Prey

He glanced out the door, at the mountainous scenery he’d seen thousands of times, and a faintly sad expression crept over his face. “I’m thinking about leaving, too.”

“What?” The unexpected confession jerked Angie out of herself and her own problems; she stared at him in shock. He’d always been here, been in these parts, and a fixture in her life from the time she and her dad had moved to the area. She had moved away a couple of times, once to college and then afterward to Billings, but Harlan had always been here, as reliable as the sun rising in the east. She couldn’t imagine this place without him. “Why?”

There was a faraway look in his eyes, as if he’d turned inward. “Because the older I get, the closer I am to the people who’ve already gone on, and the harder it is to relate to the ones still here,” he said softly. “Some days all I can think about are the dead ones. I catch myself talking to Glory all the time.” Gloria was his dead wife; Angie had never heard him call her anything other than Glory. “And your dad … I still talk to him as if he were standing right here. And there are more, too many more.”

He sighed. “I don’t have an unlimited number of years left, you know, and I’m spending too much of my time alone. I need to move closer to Noah and the grandkids, connect more with them while I still can.”

“You’re talking as if you have one foot in the grave. You aren’t old!” She was still too shocked to be diplomatic, but then diplomacy had never been her strong point. Afterward she could always think of what she should have said, but in the moment she tended to blurt out whatever she was thinking. Besides, Harlan wasn’t old; he was probably in his mid-sixties, close to her dad in age.

But her dad was gone, and suddenly Angie thought she knew what Harlan meant. He was hearing the call of the beyond; sometimes she caught the echo of it herself, in the stillness around her that would suddenly be filled with memories. Maybe it was nature’s way of transitioning from life to death, or life to another life. He knew he was probably in the last quarter of his life, and he wanted to make the most of it with the people who meant the most to him.

“Old enough,” he said, and looked again at the looming mountains. “If I don’t make the move now, I might run out of time.”

And that was it in a nutshell. She was doing exactly the same thing, though for a different reason. She was running out of time.

“Yeah,” she said gently. “I know.”

Abruptly he hugged her, a one-armed, rib-crushing hug that was over before she could do more than gasp. “I’ll miss you, Angie, but we won’t lose touch. I promise you that.”

“Back at you,” she said awkwardly. The emotion of the moment left her flailing way out of her depth, as usual, but she managed a smile for him as she stepped out onto the landing. Some people instinctively knew the right thing to say, the right thing to do, but she wasn’t one of them. The best she could do was, well, the best she could do, and hope she didn’t screw up too much.

As soon as the door closed behind her, though, her smile turned sad. She didn’t want to leave. She’d grown up in her house, she liked the small community here even though God knows there was absolutely nothing that would qualify as a nightlife, unless you counted frogs. But so what? She’d enjoyed living in Billings, and she enjoyed living here. After a while, wherever she moved to would become home. She was who she was, no matter where she lived. Fiercely she shrugged off her sadness. She’d better get over her pity party or risk turning into what she disliked most: a whiner.

She took the flight of stairs down the outside of the building at a brisk pace, then strode across the cracked parking lot to her seven-year-old dark blue Ford pickup, keeping her head high with an effort. She wasn’t beaten, not yet, but she’d definitely lost this battle, and the taste of defeat was bitter as gall in her mouth. The worst thing was, Dare Callahan probably didn’t even know—and wouldn’t care if he had known—that she’d been in a fight for her survival, and that as she’d been going under for the third time he had effectively put his boot on top of her head and held her underwater.

God, she hated him. No, not hate, not exactly, but she sure as hell didn’t like him. To think that when he’d asked her out, two years ago, she’d actually been tempted to accept, that she’d even gotten butterflies in her stomach, but that was before she realized what he was doing. She knew better now. She didn’t like anything about him, not the way he looked or the truck he drove, or even his damn name. Dare. What kind of name was that? Like he thought he was some supercool urban daredevil, able to leap small Yuppies with a single bound—except he was too cool to make the effort.

If she had to be fair about it—and she didn’t feel like being fair—she supposed she had to blame his parents for his name, but that didn’t mean he was completely innocent, because he could have changed his name to Jim or Charlie, something like that. But on a website, Dare Callahan, Wilderness Guide, looked a whole lot cooler than, for instance, a plain old Charlie Callahan; people probably subconsciously felt as if they were hiring Indiana Jones.

And when she compared her own website to his, Powell Guide Trips was so lackluster she had to admit she probably wouldn’t hire herself, either. That was a hard thing to face, but there was no getting around it. She didn’t have the extra money to hire someone to jazz-up her website, so in her spare time she’d been trying to figure out how to do it herself, though she was painfully aware that generally one got what one paid for. Her site had been set up so she could update it, but it was inspiration that failed her. She had no idea what to do to make herself sound more capable than Dare Callahan, Wilderness Guide. Change her name to Ace, maybe?