Back of Beyond (40 page)

The last moments of the evening sun reached through the trees and lit the snowcapped peaks of the eastern mountains, fusing them with a good-bye wink of neon orange and pink. Gracie had barely had enough time to retrieve her hoodie before they left and she was glad she had. It seemed cooler than it had the night before and she was grateful for the warmth from Strawberry between her thighs.

“I said—”

“I heard you,” Rachel replied. There was a cool businesslike edge to her voice, and Gracie recoiled.

“Probably the wrong time to ask,” Gracie said. “I’m sorry.”

Rachel rode ahead, her face set into the mask Gracie had seen earlier. Gracie thought,
She’s distracted. She’s leading three teenagers through the back of beyond and she’s unsure she can do it. She’s distracted.

“It seems awful to just leave him like that,” Gracie said, as much to herself as to Rachel.

“It’s what he wanted. Would you rather go back?” Rachel said with the same edge in her voice as before. “You can go back there if you want to. I told you what happened.”

“No,” Gracie said softly.

“I just had a human being die in my arms,” Rachel said, not looking over her shoulder at Gracie or trying to soften her tone. “And I saw the man who did it.”

Gracie felt sick.

“We’ve got to find help,” Rachel said. “We’ve got to get out of here.”

From behind, Justin said, “Excuse me, Miss Mina?”

Rachel jerked around in the saddle and looked past Gracie to Justin. “Yes?”

“I’m wondering why we’re on this trail? If we’re headed back to the trailhead this is the wrong direction, I’m pretty sure.”

“It’s the trail we’re taking,” Rachel said.

“I don’t get it,” Justin said, undeterred. “Seems like we’re going the wrong way.”

Gracie looked ahead for the first time at the trail itself. It was unmarked except for a single set of horse tracks. She was confused.

“What’s going on?” Danielle asked from behind them.

“Nothing,” Rachel said sharply. “Just please keep quiet, all of you.”

*   *   *

Danielle rode up beside Gracie
and leaned in to her. “I’ve been thinking,” she said.

Gracie refrained from expressing surprise.

“Remember when we got to the airport in Bozeman? Dad wasn’t there.”

“I remember.”

“Where do you suppose he was?”

Gracie shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“I don’t know either. But he’s the one who made such a big deal out of this trip. Knowing him, he should have been there three hours early pacing around and getting all worried about us.”

Gracie nodded. “That does sound more like him.”

“There’s been something going on since the beginning,” Danielle said. “He’s been up to something. And why wasn’t he in camp like he was supposed to be?”

“There has to be an explanation,” Gracie said, unsure of her own words.

“Tell me when you come up with one,” Danielle said, and slipped back into line.

*   *   *

Ten minutes later, Rachel said,
“Here he goes,” and turned her horse from the trail onto a faint game route that went west into the trees. She looked back to make sure everyone was with her. Gracie refused to meet her eyes and kept her head down. She couldn’t stop thinking of what Rachel said she saw, and the fuel Danielle had added to the fire.

“This way,” Rachel said, spurring her horse onto the new trail.

“Now I’m sure we’re headed the wrong way,” Justin said.

Gracie watched Rachel carefully. How her chest swelled with a big intake of breath, how her mouth was set, how her eyes looked like slits because the skin on her face was pulled back tight. She turned her head and glared at Justin and seemed to be holding back her words.

“Stay in line,” Rachel said to Justin. “And stop talking. I’m trying to save us all.”

“It just doesn’t make sense to me,” Justin said. “I mean, we want to go back to the vehicles and we’re heading up into the trees on the side of a mountain. I just don’t get it.”

“No,” Rachel Mina said, “you don’t.”

“Danielle?” Justin said.

“Don’t ask me,” Danielle said.

Gracie wondered exactly who was leading them and who Rachel had become. She felt sick to her stomach and wished she’d talked to her father and at least said good-bye.

And as she watched Rachel ride ahead, she noticed the bulge on her right calf where the top of her boot was. Something pushed out against the fabric of her jeans. Gracie leaned over to her left to confirm Rachel’s left calf didn’t look like that. It was as if something was protruding out of Rachel’s boot top. Like a stick.

Or, Gracie thought with sudden realization, like the handle of a knife.

*   *   *

“I met your father in Minneapolis,”
Rachel said to Gracie. The tone of her voice was warm, like it had been until recently. Like she was trying to reestablish their friendship. “I was there on business and I was staying at the Grand Hotel. My laptop was acting up and I was frustrated I couldn’t get it to work so I went down to the bar. He was at the hotel meeting a client, he said. I told him about my computer and he offered to take a look at it. I brought it down to the bar and he fiddled with it and had it working again in no time flat. Then we started talking.”

Gracie said nothing. She felt uncomfortable thinking of her dad in any situation where she wasn’t with him. She knew he was a man, and he likely had wants and needs. But she was sorry she’d asked Rachel the question in the first place, and wasn’t sure she wanted to hear the answer. And she didn’t want to set her off again.

Rachel said, “I told him I’d lost my husband recently as well as my stepdaughter. He said he was divorced but he had two daughters he was devoted to. That’s when I first heard about you and Danielle and how much you meant to him. I was touched.”

“That’s nice,” Gracie mumbled.

“Then he told me about you two and this trip. He was so excited and passionate that I just fell for him. We kept in touch and he suggested I come along so I could meet you two. So he could introduce us. I’d always wanted to see Yellowstone Park and he seemed to have it all organized and planned, so I came along. I had no idea…” Her sentence trailed off.

Gracie said, “Rachel, he wasn’t in the camp back there. Jed was gone and Dad wasn’t there.”

Rachel nodded in a sympathetic way. Then: “It must be hard to think of your father as a coward,” Rachel said. “I can’t even imagine what’s going through your head right now, so tell me. Maybe I can help.”

Gracie didn’t want to answer. Something about the way Rachel was asking, in such an intimate way, put her off. The swing from warm to cold back to warm made Gracie feel unbalanced, as if the ground beneath her feet was buckling. Finally, Gracie said, “I don’t know what I think.”

“That’s understandable,” Rachel said. “It’s the worst when someone you love does something beyond comprehension. It’s as if you never knew that person at all. As if your entire life together was based on a set of false assumptions. When it happens, it’s like everything you ever thought or knew turns out to be based on clouds and lies. You start to wonder, am I the fool here? Am I the gullible idiot who let a
man
ruin me because he was weak and tainted? It’s just so hard when it happens, and it eats at the very marrow of your soul until you either give in or decide to get out there and make your own way. You need to take back what you deserve, what belongs to you.”

Gracie said, “I don’t understand what you’re saying.”

Rachel shot a puzzled look at Gracie over her shoulder, then shook her head and shrugged. Gracie got the impression Rachel had said things she didn’t mean to say.

“Never mind me,” Rachel said. “Sometimes I just get going. You know how it is.”

No,
Gracie thought. She looked again at the backpack Rachel had strapped to her saddle. Something heavy in it. And Gracie thought about the fact that she hadn’t seen Dakota’s body. No one had, except Rachel. Just like she hadn’t seen her father. She took it on Rachel’s word he was there with her when they saw Jed murder Dakota.

As she rode she found herself looking hard at Rachel in a different light. Justin was wrong. There might be good in everybody, but there could also be evil.

Gracie continued to stare while her stomach knotted. There was a bulge next to Rachel’s calf that could be the handle of a long knife. Rachel said Dakota had her throat cut.

Gracie couldn’t help herself. She lurched to the left and got sick, emptying her stomach on the grass.

Rachel looked back with suspicion masquerading as concern, and said, “Are you okay, darling? Is this whole thing getting to you, poor girl?”

Dusk gave way to darkness.

40

Jed McCarthy dug his headlamp out
of his jacket and strapped it on the crown of his cowboy hat. He wasn’t ready to turn it on yet because there was still enough light to see, but that wouldn’t last much longer.

Even after years of wilderness pack trips, he was still slightly awed by twilight in the mountains when for a short period of time a natural transition unfolded as the wind stopped and the hidden animals became still and quiet and the nocturnal predators began to stir awake. It was immensely quiet and he could hear each footfall of his horse and his own nervous breathing.

Ahead of him, when the trees parted, he could see the massive J shape of the glacier in the bald side of the mountain. The glacier glowed light blue in the afterlight and it looked clean and pure and it seemed to beckon him.

*   *   *

His horse labored up the trail,
climbing with a rocking motion. Jed sat forward in the saddle, urging him on. They continued to rise, switching back on sharp corners, but always going up. The pitch of the mountainside was getting so sharp he could reach out and touch the wall to his right at times. As it got darker he prayed the trail was passable and had not been blocked over the winter by rockslides or deadfall.

Finally, the sky opened up and although it wasn’t pitch-dark yet he could see the sudsy wash of stars in the cloudless sky. The full moon was rising and would soon take over the sky and keep the mountain illuminated.

His senses were on full alert. He was looking for anomalies. He noted a smudge of pale color in the shadowed branches of a pine tree and it caught his attention because it was out of place. He rode over and leaned and reached deep into the needles to retrieve it. It had some heft but was pliable and he pulled it out. A perfect little bird’s nest. Empty. The materials used to build it seemed unnatural, a blending of paper and fabric. He shook it and noted how spongy it was.

Birds and mice made nests of whatever material was available. It seemed to Jed much too far from anywhere for the birds to use man-made fabric, but there it was. What had they found?

He dropped the nest to the ground and rode on.

*   *   *

He was almost unaware of it at first,
the dusting of snow on the ground in his peripheral vision. It was scattered and mixed in with the mat of pine needles.

Then he thought,
Snow?
In July?

He looked up. It wasn’t snowing, and it certainly wasn’t cold enough. Could it have snowed earlier in the day?

“This makes no sense,” he mumbled to himself while he pushed his horse farther, up the trail and finally to the top and he emerged on a long flat bench of rock.

He reined to a stop to take it all in. The glacier loomed above him like a dimly lit billboard. The bench was solid rock but puckered in places where shallow pools of water gathered from recent rains. Straight ahead of him, toward the face of the mountain, full-grown pine trees that had found purchase in cracks of the rock were knocked down. He could see where they’d been snapped off because the jagged trunks stood like a line of fence poles.

Snow was everywhere on the ground but it wasn’t cold, and he dismounted. His boots thumped on the solid rock, and he led his horse to the side where the snow was thickest, where it was caught in short grass.

He clicked on his headlamp and squatted down. The headlamp pointed wherever he looked, and he reached out to touch the snow.

Scraps of paper. Thousands of them. None bigger than a square inch. It was the same material that had been used to construct the bird’s nest. He grasped the largest scrap he could find and lifted it into the pool of light. A pair of hooded and wise eyes stared back from the scrap. He recognized the eyes, and said, “Ben Franklin.”

He stood, still holding the scrap between his thumb and forefinger. With his other hand, he reached up and twisted the lens of his headlamp to make the beam sharper.

At the far end of the bench, beyond the sheared-off trees, looking like the last glimpse of a whale sounding off the coast, the V-shaped tail of the airplane stuck straight up out of a crevice where it had fallen after crashing the winter before.

41

“What is that out there in that field?”
Mitchell grumbled. “An elk? It’s almost gettin’ too dark to see.”

Cody looked up and squinted. Ahead of them, to the left of the trail in a moon-splashed clearing, was a horizontal dark form elevated above the grass. The form had been still as they approached but now it moved a few feet to the right. The figure was hard to make out because it was dark against a green-black wall of pine trees.

“Damn if it isn’t another stray horse,” Mitchell said. The string of docile horses was behind him. “But it looks like there’s something on it.”

Cody held his satellite phone up to his ear and was talking with Edna at dispatch in Helena. He was glad she was on duty and he’d ignored her pleas to tell her where he was and what had happened since she’d seen him last. When she took a breath, he said, “Edna, send a car up to Larry’s house in Marysville. I was talking to him ten minutes ago and I got cut off. I think something happened to him.”

She repeated, “Something happened to him? What?”

“I don’t know. But I’ve called back four times since and he won’t pick up. Edna, send whoever you can as fast as you can and warn them there may be someone else in Larry’s house. Tell them to nail the guy and hold him. Go!”