Joe approached the juniper as Britney wailed, holding her face in her hands and retreating from the place where Stewie had fallen.
'Britney!' It was Stewie. 'Stop screaming! I'm all right.'
Joe kneeled and cautiously parted the stout, sticky branches. Stewie's large hand, like an inert pink crab, was in the bush, gripping onto its base so hard that his knuckles were blueish white. Joe braced himself, grabbed Stewie's wrist with both hands, and began pulling.
'Whoa, Joe!' Stewie said from over the rim. 'Whoa, buddy! I'm okay I'm standing on a ledge.'
Joe sighed and sat back, and watched Stewie's hand unclench in the brush and slide down out of it.
'Stewie! Britney cried in relief, leaning back against a tree trunk. 'Don't ever do that to me again.'
'Don't you want me to help you up?' Joe asked.
There was a beat of silence, and something small and brown was tossed up from below the juniper. Joe caught it, releasing a puff of dust,
It was an ancient child's doll. The head was a dried ball of rocklike leather and the arms and legs were stuffed with feathers and sewn from rough, aged fabric. The face, if there had ever been one, had washed clean over the years. The doll's matted black hair, sewn on the leather head, looked human. The doll, no doubt, had belonged to an Indian child.
Joe scrambled forward on his belly and pushed the juniper branches aside. Stewie looked up at him with a massive, radiator-grille grin.
Stewie stood on a narrow shelf of rock no wider than a stair step. The shelf ran parallel to the ledge, then switched back, still descending. Far below Stewie, trapped against the rock ledge by an outgrowth, were gray tipi poles that had come unbundled and fallen over the edge a hundred and fifty years before.
Joe studied the opposite rock wall as he hadn't before and now he saw it. A narrow shelf, a natural geological anomaly, barely discernible against the same yellow and gray color of the canyon wall and hidden in places by overgrowth, switch backed up the other wall as well.
'This is the crossing,' Joe whispered. 'This is where the Cheyenne crossed the canyon.'
33
'DID I WAKE YOU UP?'
'Are you kidding? I haven't slept,' Marybeth said, as she swung out of bed, the phone tight against her ear. The floor was cold beneath her bare feet. 'Did you find Joe?'
Trey Crump hesitated.
'I located his pickup in the valley. It was parked just off the road.'
The phone reception was crackling and waves of static roared through the receiver. Marybeth looked at the clock on her bed stand it was five forty-five A.M.
'You haven't seen Joe?'
'Negative,' Crump yelled over the static. 'I had to drive back up to the top of the mountain to get any radio or telephone signal, Marybeth. I might cut out at any minute.'
'I understand,' she shouted, surprised at the loudness of her voice in the empty room. 'Tell me what you found.'
'The pickup and the horse trailer are empty. The pickup's been shot up .. .' Marybeth gasped and covered her mouth with her other hand, 'and somebody disabled the engine and deflated the tires. I found two other vehicles as well; one is a Mercedes SUV with Colorado plates and the other one I just located about a half-hour ago up on the other mountain. It appears to be a black pickup with a horse trailer. There's no one at the scene of .. .'
A whoosh of static drowned out the end of his sentence. Marybeth closed her eyes tightly trying to hear through the roar and willing it to subside.
'.. . The cabin was burned to the ground just last night. It's still smoking. There was a body inside that was not Joe. I repeat, it was not Joe!'
Marybeth realized that she was gripping the telephone receiver so tightly that she had lost feeling in her hand.
'Marybeth, can you hear me?'
'Yes, Trey!'
'I found your buckskin horse, and I'm sorry to say the horse has been killed. I searched the vicinity around the horse but couldn't find any sign of Joe.'
She let out the breath she had been holding. It racketed out unevenly.
'Marybeth, I've contacted the sheriff and he is on his way now He told me he will call for a helicopter out of Cody. It should be in the air above us by midmorning.'
'The sheriff?' Marybeth recalled her conversation with Rowdy McBride from the night before. She recalled that McBride never actually confirmed .. . 'When will the helicopter get there?'
'A couple of hours. But the sheriff should be here any minute. I just talked to him.'
'My God, Trey what do you think happened?'
She missed the first part of his sentence. '.. . happened. I can't tell who is who with these vehicles up here or if they're even connected with Joe's disappearance. I ran the plates with dispatch and the SUV belongs to a Denver lawyer but they can't find anything on the plate on the black pickup.'
'You mean it can't be traced to anyone?'
