Free Sticks & Scones by Diane Mott Davidson Page B

granite, or even mountain marble. In the creek was a blackened hand. A hand attached to an arm clothed in plaid flannel. A blackened hand? I stared into the water below. The rigid body of a young man lay half in the creek, as if he’d been tossed there.
    I looked away, chilled.
He needs help
, my brain screamed.
Help him. Get him out of that water.
    I took a few tentative steps down the steep, boulder-strewn creek bank. Then I slid on a patch of ice.
    Help him, get him out.
But how could I get to him? I regained my balance and stared at the water. There were rocks in the creek itself, and a sheet of ice that might or might not hold my weight. Even if I got down there, was I strong enough to pull him out?
    Now ten feet from the water, I caught sight of the young man’s scalp. What I had thought was thick hair was a dark splotch of blood. I blinked and tried to make out his facial features.
    Hold on.
    His photo had appeared at least a dozen times in the
Mountain Journal.
I’d heard his voice once, on the phone.
    But he wasn’t supposed to be here. He was supposed to be hiding. In New Jersey. Where Tom was looking for him to question him about the FedEx hijacking. Not in Colorado. Not lying in Cottonwood Creek. Yet there was no doubt that Andy Balachek wasn’t gambling at a casino table.
    Andy Balachek was dead.

CHAPTER 6
    I t was hard to look at Andy Balachek. He was so young.
    Had been.
    Where was my phone? Wait: It was still plugged into the van outlet. Heedless of the ice, I scrambled back to my vehicle, and flung myself inside. With numb fingers, I punched in the numbers for the Furman County Sheriff’s Department. My second call to them this morning, I thought morosely, as I glanced back at the creek and tried to find my voice. When the operator answered, I gave her the details of what I was looking at: a young man in lumberjack shirt and jeans, with no hat covering his frozen, blood-slickened hair. His skin was pale in some places, blue-black in others. It was Andy Balachek, I told her. At least, I was pretty sure …
    The cell phone’s call-waiting beeped. I told the operator that I’d had an emergency situation myself that morning and I had to take this other call. She snarled at me that I was
not
to hang up, and that I should quickly dump the other call while she waited. That’s the thing aboutemergency operators: You’re anxious to get off the phone and deal with your emergency, right? But the operators want you to keep talking and not do a thing. They get especially testy if what you’re dealing with is not a natural gas emergency or a car wreck, but a crime.
    “Goldy?”
    “Tom! Where
are
you? I have so much—”
    “On Interstate Seventy, just past Golden. Took an early flight out. I called the house—”
    “Oh, Tom,” I wailed. He listened in silence as I told him about the gunshot that had shattered our window, about John Richard’s early release, about us having to take refuge at the castle. I told him my current location by Hyde Chapel, and about the young man in the icy water, a young man who was never going to move again.
    “Oh, Tom—it’s Andy Balachek.”
    “Miss G.—where are you exactly?” His voice was calm. “In the chapel parking lot?”
    “Facing the creek and the highway. Across from Cottonwood Park. You know the chapel bridge? Andy’s body is about fifty feet downstream from that. I’m above him, in a parking space, forty feet or so from the chapel doors.”
    Before he could confirm that he understood what I was saying, the call-waiting bleeped again. I’d completely forgotten about the emergency operator.
    “Get yourself out of there, Miss G.,” Tom ordered me. “Now. Drive back to town, this minute—”
    “I … I can’t!” Static invaded the cell phone and I stared at it. For some reason, I suddenly remembered Arch’s Montessori teacher telling us parents that
I won’t
means
I can’t
and
I can’t
means
I won’t.
So … why was I telling Tom that I