Chapter 6

He was kidding, Kendal told herself. She wasn’t sure why boys insisted on trying to scare girls, why they thought it was so funny. If people were actually going missing on Mount Hood, it would have been national news. Right?

Then again, it wasn’t just Bjorn who had mentioned people never coming back. The lady at the car rental place had said the same thing.

Maybe they were talking about the same person?

As she and her father walked back to the jeep, Kendal scrolled through the pictures that Bjorn had taken with her phone. The first picture of Kendal and her father was really good. They were both smiling and the lighting was good, but each picture after that seemed to grow darker. In the last photo she swore she saw a face smirking from the summit of the mountain, so she zoomed in. What she saw frightened her—dark, deep holes that looked like angry eyes and a jagged, rocky snarl.

Kendal dropped her phone. It shattered on the black pavement. When she bent down to pick it up, she cut her finger on a piece of glass. Blood streamed down her hand and across her wrist.

“Put pressure on it,” her father said, running to the car to grab the first aid kit from his backpack.

It took her father a few minutes to pluck out the piece of glass and clean the wound. The cut was deep, so he used some Super Glue to close it shut. Kendal’s mother insisted that duct tape and Super Glue be placed in all their first aid kits. She’d been a medic in the Marines and used these things to secure wounds.

“Do you think it will still work?” Kendal said, nodding to the phone that her father had wrapped up in white gauze so that it wouldn’t cut her again.

“It doesn’t look good.”

Kendal held the phone like a small, hurt animal and put it in a side pocket of her backpack. She had saved for over six months to buy that phone, even babysitting the three-year-old triplets down the street—twice. Now it was wrecked.

“You need to be more careful,” her father said. He was always telling her this. She constantly dropped or tripped over things. It was like her legs were too long, her feet too big. Or maybe her brain was to blame. Her mind was always distracted by something else.

“I know,” she said.

She wanted to tell him about the face she saw in the picture on her phone, but she knew it would sound crazy, so she sat silently as they drove toward the mountain, her finger throbbing where it was cut, a sick feeling taking over her stomach again.

They turned off the highway and onto a steep and winding road.

“So,” Kendal said, “How many times has Jeremy been up Mount Hood?”

Jeremy was the person who was going to guide them up the mountain. He was an old buddy of her father’s. They had met at the Naval Academy and served together on the SS Carter. Kendal never remembered meeting him, but apparently he was around a lot when she was really little.

“He’s led dozens and dozens of first-time climbers up that mountain,” her father said. “He’s been saving up and hoping to buy the lodge where we’ll be staying.”

If it weren’t for Jeremy, Kendal thought, maybe she and her father would have taken up bowling instead.

“So he knows what he’s doing then?”

“He’s a trained Navy SEAL. Believe me, he knows what he’s doing. We’re in safe hands.”

They turned off the highway and onto a mountain road.

“But I thought Navy SEALs trained with the Navy—in the water, not on mountains.”

“SEALs are trained for everything,” her father said.

As they drove higher up the mountain, they crossed over the snow line.

“Strange how it all just changes,” Kendal said as they went from brown grass and green trees to everything covered with snow.

Kendal thought how beautiful and peaceful everything looked covered in the deep waves of white. For some reason, in that moment, the mountain didn’t seem that scary anymore. It was as if her worries were also hidden in a blanket of snow. She wanted to get out of the car and lie down in the white softness. She wished she could take a picture, but then remembered her phone was broken. She closed her eyes so that she would remember how beautiful it was, how happy she was to be driving up this mountain with her father by her side.

But something told her this calmness wouldn’t last.

Any second now, her worries would emerge once again from their snowy covering.