Dead Again: A Romantic Thriller

by Cooper-Posey, Tracy

  “You must be good at your job.”

  “Competent enough. I’m also the only one without family or roots, who can just up and leave without notice.”

  “Ah.”

  “Why were you on the plane?” she countered.

  He lifted the plastic a little and looked out. “Still raining,” he commented and let it drop.

  It was the start of a day that was as long as Jack had predicted. Huddled beneath the plastic, they listened to the rain, which seemed to fade then return, but never stop completely. And they talked.

  And talked.

  In small companionable silences in between, they listened to the rain pattering on the plastic sheet.

  Their talk wandered over vast territories, meandering without direction, filling the long, wet day.

  “And what was that thing with the artist formally known as Prince, anyway? Did he seriously think it was going to earn him professional respect when people couldn’t pronounce his name anymore?” Jack demanded.

  “You didn’t like Prince? Oh, come on, don’t you even twitch a little when you hear Seven?”

  “God, you even know the name of some of his songs?”

  “Well, I like all sorts. Nickelback, for instance.”

  He grimaced. “That’s not rock music.”

  She giggled. “Lemme guess. Rolling Stones, right? Or…no, country and western.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with country,” he said instantly.

  “It’s all twanging guitars and mournful lyrics. ‘My horse dun gone, my woman tooooooo’.”

  “And Prince has profound lyrics, right?”

  “At least you can’t predict what the next song will be about.”

  “That doesn’t make great songs. Look at the Rolling Stones. I can just about guarantee that their next songs will be about either sex, drugs, music, or their friends.”

  “You don’t like the Stones either?”

  “I like the Stones. I’m just pointing out that their lyrics are predictable, too.”

  “Not true. What about…” She cast about for a song title, rapidly discarding the obvious ones.

  “What about?” he coaxed.

  “Paint It Black,” she said, triumphant.

  “All about being different from their friends.”

  “Can’t Always Get What You Want.”

  “Drugs.”

  “Hot—no, that’s about sex.” She rubbed her brow. “Got it! Time Is On Our Side.”

  Jack held up his hand and ticked off fingers. “It’s about having more time for sex, drugs, women and music…and spending time with their friends.”

  She started laughing. “Oh, hell, I prefer Pink Floyd, anyway.”

  “Now there I agree with you.”

  “Have a Cigar.”

  “Money.”

  “The Wall.”

  “What track?”

  “All of it, of course. What a silly bloody question.”

  He grinned. It reached his eyes this time. “Idiot me.”

  Eventually, she had to use the bedpan again and asking Jack for his help mortified her. But afterward, as he settled her back on her chair, he cocked his head a little. “Now tell me, does it feel as bad now as it did the first time, when I didn’t know the story?”

  She looked at him, surprised at the question. She thought about it. The asking had been far more uncomfortable than the action.

  “I don’t like not being able to do it myself,” she said flatly. “But…knowing that you know that and the reason why…”

  “It helps.”

  “Yes.” She could even smile a little.

  He nodded, satisfied.

  “Doesn’t mean I’m ever going to like it,” she warned him.

  “God forbid,” he said with a smile.

  Later, the conversation trailed back to their lives and their history.

  “My dad left Ontario when he was fourteen and wandered,” Jack explained. “He was working on a farm in Wisconsin when he met my mom and right away decided he would marry her. It took five years before he got the answer he wanted from her. He stuck around for those five years and then just stuck around some more after that.”

  “She wanted him to stay there?”

  “I think all the wandering in his soul was gone by that time. Mom didn’t want to go on living on a farm so he bought a general store in town and they moved into the house behind it the year I was born.”

  “He’s still alive?”

  “Last time I checked.”

  “You don’t keep in contact?”

  “I try. But my life gets in the way at times. Dad understands that.”

  Sophie resisted the obvious question, diverted her curiosity. “And your mom?” she asked instead.

  “She died a couple of years ago. Dad took it hard but he’s kept the store. He doesn’t even really manage it any more—he’s hired good people. But it keeps him centered the way Mom used to.”

  “Keeps him anchored?” she suggested.

  “Yeah…yep, that’s it.”

  Sometime later—it felt like late in the afternoon—when Jack lifted the green shelter enough to check the rain, she stiffened, her heart thumping. Quickly, she held up her hand as he tried to lower the plastic.

  “Wait,” she said. “Lift it again and look at me.”

  He lifted the plastic again and stared at her, smiling a little. “Dirt or worse?”

  She shook her head. “Your eyes. One of them is smaller than the other. That means something.” Something bad.

  “The irises?” he said sharply. “One’s smaller than the other?”

  She nodded, feeling all the spit in her mouth suddenly dry up. When she saw him swallow, her heart began to race. She could almost feel the caution flood his body as he considered alternatives.

  “Which one?” he asked quietly.

  “The right.”

  “What happens when I turn toward the light more?” He turned his chin square to the daylight, what little there was.

  “Nothing.” She bit her lip. “It’s head injury, right? Did you hit your head?” Then she remembered his probing hands at the back of his head that morning.

  He was quiet for a long moment, considering. “I’ve had a bastard of a headache since yesterday,” he said at last. “And there’s a spot on the back of my head. I can’t touch it because it hurts too much when I do.”

  “Concussion,” she guessed.

  He licked his lips. “Only, how bad?”

  “Your vision is fine?”

  “So far.”

  She could feel panic bubbling up and tried to push it away. “You’ll let me know if the headache gets worse?”

  “Of course.”

  The easy assurance made her suspicious. “Jack, I’m completely dependent upon you. If you’re…if you…”

  “I told you, don’t worry. I’ll get you out of this.”

  She tried to catch his eyes, to let the steadiness of his frank gaze reassure her but he wouldn’t look at her.

  Fear, which had been pushed back inside a mental corral for the last day, driven back by Jack’s competence, came surging through the open gate.

  It wasn’t just her own fears, now. Joining their forces was the unidentified fear that Jack held, that he wouldn’t share with her. It hovered in the background, huge and nameless, its form and limitations unknown, not even guessable.

  If Jack… If something happened to Jack, she’d be left alone to deal with these demons he wouldn’t speak of.

  Chapter Three

  Even though Jack’s condition didn’t change for the rest of the day, that night Sophie found her sleep disturbed by dreams of being left alone on the ledge to die a slow death by starvation and exposure.

  Her uneasiness must have seeped through her sleep as chatter, or perhaps she wasn’t keeping as serene an expression as she thought, for the next morning over their breakfast of coffee and dry cake, Jack said, “You’re worrying too much, Sophie. I haven’t keeled over yet and it�
�s been seventy-two hours, now.”

  A little of her dread lifted after that.

  Besides, it was such a beautiful day that just looking at it left her genuinely speechless with delight.

  The sun was out in full, with a cloudless sky dancing attendance. No fog or low cloud cover inhibited her view of the mountains that guarded her nights. She studied them, trying to absorb their scale, the sheer size of them. They reached up high into the sky. The perfect light made them seem a lot closer, a wonderful illusion that kept drawing her eyes.

  These mountains had stood so while time passed them by. The little drama playing out at their knees would have no impact on them.

  She shivered. The study left her feeling small and insignificant.

  “Jack, why are the mountains over there sheer and rocky? They’ve hardly got any trees until much lower down—it’s all vertical walls.” Walls that had been built at a crazy angle, the parallel lines of seamed rock that should have been horizontal were tilted anywhere between forty and fifty degrees, running down into the tree line below.

  But the mountain they were on was a giant’s weedy playing field, grassed over and scattered with trees and tilted at an angle that would have had the giant’s marbles rolling furiously down to the valley floor.

  Jack looked up from the rope he was braiding out of strips of foraged cloth. “You’ve never been in the mountains before, have you?”

  “I kept meaning to go but just never got around to it. There was always something better to do.” Like working. The need to push ahead, score political points and maybe get herself noticed by the partners had always pushed the idea of clearing her vacation time far down the list of priorities. Besides, a trip to the mountains was out of her financial reach. “I saw the San Gabriels once, on a clear day.”

  “Angelinos….” Jack muttered, shaking his head ruefully.

  “What?” she demanded. “So I’m from Los Angeles. So sue me.”

  But Jack was laughing. “And I suppose Colorado is a flyover state, so far as you’re concerned.”

  The laugh got her. She grinned. “Until now,” she agreed. “Is that where we are? Colorado?”

  “I’m pretty sure. North, though. North of Boulder, even Loveland.”

  They had been flying from Las Vegas to St. Louis, the second hop of a three-leg journey that would have eventually got her into New York. It had been the only tickets she could get without going standby. As Donald, her stickler of a boss, wouldn’t have tolerated delay if she’d been forced to wait for another flight, she’d picked the sure thing. New York by Thursday, lunchtime.

  Right.

  “Northern Colorado…that’s pretty far north of where we should have passed over, right?”

  “It’s off the direct line if you’re looking at a map but the pilots would have been flying the great curve. It’s definitely north of where we should be, though,” he agreed. “I think the pilots wanted to get out of commercial air space to start. Out of the corridor. Then they were too busy just trying to put her down as gently as possible.”

  “Why get out of commercial air space? Surely that’s where they’d look?”

  He was frowning, the inward stare she’d come to know. This was impinging on those areas he’d declared off-limits. But this time she got an answer of sorts and wished she hadn’t.

  “I think the radio was one of the first victims of the…accident. They couldn’t send a mayday. Maybe they couldn’t hold altitude. No, I know they couldn’t, or we wouldn’t be here. You can’t allow yourself to drift into other lanes. You’d be putting other aircraft at risk. So if you can’t hold your lane, then you have to get out—way out. Which they did.”

  His terse answer opened a small door of illumination upon the endless minutes of noise and fear she’d lived through that night, clutching the arms of her chair and waiting for the long fall to the ground. The pilots, whoever they were, must have fought the plane every foot of the way to its resting place.

  “They deserve a medal,” she said.

  Jack was quiet for a long minute. “More,” he said, his voice rough. “They deserve to have their life back. I wish I had the power to give it to them. I really do.” Abruptly he stood and thrust his hands into his pockets. “Gotta go.” He headed for the gully and the wire rope that let him climb to the top.

  She listened to his ascent, turning over the puzzling note of distress in his voice.

  Later, she got the answer to her first question. As they lunched on cookies and fruitcake softened with hot water to a thick lumpy gruel, Jack had pointed to the peaks in front of them. “They’re the same as this mountain, only you’re looking at the back of them. Or the front, depending on how you want to refer to them.” He waved behind him, indicating the slope. “That’s the front. The other side of this mountain looks just like they do,” and he nodded to Sophie’s guardians.

  “Ohhh,” Sophie murmured, understanding flooding her.

  Jack pointed to the long series of slopes and peaks that stood in ranks off to the south. “Think of these slopes as having once been flat ground—you can see how flat it would have been. Flat ground at the edge of the continental plate, which one day eons ago had a head-on collision with another plate heading in the opposite direction.” His flat hands moved together until his fingertips bumped into each other. The fingers pushed until the knuckles turned white, then the tips of one hand slipped over the other and lifted up.

  Jack kept the titled hand in place and ran his finger down the long slope of the back of his hand. “Slope here, with topsoil, grass and trees just like it used to be.” He pointed to the other side, the tips of his fingers that stuck up toward the sky and the sharp drop down to where his other hand had been beneath. “Sheer walls.” He pointed to the guardians she had been studying all morning. “You’re looking at history, Sophie. Those layers running across their face are slices of time caught in stone, showing how the earth was formed.”

  She took a breath. “Wow.” No adequate words occurred to her. It was mind-boggling. But it made perfect sense when you looked at the two sides of the mountains. Again, she was reminded of the giant’s playing field. Her instincts had been close, after all.

  Jack shrugged and went back to his cup of gruel. “Up in Alberta they’re digging dinosaur fossils out of the backside of the mountains, twenty thousand feet up where no dinosaur should have been.”

  She grinned. “Where did you learn that? More on-the-job training?”

  He grinned back. “Discovery Channel.”

  Then she noticed again the slight difference in his eyes and her good cheer evaporated.

  * * * * *

  It was the sun sinking down to meet the mountains that started the grizzly countdown to the end.

  Sophie was spacing out on the latest painkiller, waiting for the numbness to set it. Her balloon fingers and runaway heart were a price she was willing to pay for dulling the pain in her leg and hips. Two days of solid sitting had their own penalties, she was discovering.

  “I’ll get bed sores or something,” she complained, trying to move around on the chair without disturbing her leg. The slightest movement tended to reverberate down the shattered bone and set up echoes that came back to kick her in the temple with steel-toe boots.

  “Let the Percodan kick in, then I’ll help you stand up for a while,” Jack said. “I’ll even walk you around the block. How does that sound?”

  “Great.” She meant it. Trying to be patient, she threaded her fingers together and gritted her teeth.

  Jack was almost laughing. “I just love a feisty woman.” He turned back to his ropes, his gaze sweeping across the guardians where the sun was dropping down between the peaks.

  It was if he’d been shot…or like someone had looped a rope around his neck and yanked back hard. His whole body jerked and his hands shot up to his face, covering his eyes.

  He gave a hoarse, inarticulate cry and staggered backward.

  He’s going to run into the wall, Sophie thou
ght. Help him. Stop him. But she would never get there in time and even as she was cursing her immobility and the damn stupid leg, she was trying to raise herself, while watching Jack stagger.

  Then, thankfully, he tripped a little, enough to throw his balance as he was already effectively blind. One knee went down to the ground. In the slow motion tumble to his left, Sophie thought he’d be okay. Bruised dignity and little else. Then she saw it; he was too close to the wall.

  He couldn’t see it.

  Too late.

  His head slammed into the rock…and literally bounced off. The force finished the job of knocking him off his feet. He fell forward and sideways, his left hand sprawled out to save him. It was the wrong hand. He needed the right hand out to prop him up but his right hand was holding his head, protecting the eye. He fell, his weight landing on his right shoulder. Sophie felt the reverberation through her good foot. The impact started a mini-landslide down the gully, pebbles and dust sliding a few inches.

  “Jack! Jack!” Suddenly she was standing, with no idea how she’d got there. Her useless leg remained propped on the metal channel.

  Jack was motionless.

  “Ohmigod.” She was hyperventilating, almost panting. “Jack! Goddamn it, Jack! Move!”

  She had to go over to him. No way around it. But first she had to breathe, slow and easy—she was dizzy. Can’t pass out. Not both of us. Got to hold it together and do this.

  Jack’s voice, a memory and a mental snapshot of his brown eyes looking at her. This is going to hurt a little.

  She swallowed, gripped the raw edges of denim that covered her leg and lifted the foot out of the metal tray. Let it down until it was lowered all the way. Then she paused for a moment and wiped at her eyes, which were wet with tears she wasn’t aware of shedding. She’d just taken the Percodan a while ago, so it was freshest and strongest just now—but the motion of her unsplinted leg created a new experience in pain. She thought she could even feel the ends of the bones grinding together and that sent a wave of revulsion through her strong enough to make her want to throw up.