Last Safe Place, The (16 page)

Ty arrived with the towel as thunder shook the house again.

“Guess storms sound worse here ’cause you so close to the sky you got to lean over so you don’t bump your head on it,” Theo said.

“No, storms sound worse here because they
are
worse here,” Gabriella said, her voice tight. Though she’d already told them how Antero actually attracted lightning, it was a warning worth repeating. “Storms come out of nowhere. You can’t see them building on the other side of the mountain until they pop up over it like a target in a penny arcade. One minute the sky’s clear and the next minute lightning ... And
you’re
the target. In any open space—the meadow out back, the boulder field, the bristlecone forest, above the tree line. If you’re the tallest thing around, you’re warm and you’re moving, lightning will take a bead on you and …” She had raised the drawbridge between those memories and her mind a long time ago, but now they were swimming the moat.

She didn’t even realize she’d started to cry until Ty came and put his arms around her waist. His shirt was wet. She needed to tell him to go put on a dry one, only she couldn’t find her voice.

“What’s wrong, Mom?”

She reached up and quickly wiped the tears off her face, embarrassed by her sudden display of emotion and the awkward silence that followed.

“I’m sorry. It’s just … I’m fine.” She cleared her throat and then announced too cheerily, “Check this out!” She looked around at the kitchen in genuine awe. “New everything. New cabinets and stove. And there’s a microwave. New flooring—it’s oak, gorgeous. It’s all changed, everything’s better.”

Once she pulled back from the edge and recovered her emotional equilibrium, she didn’t have to manufacture excitement about the cabin’s transformation.

The small windows she remembered on the front had been replaced by a huge picture window that provided an unobstructed, panoramic view of the whole Arkansas River Valley. The décor was typically Southwest,
tastefully done. A big cow skull with massive horns hung on a piece of tanned rawhide over the mantle in the living room. A leather couch with a matching loveseat and recliner were made cozy with colorful Indian blankets and rugs on the hardwood floors. On one wall was an oil painting of the Chalk Cliffs on Mount Princeton; on another was an abstract watercolor of what appeared to be the meadow behind the cabin—with red, purple, yellow and white wildflowers as big as trees.

A small office opened off the kitchen, as did a mudroom in front of the back door. There was one bedroom off the living room with an adjoining bath that could be accessed from the living room as well. In the open doorway next to the bathroom was a staircase to the second floor.

Ty and Gabriella went upstairs and found two additional bedrooms and a single bath. A doorway on the far end of the landing in front of the stairs opened onto a deck that overlooked the view. The front upstairs bedroom also had a door leading to the deck and Gabriella claimed it as her own and assigned Ty the other upstairs bedroom—which had a door leading to a smaller deck on the back of the house facing the mountain. That left the bedroom on the ground floor for Theo. All the beds had four-poster oak frames with hand-carved designs on the footboards—a wagon train on Gabriella’s, a cattle drive on Ty’s and a herd of wild mustangs on Theo’s.

Gabriella and Ty came downstairs and Ty grabbed his suitcase and headed back up to his room to unpack. P.D padded along one step behind him. She passed Theo on his way to lie down. He had not once cast so much as a glance out the big picture window.

“That doctor we met has a slow leak,” Theo mumbled.

“Has a slow— ?”

“I don’t have no idea what he was talking about, but that’s what Pedro said. You figure it out.”

She found Pedro in the kitchen opening cabinets and drawers, checking on the supplies. The rain still battered the roof, but the lightning and thunder were moving away across the valley.

“What did you say to Theo about Steve?” she asked.

“I told Mr. Slapinheimer—”

Gabriella barely choked off a laugh. “You can call him Slappy. He was only kidding. Or Theo.”

“Theo maybe … eet ees hard to call a grown man Slappy.” He opened the empty bread box. “You got bread, right?” She nodded and he turned to the pantry. “I just told
Theo
that Steve was the speaker at a fly-fishing class at the Chalk Creek Canyon Lodge on Saturday. Thought maybe he would want to learn.”

He turned to face her. “Why?”

Gabriella thought for a moment, then burst out laughing.

“What?”

“You said Dr. Calloway
has to go speak
, didn’t you?”

“Uh huh.”

“Theo said you told him Dr. Calloway
has a slow leak.”

“He’s losing his hearing, isn’t he?”

“You know when you text, how your phone fills in the rest of the word after you type only a few letters—that must be what Theo’s brain does with sounds. Only sometimes the sounds it fills in aren’t the right ones. He told Ty the day before … once, that I said we’d have roaches in the kitchen all winter when what I’d really said was we were having roasted chicken for dinner.”

Gabriella leaned against the kitchen doorframe for a moment studying the kitchen, then asked, “How’d he do it?”

“He who do what?”

“He Jim Benninger. Do …
this.”
She made an all-encompassing gesture. “It was all I could do to get myself and a rented jeep up that road. How did Jim Benninger get all this furniture—a stove, refrigerator, couches, a recliner—up here?”

Pedro closed the pantry door, checked out the array of cereal boxes in the cupboard and turned to face her.

“He brought most of it up here by helicopter, landed in the meadow out back.”

“A helicopter?” Gabriella felt an empty sensation below her rib cage. She’d thought this place was totally inaccessible, but if a helicopter could …

“It took some doing, negotiating a chopper in these mountain wind currents. Could only come up on a still morning and they had to unload quick so the helicopter could get out of here before the afternoon storms.”

“So if it was storming …”

“A chopper would get blown right off the mountain.”

Gabriella let out a breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding and remembered her manners. “Please sit down. Would you like something to drink? I bought some Diet Pepsi—but you know that because you sold it to me. Or I guess I could make coffee. Do you know if there’s a coffee maker?”

“In there,” Pedro pointed to a cabinet beside the stove. “It’s one with all the bells and whistles, grinds coffee beans I have to special order from Denver and makes a sound like an F18 Hornet taking off the deck of an aircraft carrier.” He said that with the authority of a man who had actually heard a fighter jet take off an aircraft carrier.

Pedro settled his large frame into one of the six chairs around the oval oak table that had a bowl in the center piled high with miniature cowboy boots. “I only tried to make coffee with it one time and the result would have eaten the chrome off a trailer hitch. A glass of water is fine with me. It’s pumped here from the creek and then purified. The refrigerator has an ice maker.”

Gabriella shook her head as she searched the cabinets, found two glasses and filled them with ice water. “A refrigerator with an ice maker. We had ice in a cooler—until it melted, then we put Daddy’s Coors in the creek to keep them cool.”

She sat down across from Pedro at the table.

“Yes, but roughing it makes great memories. I bet your family had a wonderful time vacationing in this cabin.” He must have seen the look of surprise and pain on her face. “Forgive me, por favor, I did not mean to pry, I just—”

Might as well tell him the truth, at least part of it.

“It was only one summer and it wasn’t exactly a vacation. The aquamarine drew my parents here. And then there was a family tragedy, a death.”

“I am sorry for your loss,” he said, and sounded like he meant it.

“After that, we never came back.”

“And now?” he asked quietly. She wasn’t expecting the question.

“Now … Ty, Theo and I need to … get away from the world for a while.”

Pedro set his water glass down on the table.

“Speaking of getting away from the world, I think I have been away from mine long enough.”

“But it’s still raining.” Actually, it was only sprinkling. “You can’t go down that trail in the mud.”

“It has good drainage—water doesn’t puddle. And it is easier going down. Besides, if I did not travel on wet roads in these mountains I would never go anywhere.”

He stopped then, and looked at her. The silence thrived, full and heavy.

“If you need anything, anything at all, Mrs. Underhill, I—”

“No way. You can balk at Slappy, but I’m Gabriella.”

He nodded. “I am right down the mountain. I would give you a phone number to call, but cell phone service up here is hit and miss—mostly miss—and Jim never saw the need for a land line. But I weel check on you—often.”

Gabriella was unexpectedly embarrassed by his solicitousness. It had been so long since anyone had been kind to her she didn’t quite know how to respond.

He seemed to sense that, too, because he backed off, gave her emotional space.

“Thank you, Pedro. If you hadn’t ‘tagged along’ I wouldn’t have made it.”

“That is true, you would not have made eet,” he said with disarming honesty. “But you figured it out. You will be fine now. Except … you need to know. Going down takes a whole different skill set than coming up.” He didn’t have to be intuitive to see her obvious dismay. “Please do not worry. St. Elmo’s Mercantile delivers—at least to this cabin. Jim needed twiceweekly supplies so we worked it out that he would come down to the store on Tuesdays and I would bring supplies up on Saturdays. Of course, that was just an excuse for me to come up here, enjoy the view and spend time with Jim.” He smiled and got to his feet. “Jim Benninger is an amazing man.”

Then the smile faded and he added, his accent more pronounced, “The kind of friend who weel stand by you no matter what choo have done.” The moment passed. “Do you know him well?”

Gabriella shifted uncomfortably in her seat. “Actually, I never met the man.”

She could tell her answer surprised and intrigued Pedro, but he didn’t ask about it. All he said was, “I will be back in a couple of days. You can follow me down the mountain and I will show you how it is done. You are a quick study.”

He lifted his hat off the peg by the door, called up the stairs to Ty, “Adiós, muchacho,” and left.

P
EDRO
R
ODRIGUEZ HAD
been up and down the trail to St. Elmo’s Fire dozens of times. But he still could not put it on autopilot. Lose your focus, daydream on this trail and you could run right off a cliff.

This was one of the most dangerous jeep trails in the mountains. Of course, he did not tell Mrs. … did not tell
Gabriella
that. Though he suspected she would have climbed up the mountain if there had been no trail at all. She looked that determined. That desperate. Maybe even that afraid.

When Pedro joined the Marine Corps out of high school he discovered he could predict with uncanny accuracy which recruit would make it and which would wash out, could tell who was going to freeze when shots started flying, who was going to take crazy chances, who had something to prove and whose wife had told him she had a headache last night.

He had always been able to read people. Even before his own heart, his whole soul had been ripped out of his chest and stomped into a bloody lump at his feet. Even before he understood emotional pain on a personal, visceral level so intense he would be forever sensitized to it in everyone he met.

And all those heightened sensitivities told him Gabriella Underhill was one hurting woman.

He did not allow himself to picture what must have happened to her that put a scar on her face so disfiguring even a quarter-inch blanket of makeup couldn’t hide it. It had to be a moment-to-moment torment to know people were staring at it or trying not to. Obviously, a bad burn. But what kind and how it happened—he did not like where his mind wandered when he considered the possibilities, so he shifted gears altogether, thought about the curly-haired little boy with oversized Gandhi glasses. The boy had a kind of lost look, too, or maybe Pedro was just imagining it. He certainly wasn’t imagining the old man’s gaunt face, his scarecrow-thin frame and the ashy gray tint to his skin. Just old maybe. Or sick. Pedro’s money was on Door Number Two.

And Gabriella had never even met Jim Benninger! Oh, how Pedro wanted to call Jim and ask him about her. Could not do that though, even if he had been convinced checking up on the people at St. Elmo’s Fire was a good idea—which he was not. Jim was unreachable, off being a missionary in the wilds of Sudan. Serving and helping, that was Jim. He had invited
these people to spend the summer at St. Elmo’s Fire for a reason, though it was possible, even likely, Jim did not know what the reason was.

Pedro owed Jim a debt he would never be able to repay. All he could do was pass on what Jim had given to him to somebody else, and as he bumped over rocks and down into potholes, he suspected the intended recipient of some act of kindness on his part was sitting up there on the mountainside trying to start a fire in the fireplace with wet wood. Of course, she would figure out how to do that on her own. But maybe there were other things she would not be able to figure out without a little help.

CHAPTER
8

T
HEO HAD FOUND A ROCKING CHAIR ON THE BACK PORCH THAT
suited him and sank down into it now with a grateful sigh. He shivered like P.D. shaking rainwater out of his fur and pulled the Indian blanket he’d gotten off the couch up around his neck. Should have bought a hat to cover up his naked skull! Theo hadn’t been able to get really comfortable since he got here, didn’t have a speck of meat left on his boney backside for padding when he sat down and sure didn’t have enough antifreeze in his veins for the wind that felt like it’d blowed right off a glacier—and maybe it had.