My hand touched human flesh.
Kimbers hand clasped around my wrist and pulled. I tried to stay with him, but between us were obstacles I couldn't even see. I tried to climb and lost his grip. I poked all along the wall trying to find his hand again. I yelled his name at the top of my lungs and couldn't even hear my own voice.
A tree blocked my way at waist level. I climbed over it and frantically prodded the air to my left. No wall of trees! I moved another step in that direction.
There were still no trees.
Was this the (railhead?
I forced another step and ran headfirst into the trunk of a tree. The bark was hard and brittle and a piece broke off in my mouth and mixed with my blood. I spat and poked my hand into the air to my right. Nothing. I stepped around the tree trunk I'd banged into and walked right into Kimber. He captured me in a bear hug and without hesitation carried me at least twenty feet down the trail.
When he released me we started dodging and skipping as fast as we could away from the tree slide.
Behind us the cacophony continued for another twenty seconds or so. When the noise had quieted enough that I felt I could be heard above it, I said, "Kimber, stop." He did. I pointed behind me.
"Phil Barrett's dead. A tree pierced his chest. Right next to me. I saw it."
Kimber nodded, touched his finger to his lips, and raised his eyes toward the hillside. Whoever had just tried to kill us was still close by. Kimber leaned down and touched his ankle holster, then raised his palms to the sky. He wanted to know if I still had Phil's gun with me. I felt in my waistband, back and front. I didn't have the gun. I'd apparently lost it during my frantic escape from the clearing. Kimber looked disappointed.
He proceeded down the trail. I followed him until we reached a fork. One leg of the trail went uphill, the other down. I pointed toward the uphill trail.
That's where we went.
We climbed. After five minutes the tunnel of fallen trees on each side of us was only a pile thigh high, then shortly after that, knee high. Another hundred yards and we were standing in a lush, living forest of healthy green aspen trees. The air was cool and the sky above the treetops was brilliant with stars. I felt as though we'd been adrift at sea and had finally floated ashore.
We'd escaped the blow down
We both sank to the ground. I was slightly downhill from Kimber. I tried to say something to him, something to express my gratitude to him for staying close enough to help me out of the clearing. But my throat was so parched that I wasn't able to free my tongue from the roof of my mouth.
I was surprised when Kimber said, "Stay right where you are." "What?" I said, coughing the word as much as speaking it, and turned to look at him in order to puzzle out the meaning of his words. Behind him stood Dell Franklin holding a big old shotgun that he was pointing right at us.
I felt like kicking someone.
It just didn't seem fair.
Dell killed Tami?
From the moment I'd heard his voice on the hillside before the explosion that set the trees moving it just hadn't made any sense to me. Seeing the sadness in his eyes as he took Kimber and me hostage didn't make it any easier to understand.
Dell had us sit back to back. He stayed uphill from us, leaning against a pair of aspen trees that were growing from the same root ball. His finger rested close to the trigger guard of the gun. From where I sat the big gun looked like a howitzer. Dell couldn't look us in the eyes as he mumbled, "You two should be buried down there. Where's the sheriff? Is he dead?" I said, "You mean Phil?"
"Yes sir."
"I think so. I saw a tree hit him." I spread my hand across my chest.
"I think that it crushed him." Kimber asked, "Where are my friends?"
Dell shook his head. Was he telling us that he didn't know or was he refusing to answer the question? I couldn't tell.
Dell was staring at the sky. I couldn't see Kimber's face, didn't know how he was reacting to the awareness that his good friends were probably already dead.
I thought about the little gun that was strapped to his ankle.
In my only previous opportunity to be with Dell, he and I had managed some connection that had allowed him to talk with me openly. I decided to try to reestablish that connection.
"Dell?" I said. I had to repeat his name before he'd look at me.
"You didn't kill Tami, did you?"
He looked hurt.
"Oh no. Dear Lord, no," he said.
"Be like killing one of God's own angels."
"Then what are we doing here?"
"What I should have been doing back then, maybe. Protecting my family. It's all I have left that's worth protecting."
"Joey?"
Dell knew what I was asking.
"Joey did a lot of stupid things when he was young.
But, no, he didn't kill his sister."
By my count we were running out of Franklin family members.
"Cathy killed Tami?"
"By accident." The word came out "ax-ee-dent."
"Want to tell me what happened?" "No. He doesn't," Cathy Franklin said from farther up the hill.
"He wasn't there that day. He didn't know about any of this until recently. But I was there when those girls died. I can tell you what happened if you want.
Because this night's going to end the same way that one did-with bodies in the Mount Zirkel Wilderness. See, it doesn't make any difference. You're both going to die tonight, too."
Kathy voice started off shaky and high-pitched. It reminded me of water flowing rapidly over stones in a shallow stream. "You've probably met everybody by now, haven't you?" She was directing her words to me.
"You've been busy. I know you talked to Joey, figured you talked to Dr. Welle.
I bet you probably talked to Mariko's parents, too, didn't you?"
"Yes. I spoke to her father, Taro. Her mother is in Japan."
"So you probably know about the girls being picked up for smoking marijuana?"
"At the hot springs at Strawberry Park."
"Right. Well, that's when it all started." She shook her head, disbelieving.
"With a couple of damn college boys on spring break giving a couple of country girls some free marijuana. And now look at us." She waved her hands out toward the blow down
"Over ten years have passed, and there's still dead bodies as far as you can see. Who would have predicted this?" "No one," I said. I was guessing at my lines, reading the cues from her eyes.
"No one," she agreed.
"No one would have predicted it."
Dell nodded in agreement. Kimber barely moved.
Cathy asked, "Did Phil Barrett ever tell you why the girls weren't arrested that night after he picked them up at the hot springs? Did he tell you that?"
She sounded almost defiant.
"Yes," I said.
"He did. He suggested he was being magnanimous. Didn't want them to suffer their whole lives for one small mistake."
She snickered as she walked from the heart of the woods to stand beside her husband.
"Magnanimous? Phil? Let me tell you something. Phil Barrett was being a prick.
There's only one reason that those girls weren't arrested. Want to know what that is? It's because I agreed to have an affair with him. That's why the girls got off that night." Dell took one hand off the shotgun and slid it to the small of his wife's back. She looked up at him with an expression that I could easily mistake for love.
"Dell didn't know. He didn't know any of this until recently. I did everything else on my own. I did it to protect Tami."
I had an image of an old model train I'd had as a child. Of placing the individual cars on the track. Of aligning the wheels. That's where we were in the story. The cars were on the track. Some of the wheels were aligned, some weren't. I couldn't guess where the train was going to go.
"Phil Barrett was blackmailing you?"
She seemed to like the sound of that. She said, "I guess."