Right. You never know when somebody might try to bump off a twenty-five-year-old blond girl cellist. Especially in a family like ours.
“Let her bring it along,” I told Olivier. “It might come in handy.”
We followed Dark Bear on foot up the long, rocky defile. The going got rougher toward the top, as big chunks of rock broke loose from the rubble and slipped away under our feet. I really wasn’t looking forward to another avalanche. You couldn’t even out-ski ten thousand tons of crumbling rock.
We got to the top of the cliff overlooking, about two hundred feet below, a thickly forested valley cut by a broad, glassy ribbon of river, and something I recognized at once that told me precisely where we were: Sam’s favorite spot in northern Idaho, the upper Mesa Falls.
The river was wide here, and the falls dropped in a single burnished sheet, as golden in the sunlight as Bambi’s hair. Only the constant roiling mist rising from its base gave any indication of the volume of pounding water crushing the ancient rocks down there into pebbled sand. I’d come here years ago, as a teenager, with Sam. It was my last outing before I went away to school, and he wanted to show it to me.
“It’s my secret place, hotshot,” he’d told me. “I found it when I was out fishing on my own once, when I was quite young. Nobody’s been here for a very long time, maybe thousands of years.”
Holding hands, we’d waded the shallow waters just above the falls and climbed down the crooked rock face at the far side of the cliff. There we found a narrow seam in the rock, nearly invisible until you were right upon it, and so close to the pounding water that its sides were slimy with green mosses from the constant spray. Sam slipped sideways into the crack, pulling me by the hand after him.
We were inside a large cave, behind the roaring waters that fell like a veil in front of our very faces. We went back into the cave a few yards until we were swallowed in darkness. Then Sam took out a flashlight and switched it on.
It was absolutely breathtaking. The walls and ceiling of the cave were a fairyland of crystals in rainbows of colors. Real rainbows were cast everywhere, refracted from the churning mist swirling around us and the myriad prisms.
“If I ever wanted to hide myself, or you, or anything else of value to me,” Sam told me in the breathless silence that was swept beneath the vacuum of roaring waters, “I couldn’t think of a better place to do it than right here.”
And now, as I stood on the high cliff overlooking the falls with Dark Bear and Olivier and Bambi, I knew beyond question why we’d been brought here. I knew exactly what must be hidden down there in that cave.
It took half an hour to reach the river from the cliff, picking our way through forest and thick underbrush over rocky terrain. When at last we reached a clear level spot on the embankment above the falls, I turned to the others and said over the sound of the water, “We have to wade across here. Our spot is at the far side of the falls. There’s no other place for miles where it’s shallow enough to safely ford the river.”
“There isn’t any place at all that’s safe for me, I’m afraid,” Olivier said, regarding me with large dark eyes. “I hate to have to reveal it at this late hour—but I’ve never learned to swim!”
“Then it’s too risky,” I agreed. “Even though the water will only be up to about our knees here, the current is terribly strong and swift so close to the falls. You’d better stay here while we cross it and find Sam.”
Dark Bear, no spring chicken, agreed to wait on the bank with Olivier. As Bambi and I took off our shoes and rolled our trousers to wade out into the river, I set my backpack on the ground beside Olivier. To my astonishment, Jason’s furry black head popped out—I’d completely forgotten him! His eyes lit on the silently moving waters just beyond me, and his ears twitched with enthusiasm at such a large swimming pool.
“Oh, no, you don’t,” I informed him firmly. I shoved him back in the pack and handed it to Olivier. “That’s all we need right now—a cat swept overboard. You’ll have to be the boss.” I pointed my finger at Jason and added, “No more kippered herring from your landlord here, if you misbehave while I’m gone.”
As Bambi and I waded out into the waters, hand in hand, I felt my first flash of panic. The water was far colder, the current stronger than I’d recalled from the other time I’d tried this. Suddenly I understood why. Sam had brought me here in late summer—the hottest time of year, and so dry that it actually marks the start of forest-fire season.
But now we were here just after spring thaw, when the rivers were at their swiftest and most swollen. The water was shoving against us so hard I had to slide my feet along the pebbled bottom. If I lifted one foot only slightly, I might easily be swept away. Much worse, it was clear from the force of the waters—only up to midcalf at this point—that if we got in more than knee deep, we might not be able to advance at all.
I was about to yell to Bambi over the roar of water that we ought to beat a retreat to Olivier back on the bank—but just at that moment I saw a flicker of motion more than fifty feet ahead, across the
