She looked at her hands. “I no longer suspect Justin, even though I despise him. He just didn’t care. And as tough as it was for me to accept, I realized he didn’t care enough about Diane to hurt her. She really meant nothing to him. He’s got a new girlfriend now, and he’s moved from Colorado. We haven’t heard anything from him in months, although I still follow his races on the Internet. When Bobby told us about your statement, Brent called him on his cell phone and left a message that there might be some new information. Justin hasn’t returned the call.”
Joe sighed. Her pain gave him a knot in his stomach. That his report had given her a glimmer of hope made his palms cold.
She looked up. “I hope you can forgive my husband for the way he acted earlier. If there is such a thing as being obsessed to the point of insanity, that pretty much describes Brent now. I’m watching him fall apart in front of my eyes. Sometimes, I think it would be better if some hunter found her bones. At least then it would be over. If the news didn’t kill him, he might finally be able to recover. But this not knowing . . .” She let the sentence trail off.
“It’s been so hard on Brent,” she said suddenly. “He worshipped his daughter, even though she distanced herself from him in the end.”
Joe thought about that.
Suddenly, the front door burst open and Sheridan flew inside the house, running straight for her bedroom. Joe looked outside and saw her pickup truck in the driveway with the door open and the motor running.
“Crap!” Sheridan said, seeing Joe and Jenna Shober. “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize you were there.”
“What’s up?” Joe asked.
“I forgot my basketball shoes,” she said. “I’ve got to get them and go. Practice starts in ten minutes. Sorry.”
With that, she ran into her room and ran out with the shoes. “Sorry to interrupt,” she called out over her shoulder. “See you later, Dad.”
“See you later,” Joe said, even though Sheridan had shut the door and jumped back into her truck.
“She’s pretty,” Jenna said.
“Thank you,” Joe said, distracted.
Jenna reached out and squeezed Joe’s hand. “Hold on to her tight,” she said. “Don’t let her go.”
Joe knew what she was thinking. The same thing he was thinking.
SHE TOOK out a large envelope from her purse. “We meant to show you these things earlier,” she said. “But things got heated and Brent forgot. These days, he gets so wrapped up in the how that he forgets about the why. He just assumed you’d jump up and go find our daughter. When you didn’t, he lost it and forgot about the envelope. When we got to the motel, I slipped it into my purse and lied about going shopping. Brent would never have approved of me coming here myself to talk with you.”
Joe nodded, still dumbstruck from seeing Sheridan and imagining what it would be like if she left one day and never came back. He paid polite attention to a postcard she handed to him.
“This was sent to our Michigan address a year ago,” she said.
The card was a generic COLORFUL COLORADO postcard with faded images of Pikes Peak, the Maroon Bells, a skier turning down a slope, and the Denver skyline. He flipped it over. It was postmarked from Walden, Colorado, but over the border.
The handwriting was crimped and severe, as if the author had struggled with the words. He guessed the sender was male.
Jenna:I’m sending this to you on behalf of your daughter Diane. I saw her and she is fine. She says not to worry about her. She asks that you not share this message with her Dad.
It was signed, A Friend.
Joe handed the card back. “Any idea who sent it?”
“No. But it gives me hope.”
He kept his voice soft. “Her disappearance wasn’t a secret. I mean, anyone could have sent this to you. It could be a cruel hoax, or it could be someone well-meaning trying to ease your pain.”
She looked down. “I know that. But I want to think it’s real.”
A moment went by as Joe tried to form his question as diplomatically as possible. “So, did you show it to Brent?”
She shook her head quickly but didn’t look up.
He sat back. “Why not?”
She looked away. He could see moisture in her eyes.
“You didn’t want him to know,” Joe said.
She whispered, “It’s tough.”
Joe was confused. He knew he was on thin ice. Finally, he said, “Jenna, is it possible the relationship between your husband and your daughter was, you know, a little too close when she was growing up?”
Jenna refused to answer, which was an answer in itself, Joe thought.
Minutes passed. Joe didn’t press. And he tried not to stare at her while she sat silently, looking away.
At last, she said, “Would you like to look at some photos?”
“Sure,” he said. Anything to move past his last question, he thought.
He’d seen most of them before in the initial briefing before he’d struck out with the search-and-rescue team, and others on fliers the Shobers had posted, but he didn’t want to hurt her feelings by not looking at them. He did look at them to try to find what it was about the unknown woman he’d seen that made him think of Diane Shober. Maybe a profile or an expression? But thus far, none of the photos made a direct connection.
Most of the shots were of Diane running in competitions. She had a determined set to her face, and her blond hair flew back like frozen flames. Her fists were clenched, her arms pumping, the muscles in her arms, thighs, and calves taut as ropes.
“Here,” Jenna said, “this is the one we wanted you to see.”
Joe took it. The photo was not from a track meet, but from training. In it, Diane wore tight running clothes but she looked happy and relaxed and she had a nice open-faced smile. The right front fender of her Subaru poked out from the bottom left corner of the photo, and behind her were lodgepole pine trees and a glimpse of a cobalt blue sky between openings in the branches. Joe wondered if the shot had been taken at the same trailhead where her car had been found.
“Justin sent us that picture,” Jenna said. “He said he took it a week or so before she disappeared but he’d forgotten it was in his camera. He sent it to us almost a year after she’d been gone.”
Joe nodded. As he studied the photo, it hit him. He jabbed at the shot with his index finger. “Oh, man,” he said.
On Diane’s left arm was an iPod in a pink case.
“This looks exactly like the case Caleb had in his daypack,” Joe said softly.
“Bobby made the connection,” she said. “He said he asked you about it when you were in the hospital.”
“Yes, he did.”
“Brent was supposed to show that to you today, but he was so upset he forgot. That’s why I came back.”
Joe shook his head. What was the possibility the case he’d seen in Caleb’s daypack was similar but different? Given the remoteness of the tableau, the odds were tremendous they were the same item.
He looked up. How to say it without upsetting her? “Mrs. Shober, they look the same. Yup, they do. But that doesn’t mean she’s up there with them. I told you I was probably mistaken. And there’s the possibility they found this case on a trail or even stole it from a car or something.” Or found it on her body and took it, he thought but didn’t say.
He started to hand the photos back, but one of them nagged at him. He flipped through the stack again to a shot of Diane in a heated discussion with two other women runners in what was obviously a track meet at a stadium. All three wore uniforms that looked the same. Joe looked up for an explanation.
“Oh, that one,” Jenna said. “It’s from college. I have that one in there because I think it shows Diane’s passion. Those other two girls are on her team, and one of them had lost a race because a competitor tripped her deliberately. Diane was so angry. . . .”
But what Joe was struck by was the gesture Diane was making: stabbing her right index finger into the palm of
her left hand to make a point.
“Your daughter,” he said, “has she always been blond?”
Jenna laughed. “Since high school, anyway. She dyes it religiously.” Joe took his index finger and placed it along the brow of Diane’s face in the photo, creating bangs. “So if she doesn’t color her hair, it turns back to the original dark brown,” he said.
“Yes.”
Joe looked up. “Do you know the name Terri Wade?”
Jenna looked back quizzically. “Of course I do. She was our housekeeper when Diane was growing up. Diane loved her, we all did. But she left us years ago. She and Brent had a disagreement. . . .”
Joe’s jaw and shoulders dropped. He flashed back to that moment when he saw the faces reflected in flame.
Jenna saw his reaction, said, “What?”
“Mrs. Shober—I saw Diane. She’s using the name of your old housekeeper,” he said. “A name she’s comfortable with. She let her hair go brown and she dressed frumpy so I wouldn’t recognize her. But at one point outside that burning cabin, she turned away and then turned back. The angle of her face or the way the fire made her hair look lighter and her face look younger and resembled the photo on all the flyers. It made me think there were two women when there was only one.” He thought back again to that scene in the woods, that one quick glimpse of the “fourth face.” Wade turning away into the darkness, then the flash of one he’d thought was a different woman. Except it hadn’t been. It had been Diane all along. He shook his head in amazement. “And she’s got the brothers thinking her name is Terri Wade because they used it when they talked to her. I told you earlier I was probably mistaken but I don’t think so now. She was alive when I saw her last. So you need to know that. But . . .”
Her expression didn’t change but her eyes glistened with tears. “So you won’t help us?”
He couldn’t look into her eyes any longer. He handed the photo back and said, “I’m sorry.”
She started to say something, but her throat caught with a sob and she snatched the photo back and turned angrily away.
As she shoved the photos back into the envelope, Joe stared at the ceiling, the window, the floor. Anywhere but at her.
“Joe?” It was Marybeth, from behind him. He hadn’t heard her come into the house from the garage and place her briefcase on the kitchen table. And he didn’t know how long she’d been there in the doorway to the kitchen, or how much she’d heard.
He turned.
“Go,” she said. “Go find her.”
A MINUTE AFTER a sobbing and grateful Jenna Shober left their house, Joe said to Marybeth, “But I promised you.”
“You promised me when we didn’t know it was really Diane up there,” she said. “And when I put myself in Mrs. Shober’s shoes, if Sheridan or April or Lucy were missing . . .”
Joe nodded. “If you’re sure . . .”
“Take Nate,” she said.
“Of course.”
WHEN THE DOORBELL RANG, Joe expected either Brent or Jenna Shober, not the FedEx driver. He signed for a medium-sized box that wasn’t as heavy as it looked.
From the kitchen, Marybeth said, “What is it, Joe?”
“Dad,” he said.
22
THEY WERE RIDING BLIND, STILL BEARING WEST TOWARD THE high rim of the last cirque, Parnell in the lead, when Farkus said, “So all this time we were tracking a deer?”
Parnell didn’t answer. He glowered, though. Farkus thought the man was humiliated but didn’t want to show it.
Farkus said, “What I gather is these guys are the Cline Brothers? Of the Cline Family? What was their mother’s name? The one in the news?” It came to him and he answered his own question: “Caryl Cline. I remember seeing her on TV. She had a following out here, you know. But why did the game warden say their name was Grim?”
“Because I’m sure that’s what they told him.”
“Why would they do that?”
Parnell started to answer as he approached the edge of rim, but he suddenly reined his horse to stop with a violent pull. “My God! There’s someone down there.”
“Is it one of the Clines?” Smith asked. “Did you see him? Did he see you?”
Parnell shook his head slowly, “It isn’t one of them. You are not going to believe the scene down there.”
Intrigued, Farkus, Campbell, and Smith nudged their horses forward. As the horse walked, Farkus stood in his stirrups and strained to see over the rim. With each step of the horse, he could see a little more terrain below as it opened up to him. He was careful not to expose any more of himself than he had to. He was certain that the rim dropped away into a sheer rock wall. On the other side of the cirque, the wall wasn’t as steep. There was a trail through scree on the other side of a pure blue mountain lake. And then he saw her.
“It looks like a naked woman,” he said, a smile stretching across his face. “Finally, something good has happened.”
IT TOOK HALF AN HOUR for the four horsemen to circumnavigate the last cirque to the trail down to the lake. Occasionally, as they rode near the rim, Farkus would rise up and catch a glimpse of the woman. It was too far to see her clearly, but what he could see was as interesting as it was baffling. She was swimming. He wondered if the water was as cold as he remembered. He caught flashes of pale white skin, long dark hair fanning in the fantastically clear water, a glimpse of bare shoulders and small breasts and long limbs. There was a pile of clothing in the rocks near the shore of the alpine lake.
“I feel like I died and went to heaven,” Farkus said. “I been hunting up here all my life just hoping to see something like this. D’you suppose she’s alone?”
“Don’t let her see you,” Parnell said. “There’s something oddly sirenlike about this situation.”
“Sirenlike?” Farkus said. “You talk in code, Parnell.”
“Shut up, Dave,” Smith said. “You obviously don’t know your classics.”
Parnell ignored them both, said, “We’re staying just long enough to find out if she knows anything about the Clines.”
THE TRAIL DOWN to the lake was wide enough at first that the horsemen could ride two abreast. Parnell and Smith led; Farkus rode with Campbell. The trail narrowed about twenty yards from the lake and slivered between two large boulders. As they descended, Farkus could catch glimpses of the surface of the water on the far side of the lake and the high rock face that led up to the rim where they’d first seen the woman. But because of the size of the boulders on either side of the trail, they couldn’t see her yet.
The steel shoes of the horses clicked on the crushed rock of the scree. Farkus could feel his heart beat faster. He reluctantly held back on the reins so Parnell and Smith could squeeze through the opening in the boulders first. He wondered if she would scream when she looked up and saw four men coming toward her on horseback. He kind of hoped so. He also hoped he could get to the pile of clothing before she did.
But the whistling sound he heard was not a scream, and he looked up to see a thick green branch slice through the air on the other side of the boulders at chest height. On the end of the branch was a two-foot pointed stake. Farkus caught a flash of it in the air streaking toward Parnell and it thumped into the man with a hollow sound. While the fire-hardened stake didn’t penetrate Parnell’s body armor, the velocity of the impact threw him backward off his horse and he hit hard on the rocks in front of Farkus.
“Ambush!” Smith hollered ahead of him a half second before a shotgun blast blew him out of the saddle.
Farkus’s horse reared and bellowed and he flew backward out of his saddle, hands windmilling through the air as if to find a hold. He landed hard and facedown in the loose shale, and grit was jammed into his nose and mouth. Inches from his face, a horse’s hoof slammed into the rocks, and another right behind his head.
Two heavy booms came from behind a man-sized slab of rock to the right of the boulders, and he was crushed under Campbell’s dead body as it fell on him, pinning him to the ground un
der the man’s weight.
The last thing he saw before his eyes closed was the figure of a very tall man rise out of the rocks. There was something wrong with the man’s face, like there was a dried red rose on the tip of his chin. The man was thin and gaunt. His face was pale and sunken and flesh peeled away from his nose. He wore a red plaid shirt with big checks, and a white slouch hat pulled low over his eyes. Farkus watched him limp over from where he’d hidden in the rocks to where Parnell was writhing on the ground, trying to get breath. He shot Parnell point-blank in the head. Parnell’s body thrashed with the muscle spasms of the dead.
Then he heard, “You all right, Caleb?”
The response was a cross between a goose honking and a calf bawling.
Farkus turned his head toward the voice and saw the same man who’d spoken first. He thought he was seeing double.
And from the lake he heard a scream. Or was it a shriek of joy?
He thought: Wendigo. And there’s more than one of ’em.
“OPEN YOUR DAMNED EYES,” a voice growled. “I know you ain’t dead.”
Farkus felt a pure terror course through him like a cold electric shock. He hoped his facial muscles didn’t twitch, didn’t betray him. But he was afraid they had.
For the past hour, he’d lain still on his back. Campbell’s heavy dead body crushed him, and as the time went by it seemed to get heavier. Campbell’s body lay crossways across Farkus, facedown. Beneath him, several sharp stones poked into his lower abdomen and thighs and the nose of a boulder pressed against the left side of his skull. His arm—which was trapped behind his back under Campbell’s body—was numb from lack of circulation.