Reagan's Ashes

by Jim Heskett

  She drew in a sharp breath. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  He reached into the side of his pack and withdrew the folding knife Tyson had given him. He’d kept it secret so far, but now was the time to put everything out in the open.

  Reagan glanced at the knife but kept her chin held high, hands at her sides and fists balled.

  Charlie gasped. “What are you doing with that thing?”

  “Shut the fuck up, Charlie.”

  “I don’t care what you say,” Reagan said, “or how you threaten me, or what you do with that knife. You’re not going to get that key.”

  Dalton took a step backward, his thoughts now swimming. He hadn’t expected this. “A key? What key? What key do you have? What does it open?”

  She said nothing. Then it made sense to him, like the twist at the end of a movie explaining all the mysteries at once. Of course, it had to be a key. It’s not as if uncle Mitch would stash two hundred and forty large out here, where it might get wet or some other asshole might stumble on it. But a key would be easy to conceal, and Reagan could have gotten it from any one of a million hiding spots along the trail. That explained why he hadn’t seen her sneaking off into the woods to retrieve a package to stash in her backpack. The whole scenario seemed so clear and simple that he almost laughed.

  The course was now clear. Dalton had to get this key and give it to Tyson. The old fat bastard would know what to do with it.

  “I think you should leave,” she said, pointing back at Lake Nokoni. “You and Charlie just go that way. I’ll go on from here and have my own trip. We can pretend this didn’t happen and never speak about it again.”

  Charlie waved his hands and positioned himself between them, off to the side. “Everybody just calm down, please. This is getting way too crazy and we need to take a step back and think about this.”

  Dalton opened the folding knife, exposing the silvery blade within. “I can’t walk away, and I think you know it. You don’t understand, cuz, I need that key. Your degenerate-gambler dad took something that wasn’t his, and I’m supposed to make sure that what’s messed up about all this gets fixed.”

  “Don’t call him that,” she said as she retreated a step. She’d moved closer to the edge of the crest. Two feet behind her was a steep decline, with few trees to break the fall on the way down.

  He moved closer, edging her up against the drop-off. Making her think he was going to push her might scare her into giving it up. “We just want what’s ours, right Charlie?”

  “I don’t want any part of this, and I told you that. Leave her alone, please. Let’s go, like she said.”

  Dalton squeezed the knife but kept his eyes on Reagan. “I’m disappointed in you. I’m your brother.”

  Charlie puffed out his chest, in some perverted show of bravery. He stepped directly between Dalton and Reagan. “You’re acting like a jerk, and I’m not going to let you do anything stupid. Cut it out, right now.”

  Dalton whipped his non-knife hand toward Charlie to slap him, but his little brother ducked the blow and jabbed Dalton in the mouth with a closed fist. He hadn’t seen it coming. Stinging pain shot through his jaw, and his eyes watered, turning his brother and cousin into a blurry mess. For a half a second, he was too shocked to react.

  Then Dalton jumped forward, grabbed Charlie, and pulled him to the side. He’d meant to yank the kid away from the edge, but Charlie pulled in the opposite direction and tumbled down the crest.

  Dalton’s little brother folded into a ball and rolled down the steep side of the mountain, thirty feet, then sixty, finally coming to a stop when he bumped into a tree. A miniature landslide of dirt and rock cascaded down the mountain after him. He yelped and moaned, grabbing his leg with both hands.

  Dalton heard a snick, then a glint of light flashed in his eyes as Reagan’s hand came toward his face. He put up his own hand in time to block a knife from slashing him. He felt a tearing as the blade connected with his palm.

  Red-hot stinging pain seared his hand as blood gathered at the site of the wound. In the mountain air, his blood immediately cooled, and he shuddered. Less than a second had passed since Charlie fell, but the chain of events played out in distinct moments. He couldn’t believe what was happening.

  She stood there, knife in hand, chest heaving.

  “Motherfucking bitch,” he shouted as he examined the wound. He staggered at the sight of the blood, now dizzy.

  Time slipped by as his vision cleared of stars and he regained his bearings. He blinked a few times as his ears filled with the sounds of Charlie calling for help.

  Then he looked up and Reagan was gone.

  “Oh, you sneaky bitch.”

  Folding blade in hand, he ran down the trail. In front of him, the path descended to the lake, steep hill on the left and thicket of trees on the right. A collection of boulders, shrubs, and broken log carcasses clogged up the space between the trees.

  She could be hiding anywhere out in that mess to the right of the trail. How long was he not paying attention? Five seconds? Ten? How far could she have gone?

  “Reagan? I know you’re here somewhere,” he said, focusing his eyes to spot movement between the trees.

  Charlie’s wails came wafting up the hill. “Dalton, help me, please. I cut my leg and I’m bleeding all over the place. I can’t stand up.”

  “Charlie, damn it, be still. I’ll be there in a minute.” Dalton rotated slowly, surveying the trail. He tried to remember what color shirt she’d been wearing, but drew a blank. “Where are you, cousin? Up in a tree? Hiding under a fucking rock?”

  He didn’t know whether to go left or right. She may have even doubled back and gone back the trail to the other lake. His stomach gurgled, and anger unlike anything he’d experienced in years raced through his body like cars on a track. Anger at her, but mostly at himself. He’d come so far, endured three days of bullshit food and sleeping on the ground in the cold, and he’d almost thrown it all away because he was impatient.

  Tyson would not be pleased.

  “Reagan, come on out. I’m going to find you, and you know it. Where do you think you’re going to go, huh?”

  Charlie yelped louder.

  Dalton grunted and folded the blade of his knife back into itself. Charlie might actually be hurt. “Fine, you motherfucking bitch, go ahead and run. But I know where you live!”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  11:00 am

  During the return drive from Boulder to Denver, Spoon debated whether he should tell Anne that he’d seen Tyson going into Reagan’s grandfather’s apartment. Given how dismissive Anne had been about this man with the banana-shaped scar, he reckoned she wouldn’t care. Spoon was on his own when it came to puzzling through this situation.

  When they got back to the house, Anne said she was going to go upstairs and take a nap.

  “Didn’t you say you had to get to work?” Spoon said.

  She shook her head. “I thought you knew. I haven’t worked since after Mitch and I got married. Truth is, I had to get out of there. You understand, right? I can only take Frank in small doses.”

  “Sure, no worries,” Spoon said, pretending to sympathize.

  When she went upstairs, he snatched the neighbor’s Lexus keys from the dish next to the front door. Drive back to Boulder and ask the old man about his visitor? No, that wouldn’t do any good. Frank’s opinions were suspect, at best. If Frank even remembered a visit from Tyson, he may not be willing to explain.

  Frank had said that Reagan’s father was trying to get money to her somehow. If that were even true, would Tyson know about it? Because if Tyson knew, then it meant not just Anne was mixed up in this. Reagan was too, whether she knew it or not. Spoon started to consider the idea that once Reagan came back from her walkabout, Tyson might want to tail her as well. Maybe he would think she knew the location of all this mythical money.

  Too many variables and options. He couldn’t think straight. In times like this, t
he best thing Spoon could do for himself would be to find an AA meeting, refocus on his sobriety, and then let the solution present itself when his head emptied all the rubbish. Solving a problem by not solving the problem.

  He walked outside and saw no blue Chevy ute lurking along the street. He slid into the Lexus and searched his mobile to locate a nearby meeting, and found one at a Baptist church about a half-mile away. The meeting started in twenty minutes, so he drove with his mobile in one hand, navigating the twists and turns to escape the neighborhood and join the main street.

  First Baptist sat on a street corner, a nondescript building with a single steeple reaching the sky from the center of the shingled roof. He drove into the parking lot, then checked the Denver AA website again for instructions. AA meetings at churches usually met in the basement, or in the kitchen, or some other oddity.

  He had ten minutes to kill until the meeting started, so he got out of the car and circled the building, looking for a cluster of smokers. The pre-meeting AA smoking crowd was something he could count on to help him find the right entrance. After rounding the building, he found a man in a Denver Nuggets t-shirt and a woman with close-cropped hair standing near a set of doors, each of them with cancer sticks clutched in their hands. Jackpot.

  He walked toward them. “Are you two friends of Bill?”

  They both smiled at him, and the woman gave him a cheeky wink. “You bet. Meeting’s inside and to the left, through the hallway in the little room at the end. Coffee’s in the kitchen to the right before you get to the end of the hall.”

  “Cheers,” Spoon said as he shook hands with each of them. The man snuffed out his cigarette and held the door open. The three of them walked inside, and Spoon entered the hallway, debating whether to get coffee. If American coffee was weak, American coffee at AA meetings was the weakest going.

  Still, he glimpsed the kitchen as he passed it, and something caught his eye. A slender woman was standing next to the coffee maker, swirling a little plastic stick into a Styrofoam cup. He met her sight line and she threw a grin at him, and Spoon’s jaw almost dropped. He knew this woman. Or he had seen her around, like the way you can start to recognize people at the grocer’s if your shopping schedules sync up.

  Not knowing nagged at him.

  “It’s right this way,” the male smoker said, pointing to an open door.

  Spoon followed his guides into the small space, which he reckoned was a children’s classroom, given the colorful walls adorned with crayon drawings and the half-sized furniture everywhere. Someone had placed a dozen chairs in a circle in the center of the room.

  The familiar woman followed him into the room and found a chair, and Spoon sat opposite her. He tried not to think about it; tried to chalk it up to a simple coincidence, because approaching some American woman uninvited might earn him a face full of pepper spray. Better to let it go and ignore the unknown worming through him, or else he’d be unable to hear a single thing said during the meeting. And if he couldn’t concentrate, that would defeat the purpose of coming.

  The chairperson shuffled some papers and started the meeting’s opening as everyone else took their seats. At some meetings Spoon had been to, the custom was to ask out of town visitors to identify themselves, and Spoon was waiting for it.

  “Anyone here visiting from out of town, or the first time at this meeting?”

  Spoon raised his hand, and so did the familiar woman. They stared at each other. She nodded at him to go first.

  “Spoon, alcoholic. I’m visiting from Austin.”

  “Hi, Spoon,” murmured the group. A few of them wrinkled their foreheads and stared, given that he didn’t have a Texas accent. Happened a lot when he traveled.

  “My name is Jules, and I’m an alcoholic,” said the familiar woman. “I’m visiting from California, but I used to live in Colorado.”

  The situation kept getting stranger. Spoon did his best not to gawk at Jules as the meeting progressed, but he couldn’t help stealing glances every few seconds. Her eyes, her hair, the curve of her chin… all of them so familiar he felt he must have been going bonkers.

  He had an idea, but it seemed so unlikely, he pushed it aside.

  She didn’t share during the meeting, just sat with her legs crossed and her hands clasped over one knee, intently watching each person as they spoke. To alleviate the distraction, Spoon closed his eyes and tried to listen to the speakers.

  When the meeting ended, she collected her things and headed for the hallway, and he saw his chance to learn about this Jules person fading. The uncertainty burned at him, so Spoon followed her. Potential pepper spray to the face be damned. He shook a couple of hands of people who encouraged him to come back again tomorrow, but he did so quickly so he could find her before she disappeared.

  In the parking lot, she pressed the unlock button on the remote control, and the lights flashed on a brand-new Kia with a rental car sticker on the back. He walked as fast as the crutches would allow, kicking gravel across the parking lot.

  “Jules, hold up, please.”

  She turned around and raised her eyebrows at him, and in that instant, he knew for sure. Like a smack across the noggin, a simple solution appeared: Reagan plus twenty-five years. This was her mother, the same one who had disappeared a few weeks after Reagan’s high school graduation.

  “You’re Reagan’s mum.”

  Jules’ face softened and she smiled. The same smile his girlfriend wore, which started on the left side then evened up to a full, toothy smile.

  “And you’re such a handsome young man. I’m not surprised she would pick you.”

  “How do you know who I am? What the bloody hell is going on here?”

  She stepped toward him and held out her hand. “I’ve seen you on Reagan’s Facebook page.”

  He wanted to ask her why she’d appeared at the same AA meeting. But more importantly, why she ran out on her daughter six years ago. Why she never visited, or called, or even wrote Reagan in the hospital. Why she hadn’t come to support her daughter on Monday when they turned her father into a pile of ash.

  Instead, all he said was, “I’m Spoon.” Then, after a few seconds of uncomfortable silence, he regained his wits. “Why are you here, Jules?”

  She seemed a little flustered, stumbling over her words. “I was actually about to park and walk up to Mitch’s house when I saw you leaving and recognized you from her pictures online. I wanted to see where you were going.”

  Spoon felt a little embarrassed that he hadn’t known he was being followed. Should have been old hat to him by this stage.

  She nodded toward the church. “This used to be my home group meeting, when I lived here. So convenient, just down the street from the house.”

  “No, why are you here? In Colorado.”

  “Because I can now.”

  That didn’t make any sense. He leaned forward on his crutches. “You’re going to have to explain because I don’t follow you.”

  “I came to see my daughter. It’s time I was part of her life again and put right all the things I messed up.”

  Spoon was too overwhelmed to know how to interpret Jules’ words. He said the first thing that popped into his mind, hoping he could keep her talking until he got answers. “Okay, so where were you coming from?”

  “Sacramento.”

  “And did you just get in?”

  She readjusted her purse on her shoulder. “Almost. I checked into my hotel, then I made a quick stop-off to see Mitchell’s brother.”

  Spoon jerked his head upwards. “Wait, what? You went to see who?”

  “I don’t know if you would have met him. He doesn’t come around to family functions too much. He didn’t come to the memorial service either, apparently. I went to see Reagan’s uncle Tyson.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  2:30 pm

  Reagan crouched at the intersection of three large rocks, forty feet from the main trail. She braced herself between them, struggling to get her breath
ing under control. Her hands felt cold and clammy against the hard surfaces.

  I know where you live, bitch.

  Dalton’s words echoed. Why was this happening? How could a member of her family treat her this way?

  She listened as Charlie wailed about the cut in his leg. The sound of his suffering burned her, brought tears to her eyes.

  “Fine, Charlie, I’ll be right there,” Dalton said, his voice distant from her hiding spot.

  She craned her neck to try to hear Dalton walk away. In a couple minutes, she heard both of them talking, and their voices were the same volume. Charlie had stopped his pained cries, so he must have been less injured than he thought. Good. She assumed Dalton was away from the trail now, or at least she hoped so. Couldn’t sit here forever.

  Time to make an escape. She lamented all the things she would have to leave behind in her pack, which was a hundred feet back on the trail above her… her headlamp, sunscreen, hiking poles, cell phone. Leaving that last item behind seemed horrific enough that she toyed with the idea of sneaking back up to her pack to take it. But the risk was too great because he could be hiding behind a tree nearby, waiting for her… what was she going to do, have a bloody knife fight with her cousin?

  No, she had to get away. Get away and let everyone calm down. Get out of the park, call Spoon, find out what the key unlocks, decipher the note from Dad, find the money… then what? No idea.

  This is why she’d stashed the emergency blanket and the food. She’d prepared for this.

  As quietly as possible, she crept away from the rock, peering around it, but the steep angle of the mountainside hid her cousins from her. With each step, she focused on the terrain above for any sights or sounds.

  Guilt about leaving Charlie behind stung her, but with Dalton brandishing that hunting knife, there was nothing she could do. She had to hope that Dalton would help his little brother and that whatever injury he’d sustained wasn’t severe. Maybe they’d stumble on a park ranger who could get him out of the park.