Chapter 20
As Bret loaded her into the front seat of a truck she didn’t recognize, Chloe felt as mobile as a sack of flour, and not nearly as useful. He heaped some heavy blankets on her and—not surprisingly for Bret—stopped to buckle her safety belt.
He started to step back when Chloe remembered something. She put a hand on his arm.
“My shoes.” Her voice came out weak and rough.
“Your shoes?” Bret echoed incredulously.
“They got wet.”
Bret studied her, his face in shadow under the dome light. She thought she saw something soft there as he nodded.
“Be right back.” He closed her door. Chloe hunkered under the blankets and tried to absorb some warmth from them. She felt cold from the inside out. She clenched her hands between her legs.
A moment later Bret climbed into the driver’s seat and closed the door. He deposited her shoes on the floor at her feet. “Two very wet shoes.” He reached over and opened the glove box. “Two heat packs. You can thank Jake Wyndham.” He pressed the buttons that activated them. “I’m putting these on top of your shoes. I think the socks are history.”
He wrapped the blankets around her feet and rested them on top of two spots of heat that she could actually feel. Chloe let a sigh escape. Bret pulled off his coat and slid it under the blankets, the inside facing her, still warm from his body heat.
“You need your coat,” she protested. Her voice cracked.
“Not like you do. And the heater’s cranked.”
Chloe couldn’t tell.
Bret pulled off her gloves, finger by finger. “Okay. Basics.” He took her hands and rubbed them together between his. His eyes stayed on hers, as if to make sure she was tracking on his words. “You have one job. Keep your circulation going. Move your fingers, toes, arms, legs, as much as you can.”
He turned away, squinting at the thick snow that blew at the windshield. “And I have one job,” he said. “Getting us back down the hill in one piece.”
Before he put the truck in gear, he dialed a number, then maneuvered back onto the road. While Chloe diligently tried to feel her fingers and toes enough to move them, she listened as he spoke through the Bluetooth.
“Mrs. Davenport? I found her.” Chloe heard the relief in his voice. God bless him for calling her mother first.
He listened, then glanced at her. “Really, really cold. But she’s talking. I think she’s going to be all right.”
He paused again and nodded. “That’s what I told her.” He sent her a sidelong glance, and Chloe rubbed her hands together harder. “We’ve got a tricky drive ahead of us, but I’ll get her home as soon as I can.”
His next call was more succinct. “Chuck? Bret. She’s all right. Or she will be, once we get down the hill. Can you pass the word?”
There it was again. When it came to brevity, Hemingway had nothing on him.
He disconnected the call and looked her way again. “Fingers and toes,” he reminded her, and focused his eyes ahead as they moved on through the darkness.
* * *
There was no way to get ahead of the storm. Bret could only keep going and hope that the worst of it didn’t catch up to them. From time to time he spared a glance in Chloe’s direction to make sure she was moving and alert. When some time had passed, she started to shiver, which he took as a good sign: the body’s way of warming itself.
She’d felt so limp when he pulled her out of the car, barely moving. Except for the way she pressed her face against his chest, if only to escape from the cold.
“There’s coffee in front of you, when you’re ready,” he said. “I’m not sure how warm it is anymore, but it should help a little.”
He’d never touched his own coffee. He needed both hands on the wheel.
Now certainly wasn’t the time for apologies, or repercussions, or any of the things that he wanted to say to her. He didn’t even know how to start. Especially not when he had to keep watching the ever-more-obscure road and avoid the disorienting trap of staring into the white flakes that rushed at the windshield in an eerie, white-on-black 3-D effect.
Chloe had gone still beside him. A quick glimpse showed that her eyelids had fallen shut. He didn’t know how dangerous dozing would be for her at this point, but he wasn’t taking any chances. Fixing his eyes back on the road, Bret reached over and poked her arm sharply with one finger. He heard a quick breath as she straightened with a start.
“Hey,” he said. “No sleeping. Let me hear . . . the alphabet. Backwards.”
“Z, y, x . . .” She rattled it off in about twenty seconds.
That defeated the purpose. He felt half a laugh escape. “How’d you do that? It’s supposed to force you to concentrate.”
“I got really bored one day in second grade.” She sounded more like herself.
“Okay.” He needed for Chloe to concentrate on something else to stay awake, so he could concentrate on the drive. Bret made the next turn slowly and carefully. “How about . . . an animal for every letter of the alphabet. Backwards.”
“Zebra . . . Yak . . .” Chloe paused. “Xylophone?”
“Good enough. Keep going.”
“Walrus . . .” Another pause. “Vixen . . .”
Bret tightened his knuckles on the wheel, but something inside him relaxed. For someone who’d spent several hours in a freezing car, Chloe appeared to be doing remarkably well.
He didn’t know how much longer he’d driven into the interminable night, or how far he’d gotten, when a call came through on his Bluetooth.
“Bret? It’s Jake. I wanted to let you know, you only need to make it as far as the Inn tonight. We’ve got rooms for you both, and Chloe’s parents are on their way here to help take care of her.”
A handy thing, having a mother who was a retired nurse. Bret already knew he’d have to face Chloe’s family after what had happened, but this brought the reality that much closer.
“Thanks, Jake.” Bret set his jaw as he rounded another precarious curve. “How hard is it snowing in Tall Pine?”
“It’s . . . coming down.” Jake sounded as close to being evasive as Bret had ever heard. “But don’t worry. You’ll make it.”
Intellectually, he believed it, too. But he’d be glad when this drive was over.
Jake’s offer did make Bret’s mission easier. If he could just hold out until the road straightened, all he needed to do was watch for the turn off the highway for The Snowed Inn. He just hoped the snow hadn’t covered it yet.
Chloe sat forward and reached for her coffee cup, another good sign.
He tightened his grip on the wheel, and this time it wasn’t just the truck he was trying to control. Focus. Get her home first. If he let himself think about how he felt, how much danger he’d put her in—it would be the ultimate irony if he ended up driving her off the road when they were almost home.
They had to be close by now. Didn’t they?
Bret made one more turn, and the road straightened. He released a long, slow exhale. Just a few more miles, in a straight line. The dizzying flakes still rushed at them, but as long as he spotted the turn for The Snowed Inn, they’d be all right.
“Almost there,” Chloe said.
Bret leaned forward and squinted at what looked like lights up ahead. Two lines of lights.
Chloe leaned forward, too. “An accident?”
With that many lights, it would have to be an ugly one. But it looked too orderly for that. Almost like an airplane runway. “What the—”
As they got closer, Bret realized, with astonishment, what the lights were.
“Headlights,” Chloe breathed.
It was unmistakable now. The lights came in pairs, on either side of the road, angled so that they illuminated the road leading to the turnoff.
“When Chloe Davenport gets lost in the snow, word gets around,” Bret said.
Up to now, the grueling drive had made any real conversation impossible. Suddenly, it looked as if they were minutes away from being surrounded by people. Now, while they were still alone, he wanted to say something to Chloe. Something about what he’d put her through, what she meant to him, how desperate he’d been to get to her.
Words, idiot. He made his living by words. They were his stock in trade. But he’d spent over two hours white-knuckling the steering wheel, and now his tongue was thick.
All he could think of was, “If you think you can walk, you might want to get your shoes on.”
“Right.” Chloe bent forward, groping down at the floor in front of her.
They reached the double line of cars, snowflakes dancing erratically in the headlights. Bret recognized some of the cars, some of the faces behind the windshields, and realized they weren’t just there for Chloe. He saw people he’d known all his life, people he’d interviewed, people he never would have guessed would give him a second thought. Ed Hollingsworth and Mel Kruger sat together in an old Thunderbird, their differences apparently patched up for the moment. Scott Leroux, behind the wheel of Bret’s Mustang, flashed the high-beam lights on and off as they drove past.
At the turn, Jake Wyndham waved them into the driveway with an elaborate sweep of two flashlights. The cars ended there, but the Christmas lights that framed The Snowed Inn glowed ahead, and white-bagged luminaries lined the driveway. He would have had to be blind to miss it.
But for some reason the last few yards did look blurry as Bret pulled into the driveway, aware of the procession of cars following them. He brought the truck to a safe stop before he blinked hard, and the picture sharpened again.
Just in time, because the doors of each side of the truck were being pulled open.
When Bret’s feet hit the ground from the unaccustomed height of the truck, his legs wobbled—whether from exhaustion, emotion, or just the length of time sitting tensed up in the vehicle, he wasn’t sure. He covered by grasping the door of the truck with one hand and regarded the people approaching him.
Including his father, who’d opened the door.
Bret summoned awry smile. “What, Rudolph wasn’t available?” he said. He added, quietly, to the group clustered around him, “Thank you.”
His dad grabbed him in a hug. He couldn’t remember the last time they’d done that. “I should have known you’d find away to worm out of church tonight,” David said.
Over his father’s shoulder, he glimpsed Winston Frazier and Millie Bond, and he found room to be grateful he’d grabbed the scarf Millie had made.
“Merry Christmas, Dad,” Bret choked out. And turned to look for Chloe.
She’d been safely unloaded from the truck and was being engulfed in hugs from a woman almost as petite as she was, then a solidly built man. Chloe’s parents, undoubtedly. And hanging in the background, two younger, blondish men who had to be her brothers. Bret thought he recognized Todd Davenport, who’d graduated a year or two after him.
As she stepped back from her parents’ hugs, Chloe looked more wobbly on her feet than Bret. At least her legs appeared to be holding her up.
It didn’t look like he’d have a chance to catch up to her tonight. Her mom would want to check her over.
But Chloe turned to look over her shoulder, past her brothers and her parents. He saw her mouth form the word more than he heard her. “Bret—”
“Excuse me,” Bret said, even as his father gave him a shove in her direction.
This time it was Chloe’s mother who stood in the way, putting her arms around Bret. “Thanks for getting my girl home.”
Bret couldn’t think of a thing to say. Surely Chloe’s parents would be ready to shoot him by tomorrow, when it sank in that he was the one responsible for sending her up to Mount Douglas in the first place.
He’d have to take his medicine when the time came. For now, he caught Chloe’s eyes over her mother’s head and mouthed one word: “Tomorrow.”