Surrender: A Bitter Creek Novel

by Joan Johnston

  When Aiden reached out as though to take her in his arms and comfort her, Leah gasped and took a step backward. She ended up stumbling and would have fallen if he hadn’t caught her by the shoulders to hold her upright.

  “Let me go!”

  “Leah, I—”

  “Let me go, or I’ll scream.” Leah writhed and squirmed, repelling Aiden’s touch precisely because she yearned to be held in his strong arms, yearned to feel his bristled cheek against her own, yearned to have his hands moving over her body. She’d needed all her willpower to resist the urge to listen to his excuses and forgive him. She didn’t know how much time she could spend with him without breaking down entirely.

  Aiden let go of her and held his hands up, palms out. In a harsh voice he said, “You’re free. Settle down.”

  “Don’t you dare tell me to settle down!”

  “Then don’t act like a five-year-old. Would you rather I let you fall on your ass?”

  “That’s exactly what you did, Aiden. Dumped me upside down and tossed me sideways. I hope you’re happy, because I’m not! I trusted you. I lo—” She cut herself off, crossed her arms, and stared at him with her lips pressed flat.

  “Please, Leah. Let me explain.”

  Leah glared at Aiden through narrowed eyes. “No. Not now. Not ever. Not ever again will I trust a Flynn. Especially not with my heart. If you bring up this subject again, you’ll be searching for your brother by yourself.”

  Aiden dropped his hands to his sides and his chin to his chest. His shoulders slumped. When he met her gaze again, the pain in his eyes made her stomach knot. She hardened her heart and said, “Where do you want to start?”

  “If there was any way on this earth to escape the furnace that burned that forest to ash, Brian will have found it. I suggest we start on the perimeter of the burned area, where there’s still green forest.”

  “I have another idea I’d like to suggest.”

  “I’m listening,” Aiden said.

  “What if they didn’t go down with the plane?”

  “What do you mean? What other possibility—”

  “Didn’t you tell me earlier that Brian was supposed to jump the fire but ended up being the spotter instead?”

  Aiden nodded. “I see where you’re going. He probably boarded the plane with his parachute. Are we presuming the spotter’s parachute never made it onto the plane, because the spotter never showed up?”

  “What I’m suggesting is that Brian could have parachuted out of the plane before it crashed.”

  Aiden frowned. “Without Taylor? Not a chance.”

  “What if they jumped together with one parachute?”

  “A tandem jump?” Aiden said. “Without the right gear that would be pretty risky. A Ram Air is intended for one person.”

  “Put yourself in their shoes,” Leah argued. “The plane is going down. Taylor can’t find a safe place to land because they’re surrounded by mountains and sharply angled gullies. Brian could probably rig something to get the two of them down with one chute, don’t you think?”

  “I can check with the jumpers and see if Brian boarded the plane wearing his chute. That’ll tell us if jumping was even an option.”

  “I wonder why they haven’t contacted us on Brian’s radio,” Leah mused.

  “Maybe it was damaged,” Aiden said. “Even if it wasn’t, his Bendix King doesn’t have much range without a repeater in the area, and it’s useless in mountainous terrain. Where was the last contact with the plane?”

  Leah pointed to a red dot. “This is where Taylor gave their last position.”

  Aiden drew a line with his finger between the red spot where Taylor had last radioed her position to the X where the Twin Otter had crashed. “If they jumped somewhere along that line, we’ll to need to search a lot of territory to find them. How far is it from one point to the other?”

  The firefighter who’d handed Leah the map had already made the calculation, which she shared with Aiden. “Exactly 17.4 miles.”

  “That makes the search area—” Leah began.

  “Too damn big,” Aiden interrupted.

  “We can search more efficiently if we start with the plane’s location and move out from there,” Leah said.

  “Unless they jumped.”

  “The fire’s still burning at the last location Taylor gave us on the radio,” Leah said. “The fire is out where the plane crashed.”

  “I guess that settles that,” Aiden said. “How many experienced searchers can we get?”

  “You want to do a grid search?”

  “I don’t see a better way, do you?”

  A grid search involved a long line of people, about twenty feet apart from one another, moving forward slowly and deliberately through an area. Leah knew about grid searches because she’d become a trained volunteer and participated in previous searches for missing backcountry skiers and hikers.

  She also knew the math: twenty-five people to the mile with twenty feet between them meant 924 man hours. A trained team could cover one square mile in 3.5 hours. That meant they had to figure out a way to reduce the search area to make a realistic search possible.

  “Why don’t we take a look ourselves before we organize a larger search?” Leah suggested. “Especially since the area is so remote.”

  “All right,” Aiden agreed. “Meanwhile, I’ll get Dad to expand the air search.”

  “I’ll speak to King as well. Will the Forest Service even allow us in there with the fire still burning?”

  “I don’t intend to ask,” Aiden said. “That way they can’t say no.”

  Leah smiled grimly. That sounded like the Flynn way of doing things. It was similar to the Grayhawk way of getting from point A to point B without a hitch. “Finish your sandwich,” she said. “It may be a while before we have time to eat again.”

  “Leah—”

  “I’m going to say this one more time. I don’t want to hear explanations or apologies, Aiden. I don’t want you to say a word to me that doesn’t have to do with finding Taylor and Brian. Is that understood?”

  She watched a muscle bunch in his jaw, watched his lips turn down, watched his eyes fill with frustration.

  All he said was “Understood.”

  “WHY AREN’T YOU married?”

  Taylor laughed at the odd question and snuggled closer to Brian. They were sprawled on the sleeping bag, with the parachute draped over them. They’d spent the past six days sitting or lying together in the dark, because the more they moved around, the more calories they used, and they didn’t have any to spare.

  At least it wasn’t pitch-black inside. Once Brian had trimmed away the spruce branches on the inside of the cave, they could see the trunk hadn’t completely sealed the opening. A quarter-inch stream of light seeped through at the top.

  It occurred to Taylor that they might have suffocated without that opening. Besides allowing air inside, the narrow slit permitted them to tell night from day, and to observe that the forest fire had burned out as far as they could see. The smoke was gone. The sky was blue. But the landscape had been reduced to charred ashes and skeleton trees. Devastation and desolation. No birds. No chipmunks or squirrels. No elk or moose or bears. Nothing living remained.

  “We could barely tell there was a cave here before that tree came down,” Taylor said. “How is anyone going to find us with that enormous tree blocking the opening?”

  “Once I chip away enough of that spruce, we can shove part of the parachute out. It’ll be a white flag on black soot. For anyone hunting from the air, it’ll make something big to spot.”

  Taylor’s stomach growled, and she looked to see if Brian had noticed. She hadn’t yet turned out the headlamp after her early morning trip to the back of the cave, despite the knowledge that the batteries couldn’t last. It was one more reas
on to be anxious.

  Brian was stretched out with his head on his PG bag and his arm up across his eyes. If he’d noticed her stomach protesting, he wasn’t saying anything. What was there to say? They were running out of food.

  For the first time in her life, Taylor was truly starving. The sun had risen on their seventh day of captivity. Her stomach growled again.

  Brian chuckled and said, “Insistent little bugger. Wants to be fed, I suppose.”

  “If I’m hungry, you must be starved.”

  “Don’t change the subject.”

  “What’s the subject?”

  “Why aren’t you married?”

  “I’d rather talk about food. Or the lack of it. We’re running out, Brian. What are we going to do?”

  “Since there’s nothing we can do, I prefer to talk about other things. Like why you didn’t marry one of those three guys you had on the hook.”

  “Do you realize that all we’ve eaten—between us—in six days, not counting that steak and potato, are two cans of beans, a granola bar, and an apple? That all we have left is two Snickers bars, and we’re going to eat one of those for breakfast?”

  “We still have six packets of coffee.”

  They’d used the frying pan to heat water to make hot coffee, and had shared a cup each day before they’d eaten their single meal, so their stomachs wouldn’t realize how empty they were.

  We really are going to starve. We should have eaten less. We shouldn’t have been so greedy the past six days. We should have spread out our food to make it last longer.

  Taylor was silent so long Brian prompted, “Well? Why aren’t you somebody’s wife?”

  Instead of answering his question, Taylor reached up and turned off the headlamp and set it aside. They’d kept the headlamp off except to make meals or trips to the latrine, to treat Brian’s wounds, and to allow him to mark the passing of each day by writing in the small notebook from his PG bag. Today, he hadn’t even done that.

  Taylor laid her ear against Brian’s heart—she found its steady beat calming—and said, “Why do you care why I’m not married?”

  “I just wondered.”

  “I could say ‘nobody’s asked’ but you’d know I was lying.” All three of her engagements had been announced not only in The New York Times but in the daily Jackson Hole News & Guide. “I suppose the truth is ‘the right person hasn’t asked.’ ”

  “What was wrong with the three guys who gave you a ring?”

  Taylor shrugged. She knew Brian could feel the gesture because they were lying so close. She’d spent all her waking hours talking about stupid stuff that didn’t matter, until her throat was raw and sore, because talking about anything more significant suggested that she’d accepted the inevitability of their deaths. She didn’t want to talk about important things, like why she’d stayed single instead of marrying one of the three men who’d professed to love her. She didn’t want to accept the fact that her life might be ending when she had this awful, aching hole inside her that had never been filled.

  So she said, “I’m dying for a Pinky G’s pizza with sausage and pepperoni.”

  “Personally, I could go for a Liberty’s bacon cheeseburger and sweet potato fries.”

  “I keep thinking of all the hungry children in Africa, and how Leah used them as a reason for us to clean our plates. I never really understood what it meant to be hungry.”

  “Now you do?” Brian asked.

  “I’m starting to. I can’t imagine living an entire life—start to finish—like this.”

  She fell silent, with the question Brian had asked hanging between them. She gritted her teeth and pressed her lips flat. She wasn’t going to speak. She was going to keep her mouth shut and her problems private. This was Brian Flynn. What if they did get out of here? Imagine the ammunition he would have to make her life miserable.

  The silence stretched between them in the darkness.

  At last Brian asked, “What’s wrong, Tag?”

  “You mean aside from the obvious?”

  “You’ve been talking nonstop since we got stuck in here. I worry when you’re quiet.”

  While she’d been blabbering away about clothes and makeup and vacations she’d taken and holidays with her sisters—innocuous facts about her life that didn’t matter—Brian had been content to listen. Suddenly, he was probing for very private, very personal information about her three engagements.

  What’s changed?

  She didn’t like the answer that came to mind.

  Brian doesn’t think we’re going to be found. He believes we’re going to die of starvation. He just doesn’t want to frighten me by admitting it aloud.

  If all hope was gone, there was no longer any reason to keep anything from him. She took a deep breath, a breath of inevitability, and let it out.

  “Shall I discuss the prime specimens of manhood who proposed marriage to me?” she said, breaking the silence.

  “By all means.”

  “I should get a pass for getting engaged to Joe Bob Trent.”

  “Why is that?”

  “I was only eighteen, too young and stupid to know better. I think I should get credit for calling that one off.”

  “Fair enough. What about Craig Rudolph Hempstead, III? You were twenty-four when I saw that announcement. Educated guy. Yale, according to the paper. Wealthy, due to inherit his father’s copper mines in South America. Athletic, a sailor in the America’s Cup. Philanthropic, supported Greenpeace. What was wrong with him?”

  “He hit me.”

  She felt Brian’s body go rigid.

  “Just once,” she hurried to add. “That was enough. I hightailed it as fast as I could.”

  “Good for you. And the third guy? The most recent one?”

  Taylor sighed. “Dr. Harold Norwood? Nothing was wrong with him.”

  “Then why did you cut old Harry loose?”

  “I don’t know. I just…got cold feet.” When Brian made no comment, she added, “You must admit, I don’t have the greatest role models for the institution of marriage. King’s been married and divorced four times. Most of those relationships caused havoc for everyone involved when they ended. My mom was married twice—that I know of—and quit both times. What’s the point of getting married if it’s going to end badly?”

  “Who says it has to end badly?”

  “Statistics,” she said flatly.

  “Then why get engaged in the first place?”

  She made a face. “For the obvious reason, of course.”

  “What is that?”

  Taylor reminded herself that what she said here was never going any further. It was all right to tell Brian her deepest desires, because they were the last thoughts she’d be revealing to anyone. “I want to share my life with someone who loves me as much as I love him.”

  “And none of those guys loved you?” He sounded incredulous.

  When she didn’t speak he said, “Oh. I see. You didn’t love any of them. If that was the case, why get engaged?”

  In a small voice she said, “I think there’s something wrong with me.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I want to be in love. I just…don’t trust a man to keep on loving me. I figure he’s going to get tired of me eventually, so I run before he can.”

  “Get tired of you? Are you crazy?”

  “Admit it, Brian. If I hadn’t walked away from you in high school, you would have left me eventually.”

  “I liked you, Tag. A lot.”

  She noticed his use of liked, even though he’d qualified it with a lot. That was a far cry from the love he’d supposedly felt and verbally expressed.

  “I was willing to defy Aiden to keep dating you in high school. He thought you were going to hurt me if I stuck around. Turned
out he was right.”

  “You were hurt when we broke up?” She felt him nod.

  “I hadn’t nearly had my fill of you.”

  “Be honest. How much longer would we have lasted as a couple?”

  “I guess we’ll never know.”

  “You sound mad.”

  “You didn’t just walk away, Tag. You ran like a scared rabbit. You never gave us a chance. Now I see why. With you it’s ‘Don’t get too close. Don’t love too much. Or I’m out of here.’ I guess I was lucky you left me when you did.”

  “I’m sorry if I hurt you, Brian. I did care for you. Too much, maybe.”

  “Why didn’t you say something at the time?”

  She put a palm to his bristly cheek. “I guess I was afraid.”

  “Of what?”

  “That if I stayed, the pain of losing you would be devastating.” She put a hand to his lips to keep him from interrupting. “When I thought the plane was going to crash and I might die, the thing I regretted most in my life was walking—all right, running—away from you in high school. I thought about what I might say to you if I got a second chance.”

  He eased her hand away from his lips and took it in his own. “What would that be?”

  “That I wish we could try again. That there was a spark of…something…between us I think can be rekindled.”

  She felt his body stiffen. “You have feelings for me? Now? Still?”

  “Leftover feelings. Unfinished feelings. ‘Wonder if we could ever recapture what we had’ feelings.”

  He eased her head off his shoulder onto the T-shirt she was using as a pillow and sat up. “I don’t want to hear this. Not now. Not when it’s too late.”

  His words confirmed their fate, the impending doom that had loosened her tongue. Their lives would end in this cave. She understood Brian’s frustration. Why consider what might have happened between them, when there was no happily ever after to be had?

  Brian held up his wrist so he could see the face of his watch, which glowed in the dark. “We missed breakfast. And lunch. You want to eat something now, or wait until later?”

  She sat up, aware that, once again, she’d done most of the talking. Did Brian still have feelings for her? If he did, he wasn’t admitting to them. Not even when he wouldn’t have to act on them. She hadn’t believed she could be hurt. But she was. She wasn’t sure what she’d wanted him to say. Whatever it was, he hadn’t said it. He hadn’t said anything.