Chuck rocked back on his heels. “I’m sorry, Sanford. I’m so sorry.”
Sanford’s sobs subsided.
“What … what happened?” Chuck asked.
Sanford slid Glen’s body to the ground. “It doesn’t really matter. Not anymore.” The chief ranger took a deep wracking breath. “He’s at peace. Finally.”
Chuck peered around them. Broken rays of sun filtered through the limbs of piñons flanking the bluff. Beyond the trees, the open desert spread to the west, aflame in the last of the day’s sunlight. He squinted up at the vertical wall of stone. “How … ?” he ventured.
Sanford raked his nose with his forearm. His words came haltingly, his gaze fixed on his son’s body.
“Glen has been … troubled. For a long time. He was diagnosed with schizophrenia not long after he turned nineteen, more than three years ago. Voices spoke to him in his head. He hardly ate. He was convinced his mother and I were his enemies. We kept him with us as long as we could. But he stole from us. He had terrible fits of anger. He destroyed our home … his home … more than once. Finally, a few weeks ago, he threatened Elsie with a kitchen knife. He didn’t know what he was doing, of course, but that was it for me. I’d had enough. I wanted to have him arrested. I believed we could get him into the medical system that way, through a court order. He finally would have gotten the help he needed. But Elsie wouldn’t hear of it.”
Sanford glanced at Chuck and continued his story.
“We told him he couldn’t stay with us anymore. We were heartbroken, of course. We convinced him to carry a phone. We called him every day. We’d leave a message when he didn’t answer, which was most of the time. We let him know we loved him. The few times he did answer, he didn’t say anything, but we knew he was there, listening, and we’d take turns talking to him. He hiked out here on his own. I’d talked to him about how Ed Abbey had found his life’s purpose in Arches. One of the times when I left a message on Glen’s phone, I told him I’d spotted him out here and that I was happy for him, that I thought being out here would be good for him. We had the locator beacon activated on his phone. He probably knew about it. We tracked his every move.”
The chief ranger leaned back and pointed at the top of the wall.
“He stayed up there on the bluff most of the time. He’d sneak into the campground at night. I’m sure that’s where he got his water. I imagine he went through the trash for food scraps, too. He was surviving, against all odds.”
Chuck said, “The homeless people you talked about, the ones you described as living in national parks near big cities …”
“There’s no such thing,” Sanford admitted. His eyes went to his son’s body. “Just Glen.”
“He had a kind heart.”
“Like his mother,” the chief ranger agreed. “But,” he asked, looking up at Chuck, “how do you know that? How do you know his name?”
“I met him on the ridge on the south side of the campground.”
“Ahh.” Sanford nodded through his tears. “The locator beacon showed him going over that way every couple days or so. He’d work his way around, out of sight of the campground, and spend a few hours up there, then return here to the bluff. We couldn’t figure out why.”
“There are stray cats up there.”
“That makes sense.” Sanford laid his hand on Glen’s still chest. “My son,” he murmured. Then he said to Chuck, “Glen loved animals, from when he was little. Hamsters, turtles, dogs, chickens. Elsie and I could barely keep up.”
“Why did he do this to himself?” Chuck wondered aloud. “You said he was surviving, getting by.”
“He called me an hour ago, but he hung up before I could answer. He’d never called before, not once in all the weeks since he came out here. He must have known I’d come as soon as I saw his number.”
“Do you think he was signaling you?”
“He must have wanted me to find him—his body, that is. That’s the only thing I can think of.”
“What did you see when you got here?”
“I tracked him by his phone beacon. I went up on the bluff, but he wasn’t there. I went to the edge of the cliff to see if I could spot him somewhere. When I looked down …” Sanford patted Glen’s arm. Then he grasped his son’s shoulder with both hands and shook it, rocking Glen’s upper body. “Glen,” he cried. “Glen.”
“I’m so sorry,” Chuck repeated.
He stepped back, his eyes tracking to the top of the wall. Why had Glen chosen right now, this evening, to kill himself?
When Chuck had sat with Glen yesterday, the young man had seemed fully alive. He had told Chuck his name, and had pointed with purposeful intent toward the toppled arch. Glen had hiked across the desert to the site of the collapsed span. He had come to Harold’s aid when the elderly camper had fallen from the ladder—a life-affirming gesture if ever there was one. Yet now, only a day later, Glen was dead, an apparent suicide.
A puff of air stirred at the foot of the bluff, carrying with it the first hint of the evening chill. Chuck turned his face to the slight breeze, gazing through the trees at the open desert beyond.
Three people now had died here in Devil’s Garden in the last forty-eight hours. Each death, on its own, came with a seemingly rational explanation. But what were the odds of all three deaths here, in just the last two days?
He took out his phone. “I’ll call 911.”
“No,” said Sanford. “Not yet. I want to call Elsie first. I know she’ll want to be with him before anyone else. She’ll want to offer him her blessing, to send him on his way. Glen is our only child.”
“Okay.” Chuck replaced his phone. “I need to check in with Janelle in camp. How about if I meet Elsie at the parking lot and walk her out here? Then you can stay with Glen.”
“I’d appreciate that,” Sanford said. Still kneeling over his son’s body, he pulled his phone from the nylon pouch at his waist.
Chuck rounded the base of the wall, passing from Sanford’s sight as he headed for the campground. As he walked, an invisible hand, chillingly cold, settled on the back of his neck.
What had Glen been attempting to communicate yesterday when he had pointed at the collapsed arch from the ridge above the campground? Why had he hiked to the site of the toppled span? And what had led to his plunge from the cliff this evening?
Chuck put his fingers to the back of his neck and squeezed, dispelling the sinister iciness. He needed answers.
Turning away from the campground, he trod through the deep sand to the point where the two stone bluffs nearest the campground came together. A cleft between the flanking bluffs rose at a low angle away from the sand. Chuck ascended the fissure without difficulty, his hands to the facing rock walls, his boots wedged for traction.
Leaving the cleft where it widened, he climbed to the top of the middle bluff, five stories above the desert floor. He walked west, toward the setting sun. Thirty feet back from the edge of the vertical wall at the end of the bluff, he came to a jutting prow of sandstone. The prow served as a roof, sheltering a waist-high space protected from the weather on three sides. The space extended ten feet beneath the overhang. A dusty sleeping bag lay on a foam pad under the stone roof. Plastic gallon jugs of water lined the rear of the space in an orderly row, along with cans of vegetables and tinned meat. A hand-operated can opener, a plastic plate, and metal spoon and fork rested on a rock shelf at the back of the space. A solar phone charger sat next to the dishes.
Chuck peered west from Glen’s makeshift camp, shading his eyes from the orb of the sun perched above the western horizon. From where he stood, the sweeping view of the desert, cut by shallow washes and flanked by stone promontories, was spectacular. He could not convince himself that Glen, troubled though he was, would have chosen this tremendous setting and this magnificent evening to end his life.
Chuck walked to the edge of the cliff. Below, at the base of the bluff, Sanford knelt over Glen’s body. The chief ranger held out his phone, jabbing at its face.
Two small spots of yellow, wedged in a shallow crevice atop the cliff, caught Chuck’s eye. He squatted and studied the spots. They were crumbs from some sort of baked good. The fact that they had yet to be gobbled up by a mouse or passing bird indicated they had fallen into the crevice only a short time ago.
Chuck frowned. Why, in the midst of the mental storm that surely would have preceded Glen’s decision to kill himself, would he have paused to eat?