Operation Mountain Recovery Read online

  His thoughts were derailed when he caught a glimpse of the tow yard down at the end of the street. He could see a silver sedan sitting just inside the gate, the driver’s window missing.

  How was she? She could be really hurting today. The second day after a jolt like that was often the worst.

  He made a sudden, impulsive decision, even though he’d been reminding himself for forty-eight hours now this—she—was not his problem. Still, a follow-up couldn’t hurt. It was just good PR, and Sheriff Carter was all about good PR. Not that they were in a place that needed it; these mountains generally—his complainant just now aside—bred a tough, hardy lot, and since they only called for help when they really needed it, they tended to respect it when it showed up.

  He knew where the mayor’s home was. They all knew, because if a call came in from there, it was immediately high priority. Such were the politics of public service. He wondered if perhaps they’d been called out there since Ashley had moved in and he just hadn’t heard about it. He tended to tune out the gripes and complaints about such things, since whining didn’t change anything. But maybe he’d check when he got back to the station this afternoon. Just to satisfy his curiosity.

  When he reached the large, imposing house at the end of Hemlock Hill Drive, he thought not for the first time that it looked like it belonged in the Swiss Alps rather than the mountains of Washington State. He remembered the modest, much smaller house that had once been pointed out to him as where the mayor used to live, before she became mayor. He wondered now if that was the house Ashley had grown up in. The house where her father had committed suicide one dark night, with his child just down the hall.

  He knew this because he had looked up the report in the archives. That had taken some doing, since it had been twenty years ago and those files had not been computerized. Sheriff Carter wasn’t fast on the uptake, nor did they have the money for all the latest and greatest or the manpower to maintain it, so they had only input the last ten years or so into the system. He’d almost given up the hunt when he’d realized half the files were out of chronological order, but his stubborn had kicked in and he’d kept looking.

  Once he’d read the report, he almost wished he hadn’t. How do you do that to people you supposedly love? If you can’t take any more, fine, but damn, to blow your brains out with your eight-year-old daughter only a few yards away? It had been hard enough when his own dad had died after a long fight with cancer—he couldn’t imagine what it must have been like for Ashley to know her father had left her by choice. True, the man’s psychiatrist had laid out a diagnosis of various mental issues, but still, to an eight-year-old...

  When he got to the door, he almost turned around and left, but again that stubborn kicked in. He’d just check on her and leave. An official visit. Well within his purview as the responding officer, as it were.

  When she answered the door, he was sure he probably gaped at her. She looked weary, haggard and much worse than she had after the crash. Her hair was tangled, she wore a sweatshirt so big it came almost to her knees and her eyes, those eyes that had been so vividly green and alive that day, looked...vacant. It took her a moment or two to recognize him, even after he’d reminded her of his name. Her reactions were slow, much slower than they had been that day, and he wondered just how strong those pain pills they’d given her were. He looked at her eyes again, noted the size of her pupils. Could be, he thought. So maybe this was just someone reacting to a temporary medication.

  Or not.

  Something was nagging at his memory as she hesitantly answered him; yes, she was sore, sorry she didn’t remember much, and was it you who pulled me out?

  Yes, she had to be on some strong drugs, he thought. And he’d heard a roughness in her voice that made him wonder if she’d been crying.

  And then it hit him, what had been tugging at him. Right now she reminded him of Liz. The onetime fiancée who not only couldn’t handle his job, but had come to hate him for it. The slightest difficulty had seemed too much for her fragile nature, real difficulty reduced her to near hysterics, and she blamed him for all of it. Or as his mother suspected, blamed him for not letting her manipulate him with her tantrums. Either way, it had actually been a relief when she’d left him for some slick sales type and had moved back east.

  There was no way in hell he wanted to deal with a woman like that again, even for work, if he didn’t absolutely have to. That helped him shove this right into the slot it belonged in, which was labeled not in my job description. Ashley was obviously alive, if not in good shape, but how she chose to deal with her situation was up to her. If he thought he was going crazy, he might self-medicate, too.

  “I just wanted to be sure you were all right,” he said briskly, professionally.

  “As you can see, I’m alive.” Her mouth twisted sourly. “Not well, but alive.”

  “Have you seen your own doctor?” Not your job, Crenshaw. “An accident like that can rattle you,” he finished neutrally.

  “I was...rattled long before that,” she said, so sadly it wrenched at his new determination to stay clear. “Don’t worry about me, Deputy Crenshaw. There’s nothing you can do about what’s wrong with me.”

  An out. Take it and run, idiot.

  “What’s wrong with you?” he said instead.

  She looked up at him, her eyes looking suddenly bright, not because she was any more there than she had been, but with the gleam of tears. “I’m going insane. Just like my father. Goodbye, Deputy Crenshaw. Thank you for...everything.”

  And then he was staring at a closed door.

  I’m going insane. Just like my father.

  Was it true? Her mother thought so, and he knew mental illness sometimes seemed to run in families, but that was about where his knowledge ended. His job was to deal with the fallout, not the causes.

  He walked back to his unit, got in and sat there in the SUV for a moment. With an effort he put it—and her—out of his mind and went back to work. One shoplifter in custody, a nightmare of traffic control while a semi that had misjudged a turn tried to get out of town without taking half the streetlights down, two stray dogs taken home and he was done. He signed out, got back in the unit—which he always drove, since you were never really off-duty in a place like Eagle County, where they were stretched so thin—and headed for home.

  He stopped at his lookout on the way. He got out of the unit and climbed up to the boulder he usually sat on here. It was his favorite place, this cliff-side vantage point only a mile out of town that had an amazing view of his beloved mountains. It was different at all times of the day and all seasons, whether it was with the sun painting the night sky as it rose, the clouds barreling over the top and down in a storm, or just a quiet day where the massive bulk of them cut a jagged line across the sky. Today, on a severe clear Northwest day, wearing their full winter coat of snow, they looked almost unreal, they were so staggeringly beautiful.

  Right now he needed the wonder this place gave him. Needed the peace, the solidity. Because he needed to figure out why the hell he always seemed to be drawn to people who needed rescuing. Or who needed it, but didn’t want it. Or who needed it, but he couldn’t do it.

  Hero complex, Crenshaw? Is that what her shrink would call it?

  He was staring out over the mountains when he heard a bark. Odd—he usually had this place to himself; there was an official lookout a couple of miles farther down the road, where it was easier to park and there was a marker labeling the peaks you were looking at. He didn’t need any labels, he knew them all by name, not just these but everything from Hood to Adams to Rainier to Baker.

  The bark came again, this time sounding oddly familiar. He laughed at the idea of telling one bark from another, but stopped when he looked around and saw an indeed familiar dog running right at him. Cutter.

  He slid down from the boulder, having to dodge a spot where the snow had pile
d up beside it. The dog greeted him with dancing delight, as if he were a long-lost friend. It made him smile despite his mood.

  “Well, hi there, my furry friend,” he said and bent to stroke the dog’s head as Quinn and Hayley walked more sedately toward him. Holding hands, he noted, feeling a pang.

  They halted beside him, but they were looking out at the mountains. And then Quinn shifted his gaze to Brady.

  “Looks like a good place to find it.”

  Brady drew back slightly. “Find what?”

  “Peace.”

  And it came back to him, the certainty he’d had that this was a man who understood. A man who saw the need for it, who had been on that search himself. Brady’s glance flicked to a smiling Hayley, then back to Quinn. “Second only to where you found it.”

  Quinn’s smile could carry no other label than that of a satisfied man. “Yes.”

  “What made you stop here? People usually head down to the official lookout.”

  Quinn lifted a brow as Hayley laughed, a light, loving, beautiful thing. “You answered your own question.” So they preferred the solitude, too.

  “And,” Quinn added, “we discovered we’re picky about who we share our anniversary with.”

  Brady blinked. “That’s why you’re here? It’s your anniversary?”

  “Number one,” Hayley said.

  “Of many. Congratulations.”

  “You sound pretty certain,” Quinn said with a grin.

  He grinned back. “Buddy, it’s written all over both of you. So are you liking my mountains?”

  “We’re going to look for a place of our own. Alex said we’d fall in love with it.”

  “Alex?”

  “Alex Galanis. A friend of ours. We’re staying at his vacation place.”

  “He’s my neighbor,” Brady said, and then the pieces fell together. “It was you. Foxworth, I mean. You’re the ones who helped him out a few years ago.”

  “We helped, yes.”

  “From what he said, it was a lot more than that. You not only got his son out of that terrorist hellhole alive while the freaking officials sat around scratching themselves, you kept his whole family safe while doing it. Two other kids, in different colleges across the country, each of them being watched and under threat from the same ass—”

  “Hats,” Hayley supplied with a grin when he cut himself off.

  “Yeah,” Brady said with an answering grin. “Them.” Any lingering doubts he had about these people—there weren’t many, and most of those centered on their seemingly exaggerated faith in the instincts of their dog—vanished in that moment. Alex didn’t just swear by them, he damned near lit a candle for them at a church he didn’t even go to.

  “Have you seen Ms. Jordan since Wednesday?” Quinn asked.

  Brady sighed. “Stopped by there today. She looks,” he said frankly, “like hell. Probably just the pain meds, but...” He shrugged.

  Cutter whined, and Brady looked down to find the dog sitting there, staring up at him. Intently. No, not just intent. Intense. He leaned down to pet the dog again. The animal let out a small sound of appreciation, but that look never wavered, the ears never shifted and the tail didn’t wag. He just sat. Staring.

  “My dog-ese is a little rusty, my friend, so I don’t get what you want me to do,” Brady told him.

  “Fix it.”

  Brady straightened to look at Quinn, who had said the words simply, as if it were obvious.

  “Like I told you that day, that’s his ‘fix it’ look,” Hayley elaborated. “He’s found the problem, and now it’s up to us to fix it. And in this case, that ‘us’ clearly includes you.”

  His brow furrowed. “But what am I supposed to fix?”

  “I’m guessing it’s who,” Hayley said softly.

  The obvious image came to him, of the woman he’d walked away from a few hours ago. The beaten, haggard-looking woman who had so flatly, openly, told him she was going insane.

  The woman he’d sworn was not his problem.

  Chapter 7

  She never should have taken those stupid pain pills in the first place. She was hurting, yes, but they were worse. She hated the disconnected feeling she got from her regular meds, but these made it intolerable. And besides, they made her want to throw up half the time. The half when she wasn’t so groggy she could barely move. Her mother, worried by the fierce bruises that had shown up, had pushed her to take them, but this morning she’d finally put them right back in the bottle and set it aside. It had been four days—it was time to get over it.

  If only healing the brain was as simple.

  She’d had, at her mother’s insistence—and expense—three different brain scans in the last five months, and they had found nothing. And that alone told her how terrified she was, when finding a brain tumor would be more hopeful than finding nothing.

  But all the clean scans had done was prove that it was nothing physical, that the chaos her life had become grew solely out of her own mind. Prove that along with his love for baseball, reading and these mountains, her father had also passed down to her the gene or chemistry or quirk, whatever it was, that was sending her down the same path he’d taken. To pure insanity.

  The path to the place she had reached yesterday. The realization that because of her refusal to accept what was happening to her, a brave, good man had had to risk his life to save hers. Two good men, one of them an actual good Samaritan who could have passed right on by. But somehow the fact that it was Deputy Crenshaw’s job to protect made it no easier to accept that it was her fault he’d had to do it.

  And for the first time in her life, she understood, on a bone-deep, visceral level, why her father had killed himself. If this was what he’d been facing...

  I’m sorry I was so angry at you for leaving me, Dad. I didn’t understand. Now I do.

  She not only understood, but for the first time that permanent exit crept into her mind as a possibility. And that was what had her sitting here, shaking like the leaves on a quaking aspen.

  She wanted some fresh air. Wanted to be where she could see the mountains, not holed up here in the study like some crazy recluse.

  She nearly laughed out loud at herself. “You are a crazy recluse!”

  That did come out loud, and it was followed by the laugh, the sad, pitiful laugh she’d stifled before. As the sound echoed in the book-lined room, she gulped in air, trying desperately to beat back hysteria.

  She had to get out. She just had to. Surely if she just went for a walk, that would be all right? She wasn’t so far gone she would get lost, and as long as she didn’t drive, just walked, and if she didn’t go in anywhere and embarrass her poor mother by letting anyone see how far gone her crazy daughter was...that would be all right, wouldn’t it? She’d have to be careful, very careful. Her mother had been so kind, so understanding about the car, telling her it didn’t matter as long as she was all right.

  If her mother was here, Ashley was certain she’d try to talk her out of this. But she was doing a ribbon cutting this morning, at the new park at the north end, with the new trail up to the falls that Ashley hoped to hike someday soon.

  Well, not if she didn’t get herself back in shape. And what better way to figure out how far she’d backslid than to take a nice, long walk around town?

  She could do this. She would make an effort to look normal, too. She’d been aghast when she’d awakened this morning and seen her own reflection clearly, without that drug-induced fog, for the first time. It was a wonder Deputy Crenshaw hadn’t had her committed on the spot Friday. It had been Friday, hadn’t it? She frowned. She clearly remembered opening the door to see the tall, strong man in his utilitarian uniform standing there, looking at her with shocked concern.

  No wonder he’d left so quickly. Probably thinking if he stayed any longer he’d end up doing that mental healt
h committal. She remembered vividly the first time they’d taken her father away, remember her mother crying, an event rare enough that it had stunned her, and stopped her from screaming at them to let her daddy alone.

  It wasn’t until her mother insisted that she move in here with her that Ashley had realized what a nightmare this must be for her. She’d been through it with her husband and had to be strong for her little girl. And now she was watching that little girl heading on the same path.

  And what would it do to her if you took the same way out?

  Sometimes she thought that was the only thing that kept her from doing it.

  She did what she could with makeup she hadn’t used in a while. She dressed with more care than she had in weeks: jeans, but her black ones, a soft alpaca-blend sweater and boots that were a compromise between warm feet and comfortable walking. She picked up the phone her mother had gotten her after she’d misplaced—permanently, it seemed—her own. A bigger disaster than it might seem, since all her contact info for friends was in it, and none of it had downloaded properly when she’d tried to switch over. She’d even had her mother try, only to have her check and sadly say there were no contacts in the cloud to download.

  Served her right for not having memorized any numbers except her mother’s, for relying on the phone for that. She’d thought of calling the ski equipment store where her best friend, Caro, worked, but she knew she got in trouble for personal phone calls at work.

  What’s the point? What are you going to say? “Just a hello and goodbye before I completely lose my mind”?

  She felt better the moment she opened the door and stepped out onto the porch. And better yet when she was clear of the house and could really see the mountains. She drew in deep breaths of the crisp, cold air, and to her it was like breathing in rejuvenation. By the time she reached Mountain View and downtown, the fog had completely lifted, and her mind felt clear and sharp. It didn’t seem possible that her life was in such disarray.

  She found herself looking at every shop, reading the signs in the windows, as if to prove to herself that she could. Everything seemed perfectly normal to her. She seemed perfectly normal to herself, if she discounted the various aches from her adventure down the mountainside. The shadows in her mind threatened to return whenever she thought of that, of what others had risked because of her. Especially the deputy, who had gone to the trouble to check on her. He—