Chapter One
Two pink lines.
Over ten days late.
Assistant medical examiner Drennan Hawes stared at the stick until those lines blurred into one. If she stared long enough, maybe she could convince herself it wasn’t true. She wasn’t pregnant. But then another round of nausea forced her to her knees, and she lost everything she’d eaten at breakfast.
Okay. She was pregnant.
Oh, hell. What was she going to tell her mother? Drennan pressed a hand to her forehead as she flushed the toilet and pressed her back against the wall. She could already hear the criticism clawing its way into her brain. All that education and she’d gone and gotten knocked up like an impulsive teenager.
She should’ve stayed in Ohio like her mother had wanted. None of this would’ve happened if she’d just listened for once. It didn’t matter that taking this job with the medical examiner’s office in Hurricane, Utah, had been the escape she’d needed or that staying in the same place that’d broken her over and over would’ve eventually turned her into a bitter, toxic thing like her mother. Athena Hawes knew best.
A sick sensation that had nothing to do with morning sickness flooded through her. Her skin turned clammy.
Worse. What would she tell the father?Howwould she tell him? They’d parted that night without exchanging names or contact information. For all she knew, he’d only been passing through, visiting the park on a weekend with friends. Thoughshe guessed being in that bar could’ve made him a local. It certainly had been off the beaten path and not as popular as some of the other bars in town. Blood drained from her face and neck until it felt like it was pooling in her feet. She couldn’t move, couldn’t think. Their one night together wasn’t supposed to be anything more than a bit of selfish fun. Now they were having a baby? After years of following the plan that’d been strategically put in place for her since kindergarten, she’d buckled under the endless pressure to succeed, achieve, do more. She’d quit her job at the hospital, stopped answering her friends’ calls and messages and quietly disappeared from the life she’d spent decades building for herself.
A mental breakdown, her therapist had said. Utterly disappointing, her mother had said. Couldn’t even stand to look at her. What good was a trauma physician who couldn’t keep her patients alive?
And Drennan had realized it then. That no amount of overachieving or money would earn her mother’s love. That possibility had died a long time ago. All she could do was run. Escape. Her search for a new job—a new life—had come in the form of an assistant medical examiner position in the middle of nowhere Utah. A job where she couldn’t call the wrong shots, her patients were already dead and no one knew the dumpster fire that her life had become. Her mom’s angry voicemails and demands laced with cutting threats had dwindled in the four months since she’d bought out her apartment lease, packed up her car with everything she owned apart from furniture and headed straight toward the sunset. But not entirely.
It’d been one of those voicemails—it’d taken weeks of practice to silence her mother’s calls—that had driven her to the hole-in-the-wall bar in Springdale, the tiny tourist town right outside Zion National Park. That night with a handsome stranger who couldn’t seem to take his eyes off her had helped in forgettingwhat a screwup she’d become. For once, she’d chosen herself rather than some out of reach level of approval.
Drennan’s hand shook as she checked the test for the two hundredth time. She tapped her head back against the wall. “And here is your reward.”
She was going to have a baby.
Her phone rang from the nightstand in her bedroom, and Drennan forced herself to her feet. Acid coated the inside of her mouth, but whoever was calling wouldn’t notice, and she rounded into her small bedroom. She’d done a lot of work in making it feel homey without being able to paint. Lots of hanging green plants, dark bedding and macramé accents. She’d set up a reading chair where she spent most nights trying not to doom scroll, but being on call 24-7 kept her tied to her phone more than she wanted. Still, it was worth it, the peace she’d found here surrounded by red rock, rolling desertscapes and mountains that seemed to pierce the sky. The opposite of Ohio in every way. Drennan slid her thumb across the screen as the office’s phone number scrolled. “Dr. Hawes.”
“We’ve got a body.” Iain Yarrow didn’t bother with pleasantries. In fact, she was pretty sure the older medical examiner who’d hired her had a phobia of small talk, but it was one of the reasons she loved working for him. Straight to the point, direct without any manipulation or lies and always calm. Another opposite of Ohio. “National park rangers called it in about five minutes ago. A drowning from what they can tell.”
There went her plan to cry over her stupidity in forgetting to stay on top of her birth control with all the changes she’d undergone in the past few months. She checked her smartwatch, one of those new ones she decided to splurge on with her massive severance from the hospital. Only to realize she probably should’ve saved that money. Because now she’d need to buy supplies—for a baby. A crib, for one thing.
Drennan scanned her bedroom. The one-bedroom apartment wasn’t big enough. Where was she supposed to put it? No. She couldn’t think about that right now. She had a job she very much wanted to keep. “Okay. I can be at the office in about ten minutes.”
Though she couldn’t really call the basement of Metland Mortuary an office. Desert far outweighed population in Southern Utah. With a hundred different small pockets of people peppered throughout the lower half of the state, there was no real need for each town to have its own medical examiner or coroner, an oversize hospital complete with a morgue or an entire building dedicated to the medical examiner’s office. Their office in Hurricane—pronounced Hur-i-can, as she’d learned the hard way—served their local population, the tourist town of Springdale and Zion National Park with just one medical examiner and now an assistant. She and Dr. Yarrow were the only staff, acting as rulers of their too-small kingdom covering an exam room lined with cabinets, a single stainless steel exam table and a wall of narrow, horizontal refrigerators to house their patients. The funeral home director also had access considering it was his building, much to the detriment of Drennan being able to do her job in a timely manner most of the time.
“You won’t be assisting me this time.” Static or movement—she couldn’t tell—filtered through Dr. Yarrow’s end of the line. “I’m in the middle of a priority autopsy. I need you at the scene to take custody of the remains.”
The scene? Nerves and another dose of nausea shot through her. “I’ve never visited a scene.”
“There’s not much to it. Mostly preliminary stuff.” The medical examiner’s voice echoed through the line. She could clearly picture him standing over their exam table with his tape recorder—old-school and inefficient—picking up every wordof their current conversation. “Photograph the body and the surrounding scene, make sure no one has moved or touched anything, get information from whoever found the body and load it up to bring it back to the office. Ask the rangers on the scene for help.”
Sounded easy enough, but Drennan’s nerves wouldn’t settle. Despite the months since becoming a Utahn, she had yet to set foot inside Zion National Park. There just hadn’t been an opportunity. From the photos that’d come up on her search for a new life, the park was nothing short of heaven, with a river cutting straight through, mile-high red rock views and winding scenic drives through acres of wilderness. She’d always planned to visit. Guess today was as good a time as any. “All right. I’ll call you if there are any issues.”
Grabbing her gear at the door, Drennan jogged down the stairs from her second-story apartment and collapsed behind the wheel of her SUV. She hit the park’s toll entrance within thirty minutes after switching her SUV for the ME van, lining up behind a rush of visitor vehicles, and her stomach flipped. “You cannot throw up in the car.”
She wasn’t sure if she was talking to herself or the tiny bundle of cells dividing in her uterus at an alarming rate.
The promise of fall nipped at her exposed skin as she hit the window power button and showed her credentials to the ranger behind the dark booth glass. “I’m responding to a call one of your rangers made to the ME’s office.”
The ranger directed her to park at the visitor’s center, board the shuttle and make her way to the Grotto, the trailhead that would take her to the Emerald Pools trail where the body had been discovered. Hikers, families and selfie-obsessed visitors geared with backpacks, hats and sunscreen bumped and tossed her in the herd as they departed the shuttle. It took a few breaths of exhaust-tainted air for her to get her bearings. The Grottoacted as a nerve center for hikers to access several trails from one location, with Emerald Pools located across the asphalted one-lane road and over a man-made slat bridge. Impossibly tall trees added a bit of shade and brought her temperature down a couple degrees, but it wouldn’t last long with the sun angling into the vast canyon that made up the park. It seemed she couldn’t stop sweating as her body adjusted to the rush of pregnancy hormones, and she was little more than eight weeks along from her calculations. Things were about to get so much worse.
The trail entrance had been roped off. Clearly the rangers had enough sense to limit access to the scene where the body had been discovered. Another flash of her ME credentials got her through the barrier, and she started up the winding—sometimes too narrow—switchbacks leading to the lower, mid and upper pools, gear in hand. Her breath sawed in and out of her chest, her heart rate too high. Damn, she felt as though she’d run a marathon. Part of that was the pregnancy—yay for unending, bone-grinding exhaustion—and the other part was the altitude. Her body wasn’t used to thriving on less oxygen yet.
After what felt like more than an hour—honestly, how much farther did she have to climb?—Drennan reached the lower pool. Well, more of a dying stream. Beautiful, as expected, with moss-lined water cutting across the rocks before diving over the ledge into the green pool below. Evidence of a rockslide broke up the smooth lines of natural architecture, but she couldn’t linger to study why. The middle pool, located farther up the trail, was much deeper, though smaller and less impressive than she’d expected. Dead branches and mud caked the edges draining down the mountain.
It was the upper pool, which required every ounce of energy and some ankle-rolling, winding maneuvers to reach, that took her breath away. A sheer cliff protected the sprawling emerald-color water in layers of jagged red rock, black stains and a flowing waterfall that sprayed against her face with every gust of wind. Drennan stood stunned at the beauty, forgetting entirely why she’d had to haul herself up this mountain in the first place.
