The current was swifter than usual for summer, when the commercial companies were usually relegated to running pleasure trips. He was familiar enough with the river’s nuances that he figured it was a dam-release day. Officials periodically released water from the reservoir to increase the flow and depth of the river. The deeper, faster-moving water made for better fishing, boating and rafting, leading to more tourist dollars.
The strategy was working, judging by the number of people on this trip. Michael watched the rafters in front of the pack take their wild ride down the rapid, glimpsing wide grins and smiling, carefree faces.
As he tried to muster the courage to return to the town where he’d never been welcome, he envied them.
M AYBE HER FAMILY was right and she wasn’t as adventurous as she claimed to be.
The closer her group of rafters came to the churning, frothing rapid, the more Sara Brenneman felt compelled to paddle against the current. Back the way they’d come.
She suspected the beads of moisture on her forehead were drops of cold sweat instead of water from the Lehigh.
She glimpsed a lone, dark-haired man sitting on a rock, watching the rafts go by as though he didn’t have a worry in the world. How she wished she could join him on dry land.
She should be back in Indigo Springs unpacking the boxes that still filled the three-story stone row house she’d recently purchased in the heart of the downtown. The building was zoned commercial, and she was transforming the ground floor into a law office she hoped to open officially a week from Monday.
Only ten days from now.
Everything had happened so fast. One minute she was an associate at the large corporate firm in Washington, D.C., where her father was a partner. The next she was “seriously disappointing” him by starting a new life in a picturesque Pocono Mountains town where she knew no one except an old friend from high-school and the Realtor who had mentioned the white-water-rafting trip.
Even the three people in the raft with her were strangers, although they’d introduced themselves after a pretty guide with a port-wine stain on one cheek had told Sara to form a foursome with an existing group.
The same guide had launched into a talk on what to expect, mentioning that the rapids they’d be riding were classified as Class II and III. That wasn’t particularly daunting in a ranking system that topped out at Class V, but the approaching rapid was reportedly the most challenging.
“Just follow the path the lead kayak takes, and it’ll be a breeze,” the guide had said.
Sara, buoyed by the same spirit of daring that had enabled her to leave her old life behind, had believed her.
Until this moment and this rapid.
If things didn’t go well, Sara might be tempted to believe her family knew her better than she knew herself.
The rush of blood pounding in her ears merged with the roar of the white water as she paddled along with the others in her raft through the rapids. Rocks jutted out from the river, their edges appearing as jagged as serrated knives.
The rubber raft ran the gauntlet, bouncing on the water as though navigating the bumps and turns of a roller coaster. Sara’s stomach pitched and rolled with every swerve of the raft, and she consciously had to remind herself to inhale. They shot through the final stretch, a film of spray sprinkling the air as exhilaration hit Sara like a splash in the face.
She turned to see how the rafters trailing them were faring, the sun temporarily blinding her before her vision cleared. The raft directly behind them had veered to the right, where the rocks were more numerous, the path more treacherous.
Worse, one of the five people in the raft—a tow-headed boy no older than ten or eleven—perched not on the edge of the raft but smack in the middle, the exact spot he’d been warned not to sit.
The ejector seat, the guide had called it during the safety segment of her pre-trip talk.
Sara spotted the massive rock at the same time as the rafters in the boy’s raft. A man and woman Sara presumed were the boy’s parents, plus two older kids, paddled furiously to avoid it, but their raft smashed into the unyielding surface of the rock with resounding force.
Horror gripped her heart as the boy went flying into the swirling water of the river. His companions kept paddling, trying to navigate the rapid, seemingly oblivious to what had happened.
“Man overboard!” Sara yelled, but the thunderous howl of the white water drowned out the sound to everyone except those in her raft.
The boy’s blond head and the orange of his life-jacket became visible above the white froth. His arms flailed wildly.
Sara frantically tried to remember what the guide had instructed them to do should a rafter fall overboard.
“Feet first!” she shouted, but the boy didn’t have a prayer of hearing over the angry rumble of the water. She couldn’t even hear herself. “Lie back!”
The boy remained upright, increasing the likelihood his foot would get wedged by a rock. If he got stuck, the water would rush over his head, overwhelming him. And nobody in her raft could reach him, not when they were downriver from the spot where he’d fallen in and the current was running against them.
“Somebody help him!” Panic welled in her throat but she kept yelling. “Oh, please God! Somebody help him!”
A commercial trip like this one should have no shortage of people who could come to the rescue, but the guide in the lead kayak had already moved on to the next stretch of river and a big gap existed between the boy and the rafts bringing up the rear. Even if the guide in the trailing kayak noticed the boy was in trouble, he’d arrive too late.
The boy bounced off a rock, and Sara prayed his vest had cushioned the blow, that his head hadn’t taken a hit.
The water swept him along a perilous few feet, but he managed to remain upright. Then abruptly his forward progress stopped, and Sara suspected the worst had happened. He was stuck.
“Help him!” Sara yelled, the sound swallowed by the white water that had turned from beautiful to deadly in an instant.
Panic squeezed Sara’s heart. The other people in her raft were also shouting now. The four of them paddled desperately against the current even though reaching the boy was hopeless.
And then she saw a second dark head in the water, moving toward the first. A man this time, but not the man who’d been in the raft with the boy. It could only be the man who’d been sitting on the side of the river.
The man shot through the hissing rapids feet-first, with no inflated rubber raft to protect his body from the merciless rocks, a Lone Ranger tactic that could get him killed. The froth rose up intermittently to obscure him from view, but he moved inexorably closer to his goal.
The boy was fifteen feet away.
Ten.
Five.
And then the water splashed violently against the rocks, spraying into the air so Sara lost sight of both man and boy. She pictured the current sucking them under the surface, their mouths gasping for oxygen, their lungs filling with water. Dread welled up inside Sara like bile, and she shut her eyes against the devastating disappointment.
But when she opened them again, man and boy were moving down the river as one. The man must have hooked his arm around the boy, dislodging him from whatever had pinned him in place. He was guiding the boy away from the rocks, away from the swirling froth, away from danger.
The relentless surge of the white water deposited the boy and his rescuer into the relative calm of the cool, clear pool below the rapids, not far from Sara’s foursome and the raft of people who’d only just discovered the boy missing.
The boy was gasping and his young face looked as white as the froth on the rapids, but he appeared to be unhurt. Thanks to the