rose in the truck’s headlights, mixing with thin tendrils of the summer’s first rain.
Chuck kept his foot pinned to the brake as the oncoming vehicle—an Estes Park police cruiser, siren silenced and emergency lights extinguished—flashed past. Janelle clambered back to the bench seat between the girls. Ignoring the police car, she pointed through the windshield at the resort entrance ahead.
Chuck accelerated before sliding to a stop once more when a shiny, blue, single-cab pickup, the words “Y of the Rockies, Estes Park, Colorado” stenciled on its side, shot around the far corner of the lodge in pursuit of the police car. As the truck passed, Chuck caught sight of its driver hunched over the steering wheel.
“Parker,” Chuck said. He watched over his shoulder as the truck chased the police car across the Y of the Rockies compound.
Janelle pulled Rosie close and stroked the girl’s damp forehead. “Not your concern,” she said. “Not now.”
Chuck punched the gas. The rear tires spat loose rocks as the truck sped up the sloping drive and out of the shallow valley. The pickup bounced onto the paved road leading to Estes Park, the gateway tourist town at the east entrance to Rocky Mountain National Park, high in the mountains northwest of Denver.
Chuck gunned the truck toward the center of town and glanced out the side window to see, through breaks in trees, the police cruiser and Parker’s pickup racing along the far side of the broad rectangle of well-tended grass play fields, more than a quarter mile across, that marked the center of Y of the Rockies, the former Young Men’s Christian Association training center turned rustic resort and corporate retreat. The cruiser and truck sped down the row of buildings lining the west side of the fields. The buildings, catty-corner across the expanse of grass from the lodge and conference center, included the resort’s gift shop, outdoor-gear rental center, and log cabin museum. Beyond the museum were the resort’s two dormitories.
Through one last break in the trees, Chuck watched as the police cruiser and Parker’s pickup truck passed large, new Falcon House, home to the resort’s international crew of summer workers. The car and truck slid to a stop facing the second dormitory, ramshackle Raven House, home for the past two months to Chuck’s group of field school students.
In the rearview mirror, Chuck caught sight of Janelle staring out the window at the police cruiser and Parker’s truck.
She uttered a single, strangled word as she stroked Rosie’s forehead: “Clarence.”
Rosie whimpered from the back seat as Chuck sped toward Estes Park, his thoughts, like Janelle’s, torn.
Why were the police and Parker headed for Raven House? What sort of mischief might Chuck’s students have gotten themselves into in the middle of the night? And as for Clarence—Janelle’s brother and one of Chuck’s two field school team leaders—Janelle’s concern was well grounded. It wasn’t much of a stretch to think Clarence might have gotten himself in some sort of trouble.
Janelle tapped on the face of her phone as Chuck crossed Elkhorn Avenue and braked to a stop at the Estes Park Medical Center emergency entrance. Already, the smattering of rain was gone, replaced by a cold wind whipping beneath the covered entryway.
“Anything?” he asked Janelle as he threw the truck into park.
She shook her head. “No reply. He must still be asleep.” A beat passed. “Right?”
“Right,” Chuck repeated, agreeing with what they both wanted to believe.
He hurried into the hospital with Rosie in his arms, Janelle and Carmelita close behind. A gray-haired woman in blue scrubs rose from behind a computer at the front of the hospital’s compact emergency room—three curtained compartments on one side, portable pieces of medical equipment sheathed in plastic along the opposite wall. The woman’s nametag identified her as Irene, R.N. She pressed a button on her computer keyboard before stepping around the counter and putting a hand on Rosie’s arm.
At the nurse’s touch, Rosie lifted her head from Chuck’s shoulder. Despite the drained look on her face, she smiled beatifically at the woman.
Chuck’s heart swelled at the sight of Rosie’s smile. The nurse directed him to lay Rosie in a wheeled gurney in the nearest of the three unoccupied compartments.
“You doing okay, hon?” she asked, leaning over the gurney.
“Yeppers,” Rosie declared in her little-girl version of her grandfather’s raspy voice. She rose on her elbows. “I’m doing grrrreat!”
Janelle dug her fingers into Chuck’s biceps.
The nurse turned from Rosie to Chuck and Janelle and asked doubtfully, “Sick little girl?”
“Really sick,” Janelle asserted. “We think she had a seizure.” Her eyes went to Rosie. “Thank God,” she breathed.
“It’s good she’s doing better now.” The nurse patted one of Janelle’s hands, still gripping Chuck’s arm. “Why don’t we get her checked in for the M.D.?”
Carmelita curled up on a hard plastic seat next to Rosie’s wheeled bed, wrapped her arms around her drawn-up knees, and closed her eyes while the nurse set about taking Rosie’s temperature and blood pressure. Before the nurse finished, a tall, broad-shouldered young man pushed through double doors at the back of the emergency room. A shock of bleached-blond hair tumbled to just above the man’s bright, emerald-blue eyes. A deep cleft bisected his square chin, and a strand of white shells, visible in the V-neck of his scrub top, complemented a blond soul patch perched below his lower lip. A nametag on his left breast read Gregory, M.D.
Chuck straightened to his full six feet, but the ER doc still had him by two or three inches. The doctor looked far too young to be a physician, in the same way Janelle, slender and girlish at twenty-eight, looked far too young to be the mother of a pair of girls six and eight years old.
Unlike the doctor’s thick, blond locks, Chuck’s sandy-brown hair was thin and sparse, with more than a hint of gray. Crows’ feet cut deep into the sides of Chuck’s blue-gray eyes, the result of more than two decades of work outdoors on archaeological digs across the Southwest. His lean build contrasted sharply with the linebacker-like physique of the doctor.
As he crossed the tile floor in his slip-on clogs, the M.D. gave Janelle, in her fitted blouse and form-hugging jeans, a full once-over. Chuck’s eyes went to Janelle as well.
His young wife was Carmelita all grown up, olive-skinned and slender, dark, lustrous hair framing hazel eyes flecked with gold, a petite, upturned nose, and full lips.
The doctor stumbled and came to a stop, staring at Janelle.
Color rose in Chuck’s cheeks as the doctor finally turned his attention to Rosie. “Well, hello there,” he said, bending over the gurney, his voice warm and upbeat.
Rosie beamed up at him. “Are you a real doctor?”
“Why, yes. Yes, I am.”
“Do you know how to ski?”
The doctor cocked his head. “As a matter of fact, I do.”
Rosie’s words fell over one another. “I knew it. It’s because you live here, isn’t it? Chuck says everybody who lives in the mountains knows how to ski. I get to learn how this winter. My name’s Rosie. My sister learned how last year, but I didn’t because I didn’t want to. But now I want to because we live in the mountains, just like you. In Durango. We don’t live in New Mexico anymore. Do you know where that is?”
The doctor nodded, providing all the encouragement Rosie needed.
“We’re living at Y of the Rockies for the summer,” she said. “All summer. It’s a resort. It’s fancy. Chuck says it isn’t, but I think it is. I got to ride a horse. It’s fun. We live in a cabin in the woods. But sometimes