The Dead Season (15 page)

“The wind must have blown it down,” he said. There was no trace of an apology in his tone. “We’ll have to make sure it’s replaced.” He turned away from me and called, “Jess, how’re you coming with that map?”

It was possible, I suppose, that the wind might have blown the sign over. It was even possible that it might have blown the sign off the trail and down the ravine. But if Paul had looked a little closer he would have noticed what was very obvious to me: two symmetrical holes in the ground, the fresh dirt still dark with winter damp, where something had been pulled straight up out of the ground very recently. Something like a sign.

I couldn’t entirely repress a shudder as I knelt down to hug Cisco one more time. But the great thing about dogs is that they live almost entirely in the present, and Cisco, now with all four paws once again safely on terra firma, was grinning happily and ready to move on. We went to join the others just as Heather and Angel came up, followed closely by Tiffanie.  

“Doofus here got us off the trail,” Pete was explaining to them irritably. “Now we’ve got to go all the way back and figure out where he screwed up.”

“I didn’t do any such thing! We’re on the damn trail!” He thrust a half-crumpled trail map in Pete’s face. “See for yourself!”

Pete swiped the paper away. “You don’t even know how to read that thing!”

“Like you do!”

The mistake they made (and, if I was completely honest, the one that Cisco and I had also made, although not entirely on our own) was one that was common to a lot of rookie hikers. Mountain trails don’t always go forward. Sometimes they actually go
up
—
as in up the vertical embankment and over the rocks where, I could see from where I stood, the footpath picked up again on the fairly level terrain about five feet over our heads. The boys, not anticipating this, were still looking for a place that the trail might have forked without their noticing.

Naturally, I opened my mouth to point this out, but I caught the warning in Paul’s eye and closed it again. Apparently, this was some sort of test. I only hoped they figured it out before Lourdes and Rachel caught up with us and made the same mistake Cisco almost had. I was getting pretty sick of these tests, and as a note for future expeditions: the wilderness is
not
the place to test your hiking savvy. Take an online course. Practice in a nice safe national park. Don’t bring a bunch of kids out into God’s Country and expect them to prove themselves or die. For crying out loud.

“Look at your map again, Jess,” Paul advised calmly. “The route is clearly marked.”

“I looked at it! It says we’re right where we’re supposed to be!”

Heather said, gesturing forward, “What’s up ahead?”

Jess held out his arm in a staying motion. “Dead man’s bluff,” he said. “Doggie dude almost bought it.”

Heather’s eyes flew to me in alarm. “Oh my God! Are you okay?”

I gave what I hoped was a nonchalant shrug. Inside I was fuming. “Close call,” I admitted. “We just need to make sure no one goes past this point.”

Paul said nothing, and Jess, glowering, turned back to study the map. Pete pushed past him impatiently, marching back down the trail in the way he had come. “You missed a turn, you dope. It’s got to be back here somewhere.”

“Hey, wait a minute.” Frowning, Jess looked up from the map, looked up over his head, and I knew he had figured it out. He followed Pete until he spotted the access point. “This way, man.”

Though the climb was short and there were handholds, it was not, by any stretch of the imagination, suitable for the inexperienced hiker. Jess made it up, but only by stripping off his pack and leaving it with Pete. When he realized the only way to get his pack up the wall was with a rope, he had to climb back down to get it. After that things went more smoothly. Cisco was in high spirits and ready for anything, but there was no way I was going to send him up that bluff until I checked it out myself. Pete scaled the cliff and hauled his backpack over the edge, and I was right behind him, leaving Cisco with Tiffanie. I pulled my backpack over the rim, then instructed Tiffanie to loop the rope through the ring on Cisco’s backpack.

The boys had been too busy congratulating themselves on their success to even notice when I scaled the wall, much less offer to help, but they wandered over curiously when I called down to Tiffanie, “Okay, when I say, give him a push.”

She hooked her fingers beneath Cisco’s collar and called back, “Ready!”

“Cisco,” I commanded, “scramble!”

I tugged on the rope at the same moment Tiffanie boosted Cisco up the wall, and the boys watched in fascination as Cisco scrambled up the wall and over the edge. Jess even reached down to help him over, and Pete helped me with the rope. To Cisco it really wasn’t that much different from the A-Frame on an agility course, but for the boys it was a chance to put their lessons in teamwork into practice, and they laughed with pleasure in their success when Cisco put four paws on the ground again.

“Way to go, little dude!” Jess ruffled Cisco’s fur companionably, grinning.

“How’d he learn to do that?” Pete wanted to know.

While I was explaining about Cisco’s training, Rachel and Lourdes arrived, and I suggested things might go faster if we pulled up the backpacks while the girls were climbing. Before they knew it, we had an assembly line going, with Pete hauling up the backpacks, and Jess helping the girls over the edge. Kids, like dogs, almost always do better when they have a job.

Paul was the last one over the edge, and announced we had reached our day two campsite.

The kids were ecstatic—or at least, they were what passed for ecstatic under the circumstances. They had marched a torturous trail for four hours and had climbed a wall, literally, and they deserved a break. The bluff was wide and flat, and the ground was a bed of pine straw. Setting up camp was easy. The wind was miserable, though, and I made sure the kids dug an extra-deep pit for the campfire. In conditions like those, a single spark can take out a forest.

The tents were set up and they had a small fire going when I saw Heather walk away from the campsite, presumably in search of more firewood. I handed Cisco’s leash to Lourdes. “Keep an eye on him for me, will you? I’ll be right back.”

Her jaw dropped open, but her hands closed around the leash. “Me? You want me to watch him?”

“Sure,” I said. “Why not?”

Tiffanie came forward, reaching for the leash. “I’ll do it.”

Lourdes hands tightened on the leash defensively. “She said me.”

“It’s fine.” I ran a protective finger under Cisco’s collar and smiled at Lourdes. “Just don’t choke him okay?”

I followed Heather into the woods.

I was raised by a mother who did her best to make me into a Southern lady. I’ll admit I’ve been in a fistfight or two in my life. But they were mostly with boys, and to be honest those boys had a severe disadvantage: they had been raised by the same kind of mother I had, who taught one unbreachable rule—
never hit a girl. Nonetheless, as I marched toward Heather McBane, I had never in my life wanted to punch a girl in the face more than I wanted to punch her. I was practically trembling with the effort to restrain myself when I caught up with her.

“We could have been killed!” I said to her, low and hard. My hands were clenched into fists in my coat pockets. “You pulled up that sign and tossed it over the cliff. Cisco was tied to me! If he hadn’t been, he would’ve fallen to the bottom of the ravine. If I hadn’t been paying attention, we both would’ve have fallen! Are you crazy? What in the name of all holy hell were you thinking?”

There was genuine panic in her eyes, and a hint of terror. “I’m so sorry! I never meant to hurt Cisco! I didn’t know—I didn’t think you would be the first—I didn’t know!”

I grabbed her shoulder. “Who?” I practically screamed at her. “Who were you trying to hurt?”

She wrenched away from me, breathing hard, her eyes wounded and wild. “Don’t judge me! You don’t know what’s going on here! You don’t have any idea! You seriously
don’t have any idea
.
” 

I tried to look rational. “Yeah, okay, well tell me about it, Heather. Tell me what it
is
I don’t get. Because I am about thirty seconds away from turning you into Paul, or the police, or whoever it takes to get your crazy ass off this mountain and away from these kids who don’t deserve to have their lives put in danger by your crazy-ass, irrational,
stupid
agenda, whatever the hell it is. So talk.”

Okay, a little over the top. A little too many crazy-asses. I briefly cursed the mother who had made it a crime in my mind to hit a girl. I thought about Cisco going over the edge of the cliff, and the wild panic in his eyes when he realized there was nothing but air under his feet and I wanted to punch her. I really, really did.

“I didn’t mean to hurt anybody,” she said, but the way she slid her eyes away told me that wasn’t exactly the truth.

I took a step toward her, my fists clenched in my pockets. One more step and I would be guilty of assault.

Her gaze flew to mine, and it was filled with a pathetic mixture of anxiety and remorse—and maybe, because she was not entirely stupid, just a little fear. “I didn’t mean for anyone to get hurt, really. But Paul always goes first, he knows the trail and I thought he’d see—”

“Jess was in front,” I told her tightly. “You knew that!”

“He never lets the kids go first! He pretends to but… I didn’t mean for anyone to fall!” she insisted desperately. “I just figured if enough things went wrong, some of the parents would demand an investigation, and then they’d find out…”

“Find out what?”

She wiped a nervous hand across her face. “What’s really going on. Who—what—he really is. That’s all I want.”

But I was at that moment less concerned with who Paul really was than whom Heather really was. Pieces of the puzzle were falling through my brain like snowflakes that melted on contact and it took me a long, frustrating moment before I could put my hand around a solid clue. “Wait a minute,” I said, staring at her closely. “You told me this was your first time out. That you hadn’t been on this trail before. How did you know about the dead spot in the trail? How did you know where the sign was?”

She licked her lips. She avoided my eyes. “That’s not important,” she said. “What’s important is—“

“Oh my God,” I said softly. “That’s where he died, isn’t it? That bluff is where Brian Maddox fell.”

She said harshly, “He didn’t fall.”

I stared at her.

She cast her eyes quickly around and took a step closer, as though afraid of being overheard. She spoke low and fast. “I tried to tell the police, but these local yokels wouldn’t listen to me. They just wanted the whole thing off their books. Brian called me right before he died. We were on video chat just minutes—I think just minutes before he was killed.” Her voice choked a little here, and she bit her lip briefly. She continued in a stronger voice, “He had proof of what was going on here. Paul found out about it and Brian was afraid to stay here. He left the hike the second day to get the evidence back to the authorities and then all of a sudden, what do you know? He’s dead. I came out last fall with his parents to identify the body, and I made the rescue people take me to where he was found. That’s how I knew about the bluff.”

“What kind of evidence?” I demanded. “Evidence of what?”

The wind whipped her hair across her face and she pushed it back impatiently. “They were shut down a couple of years ago in Ohio when they were accused of child abuse. They beat the charge because the kids were too scared to testify. It’s not just sexual abuse. It’s sexual humiliation. Torture. Threats. Psychological battery. That’s what Paul Evans gets off on. That’s how he controls them.”

I felt queasy. “If that’s true, someone would have come forward. These programs are pretty tightly regulated—“

“Didn’t you hear me?” she practically screamed it at me. “These kids are victims of terrorism! He has them so scared not one of them would risk testifying against him. I know, because I talked to some of the kids who were in Brian’s group. I knew what they had been through. I told them I knew. And they were like survivors of a Nazi prison camp. They got hysterical when I even mentioned this place. Talk about scared straight.” She gave a short bark of humorless laughter.

“But their parents—“

A brief, angry shake of her head. “They’re in denial, most of them. They wanted an easy fix and they got it. They’re busy, important people. They don’t have time for details. Some of them, a few of them, suspected something was wrong about this place but didn’t want to dig too deep. Their kids were off drugs, out of the bad habits, obedient and respectful, and they could get on with their lives. That’s all they wanted.”

She took a breath. “Brian was a journalism major, and he was interning at a local television station when he came across the story and found out they had just changed their name and moved to North Carolina. He thought if he could get in as a counselor, he could find out what was really going on. And he did. He said he had video on his phone of Paul with some of the kids that would break the story wide open. He tried to e-mail it to me but it wouldn’t go through from here. Like I said, he was trying to get away from them, and we were on video-chat, when he said he heard someone coming. The last thing he said to me was, ‘They can’t get their hands on the phone. I’m going to hide it.’” Her expression was bleak. “I knew by the next day when I hadn’t heard from him that whoever was following him had caught up with him.”