Forty-Four Box Set, Books 1-10 (44) (168 page)

“Your ring is so beautiful.”

I smiled.

“Let me know if you need any help planning the wedding. I’m making a lot of contacts in my new job. I mean, it seems most of what we do is weddings. The entire industry, like funerals, is full of greedy flies. You gotta be smart and do the research. You can’t just throw money at the big day.”

“Then I better keep David far away,” I said.

“I know. I’m worried about him. He bought us one of those expensive Nespresso machines. He said it was so Lyle could practice at home.”

We both shook our heads at the same time.

I told her a little about David’s Old Mill spree.

“I talked him down from some of it,” I said. “But I don’t want to know what happens when there’s no one around to say no.”

“You think we need to do an intervention?” Paloma said.

“Maybe.”

“You think it would do any good?”

“Probably not.”

Lyle came up and I followed the last customer to the door and flipped over the sign.

That’s when I saw Lieutenant Willis parked out front.

CHAPTER 41

I walked out into the cool night air.

“You got a moment?” he said, coming around to the sidewalk.

“Sure. Let me throw my stuff in the car.”

“Are those your new wheels?” he said, his eyes growing large.

 “No. A friend is letting me borrow it. Until I figure things out.”

He whistled and circled it, looking it over.

“Sorry. It’s just that this takes me back. I had one of these models back in high school for about a day and a half.”

“What happened?” I said.

“Long story. Let’s just say it was too much car for a kid that age. At least this kid.”

Bob Willis was wearing jeans and a T-shirt, but he still looked like a cop. His eyes caressed David’s car a moment longer and then he turned back toward me.

“I’m here about Thomas Richardson. So far we’ve been able to keep this out of the press, but there’s something strange about what happened out there. I was hoping you could help me with it.”

“I don’t understand,” I said.

“Well, the working theory, and the only obvious explanation, is that they got too close to the edge and fell from the cliff. But the evidence doesn’t seem to support that.”

I stared at him.

“To be more accurate, half the evidence supports that theory. Peterson’s injuries, as detailed in the autopsy report, are consistent with those of someone who has fallen from a great height. Most likely the viewpoint where you said you found their backpacks. So far, so good. But this is where it gets interesting. You see, Abby, Thomas Richardson’s head injury is a mystery. Aside from it, he doesn’t have a single scratch on him. According to the doctors, the damage Richardson suffered is totally inconsistent with the kind of injury seen in falls.”

“Couldn’t he have just landed on his head?” I said.

“I asked the medical people the same thing. They said it would be a billion to one shot. Even if he had fallen on his head, from that height, they would expect to see much more widespread trauma. It’s kind of a head scratcher.”

“I’m not sure how I can help. I mean, all along I thought they fell. Both of them.”

Willis nodded.

“I was hoping Richardson could fill in the blanks when he regained consciousness, but he doesn’t remember any of it. He says the last thing he remembers is pumping water at a stream.”

I nodded, thinking back to the stream I had crossed in the vision and again that day I was out there.

“Maybe he needs more time,” I said. “That’s how it was with me and my accident. Of course, some of it never came back.”

“I don’t have the luxury of time with this. The Forest Service is going to open that area again. Soon. I need to get up there and try to piece together exactly what happened. I’m taking a small team in there tomorrow and I was hoping you’d come along. You were the first one on the scene and I think it would help to have your perspective.”

A motorcycle raced down the street and Willis gave it a long, angry look.

I was surprised that he was asking me.

“Sure,” I said. “If you think it would help.”

“We don’t have to hike all those miles you did,” he said. “I think we can get pretty close on one of the forest roads. It should only be a couple miles to walk at most.”

“That sounds good.”

“Can you be at the station by six?”

“I’ll be there.”

CHAPTER 42

The air smelled like a campfire all along the Cascade Lakes Highway even though looking out the window everything appeared normal. But when we turned off and took a small dirt road deeper into the mountains, the landscape suddenly changed. The hills and buttes were various sad shades of gray, and the trees were gone, replaced with thousands of black poles standing erect in charred fields for as far as the eye could see.

It was quiet inside the SUV as we bumped along on the rough road that was just a little wider than a trail, taking in the devastation that the fire had left in its wake.

I knew that fires, at least the ones that weren’t manmade, were part of nature. A natural cycle of death and rebirth. But it made me sad. Maybe I was being selfish, but I knew I wouldn’t get to see much of the rebirth part during my lifetime. I would mostly just see the death part.

Bob Willis hadn’t said much on the drive out anyway and now he had gone completely mute. He had brought along Deputy Wilma Janeway, a woman with a sharp smile and her hair pulled up in a tight bun.

After leaving the highway, we drove another fifteen minutes before coming to a stop in front of a large boulder blocking what was left of the road.

“Time to stretch our legs,” Willis said, getting out.

He opened a map on the hood and studied it for a few seconds.

“Should be over in this direction.” He pointed toward a ridge on the left. “A little over a mile as the crow flies.”

The sun hadn’t reached the gully we were in and the morning chill made me wish I had brought along a jacket.

They fell into small talk, Bob Willis asking Deputy Janeway about her son starting high school and Deputy Janeway asking Bob Willis if his daughter had taken her driver’s test yet. When the climb became steeper, they grew silent again and all I could hear was their huffing and puffing as they struggled uphill.

When we arrived at the meadow, I was surprised to see that it was more or less still intact. The fire hadn’t reached here or, from what I could tell, anywhere this far west. The ground was mixed with gray and white powder, but it wasn’t burned away. The wildflowers were gone but the grass was still there.

The sun had risen above the ridge and its warmth along with the short hike had made me forget about the jacket.

“Okay, point us to the spot,” Willis said, turning toward me.

I looked up to get my bearings and soon led them to where I had found the two men. It wasn’t difficult to find.

Willis measured the distance between the two spots.

“Thirty-three feet,” he muttered as he wrote down something in a notebook.

He surveyed the scene, walking around carefully, and taking more measurements, this time of the distance between each impression and the sheer wall of the cliff. Then he shook his head.

“This one here I understand,” Willis said, looking up from the spot where Bradley Peterson had died. “I can see the top.”

Then he walked over to the imprint of Thomas Richardson’s body.

“But this one here, he’s just too close to the wall. You can’t see the top. The doctors were right. There’s no way this guy fell from up there. The angle’s all wrong.”

Deputy Janeway pulled out a small camera and started taking photos.

Scratching his head, Willis looked up at the cliff again and then at me.

“Abby, you were up there, right?” Willis said. “That’s where you first saw them?”

“Well, yes, at first I just saw the one body,” I said. “I didn’t see the second one until I started coming down the trail, over there.”

I pointed to the trail snaking its way down toward the meadow.

They were both quiet for a while and then Deputy Janeway spoke.

“So, Abby, you see the one victim from above and then you start coming down the trail. How did you know that a trail led down here? I mean, could you see it from the top?”

I thought about it for a moment.

“No, I don’t think I could see it from the top, not all of it anyway. I could see the creek and the trail down here, but before coming out here I had studied a lot of maps trying to match up this place to things I had seen in my dream. I guess I knew that it was the same trail, the one up there and the one by the creek here.”

“What are you getting at, Janeway?” Willis asked.

“Okay,” she said. “How about this? Maybe Peterson falls somehow. Maybe he’s taking a photo and he gets distracted or he’s tired from the trail and he gets too close to the edge or his balance is thrown off from not wearing his heavy pack. Bottom line, he falls. And Richardson, in a state of panic, tries to climb down the wall up there instead of using the trail. Maybe, unlike Abby, he doesn’t even realize that the trail comes down here at all, and he’s just trying to get to his friend. Then at some point along the way, he slips and falls, accounting for his proximity to the wall and the different nature of his injuries.”

Willis slowly began rubbing the lower half of his face.

“Yeah, maybe so. I suppose that’s one possibility.” He paused. “But wouldn’t you check to see if there’s a better way down instead of descending this monster? How long would that have taken? What about calling for help? Abby, where did you call from?”

“Up on the trail, near the top,” I said.

“So why didn’t he call for help?”

“Maybe his phone was out of juice,” Janeway said. “Or like I said, maybe he was in a state of panic. Was this guy a climber? Maybe he thought he had the skills to get down and save his friend.”

“I don’t know,” Willis said.

They were quiet after that, the deputy taking more photos and the lieutenant walking around the meadow and looking up and down from different spots. At one point he picked up a stone and placed it in a plastic bag before dropping it in his pack.

“Time to head up there,” Willis said after a while. “Abby, you stay here and play Peterson for us, so we can get a visual of where he landed.”

“Okay,” I said.

Inhaling the old spent smoke, I stood there at the dead man’s final resting place and watched them slowly go up the switchbacks and then disappear from view.

CHAPTER 43

I crushed it at Meg’s Diner.

I kept my focus throughout and didn’t miss a beat for the entire busy lunch shift. The fries were crisp, not oily and soggy, and the burgers cooked to perfection. Nothing was burned or underdone or forgotten about. Every order was a homerun.

When I took my break out back, I sat on the old crate in the sliver of shade near the building, eating mixed nuts and drinking a soda.

I thought about the hike the day before, about the forest and all those incinerated trees and ash-covered hills and rocks and how it would take several generations for it to come back again. I thought about Lieutenant Willis, too.

He seemed frustrated on the drive back, raising his voice at Janeway when she repeated her climbing theory one too many times. Maybe he felt the trip had been a waste of time or maybe the hike had taken it out of him and he was just tired. I figured he probably didn’t get out in the field much anymore.

In the parking lot in front of the Sheriff’s Office he thanked me and said goodbye, not even bothering to make eyes at David’s car in the light of day.

“Hey, Abby,” Hector whispered through the screen door. “You got the keys to the storeroom?”

“No. I gave them back to Alberto.”

“Ah, shit. When your break is over, can you get them for me?”

“Sure. Five minutes.”

“
Gracias
,” he said, disappearing back into the clanking of the kitchen.

I took off my shoes and stretched my legs in the sun, trying to shake off the throbbing. The restaurant business was hard work, and I was noticing that owning your own place didn’t make it any easier. There were some perks in being your own boss, but the stress, long hours, and exhaustion had to be factored in as well.

I wondered if Ty ever thought about these things. Sure, he knew about the long hours from managing 10 Barrel, but after working at Meg’s all summer, I saw that a family business wasn’t always pretty.

“Hector!” Alberto’s voice boomed from inside.

I leaned back against the brick wall, glad I had a few more minutes in the fresh air, and thought about the brothers.

Although Hector and Alberto didn’t seem so close most of the time, underneath they had a strong bond. Beneath Alberto’s screaming and Hector’s joking, there was love, family pride, and even a little mutual respect at times. I saw it the day that Hector got mad at the produce guy, who was trying to hide wilted greens and soft tomatoes under a layer of plastic in one of the bins.

“Don’t you be trying to rip off my brother like that,
pendejo
,” Hector said, serious for once. “I’ll come after you with a machete.”

Visibly shaken, the vegetable man had apologized and said it was an honest mistake.

“I’m watching you,
cabrón,
” was all Hector said, staring machetes into the man.

I saw it with Alberto too, when the frantic pace of the diner died down and he could finally relax for a few minutes and joke with Hector about his alley-cat lifestyle.

“You need to start working on a family before all the ladies lose interest,” Alberto said. “It won’t always be like this,
hermanito
, you being the man and all. Soon you’ll be old and ugly and it’ll be too late. You gotta paint yourself a different future, while you can.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Hector said, shaking his head. “You’ve been giving me this same tired speech since middle school. You’re just jealous, ’Berto, that the ladies love me so much.”