Garden of Dreams (3 page)

Swearing at herself for forgetting to put on the wretched new glasses again, she rummaged through her purse. The ice cream would melt if she didn't get it home soon. She found the blasted glasses, untangled the gold chain she'd hoped would keep her from losing them, and jerked them on.

The stranger entered the station to pay for the gas. Nina glanced at the huge motorcycle in the back of the pickup. Harley-Davidson, no doubt. The man looked like that kind. She bet he had a leather jacket slung over the truck seat.

As she pulled out of the lot, she caught a glimpse of a longhaired teenager in the passenger seat. Brothers, she figured. A man with black hair that thick and unmarred by gray couldn't be old enough to have a kid that age. Why would two motorcycle thugs come to this backwater fishing retreat?

It didn't matter. She had enough worries of her own without borrowing others.

At a signal from Ethel Arnett, Nina stopped her car in the middle of Main Street. “Main Street” was a euphemism for the two-lane county highway running through the town's center. The Piggly Wiggly and other businesses on either side of the highway had installed sidewalks for the convenience of their customers, but they may as well have left the dirt roads and boardwalks of a prior era. The inhabitants still treated the road as a horse trail.

“Hi, Ethel. How's the bake sale coming?”

The older woman leaned against Nina's car door and fanned herself. “We'll have a hundred cakes or more, I reckon,” Ethel drawled. “We oughter raise more than last year. The committee thought flowers might look nice on the tables. Have you got anything we can use?”

Nina grinned. She'd known what Ethel wanted when she hailed her. The church ladies had more sense than to ask her to bake a cake. “The roses are gorgeous this year. Why don't you send Dottie out for what she needs? You know I can't arrange them like she does. I have ice cream in the back. I'd better get going. See you later, Ethel.”

The old pickup from the gas station gave a roar of disapproval and sped around her before she could shift into drive. Strangers in the area didn't take kindly to the local custom of stopping cars in the middle of the road so pedestrians and drivers could gossip.

Nina didn't waste much time worrying about what tourists thought. They came and went with the seasons. The rest of the town relied on them for a living, but she didn't. She thanked the good Lord and Aunt Hattie for that. By the time school started in the fall, Nina had usually mended her frayed patience by puttering in her greenhouses and was ready for the high-energy chaos of high school again. If she dealt with the summer tourists as others did, she'd not have any patience left to mend.

Instead of turning up the road to the interstate, the pickup ahead of her roared on toward corn and soybean fields. Nina shook her head in dismay as she carefully steered her aging Camry in the same direction. That pickup wouldn't make it the fifty miles to the next town. The driver would end up stranded in a cow pasture. He could count himself lucky if he wasn't shot by some farmer defending his marijuana crop in the woods. That had happened once a few years back.

Well, he'd better hope the truck broke down before she turned off on Hattie's Lane. She wasn't about to let that half- gallon of Breyers chocolate melt in this heat going after him.

With thoughts of ice cream floating through her mind and heat mirages puddling the highway, Nina almost didn't see the van turning out of the gravel road ahead. She supposed some stupid tourist thought he'd find a shortcut to the lake that way, but she wouldn't recommend anything but a four-wheel drive down that road. He was lucky the van still had its bottom.

The van picked up speed and disappeared around the wooded curve ahead. She hated that curve. The kids liked to fly down the road doing ninety at night. They inevitably took the wrong lane while cutting the curve, and drivers coming from the opposite direction didn't know it until they came up on them. A carload of kids lost their lives just the previous year pulling that stunt in front of a semi.

She took the blind curve at a cautious pace, prepared to pull over if someone cut it too sharply. Aunt Hattie had always said caution never hurt, and Hattie was seldom wrong.

Nina winced as she rounded the curve. The rusty pickup had stalled half off the road near the embankment ahead. The engine must have died before the driver could pull over. The boy stood in front of the cab, pushing it backward while the driver steered. At least they'd made it far enough down the road from the curve for the driver of the van to see them.

Even as she thought that, Nina watched in horror as the van accelerated without veering into the left lane to avoid the stalled vehicle. Screaming, Nina slammed her own brakes as if she could halt the van that way. Fingers clenched around the wheel in helplessness, she watched the van slam into the pickup's engine compartment where it angled half on the road. She winced and shuddered at the resounding crash. The pickup spun off the road into the soybean field. The van never slowed down.

Sick to her stomach and trembling, Nina clutched her steering wheel and edged the Toyota off the side of the road. She couldn't see more than the pickup's spinning tires from here. The words “He didn't stop” formed a continuous refrain in her head as gravel crunched beneath her wheels. How could he not stop? Was the driver insane? What in hell could she do?

“Missouri. LAW 119,” Nina muttered, halting the car near the spinning tires and disengaging the engine. “LAW 119.” She'd heard repeating something helped to remember it. She would remember that license plate number. She would have that scoundrel by the neck. But she didn't have time to rummage for pencil and paper. She leapt from the car as soon as the engine stopped.

She heard the boy's shouts of fury and breathed a momentary sigh of relief. She'd had a horrible dread of finding both occupants lying dead and bloody between the soybean rows.

The road had been built high between the low-lying fields, to avoid the traditional spring flooding. She stood on the edge and looked down. Apparently having jumped free of the collision, the boy appeared unharmed. He'd climbed up on the driver's door where the truck lay turned on its side at the bottom of the embankment. Movie images of cars exploding upon impact unreeled in Nina's head as she ran through the gravel and slid down the hill in her cheap Keds.

The boy had opened the cab door by the time Nina reached them. The rear wheel spun idly, and the gleaming chrome of the motorcycle lay crumpled in the middle of soybeans. Heat waves rose off the black dirt. A cardinal chirped “pretty-pretty” somewhere in the trees behind them. She didn't smell gas.

“Is he all right?” she called up to the teenager leaning in the open doorway.

“He's out cold! We've got to get him out of here.”

The kid sounded slightly hysterical. Nina couldn't blame him. “We shouldn't move him until we call the medics. We might make something worse.” Even as she said it, she realized how long it would take for an ambulance to arrive. The town never had organized an ambulance service. Some of the volunteer firefighters had training, but most of them would be out in their fields right now. And she didn't know that she could trust them with a serious injury any more than she could trust herself.

“We've got to get him out!” The level of panic in the boy's voice rose considerably.

“All right. Climb down from there.” She was an adult. She could handle this situation. As a teacher, she had learned the trick of taking command. “You go out on the road and flag someone down.” She glanced back at the road. They'd come almost ten miles from town already. This far from the interstate, traffic dwindled, and the road led nowhere in particular. He'd be lucky to spot a combine.

The boy jumped down. Face pale with fear, he turned to her with brief hope in his eyes, hope that died as he caught a good look at her. “You can't pull him out,” he announced bluntly. “I'll have to push the truck back up.”

Since the truck had slid down the embankment on its side, the wheels rested on the hillside. Pushing the truck up would do nothing more than set it at a precarious angle that would only turn it over again. Nina thought it safest lying flat just where it was, but she didn't bother arguing with the terrified teenager. She already knew she didn't have the strength for lifting a truck. She needed three-inch heels to reach five-four and managed a hundred pounds only when soaking wet.

“Let me take a look. I've had some first-aid courses. Can you drive?” she asked as she climbed up to where the boy had perched moments before.

“No. My ma wouldn't let me,” he said with anger. “Now look. I could've taken your car and gotten help.” His voice brightened. “How about a car phone?”

Like bloody hell would she give him the keys to her car. She'd thought he might take the motorcycle. She snorted at the notion of a car phone. If he only knew...

She glanced inside the truck and wished she hadn't. The stranger had apparently smacked the windshield when the van rammed him. He'd probably had his seat belt off so he could climb out. Blood crawled down a face too bronzed even for this southern climate. She winced at the gash in his scalp. No wonder he was out cold. His doubled-up position against the far window didn't look too comfortable either. One boot-clad foot tangled with the gearshift at an awkward angle.

Clenching her teeth, Nina contemplated some way of prying him out of his unconscious sprawl. If they could lift the pickup high enough, they could possibly slide him out the passenger door. The alternative was hauling him up by the thick ebony hair of his head. She figured the battered brown Stetson on the floorboard belonged to him. Too bad he hadn't been wearing it. Then again, she'd never seen a motorcycle thug wearing a Stetson. Maybe it belonged to the boy.

The boy watched her anxiously, as if she held the answer to all his problems. Nina imagined that at any other time he had the tough fifteen-year-old swagger that matched his long hair and earring, but right now he barely looked twelve.

“You're right. If we could lift the truck just enough to open the door, we could slide him out. I'd better drive back to town and see if I can find someone to help us.” She didn't like the idea. It meant a twenty-minute round-trip at best. She searched her brain for someone who might live closer, but she couldn't think of anyone who would be home at this time of day. Even the farmer who owned this field worked in the factory up at Calvert.

The kid looked dubious. “I can lift the truck, but how will you slide him out?”

Hell if she knew. Twisting a short lock of stick-straight white-blond hair, she stared out over the soybean field. The beans were barely peeking through the ground. All that wet weather earlier this spring, she supposed.

Wet weather. Canvas. “Stay right there,” she ordered, as if the kid could go anywhere else. Sprinting up the hillside, she dashed back to the battered Camry. She'd protected the carpet in the trunk with canvas when she'd hauled plant trays in all that rain.

Seldom did she find occasion to appreciate her petite size, but she did now as she climbed down inside the cab with the canvas. The truck cab was smaller than a double bed. She felt extremely awkward sitting on the stranger's head while determining the extent of his injuries. The man beside her wasn't terrifically large, but the muscular shoulders she'd noticed earlier pretty well filled the doorway. He groaned as she tried stabilizing his neck.

Nina pulled her hand back from the heated warmth of him as if burned. The blood disguised his features, so she assumed her sudden breathlessness had to do with the heat. She couldn't tell from this angle, but she figured him for six feet of dead weight. As she worked around him, bile rose in her throat at the sticky sweet smell of blood. Damn good thing she'd never wanted to be a nurse.

By the time she had him situated, an RV and two pickups towing fishing boats had roared by on the road above. None of them stopped. Blasted tourists.

“Why didn't you flag them down?” Nina asked in irritation as she climbed out and watched another truck cruise by.

The kid shrugged and spit on his hands as he looked for just the right spot to heft the truck. “Dad wouldn't want strangers nosing around.”

Dad? She'd like to know where the damned hell Dad was and if the asshole would want his son baking in an overturned pickup, but she didn't ask. She'd better quit swearing while she was at it. One of these days she'd let those words fly in a classroom and the parents of her students would take off her head.

“I'm a stranger,” she replied, wishing she could growl.

“You're a woman.”

Oh, good. Oh, really good. And she supposed that attitude came from the boot-wearing stud inside. If he hadn't already had his block nearly hacked off, she'd gladly take it off for him.

It was too hot and miserable to argue the point. Fine. She was a woman. Nina wiped her forehead with her arm, got beside the twerp, and with a shove to match his, dug in her heels and felt the cab lift all of three centimeters.

They inched around and shoved some more, gaining another inch or two. The man inside groaned more loudly than before.

“Use the door for a wedge,” Nina gasped. “Pry it open.”