CHAPTER 1
Abigail Foster stared through the windshield at the expired parking meter. Her fingers strangled the steering wheel, knuckles blanching, hands beginning to cramp. This had all seemed like such a good idea a month ago back in New York when she’d pitched the article to Margot, her editor at Great Outdoors. Now, on the verge of seeing him for the first time in twenty-six years, she realized she’d done herself the disservice of glossing over this moment and the fact that she’d have to walk into that building and face him.
Her watch showed five minutes to seven, which meant it was five to five, Mountain Time. She’d sat in this parking space for twenty minutes, and he was probably about to leave, thinking she’d decided not to come. The hostess showed her toward the back of the brewpub, which at five in the afternoon stood mostly empty. Peanut shells littered the floor, crunching beneath the heels of her black pumps, and the reek of brewing beer infused the air with a yeasty sourness. The hostess held the back door open and motioned to the only occupied table on the patio.
Abigail stepped outside, smoothed the Cavalli skirt she’d paid way too much for last year in Milan.
The doubt resurfaced. She shouldn’t have come. No story was worth this.
He sat alone with his back to her at a west-facing table, with the town of Durango, Colorado, spread out before him in its high valley, specked with the bright yellows of cottonwood and aspen, enclosed by pine-wooded hills and bare shale hills and, farther back, the spruce forests and jagged peaks of the San Juans.
The sound of the patio door banging shut caught his attention. He looked over his shoulder, and at the sight of her, slid his chair back from the table and stood—tall, sturdy, wavy silver hair, dark blues, and dressed like something out of Backpacker magazine—plaid Patagonia button-up shirt tucked into a comfortable pair of jeans, Teva sandals.
She felt that knot constricting in her stomach again, noticed his left hand trembling. He seized the chair he’d been sitting in to steady it.
“Hi, Lawrence.”
She knew he was fifty-two, but he’d aged even better than his photo on the history department’s website indicated.
No handshake, no hug, just five seconds of what Abigail ranked as the most excruciating eye contact she’d ever held.
Easing down into a chair, she counted three empty pints on the table, wished she’d had the benefit of alcohol to steel herself for this meeting.
She rifled through her purse, found her sunglasses. It was Halloween, and though the air carried a chill, at this elevation the intensity of direct sunlight made it pleasant to sit outdoors.
“I’m glad you came,” Lawrence said.
A waiter costumed as a hula dancer approached the table.
“Want a beer, Abigail?” Lawrence asked.
“Sure.”
“They have a bunch of different—”
“I don’t care. Something light.”
He said to the waiter, “Bring her a Rock Hopped Pale.”
“Right on.”
The whistle of a steam-powered locomotive blew somewhere up the valley. Abigail saw the plume of smoke in the distance, heard the chugging palpitations of the valve gears as the train steamed south through the heart of town.
“I don’t have any backpacking gear,” she said.
“Scott will outfit you.”
“Who’s Scott?”
“Our guide.”
The silence, uncomfortable as it came, crawled under her skin. “Pretty town you have here.”
She couldn’t help thinking this didn’t feel anything like she’d imagined it would. Having run countless versions of this moment through her head, they’d all carried more gravitas. She would scream at him. She’d hit him. They’d break down and cry together. He’d apologize. She’d accept. She wouldn’t. Now she understood none of that would happen.
They were just two people sharing a table, trying to limp through the awkwardness.
“I’m curious,” she said. “All this time, and now you contact me.”
“I’ve followed your journalism career, subscribe to all the magazines you contribute to, and I thought this…expedition…might be good fodder for your—”
“But you haven’t been interested in helping me since I was four years old.”
Lawrence slugged back the rest of his dark beer, stared at the mountains, wiped the foam from his beard.
Abigail said, “That came out more angry than—”
“No, it’s fine. You’ve got standing to be as angry as you want.”
“I’m not, though.”
The patio door opened and the waiter returned with Abigail’s pint and another round for Lawrence.
When he’d left, she raised her glass.
“Lawrence,” she said, “here’s to our past. Fuck it.”
He grinned. “That easy, huh?”
“We can pretend.”
They clinked pints and Abigail sipped her golden beer.
“So why’d you come?” Lawrence asked. “To be honest, I never expected a response to that email.”
“Funny, I was just sitting out in the car, building the nerve to walk in here, and trying to answer that question for myself.”
The sun ducked behind the mountains and Abigail shivered, the rocky slopes and snowfields blushing with alpenglow.
CHAPTER 2
At 4:30 the next morning, Abigail hurried across the parking lot of the Doubletree, moving toward a big Suburban, where four figures stood in the light of a flickering streetlamp. The air was perfumed with wet sage and resonant of the jabbering Animas River, which flowed behind the hotel.
They all turned at the sound of her footsteps, her eyes gravitating first to her father, then to the man standing beside him, who came only to his shoulders. His head was smooth-shaven and his beard, just beginning to fade in, matched the gray of his deep and thoughtful eyes.
“Emmett Tozer,” he said as they shook hands. “Guess you could say we’re responsible for this outing. Lawrence was nice enough to agree to take us out, share his expertise.”
“Abigail Foster, freelance journalist.” She turned to the woman holding Emmett’s arm. “June Tozer?”
June’s face lighted up and she took Abigail’s hand in both of hers. “Pleasure to meet you, Abigail.” She stood just over five feet, with a streak of white running down the middle of her chin-length brown hair. A sweet energy seemed to exude through June’s fingers. It made Abigail’s arm tingle, as if a gentle current were passing through.
“And I’m Scott Sawyer. I own Hinterlands, Inc. I’ll be your guide for this trip.”
Abigail shook the callused hand of the beautiful man in a T-shirt and torn khakis, instantly liking what she saw, a feeling she sensed he reciprocated. He was young, his hair bleached, probably just shy of thirty, and she discerned beneath his faded clothes the body of a seasoned outdoorsman.
They rode up toward the mountains in the dark, and Abigail was dreaming again before they left the city limits of Durango.
She slept soundly, and when she woke, the Suburban was ascending a steep, rocky road. Scott and Lawrence talked in the front seat, but their conversation seemed muffled. She swallowed. Her ears popped. The sounds of the straining engine and tires crunching over rocks came rushing in. Abigail sat up, rubbed her eyes. The dashboard clock read 6:01 a.m. The sky had lightened into dawn, and they were climbing through a canyon, the one-lane road following the path of a stream.
Scott finally pulled over onto the edge of a meadow and parked beside a rusted Bronco that had long ago ceased to be one discernible color. But despite its state of disrepair, it had somehow managed to drag a trailer up the road. Abigail climbed outside after Emmett and June, heard the chatter of a stream.
They huddled between the vehicles, their breath steaming, the air redolent of spruce.
The driver’s door of the Bronco squeaked open, and a man stepped down into the frosted grass. He was tall, his beard thick save for a few bare spots, his walnut hair drawn back into a ponytail.
Scott said, “Meet Jerrod Spicer, my trustworthy assistant. He’s an excellent outdoorsman, so you should know you’re all in very good hands.” Jerrod let slip a yawn, said, “Sorry. Still waiting for the coffee to kick in.” He walked to the back of the trailer, unlocked the doors. “Gunter, Gerald, time to go to work.”
Abigail smiled as two llamas stepped down into the meadow and began munching on the grass. She approached them, reached out to pet the black one, but it pulled away, affronted by the familiarity.
“I’d rethink that,” Scott said. “Gunter spits.” He opened the back hatch of the Bronco. “Now if you’ll step over here, we can start getting you all fitted for your packs.”
As Abigail watched Scott cinch down the llama packs, she heard a car coming up the canyon. A moment passed, and then a hunter-green Ford Expedition appeared around the bend. It veered off the road and pulled up onto the meadow, a rack of sirens mounted on top, with San Juan County Sheriff’s Department emblazoned on the driver-side door. A woman climbed out and approached the group, which had gathered by the llama trailer. She was petite, with bright, friendly eyes and long brown hair split into braided pigtails.
“Morning,” she said, and tipped the brim of her Stetson. A sheriff’s star had been embroidered into her black parka. “Y’all about ready to shove off?”
“Yep,” Scott said, pulling the strap to tighten the hip belt of his pack.
The sheriff motioned to Scott’s pack, said, “I see you’re taking a fly rod. You wouldn’t mind letting me have a peek at your fishing license?”
“Not at all.” Scott walked down to the sheriff and pulled his wallet out of his fleece pants. He flipped it open. She nodded.
“Y’all look like you’re headed in for the long haul.”
June said, “Well, we’ve got a ways to go…How far did you say, Scott?”
“Seventeen miles.”
“Yeah, a seventeen-mile trek into this old ghost—”
“What’s your name, Sheriff?” Lawrence asked. “I feel like we’ve met before.”
“Jennifer. And yours?”
“Lawrence Kendall. Get down to Durango much?”
“Not if I can help it.” She cocked her head. “Where’d you think we’d met?”
“I don’t remember, but you look familiar.”
“Don’t think we have, and I’m pretty good with faces.” She addressed the group: “Well, I assume you all purchased backcountry insurance.”
“They did,” Scott said. “I’m their guide. I insisted they buy it.”
“Where you taking them?”
“Grizzly Gulch.”
“I thought she said you were headed to a ghost town. There are no ruins in Grizzly Gulch, at least that I know of.” She leveled her gaze on him, unblinking.
Abigail watched Scott. His Adam’s apple rolled in his throat. “Actually, we’re going to Abandon,” Emmett said.
Without averting her eyes from Scott, the sheriff asked, “And what are you planning to do there?”
“Take some pictures. My wife and I are paranormal photographers. Depending on what we get, we may do a show in San Francisco this winter.”
The sheriff said to Scott, “No call to lie to me if all you’re gonna do is take pictures.”
He nodded.
“That is all you’re planning on doing?”
“Of course.”
“And you’ve got the permits to visit Abandon?”
“They do.”
The sheriff looked at June and Emmett. “Could I see them, please?”
Emmett reached into his jacket and pulled out an envelope, which he handed to the sheriff. She thumbed through the papers.
“Wow, a group permit. They don’t give out many of these.”
Emmett said, “We’ve been trying to score one for three years.”
The sheriff gave the envelope back but lingered a moment longer, her brown eyes passing over each member of the group as if taking some kind of mental inventory. “I hope y’all have a real safe trip,” she said, then tipped her hat again and strode back to the Expedition.
As they watched her climb in, crank the engine, and continue on up-canyon, Abigail caught something, but it was subtle, and she instantly let it go. In a day and a half, she’d remember this moment, wish to God she’d paid it more credence. What she saw was a glance between Scott and Lawrence—just two seconds of eye contact that looked something like relief.
CHAPTER 3
They spent the first two hours climbing out of the canyon on a trail that switchbacked through a forest of old-grown Engelmann spruce. Abigail found herself near the back, between Emmett and Lawrence, trying to come to terms with the emaciated air.
At a break in the trees, she peered down and saw the road they’d taken out of Silverton, just a twisting brown thread eight hundred feet below. The sound of the stream had faded into a sustained hiss. The next time they stopped to rest, she’d lost the stream altogether and there was no wind, only the thud of her oxygen-starved heart banging in her ears.
At midday, they crossed a stretch of open country, the grasses dry and yellowed, littered with achromatic midsummer blooms of columbine, lupine, and Indian paintbrush. Abigail could see a subgroup of the San Juans—the mountains tan in direct sun, gray in the shadow of clouds, with rags of old snow high on the peaks. The sky shone neon blue.
Scott led them to the entrance of a broad valley. They came into a forest of ponderosa, plenty of space between the trees, sunlight pouring onto the pine-needle floor of the forest. As they climbed, the occasional spruce appeared among the ponderosa. The pines dwindled. Then they moved through a pure stand of spruce again. Abigail realized they hadn’t been following a trail since breakfast.
In the early afternoon, they arrived at a small lake, and Scott told everyone to shed their packs. Abigail leaned hers against a rotten stump. Without the weight, she felt like she might float away. She knelt down on the shore and splashed water in her face. The arctic shock of it stole her breath. She sat on the grassy bank and drank from her water bottle.
Tall spruce trees rimmed the bank, and the surface of the lake sent back a perfect reflection of the trees and the sky. The water glowed a deep green. She looked through it down to the lake bed, saw a cutthroat trout motionless among the pastel-colored stones.
Jerrod came over and brought her a bagged lunch—sandwich, apple, Clif Bar.
“How you holding up?” he asked.
“Feel like I’m breathing through a straw, and my hips hurt from the pack.”
“I’ll adjust the straps again before we leave. You’re doing well.”
She shielded her face from the sun and looked up at Jerrod. She liked his face. She could tell that beneath the beard he was handsome, taller than Scott, even more well-built. But she wondered about the scars, two bare patches curving up from the corners of his mouth in the shape of crescent moons. Staring at him, she wished she could see his eyes again. They seemed different—she’d noticed it at the trailhead before the sun came up and drove everyone into sunglasses. They reminded her of something she couldn’t quite put her finger on, their density and depth, like they bore some great burden beyond the intake of the present.
Jerrod left to take Emmett and June their lunches. Abigail unwrapped her peanut butter and grape jelly sandwich. She ate, watching the llamas graze the bank.
They made camp at eleven thousand feet in a glade just spacious enough to accommodate five tents. They were only a few hundred feet below the timberline and the forest had transitioned into a withered-looking collection of blue spruce and alpine fir, crippled by years of extreme winters. Scott insisted that everyone change out of their wet clothes to avoid hypothermia. Within half an hour, they raised the tents. The guides showed everyone how to inflate the Therm-a-Rests and arrange their gear inside the vestibules.
With still a few hours of light left, Abigail emerged from her tent, bundled in long underwear, fleece pants, a vest and parka. Emmett and June stood watching Jerrod construct a campfire ring from a pile of rocks.
Lawrence snored in his tent. Scott dug through a giant compression bag filled with what Abigail could only hope was real food, not that granola-bar shit.
She walked up to him, said, “I need to use the ladies’ room. What do we do about that?”
“I haven’t unpacked the toilet yet.”
“Really? You have a portable—”
His grin stopped her. “You’ve never spent a night out in the woods have you?”
She shook her head.
“Well, no worries. There’s a bathroom behind every tree.”
She smiled and slowly raised her middle finger.
Abigail found a bit of privacy behind a blue spruce. The air nipped her bare ass. The ground steamed. She glanced at her watch—6:30 p.m., still on Manhattan time, and it made her homesick to think of Viv and Jen. Any other Sunday, she’d have just finished working out and showering, in a mad rush to meet them at the Zinc Bar. But so far, this trip had been nothing like she’d expected. The thin air, the cold, ten fucking miles, and the hardest still to come. She had thought she’d be in her element out here, but she hated everything—the Clif Bars, the smelly, bitchy llamas. And there was something about the light beginning to fade and no warm bed to climb into that depressed the hell out of her. I’m a city girl. If there was ever a question. While she squatted there, she gazed back down the valley. That open country they’d crossed several hours ago lay golden in the late-afternoon sun, and as she stood, she saw it. A few miles below, perhaps at the lake where they’d stopped for lunch, a column of smoke rose out of the forest. As she walked back toward their campsite, she felt glad to have seen it, relieved to know they weren’t completely alone out here.
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