Hawks Mountain - Mobi (24 page)

They didn’t have time for her rambling reminiscences. Becky stepped in front of Nick. “Mrs. Mullins, we’re in a hurry, and we need your help.”

Instantly, she shifted the gun from Nick’s chest to Becky’s. The old lady’s eyes narrowed. “Do I know you?”

“Yes, Ma’am.
Becky Hawks?”

She shocked Becky with a wide smile and lowered the gun barrel. “Of course you are, dear. What brings you up here?” Keeping a firm hold on her weapon, the old woman periodically threw suspicious glances over Becky’s shoulder at Nick.

Becky moved a bit to her left to block Mrs. Mullins from being distracted by Nick. “We’re looking for a little boy who’s lost in the woods. His
name’s
—”

“Davy,” the old woman cried. “Well, he was here a couple of hours ago.
Cute little fella.
All dressed up in his Sunday church clothes, he was.
Wanted me to give him a job chopping wood.”
She frowned, leaned forward and lowered her voice.
“Too puny to be chopping wood.
Got all upset when I turned him down.
Started crying and begging me to give him the job.
I told him to go home, but he took off running toward the old quarry.” She pointed toward a dense growth of trees and vines at the far end of the clearing, and then clicked her tongue and shook her head. “Hope he doesn’t get hurt. There’s a lot of loose rock over there.”

Before Mrs. Mullin had finished speaking, Becky and Nick were on a dead run, headed across the clearing and toward the spot where Davy had gone.

“Thank you,” Becky called over her shoulder to Mrs. Mullins, but the old lady had already gone back inside and closed the door.

Becky plunged through
the undergrowth, Nick right on her heels. “
How .
 . . much farther?” he shouted, his breath coming in painful gasps. A branched snapped back, hitting him in the shoulder and nearly knocking him over.

“We’re
almost .
 . . there,” came Becky’s equally breathless reply.

“Can we be sure the old
lady .
 . . knew what she was talking about? I
mean .
 . . she didn’t sound like all her oars . . . were in the water.”

If Mrs. Mullins was wrong, they’d be wasting precious time. He had no doubt Davy had been there. Asking for the job was probably his way of finding something to change the judge’s mind and let him stay with
Lydia
. But could they trust the word of an obviously confused old lady about the direction Davy had gone when he ran from her or would this be a waste of valuable time?

Becky stopped so suddenly that he almost ran into her back. Clutching her side, she bent over to catch her breath. Then she straightened and froze.

“Oh, Davy came this way all right.” She reached for something tangled in a berry bush, and then turned and held out her hand. Clutched in her fingers was a tie with the painted image of black Lab holding a pheasant in its
mouth.
“This is the tie he had on at the courthouse.”

Immediately, Nick scanned the area. Then he began parting bushes, pulling vines from their stranglehold on the nearby foliage, looking behind trees and rocks. “Well, he’s not in this vicinity.” He turned to Becky. “Think. Is there anywhere else around here he could be hiding?”

Becky shook her head. “Not that I can—” Her eyes widened. “Wait! When I was a kid, some of the boys used to go to a cave up here to sneak cigarettes. I was never there, but I think I can find it.” She went silent while she thought, then brightened. “They used a marker to find it.
A .
 . . ” For a long, tension-filled moment, she turned this way and that, obviously looking for something she could identify.

Nick waited silently, his nerves tightly coiled springs. He glanced at the sky. The sun sat just above the edge of
Hawks
Mountain
. In a few minutes, this place would be as dark as the inside of a coffin.

“There!” Tripping over huge roots and twisted vines, Becky burrowed through the undergrowth to a huge, ancient oak tree nearly hidden by a wall of thick vines that hung from its branches like a curtain concealing a primeval stage.

Nick helped her push the vines aside to expose a trunk that had been stripped of bark from the base to a few feet up the trunk. Hearts of all shapes, sizes and degrees of artistic talent had been carved into the exposed wood. Inside each heart had been chiseled a set of initials separated by the letter L.

“This tree was used by every teenage couple in
Carson
to declare their love, and it was an easy way for them to find the cave.” She looked over her shoulder, her intense thought process showing on her face. “It was near this tree somewhere.” She peered into the underbrush. Then, as if waking from a dream, she blinked.
“That way!”
She took off stumbling over rocks and forest debris. Thorny bushes grabbed at her clothes, but she forged ahead, not allowing anything to hold her back.

Nick was hot on her heels, praying as he ran that Davy would be here.

They’d only gone a few hundred yards when the yawning, black mouth of a cave, nearly obscured completely behind a thick veil of vines, came into view. Pushing aside the tangled tendrils, both of them took out their flashlights, turned them on and cautiously slipped into the opening. Two beams of light sliced through the inky blackness within the cave. A few feet beyond the cave’s entrance, Nick’s flashlight beam fell on what looked like a pile of discarded rags.

Then the pile moved.

“Davy?” Nick approached the pile of rags slowly for fear it might be a wild animal and not the small boy he so desperately wanted to find.

“Mr. Nick?”

The barely audible, frail voice came from under what Nick could now see was not a pile of rags but Davy’s soiled suit.

Nick let out a breath he hadn’t even been aware of holding. Relief washed over him like a tidal wave. The tension that had been cramping his nerves for hours vanished, to be replaced by a new worry. Was Davy injured?

“Thank God!” Becky rushed forward and knelt next to the boy. Gently, she pushed his hair off his face. “Davy, are you all right?”

Nick knelt on the opposite side and slowly shifted Davy onto his back. The spotless suit Davy had worn at the courthouse had succumbed to the boy’s trek through the woods. Large smears of mud and grass stains marred his once snowy white shirt. Several buttons had been torn off, and the left breast pocket hung haphazardly from the jacket’s front.

Davy’s face hadn’t fared much better. Tear streaks had made zigzag paths through the dirt caked on his cheeks and then mixed with the dried blood from dozens of scratches on his face. Pieces of twigs and leaves nested in his hair and berry juice stained his hands.

His chin quivered. Tears seeped from his eyes. “I hurt my leg, Mr. Nick.”

“Well, let’s have a look at it.”

Nick shifted his gaze from Davy’s face to his legs. The navy trousers had a long rip running from thigh to cuff, exposing the boy’s leg. Nick had only to see the weird angle of the leg to know the fibula had been broken.

Trying not to alarm the boy, Nick exchanged worried glances with Becky.

“Is it bad, Mr. Nick?”

For a moment, Nick considered lying to him, but obviously this was one tough little boy, much tougher than any of them had given him credit for. “I’m afraid so, sport. We’re
gonna
have to get you to a doctor.”

Davy began to cry in earnest. “My mom is
gonna
be so mad.”

Becky hushed him. “No, I think she’ll just be very glad we found you.”

“Maybe, but I know my dad will be really, really mad.”

Again, Nick and Becky exchanged looks. They couldn’t very well tell him his father hadn’t even joined the search for him.

“I’m sure he’ll be relieved that we found you, too.” Nick patted Davy’s shoulder. “I’m
gonna
talk to Miss Becky for a minute. We’re not leaving you. We’ll be right over there.” He pointed toward the cave’s entrance. “Okay?”

Davy nodded.

Slipping into corpsman mode without conscious effort and a bit surprised that the residual panic had not accompanied it, Nick methodically assessed the situation, what needed to be done and the most expeditious way to accomplish it.

Out of the boy’s ear shot, Nick gave Becky instructions. “I need you to go outside and find two pieces of wood about two feet long.” While he spoke, he removed his shirt, and then started tearing it into long strips. “After I get his leg stabilized, you can stay with him, and I’ll go down the mountain to get help to get him out of here.”

“No. You stay with Davy. I’ll go. You’re the medical person. You know how to take care of his injuries, and I don’t. I know this mountain and can get down it much faster than you can.”

Nick didn’t answer right away. All kinds of scenarios played through his head of Becky in trouble. If anything happened to
her .
 . . ”But it’ll be dark soon.”

“Yes, it will.” She smiled and laid her hand on his arm. “I’ve been up here many times after the sun set and gotten safely back to town.” She laid her hand on his arm. “I got you this far, didn’t I? Trust me. I know my way.” She glanced back at Davy, then to Nick. “He needs you here. He trusts you.”

After a moment’s hesitation and even though he hated the idea of her out there alone, in the dark, he couldn’t argue with the wisdom of her proposal. “Okay. Now, go get me the wood.” He watched as she made her way out of the cave, and then disappeared into the twilight. With a tight heart and worry for her safety already setting in, he went back to Davy.

“Okay, sport. Here’s what we have to do. I’m going to stabilize your hurt leg. That means I’m going to fix it so you can’t move it. Think you’ll be okay with that?”

Davy nodded. “I think so. Is it
gonna
hurt?”

“Yes, it is, but I’ll try very hard not to make it hurt too much.”

“Okay. You’re my friend, and I trust you, Mr. Nick.”

There it was again.
Trust.
Becky trusted him and this little boy trusted him. Ahmed had trusted him, too, and he’d let him down, but that wasn’t going to happen this time. Too many people were depending on him and his skills. Besides, this situation was not like the one with Ahmed. Davy was alive.

A noise at the mouth of the cave drew their attention and signaled Becky’s return. She carried several lengths of branches to where they were and handed them to Nick. “It’s getting hard to see out there and, this was all I could find.”

Nick took them from her, kept two that looked the sturdiest and threw the rest aside. “They’re perfect.” He turned to Davy. “Sport, I’m
gonna
straighten your leg as much as I can, and it’s going to hurt.”

Davy flashed a watery smile. “
It’s
okay, Mr. Nick. I’m a big guy. I can take it.”

Nick saw Becky wipe at a tear from her cheek. “We know you are, Davy.” She took his hand and then gestured for Nick to start.

For a fraction of a second, Nick hesitated, then took a deep breath and straightened the leg. Davy cried out, and then his body went limp. Becky gasped and looked at Nick.

“It’s okay. He’s just passed out. A blessing, since I still have to splint
this,
and it’s not going to be painless.” He placed one length of wood on the inside of Davy’s leg from thigh to ankle and the other on the outside from hip to ankle. “Hold these while I tie these strips of cloth around his leg,” he instructed.

Becky did as she was told. She watched closely as he administered to Davy’s leg, recalling how he applied the makeshift splint to Jake’s leg not all that long ago. “You’re very good at this,” she said.

“When you’ve done it as often as I have, you tend to get better.”