Back of Beyond

by C. J. Box

  “It’s hard to describe,” she said. “I heard some feet thumping around outside and a kind of grunt, like someone got the wind knocked out of them. I didn’t recognize anyone or hear any voices, just the thumping and the grunt. I thought it might have been an animal in the camp.”

  Her dad said, “Why didn’t you wake me up and tell me?”

  Gracie looked over, her eyes dead. “I wasn’t sure whose tent you were in.”

  “Meow,” Danielle whispered.

  Her dad turned red and looked quickly away. Gracie felt both good and ashamed at the same time. She expected a glare from Rachel, but the woman eyed her stoically. As if assessing her for later.

  “What time did you hear it?” Jed asked, ignoring the others.

  Gracie shrugged, and chewed on a piece of bacon.

  “I mean,” Jed said, “was it right after you went to bed or was it closer to this morning?”

  “A few hours after I went to bed,” she said. “After midnight, I’m sure. I didn’t look at my watch, but I’d guess two or three in the morning.”

  Jed nodded to himself, as if fitting this new information into a narrative.

  “So they could have five or so hours on us,” Knox said. “I don’t see the point in going after them, then. By the time we caught up to them they’d be at the parking lot.”

  “Maybe,” Jed said, worried. “But they might not have gotten that far while it was dark.”

  “I still don’t see the two of them together,” Walt said. “I’d guess they’re traveling separately in the same direction.”

  Russell said, “Fools. On their own they might get lost.”

  D’Amato cleared his throat. “I volunteer to go after them. After all, it’s my fault…” He didn’t finish the sentence.

  “You’re not going anywhere on your own,” Knox said flatly.

  “They’ll be okay,” Russell said. “It’s their deal, not ours. It was their choice to leave.”

  Jed nodded and addressed his comments to Donna. “I don’t think they’ll get lost or anything. Hell, the trail just parallels the shore of the lake nearly all the way back. There are a few side trails, but they’d follow our tracks from yesterday. I’m sure Dakota will find them. That girl can ride.”

  Walt said, “It just doesn’t make sense to me. Just because there was a disagreement on which trail to take—it just doesn’t make sense.”

  Gracie’s dad agreed. Rachel said nothing.

  Donna Glode said to the fire, “You don’t understand. Tristan is all about control. And last night he lost it.” She looked over at D’Amato. “You’re not the reason he left. I’m the reason he left.”

  D’Amato stared at his boots, still pointedly ignoring her. No one followed up with a reguest to Donna for clarification.

  “But why Wilson?” Rachel Mina asked. “Why did he leave? He didn’t seem that concerned about the vote or which trail we are going to take.”

  “Who knows about that guy,” Walt said. “He was a hard guy to read.”

  Knox agreed. “It doesn’t break me up too damn much that guy’s gone. He seemed kind of strange from the start, I thought.”

  “Hear, hear,” Russell said.

  “Tristan is another matter,” D’Amato said, as much to himself as anyone. “I think maybe it would be a good effort on my part to go try and get him. I want to do this. I want to make things right.”

  “Forget it,” Donna said, ending the discussion. “He won’t listen to you, of all people. And he’s never listened to me.”

  She stood and turned to Jed. “I know exactly what he’ll do, so you might as well prepare for it. He’ll go straight to the top, to the superintendent of the park, and demand that your license be taken away for deviating from the scheduled trip. And I would be surprised if he didn’t get his way. That’s the way he is.”

  It was only for a second, but Gracie thought she saw real fear in Jed’s eyes.

  “Dakota will find him,” Jed said, assuring no one.

  Gracie found the whole scene fascinating and a little sickening. There was no filtering of words or emotions for the sake of Danielle, Justin, or her. She felt suddenly older and more mature but she didn’t like the feeling.

  Jed said to Gracie, “What you probably heard last night was one or both of them clearing out their tents to leave. Maybe one of them tripped on a tent stake or something.”

  Gracie shook her head. “I don’t think it was that.”

  “Then what was it?” her dad asked, suddenly perturbed. “If you can’t say what you heard, maybe you shouldn’t say anything at all.”

  Gracie felt her face flush. She knew his anger had more to do with her snub of him than anything else. She said softly, “It sounded more like a fight.”

  No one said anything. The silence around the fire became oppressive.

  Finally, Jed said, “I don’t see much sense in discussing this any further. It’s time to eat up, pack up, and mount up. We’re burning daylight, folks.”

  The sound of hoofbeats filled the awkward silence, and everyone turned toward the sound.

  Dakota rode up and reined to a stop. She was alone.

  “I couldn’t catch them,” she said.

  Gracie looked up to see Jed glaring at Dakota, his hands knotted into fists at his side.

  Dakota didn’t meet his eyes.

  * * *

  Gracie walked with Danielle back toward the tents. When they were far enough away from the adults, Danielle said, “Fuck this. This trip sucks. Why couldn’t we go to Mexico or a beach or something?”

  Gracie shrugged.

  Danielle said, “Who cares if those two guys are gone or what trail we take? It’s just stupid. I’m glad that creep Wilson is gone anyway, so he won’t be sneaking around trying to look at me when I go to the so-called toilet. And I want to take a hot shower.”

  “What do you think about Dad and Rachel?”

  “I guess I would have liked to have known about it before we did this,” her sister said. “But Dad needs to get a life. This might help. Maybe he won’t be so clueless and intense all the time.”

  “That’s all you think about it?”

  Danielle shrugged. “She seems kind of cool. I don’t have anything against her.”

  “I don’t know her well enough to say,” Gracie said.

  Danielle said, “What I think is if the rules of this trip are everybody sleeps around with everybody else, then they ought to just say so and I’ll stay with Justin. He can rub my back and tell me how beautiful I am and we’ll see what develops.”

  Gracie sighed and unzipped their tent so they could repack their things for the day’s ride. As she did she saw Rachel Mina come out of a green and blue tent with her sleeping bag bundled in her arms. Gracie thought she looked angry and puzzled, as if trying to struggle through a difficult problem. Then their eyes locked for a moment and Rachel’s face softened and changed. Rachel took a deep breath, blew a strand of hair out of her face as if she’d just made a momentous decision, and let her sleeping bag drop to a pile at her feet.

  “Uh-oh,” Gracie said.

  “What?”

  “She’s coming over.”

  “Who?” Danielle asked, then saw Rachel working her way through the other tents toward them. “Oh, her.”

  Gracie looked around. There was nowhere to run.

  “Hello, Danielle,” Rachel said. “Hello, Gracie.”

  “Hi,” Danielle said. Gracie stood and nodded.

  “We haven’t officially met,” Rachel said, looking from one sister to the other and extending her hand. “I’m Rachel.”

  They shook her hand.

  Rachel said, “I wanted to take this opportunity, since we’re away from everyone, to set the record straight regarding your dad and me.”

  Gracie braced for it.

  “I want you to know something,” Rachel said, talking mainly to her. “I don’t want to be your stepmother. I don’t necessarily want to be your best friend. But I want to get
along with you and I hope you’ll give it a shot to get along with me. We all know the situation, even though the truth came out much more awkwardly than I wanted it to.

  “I’m very, very fond of your father. I know he feels the same about me. We’re both lonely, and there’s a very good possibility we’ll be together in the future. That’s where you two come in.”

  “Hey,” Danielle said, “as long as you don’t try to run my life, I’m okay with it.”

  Rachel still spoke primarily to Gracie. “I’ve been around the block. I don’t try to pretend your father is young, single, and carefree. I know he’s got a family. And I know he absolutely adores you two girls. This isn’t an either/or situation unless we make it such,” she said. “Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  Gracie said, “I’m not sure I do.”

  Rachel said, “You two are the most important people in his life. I recognize that fact and I admire it and I’d never try to change it. If we can’t accept each other and get along, I’ll step aside. I won’t force him to make a choice and he doesn’t need to. Most men are trying to do the right thing but they don’t know how. That I’ve learned. They don’t understand what we want and need and expect. They assume we think love is a zero-sum game—either he goes with you or he goes with me—which it isn’t. I know he’s attracted to me, and I to him. I could draw a line in the sand. But I won’t, because then I’d be with a man I don’t respect and you’d have a dad you resented. What I’m saying,” she continued, “is we’re not rivals. Not either/or. You’ve already got a mother and from what I understand she’s a wonderful woman. I look forward to meeting her as well. I don’t plan on disliking her or resenting her.”

  Gracie said, “You talk to us like we’re adults.”

  Rachel said, “And I plan to continue to do that. I’m too old to start playing games, and this…” she waved her hand over her head to indicate the situation they were in that morning, “is an incredible distraction. If we don’t talk now and talk bluntly, who knows when we’ll get the chance?”

  Danielle said, “Hey, I’m here, too,” attempting to break up the two-way conversation.

  “You are,” Rachel said. “And I’m sorry. I just had the impression you weren’t the one I’d need to convince.”

  Danielle started to argue, then rolled her eyes and said, “I’m not, I guess.”

  Rachel turned back to Gracie. “And what about you?”

  Gracie hesitated and felt her sister and Rachel Mina looking at her. She said, “I need to think about it.”

  “Gawd,” Danielle sighed. “Gracie, you are such a little—”

  “No,” Rachel said, holding up her hand to silence Danielle, which impressed Gracie because it actually worked, “that’s perfectly fair. I’d probably say the same thing.”

  And with that, she turned and went back to her tent to pack up.

  Gracie and Danielle watched her in silence until she was out of earshot.

  Danielle said, “I have to admit, that was pretty cool. I like her, even though I still don’t see what she sees in Dad. I mean, I could live with her around, I think.”

  Gracie nodded, although she wasn’t yet ready to agree. She didn’t want Danielle to think Rachel had won her over so quickly, even though she nearly conceded to herself she had.

  Danielle giggled. “I was kind of hoping she would have said she did want to be our best friend, though. That’s the way you get stuff, you know? There’s nothing better for a girl than to have two sets of parents competing for your affection, and buying you things to make you like them more, you know?”

  Gracie looked at her sister with disgust. “What planet are you from, anyway?”

  “Planet Danielle,” her sister said with a lilt. “It’s a good and happy place. And it has hot showers and cell phone service.”

  * * *

  Jed waited until everyone had dispersed before tracking down Dakota, who was picketing her horse with the others. His voice was tight and low. He said, “Why in the hell didn’t you keep going until you found them? Do you know what this might mean?”

  She slid the saddle and pad off, leaving a sweaty matted square on her horse’s back. “No, what does it mean?”

  He reached out and grasped her shoulder, preventing her from turning away from him. “It means he’ll go to the Park Service, that’s what it means. I could lose my contract, is what it means. Why didn’t you track him down? Why did you quit on me before you found him?”

  She broke eye contact and let her gaze slip to his hand on her shoulder. She wouldn’t speak until he let go, so he did.

  Dakota said, “I lost them, Jed. I followed their tracks for two miles and then the tracks just vanished. I can’t figure out why they left the trail or where they went. I rode another half mile to see if they got back on the trail, but they didn’t. I don’t know where they are, but I didn’t want to say that in front of our clients.”

  Jed shook his head. “They just disappeared?”

  She nodded defiantly.

  Jed felt a weight lift. If Tristan and Wilson had wandered away from the route they might never get back to the trailhead.

  “Should we notify Search and Rescue?” Dakota asked.

  “No,” Jed said. “Not yet. Those two might realize the error of their ways and come back yet.”

  He ignored the puzzlement in her face.

  * * *

  While they were packing, Gracie asked, “Did you hear anything last night?”

  “No. I had a bad dream about something, but I forget now what it was about.”

  “So maybe you heard what I heard.”

  “I don’t know,” Danielle said. “Maybe. But who cares? He’s great, isn’t he? Justin, I mean.”

  “You think they’re all great at first. This one is, but I’m sure you’ll screw it up somehow.”

  “Shut up.”

  Gracie cinched her sleeping bag stuff sack and started to carry it and her duffel toward the horses. On the way, she stepped off the path into the moist grass and bent down. The sod was churned up in several places exposing soft black soil. She looked up at her tent, which was twenty yards away. “This is where it happened,” she said to Danielle. “This is where the noises came from. Nobody tripped on a tent stake. It’s too far away from the tents.”

  Danielle stayed on the path. She looked from Gracie back toward the camp. The adults were still milling around.

  “So what are you saying?” she asked.

  Gracie said, “I’m not sure. But there’s something really wrong going on. Something evil. Two grown men supposedly just left us in the middle of the night without a word to anyone. We’re supposed to believe that two guys who’ve known each other for a day get together and make a plan like that? Why didn’t anyone hear them or notice they were taking two horses? And did you see the way Jed and Dakota were treating each other? Or how Donna Glode and Tony D’Amato are acting?”

  “I didn’t notice.”

  “I know you didn’t. And why the big deal about taking another trail?” Gracie said. “We wouldn’t know what trail we’re on, anyway. Why does that matter?”

  24

  Cody Hoyt rode a tall gelding paint named Gipper behind Bull Mitchell’s black horse through a dark stand of lodgepole pine trees that seemed to have no end, on a trail that was so overgrown it barely existed anymore, and he called to Mitchell, “Are you sure you know where we’re going?”

  It was mid-morning and up beyond the interlaced canopy of trees the sun was out and the sky was intense blue and cloudless. They’d been riding for four hours straight without a break and Cody felt quarter-sized spots on both inner thighs burn through his jeans into his flesh from leather ridges on the saddle. He knew little about horses except he’d never much liked them and he had the distinct impression Gipper thought the same about him, evidenced by the way the horse would drift off the path toward overhanging branches that, if Cody wasn’t alert, would have knocked him backwards out of the saddle to the ground.
>
  It was still moist in the trees from a brief rain shower that came at dawn as they set out, and raindrops clung like tears to the tips of pine needles. Occasionally, there was a break in the canopy and light streamed through like jail bars. But mostly they’d been in the shadows on a trail that barely was and Bull Mitchell hadn’t said three words to Cody although the old man mumbled plenty to his horse. Mitchell trailed a packhorse with full canvas panniers and Cody rode his gelding behind them both.

  Cody inventoried their weapons. Both he and Mitchell had rifle scabbards lashed onto their saddles. The scarred and faded wooden butt of a scoped .30-06 stuck out of Mitchell’s scabbard and a black polymer adjustable butt stock for a departmental AR-15 poked out of Cody’s. Mitchell’s rifle looked substantial and serious, Cody thought, while his high-tech semiautomatic rifle resembled a kind of toy. He’d switched out the thirty-round for a ten-round magazine so the rifle would slip into the creaky leather sleeve that simply wasn’t designed for it. Cody’s .40 Sig Sauer was clipped high on his belt, making the weapon difficult to get at but at least it didn’t rub along the saddle. Mitchell had strapped on a long-barreled .44 Magnum single-action Ruger Super Blackhawk revolver. Like his rifle, Mitchell’s handgun was rubbed nearly clean of blueing and the wooden handgrip was worn and scratched. He wore the .44 Magnum in a holster that covered most of his thigh. It was a bear weapon.

  “I said,” Cody repeated, “are you sure you know where we’re going?” Mitchell pulled his horse to an abrupt stop, which caused the packhorse to do the same. Gipper used the occasion to stop, dip his head, and eat grass.

  “I heard you the first time,” Mitchell growled. His voice was so deep it seemed to vibrate through the ground. He sounded annoyed.

  “Well?”

  “What do you think?” Mitchell said.

  “I think we’ve been riding in these trees for a long time and even I can see we’re the first people to use this trail in years,” Cody said. “So it’s a little hard for me to believe we’re going to catch them on it.”

  Mitchell shook his head as he looked away, as if deeply disappointed.