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“No,” he said, his tone ominous.
“Here.” Rachel’s neighbor handed her the cell phone. “I have 911 on the line.”
Holding her cell phone to one ear and the neighbor’s phone to the other, she said, “My sister is on a trail in Colorado, being attacked as we speak. I need someone to get out there before something terrible happens.”
A scream sounded on her cell phone. Rachel's hand shook so hard that she fumbled with her cell phone and nearly dropped it. She let go of the other phone, and it dropped to the ground.
Her neighbor swore and retrieved the phone.
“Lindsay?” Rachel pressed her phone to her ear, stomach roiling, her heart pounding so fast and hard she could barely breathe.
The line had gone dead.
Rachel redialed her sister’s number. It went directly to her voicemail.
She tried again with the same result. “Damn. Damn. Damn.”
Rachel reached for the phone her neighbor held and redialed 911. After reporting her sister's attack, she ended the call. “Thank you,” she said to her neighbor as she ran back to her apartment while speaking to her smartphone to call the sheriff's department in Fool's Gold, Colorado.
When she got through to the sheriff’s department, she reported her sister’s attack and sent the GPS location to the dispatcher’s cell phone number. She gave her information for the sheriff to contact her when they found Lindsay.
Rachel didn’t waste time. She searched for airline tickets to get from San Diego to Colorado Springs. Flights were completely booked for that day. The next available seat was on a plane leaving the following morning.
She booked the flight refundable in case her sister called back and said everything was fine. She prayed that would be the case and refused to think otherwise. Lindsay had probably dropped her phone while fighting off her attacker and was on her way back to her vehicle, uninjured and anxious to find a phone to let her sister know she was okay.
Her gut still knotted, Rachel got out her suitcase. Either way, she was going to Colorado to talk her sister into moving home to San Diego. Hiking alone in the mountains was just plain stupid. When she saw Lindsay again, she’d shake some sense into her.
After she hugged her and told her how much she loved her.
Lindsay was her only family. Though they’d shared a mother, they had different fathers. Rachel’s had disappeared shortly after Rachel had been born, leaving her mother to raise her daughter alone. When Rachel was four, her mother met and married Jim Stratton, the love of her life. Lindsay’s father became the only father Rachel ever knew and loved.
Lindsay was born a year after their mother married Jim. Rachel loved her beautiful little sister and their perfect family.
When Rachel went off to college, she came home for holidays until the day she got the call that her mother and stepfather had been killed in an automobile accident.
She’d come home immediately to be with Lindsay. Never had she doubted that she could support Lindsay and raise her to adulthood. Their parents had left them the house, which had been paid off through mortgage insurance. Rachel hired on with the California Highway Patrol as a cop to pay the bills and put food on the table.
It had been Rachel and Lindsay against the world from that point until Lindsay had graduated college and decided to explore the country. She’d made it as far as Fool’s Gold, Colorado, where she’d fallen in love with the Rocky Mountains.
Rachel had been heartbroken when Lindsay had decided to stay in Colorado. She’d thought her sister just needed time to see other places and would eventually come home to California.
She packed underwear, long-sleeved shirts, jeans and a jacket in the suitcase. For a long moment, she stood staring at a picture of her and Lindsay laughing in the sun on a beach in San Diego a few years ago.
Tears welled in Rachel’s eyes.
“Please, be okay,” she whispered to the photo. “Please.”
Over the next hour and a half, she packed, repacked and called her supervisor to say she’d be out for at least a few days. Then she paced the floor a hundred times, anxious to hear news but dreading it at the same time.
Finally, her phone chirped.
Rachel raced to pick it up, expecting to hear her sister’s voice. Praying for it.
“Ms. West, this is Sheriff Faulkner from Fool’s Gold, Colorado.”
Her heart sank to the bottom of her belly.
“My deputies and I responded to your request to check on your sister’s coordinates on a trail west of town.”
