Falling for Hope (7 page)

“Well,” said Lindsey, letting the
truck idle for a moment, her hands stretched out on the steering wheel as she
thought.
 
“We could try to off-road it.”

“You’re not serious,” said Amy,
mouth open as she looked at the dense underbrush that the truck would have to
cut through on either side of the downed tree.

“I mean, it’s either that or walk,”
said Lindsey apologetically.
 
She thrust
the truck down into a lower gear and pressed on the gas.
 

Amy didn’t even have time to grab
onto anything, the seatbelt tightening painfully against her chest as the truck
launched off the road, careened down into the ditch and began to mow the small
trees and bushes.

“It’s a tank,” said Lindsey with a
grin, patting the dashboard affectionately as the truck continued to barrel
through the mud and bracken, wheels turning and pulling around the downed
tree.
 
The rain came down in buckets,
and Amy wasn’t quite certain how Lindsey was able to see to steer, but as the
truck climbed through the ditch and back up onto the gravel road, both women
sighed with relief.
 

“Thanks for driving,” said Amy
weakly, and Lindsey smiled, pressing down on the gas.

“I’m just glad we took the truck,”
Lindsey laughed.
 
She continued to
smile, even when there was a blinding flash of lightning, instantly followed by
a crash of thunder.
 
The afterimage of
the lightning streak burned behind Amy’s eyes, even after she blinked, and she
realized that the lightning had struck one of the trees right by the road.
 
She watched in horrified fascination as the
tree began to fall—thankfully in the opposite direction of the road and truck.

“Let’s get back to that cabin,”
growled Lindsey, slamming the gas pedal to the floor.

Amy tried, very, very hard, not to
think of Hope out in this terrible weather.
 
Surely she’d noticed the threatening clouds—even if they had appeared
suddenly—and surely she would have begun to make her way back down the
mountain, back toward safety.
 
But all
Amy could think about was the steep, treacherous trails that were dangerous
even on a good, dry day and could turn fatal after a rainstorm, making
everything underfoot too slippery to navigate.
 
Even though they were small-ish, there were still cliffs and gullies and
a million and one ways for someone to break their leg.
 
As Amy continued to fret, the kitten woke
up, yawned hugely, and stared up at her, pushing her little whiskers out.
 

Amy held tightly to the animal,
stroking her soft back, until Lindsey finally parked beside the cabin and the
two of them ran indoors.

“Is Hope here?” Amy called,
dripping all over the kitchen tiles.
 
She and Lindsey were drenched, but Amy had held the kitten beneath her
jacket, and the little thing was hardly damp at all.
 
Amy placed the kitten gently on the floor and asked again, when
no one answered, “Guys, did Hope come back?”

Aspen wandered into the kitchen
with a big yawn, still wearing her pajama bottoms and tank top.
 
“I haven’t seen Hope,” she said sleepily,
opening up the refrigerator door and staring into its depths with wide eyes, as
if hypnotized.
 
The bolt of lightning
and roll of thunder made her jump a little, and she looked less sleepy when she
shut the door, turning back to face Lindsey and Amy.
 
“Why?
 
Did she go
somewhere?”

“She went out hiking this morning,”
said Amy, throat tight as she glanced down at her watch.
 
11:50.

“She’s not come back yet,” said
Irene from the kitchen table, hands wrapped around a steaming cup of
coffee.
 
She glanced up at Lindsey and
Amy.
 
Her brow was etched with worry,
and that’s when Amy’s stomach sank.

If Irene was worried about Hope,
there was definitely reason to worry.

The rest of the women congregated
in the kitchen, pouring cups of coffee and murmuring softly.
 
Amy stood beside the kitten, feeling her
stomach sink lower and lower, balling her hands into fists, waiting for the
clock to tick to noon, because if noon came and Hope wasn’t back yet, that
would mean...
 

The door to Chris’s bedroom opened
wide.

Chris stood in the doorway, leaning
against it, one arm arched over her head as she stared out at the women
gathered in the kitchen with a frown.
 
She straightened when she spotted Amy and came over to her, hands buried
in jean pockets, her frown deepening as she tossed her carefully styled cowlick
of blonde hair out of her eye.

“What’s this about Hope?” she
muttered, as Amy stared at her warily.

“Hope went out for a hike this
morning,” said Amy, her voice catching as both she and Chris glanced out the
window at the torrents of falling water.
 
“She said she’d be back by noon, but she’s not back yet.”

Chris eyed the wall clock.
 
“It’s eleven fifty-eight.”

Amy blinked at her,
incredulous.
 
“This is a really stupid
time to make jokes,” she muttered, tightening her hands into fists again.

Chris shrugged, her face still
contorted into an ugly frown.
 
“Yeah,
well…” she growled, and the words trailed off.
 
She glanced down at the floor, her shoulders lowering a little.
 
“Look, I don’t want to worry you, but…Hope
would have known to come back.
 
She’s my
bestie, right?
 
We’ve hiked those trails
a hundred times.
 
We know the trail
protocol.
 
She would have seen the
storm.
 
She would have
known
to
come back.”

Amy’s heart rose up into her
throat.
 
“What are you saying?” she
asked, and Chris shook her head, glanced toward the rest of the women, who were
all listening.

“Look, if Hope isn’t back yet,
something went wrong,” Chris said, voice rising.
 

Irene bit her lip, shaking her head
as she stared at the wall clock.
 
“I
think we should go after her,” she said quietly.

“I’ll go get the flashlight from
the truck,” said Lindsey, her voice uncharacteristically shaky.
 
Amy stepped out of Lindsey’s way, feeling
wooden, numb, as Chris watched her, as Chris’s
features—uncharacteristically—softened.

“Look…”
 
She worked her jaw, gazed past Amy, out toward the woods that Amy
could hardly make out beyond the rain.
 
“She might have missed the signs.
 
She was probably…lost in thought, not paying attention.
 
She might have just kept hiking—”

“Amy.”
 
Irene was shrugging into her jacket and pulling a baseball cap
over her hair.
 
“Have you tried calling
her cell phone?”

Amy shook her head miserably.
 
“She left her phone on the dresser last
night,” she said, remembering her alarm when she’d seen the phone there that
morning.
 
“Cell phones don’t work very
well on the mountain, anyway, so I guess—”

“Okay, so this is what we’re going
to do.
 
We’re
not
going to worry,
because she might have just not noticed the storms, might have just kept on
hiking,” said Irene, voice even and reasonable.
 
“Amy and Chris and me are going to go up the hill, taking the
trail that Chris thinks Hope might have chosen.”

Chris shook her head, folding her
arms.
 
“She could have taken any of a
dozen, Irene.”

“I know that.
 
But we’ll take the one
you
think she
would have taken,” said Irene, shaking her head as Lindsey came in, dripping
wet but clutching a high-powered flashlight.

“Do you really think it’s wise for
you three to go out there?” asked Cole, leaning against the table.
 
“I mean, what if something happens to you?”

“What if something’s already
happened to Hope?” asked Chris, snapping.
 
Amy glanced up in surprise as Chris turned away, blowing air out of her
nose in a snort.
 

“I know Hope,” said Irene, clicking
on the flashlight to see if it worked.
 
An intense beam of light danced through the kitchen at the exact moment
that the power flashed off.

“Well, crap,” said Lindsey, her
voice loud in the darkened kitchen.
 
It
was only noon, and it was as dim as twilight.

“I
know
Hope,” Irene
repeated, “and she would have returned by now.
 
Something’s wrong, and we need to help her.
 
Simple.
 
Amy, do you have
a thicker jacket?”

Amy shook her head, drawing the
windbreaker closer about her shoulders.

“She can wear mine,” said Chris
gruffly, taking her jacket off the hanger behind the kitchen door and handing
it to Amy.
 
Chris shrugged into her own
windbreaker.

“I’ll feed the kitten,” said
Lindsey, kissing Amy’s cheek, and then, in a whirlwind of movement, Chris and
Irene and Amy were on the front porch, staring out at the pouring rain, feeling
it drive like slivers against their faces, the wind roaring through the trees
like a train full of ghosts.

“How are we going to find her in
this?” Amy shouted, raising her voice to be heard over the rain.
 
Fear made her whole body go cold.
 

“Just don’t give up hope…on Hope,”
said Chris, and despite Chris’s outburst yesterday, Amy felt a surge of
gratitude that Chris had joined the search.
 

“Stay together,” said Irene,
pointing the flashlight into the rain.
 

Together, the three women stepped off of the porch,
into the storm.

Embracing Hope

The flashlight beam swung in a wide
arc, barely illuminating the entrance of the first trail into the woods as Amy,
Chris and Irene began to trek up the mountain.
 
Amy drew her hood closer about her face and squinted, trying to make out
the path in the torrential downpour.
 
Her heart raced.
 
It was only a
little past noon, but the world was as dark as if night was descending, with
heavy, black clouds hanging over the mountain.

It looked—and felt—like a
nightmare.
 
Because Hope was missing.

“This is the trail head!” Chris
bellowed over the roaring winds, causing the trees to thrash and groan
overhead.
 
“All of the main trails start
from here.”

“So, which one would she have
taken?” Amy called out, her voice snatched away from her, silenced by the
raging storm.
 

Chris shook her head, making a show
of shrugging.
 
“I don’t know.
 
I guess we’ll try the main one.
 
There’s dozens of trails she could have
taken, and the rain has washed away any signs of her presence.”

Amy choked down the beginnings of a
sob as she followed Chris and Irene, who was holding the high-powered
flashlight before them, down the first trail stretching off to the right.

Their tight-knit group of friends
had been coming up to Hope’s cabin for summer parties for years, and the women
had hiked these trails many times—but no one knew them as well as Chris and
Hope.
 
They’d explored every rock and
crater of the mountain together, and Chris was the only one who might have a
chance at tracking Hope down in the storm.

Amy was so grateful that Chris was
there.

It hadn’t been a given—after all,
Hope and Chris had gotten into a serious argument the day before, and it was
because of that argument that Hope had gone off for a hike by herself.
 
She’d wanted to clear her head, not
realizing that a mighty storm was descending upon the mountain.
 

Upset, Amy stumbled over the trail:
she couldn’t shake the feeling that, in a roundabout way—though the logical
part of her brain insisted otherwise—this whole thing was
her
fault.

Chris and Hope had gotten into an
argument because of her.

Once, Hope and Melissa had been a
couple, but Melissa had passed away six months ago in a car crash.
 
Hope had loved Melissa, but they weren’t
right for each other, and they’d had a heated on-again, off-again romance for
years.
 
Many times they’d broken up and
dated other people, and they weren’t together when Melissa died.
 
But Chris—jokester Chris, who never let
anything bother her—had been Melissa’s best friend.
 
And, perhaps, something more during one of Hope and Melissa’s
separations.
 
When Chris found out that
Amy, who had been secretly in love with Hope for five years, was at last
beginning to date Hope, Chris had exploded in anger, saying that Hope was betraying
Melissa’s memory.

Betraying Melissa’s memory with
Amy.

Amy was a mostly logical
person.
 
As a veterinarian, her logical
side had served her well: she was capable of making hard decisions from a
rational place, tempered with emotion, when animals needed to be put down, when
nothing more could be done.
 
But since
Melissa’s death, Amy had been far more emotional than logical.
 
Melissa was the first close friend she’d
ever lost, and their small group of friends had been rocked by her death, but
something, something sleeping, had been awakened inside of Amy that long-ago
day (had it really just been six months?
 
It was starting to feel like a lifetime), as they stood in the snow at
Melissa’s graveside, as Amy realized, perhaps for the first time, how fragile
life was.