Carla Neggers - Cold Ridge

She'd wanted what she'd had. A sexy, irreverent husband who rescued people. A smart, healthy son. A job she loved.

But she didn't have any of those things anymore.

"Negative thinking, negative thinking."

The monitor had gone into sleep mode. She got it up and running again, but she was having the same problem she'd had since she got back yesterday from breakfast with Hank and Antonia-she couldn't access Manny's files without his password. Why did the bastard need a password? Had he decided she was nuts and couldn't be trusted with access to his files?

She'd tried every possible password combination she could think of. Eric's middle name, his birthday, the name they'd picked out if he'd been a girl. Her middle name. Her maiden name. Their wedding date. Manny was a sentimentalist at heart, and he wasn't particularly creative or intricate in his thinking. It had to be something obvious.

Irritated, she typed bullheaded, but that didn't work, either.

Tyler North? Nope, not in any combination she tried.

If she called Manny and asked him for his password, he wouldn't tell her. He'd just say "butt out" and hang up. Or not bother to call her back at all.

Stubborn.

Irritating.

Nothing was working. She flopped back against her chair and sipped her Diet Coke. She had to stay busy. If she didn't, she'd think. She'd relive the scary, early days of Eric's illness. She'd relive charging off to the emergency room while Manny was out of the country, facing dangers of his own-he couldn't talk about most of his missions, but she was well aware of what he did.

She didn't think, not then, that she could lose them both, her husband to combat, her son to illness. Only afterward, only when they were safe. It was sick, but there it was.

She suddenly realized she was shaking, crying. Her gaze settled on the number of her therapist, which she'd written on an orange Post-it note and stuck to the side of the computer. She grabbed it and reached for the phone, but she didn't dial, instead doing her relaxation and visualization exercises until she felt the incipient panic pass.

It'd be okay. She was getting better.

For grins, she typed crazywoman, but nothing happened.

"Maybe I should just shoot the damn thing."

If she couldn't get into Manny's files and he didn't want to talk to her, what could she do?

She dug her date book out of her handbag and looked up Tyler North's number in New Hampshire. If he wasn't on duty, he'd be there. She used to be critical of his weird, crazy mother. Not anymore. For the most part, she'd done the best she could. She made mistakes. But she'd been lucky.

If Manny had confided in anyone, it'd be his best friend and fellow PJ. Obviously, Val thought, it wasn't his wife.

Ty tried to concentrate on the scenery as he drove Carine up the notch road, a pass in the mountains with a small lake, a waterfall, a rock-strewn brook, ledges, cliffs and breathtaking views. But it wasn't easy to focus on anything but the tense and distracted woman beside him. She wanted to see the Rancourts. He told her he didn't think it was a good idea. She said, fine, she'd rent a car. She'd take a bus back to Boston and get her own damn car. She'd hike up the ridge to the connecting trail that led down to the Rancourt house.

She wouldn't get Gus to take her, that was for damn sure. Gus didn't like the idea of her going up to the Ran-courts, either. She and Ty had dropped off the embarrassing pictures of Jodie Rancourt with the Cold Ridge police and met Gus for lunch at a village café. Gus didn't get it. Why would Carine want to see the Ran-courts? Why would they want to see her?

But Gus couldn't talk her out of it, and Ty sure as hell couldn't. They tried all through lunch. The café was owned by a couple of ex-hippies who scrawled their daily menu on a chalkboard. Carine had turned over her digital camera and camera bag as well as the memory disk. The police had warned her to expect a visit from the Boston detectives now on their way to New Hampshire to pick up the evidence-they'd want to talk to her, as well as the Rancourts.

Carine had hardly touched her sweet potato chowder. Gus had a bowl, too, but Ty didn't go near it-he had a bacon-lettuce-and-tomato sandwich. He didn't like Carine's lack of appetite. "Flutter kicks'll really kill you if you don't keep up your strength," he told her.

"They kill me, anyway."

"Why are you doing flutter kicks? Why not just take an exercise class in Cambridge? Pilates. Kickboxing. Something like that."

She'd given him a smile that he couldn't quite read. "Maybe I'm training for a triathlon."

"Okay. You've always been fit. You need to do flutter kicks to train for a triathalon?"

"Can't hurt." She seemed evasive. "I have endurance. I don't have a lot of power and speed. I'm working on it, though. You can swim twenty-five meters under water on one breath, right?"

He suspected she was trying to distract herself-or distract him. "It's not something I do every day-"

"How did you do it at all?"

"Willpower."

"I have willpower."

"When it comes to a picture you want. You'll wait around for the wind to blow the right way a lot longer than I ever would. But swimming underwater-nothing's at stake for you if you pop up for another breath. For me, it was a requirement. I had to do it."

"You're saying if you want to be a PJ bad enough, you'll stay under."

"It helps."

"That's a crock. I think it has more to do with lung capacity and efficient strokes."

He grinned. "There's that, too."

But she hadn't smiled back, and he knew the illicit pictures bothered her. She'd liked and trusted Jodie Rancourt and Louis Sanborn, but they'd committed adultery in such a way that she'd become involved. She felt used, tainted.

Gus had shaken his head over his soup. "I thought you'd be out of the fray up here, but now they're all up here with you. The Rancourts, this Gary Turner. Next it'll be Manny Carrera."

Gus was all for outfitting his niece for a three-day hike in the mountains. He even said Ty could go with her, seeing how he was more like a brother to her these days. That was designed, Ty had no doubt, to draw a response from Carine, and it did, just not the one Gus expected. He'd wanted, clearly, a hint about what was going on with the two of them. Instead, she shoved her bowl across the table at him and stormed out of the café.

"I guess 'brother' was a bad choice of word," Gus said, not particularly remorseful. "North?"

"I'm doing the best I can, Gus."

"No, you're not. You're just as scared as she is."

"Doesn't matter. I'll do what I have to do."

"To keep her safe-or to keep Manny Carrera safe? Whose side are you on? His or Carine's?"

Ty had attempted a joke. "I'm on the side of truth and justice," he'd said, but Gus didn't laugh, instead sticking him with the bill.

The access road to the Rancourt property snaked up a fifteen-hundred-foot rise of pitted pavement with one bona fide hairpin turn. It wasn't the sort of location people who lived in the region full-time generally chose for their homes, even if they could afford it. Ty glanced at Carine as he negotiated a relatively straight incline, the hill falling away on her side, the bare-limbed trees offering vistas that seemed almost endless. "We still have time to give this up and take Gus's advice and disappear in the mountains for a few days."

She smiled briefly. "Do you still have a taste for beef jerky? I remember as a kid you'd grab a piece of beef jerky and head up the ridge. You weren't even eight years old. I don't know how you lived."

"I don't know, either but I've got MREs these days. Good stuff."

"Purloined 'meals ready to eat.' Well, I understand they're better than they used to be. The prepackaged camping foods certainly are." She looked out her window, the road twisting again now, evergreens hanging over rock outcroppings. "Once I pass the PJ Physical Abilities and Stamina Test, I'm going to take one of the Appalachian Mountain Club winter camping courses. I think that'd be a challenge."