All mythology is rooted in fact.
Those six words returned again and again to the forefront of Gabriel’s mind as he drove westward along the winding highway, higher into the mountains. Throughout its history, mankind has always sought to explain what it doesn’t understand. Wild stories have been fabricated and deities created to rationalize events that are now easily justified. Thunder was caused by Thor’s hammer, lightning by Zeus’s hand. Sickness was the result of angering the spirits and natural disasters were the vengeance of the gods. While Gabriel didn’t subscribe to the Christian notion of God, he couldn’t help but think the same principles applied. How did man come to be? Why, God birthed him from nothing and set him down in the Garden of Eden, of course. Never mind the irrefutable arguments for evolution. The fall of Sodom and Gomorrah? God did it. Scholars claim to have found the Garden and the remains of both cities. If they had actually existed, then what had truly happened there? And if the mythology of the bible were based in fact, then what had his sister and her friends found in these very mountains?
Gabriel was forced to slow his black Dodge Intrepid as the snow, which until now had only come down in fits and starts, began to fall in earnest. The impregnable walls of ponderosa pines, assorted spruces, and bare aspens sparkled with the recent accumulation, while the scrub oak packed between the trunks remained sheltered beneath the canopy. Each bend in the road granted a brief glimpse of the sharp white peaks in the distance over the treetops. The flakes tumbled sideways across the asphalt on the shifting wind, but had fortunately yet to begin to stick.
He cranked up the radio to drown out his thoughts.
The highway descended into a deep valley, at the bottom of which was a wide river so blue it positively radiated a glacial coldness. Its banks were already buried beneath several inches of snow. Gabriel veered from the pavement onto the widened gravel shoulder just before the bridge that crossed the river, and turned right onto an uneven dirt road designated only by the 432 mile-marker post. The forest closed in from both sides to form a claustrophobic trench. Tire tracks marred the dusting of snow ahead. His car rattled over a long washboard stretch before the road evened out again.
County Road 432 wended around the topography of the mountains for twenty-some miles before it appeared to simply peter out on the map. The cabins were just over fourteen miles from the highway. If he pushed the car past twenty-five miles per hour, he would be there in half an hour. Unconsciously, he eased off the gas.
The river flirted with the road, but remained just out of reach through the trees.
Gabriel switched on the headlights and turned up the windshield wipers, which made the thumping sound of a mechanical heartbeat that accelerated with his own. Between the heat gusting from the dashboard and the oppressive forest, the car was beginning to feel like a coffin. Cracking the window, he welcomed in the crisp wind, which screamed through the valley. He chased away the thought that it was the residual echo of the sound his sister had made with her dying breath.
***
Gabriel recognized the final stretch leading to the cabins as though only days had passed since he was last there. In his mind, he still wandered the forest in circles radiating outward from the small cluster of buildings, his throat on fire from crying Stephanie’s name well past the point where his voice failed him. The sharp pain in his gut intensified as he rounded the final bend and turned down the short drive, which ended in a rough gravel turnaround. There was a ring of pines in the center, between which were several weathered picnic tables. Three cars were already parked in front of the cabins beyond. He pulled around and parked behind Cavenaugh’s red Explorer. More than an inch of snow had already accumulated on its hood and roof, while the two cars parked diagonally in front of it were only beginning to grow a layer of ice.
He sat in the car a moment longer and watched the snowflakes turn to droplets of water on the windshield. His hand shook when he finally reached for the handle and opened the door. After collecting his suitcase and backpack from the rear seat, he headed past the other cars toward the front cabin. The gold Lexus sedan presumably belonged to Kelsey Northcutt, Levi’s father the gastroenterologist, but he didn’t know to whom the forest green Chevy pickup in front of it belonged.
At the foot of the dirt path, Gabriel paused to survey the cabins. They seemed somehow smaller, yet otherwise little had changed. Maybe the dark wood of the exterior had faded slightly, but the fixed green shutters beside the windows still appeared to be a stiff breeze from falling off and there were more shingles missing from the roofs than remained. The painted green doors were chipped and battered, and again he refused to imagine how they might have gotten that way. Thinner branches led from the main path around the sides of the front cabin to the other two, which were set just far enough behind and to the sides of the first to form a small courtyard between them. The yellowed wild grasses showed through the snow in matted clumps. There were no stumps or other evidence of cleared trees, as though the lush forest that encircled the buildings had simply refused to grow there.
He heard the grumble of tires on gravel from the distance behind him and suddenly noticed that it was the only sound he heard over the soft patter of his tread on the snow. Even the wind, it seemed, couldn’t reach them on that isolated patch of earth.
The front door opened and Cavenaugh stepped out onto the wood-plank porch. Firelight flickered behind him through the slots of the wood-burning stove.
“Glad you were able to make it,” Cavenaugh said. He smiled, but it was obviously forced.
Gabriel nodded and continued up the path. He ascended the warped stairs and passed Cavenaugh without making eye contact. The warmth pulled him into the small room, where he set his bags to the right of the door beside the others. There was barely enough room for a threadbare couch and a small end table with a kerosene lantern around the potbellied stove. He could see the lumpy, stripped mattress through the bedroom door directly to the left of the fire, and an avocado Formica countertop beside a rust-stained sink without faucets through the door to the right. Until now he had forgotten he would again have to become accustomed to using the outhouse and the hand pump for the well water.
Cavenaugh rested a hand on his shoulder and he nearly jumped.
“We’re just waiting for Maura Aragon now,” Cavenaugh said. “The former Maura Evans.”
“Chase’s sister,” Gabriel said.
“The only one who won’t be represented here is Nathan Dillinger. His family feels that finding his femur was more than enough to answer their lingering questions. They just asked that they be notified if we come across any more of his remains.”
Gabriel nodded once. He couldn’t blame them for not wanting to learn the details of how their loving son could have been separated from his right leg. The mere knowledge that he had must have been painful enough.
“We’re setting ourselves up in the same rooms where our siblings—or son, in Kelsey’s case—stayed,” Cavenaugh said. “That means the two of us are bunking in the northern cabin with Jess MacAuley. She’s dropping off her bags over there now. We figured she could sleep on the couch and you and I could share the bed. Just no spooning.”
Cavenaugh laughed. Gabriel tried to at least smile, but he didn’t have it in him. He had known how difficult it would be to return here, yet he had been completely unprepared. It felt as though all of the air were being sucked from the room. A dull ache radiated outward from his head into every bone in his body.
“Might as well run your stuff over there before the storm gets much worse,” Cavenaugh said. “We’re all meeting back here as soon as we’re through.”
Gabriel grabbed his bags, walked through the kitchen, and exited the back door. He veered left and passed the outhouse, which was now nearly overgrown by scrub oak. Smoke billowed from the aluminum cap on the roof of the cabin. He was nearly to the back door when movement from the edge of the forest to the right caught his eye, but when he turned, he saw only a cluster of ponderosa pines and the maze of trunks beyond leading into the shadows.
He set his bags by the back door beneath the overhanging roof, and walked toward the tree line. Nothing moved, not even ground squirrels darting across the detritus from one mouth of their burrow to the next.
In his mind, he envisioned a younger version of himself stumbling blindly through the wilderness, shouting for his sister, dirt thickening the trails of tears on his cheeks to mud. He had hoped never to feel that helpless again, and yet here he stood now.
Gabriel was just about to head back to the cabin when he noticed a series of tracks in the fresh snow. They
