Page 68 of 15 Summers Later

“Ready for what?” Ava asked, clear alarm in her expression.

“To catch them if possible, and take them back to the shelter. Dogs can survive in the summer up here but come fall, they’ll be starving.”

“So you want to find two half-starved possibly vicious mongrels somehow in the vast mountains, persuade them to jump into the crates and drive them back down the mountain with us?”

Madi couldn’t help her laugh. “If we’re lucky.”

The fire road was fairly well-maintained here, wide enough for two small ATVs to pass each other. Still, the side-by-side didn’t exactly offer a smooth ride, jostling over bumps and rocks in the road. Madi glanced at her sister, who looked pale. Was Ava still feeling ill? She couldn’t tell and her sister didn’t volunteer the information.

The trail cut through beautiful old growth forests, thick with Douglas fir, ponderosa pine, aspen and spruce.

She inhaled deeply. “I love the way the mountains smell.”

“Even these mountains?” Ava asked, her hands tightly clasped in her lap.

Madi couldn’t see her features because of the bandanna and the sunglasses, but from Ava’s posture alone, Madi could tell her sister was nervous.

“These mountains are just mountains,” she answered, raising her voice to be heard above the growling engine. “Only a place. Beautiful, remote, wild. What happened to us could have happened in Hawaii or Canada or the Arizona desert.”

“I suppose you’re right,” Ava said.

She grew quiet as the road became rougher. Madi slowed down to avoid some of the worst of the ruts and rocks. As the vehicle bounced through a rocky patch, the sisters jolted against one another.

Once they made it through and the road evened out again, Ava turned to her. “Do you think you could ever forgive Dad for dragging us into it all?”

Her sister’s question, completely out of the blue, made Madi stare. In her shock, she took her foot off the gas and the vehicle slowed, then came to a stop, the grumbling engine reverting to a low hum.

“Is that what your book is about?” she asked. “Trying to figure out how to forgive Dad?”

“No. But I have to say, I did learn a lot about him while I was writing it and even more since.”

“Like what?” she asked, when Ava didn’t elaborate.

“Do you remember that Dad suffered a pretty bad head injury in a motorcycle crash right after you were born, when I was a toddler?”

“I was a baby. How would I know that?”

“I don’t remember Mom and Dad talking about it much. I had totally forgotten about it. Apparently he was in the hospital for a week and Mom had to handle us both by herself. Grandma flew out to help her.”

Leona hadn’t mentioned that to Madi, either. She wondered if everything that had come after overshadowed that singular incident.

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“Maybe nothing,” Ava conceded. “But a childhood friend of Dad’s emailed me right after the book came out. He said Dad was always the kindest person, always willing to help someone else. Apparently something shifted in him after his injury. He became more... I don’t know ifparanoidis the right term. But willing to see conspiracies and connections in everything. This guy, Larry Hampton, said Mom was always a moderating force on Dad.”

“Remember how he used to make us do emergency drills and would sometimes wake us in the middle of the night to go down to the bunker he had made in the basement?”

Ava nodded. “There’s a section in the book about that. I guess you haven’t read that part yet.”

She hadn’t readanypart yet. Madi’s hands tightened on the steering wheel and she started up the side-by-side, heading up the trail again.

“I rarely heard Dad and Mom fight,” Ava said, barely audible now above the engine, “but I remember them fighting after one of those 3 a.m. emergency drills.”

Madi didn’t want to remember. She liked pretending everything before her mother died had been perfect in their family and that it had been her mother’s death that had sent Clint spiraling. But Ava’s words seemed to have turned the key to unlock memories in her subconscious, whether she liked it or not.

“I wouldn’t have heard them, except I couldn’t go back to sleep like you did, and I had to get up to use the bathroom,” Ava went on. “Their door was ajar. I remember hearing Mom pleading with him to get help or she would have to leave. She threatened to take us girls and come back here to Emerald Creek with Grandma Leelee.”

“Do you think she would have done that?”

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