Montana Miracle

“They’re a waste of time,” she said, echoing her mother’s words from years ago when she’d asked why they didn’t do anything for Christmas. She’d stopped caring about holidays around the same time she stopped asking about them. “We never noticed them very much.”

“By the way, how are Frank and Irene?”

“I haven’t heard from them since…” She had to think about that one. Contact with her parents was rare. They left, and when they thought about it, they called. Kate was used to it. She’d been on her own since she was a teenager. “I guess it was in July sometime. They were in Borneo working on some irrigation project.”

He sat back in the chair. “Fascinating people,” he said. “Lousy parents.”

She didn’t argue with that. “They are what they are, and it’s not important,” she said, cutting off that discussion as she stood holding the folder and envelope.

“Kate?” he said when she would have left.

She turned to look at him. “Something else?”

“I’m not expecting miracles on this, but anything you can find I’ll use.”

She nodded and as she crossed to the door, she glanced at the still-frozen image on the monitor, the man and that smile. A real challenge. She tossed over her shoulder, “Keep that spot in the special open.” She looked back at James before she went out the door. “Maybe the cover.”

SNOW WAS BEAUTIFUL in pictures and on greeting cards, but that was the only experience Kate had ever had with the white stuff. She had no idea that in real life it could be blinding, even in the early evening, or that it could be driven by wind so hard that it shook a car and made it tremble, even though the car was a sturdy sedan she’d rented at the airport two hours before.

She had no concept of cold bone-chilling it penetrated the car windows while the heater fought fiercely to defeat it. Between cursing the weather and cursing herself for driving out here without checking the weather first, she maneuvered the car along the winding, hilly road that climbed into the Montana wilderness. The last sign for Bliss had said twenty miles, and the longer she drove, the more she thought a man like Dr. Parish couldn’t possibly be anywhere near this godforsaken place.

The man was used to fast cars, luxury, pampering, leggy blondes. None of which would be out this way. At least not a leggy blonde with any sense at all. The idea made her laugh. She was beginning to feel like a dumb-blonde joke. She squinted at the road ahead. She was the punch line. All for a story. Then again, she would do just about anything for a good story. Her parents went to some primitive place to build water systems. She went to some primitive place for a story. She was more their daughter than she’d realized.

As she frowned at that thought, the car skidded slightly to the left. Before she could panic, it found traction again on the curve and settled on the road. Another sign for Bliss was caught in the headlights—ten more miles. She glanced at the clock on the dash. Five-thirty, yet it was so dark it might as well have been the middle of the night, and road visibility was almost nil.

The snow she’d driven into fifteen minutes ago had been falling in this area long enough to drift high on both sides of the highway. Now it was building up on the channel of the windshield wipers with each swipe.

She should have stopped at the first sign of snow and found a motel, then waited this out in warmth and safety. Parish wasn’t going anywhere, but she’d been anxious to get to Bliss. That excitement for a new assignment had been building on the plane while she went over the Parish file in detail. Now she was convinced there was a dynamite story hidden in the Montana wilderness. Mac Parish hadn’t just left: he’d gone into hiding.

Kate sensed it wasn’t just a case of Mac’s going back to his birthplace or being a glorified baby-sitter for the kid. He had no adult family left. Both parents were long gone and his only brother had died in an accident months ago. None of that added up to motivation for what he’d given up.

A house in Malibu on the cliffs over the ocean had been sold. His collection of sports cars was gone. His spot in the high-end cosmetic-surgery practice had been filled by another doctor within a month of his leaving. He wasn’t coming back. He’d wiped out everything that would have brought him back.

The car skidded again on the icy road and seemed almost to float, as if the back of the car was about to trade places with the front. She hit the brakes at the same time she remembered reading that she shouldn’t hit the brakes, but just steer into the slide. By the time she figured that out, it was too late.

The car spun the snowy road in a full circle, a slow-motion ballet of weirdness. Slowly, ever so slowly, it miraculously stopped dead in the center of the road and facing the right direction. Kate exhaled a shaky sigh of relief, until she realized that anyone who came around the corner was going to hit her. She was a sitting duck if she stayed there, but she was afraid to drive any farther.

She sat forward, swiping at the rapidly fogging windows. Beyond the laboring windshield wipers all she could see was the reflecting of the headlights in the snow.

She stretched to her right as far as the seat belt allowed to brush at the foggy side window. She was almost certain she could see a dark shadow out there, maybe ten feet away. A bank of snow? It had to be the side of the road. Carefully she inched the car toward it, until she was pretty sure she was off the main part of the road, then stopped.

She put on her flashers and sank back in the seat with relief. The heater was working while the car idled, and her clothes were keeping her snug enough. The corduroy jacket, shirt and jeans were fine, and her boots kept her feet warm. She could wait a bit, see if the snow let up and then go on to Bliss. Just wait. That was all she had to do.

She turned on the radio, hoping to get a weather report, but there was little to no signal. Every station was filled with static, and when she gave up, it hit her that the snow might not be stopping any time soon. What if it got worse? What if she was stuck here indefinitely? What if she was stranded in the high country of Montana in a blizzard? Her gas wouldn’t last forever. One glance at the gauge and she knew that was true. Just under a quarter of a tank.

Her cell phone. She could call for help. She released her seat belt and reached for her purse sitting on top of the reading material about Dr. Parish. She found her phone and flipped it open. Her heart sank when she realized there was no signal.

“Great, just great,” she muttered, then hugged herself and stared out the windshield at the blinding storm. What was it the car-rental agent had said when Kate told her she was heading up here? Snow flurries, that was it. Even Kate knew that this beyond flurries.

She sat back at the same time a light came out of nowhere behind her. The glare of high headlights almost blinded her in the rearview mirror as she tried to make out who or what had arrived. The heavy throb of a big engine vibrated in the air, and she shifted, twisting, trying to see something. Was it a snowplow? Maybe a tow truck? Did they cruise around here in bad weather, knowing that someone would get stuck sooner or later? That made sense to her.

But what also made sense was people prowling these roads, looking for stranded motorists. She’d read enough stories about people who thought they were getting help and ended up robbed, beaten or dead, or all of the above. And she was alone. Completely alone. Unable to run. Then she saw someone out there, a large shadow cutting through the glare of the lights. She turned around, and just as she hit the button to lock all the doors, someone knocked on her window.

The shadow. A huge dark shadow was out there. And any relief was gone. She reached for her purse again, fumbled in it and closed her hand around a small cylinder of pepper spray, thankful that she’d thought to move it from her checked luggage to her purse when she left the airport in the rental car.

She held it tightly as she touched the button for the window with her other hand. As soon as the window started down, icy air rushed into the car’s interior and she stopped it before it went lower than an inch or two. She squinted into the night, still unable to make out the features of the hulk out there.

Then a deep, rough voice demanded, “Are you alone?”

Chapter Two

Kate gripped the pepper spray so tightly it made her fingers ache. “No, of course not,” she said without thinking. “I’m not alone.”

She saw movement and the stranger got a lot closer, blocking some of the cold and wind behind him with his bulky body. A light flashed on, blinding her momentarily until it shifted to the seat behind her. “Is someone else in there with you?”

She used her free hand to shade her eyes. “Could you put that light out?” When the light was gone, and she dropped the pepper spray into her lap and grabbed her phone. She held it up so he could see it. “I meant, I was about to call someone.” That was it. She was calling someone, and for all he knew, it was a man, a man who knew where she was, a man who could be on his way right then. “I’m going to call—” She grabbed the first name that came to her “—James. I’m calling James to let him know I’m on my way and let him know where I am and what I’m doing,” she said as she turned the phone on. “He’ll take care of this.”

“If you say so,” the stranger said, and he was gone.

Kate put the window back up and looked at the phone, a bit unnerved that her hand was less than steady. The throb of the idling truck behind her was still there, but the man wasn’t by her car. She looked at the phone, pressed the search button for roadside service, saw it flash on the screen, then pushed the send button, praying the call would go through someway.

When she pressed the phone to her ear, she was startled by a sharp beeping sound. She pulled it back and looked at the phone’s LED readout. The “no signal” caution flashed in red on the screen. She turned the phone off, uttered a very unladylike expletive and sank back in the seat. “Damn it all,” she muttered, wondering if she’d end up a statistic.

The truck. It was still there, the engine rumbling and the reflection of headlights in her rearview mirror shining in her eyes. He hadn’t left yet, and maybe she could get his attention before he took off. If he’d been intent on robbing or killing her, he would still be at the window, trying to get her to open the door.

She dropped the phone onto the seat and hit the horn, once, twice, then again for one long, extended blare. In moments he was at her window, knocking on the glass. The pepper spray was in her lap, and she had the doors locked. She opened the window a crack and shivered at the sudden blast of frigid air.

“What’s going on?” he asked. “Your James isn’t coming?”

She clutched the pepper spray tightly as she stared at the hulking figure that was beginning to get a bit of definition. A heavy jacket with a high collar and what looked like a cowboy hat pulled low for protection.

“There isn’t any signal,” she admitted reluctantly.

“I would have been surprised if there was out here in this weather,” the man said.

“How far is it to Bliss?”

“That’s where you’re heading?”

“Just how far is it?”

“Too far for you to make it in this thing,” he said.

That feeling of no control when the car head slid on the road was transferring to no control over anything at the moment. “If the storm lets up a bit, I could do it, couldn’t I?”

“Maybe, if you have chains.”

She wouldn’t know what to do with chains even if she had them on the seat beside her. “I don’t know if I have any,” she said.