Fatal Descent

by Beth Groundwater

  “Stay there and hold on,” Mandy yelled at him.

  She leapt back into position between her oars.

  Just in time, she plunged the blades back in the water while the raft dove over the lip of the next rapid. Water poured over the front and flooded the raft’s floor. They rode that wave out, then Mandy spied the other rafts waiting for her in a quiet eddy on river right. She spun her raft in their direction and joined them. Rob grabbed the front rope of her raft. Safe at last, she rested her oars and took several deep breaths.

  Looking sheepish, Paul climbed forward from the back of the raft. “Sorry about that.”

  “There’s a good reason we told you not to take photos in the rapids,” Rob said to him, his chin jutting out in anger. “As you found out, you not only put yourself in danger, you endangered others—the rest of the people in your raft as they tried to rescue you, and Mandy in the sweep raft.”

  With his face drooping as much as his wet clothing, Paul said with contrition, “I won’t do it again.”

  “No, you won’t,” Rob said. “And if you do, I’ll personally throw your camera in the river.”

  Mandy noticed Les tucking his waterproof camera under his PFD. He was smart enough to learn from Paul’s example, at least. In fact, everyone looked a little shaken and apprehensive. There were no gleeful smiles like she normally saw after folks ran their first big rapid.

  Rob had come down awfully hard on Paul. Why was that? Then it dawned on her. Rob had mentioned her name specifically. His macho protective instinct had reared its head, chewed up Paul, and spit him out. It was time to lighten the mood.

  “Hey, no harm done,” Mandy said. “Paul’s wet but safe, and we all made it through our first big rapid. Let’s hear a war whoop!”

  She pumped her fist in the air and whooped. Gonzo and Kendra immediately joined her, with the others soon following. During the hollering, she caught Rob’s eye and mouthed “lighten up” to him and drew a big smile on her face.

  He got the message and grinned, but there was a hint of menace behind those pearly whites. No one messed with his gal.

  Paul scrambled across the rafts back into his position in Gonzo’s raft, then looked around him. His shoulders fell and he said, “Crap, I lost my paddle.”

  “No worries.” Gonzo pulled a paddle out of bundle lashed inside his raft. “That’s why we carry extras.”

  Paul accepted the paddle. “Again, I’m sorry.”

  Gonzo gave him a friendly clap on the shoulder. “Hey, someone has to make the first mistake. It just happened to be your unlucky day and you wound up with the short straw.” He laughed good-naturedly and Paul visibly relaxed.

  With everyone’s mood now a little lighter, Mandy put her hands on her oars and said, “Well, I’m ready for some more roller coaster rides. How about the rest of you?”

  Kendra and Gonzo grabbed their paddles and their passengers followed their leads. With a last exasperated eye roll at Mandy, Rob leaned on his oars and peeled out of the eddy to lead the way through Rapid Three.

  The next four river miles flashed by with a steady stream of rapids—long jostling drops and rocking horse rides on haystacks made of water that periodically doused the rafters were interspersed with short recovery pools. All of the rafts managed to surf the rapids cleanly without swimmers or capsizes. While running them, Mandy had time to wonder whether she had just saved the life of the killer.

  _____

  Later that afternoon, they came out of Rapid Ten into what Cool and his fellow local guides called Lake Cataract, a three-mile section of swift-moving but relatively flat water. It was punctuated by just two rapids, Eleven and Twelve, in the middle. It was the only long calm section of water in Cataract Canyon before they reached Lake Powell.

  Everyone relaxed a little, and Mandy and her fellow guides were able to let down their guard some. Clients wrung out their wet hair and clothes and angled their faces to the sun. Paul and Les fished out their cameras and took photos of the striated canyon walls looming over them and of the people in the rafts.

  After running Rapid Twelve, Rob beached his raft on a wide strip of sand on river left. Kendra, Gonzo, and Mandy beached their rafts a short distance downriver, and Rob and Cool walked over to meet them.

  “We’ll take a brief rest stop here,” Rob announced. “Then everyone should prepare themselves for what’s called Mile Long Rapid. It’s really almost two miles of eight rapids, numbered Thirteen through Twenty. In high water, they run together to form one long monster rapid. We don’t want any mistakes here because it could mean a really long, hard swim for anyone who ends up in the water.”

  Diana looked worriedly at the lowering sun. “How much longer before we stop for the night?”

  “We plan to get all the way through Cataract Canyon today and camp at Waterhole Canyon,” Mandy said. “That’s about seven miles downriver, but as you can see, the river’s moving fast here. We’ve already gone seven miles since Spanish Bottom.”

  Les whistled. “We’re really chugging down the Colorado. So we’re going to run the Big Drops today?”

  Cool grinned. “You’ve heard about them, huh? The river’s got some real attitude in those honkers.”

  Rob nodded. “We’ve got a lot of excitement ahead. But as long as we don’t have any major spills, we should reach the campsite with enough light left to pitch tents and cook supper.”

  After a few more minutes, Rob whistled and waved for everyone to return to the rafts, and they were on their way. The river bent to the right and to the left, then the roar of churning whitewater greeted them again, echoing off the canyon walls. Mandy braced herself for the long run.

  All of the rafts ran rapids Thirteen and Fourteen cleanly, but Rapid Fifteen held a special danger for rafters at low water levels. Capsize Rock jutted out of the seething river. As water collided with it, rooster tails fountained into the air. The rock had a reputation for seeming to reach out and grab rafts and wrap them around itself. Cool had told Mandy to steer clear of it, so when she saw Kendra’s raft with the Anderson family aboard drift toward it, Mandy’s mouth went dry.

  Kendra yelled frantically for her crew to paddle. She ruddered as hard as she could on her rear paddle to turn the raft away, but to no avail. The powerful water smacked the raft against the rock. It flipped, spilling out bodies.

  For a heart-stopping moment, the raft clung to the rock. Mandy wondered if it was pinned. She hoped no one was stuck underneath it, which would be life-threatening. Then the raft slowly slipped off. It spun upside-down in the frothy brown standing waves below the rock.

  Heads bobbed in the water on either side of the raft. Mandy tried to count them, but she couldn’t. She was particularly worried about Hal Anderson, whose health was already fragile.

  Gonzo’s raft, just ahead of Kendra’s, moved toward one of the bobbing swimmers. Someone in his raft pulled the swimmer out of the water. Rob oared his raft toward a couple more swimmers on the other side.

  Mandy pushed on her oars to propel herself into the maw of the hungry rapid. She aimed for swimmers while trying to steer clear of the treacherous rock. She managed to skirt it and catch up to Amy and Alice Anderson flailing in the water. She yelled at them to grab her ropes.

  Alice snatched the rope right away, but Amy missed. She kept trying, while Mandy back-oared like mad to keep the raft abreast of her.

  Mandy wondered why Amy was having so much trouble and why her sister didn’t reach out and help her. Maybe Alice was too afraid to let go of the rope, even with one hand. Finally, Amy managed to grab on.

  With both women holding on, Mandy snatched a peek at Rapid Sixteen coming up. “You’ll have to ride it out through this,” she yelled to the women, “then I’ll haul you in.”

  Neither one replied as they gaped wide-eyed at the looming waves.

  The answer from the river was a smack in Mandy’s face w
ith a wave of brown water. Mandy spit and blinked. Once she could see again, she hauled on her oars. Praying that the two women could hang on, she steered for calmer water to the side of the river.

  She kept an eye out for pillows, water piled up on the upstream side of submerged boulders that might crash into her swimmers, and maneuvered the now sluggish raft to avoid a couple. She also scanned the water for more swimmers. She didn’t see any and hoped everyone had been rescued.

  When Mandy reached a momentary break in the rocking waves, she abandoned the oars. She moved first to Amy, the weaker of the two sisters. She grabbed the shoulders of Amy’s PFD and quickly hauled her into the raft. Then she did the same for Alice, whose powerful kick helped propel her into the raft.

  Mandy leapt back into her place between the oars, leaving it to the women to find seats and handholds on the raft. She steered them through Rapids Seventeen through Twenty, gaining a few more dousings in the process.

  Then she aimed for river left, where she knew Big Drop Beach awaited. She saw that some of their clients had already been dropped off there.

  Somehow Kendra’s raft had been righted. She and Cool were in it, paddling toward shore. Rob and Gonzo plied the undulating water with their rafts, with Les and Viv hanging over the fronts. They were scouting for loose gear and snagging it as it floated by. That meant all of the people had been accounted for. Mandy silently thanked the river gods.

  Mandy hit the beach and hauled her raft onto the sand. Alice and Amy spilled out of her raft and helped her pull it in, then all three of them collapsed on the beach.

  After sucking air for a minute, Mandy scrambled back to her feet. She scanned the others flopped down in the sand and found Diana and Hal. “You okay? Anyone injured?”

  “What a ride!” Hal panted, but that seemed to be all he could get out. At least his face wasn’t white.

  “We’re okay,” Diana answered. “We all made it out, but Les has a bloody scrape on his leg.”

  “Why’s he back out in the raft, then?” Mandy asked.

  “He’s frantic about finding the dry bag with his expensive camera gear in it,” Diana said.

  Alice sucked in a breath between clenched teeth. “Oh shit. They’d better find it.”

  Mandy shielded her eyes from the sun and looked out at the river. Gonzo and Viv were paddling Gonzo’s raft toward the beach. Rob was oaring his raft back in, while Les cradled a dry bag in his lap. “Maybe he’s got it.”

  After the other two rafts landed and were pulled onto the beach, it was time to take stock. Kendra insisted on cleaning and bandaging Les’s leg, since it was “her fault” he had been hurt. Mandy and Rob double-checked the others to make sure adrenaline wasn’t masking the pain of any other injuries. Cool and Gonzo inventoried the gear they had salvaged and retied it into Kendra’s raft.

  While the clients sucked on water bottles, the guides held a conclave. “We lost Kendra’s extra paddles,” Gonzo said, “but we recovered all the dry bags that were in her raft. Not too bad.” He put an arm around her shoulders.

  Kendra looked crestfallen. “I messed up bad. Les’s and Alice’s paddles got tangled up, so that side of the raft wasn’t helping at all. But still, I shouldn’t have gone so close to Capsize Rock. I’m sorry. I remembered it from our scouting trip, but it’s so much bigger in low water.”

  “Hey,” Mandy said. “None of us are perfect. And the whole team worked together well to recover from it. Don’t blame yourself.”

  “The river gods were just out to get you today,” Rob said. “Tomorrow they’ll be after someone else.”

  Hopefully not, Mandy thought. Hopefully tomorrow their motorized launch would meet them at Waterhole Canyon and extract them. They could contact civilization again and arrange for Alex’s body to be taken care of. And they could get away from the silent killer in their midst and leave it to the police to figure out who it was.

  But first, they had to make it through the worst part of the river.

  “Should we just camp here for the night?” Cool asked. “A lot has happened today, and folks might need a rest.”

  “We need to make sure everyone can change out of their wet clothes before the sun sets and the temperature drops,” Kendra added. “Already the river’s mostly in shadow.”

  Rob’s brow furrowed. “You’re both making sense, but I’d feel a lot better pushing on to our rendezvous site. I wouldn’t want the launch to miss us, particularly since we have no way to communicate with it.”

  “I agree,” Mandy said. She checked her watch. “We still have a couple of hours of daylight left. But some of our clients may be too tuckered out to paddle well. Especially Hal. Let’s offer them seats in our oar rafts.”

  “Good idea,” Rob said. “We all agreed?”

  Cool, Gonzo, and Kendra nodded.

  Rob waved a hand toward the river. “Let’s move on, then.”

  They broke up and gathered the clients around them. “We’re about to head into the biggest water in Cataract Canyon,” Rob said. “If anyone wants to get out of a paddle raft and sit this last section out in an oar raft, you’re more than welcome to. We’ll move gear if we have to.”

  Diana raised a hand. “Hal and I would like to move.”

  Mandy breathed a sigh of relief. She had been prepared to suggest it strongly to them.

  Les stepped forward, holding onto his precious dry bag with one hand and to his half-drowned precious wife with the other. “Amy and I would like to move, too. We’ll sit in your raft, Mandy.”

  Mandy was surprised Les didn’t want to paddle the three Big Drop rapids, but she supposed that Amy’s swim had frightened her and she had talked him into sitting it out with her. “Anyone else?”

  No one else wanted to move.

  Rob took Diana and Hal to his raft and Mandy took Les and Amy to hers. They were soon all launched and heading down the long V of accelerating current leading to Big Drop One.

  “Hey diddle, diddle, right down the middle,” Cool called out over the increasing roar of the squeezed funnel of water rushing over the horizon line.

  Rob had coached Mandy to aim for the middle of the rapid to avoid the nasty pour overs and rock piles on both sides. That line also set the rafts up for an awesome ride atop the wave train at the end. She followed his lead, after Kendra’s and Gonzo’s rafts, and she heard whoops and hollers from the other rafts over the roar of the whitewater.

  On her own raft, Les and Amy were silent, with Les clutching Amy tightly. Mandy concluded Amy must have been really traumatized by her swim. Poor thing.

  Mandy eddied out to the left above Big Drop Two. Rob’s raft cut right just below the large dome-shaped Marker Rock in the middle of the river. He aimed straight for Little Niagara, a massive falls to the right of Marker Rock. The goal was to ride the raft along the edge of its current, missing both the ledge hole below Marker Rock and “the Claw” on the left, a big hole with a huge wave curling over the top of it, ready to pounce on rafts.

  It was a tricky maneuver, Rob had told her, and it would give their raft passengers a gut-clenching view of Little Niagara they would never forget. Mandy hoped Amy could stomach it.

  With no place to pull out between Big Drop Two and Three, Rob continued on. Kendra’s and Gonzo’s rafts followed Rob’s expert line and made it through cleanly, then bobbed down to Big Drop Three. Finally, it was Mandy’s turn.

  She took a deep breath and pulled on her oars to position the raft. The river grabbed hold of her raft and shoved it down the steep drop beside Marker Rock almost before Mandy could react. She quickly hauled on the oars, heading right for Little Niagara.

  While the falls crashed and thundered in front of her, her belly tightened. She couldn’t imagine how anyone could survive in the thrashing whitewater at the bottom. She felt the current grab the raft and send it in the right direction. She was about to line up to miss the led
ge hole when the raft bounced hard.

  What was that? She glanced at the front of the raft.

  Amy was gone.

  fourteen

  You drown not by falling into a river, but by staying submerged in it.

  —paulo coelho

  Mandy glanced at the base of Little Niagara. Amy bobbed face-up in the churning water, arms and legs dangling loosely as if she was unconscious. Shit!

  Then the raft shot past, heading straight for the ledge hole. Mandy shoved on the oars, spinning the raft away from the hole. Her mind was spinning, too. How was she going to rescue Amy?

  Les pointed at Amy and hollered. “Amy fell in!”

  Mandy yelled back, “I’ll head for her. You get ready to pull her in!”

  Les nodded and got on his knees in the front of the raft.

  Mandy spun the raft to face upstream. She oared against the current as hard as she could to slow the raft’s downriver progress and ferry it across the river. The cross currents and boils made the raft buck like a rodeo bronco. She struggled to make corrections and keep the raft on course. She had to get in the right position to catch Amy once the boiling mess below Little Niagara spit her out.

  After a few more muscle-straining hauls on the oars, Mandy saw Amy come out of the foam. She bobbed down the undulating river directly toward them.

  “Grab her!” Mandy shouted at Les.

  He reached out and snatched the shoulders of Amy’s PFD, exactly as they had trained the clients to do. He dunked her in the water, a little deep, Mandy thought, but again, they had told them to do that. The swimmer’s natural buoyancy would work together with the rescuer pulling from the raft to pop the swimmer out of the water.

  Then Les fell backward into the raft. “Christ! I lost her!”

  “We’ll try again,” Mandy shouted.

  Les shook his head while he righted himself.

  Thinking he was giving up hope, Mandy said, “Don’t worry. We’ll get her!”

  Using his paddle as a third balance point, Les started climbing back in the bucking raft toward Mandy.