Baby In His Cradle

by Diana Whitney

  “I was eight or nine, I think, so Rory would have been around thirteen.” He set the first picture aside, picked up the second, which was similar except that an older man with thinning but tousled hair and the same serious eyes had joined the boys. “That’s my father. A moment after my mother snapped this shot, I accidentally whipped my string of fish into Rory’s face and knocked him backward into the creek.”

  “Accidentally, huh? Sounds fishy to me.”

  When Samuel groaned at the pun, Ellie laughed, cheerfully ruffled his hair. The gesture had been intended as a good-natured teasing. Instead, her fingers paused without her permission, lingered to stroke and to caress. His hair was so much softer than she’d expected, and tingled the tips of her fingers with electric warmth.

  She perceived rather than felt the subtle stiffening of his shoulders, his brief cessation of breath. Only after she’d reluctantly pulled her hand away did his chest heave to expel air. He was clearly affected by her touch. That pleased her, although she didn’t care to speculate why it should. They were friends, of course, dear and devoted friends. In a different time, a different place, perhaps they could have been more, shared more, but not now. Now Ellie couldn’t afford to unleash her heart again.

  But she couldn’t seem to control it, either.

  Struck by an overwhelming urge to wrap her arms around his neck and nibble his earlobe, Ellie managed to push away and totter around the table, where she collapsed onto the chair before her watery knees buckled. A fevered heat radiated deep inside her, spreading liquid warmth into places she dared not acknowledge, yet couldn’t possibly ignore.

  It had been a long time since she’d been aroused by the scent of a man. Longer still since she’d been unable to tear her gaze from the subtle nuance of face and form that had already seared a permanent scar in her mind. She couldn’t recall ever having been so emotionally befuddled by a man’s nearness that her pulse raced like white lightning, and her heart pounded with such force that she feared it might explode.

  It was that kiss, she told herself, one glorious kiss that had changed everything, charged the cabin air with tension thick enough to slice. Nothing could be the same between her and Samuel again. They had tasted each other, a sample so achingly sweet it left them ravenous for more. Neither admitted that, but both knew.

  Across the table, Samuel’s eyes had dilated into bluerimmed orbs, and beads of moisture glowed over his brow. He coughed, squirmed, stared intently at the photograph clenched in his white-knuckled grasp.

  Ellie tested her voice. “Do you have any more? Photographs of your family, that is.”

  Puffing his cheeks, Samuel blew out a breath, and laid the framed picture on the table: “There’s an old photo album around somewhere. My mother kept vacation pictures in it. It’s probably in one of those junk boxes up in the loft.” He flexed his fingers, avoided her gaze. The chair scraped as he pushed away from the table. “I’ll go look.”

  Suspecting he wanted a moment alone, Ellie neither protested nor offered to join him. She could use the time to recoup her own shaken composure.

  Daniel had other ideas. A cranky squeak had Ellie heading across the room to check her awakening son. “What’s the matter, sweet boy?” she cooed, lifting the wriggling infant against her shoulder. The question was answered by a satisfying burp, after which the baby issued a relieved sigh and sagged like a deflated balloon. “Gracious, I’ll bet you feel better now.”

  Ellie rubbed his little shoulders, brushed her cheek against his silky scalp, and began to hum. Daniel yawned, bobbled his head against her shoulder as a song whispered quietly through the night. “Sleepy, sleepy little baby, precious little boy of mine. Sleepy, sleepy little baby, dreaming in a cradle made of pine.”

  The loft ladder creaked. “Cedar.” Samuel stepped down with a fat, leather-bound album tucked under his arm. “It’s made of cedar, not pine.”

  “I know, but cedar doesn’t rhyme with anything useful.” Ellie smiled, laid her drowsy son in the cradle. “Unless we’re talking about someone named Peter, an avid reader—”

  “Who designs meters,” Samuel added helpfully. “And is some kind of, er, leader...”

  “Peter, the meter reader leader?”

  “Exactly.”

  “And if Peter were to take up gardening, would he also be a seeder-weeder?”

  Samuel’s face went blank. “I’m not going to win this, am I?”

  “Probably not. Ooh, you found the photo album.” Ellie finished spreading the blanket over her sleeping son then joined Samuel on the sofa, and squirmed with excitement. She didn’t know why a peek into this man’s elusive past was so enticing, but she could hardly wait.

  The moment he lifted the album cover, she spotted a buzz-haired youngster desperately hauling up the waistband of oversize swim shorts that dragged below his knobby little knees. She whooped gleefully. “Is that you?”

  Samuel issued a curt nod, would have flipped the page had she not stopped him.

  “How old were you then, five or six?”

  “I guess so.”

  “Why are you screaming at the camera?”

  “Because I was mad.”

  “Obviously, but why?”

  He sighed. “If that picture had been taken two seconds earlier, you’d know why.”

  An amusing image popped into her mind. “Would such a photograph have shown a bit more skin?”

  His grumpy expression faltered into a twitchy smile. “Let’s just say that floppy swim trunks combined with swift creek currents and trigger-happy camera moms are a bashful little boy’s worst nightmare.”

  “Ah, gotcha. Too bad she wasn’t faster on the trigger, though. Just think what a keepsake your grandchildren would have.” Grinning at Samuel’s narrowed stare, Ellie kicked off her shoes, and tucked her feet up. “Okay, you can turn the page now.”

  For the next half hour, Ellie was treated to a rare glimpse into Samuel’s childhood, a childhood filled with such obvious happiness that even reminiscence rekindled joy in his eyes.

  “This was taken while Dad was building the screen porch,” Samuel said, pointing out a snapshot of his grinning father posed on a framed deck half-laid with planking. A blurred figure in the background was wielding a hammer. “That’s Rory trying to help. His thumbnail was black for months.”

  “Aww, poor kid.”

  “Poor kid nothing,” Samuel replied cheerfully. “Rory strutted around like a squashed thumb was some kind of heroic war wound.”

  She elbowed his ribs. “Do I detect a hint of jealousy?”

  “Of course. I wanted a black thumb, too, but I certainly wasn’t going to smash myself with a hammer when Mom had a drawer full of perfectly good felt-tip markers.”

  “You didn’t.”

  He shrugged. “It was worth a shot. As it turned out, my folks thought the blatant bid for attention cute enough to warrant an extra helping of pudding.”

  “Which must have ticked your brother off royally.”

  “An additional benefit,” he admitted without a trace of remorse.

  “You can’t fool me. You and your brother were crazy about each other.”

  A wistful reverence softened his reply. “Yes, we were.”

  A page was turned to reveal another year, another summer at the cabin. Ellie gazed at the snapshots, frozen moments of time, arranged with loving care to create a cherished book of memories.

  The Evans boys were older in the next group of photos. Samuel, sporting the shaggy shoulder-length hair that had been fashionable two decades earlier, appeared to be at least twelve and Rory had spouted into the throes of a gangly, awkward adolescence.

  Someone else had joined the motley group of fishermen, too, a red-haired youngster with a face full of freckles. “Who’s this?” Ellie asked, pointing.

  Samuel’s smile faded instantly. “Drake Jackson.”

  “He looks closer to your age than Rory’s.”

  “We were friends,” Samuel conceded, and would have turned
the page if Ellie hadn’t touched his hand. She questioned him with a look. “All right, he was my best friend. We were inseparable.”

  Something in Samuel’s tone kept Ellie silent. On the next page, there were more photos of young Drake, but the pictures were different. They were larger, fluted at the edge, and taken with black-and-white film. But it was the content of those photographs that caught Ellie’s attention. Samuel and Drake both looked distraught, as if they’d been crying. They were surrounded by strangers, men in uniform jumpsuits that were similar to military fatigues, with peculiar floppy backpacks dragging from the odd harnesses each man wore. In the background, the nose portion of some kind of aircraft was visible.

  Ellie squinted at the snapshot. “Is that a helicopter?”

  Instead of replying, Samuel flipped farther back in the album to reveal a large newspaper article pasted in place. A headline read Local Boy Injured In Fall. Below that was a news photo of a vaguely discernible figure on a rescue gurney surrounded by those same jumpsuitclad men.

  “Good Lord,” Ellie whispered, studying the photograph. “Is that Rory on the gunney?”

  Samuel stared at the blurred picture as if reliving the event. “The three of us were hiking in the ravine. Drake and Rory were on the path ahead of me. They were messing around, not looking where they were going. Drake slipped on a loose rock. Rory pulled him back onto the path, then lost his balance and fell over then side. I thought he was dead.”

  His pain cut her like a knife. “You must have been terrified.”

  “Yeah.” Samuel rubbed his eyelids. “The volunteer fire department saved his life. They roared up, unloaded equipment and yanked him off the cliff so fast that Drake and I hardly knew what was happening. From that minute on, we both knew exactly what we wanted to do with our lives.”

  The poignancy in his gaze made sense now. The skill of strangers to save his sibling’s life had provided impetus for Samuel’s future career as firefighter, paramedic and member of his department’s elite rescue squad. “That’s why you became a rescue medic.” She waited for an assenting nod. “And Drake, did he follow in your footsteps?”

  Samuel’s smile was unnervingly sad. “Drake was always ahead of me. I just tried to keep up. He was the department’s best and brightest.”

  “You both ended up working for the same department? You really were inseparable.” A subtle tremor vibrated his arm, alerting Ellie that the conversation was veering into uncharted territory. She ignored the warning, was driven by an unquenchable need to know everything there was to know about this mysterious man who had first saved her life, then become a pivotal part of it. “Is Drake still with the department?”

  The album jittered against Samuel’s fingers. He released the page, let it fall away. “No.”

  “Is that why you left, Samuel, because Drake did?” Over the past weeks, Samuel had acknowledged only that he’d taken a leave of absence several months earlier, but he’d always changed the subject without offering explanation as to why he’d discarded a career that clearly meant the world to him.

  He always seemed hesitant, as if he wanted to reply, wanted to purge himself of a dark, haunting secret. Despite repeated encouragement, he’d never done so.

  This time, his eyes begged understanding, his lips quivered with need to relieve a secret burden. Ellie held her breath in anticipation. This might be the moment, she thought, the moment when his private torment would be revealed to her.

  Instead, Samuel closed the album, laid it on the table. When he looked up, the familiar shuttered sadness clouded his gaze. There would be no revelation. Not tonight—perhaps not ever.

  “I’m going to turn in now.”

  “Samuel—”

  “Good night, Ellie.” Samuel crossed room without a backward glance, climbed the ladder, and disappeared into the murky shadows of the loft.

  Boiling water, brown with mud. The deafening thrum of engines. Clacking blades sliced air thick with screams. A day of destiny. A day of horror.

  He pulled the swing cable inside the helicopter’s bay door, fastened his harness to the rescue hook. A comrade tapped his helmet. The signal. He stepped into thin air, and descended into hell.

  Below him the river churned like chocolate, crushed trees into deadly debris then swallowed it whole. He spun lower, dangled over the carnage on a woven thread of steel. His gaze was riveted on the target, a twisted log caught on the stoic branch of a partially submerged sapling.

  The cable swayed, twisted, jerked, dropped him closer, closer, closer to the boiling flood.

  And then he saw her. Huge, dark eyes, wide with fear. Wet brown hair. The small, outstretched hand. A thin voice, drowned out by the cacophony of terror, reverberated directly to his heart, words formed by colorless lips shivering with cold, and with fear. “Help me, please, help me.”

  She was only a child.

  “Help me!” The little hand quivered, fingers desperately stiff, stretching upward, stretching out to him. To him.

  He twisted on the cable, bucking his body forward and down, extending his hand to the drowning waif who clung so desperately to the wreckage of her young life. Pleading dark eyes. A small outstretched hand.

  The cable jittered and swayed.

  He could touch her now, feel the icy scrape of little fingertips brushing his palm. The battered log shuddered, twisted with the raging current. The small hand slipped from his grasp, and the huge, pleading eyes disappeared into the mud-swollen belly of the beast.

  “No!” This wasn’t happening. “No!” He wouldn’t let it happen. “No, no, no!” Not again.

  Dear God, not again.

  “Samuel!”

  A groan, a guttural cry. The earth shook.

  “Samuel, wake up!”

  He thrashed against the restraining hands. “No,” he croaked. “She needs me—”

  “It’s a dream, Samuel. It’s only a dream.” The familiar voice was sweet, soothing. “You’re all right now.”

  His lungs were on fire. He gasped for air, reared up and stared into darkness. A cool palm stroked his face. He jerked reflexively and grasped her wrist. “Ellie?” The word scratched his throat, emerged in a dry sob. He released her, scoured his face with his palms. He was dizzy with fear, sick to the stomach with it. “Did I wake Daniel?”

  “No.” Her arms encircled him with comforting sweetness. “You’re soaking wet.”

  He shivered. “I’m fine.”

  “You shouldn’t sleep without—” her voice quivered “—without clothes. You’ll catch your death.”

  Sweat dripped from his bare torso. Still disoriented, he glanced down, absently wiped his wet skin with the wadded sheet. “I can’t stand anything tight around my chest,” he mumbled, wondering why he felt compelled to issue such a banal comment. “I sleep in shorts.” Why on earth had he said that?

  “I know.” She dried his back with the T-shirt he’d discarded the night before. Her touch comforted him, wanned him, yet he shifted away, eased the shirt out of her hand.

  “I’m sorry I woke you.” He cocked his head forward, used the wadded garment to wipe the sweat from his eyes. “Go back to bed, Ellie. I’m all right now.”

  “Are your?”

  Samuel heaved a weary sigh, squeezed his eyes shut. A tingling warmth radiated from the crook of his arm as she touched him.

  “You’ve carried this burden long enough,” she whispered. “It’s time to share it.”

  A lump wedged in his throat. God knew how much he wanted to do just that, to purge himself of the pain, the haunting memories. Fear had stopped him in the past, fear of seeing accusation in Ellie’s eyes, the same cutting blame that stared back at him from the mirror. He couldn’t bear that Ellie meant too much to him.

  Yet to withhold the truth would be akin to a lie. She meant too much to him for that, too.

  Conflicted, emotionally drained, Samuel shifted, sat on the edge of the cot with his elbows braced on his knees. He waited until Ellie perched beside him. Still
staring at the floor, he heard a stilted voice, recognized it as his own. “It was a clear spring morning,” he said quietly. “It had rained the night before, just enough to wash the sky and leave everything smelling fresh and new. We were changing shifts when the call came in.”

  In his mind Samuel heard the tone blast. Three short, one long, the call for Station 12. His station. His call.

  “We were rolling before dispatch radioed details.”

  Thunderstorms. Samuel remembered the warning crackling through his headset. Thunderstorms in the mountains, a wall of water surging from bloated ravines, crashing to the valley floor.

  He took a shuddering breath. “A school bus had washed off the bridge.”

  Beside him, Ellie gasped. Samuel licked his lips, stared at the rough planking beneath his feet. “Shift A rescue squads took the land route to the river. My shift diverted to the chopper pad. By the time we’d suited up, the rescue copters were fueled and ready. We checked our gear en route, just like we’d done a thousand times before. When we reached the river it was—” A throat spasm silenced him.

  Ellie touched his hand, said nothing.

  After a moment, Samuel shivered and spoke. “It was the worst thing I’d ever seen in my life. The bridge was gone. The school bus was jammed against a frayed wooden pylon. All you could see was swirling brown muck trying to suck up a few feet of yellow metal and a couple windows. The kids—” his voice cracked “—the kids were everywhere. Screaming, sobbing, clinging to flooded trees and to each other. We pulled them out as fast as we could while the squads on the bank set snag lines across the current. There were so many kids, so damned many of them.”

  Each detail of that horrible day was seared in Samuel’s memory: the thrum of desperate chaos, the raw wind chafing his face, the helpless flailing of youngsters swept into the whirling vortex of the flood. One by one, Samuel had set his rigging, plucked child after child from the arms of murky death.

  Then he’d seen her, a small, dark-haired figure clutching a log snagged on a submerged tree. He’d shouted at the spotter, pointed out the open bay door. The spotter nodded, the pilot banked left.