Back of Beyond

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.