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Five minutes later the clench was stronger, her uterus blithely unaware that she could not have a baby now! She knew it for what it was. True labor. Yup. The real thing. This wasn’t like the damn Braxton Hicks contractions. They’d told her and told her that she’d know when it was real, and she’d listened with half an ear. Kind of like she’d treated the whole damn pregnancy: It’s not mine, so it doesn’t really count.
But it counted.
It counted.
Gritting her teeth, she guided her four-wheel-drive vehicle steadily through a thickening carpet of snow. You can do this, Savannah. You can. There was nowhere she could stop, no turning back. Sweating, fighting each contraction, she managed to keep her tires in the two tracks that were quickly disappearing after the passing of the last car, which was far enough ahead of her Escape that she could no longer see its taillights. Lining the road, rows of Douglas firs were heavy with snow, their branches blanketed in white.
She wondered how many miles she had to drive until she could risk pulling off and making a call. Or was it too late already? Another pain ripped through her, and she held steady hands clamped over the wheel.
Hold on, Kristina, she thought, jaw clenched, eyes straight forward and steady. She sent up a silent prayer for her sister.
After a moment, she sent one up for herself, as well.
Over an hour since Savannah had hung up on him. Forty-five minutes into Kristina’s surgery. Hale sat in the plastic chair and kept glancing at his watch, wondering how minutes had become so long. Eternities.
He tried calling Savvy back, but her phone went straight to voice mail. Because she wasn’t answering, or because she was out of range, heading into the storm.
Probably a little of both.
Feeling strangled for air, he left the OR waiting room and headed toward Emergency and the glass doors and hallway windows that offered a view outside. He was shocked at the amount of snow on the ground when he caught his first glimpse of the parking lot. Two inches of accumulation? Three? If there was this much snow at sea level, what must the pass be like?
Worried, he thought about calling the sheriff’s department and maybe talking to Savannah’s partner of sorts, Detective Stone. Or was it Clausen? He didn’t really know. He’d heard her speak of Stone more often. He placed the call and asked for Stone, but the brusque way he was put off by the woman in dispatch told him more about the state of the department before she even brought up the weather.
“Detective Stone is not available. Would you like to leave a message?”
“No. I’m good. Thanks.” He clicked off with the lie. He was far from “good,” and he half thought about calling 9-1-1, but what would he say? “I’m worried about a pregnant woman driving over the pass.” And the probable answer given the condition of the weather: “Yeah, aren’t we all, buddy?”
He wished from the bottom of his gut that Savannah had stayed in Portland. Better yet, he wished she’d never left the coast at all.
Snow. Thick crystalline pellets. Everywhere.
Savannah stared through the windshield, her attention laserlike on the white road, her ears tuned to the radio. After a sketchy broadcast that had started warning everyone to just stay inside with a hot toddy or cocoa, and flashlights and blankets at the ready, she was now getting mostly fuzz.
Her police band was sputtering, but she could get no clear signal through the storm. She’d tried calling 9-1-1, but her cell wasn’t connecting, either, and when she’d phoned Lang, it had been with the same result. In fact, the last time she’d fumbled with her cell, she’d lost her concentration, and the SUV’s back end had swung outward, causing her heart to jolt, before she straightened out the vehicle and eased it back onto the white road ahead of her.
Beads of sweat stood on her forehead, and she felt like she was burning up, like after a hard workout, rather than driving through a frigid landscape where the temperature was dropping by the minute. The predicted storm wasn’t supposed to be this severe; she’d heard the surprise in the weather reporter’s voice before her radio went to white noise.
“Accident . . . don’t go . . . icy conditions until . . .”
Tantalizing snippets were fighting their way through. Savvy kept herself attuned to the radio with the intense concentration of a tightrope walker. It was better than thinking about her sister, better than thinking about the next contraction, which she suspected was about two minutes away.
She could make it. Labor was intense; she’d known it would be. But it took a long time. She could do it. She was halfway through the mountains already, although this second half of the drive was bound to be a lot slower, as she’d gotten down to ten miles an hour or less. At this rate . . .
The radio fuzzed, and she caught a brief snippet of a scratchy voice: “Road closures . . . all mountain passes . . . Cascade . . . Siskiyou . . . Coast Range . . .”
“What?” she asked aloud, peering into the darkness ahead while white, swirling flakes caught in her headlights.
The finicky radio signal disappeared and gave her back that infuriating, fuzzing nothingness. It was time for the chains. Past time, really. She hadn’t been kidding when she’d told Hale they were the snap-on kind. She’d put them on half a dozen times going over the Coast Range in the winter, and though, no, she hadn’t been extremely pregnant those times, she wasn’t all that worried about it now. She just had to be careful about slipping, and that was the one area where she was lacking: good footwear for snow.
It was too dark to see too far ahead, but she knew this road backward and forward. She passed the last rest stop, which had been closed up and was buried in snow. There was a turnout not far ahead. A blocked-off road on forestry land. She could pull over there and put the chains on.
A contraction seized her, and she slowed the vehicle to a crawl, fighting through the pain. God. Damn. It. She could hear Hale and Kristina and Lang in her head, telling her what an idiot she was. But Kristina . . .
A sob escaped her lips. Immediately, she fought it back. No. No falling apart. Not now.
The SUV was barely moving by the time the contraction released her. Surfacing, she saw that the snow had covered the tracks she’d been following. Roads closed. That was the last report, followed by something about the Coast Range. She still had confidence her vehicle could get through, but if they were closing roads, this storm appeared to be a helluva lot worse than anyone had dreamed.
Her wipers were having difficulty getting rid of the accumulation of snow on her windshield. She peered through the small peephole each swipe granted her, squinting ahead into darkness. There were actually three passes along Highway 26, a climb and a partial drop, another climb and a partial drop, and then a final climb and a long drop toward the Pacific Ocean. She was near the final summit. Should she try Lang again? Nine-one-one? She was almost afraid to pick up the phone.
