ass of whatever that was just now, so drive on, okay?
A minute or so in, I picked out the faint traces of tire tracks showing through the grass ahead. I followed them straight on for a few hundred yards until we pulled up onto a little rise, and bingo, river.
Devon had said earlier we’d be fording a river, and now I saw what he’d meant.
To the right, just as I’d seen it from the tree line, the torrent churned and roiled, maybe a hundred feet wide and all kinds of loud; to the left, it hurtled its way down the valley, tumbling and hissing as if it was chasing after somebody that had pissed it off.
Right in front of our tires, though, the water spread out over the rising ground, and it was much shallower. Some industrious backcountry traveler had helped matters along by lining the shallow section with more-or-less flat chunks of rock, and while it wasn’t a bridge or anything close to one, it did make this thing look crossable.
Summoning my inner pioneer, I rolled us into the shallow water. The slabs and chunks of rock shifted under the vehicle’s weight and my stomach did a nervous little flip, but we stayed pointed toward the far side, and we kept moving.
I glanced to the right, past Devon, to see the water coming straight on at us, running over and between the rocks and splashing past us in front and behind; I looked left, and saw that on that side, bar
ely more than two feet away from my door, the rise dropped off at a sharp angle, sending the river tumbling over the edge in a miniature waterfall.
I snapped my eyes away, focused on the far side, and kept us crunching along over the rocks. We looked to be halfway to dry ground, and I wasn’t stopping for anything until grass was under our tires again.
“Stop.”
Devon tipped his head out his window and peered down at the river. Then he turned and looked past my staring, are-you-kidding face at the tumbling froth of the water shooting over the edge of the rise to our left.
“Yes, this looks just right. Stop here, please.”
My foot obeyed him, punching down on the brake and lurching us to a halt, but my brain was in rebellion. Stop in the middle of the River of Certain Doom? Why?
I got the only explanation I needed when Devon reached into an inner pocket of his coat and pulled out the small metal cylinder Lee Montvale had given him back at Graceland Cemetery. He turned it over and over in his fingers for a moment, just looking at it, and then he opened the passenger door and stepped out onto the rocks, as I put the SUV into park and shut off the engine.
After all, this was why we were here.
“Can I take a look first? I’ve never seen something like this before, other than from a distance back at the cemetery.”
“As it happens, neither have I – we shall look together.”
Devon removed the cap from the container as we stood side by side, our backs pressed against the left flank of the SUV. I could feel the icy water lapping at my insulated hiking boots that probably looked ridiculous on someone who’d never hiked, and I tried not to notice how close we stood to the edge. Only a few inches away, the water sheeted past our feet and over the brink of the rise, sending up a fine mist that beaded on our clothes and in our hair.
I leaned into Devon, my left arm slipped around his back as he pulled me close with his right arm, and together we looked at the contents of the small metal cylinder.
Five Minutes Late: A Billionaire Romance Page 38
