Page 2 of High Country Escape
Debra shook her head. “No. I think Betty must have been before either of you. I was hoping he said something about her. Or you found something that belonged to her. Anything to hint at what happened to her. Did he ever talk about another little girl, with strawberry blond hair and blue eyes?”
“No.” Roxanne shook her head. “No. There was no other girl.” She pushed back her chair and hurried away, stumbling on the threshold. She groped her way into the driver’s seat of the car and hit the starter button. Only then did she look toward the coffee shop again. But Debra hadn’t followed her. She could stillsee the woman in profile, sipping her hot chocolate at the table by the window.
Roxanne took a deep breath, counting. Holding it. Releasing slowly. She closed her eyes against the tears that stung and waited while the panic subsided.Leave it, she told herself.Leave it in the past. Ledger can’t hurt you now. You’re safe here.
She wanted to believe the words. Some of the time she did. She wanted to believe them all of the time, but she wondered if she ever would.
“Okay, I thinkI’ve fixed the problem.” Dalton Ames nodded toward the computer screen in front of him. “Now you can access the calendar from the protocols section, so if you want to know when you last treated a case of hypothermia, you can pull it up with a couple of keystrokes.”
“I don’t know how often we’d use a feature like that, but it’s amazing you can do that.” Fellow search and rescue volunteer Caleb Garrison leaned over Dalton’s shoulder and studied the screen. The two men were at Eagle Mountain Search and Rescue headquarters, installing the new software Dalton had designed for the organization.
“The whole idea is that everything cross-references to everything else,” Dalton said. “You can search our history of callouts by the type of injuries treated, time of year or even time of day. If you want to know how many children were treated in a given time period, you can create a report for that. And I thought it might be handy to know the types of calls we see most often at different times of year. Maybe we can do some public education to try to reduce particular calls in a particular area, or even work with the highway department to identify places with the most accidents that we end up responding to.”
Caleb nodded. “That’s a great idea. Of course, you can’t educate for everything. Some people are always going to take unnecessary risks, and the weather is always going to be unpredictable.”
“If nothing else, knowing that we see more sprains in July could help when it came to maintaining our inventory of supplies,” Dalton said.
“It could,” Caleb agreed. “And it could help us plan training sessions for the kinds of incidents we most need to be prepared for at various times of year. And track that everyone is up-to-date on all their certifications.”
“We do a good job of that already, I think,” Dalton said. “And some of the veterans, like Tony Meisner, can probably tell you off the top of their heads that August is the biggest month for broken bones while in January we see more accidents on Dixon Pass.”
“Yes, but everyone doesn’t know that stuff,” Caleb said. “Anything we can do to automate information to take a burden off volunteers is going to be helpful.”
Dalton nodded. He had already put in more than a hundred hours on this software, though it was a labor of love. Of course, if it worked out well, he hoped to sell the program to other emergency responders. He’d already had success selling the reservation software he had designed for his parents’ Jeep rental business. That software, along with a few apps he had created in his spare time, was already bringing in tidy sums.
Still, it wasn’t all about the money. He wanted to give back to the organization that had welcomed him and given him a focus beyond his computer. He figured most of the volunteers felt the same. The work demanded so much of them all, but it also challenged them and allowed them to make a real difference in people’s lives.
“Are we good to go, then?” Caleb asked.
“I think so.” Dalton returned to the computer’s home page, the Eagle Mountain Search and Rescue logo filling the screen. “I’m sure more bugs will pop up as we use the software more, but I should be able to fix them.”
“Thanks.” Caleb shouldered his backpack. “I need to get going. Danielle has a new contract and she needs me to watch the baby. Now that Lily is crawling, Danielle has a hard time getting anything done in her studio with her around. Lily thinks all the clay and stuff are toys.”
Dalton tried not to imagine what “stuff” baby Lily might want to play with in Danielle’s studio. Caleb’s wife worked as a forensic reconstructionist, using the skulls of the dead to re-create how they would have looked in life.
After Caleb left, Dalton shut down the computer, locked up the building and drove back into town. He had just enough time to grab coffee before his afternoon tour at Alpine Jeep. Coming into the shop, he almost collided with a woman with long purple-red hair. “Sorry about that,” he said, reaching out to steady her.
She smiled. “It’s okay.” She looked him up and down. “You can run into me anytime.”
He stepped back, not sure how to respond. His brother Carter would have come up with something smart and flirty to say in return, but Dalton had always been better at typing than talking. “Uh, see you around,” he stammered and went inside.
As he moved toward the front counter, he looked back over his shoulder in time to see the woman get into the driver’s seat of a black Volkswagen Beetle. “Her name is Debra. She’s single, but she’s doesn’t know how long she’ll stay in town.”
He turned to find the barista, May Delgado, grinning at him. “Why are you telling me about her?” he asked.
May shrugged. “I thought you might be interested.”
He glanced toward the Beetle, which was backing out of the parking spot. Was he interested? He only had a fleetingimpression of the woman—not an unpleasant one, but not particularly memorable, either. “I don’t even know her,” he said.
“That’s how most relationships start, isn’t it?” May asked. “Two people who don’t know each other—then they do.”
He shook his head and leaned on the front counter. “Just the usual, May.”
“Double mocha, coming up.” She turned to the coffee machine. “If Debra doesn’t interest you, you just missed a pretty brunette who said she’s new to town. I think she’s renting one of Robbie Lusk’s tiny houses. Her name is Roxanne.”
“Are you playing matchmaker or something?” he asked.
“Not me. But single people are going to match up with other single people. And I’m in a position to know about most people in town—at least the tea and coffee drinkers.” She turned and slid a cup toward him. “Roxanne is a tea drinker,” she added.