Blackberry Summer

Everything inside Riley seemed to freeze. He didn’t think it was possible for a person to be even more cold without turning completely to ice, but somehow he managed it. “Sorry, what?”

Grover stared at him for a minute, then he cursed, looking uncomfortable. “You didn’t know yet.”

“I’ve been standing in the middle of the reservoir for the last twenty minutes. I don’t know a damn thing. What are you talking about?”

The sheriff looked apologetic, his wide, weathered face a little more red than it had been a moment ago. Despite their history together, there was no malice in his eyes now, only sympathy.

“Thought you knew. The fatality in the other wreck. They’re saying she’s your niece. Your sister’s kid. The one with the bookstore who was married to that rock star. Chris Parker. Sorry to break it to you so hard.”

Layla? Not Layla. He pictured her the last time he’d seen her at his mother’s house a week ago for dinner: her nose piercing and her battered combat boots and her choppy black hair. She was funny and smart and seemed to think he was among her cooler relatives because he’d lived out of the valley for so long.

He sagged a little, shaking violently now, and had to reach for the open door of his patrol car to support his weight.

He couldn’t think, couldn’t process anything but shock.

“Are you sure it’s her?” he asked, then couldn’t believe he sounded like every other victim’s family he’d ever had to notify. He was aware of it on some level, but he couldn’t help hanging on to whatever fragile, pathetic thread of hope he could find that maybe some terrible, cosmic mistake had occurred.

“Sorry, man. It’s her. No question. You didn’t hear the chatter on the radio?”

He remembered that moment he had turned it down out in the water. “No, not a word.”

“She’s been positively ID’d. A couple of the kids in the accident have only minor injuries and they confirmed the fatality was Layla Parker. The responding paramedics, uh, recognized her, too.”

Maura. Poor Maura. How would she ever survive? And his mother, losing a granddaughter. His family had already suffered a vast rift. Did they have to endure this unspeakable loss, too?

“You probably need medical attention,” the sheriff said after a moment, with surprising concern. Maybe he wasn’t a complete asshole after all. “The paramedics said you’ve been in the water basically since the Bradford car went in.”

Riley scrubbed at his face, unable to focus on anything but the crushing pain. “I’m all right. I just need to change my clothes.”

“You need something dry to put on? I can probably find something in the back of my unit. Wouldn’t come close to fitting, but I don’t suppose that matters at this point.”

“No, I should have something. Uh, thank you, Sheriff.”

The words clogged in his throat, given their track record, but Grover only nodded.

“You should be with your family right now,” he said. “Someone needs to tell your sister and your mom. Between my people and the state patrol, we should be able to take care of both scenes.”

He was right. Damn it, he was right. Dread lodged in his chest as he gazed after the sheriff, who returned to his vehicle for crime scene tape and the digital surveying equipment necessary to document the accident scene.

Riley had made a few notifications in his career. Not many, but a few back when he was a beat cop. Nothing like this, though. Never in his worst nightmare had he envisioned this scenario, having to tell his sister that her daughter was dead, his mother that she had lost a grandchild.

Numb to the bone, he climbed into the patrol car and turned over the engine. Air blasted him from the heater, prickling over his wet skin, but it did nothing to warm the icy ball in his gut.

He thought of Claire and her children, frightened and cold and hurt, and then of the incalculable, inconceivable pain he was about to inflict on people he loved. Claire had been hurt—Layla was dead, for God’s sake—because of him, because for a few heedless moments, he had been focused on taking down a suspect at the exclusion of all else.

The few whispers he’d heard around town since he’d been back seemed to ring in his head. Those who didn’t want him in Hope’s Crossing were right.

He didn’t belong here. He never should have come home.

A TERRIFYING SEA CREATURE clutched at her legs, yanking hard, tugging her down, down toward the inky, icy depths of Silver Strike Reservoir.

Her children. She had to get to her children. She fought the creature with all her might, pitting all the strength of a mama bear protecting her cubs. The creature howled, clamping down hard on an arm and a leg and tangling seaweed in her nose, around her face. He could have her, but damn it, she would not let him have her children. Claire fought harder, struggling against the constriction around her arm, gasping for air, fighting for her children’s lives….

A sudden clatter and a muttered imprecation pierced the nightmare and Claire blinked awake, her heart still pounding in her chest.

She was disoriented for a moment and couldn’t figure out why she hurt everywhere. Her mouth felt as if she’d been chewing newsprint and she had the vague sense of something being terribly wrong. For a long moment, she couldn’t quite remember what.

“Oh, good. You’re awake.”

Her mother’s face suddenly loomed large in her field of vision and Claire instinctively drew in a sharp breath.

For a moment, she couldn’t figure out what was so different and then it hit her. For the first time in Claire’s recent memory, her mother wasn’t wearing makeup—not even the lipstick she seemed to put on just for a trip to the bathroom. Ruth looked haggard, her eyes red-rimmed and shadowed.

“The kids. Where…are they?” Her throat felt scraped raw and that tangle of seaweed tickled her nostrils again. A nasal canula, she realized dimly. She was in a hospital bed, hooked up to monitors and machines, on oxygen.

“They’re fine,” her mother said calmly. “Owen has a broken arm and Macy needed a couple stitches in her forehead and has general aches and pains, but other than that, they’re just fine. Don’t you worry about them right now. They’ve been staying with Jeff and Holly since the accident.”

The single word triggered a sharp burst of memory, that snowy night after the Spring Fling, headlights flashing straight toward them in the darkness, her panicked jerk of the wheel to avoid a head-on…

And then, that terrible moment of sliding out of control, seeing the gap in the guardrail, knowing they were going over.

“Owen has a cast on his arm but that’s all. Macy cut her forehead just a little, but Jeff doesn’t even think she’ll have a scar.”

“Jordie?”

“Wrenched a shoulder, that’s all. Nothing broken.”

Claire sagged against the pillow. How much time had passed since the accident? A few hours? She glanced down and saw her left leg was in traction, a cast running from her toes to just below her knee. Her left arm sported a cast as well, a vivid purple against the white of the hospital sheets.

“You definitely had the worst of it,” Ruth said. “Sheriff Grover figures your car landed on the front driver’s side when it hit the water and your body absorbed most of the impact. That’s how you came to be so banged up while the kids are okay, for the most part.”

Claire closed her eyes, a little prayer of gratitude running through her head. All she remembered thinking in that split second that had seemed to drag on forever was that she’d killed her children.

“They’ve been begging to come see you,” Ruth said, fussing with the wrinkled edge of the blanket. “But I think Jeff has convinced them to wait until tomorrow, at least until you’re not so disoriented from your surgeries.”

“Surgeries?”

“Technically only one, I guess, but they did two things at once. They had to put pins in your arm and your ankle. You really did a number on yourself.”

Usually Ruth would have made that sort of statement in an accusing sort of voice, as if Claire had given herself a bad perm or pierced her eyebrow, but her mother’s quiet tone tipped Claire that something was off.

In addition to the hollow look in her mother’s eyes, she was acting far more nurturing than normal. She hadn’t yet made one complaint about how her knees were bothering her or how inconsiderate the nurses had been or about the bad food they served in the cafeteria. What wasn’t Ruth telling her?

Had she broken her back or something? She tried to wiggle her toes and was almost relieved when that tiny movement—plainly visible at the edge of the cast—sent pain scorching up her leg.

“Ow.”

“There, honey. Don’t try to move. Let me call the nurse. You need pain medication. Trust me on this.”