Cold Ridge. Carla Neggers

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      ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

      A very special thank-you to Merline Lovelace, a retired air force colonel, a terrific writer and friend, and to Monty Fleck, an air force pararescueman (PJ), for answering my many questions about the air force and pararescue. I’m also grateful to Monty, R. B. Gustavson, Patty Otto and Dr. Carla Patton for sharing their medical expertise with me, and to Lynn Camp for her insight into nature photography. Thanks also to Lieutenant Kevin Burns, Nancy Geary, Robyn and Jim Carr, my brother Jeffrey Neggers—and to my teenage son, Zack Jewell, for his technical know-how.

      Finally, I’d like to thank the incredible team at MIRA Books—Amy Moore-Benson, Dianne Moggy, Tania Charzewski and all the rest of the “gang”—as well as my tireless agent, Meg Ruley, and my talented Webmaster, Sally Shoeneweiss, for all your hard work on my behalf.

      Enjoy!

      Carla Neggers

       P.O. Box 826 Quechee, Vermont 05059

      To Fran Garfunkel

      Contents

      Prologue

      Chapter One

      Chapter Two

      Chapter Three

      Chapter Four

      Chapter Five

      Chapter Six

      Chapter Seven

      Chapter Eight

      Chapter Nine

      Chapter Ten

      Chapter Eleven

      Chapter Twelve

      Chapter Thirteen

      Chapter Fourteen

      Chapter Fifteen

      Chapter Sixteen

      Chapter Seventeen

      Chapter Eighteen

      Chapter Nineteen

      Chapter Twenty

      Chapter Twenty-One

      Chapter Twenty-Two

      Chapter Twenty-Three

      Chapter Twenty-Four

      Chapter Twenty-Five

      Chapter Twenty-Six

      Chapter Twenty-Seven

      Chapter Twenty-Eight

      Chapter Twenty-Nine

      Chapter Thirty

      Chapter Thirty-One

      Chapter Thirty-Two

      Chapter Thirty-Three

      Chapter Thirty-Four

      Chapter Thirty-Five

      Prologue

      Carine Winter loaded her day pack with hiking essentials and her new digital camera and headed into the woods, a rolling tract of land northeast of town that had once been dairy farms. She didn’t go up the ridge. It was a bright, clear November day in the valley with little wind and highs in the fifties, but on Cold Ridge, the temperature had dipped below freezing, wind gusts were up to fifty miles an hour and its exposed, knife-edged granite backbone was already covered in snow and ice.

      Her parents had hiked Cold Ridge in November and died up there when she was three. Thirty years ago that week, but Carine still remembered.

      Gus, her uncle, had been a member of the search party that found his older brother and sister-in-law. He was just twenty himself, not a year home from Vietnam, but he’d taken on the responsibility of raising Carine and her older brother and sister. Antonia was just five at the time, Nate seven.

      Yes, Carine thought as she climbed over a stone wall, she remembered so much of those terrible days, although she had been too young to really understand what had happened. Gus had taken her and her brother and sister up the ridge the spring after the tragedy. Cold Ridge loomed over their northern New Hampshire valley and their small hometown of the same name. Gus said they couldn’t be afraid of it. His brother had been a firefighter, his sister-in-law a biology teacher, both avid hikers. They weren’t reckless or inexperienced. People in the valley still talked about their deaths. Never mind that weather reports were now more accurate, hiking clothes and equipment more high-tech—if Cold Ridge could kill Harry and Jill Winter, it could kill anyone.

      Carine waited until she was deep into the woods before she took out her digital camera. She wasn’t yet sure she liked it. But she wouldn’t be able to concentrate on any serious photography today. Her mind kept drifting back to fleeting memories, half-formed images of her parents, anything she could grasp.

      Gus, who’d become one of the most respected outfitters and guides in the White Mountains, would object to her hiking alone. It was the one risk she allowed herself to take, the one safety rule she allowed herself to break.

      She’d climbed all СКАЧАТЬ