Chapter 6
Aspen
Oh fuck! He’s Search and Rescue?The moment he told me, my body turned cold.
His little tidbit of information hit far too close to home in that instant.
“What?” he asked, propping himself up on his elbow and watching as I processed what he had divulged.
I shook my head, trying to rid the sting of tears that plagued my eyes. “Nothing,” I mumbled.
“No, I know something’s wrong,” he said quietly. “What do you have against us? For crying out loud, I’m reading one of your books and the hero is someone who’s in my line of work, so why would you?—”
“Just drop it, Cade,” I whispered, the fight over the stinging in my eyes was a losing one.
“Pen,” he rasped, then reached his other hand to grasp mine.
“I’ve dealt with people in your business before,” I gulped the lump in my throat. “My…my sister disappeared when I was twelve. We searched these woods for as long as we could. Search and Rescue, the local authorities, friends, family members, volunteers from our town and the area…”
It had been useless.
It had been my social life’s demise too.
No one believed me.
“Believed what?” He pushed at the words I thought had only been in my head.
I shivered at the onslaught of memories. “I…I?—”
“Take your time.” He squeezed my hand.
“Someone took her.” I looked at him to find that his eyes had widened at my unexpected information. “I fought him, and I screamed. No one came.”
“Bear man,” he whispered.
My eyes widened. “What?” Then I pushed his hand away as if it had burned me, and shot up to sit in bed. “W—what did you just say?”
“The legend of the bear man,” he explained. I gulped as he sat up to mimic my position on the mattress. “When I was a kid, my father—who did the same thing I do now—came home talking about one of his cases. It’s not because he didn’t believe the kid who’d told him everything at the scene. Some didn’t, and he’d come home talking nonsense and was pissed at the world for not going with his gut, which had always served him well.”
I didn’t get a good feeling about this, but like the masochist I seemed to be, I had to ask. “What happened?”
“He pushed until he was given the boot, then drank himself into liver failure and died a few years ago,” he explained.
My heart went to him and his family for their share of hardships. I hadn’t been alone in my suffering, as I always believed, and what Cade had just divulged proved it.
“Summers…” trailed off my tongue as I figured out why the surname had sounded familiar when Cade had introduced himself yesterday, but nothing had immediately clicked. “Albert Summers.”
“That’s right,” he said, smiling sadly. “My namesake. I’m surprised you remember.”
How could I have forgotten the gentleness with which that man had treated me? He had been the only one who hadn’t ridiculed me when he thought I wasn’t around or listening.
“He was nice to me,” I went on. “The only one who seemed to actually believe what I told him.”
“It was the only case he never saw closed.”
Cade
My mind was officially blown.
The girl who’d disappeared from school so long ago had returned. I remembered how much those in the hallways, between classes, had ridiculed her story, but I’d never gone along with their shenanigans. Maybe it was because I knew about her story from Dad, maybe it was because I knew what it felt like to be teased and bullied, because I’d gotten it too what with Dad being involved with the case.
So, I knew better back then.
And I knew better now.
“Sir Carter Junior High,” I stated, getting a doubletake from the woman who sat beside me. “That’s where you went to school.”
“Only the best for the kid from physicians,” she snarked.
I nodded. My parents had been lucky to get me in there through a scholarship. “I remember the day you never came back.”
“I chose to follow Mom and Dad after junior high and do my high school from home, if you can call a tent in the middle of Africa a home,” she explained. “I’m glad I made that decision. It gave me a few more years with them.”
I smiled at that. “I’m sure anywhere was better than at Carter,” I stated. “Where are they now?”
“I lost them my senior year of college. I came back to the U.S. to do that,” she explained. “They were on their way back from the Congo when their charter had a mechanical failure…something with the engine. They went down.”
Dead.
Fuck.
“So, it’s just me now; and my cottage…my dog.”
“And your books,” I added.
Her laugh came out dry, but her words sounded humored. “And my books,” she nodded. As she settled herself back on the mattress, assuming the blanket mummy position like before, I smiled to myself, and shook my head, following suit. “You mentioned you had two jobs before all of this melodrama of mine.”
“Hmm,” I managed, as I propped my head up to watch her. She seemed to have warmed toward me once again.
Our eyes caught and held.
“And?” she smirked. “Are you going to tell me or is this some top-secret assignment thing where you’d have to off me if you told me?”
Chuckling, I looked down to the blankets, noticing the pillows weren’t doing much of the work they were supposed to be doing anymore.
“I work part time for a private security firm,” I explained. “Some security, mostly stuff where they can use my Search Rescue skills to their advantage. That’s the job I was doing when I fell.”
Her excitement was palpable as she shifted. Forgetting about her reservations, she mimicked my posture: on her side with her head propped up by one arm.
She grinned. “Do tell me more,” she urged.
Knowing that the change in subject by talking about the gang at Nightshade would be of help to wipe the darkness of the earlier part of our conversation, I humored her with only the best stories, gaining myself full belly laughs instead of the few giggles I’d already received. Those sounds were the best and I found myself addicted to getting more out of her.
Before I knew it, I was wide awake, smiling, and admiring a slumbering Aspen, who snored softly, the subtle dribble of saliva gathering at the corner of her mouth, but never trickling over.
Christ, but she was cute.