Chapter 12
S omeone was shaking Nick’s shoulder, and a voice spoke to him, so muted it was as if he were hearing it while floating deep in a cold, black sea.
“Nick . . . grandfather . . . gone . . .”
Nick opened his eyes. The warm, salty taste of blood filled his mouth. Pain sizzled across his head.
Hit something , he thought. Wasn’t wearing a seat belt.
He blinked, winced from the throbbing headache.
The world spun with shadows and smoke, and slowly his vision cleared.
He was in the pickup truck on the side of the road, the front end jammed against a pine tree.
Gray tendrils of smoke twisted from underneath the hood. The engine knocked and sputtered.
“Nick.” Amiya clutched his shoulder. “Grandpa Lee. He’s gone.”
Nick turned. Amiya’s curly bangs hung in her face, and he saw a comma of blood on the side of her mouth. An ugly bruise was forming above her right eye.
She wasn’t wearing a seat belt, either , he thought.
But the meaning of her words finally sank in.
“Gone?” he asked. The taste of blood filled his mouth, and he spat. “He’s . . . he’s dead?”
She sniffled, shook her head. “I don’t know . . . he’s not here. I blacked out like you did and when I woke up, I saw my door open. He’s gone.”
“He got out of the truck on his own? How? He was . . . he was unconscious.”
“I don’t know.” Tears streamed from her eyes.
“We’ve gotta find him.” Nick switched off the ignition, concerned by the sputters and the smoke. He went to open his door. Dizziness sloshed through him. He sucked in a couple of deep, stabilizing breaths.
He tried to get out again, but discovered his side of the truck was sunken against a thick growth of shrubs that obstructed the door. Amiya scrambled out on the passenger side. He followed her.
Dropping to the thick, tall grass outside the pickup, he had to seize the door handle to keep from losing his balance. He pulled in a jagged breath. It felt as if someone had slugged him in the chest, and he figured the steering wheel had smashed against his sternum when he had crashed.
Amiya had wandered onto the dirt lane. Using her hand as a visor against the sun’s glare, she looked around.
“I don’t see him,” she said.
“He’s got to be close by,” Nick said. He shouted: “Grandpa Lee! Can you hear us? Grandpa Lee!”
“Grandpa Lee!” Amiya called.
In answer, he heard only the breeze flapping through the woods, and the annoyingly cheerful chirping of birds.
Nick could not stomach the idea that his granddad, in the midst of a medical crisis, had slipped out of the truck and was staggering through the forest, weak and incoherent. The possibility struck him with a nearly paralyzing anguish.
“Let’s search the immediate area,” Nick said. “We weren’t unconscious for long. He can’t have gone far.”
“You think he’s walking home?” she asked.
“How the hell would I know?”
From the surprised look of hurt on Amiya’s face, he realized he had yelled. He pushed out a breath, touched her arm.
“Sorry,” he said. “Let’s do our best to find him, okay? Look for any sign of him. I’ll search on this side of the road, and you take the other side.”
“Okay,” she said. “Don’t wander too far away. Keep the truck in sight. We can’t lose each other.”
They searched for several minutes, both of them calling Grandpa Lee’s name.
Nick expected to find his grandfather sprawled face down on the ground somewhere in the woods, unconscious or worse.
He didn’t know how he would respond to finding his grandpa in that condition; he didn’t know if he could handle it.
Already, he was wrestling with a growing sense of guilt that accumulated like bile in his throat.
His search turned up nothing. He wandered back to the truck. Amiya emerged from the trees on the other side of the lane about a minute later. She had leaves in her hair, but her eyes told him everything.
“It doesn’t make any sense,” Nick said. “But he must be farther away than we thought.”
“But is he alert? Does he know where he’s headed? Or is he in a confused state of mind?”
“If he were thinking logically, he wouldn’t have left us,” Nick said.
“I still can’t get a signal.” Amiya had slipped out her cell phone again, swiped her thumb across the display.
“We won’t. Forget about the phones.”
Sighing, Amiya jammed her phone back into her small purse. “We need to get back to the house. I’m thinking Grandpa Lee, even in an agitated state of consciousness, would be drawn back home.”
“Right. We need to find our way there.”
“Find our way there?” She stared at him. “You said you knew your way around out here, Nick. Do you recognize where we are?”
“Well . . .” Nick looked away from her. A nervous laugh slipped out of him.
“What’s funny?” she asked.
“Honest?” He met her gaze. “Babe, I have no idea where we are. I don’t recognize any of this.”
“But back at the lake, you said you used to come out here all the time and you knew the way home.” Her eyes sharpened into tiny darts. “Was that the truth?”
“I thought I knew the way back, okay? But I wasn’t exactly thinking clearly after I saw my granddad coughing up blood and passing out in my arms. Can you give me a break here?”
Lips tightening into a firm line, Amiya turned away from him. She put her hands against the side of the pickup, lowered her head, breathing deeply.
“It’s nine hundred acres,” he said. “To put it into perspective: that’s about a mile and a half of square mileage, like a small town. It’s not as though we’re lost in the middle of some vast Alaskan wilderness. We’ll find our way back.”
“I’m driving this time.” Amiya flung open the passenger door and got inside.
Nick shrugged, climbed in after her.
She twisted the key in the ignition. The engine sputtered, but didn’t catch.
“It’s damaged from the collision,” Nick said. “I don’t know for sure what ran across the road. I think it was a deer—if so it’s probably better that we smacked the tree.”
“Regardless, it’s not helping us now.” She switched off the ignition, and switched it on again, pumping the gas pedal. The truck coughed but the engine wouldn’t turn over. Amiya cursed and tried it again, but it was no use.
“We can walk,” Nick said. “Maybe it’s better to walk, maybe we can keep a closer eye out for my granddad.”
At the mention of his grandfather, the anger seemed to seep out of her. She slid the key out of the ignition and placed it in her purse. Flicking hair out of her eyes, she looked at him.
“Before we go, let’s see what’s in the truck that we can take with us,” she said.