Another thump on the brake and the car shuddered to a stop on the wrong side of the road. The woman at the car-rental desk had asked if he’d wanted insurance. Maybe he should have considered it. He shifted to Park, lifted his quivering foot off the brake and sat very still, breathing in pine and dust.
“Pull yourself together, Turner,” his pyrotechnics scheduler had said. “Running in every direction gets you nowhere.”
“Steady,” Sparks spoke aloud. “They can’t pay a dead man.” He needed this job more than he needed the vacation. His last two firework-design gigs had finished with fingers pointed at him, murmurs that he’d lost his touch.
On his most recent job all of the fireworks went off at once. A show that was supposed to last twenty minutes had lasted ninety seconds. One big grand finale with no build-up.
He put the car in gear, placed one hand at ten and the other at two on the steering wheel. Carefully returning to the correct lane, he forced his thoughts to remain on the twists and turns of the granite and evergreens, instead of his problems.
“Watch out for the last curve before heading down into Heaven,” the female clerk had said, brushing his hand with hers and giving him a smile. “I’ve heard it’s a killer.” Worse than the ones he’d already navigated? Ah, a sign heralding the summit. Downhill run. Good.
After meeting with Naomi Chambers in town to discuss business, he’d be able to officially start his vacation. Playing hard and long would retire the doubts he’d begun to have. It would push that yearning for something just out of reach back into the place where he wouldn’t think about it. Home.
Compared to his previous occupation—fighting isolated forest fires—and given his vast experience with pyrotechnic displays all over the world, this particular design for such a small town would be a piece of cake. Small towns were hometowns. He’d borrow this one for the summer. Maybe that would help him out.
He had to be getting close to that turn. He flexed one hand, then the other on the steering wheel. Good. He was tired of green trees, tired of the canyon, tired of thinking... He turned the blind corner in third gear, where, instead of the road continuing straight or even at a reasonable curve, a wall of rock appeared along with a ninety-degree angle.
He barely had time to stomp the brake, wrench the wheel all the way to the right and hope he would skirt the outcropping of granite.
* * *
SHE SHOULD HAVE seen it coming.
Kissing the edge of the speed limit on her way to Heaven, the phone call with Brad—made as soon as she’d ended the call from Chet—bounced around in her brain. Brad’s voice, breezy as always, had stunned Emma.
She smacked the old Omni’s steering wheel with a fist, remembering his words. “No problem, you have to go back home,” he’d said.
“It’s not home,” she’d snapped, apologized and, after his next words, wished she hadn’t.
“Given all those phone calls you ignored from Granny, I had a feeling family ties would come home to roost. I snagged Carmen a few nights ago. She can fly standby. You remember her.”
Carmen was hard to forget with bleached hair, bleached-white teeth...and a husband.
“Carmen? The married Carmen?” Despite wanting to keep her tone neutral, Emma couldn’t stop the sarcasm from catching the word married.
Emma heard the woman in the background call to Brad and ask him where he’d put the massage oil. Brad muffled the phone to answer. When he returned, he said, “We had some good times, Emma. Let’s leave it at that.”
Don’t hang up on me. Emma’s stomach started to grip like it did when she was going to be sick. Then he was gone.
In a swirl of hurt, she’d decided to confront her grandmother. Emma would firmly tell her only relative she was not falling for this ruse, that it was a shame she’d roped Chet into it and that Emma was turning around right now and heading for the airport.
She’d board that plane for England whether Brad and Carmen were on it or not. She could do this. She had to do this. She’d go with, with...a man moratorium in place. Yes, that was it.
Her brain cleared, and her foot pressed the accelerator firmly. No man for her until—well, until a very different type of guy showed up. One that made her see fireworks—or at least a spark. And who was trustworthy. Dependable. One who, when he said, “I’ll be there for you,” really was. Yet, from her perspective, it wasn’t going to happen any time soon.
Ninety minutes later, pulling off the interstate at Evanston, Wyoming, the venerable Omni rumbled along the two-lane highway toward Bigelow Canyon. Emma kept an eye out for deer, skunks and raccoons with their nonexistent road-safety habits. The speedometer climbed; every mile brought Emma closer to the place she had vowed never to return to.
Grumpa had referred to Heaven as the intersection between Are We There Yet and Nowhere. Tucked in a valley with steep canyon sides, it boasted maybe a thousand people, which swelled into many thousands as tourists flocked there for the summer, and especially for the town’s main moneymaker—the Fourth of July Jamboree.
The event lasted from Thursday till Monday. A celebration of a small Western town and America.
It was almost nine o’clock now. And as surely as she took her next breath, by the time she crossed the town limits, her grandmother would be fine, Emma reassured herself. Nomi would be formulating some powerful reason for making Chet her minion on a new project.
Emma remembered she would need both hands on the wheel for the final turn. Only idiots blew down this canyon.
No way would her grandmother actually allow herself to fall ill. Not with her riding herd over the upcoming Jamboree in July. When God created Naomi Chambers, He had given her a double shot of stamina, and on the way out, she had snatched another.
Recognizing a familiar landmark, Emma shifted down for the descent. No one else on the road at this hour. Though Memorial Day weekend, travelers would be up and at it quick tomorrow; the early birds were already in their RVs for the night, parked at the local campgrounds, ready for the kick-off of the town’s summer season.
The Omni’s headlights swept left and right, with Emma letting the engine hold the car back. Biting her lip, she tapped the brake around another curve, readying for the last one.
She recalled smelling tourists’ and semitrailer brakes burning clear through to the center of town, coming from this canyon. Others, who thought they knew better than to slow down, rode with the tow truck or in an ambulance. The slow signs meant slow.
After she downshifted to first for the final blind corner and hairpin turn, she lowered the window; cool canyon air poured in. Here came the turn. She tapped her brakes. What was that ahead? When her headlights illuminated a blue sedan, she squinted. Off into the dark, up against an outcropping of rock spray-painted every year by graduating high school students, was a car lying on its side, steam pouring out from the hood, which was bent at many angles. Emma hit the brakes.
Pulling carefully to a stop at the side of the road along faint double tracks, she eyed the car, heart rate ramping. Yanking up her parking brake, she prayed it would hold on the steep downgrade, shut off the car and regretted that she couldn’t use her cell phone. Everyone in Heaven knew precisely where the lack of signal coverage ended for cell phones, and she wasn’t anywhere near it.
Please don’t be dead. Chastising her short height once again, she ran toward the car, looking around for something to stand on to see into it. Stepping onto a large flat rock that was close—yet not close enough to be really useful—she flung herself toward the car door, hanging on by her fingertips. Now what, genius? She couldn’t go back and she couldn’t let go, so she stretched up and peered into the sedan. She could