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IT UNVEILED ITSELF before her eyes, almost in slow motion. Even from her mountaintop perch she saw the beginning of it, two cars climbing up the modestly steep highway leading into town, one in the front, one bringing up the rear at a safe distance.
Nothing out of the ordinary except the deer that darted out in front of the first car then paused in the middle of the road to stare at its would-be attacker, and run safely off to the other side. All this while the first car swerved to avoid it then jammed on its brakes, sending it into a fishtail that caused it to cut in and out, from lane to lane, over the center line, then whip back to the other side. Correcting and over-correcting to right itself.
That’s when the full realization of what she was witnessing grabbed hold and propelled her off the swing and right up to the rail of the porch for a better look. And as that horrible realization sank in deeper, and the second car jammed on its brakes to avoid the veering of the first car, her hand crept to her pocket and her fingers wrapped around her cellphone as the second car braked too hard and skidded … and skidded … and skidded …
A sickening crunch of metal permeated the mountain air, one so hideous it caused a roost of black birds in a far-off tree to flee their sanctuary with great protest and screeching. Holding her breath, Deanna didn’t divert her eyes from the road below as her fingers slid over the phone’s smooth face. She glanced down just long enough to see the numbers to push, and pushed.
Then, as she looked back down the side of the mountain, the second car was flipping, side over side, repeatedly hitting the pavement. Its course to the edge of the road clear, the clutching in her heart turning to a stabbing pain. “Dear God,” she murmured, as the emergency dispatcher came on.
“This is 911, what’s your emergency?”
“No,” Deanna cried in a strangled scream, hoping God or somebody would hear her and stop the second car’s inevitable plummet over the side of the mountain.
“What’s your emergency?” the dispatcher asked again, followed by, “Miss Lambert, are you all right? Please, can you hear me?”
Hearing her name snapped her back into the moment. “Yes, I’m here, and I’m watching a wreck in progress. Two cars …” She glanced left, to the semi heading down the mountain, its driver not yet able to see what was ahead. “And maybe a semi, if it doesn’t get stopped in …” Her voice trailed off as she watched the second act unfold.
“Where, Miss Lambert?”
Again, hearing her name from the dispatcher jolted her. “It’s a road I can see from my porch, but I don’t know its name. I’m in my cabin …”
“Above the Clouds,” the dispatcher supplied, then asked, “South porch?”
“Yes.”
“Can you tell me, exactly, what kind of damage or injuries we might be looking at?”
Massive, devastating injuries, she thought. “Yes. One of the cars has just gone through the guardrail and over the edge. And the other …” She swallowed hard. “It hit the guardrail a few times and it’s still trying to correct itself on the road … I think the truck coming from the other direction’s going to hit it.”
Whether or not the driver of the semi saw the impending disaster ahead, or simply assumed the car careening head first at him in his lane would move over, Deanna had no idea, but the excruciating squeal of the semi’s brakes and the low wail of the truck’s horn was what snapped her totally out of the surreal watching mode and into action.
“I know exactly where it is,” the dispatcher said, “and I’ve sent out an alarm to the volunteer fire department. They’ll be there as fast as they can.”
How long would that be? In a study concerning rural emergency response times Deanna had conducted last year, she’d discovered that those waiting times could be fatally long—sometimes thirty minutes, up to an hour. And from what she’d just witnessed, there were people down below who needed help before that. “What about the local doctor?” she asked. “Can we call him?”
“He’s out mending fences right now, but I’ll give his grandpa a call and see what we can do to get him there. Kelli Dawson’s my daughter, by the way. And I know this is probably not the best time to say this, but welcome to Sugar Creek, Miss Lambert.”
She heard the cordial greeting, but it wasn’t registering because … “Oh, my … No!” The semi didn’t hit the oncoming car, as she’d thought it might, but in its attempt to do a hard brake, it jackknifed and turned over, sliding on its side along the road.
And the car swerved right into it, hit the back end of its trailer with full-on force, bringing both the truck and the car to a stop. “More casualties,” she informed Kelli’s mother. “Two cars and one semi now. Can’t see how many people …” Wasn’t sure she wanted to see how many people.
But after she’d clicked off from the dispatcher, curiosity got the better of her and she grabbed her binoculars, took a look. Nobody was moving. No one was trying to climb out of the carnage. No one was trying to climb up the side of the mountain from where they’d toppled off.
And there was no one there to help. That’s what scared her the most. People down there needed help and she prayed they weren’t past the point where help mattered.
Without a thought for anything else, Deanna grabbed her medical kit, one she carried out of habit more than necessity, and sprinted for her car. She backed it out and headed down the steep road, making sure not to speed lest she ended up like one of the cars below. At the turn-off to the highway, she slowed to let a minivan by, made a left-hand turn and headed for the crash site, hoping help would be there when she arrived.
But the minivan was the only car present, and the woman driving it was standing outside her vehicle, torn between running to look for victims and trying to subdue three small children in the rear of the van. Her cellphone was in her hand and she was physically standing in front of the van’s door. Was she trying to block the view from her children? Deanna wondered about that as she pulled alongside the van, waved to the woman, then continued to drive into the heart of the scene.
It’s what she would do, she realized. She would protect Emily’s baby from seeing what she herself was about to confront. She absolutely understood that mothering priority. She wasn’t sure she’d respond that way in a crisis out of a natural tendency but, looking at it from a purely practical point of view, there was no denying the minivan mom was doing what she had to do. Something Deanna hoped she would learn when she became a mom.
As Deanna brought her car to a stop, several hundred yards short of the crash site, her cellphone jingled before she had a chance to step out. “You’re a nurse?” the deep voice practically shouted. He sounded winded.
“I am. And who are you?”
“Local doctor. Beau …”
She wasn’t even going to ask how he knew who she was, that she was a nurse, her cellphone number … “Your ETA?”
“Five minutes, tops. But without supplies. You’re on the site already?”
How did he know that? “Just got here. Don’t know how many victims yet.”
“OK, you go see what we’ve got and I’ll keep the line open, Miss Lambert. And please start the assessments, establish the priority if you can, figure out what I need to do first, and I’ll be there as fast as I can.”
He knew her name, too. And trusted her to prioritize the scene? She hadn’t done that in a while. Hadn’t been in active practice for years. Maybe if she’d told him that, he wouldn’t be so trusting of her.
Those were the thoughts that stayed with her for the next seconds as she grabbed her medical bag, switched her phone to her earpiece, and headed straight for the first car. “I’m not sure we’re cut out for small-town life,” she whispered to Emily’s baby as she went straight to the driver’s-side window of the car that had hit the semi, and looked in.
“In case you’re listening, Doctor, I have a red sedan embedded in the back of the semi’s trailer. Inside, three people. Male, mid-twenties, driver. Female passenger, approximately same age. Both unconscious. Airbags not deployed. No seat belts. From what I can see, both have had head contact with the windshield, profuse cranial bleeding both victims. Not seeing movement of any kind. And back seat …”
She bent, took a closer look, and was hit with a cold chill. “Child, age approximately three. No child seat. No seat belt. And …” she pulled open the car door and kneeled inside “… he’s conscious.”
“Stay with the child, Miss Lambert. Do you hear me? Stay with the child. I’m a minute away.”
Not that she would have left this little boy. “Hello,” she said, crawling all the way in. Instinctively, she reached over the front seat, took the driver’s pulse. Found nothing. “My name is Deanna,” she said to the toddler. He was curled up in a ball on the floor, looking at her with huge blue eyes that registered shock and terror and total confusion. “Can you tell me your name?”
Crawling across the seat until she was above the little boy, she leaned forward until she could get a good positioning on the female passenger’s neck and, again, felt no pulse. “Can you tell me where you hurt?” Were his parents both dead? Admittedly, she wasn’t in the best position to make assessments on the couple, so she wasn’t making any assumptions.
“No pulses detected,” she said to the vague voice on the phone. “Nothing affirmative, though. I’m not at a good angle to tell.”
“But you’re in the car?” he asked.
“Yes, with the child.”
“Is the car safe? No fuel leaking, nothing that looks like it’s going to ignite? Not close to the edge of the road?”
“Front end’s a mangled mess, but I’m safe.” She was pleased he actually sounded concerned.
“No chances, Miss Lambert. You keep yourself safe. Do you hear me?”
Yes, she heard him. “I have every intention of doing just that, Doctor,” she replied. To get Emily’s baby safely into the world, she would take no risks.
“Is the child injured? Can you tell if he’s hurt?”
“Can’t tell yet. I’m trying to check, but it’s cramped in here.” Cramped, even without her baby bump. She wondered how, in months to come, she was going to maneuver with a baby bump. “We’ll just have to wait and see how that works out,” she said to Emily’s baby.
“Yes, I suppose we will have to see how it works out. In the meantime, I’m coming up behind you, so hold tight.”
Startled that she’d been caught talking to Emily’s baby, she glanced over her shoulder to see exactly where he might be behind her and there he was, larger than life … a cowboy riding her way. Actually, galloping. On a horse. OK, so maybe not a real cowboy in the Western movie sense but he was certainly a doctor on a horse who gave her an unexpected chill. And he was also a big, imposing figure of a man. Jeans, T-shirt, boots. Sexy. “Other casualties?” he shouted, as he slid off the horse and ran straight towards her.
Deanna shook herself out of her observation, out of the pure fascination that was overrunning her, displacing the fugitive fantasy with the reality. “Um … don’t know. We’ve got a car over the side, about two hundred yards back …” She pointed to the black skid marks snaking across the road for a hundred yard stretch. “And a truck. Don’t know anything about the driver. Haven’t had a chance to go over there to see him yet.”
The doctor, Beau, crowded into the back seat of the car right behind her and nudged her forward most of the way to the opposite door then twisted around and proceeded to wedge himself between the back seat and the front. Doing his own assessments, as Deanna attempted to make herself more accessible to the boy, who’d curled even tighter into a ball.
After mere seconds he sucked in a sharp breath, which Deanna heard, and understood.
“How about we get the child out of here?” Beau asked. “There’s nothing here he needs to see.”
Even though she had been prepared to hear the words, the implication hit her hard. “Both of them?” she asked.
“Both of them.” He began to back out of the car, pulling his massive form out of the too-small space. “How about you? Are you OK in there?”
“Don’t have a choice,” she said, as she began the struggle to lift the boy from the floor and at the same time assess him for injuries she might not have seen right off. The truth was, nothing about this was OK. But it wasn’t about her feelings or memories. Or any inherent fears she might have for what this child was about to face.
“Then I’m going round to the truck. Janice Parsons, standing over at the minivan, said she’ll look after the boy if we need her to, so shout if you need anything else, OK?”
If she needed anything else? She needed everything, including a way out of this. Her parents, Emily … it was all closing in around her. Smothering her. “Oh, and the dispatcher said she’d get the volunteer fire department out. But I don’t know how long that’s going to take.”
“Too long,” Beau shouted, his voice diminishing even before his words were all out. “Damn problem with all of this. It always takes too long!”
Deanna rose up and took a quick glance out the window, just enough to see him run behind the truck, and while she knew she wasn’t alone here, that’s how she felt. Amazing how twenty seconds crammed together in a car with him had bolstered her self-confidence.
“So, is your name Tommy?” she asked the child, as she gently moved in to take his pulse. Strong, a little too fast. But he was scared. “Or Billy?” She wiggled her hand from his and brushed long, curly blond locks from his forehead, then took a look into his eyes as best she could. Pupils equal and reactive. “Or Porcupine?” Counted his respirations—normal.
“Not Porcupine,” he finally said.
She was so relieved to hear his voice. “If it’s not Porcupine, is it … Bulldog?”
“Not Bulldog,” he said, tears welling up in his eyes.
She began a gentle prodding of his limbs, no heightened pain sensitivity noted. Then his belly. Not rigid, no distension. “Kangaroo?” she asked, trying to move him slightly to his side to make sure nothing was sticking into him in any way, like shards of glass from the shattered windshield or objects that might have flown around the car. But he was clear of everything, and she was beginning to wonder if he’d been curled up on the floor of the car when this had happened. Maybe asleep?
He whimpered something Deanna didn’t understand but which she took to be him asking for his mommy. Glancing over the seat to the lifeless form, she drew in a ragged breath. “Mommy needs to rest right now. So does Daddy. So I’m going to open this car then we’ll get out very quietly so we won’t disturb them. Will you help me do that, Kangaroo?”
“Not Kangaroo.”
“Is it Hippopotamus?” she asked, as she pushed on the car door then climbed out. “Or Walrus?”
Leaning back in, she scooped the boy into her arms and lifted him away from the wreckage, taking great care to make sure his face was buried in her shoulder. What an awful thing, seeing your parents that way and having that memory linger as your last memory of them. Her parents had died this way, in a car wreck. But she hadn’t been in the car, and her very last recollection of them was the hugs and kisses they had given her when they’d dropped her off at her aunt and uncle’s house. Hugs, kisses, and I love yous shouted from the car window as they’d pulled away from the curb … “I personally like Cheetah, or Chimpanzee.”
“It’s Lucas,” the child said, but so quietly it was more a muffled sob than a word.
Did he know? Did he have some innate feeling that he’d just become an orphan? She hadn’t when it had happened to her. In fact, it had taken months to sink in, months in which she’d spent every minute she could with her face pressed to the window, watching for them to come back.
Deanna didn’t know about Lucas, though. Didn’t know if he had an innate feeling, or just plain knew, because she didn’t know a thing about children. She’d never been around them except for a few mandatory clinical rotations through pediatrics, and she’d certainly never planned on having them herself. She’d never been struck with that maternal urge the way Emily had. While it had defined her cousin, it had eluded her. So motherhood had never been included in her life plan—a decision she’d been fine with.
Of course, Emily’s baby changed all that. Still, she wasn’t consumed with an innate sense of motherhood the way she’d expected to be, the way she’d seen it in so many other women she’d known. The way Janice Parsons was when she bundled Lucas into her arms so protectively the instant Deanna handed him over to her.
“I think he’s OK,” she said, a little envious of the way the boy went from her embrace to someone else’s so easily. Hadn’t she snuggled him the right way? “His name is Lucas, and I’ll have the doctor do another exam on him as soon as he can. In the meantime, if you could …”
There was no sense in finishing the sentence. Janice’s mothering instincts were on full alert as she turned Lucas away from the wreckage. All that natural tendency—a beautiful thing to see, really. “Don’t give him anything to eat or drink,” she said, taking one last look at the boy then at Janice, envying the way she exuded motherliness from every pore.
Would that ever be her?
That thought plagued her as she ran over to the edge of the road where the guardrail was smashed and broken, then looked down. Thank God, the drop-off to the first ledged area was barely more than a hundred feet. Sure, it was a long distance if you were in the car going over it, but the distance was short enough that she was cautiously optimistic.
“Hello,” she shouted. “Can anybody hear me?”
The response was one staccato honk, which came as pure relief. But also frustration, knowing she couldn’t make that climb down. Thank heavens some kind of natural instinct had kicked in and kept her planted on terra firma, because her natural inclination would have had her over the side before she’d even given it a thought. She still wondered, though, if that instinct would be enough in the long term because, dear God, everything in her wanted her to go over that edge.
“Help’s on the way,” she shouted, actually taking a step backwards. “Please, don’t move. And if you have a cellphone …” She called out her number and actually stood there for a second, waiting for a call back. Which didn’t come. “I’m going to go get the doctor. We also have the fire department on the way. So don’t give up. We’re going to get you out of there in a few minutes.”
“Truck driver’s wedged,” Beau said, the instant Deanna rounded the front of the truck. He was standing on the asphalt, looking through the windshield at the driver, who was stuck fast between the steering-wheel and the seat. “Internal injuries, some bleeding. Broken arm. Mangled leg … not sure if it can be saved. Head trauma but conscious. Strong possibility of hemorrhagic shock once we get him out. I can’t do anything about it until we have more help.
“I’d stay in there with him but it’s too tight and I don’t want to risk slipping or moving the wrong way and hurting him more than he already is.”
“We’ve got survivors in the car that went over,” she said, trying to sound positive.
“Were you able to get down there?” he asked, his eyes glued to what was visible of the man in the truck.
“No, but someone honked.”
“So all we need is …”
“Everything,” Deanna said. “All we need is everything.” She studied the man next to her for a moment. Mid-thirties, but with some lines etched in his face. Dark brown hair, a bit over the collar and wavy. Brown eyes. The kinds of things that would have been included on the sperm-donor card—had there been a donor card. But in addition to the sperm switch, the donor card had gone missing.
What wouldn’t have been described on that card, though, was the kindness she saw in his eyes. From that, she was drawn in immediately. Not that his good looks alone couldn’t have done it but those were an added bonus, gave her some hope for the way Emily’s child might look. “My name is Deanna Lambert. But I’m betting you already knew that, didn’t you?”
He smiled, although he didn’t even glance in her direction. “You’re renting a cabin here for a month to do some medical writing. Live in New York City otherwise.”
“And my zodiac sign?”
He chuckled. “Give me ten more minutes and I’ll not only tell you your zodiac sign, I’ll describe your high-school graduation in detail.”
“That bad here?” she asked.
“Or good, depending on your point of view. The people here describe it as caring and, for the most part, I think that’s right.” Finally, he glanced at her, but for only a second. “I’m Beau Alexander, by the way. Local and possibly temporary doctor, aspiring horse breeder, mender of fences.”
She’d known who he was, but hearing the name—from him—still shocked her, made her reason for being here even more real. Scared her, too. Most of all it made her feel sad, thinking about the way such a happy pregnancy was turning out. “I think I may be renting the cabin above your ranch.”
“Above the Clouds. Nice view. Been up there a couple of—”
His words were cut off by the ringing of Deanna’s cellphone, and without thinking she clicked it on. Listened for a second. Drew in a deep breath. “It’s the people in the car,” she said to Beau.
“What?”
“I gave them my cellphone number in case they wanted to call me. So they’re calling.”
“Damn,” he muttered, impressed with her resourcefulness. More than that, impressed with everything he’d seen of her so far. “Good thinking.”
“Only thing that came to mind. So, do you want to do this?”
He shook his head. “Got to stay focused on the driver, and I have to go back into the truck as soon as the fire department shows up and can keep the door open for me.” The distant wail of several sirens caused him to sigh in relief.
“They’re at Turner’s Points now … you can tell by the echo. Turner’s is the first place in the canyon that catches the sound like that. And it means they’ll be here in about five minutes.” He ran up to the truck windshield and gave the man a thumbs-up then turned back to Deanna, who was already on her way back to the side of the road where the car had gone over.
“Deanna,” he shouted to her, “direct the medical end of the rescue when they get here, because when I get back into the truck I’m not getting out until after my patient does.” Meaning he was going to have to wedge himself into a damned uncomfortable spot practically underneath the man, and stay put. He had to brace the man’s leg, hopefully apply some kind of a splint, before they could move him, and at the same time keep his fingers crossed that the driver would survive the efforts to cut him out of there.
He glanced back at her, watched the way she instructed the paramedics who’d just arrived. He observed her body language, her no-nonsense stance, and liked her instantly. He wished he could have someone like her working alongside him every day.
“Hire someone like Deanna,” he grunted, more to himself than out loud as he hauled himself up the side of the truck after two firefighters had dismantled the door for him and tossed it down on the road like it weighed no more than a plastic water bottle.
“Couldn’t hurt,” he said under his breath as he reached the top then started to lower himself back inside. “Might even help.”
Considering the way he and his grandfather were battling over how to run a medical practice, he was pretty sure that having someone capable like Deanna involved would be another of the old man’s objections. But Beau had to have his say in the matter if he was going to stay here permanently. And having a nurse or a medical assistant seemed like a good idea.
He’d known her for only a few minutes yet he wanted Deanna. Snap judgment and right fit, he believed. But he’d heard she was only renting for a month, which meant she wasn’t staying in Sugar Creek. So now the problem was that Deanna had become the only person who flitted across his mind’s eye when he thought about hiring another staffer. And she was such a nice fit he wasn’t sure how to alter that image.