Heartbreaker (7 page)

Jess Feldman came up behind her as she clung to the edges of the saddle with both hands and rested her forehead for a moment against the cool leather. Lynn saw his hand first, long-fingered and brown, when he reached past her for the strap that held the saddle on the horse—the girth, she remembered. The riders were expected to unsaddle their mounts during the two-hour lunch break, tether them, and let them graze. Most of the others had done so and gone to eat. The way she felt, Lynn wasn’t sure she could lift a cup of coffee, much less a heavy saddle. But she was not going to wimp out—and she was not going to accept favors from Jess Feldman either.

“I can do it,” she said ungraciously, glancing at him over her shoulder. His hand dropped, and he stepped back, waiting. Lynn was forced to make good on her words. Gritting her teeth, she straightened and went at it. It took several minutes to work the knot in the leather strap loose, but she did it. With what felt like the last of her strength she grabbed the saddle with both hands and half pulled, half lifted it from Hero’s back.

It was heavy, heavier even than she remembered from that morning or the day before. But Lynn managed to hang on and lower it to the ground—just.

“Good job.” Jess had his hat pushed back on his head, his arms crossed over his chest, and a lurking smile in his eyes when she turned, task complete, to face him. “Don’t forget the bridle.”

“Don’t you have something else to do?” Lynn said to him with loathing before turning back to her steed. Hero was already munching grass, head down. The reins rested loosely halfway down his neck, with the middle third of the leather straps trailing the ground. Lynn realized that she had forgotten to secure the animal before unsaddling him.

Good thing he was more interested in filling his belly than running off.

“You need to tie him up before you turn him loose. Or he just might not be here when we’re ready to leave.”

I couldn’t get so lucky, Lynn thought. Then she reached down—an action that required a whole range of painful movements on her part—grabbed the reins, and yanked upward.

Hero kept on eating grass, shaking her efforts off with more indifference than he would have shown a buzzing fly.

Lynn swallowed the not-very-nice word that sprang to her lips and jerked on the reins again, hard.

This time Hero’s head came up—for a second. Then he lowered it to the grass again, ignoring all Lynn’s subsequent tugging as he grazed.

“Tech!” Jess walked around her with a shake of his head, picked up the tether line that was attached to a long rope stretched between two stakes to which all the horses were secured, and fastened it to the metal loop on Hero’s halter. Then he pulled the bridle over the pony’s head and turned to lay it across the saddle, which rested on the grass.

“I could have managed,” Lynn said as he straightened.

“I didn’t want you to miss lunch.” The barb was accompanied by that annoying lurking smile.

“Mother, do you need help—Oh, hi, Jess.” Rory came around Hero’s rump and stopped short in simulated surprise, barely glancing at her mother before focusing all her attention on her target. Jenny and Melody were right behind Rory. Rory’s whole demeanor made it clear that the detour had been carefully planned. The girls were chasing Jess, and pretending to offer help to Rory’s mother was simply the means to an end.

Lynn decided then and there that she was going to put her foot down where her daughter and Jess Feldman were concerned, and let the chips fall where they may.

“We were wondering …” Jenny began as the trio advanced on Jess, leaving Lynn alone and forgotten a few paces behind.

“… if you could give us another casting lesson. Please,” Rory finished with a beguiling smile.

Jess looked at the girls, then glanced over their heads at Lynn. With a frown and a shake of her head, she nixed that idea.

He grinned and refocused on the girls.

“Sure,” he promised, chucking Rory under the chin in an exaggeratedly avuncular fashion that set Lynn’s teeth on edge. “We’ll be making camp near Lake Fork River tonight, and that’s where you’ll find some of the best trout in these mountains. If we get lucky we’ll be having fresh trout for supper. If we don’t get lucky it’s leftover barbecue and refried baked beans.”

“Euuw!” the girls said in unison.

Jess’s grin was wicked as he glanced at Lynn again.

A
FTER LUNCH IT STARTED
to rain. Not just a gentle shower, but a deluge. An icy deluge. Mounted on Hero’s back again, Lynn resigned herself to utter misery. She was wet, cold, saddle sore, grumpy—and to top it off she felt as if she might be coming down with a cold. Her throat tickled, her nose had started to run, and every five minutes or so she gave vent to a mighty sneeze.

Trying to make use of a tissue under such conditions was a waste of time. By the time she extracted one from the wad in her jeans pocket and brought it to her nose, the rain had soaked it through.

Finally she gave it up and—
yuck!
—resorted to swiping at her nose with her sleeve.

Not that that was much help either.

Bounce, thud. Slog, splash. Shiver, quake
.

Would the day never end? Would the vacation never end?

Vacation, hah! Lynn thought. It wasn’t a vacation, it was an endurance contest!

At last they took a break, crowding beneath a stone overhang around a small fire Owen lit. Snacks carried in saddlebags were eaten, instant coffee and hot chocolate were drunk. The outfitters, impervious to the rain in what looked like army-issue ponchos and cowboy hats, saw to the horses. The girls chattered animatedly among themselves, barely paying attention as Mrs. Johnson pointed out what she said might be Anasazi drawings on the layered rock. Pat Greer passed out packets of trail mix. Debbie Stapleton and Irene Holtman stood near the edge of the overhang, talking as they peered out into the silvery curtain of rain.

Resting wearily against the stone wall, Lynn savored the cessation of movement and enjoyed being alone. She pulled out a semidry tissue and blew her nose. She rolled her head and shoulders to stretch the cramped muscles of her neck. She eased off her boots and wiggled her pinched toes in their damp socks. Changing her socks—as well as the rest of her soggy clothes—would have been smart, but her gear was being transported along with everything else by four-wheel drive to the site of the evening stop. Besides, anything she put on would just get wet again anyway.

Her waterproof poncho (suggested gear in the to-bring list) was bright yellow, very sporty, very cute, manufactured by a trendy designer. Unfortunately, it ended at her thighs, leaving her legs and feet at the mercy of the elements, which were not very merciful. The poncho’s loose cuffs allowed rain to soak the wrists of her white turtleneck. Dampness had wicked through the thin cotton until it didn’t feel like there was an inch of her left dry above the waist. Hero’s saddle had turned into one big puddle beneath her by the time they stopped, so her butt was soaked too, clear through to her underwear. Only the top of her head, which had been protected by both the hood of her poncho and her cowboy hat, felt dry.

“Oh, look, a rainbow!”

Lynn glanced up from her disgusted contemplation of her sorry condition to find that the downpour had at last slackened to a fine drizzle. The sun peeped out from behind the thick bank of gray clouds that had dogged them all afternoon—and an enormous, sparkling rainbow arched from somewhere on the mountaintop above to the horizon.

The sight was breathtaking, and it improved Lynn’s mood instantly. Translucent bands of gold, pink, lavender, and orange melted into each other, their beauty rendered more spectacular by the knowledge that it was ephemeral.

We promise you sights you’ll never forget
.

For once the brochure was right on target. Standing, Lynn tugged on her boots, stomped once, twice to get her heels in place, then followed the group out to get a better view.

She emerged into a cleared area strewn with boulders. The overhang the group had sheltered under was an outcropping of a stony cliff that rose about thirty feet straight up on the north side of the clearing. A rocky, sparsely treed slope curled around the cliff and out of sight; that was the terrain over which they would ride after the break. The lush blue-green of the pine forest was below them. To the west the mountain fell away. It was there, over a breathtaking panorama of snowcapped peaks that stretched like an ocean of vertical rock to the horizon, that the rainbow shimmered, beckoning.

Lynn’s gaze skimmed the ooh-ing and ah-ing girls as she searched for Rory. She found her, as she would have expected, standing with Jenny at the forefront of the group.

Rory’s hot-pink poncho, bought to complement the paler pink of her had-to-have cowboy hat, made her impossible to miss even amid the sea of colorful rain gear covering the other girls.

Maybe, Lynn thought, what was happening between the two of them was just a product of “the teen thing.” Maybe she was making too much of what were basically just hormone-influenced teenage moods.

Sidling up beside Rory, Lynn glanced at her daughter’s fine-featured profile. The look of wonder on Rory’s face as she admired the rainbow was unmistakable. Suddenly Lynn was fiercely glad to be standing right where she was.

This
was
a sight they would never forget—and a memory they would always share. Even the fine cold mist that hung on in the aftermath of the rain did not detract from the magic. Some four thousand feet above the rest of the world, dwarfed by the vastness of the wilderness surrounding them, Lynn felt that she and Rory and the others were being given a private viewing of the symbol of the oldest promise of all time.

“Gorgeous, isn’t it?” Lynn put a hand on her daughter’s shoulder. The Day-Glo vinyl felt slick and wet to her touch.

“Awesome.” Rory glanced at her—and smiled. To Lynn, the beauty of that smile—the first genuine one she had had from her daughter in some time—put the rainbow to shame.

“Like totally.” Jenny, on Rory’s other side, glanced at Lynn and smiled too.

The group stood together on the rim of the mountain, just above a drop-off that plunged perhaps two hundred feet straight down before gentling into pine-robed slopes that ended in a valley far below. Icy-white water twisted across the center of that valley, looking slender as the output of a garden hose as it rushed through a canyon formed by jagged gray cliffs that fit together like interlocking fingers.

Directly overhead, the rainbow soared.

They could have been standing on the edge of the world.

Rory stepped forward, presumably to get a better view.

Behind them a male voice shouted something, the tone urgent. The words were unintelligible.

Lynn frowned, glancing around inquiringly.

The ground heaved beneath her feet. Distracted, Lynn looked down. Hair-thin cracks were shooting at lightning speed across the granite ledge on which she stood.

Cracks in granite?

In front of her, Rory seemed to teeter. Lynn’s heart missed a beat as she realized that Rory was too close to the edge.

“Rory!”

The rock shelf her daughter stood on was shifting, buckling. In the split second after Lynn grasped what was happening, she grabbed at Rory’s poncho and missed. Rory lurched out of reach.

“Mommy!”

Rory’s cry was high-pitched, filled with fear. Her arms windmilled, and her boots scrabbled audibly for purchase on the rock as she seemed to topple sideways. Lynn grabbed for her again. Her fingers closed around Rory’s. Her hand was damp; Rory’s hand was damp. She couldn’t hold on.

Lynn lost her grip just as the ground gave way. Rory screamed. Lynn cried out as her daughter slid straight down through collapsing layers of rock and mud as though she were on an amusement-park slide, arms flailing wildly as she tried to regain her balance.

In less than an instant she was gone.

It happened so fast that Lynn’s foremost emotion was disbelief rather than terror. Her mouth was open, Rory’s name on her lips. Her eyes were wide. Her stomach felt as though she were in an elevator, descending fast.

“Rory!” Lynn cried even as the ground fell out from under
her
. She was sliding down too, along with Jenny, who was shrieking, and God knew who else. Lynn knew that she was in trouble, but never, not ever, by any stretch of the possible did she understand that she was falling off a two-hundred-foot cliff—until her feet shot out into space and her sliding back and desperately grasping hands lost their last contact with anything solid, and her horrified eyes encountered the vast whirling grayness of endless cloudy sky and granite mountains and the rainbow shining like an epitaph overhead.

As she plunged downward, Lynn screamed.

B
EING ALIVE HURT
. That was Lynn’s first conscious thought as she opened her eyes. Her body ached from head to toe. She was staring straight up into a broody sky. Fine droplets of water soaked her face, her hair, her eyes, making her blink. Remembrance came in a blinding flash. The fall. Rory.

Rory!

The rainbow was gone, vanished as thoroughly as if it had never been.

Lynn was afraid to move, afraid to put to the test how badly she might be injured. Surely she could not have fallen so far—she remembered how far away the ground had looked from the top of the cliff—without causing herself severe harm.

Maybe she was dead.

Maybe Rory was dead. The thought was so painful that Lynn couldn’t even entertain it. If her daughter were dead … she would want to die too.

The recent turbulence in their relationship was suddenly meaningless. All that mattered was that Rory was her beloved child.

“Ohhh!”

The moan, if indeed it was a moan and not some cruel trick played by the wind, was enough to galvanize Lynn into movement. Her head swung around, her gaze searching.

At first she saw nothing but gray: gray sky, gray mountains, the sheer vertical rise of the gray rock cliff in front of her face. The summit, where they had been standing not long before, was snapped in two like a broken cookie. The outermost part hung straight down, parallel with and resting against the bulk of the mountain.