The Rescue - Nicholas Sparks [11]
“You’ve got to help me find my baby!” Denise sobbed.
More help was requested, more people arrived within minutes. Six people searching now.
Still the storm raged furiously. Lightning, thunder . . . winds gusting strongly, enough to bend the searchers over double.
It was Taylor who found Kyle’s blanket, in the swamp about fifty yards from the spot where Denise had crashed, snagged on the underbrush that covered the area.
“Is this his?” he asked.
Denise started to cry as soon as it was handed to her.
But after thirty minutes of searching, Kyle was still nowhere to be seen.
Chapter 4
It made no sense to her. One minute he was sleeping soundly in the backseat of her car, and in the next minute he was gone. Just like that. No warning at all, just a split-second decision to jerk the wheel and nothing would ever be the same again. Was that what life came down to?
Sitting in the back of the ambulance with the doors open while the flashing blue lights from the trooper’s car illuminated the highway in regular, circular sweeps, Denise waited, her mind racing with such thoughts. Half a dozen other vehicles were parked haphazardly as a group of men in yellow raincoats discussed what to do. Though it was obvious they’d worked together before, she couldn’t tell who was in charge. Nor did she know what they were saying; their words were lost in the muffled roar of the storm. The rain came down in heavy sheets, mimicking the sound of a freight train.
She was cold and still dizzy, unable to focus for more than a few seconds at a time. Her balance was off—she’d fallen three times while searching for Kyle—and her clothes were soaked and muddy, clinging to her skin. Once the ambulance had arrived, they’d forced her to stop. A blanket had been wrapped around her and a cup of coffee placed by her side. She couldn’t drink it—she couldn’t do much of anything. She was shivering badly, and her vision was blurred. Her frozen limbs seemed to belong to someone else. The ambulance attendant—though no doctor—suspected a concussion and wanted to bring her in immediately. She steadfastly refused. She wouldn’t leave until Kyle was found. He could wait another ten minutes, he said, then he had no choice. The gash in her head was deep and still bleeding, despite the bandage. She would lose consciousness, he warned, if they waited any longer than that. I’m not leaving, she repeated.
More people had arrived. An ambulance, a state trooper who’d been monitoring the radio, another three volunteers from the fire department, a trucker who saw the trouble and stopped as well—all within a few minutes of each other. They were standing in a sort of circle, in the middle of the cars and trucks, headlights on. The man who’d found her—Taylor?—had his back to her. She suspected he was filling them in on what he knew, which wasn’t much, other than the location of the blanket. A minute later he turned around and glanced at her, his face grim. The state trooper, a heavyset man losing his hair, nodded in her direction. After gesturing to the others to stay where they were, Taylor and the trooper both started toward the ambulance. The uniform—which in the past had always seemed to inspire confidence—now did nothing for her. They were men, only men, nothing more. She stifled the urge to vomit.
She held Kyle’s mud-stained blanket in her lap and was running her hands through it, nervously rolling it into a ball and then undoing it. Though the ambulance sheltered her from the rain, the