“It’s true. Business has picked up at the shop, and Dad says they’re going to need my help at the inn over Christmas. As I told Carla, I can give you another week, two if you need it.”
“We’re going to miss you, Jo. Good worker like you’s hard to replace, but I’m glad your shop is taking off.”
“Thank you, Les. I don’t want to leave you in the lurch, but it’ll be good to be home with my kid at night.”
“I bet it will.” The radio on his belt crackled, and Carla’s voice called his name. “Excuse me,” he said, turning away to answer.
As Jo sprayed the windows and wiped till they gleamed, she wondered if one of her cousins might be interested in taking on this job. She’d like to help Les out, and one of the high school–age kids like Lauren or Katie could handle the hours, at least over Christmas vacation.
When she wheeled her cleaning cart toward the snack bar, Les was still in the hall, pacing as he spoke into the radio.
“Ay-yeah ... it’s the only way to handle it. I’ll send her up if she’s willing. Be right there, myself. Ovah.” Worry creased his face as he frowned. “Got some trouble up on the mountain. Ice storm up there has made our black diamond runs downright treacherous, and we need to close ’em off. Ski patrol is up there tending to an accident on the Crazy Eights Run right now, and with people out sick we’re short-staffed. Carla suggested you grab some skis and head up there to help us out. Mostly we need people to stand at the entrance to the black diamond trails and divert skiers.” He waved a hand toward the rest of the lodge. “If you can help us, I’ll get someone else to finish the cleaning in the morning.”
Jo felt her jaw drop at the prospect of heading up to ski on a night like this. “But ... it’s been years since I worked ski patrol. I was in high school.” She pointed up toward the mountain. “I don’t even ski anymore.”
“It’s like riding a bicycle. It’ll come back to you.”
“But I don’t have a parka or any equipment or—”
“Drop into the rental shop and they’ll fix you up with what you need.” He clipped the radio back onto his belt and patted her shoulder. “Appreciate you helping us out, Jo. I’m going to head on up there. See you at the top.”
Jo’s pulse tripped quickly as she peeled off her plastic gloves and wheeled her cart to the supply room. This was not good. She hadn’t been up skiing on this mountain since before she was pregnant. She hadn’t snapped skis on since Shane had died, and she wasn’t keen on getting back into the sport now.
Thirty minutes later she sat on the cable car decked in rental clothes from head to toe. Her feet and ankles felt mummified in the tight boots, and she couldn’t believe the weight of the black helmet in her hands, which Andy in the rental shop had told her was required for ski patrol these days. A dark, cloying dread gripped her, and she kept telling herself she couldn’t be afraid of skiing. She had grown up skiing. She used to give lessons. She could handle herself on the mountain. But then, Shane had been an expert skier, too. He’d placed in the World Championship and had been chosen for the 2006 U.S. team.
“Welcome to the White Mountains of New Hampshire,” Drake, the cable car’s operator, said as he closed the doors. “And tonight, as you can see, it’s really white out there. We’ve had ten inches of snow in the past twelve hours. Apparently there’s some ice mixed in with that, folks, because we have closed our expert runs. I repeat, the black diamond runs are closed due to icy conditions. Here at Dare our first priority is safe skiing.”
Drake nodded at Jo, then surveyed the passengers. “Do we have some newcomers here? A handful. Skiing for the holiday weekend? Then I’ll give you the short tour.”
As the car began to travel uphill, he gave a brief history of the area. “Home to Dare Mountain, Cannon Mountain, and Franconia Notch, where a natural rock formation on one cliff side became famous in the early eighteen hundreds because it resembled the face of an old man. People came from everywhere to see the Old Man of the Mountain, and in nineteen forty-five the state of New Hampshire adopted it as its state emblem. We still have it on state road signs and license plates. When the rock formation collapsed in two thousand three, people were devastated.”
Jo was sixteen when the rock face of the Old Man came tumbling down. She didn’t think it was a big deal at first, but when Shane gathered a group to drive over and check it out, she’d ditched class without a second thought. At sixteen she’d been glued to Shane’s side, whenever he wasn’t off drinking or raising hell with his buddies. Shane had had a small, elite circle of friends, stand-up guys like Sam Norwood and Tim Healey, who would have given anything for Shane. After Shane’s death, they’d been lost, too. Sam had joined the army, and Tim took a job somewhere in Massachusetts.
Trying to tamp down fear, Jo wiggled her toes in her boots and thought of Ava. She really should teach her how to ski. Ava was curious about it, especially since she’d heard that her father loved skiing.
Yes, skiing had been Shane’s number one passion ... or maybe it was passion number two, just after drinking. She wondered if the oh-so-perfect Clarice Diamond knew about Shane’s drinking problem when she had her crush on him. Or had Clarice been smitten with the media account of Shane Demerit, local legend?
Just before the 2006 Olympics when he was to be one of the top downhill competitors, twenty-year-old Shane Demerit had killed himself on a late-night run down the mountain. People called it a tragic accident, a great irony for a young skier to die on the brink of his success, a “perfect storm,” with an ice storm making conditions hazardous. People failed to mention the obscene blood alcohol level that had made even a simple descent impossible. Shane had “liked his beer” as Jo’s mother used to put it. A nice way of saying he was an alcoholic, an ugly drunk when he tied one on.
That was the side of Shane that Jo had always sought to hide from their daughter. But Shane had possessed endearing qualities, too. Despite his bouts of drinking and general craziness, Shane had a good heart, and Jo had thought their love could get them through the difficulties of her being a teen mother.
Unfortunately, Shane hadn’t seen it that way. “Trailer trash,” he kept saying. “I’m so sick of being trailer trash.” He’d thought he had found a way out of that with his skiing, but he was sure that a baby was going to send them back to the hellhole he’d escaped. He was sure they’d be ruined.
Although the baby was an unexpected mistake, Jo argued that she couldn’t destroy a part of herself and the man she loved. She would care for the baby and keep saving for their house. Her mom and Aunt Martha would help. They’d make things work, if he just gave it a chance. She had thought she could deal with his issues, help him, ease his pain. She had thought she could make him happy. Jo had gone over that last conversation a million times; it played like a top forty song she couldn’t get out of her head. But that night, talking to Shane was like talking to a wall. He was too drunk to process what she was saying, all liquored up like that.
She should have known that Shane had been drunk and “flipping out” as he used to say, but then, she’d been flipping out herself. Nineteen and pregnant and worried about losing the guy she loved.
Ay-yeah, she’d been wicked panicked.
As the cable car bumped into place at the top of the mountain, Drake gave a second warning about icy conditions and closed trails. Jo pulled the black helmet over her head, thinking that she really belonged home with Ava right now. She should be in her sweatpants and slippers, stringing beads for ornaments, peeking in on her daughter in the next room, checking for her soft, sweet breath as she slept peacefully.
Stepping out into the bitter wind reinforced that feeling. She clamped her goggles on so that she could see where she was going, tipped her skis over one shoulder, then tromped over to Les, who was easily identifiable in a red jacket with a red blinking light clipped to the front.
“It’s wicked cold up here,” Jo said, her voice raised against the noise of ice chips pelting her helmet. “I can’t believe yo
u have any skiers up here in this weather.”
“People from the city want to get their ski time in on vacation weekends, and we attract a lot of them as we’re open more’n most.” He held out a gloved hand holding a dark disk. “Take this and head over to the entrance to Heartbreak Ridge. It’s blocked with barricades, but there are always a few show-offs who think they can defy gravity.”
Jo was well experienced with daredevils.
“The cable car stops bringing people up at eleven, so you’ve only got another hour or so. You got a cell phone?”
She pressed the pocket of the ski patrol coat, just making sure. “Sure do.”
“Call Carla down at the lodge if you need anything. You should be fine, though. It’s pretty quiet up here.”
“Okay.” Feeling a bit rusty, Jo snapped her skis on and herringbone-climbed the ridge to get to the main trail. Once she began to glide on the icy surface, it all came back to her. Her palms were sweating inside her gloves, but it wasn’t terrible to be cutting an edge or gliding downhill. Although it had been years since she’d been up here, the trail map was etched in her mind. Even in the blistering ice storm, she knew where to fork left and when to veer to the right to reach the top of Heartbreak Ridge.
The entrance to the run was marked by two short gray lumps. The cones blocking the entrance were covered with icy gray scales, nearly obliterating the orange color. Jo stopped beside one of them and poked at it with her ski pole. It would take awhile to chip the ice away, but then, she had plenty of time to kill.
It took ten minutes to clear off one cone, and during that time only a handful of skiers passed by on their way to the intermediate trail. One woman stopped to ask if the expert trails would be open in the morning, but, otherwise, the mountain was quiet. Almost eerie.
As she hacked away at the ice on the second cone, she imagined Shane here, speeding down the runs. Did he stay low and tuck his poles in a racing stance, or was he so sloppy drunk that he wavered on his skis?
Hearing a noise behind her, Jo staked her poles into the ground and turned to look behind her.
And there he was ...
A gray ghost of a man looming under the lights behind the curtain of falling snow. He swayed casually down the slope, as if cutting an edge in ice was no problem at all.
Her heart pounded in her chest, her pulse roaring in her ears as he approached.
“Shane?” She wiggled around to face him, nearly crossing her skis in the process.
She wasn’t so much scared of his ghost as she was alarmed that she could be losing her mind in a snowstorm at the top of Dare Mountain.
It couldn’t be him ...
Squinting through her goggles, she noted the way he leaned fearlessly, as if he knew the mountain would support him. That was Shane’s style.
But then, as she watched him crouch, she saw that his stance was closer than Shane’s. Closer and tighter.
It wasn’t him.
Thank God. She would have felt like a total idiot, thinking she was talking to a ghost. The skier’s face was covered by a black mask. Creepy-looking, though practical up here.
He didn’t turn toward the intermediate trail but shot straight toward her, spraying ice and snow as he stopped.
“Hey, how’s it going?” she called.
He stared at her in silence, and though the mask obscured his face completely, she sensed some undercurrent running between them, connecting them.
Then, he tilted his head, as if curious. “Jo?”
Her stomach lurched, and she had to remind herself it wasn’t Shane.
“Yeah. Who are you? I can’t tell with your mask.”
He pointed one pole down Heartbreak Ridge. “How is it?” His voice was muffled by the mask.
“The trail is closed. Didn’t they tell you? The icy conditions have made it treacherous.”
As she spoke, he pushed off and moved to the top of Heartbreak.
“What are you doing? The intermediate trails just below us are open, but you can’t go down Heartbreak.”
He looked back at her, a picture of evil in the black mask. “I got it.”
“No, you don’t. Are you nuts? No one can handle themselves on an expert trail in sheer ice. It’s like jumping off a cliff.”
He didn’t answer, but pushed off toward the edge.
“Don’t be an ass!” Something sparked to life inside her and she burst from her spot, as if flying out of the gate in a downhill race. Within seconds she was on him, grabbing with her arms, tackling him as he loomed on the brink of the first big drop.
His body was hard under the ski clothes—all sinew and bone—but she must have hit some tender spot, because he groaned when she made contact and tugged him down to the ground.
For a moment they remained still, a tangle of arms and torsos, cold surrounding them, but a surprising source of heat at the core of the mass.
Well, sure ... body heat.
And the hot burn of fury for this moron, who was reckless enough to break both their necks.
Jo pushed away from him and sat up. “Are you trying to get us both killed?”
“You were the one who tackled me.” He lay back on the snow a minute, his right hand pressed to his left shoulder, as if applying pressure to a wound. He seemed to be in pain, but she was not unscathed either. Her butt hurt, and her hip, where she’d either rammed him or rammed into the ground, felt raw.
“I was trying to save your life,” she said, “but you don’t make it easy.”
“It never is.” He curled into a ball, lined up his skis, then rose. “Don’t get yourself hurt, Jo. You got a kid to take care of.”
She snapped to attention, amazed at the truth of his statement and surprised that he knew her this well. “Who the hell are you?” she asked.
He turned back toward her, pausing. “You wouldn’t remember me,” he said, then pushed forward.
“No, no! Wait!” One fist pounded the snow beside her, but she couldn’t keep him from the black diamond run.
He didn’t look back, didn’t hesitate at the edge. Dread clutched her as he pushed off into the curtain of snow and dropped out of sight.
Despair.
Panic.
She pulled off one glove. Her hands shook as she took out her cell phone and scrolled to the number of the lodge. With a fake calm in her voice, she asked Carla what they could possibly do to save a royal jackass from the mountain.
Chapter 4
The sound of his skis scraping ice cut through the silent night, the only sound besides the whoosh of adrenaline firing Sam’s body. At times he felt as if he rode the wind itself as he flew down, down, into the depths of the night.
The first landing was bone-jarring, but he bent his knees and rode the bumps to the next patch of air. He kept his body tight, his stance low. “It’s all in the knees,” old Vic, his ski instructor, used to say.
Though the run was closed, the resort had left the lights on; a good thing. Even as he hurtled down the mountain at a high speed, Sam could see that things had changed. Trees had grown taller. New moguls rose from the ground. Ice-covered drifts had formed lofty ledges, like a sloppily frosted cake. The landscape of his youth had changed. Not long ago he could have navigated this run with his eyes closed. He’d never expected it to change so dramatically.
But time had passed, the planet kept spinning.
And I return to the mountain and find Jo Truman working ski patrol at the worst possible time.
That was the damnedest thing, seeing her at the entrance to Heartbreak. He had recognized Jo Truman the minute he saw her, though she couldn’t have guessed it was him under the mask. Damned noble of her to try and stop him. She didn’t realize that, under the mask, he was already damaged goods.
Jo had been on his mind way too often in the past few years. She’d been there in the desperate moments of close calls, when shots whizzed past so close and exploded nearby patches of dirt to dust. And on quiet nights, when he lay on his bunk trying to tune out the
snores of the other guys, Jo was the only good thing he could visualize. Like a star on the darkest night, she lit the darkness, reminding him there was still some good in the world.
“She’s one of the good ones,” Shane used to say. “Sometimes I think she’s way too good for me.”
And Sam had always jumped in with a string of objections, that no girl could be too good for his best buddy, because that was what guys did.
But Sam had seen how Jo had suffered when she lost Shane. He had held the sobbing girl in his arms, a girl pregnant with his best friend’s child, and felt sick with love and compassion for her. He remembered how her dark hair, soft as corn silk, had slid over the back of his hand as he held her. How she’d stood, tall and responsible, but how the pink around her eyes and the feel of her compact, delicate bones had argued that she wasn’t as strong and proud as she seemed.
She had sobbed in his arms, her face against the stiff shirt and borrowed necktie. Jo had cried her eyes out while all he could think of was the sweet smell of her hair and the way her body fit against his. And he’d hated himself for the attraction that had consumed him.
A hankering for his best friend’s girl. His dead friend. Sam had his own girl back then, but once he’d held Jo in his arms he knew there would be no playing house with Stacey. That relationship was done once he’d touched Jo Truman. He may have seemed polite as he consoled Jo that day, but inside he knew he was sick and disgusting.
Vile.
That day at the funeral, he had made the decision to leave. He knew he had to get away, and if the army wanted to send him to the other side of the planet, well, that seemed like a safe enough distance.
Unfortunately, the distance had only amplified his thoughts of Joanne Truman. In the back of his mind, he’d known that he’d run into her when he returned to Woodstock. Jo and her family worked in just about every small business in these parts. He’d expected to see her; just not so soon, and certainly not up here.
She’d sworn off skiing after Shane’s death. Maybe it was good that she’d bounced back and returned to the mountain. It had been five years since Shane died, and Jo deserved a chance for a do-over.
Making Spirits Bright Page 21
