“I just want to get my run in.” With a foot up on a kitchen chair, Nicole Sandquist leaned forward to tie her laces and spoke toward the cell phone set on speaker and laid on the table.
“So maybe noonish?” Ethan said.
“That sounds about right, but you’d better wait for me to call you.” Nicole liked to run at least five miles and often ran seven or eight. She could run toward town, loop around downtown, catch some of the river trail on the way back, and still have time to shower.
“I thought you’d be in more of a hurry to get to Birch Bend.”
Nicole stretched her hamstrings. “I think better if I run.”
By dinnertime, Quinn would have been missing for seventy-two hours. Nicole didn’t have time for muddled thinking. Hours on the Internet and at the local newspaper archives the day before had turned up nothing about Quinn’s past before he moved to Hidden Falls. Everybody had a past and people who knew them before. The vacant column under Quinn’s name niggled at Nicole more persistently with each hour that ticked by.
After jogging for a few minutes to warm up, Nicole ran hard. As soon as she was out of the stately subdivision where she grew up in the block behind Quinn’s house, she was off the harsh sidewalks and lengthening her stride on the softer shoulder of the road into town. A gap of three-quarters of a mile had somehow escaped the developers in the history of Hidden Falls’s gradual expansion like concentric rings around the shops on Main Street. Nicole had first started running along here when she was about twelve. She ran with a backpack in those days, getting off the school bus long before her assigned stop to discharge the anxiety that built up over seven hours in the classroom. Nicole hated being the only girl without a mother, agonizing over how to become a grown-up woman with no mother to show her or being jealous of all the girls who complained about their unreasonable mothers. At least they had mothers.
Nicole got over being anxious and jealous, but she never let go of running.
Quinn found her one day right along this stretch of road when she had run herself breathless and stood with her hands on her knees, trying to fill her lungs. He said he was on his way to get an ice cream cone and figured she would want one. Many years passed before she realized he was driving the wrong direction for an ice cream cone. More likely he was headed toward the lake to walk or fish on his own. He’d given up his afternoon to make a lonely child smile.
Nicole’s feet thudded against the ground in unvarying rhythm. Her running shoes were worth every penny of the exorbitant price she paid for them at regular intervals. She catered to few indulgences, but new running shoes in the budget every three months was not negotiable.
Her eyes soaked up the view. Reds and golds and browns rustled against one another in autumn breezes that swirled them, one by one, to the ground. In another couple of weeks, nearly bare tree branches would herald the unstoppable turn of the seasons. The sun would provide more light than warmth in the middle of the day, and one morning not long after that, snow would startle the county—and like all good Midwesterners, the residents of Hidden Falls would hunker down.
Quinn would be assessing whether his firewood supply would see him through a winter of the roaring blazes he relished. He never had them growing up, he’d said once. His family never had a fireplace.
Nicole stumbled with the memory and uncharacteristically halted her run. She stood with hands on hips, breathing hard.
The lack of a fireplace hardly narrowed the possibilities of where Quinn might have lived, but the fact that she knew this bit of his past bolstered Nicole’s conviction that a clue would emerge if she only dug for it hard enough and deep enough. And if she could find where Quinn came from, she might also find where he had gone to.
She could almost feel him there on the side of the road. Quinn had seen this same view three days ago, the same riotous swaths of competing color, the same midmorning brilliance of the sun. Perhaps he had stood in this spot.
Had he known then whatever it was that made him leave?
Nicole resumed running, suddenly feeling the urge to see if that old ice cream parlor was still in business. Instead of skirting around downtown, she would run right through it. She could go by Our Savior Community Church. If she remembered right, the frozen treats of her childhood were four blocks west of the church. Her path sloped gently now, and Nicole saw the steeples of several churches amid the patchwork of rooflines ranging from forty to one hundred years in age. Hidden Falls was a picture-postcard small town. Nicole had grown up here, but Quinn chose this town and liked it so well he never wandered more than fifteen miles to the west or south. On the other side, the county line ran just north of the river and just east of the falls. Still, the county covered over three hundred square miles.
Nicole’s mental calculations had carried her into downtown. Rounding the corner at the church, she saw the woman with the baby and toddler a fraction of a second too late. She stumbled for the second time that morning, this time stepping off the curb before she judged its depth.
Her ankle crumpled beneath her. Pain shot through her lower leg. Lying between two parked cars, Nicole tried not to shriek.
“I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry.” The woman scrambled off the sidewalk. “I didn’t see you. I was looking at the baby.”
The infant bawled now.
Rolling to one shoulder, Nicole breathed rapidly in and out. Her foot screamed. “I didn’t see you either. Accidents happen.”
“Are you all right?”
Nicole maneuvered to all fours, holding the injured ankle off the ground, and concentrated on not biting her tongue.
“I’ll find help.” The woman took the toddler’s hand. “Come on, Kimmie. We’ll go in the church.”
Nicole gripped the grill of the nearest car and pulled herself upright, amazed at the way pain superseded the instinct to breathe. She leaned on the hood of the car and tentatively tested her weight on the ankle—and immediately shifted to the other foot. As a runner, Nicole had her share of sprains. This was no sprain.
The side door of Our Savior swung open and Lauren hustled toward Nicole.
“Raisa Gallagher told me what happened.” Lauren ducked under Nicole’s arm to brace her weight. “What are you doing trying to stand up?”
“It seemed like a better idea than lying in the street.” Nicole grimaced. “I think it’s broken.”
“Lean on me.”
With her foot off the ground, Nicole’s ankle dangled at a precarious angle. “Didn’t there used to be a little urgent care place around here?”
“It’s part of the hospital now. We have to get you up there.”
“This would be a really good time to tell me you have a car nearby.”
“I don’t drive, remember?” Lauren tightened her grip around Nicole’s waist. “I think you’re leaning on Jack Parker’s car. Oh, there he is now. Jack!”
Across the street, Jack’s head turned.
Nicole didn’t know Jack Parker, but if he had a car and knew where the urgent care center was, then he was about to be her new best friend.