Last Safe Place, The (39 page)

As he clambered up the last switchback before the trail to the cabin, he heard gunfire. He’d heard what he thought was a lone gunshot earlier but the wind carried sound a long way in the mountains and it could have been distant thunder. This time he was sure and the adrenaline boost gave him the renewed energy he needed to run the rest of the way.

He could see the cabin through the trees in the fading light. A black jeep sat next to Gabriella’s in the gravel beside it, lights shone out every window and the back door was standing open.

Pedro instantly became again the Marine he had been years ago. He slowed, approached the cabin at a crouch, rifle ready. Keeping the jeeps between him and the cabin, he dodged from one to the other, then to the back corner of the house. He stood listening. Not a sound.

Slowly, he peeked around the doorframe and could see through the mudroom into the kitchen. Even with only a small swath of the kitchen visible, what he saw there momentarily took his breath away. Blood was all over the floor, dripped, in puddles and smeared. An overturned chair lay next to a lampshade, broken cups and bowls were scattered on the floor. And it looked like … there was a piece of bloody … was that a
human ear
lying in a puddle of blood?

Pedro had been in combat in Somalia and had seen enough battle scenes to know this was a place where a life-and-death struggle had been staged. But who had fought? Who had won? And where were they?

He eased slowly through the door, crossed the mudroom silently. Theo lay in a puddle of blood on the floor by the sink with a bullet hole in the center of his forehead. It had been a gunshot he’d heard. Pedro groaned without making a sound, but stayed focused. He stepped quickly into the room and swept the perimeters of it and the family room with his rifle. No one.

He crossed to the stairs and eased up them, urban warfare in Mogadishu, street by street, house by house.

As soon as he was certain the cabin was empty, he raced back downstairs and tried to puzzle out what had happened here. Theo had been shot at close range. Executed. Pedro felt rage meld with the fear that had been
building in his chest as he raced up the jeep trail to the cabin. Paw prints in the blood. And human footprints—large and small. Gabriella and the stalker. Where was Ty and where—?

Another gunshot! The sound came from the mountain. Pedro remembered Gabriella’s description of the chalet in the bristlecone pine forest and he took off at a dead run across the meadow.

G
ABRIELLA STOOD STOCK
still at the edge of the clearing, staring in awe and wonder. Thunder rumbled and lightning flashed on the other side of the peak. P.D. had run ahead, leapt up the steps and stood on the top stone, flashing his golden retriever smile. But Gabriella couldn’t move, merely gawked at the apparition from her dream come to life before her.

The igloo-shaped rock formation. The stair-step stones leading at an angle around and up the side of it like a spiral staircase. All of it resting squarely beneath the ominous overhang—the diving-board rock with boulders piled on the other end of it.

The sight detonated a bomb in her head and the concussion blew open all the locked doors that held her memories captive, imprisoned for so long they’d sneaked out as dreams and fantasies. Now they were a stampeding herd, thundering past her so fast she hardly had time to examine them.

She and Garrett had found this place, came here often.

This is where they’d sat on the day before their birthday almost thirty years ago, where they’d dangled their feet as they tossed in pebbles.

And … this is where the piece of granite hit the dirt and rolled out through an opening at the bottom, the rock that didn’t look like a geode, the one that contained an inner treasure of impossible quartz.

All of those thoughts fired through her mind with the speed of a comet, lit up her brain inside with light.

Just like the light shining up from the pile of boulders.

No, not just like it. The light in her head was the fierce white of the halogen bulbs in a stadium that illuminated a football field so bright you could perform surgery on the fifty-yard line. The light coming from the boulders was golden. Not shining, really. A golden glow.

This couldn’t be real. She had to be imagining it. It must be like the ghost images you see after the ophthalmologist dilates your eyes.

P.D. barked, a single yap, and suddenly Gabriella was running, couldn’t cross the clearing fast enough, couldn’t scramble up the stone steps quickly enough. She peered down through the opening at the top of the boulders at a single, perfect Jesus tree below.

Ty was sitting on the ground next to it, a golden glow sparkling in his round glasses.

But for the space of a single heartbeat, the boy wasn’t Ty. He was Garrett.

“I’ve got a secret. I’ve got a secret,” Gabriella chants in a sing-song voice.

“I don’t care,” Garrett says. He’s grumpy today; his stomach hurts. He didn’t want to leave the chalet, didn’t want to come with her to The Cleft after Grant and their parents left to search for aquamarine near the mountain peak.

Oh, how she wants to show him the rock! She has his half of it in her pocket and it is like an itch she can hardly stand not to scratch. She has to wait until their birthday party later today, though. She
has
to.

But the rock is a hard secret to keep. Because of it, she can’t tell him the real reason she is so determined they go to The Cleft today—so she can search for more rocks like it!

Instead, she tells him she needs his help with the pole. After Grant told them about St. Elmo’s fire—they call it firesies—they found a broken fishing pole and decided to stick it in the ground above The Cleft to get firesies to land there—like the sugar water Mom sets out in those little glass things on the porch attracts hummingbirds.

Once they’ve made their way through the forest to the special pile of boulders, Garrett helps her find a spot and then jam the fire stick down into a crack between two big rocks. But then he sits on the edge dangling his feet, won’t help her look for thunder eggs. She has to do it all by herself. All the rocks she finds are granite. But the special rock was like that, too, didn’t look like a geode at all. She’d been certain it was just another hunk of granite when she tossed it in yesterday, but now she remembers that when she picked it up after it had rolled out the opening in the bottom of The Cleft, it felt warm, like it’d been lying out in the blazing sun. Only it hadn’t. She’d found it in the shade up next to the boulders along with all the pebbles she’d chucked into the opening—and they’d all felt cold.

And the rock with the amazing crystals had felt … heavier, too, but that’s crazy. Well, she’ll just have to gather up a whole sack full of them and take them back to the cabin and hit them with a hammer and see—

There is a sudden crack and boom of thunder so close to them both children jump and cry out.

Gabriella had been focused on finding rocks; Garrett on his stomachache. Neither of them noticed the storm. They do now. It’s not noon, probably not even eleven o’clock yet, but dark, bubbling clouds are gathered around the peak of Mount Antero and are spreading out toward them, reaching out monster fingers in the sky.

Cold wind that smells of rain lifts Gabriella’s long curls and tosses them into her face; Garrett’s Pirates baseball cap flies off and disappears on the other side of The Cleft.

“Come on!” Garrett says, leaps up and runs down the stair-step rocks with Gabriella right behind him. Before the two of them hit the bottom rock, lightning rips out of the sky and snakes down in a blurred white flash and incinerates a pine tree in the forest—between them and the chalet.

The boom of thunder that follows in its wake is deafening. Like an invisible breaker hitting a beach, a wave of air knocks the children backward a step.

Both of them squeal in terror and then start to cry. Since the day they arrived at the cabin, they have never been outside during a storm. Certainly not way up on the mountainside in the boulder field! They have seen one, though. From the window of the cabin, they watched in awe as lightning danced around the mountaintop, so many bolts of it at once it looked like the mountain had grown white fuzzy hair that was attached to the clouds the way their hair stuck to a balloon that time Grant rubbed one back and forth on the carpet and then held it above their heads.

They can’t go through the trees back to the chalet! It’s too far. But they can’t stand here out in the open, either.

That’s when Gabriella remembers the opening in the base of The Cleft that the rock rolled out of yesterday.

“This way!” she says, turns and dashes around the bottom of the boulders to the far side, gets down on her hands and knees and starts to crawl into the opening.

“What are you doing?”

“This goes all the way through. Come on!”

Gabriella drops down on her belly and squeezes through the tunnel formed by the rocks. It is a tight fit. If she’d been much bigger, she couldn’t have made it, but within seconds she is through, in the empty space formed by the overhanging boulders. Empty except for the lone bristlecone pine tree in the center, where the sun would be shining if there’d been a sun to shine.

She turns and urges Garrett on. He is taller than she is, but only a little bit larger. Even so, he has to grunt and strain to make it through. When he crawls out into the opening with her, he has a large scratch on his cheek.

But he doesn’t mention it. Neither does she. They’d been so terrified; it had been so noisy, windy and dangerous out there. But in here, it is quiet. No, more than quiet. Hushed.

Gray storm light streams in a pallid beam through the opening above them, and it has begun to rain. Hard. The drops fall through the opening and pummel the tree. But the rocks overhang—they hadn’t realized how much, looking at it from above. From down here, it looks like the picture Grant showed them in a
National Geographic
of a house made out of ice where Eskimos live. It was called an igloo. Smoke went out the hole in the igloo; rain falls in the hole of their boulder igloo. But only what is directly beneath the hole gets wet and that’s the pine tree.

Maybe it is just her eyes adjusting to the darkness here. Because it doesn’t seem nearly as dark as it had looked from above. In fact …

She turns to Garrett and he’s grinning, the first time he’s smiled all day. She can see the gap between his teeth where he has already pulled out the two top ones in the front. Hers are loose, but she’s afraid to pull them.

And it seems like … no, it is. Garrett’s face is glowing.

He says nothing, just points behind her at the tree. She turns to look and realizes Garrett’s face isn’t really glowing. It’s reflecting the glow from the tree. The glow shifts through amber, caramel and yellow and turns her brother’s pale face the color of a brown-toast suntan.

Is this real?

They can hear the rumble of thunder out there in the world. It sounds a little like being in a bowling alley. But the sound doesn’t really come in here. Nothing from the outside does. The air is different, the light is different, the sound is different.

Gabriella lets out a shaky breath she didn’t realize she’d been holding. It’s okay now. They’re safe. The lightning won’t get to them here. In fact, she’s pretty sure that nothing bad can get to them here.

She turns and looks at Garrett. She knows he’s thinking the same things she is. He reaches out and squeezes her hand.

“Drumma du, Gabriella,” he says. Or maybe he doesn’t say the words. Maybe she hears them without him having to say them.

“Drumma du, too, Garrett.”

“Mom!” Ty leapt to his feet. “How did you fi—?” He saw P.D. and didn’t finish the question. “You can’t stay here, you have to run. That man is looking for me and—”

“How did you get down there?” She knew he hadn’t crawled through the opening she and Garrett had used. They’d barely fit and they’d been younger and much smaller than Ty.

“I jumped. Sort of. See over there, on the back side, where that rock juts out over The Cleft like a little shelf?”

The Cleft?
How did Ty know …?

Gabriella looked where he pointed. A piece of the back boulder extended out past the other boulders on the top portion of the igloo. It was about the thickness of a shelf in a closet.

“I scooted down off that on my belly, let my legs dangle below, scooted farther and farther until I was just holding on with my hands. Then I let go.”

That was still a long drop. He could have broken … She realized she was about to scold him for doing something dangerous!

Without another word, Gabriella got down on her hands and knees on the shelf with her back to the hollow space between the boulders—nose to nose with P.D. What about Puppy Dog? There was no way to get him down into The Cleft with them and Yesheb would shoot him on sight.

Then Ty called out, “P.D.—Hide!”

The dog turned instantly, raced down the rock steps and disappeared into the trees. She turned and looked a question over her shoulder. “It’s a new game I taught him,” he said. “He won’t come out until I find him or call him. We play it here all the time.”

Play it here all the time?

Gabriella flattened out on her belly on the shelf overhang with her legs dangling into the hole and slowly eased herself backward until she’d slid all the way off the shelf and was hanging from it into the hole. She didn’t have much strength in her hands and arms.

“Out of the way,” she cried, let go and fell down through the years into the shelter of The Cleft, the only place she had ever felt perfectly safe.

She understood now what she’d really known all along. The Cleft was the reason she had come to Colorado.

Gabriella landed without much dignity on her backside in the dirt and Ty leapt into her arms, held on so tight it shot bolts of pain through her injured neck. But she didn’t care, squeezed him just as tight, realized she was rocking him back and forth in her arms, crooning the universal mother song,