Carla Neggers: Cold Ridge

Manny, no surprise to North, wasn't the most cooperative patient, but he finally, reluctantly, agreed to let someone do a CT-scan of his head-just so they'd all leave him alone. He said his head was fine. He was right. The CT-scan was negative.

Antonia shoved a cardboard cup of gray-looking coffee at North in the ER waiting room. "The doctor orders you to drink. You've had a hell of a day, but I see you're as indestructible as ever."

"That piece of rock could have hit me instead of Manny."

She smiled faintly. "The key here is that it didn't."

He sipped the awful coffee. "I can tell you, you wouldn't have seen me kicking over a damn woodstove with my hands and feet tied together-what'd Hank plan to do, slither out of there like a snake?"

"No, he planned for you and Manny to rescue him. He says that's what you guys live for."

But her face was pale, and she looked strained and tired. "I'll bet right now Hank knows exactly why he married an ER doc."

"He won't even be admitted. He'll just need to grow new eyebrows." She teetered suddenly, and North grabbed her. "I think-oh, hell, Tyler, I'm going to be sick."

And she was, right there on the waiting room floor, damn near getting his shoes.

"I know you hate barf," she said, embarrassed.

He got her onto a chair, and a nurse came running, but Antonia waved her off. "I'm all right. I'm-" She smiled through her wooziness. "I'm pregnant."

"Antonia!" It was Carine, coming around the corner into the waiting room, eavesdropping as usual. "That's wonderful. Are you okay? Can I get you anything?"

"Have you told Hank?" Ty asked.

Antonia lifted her head. "It took the cocky pilot right out of him."

North figured the voters of Massachusetts would either get used to their new senator's way of doing things or they'd give him the boot in six years. Kids came first with him. Period. He was the kind of guy who'd kick over a woodstove while he was tied up if it meant giving an asthmatic kid an extra few minutes' lead, to escape his captor.

Nate Winter finally wandered in, pissed off and pacing, in full U.S. marshal mode. He was tall and rangy like his uncle, with about as much patience. He glared at the younger of his two sisters and then at North. "I told you two to go mountain climbing."

Carine ignored him. "How bad a bad guy was Gary Turner?"

"Considering he kidnapped a fourteen-year-old boy and a U.S. senator and planned to kill them and you, Manny Carrera and your ex-fiancé here, I guess he was pretty goddamn bad."

"Yeah, but before that?"

His mouth twitched. "Before that he wasn't so hot, either. He likely committed two murders in Canada. Tony-Louis was a trip, too. Extortion, smuggling, forgery. He was very good at forgery. Smuggle people into a country, they need papers."

"The wife?"

"Turner was devoted to her. They had some weird relationship-looks like he went to pieces when he accidentally killed her. The doctors treating him say it's a wonder he made it out of the mountains last winter. It doesn't look as if he ever sought medical help for his fingers and toes."

"He's talking?" Carine asked.

"Some. He wants credit. Hell-" Nate bit off a sigh. "If he goes downhill or shuts up, investigators can just talk to my baby sister and wrap this one up."

Carine didn't wither under her brother's impatient scrutiny. "Will I get a medal?"

"Pain in the ass," he said.

The Rancourts were talking to the police, but only through their lawyer. They'd stopped ten miles up the notch road to call the police and, according to Nate, acted like victims.

She sipped some of Ty's coffee, made a face and dug money out of one of her endless barn coat pockets for the soda machine. "Antonia, I'll share a Coke with you, provided I don't catch what you've got."

Her sister tried to smile, but she was done in. North winked at her. "Long goddamn night and day for a pregnant lady."

"Long night and day for all of us."

They all went up to Gus's room. He bitched about having his leg in a cast and the prospect of missing even a minute of snowshoeing and cross-country skiing season, but he hadn't incurred any permanent damage. He'd be back on the ridge before the winter was out. He had no sympathy for Carine's brush with hypothermia. Apparently he'd offered to stop at her cabin for her to put on more appropriate clothing, and she'd refused.

"The doctor lectured me on wearing cotton," she told him. "It was an accident. I never wear cotton hiking, not even in the summer."

North smiled. Winters, even when they were being treated for their injuries, never liked being told something they already knew. They were a loving but contentious lot, and as he looked from green-at-the-gills Antonia to rangy Nate to brittle-haired Gus to Carine, blue-eyed and auburn-haired and not nearly as fragile as everyone thought, North knew he could never leave Cold Ridge. Not forever, anyway.

Val figured she was dreaming or maybe dead. She didn't care which, just so long as it didn't end. Manny was there beside her hospital bed, holding her hand and telling her he loved her, that Eric was okay, they were all okay.

He was crying. That part she could do without.

She touched his stubble of beard. She had all kinds of tubes and crap in her, but a doctor had told her she'd be fine, she was lucky. She liked that. Lucky.

Manny kissed her fingertips, and she felt his tears warm on her hand.

"I just didn't know what else to do," she said.

"I know. Neither did I."

Carine rented her apartment to a special education teacher who "loved" her bright colors, which was a good thing, because her landlord hadn't had citrus green and mango and lavender in mind when he'd agreed to let her paint the place. She moved back to her cabin on the edge of the meadow and cleaned it from top to bottom. Satisfied there were no more bats, mice, snakes or any of their droppings, bones and skins, she let herself relax.

It was a cold, bright winter morning, with six inches of fresh snow on the ground. She had her winter hiking books out, new crampons, her serious backpack, her sub-zero sleeping bag, her Nikon with her longest lens-she'd taken a Gus-approved workshop on winter camping, and it was definitely more complicated business than summer camping.

She was good on her own, she thought, filling up a water bottle at her kitchen sink. She didn't need anyone to complete her and never had. But Tyler North was her soul mate. There was no way around it.

He'd gone back to Hurlburt. She wasn't sure exactly what the teamleader of a special tactics team did, but she figured she'd find out-she had tickets to Florida. She'd never been on an air force base. She'd go and see how far she got before someone threw her out or pointed her in Ty's direction. She suspected that the incident in November had reinforced his notion that he was dangerous- that he was bad luck and could die on her and she deserved someone "safer." She wanted to disabuse him of that notion As far as she was concerned, it was just an excuse. He wasn't used to letting anyone in. His mother had been like that-it wasn't just the way he was raised. It was the way he was. Independent, solitary, good on his own.

Well, so was she. She'd redone her Web site and got back to work on her series of guidebooks, beginning with one on the White Mountains. She'd dug out her pictures, started jotting down descriptions of her favorite trails and listing people she needed to contact and places she needed to go.

She could work on the guidebook from Florida if she ended up staying. Air force guys moved around a lot. Ty might not stay in Florida. It didn't matter. Cold Ridge was her home-she belonged there in a way she never would anywhere else. But Ty was definitely her soul mate, and she wanted him to know what that meant to her. She hadn't really known what it meant last February when he'd canceled their wedding. She'd needed this past year to figure it out. In the past weeks, she'd thought of him-she'd thought of herself-on Cold Ridge in November with Gus run over, Eric Carrera near death, Hank Callahan tied up-all of them at the mercy of a determined murderer. What if she'd been killed chasing up the ridge after Eric? What if Ty had been killed rescuing Hank from the burning hut? Anything could have happened. But they'd done what they'd had to do.