Page 5 of Colton in the Wild
She pitched right in and they began shifting boxes and crates. He was not at all surprised at how much Kansas could lift. He knew well enough how strong his little sister was. He thought the “little” part but didn’t say it, because it irritated her—Two years isn’t that much difference,she would say—and she was helping him out, after all.
He was mentally gauging the space left in his truck, comparing it to what was left on the inventory list, and deciding which crate to move next when he heard a notification tone unfamiliar to him. He knew from the way Kansas stopped dead and yanked her phone out of her pocket that it was probably something official. He wondered if it was a call-out, if somebody out there had stopped being careful, or if Alaska had decided to teach some puny human a needed lesson about life in the wild.
Kansas swiped the screen, read what was there, smiled, tapped out a couple of quick sentences, sent the message, and put the phone back in her pocket.
“No emergency?” he asked.
“No. Just a text from Scott Montgomery, a guy who works with Eli. A forensics guy. He looked up something on an old case for me.”
“An old case?”
“Yeah. That kid we found last year, out in the Kenai Wildlife Refuge.”
“I remember that. The kid you found with that herd of…what were they? The ones that look like mountain goats only with killer horns?”
“Dall sheep. I’d never seen one up close before. It was funny, how they almost seemed to be protecting him. Like they knew he was young and harmless to them. Anyway, I wanted contact info, to see how the kid’s doing, and Scott just happened to answer the phone. He was nice about it, like he always is, and looked it up for me.”
That was very Kansas, following up on something she was hardly required to. She was nothing if not passionate about her work, as he knew from the times a search ended badly. She took it hard, was occasionally even distraught at what she saw as failure. And he’d heard she had no qualms about unleashing her anger on people she didn’t feel were as dedicated to the work as she was. The Coltons were not a retiring bunch.
She was coming back from the truck for another box when she unexpectedly said, “You ever wonder what we’d be doing if Mom and Dad had never left San Diego?”
“Nah,” he said. “All that heat, concrete, asphalt, traffic?” He gave an exaggerated shudder. “Too scary.”
She laughed. But then her tone changed to very serious. “You really love it here, don’t you.”
It wasn’t really a question, more of an observation. Of the obvious, he thought, but he answered her anyway. “I do. I would not want to live anywhere else.”
“Neither would I,” she said quietly. “And not because of what happened down there.”
Spence stopped, shutting down the jokes, sensing his sister was in a serious mood at the moment. He put down the crate he’d started to lift and turned to face her.
“You okay? What brought this on?”
“I talked to Eli this morning. He had a question about one of our rescue cases from a few months ago. Which was what made me think of the Kenai kid. Anyway, he sounded kind of…something. I asked what was wrong, and he just said it was the date.” She grimaced. “It took me a while and a calendar check to understand. It’s…or it would have been, Aunt Caroline’s birthday tomorrow.”
Spence grimaced. “Damn.”
He knew the family story, of course, but it wasn’t ingrained in him, or Kansas, to the point where the date would have even occurred to them. When he’d gotten old enough to understand tragedy and trauma a little better, he’d tried to imagine how Eli must’ve felt. Spence had never known Caroline, but Eli had. What would it have felt like to be there when the body was found?
She’d been beautiful; he’d seen the pictures. A rising star in the modeling world at a young age, still in high school, she had attracted many fans. One of them in particular was mentally unstable and vicious. That twisted, sick fan had come to the house to kidnap Caroline. Instead, he had brutally murdered the grandparents Spence had never known, Edward and Mia Colton. He hadn’t stopped there, continuing with the apparently unplanned murder of Caroline herself. The killer had then arranged himself with Caroline on the living room sofa and taken his own life. When Uncle Will and Eli had arrived, it had taken them a moment to realize they were both dead. And then they’d found her parents, slaughtered upstairs.
Spence couldn’t imagine ever being able to put that out of your mind.
To him and Kansas, it was history, but Eli had lived it. At five years old, he had been old enough to have the ugly scenes and the trauma etched into his memory. Spence had always figured it was why Eli had chosen the career path he had.
It had also been big news, in all the headlines, and he knew the day Uncle Will had found the media camped out in front of Eli’s school had been the day the decision had been made. And three months later, the Coltons were in Alaska, far from the chaos of Southern California.
“I’m glad we didn’t have to live through all that,” Kansas said. “Although I think we might understand it all better if we had.”
“Maybe. What I try to focus on is afterward. That, together, Uncle Will and Dad built this, and because of that I’m able to do what I love.”
“And I found the one thing in life that I was meant to do,” Kansas agreed. “Maybe…maybe because it’s that day, we should say something.”
Spence’s brow furrowed. “Say something?”
“To Dad and Uncle Will. About how glad we are they did what they did, and how sorry we are that they had to go through…that. That we know the life we have now is because they got through it.”
That was so like Kansas. When she cared about something, she went full bore. Not that that made him any more comfortable with the idea of getting all sappy and emotional with everybody. But maybe she did have a point. Maybe it did deserve acknowledgment, at least.
