Page 1 of Wilderness Search (Eagle Mountain: Unsolved Mysteries #2)

Deputy Aaron Ames stood on the edge of the Colorado state highway and stared into the canyon below, his chest tight with dread.

A small white sedan was wedged, nose first, between boulders at the bottom of the canyon.

A passing motorist had spotted the glint of sun off the taillights and called to report the accident.

Aaron squinted, trying to detect any movement in the car.

Surely no one could survive a plunge like that.

The canyon had to be at least two hundred feet deep at this point.

“Search and rescue are on the way.” Jake Gwynn joined Aaron. The young deputy was close to Aaron’s age—thirty—with dark curly hair and the deep tan of an outdoorsman. “The highway department is sending a team to block off this lane. We’ll help with traffic control.”

Aaron turned his back to the canyon and studied the roadway.

This time of morning on a Sunday, there wasn’t much traffic.

Two lanes of pavement wound between rocky spires, sun glinting off the red granite peaks.

This stretch of the highway was fairly straight, without the hairpin curves in other sections.

“We haven’t had any rain lately,” he said.

“I wonder what sent the driver off the side?”

“No skid marks,” Jake pointed out. “I don’t see any signs of another driver or an animal or anything.” He glanced back into the canyon. “Unfortunately, some people choose to end things this way.”

Aaron grimaced, but any reply he might have made was cut off by a siren.

Seconds later, a large orange Jeep pulled in ahead of his sheriff’s department SUV.

The siren’s wail still echoed off the canyon walls as half a dozen volunteers piled out of the vehicle and began unloading equipment.

His sister, Bethany, waved. His two brothers, twins Carter and Dalton, were also search and rescue volunteers, but they must have been working when this call came in.

Sundays were a busy time for the family’s Jeep tour business.

SAR Captain Danny Irwin, a tall, lanky man in tactical pants and a blue Eagle Mountain Search and Rescue windbreaker, strode toward them. “Hey, Aaron, Jake.”

The men shook hands, then looked down into the canyon. “I haven’t seen any movement down there,” Aaron said.

“Any idea when this happened?” Danny asked.

“No telling,” Jake said. “No one’s reported anyone missing. It’s pure luck a passing motorist saw the wreck.”

Danny looked down at the pavement. “No skid marks.”

“Yeah,” Jake said. “So maybe we’ve got a suicide.”

“We’ll get down there and see what we can find.” Danny turned back toward the other volunteers.

“Get a plate number for us and we’ll call it in,” Jake said.

The highway department crew arrived to set up cones to close the lane to traffic, and Aaron went to help.

By the time he returned to the accident site, the SAR volunteers had staged on the narrow shoulder.

A man and a woman in climbing harnesses and helmets were beginning their descent into the canyon while other volunteers lined the roadside, watching.

An aluminum-framed litter waited at the ready.

Aaron started to join the volunteers, then stopped as his gaze fixed on one young woman, petite and slender, hair in a long blond braid down her back. Recognition jolted him—a knowing deep in his gut, more instinct than conscious knowledge.

“Kat?”

He hadn’t realized he had spoken out loud until she turned.

The same cool blond beauty—pale skin, blue eyes, delicate features that still haunted him.

But the look on her face—surprise, followed by such raw hurt—hit him like a kick in the gut.

It had always been like that with Kat—the very first time he had seen her he had felt the connection to his core.

He had fallen so hard, and the impact when they had parted still hurt.

She quickly masked her own pain with a cold disdain he remembered from their last encounters.

But instead of turning her back to him, she moved away from her friends, coming to stand beside him.

“Don’t call me Kat. My name is Willa Reynolds now.

” She spoke softly, so that he had to lean toward her to hear, and caught the soft scent of her hair, a sensory memory imprinted on his DNA.

But her words confused him. “You changed your name? Why?”

“I had to.” She spoke in a clipped, angry tone. “Gareth changed his, too. He’s just Gary now. Gary Reynolds. It makes it harder for the media and other people who want to harass us to find us.”

Her words pained him. He knew things had been tough for her, but not that desperate. “I’m sorry you felt you had to do that,” he said.

“Are you?” She glared at him and moved away once more.

He wanted to pull her back, to tell her how much he missed her. How sorry he was for the way things had ended between them. But what could he say? He had done the only thing he could under the circumstances, what he still believed was the right thing. Why couldn’t she respect that?

He had so many questions he would probably never know the answers to. What was she doing here in Eagle Mountain, Colorado, anyway? Surely she hadn’t known he was here. But it was so unexpected, that they had each moved so far from their hometown and ended up in the same small town.

She returned, not to where she had been standing, but farther away, where another volunteer was doing something with ropes and the litter.

She moved in to help him, her back to Aaron.

She bent over, and he had a view of her shapely backside.

He forced himself to look away, not wanting to be caught ogling her.

Jake soon joined him. “I saw you talking to Willa,” Jake said, and nodded toward where Kat and a young man were moving the litter closer to the edge of the canyon.

Aaron would have to get used to thinking of her with her new name. “How long has she been with search and rescue?” he asked.

Bethany or one of his brothers hadn’t mentioned that Kat Delaney was with the group.

Surely one of them would have recognized her, whatever name she went by now.

Maybe not Bethany—she had moved to Eagle Mountain before things got really serious between Kat and Aaron.

But surely the twins would have remembered a woman who was so striking.

“She’s brand-new,” Jake said. “When Hannah went on maternity leave she recruited Willa to fill in for her. I’m pretty sure today is her first call.”

Aaron nodded. Jake’s wife, Hannah, a paramedic, was expecting their first child.

“The group is always short medical personnel,” Jake continued. “Willa is an RN, a new hire at the local clinic.”

Aaron and Kat—Willa—had met when he had delivered a prisoner for treatment at the emergency room where she worked in Waterbury, Vermont. Two thousand miles and a lifetime from here.

“I hear she’s single.”

Aaron turned to see Jake grinning at him.

Aaron shook his head and turned away. Willa was never going to forgive him for arresting her brother for murder.

Never mind that all the evidence had pointed to Gareth.

In the end, the district attorney hadn’t felt they had enough evidence to convict.

The case had never gone to trial, and Gareth Delaney and his sister, Kat, had moved away, leaving behind a lot of suspicions and unanswered questions.

Now they were here in Eagle Mountain. Kat was a chapter in Aaron’s life he considered closed.

But in a town this small, where it was impossible to avoid running into people, they would have to find a way to at least maintain a facade of distant politeness.

The prospect left a sour taste, but was it that different from the compromises people made every day for the sake of keeping peace?

He had learned to hold back anger at people who broke the law, and to keep his opinions about some things to himself, out of respect for others.

He could pretend he didn’t care about Kat anymore.

What was one more lie in the grand scheme of things?

Willa tried to concentrate on the knot she needed to tie, but every nerve vibrated with awareness of the man standing behind her.

Aaron Ames. Tall, dark and handsome Double A, as his partner on the Waterbury police force had referred to him.

The first time he had looked into her eyes and flashed his confident smile she had been lost. What were the odds of seeing him here, two thousand miles away from Vermont, in a town most people had never even heard of?

Had he somehow followed her here? Or worse, did he think she had followed him?

The idea shook her so badly she dropped one end of the rope.

“Take your time.” Caleb Garrison picked up the dropped rope and returned it to her.

A boyish-looking man with a mop of unruly blond hair, Caleb was helping train search and rescue rookies like Willa.

He had the kind of patience that probably came in handy at his day job, teaching history to college students. “You don’t need to rush,” he said.

She nodded, and this time tied the knot correctly.

Danny Irwin joined them. “Sheri and Ryan say they’re ready for the litter,” he said. “Send a body bag down, too.”

Willa swallowed a lump in her throat and nodded. As soon as she had seen the crumpled car, so far down below, she had told herself no one could have survived that plunge. Still, they always hoped for survivors.

“Just the one person in the vehicle?” Caleb asked.

“Seems so,” Danny said.

Willa stepped back and watched as Caleb and volunteer Carrie Andrews lowered the litter. She was here to give medical assistance, but the driver of the car was beyond that. Suicide—if this was suicide—was always hard, on the families, but on everyone else, too.