She kept climbing. When she reached a ridge that had been logged at one time, she staggered over to a rotten tree trunk, gray from the sun. The clearing was wide and covered in slash like bony toothpicks. Stumps were blackened. Fireweed and berries fought for survival.
She tried to massage her aching calves, but that set the sunburn aflame. She settled for stretching her legs out in front of her and resting her feet. When she took off her pack, her shoulders were red, with white stripes where the straps had protected her skin from the sun.
She turned her face to the cloudless blue sky. An eagle let out a screech that startled her through her spine. She pulled out her binoculars and watched the eagle swoop, then lowered her view to the valley below. She didn’t see any obvious places where someone might camp.
She put the binoculars away, then used her shirt to pat sweat off her face. Checked her watch. Eleven. She’d been in the woods for two hours. It felt like a lifetime. She tied her shirt over her head like a bandanna, then started back down the trail. Enough was enough.
She thought that going downhill would be easier, but as she continued, the sun moved higher and now hung directly above her head. How much longer until she made it to the campsite? She glanced at her watch. Noon. If she kept walking at the same pace, she’d be out of the woods before the hottest part of the day. As soon as she got back to her site she was going to leap into the lake. She stopped to pick berries for moisture in her mouth, and realized she was staring at a small, overgrown animal trail that ran alongside the blackberry bushes. Maybe deer used it to get to the river for water. She gave the backpack a little lift, adjusting it on her shoulders, and winced at the bite of canvas against her throbbing sunburn. She pushed through the greenery.
She emerged onto an outcropping, stood with her hands on her hips. She admired the view of the river below for a few moments and felt glad for the fresh air, the greenery. It had been good for her to get out of her rut, even if she hadn’t found anything. She let out her breath in a long sigh.
Behind her, a sharp sound. A stick breaking. She spun around. A deer, soft-eyed and gentle, strolled through the timber, lifting its hooves delicately. Beth gasped at how close it was—it saw her, then sprinted away, bounding over trees, crashing through the bushes.
Beth stood still, her heart racing, and laughed to herself. Maybe the deer was a sign from her sister. You don’t belong in this forest. Go back to the city, Beth!
She had dropped the compass in her surprise. She bent over now to get it, and the pack shifted on her shoulders, throwing her off balance. One of her heels came down on the mossy rocks and skidded off to the side. She fell onto her knee. She pushed her hands into the moss, trying to grab on to something, but it all came apart. Her boots slipped. Now she was on her stomach.
She slid over the cliff edge, grabbing at twigs and branches and roots, the hard rock. She almost caught herself, then the root broke away from the dirt, and she was plummeting down.
* * *
She was freezing. She reached for the blanket to tug it over her shoulders, felt only air. Something was pulling on her from behind, jerking her back. She opened her eyes, moaned, and sucked in a mouthful of water. She gasped and spluttered, shifted onto her side. She tried to sit up. Everything tilted and she lowered herself toward the rock—most of her body was in the water.
Barking. The rasp of a wet tongue across her cheeks, her forehead. Rough, insistent. She turned over, then startled when she saw the black dog. Was it him? She held out her hand, but he danced backward. He grabbed the side of her backpack in his mouth and yanked hard.
“Hey! Stop it!”
She slowly sat up, clutching her head, and squinted at the sun. Her hand felt sticky. She pulled it away and sucked in her breath when she saw the blood, and instantly regretted it because of the shock wave of pain stabbing her ribs. The dog had bounced out of her reach and was sitting nearby. One ear twitched at her.
“I’ve been looking for you.” Speaking hurt. Her mouth tasted like blood. She stared at him for a long, wavering moment, leaned over, and puked. She bent over the river and scooped water into her mouth. When she tried to stand up, she wobbled, and stumbled backward. She thought for sure she was going to fall again, but she threw out her arms for balance.
She shrugged her wet backpack off her shoulders, groaning with every move. She took out another shirt, which was also wet, and pressed it to her head. She looked at the dog.
“Thanks for waking me up.” His tail thumped. That was new. Last time he had ignored her. “Are you with someone?” He thumped again. The mountain man? He could be watching her. She turned and looked into the forest, scanned the shadows, stumps that looked like hunched people. “Is anyone out there?” She was greeted with silence.
“I’ve lost my mind.” She started to shake her head, then grimaced at the wave of nausea. It took her a couple of tries before she was able to bend and fill her water bottle. She hesitated, thinking about bacteria. The river was running fast though. That was good, right? It had to be okay. She drank in big gulps, then attached the bottle to her backpack. The dog watched.
She began to pick her way over the rocks. She thought about how far she was going to have to walk to the campground. Did she even know the way? She stopped at the shore.
“I’m so fucked.”
She bent over to puke up the water she had just drunk. The dog bolted into the woods, but he stayed at the top of the bank. As if he were waiting. When she walked toward him, he yipped, spun around, and started down the trail.
She stopped, thinking. Was he leading her back to the campground? Maybe she was crazy. Her head throbbed. The trees around her kept merging. She closed her eyes, waited for her balance to come back, then she took a tentative step toward him. He wagged his tail. Okay. She’d let him play leader. He seemed more certain about where he was going than she did.
It took all afternoon. She stopped a few times to sip her water, pausing between each mouthful to make sure she could hold it down. Every time she glanced over her shoulder, eyes scanning the forest, the dog would yip impatiently, and she’d continue on, but she found herself moving slower and slower.
She sank to her knees and leaned forward on her hands, bracing herself, but her arms sagged, and she collapsed onto her stomach in the middle of the trail. The ground was cool under her body. Her breaths felt ragged. The dog barked in her face.
“I need to rest,” she said weakly. “Few minutes.”
The dog wouldn’t shut up. He barked incessantly, coming within inches of her, nipping at her boots, then leaping backward.
“Go away!” She scrabbled up a handful of dirt and tossed it at him, but he didn’t run off. He grabbed on to her backpack strap, dug his feet into the ground, and began yanking and growling, twisting his neck. She moaned and cursed at him but pulled herself to her knees.
The dog pounced forward, still aggressively barking.
She got to her feet, weaving, and stumbled after him. When the trail started to look familiar, she realized she was close, and she quickened her pace. She was panting hard, almost gasping. Then she remembered the gun—at the top of her pack. She stopped, and with shaking fingers she removed the bullets, and shoved the gun to the bottom of her damp backpack.
She broke out of the trail, staggered onto the campground road. She looked behind and the dog was standing at the edge of the forest. He spun around and disappeared.
“Hey, you okay?” A shout. She looked up. The black-haired guy from the other site. They’d cooked bacon yesterday. It had smelled so good. She had really wanted a slice of that bacon.
She slumped to the ground.
* * *
Beth woke to noise. Pale green walls, a TV hanging in the corner, a white board with red writing—the day nurse’s name, the date, Beth’s last vital check, the attending physician’s name, and a cheerful smiley face.
The noise again. She turned her head to the right. Jonny sat sprawled in a chair, watching her with his chi
n in his hand, a paper cup in his other.
“Brought you a coffee. It’s on your stand.”
“Thanks.” Her voice felt dry, husky. She slowly sat up and reached for the coffee, wincing as her body stretched. She couldn’t stop thinking about what it had felt like to fall from that cliff, the sensation of nothing under her feet, hands grasping at air. The strangest thing was the feeling of disappointment when she woke at the bottom. She’d thought that if she ever came close to death, she would feel her sister nearby, maybe hear her voice, but it was only the dog.
Jonny got to his feet and passed her the cup, made a few adjustments to her bed so that she could sit up. She took a swallow, rested her head back. Was it only this morning that Jonny had left her campsite? She imagined how she looked to him now. The nurses had helped her into the bathroom to wash the blood out of her hair. She’d studied herself in the mirror, shocked at her pale face, the dark shadows under her eyes, the ugly bruise along her temple. Turned out head wounds bleed a lot, but the cut wasn’t as deep as she had feared. She only needed a few stitches. The area around it was swollen and hurt to touch. The mother of all goose eggs.
She blinked at him. “How long have you been here?”
“Just a few minutes.”
“Your friend tell you?”
“Andy? Yeah.”
She remembered the ambulance ride, the jerkiness of the stretcher as the paramedics bumped it over the curb and pushed it into the hospital. “I owe him.”
“Don’t tell him that. He’ll have you buying him dinner.”
She looked over and met his eyes. Was that jealousy? She couldn’t tell. His voice was teasing, but they’d left things so awkward. “I could offer him a burnt hot dog.”
He laughed. “That’s still better than hospital food. I broke my ankle a few years ago and needed surgery. Hailey snuck in DQ milkshakes and hid under my bed every time a nurse came to check on me.”
“Nice. You had your own delivery service.”
“She was just trying to get out of school,” he said with another easy laugh. “She always wanted to be outside, and skipped classes constantly, but she got good grades.”
“How did you become friends?”
“We were kids, she taught me to ride. We liked doing all the same things.” He rubbed at a worn spot on his jeans. Beth imagined them riding dirt bikes, going out to the lake, jumping off the dock. She could hear the echo of her laughter. She was a ghost, always around him.
“Amber and I didn’t have much in common, but I think that’s why we got along. I didn’t have to worry about her stealing my clothes.” A comforting warmth spread across her chest, a memory of Amber flipping through her closet. Why is everything gray? You need more color!
“Family is different.”
“Mine is a mess.” She sighed. “I’ve been lying to my parents for months. They don’t know that I dropped out of school. They don’t even know that I’m in Cold Creek.”
“No kidding.” His eyebrows lifted.
“I can’t seem to make myself care anymore.” She drifted into silence. She liked that he didn’t ask for more details. He took a sip of his coffee, his long legs crossed at the ankles. He’d been like that in bed, she remembered. Never pushing her past her limit or rushing ahead. It was this easy sort of dance. She wished they were in a darkened tent again. Using their bodies to talk.
“I stopped racing for a while,” Jonny said. “It seemed stupid, shallow. Who cared about winning a trophy when my best friend was gone? It took a while to get over that.”
“How did you?” She watched his face, the play of emotions.
“It bothered me, that I was letting Hailey down. She used to come out to every race, no matter what, and I started thinking that maybe I should have as much faith in myself as she did.”
Beth thought over what he’d just said. “Amber was such a hippie. She’d probably tell me that I’m on a spiritual journey now and I need to go with the flow.” Beth waved her hands in the air, then brought them to the prayer position at her heart center. “Namaste.”
He smiled. “Maybe you could open a yoga studio.”
“Ha. Don’t make me laugh. It hurts.” She let out her breath, releasing some of the emotion that had tightened her throat. “Amber really liked Hailey.”
“Hailey liked her a lot too. She was upset they couldn’t see each other.”
“Why was Vaughn so hard on her?”
“That’s the bullshit part of it all. We pulled some crazy stunts, but Hailey was good. She kept me away from drugs, and she was always busting up my fights. She was my voice in the dark, you know? That person who gets you through when you can’t see the way.”
Beth thought over his words with a pang of longing. Amber had been her voice. Maybe that was why she had felt so weightless since she’d died. Unanchored. Lost.
“We got stuck in a silver mine when we were kids,” he said. “I freaked about bats and Hailey told me to stop being such a baby.” He laughed. “She dragged me out of there, talking the entire time about how she was never going to let me forget that she was the brave one.”
“She sounds great.”
“She wasn’t afraid of anything.” He said it with so much admiration that Beth felt even sadder for him. In the end, being brave hadn’t been enough, had it? He realized that hard truth at the same moment she did, his smile fading. “Anyway, she really liked Amber. Vaughn saw them together. He flipped out.”
“Is he homophobic?”
He shrugged. “I think he just didn’t like Hailey having fun.”
Beth turned over all this new information in her mind like stones at the beach, searching for something to scuttle out. Who else might have seen them together?
“I was thinking about how most of the girls had been at the lake at some point. Like that’s where everyone goes. I wondered if the killer has been watching them there.”
“How do you mean?”
“What if he’s in the woods? Vaughn said there’s lots of illegal camping. That’s what I was looking for. Signs of someone living out there. Maybe by the river.”
“Whoa. Your brain is moving too fast for me.” Jonny shook his head. “If someone was living out there, then a hunter or dirt biker would have seen him by now.”
“I don’t know. When I woke up at the bottom of the cliff, that dog was licking my face and barking. He led me back to the campsite. If he was really a stray, would he do that?”
“Okay, what kind of drugs are they giving you?”
“I’m serious. He has to belong to someone.”
“No one could live in those mountains. Not even an experienced guide.” Beth was surprised to see a shimmer in Jonny’s eyes. He blinked a few times and cleared his throat. Then tossed his coffee in the garbage with a thump.
“Hey—I didn’t mean to upset you.”
“It’s okay, but I should let you rest.” He got to his feet.
“You don’t have to go.” She blinked, her eyelids drifting closed. She was so tired. The weight of all this. The ghosts of Amber and Hailey crowding the room.
She felt him squeeze her hand. “Hang in there.”
When she opened her eyes to say goodbye, he was already gone.
CHAPTER 23
They kept her in for another night and her duffel bag was in the room when she woke. The nurse told her that a young man had dropped it off, along with her keys. Her car was in the parking lot. She didn’t ask for a description. She knew it was Jonny. She looked at the items he’d packed: shorts, tops, toiletries, underwear, and bras. Strangely, she wasn’t embarrassed. She felt comforted. Maybe that was how people with boyfriends felt. Like they had someone looking out for them.
She’d gone through her backpack the day before, pulling out the damp items to dry on the hospital room heater, and was relieved that the gun was still wrapped in a shirt at the bottom.
Now she put everything back inside and thought about how none of it had helped her in the end. She smiled when sh
e saw a few teeth marks in the nylon fabric. Her dog angel.
A noise at the door, someone clearing their throat. She closed the flap on her pack and looked over her shoulder. Vaughn. Her body stiffened.
He came farther into the room. “Glad to see you are up and about. I checked on you last night, but you were asleep.”
A spider of fear skittered across her shoulders. He had been in her room while she’d been sleeping. The nurses had given her drugs. She remembered nightmares, dark shapes, falling.
She moved around to the side of the bed. “I didn’t know.”
He sprawled, uninvited, in the chair beside the window, and set down a couple of magazines. Fashion magazines. “Wasn’t sure what you like to read.” His legs were stretched wide, black boots with a thick tread, his arms crossed over his chest so that his biceps bulged. It would look casual to most people, but somehow it felt aggressive. Like he wanted her to see how large he was, how unhurried. He had all the time in the world—and it was focused on her.
“I’m leaving today, but thanks.”
“You need a ride?”
“I have my car.”
He studied her. “You could have died in that river.”
“I could die anywhere.”
“Hiking in those woods alone, without experience, wasn’t smart.” His scolding tone was beyond patronizing. How did his wife stand him?
“I’ll be more careful.” Maybe if she humored him he’d feel like he’d done his job.
“I heard you had a visitor yesterday.”
“Isn’t a hospital supposed to be private?”
“Not much stays private in this town. If you two are dating, that’s your choice.” He held up his hands, then said casually, “He used to date Shannon Emerson.” He watched her lower herself slowly to the bed. He smirked. “You didn’t know that, huh?”
“It’s a small town.”
“She was at the field that night with him. Somehow she ended up alone.”
She frowned. “That doesn’t mean—”
“You think all these girls are just unlucky? He came into the diner every few days, and, sorry, sweetheart, but the burgers aren’t that good. He had his eye on your sister.”
Dark Roads Page 19
