Joy in His Heart (7 page)

“Yeah, I enjoy Greg’s tribe, too.”

“I hope so, since you work with kids. I assume you must like them.”

For the first time all day Brian felt the knot appear in his stomach that he’d come to associate with work. “Liking kids sometimes makes my job harder. A lot of
the time they’re unconscious and in critical condition when I first see them. At best they’re scared half to death and in pain. It’s hard seeing them that way. Especially since most of them don’t understand what’s happened to them and they have no say in what the adults around them have decided to do. I don’t usually have the time to explain any of it to the actual patient so a lot of them see me as the enemy.”

“Still it must be satisfying or you wouldn’t work so hard.”

He sighed unconsciously. “Sometimes I think working hard is just a habit with me. Don’t get me wrong, it’s very satisfying to see a child go home to a bright future because I used the skill God gave me. But sometimes it’s a little scary, too. You see that innocent face and know his or her life is in your hands. And you know the clock is ticking. I’m sure you know from the rescue work you’ve done that there really is a critical hour in trauma cases. A lot of that time is gone before I ever see the victim. There have been days recently when I’ve wondered why I put myself in that position day in and day out.”

Brian glance back to gauge her progress. She moved with a fluid grace even though not with her usual confident near-swagger. “At times like this do you question your career?” he asked. What she did and why she did it were a huge mystery to him.

She hesitated, then shook her head. “I enjoy flying—yesterday’s mishap notwithstanding,” she added with a grimace. “The only time I get stressed is when I’m trying to balance the bank accounts.”

“I heard you’re buying old George out,” he commented then started forward again. “I guess you got what you wanted.”

“For the most part,” she answered.

It was an ambiguous reply, at best. Brian found himself saying, “I know it’s a hard life. I hope you’re happy.” And surprised as he was to have said it, he really did hope she’d found what she wanted in life. He was proud of what she’d accomplished, though he was sure she cared little for his opinion. What did he have to be proud of where she was concerned anyway? The only thing he’d ever done was try to get in the way of what she wanted to do with her life. He was beginning to think he’d been dead wrong and not merely clumsy in his attempt to save her from a lifetime of hard work and danger.

Having run out of topics to introduce, Brian fell into silence as they continued to descend the deer track toward the valley. Joy didn’t initiate any conversation, either. The terrain began to flatten out and he heard Joy quietly call his name. He turned and went back to her side.

In her hands she held a stuffed bear that must have slipped his notice. She handed it to him. “It can’t be one of theirs. I got the impression they were all junior-highage kids. Maybe my brother was unusual but I can’t imagine Jim taking a stuffed bear on a hike with six other kids at that age.”

“Take my word for it, it wouldn’t have made a guy real popular even back then. Still, even though it’s damp and dirty, I don’t think this bear has been out here all
winter. And this isn’t an area I would expect anyone to bring a young child, especially this early in the year.”

“I’m trying to remember what Russ Dempsey said about them. He said they’d rescued one of the boys and his pastor and that the pastor had been leading the kids and that they’d gotten lost.”

“And he said all of them were under thirteen,” Brian put in. “Come to think of it, I don’t think I heard Mr. Dempsey say how young the youngest boy is.” He raked his fingers through his hair and looked at the bear. “We have to find those kids but you can’t go on much longer today. When we get to the valley, I’ll set up the shelters again and get a fire going. After that, while it’s still light, I’ll try to look for them. They can’t be very far ahead of us.”

Joy’s eyes widened like a deer caught in a powerful pair of headlights. She stared at him as if trying to gauge his thoughts. Again he wondered if she’d ever gotten over her fear of the wilderness. There was no sense asking, though. If she thought he saw a vulnerability in her, she’d dig her heels in twice as hard to hide it. He also didn’t want to chance putting an end to what had become an undeclared truce between them and that would be sure to do it.

Instead he went on trying to reassure her without seeming to. “I probably won’t be much farther away than shouting distance and I won’t be gone past dark because it’s too dangerous tromping around unfamiliar territory at night.”

“I pray you find them before dark.”

She looked down at the bedraggled teddy bear he still
held and did just that. Joy prayed aloud for the unknown children but she never mentioned herself when he knew she was in severe pain. She was quite a woman. Too bad he was only now beginning to realize it—twelve years too late.

“They must be so afraid,” she whispered, looking back up at Brian. The worried look in her eyes would be enough to melt the hardest heart.

“My worry isn’t so much that they’re afraid, Joy. The security of home and maybe some counseling should take care of that. It’s the possibility of exposure, dehydration and starvation that have me worried. Those are real life and death issues,” he explained, but Joy still looked unsure and, he realized, guilty, too.

He wanted to reassure her that the crash hadn’t been her fault, but Brian knew he was the last person she would accept or want comfort from. He hadn’t bought her excuse earlier that his help was causing her pain. She just hadn’t been able to stand being near him no matter how much his help lessened her pain. He’d had no idea he’d hurt her this badly or that she hated him this much.

Remembering the bear she’d kept hidden in her room as a child, he handed her back the bear she’d found. Maybe she could draw a little comfort from the child’s toy. “Here, you take care of old Humphrey.”

She took it and smiled, falling back into an old game. “Humphrey?”

Brian grinned. “Wasn’t that your bear’s name?” He knew it wasn’t but when they were sparring, she didn’t look so sad.

Joy arched an eyebrow and eyed him with pretend annoyance. “Actually
her
name was Josephine. I think
this
bear looks more like a Mildred,” she said with a cheeky grin of her own then looked down at the bear. “Honestly, Mildred, men just have no clue. Do they?”

There, he thought as he stifled a laugh. That was much better. She was his Joy again. Brian’s smile faded as he watched her struggle ahead. She’d never be his again. She was the wrong woman for him and he’d seen that clearly twelve years ago. Why was he now beginning to fear that he’d rejected a diamond in the rough as flawed, foolishly missing the very features that made her priceless?

J
oy reached out to accept Brian’s hand once again when they came to an extremely steep section of the deer path they’d been following. She steadfastly ignored the tingle that shot up her arm at his touch as he helped her down that last steep embankment before they reached the floor of the valley. Resolutely, she took her hand back and held it out for the crutch.

Digging deep for composure, Joy lectured herself not to be stupid enough to still be attracted to Brian Peterson after all the hurt he’d caused her. She couldn’t be attracted to him. She just wouldn’t be.

That settled in her mind, if not her heart, Joy walked along next to him trying to banish her awareness of him by turning her attention to the valley ahead. Verdant meadows stretched out before them. A wide stream shimmered in the distance as it flowed along at a quick pace. A pink-orange sunset cast an odd light on the valley.

She stopped and looked back at where they’d been
and noticed how the odd sunset lent a rosy color to the steep rock walls that ran the length of the valley on their side of the wide stream. Brian’s decision to follow the deer path had been prudent, and not just because they had stumbled upon the children’s trail. The deer path seemed to be the only trail on this side of the mountain that led into the valley that didn’t included a steep descent down what looked to be a hundred-foot rock wall.

With her shoulder aching, her arm on fire and her knee and ankle not far from agonizing and useless, Joy would never have been able traverse those cliffs, even with Brian’s help.

“I wonder how much more beautiful the Garden of Eden was if just a little corner of the world can look like this,” Brian wondered aloud, his quiet reverent tone drawing her attention back to him.

Annoyed at this new penchant of hers for admiring even the tone of his voice, she replied, “You really are depressingly provincial, you know. You spend more time waxing poetic about the great outdoors than Teddy Roosevelt did. The Sierra Club should hire you as a spokesman.”

Brian didn’t bristle, but grinned. “Blame that on my father and those weekends in the mountains.” He sighed in a way that sounded like relief. “I missed this more than I’d realized. Too bad it took a plane crash to get me to slow down enough to smell the roses again. I know it might sound foolish to you, and I’m sorry you lost your plane and that you got hurt, but I’m not sorry this happened. I guess the Lord was trying to get my attention and I wouldn’t listen.”

“Well, I wish I hadn’t gotten caught up in your rustic rejuvenation,” she told him, but the casual way he spoke of the Lord’s influence on his life struck her.

Considering who his parents were, the depth of Brian’s faith shouldn’t surprise her, but it did. Maybe because Brian had never been one to talk about his faith even though his parents and brother had.

Now that she looked back on it, the friendship between the older Petersons and Lovells seemed even odder now than it had back then. That there was an unmistakable difference between the two families was something that had always been glaringly obvious.

Bud Peterson was a plumber who’d made enough money that he could have moved his family to the suburbs. But his business was in Riverside so he’d stayed, living and working among his neighbors. Her father was a cop and no one made enough money to live comfortably serving the public of Riverside. The only thing that kept the two families on a somewhat even financial footing was that the Petersons didn’t spend anywhere near the level they could have and Joy’s mother had her own career.

Although many wouldn’t call hairdressing a career, it was something her mother still loved doing and it supported her nicely now. She owned the salon that she’d opened with Jimmy Lovell’s life insurance in the little town center of Village Green, Pennsylvania. She lived upstairs from the shop not far from Jim and Crystal’s house, or Joy’s, and still looked forward every day to doing her job.

The difference between the families was more than
financial, though. Her father had been a tough, fair man who’d worked hard but he’d played even harder. Beer, sports and cars were his interests outside work. It was in sports, cars and love of their families where he had found a common ground with the gentle, soft-spoken Bud Peterson.

Her father had taken the name of the Lord in vain on an hourly basis, but never around Bud. She remembered Jim once saying that if it hadn’t been for the Petersons, the name of Jesus would have been nothing but a swear word to him. The couple had lived their faith and let their lives and the way they lived them speak of the Lord. It had eventually spoken to both Jim and Joy.

Though she had been young at the time, Joy remembered the grace with which the couple had endured the death of their middle son, Tommy, to a drug overdose. And she remembered her gruff take-no-prisoners father, hugging his friend and assuring him that he hadn’t been at fault.

It had been Bud Peterson her father asked for when he lay dying of an assailant’s bullet. Why Bud had been able to lead Jimmy Lovell to the Lord when his son and daughter and Bud’s oldest son, who was a minister, had failed was one of those things that would remain a mystery into eternity. The most important thing was that it had happened.

“Does that stream help you at all to pinpoint where we are?” Brian asked, yanking her back to the present.

She blinked and focused again on the valley and on the wide, gurgling stream that rushed through the center of it. “It looks as if it may have flooded its banks.
That changes the look of it. But even if it maintained its usual course there are several valleys like this in the Adirondacks and I only know how they look from the air.”

Knowing how important getting their bearing was and not wanting to give up, she glanced around and limped forward. She closed her eyes trying to visualize where they’d been when the weather had turned ugly in an instant of lightning and blinding rain. But the wind had buffeted their small aircraft and she’d been too busy trying to keep them aloft to take notice of their course. It didn’t take long in an aircraft to lose track of how many mountains you traversed when you couldn’t see past the windshield. And, of course, it didn’t help that she’d lost the map when she’d jumped.

They stood on the floor of the valley with mountains rising all around them. The mountain directly across the valley rose from the valley floor in a sheer rocky cliff. The mountain they’d just come down did as well, with the exception of the terrain around Brian’s deer path. Two mountains rose more gently to the east and one to the west. Until that moment she’d had no idea of the monumental task that lay before them. Between them and the plane stood miles and miles of rough dangerous terrain that from their current vantage point, looked almost straight up.

She felt her scalp prickle and her blood run cold. Joy frowned and fought off a wave of fear. She just might know about where they were and why they hadn’t heard or seen any more search planes. The tumultuous wind of the freak storm had blown them into the more remote
and little-used area of the preserve. The search had not been centered on this group of mountains and valleys at all.

If the transponder wasn’t working and if her radio messages hadn’t gone out, they were on their own. The lack of search plans more or less confirmed those fears. There was no way to know how far off course they’d been blown. One look at Brian’s expression told her he suspected there was no rescue on the way.

“I’m not sure. It all looks so different from down here,” she hastened to say. She didn’t know if she was trying to reassure herself or Brian. Maybe both. Maybe neither. “I’m not sure of anything but that the plane’s up there,” she said, pointing to the tallest, most-distant peak of the valley. “And without knowing which way the nearest town is or how far it is, that transponder and the plane’s radio are our best hope for a rescue that I can think of.” She sighed. “But it went in pretty far up there.”

They stared at each other. As if by some silent communication, Brian put his hand on her shoulder and nodded, letting her know that he understood the harsh reality of the situation. “It won’t seem so far away after a good night’s sleep. And speaking of sleep, I’d better get going on the shelters. Maybe we should move in closer to that stream, though. Can you make it a little farther?”

She nodded. “I’ve been thinking about the kids,” Joy said. “If you can, maybe you should make one of the shelters big enough for you and them. We may have them with us by tonight if those were their tracks we saw.”

Brian nodded, looking worried as they started a slow progress across the valley floor. Considering those lost kids, Joy knew what had to be done. She gripped her crutch tightly. It was the most difficult thing she’d needed to say since they’d parted twelve years earlier when she’d wished him a good life and walked away without meaning a word of it.

This time she meant what she said but it was harder to put voice to it. However much they’d avoided saying so, they both knew there were no planes looking for them where they were. It would mean hours alone for her, but the kids were just as alone and a lot more helpless than she was.

“Um…Bri, if we don’t find them today, we really should stay here while you search for them using this as a base camp. You said you don’t think they could be far ahead of us.”

As if on cue, they heard a pain-filled scream from the direction of the stream. Joy nearly jumped out of her skin. Brian took off like a shot in that direction. Unwilling to await his return and concerned for the children, Joy followed as quickly as her aching leg would allow.

When she arrived she found Brian kneeling over the prone body of a boy. He lay at the base of a pile of boulders near the swollen stream. Five other dirty, disheveled boys stood around looking frightened and worried, staring at the boy on the ground. Silent tears flowed from his tightly closed eyes. He lay there biting his lip and shaking with pain. They were all dressed in varying shades of the same kind of warm spring jacket, long cargo pants and mud-encrusted sneakers.

Brian murmured to the boy on the ground, examining him with reassuring efficiency. “Someone tell me what happened,” he said over his shoulder.

“He thought if he stood on the top of the rocks, he could see the whole valley and maybe see if anybody was looking for us,” a small boy with longish brown hair piped up.

“I told him not to climb up there,” a tall preteen said. She gauged his age about that of the injured boy. His superior attitude reminded her of Brian at that age, but the casual style of his blond hair and height reminded her of her brother, Jim.

“But he did see them, Adam,” that same boy with the brown hair said. She judged this one to be around eleven but a little small for his age. “Hey, mister, where’s the other guy Dan says he saw?” he added.

Joy tried not to flinch, wishing just once someone would see her feminine side when she wasn’t wearing a dress, especially since she didn’t wear one often. Then, warming her heart, Brian said in a matter-of-fact tone, “Actually, that was a very tall, very pretty lady, son. And she should be along any moment. Like your friend Dan here, she’s hurt.”

“Are you here to take us home?” a very small blonde asked.

“That’s the plan, son.”

Brian was startled when his statement was met by a round of raucous giggles led by a boy with very close cropped hair. Brian looked up at the child who’d asked the question and blinked.
He
was a
she.
And not anywhere near eleven years old. He guessed seven or eight.
Then, for no reason at all, he knew Joy had caught up to him. He felt her presence. He looked over to the way he’d come to see her limping toward the little girl. She placed her hand on the child’s shoulder. Even sick and tired, disheveled and dirty, Joy really was a beautiful woman—the very picture of a nordic beauty. Blond, blue-eyed, long-legged. Like that old secular song that had spurred the women’s movement said—strong; invincible. She had indomitable spirit that had kept her going when most people would have begged for rest.

But she was so much more. He saw something he thought few people did. Behind the tough exterior, she was kind-hearted and vulnerable and scared to death. He prayed he hadn’t had a hand in making her feel that way.

“Suppose we all introduce ourselves,” Joy said with a bright smile. “I’m Joy. This is Brian. He’s a doctor and I’m a pilot. Is he all right?” she asked him. She’d taken her sunglasses off now that they were in the deep shade and again her concern for the injured boy was reflected in her bluer than blue eyes.

Brian glanced at Dan, then back up at her. “His leg’s broken. That’s all from what I can see but it’s enough.” He looked at the other kids and shook his head a little, hoping she got his signal. The break was bad. The other kids, though not presenting symptoms of dehydration thanks to recent weather making water plentiful, were too thin and weak to hike up the mountain. He couldn’t imagine they’d had much to eat in the last week and children could lose weight at an alarming rate.

“I think we should get to know each other,” Joy said
after a quick nod. “I know you’re Adam,” she said pointing to the tall blonde. “That’s Dan and he got hurt trying to help all of you,” she added, acknowledging the boy on the ground whose silent tears had stopped. He stared at Joy with open fascination. Brian couldn’t blame him.

Joy kept a bright smile in place when she put her hand on the little girl’s shoulder. “And who is this little darling?”

The child with the wispy blond hair and huge brown eyes turned to Joy and looked up. “Oh! You found Bear!” She held up her hands and took the stuffed toy Joy gave her into her thin arms with a fierce hug. “Thank you.” She looked around at the boys. “They said the river took her away like it did my daddy. Did you find my daddy, too?”

“Other searchers did and he’s doing just fine. As for your bear they were obviously wrong,” Joy said, sending them all a censoring look.

Brian stiffened. One of the boys had obviously taken it to be cruel and he was very afraid he might have once done the same thing. It was like having a mirror held up to him that revealed deeds he was now, more than ever, thoroughly ashamed of. He would make amends eventually.