The Dead Season (20 page)

Ritchie asked, “Why didn’t you just lift him back up to the top of the cliff? You had the ropes, and you said it was less than ten feet.”

I nodded slowly. “That would have been the best plan. It wouldn’t have been easy, but I think we could have done it.”

“Why didn’t you?”

I couldn’t reply at first. I was silent for so long that both Mr. Willis and Sonny looked at me curiously, and Agent Brown prompted, “Miss Stockton?”

“I couldn’t,” I answered. “I couldn’t do it by myself, and the kids—they refused to help me.” I met Detective Ritchie’s eyes. “They wanted to leave him there.”

CHAPTER
EIGHTEEN

W
hen I reached the top of the cliff, both Jess and Pete were there to grab my jacket, my arms, and the last few inches of my rope harness to pull me over the edge. The snow was blowing like a white curtain whipping back and forth in front of a foggy windowpane, and the wind had the sound of a roaring ocean. Cisco came wagging toward me with tail held low but face smiling, his way of saying that, while he had missed me terribly and was glad I was back, he understood this was no time for exuberant greetings. I hugged his neck, and for a moment, I just clung to his snow-heavy coat, getting my breath.

“Okay,” I said, raising my voice to be heard above the wind. I pushed to my feet and began to untangle myself from the rope harness. “The good news is, Paul is alive. The bad news is, his phone is not. We’re going to have to make a rope travois—that’s like a stretcher—and pull him back up over the cliff. We’ll have to hurry before the slope ices up so badly I can’t get back down there. I need you guys to get me the ropes from your backpacks—hurry!”

Pete and
Jess, who had been helping me unwind the ropes from my ankles, glanced at each other, and stood up. As one, they backed away.

“Come on, guys, I’m not kidding!” The snow was so thick now I actually thought I would choke on it as I yelled at them. I gestured wildly. “Look around you! This is serious weather! We don’t have time to waste!”

Jess and Pete, stony-faced, said nothing and did not move.

I stared at them for a moment in disbelief and then shoved passed them, stumbling toward the pile of backpacks that were already half-covered with snow. I grabbed loops of rope from each one and, slipping and sliding, made my way back toward the cliff.

“This is not a game, kids!” I shouted at them. “I need help!” I looked from one to the other of them, my arms sagging with the weight of the ropes and my feet stumbling in the snow. “You’re going to have to form a team to lift him up, and I’ll need someone to go over the cliff with me to help form the travois.” I met nothing but deliberately blank faces and gazes that shifted from mine. I turned frantically to Rachel. “You!” I commanded. “Come with me. I’ll help you over the edge. Come on, there’s no time to waste, I can’t do this by myself!”

Rachel’s eyes were as cold as the bottom of an arctic lake. I thought she had not understood me. I screamed, “He’ll die!”

She said simply, “Good.” And she walked away from me.

I looked through the heavy veil of snow to Angel, Lourdes, Tiffanie, Jess and Pete. They stood like soldiers with their chins set, their hands in their pockets, their eyes averted. Cisco stood watching us all, his anxious breath steaming the air.

I stumbled to Heather and grabbed her arm. “This is your fault!” I screamed at her. “You set Lourdes up! You told her about Brian and you planted that phone!”

She jerked her arm away angrily. “I told her the truth! Someone had to know it! Okay, so I planted the phone but I spent three months combing these mountains to find it.”

“You should have turned it into the police! What were you thinking?”

“The police don’t care!” she screamed back at me. “They already proved that! So I wanted witnesses, and I found them, didn’t I? He’s not going to get away with it this time, he’s not!”

I could hardly believe what I was hearing. “If he dies, you’ll be a murderer!” I was in a panic; I didn’t know what I was saying. I said it anyway. “It will be your fault as surely as if you’d pushed him off that bridge!”

The wind whipped her hair across her face and obscured her expression. She may have shouted something at me, but I didn’t hear it. I turned away from her, dragging the ropes, pushing against the driving snow. I turned to face the kids. Cisco pressed his snow-covered shoulder against my knee. I dug my fingers into his fur briefly and then braced myself.  I raised my voice to such a pitch that I thought my voice-box must be bleeding, and still the wind tore away my words.

“Listen to me!” I pleaded. I looked from Jess to Pete to Lourdes to Angel and Tiffanie. “I don’t care who you are, I don’t care what you’ve done. I’m so sorry for what’s happened to you here, and if I have anything to do with it, someone will pay, but right now don’t you see you’re letting him win? If you let him die you are no better than he is, don’t you see that? You let him win! Maybe you think this is the right thing to do, the easy way out, but in the end you are the ones who will pay for it for the rest of your lives—with nightmares, with guilt, with regret. Please don’t let that happen to you! Haven’t you paid enough? You are more than this. I know you are! Please!”

The air was white between us, and faces were hard to see. But no one spoke, no come came forward to help me. I swung toward Rachel and grabbed her arm. “He’s your husband!” I cried.

She pulled away, her face filled with contempt. Her eyes were so dead and cold that they chilled me to my soul.

In the few moments I had stood there, a crust of snow had formed on my hat that was so heavy I could feel it, and the strands of hair that escaped around my face were wet and frozen. When I looked down at my boots, I saw they were already covered with snow, and when I looked up at the sky it was bruised and angry, spinning out a brutal vortex of snow that looked as though it could suck us all up into its fathomless core if we weren’t careful. If we didn’t get moving.

I looked around until I found a sturdy tree and I began to wind a loop around it that was strong enough to hold my weight. When I had secured it, I trudged back to Rachel, shouting against the wind. “The bridge is too dangerous to cross, but you’ve got to get the kids to the lodge before dark. Can you find the footpath?”

She stared at me as though she couldn’t hear me. Frantically, I whirled toward Heather. “I’m going to try to lower Paul to the bottom!” I yelled at her. “Can you get the kids down the footpath?”

Shielding her eyes against the stinging snow, she searched for the path.

A gust of wind almost knocked me off my feet and I could feel time running out. I unsnapped Cisco’s leash from my waist and hooked one end of it to his collar. I handed the other end to Lourdes. She looked at me with big questioning eyes as her hands closed around the leash. “When you get to the bottom, let Cisco lead. He’ll find me.” I turned to Heather. “You’ll have to tie yourselves together or you won’t be able to see in the snow. Heather, can you do this?”

She nodded numbly. I had to believe that she could. I had no choice.

I knelt and took Cisco’s face in my hands. His fur was crisp with snow, and his eyes had a similar look to that I had seen in Lourdes’: confusion, uncertainty, but ultimately trust. I pressed my forehead against his for one breath, tightening my fingers in the fur on the side of his neck, and then I stood.

“Go on,” I yelled at them, gesturing toward the footpath. “I’ll meet you at the bottom.”

My plan was pieced together from scraps and desperation. Clearly, it would take less physical strength to lower Paul the remaining fifteen or twenty feet to bottom of the gorge than it would require to raise him over the ledge, and I thought I could do it myself using the ropes as pulleys. I would have to climb back down to him, fasten him to a rope harness, then scale the cliff again and secure the harness to a tree as leverage so that I could lower him to the next secure ledge. I would then have to climb back down, resecure the ropes, and repeat the procedure until he reached the bottom. It would not be a pleasant journey for the injured man. In fact, the chances of us both making it to the bottom alive were not good at all. But if I left him there, he would surely die.

I was just starting to lower myself over the ledge when Jess grabbed my arm. I was startled. The snow was so thick by this time that I could barely make out shapes within it, and I could only assume—and hope—that the others had followed my instructions and started for the footpath. “I sent Pete with the girls,” he shouted to me. The wind half-closed his eyes and tried to snatch his words away. He staggered against it. “What do you want me to do?”

I was too relieved to argue with him. Of course under ordinary circumstances I would have never endangered the life of a sixteen-year-old, no matter how badly I needed his help. But I think we both knew that, whether he stayed with me or went with the others, all of our lives were in danger at that point. And I needed his help. Desperately.

“I’ll go down and fasten the harness,” I called back. “When it’s done I’ll pull on the rope twice and you’ll lower us both down. Just keep tension in the rope when you feed out the slack. When I get to the bottom, I’ll tie off the rope and you can use it to guide yourself down. Be sure to use a safety harness that’s secure on this end. I’ll show you how.”

“It’s okay!” he shouted against the wind. “We learned rappelling in wilderness training!”

I wondered if he understood, as I did, the irony of the fact that the man who, only moments ago he had been willing to leave to die had taught him the thing that would now save his life. Both of their lives.

He nodded and I caught his shoulder. I was trusting this kid with my life and I wanted to see his eyes when he answered my question. “Why are you doing this?”

His lips compressed briefly and in the blowing snow it was impossible to read what he was thinking. “Not for him,” he returned briefly and turned to get to work.

It took what seemed like hours, working the wet ropes in the icy wind, and by this time, Paul was so delirious with pain that he was no help whatsoever. His leg had begun to swell against the splint and I was worried about cutting off the circulation. He had to have medical attention. But first we had to get him off the cliff.

When the harness was secure, I wrapped Paul’s hands around the rope and I shouted to him, “Paul, listen to me. We’re going to lower you to the bottom of the gorge. You’ve got to try to hold on. Use your other leg if you can to keep from hitting the cliff wall. I know it’s going to hurt. I’m sorry. Just please try to hold on.”

His face was grey and a faint line of frozen saliva rimmed his lips. There was no way of telling from his dull, feverish eyes whether he understood me. But he did tighten his hands around the rope.

I don’t remember much about the descent. I did my best to guide Paul down, but even under good conditions it would have been a tricky operation. At one point I lost my footing and if I hadn’t been tied to Paul we both would have fallen. At another point a gust of wind combined with a slippery foothold slammed us both against a rock wall. I heard Paul scream with pain, and he lost consciousness for a while. My back and my legs and my arms were numb when we reached the tangle of brush and scrub pine at the bottom of the slope, and Paul was going into shock. All I could do was to cover him with a space blanket to keep the snow off and hurry to help Jess.

Under no natural law should any of us have survived that trip down the slope. An injured man with no one but a woman half his size to keep him from tumbling into the abyss, a teenage boy with no practical rappelling experience, a blizzard in which we could neither see where we were going or hear each other’s shouted instructions. At one point I thought I saw Jess swing away from the mountainside and then slam back into it, and my heart stopped. But he righted himself again and completed the descent with nothing more than a torn jacket and a smear of frozen blood on his face to account for the adventure.

I think I knew then that we had no chance of making it back up the other side of the ravine and reaching the lodge before dark. It would have been suicide even to attempt to find the footpath under these conditions. We were stuck at the bottom of a gorge in the midst of a blizzard with no way out and no way to call for help.

I turned my back to the wind and pulled Jess close, shouting into his ear to be heard. “Start putting up Paul’s tent,” I told him. “Double-stake it. Get inside with him and stay there. I’ll find the others.”

He shouted back, “Never separate from your group!”

He was right, of course he was. The worst thing you can do in a wilderness crisis is to move, and that’s true whether you’ve just wandered off a hiking trail or survived a plane crash in the Andes. You stay put and let the rescuers come to you. But my dog was out there, not to mention six other people for whom I was responsible, and all of our survival supplies. If I left Jess and Paul, there was no guarantee that I was not leaving them to their death. If I did not leave them, I might never see Cisco again. I knew what I had to do. I just didn’t know if I had the courage to do it.

Fortunately, I never had a chance to find out. Just as I was drawing a breath of icy air to speak, I heard a sound so faintly in the distance that I might have thought I’d imagined it had I not seen a flair of recognition in Jess’s eyes at the same moment. Torn by the wind and smothered by snow, it was nonetheless unmistakable: it was the sound of a dog’s joyful barking.