“That’s nine thousand feet there,” he said. “And we were one ridge down, in this area that flattened out, and we had the slope at our back. You can see that? The way the line bends, it shows you that there’s a flat area there. It’s not as steep as what’s around it, you see?”
He looked up at her, curious to know if she understood.
“Yeah,” she said. “I can see it.”
“Well, that’s where we were camped. We’re working on orienteering, and I saw the smoke and figured out where we were…and then…then, later, when you put the light on, I saw this place. That was probably an hour ago? You’d be surprised how well the light carries, with this thing being so tall. But once I saw it, I remembered what it was. Or what it probably was. When you turned it off, I got kind of worried that I’d imagined it. I mean, it got so dark so fast, it was like it was never there. But I had the angle right, I mean the bearing, it’s called a bearing, and so I just…I just kept walking.”
He was beginning to ramble now, and his hands had started to shake. For the first time, he looked troubled. More than troubled. He looked terrified.
“Walking away from what?” Hannah said. “What has you so scared?”
“I don’t know. Listen, I need you to do me a favor.”
Here we go, she thought. Here’s where it gets interesting.
“Call for help,” she said. “Yeah, I’m on it.”
“No. No, please don’t do that. If you could just…give me a little while to think.”
“To think?”
“I just need to…need to stop. Just for a few minutes, okay? I need to just…figure some things out. But I’ve got to think.”
“We need to get you out of here to someone who can help you. Let’s do that, and then you can think. You shouldn’t be up here. I can’t just let you stay up here.”
“Then I’ll leave. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have come here. It seemed like the right thing but now…I’m afraid I made a mistake. I’m going to leave.”
“Don’t.”
“I should. Forget about it. Just forget I was here. There’s no need to make a big scene out of it, calling the police or whatever. I don’t think that would be good.”
His voice was shaking.
She said, “Connor? It’s my job to let people know what’s happening up here. If I don’t report this, I could get fired.”
“Please,” he said. He seemed on the verge of tears, and she didn’t understand a bit of it, knew only that she needed to get somebody up here to deal with him. An underage kid wandering the backcountry alone at night? That was something you called in immediately.
“Let’s all think on it,” she said. “I’m just going to let my bosses know you’re here. That way, if they have a good idea, they can share it, and if your parents have gotten ahold of people already, if they’re looking for you, then everyone can relax.” She moved toward the radio. “Think about how scared they’re going to be. This could do a lot to make them feel better.”
“Please,” he said again, but she wasn’t going to listen, and she kept her back to him as she reached for the mike.
“I’ll just report your position, that’s all. You don’t need to worry.” She keyed the mike but got only as far as “This is Lynx Lookout” before he smashed the hatchet down on the desk, severing the cord between the microphone and the radio.
She screamed and whirled away, tripping on the chair and falling to her hands and knees. Turned back and stared at him as he took more careful smashes with the hatchet she kept near the woodpile for splitting kindling. He was using the back of it now, trying to crush the front of the radio. And having success. He was sobbing while he did it.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Really, I am. But I don’t know if we can do that. I don’t know if that’s a good idea. If they already made it this far, then somebody is listening. Somebody is telling them things that were supposed to be secret.”
18
The smoke that Connor had located correctly on the map was still visible above the mountains when Ethan reached the Pilot Creek trailhead with six exhausted boys in tow and one missing in the wilderness behind them. It had been a forest fire, just as he’d feared. It seemed to be growing. He stared at it with detachment, this thing that once would have occupied so much of his attention, and then he turned to look back at those who were waiting for them.
Three police cars-two SUVs and one pickup truck from the park. Six people in uniform milling around. One for every boy Ethan had brought back out of the mountains.
He’d had some time to think about it, several hours of walking down through the darkness while behind him Connor walked in the opposite direction. If he walked at all.
In a different situation, Ethan would have cared deeply about that. He wondered what was more selfish, putting the anonymous boy ahead of Allison, or Allison ahead of the boy. There was the responsibility to a child in need, and then there was the responsibility to your wife. Picking one over the other was never the noble choice, not that he could see. So you tried to care for them all, but in the end you couldn’t do that. You made choices.
He had made the wrong choice.
Only you can handle this, Jamie had suggested, and his answer had been Of course, you are right.
The boys fell gasping onto the ground, some of them not even unfastening their packs first. He looked at them and felt the weight of failure, a weight he had not known before.
He knew several of the officers on scene. While most tended to the boys, passing out water bottles and asking questions, a police sergeant named Roy Futvoye took Ethan aside. They sat beneath the open tailgate of his Suburban and Roy told him that the house was destroyed and Allison was in the hospital in Billings.
“She said there were two of them. She seemed…a little vague with what they were after.”
Yes, she would have. Secrecy, Ethan had said. Trust no one, Ethan had said. I’ll keep him safe, Ethan had said.
“What did they do to her?” His voice was low and he couldn’t look Roy in the eye.
“Far less than they might have. If she hadn’t started that fire, who knows.”
Ethan looked up. “Allison started the fire?”
Roy nodded. “Used a can of bear spray on the woodstove. It ran them off, but…but she paid a price too. She’s got some burns. And one of those guys”-now it was Roy who didn’t meet Ethan’s eyes-“one of them busted up her mouth pretty well.”
“Did he, though,” Ethan said. His own mouth went dry.
“She’s okay,” Roy said. “She’ll be all right. But I need to talk to you. If there’s a reason these men are here-”
“There’s always a reason,” Ethan said. His mind was already gone from the conversation. He was back at the cabin, envisioning a man busting up her mouth pretty well.
“Serbin? I’m going to need you to focus for me here. If you’ve got any information on these men, I need it. The sheriff is dead and it might be connected. The action I take is-”
“Claude is dead?”
“You see that smoke?”
“Yeah.”
“That fire’s still going, and Claude was at the start of it. We found his body up there. He’d been timbering. Now, you know Claude. And I know Claude. You tell me-does he start a fire in the middle of the afternoon while he’s felling trees?”
“Unlikely.”
Any job that arrives with a blizzard, he’d said to Jamie Bennett that night. And laughed.
He turned and stared at the faces of the fatigued, confused boys who knew nothing. Marco was watching him with concern. Marco, who’d be going back to his shitstorm of a home life now. All of them would be.
“She’s safe,” Ethan said to Roy. “She’s okay. Hurt, but okay.”
“That’s right. You can see her. She’s had better days, to be sure, but you’re not going to lose her, Ethan. You didn’t, and you won’t.”