“Nick, you’ve got to believe me. I didn’t know it was in the backpack. I promise you I would have left it behind if I’d found it.”
“Yeah, right. Well, one way or the other, when you ran out on me, it went with you. And you can see what came of it.” He turned his head so she could see his face from every angle.
“I’m sorry.” Lainie’s voice dropped to a whisper. “I never meant for that to happen. Please believe me.”
“Well, it doesn’t matter now. Come here.” He yanked her to her feet and shoved her toward the clump of mesquite.
“Wait. I don’t want to—” Lainie tried to pull back, but his grip on her arm was strong.
“Get in.” Nick opened the passenger side of the car hidden in the thicket and shoved her inside. “We’re taking my car from here.”
He shoved the car into Reverse to pull out of the thicket and then gunned it back the way they came. Lainie clutched the door with one hand and held the other against the ceiling as they bounced over ruts and fishtailed through sand. Her eyes wouldn’t close, but she silently prayed anyway. “Lord, even if no one else knows where I am, you do. Please, please, please . . .”
A loud curse broke the silence, and Nick slammed on the brakes and threw the car into Reverse again. Just ahead, a sheriff’s car turned off the highway and barreled down the dirt road toward them. Another followed right behind, and a pickup that looked a lot like Ray’s brought up the rear. Lainie grabbed the door and opened it when the wheels of Nick’s car spun in the gravel as he reversed directions, but before she could jump out, the tires gained traction and the forward lurch slammed the door shut.
If Nick noticed, he didn’t say anything. He just threw it into Drive and headed back toward the mountains. Lainie looked in the side mirror to see if the sheriff might be gaining, but if they were still back there, they were lost in the huge dust cloud trailing Nick’s car.
Nick must have noticed the same thing. Jerking the wheel hard to the left, he took the car off the road and headed into the desert in a wide circle, creating a cloud of dust that enveloped as well as followed them.
“Nick, this is crazy!” Lainie was still hanging on for dear life. “Even if you do get back to the road, you know they’ve got radios. You’ll have every law officer in this part of the state on your tail. Just pull over.”
“Shut up.” Nick leaned forward, trying to see his way through the dust. “This is all your fault anyway. And you’re in it as much as I am.”
“What are you talking about?”
But Nick didn’t answer. He never saw the arroyo until they sailed over the edge. The instant the nose of the car hit the opposite bank, Lainie’s head hit the side window and everything went black.
Lainie first became aware of voices, lots of voices, far off.
“I think she’s coming around.” Ray’s voice. Where was Ray?
She opened her eyes. Her shoulder ached where the seat belt had grabbed her, and a big parachute-like thing was all over her lap. She turned her head to find Ray kneeling in the sand next to her open door.
“How’re you doing?” His voice and his smile were gentle. Lainie closed her eyes again. When she opened them, he was still there. She tried to smile too.
“I’m fine.” Sleepy, maybe, but fine.
The fear came first, and then memory fought its way through the fog.
“The babies—Nick.” Her hand scrabbled at her seat belt until Ray covered it with his own.
“The kids are fine. I called Manny. Nick’s not going anywhere. He’s sitting in the backseat of the patrol car right now. And you need to stay still until the ambulance gets here.”
Warm peace, the first she’d felt in months, coursed through Lainie. She closed her eyes and leaned against the headrest. “Good. But don’t worry about me. I’m fine, really.” Had she spoken aloud? She wasn’t sure.
“Great, but you still need to stay put.”
Lainie opened her eyes. Ray was still there. “How did you find me so fast? No one knew . . .”
He grinned. “You left a trail of dust a half mile long. It wasn’t hard at all to know where you turned off.”
“But how’d you know it was me?”
“I saw your note.”
Lainie just looked at him.
“Gran forgot her comfortable shoes and asked if I’d run home and pick them up for her.” He looked sheepish. “I’d heard you were planning to leave after the wedding, and I wondered if you were still going, so I checked to see if your stuff was still there. Is that weird?”
“Sort of.” She was so tired, and her head throbbed.
“Well, I saw your snow globe sitting on the sewing machine, and then the note under it. I took it with me because I wanted to talk to you about it, but just before I got back to church, I saw your car pull out. You were driving, but there was a passenger.”
“Nick.”
“I was afraid of that, so I called the sheriff. Then I followed you.”
Lainie thought she smiled as she reached for his hand.
“The hardest thing I’ve ever done was to wait on the highway at the turnoff for the sheriff. But he promised me that if he got there and found me on that road between him and you all, he’d run me in too.”
Lainie’s eyes drifted closed. The siren of the approaching ambulance whined to a stop. She felt Ray’s hand brush the hair from her face and his lips gently touch her own.
“They’re here for you now.” His voice was low in her ear. “I’m going to follow you to the hospital. And then, when you’re ready, I’ll bring you home.”
Epilogue
Two weddings within three months, and coming as they did in summer when the Last Chance Motel was at its busiest, would have been more than the average wedding planner/mayor/motel owner could have handled, but Rita pulled it off. And no one was surprised.
She ducked into the crying room off the vestibule where Lainie waited with Fayette. “Standing room only, and I’ve closed the church doors. We’re ready to get this show on the road.”
Lainie glanced again in the full-length mirror Rita had placed in the room and let her hands drift over the soft ivory chiffon of her wedding dress. Her image, misty through the veil that brushed her shoulders in the front and trailed behind her, seemed to belong to someone else.
“You look beautiful.” Fayette caught her hand and squeezed it. “And no one ever deserved happiness more.”
Lainie took a deep breath. “Deserve it? I don’t know about that, but I’m so happy it scares me. Is it even real?”
“It’s real.” Fayette squeezed her hand again and looked over her shoulder with a smile as Rita bustled her out the door.
Alone in the crying room, Lainie heard the piano music swell and the murmur of the wedding guests hush as Rita threw open the doors from the vestibule and Fayette began her slow progression.
“Now!” Rita’s loud whisper and frantic wave brought Lainie to the head of the aisle. She paused and looked over the church. She was vaguely aware of the fragrance of late summer flowers and the sea of smiling faces as the guests shuffled to their feet.
Steven, handsome as ever, stood grinning next to Ray as Fayette reached the front of the church and turned to take her place on the other side of Brother Parker. The choir beamed at Lainie from the loft. From the moment Lurlene heard of the impending wedding, she had been planning the music, and it seemed right somehow that the choir would sing her down the aisle.
But it was Ray who caught her gaze and held it. He smiled his slow smile, and as he started up the aisle to meet her, Lurlene nodded to the pianist and the church was filled with the triumphant opening chords of the “Hallelujah Chorus.”
Cathleen Armstrong lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband and their corgi, but her roots remain deep in New Mexico where she grew up and where much of her family still lives. She and Ed raised three children, and when they were grown, she returned to college, earned a BA in English, and began to write.
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