The Dead Season (6 page)

“But I’ll be in the wilderness.” I was starting to wonder if I should reconsider.

“That phone will work from Mars. That’s why I gave it to you. Just make sure it’s charged before you leave. And, Raine.” He looked for a moment as though he was going to say something stupid and patronizing like
Be careful
or, worse,
Don’t go hiking up a mountain in the middle of the winter for ten days with a bunch of jailbirds you don’t know
.
I could see it in his eyes, and I appreciated the sentiment, but no one who knew me would have said it out loud. So he only said, “Stay warm. I’ll call you from the airport.”

“Have a good time. Tell Melanie I’ll check on her before I leave.”

It was only after I hung up that I realized, with a silly kind of wistfulness, that I really kind of wished he had said something stupid.
 

I had known Maude for most of my life.
She had
taught me everything I knew about dogs. It had been she who had given me my first golden retriever,and s
he
’d
been my partner in Dog Daze for fifteen years. Maude and I were accustomed to taking over for each other when we had to, and even though she had only been back from Florida a few days herself, Maude had no problem moving in with her two dogs for a week to run the kennel and take care of Mischief and Magic while I was gone. In fact, I think she was as bored as I was with the extended holiday, and she was glad to have easy access to the training facility, which would give her goldens a head start on the competitive season. She was not, however, quite as enthusiastic about the details of the expedition. “No offense intended, my dear, but young people are hardly your specialty. Haven’t you told me over and over you’d rather have dinner with a golden retriever than a child any day? Why would you willingly agree to take an entire bevy of them on a wilderness hike?”

I felt compelled to defend myself. “Well, I did okay with Melanie, didn’t I? She wasn’t exactly a little cupcake when I first met her.” She had, in fact, been a holy terror, and if the truth were told, it had been my dogs, not I, who had turned her around. Now Melanie was one of my favorite people, and the experience had suggested that there might, in fact, be other children in the world I could learn to like. “Besides,” I added, “these are teenagers, not children, and I’m just going along as a field specialist.” Whatever that was.

“Troubled teenagers. What kind of trouble, do you suppose?”

“Well, I don’t think any of them have served time. According to the website, rebelliousness, anger, disrespect, the usual.”

“Hmm. Sounds a good deal like you when you were a teenager. Perhaps you’ll be of use after all.”

“Thanks a lot.”

Maude had clerked for my father, a district court judge, until his retirement, and had been practically a member of the family for as long as I could remember. She had pulled me out of more than one scrape as a teenager, and if she hadn’t, I doubt I would’ve grown up to be the respectable citizen I am today. “Anyway, that only goes to prove there’s hope for anyone.”

“True enough. You’ve checked this fellow out, I suppose?”

“Sure.” I guiltily remembered the video Miles had sent me, which I had not had time to watch. “That is, I’ll give Buck a call in a minute, but you don’t get the money for a building like that one unless you’re legitimate.”

“I’m certain you know what you’re doing, my dear. What time shall I report for duty?”

I arranged for her to mind the kennel while I ran errands the next day, and as soon as we hung up, I dialed the sheriff’s office. I was both surprised and oddly relieved when the dispatcher informed me that Buck was on vacation. In all the time we’d been married, the only vacation time Buck had taken was a few days here and there to go fishing. Of course, he hadn’t been sheriff then.

And he hadn’t had a cute new girlfriend to go on vacation with.

“You know things are dead around here this time of year,” she went on, “and I hear the weather is great in Florida. He’ll be back next week though if you want him to call you.”

Florida? The farthest he had ever taken me was to the next county for a movie on Saturday night. And he hadn’t even told me he was leaving. The two of us might be estranged, but we did still talk.

I guess things had really changed.

I said, “No, umm, that’s okay. I just called to ask someone to check on something for me.” I explained to her about New Day, and she volunteered to do a computer search while I waited on the phone. A few minutes later, she came back with a clean report: permits and licenses in order, no complaints.

“Oh, wait a minute,” she said, just as I thanked her absently and was about to hang up. “Here’s something. APB on a missing person last year from Bullard County, some kid went off a hiking trail. But he must’ve turned up because they closed out the case a couple of days later.”

“Okay, sounds good, then,” I told her. “Thanks for your help.” And I hung up, still thinking about Buck in Florida.

And Miles in Portugal.

I called Paul Evans and took the job. He was delighted. “Report here Saturday morning at seven,” he told me. “We’ll provide your backpack, tent, sleeping bag, food and other supplies, and you have the list of personal items you should bring.”

“I’ll bring my own provisions,” I assured him. Packing a backpack for a wilderness expedition was, in my opinion, like packing your own parachute. If you left the chore to someone else, you had no one but yourself to blame when things went wrong.

“That’s really not necessary—”

“Thanks, but I prefer it. Besides, I have to pack for Cisco, too.” Cisco was trained for backpacking and could carry most of his own food and water, but that was certainly not something I would trust to anyone but myself. “What kind of fresh water sources can we expect?”

Most people think that the cold is the biggest danger of winter camping, but it’s actually dehydration. A smart camper always carries plenty of water purification tablets and makes sure his route takes him close to fast-moving streams that are unlikely to freeze.

He chuckled a little. “Plenty of fresh water, Miss Stockton. We have done this before.”

I assumed that meant they would have jugs of purified water stashed along the route for the city kids. I’d bring my own water purification kit anyway.

We talked for a few more minutes about some of the demos I had planned, and he was enthusiastic. When I hung up I was feeling quite pleased with myself. Who needed Florida? Or Portugal, for that matter. I was going to have a
real
adventure.

~

I got up early the next morning and drove to Asheville for the supplies I needed: protein bars for both Cisco and me, freeze-dried dog food in pre-measured pouches that were both lightweight and nutritionally balanced, and MREs that actually tasted like the food they were purported to be. I kept most of those things on hand, but when Cisco and I went into the wilderness it was rarely for more than a day or two and I was not accustomed to supplying for over a week. I also bought Cisco a set of protective rubber booties, because you can never tell how the weather is going to turn above 3500 feet, and nothing will slow a dog down faster, or make him more miserable, than ice between his paw pads. I had a perfectly good camp stove, collapsible cup, water pouch and sleeping bag, but I spent more time than I should have in the camping store, marveling over the high- and low-tech equipment that was guaranteed to make the great outdoors as comfortable as your own living room. In the end I bought a new set of wicking long underwear, some extra wool socks—because you can never have too many pairs of dry socks—and a couple of extra lightweight heat packs. I could have spent my entire paycheck in the camping store, but made myself leave before temptation got the better of me.

The night before, I had watched the four-minute news clip Miles had sent me about wilderness rehabilitation programs for troubled teens, which were, as I suppose anyone with a troubled teen would know, fairly prevalent across the country. The programs lasted anywhere from six weeks to six months and centered around a holistic approach to wellness and recovery. In addition to psychological counseling and team-building exercises, the teens spent weeks learning wilderness survival skills and practicing them on day hikes in a relatively safe environment. Toward the end of the program, their skills were tested in the wilderness on a hike of one or two weeks’ duration. Graduates of the program were said to have a 50% less likely chance for recidivism than those who attended traditional rehabilitation therapy, and in the past ten years, only one provider had fallen under scrutiny when charges of child abuse were brought—charges that were, according to the report, eventually dropped.

While I was waiting at the drive-through for a burger and fries for the trip home (after all, winter hiking uses an enormous amount of calories and I figured I could afford to bulk up), I got a text from Miles. Personally, I think we are both too old to be texting and that was only one of the things about the new phone that I disliked. But over the past few weeks I had gradually gotten used to it.

What are you doing in Asheville?

The phone’s GPS system, which was supposed to be an important safety feature, was another thing I could have lived without. You were supposed to be able to disable it, but I had not yet taken the time to discover how.

I texted back:
Are you stalking me?

Trying to.

Where are you?

Airport. Check photos.

I pushed t
he icon for new photos and a picture came up of a golden retriever puppy curled up asleep atop a pile of neatly folded clothes in an open suitcase. I grinned in spite of myself.

Cute.

Boarding. Bye
.

My order arrived and received the steaming, fragrant bag with one hand while I typed with the other:
Me too. Bye
.

Actually, I was getting pretty good at this.

~

By the time I got home, Max was already comfortably installed in his private kennel, with its radiantly heated floor, elevated bed and automatic water supply, munching on a bone and surrounded by an array of toys that Heather had left for him. It occurred to me that Max, by being unqualified to go on this trip, might actually had gotten the better end of the deal.

Maude agreed with me. “His owner seemed to be a pleasant enough young lady, but I explained to her he is a good obedience course or two away from being certified for anything, much less a wilderness trail. But of course at his age, a certain lack of impulse control is only to be expected.”

I was confused. “Heather told me he was four.” But now that I thought of it, he did look—and act—much younger.

“Not according to his vet records. The Town and Country Animal Hospital of Pendleton, Ohio, seems to think he turned two last September, and I’m inclined to trust them, since their shot records go back to his first puppy shots at age eight weeks. Of course, she is his second owner, so perhaps she was misinformed.”

I looked up from the vet record she had handed me, frowning. “That’s odd,” I said. “She told me she’d had him since he was a puppy. I wonder why she would lie.”

Maude gave a philosophic shrug as she returned the papers to their file folder. “I should imagine that, with ten days in the wilderness together, you’ll have plenty of opportunity to find out.”

But by the time I saw Heather again, a minor prevarication about her dog was the least of my concerns.

CHAPTER
SIX

T
here is something exciting about getting up before dawn on a below-freezing morning, grabbing a cup of coffee and a bowl of instant oatmeal, and packing the car for a trip by the lights from the windows with your boots crunching on ice mud and your breath frosting the air. For Cisco and me, such mornings usually mean a competition, a tracking class, or—even better—doing what we were trained to do: a wilderness search for someone who was in trouble. Cisco’s spirits were as high as mine as I hurried through my morning chores—feeding the dogs and turning them out into the exercise yard, scooping the poop, refilling water dishes, setting the thermostat, and checking my backpack and Cisco’s one last time. Cisco gulped his breakfast, looking up several times to make sure I wasn’t going to leave without him, raced outside for his morning toilet, and then padded through the house at my side, panting excitedly, up and down the stairs, back and forth from door to hall, as anxious to get on with the adventure as I was.

Maude was coming at nine, so I put Mischief and Magic in one of the big kennel runs next to Max, turned the lights down low, and left them with some peanut butter-smeared chew bones and classical music to pass the time. Inside the house I made sure the coffee pot was off, washed all the dog dishes and put them away, double-checked the thermostat and turned off the upstairs lights. My backpack and Cisco’s were waiting beside the front door. I pulled on my hiking coat—an insulated all-weather job with zippered underarms for ventilation, elastic wrist and neck bands lined with sweat-absorbing, wind-chasing crew knit, and double fasteners to keep out precipitation—and hoisted both backpacks. “Okay, boy,” I said, “let’s hit the road.”