Moab, Utah
The winter solstice
Fourteen years later
THERE ARE SACRED SECRETS. Day Sutter had one. She had kept the secret for almost a decade. Now she was twentyseven years old, and the cause for secrecy occurred only once a year, always on this night, the night of the solstice. No other night mattered to her more.
New lights, shaped like toy rockets, hung on the fir tree in her living room. Her other ornamental light sets, strung throughout the house, included planets, cowboys and horses and covered wagons, bunny rabbits and carrots. For Day, Christmas was part of a pagan holiday season. She dated her new year from the winter solstice—the longest night that was always too short.
As usual she had decorated with holly and mistletoe and poinsettias. All real. It seemed important to bring nature indoors, to simulate the wilderness, though it never really worked. When he first showed up, he always seemed trapped and restless, like a person who’d arrived at an important business function only to remember that he’d left the coffeepot on at home. Or like a wild animal kept as a pet.
Through the patio doors, she noted the dimming of the desert colors, the gradual disappearance of light outside. He would come when the sun set.
Day crossed her freshly swept floors on high heels, lighting scented candles, checking the bulbs on the tree, rearranging a gift-wrapped package beneath the lowest boughs—her gift for him. The yellow of her neighbor’s house lights glowed between the slats of her backyard fence. By this time in the afternoon, she’d usually drawn curtains across the plate-glass windows beside her patio, on the French doors in her bedroom, on the windows facing Uranium Street. Tonight, she hadn’t; she’d even left the windows and doors themselves open a crack, counting on the wood stove to warm the house.
At the end of the hall, she checked her reflection in her full-length beveled mirror, a yard-sale treasure. She looked pretty. Red-and-white herringbone-check straight skirt, white angora sweater, a string of real baroque pearls and matching earrings that had been a birthday gift from Grace and Zachary. Garters held up her stockings, translucent white silk stockings with seams up the back. She had purchased both stockings and garter belt from a mail-order outfit that recreated vintage clothing. She’d made the skirt.
Back in the living room, she glanced toward the windows. Darker. Now the glass reflected her lights.
A bottle of Courvoisier XO on top of the refrigerator beckoned, and Day considered taking a hit. But he would bring wine, and anyhow, what she really wanted was to step outside and smoke a cigarette. Unfortunately he hated the smell.
Dammit, why was she so nervous?
She knew why. Because of Shep. Shep, aka Elizabeth Shephard. Earth child, athlete, trust-fund brat.
Don’t think about Shep. Shep is a passing fancy, a thing of the moment.
The question was whether or not the fancy had passed. If his latest girlfriend was a thing of this moment.
Day made for the bathroom and lined her lips with a lip pencil, her heart stopping and starting at the sound of a car passing on the street. She tried to feel happy, light of heart.
But the sadness was creeping in.
Her secret was sad. And getting sadder every year.
NICK COLTER RELAXED his fingers on the wheel of his blue‘57 Chevy pickup and let the engine idle as he stared across Uranium Street at Day Sutter’s one-story gray-and-stone house, a fixer-upper she’d bought years before, after it had lain vacant for two decades and been vandalized. Day had refurbished the place—or rather, hired someone to do it. Hammer? What’s that?
Pink lights rimmed the windows, and white bulbs blinked in the trees outside, shimmering against the crust of snow on the lawn. A storm had dumped on Moab two days earlier, and bulldozers had pushed the snow to the middle of the street where it made a divider four feet high.
In the night shadows of a sprawling cottonwood tree’s denuded branches, Nick considered a paper bag on the seat, the bottle of chianti. With a sigh, he switched off the ignition and rested his arms on the steering wheel.
Have to do it, he thought. This is it.
They couldn’t go on like they had been, but he was tempted, anyway. What could it hurt? One more time. One more night. In her bed they could probably even reach some compromises about how to run Rapid Riggers.
No.
Disgusted with himself, he drew the key from the ignition and grabbed the wine. He’d leave it with her, to soften the blow. Nick didn’t pretend that it wouldn’t be a blow. About some things, they’d never had secrets.
DAY HEARD his footsteps on the walk and peered out the front window. Her heart pounded faster at the sight of his dark hair, which always looked overdue to be cut, the hair that in the sunlight proved it wasn’t quite black but a very deep brown, with faint highlights of burnt sienna, like the darkest rocks of the canyons. He was big, almost as tall as her sister’s husband, Zachary, and lean and powerful, like an Indian hero on a paperback in the grocery store.
Day waited till he knocked before she opened the door with a grin she hoped was effervescent, full of fun. They had to have a good time. Each year should be better than the year before.
Nick’s hands were in the pockets of his parka, the bottle of wine tucked under his arm. His shoe-black eyebrows lifted slightly. “Hi.”
“Hi.” Nervousness poured through her again. Every time it was the same. Fear that he might stand her up or that something would go wrong between them. That he would cease to care. She held the door wider, and he entered.
To Nick, her living room always smelled faintly of cigarettes, even now, despite the pungent evergreen. Shutting the door behind himself, he saw the candles. The tree.
He shouldn’t have let her do all this.
Should have picked another time to tell her.
Should have left her some pride.
She smelled good, and her platinum-and-dark-blond hair looked frothy, shiny, like the hair of a 1940s movie star or a Vargas girl. Her eyes were sky blue, and her mouth was too big for her delicate face. There were dimple lines at the corners of her lips, under her high cheekbones.
She was, bar none, the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. In bed, no one could excite him more.
Out of bed, no one could be more frustrating.
Nick put his arm around her shoulders, hugged her, felt her silky hair against his jaw.
Day closed her eyes, soothed. Everything was going to be okay. They’d have some wine and relax and eventually wind up on the floor in front of the wood stove or maybe go right into the bedroom. They would know each other naked. And say the things that could only be said on the solstice.
Nick released her, and when she looked up, his eyes were on her face. She expected a joke, a flirtation. I see you’ve worn something sensible. Something he could have fun taking off her. Stockings. Garters. Nick was funny, lighthearted and easygoing. At work, he possessed a genius for winning over tourists, even those who spoke other languages.
Now he said in a strange dry voice, “How are you?”
“Good.” Day smiled, hoping her lips didn’t quaver.
She’d seen him just hours before, of course, at the office of their river outfit, now closed for the season. Rapid Riggers River and Jeep Expeditions, the oldest river outfit in Moab, Utah, had been founded by Day’s father, Sam Sutter. Sam had been dead almost two years now, but only a few months had passed since Nick had bought half the business from Day’s sister, Grace.
Day owned the other half of Rapid Riggers. As Day saw it, the fact that she and Nick were equal partners was a very good thing. A permanent thing. She hoped it would be a precursor to another permanent thing, once Nick reconciled himself to the big M. He was only twenty-eight. Not finished sowing his oats.
Blocking out a discouraging vision of an octogenarian Nick still unable to settle down, too wild to be tamed, still climbing mountains and rowing rivers and breaking hearts and unable to sleep with the doors and windows shut, Day reached for the wine. “Shall we open this?”
“Um…” Nick ran his tongue along his bottom lip. “Let’s just sit down.” He hadn’t even unzipped his coat.
Day’s breath stilled. Something was wrong. “Sure.”
They moved over to the couch, a pale blue leather couch with cherry legs and rows of brass tacks at the edge of the upholstery. The couch was the color of her eyes.
He said, “I’m not staying.”
Nightmare words. Day shifted on the couch and made herself look inquisitive. Interested.
Not afraid or heartbroken. Or shattered.
Nick thought, I forgot how much class you have.
She actually smiled. “Shep?”
It wasn’t what he’d expected. His trachea felt as though it had a piece of gravel stuck in it. “Ah…no.” He leaned forward, seeing a large glossy book on her coffee table. It was a book about rock climbing. Something he could spend hours paging through. Yes. Have to stop this.
Day wasn’t a rock climber.
Day was just in love with him, and the book was there for him, to make things right for him, to hold his interest. He wanted to see her books, the evidence of things that were important to her. In her bedroom and her study were theater scripts and the sewing machine she used to make her own clothes; actually she’d made a lot for him, too. She had a decade’s worth of costumes she’d designed and sewn for the Moab lip-sync contest, which she usually won. And there were the books she read to learn stories to retell at the library and the museum. Oral storytelling was her latest interest, but sometimes he wondered if that was because of him, too. Stories were something they’d shared from the first. Stories bound them, and Day made the most of that. Of anything that brought them together. And here, in this room, on this night, everything was carefully orchestrated, done for him.
Nick focused. Shep. “It doesn’t have anything to do with Shep. I just realized it would be hard to see you at work tomorrow.”
Day played that over. True, in the past he’d always done a disappearing act after the solstice. Shoestring river trips in South America, mountain-climbing expeditions. Nick was an EMT-I, an intermediate-level emergency medical technician, and a member of Moab’s search-and-rescue team. Some winters he worked ski patrol in Park City or Aspen and drifted into Moab only for the night of the solstice. Afterward, he left and never returned until spring, just before river-running season, to help teach annual classes in advanced first aid, wilderness medicine and river rescue.
But now he was an outfitter, a businessman, and his responsibilities in Moab extended into the off-season.
Day picked over some responses. That’s okay…But just for the record, it would be like usual. Or, Hard to see me how?
The wine sat in its paper bag on the coffee table, still unwrapped, unopened. Nick wasn’t going to stay.
She said, “Why is that?”
“What?” He jerked his chin up.
“Why would it be hard to see me?”
“Awkward.” He could have said something more flattering—implied that he would be hot for her for the next three months, for the rest of his life.
It wasn’t what he wanted to get across.
“This isn’t going anywhere, Day.”
Day smiled, hankering for a cigarette. Better wait—just in case. “We’ve always known that. That wasn’t the point.”
What is the point? he wanted to say. But he knew. He knew Day.
He wouldn’t spare her pride or let her hope. This solstice he would give her back her life. He touched her, his right hand on her left arm as she faced him, and the electricity, the physical awareness he didn’t want, arced between them. “We have two rules. No lies. No strings. We’ve never broken either.”
No, thought Day, and we’ve made love and said, I love you, both of us.
No lies.
No strings.
Nick whispered, “I’m never going to marry you, Day.”
Time for a cigarette. Day rose to get them from the top of the refrigerator, glad for a reason to keep her back to him.
On the couch, Nick put his hand over his forehead. The draft from the open window carried a memory—not fresh air, but stale. It made him think about himself and about Day, who understood. About windows.
In the kitchen Day lit a cigarette.
No lies.
She couldn’t say, What makes you think I want to marry you?
Couldn’t even say, I never thought you’d marry me.
Maybe she’d never thought it. But she had dreamed.
In the living room he was staring at her tree.
This isn’t any fun for him, either.
Leaning against her breakfast bar with its 1950s-style soda-fountain stools, she said, “Okay.”
Nick turned his head.
She smiled, telling herself she wasn’t blinking too much. Hang on. Just till he’s gone.
Nick thought, Shit, Day, don’t be a hero. Say something bitchy. Throw something. He’d duck. He’d had lots of practice.
But she sucked on her cigarette, pretending her hand wasn’t shaking.
Nick left the couch and came to the breakfast bar. He reached into one of the half-dozen or so pockets of his Patagonia guide shell, pulled out a small package and held it over the counter. “I got this for you.”
The box was covered in brown paper and tied with red and green and gold bows. Professionally gift wrapped, wherever he’d bought it. Day knew what was inside. Basically.
“I don’t want it.”
A breath passed. He dropped the box back in his pocket. “I guess not.” Now maybe she’d throw something.
Day tried to stop the emotions bubbling in her throat. Be careful. Be careful. Lightly she asked, “So this really is about Shep, isn’t it?”
Her mouth was a natural line, deliberately relaxed. He knew she was trying not to be unpleasant. Trying too damn hard. “No,” he said, “it really isn’t.” Don’t want to hurt you, Day.
She didn’t look hurt.
He knew she was.
“Then it’s about Rapid Riggers, isn’t it?”
“It is not about Rapid Riggers.”
Oh, that got a little charge out of you, didn’t it, Nick? “Truly?”
“You want to talk about new rafts, or you want to talk about us?”
“You just said it had to do with work. If this is about getting a loan—”
“It’s not.” Her cigarette smoke stole too much air from the room, but he knew she was smoking because she was upset. Gently, ready to get away, he said, “I’ll see you at work tomorrow, all right?”
Don’t cling, Day warned herself.
“Sure.” Her smile felt crooked. She drew on the cigarette as she walked to the door and opened it. “Want your wine?”
“I brought it for you.” He lingered by the door, the heat rushing out with him.
“Thanks. See you tomorrow.”
He wanted to lean toward her, to kiss her cheek before he left.
He liked her too much to do it.
“Bye.”
Day watched his back as he went down the steps and blended with the colors of the night. When he reached his truck, she closed the door and stood listening till the engine started and he drove away.
Balancing on one foot, then the other, Day took off her shoes, red patent-leather high-heeled Mary Janes she’d ordered from New York. “Screw the wine.” Ignoring the package under the tree—she’d figure out what to do with her gift for him when the idea didn’t make her cry—she wandered back into the kitchen, took down the bottle of cognac, warmed a brandy snifter and filled it.
Minutes later she was ensconced on the couch with her cigarettes and her drink and the longest night of the year ahead of her.
“Shit,” she said, and minutes passed before she thought to get up and close the blinds so that no one could see her crying. As an afterthought, she walked through the house shutting the windows and doors, because he wouldn’t be staying there that night.
But Day would never be warm again. On the back of the couch was a throw with cowboys and Indians on it. She tugged it over herself and lay down against an embroidered pillow, to keep a vigil of misery.
She was too old to carry this torch. She had waited for him too long. She should never have loved him at all when she knew they were ill suited. She should never have accepted friendship for 364 days of the year and let it be enough that he loved her on the 365th.
Although the numbers weren’t that strict. One time, his birthday gift to her had come with desperate I-need-youright-now, I-miss-you-too-much birthday lovemaking. That was the real gift. Anyhow, things happened. For instance, two years ago, when her father had died…She’d learned more about Nick in those few weeks of loving and grieving than in their whole acquaintance.
Ten years they’d been lovers. Secret lovers. She threw off the afghan and went into her bedroom. The silver charm bracelet glistened in the top tray of her jewelry box. Nick had given her the bracelet the first year they’d made love—back during that spell when he was in love with her, too, when the only thing holding him back was her father. What he had called disloyalty to Sam Sutter. But even then, even then, he had known—and said—that the two of them were too different from each other. The bracelet had collected a charm that winter and every year since, always from Nick on the solstice.
Fingering the charms, Day started crying again. Why had she fallen in love with him? Nick could only break her heart. They both knew it, but they’d never wanted to give each other up completely. So they’d agreed to meet once a year, on the solstice.
But now…
Shep. It had to be Shep. He was probably with her right now. Nick and Elizabeth Shephard were probably lying in the snow under the stars drinking carrot juice, eating sprouted-bean bread and planning a mountain-bike expedition to Machu Picchu. Or maybe they were at Shep’s house, which she shared with three other river guides, unemployed in the off-season.
Once, the previous summer, Shep had invited Day to her house for a potluck. Day had gone and felt like an alien beside the muscular suntanned women who rowed the river, who spent their free hours climbing cracks in Arches National Park or practicing rolling their kayaks on the section of the Colorado known as the Daily. In spectator pumps and a homemade copy of a Chanel dress, Day had studied the others in their woven Guatemalan fabrics and nylon-strap river sandals. Watching them compete with Nick and the other men, doing sets of fingertip pull-ups on the door frames, Day had felt envious and perplexed. Was this a mating ritual? She feared so.
After executing thirteen pull-ups, Shep had invited Day to go down the Grand Canyon with a group of guides when the commercial river-running season was over.
Nick had put in his two cents. Day gets separation anxiety when she’s apart from her hair dryer.
She’d rolled her eyes. Not to mention my stockings and garters.
Perhaps feeling some separation anxiety of his own, Nick had immediately left the room. He knew why she wouldn’t go down the river, and it wasn’t as trivial as a lack of electricity. It was deeply ingrained fear, born of experience. But his dig had symbolized the greatest difference between them.
And it had hurt.
Though not like this.
In the past she’d always been able to tell herself that at least they had the solstice, that there was a part of him that belonged only to her.
Day downed her glass of Courvoisier and lit another cigarette. She’d read the books. The shelves in the spare room, her home office, were full of them. Women Who Love Too Much. The Worst Mistakes Women Make. She was a self-help junkie. Unfortunately her greatest addiction was Nick. What should she do now?
“Give up,” she said aloud. “Get a life. Forget Nick Colter. He said it. He’s never going to marry you.”
Day burst into tears anew, hugging the pillow on the couch, wanting what could never be.
THERE WAS ICE on the river. Not a solid sheet, but big chunks of ice, shifting with the current in the starlight. In the Rapid Riggers parking lot, Nick sat in the cab of his truck watching the flow.
Usually, after breaking up with a woman, he felt emancipated, as though he’d just eluded a dire oppression. This was different.
He felt sick.
He considered ways to spend the night. He could stop by the Dry Gulch Saloon, see if Dirty Bob was around. They could drink 3.2 beer, weak Utah brew, and talk rivers and reincarnation over a game of pool. Or he could drive to Shep’s…
No.
Feeling raw, he got out of the truck to go inside.
Day had talked him into stringing Christmas lights on the eaves of the two-story gray-shingled building that was the Rapid Riggers office. The bulbs provided plenty of light to find his key. As he slid it into the lock, the ghosts came.
He saw an old man’s face. Blue eyes like Day’s, but sharper. He remembered a coffin suspended above the torn lawn of the cemetery. Then those weeks in bed with Day. Telling her things, but avoiding what she’d wanted to discuss, the apologies she’d tried to make. For her father’s will.
A more recent memory sprang at him. Tonight. Her hand jerking as she held her cigarette.
Now he’d committed the ultimate crime against Sam Sutter’s memory. Hurting Day.
“So we’re even, Sam.” Nick let himself into the office and didn’t bother with the lights. This was his home. Granted, he had another now, upstream on the river road—a trailer on a prime piece of real estate he’d bought for a song before mountain bikers discovered Moab and land prices skyrocketed. But the river office was where he’d grown up, where he’d learned which attitudes were acceptable and which weren’t and what words to unteach his tongue. Things he would never have learned from the three sets of foster parents who’d kept him before he’d figured out he could survive on his own. In some ways, he’d always been on his own.
Till Sam Sutter entered his life.
He passed through the reception area and entered the inner office where Day worked. There he collapsed on the couch, on top of a layer of Ensulite camping pads they’d put down because of springs popping through the upholstery.
Outside, a siren wailed, and he sat up, curious. It was an ambulance, somewhere south. In town.
He could drop over to the hospital and see the guys after their call.
Nick reclined on the couch again. Day…
She made him feel like he hadn’t had sex in a year.
He jumped up and slipped through a back door into his own office, the long narrow room he never used because it was dark—and had been Sam’s domain. Now it was a memorial to unfinished arguments and apologies that could never be made. The keys to the Rapid Riggers Bronco, their twenty-year-old, oil-thirsty gofer vehicle, hung in the correct spot, the kind of detail Nick depended on—and Day often forgot. Nick plucked the key ring from its hook and left the room and the building, locking the door behind him.
No state troopers passing, and he was glad. Granted, as half owner of Rapid Riggers, he had a right to be there. But he hated being noticed by cops, the way he hated rooms without windows.
Climbing into the bed of his pickup, he unlocked the storage box and removed his backpack and, after a moment’s reflection, his avalanche shovel. He dropped them down into the snow and mud, locked the box and jumped to the ground.
Minutes later, after loading his gear, he turned the Bronco south on the highway and drove across the bridge, over the ice-choked Colorado. Immediately after the bridge on the left was Highway 128, the river road, which led upstream toward his place. Ignoring the turnoff, Nick continued toward the lights of Moab and the vast expanse of public land that lay beyond.
Thoughts of Day came to populate the landscape as he drove toward his destination. Where he was going, what he might do there—one more good reason not to sleep with her. Soberly he mulled over other things, secrets he’d never told even her.
I’ve got a lot of reasons.
AT THREE IN THE MORNING, Day lay awake and lonely in her walnut four-poster bed. The pain would not stop.
There were too many memories. Naked beside him, telling and listening to stories. He’d never grown to enjoy reading, but he loved stories, and she had shared the tales she loved, of King Arthur’s Round Table. He had told her his own stories, making them up for her. Or true stories, when they’d talked privately about things she knew Nick told no one else. Kissing. Making love with the muscular shape of his shoulders above her body, with the moonlight illuminating the ridges of his collarbone, shadowing the recesses around it. Sleeping in each other’s arms and snuggling closer when they awoke and rediscovered each other. In the morning, his skin was dark as oak beside hers. They never had enough of each other’s eyes, of each other’s face. He had a way of cradling hers in his hands, touching before he kissed, drawing her spirit to his till she felt his unhappiness and need living alongside his confidence and adoration. Adoration of her. He’d told her what she needed to hear—and he’d needed to say. I love you, Day. I love you so much.
Was it all gone now?
Too hard to see her at work tomorrow. What had he meant?
Day knew what he meant. It was the same reason he never stuck around after the solstice.
Because they’d end up in bed again, in a frenzy of lovemaking, and after a few weeks the real problem would come up. High-risk sports. Nick would want to take off skiing or ice climbing or making a first descent of some Third World river, and she would be left behind. She didn’t mind that, but he did. Nick wanted company, and he never had trouble getting it.
As far as Day knew, there was only one kind of woman more irresistible to Nick than those who could keep up with him in the wilderness.
Someone who needed to be rescued.
Day did not qualify.
I’m never going to marry you, Day.
The pillow caught her sob. “Nick,” she whispered.
What he’d said and done tonight was only right, only decent. He knew how much she loved him, and he’d told her not to hope. That he wouldn’t help her hope. She couldn’t do the things he loved. She wasn’t the kind of woman he wanted.
Closing her eyes, she imagined another world. She was pedaling a mountain bike up the Slickrock Bike Trail, up the treacherous section known as Testosterone Poisoning. She was trekking through a blizzard on Denali. She was kayaking Westwater Canyon…
Day shuddered.
Not the river. She’d never go down the river again. Not after what she liked to think of as the last river trip of her life.
But what about cycling? Cross-country skiing? An idea nudged her. Come on, Day. You know what to do.
She’d considered it before, of course. Not going on that Grand Canyon trip—there were limits—but…
Was there any chance she could learn to do the things Nick loved? She wasn’t naturally athletic, and she hated being too cold or too hot or dirty or sweaty or too many miles from the nearest pack of cigarettes.
Cigarettes.
“Damn,” she whispered softly into the sheets.
There was just one course open to her to bring the man she loved back to her side and keep him there forever, to make him renounce those words he’d said tonight. And say other words, instead.
She had to become Nick’s kind of woman.
IN THE REMOTE Bureau of Land Management area known as the Back of Beyond, fifteen miles out of Moab, Nick squatted in the sand beside an Anasazi trash midden, picking through potsherds in the beam from his headlamp. The Anasazi, the Ancient Ones, had wandered the Four Corners area centuries earlier, leaving behind ceramics, basketry, worked wood and stone. Remnants of their civilization.
Farther south, other peoples had left their mark, too. Nick knew the work of the Hohokam and Mogollon. But this trash dump was Anasazi. The sherds showed indented construction coils, probably Dolores corrugated style. There was some black-on-white, too.
Even after fifteen years’ hiking among the sandstone monoliths in the red-rock canyons, in the goblin desert that was his home, Nick was amazed by how broadly these craftsmen had spread their wares. And thanks to the Archaeological Resources Protection Act, which forbade disturbing such sites, much remained. Casual hikers who stumbled upon ruins might report them to the Bureau of Land Management or the park service, but they’d been educated and they seldom took anything.
Nick knew better, too.
He checked the glowing face of his wristwatch. Fourthirty. He should get back to Rapid Riggers. The fact that he had the Bronco wasn’t a problem; his truck was twowheel drive, so he often borrowed the Bronco to reach remote hiking or mountain-biking trails.
And he didn’t have anything to hide—this time.
But his life sheltered silent crimes, and if he had to tell Day where he’d been, that he’d gone for a hike, it would feel like deception. Even if it was mostly the truth.
Nick donned his pack and started back to the Bronco, walking the road between his two lives. Behind him was a murky half-remembered past, a world of darkness eased only by the comforting candle of another child’s presence, by the stories they’d invented for fortitude against pain and hunger. Against the things he’d told Day after her father died.
When he’d made love with her after those confessions, in the miracle of her acceptance, he had thought he would never be with another woman. Then spring had come, the snow had melted, the river had risen and called to him.
It was always easy to run when you were afraid.
Afraid of discovery, of being found out. That wasn’t the reason he’d left tonight, the reason he’d broken it off. There was no single reason, but several.
He reached the Bronco just after five, stowed his pack behind the driver’s seat, then thrust the key into the cold ignition and turned it. The idiot lights on the dash flashed on, and he watched them flicker out as he revved the engine.
But one remained red, glowing.
Bleary-eyed, Nick squinted at the panel of lights, realizing his error.
The Bronco had burned all its oil.
And it was a long walk home.
As he got out of the vehicle and reached behind the seat again for his parka and water bottle, the sleeve of his moss green fleece pullover caught on the door catch.
Afraid he’d torn it, he checked the fabric, and as he did so, he remembered. Not that Day had made the sweater; he never forgot that.
But that she must have made something else to give him tonight.
AS THE DARKNESS lifted to morning, the woman known as Rory Abbot made her way around the alcove, shining her flashlight up on the mud-and-dab walls of a ruined cliff dwelling. She had already mapped the surface features on her computer, and the dig wouldn’t start until March; there was no reason for her to be here now. In fact, she had to leave—return to the university for a meeting.
But the comfort she’d gained from spending the night here was worth the inconvenience. This project was personal, and she’d felt compelled to come down and see the place again, to make sure the pot hunter who’d dug a hole at the edge of the ruin did not return. To make sure no others came.
She’d participated in digs before, as an amateur archaeologist. But now she was well on her way to a master’s degree in archaeology, and on the March dig at the site called Broken Sandal, she would be field supervisor, second in command to Dr. John Frazier, the expedition director. The site had been occupied during the Chaco era, and already human feces had been found, preserved.
Rory revered the clues of history. Her own past was part mystery. What she knew disturbed her. Yet she wanted—needed—to know the rest, and she dug diligently, keeping careful records, maintaining a mental grid of everything she discovered in her personal search. Unfortunately, like pot hunters, vandals who destroyed archaeological sites in their quests for artifacts, her parents had ravaged the historical record of her past. For different reasons. But the result was the same.
Squinting out the sadness, Rory followed the beam of her flashlight as she carefully surveyed the ruin. She acknowledged the need to dig. No matter what she might find.