CHAPTER ONE
Colton
HIS CONNECTING FLIGHTfrom Washington to Denver ended up being delayed for more than five hours, and it was long past midnight when Colton arrived at an almost deserted Chadron Municipal Airport. In the e-mail from the car rental service, he’d been advised that he could obtain keys and a map for the drive into Hayley’s Peak from the airport’s after-hours desk.
After filling out the necessary paperwork and briefly chatting with a very sleepy receptionist about current road conditions into Whitney and then eventually to Hayley’s Peak, he picked up the Honda SUV from the nearly empty parking lot and began the drive towards the small Nebraskan town. With a population of 4500, Hayley’s Peak was the hometown of his deceased father and his estranged uncle, who Colton hadn’t seen since the age of five or six. It lay some thirty miles outside Whitney, close to the Nebraska National Forest.
There had only been a two-year age gap between Colton’s father, Walter, and his younger brother Hank. For reasons unknown to Colton, they’d rarely seen eye to eye, and their relationship eventually ended with a fight when Walter was in his mid-twenties. Walter Dietrich, who grew up in small town Nebraska as a third-generation German immigrant, was known for his stunningly good looks and short fused temper. A popular guy who eventually ended up marrying his childhood sweetheart, Amy O’Connor, straight out of high school when she was already six months pregnant with Colton. The brothers ran the only auto shop in town together until their falling out when Walter started working for the local sawmill to make ends meet.
Colton didn’t recall much of his early childhood except that his mother’s floral dresses always carried the distinct smell of lavender from the laundry detergent, and the way her unruly chestnut colored hair felt against his cheek when she tucked him in at night. The very same hair that Colton had inherited but had kept short for the twenty-one years while he was in the Army.
On warm summer evenings his mother would turn on the local country radio station, and she and Walter would dance on the wrap around porch till the stars exploded in the Nebraska night sky, and Colton would fall asleep to the sound of his mother’s giggles and his father’s low hum. Those were the memories Colton clung to when, at the age of twenty-five, he and the rest of his squad arrived at the remains of the Children’s Hospital in Kabul, Afghanistan. Approximately thirty children had been admitted to the hospital for various war injuries at the time. A suicide bomber dressed as a nurse had walked into the main ward and never walked out again. Colton had tried to repress the odor of burnt flesh with the smell of lavender and the screaming with the sound of his mother’s giggles. Like the rest of his men, he’d eventually broken down during the search for survivors. Colton’s breaking point had been when he found a child’s red tennis shoe.
Another memory which Colton didn’t like to revisit was the image of his father’s tear-stained shirt at Amy’s funeral on a bleak November afternoon where the rain came down in torrents. As if the weather had decided to compete with Walter on who could produce the most tears on that day. Colton had only been six, when Amy lost the battle to breast cancer after a six-month illness, but he clearly remembered the sound of his father’s crying in the living room later that night. And the smell of whiskey on his breath, when he spoke the loneliest words ever spoken to a six-year-old.
“You’re on your own now, kiddo.” Notwe. Butyou. Colton was now on his own at the age of six and had been ever since, now a mere week from his thirty-ninth birthday.
CHAPTER TWO
Henry
WHEN HIS EMERGENCYnumber rang at 3 a.m., Henry barely noticed the sore throat which had pushed him to an early night the day before. As he answered the phone, he registered the sound of a running car in the background and what sounded like a faint whining noise. Henry cleared his throat expecting some sort of car accident, which was not uncommon on the dark, narrow road between Whitney and Hayley’s Peak.
“This is Dr. Jenkins speaking.”
“Henry, this is Deputy Hawkins on the line. We’ve got us a situation down near Bear Creek. I think it’s Old Myrah’s dog from the looks of it... you know that greyish brown ball of fur and the...”
Brushing his unruly, blond hair from his eyes, he interrupted the deputy, Mike, before he went on a tangent.
“Mike, just let me know what happened?”
“Well, it seems this fella in an SUV was caught off guard in the dark by Old Virgil here as he came round the bend at the Creek. You know how dark it gets this time of year and Virgil he’s not the fastest anymore, but you know Myrah always leaving the yard gate open...”
“Mike, I assume the reason for you calling me at this ungodly hour is that you need my assistance in some capacity or another.” Henry reached out to turn on the bedside lamp and searched the table for his keys
and wallet. Past experience and a sprained ankle had taught him to keep them close by in case of an emergency call, saving him from having to stumble through the house in the dark.
“Right, so I don’t know about Old Virgil, maybe he’ll need to be put down, but the fella’s got some cuts and bruises as well and, with the road conditions right now, I see no reason for bringing him in to Whitney since you got...”
As often the case when interacting with Mike, Henry was slowly but surely losing his patience thanks to the early hour and his throat, which was killing him by now. Sure, he was a vet and not a human doctor, but it wasn’t the first time that he’d attended to minor injuries in his clinic. With the occasional fishing hook getting caught in various body parts or infected, ingrown toenails, the locals kept him busy along with their pets and farm animals.
Was it the future he’d envisioned for himself when he was finishing up his degree in Veterinarian Science at the University of Omaha? Not exactly. At that point, he and Chad were talking about getting their own place off campus while Chad went to grad school and Henry finished his residency. They’d met the first year of college when Chad was studying biochemistry and that had pretty much been it.
Four years later all his plans came crashing down when Henry received a call from the hospital in Chadron letting him know that his only living relative, his Granma Iris, had had a seizure. When Henry returned to Hayley’s Peak, he and Chad had initially agreed that he’d only stay until his gran was settled in the nursing facility in Chadron. As days turned into weeks, it became clear to Henry that there was no way he could leave Iris at the facility and return to the city ? and to Chad. This had turned out to be an insurmountable obstacle in their relationship. Chad was a city boy through and through and had “no intention of moving his gay ass to redneck America and be forced back into the closet, which he’d fought so hard to break out of,” as he put it. Henry didn’t blame him. Not one bit.
Henry chose to stay in Hayley’s Peak, moving into Iris’ bungalow where he’d spent most of his childhood weekends and holidays at her worn kitchen table scarfing down her banana muffins. In a way he saw it as his job to now repay the debt he owed to Iris for taking him in at the age of sixteen, when his parents threw him out for making out with Steven Cassidy on the living room couch. His parents had returned home early from dinner with some church friends only to interrupt their only child’s full-on make out session with his best friend.
It wasn’t so much the fact that Henry was only sixteen. Or that he was making out on the center piece of his parents’ living room, the floral couch. The problem was that it was with Steven and that Steven was a boy. And boys weren’t supposed to kiss other boys let alone dry hump them on a Friday night on a floral couch.
So, Henry moved from Whitney to live with his Gran Iris in Hayley’s Peak and hadn’t spoken to his parents since that night. Sure, he got the occasional birthday card informing him that the Jenkins household was ready to welcome the estranged and misguided son back into their arms when he was ready to see the error of his ungodly ways. Iris, who was by then already fed up with her son and her daughter-in-law for theirphony puritanismas she called it, comforted the sixteen-year-old that it wasn’tthat much of a loss anyhow. She always liked him best of all anyway, she told him when he cried himself to sleep for the first week and a half. Since then, he hadn’t shed as much as one tear for his past life.
Henry finished high school with Iris’ help. Later she put him through college on her small pension from her deceased husband, Henry’s grandpa Earl, who’d died more than two decades earlier. Thanks to a scholar ship and weekend shifts at a local bar, Henry had been able to go to college and had done well there.
All in all, he’d made a good life for himself in Hayley’s Peak. The locals initially accepted the out and proud 5’8” blond due to the respect his grandma held in the community alone. However, slowly but surely Henry won over the town with his sense of humor, positive nature and boyish good looks. With his blue eyes, cute freckles and boy next door smile, he could melt even the coldest of hearts.
Yeah, Henry was pretty okay with the way things had turned out. At the age of twenty-six his only regret was that the selection of available gay men in town was close to zero unless you counted the local auto shop owner, Hank Dietrich. But with Hank being in his late fifties, with a beer gut and at least a few molars missing, he wasn’t exactly Henry’s type.
“Just bring them both in and I’ll meet you there,” he told Mike. “If the injuries are too severe, I’ll take the driver into Whitney myself in the morning.”
