They ate Cup Noodles and crackers for supper, and Beck mixed up a batch of instant pudding for dessert. It was runny and lumpy, but chocolatey in the best way. Imogen knew they were low on freeze-dried dinners, but instead of using the dead man’s food, Beck had made them a meal heavy on carbs and comfort. It was just what they needed.
They’d entered a place where the shared experience made conversation unnecessary; this was how soldiers bonded for life. There was a lot to think about. They needed to nudge parts of themselves aside to make room for a new kind of existence. It would take time. But in the meanwhile, some things needed to be discussed. Imogen was hesitant to tell them what she’d been contemplating, afraid they would be dismissive or critical, but she had to try.
“I’d like…” Her words broke a spell. They looked up from their spoons. “I’d like to not tell anyone. What happened here.”
A seriousness descended like a curtain on Beck’s face and Imogen knew she was weighing the ramifications of their silence.
“Why?” Tilda asked. “We didn’t do anything wrong.”
“It’s not that.”
“What about the other man?” Beck asked. Because of course she’d found the most ethically problematic complication: not alerting the authorities—or the man’s family—to his whereabouts.
“I was thinking…Maybe we could leave something, plant something of his, just outside the tunnel. To help them find him. Once it’s known he’s missing, hopefully soon, they’ll be searching and when they spot it they’ll look in the tunnel.”
Beck considered that. “Maybe his permit.” She got up and crossed to his backpack, untwisted the wire that attached his permit to a zipper. She scanned the info as she sat back down. “He was heading straight out to Slate. Planned to spend a couple nights. That’s better.”
“Than what?” Tilda asked.
“Than if he’d planned to stay at Boucher—how could we not have seen him then? But if we’d been at the river, or day hiking, we legit might not have seen him pass through Boucher.”
“But he didn’t pass through,” said Tilda. “He didn’t even get across the camping area.”
“But how would we know that, if we weren’t there all day?” Beck was building an easy case for plausible deniability.
“They may ask us, at some point,” Imogen had to concede.
“They’ll contact me first,” Beck said. “I registered our permit. But yes, we should be prepared. Are you comfortable saying you didn’t see anything?”
“We can say we were hardly at camp—which is true. Telling the truth is easier than lying,” Tilda said.
“Agreed. But…Imogen, have you thought this through? Remember last—” Beck didn’t say time, but Imogen knew that was the word she wanted. “It might have gone better then, if we’d told.”
Imogen shook her head. “Please. Please trust me. It’s not that I don’t want him to be found—I do. And I want him to have justice. It’s just, I don’t…I don’t want Gale to be found. And we can’t really report one without reporting both.”
“You saved us. They’re not going to blame you,” said Tilda. “You’re not going to be in trouble.”
“That’s not it.” It sounded like they might be willing to honor her request. But that could change when they heard the full reason. She took a deep breath before proceeding. “I want to give Gale his final wish. To disappear. He can disappear, if we don’t say anything.”
He wouldn’t want it, to be dragged out of the Canyon. Autopsied. Dissected. Put on display to be judged by the World Wide Web. And Imogen didn’t want that either, for herself.
“You don’t owe him anything,” Beck said, her brows pinched with concern.
“I know. But…if he escapes the end of his story, then we can escape it too.” She didn’t want to beg, but she prayed they would really hear her. “This will be attached to me—to us. Attached forever. It won’t matter that we were defending ourselves because what people will say is that we were terrorized, we were victims. They’ll choose all the words and decide who we are. And whatever else we do, for the rest of our lives—they’ll write it in our obituaries, that we were kidnapped by cop-killer whatever-his-full-name-was. And if we tell them everything then everyone will know. I won’t be me—no one will see the rest of me ever again. I’ll be That Author Who Killed Her Kidnapper.”
“It would be good press,” Tilda said with an impish grin. Then, more seriously, “No, I see what you’re saying.”
“I don’t want to be seen as a victim—or a killer. I don’t want these words attached to me. I want to leave this here. We didn’t do anything wrong…” She faltered, not entirely at ease with what she’d done. “I don’t want people to know my name, for this. He can disappear. We can be…who we are, on our own terms.”
Beck nodded. Tilda chewed her lip. “What about Gale’s body?”
“The vultures and ravens will be done with him in a matter of days,” said Beck. “Maybe no one will ever find him. Or someday, maybe they’ll find his bones.” Imogen glanced over at the dead man’s pack. They followed her gaze. “We’ll leave it near Gale. If he’s found, they’ll put two and two together and know he killed the backpacker, for his provisions.”
“So you’re okay with it?” Imogen asked.
“I am.” And Beck sounded certain. “I don’t want this attached to me—it would be worse than a ghost. We’ll leave it here.”
Imogen turned to Tilda. “What about you?”
“More than okay. It’s hard enough to have a public persona, trying to keep it grounded in reality—this would blow up my life. This is ours. What we endured. Whatever we feel…it might change over time, but we’ll have each other. We survived this. We should get to say who knows and who doesn’t.”
“What about telling our significant others?”
“Do you want to?” Tilda asked Beck.
“I don’t know. I’d have to think about it. Maybe I’d tell Afiya in some distant future. It would scare her now, even to see that I’m all right. I don’t want that kind of…fear, changing our relationship, setting boundaries. We’ll need to process this—us, the three of us—alone, and maybe together.”
Tilda and Imogen nodded.
“So we leave it here?” Imogen looked to both of them. “I know…we don’t know how it’ll manifest in our lives…but for now, for as long as we can? Between the three of us?”
“It’s ours. It belongs to the three of us.”
“Agreed,” said Beck.