Chapter 4
The captain wasn’t lying. The plane bounced around like the air had potholes in it. Kendal’s teeth chattered with every jolt. Her book practically leapt out of her hands. She felt dizzy and sick and spent most of the time with her eyes closed, telling herself not to puke.
Her stomach was still in knots when they got to the car rental place.
“Something with four-wheel drive,” her father said to the smiling woman behind the counter.
“Where are you heading?” the woman said as she typed something into the computer.
“Mount Hood,” her father explained.
The woman’s fingers froze. Her smile disappeared.
“Do you have something with four-wheel drive?” her father repeated. He looked confused by the woman’s silence and sudden stillness.
“I wouldn’t go near that mountain if I were you,” she said in a whisper of a voice. “That mountain is cursed.”
The woman reached for a silver cross that hung around her neck and moved it back and forth along the thin, silver chain.
“Six months ago,” the woman said, looking at Kendal’s father and then at Kendal, “one of our rentals went missing. And you know where it was found?” The woman didn’t give them a chance to answer. “In a parking lot at the base of that mountain. The driver had decided to go for a short hike, and he never came back. He was the third person to go missing this year. I’m telling you, I wouldn’t send my ex-husband near that place.”
The woman waited for them to change their mind, and Kendal hoped that maybe her father would ask for a convertible instead. She imagined them driving south to California and spending the week on a beach. But her father just repeated his original request.
“Don’t say I didn’t try to warn you,” the woman said, typing again and then squinting at the screen. “Just trying to keep my customers safe and the cars returned.”
Kendal looked at her father, but her father just shook his head as if the woman were crazy, as if they didn’t have anything to worry about, as if Kendal hadn’t spent the last month having nightmares in which she fell off the side of the mountain. Over and over, there she was—in a free fall, tumbling through icy, cold air. Nothing to grab hold of. She always woke up just before she hit the ground.
“Come on, kid,” her father said, holding a set of keys in his hand. “You look like you need some fresh air.”
Outside, there was a black jeep waiting for them. Kendal’s father threw their backpacks into the back, and there was the sound of rattling chains.
“What is that?” Kendal said.
“Looks like someone left us their tire chains, which is lucky because now we don’t have to stop and buy them. There’s a hefty fine if you don’t have them up on the mountain when it snows.”
“You don’t think this is the car that the missing guy drove?” Kendal said, afraid to get in.
“I’m sure it’s not,” her father said, scrunching up his eyebrows and shaking his head. But Kendal noticed in the left corner of the windshield there was a parking sticker for Mount Hood National Park. It looked like someone had tried to scrape it off but had given up.