The Dead Season (22 page)

“I risked my life to save him!”

“No one is denying that,” he agreed. “But when other lives were at stake—innocent lives—what happened?”
  I couldn’t speak. All I could do was stare at him.

“So what happened next?” prompted Agent Brown. “Please be specific about the details.”

I said abruptly, “I need to go to the ladies room.”

Detective Ritchie responded immediately, as any gentlemen would to such a request, “Of course.” He lifted his arm in a gesture to the mirrored panel over my shoulder and I realized for the first time that people were watching us from behind it. I should have known that, I just hadn’t cared before. “I’ll get a policewoman to escort you.”

“I don’t need an escort,” I snapped back. “I’ve been going to the bathroom by myself since I was three years old.”

Sonny pushed herself to her feet. “I’ll go with you, Raine.”

I could tell the two policemen didn’t like it, but just like that, she had transformed an officer-of-the-court-escorting-a-suspect into two girls visiting the ladies’ room on their break, and no one dared call her on it.

I did not notice the corridors, the glass-doored offices, the ringing phones, the officers moving back and forth or the voices. If I had been required to find my way back by myself, I would not have been able to do so. I walked with my head down, eyes focused on the polished industrial linoleum, my arms folded and my fingers digging into my biceps to keep the shivers from wracking my whole body. “They think I did it,” I said lowly, in a tight voice. I did not look at Sonny so she wouldn’t know how scared I was. “They actually think I had something to do with it.”

Sonny was checking her phone messages. “No one thinks that, Raine. They’re just trying to find out what happened. They’re asking everyone the same questions.”

“I risked my life climbing down that cliff!”

“I know that. Everyone knows that.”

“They make it sound like—like some kind of Donner Party thing went on there, like people really make those kinds of decisions, like anyone would really do that!”

We had reached the door with the word “Women” stenciled on it, and Sonny stopped. She did not answer, and I looked at her. She said gently, “Raine, someone did.”

I wanted to say something in reply, but I couldn’t. I felt my throat start to tighten up. I pushed open the door of the ladies’ room and left her behind.

Inside the stall, I dropped my head to my knees and sobbed silently until I couldn’t get my breath.

~

I washed my face in cold water and finger-combed my tangled hair. There was nothing I could do about my red, swollen eyes or my cracked lips. I met Sonny in the hall, where she was just finishing a phone call. She was smiling before she looked at me. “Maude says to assure you all is well, but if you need her to drive up, she is ready and able.”

But when she turned to me her expression changed, and her eyes were immediately flooded with compassion. “Raine, we can stop this. We’ll come back tomorrow. You’re exhausted.”

I said tiredly, “You know what I was thinking the whole time? Well, a lot of the time. How easy it would have been for me to end up like one of those kids. There’s no reason I didn’t. No logic to it, really. The luck of the draw. It could have been me at the mercy of someone like Paul Evans.”

“But it wasn’t.” She looked at me closely. “Is there something you want to tell me? Now would be the time.”

I said softly, almost to myself, “I just can’t figure it out. Why not me?” I squared my shoulders. “Make sure Cisco gets home to Maude,” I said. “She’s the only one who knows about his diet.”

“You can take him home yourself.”

“I don’t want him to spend another night in a cage. You know how he hates to be crated.”

“Raine, honestly…”

“Promise me.” I looked at her, holding on to my composure with both hands. “Just in case.”

She looked as though she wanted to argue, but then her expression softened, and she touched my arm. “Don’t worry,” she said. “I’ll take care of it.”

I relaxed marginally, and took a breath. “Okay. Let’s get this done.”

CHAPTER TWENTY

H
eather had cleared a passage out of her tent when I pulled a blanket over Paul’s face and left him, zipping his tent securely behind me. Cisco bounded over to Heather and she bent to greet him. I plowed my way over to her more slowly, and spoke briefly in a low tone.

“Paul is dead,” I said.

Nothing but dismay registered in her face, and she rose slowly. “Oh, my God. Oh, no.”

“Where is the hatchet?”

“What?” she looked confused. “I don’t know who had it last. Why?”

“Because Paul didn’t die of his injuries. Someone gashed his head open.”

She looked at me for a moment without comprehension, then the color began to drain from her face. “What?”

But the snow was still falling, we were still stranded, and the shock and horror that had seized my gut when I saw Paul had turned to a knot of terror as I looked around for the other tents. “We have to check on the others,” I said, stumbling back in the direction of my tent.

“I can’t even see the tents!” Heather cried.

“Start with your own and work yourself around. Cisco, with me!”

I started screaming then, “Jess! Pete! Girls! Yell so I can find you! Blow your whistles!”

After a moment I heard some faint noise, and Cisco bounded toward it. I started digging and so did he, and in a moment we had cleared the snow from the entrance of Tiffanie’s tent. She stumbled out into the snowy day and looked around in awe. Heather was helping Lourdes crawl out of her tent. Tiffanie said in a small voice, “Oh my God. Look at this. Just look at it. Is it an avalanche? Are we going to die?”

“We’re not going to die,” I said. “Grab your shovel. “Help me find the others.”

With four of us plus Cisco working, it only took a few minutes to free the others. But when Heather and Jess dug the snow away from Rachel’s tent, they found it empty.

I went to check for myself and found her backpack gone as well. There was no sign of the hatchet.

I crawled back out and stood up, beckoning the others to come close. They huddled around looking miserable and scared, but also a little excited, the way young people tend to do when in the midst of an adventure. They were all battered and worn, their clothing torn and stained with mud and soot and blood from yesterday’s harrowing climb down into the gorge. I didn’t know how to tell them what I had to tell them, but I didn’t give myself much time to think about either.

I said, squinting against the snow that battered my face, “I have some bad news. Mr. Evans died during the night.” I didn’t think there was any reason to say more, and I met Heather’s gaze in a warning. I heard some soft sounds of horror from some of the girls—I don’t know which ones—and Jess swore shortly, stuffing his hands into his pockets and hunching shoulders. Everyone looked at the zippered tent where Paul Evans’ body lay, and I thought about the way they had all lined up against me yesterday when I asked them to help me. They did not look angry or defiant now. They looked stunned and lost and disbelieving. They looked like children alone and scared in the woods.

I said, because I thought they had heard enough bad news for one day, “Mrs. Evans has gone for help.” Maybe she had. But I doubted it. “In the meantime, we’re on our own. We need to cut some of those evergreen boughs for a wind shelter and dig out some branches to make a fire. Who has the hatchet?”

They looked from one to the other. No one spoke up.

“Come on, guys, I’m not kidding. We’ve got to find it.”

But we never did.

~

The snow fell for another four hours. We managed to get a small, sputtering fire going of wet sticks and brambles, just enough to melt the water that was left in our canteens. I felt guilty for thinking it, but I wished I had not wasted the fuel in my camp stove on Paul the previous night. It might well have proven the difference between life and death to us over the coming days.

I felt guilty for a lot of things. For causing the delay at the bridge. For sending the kids down the footpath into the gorge without knowing whether we would be able to get out. For putting my phone in my backpack instead of my pocket. If anyone wanted to know whose fault this was, the answer was clear: It was mine.

And I felt guilty every time I looked at Lourdes, because all I could remember was the way she had stood on the bridge with the phone in her hand and shouted, “You’re going to pay!” Had she made sure of it, sometime during that night? I felt guilty when I looked at Heather because all I see was the hatchet in her hand, when I had passed it to her last night. I felt guilty when I looked at Jess, because he had come back to help me, but the hatred in his eyes when he had looked at Paul Evans yesterday had chilled my soul. I felt guilty because before this morning I could not have imagined that a high school student could take a hatchet and split an injured man’s skull while he slept. And because, when I tried to imagine what they had endured at Paul Evans’s hands, I had a hard time passing judgment on any of them.

When a couple of hours had passed and Rachel still had not returned, I made a decision. I called the group together. “We’re breaking camp,” I told them. “We’re almost out of water and we don’t have enough dry wood to melt the snow it would take to make drinking water for us all. There’s no way of knowing how much worse the weather is going to get. If we can get out of the gorge we can make it to the lodge in a day. But we’ve got to get out of the gorge.”

“What about Mrs. Evans?” Angel said.

I had no ready answer for that. Part of me hoped we would find her. Another part hoped we would not, because I didn’t think she could have survived the night out in that storm.

Heather volunteered, “Maybe she’ll meet us at the lodge.”

Pete looked around uneasily. “I don’t see the path out of here, do you?”

“We’ll find it,” I assured him.

But I had no idea how.

~

I planted a stake wrapped in orange emergency tape to mark the site of Paul’s tent, and left the body inside. I didn’t know what else to do. My priority was to take care of the ones who were still alive and to try to keep them that way.

There is nothing more exhausting than wading through knee-deep snow without snowshoes and carrying the weight of a backpack, and our progress was excruciatingly slow. I strapped on Cisco’s rubber booties to keep the weight of the snow between his paw pads from slowing him down, but even his customary exuberance was tempered. My heart began to pound after half an hour, and I worried about Lourdes. But no one considered leaving her behind this time. When she began to stagger, Tiffanie silently took her backpack and carried it for a while. When Tiffanie tired, she passed it to Pete, and so on throughout the day.

I had a picture in my head of where I had spotted the footpath in relationship to the bridge yesterday, and my plan was to hike until I could get a clear view of the bridge, then navigate a course toward the general direction in which I remembered the footpath lay. We had been traveling about three hours before I realized that the reason I couldn’t see the bridge was because it was not there anymore.

The gorge was filled with uneven shelves and unexpected drop-offs, slow hills and steep slides. Already Pete had made a misstep and ended up in a hole with snow up to his chest. Heather had landed hard on a declination and had been limping ever since. I had noticed that the snow level had been decreasing for some time now and hoped that meant we had reached a slope that would eventually lead up and out of the gorge. But I had no way of knowing.

I stood at the top of a small incline—the reason I knew this was because the snow was only up to my ankles—and gazed at the torn and twisted support post at the top of the gorge that was now only half-visible beneath a massive fallen tree. The snow had stopped, but the day was still overcast, and doubtless I would not have noticed it at all if one of the guide wires had not suddenly flapped in a gust of wind. My heart sank.

The others drew up beside me, exhausted, breathing hard. I pointed wordlessly.

“Man,” Jess said softly, and for a moment we all just stood there in a kind of numb stupefaction, marveling over what nature had wrought.

I turned in a slow circle, trying to get my bearings. Cisco, his hiking lead still attached to my waist, wandered in front of me, sniffing the snow-covered ground. And it all happened at once. The snow embankment beneath me gave way and I started to fall. Someone screamed. I saw a yellow blur of fur. I landed on my belly, frantically clawing at the snow as I continued to slide, and then my forward momentum was abruptly halted. Someone had caught my feet.

There was a lot of shouting:

“I’ve got her, I’ve got her!”

“Don’t let go!’

“Hold on!”

“Oh my God, the dog!”

That was when I looked down and saw Cisco, about six feet below me, clawing at the snow for purchase, hanging by his neck from the end of the leash. I had been carrying his backpack the last half hour or so, when he had begun to stagger beneath its weight, and had automatically transferred the leash clip from his backpack harness to his buckle collar. I was hanging upside-down halfway over the drop off, but the fall had sent him tumbling down before me. The leash was still attached to me, and the more he struggled, the more precarious both our positions became.