Chuck raised his downcast eyes, taking in the mine site at the end of the trail. Nothing appeared amiss. The door to the mine tunnel remained as he and Clarence had left it a few hours ago, chained and locked, the plastic storage bins stacked in place beside the collapsed cabin at the edge of the plateau, picks and shovels leaning against the bins.
The students had been more than accepting of Chuck’s proposal that they return to the mine this morning in order to stay out of the way of the police working the crime scene behind the dorms. Clearly, they were as anxious as he was to stay away from Raven House until their interviews.
The weather was the same as that which had greeted them at the mine site all summer, clear sky overhead, cool breeze growing warmer as the sun climbed in the east.
Chuck wandered away from the group, overwhelmed by the memory of Nicoleta’s scream, her vicious neck wound, her last breath, the feel of her hand in his. He lay on a patch of brown grass at the far side of the plateau, his head on his pack, face to the morning sun, eyes closed, fingers interlaced on his chest.
He half-listened as Kirina took charge, Clarence uncharacteristically silent at her side. She told the students they would spend the morning refilling the excavated squares beneath the collapsed cabin, after which they would return the cabin logs to their former resting places atop the dig area. Upon accomplishing those tasks, she explained, they would head back to the road one last time, carrying the storage bins and tools with them.
Chuck propped his head higher on his pack and looked out over the plains to the east as the students set to work. After lying awake until sunrise with Janelle stiff and unmoving beside him, he’d helped her get the girls up and dressed before driving with the three of them down through the trees to the lodge.
Janelle led the girls inside to have breakfast surrounded by hotel guests after she assured Chuck that she and the girls would remain out and about in town, and would not return to the cabin until he came back from the mine.
Chuck hadn’t called Sartore. Better to let the initial police investigation play out before checking in with the professor at the end of the day. Maybe, by then, Chuck would be reporting the arrest of one of the Falcon House workers to him.
Sheila, the Navajo student, broke away from the group and took a seat on the ground beside Chuck. “Threes,” she said. She squinted at the morning sun.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Chuck asked, his eyes focused on the hazy expanse of flat land spread before them at the foot of the mountains. There were cities out there, houses and stores and restaurants, all of them filled with people going about their daily lives, none of them having washed someone’s blood from their hands in the middle of the night, none of them even aware of Nicoleta’s murder.
“Bad things come in threes,” Sheila said.
“That’s just superstition.”
“It’s not superstition, it’s fact. And last night was number three. First, the blood. Second, the floor falling in. And now, that poor cashier, Nicoleta. One, two, three.”
Chuck turned to her, closing one eye against the sun. “You’re telling me all the bad stuff’s finished?”
She rolled her head around her shoulders in a mini-trance, her eyes closed. “It is,” she said, opening her eyes. “I know it.”
Chuck wished he had Sheila’s certainty. Even more, he wished she knew what she was talking about.
He stood and picked up his pack. No need to inflict his dark thoughts on her.
He climbed the ridge away from the mine, the sun warm on his back but the clouds in his head black and threatening. He topped the ridge and looked north across the Mummy Range. What he would give to just keep walking, to climb from peak to peak and never return to Estes Park and the police interrogation awaiting him there.
He turned and looked down at the students shoveling dirt and rocks into the excavated squares beneath the site of the collapsed cabin, Clarence and Kirina at work with them. A gust of wind curled beneath the brim of his Fort Lewis Skyhawks baseball cap, lifting it off his head. He made a grab for the cap as it became airborne but managed only to swat it, sending it spinning like a Frisbee into the face of the breeze.
The cap sailed over the far side of the ridge into a steep, granite-walled couloir worn into the mountainside, coming to rest on a chunk of rock fifty feet below the ridge crest.
Chuck descended the couloir, testing each foot placement before trusting it with his weight, his hands to the granite face behind him. As he bent to pick up the sky-blue hat from the rock, he noticed, between his feet, something entirely out of place in the couloir: a reddish-brown drop of dried blood.