pass,” he said, his voice revealing his uncertainty. “Won’t it?”
“She’s having some sort of a seizure. I’ve never seen her like this. Nunca. Neither of the girls.”
Rosie’s eyes were closed now, but her arms and legs continued to stir.
Chuck ran a hand over the top of his head, passing his fingers through his short hair. “You’re right.”
Relief flooded Janelle’s face.
He looked into her frightened eyes. “She’s my darling girl, too,” he said.
Minutes later, gravel pinged off the undercarriage of the pickup as Chuck sped down the two-track from the cabin, familiar after seven weeks with the narrow, descending drive through the trees to the flat valley floor a mile south of downtown Estes Park. He slowed as he left the forest and turned onto the gravel road behind two massive log buildings—Lodge of the Rockies and, next door, Mills Conference Center. The matching, three-story, historic structures faced onto the open greensward at the center of the Y of the Rockies resort complex.
A glance in the rearview mirror showed Rosie slumped in her seat, strands of dark hair stuck to her sweaty forehead.
Rosie was her grandfather Enrique in miniature: short, stocky, and—normally—full of life, with thick, wiry hair and round, rosy cheeks. Carmelita sat opposite her little sister on the rear seat, her head against the side window of the truck, her eyes half-closed. Carmelita was thin and delicate like her mother, with Janelle’s heart-shaped face and long, straight hair.
Dread coated Chuck’s insides like heavy syrup. He swallowed grit from his throat as he fishtailed around the near side of the conference center. He slung the truck east onto the main road leading out of the resort, only to be greeted by a car rocketing down the open slope from the Y of the Rockies entrance two hundred yards ahead.
Chuck jammed the brakes, skidding the pickup to a stop in front of the lodge and conference center. Janelle tumbled from the rear seat of the crew cab to the floor between the seat-belted girls. A cloud of dust 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
