Alone Again
by Klick
Part 1
Richard Keller stepped out of the cabin door and breathed in a lung full
of crisp morning air. He looked down from the deck and out into the thick
woods as he heard the sound of Zeke, his golden retriever, rustling around in
the underbrush. "Zeke." he shouted at the dog, "Want some breakfast?" At
the sound of his voice, Ned, a five year old, quarter horse stuck his head out
from the door of his barn stall and snorted his morning greeting to the human
that was his provider. "Good mornin' Ned, there's a little nip in the air this
mornin', fall's not far off. Pretty soon we'll be butt deep in snow." The horse
nodded his head up and down in pure horse fashion at the man's words and
whinnied an agreement. "Guess you'll be wantin' some breakfast too?" The
horse snorted again as the dog came up a narrow footpath towards the cabin
and the man that was his best, actually his only friend if you didn't count the
horse. "Ok you two, we'll have a bite to eat then there's work to do, we've got
to go out and gather some game for dinner or you guys will be the only ones
eatin’ tonight."
Keller, technically, Dr. Richard Keller went to scoop some oats into
the horse's feed bucket before going back into the five room cabin that
occupied the center of a clearing in the trees of a hillside in southwest Idaho.
He put a food bowl down and a cup of Purina Dog Chow in it for the
retriever, then started preparing himself a breakfast of eggs, toast and coffee.
With his morning meal ready, Keller carried it out to the deck and took a seat
at a handmade table to eat and listen to the nature sounds surrounding his
mountain retreat that had been his home for the last three years.
Not a hermit, nor could one call Keller a recluse, the former researcher
and world renowned leader in the field of artificial intelligence was on the
frontier of perfecting a computer that could actually reason when he
discovered that his research and successes were being used in weapons by the
military. He protested but the government, which funded his work, argued
that as long as it was paying for them, he had little to say about what they did
with his developments. Keller, a brilliant designer of hard and software had
other opinions. Instead of continuing his work and seeing it used to guide
devices meant to kill people, he simply quit, walked away from a six figure
salary, a position of prestige in the scientific community and divorced himself
from the industrial complex that had been his life, his whole reason for
existing for nearly thirty years.
He moved to the log cabin that he'd had built on a hundred and fifty
acres of land in the center of the state, surrounded on all sides by the majestic
beauty of the undeveloped wilderness that he had grown to love. Unmarried
and with no living relatives, the good doctor lived alone for half a year before
adopting the dog from a city family when it was seven weeks old and a month
later bought Ned from a rancher that owned land that bordered his. Now with
the horse and dog as his only companions Keller lived a life of quiet solitude
in the comfort of the cabin that although looked rather rustic on the outside,
had within it's insulated walls all the modern conveniences of any home found
in the city. He had made a lot of money in his career and had invested wisely
and when he walked away from the work he'd been so deeply involved with
for so long, Keller was financially independent and with sufficient resources
to remain that way for the rest of his days. Not a young man, not unless one
looks at fifty-two years old as young. He still had some good years ahead of
himself and with his good health he intended to enjoy the time left to him and
the existence he'd chosen for himself, the horse and dog for as long as the
good Lord allowed.
Keller, or 'Doc' Keller as he was known to the town's people of the city
of Spalding, the only real form of civilization within a eighty mile radius of
his cabin, sat in a squeaky cane back rocker and drank his coffee, listened to
a blue jay squawk in a tree fifty feet away and watched a squirrel scamper
along an oak branch. Zeke saw the small animal too, raised his head from
between his paws and made a low growl, wishing just once that the bushy
tailed rodent would get just a little too far from a tree. "Zeke, those squirrels
drive you nuts, don't they?" The dog looked up at his man with an interested
expression then resumed his position of lying at Keller's feet and watching the
area surrounding the cabin.
Had it not been for the densely wooded surroundings, Keller would
have been able to look out in any direction and see not a sign of humanity. No
power poles, no buildings, no highways or bridges. His cabin was six miles
from the nearest road and that was a narrow, two lane blacktop that ran for
thirty eight miles before coming to the town of Spalding to the west. East of
where he sat enjoying his strong coffee there was nothing but trees and grass
meadows for over eighty miles. To the north the land got a little hilly and
forty miles away was Interstate 84. To the south there was still more hills and
the country got a little rougher, more rocky but still very few signs of
civilization. All in all Keller was miles from anything that could even
remotely be called an intrusion into his quiet lifestyle. But had he been able to
see four miles over the ridge to the south on that crystal September morning
he would have seen something that would have certainly drawn his attention
from the squirrel that was again worrying Zeke.
Strewn for several hundred yards was the smoldering remains of what a
few hours earlier had been a Piper Saratoga. A plane identical, except for it's
color, to the one that JFK junior had perished in a year earlier on the East
Coast. The most recognizable part of the wreckage was the vertical fin and
half of the horizontal stabilizer which were wrapped around the trunk of a
thick old pine tree fifty yards from what remained of the burned out cabin
section of the fuselage. The engine, and twisted propeller, blackened by fire
lay twenty feet away while the scorched wing panels lay scattered off to the
sides, sheared off in the impact with the trees as the plane slammed into the
ground at a gentle angle but obviously a high rate of speed.
The Saratoga is not a difficult airplane to fly; on the contrary, it is a
docile, very forgiving aircraft when in the hands of even a low time pilot. But
put that inexperienced person in any plane and let him or her fly it into severe
weather or in instrument conditions and that inexperience can quickly turn the
Saratoga, or any flying machine, into a lethal vehicle, doomed to destruction.
There had been heavy thunderstorms the night before that had kept Keller and
his dog off the porch and sheltered within the cozy confines of the cabin and
unmindful of the horror being experienced by three people in flight above
where he and Zeke listened to Mozart. The young pilot who had just recently
been checked out in the plane had elected to continue on into weather
conditions that he was not qualified to fly in and had paid the price that so
many before him had paid. The Piper had hit the top of a rocky ridge at over
one hundred and sixty miles an hour, disintegrating on impact and the
resulting fire had consumed most of the plane, the pilot and the front seat
passenger. Miraculously, unbelievably, there had been a survivor.
A portion of the rear seat had been ripped away from it's mountings
and hurled clear of the fire coming to rest in the rain softened muddy grass
fifty feet away from the nearest burning piece. Still strapped to what remained
of the seat was the plane's back seat passenger, totally unhurt. An agnostic
would have seen nothing miraculous about the survival of the young woman
who had been strapped in the seat at the moment of impact. He would have
simply said that, the force of the crash had caused the steel and aluminum
structure to fail with the inertia of her weight and had carried her and what
remained of her seat forward and away from the main fuselage. On the other
side of the coin would be the view of a more spiritual person who would have
easily concluded that the divine hand of God had reached into that plane and
plucked the girl out of harms way. Gently depositing her far enough from the
flames that she would not be harmed by the fiery tongue of Satan.
Whatever one's beliefs might be, the results were the same, at that
moment when survival was most unlikely, Melissa Croft was catapulted fifty
feet into the soft grass of an Idaho meadow and had cheated death. So gently
had she impacted the earth that she was uninjured and actually had suffered
not even the loss of her shoes, which were still strapped on her feet. At the
same moment that Zeke was standing, stretching and giving the squirrel one
more verbal warning, four miles away Melissa was sitting in the wet grass,
rocking herself and looking at what was left of the airplane that she had been
a passenger in just hours before.
Melissa Croft, twenty six years old, a graduate of Harvard, a computer
and financial wizard for one so young and former vice president of the
Farmer's Mutual Savings and Loan Association in Denver Colorado, watched
the small remaining flames that had survived the rain and consumed the Piper
leaving her alone in a condition that she wouldn't have seen herself, even in
her worst nightmares. She was wet and cold, dressed only in a pair of jeans
and light blue denim, short sleeved shirt. She shivered and looked away from
the fires that she had stayed close to for warmth most of the night and glanced
down at her hands. She tugged upward and like all the times before in the last
hours, they didn't respond to her wishes to change their position. Around each
wrist was locked a gleaming, polished nickel handcuff, joined by a hinge that
prevented her from rotating her hands opposite each other and in turn linked
to a chrome steel hoop that was securely attached to the front of a two inch
wide, thick leather belt that snuggly encircled her waist. The transport belt
had been applied just a notch or two tighter that it needed to be and her cuffs
similarly closed a few clicks further than would have been required to keep
her from slipping her small hands out of them. She worked her fingers to help
keep the circulation going and turned her attention to the another set of steel
restraints joining her legs and laying above the leather ankle straps of her four
inch heeled pumps. Why she was made to wear leg irons in the plane she
didn't understand but they had been applied after she had been seated and her
seat belt buckled. She'd asked the woman that had chained her but the reply
had been only a sarcastic, "Get used to them."
Melissa shivered again, her body's movement caused the handcuffs to
make a metallic, chattering sound against the steel hasp of the belt. She
looked up at the sky and wondered how long it would be before the sun came
up over the ridge of rock that had claimed the airplane the evening before.
"That must be east." She thought to herself as she looked up longingly at the
glow of the morning sun as it approached the point that it would finally offer
her some warmth. She arched her back in an effort to relieve the stress of
sitting in virtually the same position since she had been cuffed and belted at
the jail in Eugene Oregon yesterday morning and driven to the airport for
what was supposed to be an uneventful flight to Denver. She glanced down at
her left wrist expecting to see the gold, lady’s Rolex that she was so
accustomed to looking at, instead there was the gracefully curved steel frame
of the American Handcuff Company's newest offering to law enforcement,
their model N-550 hinged handcuffs. The prisoner made a mournful whimper
and flexed her hands against the cuff's tight hold on them and remembered
that all her jewelry had been taken from her at the jail and was now
somewhere in the ashes of the plane in what had been a manila envelope
along with her arrest records and whatever other paperwork the female U.S.
marshal had been carrying with her. The though of the woman that had been
her escort started her thinking about her handcuffs and the possibility that the
keys to them might have survived the fire. She looked at what she knew to be
the remains of the cabin section and the front seats of the plane and wondered
if their was any chance that she could find those keys and decided to wait for
some of the last small flames to die before attempting the search.
Melissa looked around her at the hills, trees and grass and thought that
although the area appeared peaceful and serene, for a girl in her condition it
could be quite hostile. As barren and foreboding to a helpless woman as a
desert, without means of obtaining food or water the lush forested hills could
be a terribly unforgiving environment. Her stomach growled as if on cue and
reminded her that she hadn't eaten since the previous morning and she had
hardly touched the breakfast offered by the Eugene city jail. A cardboard tray
with a portion of something soft and brown and gooey, two slices of too dark,
cold, hard toast and a small cup of warm juice. She'd drank the juice and tried
the brown stuff only to spit it back onto the tray then consumed half of one
piece of toast that she scraped the burnt crust from with a plastic spoon. That
had been at least twenty-four hours ago and she had not had so much as a
drink of water since. Her chin trembled as she began to realize that she was in
very serious trouble. She had survived a plane crash but unless she was found
or could walk out of this valley and be rescued, she stood a very good chance
of starving to death. At that moment, a prison cell seemed very inviting to the
helpless captive. "I’m sure jail won't be fun, and there's probably some
dangers there, but starving or being eaten by a wild animal isn't among them."
She thought, as she began to worry about things she had never given thought
to once in her life.
Melissa was no outdoors person, she'd never been in the Girl Scouts,
never camped out, her idea of roughing it was a hotel with a soft bed, a hot
shower and HBO. Not one night had she spent under a blanket of stars, never
had she drank from a stream or cooked over a campfire. She had no idea
where or how to even start looking for water but she did know enough, from
reading something, somewhere, that as long as a person had water to drink
that they could survive or at least prolong life even without food. She looked
around her again and tried to think where would be the most logical place to
find water. "Water runs downhill, right? Then if I walk down this valley, I
should find water at some low point, where those trees close off the end of
it." Her reasoning was sound and she felt better for at least making a decision
on what she had to do next. But before she abandoned the crash sight she had
to see if there was any chance of finding the handcuff keys.
Melissa managed to get on her feet, not an easy task with her hands
held so immovably to her waist, and walked slowly towards the burned out
plane's cabin section. There was a stench that made her grimace as a waft of
smoke came her way. She'd never actually smelled burned human flesh but
instinctively she knew what the odor was and opened her mouth to breath
through it instead of her nose. As she came near enough to the blackened
wreckage she peered at what she believed to be the right seat area and
suddenly wretched and turned away, gagging and nearly vomiting at what she
saw.
When she was a little girl of maybe ten, her father was cooking
hamburgers on the grill and accidentally let one of the patties fall through the
grill into the charcoal fire. She remembered how funny it had been and her
dad's efforts to keep it a secret but she had humorously yelled to her mother
who was in the house. "Mom, Dad just cremated a burger!" as she watched
the beef curl and turn black in the heat of the glowing embers. The sight she
had just witnessed reminded her of that childhood event however there was
no humor in what she had just seen. She turned away, still nauseous from the
sight of what remained of the once somewhat attractive woman that had been
responsible for transporting the prisoner back to stand trial. She knew that
even if the metal keys had survived the flames she didn't have what it would
have taken to search in the remains of the body for them. Melissa walked
away from the wrecked aircraft and began her journey towards the low end of
the grassy meadow, her leg chains jingling softly as she walked.
Rich Keller was throwing a saddle on Ned's back and was snugging the
girth strap three miles from where the chained girl was slowly making her
way down the valley. He slid a Winchester rifle into the scabbard, slung two
canteens over the saddle horn along with a pair of binoculars and called for
the dog before mounting the horse for a day's ride to shoot some game for his
evening meal. "Come on Zeke, let's go get 'em." he reined Ned to the left and
started at a slow walk down the trail that would take him to Nursery Valley.
He had no idea why the piece of land had come to be known by that name but
that's what all the local people knew it by and they were all aware when
Keller bought the land that Nursery Valley had been part of the deal. It had
been known for good hunting of small game for years and there was little
chance that Keller would come home without a meal in his game bag. Zeke
ran twenty or thirty paces in front of the horse, sniffing at every new scent
that the previous night's storms had brought to his otherwise familiar territory.
Keller serenaded himself and his animal companions with his rendition of an
old Neal Diamond song as the trio descended the hill where they called home.
"You don't bring me flowers, and you don't sing me love songs...." Ned's ears
turned toward the man on his back as he listened and walked.
She thought she had it all down perfect. With her knowledge of the
banking business, how the security systems worked and the Federal
Government's ineptitude’s at finding discrepancies in their insurance coverage
of banks, Melissa Croft was sure that there would be no way for the losses to
be traced to her or even where they had gone. She had covered her trail so
completely, even gone way overboard in some areas to hide the paper and
electronic paths the money had taken that it was more of a shock to her than
being arrested that her thefts had been discovered at all. Her office was on the
tenth floor and glass on three sides. She had looked up from her cherrywood
desk one morning about a month before and observed two people, a man and
a woman standing at her secretary's desk and looking in her direction.
Without being announced or introduced, they came into her office, told her
they had a federal warrant for her arrest and while the man read her the
obligatory Miranda card, the woman had put her in handcuffs, behind her
back and roughly ushered her out of the office in plain view of all her friends
and co-workers, down the elevator and in short order she found herself
locked in a hot, smelly jail cell in downtown Denver. The charge was
embezzlement of Federally insured funds, to the tune of one point six million
dollars. The FDIC wanted their money back; the FBI wanted her in prison. It
took two days for her lawyer to get her out on bail and while she was free she
boarded a United Airlines jet and headed for Eugene Oregon. She had placed
the stolen money in six different accounts in the names of phony companies
that she had set up to receive the funds once they had been laundered through
various pathways and investment houses. The account's combined balances
actually went over the two million-dollar figure and Melissa was intent on
protecting her interest. She had no knowledge that the FBI already knew
about Oregon and the half dozen accounts when she arrived at the bank when
it opened. However instead of getting her money, she was greeted with
another pair of handcuffs and the female investigator that had been working
on the case for over two years.
"You just weren't smart enough, and you got greedy." The woman told
her as the cuffs ratcheted closed around her wrists for the second time in three
days. Up to that point Melissa had never touched a pair let alone know what
it felt like to wear them. Now she was being handcuffed every time she turned
around. They'd cuffed her when she was out of her cell in Denver to talk to
her lawyer, they cuffed her when she was taken before a judge to hear the
charges against her read and when the FBI had again arrested her in Oregon.
Now she was in those bright, hard manacles again, only this time there was
no one around to take them off her. She knew that even if she located water
that drinking was going to be a challenge and that she would probably have to
get down on the ground to drink, "Like a dog." she said to herself in disgust
as she trudged toward the low end of the tree thicket still a quarter of a mile
from where she had stopped to rest and give her ankles a break from the
constant chafe of the leg irons. Her high-heeled pumps were not intended to
be worn in the wilderness either but she preferred them to being barefooted
and made the best of what they offered in the way of protection for her feet.
The chained girl reached the trees about a half-hour later and
welcomed the shade. The sun had come up above the ridge and at first she
was happy that she was finally getting warm again but after the arduous hour
long walk down the valley the coolness of the shade offered by the thick
woods was refreshing. She stayed towards the lowest areas and it was a short
time after leaving the meadow behind that she thought she heard something in
the quiet morning that sounded like water running over rocks. After a short
search of the area found what she was looking for. "Oh, thank God!" She
exclaimed aloud when she came to the stream that ran through the middle of
the low-lying wooded ravine.
Melissa stood for several moments looking at the water and watching it
tumble over the rocks and sandy bottom and the sight and sound of it made
her even thirstier than she had been before locating it. "Ok, now how am I
going to do this?" she asked herself as she stepped closer to the shallow
stream. She glanced around the area as if she would find a clean cup or
something to use as a container then realized that even if there were a set of
crystal glasses setting there, she would be unable to use them and looked
down at her closely cuffed hands and how they were held at her waist by the
belt around it. She was well aware that she was unable to reach her mouth
given the combination of the restraints and the hinged link between them that
wouldn't allow any degree of twisting her hands up toward her face. Tears of
frustration welled up in her eyes as she stood, her heels sinking in the soft
mud at the water's edge.
A hundred yards up the wooded arroyo Keller, the horse and dog had
just started down their side of the hill when Zeke stopped in his tracks and
produced a low warning growl. "Whoa Ned," The man spoke as he eased
back on the reins. 'What is it Zeke, what do you see?" thinking that the dog
might have picked up the scent of a bear or bobcat that often frequented the
area, Keller slung his leg over the saddle and lowered himself to the ground.
He dropped the reins below Ned's head knowing the well-trained horse would
not walk away as long as the leather trailed below him that way. He walked a
few feet in the direction that the dog was looking, down into the ravine and
saw a sight that was the last thing he had expected to see in this part of the
land. "Who the hell?" he said as he recognized the unexpected intruder as a
human. His eyesight wasn't what it used to be and he had to squint to see that
the lone figure below him was a woman. Zeke growled again and Keller told
him to keep quiet."Hush Zeke, it's just a girl. But what in the hell is she doing
here?" he asked himself. The dog looked back at him for reassurance then
directed his attention on the female who at that moment was dropping to her
knees at the edge of the water. Keller frowned and from his vantage point
could see that she held her hands oddly but not the reason why she didn't
seem to want to use them to try to get herself into a position that would
obviously allow her to drink from the rushing water. Not wanting to let his
eyes leave her but desiring a better view, Keller stepped back to his saddle
and took the binocular case down from the horn and walked back to the area
where he could get a look at the oddity below.
Raising the glasses to his eyes he had just gotten his focus when she
leaned forward in an attempt to drink, lost her balance and fell face first into
the cold stream. Keller couldn't believe he was seeing what he was as she
screamed loud enough for him to hear which despite his master's command,
produced a loud bark from the dog. The woman thrashed and splashed in the
water and kicked up mud from the bottom as she made several attempts to get
back up and all during her struggles Keller saw that not once did she use her
hands. He refocused the binoculars and took a better look and that is when he
caught the glint of shiny metal at her wrists and he suddenly realized why her
actions had seemed so strange and unnatural. "Well I'll be damned, she's
handcuffed!" he said to the dog that was still staring down the hill at the new
thing in his world. "Now what in the hell is a handcuffed girl doing out here?"
Zeke whined a reply and looked at Keller for an answer. "Well, whatever, but
she sure as hell doesn't need to be drinking from that stream, let's go down
and help her Zeke." Keller said as he climbed back into the saddle and
clicked at Ned to head down the hill.
As he descended he kept the glasses trained on the girl that had
managed to extricate herself from the water and was standing next to it,
seemingly unmindful of the three coming toward her, that's when he saw the
leg irons on her ankles and the high heeled shoes. "I don't get this, I just don't
get this at all." he said to himself. Finally she heard the horse's approach and
looked up to see the man across the stream from her and stopping a few yards
from the water. She looked around as if for a way to escape but she didn't
even try to run. She was all too aware of her leg irons and any progress she
would be able to make would be much too slow to get away from the three
that stood twenty yards from her and the man looking in disbelief at the
helpless female that had invaded their usually sedate country.
"Morning Mam, hope you didn't drink too much of that water, ever
hear of Giardia?" he said across to her.
Melissa was shivering again as she tried to think of something to say.
She looked around again then down at her hands then finally at Keller. "Can
you help me?" was all she could manage before the events, stress, and
discomforts of the last few hours took their toll and she began to sob
uncontrollably and dropped to her knees as Keller hurried across the ankle
deep water to her side.
