Page 79 of Threat of Danger
Chapter Eighteen
Sunday
WHEN DEREK WENTfor his walk by the river midmorning, after switching Zelda out for Kaylee at the hospital, Jess went with him. The sun shrugged off its cloud cover, melting the last of the snow on the ground. They walked by the river first—the water swollen from the snowmelt rushing down from the hills—then through the woods.
He wanted, desperately, to find the words that would make everything all right between them. He was a writer, dammit; if he was good at anything, it was finding words.
Not today.
Maybe because she was more important to him than anything he’d ever done, any book he’d ever written.
So they talked about their work. As it turned out, working in the movie business and writing books had a lot in common. It was all about story.
The trees towered over them, enfolding them as if they were in their own little bubble.
“For a while, I thought I’d never love the woods again,” Jess said after a long stretch of silence, jumping a log, “but this is nice.”
She was tireless. Walking with her was like walking with one of the guys on Derek’s old team—she knew when to talk and when to listen to the forest. Not one word of complaint the whole time either; she knew how to get over and around obstacles. Derek liked hiking through the woods alone, but he found he liked hiking with Jess even more.
“I have a friend I was a POW with, Cole Makani Hunter, who married an ecotherapist,” he told her. “Being in nature is good for PTSD. She takes her patients on green walks. When she’s working. She’s not working right now. She just had a baby, a little girl.” He’d gotten the e-mail that morning, with half a dozen baby pictures, Cole bursting with pride and love. Man, seeing him that way was good. He’d gone through some hard times after their return from overseas.
“You don’t talk much about being a POW.”
“I don’t talk about it at all, if I can help it. Lost too many good friends. Six months of bloody torture. Not exactly fond memories.”
“You seem to be doing OK,” she said with caution.
“I think the books help. I used to have a lot of darkness inside. But then I write it down and put it in a book as part of a story, and then there’s this gap between me and those things suddenly. I get a little distance. It gets a little easier.”
“Writing therapy?”
He nodded, and she fell silent, which made him wonder if she was thinking about her own torture. Jess’s pain got to him on a visceral level, more than any pain he himself had suffered. He’d go back to the damn cave with the insurgents if that could erase what had happened to Jess.
He searched the mud with his stick on autopilot.
“Do you walk the same path every day?” she asked.
“No. Sometimes I go deep into the woods. I keep thinking that someday I’ll walk through a clump of bushes and the old camper will be there, covered by branches and weeds.”
Jess shuddered. “I can’t believe nobody ever came across that horrid thing.”
“Neither of us had a clue where to find it, other than the other side of the river.”
Hell, he’d been hopelessly turned around, running from a madman, carrying Jess. He’d had no idea where he was coming from or what direction he was running. He ran down whichever path was the easiest, ran through wherever the bushes were thinnest. Then he zigzagged on purpose and looped around so the masked man wouldn’t be able to follow his tracks.
Now, with his SEAL training, he had much better situational awareness. He wouldn’t be easily lost in the woods again. But back then ...
They’d escaped in the middle of the day, the sun high in the sky. He couldn’t tell what was east and what was west. He was surprised when he’d burst out of the woods near the river. Even more surprised when the guy found them.
That spot on the riverbank where Derek had pushed their kidnapper into the icy water had been his only point of reference, the only place he could show the police.
The tracking dogs Sheriff Rollins requested arrived the following morning. Two feet of snow had fallen by then—no footprints to see and no scent to follow. And, since Derek had told them the man had drowned in the river, the police spent most of their time on the riverbank with the dogs, trying to find a body. They didn’t start looking for the camper until days later.
“That was another thing,” Derek said now. “Why I think the bastard survived. Somebody had to have moved the camper. Otherwise the cops, or a hiker—someone—would have found it eventually. I would have. Those weeks while I waited for you to recover, I looked for that damn camper every single day.”
“You did?” She nearly stumbled over a protruding root, but caught herself. “I always thought nobody cared. We were gone, then we came back, the bad guy was dead. Everybody was just waiting for me to get over it.”
“A lot of people were looking.”
