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Rescuing Reeve Book 1 in the Cassidy Kincaid Series
Copyright © 2018 by Amy Waeschle. All rights reserved.
Publisher: Savage Creek Press
Genre: Adult Mystery.
All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the expressed written permission of the author.
This is a work of fiction. While, as in all fiction, the literary perceptions and insights are based on experience, all names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
ISBN: 9781070174020
Editor: Melanie Austin
Cover Photograph: @allisonk.courtney
Cover Design: Creative Fusion Works
Author Photo: Josh Monthei
For my surf sisters,
thank you for your
inspiration, your laughter,
and for sharing the journey
One
Volcán Arenal, Costa Rica
Everyone wanted to know when the volcano was going to explode. Which was why, on a Friday evening, Dr. Cassidy Kincaid was on her knees in the cindery black dust, fiddling with the seismic station she had built from a car battery, various cables, and a very expensive seismometer. After setting up two of these stations on Arenal that day, she was grubby, her fingertips raw from digging in the volcanic soil, her brow salty from sweat. A cold beer and a shower were just a jeep ride away, if only she could get this signal to transmit.
“Try it now,” Héctor, her field tech and indispensable fixer, called from the nearby solar panel mount that she had also built.
Cassidy flipped her braid over her shoulder and stomped on the ground to make a mini earthquake. The digital waveform on her laptop jumped, and then she watched the GPS finally recording the station’s time and coordinates. She hooted with glee and closed up the ammo box containing the electronics that was set in the ground about a meter deep. She and Héctor carefully buried the box just as the setting sun washed the barren hillside with a golden glow. Cassidy took a moment to close her eyes and let the moment sink in, a moment she would have shared immediately with Pete if he was still alive.
All stations up and running: she would have texted him.
He would have texted back: Nice! Is the volcano behaving herself?
Yes, unlike me. I plan to get drunk and eat too many empanadas.
“There’s dancing tonight,” Héctor said, his accent soft and melodic. She sometimes caught him singing as they hiked to and from her stations. “Are you going?”
She turned to see him leaning on the handle of the shovel, a playful look in his brown eyes. The question took her by surprise. Dancing?
“Are you going?” she asked.
“I think everyone ees going,” he said.
By everyone, she knew he meant their team of seven: a mix of techs like himself, local scientists, government researchers, and University of Oregon academics.
“Then I guess I’m going, too,” she said.
On the jeep ride down the rocky, pockmarked road, she caught Héctor noticing her spinning the gold band around her left ring finger. “How long will you wear it?” he asked her quietly.
Cassidy’s face burned, and a gut-twisting sensation made her feel suddenly sick. She kept her gaze straight ahead. Pete had been gone for just over a year—a year that she had not known how to survive. The anniversary of his passing had come and gone almost three weeks ago, a night she had spent holed up in her small house, waiting for something different to happen, or simply to feel different, though whether she expected it to be better or worse she didn’t know. She had cried, drank one cocktail—a ginger beer, rum, and lime concoction, his favorite—worn his faded, blue hoody, the one that no longer held his scent, and reread the only two cards she had thought to save. One was from a care package he had sent her when she was doing fieldwork on Mt. St. Helens, the other from her birthday two years ago. These things were all she had left of him, besides the ring, a gold band etched with an endless wave and inset with tiny sparks of peridot, a volcanic gem, placed just above the peaks to look like phosphorescence or stars.
“I don’t know,” she said, after swallowing a dry lump in her throat.
Héctor went back to humming the Garth Brooks tune that had been playing on the radio that afternoon.
The shower ran cold after five minutes, but Cassidy didn’t care. It felt good compared to the stuffy humidity of the hotel room; plus, she knew she would just start sweating the minute she stepped out of the shower. Might as well enjoy five more minutes of not feeling like a baked turkey, she thought.
Her phone chirped from the nightstand, and the memory of her imagined text to and from Pete sent a jolt through her heart. Figuring it was only her colleague, Dennis, telling her where to meet for dinner, she ignored it until she had dried off and dressed in faded cotton shorts and a button-down linen shirt. When she checked her phone—the screen’s waterproof case so scratched that it was hard to read in certain kinds of light—she saw that the text was not from Dennis, but from Rebecca, her stepsister.
If you’re still in Costa Rica, please reply. Urgent.
Cassidy frowned. Rebecca, the older of her two stepsiblings but still younger than she by three years, lived in Reno. She did not recall connecting with Rebs, as Cassidy had called her behind her back when they were growing up together, on WhatsApp, but they had probably done so before her first trip to Central America two years ago. Rebecca was like that—she would have wanted a way to reach Cassidy in an emergency. As if any emergency of Reb’s would be an emergency of hers. The urgent at the end made Cassidy especially wary. She decided to ignore the message until the morning.
After a lively dinner at their favorite hangout, where Cassidy,
