15 Summers Later

Chapter 20

In the silence of another moonlit evening, a pair of gleaming eyes in the darkness catches our attention. A mountain lion stalks us, a sleek silhouette moving with lethal grace. Fear seizes our hearts, and we huddle together, our breaths held, as the predator assesses its potential prey. It circles, a silent guardian of the mountains, and we inch forward cautiously, praying it finds no interest in our vulnerable forms.

—Ghost Lake by Ava Howell Brooks

When her sister and Cullen came down the trail after about twenty minutes, Madi could tell something had shifted between them.

Where they hadn’t touched when they walked away, now her brother-in-law helped Ava over a rock in the trail and touched her to show her a red-tailed hawk that flitted through the trees around the camp.

She exhaled deeply, not even aware until that instant how anxious she had been about the two of them.

“It’s good to see you, Mad,” Cullen said when they rejoined her. “Sorry I didn’t say that before. I was shocked when you both suddenly appeared.”

Cullen gave her an affectionate hug and Madi returned it. He smelled of dirt and pine and sage and sunshine. It was a smell that reminded her of hugging her father in the before days, when they would all go camping together as a family.

She managed her lopsided smile. “Right back at you, Dinosaur Hunter.”

“Thanks for coming up here with my wife. I know it’s not your favorite place.”

“You have a cute dog and a beautiful view. That’s enough for me. Anyway, I know from past experience that if not for me, Ava would be hopelessly lost.”

It was the very first time in her life she had joked with her sister about anything to do with that time.

In reality, Ava had led them on a circuitous route away from the dogs and the searchers. In the process, they had both become twisted around and had gone for two days in the wrong direction, deeper and deeper into the wilderness, before they realized their error.

After a startled moment now, Ava huffed out a breath that almost might have been a laugh before she moved toward the side-by-side and climbed into the passenger seat.

“You said you wanted to leave before dark. We should probably go, then. You’re right. We don’t have the best track record up here together.”

Madi would have enjoyed having Cullen show her around the dinosaur camp and especially the actual dig site, but she knew it would take them at least an hour to drive back to the trailhead.

With one final pat to Bob, she climbed behind the wheel.

Cullen approached the side-by-side near Ava. “I’ll see you both later. I’ll try to stop by Leona’s this weekend.”

There was something meaningful in that, but Madi couldn’t work it out. Cullen reached down to kiss his wife and what started as brief, almost casual, quickly transformed into something else. A kiss even Madi could tell seethed with emotion.

“Be well,” he said, gazing at Ava intently.

Madi’s sister nodded, swallowing hard. Tears glimmered in her eyes as Madi started up the side-by-side and turned out of the camp.

For the first fifteen minutes of the drive, it took all her concentration to maneuver down the narrow, rutted trail toward the larger and better-maintained dirt fire road.

When they were perhaps two miles from camp, she couldn’t take all the questions swirling through her head. She pulled off the side of the road to a clearing, cut the engine and faced her sister.

“Okay. Tell me,” she demanded. “What was that all about? What was so important that you had to come all this way to a place you hate to talk to Cullen?”

Ava gazed at her, then looked away. Golden hour had transformed the mountainside into a masterpiece of colors, bathing the mountains in amber light. The fading sun filtered through the trees, splotching the road and the undergrowth with columns of light. One lit up a patch of columbine, turning it a brilliant blue.

The soothing sights and smells of the mountains somehow calmed Madi, centered her. She couldn’t help thinking that she had come a long way in her journey, if she could find any sort of peace deep in the backcountry.

“Do we have to do this here?” Ava asked, fingers working at a loose thread from her jacket. “I would rather get out of the mountains first so we’re not stuck here after dark.”

And avoid telling her the truth even longer?

“This thing has headlights. What’s going on, Ava. Are you sick? Is it cancer?”

“Why did you immediately jump to that conclusion?”

Icy fear gripped her. She didn’t want to lose her sister. Not Ava, as well as everyone else. “Are you sick?”

“I don’t have cancer.”

“Then, what?”

Ava sighed, looking through the trees. “I’m pregnant.”

Madi’s heartbeat kicked up and she stared at her sister in disbelief, unable to comprehend how Ava could sit there so self-contained and cool while sharing the staggering news.

“Pregnant? Seriously?”

Ava nodded. At first, Madi couldn’t tell how her sister felt about that, then she thought she saw a glint of joy in her eyes.

“That’s fabulous. Oh, Ava. I’m going to be an aunt!” Madi instinctively reached out and hugged her, remembering all the times they had talked about the families they might someday have. Ava had always wanted to have children, she remembered, while Madi said she would be happy only having fur babies.

At her hug, Ava was stiff, all thin bones, for only a moment before she hugged her back.

“It’s none of my business but...have you guys been trying long?”

Ava shook her head, easing back into her seat. “It was a surprise. A...a happy one but totally unexpected. Before a month ago, we were talking about maybe in a year or two, after we bought a house and felt more settled.”

She frowned, picking up immediately on that short disclaimer. “What happened a month ago?”

Ava said nothing, the only sound the breeze rustling the aspen leaves near them and the chitter of a squirrel protesting their intrusion. “What happened a month ago?” she finally answered. “Ghost Lake came out and Cullen learned he wasn’t married to the woman he thought I was.”

Madi stared. “What are you talking about?”

“He didn’t read the entire book until after it was released. I didn’t...didn’t want him to.”

“Why not? He knew about what had happened to us at the camp and about Dad, right? About the grooming and the punishments and your sham of a marriage.”

Ava didn’t answer, gazing at the vast mountains around them. Madi read the answer in her silence.

“You never told him? How is that even possible? You’ve been married for three years!”

It was such a part of her, even if she didn’t want it to be, Madi couldn’t imagine concealing that from someone with whom she shared her life.

She might not want to dwell on it or talk about it or, heaven forbid, write a blasted book about it. But she would still want any man she loved to know that part of her.

“He knew bits and pieces. He knew about our rescue and Dad being killed and that you were hurt at the same time. He knew about Dan Gentry.”

“Okay. What didn’t he know?”

“I...might have let him think we were only there a few weeks instead of months. I didn’t want him to know about how bad things were.”

“Why not? He’s your husband! He loves you.”

“Because of that! Because I didn’t want him to pity me or to...to wonder if I was damaged forever because of what happened. We were so happy together and I didn’t want that ugliness to cast any kind of shadow on our joy.”

“You never told him any of it? Did he know about your wedding?”

Ava’s denial was in her tightly compressed mouth. “Not until he read the book,” she admitted. “It wasn’t like it was a legal marriage, anyway. I didn’t consider it important.”

Not important?Ava’s wedding had been the catalyst for everything else that came after.

That had been when Ava finally accepted the grim truth that no one was looking for them, that their situation was untenable and they couldn’t remain there.

She’d also had to face the even more painful truth that their father wasn’t going to come to his senses and they were going to have to leave him behind. He had been so wholly brainwashed by the warped ideology of the Coalition, by the Boyle brothers, that he had even been willing to give his own daughter to one of them and was planning to hand over the other one.

If Cullen hadn’t known about Ava’s wedding, at sixteen, to a man thirty years her senior, a man whom she feared and loathed, he couldn’t have known about her wedding night. He couldn’t have known how Ava had somehow found the courage to drug the man who had just raped her with herbs they had crushed from wildflowers obtained surreptitiously. Or that she had known even as she mixed the dried plants into his tea that they might knock him out, as she hoped, or they might kill him.

At that point, neither she nor Madi had cared which.

“Why?” Madi asked, her voice hoarse. “Why didn’t you tell him? I thought you loved him.”

Tears welled up in her sister’s eyes. “I do love him. I wanted his love in return, not his pity. I wanted him to see me as a strong, capable woman, not as...as a weak, frightened girl, so afraid that she actually went through with an abhorrent marriage rather than fight. A girl who had to be rescued by her younger sister!”

The tears glimmering on her lashes spilled over, gathering in the corner of her eyes before dripping out. The resentment and anger and sense of betrayal Madi had nursed for weeks, since the release of Ghost Lake, didn’t seem nearly as important when her sister clearly was suffering so much.

“We rescued each other, Ava.”

Her sister scoffed. “Only because you were the one who had the strength to do what I couldn’t. While I was torn by indecision, waiting for the impossible, you went ahead and gathered valerian root and deathcamas while you were forced to forage for food with the others. You were the one smart enough to remember what you learned about it from Grandma and Mom, then brave enough to hide it, to dry it, to crush it into tea.”

“I couldn’t let you stay married to that evil man. Partly for you and partly because I knew I would be next,” she admitted.

“I know. Which was one of the reasons I finally agreed to your ridiculous plan.”

“My ridiculous plan that worked perfectly, I’ll remind you. James fell asleep. He didn’t die. I wish you had been able to get him to drink it before he...before he...”

“So do I.”

Madi felt the same burning anger she always did when she remembered that dark time. She didn’t want to wish anyone dead, but she was glad James had been arrested and that he had died in a prison brawl six months after his conviction.

“It worked. Somehow it worked. For the first night since we arrived at camp, you weren’t locked into a room. You were able to sneak out and get me.”

She frowned at Ava. “You did nothing wrong. I don’t know why you couldn’t tell everything to Cullen.”

“Believe me, I’ve asked myself that over and over.”

“I also can’t understand how you could keep everything from your husband, the man you love more than any other, yet still go ahead and pour every single detail into that damn book.”

“It’s...complicated.”

Ava lapsed into silence. The squirrel had moved away and the mountainside echoed in the quiet.

Then, distantly through the forest, Madi thought she heard something. A faint cry that didn’t belong among the hoots and calls and chatter of the mountain’s usual inhabitants.

A dog’s whine.

“Shhh.” She held out a hand to Ava.

“I didn’t say anything.”

“Be quiet,” Madi hissed.

Ava fell silent, her eyes going wide. “What’s wrong?”

Madi strained her ears and heard it again. A faint, unmistakable whine.

“Did you hear that?”

“It sounds like a cat or something. Is it a cougar?”

The whispered fear in Ava’s voice and her sudden wide eyes and trembling lips were visceral reminders of one of the most terrifying incidents during those days they spent in the wilderness, trying to get to safety. They had been making their way up a slope when they realized they were being stalked by a mountain lion.

They had faced an impossible choice between staying quiet to avoid discovery by their pursuers or making as much noise as possible to scare away an apex predator.

The abject terror in Ava’s voice now gave Madi pause, especially when her sister curved an arm over her abdomen.

She touched her sister’s hand, trying to reassure her. “I don’t think it’s a mountain lion. It sounds more like a dog.”

She heard it again, that distant yelp, and unbuckled her seat belt. “I have to go check it out.”

“You can’t leave me here!”

Madi pointed to the keys in the ignition. “If I don’t come back in ten minutes, you can go back to Cullen’s camp for help. It’s straight up the trail, then turn left at the fork.”

“No! I won’t let you go by yourself. Forget it!”

She thought about arguing with her sister, but that would waste precious moments of their remaining daylight. “Fine. You have to keep up, though.”

Ava scrambled out of the side-by-side. “I might be pregnant, but I’m not the one with a bad leg.”

“Fair point,” Madi admitted.

The undergrowth was sparse at this higher elevation, which made the going easier. They walked over pine needles and around clumps of wildflowers. The barks and yelps continued at random intervals, growing louder as they moved.

“Is it a wolf?” Ava asked, casting a wild eye through the trees.

“I mean, it’s possible a wolf might have strayed from the Yellowstone ecosystem but I don’t think so. I’ve not heard of any sightings up here.”

“Coyotes?”

“Again, possible. I suspect it’s a dog. Remember, I told you about those strays people have reported? In fact, Luke had planned to come up tonight to look for them.”

Ava didn’t look any more relieved about the possibility of stray dogs than she might have if Madi had said there were slavering werewolves.

“What kind of dogs?”

“From what I heard, maybe a border collie and a corgi mix that had a collar.”

Ava relaxed slightly at that. Madi wanted to tell her any dog could strike out in the right circumstances. If hungry, in pain or scared enough.

“We have to be getting closer,” Ava said, her attention fixed on the terrain ahead of them.

“There!” Madi exclaimed. She pointed to a small meadow ahead of them. Perched on the edge of a gaping pit, a small stocky corgi barked ferociously at them.

Ava froze and looked as if she wanted to turn and run back to their vehicle. While she stayed locked in place, Madi moved closer slowly, making her way around boulders and fallen logs scattered through the meadow. She tried to look as unassuming as possible.

“Hey there. Hi,” she crooned to the dog, who had stopped barking and was now growling ominously. “It’s okay. I’m not going to hurt you. Look what I have.”

She stuck her hand in her pocket, grateful that she had had the foresight to bring some treats, just in case. “Look. It’s a beef stick. Yum!”

The dog’s growling stopped abruptly and it took a step toward her before retreating another step. The dog looked down at the pit and Madi heard it again, a whining yelp coming from the depths.

It was the other dog, she realized. Possibly injured and definitely trapped. Poor thing.

Holding out a piece of the beef stick, Madi took a step closer to the corgi. She needed to see what they were up against, how difficult it might prove to rescue the other dog.

She tossed one small piece to the dog, who almost swallowed it whole in her hunger.

The grasses and weeds growing around the pit were flattened, as if the small dog had spent considerable time crouched here, unwilling to leave the other animal. Her fur was matted, not unlike the grasses, with burrs and other random pieces of debris stuck in it.

Madi tossed her another piece of treat. The dog moved closer this time to retrieve it.

“Good girl. That’s right. I’m not going to hurt you or your friend. You’re both so hungry, aren’t you? Should we see if we can get him out?”

She continued speaking nonsense in the same low, calming voice. Dogs never seemed to mind if she stumbled over words, which was one of the things she loved best about them.

Finally, she managed to move close enough to the edge of the pit so she could look in.

It appeared to be an old mining shaft, about twelve feet deep and seven or eight feet at its widest point. She could barely make out a white blur in the fading daylight until she aimed her flashlight down and saw wary canine features looking back up at her.

“Oh, you poor thing. You must be starving. Here you go. Here’s a treat.”

She tossed down a large treat for the dog and almost instantly heard lips smacking together as he ate it hungrily.

“What is it?” Ava called.

“It’s the other dog. He’s stuck down some kind of pit. It looks like an old mine shaft, maybe? I’m guessing he was sniffing around the edge and must have lost his footing. Or maybe the side collapsed or something.”

“Oh, that’s so sad. How long do you think he’s been down there?” She moved closer, though still keeping her distance from the other dog.

“My guess is at least a day or two. See how the grass is tramped down around the opening? I think that was done by his friend here, keeping watch.”

Ava’s features seemed to soften at that. Madi wondered if she, too, could relate to the trapped dog, feeling as if she had no way out.

“What do we do now? Maybe we should go get Cullen. He and members of his team might know of a way we could get him out.”

“It will be full dark by the time we drive back up to the dinosaur camp and then make our way back here. I don’t think we’ll be able to find him again in the dark.”

“We can’t leave him here.”

“No. We can’t,” Madi said, feeling closer to her sister than she had in a long time. They shared a purpose now. “I’ve got a towrope in the side-by-side. I can attach it to a tree and belay into the hole.”

“No! No way! What if you get stuck down there, too?”

“Then, you can drive back to Cullen and he can come find me and help me out.”

Ava looked horrified at the prospect. “You just said we won’t find the dog in the dark. How are we supposed to find you?”

“I have a whistle.” She pulled it out from the chain around her neck. She never traveled into the backcountry without one now. She had spent enough time being lost in the wilderness. She wasn’t keen to ever go through that again. A whistle could be heard over longer distances than shouts, and a person could blow a whistle even after losing her voice calling for help.

“You wait here. I’m going to go back and get the towrope.”

Ava’s eyes went wide. “No! I’m not staying here by myself. I’ll come with you.”

“One of us needs to stay here or we won’t be able to find our way back. I can stay here if you want to go back to get the rope.”

Ava gazed at her, then took a few steps, turned and threw up into the undergrowth.

“Are you okay?”

“Swell,” Ava snapped. She wiped her mouth with the corner of her shirt, swished water from the bottle she had brought along and spat it out.

“It will be much faster if I go. Here, take the whistle. You can use my flashlight. I’ll use my phone for light if I need it.”

“You want me to stay here with the...the dogs?”

“The border collie is trapped and can’t hurt you. And the corgi wants to help her friend. Here. You can give her some of these treats. You can toss a few down to the other dog but not too much. I don’t know if he has water down there.”

After handing over the rest of the treats, she hurried back the way they had come, crossing the space in half the time as before, ever aware of the fading sunlight that cast long shadows through the trees.

She went to the cargo area of the side-by-side. After unhooking the dog crate, she was rooting through the back for the towrope and the headlamp she kept there, as well as extra rope and leather gloves, when she glimpsed the flash of movement coming up the trail and heard the thrum of an engine.

As a woman currently standing alone in the backcountry, with no one else in sight, Madi couldn’t help the instinctive spurt of adrenaline and wariness.

She closed her good hand around the heavy winch, in case she needed a weapon she could swing at someone who might decide to take advantage of the situation.

Her fear instantly eased when she recognized the man driving a side-by-side newer than her own and she relaxed her grip on the winch.

“Oh, am I glad to see you!” she exclaimed to Luke. It was all she could do not to rush to his vehicle and hug him.

He shut off his engine with a concerned look. “What’s up? Are you having mechanical difficulties? Where’s Ava? Did she stay at camp with her husband?”

She shook her head. “It’s a long story, but we found the dogs everyone has been looking for. One of them is caught in some kind of pit about two hundred yards off the trail. Ava stayed with them while I came back here for supplies.”

He looked at the array of items in front of her. “Supplies for what? What exactly are you planning to do with your kit here?”

“Get him out,” she said simply. “We can’t leave him there. I thought I would belay down, have Ava lower the crate down, put the dog into it, then use the pulley and winch to get him back out.”

“And how were you planning to get back out?”

“The same way. With the pulley and winch.”

He sighed. “Of course. Why not? What could go wrong?”

She decided, in this case, she couldn’t do everything on her own. Her customary need for independence seemed pointless when an animal was in need.

“I could really use your help. Ava’s not...feeling her best right now.”

Without hesitation, he climbed out of the vehicle, grabbed a few supplies of his own out of his vehicle, then picked up the heavy winch in one hand, the crate in the other and followed her into the forest.