Читать книгу Mountain Rampage - Scott Graham - Страница 9

TUESDAY

ONE

Rosie’s cry jolted Chuck Bender awake. He blinked, blurry eyed, and sat up, focusing on his six-year-old stepdaughter sprawled before him, her arms and legs jerking in violent spasms, her eyes rolled back in her head.

Rosie had been asleep in her twin bed in the cabin’s tiny back bedroom, her forehead warm to the touch but her breathing calm and steady, when he, too, had drifted off, chin to chest, slumped in a ladder-back chair cadged from the kitchen table.

Chuck checked his watch. 2:30 a.m. He’d dozed for no more than fifteen minutes, but a different Rosie now lay before him.

Janelle hurried into the bedroom, a damp washcloth clutched in both hands.

Rosie cried out a second time. Only the whites of her eyes showed between her fluttering eyelids. Her arms and legs thrashed, spilling the sheets to her waist.

“Rosie. M’hija,” Janelle whispered, her voice laced with fear. “Darling girl, my darling girl.”

She crouched at the side of the bed and put the cloth to her younger daughter’s forehead. Chuck leaned forward and mindlessly kneaded Janelle’s shoulders, his gaze fixed on Rosie.

Janelle turned on him. “You fell asleep.”

Stung, Chuck lifted his hands from her shoulders. “She fell asleep. Finally. I thought we were in the clear.”

“You thought wrong.”

He pressed his palms together between his knees. Rosie’s fever had built until midnight. When, finally, it had receded, he’d figured they had simply to last out the night, that Rosie would be better by morning.

But what did he know about childhood illnesses? What did he know about children at all, for that matter?

He reached past Janelle and caught the nearest of Rosie’s convulsing arms. He pressed it gently to the bed. The soft skin of her bicep was blotchy and scalding to the touch. Her fever was back, fiercer this time. As soon as he released her arm, it lashed about.

“More Tylenol?” he asked Janelle.

She put the back of her hand to Rosie’s cheek. “Too soon. We already gave her two doses.”

“Some ibuprofen? Isn’t that allowed?”

Janelle shrugged, her back stiff.

On the opposite side of the small room, eight-year-old Carmelita rolled over in her matching bed and settled back to sleep.

Chuck stared at Rosie, his every muscle tense. He was twelve months into parenthood, still a newcomer to the world of sleepless nights and sick little girls. “The doctors’ offices are all closed,” he said. “The only thing open at this hour will be the emergency room.”

“Then let’s go.”

He hesitated. “Yeah.”

Janelle skewered him with a hard look over her shoulder. “Don’t tell me you’re worried about money.”

Chuck pushed himself back in his seat. “With our deductible, we’ll get slaughtered.”

Janelle’s voice shook. “This is not a baby-medicine type of thing, Chuck. Not anymore.”

“It’ll pass,” he said, his voice revealing his uncertainty. “Won’t it?”

“She’s having some sort of a seizure. I’ve never seen her like this. Nunca. Neither of the girls.”

Rosie’s eyes were closed now, but her arms and legs continued to stir.

Chuck ran a hand over the top of his head, passing his fingers through his short hair. “You’re right.”

Relief flooded Janelle’s face.

He looked into her frightened eyes. “She’s my darling girl, too,” he said.

Minutes later, gravel pinged off the undercarriage of the pickup as Chuck sped down the two-track from the cabin, familiar after seven weeks with the narrow, descending drive through the trees to the flat valley floor a mile south of downtown Estes Park. He slowed as he left the forest and turned onto the gravel road behind two massive log buildings—Lodge of the Rockies and, next door, Mills Conference Center. The matching, three-story, historic structures faced onto the open greensward at the center of the Y of the Rockies resort complex.

A glance in the rearview mirror showed Rosie slumped in her seat, strands of dark hair stuck to her sweaty forehead.

Rosie was her grandfather Enrique in miniature: short, stocky, and—normally—full of life, with thick, wiry hair and round, rosy cheeks. Carmelita sat opposite her little sister on the rear seat, her head against the side window of the truck, her eyes half-closed. Carmelita was thin and delicate like her mother, with Janelle’s heart-shaped face and long, straight hair.

Dread coated Chuck’s insides like heavy syrup. He swallowed grit from his throat as he fishtailed around the near side of the conference center. He slung the truck east onto the main road leading out of the resort, only to be greeted by a car rocketing down the open slope from the Y of the Rockies entrance two hundred yards ahead.

Chuck jammed the brakes, skidding the pickup to a stop in front of the lodge and conference center. Janelle tumbled from the rear seat of the crew cab to the floor between the seat-belted girls. A cloud of dust rose in the truck’s headlights, mixing with thin tendrils of the summer’s first rain.

Chuck kept his foot pinned to the brake as the oncoming vehicle—an Estes Park police cruiser, siren silenced and emergency lights extinguished—flashed past. Janelle clambered back to the bench seat between the girls. Ignoring the police car, she pointed through the windshield at the resort entrance ahead.

Chuck accelerated before sliding to a stop once more when a shiny, blue, single-cab pickup, the words “Y of the Rockies, Estes Park, Colorado” stenciled on its side, shot around the far corner of the lodge in pursuit of the police car. As the truck passed, Chuck caught sight of its driver hunched over the steering wheel.

“Parker,” Chuck said. He watched over his shoulder as the truck chased the police car across the Y of the Rockies compound.

Janelle pulled Rosie close and stroked the girl’s damp forehead. “Not your concern,” she said. “Not now.”

Chuck punched the gas. The rear tires spat loose rocks as the truck sped up the sloping drive and out of the shallow valley. The pickup bounced onto the paved road leading to Estes Park, the gateway tourist town at the east entrance to Rocky Mountain National Park, high in the mountains northwest of Denver.

Chuck gunned the truck toward the center of town and glanced out the side window to see, through breaks in trees, the police cruiser and Parker’s pickup racing along the far side of the broad rectangle of well-tended grass play fields, more than a quarter mile across, that marked the center of Y of the Rockies, the former Young Men’s Christian Association training center turned rustic resort and corporate retreat. The cruiser and truck sped down the row of buildings lining the west side of the fields. The buildings, catty-corner across the expanse of grass from the lodge and conference center, included the resort’s gift shop, outdoor-gear rental center, and log cabin museum. Beyond the museum were the resort’s two dormitories.

Through one last break in the trees, Chuck watched as the police cruiser and Parker’s pickup truck passed large, new Falcon House, home to the resort’s international crew of summer workers. The car and truck slid to a stop facing the second dormitory, ramshackle Raven House, home for the past two months to Chuck’s group of field school students.

In the rearview mirror, Chuck caught sight of Janelle staring out the window at the police cruiser and Parker’s truck.

She uttered a single, strangled word as she stroked Rosie’s forehead: “Clarence.”