Page 75 of The Fault Between Us
“I’m fine,”Red said thoughtfully. “Claire says that a lot.”
In the dark, surrounded by trees and the light of the stars, Bridget felt like she could see the past more clearly. Her sisters, her father. Herself.
Bridget wasn’t brave like Claire. She knew better than to put herself—or her heart—in danger. It was better to be alone than risk getting hurt like Dad had been that night she saw him crying. Betterto break up with a suitor before she let herself care too much. Better to be hard-hearted—oh, how she hated that Dr. Sampson!—than brokenhearted.A caring heart is the best medicine,Sampson had said. But Bridget knew better.
A caring heart was an invitation to pain.
She took care of other people’s pain—broken bones and abrasions, illnesses and disease—but did whatever it took to avoid any pain of her own. Physical or mental... or heartbreak. The worst pain of all. Bridget was doing just fine. But it didn’t take a genius to see that Claire and Frannie weren’t.
I’m the reason Mother left us.Did Frannie act out because she really thought it was her fault Mother left?
It would explain a lot.
Red’s horse broke into a trot and Bridget clamped her hands on the saddle horn as Flick followed suit. Suddenly, the line of trees next to the trail swayed wildly and the ground bucked and heaved. Bridget shrieked as Flick staggered. She bent over the saddle horn, clutching the mule’s short black mane for dear life. She closed her eyes—Lord, make it stop.
The quaking stopped.
Bridget stayed where she was as the crash of rocks and the crack of falling trees echoed in the dark. She was still on the mule.Thank you, God.She heard Red speaking in a low voice to his horse. Carefully, she opened her eyes.
“You okay?” Red asked.
No, she was certainly not. Her heart was galloping and her blood pressure was probably sky high. “I’m fine,” she said, and could have bit her tongue.
Red reined his horse back toward the trail. “Let’s go, then.”
Bridget’s legs quaked as they started out even faster than before. She was going to die on this trail. She’d be hit by falling rocks or get pinned under a tree. She’d be thrown from this mule and break her neck before she ever found her sisters.
This wasn’t like one of her novels, no matter what Frannie would say.
This story had no guarantee of a happy ending.
chapter 49:FRANNIE
Frannie stood at the edge of the rising water.
She was freezing cold and soaking wet. They’d found five more survivors, but not Claire or Jenny or Jerrylynn or Paul. She wasn’t giving up, she just didn’t know where else to look.
Frannie had organized the search with Mel and Roberts. Four uninjured men from the ridge joined in, one of them about a hundred years old but they needed all the help they could get. Frannie grabbed a teenage boy named Lance and told him to look for supplies in the remaining cars and trailers. “We need clean water, clothes, and blankets,” Frannie told him. “And anything else you can find before the water covers it all.” A woman with an injured eye said she’d watch over Mildred Wilson, and Frannie put Jean and Jan to work building a couple campfires.
Down in the wreckage, Frannie and Mel found a boy named Phillip trapped in an upside-down trailer. Phillip’s foot was crushed and bloody, but his only concern was for his mother, who was barely conscious in a tangle of rocks and debris twenty feet away. Next, Frannie found Vicky sobbing under a pile of branches, naked as ajaybird. She asked her about Jerrylynn as she helped her up the bank. “I was in the tent, and then the water—and—” Vicky hiccupped and started to cry again.
“Get her a blanket and put her by a campfire,” she told Lance, then went back down. Jerrylynn had to be somewhere. She just had to be.
Roberts found the kindly Mr. Wilson pinned under a boulder not far from the slide. He and Mel carried Mr. Wilson up the hill to join his family, and the girls surrounded him, kissing his cheeks. Frannie was happy for them, until she saw Mr. Wilson’s leg. It looked like it had been shredded by a grizzly and was bleeding so bad Frannie’s stomach turned over.
“Do you think we should put a tourniquet on it?” she asked Mel, who was looking sick in the flickering campfire light.
“Do you know how?” he asked.
“Not unless seeing it on television counts.”
She helped Connie wrap her father’s leg in a bedsheet and headed back down the ridge, where she met Roberts coming up carrying a frail white-haired man in his arms, while another man dragged a wheelchair behind them. “Polio victim,” Roberts said. “Found him stuck in the mud.”
Now, Frannie picked her way back down the wreckage to the edge of the rockfall, looking for Jeff and Dottie’s trailer or some sign of Jerrylynn. Her flashlight was growing dim and her spirits were plummeting. She hadn’t heard the cry for help from across the water since Roberts showed up. Had whoever was out there given up—or worse?
A faint shout came from a tumble of debris out in the dark.
Frannie waded toward the voice. Mel followed, his flashlight sweeping the wreckage around them. She picked her way around the pile of downed trees. The beam of the flashlight skipped over the water and then—there—a blue plaid shirt, a pale face.
