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Claire didn’t answer, too busy remembering how delicious cold water could taste on a parched, achy throat.
“You probably feel terrible right now, don’t you?” The soft concern in Brooke’s voice unexpectedly brought tears to Claire’s eyes.
She blinked them away and managed a shrug. She hated this, being helpless and needy. “I’ve had better days.”
“You’re due for more pain medicine. I’m going to add it to your IV.”
“When can I go home?”
“That’s for Dr. Murray to say. I’m guessing at least a few days, given your head injury and the surgeries.”
Claire looked at her mother in surprise. “Not Jeff?”
“You know he can’t operate on you because of your relationship. But he’s been coordinating your care with Jim Murray.”
“Dr. Bradford was just checking on another patient down the hall,” Brooke offered as she checked Claire’s vitals. “I’m sure he’ll stop here before he leaves for the night.”
Sure enough, the nurse was typing a few notes into the computer on a swing-arm beside the bed when the wide door opened and Jeff came in. His hair had as many blond streaks as Brooke’s these days and was cut in a shaggy youthful style that seemed incongruous with his traditional green hospital scrubs and white lab coat.
She was pretty certain he’d had Botox sometime in the past few months, although she was also sure he would rather be tortured with his own scalpel before he would admit it.
“Hello. Claire. Ruth. Brooke.”
The nurse gave him her cheery smile, but Claire’s mother just lit up, like she always did around Jeff. Her mother adored the man. Claire sometimes thought Ruth considered her and Jeff’s divorce the biggest tragedy of her life, even worse than the scandalous end to her own marriage.
Jeff barely looked at her, reaching instead for her chart. As he flipped through it with those familiar blunt fingers she had once loved, Claire sighed, wondering which felt heavier to her right now: the cast on her limbs or the weight of her own failures.
She was very glad she wasn’t married to him anymore, for just this reason. She had mostly become invisible to him.
“You didn’t operate on me.”
He glanced up. “I assisted. Jim Murray was your surgeon. He’s a good man. I’ve just been reading his report.”
They were in the same practice, she knew, and she tried to summon a picture of Dr. Murray. A hazy picture formed in her head of a man who was slightly shorter than Jeff with a steel-gray mustache and kind eyes.
The beeper the nurse wore around her neck suddenly went off. She glanced at it, then turned to Jeff. “If you don’t need me, Dr. Bradford, I’ve got another patient to check on.”
“Thank you,” he said. When she left, he reached for Claire’s broken arm, lifted it and wiggled her fingers. For not being her treating physician, he was doing a fairly good impression of it.
“How are the children?” she asked when he turned his attention to her ankle.
“Just fine. I spoke with Holly a few moments ago and she said they had rested most of the afternoon, even Owen. She’s making popcorn and when I get home we’re going to watch a movie.”
Claire felt that absurd urge to cry again. In that moment, she wanted to be cuddled up in her comfortable family room with her children eating popcorn and watching a dumb kids’ show more than she remembered wanting anything in her life.
“You don’t need to worry about them,” Jeff said in that stern, listen-to-me-I’m-a-doctor voice of his. “You should be focusing on yourself.”
She didn’t know how to do that very well and probably never had.
“That car. The one that drove us off the road. Did the police ever find them?”
Ruth and Jeff exchanged looks and Claire thought she saw her mother give a slight shake of her head. “Don’t worry about that now,” Ruth said quickly.
“What does that mean?”
They were definitely keeping something from her, but she didn’t have the energy to push. Claire really wished she could remember more than those few moments just before the crash and then that terrible moment of flying toward the water.
And Riley McKnight. Good grief. Why would she remember Riley?
Fragments of memory teased at her mind. A quiet voice soothing her, a cold hand smoothing her hair away from her face. Had Riley really been there or was she just mixing things up after seeing him first at her store and then later at the Spring Fling?
“How long will I have to stay here?” she asked Jeff.
“That’s for Dr. Murray to decide. If you were my patient, I would probably keep you two or three more days post-op to get you through the worst of the pain and to make sure we don’t see any complications from that head trauma.”
“I can’t stay here four days! The store!”
“You’re going to be away from String Fever for more than four days, Claire.” Her mother’s tone was brisk. “At least three or four weeks. But don’t worry, Evaline is taking care of things for you.”
“Dr. Murray will go over this all with you, but you’re going to have a difficult recovery,” Jeff warned. “One ankle is broken, the other is sprained and you’ve got a broken ulna to boot. Mobility’s going to be your biggest issue because you won’t be able to use crutches very well at first due to your arm, or at least until the right sprained ankle heals a little. You’re going to need help, Claire.”
“Don’t you worry,” her mother said, squeezing her arm. “I’ll move into the house with you and take care of everything. We can move you into that guest room you’ve got downstairs and I’ll take your room.”
She looked between the two of them and didn’t know how to respond. The pain medication Brooke had given in her IV was beginning to take effect. Blessed oblivion lurked just on the edge of her consciousness, enticing her to just close her eyes.
“You rest now, poor thing,” Ruth said. “That’s the very best thing for you. Am I right, Jeff?”
“Absolutely.” Her ex-husband brushed his streaky blond hair from his face, his face twisted into that unnatural botulism-toxin placidity.
Normally she would fight sleep with every ounce of strength she possessed, but right now even battling mystical water creatures in her medication-twisted nightmares was more appealing than contemplating the idea of having her mother living with her for the next few weeks.
She would worry about that later. As long as her children were safe, she could cope with anything.
CHAPTER FIVE
HOSPITAL SLEEP WAS THE WORST. As she expected, her dreams were tortured and disjointed. Every time she seemed to drift off, the nurses would come in to make her move her arms and legs, to give her more meds, to check her vital signs.
When she awoke to pale morning sunlight streaming through the gap in the blinds that hadn’t been fully closed, she was blessedly alone and only in moderate pain.
She gazed at that beam of sunlight and even though she wanted to stay there in the quiet peace of morning, she made herself revisit the accident. Something teased at her, some discordant note she couldn’t quite place. Her mother wasn’t telling her something and for the life of her, she couldn’t figure out what.
With the subtle whir and beep of monitors in the background, she remembered that terrifying soar into the water again, her pain and overwhelming fear for the children, then Riley’s quiet voice, offering strength and comfort.
She wasn’t imagining. Somehow during the night, full recollection had returned. Riley had been there, out in that cold water with them. He had saved them. She considered it nothing short of a miracle that he’d seen them at all. That stretch of canyon could be sparsely populated at night. If they had gone off the road when no other cars had been in sight, they might have frozen out in that lake before someone else sighted them there below the roadway, trapped and helpless as the car filled with icy water.
She certainly wouldn’t have had the strength to extract the children on her own, not with her injuries. If not for Riley, she didn’t want to think what might have happened to them.
Riley. The most unexpected rescuer she could imagine. Teasing, tormenting, hell-raising Riley. Somehow he had been there right when she needed him and had risked his own safety to make sure she and the children were okay.
She hoped he hadn’t suffered any ill effects from being out in the water so long. She should call Alex. Alex would know. Probably once the doctors allowed visitors today, one of the McKnights—Alex, Angie, Maura or even Mary Ella—would stop by to check on her.
When she heard a quiet rap on her closed door a moment later, she called out “Come in,” expecting a nurse to bustle in with more antibiotics or a breakfast tray or something.
Instead, a tall, dark-haired figure appeared in the doorway as if she had conjured him with her thoughts. He wore a dress shirt and tie and a pair of slacks and had obviously dropped in on his way to the police station.
“Riley. Hi!”
In an instant, she was aware of how terrible she must look. Her hair was probably matted and tangled, she was wearing an oh-so-attractive hospital gown and she hadn’t seen the inside of her makeup bag in thirty-six hours. She was mortified for just a moment, then gave herself a mental eye roll. She was alive. That was the important thing. She couldn’t do anything about the rest of it anyway.
She must be feeling better if she could worry about her vanity, she thought, as Riley moved into the small hospital room, taking up more space than he should given the laws of physics and particle displacement.
“Hi. I hope I didn’t wake you.”
She worked the button on the bed that raised her head to more of a sitting position. “I’ve been up for a while. I was just thinking about you, actually.”
Surprise flickered in the green of his eyes. “Oh?”
“I was hoping you didn’t suffer any hypothermia or anything from the accident. You were in that water with us a long time.”
“Nothing some hot coffee and a couple of blankets didn’t take care of. I’m fine.”
He didn’t smile when he spoke and she again had that strange, instinctive sense that something was terribly wrong. Like her mother, he looked haggard and tired. A few more lines fanned from his eyes, a new tightness around his mouth.
“What about you?” he asked. “You’re looking good.”
She made a face. “And you used to be such a good liar.”
Now he did smile, but it didn’t reach his eyes as he pulled a chair over closer to her bedside.
“So what does the doc say? What are the damages?”
She thought of her conversation with Jeff and then later in the evening with Dr. Murray, who had indeed been kindly and avuncular. “My arm is broken in two places and my left ankle now has more hardware than the robot Owen built for his science fair project last fall. The right ankle is sprained. The head is okay. Mild concussion and only four stitches. Dr. Murray tells me to expect to feel like I was hit by a truck for at least a month.”
His mouth tightened even more. “I’m sorry, Claire. So damn sorry.”
The words seemed to vibrate through the room, much more intense than just casual sympathy for an injured acquaintance. She frowned and studied him more closely.
Through those signs of exhaustion, she saw something else. Something that looked oddly like guilt. “Why do you say it like that?”
He was silent for a moment. “Do you know what caused your accident?”
“Yes. I remember that much. Some joker coming down the canyon took a curve too fast for conditions and veered into my lane. I swerved away to avoid him and went off the road.”
“Right. That joker was a suspect trying to get away from me.”
She blinked, aware of the machines beeping and the low buzz of activity outside, probably doctors beginning their rounds.
“A suspect? In what?”
He sighed. “Burglary. Multiple burglaries.”
In all the craziness of the past few days, it had seemed natural to focus on the accident than on what had come before. “Of my store?”
“Yours and the others hit that night. I had a call about suspicious activity at a house that was supposed to be vacant. The suspect vehicle matched the description of the one seen outside the downtown businesses that were burglarized. I thought I could catch the suspects, maybe with stolen property. When I decided conditions weren’t ideal for pursuit, I pulled back but it was too late. They were already spooked. If I hadn’t been chasing him, that idiot Charlie Beaumont wouldn’t have come around that corner like a bat out of hell and you wouldn’t have had to swerve to avoid him and we wouldn’t be here having this conversation.”
She stared at him. “Charlie Beaumont?”
She pictured Genevieve’s younger brother, small for his age and cocky and, like Riley had been, often in trouble.
“He was driving?”
Riley nodded and something bleak and cold swept across his features.
Her brain didn’t seem to be working right. She couldn’t seem to make the connections click together. “You’re saying Charlie robbed my store and all the others in town?”
“He and…a few others.”
That bleakness sharpened and she again wondered what she was missing.
“That’s the theory we’re going with,” he went on. “So far the evidence seems to back it up. Charlie’s not talking on advice from his attorney.”
“Mayor Beaumont,” she guessed.
He nodded. “But we have confessions from a couple of the other teens involved and they’ve led us to some of the stolen items.”
“There must be a mistake. I know Charlie has had some trouble, but this is…crazy.”
“No mistake,” he said.
“But the Beaumonts are rolling in money. Why would Charlie need to take a computer and some spare change from my till? Why would he destroy his sister’s wedding dress?”
“Who knows? The thrill of it, maybe? Whatever the reason, Charlie and the others are in serious, serious trouble. I’m sorry you were tangled up in it. One of those wrong place, wrong time kind of things.”
She thought of the weird confluence of events that had led her to the canyon at that moment, of Jordie’s parents falling ill, of her spontaneous offer to take him home from the Spring Fling, of the late-spring snowstorm that hit so fast and so hard.
“You probably thought Hope’s Crossing would be tame compared to what you left in Oakland.”
His jaw tightened. “I certainly didn’t expect this.”
“Okay,” she finally said, exasperated with all the layers of subtext that seemed more treacherous than the imaginary tendrils of seaweed in her nightmares. “What aren’t you and everyone else telling me?”
His features turned wary. “Why would you think I’m keeping something from you?”
“I have two children, Riley. I’ve got a built-in lie detector. It’s part of the mom job description.”
He looked surprised. Good. That was better than that bleak sadness in his eyes. “You’re comparing the behavior of your two children trying to get out of trouble to a cop who spent the last five years undercover, lying to keep from being stabbed in his sleep?”
She didn’t like thinking about his life before he came home, but that still didn’t keep her from picking up on his tactics. “My children also seem to think that if they distract me by changing the subject, I’ll forget my train of thought. What aren’t you telling me?”
He studied her for a long moment and then released a long, slow breath and looked away. “After he ran you off the road, Charlie Beaumont crashed his pickup a little way down the canyon. Rolled it and hit the trees.”
She gasped and the movement hurt her head. “Oh, no. Tell me everyone is okay.”
He didn’t answer and she shifted on the bed, pulling the blankets higher against the sudden chill.
“They’re not okay,” she said when his silence stretched on and she didn’t need to see the confirmation in his eyes to know she was right.
“A few of them had only minor injuries.”
“But?”
For a long moment, she didn’t think he would answer her. When he did, his voice was weary and his eyes held a deep sorrow. “Two girls were thrown from the vehicle. One sustained severe head trauma and had to be airlifted to the children’s hospital in Denver. And…another one didn’t make it.”
Claire’s hand clenched convulsively on the blanket. How could she lie here feeling sorry for herself, worrying about her store—about her vanity for heaven’s sake—when a mother somewhere had lost a child?
“Who?” she whispered.
“You don’t need to worry about this, Claire. You just need to focus on yourself.”
“Who?” she demanded more forcefully.
He sighed. “Taryn Thorne is the girl with the head injuries.”
“Oh, poor Katherine!”
Her friend adored her only granddaughter, fifteen and slender and turning into a beauty with her big dark eyes and long dark hair.
Taryn sometimes came into the store. Just the week before, Claire had helped her make a pair of custom earrings for a school dance.
What was Katherine going through? Claire suddenly hated that she couldn’t help her friend through this, that she was stuck here in a stupid hospital bed instead of offering solace and aid to Katherine when she needed it.
“And the other girl?” she finally asked, not sure she wanted to hear the answer.
Riley didn’t answer for a long time, that bleakness turning his eyes a wintry green.
“You don’t need to worry about this right now.”
“Stop saying that. Tell me. Please, Riley.”
He finally spoke in a voice so low that she almost didn’t hear him. “Layla.”
When the name finally registered, icy disbelief crackled through her. Layla. Maura’s daughter. Riley and Alex’s niece. Mary Ella’s granddaughter.
Layla, who had worked in her store sometimes in exchange for beads to make the funky Goth jewelry she adored.
“No. Oh, no. Oh, poor Maura.”
Her throat was heavy and tears spilled over and she was only vaguely aware of Riley reaching for her uncasted hand.
“I shouldn’t have told you. I’m sorry, Claire. You need your strength to recover, not to worry about Maura and the rest of us left to grieve with her.”
She wept then, noisy, painful tears that clogged her throat and burned her eyes and hurt her heart. Through it all, Riley held her hand in both of his, looking tortured. She wanted him to hug her as he’d done that day in the store, but she knew he couldn’t, not with her casted arm awkward and heavy between them.
He handed her the box of tissues and she must have used half of them before the storm of tears gave way to a deep, primal ache.
“How is your family?” she finally asked.
“Hanging in. We McKnights are tough, but this is…”
“Unimaginable.”
“Yeah.”
“I’m sorry, Ri. This isn’t what you expected.”
“No, I’m—”
Whatever he was going to say was cut off when the door swung wide and her mother bustled in carrying one of Claire’s beaded bags and her arms loaded with magazines and books.
Ruth stopped in the doorway and did a double take Claire might have found funny if she hadn’t been staggering under the weight of her grief for Layla.
“What do you think you’re doing here?”
Riley blinked a little at Ruth’s outrage, then he shuttered any expression.
“Visiting Claire. I thought she might want to know the status of the investigation into the break-in at her store.”
Claire didn’t care anymore. She would have gladly endured the violation and outrage of hundreds of burglaries if it meant Layla could still be alive, with her black-painted fingernails and the mascara she would layer on with a trowel.
Ruth squinted at Claire and the scattered tissues on top of the blanket. She advanced on Riley, her features furious. “You told her, didn’t you?”
This was what her mother had been keeping from her, Claire realized finally, why she was drawn and upset. She had said nothing to Claire yesterday, had prevented Jeff from telling her, as well.
“Yes,” Riley answered. “She asked. I answered.”
“You had no right. No right!”
“Why didn’t you tell me, Mother? Maura is my friend. Alex is my best friend. I needed to know. You shouldn’t have tried to keep it from me.”
Ruth bristled and looked offended, an expression she wore with comfortable familiarity. “I didn’t want to upset you. You’ve been through a terrible ordeal.”
“A few broken bones, which will heal,” Claire shot back. “I didn’t lose a child!”
Ruth aimed another vitriolic look at Riley. If her mother hadn’t already disliked him, she would loathe him now for going against her misguided wishes.
“What good does it do for you to know right now? You would find out soon enough. Look at how upset you are.”
Ruth would never understand that Claire was angry at her for withholding the information, not at Riley. With her classic myopia, her mother could always figure out a way to make herself the injured party in any conflict, so why bother trying to explain?
“I’d better go. I’ve got to head down to the station.”
He seemed so different from the teasing, flirtatious man who had come into her store after the robbery and her heart ached. “I’m so sorry, Riley,” she murmured, knowing the words were grossly inadequate, but they were all she had available. “Thank you again for everything that night.”
“I’m glad you’re doing better. Take care of yourself, Claire.”
She nodded and watched him go, then settled in to face an exhausting day of busybody nurses and poking, prodding doctors and, worse, having to cope with her mother.
“ARE YOU SURE YOU’RE okay back there?” Jeff met her gaze in the rearview mirror.
Claire shifted on the backseat of his Escalade, trying to ignore the pain shooting through her muscles with every rotation of the tires.
She hugged Owen to her and reached across his back to hold Macy’s hand. What were a few bumps in the road when she finally had her children close?
“I’m fine. It’s only a fifteen-minute drive anyway.”
“You really should have taken the front seat.” Seated beside Jeff, Holly leaned around the headrest and gave Claire a stern look.
She was absolutely right but Claire refused to give her the satisfaction of agreeing. It had been stupid to insist on taking the backseat, where she didn’t have nearly enough leg room for a cast. She had to stop literally bending herself in half to make everyone else happy.
“But then I would have missed the chance to sit by the kids and I’ve missed them like crazy.”
She forced a smile and somehow managed to keep it from wobbling away when Jeff hit one of the town’s legendary late-spring potholes and the subsequent lurch sent her meager hospital lunch sloshing around her insides.
It was only the pain pills making her nauseated, she knew. That and the fact that she was actually in motion again after being confined to her hospital room for nearly five days.
“It looks as if most of the snow has finally melted.”
Indeed, with the capriciousness of a Rocky Mountain spring, the temperature during her brief trip from the wide hospital front doors to Jeff’s backseat had been mild and pleasant. Outside the car window, she saw children playing on muddy lawns already beginning to turn a pale green and as Jeff turned onto Blue Sage Road, she enjoyed the sight of the bright yellow and red tulips beginning to bud in Caroline Bybee’s always-spectacular garden.
“It’s about time,” Macy groused. “It seems like winter went on forever this year.”
“I know, right,” Holly said. “I mean, Sunday is Easter and everything. I was thinking we’d have to hide eggs in the snow this year.”
That wasn’t an uncommon occurrence in Claire’s memory. In the high Rockies, Hope’s Crossing had been known to see heavy snowstorms into late May, but usually by the first of April, most of the remaining snow was up at the higher elevation of the ski resort.
“I’m glad it’s warmer today, for Maura’s sake,” she murmured.