"You haven't seen Joe?"
"Negative," Crump yelled over the static. "I had to drive back up to the top of the mountain to get any radio or telephone signal, Marybeth. I might cut out at any minute."
"I understand," she shouted, surprised at the loudness of her voice in the empty room. "Tell me what you found."
"The pickup and the horse trailer are empty. The pickup's been shot up .. ." Marybeth gasped and covered her mouth with her other hand, "and somebody disabled the engine and deflated the tires. I found two other vehicles as well; one is a Mercedes SUV with Colorado plates and the other one I just located about a half-hour ago up on the other mountain. It appears to be a black pickup with a horse trailer. There's no one at the scene of .. ."
A whoosh of static drowned out the end of his sentence. Marybeth closed her eyes tightly trying to hear through the roar and willing it to subside.
".. . The cabin was burned to the ground just last night. It's still smoking. There was a body inside that was not Joe. I repeat, it was not Joe!"
Marybeth realized that she was gripping the telephone receiver so tightly that she had lost feeling in her hand.
"Marybeth, can you hear me?"
"Yes, Trey!"
"I found your buckskin horse, and I'm sorry to say the horse has been killed. I searched the vicinity around the horse but couldn't find any sign of Joe."
She let out the breath she had been holding. It racketed out unevenly.
"Marybeth, I've contacted the sheriff and he is on his way now He told me he will call for a helicopter out of Cody. It should be in the air above us by midmorning."
"The sheriff?" Marybeth recalled her conversation with Rowdy McBride from the night before. She recalled that McBride never actually confirmed .. . "When will the helicopter get there?"
"A couple of hours. But the sheriff should be here any minute. I just talked to him."
"My God, Trey what do you think happened?"
She missed the first part of his sentence. ".. . happened. I can't tell who is who with these vehicles up here or if they're even connected with Joe's disappearance. I ran the plates with dispatch and the SUV belongs to a Denver lawyer but they can't find anything on the plate on the black pickup."
"You mean it can't be traced to anyone?"
"That's what they tell me. But they're checking again."
"Trey" Marybeth said, increasing her volume again as a wall of static began to build, "It's the Stockman's Trust. That's who is behind all of this. The pickup belongs, I think, to the Stockman's Trust!"
".. . Say again?"
She cursed. Someone was knocking on her bedroom door. Sheridan. "The Stockman's Trust!"
"I see Barnum's vehicle now, Marybeth," Trey Crump said, distracted. "I'll call you back when I know more."
"Trey!"
"Got to go now, Marybeth. Stay calm and don't panic. It's a good sign that I didn't find Joe here because it probably means he's in the area. Joe's a smart one. He knows what to do. This is big country but we'll find him and I'll advise you of our progress." The connection terminated and Marybeth couldn't tell if it was because the signal was lost or Trey Crump had hung up.
She lowered the receiver to her lap. Sheridan entered, and sat down beside her on the bed.
"No, they haven't found him yet," Marybeth said, finding the strength to smile with reassurance. "But they've located his pickup."
"Why were you yelling?" Sheridan asked.
"It was a bad connection."
34
Once they had crawled down through the steep, narrow, and brushy chute to the trail, their commitment was made. The ledge Stewie had found was a seven-foot drop down a tongue of slick rock. It was clear to Joe that if the switchback ledge became impassable on the canyon wall, or had broken away somewhere below, it would be hard for them to turn back.
Because the ledge was so narrow, Joe did not try to shoulder around Stewie into the lead. Hugging the wall, Stewie sidestepped along the jutting fissure, calling out hazards such as a break in the trail or loose rocks. Joe followed, and Britney with tears of fear streaming down her dirty cheeks, stayed close. They had tied the rope around their waists to each other.
"There's something, like, cinematic about this," Stewie called over his shoulder.
"Watch where the fuck you're going!" Britney hissed.
"Stay calm," Joe sighed. "We've got a long way to go."
Joe buttoned the doll into his shirt. If there was any luck or mystical charge emanating from the doll, Joe wanted as much of it as he could get. The doll rested against his sweating skin as a lucky talisman. He vowed that if he somehow made the descent and got back to his family he would clean up the doll and give it to his girls.
After the first switchback, the trail widened and they were able to square their shoulders and hike down it slowly Like Stewie, Joe kept one hand on the canyon wall at all times. If he slipped on loose earth, he wanted to fall into the wall and not plunge into the canyon.
"I swear if I get home I'll go to church," Britney promised. "I don't know which church yet. It needs to be spiritual, and healing, and forgiving. And without a lot of that religious baggage so many churches seem to have nowadays." Joe's thighs began to burn as he descended. He perversely welcomed the sensation, because it took his mind off of other concerns. He was hungry and his mouth was cottony with thirst. His clothing had been ripped by branches. His eyes burned due to lack of sleep, and despite his efforts to concentrate, there was a thick fog born of exertion, fear, and unusual self-doubt that was clouding his thinking.
They were far down the trail, which Stewie had taken to calling the Cheyenne Crossing, when Joe started to question if they had done the right thing. It would be amazingly easy to become rim rocked that is, to get to a point where they realized they could not get back. Joe had been involved on a search-and-rescue effort of a bighorn sheep hunter who had meandered up a boulder-strewn mountain and found out he couldn't figure out how to get back down. He fell, and the hunter's broken body was found wedged beneath two up thrusts of granite, where he had been for seventy-two hours. The hunter died of exposure on the way to the hospital.
If suddenly the wedge of rock that served as a path ended, they would have to backtrack up the wall. Balance and gravity had helped carry them this far down, and going back up with aching muscles and minds dizzy with hunger and exhaustion would spell trouble. It would be extremely difficult to crawl up the slick rock chute they had used to slide down to the ledge.
Only when Joe looked across the canyon at the opposite wall did he realize that they had already dropped two-thirds of the way into the canyon. He looked at his watch and confirmed that it had only taken twenty minutes.
"When we get to the bottom," Britney asked, "will we go downstream or up the other side?"
"Up the other side!" Stewie shouted triumphantly. "Then on to Saddltstring and cheeseburgers! And beer! And chicken-fried steaks swimming in country gravy!"
"A shower would be nice," Britney said lamely
Getting rid of you two nuts would be more than nice, Joe thought with such clarity that for a moment he feared he had actually said it.
Joe smiled, his spirits recovering. The exhaustion combined with their progress seemed to supercharge his emotions. His mood swung from the utter despair he had experienced a few moments before to near euphoria as they approached the canyon floor. It was a sensation he didn't
welcome, or trust.
The path narrowed, now only slightly less wide than the length of his boots. He pressed his cheek against the cool rock wall and held its unforgiving firmness with outstretched arms as he shuffled along. Soon, he could hear the tinkling of the stream below, but he dared not readjust and look down.