by Jim Heskett
“Because we need to go to Haynach,” she said, and left it at that.
Dalton grumbled and Charlie simply turned and started hiking. Reagan followed, cursing herself for daydreaming about the key and not spending enough time focusing on the trail. Without focus, people wandered off and died. It happened all the time in the park, even though they were only a few miles in different directions from thousands of people in the little mountain towns like Estes Park and Granby.
So they hiked back through the aspens, over the crest and through the switchbacks. She kept listening for the water, watching the side of the trail for a small post with a rectangular wooden sign.
“Wait a second,” Dalton said. “If the trail goes west, and the creek is back there, and Haynach is north, why don’t we just turn here? It’s north, right? Let’s go off the trail and we’ll eventually find it. I know we’ll find it.”
Reagan considered this as she squinted through the thicket of trees in the direction Dalton had pointed. “I don’t think we should. If we go off trail, we could end up totally lost.”
“Maybe you already know what you’re looking for, but we don’t,” Dalton muttered, barely loud enough for Reagan to hear. He flashed a look at her, then his face fell and he diverted his eyes to the ground.
The statement came across as an accident; something he hadn’t meant to say. But even more confusing was his tone and the way he seemed to catch himself after he said it.
She stared at him, and he remained frozen in place.
What the hell did he mean?
She didn’t have time to puzzle it out now. They were against the clock, always against the clock. They were alone in the woods and always against the clock.
Against the empty casket.
“We’re going to keep on the trail,” she said. She was aware that running the show wasn’t earning her too many popularity points, but this was her hike and they would have to deal with it.
The three of them pressed on, no wooden sign in sight. A collection of black birds gathered on an overhanging tree branch all launched at once, painting the sky in a dozen dots. Their caws bounced between the nearby trees like the ricochet of bullets.
Eventually, the sound of running water became clear and they glimpsed the creek.
“What the fuck?” Dalton said. “I swear, I was like a hawk looking for that sign. It’s just not there.”
“What do we do, Reagan?” Charlie said.
“The sign must be gone. We’ll have to follow the creek.”
Hip raw from the belt, shoulders aching, jaw tense, she led them along the water.
Following the stream was certainly not as desirable as following a trail, because the park rangers and volunteers regularly removed fallen branches, swept away brush and kept the path free of obstacles. Off the trail, patches of leftover spring snow still sat clumped in dirty piles sometimes four or five feet tall. Fallen trees had to be navigated, which Reagan found challenging with a bulky thirty-pound obstruction clinging to her back. Since the sleeping bag was strapped to the bottom, she kept reaching behind to feel for it.
Within minutes, Reagan and her cousins were slogging through muck created by melting snow. Boots made sucking sounds with each step. Dad had once covered his boots with trash bags and cinched them with bungee cords. At the time, Reagan thought the idea brilliant. She wished she had trash bags now.
The makeshift rope hipbelt dug into her, twisting the Indian burn deeper with every step.
Charlie and Dalton started complaining about their socks getting soaked and rubbing against their feet. She wanted to snap at them because the off trail journey was not her fault, but she’d ultimately made the decision for the group to pursue it. Their wet feet were her responsibility. Little fingers of guilt stroked her chest, and she struggled to resist the urge to ask everyone if they were okay. Not her problem.
Fifteen minutes into their creek-following excursion, no one was speaking to anyone else. And that silence allowed her to hear the grunting sounds.
Reagan halted, and Dalton and Charlie did soon after. She first thought it sounded like a moose or elk rooting through the carcass of a dead animal. Sniffing, eating, grunting.
Then Dalton exploded with laughter and pointed to a spot on the rocks uphill.
Two human faces. A topless woman leaning over a waist-high boulder and a man standing behind her, thrusting. Both of them froze in fear, wide eyed and slack-jawed.
Charlie looked mortified, but Dalton nearly fell over with glee.
“Busted,” Dalton yelled through the trees. “Thought you could get in some deep-woods fucking, but there’s always someone around. Don’t need to stop just because we’re here, though. Don’t you go giving that poor dipshit blue balls!”
The couple separated and yanked up their pants, looks of indescribable embarrassment on their faces. The woman did her best to cover her face with one of her hands. Reagan cringed for her because she flashed on a memory from high school when she thought her parents had gone out to dinner, and she and a boyfriend were alone in her room. Reagan’s dad threw the door open as she was climbing on top of her boyfriend, both of them naked and entirely exposed. The expression of horror on her face matched the one on Dad’s face. She couldn’t look him in the eyes for days afterward. Worse to walk in on your parents having sex, or worse for them to discover you having sex? Reagan thought she had experienced the answer to that question.
Dalton howled with delight as the lovers scurried to get dressed.
Reagan scowled at the malicious joy he seemed to take from the experience. “Come on, Dalton, they’re embarrassed enough as it is. Let them have a little bit of…” The word she was looking for was dignity, but it caught in her throat when Dalton turned his stare onto her. His eyes bored into her as the joy melted away from his face.
With a cold, straight expression, he said, “no problem, cuz. You’re the boss.” And with that, he turned back toward the creek and started to walk.
The speed at which he gave up and fell into line unnerved her. He’d been nothing but a hindrance to every effort so far to keep them on track. First, the odd statement about how she knew something they didn’t, and now this? Why had he so suddenly changed? What was going on with her cousin?
“My feet are killing me,” Charlie said.
“We’ll be at the lake soon,” Reagan said. “Just swap your wet socks out for a dry pair. We’ll take the trail back because it’ll be easy to find once we’re by the water. No muck that way.”
“Oh, um… I only have one pair,” Charlie said.
“One pair?” Reagan said. “You’re always supposed to bring a backup.”
“I thought we were supposed to pack light, and shit like that,” Dalton said.
“You too? Come on, guys. You’re acting like you’ve never been camping before.”
Charlie lowered his head like a shamed dog. Dalton started whistling and hooked his thumbs into the shoulder straps of his pack.
Reagan wondered what else they hadn’t brought. Emergency blankets? Water purifying tablets in case something happened to the water filter?
For fifteen more minutes, they hiked through the muck and Reagan thought about Spoon, how she wished she could call him, how she wished he could be here to nuzzle her neck and tell her that transporting Dad’s ashes was a good thing, how it was a necessary thing. She would tell him the hardly-believable story of the couple in the woods and then his hot breath on her neck would wipe her memory clean.
They reached a clearing and up ahead the trees broke, just to their right. She approached it and saw the dirt line through the grass, meaning they’d found the trail again. A wave of relief lifted her.
Charlie cheered as Reagan checked the sky. The sun was not quite overhead, so they had a little time to spare. The lake was still a few more minutes along the trail, but her aching glutes told her she had to rest a minute.
She took off her pack and winced as the rope hipbelt released from her hips. If there was
any ointment in the first aid kit, she was going to need it tonight.
“Why are you stopping?” Charlie said. “I thought we weren’t going to break for lunch until the lake. Aren’t we close?”
“Yeah,” she said. “You guys go ahead. I’ll catch up in a minute.”
Charlie returned to the trail, but Dalton dropped his pack. “I gotta see a guy about a horse,” he said, and then wandered back into the trees.
Reagan looked for a nearby fallen log to sit, and when she was off her feet, the soreness disguised by the adrenaline of constant motion caught up with her. She desperately wanted to take off her boots and rub the feet that had been terrorized by wet wool socks for the last half mile.
But when she sat, a thought struck her. The note. Too upset last night to read it, she’d pushed it from her mind and hadn’t considered it yet today.
Glancing left and right, she was alone.
She reached into her cargo pocket and took it out. Ran her thumb over the handwritten R. She wanted to open and read it, but also didn’t want to open and read it. Those words were the last Dad would ever speak to her. Should she save it for later? No, she needed to read it now and hear whatever he had to say to her. Maybe it explained the key. Maybe it explained a lot of things.
The note was a single piece of paper, folded into quarters. She unfolded it once. Then a rustling in the trees and the crunch of twigs filled her ears.
Dalton.
Something came over her and she shoved the note pack into her pocket. The little voice of fear told her that Dalton wasn’t supposed to see it. She straightened up and put on an innocent face, as she used to do when her parents walked in while she was too close to a boy on the couch. Nothing to see here, thank you very much.
“Hey cuz, whatcha doing?” he said.
“Just resting,” she said, but there was a glint in his eye that suggested he didn’t believe her.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
9:00 am
Spoon tried again to phone Reagan, but it went straight to voicemail. He wasn’t sure what he would have said if she’d picked up. Tell her about losing his current job? Tell her the prospective job might not be there anymore? Tell her nothing and say he couldn’t wait to see her again?
Seated on the couch in the living room of her father’s house with a laptop warming his thighs, Spoon ran through the possibilities when the front door opened and Anne strode in. Seeing her spurred a resurgence of his desire to find transportation around town.
She had a yoga mat under her arm, hair pinned back, and she was wearing skin-tight clothes. For a woman who must have been on the dark side of forty, she had quite a nice figure. Flat stomach, well-shaped calves, perspiration highlighting the cleavage line in the v-neck of her shirt. Then Spoon felt guilty for noticing.
“Hello, darling,” she said. “Good to see you’re up and around.”
“Slept in a bit. Stayed up a little too late coding.”
“I can’t wait to hear all about it,” she said in a breezy voice, which suggested she had no desire to hear about it. She dropped the yoga mat on the floor and walked into the kitchen. When she returned two minutes later, she was dunking a celery stick into a glass of red liquid.
He’d been sober long enough that being around people who drank no longer bothered him, but Anne seemed to imbibe non-stop. He sneaked a glance at the wall clock. “Don’t you reckon it’s a bit early to have a drink?”
She snorted a laugh. “Reckon. You’re precious. Hate to break it to you, but this isn’t the first drink I’ve had today.”
He blinked. “You go to yoga drunk.”
“I don’t do anything without a few drinks in me. And before you try to preach some of your recovering alcoholic nonsense to me, just know I’m a lost cause, darling.” She said this last bit with a wry grin on her face, as if it were all some big joke.
He had considered trying to share some of his drinking experience with her, like the time he jumped into jellyfish infested waters in Queensland and nearly died because he was too pissed to realize what he was doing. But he knew enough to withhold the advice for drunks not yet ready to hear it. One of the cardinal rules of AA: no recruiting. “I’ve always been a staunch supporter of lost causes, but I wouldn’t dream of it.”
She sat on the couch next to him and patted the brace over his knee. “Why don’t you entertain me with some stories from the red continent? Tell me about wrestling crocodiles, or riding kangaroos, or something like that.”
“Afraid I can’t say I’ve ever wrestled a crocodile.”
She leaned over, closer to him, deliberately pushing her cleavage into view. “Come on now, don’t hold out on me.”
She extended her neck so that she was within inches of his face as beads of sweat slid from her neck to her collarbone. The mixture of sweat and alcohol and some kind of fruity fragrance wafted into his nostrils. His heart thumped against his ribcage.
“Mrs. Darby, I’m not sure what…”
“I told you to call me Anne,” she said as she set her drink on the coffee table. She put her hand on his good knee and gave it a light squeeze. “That football injury didn’t put all of your parts out of commission, did it?”
Elevated heartbeat turned into panic. Had he two good knees, he might have jumped up from the couch right then. But her hand pressed on his leg, effectively paralyzing him. “You seem nice, Anne, but I don’t think this is a good idea.”
“I’ve built my career on bad ideas. There’s no one else here. No one else is going to be here for days. And if you and I have a little fun, there’s no reason anyone has to know about it.”
She caressed his leg and leaned in toward his neck, lips parting. For a split second, the warmth of her wet mouth above his collarbone shocked and thrilled him. But only a second. Like snapping awake, he became fully aware of the situation. He placed his hands on her shoulders, then pushed her back to arm’s length.
“We can’t do this.”
Her eyes flicked open. “Are you stupid? You’re not going to take what I’m offering here?”
She leaned in again, and he threw his shoulders into pushing against her this time. He used a little too much force, as she slid off the couch, yelping as her tailbone connected with the floor.
He sat upright and scooted back to the edge of the sofa. “Anne, please, I’m heaps sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt you… just… please don’t do that again. You have to understand that nothing like that can happen between us. I love Reagan and I can’t do that to her.”
She ran a hand over her brow to flatten strands of wayward hair against her scalp. Her lips jittered as tears welled in her eyes, and Spoon fought a reflex to reach out and place a soothing hand on her shoulder. Reagan’s words echoed in his head from the last night they were together. Don’t trust my stepmom.
“Damn it,” she moaned as she smacked a closed fist against her thigh. “Jesus Christ. What the hell am I doing?”
He had no idea what the right move was. Comfort her, not comfort her. There seemed to be no good choice.
“No worries,” he said. “It was a simple mistake, that’s all.” He waited, hoping she would leave, stop crying, or do something. She seemed to be stuck in place.
“It’s always a mistake. You probably think I’m a terrible person.” She walked to the stairs and leaned over the banister, lightly thumping her head against the wood. “You ever have pain that stays with you for a long time, then when it’s gone, you’ve gotten so used to it, it feels wrong for it to be gone?”
Spoon stared at his knee injury, with no idea how to respond to that. He couldn’t imagine the grief she was going through.
“And what does it say about me that I put up with it for so long?”
In a few seconds, she wiped her face and strode to the front door. She grabbed her keys, slid one of the keys off the ring, and stuck it in the waistband of her pants. Then she left.
Spoon readjusted himself on the couch so he was facing the door, trying to make sense
of everything that had happened. The room became still, only the ticking of the wall clock to break the silence. His mind swam.
Five minutes later, Anne re-entered the house, her face now bright and lively. An entirely different woman. “You still need a car?”
“I thought I might go to a meeting,” he said. He didn’t say that he also intended to check out A1 Lawnmower Repair and its proprietor Tyson at some stage today.
She tossed a key in an arc toward him. “I switched cars with the neighbor for the next two days. It’s an automatic, so you should be able to drive it.”
Spoon gripped the key, now totally confused and unsure what to think about his host. “Ta.”
“Ta?”
“That’s Aussie for thanks.” He considered mentioning the fumbling attempt at seduction, how it had probably been a misunderstanding, how maybe they would be able to talk about it once they’d both calmed down and gotten some perspective.
But whilst he was thinking about it, Anne left him and walked into the kitchen. “I have to run some errands in a minute,” she said from the other room.
“Don’t you need a car?”
“I have my bike. If you go out, you can leave the door unlocked.” The sound of a blender roared from the kitchen.
Any chance to get clear about what had happened was going to have to wait. He took the opportunity to walk away from the craziness and gather his things from upstairs as quickly as his crutch-bound legs would carry him.
Stepping outside for the first time today, he breathed in a lungful of the thin Colorado air. He still hadn’t adjusted to the altitude, and moving too quickly made him lightheaded. But being outside the house, he already felt the prison shackles of boredom lifting.
And that’s when he saw the strangest thing.
Across the street was the same blue Chevy Tahoe from yesterday, parked along the curb. A large and ruddy-faced bloke was sitting in the driver’s side of the ute. When Spoon first noticed him, the man had been staring directly at him, but he quickly sunk into the seat and lowered his eyes. The deliberate avoidance unsettled Spoon.