Freefall Read online

  Freefall

  Robin Brande

  Ryer Publishing

  FREEFALL

  by Robin Brande

  Published by Ryer Publishing

  www.ryerpublishing.com

  Original Copyright 2012 by Elizabeth Ruston/Robin Brande

  Revised Copyright 2014 by Robin Brande

  All rights reserved.

  Cover photos Dreamstime.com

  Cover design by Robin Ludwig Design, Inc.

  http://www.gobookcoverdesign.com

  All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Created with Vellum

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Heart of Ice

  About the Author

  Also by Robin Brande

  1

  It was her last column for Outdoor Adventure.

  Their last column.

  Eliza had waited three months until she could write it, could bear to look at the picture of him taken on that last day—the picture she knew she’d have to let them print at the top of the page. Because their columns always came with a picture.

  She could have waited longer—people understood, no one was pushing her—but she wanted to write it while she was still angry at him, because those had always been their funniest columns, those he said-she said renditions of some disastrous adventure they’d both just barely survived.

  This one wasn’t funny at all.

  Is it better to die doing what you love, or to be more careful so you can stay alive and keep doing it? Jamey and I had those fights all the time—when he’d go diving with sharks in baited water. Or backpacking alone, deep in grizzly country during a salmon run, no contact with the outside world until a plane was scheduled to pick him up a week or ten days later. Or climbing in a country where even the toddlers carried guns.

  Or that time we were hiking up Conundrum Pass in Colorado, and a freak storm blew in early in the morning, trapping us high on an exposed ridge above 13,000 feet. The hail beat down on us as lightning flashed all around. A bolt slammed the ridge right above me, blinding me for a moment with light I didn’t know could be that white.

  And what did Jamey do? He pulled out his camera. He stood on that ridge with electricity raining down on top of us and he pulled out his damn camera.

  “What are you doing?” I screamed as I topped the hill and prepared to keep running down the other side.

  “It’s so beautiful!” he shouted back, aiming at the sky.

  “You’re going to die, you a**hole!” I’m not proud to say I shouted, and as I tore down the hill desperate for the safety of treeline, it went through my head that those would be my last words to my husband, and some time a few hours later, when the storm passed, I’d have to trudge my way back up that mountain to retrieve his lifeless body. I actually started working out how I was going to carry him down. It kept my mind occupied and pushed out the terror of being struck by lightning myself. Cursing helped, too, and I had an awful lot to curse about with a husband who was such a reckless idiot.

  But of course he didn’t die. Because Jamey was incredibly lucky that way. Everyone knew it—it’s what made being with him and reading about all his exploits in the wilderness so exciting.

  But this time he is dead. From doing something so easy, something he’d done twenty, forty, fifty times before. Climbing up one of our local pitches, perfect blue-sky day, no wind, no weather, just Jamey and his friends out for a leisurely afternoon. He was supposed to be home by five. We were going to an early movie.

  But it doesn’t matter how lucky or handsome or funny or charming or well-loved—fiercely-loved—you are, you can still die when you’re 29 and leave behind a bewildered, pissed off wife who doesn’t know how to be a widow any more than she knew how not to fall in love with the likes of you, Jamey Shepherd, from the first time I saw you in our college English class 11 years ago. You hooked me in the first time you spoke, and even though I was a lifelong chicken you somehow turned me into an adventurer, into a partner who could do half the crazy things you did, and I know if we’d have had time to start that family we talked about, our children would have been more like you than like me, because everyone always wanted to be you.

  But now that’s over and that’s it, and all the amazing, daring, hilarious things you would have done and written about for all of us to see will never happen. Because of a stupid anchor bolt.

  Wasn’t that a history lesson? “For want of a nail, the shoe was lost; for want of a shoe, the horse was lost; for want of a horse, the battle was lost...” Because little details matter. Sometimes little details are all that matter.

  The point is, Jamey, you robbed us. You went out one day with just a kiss at the door, and you promised to come back and you didn’t. You took that joyous, carefree life of yours and played with one too many risks. And now you’re never coming back, and there’s nothing any of us can do about it.

  We should all be monumentally pissed.

  2

  Eliza passed the kitchen window on the way to her mother-in-law’s back door. Daisy sat on guard duty just inside. She started barking before Eliza could knock.

  “Good,” Hildy called to her. “I’ve got coffee.”

  Eliza opened the door slowly, her foot extended to prevent Daisy from dashing. Still, the dog tried. Eliza reached down and scooped her up. “Why would you run away? Not spoiled enough here?” The dog panted. “Brat.”

  Eliza set the terrier down and gave her mother-in-law’s thin shoulders a squeeze. “How are you feeling?”

  “Rotten.” Hildy’s voice was deep and throaty, with the broad tones of her New York girlhood still intact. “The phone never stops.”

  “Take it off the hook—you’re allowed. I did when Jamey died.”

  “That’s because reporters were calling you. It’s just my friends calling me—but they won’t stop.”

  The phone rang to prove her point.

  “Leave it,” Eliza said.

  Hildy shrugged. Eliza freshened her mother-in-law’s cup of coffee and poured one for herself. At the fifth ring the answering machine took over.

  “Hi,” Hildy’s deep voice cut in, “Ron and Hildy can’t come to the phone...”

  “I’ll have to change that,” Hildy mused, a slight break in her voice. She quickly doused it with a sip of coffee. “So, how you doing?”

  “Fine. I thought you might like some company. Did you sleep much?”

  �
�I’ll take a nap later...” Hildy paused to listen to the end of her friend’s message.

  “—so give us a call—any time—I mean it. We’re thinking of you. Bye now.”

  “That’s nice,” Hildy said. “They’re all so nice.”

  “You should take them up on it, you know. That was the mistake I made—I hardly left the house for weeks.”

  Hildy patted her daughter-in-law’s hand. “It’s not the same, is it? Jamey was such a surprise. Ronny...well, we knew about that for a long time, didn’t we?”

  A stroke had destroyed Ron Shepherd’s great engineering mind, but left his body still relatively untouched. He deteriorated more slowly than he wanted to, Eliza suspected, knowing all along that his mind would never return. When finally his body began breaking down, he made it clear he was ready to go. Then a cold brought on pneumonia, and Hildy abided by his wishes not take any extraordinary measures. He had died quietly in his bed a few nights ago while Hildy sat holding his hand.

  “I’ve been thinking,” Hildy said. She took another sip of coffee, then leaned back in her chair and peered at her daughter-in-law. “You’re going to say I shouldn’t, so let me tell you right now my mind’s already made up.”

  “Okay,” Eliza said with a smile. “That’s typical.”

  Hildy fidgeted with the edge of her placemat. “I’ve still got the house, you know—in Careyville.”

  It had been Jamey’s childhood home in a small suburb of Syracuse, New York. He had left it for college at the opposite end of the country, deliberately choosing the hottest, brightest place he could find after a lifetime of cold, dark winters. Eliza had grown up in Henderson, Nevada, close to Las Vegas, had never left, and was grateful for it when Jamey showed up that first day of college at UNLV. Jamey’s parents had followed him to the desert a few years later, enticed by the warm winters.

  Ron and Hildy had rented out their Careyville house to a series of tenants over the years, and the last family had been a disaster. After bouncing several rent checks, they moved out without notice and left the house in disrepair. The property manager had called with the bad news only a few days before Ron’s death.

  “I was thinking I should go back and take care of that.”

  “Why?” Eliza asked. “Let the management company do it—that’s what you pay them for.”

  “No, I mean live there—move back there. Stay there.”

  Eliza took a moment to absorb the news. “But why? I thought you hated New York—it’s too cold.”

  “I don’t hate it,” Hildy said. “I just stopped liking it for a while. But maybe I can like it again—who knows?”

  “But you have all your friends here. And me.”

  “I have friends there, too. I don’t know, honey, it’s hard to explain. I just don’t feel so...right here anymore. First Jamey, now Ronny—all my boys are gone. I don’t think I want to live here without them anymore.”

  “But your work—”

  “I can get it going up there, too. Some of those people still remember me. I can work for a caterer, maybe, while I build my clientele back up again.”

  “But Hildy...” Eliza cast about for a better argument. What exactly, she wondered, was her objection?

  “I’m only sixty-nine,” Hildy continued. “I’m not ready to curl up and die yet. My mother lived until she was ninety-one, the mean old bag—”

  “Hildy...”

  “I have at least ten or fifteen more years of good honest work in me.” Hildy reached for her daughter-in-law’s hand. The older woman’s skin was warm and soft, and Eliza’s fingers were still cold from her early springtime walk.

  “Lizzy, you’ve always lived here, so you don’t know what it’s like to miss your home. I never thought I’d say this, but I actually miss those miserable winters in Syracuse—at least you know when it’s Christmas. Here I can hardly get in the mood for it—some years I’m still wearing my bathing suit on Christmas Eve.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “Close enough. What I’m saying is, maybe I forgot how much I hated it, but I swear I miss it. I think it’s time for a change. Again. I want to go home.”

  “You are home,” Eliza urged. “You can move in with me if you don’t want to live alone.”

  “I don’t mind living alone. I like the quiet—you know that. Besides, I’ve been living alone the past few years, haven’t I? The way Ron was.”

  The two women sat in silence for a few minutes, each absorbed in her own thoughts.

  The decision came easily, almost unconsciously. Eliza was almost surprised to hear herself say it. “Then I’m going with you.”

  “No, you’re not.”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “You wouldn’t last a winter,” Hildy said.

  “I’m a hardy girl—you’ve always said so. Besides, it would be good for the book. I could fill in all the details about Jamey’s childhood—I wouldn’t have to rely on just you and what Jamey told me and a bunch of old pictures.”

  “Sweetheart, there’s nothing for you there. Believe me.”

  “Hildy,” Eliza answered softly, “there’s nothing for me here anymore, either. I’m coming with you. You might as well get used to it.”

  * * *

  It wasn’t entirely true, that part about there being nothing for her there. Eliza still had her own family—mother, stepfather, two brothers and their wives and a niece and nephew.

  Which was why her mother couldn’t understand the impulse to go.

  “I just want to see her through this year,” Eliza told her mother. “Make sure she’s okay. Jamey would want me to.”

  “A whole year?” Joyce said.

  “At least through Christmas. Come on, Mom, you know it’s the right thing to do.”

  Joyce sighed. “But what about our movie dates? And all the birthdays and holidays you’ll miss? It’s only March—how are we going to do without you the rest of the year?”

  Eliza had those same misgivings. It’s why she hadn’t gone away to college. She liked being close to everyone and everything she knew. But Jamey had already drawn her out of that shell, teaching her the pleasures of travel and outdoor excursions. She would just have to look at this as one longer expedition. Once it was over, she could come home again and burrow back into her routines.

  “I think a change would do me good for a while,” Eliza said, hoping to convince herself as much as her mother. “I haven’t been able to work on the book at all—I’ve been too distracted. The publisher already paid me a good chunk of money for it. I’m supposed to deliver a manuscript by next year.”

  “It’s just so long,” Joyce argued. “And what about your house?”

  “It’ll be okay. The neighbors can check it every now and then. Really, Mom, it’ll be fine.”

  * * *

  Eliza decided to pack light. It was a skill she learned from living with Jamey for so long. He could get an assignment, get an invitation to go climbing or rafting or caving, and he’d be packed and out the door in a few hours. No puzzling over what to wear for formal versus casual events, what to wear if the weather went south—just his standard kit of zip-off pants, a few synthetic shirts, rain gear, and a layer of fleece.

  Eliza had developed her own standard kit in the two years since Jamey died.

  A widow’s wardrobe, she once told her readers, can play tricks on the eyes.

  It’s like a nun’s habit. It draws attention to the woman, but it also allows her to hide behind it.

  Think of the last time you saw a nun in the grocery store. You couldn’t help but stare at her—right?—no matter how briefly. But did you really see her? What color were her eyes? Were her lips full or thin? Did she have freckles or moles or a scar above her lip? Admit it: All you saw was the outfit. You forgot that behind it she was somebody’s daughter once, and that she had a life before she became what her clothes said she was.

  Eliza fished through her widow’s wardrobe now: the black fleece pants and jacket, the gray sweaters and d
ress, the black dress pants and matching jacket. She added a few pair of jeans, some shorts and T-shirts, then considered her packing complete. She wasn’t going to Careyville to try to impress anyone. She was going to be a companion to her mother-in-law.

  And to finally force herself sit down and write the book she had agreed to write. Even if it was going to hurt.

  3

  Snow covered the daffodils. They, like Eliza, had been tricked into believing spring had come to Careyville to stay.

  Eliza layered long johns under her sweatpants and coat, and snugged a gray fleece cap over her ears. She left her long brown hair out of its customary ponytail so it could keep the back of her neck warm.

  “Come on, Daisy.”

  The terrier leapt from her sentry post on top of the couch. She had been sitting there since dawn, erect in front of the second-story window, eyes trained on the street below to guard against cats invading the Shepherd yard. So far she had warned away three.

  This time of day Daisy faced south. Later, at a shifting of the guard Eliza still didn’t understand, Daisy would pad toward the window on the opposite side of the house, take up her station on one of the kitchen chairs, and guard the back yard instead. Eliza had to admit that the dog had adjusted to their new life in Careyville far faster—and better—than she had. For Eliza it was still a work in progress.