The road to Cooke City was filled with ghosts.
Mark was used to traveling with them, had become accustomed to that since Lauren was killed, but there were more of them now. He was in the Sunlight Basin, carving through country he’d once known so well, and the faces of men and women who had probably been dead for years rose smiling in his mind. Also in the mix, all too often, was Lynn Deschaine, her face just above his own in the dark, her body pressed tight to him, her racing heart pounding against his chest.
The Chief Joseph Scenic Byway links Cody, Wyoming, with the northeast gate of Yellowstone, just a few miles from Cooke City, Montana. It crosses through the Shoshone National Forest and the Absaroka Mountains. The Beartooth range looms to the north and the Absaroka range falls behind to the south and the Clark Fork of the Yellowstone River winds along through the low country—if a vertical mile up can be considered low country—and then the road begins to climb again, and seeing it in the daylight, many people would consider it the most beautiful drive in the West, at least if they hadn’t driven the Beartooth Highway up and over the top.
Tonight, none of the grand country was visible beyond the reach of the headlights, and the road mocked Mark. He’d come here to settle the score for the family member who had been taken from him, but instead, he was driving the old roads in search of the family he’d left behind willingly, and he felt as if the mountains were laughing at him now. Even the route he had to take felt predestined, promised.
They never met, he thought. Never spoke. There cannot be overlap, not between my mother and Lauren, between this place and that one.
But already he knew the latter was false. Cassadaga, Florida, connected to Lovell, Wyoming. The place where Mark’s future had died was bridged to the past he’d left behind. And if that connection was possible, why not more?
She went to Cassadaga on a case. Went for Dixie Witte. That was all. It had nothing to do with my past.
Somewhere, a missing Homeland Security agent might have disagreed.
It was still dark when he arrived in Cooke City, and the temperature was at least fifteen degrees colder than it had been in Red Lodge. The traces of snow that were visible on the peaks down there lay in drifts on the ground up here. He drove slowly into town and Miner’s Saloon came into view, the sign that had been over his mother’s shoulder in the surveillance photos sent to Lynn Deschaine.
He parked in front of the saloon and cut the engine and the headlights. He turned on the cell phone just for the hell of it and saw the expected—no trace of a signal. Mark was, for the moment, at least, very securely off the grid.
He stepped out of the car and into the bracing cold and walked down the road to see what had changed in the town.
The answer: not much. There were a few new buildings, but for the most part, things were the same. They had a fire station now. That was impressive. Mark wondered if they had any firefighters. The summer before Lauren was killed, a forest fire had done some serious damage just beyond the town, ravaging the base of Mount Republic and chewing through the forest along Pilot Creek. Arson, apparently. People died. He’d read about it and looked at the photographs, and that was one of the few times he’d discussed the place with Lauren at any length.
At the end of the town the road curled away toward Silver Gate, just two miles farther on, but he knew that it would be as silent as Cooke City. It was the dead season, after the snowmobiling and before the Yellowstone summer tourists. Anyone who’d seen Mark’s uncle in the past few months was sound asleep, and the way to get cooperation wasn’t by banging on doors in the middle of the night.
He stood at the edge of town feeling very small, powerless. Night in the mountains could do that to you, reminding you of your place in the world and laughing at any sense of self-importance. Tonight it was worse. Mark didn’t feel just powerless; his entire understanding of the world had been ripped away from him.
His ignorance of the phrase rise the dark appears genuine based on his interviews with police investigators in his wife’s homicide.
He walked to the car with his breath fogging the air, the stars brilliant against the blackness, and then he fell back on family tradition on his first night in Cooke City: he slept in the car and waited for the saloon to open.