Loe raamatut: «Strange Bedfellows»

Chapter Two

Boom, and the solid wall of mountain was gone. Like a sand castle undermined by an incoming tide.

One moment there had been a mountain wall safely straight and solid on the other side of the two-lane highway, and the next moment the Jeep was sliding sideways onto the wide gravel shoulder of the road, surrounded by a river of living mud and boulders, being swept along down the hillside as if the vehicle weighed no more than a feather.

The only thing that stopped the Jeep from moving as one with the mud and rock tumbling down the steep embankment was the strong guardrail at the side of the road, which caught and held the vehicle.

Many things happened in the first few seconds after the Jeep finally slid and bumped to a halt. For one, Cassandra realized that she was screaming, and she immediately stopped, slapping both hands over her mouth just to be certain a small, involuntary squeak couldn’t still escape.

Which was a pity, because she could have used one of those hands to prudently cover her wide-open eyes, so that she couldn’t look out the window and watch the whole mountain rushing past the Jeep’s headlights.

Then Sean took over, exchanging places at the wheel with a numb and clumsy but still pathetically willing-to-move Cassandra, and trying to use her four-wheel drive to extricate them from their precarious position before more of the mountainside gave way and they could be swept farther into disaster.

It didn’t take more than a few tense, gear-grinding, wheel-spinning minutes for Cassandra to be pretty certain that they were well and truly stuck. Hearing Sean Frame’s fairly eloquent if low-pitched string of profanity as he shoved the gear stick into park and turned off the ignition nailed it down for her. Still, when she could pry her hands from her mouth, it was to hear herself ask, “We’re stuck, aren’t we?”

“Yes, Ms. Mercer, we’re stuck,” Sean answered, running a hand through his hair, then exhaling his breath in an angry whoosh. “If it weren’t for the guardrail—but never mind that. Someone else from the meeting will be along soon enough, I’m sure.”

“I—I was the last one to leave the school,” Cassandra told him. “Smitty let me lock up.”

He sliced her a quick, angry look. “The janitor allowed you to lock the school? That’s not in your job description, is it, Ms. Mercer?”

Cassandra rolled her eyes, wondering if the man ever listened to himself speak. “No, Mr. Frame, it’s not. But there was no reason for Smitty to be late for his dinner because I wanted to get a few files from my office, now, was there?”

He lowered his head, reaching up to rub at the back of his neck. “No. No, I suppose not. I apologize. Sometimes I come on too strong, don’t I?”

Cassandra wanted to stick her little finger in her ear and give it a shake, just to clear the passageway. She couldn’t have heard the guy right. “You’re a businessman, Mr. Frame,” she said in reply, wondering how her parents had managed to instill such good manners in their only child, when that same only child was obviously harboring a second personality, one that wanted to say, “Strong, Sean baby? Do the words like a Mack truck mean anything to you?”

A clap of thunder equal to the decibel output of five Rolling Stones concerts playing at the same time shook the mountain.

Cassandra couldn’t help herself. She whimpered. “Oh, God,” she groaned, then pulled her feet onto the seat, wrapped her arms around her lower legs and buried her head against her knees. “Watch for the next lightning bolt, would you? Please,” she mumbled. “And then count one-one thousand, two-one thousand, until we hear the next boom, okay? I want to know how far away that lightning is.”

“How very scientific, Ms. Mercer,” Sean commented, then added, “or we could simply pretend that God is bowling, and the sound we hear is the pins going down? That’s the fairy tale they told us at the home.”

Cassandra turned her head slightly toward him and looked at him through the deepening dusk, forgetting about the storm raging outside. “The home? Are you an orphan, Mr. Frame?”

That would explain a lot. He was urbane and sophisticated, yes, but she hadn’t been able to help noticing that he had this edge to him. It was a slightly rough edge, as if he had one foot firmly anchored in the tough but civilized corporate world, and the other somewhere to the left of success, standing in a more human, fallible, even vulnerable place.

His smile revealed straight white teeth, with one top tooth just the slightest bit crooked, showing that he’d never had braces. “And here you were, Ms. Mercer, all this time believing I’d been hatched from an egg like the other reptiles. But, no, I wasn’t an orphan. Not in the ordinary sense.”

She frowned. “There’s an un-ordinary sense?”

“Actually, there is, and it’s becoming more frequent all the time. You see, my father abandoned us before I was born, and my mother had this habit of forgetting where she’d put me from time to time. Unfortunately, she wouldn’t give up custody so I could be adopted when I was still young and reasonably adorable.”

Cassandra didn’t hear the next clap of thunder, much less react to it. “That’s horrible!”

“It was all right, once I got used to it. I’d spend time with her, then in the home, and occasionally, in someone’s house as a foster child. It was an interesting childhood, and one I strove to overcome from the time I was old enough to know what I wanted. What I needed to do to get what I wanted. It was also a childhood I made certain Jason avoided. Three miles, Ms. Mercer.”

“Three—oh! The lightning is only three miles away? It might as well be on top of us!” Cassandra buried her head against her knees once more, then flinched as a tumbling boulder crashed into the side of the Jeep, mashing it more firmly against the guardrail.

To keep her mind occupied—to keep from screaming—she concentrated on the other things Sean Frame had said. She looked at him again, wishing it were darker so she couldn’t see his intelligent hazel eyes, his incongruously long, lush black lashes.

“Your own childhood must have made it doubly important for you to have Jason raised in a firm family situation,” she commented at last. “And yet, after allowing him to live with his mother since he was born, you’ve now taken total custody and moved him here to Grand Springs. How does that equate with this image of permanency you’re talking about?”

He looked at her for a long moment, during which Cassandra realized that he was talking, telling her about his personal life, only to keep her mind off their current predicament, off the fact that they might, at any moment, become a part of the mountain. That was rather sweet of him—which didn’t mean that she liked him. She couldn’t possibly like him!

“Sally remarried about two years ago,” he explained. “When Jason was fifteen. He didn’t take it well, didn’t care much for Bob, her new husband. And I’m pretty sure he doesn’t much like the fact that there’s now a new baby in the household.”

He shook his head. “Sally doesn’t know the first thing about dealing with teenage boys, I’m afraid, not that she was much better when Sean was younger. I tried to be there for him, but I was building my company and working ninety-hour weeks. And a child should be with his mother, or so the books say. When he ran away from home for the third time in a month, she called me in hysterics and said it was my turn. I agreed, wholeheartedly, and Jason moved in with me. Now, instead of fighting Sally’s ridiculous coddling of my son, I’m fighting your off-the-wall methods, which are equally softhearted and maddening. And Jason is still—what do you call it?”

“Acting out,” Cassandra told him, bristling. “And now I understand why! How could you not have told me about the new stepfather? The new baby? Don’t you know that these things have a profound impact on a boy Jason’s age? He loves his mother, and now his mother has a new man in her life, a new child. Of course he’s feeling displaced, unloved, passed over.”

“Oh, really. You should have seen his bedroom, Ms. Mercer. From the time he was born, that kid had everything he ever wanted.”

“Material things are no substitute for love. I’m telling you, he was feeling displaced, shunted aside. And then his mother goes and proves it to him by all but throwing him out of the house, straight at a man who pulled himself up from nothing and probably thinks a child like Jason is spoiled rotten and in need of a good smack upside the head to settle him down.”

“There you go—more mumbo jumbo, more textbook pap meant to—”

But Cassandra cut him off. “God!” she exclaimed, laying her head back against the seat as she slumped down on her spine. “That poor kid! I’m surprised all he’s done is break a couple of windows and almost fail a couple of classes.”

“Let’s just hope you haven’t told Jason that almost failing a couple of classes and breaking a couple of windows is permissible behavior because he now lives with his father instead of his mother,” Sean shot back, reaching up a hand to jerk loose his designer tie and then roughly unbutton the collar of his designer shirt. “Or is this the new ‘in’ thing with guidance counselors—explaining away unacceptable behavior and placing all the blame on the parents and not the kid?”

“Mr. Frame,” Cassandra began, pulling herself upright on the seat. “You have no idea how difficult it is to deal with the teenage child. I see what he does in school, yes, but unless I am informed as to his home background, his relationship with his parents, his general physical health—circumstances that are not apparent when I sit across the desk from a mulish young boy who thinks he hates everything and everyone in his life when, in reality, he is simply a painfully unhappy lump of insecurity and fear—well, it just makes my job all that more difficult, that’s all.”

“So you forgive him, play cheerleader, tell him to go away and sin no more, and you think you’ve done enough? This is your main problem, Ms. Mercer, as I’ve said time and again—your psychobabble methods. Where’s the discipline, the punishment? When does he learn that all actions have their consequences? Surely not in Ms. Cassandra Mercer’s office.”

Cassandra felt her mouth open, heard words coming from it, and still couldn’t believe what she said. And, to her everlasting embarrassment, the words she had said, the words that hung in the stuffy air inside the Jeep for long moments, were “You, sir, are a horse’s ass!”

“That does it!” Sean shouted over the roar of the storm as he started the Jeep, slamming the vehicle back into gear and easing his foot onto the gas pedal. “Either we get out of here or I’m going to murder you,” he said as he began rocking the Jeep, throwing it into reverse, pushing it into low gear—and getting them nowhere.

Cassandra was furious. “Oh, stop it! We’re stuck, and that’s that!”

“Damn it!” he exploded as he turned off the ignition and slammed his fist against the steering wheel before pressing his head back against the headrest. “I’d rather be in Alaska, snowbound with a polar bear!”

Cassandra pleated the skirt of her long, full cotton dress with her fingers, wondering why her anger had felt so good, why she suddenly felt so free, so liberated. Why had watching the unflappable Sean Frame lose his cool made her feel so much more in control?

Who knew?

Who cared?

She only knew she liked the feeling. “Oh, really, Mr. Frame?” she shot back, staring straight at him. “Well, I’d rather be tossed overboard into a school of hungry piranha. Or is that piranhas? Piranhi?”

He turned his head on the headrest and eyed her carefully, assessingly. She saw the way his open, sparkling-white shirt collar pressed against the side of his tanned chin, and her stomach did a small flip. “I’d rather,” he bit out challengingly, “be in orbit for six months with a rabid rhesus monkey.”

So, he wanted to play “can you top this insult?” did he? She narrowed her eyes, her heart pounding. “I’d rather be trapped in an elevator with an amateur rap group on their way to their first audition.”

“I’d rather be locked in a bank vault with the entire Mormon Tabernacle Choir—all of them singing the Hallelujah Chorus and suffering with laryngitis.”

This was fun!

“Ha! Kid stuff!” Cassandra exclaimed joyfully, then struggled for another comeback. “I’d rather—I’d rather be shipwrecked with Bill O’Reilly!”

Sean gave out a shout of laughter, then held up his hands in surrender. “You win, Cassandra. You win. Although, I must say, I didn’t know you had it in you.”

“Neither did I,” Cassandra answered quietly, frowning at her own audacity, then smiling as she realized he had addressed her by her first name.

Then Sean waved his right hand as if asking for silence. “I think I see something moving out there,” he said, using his sleeve to wipe steam off the inside of the window and peer into the now almost total darkness outside the Jeep. “Hand me my flashlight.”

“Since you asked so nicely, Sean,” Cassandra grumbled, remembering again how much she really didn’t like this man, although it had been rather nice to hear him call her Cassandra instead of Ms. Mercer. But that didn’t change the fact that he probably couldn’t find the word please with half a dozen flashlights!

“Here,” she said, shoving the thing at him. “Maybe it’s Bullwinkle Moose come to rescue us. Because, if you haven’t noticed, there aren’t any lights to be seen anywhere below us, except those at the hospital. The substation must have been knocked out by the slide, considering it’s only about a half mile higher up on the mountainside.”

Sean didn’t answer her but only cursed as he reached to roll down the window, then realized that the Jeep had push-button controls and the engine had to be engaged in order to operate them. He turned the ignition key to the “accessories” position with a determined hand, then lowered the window and stuck the flashlight outside. “There! Over there! Some nut’s trying to walk out of here. Hey! Buddy! We’re over here!”

Cassandra leaned across the seat, her chin on Sean’s shoulder as they both peered into the rain and darkness. “I see him!” she shouted excitedly, earning herself a dark look from her companion. “Sorry,” she added more softly. “But I do see him. If he can make it through the mud, why can’t we? I mean, anything has to be better than spending the rest of this miserable night up here.”

She didn’t say it, but the words with you hung in the air, heard by them both. She took off her glasses, which she really only needed for driving—but wore almost constantly—and which were steaming up, anyway, and placed them on the dashboard.

“Do you want to take the chance of being caught in another slide?” Sean leaned his head out the window, looking down. “There’s a boulder smack up against my door and the back door, holding both of them closed. Lovely dent in the metal, by the way. The road, if we could reach it from the shoulder, is nothing but a river of mud and boulders. We can’t get out your side because your doors are smashed up against the guardrail. If we do get out of here, it’s going to have to be through the back hatch.”

“If we could reach it? If we get out of here?” Cassandra moved her body a little closer to his. “Don’t you mean when we get out of here?”

He turned his head, looking at her from only mere inches away, then put his hand on hers, squeezing it—which was the first time she noticed that she had been gripping his shoulder tightly. “We’ll get out of here, Cassandra. I promise.”

Well, as long as he promises, her inner self said, even as Cassandra tried, and failed, to relax her hold on his shoulders.

Then Sean aimed the flashlight onto the muddy roadway once more, and at the man who now stood about twenty yards away from them, obviously not able to move closer without possibly injuring himself in the debris littering the roadside. “Do you think it’s really wise to try to walk out of here, sir?” he called over the sound of driving rain and crashing thunder.