Obsession Falls (Excerpt)

Chapter 1

The highway from Idaho's Sun Valley travels north into the Sawtooth Mountains with two lanes and strategically located turnouts in case a person needs to change a tire or gawk at the scenery. The road winds past shacks constructed of beer bottles and aluminum siding, past rusty mobile homes and clapboard houses in need of paint. That highway is a drive back in time, to a moment when the West opened its arms to every pioneer and misfit in the world.

Then the National Forest Service moved in.

No one ever said they did it wrong. The world deserves places of wildness, where no one logs trees that have grown since the time of Jesus, where snowmobiles and ATMs can't challenge black bears to battle and take out rare and delicate flowers. Most people want a place where hikers and backpackers can roam the wilderness, and then only in summer months when winter retreats... and waits.

But even the National Forest Service can do nothing about Wildrose Valley. Wildrose Valley Road turns off the main highway, and rises up and up in hairpin turns that make flatlanders clutch and cringe. The surface is gravel, full of washboard stretches that beat a woman's teeth together as she drives her rented black Jeep Cherokee toward the place where she had been born.

She tops the summit and there it is— the valley, slung like a hammock between the mountains. Ranchers had settled here in the early twentieth century, carving out tracts of land where they raised cattle and children, grew gardens and alfalfa, fought freezing cold and the Depression and bankruptcy.

But here and now, in August, the valley is wide, yellow with grass, dappled with cattle and antelope. Meadows stretch miles to the far horizon where the mountains close in. The Forest Service likes to think they protect the wilderness; in truth, the Sawtooth Mountains themselves are the sentinels and guardians of the land.

Taylor Summers had spent her first nine years roaming the Sawtooth Mountains in search of a safe place, away from her home, away from her parents' constant, bitter arguments about her father's ranch, her mother's ambitions, and Taylor, who had somehow become the heart of their conflict.

Then, on her tenth birthday, she had moved with her mother to Baltimore, and was never again to see Wildrose Valley . . . until today.

She drove slowly down the steep grade and into the flatlands, absorbing the changes. Where small craftsman-style ranch houses had once stood, mansions now sprawled. Not many mansions, though; rich people bought wide acreages and surrounded themselves by vistas that could not be blocked.

Taylor didn't blame them. Today, when she rolled down her windows, she heard nothing but the wind through the golden grasses and the occasional call of a bird. She recognized a few landmarks: a stand of maple trees where she used to play, the unpainted wreck of a barn where she'd swung in an exhilarating ride on a rope out of the hayloft and through the wide- open doors.

And there! There was the turnoff to the Summers ranch, owned by her family for over a hundred years, until her mother forced her father to sell it in the divorce and divide the profits.

Involuntarily, Taylor's foot slipped off the accelerator and the car slowed.

Look! The people who bought the place had put up a phony gate, and they had the guts to put up a sign calling the place SUMMERS FOREVER.

They not only had claimed her heritage, they'd also claimed her name.

The bastards.

Taylor rolled up her windows, put her foot back on the gas, and drove through ruts and dust through the flats at the end of the basin toward her goal, where the mountains came together, squeezing the road like a vise.