The Dead Season (9 page)

I felt sorry for the overweight girl whose cheeks were already stained strawberry with exertion, and I tried to make conversation. “Hi, I’m Raine,” I said.

She trudged on, head down, mouth sullen. “You’re not supposed to talk to me.”

“Sorry, I’m new,” I replied easily. If she thought being rude would discourage me, she was very much mistaken. “What about you?”

She scowled at me, and then hitched up her shoulder straps. “What kind of dog is that?”

“Golden retriever. Do you have a dog?”

She grunted. “Where I come from, we put dog meat in our stew.”

I lifted an eyebrow. “Good to know. Remind me never to have dinner at your house. Where do you come from?”

“You ever hear of a barrio?”

“Sure. I saw
West Side Story
.”

The uneasy, slightly challenging way her eyes slid toward me from beneath her tattooed brow assured me that she had not.

“A barrio is a like a ghetto,” I explained to her, “only Spanish-speaking people live there.”

“Well, that’s where I’m from. We cut people just for fun. On the street where I live, even the cops are afraid to come.”

I shrugged. “Wherever you’re from is home, I guess.”

Once again she slid me an uncertain look. And since, had I been a betting woman, I would have placed money on the fact that she did
not
come from a barrio, I added, “So who did you cut to get sent here?”

“You’re not allowed to ask me that.”

“Sorry.”

She was starting to breathe hard, so I said, “Do you want to stop and have some water?”

She said, stomping determinedly ahead, “Shut up. I could cut you.”

I replied mildly, “Pretty sure you’re not allowed to talk to me like that.”

“Yeah, well, turn me in, bitch.”

Good thing I’m a dog trainer, and know all about staying calm around out-of-control animals. I replied with a thin smile, “I
know
you’re not allowed to talk to me like
that
.”

“Miss Stockton!”

I looked up to see Rachel striding back down the trail toward me. “You’ve been asked not to socialize with the students.”

“No problem.” I clucked my tongue to Cisco and increased my pace, leaving Rachel to bring up the rear.

Okay, lesson learned: I still liked dogs better than kids. And just because I’d managed of make a friend out of one mixed-up girl with dark hair and a bad attitude did not mean I’d cornered the market on child psychology.

Moving on.

~

As the sun rose, our little line of hikers spread out, the chatter grew more sporadic, and the thirty five-plus pound packs the kids carried began to take their toll. I was reminded that three months of sleeping late, lounging around the house, and eating fast food had left me in considerably less than tip-top shape. After the first hour, I took Cisco’s backpack off and carried it myself for the next hour, because he hadn’t had any more time to condition himself to this kind of exercise than I had. The temperature hit forty (I know because I surreptitiously checked the app on my phone) and I tied my jacket around my waist, advising the kids to do the same before they started to sweat. I figured that much was within my purview as a wilderness survival expert.

I munched on trail mix, sipped water from the pouch on my backpack, and fed Cisco some high-protein treats. After we had been hiking for three hours, we came to the first challenge: a steep-banked creek that was too wide to jump and too deep to wade across. I assumed the kids were supposed to figure out how to build a bridge to the other side using ropes and fallen logs, but I knew that no matter what kind of bridge they came up with, Cisco would not cross it. So while the others arrived one by one, wearily divested themselves of their packs, and began to discuss the best way to cross, Cisco and I went downstream in search of the shallows.

It’s true I had never been on this trail before, but I was familiar enough with the terrain to know that if I walked far enough the banks would eventually flatten out; that was the nature of mountain streams. I was in luck. After ten or fifteen minutes of hiking I could easily climb down the bank and jump across the stream in two quick steps that didn’t even splash the bottom of my jeans and barely stained my waterproof boots. Cisco happily padded across without even getting his white feathers wet. We climbed up the opposite bank and hiked back up stream.

Along the way, I took out my phone and texted Melanie.

Don’t ever get a tattoo
.

She texted back:
Kewl! I want a paw print.

Terrific. I was sure Miles would be thrilled when Melanie started pestering him to let her get a paw print tattoo, and there would be no use pretending I’d had nothing to do with it. On the other hand, the good news was that Miles had been right: even out here in the middle of nowhere, the phone worked perfectly.

We could hear the kids’ voices on the other side long before we saw them, and they did not sound happy. One of the girls said, “Why can’t we just camp here?”

And another one—it sounded like Lourdes—spoke over her: “If you think I’m going to crawl over that rickety-looking thing, you’re stupider than you look, boy.”

One of the boys snapped back, “If you’d both just shut up and give us a hand—”

It was then that Cisco, excited to see his friends on the other side, pushed through the underbrush to the edge of the bank and barked a happy greeting.

Jess and Pete were trying to roll a log from a fallen tree—which, by the way, looked about six inches too short to span the creek—to the bank. Everyone else was sitting on the ground, munching protein bars. When they saw Cisco on the other side of the creek, the astonishment on their faces made me grin.

“Hey,” I said. “If one of y’all will toss me a rope I’ll tie it off on this side and we can haul your backpacks over. It’ll be easier than trying to walk that tree with them on.”

One of the girls—Angel, I thought it was—swallowed the half-chewed bite of her protein bar and demanded indignantly, “How did you do that?”

And Pete, straightening up from his efforts with the log, echoed, “Yeah, how did you get over there?”

“There’s a crossing about a quarter mile downstream,” I explained companionably. “My dog doesn’t do bridges.”

“Yeah, well, I don’t do bridges either,” said Lourdes, scowling.

Jess dropped his end of the log. “The hell with this,” he said. Hoisting his backpack, he raised his arm in a kind of lazy salute and declared, “Troops onward!”

He started trudging downstream, and the others scrambled to get their possessions together to follow him. It wasn’t until I saw the quiet fury churning in the eyes of Paul Evans that I realized I had screwed up. Royally.

Of course there was no going back from there. The kids found the shallow crossing as easily as I had and were soon once again marching along the trail, their spirits somewhat higher for having cheated destiny and greatly reassured by the promise that the camp site was less than an hour’s walk away. It was forty-two degrees with four hours of sunlight left. Not bad for the first day.

Paul caught up with me when we had all been on the trail again for less than five minutes. “The point, Miss Stockton,” he said lowly, “was for our students to use the skills they have acquired over the past six weeks in the program to work together and build a bridge. Your interference was counterproductive.”

I replied innocently, “I’m sorry. I thought the point was to cross the stream.”

Rick, my boss at the forest service, used to say I was lucky we had gone to high school together, because I was such a smart-ass no one else would ever hire me. Maybe he was right. Because I do tend to say what I think about any given situation, and I don’t have a lot of patience for idiots.

“I thought we made it clear you were not to interfere with our therapy program,” he said sternly.

“And I thought I was hired as a wilderness expert,” I replied. “Do you want me to do my job or not?”

He gave me one of those gut-freezing looks that reminded me of the times I had been called into the principal’s office as a kid. For the first time, I felt sorry for the young people in his charge.

But he said nothing. He let me out-distance him with my stride, and I could feel his eyes boring into my back, as though he was trying without success to think of a rejoinder. Later, it occurred to me that that was probably the first time anyone had successfully talked back to him.

I felt a little smug for that. I’m not proud to admit it, but I did.

CHAPTER
EIGHT

W
e reached the first day’s campsite while the sun was still high and hazy-bright in the western sky. Lourdes had, of course, fallen far behind once again, but no one seemed to miss her. They got busy setting up camp just as though they knew what they were doing, and I left them to it. 
             
             

Paul had made it clear the staff was not to help with any of the physical aspects of setting up camp, so I unleashed my two-step pop-up tent, staked it down securely into the frozen ground, unrolled my sleeping bag over the foam pad, set up my camp stove, and poured food and water into Cisco’s collapsible bowls. While he lapped up the contents of both bowls, I sat cross-legged on the sleeping bag and prepared a gourmet MRE of not-half-bad chili, followed by a tube of orange-pineapple sherbet for dessert. Always pay extra for the good stuff.

I crawled out of the tent, surprised at the drop in temperature that had occurred in the short time I’d been inside. The sun had started to sink behind a mountain peak and the wind had picked up with a bitter bite. The kids were struggling to assemble their own tents, swearing and whining, but I ignored them as instructed. I flipped up the hood of my jacket and tightened the drawstrings, pulling on my gloves while I walked Cisco into the wood line. Once away from the camp, I attached a twenty-foot line to Cisco’s collar, and allowed him to claim his own doggie latrine. While he was so occupied, I took my phone from my pocket and checked my messages. There was one from Maude, reporting that all was well, one from Melanie wanting to know how, exactly, to teach a dog to speak who wasn’t old enough to bark—as though I hadn’t tried to warn her about that exact problem—and one from Miles, leaving his hotel contact information. I called Melanie back.

She answered chirpily.

“May I speak with Pepper?” I asked politely.

She giggled and there was a lot of clunking and static, but in a moment the goofy face of a golden retriever puppy appeared on the screen. You’ve got to respect a kid who always knows where her puppy is.

In the background I could hear Melanie prompting, “Speak, Pepper, speak!”

Pepper sniffed the camera and turned around to chew her tail.

“Pepper,” I said seriously, “I want you to be patient with your new mom, who loves you very much. Sometimes she forgets you are a dog. We all know that you’ll show her how smart you are when you learn to bark on command in three or four months, but in the meantime maybe you could save us all some time by teaching
her
to walk by your side without tightening the leash in public. That would be great. Now could I speak with Melanie again?”

When Melanie’s face came back on the screen it was a mixture of amusement and, I was happy to see, a little bit of chagrin. “Pepper says she’ll think about it,” she said.

“Good for her.”

“My dad says you’re pretty smart,” she added.

I liked that. “Yeah, well, what do you think?”

“I think you’re kind of a nut.”

I laughed. “Listen, Melanie, I’m out here in the middle of nowhere so I might not be able to call you every day. But if you need anything you can call me because I’m checking my messages all the time, okay?”

“Okay. Dad says we’re coming back to the mountains next month.”

“Cool. Are you having fun with Grandma?”

“You bet. She lets me watch Animal Planet until bed time. Did you know there are 300 species of venomous snakes in the world?”

“Did not know that,” I admitted. And, if I were to be completely honest, it wasn’t the kind of thing I really wanted floating around in my head while hiking the wilderness, even if it was the dead of winter. “I’ve got to get back to work. Tell Pepper bye for me, okay?”

“Okay,” she responded happily. “I’ll text you.”

I chuckled. “Okay. Bye, Melanie.”

As I was about to put the phone away, it buzzed in my hand. When I hit the answer button, Miles’s face appeared on the screen, looking well-rested and well-groomed against a late evening backdrop of cerulean ocean and gold and azure sky. He said, “What’s this I hear about you and Melanie getting matching paw print tattoos?’

I tightened my hood and turned my back against a sudden gust of icy wind. “Are you on your hotel balcony?”

He lifted a glass of something frothy and tropical looking to me. “Why, sugar, you look cold.”