But there was no headrest for the center of the seat. My only pillow would have to be the top of the seat itself, and resting my head on it would only result in a bad crick in my neck. “It’s okay. I’ll just wait till we get to your grandma’s.”
One thick eyebrow rose. “If you need a headrest, my right shoulder’s not hurt, you know.”
“Oh. Right. Thanks.” I swallowed hard.
“You okay?” He glancing at me with a frown.
“Uh, sure, why wouldn’t I be?” My smile felt stupid and overly bright even to me. I was acting like an idiot.
It’s just Hayden, I reminded myself.
To prove to myself that everything was normal between us, I tilted my head to the left, resting it against the hard curve of his shoulder. A sigh slipped out through my nose, and my face burned again.
“Tired?” he asked.
I nodded, not trusting how my voice might sound if I tried to speak right now.
“Then sleep, Tarah.” He sounded like he was trying not to laugh. “I promise I’ll wake you up if anything worth reporting happens.”
I smiled. “Okay.” I hesitated, my smile fading, then had to say it. “Hayden, for what it’s worth…I’m sorry I got you involved in all of this.”
Silence for a long minute. “Don’t worry about it. It was worth it.”
I closed my eyes, and the need for sleep won.
When I woke up some time later, I could practically hear Hayden’s thoughts churning.
“What are you thinking about?” I mumbled, comfy and warm, unwilling to move yet wanting to hear his reassuring voice for awhile.
He hesitated before replying, “When did you wake up?”
“Just now. You didn’t answer my question.”
He hesitated again, and the fog of sleep slipped further away from the edges of my mind. Now I really wanted to know what was going on inside that head of his.
“You. I was thinking about you.” His voice sounded gruff. Embarrassed?
“Oh?” I smiled, glad he probably couldn’t see my face right now since I was still leaning against his shoulder.
“Yeah, I was just wondering if…”
“Mmm?”
“If you…still sleep with stuffed animals. You know, since you’re using me like a giant teddy bear here.” Definite humor in his voice now.
I glanced down and realized I’d wrapped my right arm across his waist at some point in my sleep.
I sat up straight. “Sorry!”
He chuckled. “It’s all right. Actually, it was kind of nice. Made me feel all soft and squishy, and a little furry too…”
I lightly swatted his arm, grinning in embarrassment. “Yeah, yeah, enough with the Teddy jokes. I haven’t slept with him in years.” This was what I got for oversharing with Hayden when we were kids. He would never let me live it down now.
“Well, since you’re up now, Sleeping Beauty, why don’t you take a look outside?”
The weather must have gotten even colder the further north we’d traveled, because white flakes began to fall. Growing up in East Texas, we saw snow maybe once or twice a year at best.
“It’s snowing!” It was hard to keep my voice down, especially with the way the flakes were pelting the windshield as we drove straight into the wind. “Oh wow, that is beautiful. Look how huge those flakes are. They look like chicken feathers.”
Hayden’s left hand jerked on the wheel, and I felt the back end of the truck get squirrelly. His whole body tensed up as he grabbed the wheel with both hands and hissed out a curse. The truck righted itself as he let off of the gas a little.
“Sorry. Road’s getting slick,” he muttered. “Better warn Bud. We’ll have to slow down till the roads clear up.”
If they cleared up. After all, we were headed almost straight north in December. The weather and the roads might both get worse from here on out.
I grabbed the walkie talkie and warned Bud.
“Can you also check to be sure they’re all belted in back there?” he asked, nodding towards the backseat.
“Sure.” Twisting, I leaned over the seat to help get Kristina and her mother belted in.
Beside me, Pamela stirred, yawned then frowned. “What’s going on? Is Kristina okay?”
“She’s fine,” I told her over my shoulder. “Just belting them in since the roads are getting bad.”
“Thanks,” Hayden told me when I was done. “Don’t forget to put your belt back on too.”
Twisting back around to face the front again, I followed orders then gave him a snarky salute with a grin to try and keep the tension in the cab down. “Aye aye captain. Copilot secured.”
“Are you sassing me?” he said, trying to joke but completely failing to hide the tightness in his tone as the wheel jerked beneath his hands again. He let our speed drop to ten miles under the limit.
The back end of the truck slid sideways again. Hayden whispered another curse then winced as we heard a small voice cry out from the back seat, “Mommy?”
“Shh, honey, it’s okay,” Pamela murmured, turning to look over the seat at her patient.
But Kristina wasn’t soothed. She wanted her mother and fought to sit up despite Pamela’s murmured pleas for her to stay down.
“Mommy, I’m scared,” Kristina whimpered, wrapping her arms around her mother.
One of her mother’s hands drifted up to stroke her daughter’s arm. Then the woman began to hum something. It took me a half minute to recognize the song as “Somewhere Over the Rainbow”. Kristina must have heard it a lot; she managed to stop crying and stumbled through singing along with her mother.
Hayden glanced at me, his eyes wide as he realized Kristina’s mother was finally starting to come out of her zombie-like state. Then he had to refocus on the road as the gathering ice pellets turned the interstate into an endless hockey rink with our too light ended truck trying its hardest to be the puck.
By the time we had to merge onto I-229, Hayden’s knuckles had turned white and his jaw muscles had knotted.
Then we spotted the cop cars blocking the road up ahead, their lights flashing.
I swallowed hard, praying Hayden was right about his father not turning him in and tracking us down. If he was wrong and Senator Shepherd had called in the locals to help intercept us…
But before we reached the cops, other lights brightened the night…large, electronic road signs warning that I-229 was closed due to icy conditions and all traffic was to detour onto Minnesota Ave. I sighed in relief as Hayden took the exit I could now see the cops directing everyone towards.
“Can you reroute the GPS and find us a new way to Grandma Letty’s?” he said.
I fiddled with the GPS for a minute. “Okay, it looks like we can take 14th Street to Phillips, and then to 10th Street and cut across that way.”
But 10th Street was where it got confusing. Just as Hayden was about to take a right onto it, I shrieked, “Stop, it’s a one way!”
Hayden hit the brakes, muttering a curse.
From the backseat, we heard, “Ooo, Mommy, he said a bad word!”
I pressed my lips together to keep from laughing at him.
“Keep going straight,” I said.
When the light turned green, Hayden headed straight. “Okay, now what?”
I zoomed out on the map. “Um, just keep going straight. I’m trying to find a place for us to turn around.”
So we kept going straight as building after building of rose-colored stone passed by. White Christmas lights wrapped around old fashioned street lamps would have made the drive a nice one, if we weren’t lost and tired and hiding from the law. Not to mention the ice pellets still pelting the windshield and making it tough to read the street signs.
“Tarah? Got a new route yet?” Hayden grumbled.
“Working on it,” I snapped. “Just keep going straight. There’s a place to turn around up ahead.”
The buildings ended, and we drove beneath a metal arch. I could barely make out t
he words “Sioux Falls Park.”
The ice pellets stopped falling just as we headed underneath a metal railroad bridge. As the road curved sharply to the left, the view ahead burst into life with countless numbers of Christmas lights.
“Turn right here,” I whispered.
We’d reached the waterfalls for which the city had been named.
As we viewed the area, lit up by display after display of animated lights in white and gold and green and red, I suddenly realized. It was almost Christmas.
“Look, Momma,” Kristina whispered in the backseat.
I didn’t trust myself to speak, afraid my voice would come out all choked up. After everything our group had gone through, the combined sight of the snow-covered grounds all lit up like a winter wonderland, falling away into the icy waterfalls, was almost too much to believe. It was like waking from a too long nightmare into a fantasy fairytale.
“Good detour?” I asked.
“Yeah. Good detour.” Hayden returned my smile with one of his own.
Behind us, the bus rocked a little, probably from everyone rushing over to look out the right side windows at the falls.
“Hey, Hayden, everything all right up there?” Bud asked through the walkie talkie.
“Yeah,” Hayden said, clearing his throat as his voice came out in a croak. “Don’t let anyone out. We won’t be here long enough for that. We’re just turning around. But let’s give them a couple more minutes.”
Hayden reclipped the walkie talkie onto his belt then leaned back, staring out the windows at the sight before us. Without looking at me, his hand slid over to hold mine. Surprised at the gesture and a little confused by it too, I wanted to look down at our hands laced together on my thigh but was afraid doing so might break the moment. So I simply squeezed his hand and kept staring at the color changing lights that turned the ice draped waterfalls red then green then blue, grateful to be here in this moment with him.
Something tightened so hard in my chest that it was almost a struggle to breathe. I wanted to memorize every detail of this moment so I would never forget it. I tried to remember what Jeremy had said about using all five senses so I could be a good reporter. But all I could see was the surreal beauty of the winter wonderland, and all I could feel was that strong hand, so large compared to my own, heating up my skin everywhere we made contact.
After another few minutes, Hayden sighed, eased his hand from mine and reached for the walkie talkie again. “Okay, Bud, let’s get going.”
CHAPTER 14
Hayden
Twenty minutes later, we pulled into Grandma Letty’s driveway. Her house, a huge Victorian situated on a hilltop at the end of a winding dirt and gravel road, was a welcome sight. The driveway ended in a cement pad in front of a three car garage, giving Bud plenty of room to park the bus beside my truck. Slowly, with stiff movements of obvious soreness or fear or both, everyone got off the bus and gathered on the wraparound porch.
I rang the doorbell with no idea what to expect. The last time I’d seen my father’s mother was at Damon’s funeral, and even then she hadn’t stayed long. Since he had become a senator, my father apparently hadn’t wanted anyone to know about his witch of a mother, though I used to think it was because she was a little too blunt to be politically correct. Contact with her had consisted of only a few cards each year on the holidays.
The door opened to reveal a stooped over old woman in brown slacks and a pink and brown polka dotted blouse with a floppy bow at the neck. Her body seemed frail, but her gaze was still as sharp as I’d remembered it beneath that same perfectly poufed salt and pepper helmet hair.
“Hi, Grandma,” I said. “Uh, I hope you were telling Tarah the truth about having room for about fifty people ‘cause...here we are.”
Her papery cheeks bunched into a big smile as she stepped forward to grab my shoulder. “Hayden Shepherd. My lord, you’ve grown tall! Come here and give your grandma a hug.” She tugged me down to her height with a grip that was none too shabby. I awkwardly patted her back, afraid I’d break her bones if I patted too hard.
“Is this Tarah?” she said, turning to her. “Yep, just as pretty as I pictured you from your voice on the phone. But my lord it’s cold out here! Come inside, please, everyone come on in.”
She led us all inside, where the group sort of spilled across the adjoining living and dining rooms, growing noisy as Grandma Letty insisted on make refreshments in the kitchen and Pamela, Tarah and a few other weary women helped her. I joined them, needing to warn my grandmother about the bus driver and our church group cover story. I spoke to her in as low a voice as I could, praying she wasn’t deaf since the living room, only yards away from the open kitchen area, was closed off by only an L-shaped wall with large arched doorways leading to the kitchen and dining rooms.
“I’ve got just the thing for him.” With a wink, she grabbed a tiny bottle from a nearby cabinet, poured a healthy dose of it into one of the hot chocolates the ladies were fixing trays of, and told Pamela to be sure the bus driver got that drink. Nodding, Pamela took the tray of drinks into the living room.
“Grandma, we don’t want to kill—” I started to say, but she shushed me.
“A potion of sleepy time herbs, completely harmless. From the looks of this group you’ve brought me, a few more could do with a dose of it too.” Her thin lips pressed themselves temporarily out of existence.
“They’ve been through a lot,” I agreed, the memory of the dying cop flashing through my mind. “Right now, they probably just want somewhere safe to stretch out and sleep for a while.”
“Let’s get them squared away then,” she suggested. “You can fill me in on it all later.”
I followed her to the living room, where Bud was already asleep sitting upright in a green wingback chair by the crackling fireplace, despite the noise of the exhausted adults trying to corral their equally fussy kids. The adults who weren’t busy trying to calm down kids were nodding off where they sat or stood leaning against door jambs wherever they could. It was a lot of people to cram into this house, but Grandma Letty managed them like a general, working with the few remaining conscious parents to get whole families set up in the rooms upstairs or on pallets in the living and dining rooms.
Forty-five minutes later, the house was quiet and dim except for the occasional opening and closing of a bathroom door. Tarah had shyly asked if she could take a shower, and Grandma Letty had sent her off to the master suite upstairs before nudging me over to a barstool at the kitchen island. Grandma Letty took a stool opposite me, and I finally had time to look around. Her kitchen wasn’t as big as Mom’s, the appliances regular sized instead of the industrial versions Mom preferred, the cabinets older, more traditional and less contemporary. Cozier. I could feel myself sort of melting into the barstool and had to fight the temptation to use the island as a pillow for my head.
“Fifty people tucked in in under an hour,” I said, forcing a tired smile. “Even for a grandma, that’s got to be some kind of record.”
“This was nothing. I had practice. Getting you and your brother to go to sleep when you were little was much harder.”
I had a brief memory of her hollering at us to settle down, back when we lived in our old house. I’d forgotten she’d come to stay with us a few times when I was a kid.
“You’ve sure gotten yourself into it this time,” she murmured before taking a sip of chamomile tea. “This is a lot of lives to take responsibility for, Hayden. I mean, I’ve heard of people creating their own careers, but this isn’t a career you’re building here, hon. It’s a life calling.”
Life calling. The words sent actual chill bumps racing down my spine.
I gulped. “This isn’t a career or a life calling. I just promised I’d get them here safely so they could figure out what to do next.”
One gray eyebrow arched. “I see. So your grand plan was to get them through the woods to Grandma's house and then dump them off for me to deal with?”
; I scrubbed my hands over my gritty face. “I didn’t say I was going to abandon them. I’ll help them out if they need it.”
I didn’t like the way her eyes narrowed at that.
She took a slow sip of tea. “What about that cute girl you were standing so close to on my front porch? Does she have somewhere to go from here?”
I thought about my answer to that one. “Tarah’s not really a witch. She can’t do magic, though she claims different. So she might be able to go back home with the right help from a lawyer to clear her name. She’s only guilty by association.”
Both her eyebrows rose. “I see. So she’s just tagging along for the fun of it then?”
“Well, it started with her trying to free her dad. He’s a scientist who got arrested at a protest while trying to convince some outcasts to let him test their powers. He got thrown into an internment camp out in west Texas. But then she ended up being caught in the wrong place at the wrong time and got thrown into the camp too, along with everyone else here.”
“Ah, now I understand. She’s why you broke everyone out of that camp, isn’t she?”
I nodded then told her about getting shot, waking up to see one of the prisoners kill a cop at the gas station in Oklahoma, and having to work with that same outcast in order to secure the charter bus. As I summed up the mess of events, the house shifted and creaked from the temperatures dropping still further outside.
“So you did it all because of her,” she whispered, her eyes widening beneath their saggy hoods of loose skin. She was silent for a few seconds before shaking her head and sighing. “Such is the power of love.”
Love. The word did weird things to my stomach and chest. A random memory flashed through my mind of Tarah’s lips softly curving into a smile…
In a firmer voice Grandma Letty asked, “What about Tarah’s father? You didn’t say what happened to him. Were you able to free him from the camp too?”
“Yeah. He went back home to get Tarah’s mother and take her into hiding somewhere. Tarah should have gone with them, but she’s sticking with this group for the story. She wants to be a journalist like her older brother. Probably thinks she’ll get the Pulitzer for it.” I stared down into my mug.