Danger at Clearwater Crossing
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Colleen Thompson
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17
Chapter 1
Sweat-soaked, shirtless and coated with a layer of the same muddy grime he had just wiped from his face, Mac Hale-Walker looked down from the debris heap on the rocky, tree-lined bank where he stood to the still-swollen Frio River. As a tangle of tree limbs wrapped up with barbed wire rushed past on the current, he weighed whether it was safe to risk a quick swim or if anyone—other than the gray-muzzled Labrador retriever who watched over him from the pile of old feed sacks Mac had stacked up for her—would give a damn if he were finally well and truly washed away.
His body ached with weariness after days of backbreaking labor in the June heat working to repair the flood-damaged river resort with its dozen rental cabins, days that only added to the weight of eight long years of grief and anxiety, bitterness and anger over losses beyond measure. What if he finally quit fighting so damned hard just to keep his head above water? What if, at long last, he quit worrying about whatever might come hurtling downstream next, waiting—
Mac scowled, cutting off the thought cold. Hell with that idea, since he knew all too well his death would, in some circles, be a cause for celebration. He would never give his enemies the excuse to host a grand fiesta, no matter how many bleak years he had to keep on spitting in the wind to spite them.
His thoughts were interrupted by a clunking sound, one loud enough to carry over the rushing water. Recognizing it as the slamming of a nearby car door, Roxy gave a gruff alarm-woof and attempted to raise herself from her nest before apparently deciding that her heart—or her hips—weren’t in it at the moment.
“I know, old girl,” he said as he attempted and then gave up on shaking out the filthy shirt. If these trespassers were going to drive right past the Closed Due to Flooding—Keep Out signs without reading, they’d have to deal with the sight of him looking like Sasquatch’s river rat cousin. “Some folks just aren’t worth the effort of climbing up out of your hammock.”
Tossing aside his crumpled shirt, Mac grabbed the same ax he’d been using to deal with some warped and splintered decking. Then he clambered up the bank, eager to eject what he figured were either gawkers or more of the thieving scavengers who’d been making off with whatever they could grab and flee with from the only property left to his name.
In most cases, his fearsome scowls and a few choice words would be more than enough to send them scurrying away. If not, however, he was perfectly prepared to resort to harsher methods—methods that might not earn him any five-star reviews for hospitality but would go a long way toward allowing him to vent the frustrations he’d been carrying around for far too long.
After a struggle to suppress a yawn, Sara Wakefield wriggled in the driver’s seat of her Honda then pinched the inside of her lip with her teeth—anything to keep herself awake as she negotiated the bumps and ruts of a muddy, washed-out road between two walls of green so thick that she felt almost crushed between them.
Though she found the Central Texas Hill Country beautiful with its tree-clothed slopes, its flower-strewn pastures and its boundless wildlife, the thirty-one-year-old was a city girl at heart, who’d happily made her home near the heart of Austin since completing her degree in social work there. After an hours-long drive, following a seemingly endless international return flight home to the States in the wake of her Buenos Aires errand, she found herself fantasizing—or most likely hallucinating—about returning to the small apartment she’d only recently moved into with its amazing city views, exposed brick walls and, most important, her comfy bed.
This place shouldn’t be much farther. Then I’ll have done right by my charges and I can find a place to grab some sleep... Maybe at that mom-and-pop motel she’d spotted in the last little town she’d passed through because there was no way she would safely make the three-hour drive back home without first catching some shut-eye.
At the sight of the sign she’d been anticipating for so long, Sara wanted to whoop with joy but kept buttoned up so as not to wake the children riding in her back seat.
Clearwater Crossing River ResortRio Frio, Texas
Welcome to Your Hill CountryHome Away from Home!
Her grueling, weeklong journey, a trip that had spanned not only counties but continents as she’d worked, at the personal request of one of the governor’s top aides, to reunite a broken family, was finally at its end.
Slowing for the turn, she allowed the fantasy of a joyous, tearful reunion with decorated cakes and streamers to spin out in her sleep-deprived brain. But reality caught up moments later, her stomach twisting with the memory of how the eleven-year-old twins had been crying themselves to sleep each night since they’d been torn from the arms of the loving grandmother who had doted on them since they were three and a half years old, when their mother had brought them to her native Argentina for a visit with her parents.
The children’s mother’s tragic accidental death abroad had set off an eight-year battle when her grieving parents—who were apparently wealthy and powerful enough to pull a lot of weight in their home country—had refused to turn the twins over to their American father. A father who had spent every dime he could come up with and pleaded for help from every government official he could persuade to listen as he’d fought a one-man war to win them back.
She only hoped he had plenty of patience and enough resources remaining to pay for the counseling they’d surely need to put this Humpty Dumpty of a broken family back together. Because they were going to need all of that, and plenty of love and luck besides.
As she turned into the drive, she mashed down on the brakes, eliciting startled cries from just behind her.
“¡Lo siento!” she apologized, automatically using her Spanish, the only language to which the twins now responded. Apparently, whatever English they had spoken before leaving had been lost during their years abroad.
“Look out the front,” she urged, continuing in the same tongue, which she had learned at the knee of the grandmother who had helped to raise her—though her fluency often surprised fellow Texans because of her fair skin, green eyes and blond-streaked, sandy-brown hair.
“Deer, and with a baby, too,” exclaimed the girl, Silvia, for once not sobbing and pleading to be taken back to the place that she considered home. “¡Que bonita!”
They certainly were pretty with their white-spotted golden hides glistening in the dappled sunlight. Sara wondered if they might be one of those exotic species she’d read about, imported by ranchers and then accidently released to breed freely in the region.
“They’re twins, like us,” said curly haired Cristo, shaken from his long sulk by what sounded like pure wonder as the second fawn stepped out from behind its mother.
All three of the car’s passengers held their breath, but a moment later the beautiful doe led her two fawns into the heavy brush, where they melted away into the shadows.
“Now that you’re both awake,” Sara told the children, “I need to let you know we’ve just pulled onto the property. I know it’s been a long time since you’ve seen your father, and you’re probably a little nervous—”
“I don’t feel so good,” Silvia fretted, once more sounding on the verge of tears.
“I won’t let him hurt you,” Cristo insisted, his own Spanish edged with pride and anger. “The first time he tries anything, I’ll knock him right out. Grandpa taught me how a real man protects his family.”
“Your father is your family, and he wants you, desperately. He’s always loved and wanted you, no matter what you have been told,” Sara repeated, knowing the words were even less likely to sink in right now, with both of them scared to death, than they had the last ten times she’d said them. The grandparents had really done a number on these children with their stories. Worse yet, they’d flatly refused to allow their son-in-law any contact with his children whatsoever, giving him zero opportunity to counter their poison.
Sara was aware of the couple’s claims that Mac Hale-Walker had been physically abusive to his late wife. The children’s mother had supposedly tearfully told her parents, before the snorkeling accident that took her life, that she’d planned to file for divorce immediately upon her return to the US. But an investigation here in Texas had turned up no evidence that Analisa Rojas-Walker had ever consulted with any attorney, sought medical help for any injuries or spoken to any of her friends in less than glowing terms about what had appeared to be a loving marriage.
It was enough to make Sara confident that she was helping to right a tremendous wrong by bringing the twins home to their sole living parent—a restoration that had only been made possible after the recent death of the children’s powerful grandfather. What was making her nervous, however, was the governor’s aide’s failure to return her calls since her return stateside. He was to have worked through this county’s social services department to make sure the transition into the children’s new home went as smoothly as could be reasonably assured, and she didn’t like arriving without knowing they would have clean, welcoming rooms of their own set up and warm, smiling faces to greet them and help put them at ease.
But between her hit-or-miss cell service overseas and the terrible reception out here in the sticks, which had caused an issue for her phone as it attempted to download all her stacked-up messages and e-mails, she had no way of making certain.
Don’t fret so much. Paul Barkley’s surely got it covered, she told herself, thinking what a stickler the veteran aide was for details—and how personally concerned for the twins’ welfare he’d seemed during their in-person briefing. But she hadn’t driven another twenty yards before she stopped to read a large hand-painted closed sign.
“What does it say?” Cristo asked her of the black block letters.
“It’s nothing to do with us,” she assured him as the Civic wallowed through an especially deep puddle on its way past. But her dreamy fantasies of crawling into a clean bed vanished, giving way to a gnawing in the pit of her stomach.
She only hoped they didn’t end up stuck on the godforsaken excuse for a dirt driveway before she had the chance to figure out what her instincts were rattling on about. So what if the resort’s rental cabins had been affected by the recent storms she’d read about in news updates in those odd moments when her phone had been working right?
Surely, the owner himself would have a nice, dry home—one he’d spent the past joyous week preparing for the miracle of this sudden reversal in fortune after so many years of foot-dragging by the authorities overseas?
Turn around now, a small voice inside her whispered. The sensible, no-nonsense voice of her better judgment. Drive back to town. Check into that motel with the kids and don’t go anywhere until you’ve made some phone calls.
A sensation of icy dread crept up into her throat like bile, another nudge from instinct. This time, however, she decided to listen to her social worker’s intuition. She’d turn around for certain. The only problem was, she had no choice except to move forward far enough to find a spot that looked wide and firm enough to hold her tires so the Civic wouldn’t get stuck when she tried to turn around.
Gritting her teeth, she continued until the gravel driveway finally opened up directly ahead and to their left.
From the back seat, Silvia gasped in horror at the sight that greeted them. “Is this really where we have to live?”
“No, Silvia,” Sara told her, stopping for a moment to stare at the ruin of what appeared to have recently been a lovely, if rustic-looking, cabin. “You two won’t be living in this house, I promise. I’m sure this is just an old guest cabana, and there’ll be a nice home somewhere you can—”
“We would run away first,” Cristo vowed, managing to sound both fierce and solemn, though beneath the veneer of his bravado, the eleven-year-old’s voice was trembling. “We’ll run all the way back to Abuelita!”
Sara’s heart squeezed over how much they missed the grandmother they had come to think of more as a mother. But with Silvia still going on about how she needed to go home now, Sara needed to keep focused on the cabin, which must have been washed off of its posts by the force of the water. Poised near the edge of a slope, the structure had collapsed on one end, its timbers buckling. In its collapse, all of the windows had been shattered, as well, giving the place the empty-eyed look of a desecrated skull.
Before she could attempt to calm the children, a tall, powerfully built man appeared on the slope’s edge, quickly striding toward them. Shirtless and smudged with grime, he had a mane of thick, dark blond waves and a fierce expression—one underscored by the item he was hoisting, an honest-to-goodness Paul Bunyan, or maybe serial killer, styled ax.
Alarmed by the sight and the speed of his approach—both of which had the children screaming—Sara dropped her Civic into Reverse, thinking, This isn’t right. Get out now!
But in her haste, the rear tires rolled up over something—a big rock, maybe? Whatever it was, she felt the car’s front end literally lift up as the vehicle tipped backward, and after that, nothing she did, from stomping the accelerator to wrenching the wheel back and forth to yelling, “Go, go, go!” made a single bit of difference.
She double-checked the locks and then reached for her phone as the man strode nearer.
No bars of service. At all. Sara would have screamed or cried or cursed a blue streak—she wasn’t entirely sure which—had the children not been with her, so terrified that they’d gone silent.
“Is he going to kill us?” Silvia finally whispered, her small voice shaking.
“Abuelita said he would!” insisted Cristo.
“No one’s killing anybody,” Sara assured them, but it wasn’t until she had looked over at the man approaching that she gusted out a sigh of relief, seeing that he’d dropped the ax he had been carrying when she’d initially spotted him. “And I’m not entirely sure who this is, but I’m going to get out and talk to him, and you two are going to lock the doors after me and—promise me you’re listening—stay inside no matter what. Do you understand?”
After both children gave their word, she took a deep breath, donning her professionalism like a suit of armor, and climbed out of the car.
The first thing she did afterward was turn and point to Cristo, who reached over from the back seat to lock the doors before giving her a nervous-looking thumbs-up.
Only then did she turn around to face the tall man who’d stopped within six feet of her, a pained look creasing his dirt-coated forehead and an apology in his blue-gray eyes.
“I’m sorry for frightening you and your children, miss.” He grimaced, looking stricken. “When I heard the—the screaming, I realized what a sight I must be after all day working on this mess the flood’s left.” He gestured toward the cabin.
“Then you’re the...the owner?” she asked, peering harder at the lean but handsome face, though it certainly needed not only a washing but a good shave. And trying to come to grips with the stunning possibility that the impeccably organized Paul Barkley might have somehow left one absolutely essential detail off of his to-do list.
How could such a thing have possibly happened?
Nodding, the man continued speaking. “Only reason I came boiling up here like a thunderstorm in the first place is on account of the thieves who keep driving past my closed sign and making off with whatever they can steal out of the damaged cabins. As if I haven’t lost enough here, having to shut down for what might amount to half the season—but I’d never intentionally scare anybody’s kids.”
“So you’re really Mac Hale-Walker?” she tried to clarify, noticing that beneath all that sweat and grime, there was a tanned, work-hardened body with an honest-to-goodness six-pack. When was the last time she’d seen one in the wild, especially on a man nearing forty who’d apparently earned his muscles through honest work rather than a gym?
“I am,” he admitted, raking back the thick mane, which fell to his shoulders. “But you seem to have me at a disadvantage—and I feel rude as hell, standing here half naked while your poor kids are stuck in the car, which, excuse me for noticing, isn’t going anywhere until I help you get it down off that big log you’re hung up on like some kind of seesaw.”
Without correcting him about the children, she said, “It’s Sara—Sara Wakefield—and is that what I hit?” Her face heated with the appalling memory of her panic...because he no longer seemed so terrifying at the moment—just completely unprepared.
She felt for him, too, realizing that, as crazy as it seemed, some bureaucratic snafu had messed up what should have been the biggest moment of his life. But that empathy didn’t mean she didn’t also have concerns—and huge ones—about what she was seeing.
“If you’ll give me just five minutes, ten tops, Miss Wakefield,” he emphasized, as if to prove he had been listening, “I’m going to ride over to the house in that little utility cart I have parked there, grab myself a clean shirt and come back in my truck to pull you out of trouble. Meanwhile, you’re welcome to take the kids out, let them stretch their legs a little. You can show them the river down that slope there, if you keep a careful eye on them. The water’s up, and it’s running fast right now, with way too much debris in it to want to let them play near.”
“We’ll be fine,” she assured him, grateful for the thought of a respite.
“Oh, and if you see a big black Lab down there,” he told her as he started toward the utility cart, “that’s just my Roxy. She’s getting on in years, but she’s super friendly and she lives to love on kids.”
“Before you go, please,” she said, her heartbeat picking up speed as she asked the question that had been weighing on her since leaving Argentina. “I have just one more question for you. It may seem a little odd, but...” She hesitated long enough for the moment to grow awkward before blurting, “How’s your Spanish, Mr. Walker? Would you, by any chance, be fluent in the language?”
Stiffening, he very slowly turned back toward her, the hospitable look on his face hardening into something far more guarded. Or maybe hostile was the right word. “I can’t help but wonder why you’d ask me such a question. Especially when the two of us have just spent the past few minutes communicating in English with no issues.”
“You’re absolutely right. But believe me, I have my reasons. Reasons, I assure you, are for your benefit as well as mine. Now, please tell me, Mr. Walker, habla español?”
“Just about enough to understand your question and order off the menu at the nearest taco stand without straining my brain too hard,” he told her, his face darkening with anger. “Now, you answer a question for me, Miss Sara Wakefield. Just what the hell are you doing snooping around my closed property, asking questions about my abilities with the Spanish language? And why on earth would you drag along your kids on your little spy errand—because that’s what you’re here for, isn’t it? Digging up dirt on me for someone, aren’t you? You have that look about you—some kind of two-bit bureaucrat, or maybe you’re another reporter crawling out of the woodwork after all these years, looking for a new angle on a half-forgotten story—hoping to crack open this damned chest of mine—” he thumped it with his knotted hand “—and tear open the scar tissue. Because nothing sells a blog or whatever crime TV docudrama you might be shopping to the cable networks like a victim’s bloody-fresh pain, does it?”
“I’m not here to hurt anybody,” she argued, though inside she was shaking, every part of her wanting to recoil from this man’s fury.
“The hell you aren’t,” he countered, clearly in no state of mind to listen. Nor to do anything but further traumatize the children witnessing his outburst. Children who were already more than half convinced he was a madman.
“We’re done here, Mr. Walker,” she told him, forcing her voice to icy coolness. “When you return to your house, I’ll thank you to stay inside. But if you’ll call a tow truck to assist me, we’ll be off your property as soon as possible.”
“That’s ridiculous. A tow truck around these parts could take hours and I’m just up the—”
“Out of the question,” she said, cutting him off crisply. “If the tow truck’s not a practical option, then a call to the police will do—”
“We don’t have police here in Rio Frio.”
“Then the sheriff or whatever kind of hayseed brigade you do have on duty.”
“Hayseed brigade?” He made a huffing, half-amused sound. One that wasn’t at all friendly. “But sure, all right, if you’re certain that’s what you want.”
“I’ve been awake and traveling for so many hours by this point that I barely know what day it is, but there’s one thing I am absolutely sure of,” she insisted. “I have nothing more to say to you until you get some more clothes on and I get some official guidance on how I’m to proceed.”
