Page 29 of Peak Suspicion
“You don’t have to go through whatever it is alone.”
But she did. How could she trust anyone else to understand? “I’ll be fine. Right now I just need time.” Though it wasn’t as if more days or months or even years were going to change the past.
His phone buzzed. He pulled it from his pocket and looked at the screen. “It’s search and rescue,” he said. “I have to go.”
“Be careful,” she said.
“I always am.” He shrugged. “I know I come across as not taking things seriously sometimes. But mostly, that’s just an act. I’m a lot more serious than most people think.” He tucked the phone away. “See you later.”
When he was gone, she sat at the desk and thought about what he had said. It was true—when they first met she had dismissed him as a flirt who was used to women falling at his feet. Someone who relied on charm to coast through life. Butwhen he responded to her accident on Dixon Pass, she had seen a different side of him. Was everyone like this—with a facade that made them seem one way, and a reality that was completely different? If that was so, how was she supposed to form an accurate impression of anyone?
Chapter Nine
“It’s Helen Wakefield again,” Danny told the search and rescue volunteers who answered the summons. “She told the daughter she lives with that she was going to her room to watch TV, but when her son-in-law looked in on her two hours later, the room was empty. The TV was on, the sound turned up, but Helen was nowhere in the house. The back door was unlocked and he is sure he locked it right after supper. They believe Helen went outside and wandered off. She’s done it before and they usually find her a short distance away, but this time they searched everywhere they could think of with no sign of her, so they called 911.”
“I guess they checked the neighbors’ house, where they found her last time they called us?” Tony asked.
“They did,” Danny said. “No one has seen her. The sheriff’s department is doing a house-to-house search in the neighborhood. They need us to concentrate on the undeveloped areas—vacant lots, mountain slopes and ravines.”
They had searched the same areas before, only this time it was after dark, in an area with little residual illumination from streetlamps or even house lights. The neighborhood they were in had been built according to dark sky principles, which meant light was confined to a very narrow space. This made for great stargazing, but difficulties maneuvering rocky, uneven terrain.
As Carter joined Vince and Bethany in searching their assigned area, he thought of the hundred ways there were to get hurt out here, from tripping over a tree root to tumbling downa ravine, to being attacked by a mountain lion. Someone who loved Helen Wakefield was probably thinking of all of that right now, too, and depending on this group of strangers to save her.
“Do you remember Grandma Russo?” Bethany asked as he followed her up a set of half-buried logs someone had long ago set as steps up a slope behind the Wakefield house. At every step twigs or dried pine cones crunched under their feet. He tried not to think about falling and to search on either side for Helen. They might pass right by her without seeing her in this darkness.
Carter had a vague memory of a tiny, white-haired woman confined to a bed in a nursing home. “Not really,” he said.
“She babysat us a few times before she had to go in the care home,” Bethany said. “You and Dalton were still tiny. Just crawling. I thought she was so funny because she’d give us ice cream for lunch or put your diapers on backward. And she’d call us by the wrong names. I was always Diane and Aaron was Don.”
“Diane is Mom’s name,” he said.
“Right. And Don is her older brother, Uncle Don. Grandma thought that’s who we were. Not too long after that she had to go into memory care. It was so sad.”
“Let’s hope we don’t have a sad ending for this family,” Vince said. “Or not any sadder than it already is.”
At the top of the slope they were on a high ridge. They stopped and looked back the way they had come. Carter could make out the roof of the house where Helen lived. He cupped his hands around his mouth. “Helen!” he shouted. “Helen, are you okay?”
They walked east along the ridge, alternately calling and sweeping the beams of powerful flashlights across the landscape, looking for a flash of Helen’s white hair or the pink sweat suit her daughter had told them she was wearing. They could hear other groups of searchers around them doing the same.
The ridge began to climb higher, merging with an even steeper slope. At the base of this slope they met with half a dozen other searchers. “We’ve found her,” Tony said. “She’s standing on a rock at the edge of a ravine. When we tried to get closer, she started throwing rocks at us.”
“She hit me.” Ryan wiped at a muddy smudge on his cheek. “For a woman that age, she’s got a pretty good aim.”
“We had to back off way over here before she calmed down,” Carrie said.
“What do we do now?” Bethany asked.
“We’re waiting for her daughter and son-in-law to see if they can talk her down,” Tony said.
Crunching leaves and snapping twigs announced the arrival of the family members, bent practically doubled as they scrambled up the slope, flanked by two sheriff’s deputies. “Where is she?” Helen’s daughter asked. She was a fiftysomething woman with long dark hair streaked with gray and a round face.
“She’s on a ledge above a ravine,” Tony said.
“Let’s move a little closer so you can talk to her,” Deputy Jake Gwynn suggested. Jake was also a SAR volunteer.
He and Shane escorted the couple to within a few yards of Helen, who stood leaning back against the rocks. A flashlight beam held by one of the deputies illuminated the new arrivals. Helen turned to face them. “What are you doing here?” she asked.
“Mom, please come down and come to bed,” the woman called.
