“River otters,” Raine breathed. “Really?”
“They can’t be river otters,” Drake whispered flatly.
“Why not?”
“Because there aren’t any river otters in Colorado,” Drake whispered back. “Not anymore. Aren’t they extinct?”
Below them, the otters had finished their game and had disappeared below the surface of the river. Tor could see the path of the snow-covered river in the broad valley that stretched in front of them. A river, and beaver ponds, full of fish and crawdads. No one could reach this place to disturb them. No one knew about them. No one—
“Raine,” he said suddenly, turning to her. She looked at him, and saw the knowledge in his face, and realized what he was about to say before he said it.
“The people,” she breathed.
“The people. Her people,” Drake said from the other side of Tor. Tor turned to see Drake with the same look on his face that Raine had on hers.
“These are Leaping Water’s people,” Raine said, and her voice was choked. “My great-great-great-grandmother’s people. The river people.”
“They’re real,” Drake said. “They’re really real.”
“Leaping Water wasn’t crazy,” Tor said. “She really was protecting her people.”
“Holy crow,” Raine said, and fell back into the snow.
“Well, she was crazy,” Drake said. “You gotta give her that. But, wow, Raine—look at them!”
Tor watched Raine as she lay in the snow, her helmet and goggles masking everything but her mouth. Her mouth was trembling and tinged slightly blue. He knew he was getting colder by the minute, and there was a terrible empty space in his middle that was telling him that the hamburger he’d had for lunch was far too long ago, and perhaps the way off the mountain would lead them into some dreadful mine shaft and they’d all die. But for just a bit longer he ignored all those thoughts and let the sight of Raine’s stunned face and the thought of the otters fill his mind.
This valley was completely undiscovered, another world right next door to their ordinary lives, and it held creatures that no one knew existed.
“It’s like a secret world,” Drake murmured, echoing Tor’s thoughts exactly. Tor turned to see Drake looking into the valley and grinning in a completely uncomplicated way. This was something, Tor realized, that Drake’s famous father had never done. Never seen. Something that no one knew about but them.
“You’re right,” Tor said, and laughed out loud. He could hear the sound echo through the valley and suddenly a head popped out of the black hole in the water in the valley floor. Tor slapped a hand to his mouth but it was too late. The otter turned its head and looked right at them. The three of them sat and looked at the otter and the otter looked back at them. Tor could see the ink-black shine of its eyes and he held his breath. The otter chirped and then casually turned and sank back under the water.
“He wasn’t afraid of us,” Drake whispered. “Like he’d never seen humans before.”
“He probably hasn’t,” Tor said.
“We can’t tell anyone about this,” Raine said.
“Of course not,” Tor said immediately. The very idea seemed wrong. This was their magical place. He didn’t want to share it with anyone.
A snowflake spiraled out of the air and landed on Raine’s helmet. Drake looked up at the sky.
“Snow. We better get back,” Drake said. “If we can, that is.”
“We can,” Raine said, and levered herself to her feet. “I know we can. Can’t you feel it now? That the mountain is going to let us go?”
“Yeah,” Drake said, “I can.” He was grinning but there wasn’t the usual edge to it that Tor was used to seeing. Drake looked like a kid, Tor thought. For once, he looked like a kid.
“Me too,” Tor said. “Me too.”
Raine balanced on her board. She looked worried as a few more snowflakes drifted from the sky.
“Let me lead, Drake. We can’t go back the way we came, so we’ll all go downhill.”
“We can’t go back?” Tor asked.
“Uphill all the way, through snow that’s hip-deep,” Drake said. “We’d never make it.”
“We’ll snowboard out, Tor. Drake, you follow Tor so if he falls we can stop for him. Okay?” Raine asked.
“Okay,” Drake said.
“Okay,” Tor said, and ignored the agony of his leg muscles as he got to his feet. His board followed Raine as though it had a mind of its own, and he had one chance to glance back and glimpse the valley where the river people lived before the trees closed in and it was gone.
Tor fell twice and the second time he wasn’t sure he could get to his feet. There were thick aspen trees all around him. His board slid out of the path Raine was carving and he caught an edge of a pale white trunk and that was that.
“Come on, Tor, we’re almost there,” Drake said, holding onto the bole of another aspen tree and looking as calm and rested as if he’d just gotten out of his Sherlock chair. “Listen. Can you hear it?”
Tor held his breath for a moment and he heard a rushing sound like a river. Then he had to breathe, and that was all he heard—his whooping breaths and his pounding heart.
“What was that?” he finally got out.
“The highway,” Drake said with a grin. “Raine led us right out. I knew she could. And it’s not even dark yet.”
Tor used Drake’s trick and grabbed the slender bole of an aspen tree. He found his feet and stood, swaying, not knowing if he could force his legs to push his board a foot farther. Then he found himself gliding through the trees and he figured he could, after all.
Raine waited at the edge of the aspens, standing on her board and gazing down into a thick stretch of pines. She was as relaxed on her board as if she was born to it. She grinned at Tor as he slid up to her, showing a stretch of white teeth that shone in what Tor realized was the deepening gloom of late afternoon.
“What time is it?” he asked. His mom was sure to be worried if he didn’t show up after the chairlifts closed.
“Four-fifteen,” Drake said. “Lift lines just closed. It’s so dark because of the snow that’s about to fall. Lots of it, I betcha.”
“You’re pretty cheerful for a kid who swore we were going to be killed,” Raine said, grinning.
“That was before we found your river people,” Drake said. “No way I’m going to fall in a mine shaft after seeing them.”
“What’s that?” Tor said, pointing through the trees. Something large and dark shot by, so fast he couldn’t tell what it was. His empty belly tightened in fear. Now what?
“That, my friend, was a semitruck,” Raine said, and slapped him on the shoulder. “That’s the highway. We’re almost home.”
The snow started to fall for real as they unstrapped from their snowboards and prepared to climb over the barbed-wire fence that separated them from the highway. Tor noticed with interest the white signs fixed to the wire at intervals: Danger. Private Property. Restricted.
Then they were over. They trudged to the verge of the road and started walking, their boards under their arms. Tor’s feet felt odd walking instead of sliding. He was so hungry his stomach growled loudly.
“What was that?” Raine said, looking into the woods. Snow covered her helmet and gathered in her black braids.
“That was me,” Tor said. “I’m sorry. I’m really hungry.”
Drake started laughing. “You sounded like Bigfoot.”
“I could eat a Bigfoot,” Tor said. “Seriously.”
“We’re about a mile from town,” Raine said. “When we get there, how about you ask your mom if you can come to our place for dinner? My mom’ll feed us all. And we need to talk.”
“A powwow?” Drake asked. He’d shoved his goggles up onto his helmet. Tor copied Drake and the day lightened. A little. The snow was swirling down thickly and Tor found himself thinking that the powder was going to be terrific tomorrow. He almost laughed. California seemed very far away.
Drake looked ready to scoop out a handful from the snow crusting his board, but suddenly the snow lit up with blue and red light. Tor turned to see a police car right behind them, lights flashing.
“Tor, don’t say anything,” Raine hissed in his ear. Tor clutched his board tightly under his arm as the police car—actually an enormous SUV with knobby tires—rolled up next to them. Leaning out the window was Coach Rollins, dressed in his Deputy Rollins clothes, and he was frowning.
“HELLO, KIDS,” DEPUTY Rollins said.
“Hello, sir,” Raine and Drake chorused as one. Tor remained silent. They all stopped and stood, their breath smoking in the cold air, the snow falling faster now. The rumble of Deputy Rollins’s car blew exhaust toward them and it tasted so bad in his nose and throat that Tor nearly stopped breathing.
“What you doing out here?” Deputy Rollins asked. “Not doing any out-of-bounds riding, are you?”
“No, sir,” Drake said. There was a silence, and Tor waited for someone to come up with a reason they were a mile out of town with their snowboards under their arms. Deputy Rollins leaned out the open window and looked at the three of them, his face intent.
“I see. Well, throw your boards in the back and I’ll take you into town,” he said. “No need to be walking along the highway. It’s dangerous out here with a new storm coming in.”
Tor looked at Raine and Drake, who shrugged their shoulders a tiny fraction of an inch. What else could they do? They silently stowed their boards in the back of the SUV and climbed into the back. Tor couldn’t help heaving a sigh of relief when he sat down. Warm air blew through every vent. He buckled his seat belt and glared at Drake and Raine until they buckled up, too.
“We’ll be in town in a minute or two,” Deputy Rollins said. Tor, Raine, and Drake sat silently in the back, shoulder to shoulder. Tor looked into the rearview mirror and met Deputy Rollins’s interested eyes. He had a look like Tor’s old biology teacher, who’d enjoyed dissecting things way too much for Tor’s taste.
“Thank you, sir,” Tor mumbled.
“I know that Raine’s…people…don’t particularly care what she does or where she goes, and of course we all know about Drake,” Deputy Rollins said. “But I can’t imagine that Dr. Sinclair would be happy to find out her son was breaking the law by riding out of bounds. You three were just a few feet from riding into the restricted forest, and that’s not just unlawful. You might have been killed.”
Drake’s shoulder was stiff against Tor’s, and Raine’s was no better. Tor glanced down to see their hands fisted in their mittens. He looked back up to see Deputy Rollins looking at him again. He opened his mouth and felt two mittens come down on his hands. Raine squeezed on one side, Drake on another. Tor shut his mouth again.
“The snows are too heavy right now for out-of-bounds riding,” Deputy Rollins said. The lights of the town were illuminating the swirling snow. Tor saw the neon sign on top of a big gasoline station and knew they were minutes from home. “I might lose some people trying to dig your bodies out from an avalanche. And I’d have to tell your parents. I never enjoy that.” The deputy’s jaw muscle clenched and Tor believed him. Then his face became smooth again, and he smiled. He met Tor’s eyes in the rearview mirror and Tor didn’t look away.
“I’d love to see you on the snowboarding team come high school, Tor. But of course you need to choose…better companions. We’re always looking for fresh blood on the team. If you’re still here, that is.”
And with that, the deputy pulled up next to the Pro Shop and let them out.
Tor propped his board in the snow and looked at Drake, then at Raine. They were both looking down, their cheeks flushed with anger and perhaps shame. Tor was so hot with fury he wondered if there wasn’t actual steam coming from his head. Deputy Rollins drove off, leaving a cloud of choking exhaust behind.
“In San Diego, if the cops don’t like you they just shoot you and blame it on the gangs,” he said. “This guy’s a marshmallow.”
Raine’s jaw dropped, and so did Drake’s as they looked at him. Tor forced his shoulders to shrug. Deputy Rollins had been terrifying, and Tor’s suburb of San Diego was peacefully multicultural. But Drake and Raine didn’t know that.
Drake sent a plume of white breath out in a choked laugh. “You are so in the club,” he said.
“Why doesn’t he like you?” Tor asked.
“I’m Wexler’s son, one step up from a homeless kid living in a Dumpster,” Drake said, shrugging. “When I was real little, my dad would sometimes forget about me. He’d leave me in stores or in the park. Once he left me in the car while he was at a bar. It’s embarrassing to the cops, to be hauling a little kid in the back of your cop car all the time. And Rollins would never go hassle Todd Wexler about me. He practically worships him.”
“You never even tried out for the team,” Tor said suddenly. “Did you?”
“Well, I can’t try out until I’m in high school, but you’re right. I won’t try out,” Drake said. “And whenever I see Coach Rollins on the mountain I pretend I’m terrible. I fall down, I go real slow. He thinks I’m an idiot.”
“Why?” Tor asked.
“You’ve seen what he turns his riders into,” Raine said. “You want to be like them?”
“No way,” Tor said instantly.
“And I’m a Ute, grandmother cursed the town, you know the story,” Raine said cheerfully. “Let’s get some supper. I’m starved. Call your mom from my house?”
“Sure,” Tor said. “Uh, where’s your house?”
Raine pointed up. Tor looked above the Pro Shop and saw a row of lighted windows.
“We live above our place,” she said.
The Douglas home was at the top of a narrow flight of stairs that were reached by a door Tor had never noticed before. The door was right next to the shop and he must have walked past it a dozen times, but he never noticed it until Raine unlocked it with a key and ushered them up the stairs. Tor immediately began to smell something so delicious his stomach woke up again and growled furiously. He was starving.
A light went on at the top of the stairs. Mr. Douglas appeared in the doorway. He looked anxious, and then he gave a big sigh.
“I was starting to get worried,” he said. “Drake, good to see you. Er, Tor?”
“Yes, sir,” Tor said, feeling awkward.
“We’re inviting him for dinner, is that okay, Dad?” Raine said in a rush. “Can we get out of our clothes and wipe down our boards? We’re starving and Tor has to call his mom—”
“Enough, enough,” Mr. Douglas said, laughing and stepping back. “Get in here and strip down. I’ll get the phone.”
Tor followed Raine and Drake into a large room filled with shelves, pegs for snowboards, benches to sit on, and places for wet snow boots. It was warm and dry, and the smell of whatever was cooking in the Douglas apartment smelled even better in here, if that was possible.
Tor called his mom, who sounded pleased that he had an invitation to dinner. He turned to Raine. “She said okay.”
“Great,” Raine said.
“If I don’t eat soon, I’m going to start eating my sweater,” Drake said.
Drake’s sweater was patterned with watermelon and lime slices on an orange background. The sweater might have been brightly colored when it was new, but the colors had faded to shades that defied description, as though the fruit wasn’t exactly from planet Earth. Tor nodded in approval. This had to be the worst sweater yet.
Dinner was a crowded affair, because Raine’s family included her parents, her younger brother, Carswell, and a grandmother so ancient and wrinkled she looked like a mummy Tor had once seen on the cover of a nature magazine. Her eyes were as sparkling as pools of black oil set in her seamed face, and she took a great interest in Tor. She held his hand a
nd examined his palm, pinched his cheek like she was testing fresh bread at the store, and touched his hair with her gnarled fingers.
“You’re starving,” she announced, after stepping away from him, and Raine’s family laughed as one.
“I could have told you that,” Raine said. “Let’s eat!”
Tor had finished a second bowl of a savory stew, scooping it up with a thick tortilla they called fry bread, before he could think of anything but the need of filling the enormous hole in his belly. When he looked up, he met the black eyes of Grandma Douglas, looking at him like he was the most fascinating thing she’d ever seen. She winked at him. He smiled back at her, as fascinated by her as she was by him. This was the great-granddaughter of Leaping Water. Had she been there when Leaping Water cursed the town?
“I was there,” Grandma Douglas said, reading Tor’s mind as easily as though he’d spoken. “But I was only seven. I was in school and missed the whole thing, darn it.”
Mr. Douglas jumped in surprise and Mrs. Douglas dropped a piece of fry bread into her stew. Mrs. Douglas was a delicate little woman with short-cut black hair and a heart-shaped face. She made a little “o” sound of distress.
“You heard about it, though?” Tor asked, ignoring Raine’s parents.
“My whole life,” Grandma Douglas said. “My husband never cared about the legends, though. Short though it was, his life.”
“Vietnam,” Raine mouthed across the table.
“He was a navigator on B-52’s,” Grandma Douglas said proudly. “Carswell Douglas, one of the great-grandsons of Chief Douglas of the Ouray Utes. We met at a dance on the reservation in Utah. I found a job as a teacher there after I graduated from college. I wanted to know my roots, and there was Carswell at the door of the Corn Festival dance, all six foot of him, all the roots I ever wanted.”
Grandma Douglas sighed like a girl. Raine looked fondly at her grandma.
“When my husband died in the war, I came back to Snow Park and worked in the store for my parents. I had Merrill by then, though he was just a baby. Merrill has a hawk’s eyes, do you see? So many hours in the air, my husband, he gave his son those eyes.”
The White Gates Page 10