Page 1 of Guarded Secrets
CHAPTER ONE
Keeley steered through the curve in the mountain road. The low western sky reflected in her side mirrors showed sullen clouds against the faintest lavender remnants of the sunset. Spring had made a tantalizing showing earlier in the month, only to be followed by snow last weekend. And more was predicted by morning. She was plenty tired of winter.
The big curve up ahead led to a straightaway where the road became steep before going through a series of switchbacks, and then another straightaway that went into Sisters, the cutest of all the historic gold mining towns in the Sierra Nevada mountains of California.
Okay, she might be a little biased, but she loved her hometown, and it was, hands down, the best place to raise a family in California. Which she’d been thinking about a lot lately.
Turning thirty had been no big deal, but thirty-two? Definitely a big deal. A disastrous relationship after college had made her wary of trusting anyone with her heart. But she needed to get past that. She wanted a husband and kids, and the mental image of her ovaries shriveling with every passing year wasn’t helping.
With the window cracked open to enjoy the piney mountain air, and the heater cranked because it wascoldout there, like a true Swiftie, she sang along with Taylor about unrequited love, steering through the next curve, and then onto the straightaway.
Click, click, click.Uh-oh. Not a good sound.
The rapid metallic clicking continued and she sat up straight, tightening her fingers on the steering wheel. She muted the music and listened intently. Lifting her foot off the accelerator slowed the clicking as the car decelerated. The steering wheel gave a weird shudder and the tire pressure warning light flashed on like the dark omen of doom it was.
“Oh, good lord.” Nothing obliterated a good mood like car trouble.
Maybe it was nothing. Or if it was something, maybe it wasn’t serious enough that she couldn’t make it home. She’d take it nice and slow and get the tires checked first thing in the morning. The delusional thinking lasted about fifteen seconds before the clicking morphed into a squishy sound that could only mean a flat tire.
Damn it.Weren’t new tires on her summer to-do list? The current set weren’t in bad shape, they still had tread, but they needed replacing. She’d kept up on the maintenance and had checked the tire pressures only a week ago.
Despite comments from a certain cranky bar owner who said she shouldn’t be commuting down the mountain in her “tin can,” Keeley was a responsible car owner.
Owen Hardesty had a way of getting her back up as no one else could, and she’d defended her “tin can.”
With good maintenance, a Honda CRV could run for a couple hundred thousand miles. Thank goodness because hers was nearing the two-hundred-thousand milestone.
Faithfully, she’d followed the monthly maintenance checklist her dad had made for her when she’d first moved away from home. But she had the unhappy feeling the clicking sound meant she’d picked up a nail, and it had punctured a tire.
No amount of maintenance could prevent a nail puncture.
Resigned, she pulled to the side of the road along a stretch that in the spring would be a wide meadow bursting with wildflowers, but currently held the snowy remnants of the storm that had swept through the previous weekend.
Mountain spring was different from calendar spring. It was a time of year that teased with hints of warmth and color, only to dump six inches of slushy snow to remind you that Mother Nature could do whatever the hell she wanted.
The dirt shoulder was wide with plenty of room so she should be safe.
Putting on her hazards, Keeley got out of her car, sighing fatalistically when her cute suede Uggs sank into the mud. The dark seemed to be closing in, the clouds from the west swallowing the stars.
Vehicles sped by, headlights lighting up the road in front of them. Using the light from her cell phone, she found the front tire on the passenger side with rubber pooled like a pancake beneath the rim. “Terrific.”
First things first, she needed to call for roadside service. Back in the car, she tapped the screen of her phone and uttered a low groan. No service. A fact of life living in the mountains: cell service was spotty. But darn, she wished she could call for help.
Leaning back onto the headrest, she closed her eyes and thought the word she never allowed herself to say out loud.Fuck.
Pulling the zipper up on her light cotton jacket—because who wanted to wear their heavy winter coat in April?—she considered her situation. She could deal with this. Her dad had taught her how to change a tire, plus he’d put together a safety kit for her car that included a reflective vest and a battery-powered light.
“This sucks. But I can do it.” If she said it loud enough, maybe it would be true.
Getting out of the car again, she opened the back and gave another mental curse. She’d forgotten that everything necessary to change the tire, including the spare, was beneath the CRV’s cargo floor, currently buried under crates and boxes of books, papers, and school supplies, all tightly packed around her desk chair and bookcase.
Why had she thought it was a good idea to bring her own desk chair and bookcase to what had been another teacher’s classroom? Thankfully, her genius pal Yousef had mad Tetris skills and had banned her from packing her car herself. He’d done his magic and fit everything together in a way she knew she could never replicate. He’d folded the back seats forward to make more room, and it was needed. Even the front passenger area was jampacked.
No way would she be able to get all that stuff unloaded, change the tire, and then reload and fit it all again. To cap it off, the cotton jacket and jeans she wore had been great for the we’re-sad-you’re-going-away drinks and tacos at the cantina, but the temperature was dropping and she was already cold.
Somewhere in one of the carefully packed boxes was her down coat, plus the fuzzy blanket she’d kept in her classroom for emergencies.
Her home in Sisters was only six miles away, but it might as well have been six hundred. A coyote howled, not quite far enough away for comfort.
