“It’s ‘Native American,’” Hari said. “I’m Indian.”
“Right. Sorry. Anyway, I can’t pronounce his name, but the road ends there. When you want to come down you have to use this road.”
The road could barely fit two cars.
“Not with those trucks on it you’re not. How do they—?”
A cop car with Berkshire County Sheriff emblazoned on the door was parked on the shoulder ahead. An armed deputy in a tan uniform, Stetson hat, and Sam Brown belt, who had been lounging against the front grille, stepped into the road and held up his hand.
Donny stuck his head out the passenger window. “What’s the problem, officer?”
“Rock fall ahead. You need to turn around and go back.”
“What about all those trucks we’ve been stuck behind like forever?”
“They’re gonna be a problem.” He didn’t budge from the middle of the road. “We have to get them turned around somehow. In the meantime, you’ve got to go back down to the highway and stay off this road.”
“But—”
His voice hardened. “We’re both speaking English, aren’t we? Turn around, go back down to the highway, and stay off this road.”
Hari waved at the deputy and began backing up.
“Hey, Hari,” Donny said, “what are you doing? We need to—”
She lowered her voice and said, “What we need is to not draw attention to ourselves. Look at Deputy Dog’s face. He’s not going to let us by.”
“But he’s lying.”
“Of course he is. He might not even be with the sheriff’s department. But you said it yourself: This road ends at the summit. What goes up, must come down. We simply have to wait.”
They parked farther east on Route 2 where they had a discrete and only partially obstructed view of the turnoff. Hari lowered the windows, turned off the engine, and they settled in to wait.
It turned out to be a short wait—half an hour, tops—before the convoy started rolling back onto the Taconic Trail and heading downhill toward Albany. But only the tractors were rolling. All the semi-trailers had been left behind.
“And there goes Deputy Dog,” Hari said as the sheriff’s car brought up the rear.
“Why do you keep calling him that?”
“The cartoon. You don’t remember Deputy Dog?”
“Nope.”
“Not important.”
Hey, Nineteen started playing in her head.
Hari waited until the sheriff’s unit drove out of sight and they had the road to themselves, then headed back up Norum Hill.
“They left their loads up there,” Donny said, staring at his tablet.
“Yes, Captain Obvious.”
“But where? There’s one road to the top with no turnoffs.”
He was getting on her nerves.
“Maybe they’ve created a turnoff that’s not on the map. Maybe they left the trailers at the summit.”
“Ten semis and tankers?”
“Exactly. You can’t hide all those, so can we stop speculating? We’re on our way up the mountain. We will see wherever they left them.”
But they didn’t.
Hari drove all the way to the summit without seeing anything but trees. The top had been flattened somewhat and layered with gravel for parking. A short memorial obelisk stood near a tall cell tower at the northern edge, but otherwise…nothing. The view might have been impressive had Hari’s interest in mountain vistas exceeded nil.
Donny got out and inspected the ground.
“No sign of anything with major tonnage up here recently. The gravel would be chewed up.”
“Which means we missed it. We’ll take it real slow going back down.”
But before leaving the summit she did a slow circuit of the perimeter of the groomed area. The Norum Hill road stayed mostly on the eastern and northern faces of the mountain and she saw why. The western face was much steeper.
“See anything that looks like a bunch of trucks down there?” she said.
Donny craned his neck to look but neither of them saw any sign of the trailers.
“Nothing. How is this possible? I’ve got a topographical map of this place on my tablet and, according to that, the summit here is the only even vaguely flat spot on the whole hill. There’s no place that’ll accommodate ten semis but here.”
“Obviously you’re wrong,” she said.
“I’m not. I’m…” He ran out of words.
“Think about it: We saw them pull trailers up, we saw them come down without them, so that means the trailers are still up here. We simply have to find them.”
Hari took her time on the way back down, and somewhere near the halfway point they spotted a break in the trees that hadn’t been apparent on the way up.
“Gotta be it,” Donny said.
The road didn’t branch here, but two well-worn ruts angled off through the underbrush between trees. Hari hesitated to turn in, unsure about backing out. She pulled onto the shoulder—extra wide here—and parked.
“Let’s reconnoiter on foot,” she said.
Donny pointed to the pavement as they crossed the road. “Lots of heavy traffic turning here. Gotta be the place.”
Hari wasn’t so sure. With the cliff face looming above them, she didn’t see any place to go. She did see fairly fresh tree stumps that had been sawed off a ground level. Someone had cut a path through here not too long ago.
But to her amazement, the trail ended abruptly at a sheer rock wall.
“This is impossible,” Donny cried, slapping his palms against the granite or whatever the hell these mountains were made of. “Look at the tire ruts! They run right up to the rock—right up to it! It’s as if it was lowered over the trail like a curtain.”
A perfect description. The tire ruts didn’t stop a foot before the rock face, they didn’t stop an inch before it: They stopped against it—as if the rigs had driven straight through solid rock, unhitched their trailers inside the mountain, then driven out again.
The perfect impossibility of that gave her a deep, uneasy feeling. Because it looked like that was exactly what had happened. Which made no sense.
She did a slow turn, looking for an answer. Her world was numbers, and numbers made sense. They didn’t lie. People might try to make them lie, but
