Page 67 of The Fault Between Us
What had happened? Claire tried to piece together the moments after the earthquake, but it was a jumble of fear and panic. Shaking and an unearthly roar. Jenny.
Where was Jenny?Please, God.
Was she safe? Who was the man who had taken her in those awful moments? Had they been swept away in the water? Was her baby still alive?
“Help!” Claire croaked out in panic, her throat gritty. She had to get to shore, she had to find Jenny. “Help us!” She raised herself higher out of the water, desperately straining to hear a voice returning her call for help—her call for hope. No one called back.
Jenny was gone. Frannie. All the people who had gone to sleep under the full moon. Where were they? The tree swayed, and with a sickening realization, Claire felt the cold water splash at her chin, when it had just moments ago been at her neck.
Fear shuddered through her body in an icy torrent. She and Beth were alone in the dark. No one was coming to save them, and the water was rising.
chapter 43:RED
“On three,” Red said to Bridget and the boys. “One... two...”
Bridget gunned the engine.
“Three!” He pushed hard. The boys groaned. The back tires found purchase on the dirt and the car jerked back onto the buckled road. The fancy convertible had a dented bumper, but the tires weren’t flat, and the engine worked.
After the second quake, Red had knelt down with Bridget and prayed. The two boys mumbled along with them. After they said amen, he helped Bridget up. “We need to get to a telephone and get word downstream.” He glanced to where the ominous wave of water had rushed toward the dam. He hoped it wasn’t too late.
“Where are we going?” Bridget asked as they headed back the way they had come.
“Sunnyslope.” Red hated driving the opposite direction from where Claire and Jenny might be, but he didn’t have a choice with the road gone. He slowed to veer around a fallen spruce and a scattering of rock, then eased over a foot-wide crack in the road. He’d callthe Forest Service. They’d be able to get word to the campgrounds about the dam.
“Do you think...” Bridget sounded tentative, as if she didn’t want to ask the question. “Do you think Claire and Jenny and Frannie...?”
Red didn’t answer her unfinished question.
Just before the turnoff to Sunnyslope, the headlights ran out of road and he stomped on the brake. He got out of the car and walked to a sharp drop-off. At the bottom of the six-foot scarp, a car was wedged nose-down.
“Help me!” A desperate call came from inside the car.
Red stifled a curse. He didn’t want to waste a minute, and certainly not for the man in the baby-blue Cadillac.
It took far too long to extract David Endicott from his car. When Red and the boys were finally able to pull him through the passenger-side window, he was blubbering like a baby and blood stained his expensive cowboy shirt.
“Get him up to the car,” he told Sam and Ernie. Instead of following them, Red scrambled up the scarp to the back trunk of the Cadillac. It only took a minute to pry it open, and what he found inside was exactly what he’d expected. He had proof now, as much good as it would do him.
Red got back to the Thunderbird, where Bridget was examining the gash on David Endicott’s arm. “He needs stitches.”
“Hold on,” Red said. He bumped the car around the scarp, ignoring David Endicott’s groans of pain. He didn’t have it in him to feel sorry for Endicott, being that the man was the cause of his troubles.
The last time he’d been to Sunnyslope was the morning he’d run away from Claire. He’d seen the empty closet, and shame burning him up had kept him from coming clean with her about Dell—and about getting fired. So he’d fled, catching a ride with Bucky and praying Wormsbecker would change his mind.
Wormsbecker needed him. When Red had signed on at Sunnyslope four years earlier, a lot of the horses had been in bad shape—overridden, untrained, lame. He’d turned the herd around. Between him andBucky, Wormsbecker’s clients could count on good hunts and bringing home big game. But when Bucky turned into the ranch the morning after the fight, Red saw that his luck had run out. Wormsbecker sat on the front porch of the ranch house with David Endicott beside him. Red climbed the porch steps, took off his hat, and hid a swell of satisfaction at the sight of Endicott’s black eye.
“You don’t work here anymore, Wilder,” Endicott said in a high-pitched wheeze.
Red ignored Endicott. “Sorry about last night,” he said to his boss with as much regret as he could manage. “I was out of line. If you could see your way clear to—”
“Save your breath, Red,” Wormsbecker spoke around the cigar in his mouth. “Lem Garrison was by this morning, bright and early. He was looking for you.”
Now it was Red who felt like he’d been sucker punched. If the Yellowstone National Park commissioner was looking for him, it was about Dell.
Wormsbecker tapped his ash into his coffee cup and narrowed his eyes at Red. “I’ve heard you’re behind the shed racket in Gallatin County.”
Red’s body tensed. “That’s a lie.” He’d bet his last dollar Pete Henshaw started that rumor.
