Dangerous Conditions. Jenna Kernan
junior year. He’d lost the time between his junior year and when he woke up Stateside at Walter Reed about six years later, along with the part of his brain that allowed him to hear and talk and read. Reading came back first. Speaking more slowly. The hearing was improved, though the doctors said he still didn’t process sound correctly, might never process it as he had. He’d adjust, they’d said; he’d learn to speak more slowly to give him time to recall the words, but the memories were just gone.
He was glad the hat covered the worst of the scar. It kept Paige from staring at his forehead. Now she stared at his hat instead.
“You…ah…you be there on Saturday?” he asked.
Paige always made him more tongue-tied than usual.
“Planning on it,” she said.
“They’re bringing in a bouncy hut this year,” he said.
She turned from the street and faced him. “You looking forward to that?”
“No. Not me. The kids. I hope.” He sounded more like a guy without a brain than one with a brain injury. “Your girl might like it.”
Paige looked away. “Lori is too old for that, I’m afraid.”
Why would a woman with an eight-year-old daughter care about a bouncy hut? Lori was already on the youth soccer team and he noticed she was fixing her hair now instead of leaving it in a wild braid with strands flying everywhere. Unlike Paige’s hair, Lori’s was light brown and her eyes were amber. Like her father’s, he supposed. That thought brought a frown. He’d asked Paige once about the girl’s father and it had made her cry. He wasn’t doing that again.
He stared at those sympathetic blue eyes. Paige had skin that was rosy and perfect. She was taller than most women with a frame as willowy as a dancer’s. She’d been five feet eleven inches in eighth grade and gotten no taller. She’d even been taller than he’d been for a time. Until sophomore year when he’d shot up to six feet and one inch. Back then her red-blond hair had been to her waist. Now she wore it at chin length, letting the riot of curls just dance all around her pretty face.
He tried to ignore the smell of her skin and the urge to feel the soft texture of her spiraling curls. She stared at him with those bewitching blue eyes. He went still as his body galloped to life. He wanted to break their friendship by kissing her, really kissing her, and take this relationship back to what he’d been told it had once been. But he was equally terrified that doing so would ruin what they had. He lived on their friendship, tried to make it be enough. What if he told her how he felt and she laughed or avoided him?
Paige was a scientist. Educated. Pretty and a mother. While he was a brain-damaged vet who had gotten his head knocked in “engaging insurgents while simultaneously evacuating three wounded marines under fire.” That sounded cool and he surely wished he could remember doing that. But it wasn’t as cool as the fantasy of being Paige’s one and only again.
Why would she settle for a man like him? She wouldn’t. He knew it and that stopped him every time.
“Well, good luck setting up that bouncy hut,” she said.
He tipped his hat and she smiled, letting her go yet again.
And she was off, walking down Main Street from the home that she shared with her parents from the time they went to school together. Only now her dad was gone. So was his mom. Paige was a scientist at Rathburn-Bramley and yesterday he’d mistaken the church bells for the fire engine.
But he and Paige had always been close; he had looked out for her and now she looked out for him. She’d even helped his brother get the village council to approve his position, with some assistance from her new employer. She’d helped him get the necessary certificates and training to be a constable, too. He missed her helping him study. He wondered again if he should try to kiss her. Then he imagined making an unwelcome advance and decided it would be a great way to end their friendship permanently. She didn’t want a man like him. Who would?
“Have a great day, Dr. Morris,” he called.
She paused, half turned, glancing back over her shoulder at him. “And you have a great day, as well, Constable Lynch.”
PAIGE MORRIS HURRIED down the street, wishing she could go back in time and change things, knowing she could not. Each misstep along the way, each decision that seemed like the only option at the time, rose up to haunt her now.
For the best, her mother said. But was it really?
The stone in her heart ached as she reached the entrance to the manufacturing facility, waving at Lou Reber, who was the head of security. She registered her identification badge on the scanner as Lou watched the monitor for the green light.
Lou had the lined face and gravelly voice of a former smoker, a muscular build and the gray hairs to prove he’d worked as a police detective for twenty-some years before he earned his gold shield and took his early retirement from the force in Poughkeepsie, New York. Somewhere along the way his grown kids had stopped bringing the grandkids to visit each summer, but he had been married to the same woman for thirty-four years, so he was doing something right.
“How is Miriam?” His wife had suffered a fall on a ski slope a few years ago and had injured her back. Two surgeries later, she still couldn’t do any of the activities she once enjoyed like gardening, golf and skiing. As if that were not enough, she had been recently diagnosed with kidney failure and required biweekly dialysis down in Glens Falls.
Lou’s smile slipped. “Oh, about the same. Good days and bad days. She’s on the list for a new kidney now.” He exhaled, his expression glum but then he rallied. “You hear about the hunters up on the cutoff from Turax Hollow Road?”
“They shoot each other?” she guessed.
The location had a fair number of hunters from urban areas who did not quite seem to know the difference between Jersey cows and deer. They also sometimes shot at motion that could be a deer or their hunting partner.
“No, they ran into a bull moose.”
“With their car?” Paige knew that at 1,300 pounds, a bull moose stood six feet high on stilt-like legs and was the perfect height to sail over the hood of a car or truck before crashing through the windshield and crushing the driver. Everyone up in the Adirondacks had a healthy respect for moose.
“No,” said Lou. “They were chasing it down the road. Animal got tired and turned to fight. Guess they figured out how fast that truck could go backward!” He laughed. “The thing put his antlers through their windshield.”
“They’re big animals.”
“And meaner than all get-out in mating season, which it is.” Lou pulled out his phone. “State police asked me to tell everyone to be extra vigilant while driving. They also sent me photos. Want to see?”
She nodded, and Lou went to his texts. Up came an image of a blue pickup truck missing its passenger-side mirror, with deep gouges in the side panel. The windshield was caved in like an empty soda can and the glass showed a web of hairline cracks.
“Wow.”
Lou beamed, delighted at the damage. “Village supervisor voted to close that cutoff to traffic so folks avoid that moose’s territory.”
She approved of that solution. Calling animal control would mean that moose would be put down. The hunters had been in his territory. The long-time village supervisor and Logan’s older brother, Connor Lynch, was competent and respected, handling squabbles and avoiding small-town politics with the mastery of an experienced politician.
Paige wished Lou a good day and headed for the elevator. Once inside the compartment, she unbuttoned her wool coat. Today was one of those in-between days. Too hot for winter gear and too cool for a light jacket.
Leaving the elevator, she crossed the spotless hallway