Canyon Echoes

by Miranda Nading

  “Where are you going?” Panicked, Gracie reached out to grab the tail of Julie's jacket.

  “The same place you are, little one,” Julie pulled Gracie's hand off her jacket and tugged her across the console. Helping Gracie out of the car, she turned her to face the police tape, put her cheek next to Gracie's and whispered. “Face the reality, so you can control what's happening in your head.”

  Facing Sulphur Caldron was so far from Gracie's list of things she wanted to do that she balked at walking forward. Closing her eyes, Gracie took a deep breath and listed all the reasons she needed to put one foot in front of the other. No pushing or shoving came from Julie. She stood behind her, not making a sound. Waiting. In the end, Gracie stepped forward.

  If for no other reason, she owed it to Julie. Her patience and understanding had allowed Gracie to begin a new life, become someone she could be proud of. Without Julie, Gracie would still be a terrified little mouse, living on the crumbs of society instead of being a part of it.

  Granted, some would argue that her life was still on the wrong side of the antisocial line, but it was a life, her life. Her job kept her from being inundated by strangers; strangers who came through Yellowstone and left their manners and common decency at the gate, strangers who were rude, loud and needy and gave no thought to how they treated the people around them.

  Interacting with other employees had been painful at first, yet she had gotten to the point where she looked forward to seeing certain faces every spring. Those few had become her friends, her support network and her family. With each year that passed, that circle grew.

  More than that, she was damned good at the job. A job that earned her an honest paycheck, security and stability. That was a dream so far out of reach that she hadn't thought it would be possible. Not for someone as broken as she had been.

  Holding on to the knowledge that she had come too far to turn her back on the woman she had become, she took another step and opened her eyes. Snow, once as pure as a dove's wings, had been trampled down by both feet and tires, turned to slush that pulled up the dirt and oil from the road, making it as filthy as the world outside of the gates.

  Battered by the afternoon storm, the police tape flapped and fluttered in the breeze. Lifting it up, she ducked under the tape and faced the path that led to Sulphur Caldron. Without giving herself time to think about what she was doing, Gracie climbed the path until she found herself looking at the blood-spattered ice.

  She closed her eyes, shook her head, and looked again. Most of the bloody ice had been covered by the recent snow shower, yet patches of pink ice could still be seen as if a young child had carelessly walked through with a strawberry slushy that had been too full, leaving a pink trail behind her like breadcrumbs in a haunted forest.

  “The voices?” Julie stood a few steps behind her, staying back far enough for Gracie to do what she needed to do, but close enough to be there if she needed her.

  “Quiet.” Walking around the tainted snow, giving it a wide birth, Gracie moved to the damaged railing and looked down.

  Death did not wait for her at the bottom. No dead man stared back at her, accusing her with molten eyes. What snow hadn't yet melted on the heated wall of the caldron had been trampled, smeared, as the body had been pulled free of the deadly sludge.

  “The door knob? The little girl?”

  “Not here,” Gracie turned to find Julie scanning the snow at her feet. “At least, not yet.”

  “Your snowshoe tracks are all over the place. Did you turn them back in?” Julie laughed and shook her head before answering her own question. “Of course you did. I love that screwy little moral compass you have in your head, but maybe it shouldn't point true north all the time.”

  “I haven't learned shades of gray yet,” Gracie shrugged. “Maybe I should. What are the chances that they got here after the snow shower?”

  “Slim to none,” Julie pointed at a congregation of tracks between the rock wall and railing. “They're all covered pretty much the same. They were here before the snow. Did anyone drive by while you were here?”

  Heaving a sigh, Gracie shrugged her shoulders and shook her head. “I have no idea. I don't remember hearing any cars before the…whiteout. Now that I know it was real, maybe I should call someone.”

  Julie was already shaking her head, “Absolutely not. Too much time has passed and they'll start digging into your past.”

  Just the idea of anyone probing into who she was and where she came from sent a shiver up Gracie's spine. Some things were better left in the dark, in the closet. Her skeletons weren't meant for the light of day. She certainly didn't need anything feeding them, making them stronger.

  After taking a deep breath, she nodded and turned to head back toward Julie's car. “I guess you're right.”

  A glimpse into the trees stopped her in her tracks. The snow shower had done a lot to blur the sharp edges of the horrible scene, but her frantic run from the caldron and the emotional floodgates it had opened, stood out in stark relief against the smooth, unblemished surface of the cold blanket that wrapped everything else.

  Missing memories, missing time, was disconcerting and she wished she could get them back. At the same time, however, the idea of what must have been going through her mind as she ran was terrifying enough. She didn't know what had been driving her on, but she was more than intimately aware of what her mind was capable of conjuring.

  “What worries me,” Julie said as she climbed behind the wheel, “is the question of time. How long after the killer left, did you stumble onto the scene? What would have happened to you, if they had still been here?”

  Somehow, the idea that she could have stumbled into the killer was even worse than the missing time, but so much better than the idea that she had done this horrible thing. “What if the killer had been there? Watching me, from the trees? Hell, they could have been standing right next to me and I would have been oblivious.”

  Julie's cheek puckered in as she bit down on it. “The state you were in,” she took a deep breath and let it out, keeping her eyes focused on the road through Hayden, “I don't think you would have walked away from it, Gracie. I think you would have ended up in the bottom of Sulphur Caldron.”

  A chill raced up Gracie's back. Losing time was disorienting enough. The idea of someone watching her do—whatever in the hell she had been doing—was like having someone watch her while she was getting undressed.

  Julie was right. During the fugue, the lost time, and the rampaging hallucination of the little girl, she would have been at her most vulnerable. But, only someone that knew her intimately would have realized that.

  The relief that came from knowing the gruesome scene had probably ignited the mental breakdown grew cold inside of her. Someone had taken a life. If not Gracie, then who? If they had seen her, if they thought she had witnessed anything, Gracie would become just another loose end to tie up. They would come for her.

  7

  Barbeque from The Cowboy could ease a lot of ills. Making the pile of folders he had to go through more bearable wasn't one of them. Hudson tossed the last of the takeout containers into the trash and popped the tab on another can of beer, lifting it towards a picture of his late father on the far wall.

  Being a year-round ranger was a family calling and had its advantages. The biggest of which was the absence of a roommate, second only to not having to live in the crowded dorms with the young bucks who poured in to work for the summer. Compared to the employees the concessionaires brought in, ranger numbers didn't seem that bad. When you crammed twenty or thirty of them into a dorm, the comparison didn't matter anymore.

  Too many bodies pressed into one residence, sharing one or two bathrooms, was not a place he wanted to be. Especially when they were all either under twenty-five or acted as if they were. There was something about being in the park, the freedom it represented, that made people young and dumb, even if they weren't.

  File after file, he looked into the person
nel records of everyone who had worked closely with Lester Dunkirk. Starting with the women in Lester's family who worked at Lake, he noted that all held the position of manager in one department or another. He'd have to look into Wilderness Resorts' policy on nepotism, but each and every one of them had glowing evaluations. There was nothing to indicate that they were anything other than hardworking, friendly people. Not so much as a tardy-to-work note marred their files.

  He tossed the latest file back to the table and rubbed his eyes. Morning was going to come early if he was going to make it to Lake by eight. Sleep sounded like a great idea, but he couldn't get his mind to rest easy. If it was someone at Lake, why not kill him there? Why go through all the trouble of getting him to drive to Sulphur? The trip was not a short run. There were still plenty of stretches of road treacherous with ice, snow and avalanche potential.

  Worse yet, the picture from Gracie O'Dowdy's file kept creeping through his thoughts and getting in the way. Snowshoes being checked out, did not a case make. There were more than a few regulars in the park who enjoyed tramping around in those things—as long as there was enough snow on the ground to make it worthwhile. Pre-season was the perfect time for it, bears were just coming out of hibernation, most of the roads and trails were still closed, and best yet, there were no tourists to fight with.

  Being a novelist wasn't a crime either, the last time he checked. David seemed to think she was a sweetheart, a timid little thing who wouldn't say crap if she had a mouthful of it. How sweet, how innocent, could someone really be if they wrote twisted horror stories? There had to be something there, something dark, to draw from.

  Realizing he was judging this girl based on hearsay, he fired up his laptop and typed her name in the search engine. Her official website was the first thing on the list, followed by several books and fan sites. Her first novel, Red Mists, was about a serial killer in Tampa. Though not evidence, he found himself wondering if she pulled fiction from fact.

  The website took his money and shot the book to his tablet. Reading into the first few pages did nothing to calm his doubts. Graphic, violent and dark, the murder scene playing out in the first chapter had such intimacy, such emotion, that it was hard to correlate the story with someone who was without guilt, without darkness in her own soul.

  Dialing Mike's cell before he realized what he was doing, made him feel foolish. He hit the end button and tossed it back to the table. There were no facts in those pages, no evidence, just a foolish man freaked out by a badly written story. He shut the cover on his tablet and went to the fridge for one last beer before bed.

  There was a reason he only read westerns. Romance novels held the same prestige as horror stories in his book, and for the same reason. There was no credibility, no truth in those kinds of stories.

  Westerns, on the other hand, especially those based on historical figures, told it how it was. They gave you a glimpse into the not-so-distant past of Americans. The darkness in their pages was based on the truth of a cold, hard world. A world where men and women had to scrape out a living any way they could and who they were didn't matter nearly as much as how they lived.

  He made one more pass through the house to check the locks and headed to bed. As he passed his recliner, he stopped and looked down at his tablet. “Dammit,” he mumbled, snatching it off the end table and carrying it to his room. There was still plenty of night left to sleep.

  As he settled in to read, he grabbed the picture of Janette and lay it face down. It was bad enough that the day, and the murder case, had kept him from doing his emotional penance—he didn't want her watching over him while he read the rubbish he had downloaded.

  8

  Pre-season meant most restaurants and shops in Gardiner were closed. A few stayed open to cater to the small local population and winter season employees. K-Bar was the Canyon Crew's favorite Gardiner getaway. During peak season in August, the narrow pizza parlor with its long, high, log slab tables would be packed and it would be shoulder-to-shoulder at the bar. In early May, however, the ladies pretty much had the place to themselves.

  Kari made a beeline for the men sitting at the bar, a drink finding its way to her hand before she had even climbed up on the barstool. Kristi grabbed the remote for the big screen TV on the fly and picked a table near the front, so they could watch night soften the hills that stood sentry over the northern boundary of the park.

  Julie waved at the young man behind the pizza bar and he began working a ball of dough, throwing it into the air to spin it out. The waitress brought three chilled glasses of beer and a glass of Coke without waiting for them to order.

  “Do you get the feeling we come here too much?” Kristi laughed under a foamy mustache and used her mug to point toward Kari. “That girl is like an old sailor, a dude in every port.”

  Gracie laughed out loud, grateful to be surrounded by her friends, the familiar smells of the K-Bar making her mouth water. “There's a reason they call her Cougar Kari.” This scene had played out every spring for the past nine years. Kari's long, blond hair caught the eye of the few men in the room and they flocked to her, eager to buy her a drink. Kristi searched the satellite dish for anything sports related and Julie cornered the owner, ready to start the old dance of smack-talking to defend Purdue, even though football season was still half a year away.

  God, how Gracie envied them. Kristi's husband worked at Canyon, Kari had men chasing her all season long, and Julie's husband made frequent trips out to visit her during the summer. The idea of having someone that close, especially someone who loved her, was more than she could ever hope for. Between her stepfather, and her time at the sanitarium, Gracie would never be anything other than damaged goods. There was nothing left worth offering to someone else.

  Every summer, however, she could count on the three of them, her family, to make her feel welcomed, loved. Sipping her Coke, Gracie sat back and enjoyed the laughter around her. It felt like it had been an eternity since she stepped through the mist at Sulphur Caldron and the door in her mind slid open. “Does Corny still get mad at you for leaving him behind for this?”

  Kristi laughed, but it didn't reach her eyes. She pulled off her ball cap and sat it on the chair beside her. It always amazed Gracie when the tomboy façade dropped long enough to see the beautiful woman beneath. “Nah, he's finally getting used to girl's night out. Told him I wouldn't complain about his mushrooms stinking up the coach, if he'd stop whining about being left behind once in a while so I can hang with my girls or go fishing.”

  “Does that mean I should share my favorite hunting spot with him?” Gracie grinned behind her glass when Kristi shot her a withering look. “I know where there's going to be a whole mess of King Boletus.”

  “Don't encourage him!”

  Pizza, sizzling and popping, was brought to the table and like a siren call, brought the other two women back, their noses in the air as they followed the sauerkraut, sausage and jalapenos. All attention was devoted to the Fireman as they parceled out pieces, passed the parmesan cheese and tried to keep from burning their lips off.

  After polishing off the first slice, Kari sipped her drink and then pointed to the men at the bar. “The Canyon has already started echoing.”

  All three women cast a glance at the men before turning back to Kari. Kristi was the first to finish chewing. She turned a hard look at Kari and asked, “Who's having an affair this early in the year?”

  “Not an affair,” Kari flinched, leaned forward like a conspirator and whispered, “Murder.”

  Gracie blanched under the words. Only Julie seemed to notice and quickly drew their attention away from her. “In Canyon?”

  “Close enough, Sulphur Caldron. They're saying it was Lester Dunkirk from Lake.”

  Kristi leaned in; and the hard look Gracie had seen only a few minutes before disappeared. This was gossip worth hearing and Kristi was eager for every tidbit. “The location manager?”

  “The one and only.”

  “The
y call it Canyon echoes for a reason, ladies,” Julie scolded, but her fingers were white from the crushing grip she had on her beer glass. “Each time the echo passes, it gets a little distorted.”

  They all nodded, remembering how fast rumors got more colorful as they moved from employee to employee, but Kari persisted. “These guys are saying they're from Lake. Said the rangers pulled both Karen and Silvia in to talk to them and they were devastated.”

  “I wonder if that had anything to do with the rangers in Canyon today?” Kristi offered, eager to join the network of gossipmongers. “I went up to the Rec Hall today to see about getting the big screen ready for movie night and they were locking it up.”

  “What were they doing?” Julie snapped, although neither Kristie nor Kari noticed the harsh edge to her voice. They were too caught up in the intrigue.

  “Looks like they had the winter gear, snowshoes.”

  Running the gambit on who might have done what, the girls came up with colorful scenario after colorful scenario. Some were so outlandish that even Gracie had a laugh surprised out of her, but some hit a little too close to the mark.

  Faking a smile she no longer felt, Gracie reached for her glass, only to find her hand shaking so hard that she almost knocked it over. Once she had a good grip on it, she looked up to find Julie staring at her, her eyes tight, making the nests of fine lines around them gather. It gave her usually soft features a hard edge. Gracie shook her head once, to let her know she wouldn't volunteer anything, and forced down another bite of pizza.

  “Speaking of snowshoeing,” Kristi pinned Gracie down. “Did you get to do your annual trek out there? Did you see anything?”

  A long drink of Coke only bought her a few seconds. She hated lying. Period. Lying to her friends felt like she was cutting out a piece of her soul and stomping on it. She loved them, trusted them, but something kept her from telling the truth. “I did, but didn't make it all the way through Hayden. Guess I'm out of shape.”