by Harper Lin
“Who are you shouting at?” Quinten asked.
After a moment, one of the kids in the rear of the column pointed at us. The whole group stopped. Ms. Chipper appeared and waved to us. We waved back. They did not move.
“Good, they’re waiting for us,” I said.
“Who?” Quinten asked, peering out over the valley and seeing nothing.
“Don’t be embarrassing, Dad,” Butch said.
We hurried down the trail, the rain pelting us. It had increased in strength, coming down in heavy droplets. In a couple of places, we had to pick our way around washouts on the trail.
At last, we came to a straightaway cutting along a steep section of slope barren of trees except for lower down, where the slope grew gentler. At the far end, about two hundred yards away, stood the rest of the group, waiting for us.
Angie cupped her hands and shouted, “Hurry up!”
“Does it look like we’re standing still?” Quinten asked.
“So you finally see them?” Butch asked.
“I wished I couldn’t see her.”
We walked along the straightaway, Angie still calling for us to pick up speed, when I heard something above her shouting.
A low rumble, coming from upslope.
I turned, my heart clenching, and saw a rock the size of my dining room table rolling down toward us. As it bounced and tumbled, it broke away smaller stones as well as big chunks of earth. Within seconds, a section of hillside a good fifty yards wide was roaring down at us.
SEVEN
We ran back the way we had come. I think I screamed. In fact, I was sure I screamed. I only hoped I didn’t scream words that I should never say in front of my grandson.
I’m not generally a potty mouth. There are times, however, when certain words are called for.
We ran as the roaring of the landslide filled our ears and the ground trembled beneath our feet. Nothing hit us. The roar subsided, the trembling growing still. We slowed, stopped, and turned, panting and wide-eyed.
I let out a gust of relief to see the other half of our group standing well away and unhurt. I let out another gust of relief to see that Quinten had run in the right direction. He stood panting by my side, foggy glasses askew but otherwise fine.
I looked back at the other group. Between us was a wide swath of chewed-up earth, a broad smear of mud and stone.
The trail had vanished.
I cupped my hands and shouted, “Is everyone okay over there?”
“Yes,” Ms. Chipper called back.
“Don’t shout!” Angie shouted. “You’ll cause another avalanche!”
“You’re shouting just as loud as they are!” Butch shouted.
“Quiet!” Angie shouted.
“Everyone stop shouting!” I shouted.
“You’re shouting too!” Angie shouted.
Ms. Chipper turned and said something to Angie. She said it in a normal tone, so I didn’t hear what she told her, but I could guess. The scandalized look on her face was visible even at a distance. The kids all laughed, even her daughter. Especially her daughter. Poor girl. We don’t get to choose our family.
Once Angie was out of the way, Ms. Chipper and I resumed our conversation.
“Is there another way out of here?” I asked. The trail had vanished, replaced by churned-up mud and loose stones. The kids might have gotten over it safely, but I didn’t want them to risk it. I doubted Quinten and I could make it across.
“If you go back to the campsite and continue on the trail another half mile, it branches. Take the upper branch. It angles around this side of Widow’s Peak then follows the top of the valley edge before coming down to meet the main trail a couple of miles down the valley.”
“How many miles is that going to add to our trip?”
Ms. Chipper studied her map. “About five, with a big gain in altitude. And you’ll still need to walk out of the rest of the valley.”
I sighed and looked around. The rain had not let up. The air had turned cold and clammy. But we were all dry, and we had a bit of food with us. The kids would be all right. Quinten looked a bit tired, and I certainly felt tired.
I didn’t see another option, though.
“We’ll do it,” I called back to her and then said something I had never said in all my days as a CIA agent. “If all goes well, we’ll be at the parking lot a couple of hours before sunset.”
If all goes well.
We never said that when planning a mission. Some agents thought it brought bad luck. I had never been superstitious like that, but I avoided saying it because it was a dumb thing to say. Missions never went all well. Something always messed up. A bad guy got away or an agent got hurt or even killed. So I’d never used “if all goes well.”
I said it to make the kids feel better. I also said it, if truth be told, to make myself feel better.
My CIA discipline took over and forbade me from thinking of all the things that could go wrong. It only allowed me to think of the potential dangers so I could protect myself against them.
The primary one was the chance that the murderer had not fled after killing Thomas and might still be up here. We had to pass right by the crime scene again. What if he had been waiting for us all to leave and had gone back to clean up the scene? What if he had been watching and had seen me take evidence? He’d want to stop us from taking that to the police.
Martin suggested an even more sinister possibility.
“Do you think the guy who killed Mr. Cardiff started that avalanche to kill us?”
“Ohmigod!” Butch cried. “That’s totally what happened. He tried to crush us and wipe us right off the hillside!”
I glanced at Quinten. His face looked grim. I looked back at Martin and Butch, my too-cool-for-you grandson and the rising star of the football team, and saw two frightened children.
It would have been nice to reassure them, tell them that with such a steep slope and heavy rainfall, it was perfectly natural that there would be a landslide.
But that would be doing them a disservice.
“It might have been.”
Their eyes widened. They were accustomed to adults telling them sweet lies. In normal suburban life, that might have been all right, but this was survival.
“If it was him, he would have stuck around to see if we had gotten killed. He’ll know we’re still alive and might try to hurt us again. Or he might not. We haven’t seen him, and he might not want to get close enough for his face to be seen. If we stick together, stay alert, and walk fast, we can probably avoid him.”
“If he’s up there, then he’s on the trail we need to use,” Quinten said.
I took a deep breath. “Yes.”
“And he probably heard Ms. Chipper giving you directions.”
Trust a librarian to get to the facts. “Yes.”
I turned back to Ms. Chipper and called, “Is there any other trail out of here?”
“Not one that will get you out today or even tomorrow.”
That decided it. I didn’t want to spend the night out here with the killer, and we didn’t have enough food for an overnight. Water would be no problem; there was an abundance of that at the moment, and I had packed some iodine pills. We could purify water from one of the streams.
“You folks go on ahead,” I told her. “The quicker you get out the better. Leave us some food at where the trails meet.”
“All right. Good luck!”
Ms. Chipper tried to say that in her usual chipper voice. It did not come off as convincing.
“Let’s go,” I said, turning back to the others. I found Quinten and Butch had pulled out Swiss Army knives. They looked brand new—a father-and-son set probably purchased for this occasion. Martin had picked up a big stick.
I said nothing. Someone who had set off into the wilderness to kill a man while he was with a group of people would probably laugh at such feeble weapons. I wondered if he had a gun. He hadn’t used it, most likely because he’d wanted to kill Thomas Car
diff quietly and perhaps wanted the killing to be up close and personal.
I decided not to tell the others this. If it made them feel better to carry a stick or a little three-inch blade, let them.
As a matter of fact…
I pulled off my pack, reached into it, and took out a survival knife with a nine-inch blade, serrated on the back side and with a compass on the pommel and a hollow hilt that contained a length of extra-strong twine, a tinder box, a couple of iodine pills to purify water, and a needle and thread.
“Whoa,” Martin said. “Where did you get that, Grandma?”
The CIA. “Oh, I picked it up many years ago. Your grandfather had one just like it. I’ll give it to you when we get back home.”
This offer of a gift cheered him up a little.
“They’re leaving,” Butch said, his usual husky voice coming out soft and quiet.
I turned and saw the others walking down the trail. One by one, they rounded a corner and slipped out of sight. A girl stopped at the back. Melanie.
She waved. Martin raised his stick and shook it over his head like some primitive warrior. Then she, too, rounded the corner and was gone.
“Let’s go,” I said.
No one said anything as we trudged back to our original campsite, forlorn and abandoned. Thomas’s tent was being battered by the rain, its former occupant lying dead not five minutes’ walk up the slope. The campfire was cold and black, still sheltered from the rain by the tarp we had not had time to remove.
“Martin, Butch, climb up those trees and fetch the tarp.”
“We’re going to be out of here before dark,” Butch said. “We don’t need to make another campfire.”
“Just in case. When you get it down, roll it up and secure it to the top of your pack, Butch. You’re the strongest.”
Without another word, they did as they were told. I kept glancing up at the mineshaft entrance, which I could barely see as a thinning in the greenery. Was he up there somewhere? If he had hurried, he might have paralleled us along the ridge then cut straight down the slope. He might be at the murder scene right now, watching us through the foliage.
It occurred to me that the killer must know this area very well and knew precisely what paths we would take and where we would camp. He had probably scouted out this region extensively beforehand and knew his intended victim would be coming with the group.
This man was strong, accustomed to life in the wilderness, and knew the area better than we did. He had all the advantages. Even our numbers weren’t an advantage—one strong, well-prepared man against a half-blind man, two frightened fourteen-year-olds, and a woman in her seventies.
I gripped my survival knife a little tighter.
I might have been a little old lady, but I was a little old lady with survival and combat training. I was a little old lady who had been through a lot worse than this and come out on top.
Now it looked like I’d have to do it again.
EIGHT
We found the trail just where Ms. Chipper had said it would be, half a mile beyond the camp. One branch continued straight, while the other took a sharp angle up the slope.
I glanced around, nerves taut. The foliage grew thick here, with numerous thick trees and outcroppings of rock. There were plenty of places for an attacker to hide. If I had been with a group of fellow agents, I would have gone off trail, sent out scouts to the front, flanks, and rear, and moved slowly and carefully every step of the way.
But I was not with fellow agents. None of us had a gun, and only I had any training. We had to walk along the narrow trail single file, like a bunch of ducks in a shooting gallery.
Was I doing the right thing? Perhaps it would be best to get off the trail and hide somewhere a few miles away.
That might end up getting us in worse trouble. If we stuck to the trail, we would not get lost, and we might even come across someone who could help, like other hikers or a park ranger. We had seen a couple of hikers heading out of the park on our first day. Today, however, we hadn’t seen a soul.
Also, if we moved into the bush and tried to find a place to hide, we’d be out of sight of any potential witnesses if the killer came for us.
Would he try to kill us? Maybe that landslide had been an unhappy coincidence and the killer was really long gone.
Maybe.
I thought about his actions. While he (or she or they, I reminded myself) had kept hidden from view, he had also signaled his presence. That blaze from our first night had been set so that we would see it, and the killer or killers knew that it would send a clear signal to Thomas. It sure had spooked him.
And had the killer deliberately revealed himself by following on the trail at a distance? Had he wanted Thomas, who had remained at the rear of the group for the entire hike, to spot him?
That seemed to entail too great a risk. If the killer knew so much about Thomas and our trip, he would surely know that Thomas would have brought along a high-quality camera with a zoom lens. I was betting Thomas had taken some pictures of the killer, and that was why the killer had risked coming into camp to fetch the camera.
And then there were the words my grandson and his gal had heard Thomas say. He had been muttering about going and confronting someone. Had there been another signal, one that we hadn’t seen since we had all been in our tents?
“Martin, did you see anything unusual last night when you were, um, visiting Melanie?” He was right behind me. I was in the lead, and behind him came Butch and then Quinten.
“Like what?”
“Like anything.”
Martin thought for a moment. “Well, when I first got up to go over to her tent, I thought I heard some rustling in the bushes. I figured it was a deer, maybe, like the one we saw the first day. Or maybe one of the other kids moving around.”
“What direction was this coming from?”
“Uphill, kinda close to camp. I didn’t really think anything of it.” Martin’s face grew serious. “Do you think it was… the guy that’s out there now?”
“Perhaps.”
I saw everyone grip their makeshift weapons a little tighter.
“What can you tell me about Mr. Cardiff?”
“He runs the photo lab,” Butch said. “That’s the only class he teaches. He’s also the sub.”
“What classes does he substitute for?”
“Whatever,” Butch said with a shrug.
Cheerville High was a big school with a lot of classes.
“So he’s usually at the school all day?”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“What kind of reputation does he have at the school?”
“He’s a grouch,” Martin said.
“Totally,” Butch agreed.
“Why do you say that?”
Martin shrugged. “I don’t know. I mean, he’s never mean to us or anything, but he’s always, like, stressed out over everything. Like once last week, the school forgot to order an update to some photo software, and he got all pissed off.”
“Does he ever say or do anything inappropriate?” I asked gently.
Martin looked confused for a moment. “Inappropriate? You mean, like… ew, no!”
I looked at Butch, who also shook his head. It seemed that Thomas really did keep his sleaziness out of school. That relieved me on more than one level. The kids had been safe, and I was investigating the murder of a victim who deserved justice.
“Any other strange behavior?” I asked.
Butch grinned. “Like Boozy Bradford? No.”
“I did have one odd experience with him,” Quinten said.
“Did he get inappropriate with you, Dad?” Butch asked. He and Martin snickered.
The resilience of youth never ceased to amaze me. Here we were on the run from a killer, and these kids were making jokes about their murdered photography teacher. It reminded me of some of the graveyard humor the Special Forces got into, all of it unprintable.
Quinten blushed. “No, don’t be ridiculous.
He came into the library to do some research last month. I recognized him from the big parent-teacher meeting we have at the beginning of every school year.”
“What was he researching?” I asked.
The trail was getting steeper, and I had to watch my footing more than the forest around me. I didn’t like that. Not at all.
“He wanted to see the microfilm for newspapers in the region. Not the Cheerville paper but the ones for all the surrounding towns.”
“Microfilm? Was he looking at old papers?”
“No, he wanted editions from the last five years. He got irritated when I told him we don’t have them for those years. Everything’s online now, and with our limited budget, we don’t order newspaper microfilm anymore.”
“So what did he do then?”
“He used one of our public computers.”
That was interesting. As a photojournalist, he would have known the articles were available online. Most people knew that even without a background in newspaper work. It could only mean that he didn’t want to access them from his own computer. He was being so careful, in fact, that he didn’t even want to use a public computer except as a last resort.
“Did you see what he was looking at?”
“No. I had other work to do. I did notice one odd thing though. When I passed by him to reshelve some books, he popped up another window.”
“Ooooh.” Butch got a knowing look. “He was looking at porn.”
To my surprise, Quinten didn’t scold his son. “That’s what I assumed. It’s happened before. Now I’m not so sure that’s what he was doing.”
“Do you remember him doing anything else?” I asked.
“Wow, Grandma. You’re acting like a detective,” Martin said.
“I think that’s a good idea at the moment, don’t you?”
“Just keep your clothes on,” Martin said with a chuckle.
The other two gave him a very odd look. Quinten did what many people do in awkward situations—he ignored the comment entirely.
“He sat at the computer for an hour or so, taking notes, and then he went to look at the law books we have in back and took another hour or so on those. Took a bunch more notes there too.”
