15 Summers Later

Chapter 18

As our escape unfolds, hunger claws at our stomachs, a constant reminder of the price we pay for our freedom. We forage for berries and edible plants, our fingers stained with the juices of the wild. The taste is bitter, but the sustenance is a lifeline in the unforgiving landscape. Each morsel is a testament to our resilience, a reminder that we are survivors, not just of captivity, but of the wilderness that seeks to consume us.

—Ghost Lake by Ava Howell Brooks

As she hurried back to the office, Madi was torn between being nervous about speaking with Luke for the first time since their stunning kiss or being baffled by her sister’s odd behavior.

It was easier to focus on Ava, she decided as she returned to the office. Why did Ava need to talk to her husband so urgently?

Was their marriage in trouble? She wasn’t sure what gave her that worry but since Ava had returned to Emerald Creek, she acted so strangely whenever Cullen’s name came up.

If it were true, if they were breaking up, Madi would find it beyond tragic. She adored Cullen and had from the first time she met him.

He always treated Madi with kindness and respect and she never saw pity in his gaze when he looked at her.

She understood why Ava couldn’t go to Ghost Lake by herself. Madi wasn’t thrilled about it, either. She tried to avoid that area when possible. Still, it wasn’t as if they would be going to the Coalition camp again. From what she understood, the dinosaur hunters had set up on the opposite side of the lake, at least a mile away from the ruins of the compound.

When she reached her office, Madi sank into her desk chair and took a few deep breaths. She didn’t want to sound like she had just raced across the rescue to talk to him, as if he only had to call for her to come running.

Okay, it might be the truth, but Luke didn’t need to know that.

Her nervousness annoyed her. Luke was her friend. She had no reason to feel so on edge.

He answered on the second ring. “Hi,” he said. “Thanks for calling me back.”

She tried not to picture his mouth forming those words—the same mouth that had been flavored with cinnamon and chocolate when he kissed her the night before.

“Hello,” she managed. “I got your text. What’s up?”

He hesitated. Was it possible he might be as ill at ease to be speaking with her as she was with him?

“You told me Ed went up in the mountains over the weekend, looking for those stray dogs we heard about, but didn’t have any luck. I got another report from some sheepherders up there who said they saw a couple of dogs running loose around Elk Flat Road. I thought I might take Sierra up there this evening to look for them. Want to go with us?”

She would much prefer doing that, riding up with Luke and Sierra looking for dogs, instead of taking Ava on some mysterious errand to see her husband.

“I’m sorry. I can’t. I already agreed to take Ava up to Ghost Lake. She needs to talk to Cullen. We’ll be leaving in about an hour.”

“That’s a funny coincidence. Okay. Maybe we’ll see you up there, then.”

“From what I understand, the dinosaur camp is on the east side of the lake. We have to travel right through Elk Flats, so I’ll keep an eye out for a couple of strays.”

“Sounds good. Be alert, if you see them. It sounds like they’ve been wandering the mountains for at least a couple of weeks, from the reports we’ve had. If they’re starving, who knows how they’ll react to people?”

“I’ll be careful.”

A silence fell between them but it didn’t seem as awkward as she had feared.

“We missed you around here today,” he said, his voice gruff. “I thought we were going to have to do emergency surgery on Janet Mitchell’s cockapoo again this morning. He had an obstruction. Apparently he swallowed a chicken bone he pulled out of the trash.”

This was at least the third time they’d had to retrieve something inappropriate from the little furry vacuum cleaner. “Oh no. Is he okay?”

“He will be. We gave him some hydrogen peroxide and he hacked it up about five minutes later. We’re keeping him here overnight for observation.”

“I’m sorry I missed that,” she said, only half-joking. She loved when they treated an animal emergency that could be resolved easily and swiftly.

Those were the things she would miss most about working at the veterinary clinic, the moments when they were able to ease a pet owner’s mind about their fur baby or help an animal through a frightening health challenge.

Life was a series of trade-offs. She had chosen to start the animal rescue in order to serve a void in the community and had worked hard to make it a reality. In order to devote her whole attention to the Emerald Creek Animal Rescue, she would have to walk away from her work as a veterinary tech at the clinic.

That didn’t mean she would never go back, only that she was focusing on something else for now.

They talked about other patients on his schedule that day. Gradually the awkwardness eased and they slipped back into their usual comfortable camaraderie with each other.

Only after they ended the call and she returned to organizing the volunteer schedule for the next month did it occur to her that that was probably the very reason Luke had called her. He must have known that waiting even one more day would only heighten their discomfort with each other.

“This trail can get pretty dusty,” Madi said as she climbed into the driver’s seat of the side-by-side she had unloaded from the trailer. “Do you have a scarf or a bandanna or something?”

Ava looked startled. “No. Do you really think we’ll need one? I thought it was a fairly well-maintained dirt road, at least until we get closer to the lake.”

She shrugged. “Hard to know for sure. It will still be dusty. I figured you wouldn’t think to bring one and I forgot to mention it, so there’s an extra in the side pocket for you.”

Ava blinked, clearly surprised. “Thank you. You’re right. I didn’t think about it.”

“I would guess you don’t spend a lot of time in the mountains these days.”

“Not true,” she said defensively. “I go with Cullen sometimes when he needs to explore a possible site. We try to combine work with recreation. We spent some time last summer hiking in both Montana and Utah. It was beautiful.”

Madi found it odd to think of her sister going along with her paleontologist husband on a hiking trip into some of the world’s most remote places. It was hard to reconcile that with the pale, serene, controlled woman Ava had become.

“I’m assuming you’ve been in one of these, then.”

“Not often. But yes.”

“You know what they say. Keep your arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. We’ll be going through some heavy forest. You don’t want to lose a hand to a tree limb.”

Ava looked concerned. “Would you like me to drive?”

“You can if you’d like. But I’m fine. I quite enjoy it, actually.”

With a deep breath, Ava climbed into the passenger seat of the side-by-side and put on her own seat belt.

She gestured to the empty dog crates Madi had tied down in the small bed of the vehicle. “Do you want to explain what those are about? Are you expecting to bring something back?”

“I hope so,” Madi said as she started the vehicle. “Apparently there are a couple of stray dogs running through these mountains. I want to be ready in case we see them.”

“Ready for what?” Ava asked, clear alarm in her expression.

“To catch them if possible, and take them back to the shelter. Dogs can survive in the summer up here but come fall, they’ll be starving.”

“So you want to find two half-starved possibly vicious mongrels somehow in the vast mountains, persuade them to jump into the crates and drive them back down the mountain with us?”

Madi couldn’t help her laugh. “If we’re lucky.”

The fire road was fairly well-maintained here, wide enough for two small ATVs to pass each other. Still, the side-by-side didn’t exactly offer a smooth ride, jostling over bumps and rocks in the road. Madi glanced at her sister, who looked pale. Was Ava still feeling ill? She couldn’t tell and her sister didn’t volunteer the information.

The trail cut through beautiful old growth forests, thick with Douglas fir, ponderosa pine, aspen and spruce.

She inhaled deeply. “I love the way the mountains smell.”

“Even these mountains?” Ava asked, her hands tightly clasped in her lap.

Madi couldn’t see her features because of the bandanna and the sunglasses, but from Ava’s posture alone, Madi could tell her sister was nervous.

“These mountains are just mountains,” she answered, raising her voice to be heard above the growling engine. “Only a place. Beautiful, remote, wild. What happened to us could have happened in Hawaii or Canada or the Arizona desert.”

“I suppose you’re right,” Ava said.

She grew quiet as the road became rougher. Madi slowed down to avoid some of the worst of the ruts and rocks. As the vehicle bounced through a rocky patch, the sisters jolted against one another.

Once they made it through and the road evened out again, Ava turned to her. “Do you think you could ever forgive Dad for dragging us into it all?”

Her sister’s question, completely out of the blue, made Madi stare. In her shock, she took her foot off the gas and the vehicle slowed, then came to a stop, the grumbling engine reverting to a low hum.

“Is that what your book is about?” she asked. “Trying to figure out how to forgive Dad?”

“No. But I have to say, I did learn a lot about him while I was writing it and even more since.”

“Like what?” she asked, when Ava didn’t elaborate.

“Do you remember that Dad suffered a pretty bad head injury in a motorcycle crash right after you were born, when I was a toddler?”

“I was a baby. How would I know that?”

“I don’t remember Mom and Dad talking about it much. I had totally forgotten about it. Apparently he was in the hospital for a week and Mom had to handle us both by herself. Grandma flew out to help her.”

Leona hadn’t mentioned that to Madi, either. She wondered if everything that had come after overshadowed that singular incident.

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“Maybe nothing,” Ava conceded. “But a childhood friend of Dad’s emailed me right after the book came out. He said Dad was always the kindest person, always willing to help someone else. Apparently something shifted in him after his injury. He became more... I don’t know if paranoid is the right term. But willing to see conspiracies and connections in everything. This guy, Larry Hampton, said Mom was always a moderating force on Dad.”

“Remember how he used to make us do emergency drills and would sometimes wake us in the middle of the night to go down to the bunker he had made in the basement?”

Ava nodded. “There’s a section in the book about that. I guess you haven’t read that part yet.”

She hadn’t read any part yet. Madi’s hands tightened on the steering wheel and she started up the side-by-side, heading up the trail again.

“I rarely heard Dad and Mom fight,” Ava said, barely audible now above the engine, “but I remember them fighting after one of those 3 a.m. emergency drills.”

Madi didn’t want to remember. She liked pretending everything before her mother died had been perfect in their family and that it had been her mother’s death that had sent Clint spiraling. But Ava’s words seemed to have turned the key to unlock memories in her subconscious, whether she liked it or not.

“I wouldn’t have heard them, except I couldn’t go back to sleep like you did, and I had to get up to use the bathroom,” Ava went on. “Their door was ajar. I remember hearing Mom pleading with him to get help or she would have to leave. She threatened to take us girls and come back here to Emerald Creek with Grandma Leelee.”

“Do you think she would have done that?”

“We’ll never know. She was killed only a few months later.”

The trail turned rough again, climbing more steeply, and Madi had to concentrate on driving.

She didn’t like thinking about their father. It hurt too much. She had adored him all through her childhood, had considered him her hero. He had worked so hard to provide for their family, taking on second jobs to pay the bills when times were tight and his mechanic’s salary and the little they made from the farm didn’t stretch as far as necessary.

They rode in silence, each lost in her thoughts. It was too hard to carry on a conversation anyway, with the wind in their faces and the engine of the side-by-side throbbing.

The terrain began to grow more familiar. She remembered certain mountains, the winding flow of a creek, that wall of granite rock that curved along a hillside.

They continued climbing, moving deeper and deeper into Forest Service land, around switchback turns and through deep washes.

When they were maybe two miles from Ghost Lake, she pulled off at an overlook, where they could look back at the road they had traveled, so she could grab a drink. She turned off the engine and found her water bottle, drinking thirstily.

Ava, she saw, was shifting uncomfortably in the seat.

“If you need to use the forest, I have a spade and eco-friendly camp toilet paper.”

“That might be good,” Ava said, her cheeks turning pink.

Madi pulled them out of her pack and handed them over and Ava slid out of the vehicle.

“You won’t drive away without me or something, will you?” she asked.

Madi couldn’t tell if she was joking or not. “I hadn’t planned to. But thanks for the idea. I’m sure you can find your way to Ghost Lake. It’s only a few miles farther along the road.”

Ava stood next to the vehicle, her hand still on the door handle, her expression alarmed, and Madi rolled her eyes. “I won’t leave. I promise.”

After another pause, her sister apparently decided her need was greater than her fear, in this particular case. Gripping the spade and the toilet paper, she hurried away from the trail to a thick area of understory.

She returned shortly, handing Madi back the essentials as Madi in return passed her a bottle of hand sanitizer that always came in handy.

“Thanks,” Ava said. She gingerly climbed back into the UTV and Madi followed suit.

When they were both settled, she didn’t hit the gas immediately. Instead, she asked the question she had been wondering.

“Have you forgiven Dad?” she asked.

Ava was quiet. “It’s in the book,” she finally said.

“Right. I haven’t read that part, either,” Madi said.

“You haven’t read any of it, have you?”

“So give me the short version.”

“I read through all the investigative reports and the trial transcripts for the defendants. I found out some things I never knew. Things I wish I could have had the chance to ask him about before...”

Ava didn’t need to answer that. Before their dad, the man they once had both loved so much but had grown to fear, had been killed by federal agents in that final firefight.

“Like what?” Madi didn’t want to ask but couldn’t seem to help the words.

“He wanted to get us out, especially the last two weeks leading up to...up to my marriage. He was making plans but the Boyle brothers had as tight a leash on him as they did us. We escaped ourselves before he could...could help us.”

Madi stared out at the forest, the trunks of the aspens blurring together. She wanted to believe their father hadn’t abandoned them to their fate, caught up in his own twisted dogma. She couldn’t quite get there. The loving, playful father she had adored had warped into someone she didn’t recognize by the time they’d managed to creep away from camp into the wild unknown.

“We should get going,” she said abruptly. “Otherwise, we won’t make it back before dark.”

She didn’t wait for Ava’s response, simply started up the side-by-side and headed up the trail, which grew increasingly narrow and rutted as they drove.

Fifteen minutes later, they crested the final hill to find the beautiful waters of Ghost Lake glimmering through the pines.

Hard to believe something so pristine could once have been home to so much evil.

“From the way Cullen described it, his dig isn’t quite to the lake. You need to turn off before we get there on a side trail.”

“Can you be more specific? We’ve seen several side trails.”

“No. But I would guess there will be some kind of marker.”

She frowned. She had assumed Ava knew right where she was going, not that they were going to have to search out Cullen.

She drove more slowly, keeping an eye out for anything that might indicate a camp.

“There!” Ava said suddenly.

Madi’s gaze followed the direction she pointed and she saw a cairn of stacked rocks with a small pink plastic stegosaurus toy on the top.

Apparently paleontologists had a sense of humor, she thought as she turned onto what could barely be called a trail. Who knew?

The trail led them through thick forest that finally opened out into a clearing where she saw two wall tents and a cluster of smaller ones, some camp chairs and a couple of ATVs.

At first, Madi didn’t see any sign of life, then a large black Lab came trotting around the side of one tent, barking loudly as he hurried toward them.

Beside her, Ava stiffened, her knuckles white on the grab bar in front of her.

“Relax. He’s not going to hurt us,” Madi said.

“How do you know?”

“Because I know dogs and this one is friendly.”

She turned to the Lab as he approached their vehicle. “Hi there,” she said in calm voice. “We don’t mean any harm.”

Tongue lolling, the dog came closer. He was almost to the side-by-side when a man walked around the tent after him and came to an abrupt stop, looking as if someone had clobbered him with a tree trunk.

“Madi. Ava. What...what are you doing here?”

At the sight of Cullen, Ava had gone even more pale and pressed her hand to her stomach like she was about to hurl all over the place. She opened her mouth but no words came out, and for a weird moment, the three of them—and the dog—remained in a weird tableau.

Madi finally felt as if she had to speak. “Ava needs to talk to you. Don’t you?”

Her sister nodded mutely, that hand still curled over her abdomen. The raw emotion in her eyes as she looked at her husband was almost painful to see—especially when he looked more stunned than happy to see his wife.

“Yes,” Ava finally said, her voice ragged. She opened the door and slid out to stand beside the vehicle. The dog moved to greet her, but Madi headed him off by opening her own door and reaching out a hand.

She told herself she wasn’t protecting Ava, she just liked dogs.

“I’m sorry to...to bother you,” Ava went on. “I wouldn’t have come if it wasn’t important.”

He finally nodded, moving closer to them.

“Okay.”

The coolness in his voice raised Madi’s hackles. She had never heard her loving brother-in-law speak in that tone of voice.

With more solicitousness than she might have felt if Cullen had been more welcoming, Madi turned toward her sister, who seemed a ghost herself.

“Do you need to sit down? Are you feeling sick again?”

“No.” Ava seemed to shake off her strange torpor. “I’m fine. Could we...? Is there somewhere private we could talk?”

Cullen looked undecided, then nodded. “We can walk back into the trees. We’ve got a bench and a couple of camp chairs there, overlooking the lake.”

“That works.” Ava moved to follow him.

“I’ll just hang out here with your dog,” Madi said. “What’s his name?”

“Bob. He belongs to one of the grad students but thinks every visitor to the camp is his business.”

“Hi, Bob. I’m Madison,” she said, adopting a cheery tone, and was happy when the dog wandered closer, his tail beginning a tentative wag.

By the time Ava and her husband walked up the trail, Madi and the dog were the best of friends.

That didn’t stop her from watching after the departing figures of the couple and wondering what in the world was going on.