Lucinda attempted to study the drawings on her lap as the Wrangler bucked its way up Gore Pass, up beyond the farm fields, up into the Gore, leaving the town far behind as the road disintegrated to what seemed a rock-strewn creek bed, the tempest of snow obliterating visibility beyond a few feet.
Lucinda’s head ached as she thought of confronting Jonah.
“Where the heck does he live?” Dale said.
“Keep going, it’s up here, somewhere,” Lucinda said. She was not certain where Jonah lived. She’d not been this way in years, but she knew roughly where he parked his truck off the road, and that there was a small trail from there to the cabin, though she was unsure how she and Dale would find their way in the snow and near darkness. There were mines up here that would swallow you and never give you up, and she was no longer a girl naive enough to believe herself immune to their dangers.
As the Wrangler lurched upward, the snowfall diminished.
Lucinda stared at her reflection in the sideview mirror. She’d forgotten about her injured face. She looked disfigured. The eye had shut tight as a walnut shell, swollen and tender with fluid. The gash, crusted black with dried blood, would leave a scar. What karmic forces are at work that I deserve this? she wondered.
She wrapped her arms around herself, leaning across the seat to lay her head against Dale’s shoulder, and the Wrangler shuddered. She was bone-achingly cold, and tired—
As the road crested, she saw through the now gentle snowfall a glint of chrome through the trees.
“Stop!” she shouted. She thrust her finger toward the truck in the trees.
“There?” Dale said. “There’s no—”
“Pull in.”
Dale cranked the Wrangler steering wheel as far to the left as it would go, the steering column clacking and whining. He eased the Wrangler in toward the trees, branches screeching on metal.
“You’re shitting me,” Dale said and tucked the vehicle into the trees beside the truck, forced to pull onto a flat, precarious ledge, the Wrangler cockeyed and half off the ground. Lucinda wondered if they’d ever be able to back the Wrangler out, but that could not be a concern then.
Lucinda got out and stood in the small clearing. The snow here was deep, up to her knees.
The dusk woods were quiet and still, and the snow had stopped save the slow sifting of it as it fell through hemlock bows. The world crystalline. Purified with its cold. The scent of the hemlock made her think of the pit. It was near here, wasn’t it? Or had they passed it, farther below? They must have gone by it long ago. She and Sally had never ranged up this far. Had they? Perhaps the slow going and the dark had only made it seem she was now farther up in the Gore than she actually was, or perhaps as girls she and Sally had ventured farther up into the woods than they realized. She could not be sure. The woods had changed in the past decades. They were not the same woods. They’d grown all the more dense and forbidding. And she’d never entered them in the dark.
She searched for the path that led to the shack, turned on the headlamp as darkness descended, the light a trifling against the deep black of the woods. She could not locate a path, though she knew one must be there, somewhere. If she could not find one, she’d make her own.
“Now what?” Dale said.
“We hike.” Lucinda pointed into the woods, spotting what seemed a wisp of a trail.
“We shouldn’t be here in the dark.”
But Lucinda was already pushing into a darkness so absolute it now seemed a physical presence, the headlamp beam lighting only the tangle of branches most immediate, the blackness folding in behind her as she passed.
The wind picked up again, screamed in the treetops. Icy snow bit into her wounded face. Several times she stopped, searching for the phantom trail she was sure she’d lost for good. The blowing snow covered their tracks behind them. She picked up the ghost of a trail again and forged on.
She slogged ahead in the deep snow, eyes wet from the cold shearing wind, her hope for finding the cabin fading as her fear of being able to find their way back to the Wrangler intensified.
“We’re close,” she said, though she had no idea if they were closer or farther from the cabin, or about to fall into a mine shaft with the very next step.