opened his tackle box and chose a new bait for his line, he said, “Doing what I do for a living, I’m no stranger to violence or to tragic circumstances. But when it involves kids …” He exhaled a heavy breath. “It’s so damned hard.”
Following a brief hesitation, she asked, “Children?”
Zach fixed the fly onto the end of his line. “I patrol a loop that circles around Mirror Lake. It’s about fifteen miles from here, up above Heartache Falls, and I met a family from Kansas as they set up their campsite three days ago. Nice people. Real nice people. The father sells insurance and the mom teaches fourth grade. They have two kids, eight and six. Tom and Elizabeth. Those kids were having a ball. Today I had just turned in to the campground when I heard screaming. Tom ran out of the trees … he had Elizabeth in his arms. Both kids were shrieking at the top of their lungs. They were just terrified. Turns out they’d been playing hide-and-seek in the trees just beyond the campground and they flushed a mountain lion.”
“Oh, no.”
“Tom ran toward camp. I’ll bet he was planning to take shelter in the family’s Suburban because he was yelling about keys. Anyway, he hit a soft spot on the trail too close to the edge of a drop. His feet slipped out from under him. Both children fell into the lake. Tom’s head whacked a rock on the way down.”
Savannah dropped her chin to her chest and shook her head. “That’s horrible.”
“Yeah, it was. Neither one of the kids came up, and both parents jumped into the water. I called it in and followed them.”
She stared up at him with troubled eyes. “You jumped into the water?”
“Yeah.” Zach stood silent for a long moment as memories of those next horrible minutes rolled through him. “The water was ice. Murky, too, this time of year. Mirror Lake is pretty to look at but a bitch to search.”
He paused. Blew out a heavy breath. Cast his line into the water once again, but just let it sit and sink. “I’ve never felt so damned helpless in my life.”
“How horrible for you.”
“Not as horrible as it was for them. I’m pretty sure I’ll hear the mother’s screams in my nightmares for a long time to come.”
Savannah set her fly rod aside and picked up the quilt. She spread it across the grass, then gestured toward it. “Sit down, Zach. You look pale.”
He did as she suggested and lowered himself to the quilt, where he sat with his legs stretched out in front of him, crossed at the ankles, facing west. Leaning back, he propped his weight on his elbows and watched the setting sun. The sky was beautiful, a crown of crimson and gold surrounding blue-shadowed mountains capped with snow.
Savannah took a seat beside him and quoted, “Purple mountain majesties.”
“A little glimpse into heaven.” Zach found comfort in the notion, and after a few moments of peaceful silence, he continued his tale. “I’ve never worked a drowning before. I didn’t want to do it today. Diving beneath the water, I could hear only the clock ticking in my head, and every second sounded like a death knell.”
From the corner of his eyes, he saw her reach out to touch him. Her hand stopped six inches away and she pulled it back. “How terrifying it must have been.”
The absence of her touch was tangible.
Zach closed his eyes as he relived the frantic dives, the strain upon his lungs as he pulled back to the surface to fill his lungs with air, the mother’s screams and the father’s frantic shouts, the gunshot when another camper took down the big cat. “The father found the boy first. He wasn’t … good. The bounce against the rock had cracked his skull. Those poor parents were torn—needing to help the boy, to find his sister.”
“I cannot imagine what they were feeling. What you were feeling.”
“I was too cold to feel. I just kept diving. By then my hands were so numb that it almost didn’t register what touched me. It was a little round plastic ball. The girl’s ponytail holder fastened with two plastic balls, and one of them brushed my knuckle.”
He heard Savannah gasp a relieved breath. “You found her.”
“Yes, thank God.” He barely recalled the rush to the surface, the swim to the bank, hauling her from the water, and beginning CPR. “Elizabeth was limp as a dishrag when I