Reflection Point: An Eternity Springs Novel (15 page)

“Your newest deputy is a godsend. She does the work of two people.”

Zach smiled with satisfaction. “She’s a dynamo, all right.”

As Zach reached for the door, it opened and Deputy Dynamo, aka Gabi Romano, rushed outside, her features set in a grim expression. Seeing Zach, she said, “Domestic disturbance.”

The pleasure of his easy morning melted away. “The Armstrongs?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll go with you.”

It was the first call in what quickly evolved into an extremely lousy day—a rare occurrence for his little mountain town. They arrived at the Armstrong household to find a bruised and battered Nina cradling a broken arm and her alcoholic husband passed out on the couch. As usual, Nina made excuses for her man, which totally pissed Zach off. While he pleaded with Nina and warned her about the reality of escalating violence, Ginger radioed with a report of a car accident with injuries just north of town, and the news that Deputy Martin Varney had called in sick with a stomach virus and would miss his afternoon shift. Zach left Gabi to deal with the Armstrongs and rushed off to the car wreck.

The worst call of the day had happened just before three and wasn’t a call at all, but an accident he witnessed when responding to a car burglary report at the campground up on Mirror Lake. The simple family picnic gone terribly wrong had been the most heartbreaking thing he’d seen in years.

When the god-awful day finally ended and he went home to his dog, Zach sought solace with his fishing pole and the soothing, familiar rhythm of casting his line into Hummingbird Lake. Ordinarily, fishing soothed his soul, but tonight visions of the day haunted him,
with peace remaining elusive and his heart as heavy as Murphy Mountain. When he heard the crunch of tires on the gravel road leading to his house, he glanced over his shoulder, glad for the interruption.

He almost dropped his rod. Savannah Moore?

She climbed out of her old beater of a Taurus wearing a belted white shirt over an ankle-length yellow print skirt, a scowl on her face. Ace rose and loped down the drive toward his visitor. After a moment of silent self-debate, Zach returned his attention to the lake. If she’d come here looking for the sheriff rather than the man, his on-duty deputy would have given him a heads-up. But Gabi hadn’t radioed him, and Zach couldn’t imagine what had brought Savannah out here. He admitted that he liked her spit and vinegar and that any other night he likely would have enjoyed watching her sashay toward him. Tonight, though, he just wasn’t in the mood.

When she approached close enough to speak without raising her voice, she said, “Okay, Sheriff. I surrender.”

“Is there a warrant out on you?”

“You tell me.”

He glanced over his shoulder. She walked down the point with her shoulders squared, her hands clasped in front of her. Add a length of rope around her wrists and she could be a pirate’s prisoner about to walk the plank.

For the first time in hours, his heart lightened.

“You haven’t told them. Why haven’t you told them? I’ve tried to do it myself, knowing it’s bound to happen at any moment, but I just can’t make myself say the words. Every day for more than a week I’ve waited for it. Who will it be? Which one of them will shift their eyes away from mine? Whose smile will go from genuine to plastic? Will Nic Callahan warn me away from her children? Will Sage Rafferty ask me to move my shop? Celeste says you’re trustworthy, but what does she
know? You’re a cop. Why are you doing this to me, Zach?”

Zach. She’d used his name. Finally. He liked that.

“Do you like to fish?” he asked.

“Excuse me?”

“Here.” He handed her his fishing rod. “I have another in the shed. You apparently want to talk, and I want to fish. No reason we can’t both be happy.”

Savannah sputtered as Zach strode back up the point to the storage shed behind his house. When he returned with his second-favorite fishing rod and a quilt—the temperature dropped quickly once the sun went down, and if this conversation turned into a long, drawn-out drama, she’d get cold in that sleeveless outfit of hers—she was casting his lure into the lake.

He tossed the blanket near his tackle box. “Why did you pick tonight to come out here?”

“It was either this or make brownies, and I’m already past my dessert limit for the week. I ate dinner at the Yellow Kitchen last night, and I couldn’t resist the tiramisu Ali had made. I don’t want to put on my bathing suit and look at my hips and think of you.”

A mental image of his hand on Savannah Moore’s string-bikini-clad hip flashed through his mind midway through his cast. Zach inadvertently jerked his hand, sending his line flowing off target. The hook caught on a half-submerged log, and Zach scowled. “Why would you … oh, never mind. I’ve had a helluva day, Peach. Let’s see if we can’t cut to the chase. If I’m reading this situation correctly, you want to know why I haven’t shared with our mutual friends the fact that you have a prison record. Am I right?”

“Yes.”

“You’ve been waiting for the hammer to drop.”

“Yes.”

“It makes you a little crazy.”

“Yes!”

“Crazy enough to challenge your personal Darth Vader at his Death Star.”

She threw out her arms. “A movie villain? You think this is all a big joke?”

“Better a movie villain than a two-bit TV sitcom costar,” he snapped, then sighed. “What I think, Savannah, is that either you are enormously insensitive or else you didn’t hear about what happened up at Mirror Lake today.”

She drew back, her expression growing wary. “What happened at Mirror Lake?”

Zach didn’t have the first clue why, but he felt compelled to share the events of his day with the felon from Georgia. As he opened his tackle box and chose a new bait for his line, he said, “Doing what I do for a living, I’m no stranger to violence or to tragic circumstances. But when it involves kids …” He exhaled a heavy breath. “It’s so damned hard.”

Following a brief hesitation, she asked, “Children?”

Zach fixed the fly onto the end of his line. “I patrol a loop that circles around Mirror Lake. It’s about fifteen miles from here, up above Heartache Falls, and I met a family from Kansas as they set up their campsite three days ago. Nice people. Real nice people. The father sells insurance and the mom teaches fourth grade. They have two kids, eight and six. Tom and Elizabeth. Those kids were having a ball. Today I had just turned in to the campground when I heard screaming. Tom ran out of the trees … he had Elizabeth in his arms. Both kids were shrieking at the top of their lungs. They were just terrified. Turns out they’d been playing hide-and-seek in the trees just beyond the campground and they flushed a mountain lion.”

“Oh, no.”

“Tom ran toward camp. I’ll bet he was planning to
take shelter in the family’s Suburban because he was yelling about keys. Anyway, he hit a soft spot on the trail too close to the edge of a drop. His feet slipped out from under him. Both children fell into the lake. Tom’s head whacked a rock on the way down.”

Savannah dropped her chin to her chest and shook her head. “That’s horrible.”

“Yeah, it was. Neither one of the kids came up, and both parents jumped into the water. I called it in and followed them.”

She stared up at him with troubled eyes. “You jumped into the water?”

“Yeah.” Zach stood silent for a long moment as memories of those next horrible minutes rolled through him. “The water was ice. Murky, too, this time of year. Mirror Lake is pretty to look at but a bitch to search.”

He paused. Blew out a heavy breath. Cast his line into the water once again, but just let it sit and sink. “I’ve never felt so damned helpless in my life.”

“How horrible for you.”

“Not as horrible as it was for them. I’m pretty sure I’ll hear the mother’s screams in my nightmares for a long time to come.”

Savannah set her fly rod aside and picked up the quilt. She spread it across the grass, then gestured toward it. “Sit down, Zach. You look pale.”

He did as she suggested and lowered himself to the quilt, where he sat with his legs stretched out in front of him, crossed at the ankles, facing west. Leaning back, he propped his weight on his elbows and watched the setting sun. The sky was beautiful, a crown of crimson and gold surrounding blue-shadowed mountains capped with snow.

Savannah took a seat beside him and quoted, “Purple mountain majesties.”

“A little glimpse into heaven.” Zach found comfort in the notion, and after a few moments of peaceful silence, he continued his tale. “I’ve never worked a drowning before. I didn’t want to do it today. Diving beneath the water, I could hear only the clock ticking in my head, and every second sounded like a death knell.”

From the corner of his eyes, he saw her reach out to touch him. Her hand stopped six inches away and she pulled it back. “How terrifying it must have been.”

The absence of her touch was tangible.

Zach closed his eyes as he relived the frantic dives, the strain upon his lungs as he pulled back to the surface to fill his lungs with air, the mother’s screams and the father’s frantic shouts, the gunshot when another camper took down the big cat. “The father found the boy first. He wasn’t … good. The bounce against the rock had cracked his skull. Those poor parents were torn—needing to help the boy, to find his sister.”

“I cannot imagine what they were feeling. What you were feeling.”

“I was too cold to feel. I just kept diving. By then my hands were so numb that it almost didn’t register what touched me. It was a little round plastic ball. The girl’s ponytail holder fastened with two plastic balls, and one of them brushed my knuckle.”

He heard Savannah gasp a relieved breath. “You found her.”

“Yes, thank God.” He barely recalled the rush to the surface, the swim to the bank, hauling her from the water, and beginning CPR. “Elizabeth was limp as a dishrag when I got her to shore. Prettiest sound I ever heard was when she began to cough.”

“So you saved her.”

“Her brother saved her. That cat was in full attack mode. The wildlife guys will test it, but I wouldn’t be
surprised if it was rabid. I don’t think it got to either child, but I’m not certain.”

“How is the boy doing?”

After a long, silent moment, Zach rolled to a seated position. He scooped up a handful of gravel and began tossing the pebbles, one by one, into the water. Savannah sat with her legs tucked primly to the side. The quilt was large and a full three feet separated them. Nevertheless, he could smell that unique citrusy scent she used, and it floated past him on the evening air like a song. He wanted to reach for her and hold her. To be held. Comforted.

Turner, you’re an idiot
.

“I don’t know. Head injuries are tough. We life-flighted him to a trauma center. Last I heard he’s touch and go.”

“I’m so sorry, Zach.”

“Me too.” He threw a marble-sized pebble into Hummingbird Lake, and as twilight faded to night they sat in silence. When the last glimmer of sunlight was extinguished, leaving a spattering of lights from the houses across the lake to cast a silver shadowed illumination over Reflection Point, the burden of Zach’s day slowly eased. Talking to Savannah had helped, he realized, but what had made the difference was the quiet understanding she offered with her silence.

Her company eased him. She brought him peace.

I should return the favor
.

He thought the idea through for a couple of moments, then said, “Listen, Peach. As far as I’m concerned, your conviction is your private business. If you want to share it with folks around here, fine. If you don’t, that’s fine, too. Unless you do something stupid that brings your past into relevancy where my job is concerned, no one will hear about it from me.”

No one will hear about it from me
.

Savannah wanted to believe that. She wanted to believe him.

Everyone she’d met in town sang Zach Turner’s praises. Celeste Blessing said he was trustworthy, and after their meeting at Angel’s Rest, Savannah had learned to accept that just because Celeste looked like Francine Vaughn didn’t mean she had Francine’s black heart.

Just because Zach was in law enforcement didn’t mean he was a lying, thieving gutter rat like Kyle.

Zach had saved a life today. Today he’d been a hero to a tourist family from Kansas.

Tonight, by claiming he’d keep her secret, he’d offered her the moon—if only she could accept it.

Trust. She hadn’t trusted anyone other than herself in a very long time. Dare she do it now? Could she believe him, considering that he didn’t know the whole story?

Tell him. Tell him and see how he reacts. If nothing else, maybe it will provide him a distraction from his crappy day
.

Savannah drew a deep, cleansing breath, then exhaled in a rush. “I was engaged to a cop.”

Full night had fallen and the moon had yet to rise. Reflection Point lay in shadow, so she sensed rather than saw that he’d turned his stare toward her.

“My dad was a boat mechanic in a little town in Tennessee. He ran the service department of a marine dealer. He met my mother when they were both hiking part of the Appalachian Trail. They got married and had three boys and then me. I was eight when my mother was killed in a car accident. My dad did his best, but money was tight and the boys were in and out of trouble. In and out of jail. My dad turned to an old family tradition to make ends meet.”