Canyon Sacrifice (5 page)

Janelle's eyes narrowed. Without a word, she let go of his hand and set off down the hallway after the girls.

Chuck gathered himself and followed. He would catch up with her and take her in his arms, tell her how fortunate he knew he was, how much he loved and cared for her. But he was still trailing her when she spun to face him in the middle of the corridor, causing other museum-goers to alter course as they passed. He avoided her eyes as he approached.

“Look at me,” Janelle said.

He stopped in front of her and offered her an uneasy glance
before looking past her at Carmelita and Rosie, still making their way down the passageway.

“Look . . . at . . . me,” Janelle repeated.

He did as told. Seconds ago, her mouth had been relaxed, her eyes warm and inviting. Now, every muscle in her face was tight, her eyes burning into him.

“I love what we've got going between us. You have to believe that,” she said. “But I have to be sure you're with me on this. I already placed my trust in someone by mistake. You know that. I can't let it happen again. I
won't
let it happen again. Not to me, and not to Carm and Rosie.”

Chuck opened his mouth, then closed it.

“Maybe I should have figured this out earlier—like, before we got married,” Janelle went on, her voice softening. “But I'm doing the best I can here. And what I'm saying is, you have to be all the way in on this with me. No halfway about it. You don't deserve that. I don't deserve it.” Her lower lip trembled. “And the girls . . . the girls . . . they don't deserve it either.” Her voice shook. “I don't need a pretend husband, Chuck. I need the real thing. I can't stand by and let the girls grow close to you just to risk having you walk away from them.”

“I—” Chuck began, but Janelle wasn't finished.

“There's a time limit on this thing,” she said, her voice steadying. “I don't know how long, exactly. But there has to be, for the girls, for me. You have to come around for the three of us. All the way around. And you have to do it soon.”

With that, she turned and headed down the corridor after her daughters.

F
IVE

2 p.m.

Chuck shuffled down the passageway behind Janelle.

A time limit
, she'd said.

She was headstrong, impetuous. She'd probably just been blowing off steam. Still, her comment filled him with dread because he knew she was right. Did he have it in him to do what she needed, what he himself knew he had to do, if their brand-new marriage was to last?

Rosie came charging back up the corridor. She darted around her mother, took hold of Chuck's wrist with both hands, and dragged him past Janelle toward a darkened doorway off to one side.

“You gotta see, you gotta see,” she exclaimed gleefully, tugging him through the entry into a windowless, cave-like room lit only by black lights directed at luminescent specimens of hackmanite collected from Meteor Crater, a fifty-thousand-year-old, five-hundred-foot-deep asteroid-impact depression in the high desert east of Flagstaff.

Rosie pranced around the dark room, giggling at the way the cream-colored piping on her blouse glowed beneath the black lights. “Look at me!” she cried out.

Carmelita entered the room behind Chuck and Rosie. As she took in the spectacle of her sister dancing and spinning across the floor between the specimen cases, she smiled, her teeth shining as brightly as the luminescent rocks on display. “This is so cool,” she said to Rosie. Catching sight of Chuck looking on, she clamped her mouth shut. Even from across the room, her disdain for him was evident. She turned her back on him and left.

This didn't surprise Chuck. Where Rosie had taken instantly
to him, Carmelita consistently turned a cold shoulder his way—perhaps wisely so, he chastised himself, given what Janelle had said to him in the museum corridor. Carmelita shared Janelle's striking beauty, same dark hair, heart-shaped face, and smooth olive skin. It was in her eyes that she differed most from her mother; where Janelle's were warm and inviting, Carmelita's tended toward cool and appraising, taking in the world without offering much in return.

Rosie took Chuck by the hand and bunny-hopped alongside him out of the black-lit room behind her sister.

After the museum visit, Chuck, Janelle, and the girls wandered with the crowds along Rim Trail, the strip of pavement that separated the village from the canyon. They escaped the blazing midafternoon sun by ducking into each of the several hotel gift shops that faced the trail and the gaping canyon beyond.

As they strolled from shop to shop, Chuck maintained a discreet distance between himself and Janelle, counting on the passage of time to dissipate any residual heat from her comments in the museum passageway even as the day's temperature kept climbing. He set himself to finding a gift for her in one of the shops. In the gift shop on the ground floor of Kachina Lodge, and again in the Bright Angel Lodge gift shop, he spotted some earrings he thought Janelle would like—though he wondered if she would see his present as too obvious an act of atonement.

Not daring to risk it, he abandoned the earring display and made his way to the safety of the camping-gear section in the far corner of the store. There, among familiar displays of extended-reach lighters and LED flashlights, one item caught his eye: an old-school hatchet, silver, with a black rubber handle and hard plastic head cover. The hatchet, the last in the store, hung alone between foil packets of dehydrated strawberry ice cream and a row of digital compasses that pointed to true north at the press
of a button. He slid the hatchet off its hangar rod; it was coated in a layer of dust. Hatchets were fast becoming relics of a bygone era. Rather than use one to chop kindling, it was far easier these days to start a campfire with a squirt of lighter fluid and the flick of a butane lighter.

He gave the hatchet an experimental swing. It was heavy and solid in his grip. He felt someone's eyes on him and glanced up in time to catch Carmelita watching him from a T-shirt display on the far side of the store. He smiled at her and slashed the hatchet through the air, bringing it to a sudden halt with a silent
thwack
when it struck imagined wood. Carmelita's eyes lit up. He thought she might smile back at him, but, catching herself, she pursed her lips and went back to studying the display of shirts.

The brief light in Carmelita's eyes was enough, however. Chuck paid for the hatchet and handed it to Janelle when the four of them regrouped across from the store.

“What's this?” Janelle asked, holding the hatchet away from her body with her finger and thumb, as she might a dead fish.

“A hatchet.” Chuck grinned at her.

“I know, but . . .”

“I'm giving it to you for reasons of safety,” he explained. He buried his grin, careful not to look at the girls. “It's indescribably sharp, a brutal and unforgiving implement of total devastation and destruction that's really for someone else. Some
ones
else.” He paused, feeling the girls' eyes on him. “If you think they can handle it.”

Janelle's face brightened in understanding. She wrapped her fingers around the hatchet's rubber handle and spoke gravely, even as her eyes sparkled. “I'm sorry, but I'm not sure I can allow this dangerous implement into our household.”

The girls were on their toes, their eyes on the shimmering object now gripped firmly in their mother's hand. Chuck allowed the agonizing silence that followed Janelle's comment
to play out for as long as he dared, his face set, smiling back at Janelle only with his eyes.

“Well, then,” he said, taking the hatchet back. “I guess we'll just have to dispose of this in the simplest way possible.” He turned to the girls. “Here goes nothing.”

He reared back and made as if to heave the hatchet over the railing and into the depths of the canyon. Before he could complete his toss, however, Janelle laid a hand on his forearm and brought her face close to his. She was smiling openly now.

“Actually,” she purred, “I kinda like things that result in devastation and destruction.” Her fingers drifted down Chuck's arm and closed around the back of his hand.

From the corner of his eye, Chuck saw Rosie and Carmelita smiling along with their mother's obvious pleasure.

“Hmm,” he said to Janelle. “Sounds like this implement is too hot for either of us to handle. We're going to have to come up with somebody else to carry it for us.”

“Me, me!” Rosie hollered, her hand thrust into the air. “I'll carry it! It's not too hot for me!”

Chuck looked at Janelle, his brow furrowed, then back at Rosie. “I'm tempted,” he told her. “I am. But you, all alone? I'm not sure. Don't you have someone you could share this duty with?” He slid his hand, still holding the hatchet, out of Janelle's grasp and raised the hatchet so that its metal handle glinted in the sunlight. “I believe this is going to have to be a shared responsibility.”

Rosie looked confused. Then she beamed. “My sister!” she shouted. “Carm! She can help me!”

“Why, of course she can,” Chuck said. He handed Carmelita the hatchet before she had a chance to refuse.

Carmelita feigned reluctance, but the gleam in her eyes betrayed her. She turned the hatchet over, its head protected by the plastic cover, as Chuck spoke to her in an Old West accent.

“You take good care of that instrument of destruction, little lady,” he said with mock seriousness. “We aim to have us a camp-far this evenin', and we're a-gonna need that-there blade to help make it fer us.”

“A fire! Yea!” Rosie cheered at Carmelita's side. She turned to her sister, her eyes big and round. “Do you think you can do it, Carm?”

There was a beat of silence, long enough for Chuck to wonder whether Carmelita would reply, caught as she was between reassuring her little sister and maintaining the wall between herself and Chuck.

“Sure,” she told Rosie. “I got this.” Without looking at Chuck, she swung the hatchet through the air and brought it to a sudden stop with a silent
thwack
against an imaginary piece of wood. “See? Piece of cake.”

She marched down Rim Trail, hatchet in hand. Rosie skipped alongside, chattering away.

“An ax?” Janelle said to Chuck as they headed down the trail. “You're trying to win the girls over, and you buy them an ax?”

“A chance to find out what you tied yourself and the girls into. That's why you wanted to come here, right?” Chuck gestured ahead at the hatchet hanging from Carmelita's hand. “For better or worse, that's my world right there.”

Janelle dangled her thumb from the back pocket of Chuck's jeans and reached across her body to take hold of his upper arm with her other hand. “I guess you're right,” she said, pulling him tight against her as they followed the girls along the trail. “I guess this is exactly what I tied us into.”

Chuck glanced at her and was relieved to find that she was smiling.

S
IX

6 p.m.

A comfortable, early evening breeze, no longer hot though not yet cool, sifted through the trees. Carmelita and Rosie played in the camper. The plan was for Chuck, Janelle, and the girls to dine on the prepared meal of fried chicken and potato salad they'd picked up from a snack stand in historic El Tovar Hotel, then head over to the canyon rim for sunset.

Chuck sat in a folding chair in front of the campsite's ash-filled fire pit with a bottle of beer in hand, absorbed in his thoughts. Janelle sat next to him, her fingers tapping on the tiny keyboard attached to the Internet-enabled tablet computer balanced in her lap.

The fifteen-year age difference between Chuck and Janelle made for a gaping divide between them in any number of aspects—including their comfort levels with all things high tech. Chuck used plenty of technology in the course of his work, of course, relying on a digital transit, fluxgate magnetometer, and wheeled spectrometer to perform initial site assessments and determine how best to string grids and proceed with digs. He cataloged finds in spreadsheets on his laptop at the end of each field day, prepared reports and bids with the aid of ArchLogical software, and kept in close contact with contract administrators via text and email. His personal life, on the other hand, was decidedly low tech. Prior to meeting Janelle, his days away from work had revolved primarily around fly fishing the waters of the Animas River flowing through Durango, his nights around weekly poker games with a small circle of friends from his high-school days, and shooting pool an additional night or two a week with the same handful of buddies.

As his work grew more technological, Chuck had gone the
opposite direction when it came to the one pastime he was truly passionate about: elk hunting. Each autumn he scheduled the timing of his contracts to give himself a two-week break, which he spent hiking through the high country north of Durango dawn to dusk in search of the elusive ungulates. He'd hunted with a high-powered rifle and scope for a number of years, until he'd grown uncomfortable with how easy it became to spot the movement of animals as far as half a mile away using his peripheral vision, a critical hunting skill, then close in and drop an unsuspecting elk with a five-hundred-yard shot. He took to hunting only with open sights, which required him to stalk within two hundred yards of an elk to make a reliable kill. After several more seasons, he increased the degree of difficulty of his fall hunts even more by switching from his 30.06 to a Civil War-era muzzle loader, which had a reliable firing range of only a hundred yards.