“Please,” she said. “I need to get him a message. You know how. The GPS can—”
“I’ll get him the message, Allison. You just tell me what to say. I’ll get it to him.”
He kept looking away. She wondered what he saw. What she looked like to his eyes.
“You t-tell him…” Now she stuttered, because it was critical to get the wording right. That was imperative. To find a way to make Ethan understand without allowing the rest of the world to understand. A secret code. Husband-and-wife. Why hadn’t they ever developed a code? It seemed like something they should have done. Buy groceries, do laundry, create code.
“You need to get this right,” she told the police officer. “Just as I say.”
He seemed concerned now, but he nodded. One of the paramedics was asking him to step back, trying to close the door, but he held up a hand and told them to wait.
“You tell him that Allison says she is fine, but that JB’s friends are coming to see him.”
“We’ll tell him you’re fine. He’ll be here soon. You’ll see him very—”
“No.” She tried to shout and the pain that brought on was excruciating, but she tunneled through it. “You need to say it right. Tell me how you will say it.”
They were all staring at her now, even the paramedics. The officer whose name she could not remember said, “Allison is fine but JB’s friends are coming to see him.”
“Two. Say two of JB’s friends.” It was important to be detailed. She knew that. The more details he had, the more prepared he would be.
The officer said that he would. He was receding from her but she couldn’t feel the ambulance moving and the door was still open. That was fascinating. How was that happening? Oh, he was stepping back. Funny how fast the drugs worked. Very disorienting. Very good drugs. She told the paramedics that. She thought they would like to know how good these things were. They were busy, though; they always seemed to be busy.
The door closed and the ambulance shifted beneath her and then they really were moving, bumping down the driveway. She could see the men with the pale blue eyes again and she could see her husband’s face and she wished that she’d been able to send the message herself. The officer had better get it right. There were two of them, and they were evil. Maybe she should have used that word in the message. Maybe she should have been clearer. She had said that two friends were coming, but that was so far from the truth.
Evil was coming.
This time the dream was different, gentler in its layers but more evil in its content. This time the boy was coming for Hannah. He was walking right toward her, wearing a headlamp, marching to her tower, and she was terrified of him and whatever message he carried.
You’ve lost your mind, she thought, staring out the window as the boy with the lamp reached the base of the tower steps and began to come up them, the steel rattling against his feet.
He couldn’t be real. A boy just like the one who haunted her, walking out of the night woods, out of the mountains, all alone and bound for her as if he’d been marching toward her all this time?
The terrible thing stopped after ten steps, though. Held tightly to the rail, looked up at her tower and then back down. Came up another few steps in a rush, moving awkwardly with the weight of an outsize pack on his back, then stopped again and put both hands on the step in front of him. Holding on to it as if for balance.
Hannah was still developing her theory of ghosts and she didn’t understand much about them, but one thing she was sure of: they weren’t afraid of heights.
She rose from the bunk and walked to the door, and down below the boy began his surreal ascent from the blackness again, the white beam of light guiding him toward her. She opened the door, stepped out into the night, and shouted, “Stop!”
He nearly fell off the tower. Stumbled into the rail, gave a little cry, and slipped sideways; the pack caught him and kept him from sliding down the steps.
Ghosts were not scared of the living. Nightmares didn’t tremble at the sound of your voice.
“Are you okay?” she called.
He didn’t answer, and she started down the steps. He watched her come, the headlamp shining directly into her eyes.
“Please turn that light off.”
He reached up and fumbled with it and clicked something and then the light shifted from harsh white to an eerie crimson glow. A setting designed to protect your night vision. She walked down until she could see him.
He bore no resemblance to the boy from her memories. He was older and taller, with dark hair instead of blond. His face was covered with dirt and scratches and sweat, and he was breathing hard. He’d been walking for a while.
“Where did you come from?”
“I’m…I got lost. Heading back to camp.”
“You’re camping?”
He nodded. She was close enough now to see that there were streaks on his face where tears had cleared the dirt.
“You’re with your parents?”
“No. I mean…not anymore. Not now.”
It was a strange answer, and his eyes made it even stranger. Flicking around like there were options all about and he needed to find the right one. For a yes-or-no answer? Hannah looked at him and tried to see what she was missing. There was something. He was dressed for camping, yes, and he had the pack and the headlamp, all the proper equipment, but…
The pack. Why was he still wearing it if he’d gotten lost on his way back to camp?
“How long ago did you wander off?”
“I don’t know. Couple hours.”
That put him strapping a full pack on after midnight. A pretty serious bathroom run.
“What’s your name?” she said.
Again the flicker of the eyes. “Connor.”
“Your parents are out there somewhere, but you don’t know how to find your way back?”
“Yeah. I need to get in touch with them.”
“I’d say so.”
“You have a phone up there?” he asked.
“A radio. We’ll call for help. Come on up. We’ll get it straightened out.”
He got to his feet slowly. Holding to the railing as if he fully expected the stairs to collapse beneath him and leave him dangling from it. She turned and led the way up to the cab. The moon was descending, and in the eastern sky there were the first perceptible lightening shades of dawn. She’d been awake until well past midnight listening to the reports from the fire line. They’d failed to contain the flames before dark and had called for a second hotshot crew to help. In the morning, she expected there would be discussion of a helitack unit. For a brief time, there had been added excitement when reports of a second flare-up a few miles away came in, but that turned out to be a house fire, quickly extinguished. Now it was just the one blaze out there in the night. The wind that had picked up at dusk had blown steadily all through the night and showed no sign of wanting to lie down in front of the oncoming day.
Poor kid, she thought. Whatever he wasn’t telling her—and there was something—he needed to get the hell out of these mountains and back to his family. She wondered if he had run away from them. That would explain the full pack and the hesitant answers. It was none of her business. All she had to do was make sure he got to safety. A more active role than she’d expected to have this summer.
She reached the top of the cab and turned on the overhead lights and waited while he made his way up. She’d been going slow but he still had fallen well behind. Even when the lights went on in the cab, he didn’t look up from his boots. Step, step, pause. Step, step, pause. Never glancing up or to the sides.
“Here we are,” she said. “My little kingdom. Where did you come from? Do you know the name of the campsite, or a landmark? I’ll need to offer instructions to find your family.”
Again, that strange expression overtook him. As if he didn’t have an answer ready and needed time to consider before offering one. It wasn’t a deceptive look, just uncertain.
“Wh
o do you call on the radio?” he said.
“People who can help.”
“Right. But…who, exactly? Police?”
“Are you worried about the police?”
“No,” the boy said.
“Do you need the police?”
“It’s just…I’m curious. I need to know, that’s all.”
“What do you need to know?”
“Who exactly answers the radio?”
“Dispatch for firefighters. But from there, they’ll call whoever you need.”
He frowned. “Firefighters.”
“Yes.”
“Who can hear what they say?”
“Pardon?”
“Is it just…is it two-way communication?”
“Two-way communication?” she echoed. “I’m not sure that I follow.”
“Can other people hear what you say? Like, is it just you and another person, the way it would be on a phone? Or can other people listen? On other radios?”
“Hon,” she said, “you need to tell me what the real problem is here. Okay?”
He didn’t answer.
“Where did you really come from?” she said.
He let his eyes drift away from hers. They settled on the Osborne. He wandered over to it and stared at the map, silent, then leaned down, investigating it.
Autistic, maybe, she thought. Or—what’s that other condition? When a kid is really smart but you ask him a normal question and he ignores it? Whatever that condition is, this kid has it.
“If you don’t remember, that’s okay. I’ll just need to explain what—”
“I’d say we were right…there.” He had his index finger on the topographic map. She was too intrigued by him now to just repeat the question, so instead she went to his side and looked at where he was pointing.
“That’s nine thousand feet there,” he said. “And we were one ridge down, in this area that flattened out, and we had the slope at our back. You can see that? The way the line bends, it shows you that there’s a flat area there. It’s not as steep as what’s around it, you see?”
He looked up at her, curious to know if she understood.
“Yeah,” she said. “I can see it.”
“Well, that’s where we were camped. We’re working on orienteering, and I saw the smoke and figured out where we were…and then…then, later, when you put the light on, I saw this place. That was probably an hour ago? You’d be surprised how well the light carries, with this thing being so tall. But once I saw it, I remembered what it was. Or what it probably was. When you turned it off, I got kind of worried that I’d imagined it. I mean, it got so dark so fast, it was like it was never there. But I had the angle right, I mean the bearing, it’s called a bearing, and so I just…I just kept walking.”
He was beginning to ramble now, and his hands had started to shake. For the first time, he looked troubled. More than troubled. He looked terrified.
“Walking away from what?” Hannah said. “What has you so scared?”
“I don’t know. Listen, I need you to do me a favor.”
Here we go, she thought. Here’s where it gets interesting.
“Call for help,” she said. “Yeah, I’m on it.”
“No. No, please don’t do that. If you could just…give me a little while to think.”
“To think?”
“I just need to…need to stop. Just for a few minutes, okay? I need to just…figure some things out. But I’ve got to think.”
“We need to get you out of here to someone who can help you. Let’s do that, and then you can think. You shouldn’t be up here. I can’t just let you stay up here.”
“Then I’ll leave. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have come here. It seemed like the right thing but now…I’m afraid I made a mistake. I’m going to leave.”
“Don’t.”
“I should. Forget about it. Just forget I was here. There’s no need to make a big scene out of it, calling the police or whatever. I don’t think that would be good.”
His voice was shaking.
She said, “Connor? It’s my job to let people know what’s happening up here. If I don’t report this, I could get fired.”
“Please,” he said. He seemed on the verge of tears, and she didn’t understand a bit of it, knew only that she needed to get somebody up here to deal with him. An underage kid wandering the backcountry alone at night? That was something you called in immediately.
“Let’s all think on it,” she said. “I’m just going to let my bosses know you’re here. That way, if they have a good idea, they can share it, and if your parents have gotten ahold of people already, if they’re looking for you, then everyone can relax.” She moved toward the radio. “Think about how scared they’re going to be. This could do a lot to make them feel better.”
“Please,” he said again, but she wasn’t going to listen, and she kept her back to him as she reached for the mike.
“I’ll just report your position, that’s all. You don’t need to worry.” She keyed the mike but got only as far as “This is Lynx Lookout” before he smashed the hatchet down on the desk, severing the cord between the microphone and the radio.
She screamed and whirled away, tripping on the chair and falling to her hands and knees. Turned back and stared at him as he took more careful smashes with the hatchet she kept near the woodpile for splitting kindling. He was using the back of it now, trying to crush the front of the radio. And having success. He was sobbing while he did it.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Really, I am. But I don’t know if we can do that. I don’t know if that’s a good idea. If they already made it this far, then somebody is listening. Somebody is telling them things that were supposed to be secret.”
18
The smoke that Connor had located correctly on the map was still visible above the mountains when Ethan reached the Pilot Creek trailhead with six exhausted boys in tow and one missing in the wilderness behind them. It had been a forest fire, just as he’d feared. It seemed to be growing. He stared at it with detachment, this thing that once would have occupied so much of his attention, and then he turned to look back at those who were waiting for them.
Three police cars—two SUVs and one pickup truck from the park. Six people in uniform milling around. One for every boy Ethan had brought back out of the mountains.
He’d had some time to think about it, several hours of walking down through the darkness while behind him Connor walked in the opposite direction. If he walked at all.
In a different situation, Ethan would have cared deeply about that. He wondered what was more selfish, putting the anonymous boy ahead of Allison, or Allison ahead of the boy. There was the responsibility to a child in need, and then there was the responsibility to your wife. Picking one over the other was never the noble choice, not that he could see. So you tried to care for them all, but in the end you couldn’t do that. You made choices.
He had made the wrong choice.
Only you can handle this, Jamie had suggested, and his answer had been Of course, you are right.
The boys fell gasping onto the ground, some of them not even unfastening their packs first. He looked at them and felt the weight of failure, a weight he had not known before.
He knew several of the officers on scene. While most tended to the boys, passing out water bottles and asking questions, a police sergeant named Roy Futvoye took Ethan aside. They sat beneath the open tailgate of his Suburban and Roy told him that the house was destroyed and Allison was in the hospital in Billings.
“She said there were two of them. She seemed…a little vague with what they were after.”
Yes, she would have. Secrecy, Ethan had said. Trust no one, Ethan had said. I’ll keep him safe, Ethan had said.
“What did they do to her?” His voice was low and he couldn’t look Roy in the eye.
“Far less than they might have. If she hadn’t started that fire, who knows.”
Ethan looked up. “Allison started the
fire?”
Roy nodded. “Used a can of bear spray on the woodstove. It ran them off, but…but she paid a price too. She’s got some burns. And one of those guys”—now it was Roy who didn’t meet Ethan’s eyes—“one of them busted up her mouth pretty well.”
“Did he, though,” Ethan said. His own mouth went dry.
“She’s okay,” Roy said. “She’ll be all right. But I need to talk to you. If there’s a reason these men are here—”
“There’s always a reason,” Ethan said. His mind was already gone from the conversation. He was back at the cabin, envisioning a man busting up her mouth pretty well.
“Serbin? I’m going to need you to focus for me here. If you’ve got any information on these men, I need it. The sheriff is dead and it might be connected. The action I take is—”
“Claude is dead?”
“You see that smoke?”
“Yeah.”
“That fire’s still going, and Claude was at the start of it. We found his body up there. He’d been timbering. Now, you know Claude. And I know Claude. You tell me—does he start a fire in the middle of the afternoon while he’s felling trees?”
“Unlikely.”
Any job that arrives with a blizzard, he’d said to Jamie Bennett that night. And laughed.
He turned and stared at the faces of the fatigued, confused boys who knew nothing. Marco was watching him with concern. Marco, who’d be going back to his shitstorm of a home life now. All of them would be.
“She’s safe,” Ethan said to Roy. “She’s okay. Hurt, but okay.”
“That’s right. You can see her. She’s had better days, to be sure, but you’re not going to lose her, Ethan. You didn’t, and you won’t.”
He nodded. Still looking around him. Taking in the faces, the questioning stares, the hard smoking mountains beyond.
“I’ll come back to find the boy,” he told Roy.
“The boy?”
And so Ethan told him what he’d hoped he’d never have to say in his life: he’d lost a child on the mountain.
“We’ll get him, Ethan. Don’t worry about that.”
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