Page 72 of Built of Flames
Next up in the Small-Town Heroes series will be Built Of Second Chances featuring Tessa and Flynn!
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Built Of Second Chances
Built Of Second Chances
She was supposed to be dead.
Flynn had mourned her when she’d died in a terrifying explosion. He’d joined the FBI solely to lock up people like the ones who’d killed her.
Not only was she alive, but she was the very person he needed to move forward on his case. The case to take down the only family she had left.
In Plain Sight
Tessa Flores had trained her brain to never think of her childhood in Texas. Never ever. Sitting in a canoe in November in Vermont with snow covering the ground and ice trying to form on the lake had her thinking about it anyway.
Tessa shoved the memories away then closed her eyes and recited the facts.
Born and raised on a farm southwest of Salina, Kansas.
Parents Robert and Gloria had died when she was nineteen when a tornado had destroyed the area.
Graduated with a zoology degree from the University of Wyoming.
She’d lived in six states since, always looking for the perfect job.
Tessa opened her eyes and rubbed her hands together to warm them up. Her life depended on those facts. She had no business thinking of anything else.
She returned her attention to her fish finder. Well, turtle finder. Her friend, Tansy Cheveyo, who owned the property, had helped her modify the tool to search through the sludge at the bottom of the lake.
This was Tessa’s first test day and she wanted to collect a baseline of data. Once she found a potential turtle site, she stopped the canoe with a couple of back paddles and dropped her anchor.
Tessa picked up her improvised measuring pole and lowered it carefully so as not to cause waves. When she felt the resistance of the mud, she opened the voice recorder on her phone and recorded the data.
Then she lowered the pole again. As soon as she touched something hard, she stopped. She didn’t want to disturb the turtle’s slumber stage or put it at risk.
After she’d brought up the tool, Tessa picked up her tablet and opened the app she’d created. She enlarged the map and confirmed her location on Midnight Lake as best she could. Then she added a data point and input her depth measurements for both the turtle and the mud layer.
She’d be able to compare the layers over the next few years to find out if climate change was affecting their slumber periods.
Tessa had never spent much time in an area with true winter so she knew she’d have to collate other measures as well to see what other factors mattered.
Ice depth and average temperatures for starters. New weather patterns meant that nature was changing in many ways. Ice that stayed on a lake too long, or not long enough, could create havoc on the surrounding biome.
The data she collected would help figure out solutions. It might not be the career she’d dreamed of when she was a kid, but it was a good one. She was using her skill with numbers and patterns to help the animals and the planet. She could almost pretend it was her passion. At least the FBI consults she did fed her love of numbers and data.
It took three hours to get to the other end of the lake. There were a lot of turtles preparing to spend their winters slumbering at the bottom of Midnight Lake. She hoped to follow the turtles over the following summer and figure out which species slumbered where. That would improve the data. So far, she’d identified at least seven different turtle species on the lake. It would be interesting to compare them.
Tessa pulled the canoe up to the dock in front of the cabin furthest from Midnight Lodge. It was like being alone in the universe and she loved the setting.
She wasn’t sure she would ever be able to walk the distance from the lodge to the cabin, but whenever she had the canoe out, she stopped here.
It was a tiny cabin with a front deck that had a perfect view of the sunrise. She couldn’t see the lodge or any other cabins from the small dock. When she sat there, all the worries, all her fears disappeared.