What if Miguel had feared Janelle would recognize his voice through the phone-synthesizer app and so had coerced someone else, someone who knew the canyon well, into doing the talking for him? That certainly would account for Francesca’s “they.”
Chuck fixed his eyes on the black trunk of a massive ponderosa rising into the night sky. Of course Miguel was involved. After his failure to get his hands on the treasure at the railroad wye and his mistaken killing of Donald, Janelle’s ex had to be ready to play the second proposed exchange straight, to hand over Carmelita to Chuck at the music festival site in return for Chuck’s takings from the alcove before heading farther east, away from the village on Desert View Drive and out of the park. All of which meant it was critical for Chuck to get to the festival site and be ready to make the exchange when the sun came up.
But there was one thing he had to do first.
He’d avoided meeting Janelle and Clarence behind the Backcountry Information Center, after which he’d ended his phone call with them to take the incoming call from the computerized voice. He owed it to them to call back. Besides, they’d likely heard about the crash by now. Had Dolores and Amelia survived the accident?
Chuck stopped next to the large ponderosa, pushed the goggles up on his forehead, and dialed Clarence’s number into Janelle’s phone. One ring sounded. Two. Three. No answer. He began rehearsing the voicemail message he would leave when, on the fourth ring, Janelle’s voice came on the line.
“What?” In a single word, Chuck heard it all: Janelle’s frustrated, desperate love for her missing child, and the fact that, against all expectation, she was holding her well-deserved anger toward Chuck in check.
How, he asked himself, had he been so lucky as to find Janelle? And how could he even have conceived the idea of her involvement in Carmelita’s kidnapping?
He would tell her the good news that the exchange was back on, that he would do whatever it took to return Carmelita safely to her. “Jan—” he began.
“Clarence wouldn’t answer,” she interrupted. “I had to grab the phone out of his hand. And you know why.”
“No, Jan,” Chuck said. “Please.”
“Carm gets kidnapped, and what’s the first thing you do? You send us off with your ranger friend while you disappear into the canyon. Then your friend gets killed, and I tell you I have to see you, I have to meet up with you so we can figure this thing out together, and you don’t show up. Then, along about the time Clarence and I are going absolutely crazy with worry, you decide, oh, okay, I guess I’ll check in—but then you hang up on us.”
Chuck swallowed. “I—”
“Don’t say a word, Chuck. Don’t you dare say a word.” Janelle began to cry, but through her tears, her words were clear and cutting. “The truth,” she said. “Always the truth between us. Nothing but.”
“Jan. Please.”
“Mami, she had her concerns. But you won her over. Papi, too. And I was ready. I was so ready.” She was crying hard now, speaking in bursts between gasping breaths. “The girls were ready, too. They needed you. I told myself you were the one. I willed myself to believe it.”
“You are my one, Jan. Every time I’ve told you I love—”
“No,” Janelle cut in sharply. “I don’t want to hear that from you. I can’t.” Her voice shook. “The rangers, they . . . Clarence . . .” She fell silent.
“What, Jan? What?”
Clarence spoke in the background. “Here, Sis,” he said. “Give me the phone.” A second later Clarence’s voice sounded in Chuck’s ear. “Listen to me, Chuck.”
“Clarence, I—”
“No. You listen to me. The rangers, they’ve been talking to us. They say you did it. We keep telling them no, no way, it isn’t you, it can’t be you. But you won’t come back.”
“Clarence—” Chuck tried again.
“You have to get back here,” Clarence said, “to the campsite. You have to show yourself, prove to them it’s not you. They’re gunning for you, man. They’re gonna kill you.”
Chuck opened his mouth to speak, but no words came out.
“One more time, Chuck,” Clarence said. “Come back here. Right now. We’re waiting.”
With that, the line went dead.
TWENTY-SIX
4 a.m.
Chuck turned a slow circle in the dark forest. He thought of how alone he’d felt when he’d run from Rachel and Robert at the railroad wye. That had been nothing. This—this—was what being alone felt like.
He was lucky Janelle and Clarence weren’t buying the rangers’ conclusion that he was involved in Carmelita’s kidnapping. Not yet, anyway.
He lowered his head, staring at the forest floor. He had fallen for Janelle the instant he’d seen her in her parents’ home. She’d said yes when, after a few whirlwind weeks, he had heard himself asking her to marry him. She’d left Albuquerque and moved with the girls to Durango unquestioningly, upending her life for him a scant three months after meeting him. A fresh start, she’d told him, that’s what he offered her.
Look what her fresh start had turned into.
Chuck bent forward, his hands on his knees. The rangers were focused only on his apprehension. They weren’t looking for Carmelita’s real kidnappers. Which meant whatever happened next was up to him.
He straightened up beside the ponderosa. He understood why the park rangers saw him as their sole suspect. But he knew who he was and who he wasn’t. He would win Carmelita’s release and, in so doing, prove his innocence.
Only he knew the time and place of the second proposed exchange. He still had the necklaces stowed in the bottom of his pack. He would keep the rendezvous at dawn at the Grand Canyon Music Festival site. He would do whatever it took to secure Carmelita’s freedom, including trading his own life for hers if necessary.
He checked the time. After four. Little more than an hour and a half until dawn. He would trade the necklaces for Carmelita when the sun came up, and he would do so on his own, as the caller had directed.
Chuck centered the goggles over his eyes and set off through the trees. The shallow wash formed by Pipe Creek was half a mile ahead, midway between the village and the festival site. The sounds of the car accident—Dolores’ scream, the rending metal and breaking glass—reverberated in his head. He took another look at his watch, calculating. There was enough time.
He looped south and east through the forest, running until lack of oxygen overtook him, walking until he regained his breath, then running again. He refused to accept how tired he was, how much his head and body hurt. The forest floor, carpeted in ponderosa needles, was spongy beneath his boots. Tree trunks swam past his field of vision.
After a few minutes, he emerged from the forest at the rocky edge of the Pipe Creek drainage. The vanilla scent of the ponderosas on both sides of the drainage rode the early-morning breeze. The slightest hint of gray shone in the eastern sky, just above the serrated outline of trees on the far side of the low wash.
He found a break in the cliff along the top of the wash, made his way to the gravel bottom of the dry twisting creek bed, and headed downstream toward the canyon rim. Within a hundred yards, he came to a house-sized chock stone in the middle of the creek bed surrounded by several truck-sized boulders resting against one another. The accumulation of rocks blocked the way ahead, forcing him up a series of waist-high sandstone ledges to bypass the obstruction. As he rounded the topmost of the boulders, he came upon one of the long-abandoned Anasazi homes along Pipe Creek. The tiny structure was built beneath a low overhanging cliff. Its stone-and-mortar front wall remained in place under the rock face, fronted by a flat sandstone shelf. In the center of the wall was the black rectangular opening that had served as the one-room home’s only entrance.
Though Chuck had never been contracted by the park service to catalog the Anasazi structures along the wash, he’d spent plenty of time in his off hours exploring them. Other than the surviving walls of the structures, there hadn’t been much t
o see. Any items left behind by the Anasazi had been carted off more than a century ago by prospectors and other early visitors to the canyon.
Despite the lack of artifacts, however, the aura of the long-disappeared Anasazi clung to the crumbling walls of the abandoned homes. During his explorations, Chuck had come upon evidence, in the form of ancient meadows where trees had yet to fully reestablish themselves, indicating that the Anasazi families of Pipe Creek had hauled water from their reservoirs to irrigate crops on the flats above the wash, a task as labor-intensive as any Chuck could imagine. Perhaps it was no surprise, then, that the handful of families who had worked so hard to make Pipe Creek their home hadn’t lasted long here. The small number of homes along the wash and the lack of any ceremonial kivas indicated that the band of Anasazi at Pipe Creek had inhabited the site for no more than a few decades. They’d likely been driven away by the same lengthy drought in the early1200s that Southwest archaeologists believed had pushed the Anasazi out of their cliff-wall communities all across the Colorado Plateau to settle far to the southeast in the broad Rio Grande valley with its year-round water.
Chuck had a sudden vision of two toddler-aged Anasazi children giggling as they played together on the shelf of sandstone in front of the doorway of the abandoned home. He gave his head a stiff shake, but the memory of the toddlers lingered as he made his way back to the drainage bottom and on downstream.
What must the day have been like when the Anasazi families of Pipe Creek had abandoned their world on the lip of the Grand Canyon? How heartbroken they must have been when the drought that parched the Colorado Plateau forced them to give up all they’d worked for—their homes and reservoirs, the fields they’d cleared and cultivated, everything they and their children had ever known. And how unlikely it must have been that any youngsters had survived the long and arduous trek from the high plateau to the lowlands of the Rio Grande.
As he jogged down the dry creek bed, Chuck felt the sorrow of the ancient families as if it was his own. This was what it meant to be a husband and father, to be a part of something more than just himself. His life now was inextricably intertwined with the lives of others, with Janelle and Carmelita and Rosie, and with Clarence and Enrique and Yolanda.
As he made his way down the wash, he came upon the remains of the dams the Anasazi had built, stone by stone, across the floor of the drainage. Centuries after their construction, the low rock barriers trapped broad expanses of silt that supported the growth of tall grasses and thick shrubs. Emergency lights flickered of the sides off the drainage as Chuck made his way through the high grass and bushes upstream of the third such dam he came upon. He topped out on the ancient water barrier and stopped, dreading what lay ahead even as he remained determined to bear witness to the accident on his way to the festival site.
He descended the face of the dam. The lights flashing on the walls of the drainage grew brighter and the sound of radio voices crackled in the night air. He rounded a final bend and stopped a hundred yards upstream from where, following big rains, the waters of Pipe Creek poured off the South Rim into the depths of the canyon. He had a full view of the accident scene before him, and from where he stood deep in the shadows, no one could see him if they looked his way.
Desert View Drive angled toward him into the shallow wash. The two-lane road, empty of cars, turned and crossed a small bridge over the dry creek bed fifty yards in front of him. The road climbed back up and out of the wash and disappeared in the direction of the music festival site to the east.
As Chuck had feared, the accident had occurred where the road turned hard away from the canyon rim to begin its descent into the wash—though his first glimpse of the wreck filled him with sudden hope. Amelia’s car indeed had missed the curve and crashed through the guardrail. But the car had not plummeted off the South Rim into the canyon. It had sailed down the steep embankment from the road into the shallow Pipe Creek drainage. There it had come to rest, its nose buried in the rocky creek bed and its windshield broken out, a few feet from where the wash plunged off the cliff that marked the canyon rim.
A pair of spotlights beamed from poles extending from the rear corners of a fire-rescue truck backed to the guardrail fifty feet above the wrecked car. The bright lights prompted Chuck to remove Rachel’s goggles. The front end of Amelia’s compact was crushed where it had smashed into the scoured-sandstone bed of the creek, but the car itself was upright and largely intact. Beside the car, lit as if on stage, stood Dolores. She appeared uninjured. She wore a dark-colored jacket, her arms wrapped around her narrow waist to ward off the nighttime chill. She was deep in conversation with a park ranger.
Chuck spotted Amelia, her arm in a sling. She wore slacks in place of the white denim shorts she’d worn at camp. She stood at the foot of the embankment below the road, between her wrecked car and the spot where the compact had crashed through the guardrail. Despite the sling, Chuck could see that she, like Dolores, had suffered no serious injuries. He breathed a long sigh of relief.
A second ranger stood at Amelia’s side, notebook in hand. Amelia spoke into a phone, her head bobbing in cadence with her speech. Surely she was talking to Janelle. In Amelia’s mind, Chuck nearly had succeeded in his attempt to kill her and Dolores by sending rangers in pursuit of them. Janelle’s two best friends had been suspicious of Chuck before Carmelita’s kidnapping. Now, like Robert Begay’s ranger corps, they would be out for his blood.
A flatbed wrecker, its emergency lights flashing, was backed to the narrow hole in the guardrail where Amelia’s car had plunged off the road. A mechanic in overalls edged his way down the slope from the wrecker, winch cable in hand. The cable unwound from a spool in the bed of the truck with a loud whine. Amelia looked on, immersed in her phone conversation, as the man backed past her toward her battered car.
But where was Rachel?
Several rangers, three in uniform and the rest in street clothes, looked down on the scene from along the guardrail. Two spoke into handheld radios. One appeared to be Hansen Conover. The rangers’ patrol cars were parked haphazardly at the side of the road behind them. There was no sign of Robert Begay’s Suburban.
Finally, Chuck spotted Rachel. She stood off by herself on the far side of the wrecked car, at the very edge of the precipice where the wash fell away into the canyon. Her back was to the accident scene, her shoulders bowed. She rocked back and forth in obvious distress. Rachel had disobeyed basic law-enforcement guidelines in continuing to give chase to Amelia and Dolores, innocent as they’d turned out to be, after they’d refused to pull over upon her first catching up to them on Center Road. Chuck had demanded that she do whatever it took to stop the escaping car. If fault for the accident lay with anyone, it lay with him.
Chuck had held it together through everything since Carmelita’s disappearance—his ill-fated trip into the canyon, Donald’s killing, the confrontation with Francesca—but this was too much. His legs gave out and he sank to the ground. Seated in the sand, he pulled Janelle’s phone from his pocket and dialed Rachel’s number. She flinched at the first ring and stood unmoving through the second. Not until the third ring did she slide her phone from her belt case and look at it. She brought it slowly to her ear. “Chuck,” she said, her voice weary.
“Rachel.”
“What was I thinking?”
“I’m the one who sent you after them.” He spoke quietly to ensure his voice didn’t carry to the accident scene. “I was wrong. About Janelle, too. I was wrong about everything.” The void he felt inside himself was as gaping as the canyon.
Rachel straightened in response to Chuck’s words of reassurance. “These women, they’re already threatening to get lawyered up,” she said indignantly, her tone that of the adventure-racing ranger Chuck knew so well.
His reply was impulsive: “Turn around.” If he could have reached out and taken her in his arms that instant, he’d have done so. “Look up the creek.”
She turned away from the canyon. “It’s dark,”
she said. She was looking straight at him over the roof of the wrecked car. From this distance, in the glare of the spotlights, her face was a splash of white against the blackness of the canyon.
“I’m here,” Chuck said, “with you. You’re looking right at me.”
Rachel did not reply. She set off in his direction, stepping around the smashed car and past Dolores and the ranger.
Chuck scrambled to his feet. “Rachel,” he warned her.
The rangers along the guardrail watched with rapt attention as she walked away from the accident scene. No one made a move to intercept her.
Chuck took an involuntary step backward when Rachel reached the point where Desert View Drive turned at the bottom of the drainage and crossed the creek bed. She climbed up to the raised roadway, strode across the blacktop, and dropped back down to the wash on the other side. She left the glare of the spotlights behind and faded into the night, disappearing from the view of her fellow rangers.
A long second passed. The rangers peered up the wash into inky blackness. Then, one by one, they turned back to the scene of the accident, where the wrecker operator now lay on his back at the rear of Amelia’s compact, attaching the winch cable to the car’s undercarriage.
Rachel advanced through the enveloping darkness. She made her way up a low rise and wound through a clump of sagebrush until she drew abreast of Chuck.
“Over here,” Chuck whispered, his nerves jangling. He cast a frightened glance at the rangers, who, thankfully, remained where they stood.
Rachel angled toward the sound of his voice, stopping only when she was so close to him he could feel the warmth of her breath on his face. She stood with her back to the brightly lit accident scene, silhouetted in front of him, her face an invisible mask.
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