The Panic Zone - By Rick Mofina

1

Big Cloud, Wyoming

Emma Lane whispered a prayer for her baby son, Tyler, cooing in his car seat behind her.

Her miracle.

Over the past few days, he’d been pale and had run a fever.

“Just a little cold. Give it another twenty-four hours,” the doctor had told Emma, who had succumbed to the anxieties of being a new mother until Tyler’s illness had passed.

Now, with her worries eased, Emma smiled and reached back to adjust her son’s straps as their SUV cut across Wyoming’s rolling plains.

“Everything good?” her husband, Joe, asked as he drove.

“Everything’s good.” Emma caressed Joe’s firm shoulder, then kissed his cheek.

“What’s that for?”

“For putting up with me.”

“Do I have a choice?” He chuckled.

They gazed at the Rockies before them, a majestic reminder that some things stood forever, while others lasted no longer than a shooting star. And after what they had gone through to have Tyler, Emma took nothing for granted. Life did not come with guarantees. It was as indifferent to you as those mountains out there.

Emma thought it was funny how the things she’d dreamed of had come to her in ways she never expected. She was thankful for the blessings she could touch, hold and love forever: her son and her husband.

Today, they were headed to a pretty spot north of town, for a picnic beside the Grizzly Tooth River. This would be a break for Joe, who had been putting in twelve-hour days for the past three weeks straight, building houses in Big Cloud’s new subdivision.

Lord knows they needed the overtime cash, but fretting over Joe’s long hours and Tyler had kept Emma on edge lately.

On Monday, her two-week break ended and she would return to Rocky Ridge Elementary School where she taught children in the first and second grades. They were little sweethearts and Emma loved teaching, but she hated being apart from Tyler.

Joe guided the SUV along the empty highway, a meandering back route few people took. With the exception of a couple of cars that had passed them earlier, the road belonged to them. It was soothing. As the wheels hummed, Emma thought of other matters, like the spate of wrong number calls to their house over the past month. They had come at all hours—in the afternoon, when Emma was home alone with Tyler, and in the middle of the night. The callers never said anything. They were quick hang-ups and the number was always blocked.

Like someone was checking in on them, she thought.

But Joe shrugged it off. “Just people who can’t dial,” he assured her.

Eventually, Emma stopped worrying about it, too. Until the episode with the mystery car.

One day last week, after she had finished shopping downtown and was leaving her parking spot, she noticed a white sedan that had arrived at the same time she had.

It was a few cars back and it seemed to be following her.

When she pulled in to the mall, it was still a few spots behind her. After Emma parked and got Tyler into his carriage, she saw it again, parked off in a far corner. It was still there when she returned to her car and left the mall’s parking lot. Emma was not certain if the sedan left when she did because she had lost sight of it in the drive-home traffic.

A day later when she took Tyler out for a stroll to the park, Emma saw the same white sedan at the end of their street.

“Do you think maybe you’re being a little paranoid?” Joe had said when she told him about it later. “It’s the mama grizzly syndrome kicking in.”

When she didn’t smile at his teasing, he got up from the kitchen table, left his receipts and job estimates, and put his arms around her.

“Em,” Joe said, “Big Cloud has nine thousand people. We bump into most of them every other day. You’re likely seeing someone new.”

She pressed her cheek to his hard chest and nodded.

“Besides,” he added, “you’re one of the most fearless people I know. Woe to anyone or anything that comes between you and Tyler. If it was a mama griz, I would fear for the bear.”

Emma smiled at the memory and turned to her husband. He was her rock, her protector, her hero because of what he’d gone through for her.

Tyler did not come to them the usual way.

Joe was a proud man and what he did for her was not easy. But he had put her happiness before his own and, no matter what happened, Emma would