timber that stretched from the property line all the way up and over the ridge.
An hour slogging along a barely discernible maze of animal trails to the north and east. No sign of her.
South and east then, over some of the same terrain I’d covered yesterday. When I reached the rocky meadow, I found another trail that skirted it on the uphill side and took that until it vanished in thick underbrush. No sign of her.
Across the grassy open space and into the trees on the other side. No sign of her.
Back over the far end of the meadow and up the slope beyond. I hadn’t climbed up there yesterday and I should have, because partway up there were indications of recent passage-a trampled fern, a slide mark on the needled ground. The marks weren’t distinct enough for me to tell if they’d been made by a human or a large animal like a deer. I hunted for more signs, didn’t find any except for another unidentifiable ground scrape. I shouted Kerry’s name until my voice began to go hoarse.
At the top of the slope was an unpaved, rutted road that appeared to be little used-the old logging road I’d been on yesterday when I heard the explosion, I thought. Yes: I walked down it to the right, and after a couple of hundred yards I was at the intersection with Skyview Drive. No sign of her.
I turned back to follow the logging road in the other direction. Fifty yards or so after I passed the place where I’d climbed onto it from the slope, I came to an area along the far verge that caught and held my attention. Broken branches, crushed vegetation, faint tire tracks in the soft earth that hadn’t been there long. Kids parking for sex or drugs, maybe. I walked around, studying the ground. No other tracks. A slope fell away below the road on that side as well; I moved along the edge, looking down among the trees and underbrush.
A short distance from the tire tracks, there were more signs of what seemed to be recent passage. But again, I couldn’t tell who or what had made them. There was no trail, so I had to make my way down the incline using pine trunks and boughs for leverage. Toward the bottom were more marks in the soft, needled earth, one that might have been a footprint.
The terrain leveled out through heavy timber. A couple of faint scuffs in the carpeting of needles, then nothing. I kept going, winding through the trees until they thinned and the ground angled downward again. Another fifty yards and I could see through the trees to open daylight.
I could smell something, too, sharp odors that overpowered those of pine resin and leaf mold and moist earth.
Burnt wood. Smoke residue.
I groped ahead to where the treeline ended near the bottom of the slope. The open space I was looking at was the long, wide section spanning the bottom of Skyview Drive. And straight ahead, the burned-out remains of the Verriker house.
VFD firemen were still on watch, a single truck parked at the edge of the driveway. Quick action and luck had prevented the blaze from spreading into the surrounding timber. If there’d been any delay, a strong wind, they’d have had a holocaust on their hands. Scorched grassland extended partway up the rear hillside to where the firefighters had dug long, irregular firebreaks; half a dozen trees and the remains of the upended passenger car spread out like charred skeletons. The smaller outbuilding had been destroyed, the front wall and one side wall of the barn blackened, and the roof burnt through.
Difficult looking at what was left of a home where a woman had been alive one minute, incinerated the next. I turned away, back into the trees.
As shaky as I was, the climb up to the logging road seemed interminable. Two steps forward, one sliding step back, like one of those slow-motion dream sequences where every step you take feels as if you have fifty- pound weights strapped to your legs.
But then, near the top of the rise to the logging road, I found the hat.
Spotted it out of the corner of my eye as I was climbing, a pale blob caught behind a moss-covered tangle of broken tree limbs. That was why I hadn’t seen it on the way down. I veered over there, caught it up.
Wide-brimmed straw hat. Kerry’s sun hat.
Recognition brought a rush of relief. If the hat was here, then she had to be somewhere close by.
But neither the deadfall nor the vegetation that stretched out around it had been disturbed. No marks in the grass, no trampled ferns, no torn boughs or trunk-bark scratches. Just the hat.
I plunged along the slope to the west, stumbling, sliding, pawing through the ground cover, shouting her name. A hundred yards, two hundred, until I could see Skyview Drive through a break in the trees. Nothing to indicate that she’d come this way. I dropped down lower, groped my way back past the faint animal trail to search and call in the other direction.
Still nothing.
I must have gone another four or five hundred yards, up and down the slope, before I gave it up and dragged myself onto the road. And then along the road to where it began a steep, curving climb up toward the ridge. And then back along the slope on the other side.
No Kerry, no other sign of her.
By then, my breathing was so labored I began to feel light-headed. Muscles quivered all through my body. If I didn’t quit moving, rest a while, I was liable to keel over.
I found a rotting log, sat with my legs splayed out and my head lowered until I had control of my breathing again. The dial on my wristwatch swam into focus through a blur of sweat. Christ. Not even nine o’clock. It seemed as though I’d been out here half the day. Three-plus hours gone, and already I was low on stamina. Sixty-four years old, not in prime physical condition… I could not keep making unreasonable demands on my body, or I’d end up having a stroke or a coronary, and then what good would I be to Kerry?
The straw hat was still clenched in my hand. I turned it over and over again, staring at it. If her hat was here, she’d been here. So why hadn’t I found her? Lost the hat, then somehow got herself lost? No. If the hat had fallen or been knocked off and she wasn’t hurt, she’d have been sure to retrieve it. Favorite of hers, she wouldn’t just abandon it.
Hurt somehow… but please, God, not too badly? She might have managed to walk or hobble a distance away from here, trying to get back the house, looking for help or shelter. Maybe she had made that trail I’d followed down to the Verriker property after all No, no, you couldn’t see the property from up here; she wouldn’t go downhill through heavy timber to an unknown destination. She hadn’t been anywhere near the Verrikers’ house when it exploded, or somebody would have found her by this time. I’d already settled that in my mind.
If she had been hurt, it had to’ve been up here on the trail-there’d been no evidence of a fall down the slope anywhere near where I found the hat. In that case, logic said she’d have stayed on the road until she reached Skyview Drive. Made no sense she’d have gone the other direction, up that long steep incline toward the ridge. Besides, there was no evidence on the road to support that explanation, either.
Something else had happened here.
The grassy place across the road, where a vehicle had been parked recently… suppose the vehicle had been there when Kerry came along, suppose whoever owned it had been there. The spot wasn’t far from where the hat had lain.
I went over there, walked around carefully so as not to disturb any of the signs. Look closely, and you could see the tire indentations in the grass, the slide marks on the needle-covered earth that had been left when the vehicle backed up and turned around. One of the indentations was clear enough and deep enough to indicate that the vehicle had been heavy and broad-beamed-SUV, van, pickup. I could make out other marks, too, less distinct, that might have been made by shuffling feet.
A coldness moved through me, tightening my gut, stiffening the hairs on the nape of my neck. Negative vibes, hypersensitivity, sixth sense-call it whatever you wanted to. I’d had it before and I’d learned to trust it, and in this place, it scared the hell out of me.
Something had happened here, all right.
Something bad.
10
PETE BALFOUR
