He just grunted. “Do you know what it is?” she asked.
He shook his head. “Y’know, Ray Yardhaas was a lot more entertaining as a hiking companion than you are,” she said.
“Be quiet,” he replied. “If there’s somebody in here with Peggy Landry, I don’t want to give him advance notice we’re coming.”
“Oh. Sorry.”
He waved her apology away. They reached the fork in the track she remembered from Monday. “Quarry,” she said, pointing right.
He gestured with his head that they should go right. After a few yards, the forest canopy opened up and she could see the hazy sky, colorless and cloudless. He waved her behind him and walked toward the edge slowly. When he got within a few yards of the rocky outcrop that Clare and Ray had stood on to view the quarry, Russ dropped down on his belly and crawled forward. Clare did the same, the small rocks and scrub grass scraping her exposed skin.
“Anything?” she asked as she drew near to the edge.
He pushed back and clambered to his feet. “No.” She stood up as well, gratefully brushing away the bits of rock embedded in her thighs. They looked over the smooth chunks of shale that marked the upper rim of the quarry. “What’s that over there?” he asked, pointing to where the crevasse opened into the rear of the quarry. After several days without rain, the waterfall was a weak trickle down the rock face. “Is it part of the construction?”
“No, it’s a natural gorge. Runs down from the mountain.”
“Could they have hiked up there?”
“I don’t think so. I met the state’s geologist when I was here on Monday, and he described it as knifing down the mountain. I suppose someone could climb up the back wall of the quarry and get in, but I can’t imagine this Colvin guy getting Peggy up there under duress. Look at it. That’s a real toe-and-fingerhold climb for at least fifteen or twenty feet.”
“Yeah.” Russ squatted on his haunches and took a long, slow look at the quarry beneath them. “What about past those dump trucks? Where the forest takes up again?”
“I don’t know. I guess if you headed downhill long enough, you’d eventually run into the road. I can’t say I took a close look around when I was down there, but I sure didn’t see anything that leapt out at me as a trail.”
“I don’t like it,” he said. He stood up again, rubbing his hands on his jeans. “If she really is here on spa business, why the hell isn’t she at the office? I don’t see her as the type to take spontaneous hikes through the deep woods on a ninety-degree day.”
“Not with a houseful of guests,” she said.
“And if Colvin or someone was trying to lure her here, where did he take her? If you want to rob someone, you take the valuables and leave. If you want to kidnap someone, you take the person and leave. Except this guy, from the way you describe hearing him, sounded too chickenshit for an actual kidnapping. ’Scuse my French.”
“Maybe he took her in his car and left the purse behind.”
“In which case, we’re back to square one.” He twisted around, looking back into the woods. “What I worry about is that he might have met up with her here, tried to intimidate her into paying him off, and—”
“And then something went wrong,” she said.
He looked at her. “There’re lots of places to hide a body in these woods.”
Despite the heat, she felt a prickle of gooseflesh along her arms. “Let’s try the other trail, the one that heads up the mountain.” Even as she made the suggestion, she knew that it was more an attempt to deny the awful possibility that Peggy was lying dead out there than a realistic hope that they might find her.
He shifted his weight. “Okay. We’ll try it for a ways. But if we don’t see anything, we’re turning around and heading into town.”
“Will you put together a search team?”
He nodded. “And get a dog up here.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
The track up the mountain was harder. They walked side by side, silent once more, although Clare had stopped expecting they would find anyone lurking ahead. At least anyone alive. Silence in the woods seemed to come naturally to Russ. She slogged along, one foot in front of the other, feeling as if she were hiking with a wet Turkish towel draped around her, but his back and arms had a line of tension about them, and each step he took was deliberate. He kept looking into the trees, left, right, scanning overhead.
They passed a dump site barely hacked out of the woods, filled with cracked pallets and bags of rubbish. One of those golf carts Ray had mentioned to Clare lay tipped over on its side. Russ made her get behind him, then drew his gun from its holster before approaching the pile of trash. He peered into an open barrel before retreating back to the trail. He shook his head and motioned to Clare to keep walking as he reholstered his gun.
She didn’t know if it was the quiet, or Russ’s behavior, or the tangled thicket of underbrush, which reminded her of where she had found Ingraham’s body, but she was getting seriously creeped out. When he paused at the sound of a woodpecker’s knock and searched the trees, she hissed at him, “Why are you doing that?”
“What?” He turned to her. “Doing what?”
“Acting like we’re about to come under fire. I ferried guys to the front during Desert Storm who were less tense than you are.”
“I didn’t know you were in the Gulf.”
“Cut it out. You’re making me more nervous than I already am.”
“Sorry.” A dried-up streambed cut across the trail, and they picked their way across the smooth stones. His eyes flicked across the trees.
“Do you really think that the guy who took Peggy is waiting to ambush us?” She kept her voice close to a
