Help Me I Think I’m Falling

"YEAH," GUTHRIE said into his earbuds as he stepped out of his truck toward work. The wind was really kicking it in today, which made him glad for Tad's plaid hoodie, but even more warming was the conversation. "I'd be happy to have Kelly's sister come stay with me for a bit."

Kelly's youngest sister, Agnes, really loved theater. She would be a junior in high school, but she'd gotten a part in a play in San Francisco: four nights a week, with rehearsals starting the next week.

"Lulu's going to come with her," Seth said, like Guthrie hadn't heard that part. "I know your place is small, man. It's just their mom will only let us help so much, and Kelly's doing finances. We're buying a house here in Connecticut and one in Sacramento for my dad and Kelly's mom and the girls. It's just a lot right now, but you know." His voice went soft. "It's Agnes."

Yeah, yeah. Guthrie knew about all of Kelly's family. The twins, Lulu and Lily; Agnes, the baby; even Kelly's late brother, who had cut a big damage path and left two special needs children in his wake.

Seth had been responsible for this family—or Seth and his father had taken responsibility for this family, Kelly and his mom included, when Seth was barely nineteen. That was how they'd met. Seth had needed money for Kelly's family, so he'd walked his gay Black ass into a honky-tonk bar because Guthrie's dad had put out an ad for a fiddler.

Guthrie had chafed for his friend then. Yeah, sure, he'd been in love with Seth, but God—hadn't Seth wanted more for himself than a bunch of old man's problems? It hadn't been until Seth had left for Italy that Guthrie had realized those old man's problems were the promise of Seth's life. That family he was helping to support was the best, most brilliant part of his friend's heart.

Agnes, the baby, was a lot like her big brother. Squirrel-bright eyes, wicked sense of humor, round, cherubic face. And apparently she was talented on the stage in the same way Seth was talented with music, and because this was Seth and Kelly's family, they were doing everything they could to give her the dream.

In this case, it was to sublet an apartment outside the city, but San Rafael was still kind of pricey. So Seth had called Guthrie, asking for a favor, and Guthrie had just lost his summer gig. Yeah, The Crabs would be playing at Scorpio for the next month and a half, but after that, the kids all had something bigger, more important, lined up. Money was going to be an issue, and Guthrie could sleep on the couch, drum up more gigs, and have a couple of roommates he really did love, and Lulu could take Agnes into the city four days a week and take an online summer course in physics, because Kelly's sisters were that damned smart.

Guthrie would gladly give up his bed and sleep on his couch for two months—not only for the help with the rent, but because Kelly's sisters were every bit as delightful as Kelly.

Besides. It was Seth.

"Yeah," Guthrie said now, pausing before he went inside because he knew his boss would give him shit if he didn't. "I know. It's Agnes. But honestly, Seth, the timing's great, and I got no problem with company."

"But, uhm, what about if you have company," Seth asked. Over the sound of the wind and the distance between phones, Guthrie heard him hiss, "See? I did ask him," and Guthrie masked a smile as he realized Kelly was prying into his love life.

"If I do have company," Guthrie said, pretending he hadn't heard, "then company is coming over Saturday night. You said the girls would be up in Sacramento then, right?"

"Wait," Seth said, his voice suddenly excited. "You got company?"

Guthrie shook his head, because the vote was still out on that one. "Well, sort of," he said, clutching Tad's shirt closer. "I had company two weeks ago, and I was supposed to have company this week, but company bailed."

He tried not to let his disappointment be too obvious. He'd expected Tad to ghost him. He'd been waiting for it. Instead, he'd gotten a text when Tad had gotten back to Sacramento and started work again, and… and it was like they hadn't stopped texting. Like the weekend—the awful parts and the amazing parts—were just an extension of… of… knowing Tad . He still sent Guthrie texts during the day. Guthrie still replied on his break. And at night? Oh damn. At night, once a night, unless Tad was working, Tad would call. They'd chat briefly—fifteen, twenty minutes, usually after ten at night when Tad knew Guthrie would be home—but it was so damned homey. Tad's voice on the other end of the phone so… so normal . Like they really were in each other's lives and not an anomaly. Guthrie had started to warm to the idea that Tad would… might be… just may become sort of an actual person in his life.

Which was why the night before had been so disheartening. Tad had been planning to come see their last performance at the Washoe on Thursday night. Yeah, sure, The Crabs had the other gig at the Scorpio—at least until mid-July—but their last night was usually a thing. And Tad had seemed to pick up on this, because he'd gotten permission to get his sister out of her halfway house. He was going to take her to the Washoe, then she was going to sleep on Guthrie's couch, and Tad would take her home while Guthrie had been at work on Friday so he and Tad could spend the entire weekend together.

There would be another trip to Bodega Bay on Sunday, hopefully, and… and it would be like they were real . Guthrie Arlo Woodson was in a real relationship, something with hope at the end.

And then Tad had called him up the night before as Guthrie was leaving work.

"Baby," he'd said, and Guthrie's eyebrows had gone up as he'd gotten into his truck.

"What's wrong?"

And instead of denying it, Tad had said, "Look—we're about to go out of cell service, so if the call shorts out, don't panic. But Chris's old mentor called up this afternoon and asked for SAC PD's help on a raid. He's up in a little tiny town in Tahoe National Forest, and he's not sure he can trust everybody up there with him. I…. Guthrie, Chris is my partner and―"

"And you need to go with him," Guthrie said. "I get it. You got his back, he's got yours. Don't sweat it." He was trying to sound grown up and mature, but some of his hurt must have seeped out.

"You know," Tad murmured, "I was really looking forward to this weekend. I should be back tomorrow, and I can be by your apartment when you get home from work. How's that sound?"

Guthrie swallowed. "It sounds like you need to concentrate on doing your job and staying safe," he said firmly. "I'd love to see you this weekend, but the safe part—that's gotta be your priority."

"Thanks, Guth—"

And true to his word, the call had dropped.

So Guthrie wasn't sure what to tell Seth now. "Listen," he said softly. "The girls'll be leaving on Friday night and coming home on Sunday night, and if my company gets the weekend off, that's his sweet spot right there."

"Where does company live," Seth asked, "that he can't come by other days?"

Guthrie sighed. "Company lives in Sacramento," he admitted. "Yeah, I know. It's a long way off for company, I get it."

"It's a hard way to have company," Seth said quietly. "Is he good to you?"

And by dropping the pretense of "company," Seth made it real.

"He's a detective in Sacramento," Guthrie said. "And he's been… great so far. But you know. Guys with old-man problems. I can't seem to stay away."

Seth snorted. "Maybe that's because old-man problems mean they're invested in bigger things. Family things?"

Guthrie thought of Tad's sister. "Yeah. Those things."

"It's almost like you want a guy with a big family, because you deserve a big family of your own," Seth said, then he ruined the snark by saying, "Did I do that right?" to Kelly, who was obviously still listening.

"You did that fine. Now give me the phone." And suddenly Guthrie was having another conversation.

"You can do long distance," Kelly said bluntly. "And you can do old-man problems. And you can do all the things if he treats you good. Does he treat you good?"

"Y'all, we've had a month of texts and a really good weekend," Guthrie said, laughing and exasperated at once. "He's been a prince."

"And he's your only prince for a really long time," Kelly said. "And the only prince you've ever told us about. So this is important, and it's going to be important and—what does he do for a living?"

"Law enforcement," Guthrie told him, cringing a little. Law enforcement would have blown right over Seth's head, but Kelly's family was not a fan.

"Great. You had better fucking fix your truck, mijo , or he'll be ticketing you for driving while poor."

Guthrie shook his head. "So far, he hasn't said a peep about the truck. I… I think he does bigger things. Investigations and stuff." He was tucked into a corner of the front of the dealership—the opposite end from where the smokers went to get their fix, but this side was in the wind. He was grateful for Tad's hoodie but still cold, and he had about three minutes before he'd be officially late. But God, he was glad to talk to Seth and Kelly. Roberta was sweet, but she hadn't had a big relationship yet. He wasn't sure if she'd ever had her heart broken—and Neal and Owen weren't in the market.

Seth and Kelly knew life wasn't fair. They knew shit got hard. He trusted them with this.

Kelly grunted. "That's not so bad. You think he's serious?"

"Hasn't missed a text in a month," Guthrie said with an inward shrug. The fuck would he know from serious? Something in his stomach vibrated. "Until today. He called yesterday to say he wouldn't make it to see me play, and then his phone went offline. I… I guess he's still up in the mountains with shitty service."

He'd been planning to be back that evening. Wouldn't he at least be in Sacramento by now?

With a start, Guthrie realized he trusted Tad would get in touch if he could.

If he could.

Oh God. Would anybody know to tell Guthrie about Tad Hawkins if he got hurt?

"Well I hope he gets back early," Kelly said. "You sound worried."

"It's… well, it's not like him not to communicate," Guthrie said, the uneasiness making him shift even more as he stood. With a sigh, he resolved to finish the conversation. "Which is neither here nor there for you guys. Yes, I'd be happy to have Agnes and Lulu stay at my place over the summer. They can have the bed, the couch is plenty comfy. Now I gotta get to—"

"Wait!" Seth said. He'd obviously grabbed the phone from Kelly. "One more thing. The end of August. We're coming to town to see Agnes's play, but there's more. I've got a recording gig for you."

"Me the band, or me me ?" Guthrie asked, surprised.

"You you ," Seth said. "I want to do a pop album, and you and me do good work. I'll be texting you songs you can work up on drums or guitar. Your choice, you get dibs, and if you want to do vocals, tell me. I want Vince on trumpet, Amara on winds, and you wherever you want. I've got some other people I want to play with, but you, Vince, and Amara get first dibs. I'll have contracts drawn up so everybody gets paid just for showing up at the practice and recording sessions, but…." His voice dropped wistfully. "I like playing with the people I love," he said. "And it's my vacation, and my agent got backing from a label and some streaming services, and that's what I want to do."

Guthrie smiled, his eyes burning unexpectedly. Seth never asked for things for himself. It figured that of all the things in the world his talent and his good heart could bring him, this would be the thing he asked for.

"I can't think of anything I'd rather do," he said, his heart in every word.

"Good. It'll be good money, Guthrie. I mean, I know that's not what you care about, but it'll be enough to maybe let you quit your day job. Enough to let you find more gigs and make your living doing what you love. I'd… I'd really like to see you happy."

"You're the greatest, Seth. I love you madly. Tell Kelly I love him too. Give Agnes and Lulu my info so we can get together on them moving in, okay?"

"Will do. Hope your ‘company' is okay. Kelly's right—you sound worried."

Guthrie was worried, but that was a whole different subject. "I'll keep you informed," he said, not sure if he would. Seth had just promised to make Guthrie's dreams come true out of nothing more than friendship. Guthrie wouldn't bother his friend with his love life unless he had to. "But right now, I gotta run."

"Later, man."

"Later."

And with that he shoved his phone in his pocket and walked into the blissful warmth of the dealership, hoping Eugene Calhoun wasn't around to give him crap, because he sort of wanted to share his excitement with Martin. The last month or so had proven that Martin could be a much nicer guy when he was talking about music, and with a few HR lessons, Guthrie could get him to not be a complete dick about women.

But as Guthrie walked in the door, Martin gave him a quick dart of the eyes toward the back where employees were required to clock in. Calhoun was known to get in front of people, monopolize their time, and then dock their pay if they were so much as two minutes late, for spite, and Guthrie figured that was what was going on now.

Guthrie nodded and said loudly, "Hey, Martin, do me a favor and go to the maintenance bay. Tell Tracy about the computer glitch we had yesterday."

Martin slid out from behind the counter one way, winking, waiting for Calhoun to follow him as he complained loudly about how people broke the computers because they were stupid, particularly females because they didn't understand the machines. As Calhoun aimed his irritation at Martin's back, Guthrie slid around the corner and through the back from the other direction, making it to the time clock and out into the front before Calhoun could figure out he'd been had.

Martin was moving slowly. They'd practiced this maneuver before, mostly for Martin, who took the bus and couldn't always get there ten minutes early, but sometimes for the other employees because Calhoun was a prick and no amount of health and dental was worth the harassment. He was still there while Guthrie slid right into his seat, booted up his computer, and said, "Wait, Martin, I'm sorry. The glitch has cleared up. My bad."

Martin barely let a smile quirk at his lips as he said, "No worries. Here, I'll show you how far I got on the invoices, okay? I picked up from where you left off yesterday."

Calhoun was left speechless, no openings for discussion, no place to vent his spleen, so he stalked off to micromanage the sales force, and Martin and Guthrie both breathed a sigh of relief.

"Thanks," Guthrie murmured.

"Insufferable prick," Martin returned under his breath. They worked quietly for a few moments until they heard the squeak of the old man's office door and the rustle of his blinds. This meant Calhoun had retreated for his morning nip of scotch with some coffee, and they had some peace for the next two or so hours. Martin gave an exaggerated sigh.

"That was close—geez, the price you pay for being three minutes early instead of fifteen minutes early."

Guthrie chuckled, his stomach still rumbling uneasily, and he pulled out his phone, surreptitiously checking for a text from Tad, but there was nothing there.

"Yeah, I caught a call from a friend just as I was getting out of the truck."

"Bad news?" Martin asked, and Guthrie shook his head, remembering that it was, in fact, good news.

"No. Not at all. My friend's little sisters are going to stay with me for the summer. The youngest one is doing a play in the city for a junior theater company. It's a big deal. Her sister's going to escort her to the city and work on an online course with some visits at CSUSF. They're great kids, and, you know, my friends. So it's nice I get a chance to help out."

"Oh!" Martin grinned, the newly nicer part of him obviously lighting up. "So is this like… your, uhm…." He glanced up, like toward the music that was humming out of the speakers, and Guthrie nodded and gave him a wink.

"Sure is. In fact…." Guthrie glanced around surreptitiously. "He might…." He hated to doubt Seth like this, but he also didn't like to hope too much. Dreams were great, but sometimes plans fell through. "He's trying to get a recording session in place. Sort of classics meets pop music sort of thing. Wants me on vocals and drums and guitar if I want. Says his agent's got backers, and they just have to free up some studio space in the city for the end of August. I mean, even if it's nothing, it'll be a chance to meet up with my friends again, right?"

"And play?" Martin asked, mouth open a little in wonder. He'd confessed to signing up for guitar lessons at a local community outreach and had shyly admitted he loved practicing.

"Yeah," Guthrie said, the dream of that flooding him with endorphins. "And play."

"Righteous," Martin said softly. "Put in for vacation right now so the old man can't complain."

Guthrie grimaced. "I gotta wait until Seth gets back to me with dates—"

Martin shook his head. "Two weeks off, the last two weeks of August, dude. And if your friend can't come through, book your own session, even if it's in somebody's garage."

Guthrie stared at him, a little surprised. "Buddy, I am a honky-tonk guitarist and a backup musician—"

Martin shook his head even harder. "I was at Scorpio last week, Guthrie. I know you didn't see me because your crowd was insane , but your band is good, and you can work solo any time. I'm telling you this because…." He glanced behind his shoulder, as though expecting to see Eugene Calhoun there, breathing down their necks. "You are too good for this, brother," he said.

"Honest money's honest money," Guthrie told him soberly.

"I'm telling you, your music's honest. I'll put in for the vacation for you right now, and you approve it. I want…." He sighed. "I want somebody I know to have something good."

Guthrie frowned. In the last month he'd discovered Martin lived with his mother, who, as far as Guthrie could tell, was sort of controlling and overprotective, and he would probably be forever hurt that his father didn't want a relationship with him. Guthrie couldn't articulate how lucky the poor guy was that he did not. But Guthrie had never pried, and he wasn't sure how to pry now. Martin gave his head a violent shake and said, "Please. For me. Let me think of you getting your break and feeling good about it, okay?"

"Yeah," Guthrie said, helpless in the face of that much despair. "Okay."

His computer beeped in a few moments with the paperwork for Guthrie's own vacation—Martin hadn't lied. He'd put it in himself.

Guthrie okayed him and made sure the automatic email was sent. He realized that he'd committed to something—a promise of some sort to make his life better, to see his dream through, no matter what the cost.

But he'd tasted hope two weeks before. He'd had hope show up on his phone a few times a day since. And hope had gone to a cold, dark place the night before, leaving Guthrie on the stage with a band that probably wasn't going to make it till the end of summer, because those kids had whole different careers than he did. Guthrie had poured his soul into "Long Long Time" the night before, because he couldn't play "Faithfully" when Tad wasn't in the audience, and the other song he'd worked up, the one that was supposed to be a surprise, had felt like a lie.

Suddenly he needed that hope, that last gasp of summer, that need to drive his life forward instead of to tread water and wait for something more.

The day continued—Friday was often a reasonably busy day, particularly after graduation. A lot of wealthy parents were there with dazed, excited, and yes, sometimes entitled children shopping for a graduation present that would help them launch into promising lives.

Enough of that sort had come through the doors, chattering animatedly, that when at about one o'clock, a wraith-thin young woman in worn jeans and a faded hoodie came through the door, Guthrie glanced at her twice to check her out. She had auburn hair and green eyes, both of which seemed suspiciously familiar, and haunted elfin features.

With Guthrie's second glance he read SAC PD across the chest of the hoodie, which flapped around her ninety-pound frame, and stood.

"Do we need security?" Martin asked, and Guthrie shook his head.

"No," he murmured. "I think she's a friend's sister. I… if Calhoun shows up, tell him I took early lunch, and see if you can get Tracy back here to help you out."

"No worries," Martin said, picking up the phone, and then, as they both saw the girl—who had an enormous bag over her shoulder, like a cross between a duffel bag and actual luggage—wipe the back of her hand across her eyes, he added, "She looks desperate."

"Yeah," Guthrie said. He didn't have to check his phone, see the screen with zero notifications, to guess why.

"April?" he said, drawing near, and she gave a hunted glance around the unusually crowded foyer. "Sweetheart, are you Tad's sister?"

She swallowed hard and nodded, rabbit-like, and he extended his hand, but not to shake.

"Darlin', come with me. There's a quiet spot around back—let's go there to talk."

Her eyes watered over, and he thought about that blank screen, about Tad. Oh God. Oh God . Tad!

He pulled her into the coffee nook, which was a sort of recessed hole in the break room that more people had bitched about than God could count.

"Here, darlin'," he said, putting his back to the wall so she wouldn't feel trapped. "We gotta listen for my boss, though, 'cause if he sees you here, he'll have kittens. He's a shitty human being, and I'd like to spare you that."

"Tad," she rasped without preamble and then pulled out her phone, her fingers shaking as she spoke. "He was gonna come pick me up. We were gonna watch you play." She gave a half smile. "I was looking forward to it. We both love music."

He gave an encouraging smile. "I was disappointed not to meet you," he told her truthfully. "He called me on the way out of town—"

She nodded hard enough for it to be an actual sentence. "Me too. He had to bail on me so he could get you before service quit."

Guthrie grunted. "And it did," he told her, hoping for a smile, but she only turned paler. Finally she had her cell phone out, and she was busy punching buttons.

"Did he tell you where he was going?" she rasped.

"Just somewhere in the Sierras," he said. "Tahoe National Forest?"

"Colton," she said, fingers busy. She was jumpy— twitchy —and he had a thought.

"Darlin', how did you get here?"

She gave him a gaze of stark fear. "The bus. He… he didn't get in touch with me this morning, and then… then I looked up his name, and Colton, in case…. God, in case something… and I'm his contact person, but…." She shoved the phone at him. "But he's not dead. He's alive. But he's in trouble. And God, I need to be there. I need to be there. And… and he talks so much about you. I thought you could help me. Can you help me? Mister— Guthrie —I know you don't know me, but will you help me get to my brother?"

"Shh…," he soothed, and he took the phone in one hand but kept a gentle hold of her fingers in the other. She twined their hands together almost violently, and he started a soft massage over her knuckles with his thumb. "Here, darlin'," he murmured, opening his arm. "You tuck into there, and I won't take no liberties, I swear. But give me a minute to read this so I know what we're getting ourselves into, okay?"

It shouldn't have worked. She was rabbity as hell. But apparently the fact that Tad trusted him made her desperate enough to send her into the shelter of his arm. She huddled there, barely letting him touch her but in the center of his body heat, while he read the police blotter section of the Sacramento paper.

He tried to keep his breathing steady so he didn't freak her out.

SAC PD Detective one of four people stranded in an old strip-mining canyon in Colton, California. Search and rescue officials are looking for solutions to get to the four men who fell into the canyon during an investigation into the shooting of Sheriff Eamon Mills of Colton County. In addition to Detective Tad Hawkins, Undersheriff Aaron George, High School Principal L. Larkin, and missing local man Curtis MacDonald are all stuck in what was once a strip mine but is now a geographical hazard.

Guthrie's breath caught as he continued to read the story, which gave precious few details about how the men had gotten stranded and was pretty vague on why it was so hard to get them out. His mind did manage to focus on the part about the gravel and loose shale being so prevalent in the small canyon that a helicopter rescue was absolutely not an option, because the small rocks would turn deadly in the copter's rotor wash, and then… oh God. They had a picture. It was an aerial shot, taken at distance, of two men climbing up an impossibly steep incline using a thin rope and a pulley system utilizing the wheels of an upside-down vehicle in the bottom of the canyon. The men didn't appear familiar, but… but this was pure MacGyver shit here, and Tad was part of it.

And Guthrie and April were five hours, at the very least, away.

His arm tightened around April's shoulders, and he heard himself say, "You got clothes in that bag, darlin'?"

"And my yarn," she practically whispered. He remembered that, remembered Tad's complete indulgence in her and her hobby, which was keeping her sane during a really shitty time.

"Well, you let me know if you need more of either," he warned. "Let me tell my coworker I've got to jet the hell out of here, and then we'll stop by my apartment so I can pack my own bag and my own woobie. You good with that?"

"Then we go find Tad?"

He nodded, his hands sweating with the need to move. "Stop for gas, get some food, and get the hell out of Dodge, angel—it's a plan."

"Thank you," she wept and practically melted into his shoulder. "Thank you. He's… you know… he's Tad— "

"Oh, honey, we're not leaving your brother in a pickle like that without letting him know we've got his back, right?"

"Right," she said. Then, "Uhm… I ran away from my halfway house. Is there any way you could call them? Let them know I'm not on a bender? I…. They yell."

"Sure," he said. "I can definitely do that. But we gotta get a move on, yeah? It'll take us six hours plus in Friday traffic, I don't care what Google tells us."

She swallowed against his shoulder and pulled away just as the door to the foyer opened, and who but Eugene Calhoun himself opened the door to the break room and shouted, "Why the hell are all these people milling around out here? That damned girl can't handle all this. She's useless!"

"Tracy's good at people, sir," Guthrie replied, ducking out of the coffee cubby and putting April behind him. "I told you to staff more today, and you blew me off. And it's too bad because I've got a family emergency, and I've got to go."

"You've got to what ?" Calhoun was an almost gaunt man with bulging eyes and a red, bulbous nose from too much scotch with his coffee. As he came unglued, not only did his eyes bulge, but his nose seemed to throb along with the vein in his head.

"It's in our contract, sir," Guthrie said. "Everybody gets two emergencies a year without question. You approved it yourself." Guthrie had written it into the contracts and then waited until Calhoun was tired from a good day grifting, erm, selling, and really mellow from half a bottle of scotch in a pot of coffee. "I've been here two years, haven't taken one of those once. This is mine. Her brother's a policeman, and he's in mess, and he needs his little sister, and I'm the one making that work."

He turned to April and gestured with his chin to stay behind him as he swung around Calhoun to keep her at his shoulder. Calhoun had been known to reach out and grab a girl's wrist with hard, pointy witch's fingers, and Guthrie was not letting that happen here.

Calhoun did it with Guthrie's wrist instead, his fingers digging into the nerve, and Guthrie gasped. "You walk out of here, Woodson, and you won't have a job when you get back."

Guthrie snorted. "Sir, if you fire me, I get bennies for a full six months and car maintenance for three. Do you think you're the only game in town? This place was a disaster two years ago—you couldn't keep customers because your staff was running around like headless chickens and thumbless monkeys. You got a good staff now, and I keep this place running like a Swiss watch. You want to jeopardize that because you can't honor a contract you signed yourself, you go ahead."

"Some piece of ass wanders in here and asks you for help and you bail on me? Nail her in the bathroom if you need to, but do not leave me in the lurch!"

And it hit Guthrie—he'd covered his ass in all the ways he'd had, but he still might lose his job because Calhoun knew, like all good tyrants, that even if they'd put their names down, that didn't mean the little guy had the wherewithal to make them keep their word.

Guthrie peered behind him at April's pinched face, at the bravery it must have taken to get her on a bus to come here—Tad must have mentioned the place, that could have been the only way she'd known—to come here and look for Guthrie's help.

Guthrie wasn't rich, and he wasn't powerful, but by all that was fuckin' holy, he knew how to keep his word.

"You do what you gotta," Guthrie said. "My plaid flannel hoodie's in the lobby. I gotta go."

Later, he reflected that he might have bailed. He'd had to fight his way through a throng of people to get that hoodie, but it was Tad's, and Guthrie couldn't bear to part with it. As Tracy leaned forward and competently dealt with the person at the counter in front of her, he tugged it off the chair and turned to Martin.

"I've got to go," he murmured. "Calhoun might not let me come back, so if this is it, man, it's been good working with you."

Martin turned stricken eyes to him. "Aw man—no!"

Guthrie paused and realized that he might not miss the job, but Tracy, Martin, the other employees—they were all right. He glanced over his shoulder, saw April hovering in the doorway, and gave her a little wave. His wrist ached and his heart ached and his worry for Tad made his stomach ache, but he had a moment to give Martin a squeeze on his shoulder and a wink.

"Keep practicing, amigo. You deserve something good too." Then he brushed Tracy's shoulder with his knuckles and said, "You're doing good, sweetheart. Don't let nobody here give you shit, and don't let Calhoun touch you anywhere you don't want to, you hear?"

She turned to him, her dark brows drawn tight under a mane of fuzzy yellow hair. "Guthrie?"

"Take care of yourselves," he said. "If I can, I'll be back Monday."

But he wasn't counting on it. He slid his hands into the hoodie, checked his jeans for his wallet, phone, and keys, then turned to April and vamoosed.

He opened the truck door for April and gave her a hand up, because the giant beater wasn't short and April was .

"Did you…," she asked hesitantly as he started the thing up. "Did you just… just quit your job?"

"That's up to Calhoun," Guthrie muttered, putting the thing into gear and backing out. "I'm within my contract rights, which I know because I rewrote everybody's contract and the work handbook. But the problem with getting a drunk monkey to sign something that helps everybody is that in the end he's still a drunk monkey, and his best talent is flinging shit."

"You quit your job," she said in wonder. "Oh my God. Tad finally finds a guy worth his time and he falls down a fucking well ?"

Guthrie sputtered a little laughter as he took the freeway onramp and headed for his apartment. "I don't think he fell down that canyon on purpose," he said, his lips twitching.

"I think it's typical," she sniffed. "Most other officers, they're worried about getting shot. Tad , on the other hand, ends up sliding down a mountain with MacGyver."

"Yeah," Guthrie muttered. "The hell was that? If I wasn't worried as shit, I'd be intrigued, you know?"

"Too smart for me," April said decisively. "I can barely put one foot in front of the other, most days."

Guthrie grunted. "I've had those days," he said. "Not like you, but the world gets damned hard."

"Tad makes it better," she said disconsolately, leaning her head against the window.

He heard all over again Tad's concern for his sister, his worry that she wasn't doing well in her current place, his hope that she could move to room with him.

"Let's get you to him," he said. "We'll get you to him, we'll move you into his apartment―"

"And we can get a cat," she said, like she was holding on to that. "We can get a cat, and maybe a big dog, the kind that likes cats. And I can get a job—something small. Volunteering at a library, or…. God, I'm a junkie, but I do love working with kids. Nobody'll want me with their kids, but I swear I wouldn't use—"

"Darlin'," Guthrie soothed, realizing that this was what April had needed all morning, and the one person who could have given it to her was the one they were both freaking out over. "You need to focus on the cat. Focus on pizza on Fridays and movies and trips to the park. Focus on listening to music and listening to your brother talk about his day. Keep these things in mind. These are the things you'll want after we get him back safe. Your brother, he's as solid as they come. Once we get this sorted, you know he'll be there for you, right?"

"What about you?" she whispered.

"I love cats," he said. "I could visit, be there maybe for some pizza Fridays, take some of those weekend jaunts. I'm not jealous about family. You were there first, right?"

She nodded, and while her tears seemed to fall more freely, she also seemed to be calmer. "We could get two cats," she said. "One for you, one for me."

Guthrie smiled as he took the turn that would lead to his apartment. "What about your brother?"

And suddenly she was sharp as a tack, neither freaked out nor helpless. "Oh honey, any fool can see you're like me. We'll be his damned cats. He can feed us and pet us and give us a place to sleep, and we'll let him know he's the best thing in our lives."

Suddenly he was the one with his eyes burning, and he had to take a deep, deep breath to keep from losing it now. Traffic on the 380 had been heinous. He estimated six hours at the minimum to get to Colton, if you counted pit stops and gas. Frankly, he didn't see April being able to sit in the truck for the whole four- or five-hour trip, so he needed to count pit stops and gas.

"Well, sadly," Guthrie said, pulling into his spot, "I have no cat. But I do have some bottles of water, some blankets and sleeping bags, and a knapsack so I can throw in a change of clothes. You want to come in and hit the head?"

She followed him into his apartment, pausing to look at the drum kit, which was set up, as well as his laptop, ready to record or transmit so he and the band could jam together. She saw the bookshelf with the Michael Connelly, the John Grisham, the James Patterson, and his copies of Rolling Stone and Entertainment Weekly .

"Can I grab some books and zines?" she asked. "I brought my yarn, but sometimes your hands get tired and you need to fuzz out."

"Knock yourself out," Guthrie told her. "Grab at least three."

"Three?" She looked at him curiously.

"One for me, one for your brother, one for you. Then we can switch off when we're done."

She didn't laugh, and she picked five books, so he figured she must be a fast reader.

He ran around and grabbed stuff. His sleeping bags, extra heavy-duty blankets, and, thinking mostly about April, a pillow so she could lean her head against it while he was driving. She watched him with incurious eyes, and he nodded to her to start picking stuff up.

"There's a lockbox in the back we can stow most of it in," he said. "Including my baby."

And with that, he picked up his smallest, oldest acoustic guitar in a battered black case. The leather was so worn it was flaking in places, and the edges were starting to crack, but the instrument inside held a tune in the worst situations—including playing by the sea or in the wind. It wasn't his best, and he usually performed with the electric, but the acoustic was… well, it was his crocheting, and like April, he needed something to give him comfort.

He had no idea what was waiting for them. He needed his fucking guitar. He'd been planning to order groceries sometime that day, so his cupboard was mostly bare, but he did manage a box of crackers and some chips and, oh hey, a couple of bottled sodas, which he threw into his lunch cooler.

"We'll get more at the gas station on the way out of town," he told her.

"You believe in being prepared," she muttered, taking the cooler and loading up on the other stuff.

"Yeah, well, we got caught out enough as a kid that I learned if I didn't want to go hungry, I had to pack my own damned granola bars."

In fact, this entire situation was enough to send his brain swimming back to his childhood, his dad and Uncle Jock wrapped in their jackets in the truck bed while Guthrie curled up across the bench seat, his stomach growling because they'd gotten a gig and needed to drive halfway across the state at the drop of a hat. And God forbid, Elmore Butch Woodson remember anything besides his licks. His son would have to suck it up and eat when they found a microwaved burrito or something because Guthrie's father had no use for foresight or planning.

"Our mom," she said, pausing, as though this memory was slow to surface, "she… she would put breakfast bars in our pockets on our way out the door. If we didn't like the taste, she'd put Pop-Tarts in our pockets, even though she thought they were a… what'd she call 'em? A ‘nutritional abomination.'"

Guthrie smiled as he loaded everything in his arms, not forgetting the guitar. "I like that. I'll have to remember that."

"She was the best," April said bitterly.

"Tad misses her too," Guthrie said, nodding at her. "Let's go, hon. We're burning daylight."

She paused at the doorway and glanced around, gnawing her lip. "You work hard," she said, "at making a home."

"Won't be mine for long if I lose my job," he confessed nakedly. "C'mon, let's hit the gas station before people start getting out of work."

THE TRUCK was a good twenty-five years old, a Chevy Colorado that he tried to keep maintained but that was probably due for a complete overhaul. The bushings were going, and the belts—he'd been planning to take it in to the maintenance department because he had the employee maintenance package taken from his check and he might as well use it, but there was no time for that now.

Still, he'd hooked up a decent sound system in it, and he could hear his music even when it wasn't played at top volume. He put up a "road trip" list he'd compiled and—after the stop at the gas station, where he had April get them a shit-ton of nuts and candy bars to add to the grub he'd already packed—the music helped him get up the hill without killing anybody, even when he hit the giant fucking construction mess at the I-80 split near West Sac.

By the time he followed his flickering GPS to Colton, a little town in the Tahoe National Forest, he and April were tired, cranky, hungry for real food… and scared out of their minds.

April had slept a lot, arms crossed in front of her, one of his blankets wrapped around her shoulders, the cooler on the floorboards by her feet and her giant flowered bag next to her on the seat. He had the feeling she'd done that on purpose, surrounded herself with things to make everything not so big and scary.

Smart , he thought, realizing how hard this must be on somebody who was hypersensitive for whatever reason. Everything from the engine noise to the jouncing of the cab, which Guthrie took for granted, was probably scraping on a nerve filed down to a nub by now.

"So," April murmured, glancing around, "what now?"

Guthrie turned the radio down, where he'd been humming along to "Sympathy for the Devil," wondering how it was that the Stones never seemed to age. Old Mick was looking fairly corpselike, it was true, but the music , man, that was devil-at-the-crossroads stuff right there.

"Let me ask where the sheriff's office is," he said, eyeballing the gas station right off the main thoroughfare through town. "Everybody knows where to support their local sheriff."

TWO HOURS later, the sunlight that had been filtering through the tall pines as they'd pulled off the road had completely disappeared, and Guthrie thought if he got sent on one more wild-goose chase, he'd grab the next local he saw by the throat and shake them until dead.

The sheriff's office had been full to the brim with cops, none of whom knew what was going on. When Guthrie had approached the desk, a distracted-looking middle-aged man in a uniform with W. Coolidge on the name tag had shrugged.

"I don't know what's going on," he muttered. "The Sacramento people have taken over everything. Ask them."

"I will," Guthrie snapped. "Where the fuck are they?"

"The one hotel in town," Coolidge snapped back. "But don't get pissy with those people 'cause the SWAT team is up here and they'll shoot you into sushi if you so much as ask a question."

Guthrie raised an eyebrow. "Have they shot you into sushi yet?" he asked carefully.

"No, sir, but they are not sharing information, and search and rescue has got a giant banana up its ass." A mean smile twisted his lips. "Or at least that's what I hear."

Guthrie wasn't even going to fuckin' ask. "Great. Do you know where Chris Castro is? He's one of the two detectives that came up."

"Oh, who the fuck knows," W. Coolidge shot back. "I'm going to say the hotel, and if I'm wrong, sue me."

Guthrie blinked and said, "Okay then, son, the hotel it's going to be. And I cannot thank you enough for not being any fucking help at all."

And with that he whirled on his heel and went out to the truck, where April was huddled with the flannel blanket that she'd been hugging for the entire trip.

"So?" she asked.

"So," Guthrie said, gnawing on his lower lip, "Their sheriff got shot last night, and their undersheriff fell down the same goddamned hole Tad did. Right now you've got a lot of tired assholes wandering around in circles going, ‘Have you heard anything yet?'"

"That's not promising," April muttered. "Where to next?"

"The hotel. I guess there's only one, and I saw it a mile back." He started the rattling truck and put it into gear, heading for their next destination.

A next destination that looked like a kicked hornets' nest.

The hotel itself was a very basic place: a two-story row of rooms with rickety stairs on each side of the strip. There were three big SUVs parked in front and an honest to God tactical van, with people geared up—masks, armor, the whole nine yards—running up and down the stairs shouting orders and directions to each other in the quiet dark of the mountains.

April made a muffled " Meep !" and slunk down practically on the floor, throwing the flannel blanket over her head and whimpering to herself.

Guthrie didn't blame her.

He slid out of the truck and started reading people's chests and backs, praying he'd see the thing he needed most.

And there it was.

SAC PD DET

Big letters across the front, like the giant shirt April had worn, probably hoping to prove Tad was her brother.

The man wearing it was fortyish and attractive—black hair, pale copper skin, large brown eyes. Guthrie took a risk.

"Chris!" he called. "Detective Chris Castro?"

The man paused by the door to one of the SUVs and turned toward Guthrie, surprised.

"And you are…?"

"Unimportant. But the lady in the truck is April Hawkins."

Castro's eyes went large and concerned. "Tad's sister ? What in the hell is she doing here?"

"You went out of contact last night, and suddenly her brother's name is splashed across the news along with this little one-horse burg. She's terrified , and she's sort of a mess, and I told her we'd come and see what was going on." Guthrie held on to the tone of his voice—this was Chris, Tad's partner, and Tad spoke highly of him, but dammit, it had been a long goddamned day.

"You're the snakebit guitarist," Castro said, seemingly excited at having put the puzzle together. "Man, Tad's going to be happy to hear from you."

Guthrie grimaced. "I would love to oblige you, but nobody will give us a straight answer as to where he is . The guy at the police station said something about how the whole damned world had fallen down to the bottom of Daffodil Canyon, and seriously? That's the most coherent thing I've heard since one o'clock this afternoon."

Castro grimaced. "Look, I've been out to the canyon for half the day, and I came back because nobody had any ideas how to get them out. I understand a team of scientists and the search and rescue folks have teamed up, so this might end soon. The canyon is a pain in the ass to get to, and it's dangerous, and I understand it's swarming with people right now, so maybe you should go to the hospital and wait there. They've been out in the sun all day, and while I've heard they had some supplies, there were also some injuries. Odds are, everybody is going to be sent there to be checked out."

Guthrie nodded. "Okay, then." He took a deep breath. "So, the hospital…."

Was about half a mile away, and Castro gave very succinct directions.

Guthrie parked close to the front and glanced around the parking lot unhappily. It wasn't that the lot wasn't lighted, it was that the darkness here was so absolute , it seemed to devour the light from every other source.

"Do you want to stay or come with me?" he asked wearily.

"I gotta pee," she replied, and he slid out of the cab, feeling muscles and joints creak and a howling void in his stomach. He stopped and reached inside, grabbed a bag of nuts, and started shoving them in his mouth, offering some to April as they walked inside.

He was so tired he honestly thought about sitting in the bank of chairs in front of the ER and zonking out.

He walked up to the night nurse, who was monitoring her computer with absolute dedication, and said, "Heya. I… our friend—her brother—was in the news because he fell down a canyon , and I asked the sheriff's office and the SAC PD people, and nobody knows where to find him, but I was told to come ask you—and—"

At that moment, there was a gasp and the hurried pad of feet in tennis shoes. Guthrie and April turned to see a coltish young woman with masses of red hair and bright blue eyes practically sprint to the front counter.

"Annie?" she asked, and the woman nodded.

"Maureen George? I know your father."

The redhead nodded back. "You guys have supplies for us, right? Because I understand somebody was shot and there's somebody who's in withdrawals and Larx has a concussion and―"

Annie, the nurse, nodded and held out her hands. "Hold on, sweetheart. We've got somebody running a cooler up here with everything they need. Do we know about the gunshot?"

Maureen shook her head. "It sounded like they were more worried about infection than blood loss, but you know, they're in the bottom of Daffodil Canyon and—"

She might have said something else then, but suddenly Guthrie's entire world telescoped, and at the end of the telescope was a small word, swimming in an ocean of blood.

"Wait wait wait wait wait wait wait," he shouted, and then, gripping the counter so hard he felt like his knuckles must be white, he said, "Did you say shot ? 'Cause our friend is at the bottom of that canyon and… and we thought he was coming here, and nobody can tell us shit, and where in the hell is Tad Hawkins !"

Maureen's eyes got big, and then she blinked. "Hey," she said. "Do you have the pickup truck I saw driving up?"

"Yes," Guthrie said, hearing his own voice wobble.

"Listen, we need something that can haul shit. We're going back down to the canyon with a care package for the people stuck there. Would you… would you want to come with us?"

Guthrie stared at her. "Who's us?"

Maureen laughed a little. "That's another story, and you don't look like you'd care. But if you and your friend—"

"I'm Guthrie, and this is April," he said, realizing she was about to do something really generous, and she didn't even know their names.

"Nice to meet you. So, if don't mind waiting for the medical supplies—"

"And here they are!" Annie said happily, taking the soft-shelled cooler from a young Black man who was already running back to wherever he'd sprung from. "Thanks, Jed. Here you go, Maureen." She gave Guthrie and April a sympathetic look. "I'd follow Maureen if I were you. Her father is the undersheriff, and he's stuck down in the canyon too. If they're sending down care packages, there's got to be somebody at the rescue site who can give you an explanation, okay?"

Guthrie nodded and turned to April. "Did you still need to pee?"

"It just crawled back up," she said, her eyes huge. "One more place? Guthrie, I'm hungry ."

"We're stopping for burgers. The guys in the canyon are also starving." Maureen George was so perky Guthrie almost wanted to smack her.

Guthrie took a deep breath instead. Yes, it had been a longassed day. Yes, this was one more destination in the scavenger hunt that had become their search for Tad. But this nice girl seemed to have a line on the rescue operation, and if nothing else, she knew where to find food .

He was weary to every molecule of his being. His joints ached. His head was pounding. His stomach churned. And here they were, one more chase. One more destination. One more motherfucking lead.

"Lead the way," he said.

"Awesome." This Maureen George person seemed to be made out of puppy dog tails because she was perky like it was morning and she was coffee.

"Here," Guthrie told her, reaching his hand for the pack. "Let me take that. Least I could do."

GUTHRIE THOUGHT he was tired, but ten minutes later he had to admit the very pregnant woman now sitting shotgun in the pickup seemed to have him beat.

When they'd gotten out to the vehicles, it had seemed logical to split up; Guthrie and his very convenient pickup truck were going to get sleeping bags and warm clothes for the people stranded in the canyon, and the people Maureen had come with were going to get burgers. They'd all meet at someone's house (Guthrie was a little fuzzy on whose house) and plan from there. April was exhausted and, he was pretty sure, about done with his fucking noisy, bouncy pickup truck, so he'd suggested she ride with Maureen, because compared to the last eight hours, a minivan seemed the height of comfort.

Maureen had surprised him then by picking up on April's mood. The young man behind the wheel had a crooked nose and a crooked jaw… and wide, fathomless brown eyes that had taken in April's pinched, on-the-edge-of-the-cliff features with one sweep and had nodded her to the back seat, with a sort of mute promise to stay off her last nerve.

And that left Guthrie with Olivia Larkin-McDaniels, his guide through the darkened land of no streetlights, no city lights, and a whole lot of stars.

And also an amazing font of information about what in the hell had happened to Tad.

When she was done giving her snarky, pithy explanation, Guthrie wanted to shake her and yell, "Are you fucking kidding me?" but he couldn't. Besides the fact that this whole situation was not her fault, two people she loved were down in the canyon with Tad, and she and Maureen, and even the quiet Berto, were all working really hard to hold on to their shit.

Tad and Chris had been called up to help the Sheriff of Colton County, Eamon Mills. Thursday morning, after the local high school had graduated and a freaked-out parent had realized his son wasn't at the ceremony. Sheriff Mills—with the help of Olivia's father, the principal of the high school—had tracked the kid to a local meth house that backed up against Daffodil Canyon. Maureen's father—the Undersheriff of Colton County—hadn't been able to help in the search, because he and Olivia's father were hosting a giant to-do for the graduating class.

Guthrie had grown up in a small town. He knew high school graduation was a big fucking deal. To have a party hosted by the undersheriff and the principal wasn't something either one of those people could walk away from. But Sheriff Mills hadn't trusted all his men, either, so he'd called in Tad's partner and more backup.

Which hadn't stopped him from getting shot. Eamon Mills was apparently out of surgery and expected to make a full recovery, but in the meantime, the undersheriff had gone to the scene of the shooting along with Tad and some of the borrows from SAC PD to investigate further. Somebody had shot at them, and Tad and Undersheriff George had gone sliding down into the canyon, or "the giant fucking gravel pit" as Olivia referred to it, bitterness in her voice. The place was an ecological disaster. The surface was loose shale and scree, and while trees grew upright, that was because they had taproots that punched through the granite, so the canyon was pretty inhospitable.

So inhospitable that when Olivia's father had gone driving down on a service road to see if he could reach Tad and Undersheriff George, the road had collapsed under his car wheels, and he'd gone sliding down to a lower level than the other two people trapped in the pit in the first place.

Getting them out was next to impossible. Like the news blog had reported, a helicopter would shoot up the gravel and loose rock in the rotor wash, and that was too dangerous to risk. The lip of the "canyon" was crumbling; any rope or rescue harness lowered to the injured had the potential to bring half the canyon walls tumbling down on their heads. And there were injuries all around. Maureen's dad had a still-bleeding cut on his leg. Larx—Olivia's dad—had a massive concussion. And Tad apparently had a bullet in his ass.

Oh, and the kid they'd been looking for was under a tree, although whether that was voluntary or the tree had fallen on him, Olivia didn't know.

All of that— all of it—and Guthrie's big takeaway still seemed to be "Wait, so your dad and Maureen's dad are together?"

They were a couple. The whole town knew. He'd asked her if that was just… okay , and her response?

"It's had its moments."

And that was all. But Olivia and Maureen weren't only upset about their respective fathers , they were upset about their parents , as a team, and as Guthrie piloted the pickup truck through the darkness to Olivia's fathers' house, he had to swallow against a lump in his throat.

Sure. Apparently, some people got shitty about it—Guthrie knew all about that on a gut level. But just like in Seth and Kelly's family, some people had family rooting for them.

In this case, all their teenaged children—and Guthrie couldn't keep up with who was who—as well as Mr. Larkin's coworkers and the entire sheriff's department had put their brains together for a way to help search and rescue get everybody out of a pit designed to trap people at the bottom.

On the one hand, it boggled the mind. It defied emotion. Guthrie could not wrap his brain around it.

On the other, Tad—the man who had made love to him and cared for him and shown up at his shows and made him laugh and… and given him hope —was injured at the bottom of a black hole, looking up at the stars, not knowing that Guthrie and April had come all this way to see about getting him out.

Guthrie had to give his boy hope.

Livvy, as Maureen had called Olivia, directed Guthrie to a neat little house at the end of a long drive. It was surrounded by forest, but it had a lawn and planted flowers that were fragrant even in the cool dark of the woods. There was a second story, probably for bedrooms, but the bottom half was ranch style, and as Livvy detailed all the things wrong with the place—the absolutely impractical fireplace, the old kitchen, the carpeted stairs—all he could hear from her was how much she loved it here, even though she and her husband lived with Berto and his brother a couple of miles away.

This was the house she'd grown up in. This house was where she knew she'd be safe. The other house was what she was building into a home. He hadn't known the girl an hour, but this much he knew.

And this house had three cats and an enormous blond dog that full-out body hugged her when they walked in the door.

"Nice," Guthrie said, squatting down to pet an enormous ginger tom who had slipped in with the other cats after Livvy was done making out with the dog and let him out to pee.

"You have a cat?" she asked.

He grunted and changed his attention to a tiny calico.

"No." The little darling let him smooth back her whiskers, and he remembered his and Tad's conversation about cats and wanted to cry. "I got a day job, and I take gigs and sleep on people's couches and shit. It's… it's no damned good for having a cat."

"Or a boyfriend," she said, voice quiet, and he had to give her points for observation.

"Or a boyfriend," he agreed.

"But you came," she said.

"I did," he said, mostly to the third cat, a pudgy torti who demanded his attention. "He was supposed to show up to my gig last night, but he called to say he couldn't make it. This morning his sister showed up at my work just… freaked the fuck out. Said something about a shooting, and she couldn't get her brother on the phone and…. And I walked out on the best day job I ever had. Told them I'd be out for a few days, and we drove up here."

Boy, cats were great. Didn't demand emotional commitment, didn't care that you were baring your soul—or that you'd probably just lost your job.

"Surprised yourself?" she asked, sounding like she'd been there.

"Yeah." Oh fuck. The day was crashing down on him. "I-I didn't think I was there yet. Didn't think I'd ever be there. And suddenly…."

"Seeing his face was the one thing that was going to keep your world from turning black," she said, voice laden with compassion, and he glanced up at her.

"Yeah," he said again. "I…." He stood, not ready for this conversation. "Tell me what to get out of the garage. I can throw it in the back of the truck and we can make them comfy for the night."

"Fair," she said with a sigh. She was exhausted—any fool could see that. But what she said next made him love her with all his heart. "I'll go through their drawers for some old clothes. How big's your guy? Larx is mid-sized, Aaron's a little bigger."

He didn't even think about it. The plaid flannel hoodie that had kept him sane— Tad's shirt that he'd hugged around his body all day—slid off his shoulders, the shock of the cool night almost painful. Tad would know this shirt. He'd know Guthrie was there.

"Put this in the basket," he said. It was time to get cooking.

She kept him on his toes, showed him where the sleeping bags were, told him what to grab while she was packing. It was as cool in the mountains as it had been in San Rafael, without the constant ocean wind. Everybody who'd gone down into the canyon had been wearing short sleeves and cargo shorts or khakis, and a lot of that had been bled on. Or, Olivia told him, baffled, somehow completely lost.

"My father was reportedly wearing half a shirt," she said as she came out to the garage with a flat of water and a case of Gatorade, which she set on the work counter while she took a breath. "I… I have no idea why that is. Why would you be at the bottom of a gravel pit where the earth itself wants to kill you with only half a shirt? I… I'm boggled."

"He was wearing a whole shirt on the news-blog footage," Guthrie said. He'd gathered it had been her father in the picture, wearing the makeshift harness. She said that's how they all knew he was concussed; apparently he was a runner and insanely fit, and he'd be running up the side of the canyon wall if something hadn't been wrong with him.

"I know !" she said, throwing her hands in the air, all exasperation. "I have the pictures on my phone . And now in spite of all the worry, I want to know. What in the hell did he do with the bright yellow Star Wars T-shirt I gave him for his birthday?"

Guthrie chuckled then, liking her very much. "Go do what you're doing," he told her. "Unless there's anything you all can't bear to part with, I'll finish up here."

"You could burn the garage down," she told him rashly, "as long as my dad and Aaron get home. You… you have to see them together. Like a team. They're teaching Elton and me what it means to parent, and they're doing it to us while we get ready to have our own squid." Her hand rubbed her stomach absentmindedly. "Ugh. I've got to hurry. I need to eat and take my meds and…."

"Blood pressure?" he asked, suddenly ready to chivvy the girl to the cozy living room immediately . She was at the tail end of her pregnancy. So much could be going on right now.

"I'm on the edge of all the things," she admitted glumly. "Blood pressure is creeping up , blood sugar is getting a little high —but no. It's bipolar meds. If I don't take them before I go to bed, tomorrow's going to be a house of horrors—all of it in my own brain."

"April needs them too," he said softly, remembering what April had told him about sneaking two days' worth of meds from the halfway house so she could get away. "She… she tried to self-medicate with street drugs, but…."

Olivia sucked in a breath. "Oh, that's rough. That's a hard thing to kick, then. My shrinks told me that, super concerned that I not try it. The things it does to brain chemistry are bad ."

Guthrie nodded, liking this woman, this family, more with every moment he was in their home, and then to his horror, he saw she was picking up cases of water and Gatorade again. "Oh my God, woman, go put your feet up and put that down !"

She glared at him. "I'm—"

"Doing my job, darlin'. I've got nothing to offer here but a strong back and my fuckin' truck! Now go sit down, med up, and rest. Food's coming." He toned his voice down for a minute. "You don't do anybody favors by hurting yourself right now. Go rest."

"If you insist," she said, trying to sound snotty.

"I do." He winked at her, and she smiled, and he got back to work.

He finished with the bedding and the eggcrate—not only enough for the people in the canyon, but enough for some of the people on top of the canyon who were trying to assemble an apparatus that would pull the fallen up without tumbling the canyon edge down on their heads.

FINALLY— FINALLY — he was headed back to Daffodil Canyon, just him and Maureen George. By the time Maureen had shown up with the food, Livvy had been too tired to move, and so had April. With that perfect empathy Livvy had shown him, she'd honed in on the fact that April was absolutely at the end of her rope. When he and Maureen had left them, April was scrolling through the aerial photos on Livvy's phone, cuddling with the giant blond dog, who had found his date for the night.

Now their destination was up the road, unspooling from darkness under their headlights and the rattle of the pickup. As Maureen directed him to some place called (har, har!) Dropoff Drive, he asked why the gravel pit was called Daffodil Canyon. He was imagining wildflowers or pioneers planting bulbs or some such bullshit.

"Fucking yellow pollen," Maureen said, shaking her head. "This time of year the air is thick with it. You'll find it in your clothes, your hair. It collects there on top of the rocks like a blanket sometimes. God, Larx—"

"Livvy's dad?" He still couldn't figure out why they'd call him that, and he wanted to know. He was impressed with these people, by their sense of community. Nobody was making the pregnant girl go until she dropped because she was the one who could organize shit—and Maureen seemed to regard her as a true sister, in spite of the fact that their dads had hooked up the year before.

"Yeah," Maureen was saying now. "Larx was the science teacher before this year when he took over as principal. He was… well, sort of the greatest. Took the biology classes to the river to take soil samples and, you know, to do all the outdoor active things that make science not boring words on a page. Built trebuchets with the physics students, made ice cream in chemistry. I hear he hired a geology teacher special because this area is unique and he wanted to explore that, and then he got the guy a job part-time at Truckee Junior College when he couldn't give him a full-time job at the high school."

"Wow," Guthrie said. "Dedication."

"Paid off!" Maureen laughed. "The guy is part of the team of people—Larx and Aaron's people—who put together this little search and rescue deal you'll see in a few. He's kept the damned search and rescue department from dragging the mountain down on our guys' heads about sixty-dozen times today, so, you know. Us grown-ups are buying that guy some scotch when this is over."

Guthrie chuckled. "Put me in for some of that," he said. "Who else is up there?"

"Larx's best friend, Yoshi Nakamoto," Maureen said promptly. "Who mostly just herds fish, because he's Larx's vice principal and he's good at it. My little brother, Larx's foster kid, Livvy's little sister, who will feel like ten people because she's exhaustingly optimistic, Berto's little brother who's like a spun top, Livvy's husband, Elton, who is damned cute but don't tell her I said that, and the other physics teacher that Larx recently hired, presumably because Larx is finally going to admit he's a human being and stick to being a principal instead of trying to do it all."

"Wow." Guthrie crossed his eyes. "The more I hear about this guy―"

"You've got no idea," Maureen said, shaking her head. "My little brother overheard the battles he had with the administration over being principal—they had to blackmail him with somebody both hated and incompetent before he'd take the job, and then he negotiated terms. In the end, he had to give up the track team to get Yoshi in as VP, and he kept the AP class in order to get veto power over hiring. It was small-town politics at its finest, done by a guy who spent his formative years telling politicians and bureaucrats to kiss his scrawny ass." She sighed. "It's a good thing my dad's marrying him, or I might have fallen in love with him as an adult, and that would have been both fruitless and embarrassing."

It took him a minute. "I take it you harbored a crush?" he asked delicately.

"Shh," she said, holding her finger up to her lips. "He made ninth grade bearable. Don't tell my dad—that'd be weird. Besides"—she shrugged—"it was a kid thing. What my dad and him are doing, that's grown-up actual love and relationship. A crush in the ninth grade is really nothing."

"Didn't feel that way in ninth grade," Guthrie said, trying to remember who he'd been crushing on. An image of Bruce Springsteen from his 1980's album covers floated behind his eyes, and then Billy Joe Armstrong and Brandon Flowers. Ooh… and Fitz from Fitz and the Tantrums. Nice!

He shook himself. "Sorry. All I've got is a spank bank of celebrities, and since I'm never gonna play with "Born to Run" era Springsteen, I think I'm safe from your situation."

She laughed hard, appreciating. "Young Bruce was nice ," she said. "But young Steve Perry was the shit ."

He pointed briefly to his own profile. "I got the nose but not the inclination," he said with regret, and this time she had to cover her mouth with her hands.

When she was done laughing, a melancholy quiet settled over the rattling old truck, and Maureen spoke into the silence. "You're nice. Can I be your friend as well as Livvy?"

Guthrie blinked. "Why, uhm, can't I be both?" Were they at friends-for-life now? He thought about Olivia, freaking out about her shirtless father in the middle of a survival wasteland, and recognized the act of will she'd used to pull herself out of her spiral by her bootstraps and shoulder on into the void.

It was sort of the same thing that had gotten him, after three tries, to a place where he finally knew where Tad was. Maybe he and Olivia were friends for life.

"Olivia was always so intense in school," Maureen said softly. "I… I wouldn't steal a friend from her for anything because she's a lot more guarded about that sort of thing. Not prickly, definitely not mean, but very much finding her way to her own heart with hard work. She relaxed around you in a way I've only seen with her family—or with Elton. I-I guess I'm a die-hard meddler. I want her to have all the friends." She gave a snort. "She and Christie are pretty much my favorite sisters, right?"

He blinked. "You've got another sister?"

Maureen shook her head in disgust. "Tiffany. She's pretty awful. Last Christmas Dad locked her out of his and Larx's house until she could come over and not be a twat, and she spent the entire time on the phone with the grandparents, trying to get away from their awful den of gay iniquity."

His heart ached for her. The only reason his father had kept talking to him when he'd come out was that Guthrie and Seth were friends, and Seth was gay, and by that time, Fiddler and the Crabs was making some money. The minute Seth had left for Italy and it was just Guthrie, he'd ceased to exist for Butch Woodson. If it hadn't been for Guthrie's uncle Jock, nobody in the family would have kept contact with him period .

"Family can hurt sometimes," he said, his throat dry. He'd hated talking about this with Tad. It had felt so… so sordid . So shameful, compared to the warmth and dedication Tad and April had to each other. In light of what these people had, his relationship with his father felt like a dirty secret, something he didn't want to contaminate their little circle of kindness.

"Mm…," Maureen said. Then, through the trees, they could both see the ambient light of emergency klieg lights erected high up—not higher than the ginormous pine trees that surrounded them but midway—probably using the trees as mounts. "And here's a place where it doesn't. Here, turn right and you'll see the spot we're heading for. It's, uh, kind of hard to miss."

Hard to miss was right.

In the middle of that darkness, the lights—which were secured to a tree and powered by a generator somewhere far back—hovered like a UFO, and the mass of people looked like something out of Close Encounters . Except on closer examination, nobody was wearing a white Tyvek suit. In fact, Guthrie saw a bunch of shivering people in T-shirts, board shorts, and in one case, a Pusheen button-down.

"Pull up to the shoulder there," Maureen said, "but don't go beyond the yellow tape."

Guthrie frowned, seeing nothing beyond the yellow tape but more road. "What's the yellow tape for?"

Maureen darted him a quick glance. "About twenty yards beyond the tape is the service track that Larx rolled down. According to Mandeep—he's the geology teacher—the granite shelf that supports this hillside ends about ten feet beyond the yellow line. Everything else is on decomposed granite, scree, and tree roots, and too much weight can pull it down. It's part of the reason we haven't been able to get them, right? It runs all along this side of the canyon's perimeter. So the yellow line is a guideline—nothing heavy goes beyond it."

Guthrie frowned. "But if cell service is shit, and you can't go beyond the yellow line, how do you talk to the guys in the canyon."

Maureen shuddered and pointed to a weird apparatus hanging from a faraway tree. "That," she said. "We borrowed it from the theater department. Christiana—Livvy's little sister—hung out over the edge of the canyon and hollered."

Guthrie thought of that, and while not particularly afraid of heights, he still felt the bottom drop out of his stomach. "Great."

"Livvy was pissed. She would have done it, but, you know…."

"Preggers," Guthrie said, and Maureen nodded. He put the car in park, clutched the sweatshirt Olivia had given to him in lieu of Tad's shirt, and took a breath. "Let's go deliver some care, right?"

"Right," Maureen said. She flung the door open, slid out of the pickup truck, and sent out the siren song to all teenagers everywhere. "Food, people! I've got food, blankets, medical supplies. Everybody get their asses over here and help!"

Suddenly Guthrie was besieged. Four teenagers practically teleported to the truck, hands out. Not for the food, although Guthrie wouldn't have blamed them, but for the supplies to be handed down to the guys in the canyon.

He was surprised by a kid a few inches taller than he was, with blue eyes and dark blond hair, appearing at his elbow, saying, "Here, give me the medical bag and the eggcrate. We can use the eggcrate to wrap the med bag and make sure it gets down there intact."

Guthrie went to do that, and the kid said, "And by the way, tell Livvy she owes me a Powerwolf sweatshirt, 'cause, you know, that one still has life in it."

Guthrie grinned at him and looked down at the sweatshirt Livvy had pulled out for him, which had a bright neon zombie horse on the back and the band's logo on the front. "You can have it back when this is over," he said. "I promise, I had no idea I was trespassing."

"Kirby," Maureen huffed out in frustration, "you know she only did that so she'd have something to get you for Christmas. We were at a loss this year."

Kirby grinned. "Great," he said. "Keep it. There are some Rare Americans concert tickets I'm dying to get my hands on for February. Kellen, I'll get you to that concert if it's the last thing I do."

"I owe you a car trip with CW's greatest hits," said the shorter, stockier young man with the black hair. "Just so you know."

"Ugh," said the girl who could only be Christiana, Olivia's little sister. "You can both leave me out of your caveman bonding rituals. I'm listening to Taylor Swift and Beyoncé, and you all can bite me."

"I like me some Taylor," said the tiny fourteen- fifteen-year-old? dodging in to take some of the load. Guthrie, trying to remember Maureen's description of people, thought this must be the little brother of the guy in the minivan.

"Or Beyoncé or Rihanna," Kellen was saying. "But the country western guys will melt my panties, and sometimes I'm down for that."

Kirby burst into low dirty laughter, and Christiana rolled her eyes. While they were talking, they were also unloading the truck, and by the time Guthrie turned to take the bear-proof ice chest Olivia had packed, everybody had something, and the only thing left was the eggcrate and sleeping bags he'd saved for the back of the truck.

And his guitar, of course, which was in the lockbox.

He ventured with the youngsters to a sort of giant erector-set construction site and tried to put together what he was seeing.

"The edge of the canyon and everything about twenty yards back from it is unstable," Maureen said as they set everything down and motioned for the workmen and a few guys who looked like teachers or search and rescue workers to come get food. "They're building a sort of treadmill using PVC pipe and three rows of paracord. There's the EMT basket—" She pointed to a coffin-shaped metal basket that looked like what helicopters dangled when they were lifting victims into the cockpit to whisk them to safety. "—and it's hooked up to a winch on a flatbed that's parked way back on solid ground. The idea is we can drop the basket down and it will slide to them, then pull it up—" Now she pointed to pulleys suspended by trees high above the canyon's edge. "—and pull the basket back on top of the treadmill until it's on solid ground and we can let them out and have EMTs ready to check them over."

Guthrie studied the elaborate system of pulleys and physics and some really ingenious thinking and swallowed. "This must have taken half the day to set up," he said.

Maureen nodded. "We started in the hospital, waiting to see how Eamon—the sheriff—was doing after surgery, when the teenagers started spitballing, and then Yoshi showed up, and he called in the physics teacher and the geologist and…." She chuckled. "And Olivia used some sort of emotional blackmail to get the search and rescue guys to forego the red tape and get their asses out here. By the time we had the setup for Christiana to talk to the guys, it was dark, and…." She sighed. "We need more light. We need to be able to see cracks or shifts in the soil, to watch for scree or rockfalls, and to know where the guys are exactly . Right now they're under the trees, leaning against an enormous dead tree that ended up stuck horizontally against the younger trunks. We can't see much of them, even with the lights shining down, because of the shadows. It sucks—I mean, believe me it sucks. Christi's dad has a concussion so bad he can't holler, and that's not right, trust me. And you know, my dad is law enforcement. He'd be bleeding out his eyeballs and say, ‘It's fine, honey. See to everybody else, okay?' So we know your worry and your impatience, trust me. But…."

"But you all already pulled off a miracle," Guthrie said softly, looking again at all that work in a hurry. "So we'd better not push it."

She smiled at him. "No, we'd better not. Now I know you wolfed down a burger at Larx and Aaron's place. Do you need any more food? Livvy packed a whole bag of apples…." She said it like she was luring him in, and he smiled, grateful.

"An apple would be much appreciated," he said, glancing around again. As he did, he took in a dilapidated, tattered old house that might have once been the epicenter of activity, but it sat, deserted and alone, falling in on itself toward the road. He realized that the football-stadium-sized area of industry he saw now had once been the place's backyard. There were vehicles—SUVs, sedans, battered cars, and teacher-mobiles—parked on the street in front of the house, and he saw a couple of guys sitting in their cars, eating. Search and rescue had brought vans, and that's where the guys in uniform were. The teenagers were putting together the care package in the center of the work area, shoving cheeseburgers and fries in their mouths as they worked. A small Asian man wearing the bright Pusheen button-down shirt and khaki shorts was helping them, also eating his burger one-handed.

Maureen dug into the bear-proof chest for the apples, showing Guthrie how the latch worked, and Guthrie thanked her and took his apple to go help with the organization process.

"Okay," the Pusheen guy said, "I think if we shove the eggcrate down on top of everything and wrap the straps over it , nothing should fall out of the basket during the initial drop." He glanced at another man with sepia-toned skin and a fall of rich black hair. "Mandeep, are you sure the edge isn't going to crumble when it touches down on the side of the canyon?"

"No, Yoshi, I'm not," Mandeep said shortly. "Remember, we pulled this whole thing out of our asses about eight hours ago." He sighed and stared out toward the gaping darkness that Guthrie knew instinctively was the canyon itself. "But it should hold. And we need to get them out."

Yoshi nodded. "Buddy, nobody's going to blame you if this doesn't work—but we are going to double-check with you, because you're the smartest one here." Yoshi shoved the last bite of food in his mouth and spoke while chewing. "I'm an Engrith teather, rmmbr?"

Mandeep rolled his eyes. "Yeah, Yoshi. Just an English teacher. My God—if you ever get to be principal without Larx, we're all going to have to run for the hills, because you are an absolute dictator." He shook his head, and another man—younger, wearing a denim jacket and sporting a couple days' worth of scruff—ran over from giving some of the search and rescue guys burgers. He was digging his own burger out of a bag, and he paused by the rest of them to eat it.

"Everybody fed?" Maureen asked.

"Everybody but the dads," the young man said. He glanced worriedly at Maureen. "How's Livvy? She settled?"

"Last we saw her," she said, indicating Guthrie with her chin, "she was on the recliner, talking Tad Hawkins's sister down from the ledge. Poor thing." Maureen shook her head. "She was beat. I gather these guys had been through the wringer to get here."

Guthrie grimaced. "This was not April's comfort zone," he admitted. "But she had to see her brother."

"Are you her boyfriend?" Elton asked as he wiped his hand off on the ass of his jeans. He extended it with a self-conscious smile. "Elton McDaniels—Livvy's husband."

"Guthrie Woodson," Guthrie said, shaking. "And, uhm—"

"Wrong sibling," Maureen said dryly.

Elton laughed. "Sorry about the assumption," he said. "But I'm glad you both are here." He sobered. "From what I understand, Tad is doing okay…." His voice trailed off like "okay" wasn't the word. "They asked for antibiotics, saline, and bandages—and ibuprofen. We've got a witness that says Tad took a shot in the upper thigh. It was from a distance, so blood loss isn't the problem, but infection…."

Guthrie nodded, feeling numb. "So you guys swing up there and talk to them?"

Elton shook his head. "We're not doing that again—we got eyes on them, but barely, considering the light. We're lowering the care package, and Yoshi's going to use the megaphone to talk to them, and then…." He shrugged, the hamburger in his hand still held up to his mouth but forgotten. "Then we hunker down for the night. I'm going to run and get Livvy—and probably April, if that's okay—early in the morning so she can be there when we go to pull them out. You're welcome to settle down here with us."

"I've got the pickup truck," Guthrie said, feeling like he should contribute something. "It should sleep three in the back. There's eggcrate and sleeping bags, so anybody who needs to stretch out—"

"I'll take it!" Kirby said, straightening. "Kel?"

"I'll sleep in the cab," Kellen said, shivering. "All the stars overhead? Creepy."

"I'll take the pickup," Elton said, yawning. "That way I'll see the sunrise start to hit the canyon, and I can go get Livvy. She's going to be losing her mind."

THE LOWERING of the care package was almost a disaster. The thing went up in the air, over the edge, and then was lowered to the ground—to be met by a chorus of yelps and "The actual fuck s!" from their rescuees in the canyon. Apparently, they'd set up the basket's path to be directly over where the four men were holed up against the tree, and that sent debris onto their heads in an unwelcome hail.

Yoshi apologized quickly, and then, with a speed that amazed Guthrie, the entire operation was just… moved. The PVC and paracord contraption was picked up in sections and reassembled fifty feet to the south, the truck with the winch was moved to accommodate the new location, and he was one of the group of people who hoisted the rescue basket and hot-stepped it to where the S and R guys were reassembling the pulley system.

"Wow," he said, a little dazed as, less than half an hour after the first try, they sent the basket down again. Somebody had a searchlight in the trees driven by remote that they used to track the progress of Larx and Aaron, Guthrie was told, as they ventured across the inhospitable incline to drag the supplies back to their small base camp on the other end of the tree.

"Did he still have his half shirt on?" Guthrie asked.

"No," Elton told him, semihysterical laughter in his voice. "Apparently, by the time they got to the basket, there was no shirt. No shirt at all."

A surprised smile tilted at Guthrie's lips as the camp—reassured that the supplies had been retrieved and the rescuees were making the best of a very uncomfortable night—began to power down. They left the lights on for another hour as everybody found a vehicle and some blankets or sleeping bags. Guthrie was particularly touched by Christiana and Maureen, reclining in the seats of what Guthrie took to be a Chevy Impala that was just for the teenagers to drive. The girls were turned toward each other, each with a fleece blanket pulled to her chin, clutching each other's hands as the generator-driven lights were shut off, a few at a time.

Sisters , he thought, and the thought was followed by another: that he'd never really known his mother, or a sister—or even an aunt—but that he'd been lucky in his choice of friends, because he seemed to be surrounded by them.

Guthrie was watching the last of the lights go off when he felt the pull, the absolute need , to tell Tad about that. About loving women. Not as lovers but as humans, because they had a unique energy and for no other reason. Strong women, fragile women, melancholy women, extroverts, Guthrie adored them all.

But not as much as he… adored Tad.

Way to chicken out.

And suddenly he needed to say the real thing too. But he couldn't because Tad was way down on the side of a canyon, being tended to by, all accounts said, two of the best father figures a boy could have, while Guthrie had nothing to do but gnaw his nails and worry.

Or there was the other thing he had that soothed his nerves.

As Elton and Kirby were setting out the eggcrate and sleeping bags for what promised to be a cramped but cozy night in the bed of the truck, Guthrie reached into the lockbox and pulled out his guitar case. Ignoring the other men's surprise, he made himself comfy on the tailgate and cradled his baby, tuning it with his brain on autopilot, his emotions swelling up, blocking rational thought and turning on his fear, his grief, and, oh God, God damn you Tad Hawkins, the hope that he couldn't seem to shake.

Suddenly he knew which songs he wanted to play.

The beginning chords of an old Coldplay tune thrummed through the air, and he opened his mouth and began to sing.