It echoed through the woods, but I forced myself to count off beats in my head instead of running straight for the clearing. I imagined it all, him stepping away from the camouflage of the trees, the rocks slipping from beneath him, his camera in his hand as he fell to the bottom, his backpack and water bottle the only markers left behind. We’d all agreed it was better this way; if Vera and I watched John walk off the trail, we might get our stories messed up.
So I waited, twenty counts, and then, as if suddenly sensing danger, I ran.
The clearing was empty, not a soul in sight, but I spotted his backpack, about fifty feet up ahead. I bolted down the path, over rocks, around ivy, across fallen leaves, toward the spot, the light spatter of rain coating my face, letting myself pretend, for a moment, that my story was true, that I really had seen him. Letting myself feel those feelings just the tiniest bit: of being alone, of losing someone you love. Feelings I knew well, that the absence of my parents had printed on my heart.
Up close, the tableau was more frightening than I’d expected.
I shouted for Vera, as we’d agreed I would, then studied the scene before me. The backpack and bottle were upright and covered in water droplets—obedient pets waiting for their owner to return.
There was no blood—John must have been careful not to drip any—but the rocks and gravel on the cliff’s edge were disturbed. It looked so real, so true to life. I stepped closer. The tiny bit of grass and mud just before the rocks was marked with . . . footprints. Had to be John’s.
Vera had told him to be careful, but what if he’d gotten too into staging it?
What if . . .
I turned back, looking for John’s footprints leading back off the trail, but the leaves were too thick to see any—there was nothing. It made sense, of course. He would have been careful to step only where the ground was covered as he walked off the trail, careful not to leave any tracks. My ears pricked, listening for the rustle of leaves, for John’s movements, but I couldn’t hear a thing.
I took one step closer, careful to stay out of the mud so as not to disturb his footprints, taking them in. They were thoughtfully placed, as if he’d stepped far too close to take a photo—an artist’s work, his swan song. I reached out, wanting to run my fingers over them, these impressions of John, unsure when I’d see him again.
“What are you doing?”
I jumped up, my feet kicking at an errant bit of gravel, and I heard it bounce all the way down. I swallowed, throat tight. “It just looks so real. If he really had fallen, we wouldn’t even see him.”
“Exactly,” Vera said. “That’s the point.”
Her gaze was steely, like I’d disappointed her somehow.
“I don’t hear anything,” I said. “Do you think we should make sure he’s okay? Before we . . .”
Vera shook her head firmly. “We can’t, Lucy,” she said. “We have to stick to the plan.”
“Okay,” I said quietly, and then repeated myself, as if to prove the point: “Okay.”
Her eyes softened, and the old Vera came back. “He’s fine, I promise, he knows exactly what he’s doing out there—”
“But I hardly gave him any time to prepare.”
“It’s okay, Lucy,” Vera said. “He’s good at this. He’s doing his part—we need to do ours.” She retrieved her phone, rubbed it against her shirt to clear it of water, and made a show of keying in 911. “No service,” she said robotically.
I nodded, wanting to look at the river again but knowing I shouldn’t.
Vera stepped closer, and though her eyes were serious, there was kindness there, too. Coated in droplets, her hair practically shone. “Can you do this, Lucy? If you can’t, we can call it off. We can meet John in his cabin tonight. We can pretend that none of this ever happened. We can go back to—”
“I don’t want to call it off.”
“You’re absolutely sure?” Vera asked. “Because there’s no going back, once we do it. You understand that, don’t you?”
“I understand.”
Vera took my hand in hers, cool and damp from the weather, and squeezed. “Thank you,” she said. “I love you. Now, let’s get back to where we can make a call, before it gets dark.”
As agreed, we ran, retracing our steps, Vera, agile, leading the way; me, trying my best not to trip over roots and stones, matted leaves slick from the rain.
At a break in the woods, she stopped and checked her phone. “I have service.”
“Me too.”
We stood, like statues, at the same place I’d paused to take in the colors, but now the sun was almost down, the hues hazy and fever-dreamy. There wouldn’t be light much longer. We had flashlights, and so did John. Still, I couldn’t shake the feeling, deep in my bones, that something had gone wrong. That John was in danger, that this wasn’t going to work.
I heard a crackle up ahead, and my pulse quickened, but Vera didn’t pay it any attention. She lifted the phone to her ear. “Yes, hello, I think, Jesus, I think my husband—” Her voice cracked, her words turning into a wail. “I think my husband just fell off a cliff. We’re on a hike. God, he was just ahead, and he, and he must have stopped to take a photo, and—”
She paused, her eyes pinpointing a break in the trees that led to the next thicket of woods, her breath heaving from our quick run down. “I don’t know the address,” she said, voice strained. She was practically yelling now. “We were on Platte River Trail, the trailhead by the parking lot just off of—” She looked at me.
“Chapel Road.”
“Chapel Road,” she said, and I didn’t know if she’d truly forgotten or if it was all a part of her act. I briefly imagined her in athleisure, fresh from an afternoon run, standing in front of the mirror and practicing the 911 call like I used to practice the specials for the restaurant where I’d waited tables when I first moved to New York.
“No, we’re not in the parking lot now . . . Please, I just . . . No, we can’t see him . . . Yes, yes, I’ll stay on. Hurry. Goddamn it, please hurry.”
Without getting off the phone, she gestured to me, and we continued down the path toward the parking lot, the trees enveloping us once again, darkening the ground around us. I fiddled in my backpack for my flashlight, already nervous about hiking in the oncoming dark, but my hands brushed against a bit of paper. Strange. I’d emptied the bag last night; there shouldn’t be anything inside but my flashlight and an extra layer. Carefully, I unfolded the scrap in my hands.
My breath caught as water drops from the canopy of trees made spots on the paper. It was his handwriting, chicken scratch that I’d seen on the whiteboard that hung on their fridge, not elegant and swirling like hers. His letters were fat, short, and instantly recognizable.
I’m sorry about the other night. Please don’t tell Vera. I’ll call you soon.
I folded it as quickly as I could, my hands beginning to tingle as sweat pricked the back of my neck. Vera was up ahead, still on the phone. I shoved the note into my pocket and hurried to keep up. After another five minutes, Vera got off the call. They were sending rangers from the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, she said, as well as DEC police officers.
The rangers came first, in hunter-green uniforms and khaki hats, driving utility-terrain vehicles. They were going to do everything they could to find him, they said, as Vera continued to play distressed and I kept my mouth shut, not wanting to say anything wrong, wondering what would happen if the rangers found John as he was making his way toward the cabin, cash and supplies tucked away in his second backpack.
It was fully dark out by the time the officers arrived, in a cop car instead of a UTV, lights flashing, giving the parking lot an eerie clublike feel, turning the tall grasses and signposts into shadow people, dancing and gyrating as the glow flickered round and round.
Vera shifted her weight back and forth as a woman climbed out of the police car and approached. She was in a similar hunter-green uniform, but her weapons belt and wide-brimmed hat set her apart from the rangers. Against her large brown eyes and neat low bun, her hat and her gear looked too big for her, like they were weighing her down. Behind her, a short, stout man emerged from the passenger side and slowly headed our way.
“I’m DEC Officer Parker,” the woman said, her voice brusque but warm. “And this is DEC Officer Roberts.”
“My husband,” Vera said, voice soggy and waterlogged. “My husband, he—”
“Are you the one who placed the nine-one-one call, ma’am?” Parker asked.
Vera nodded. “He just—” Her voice cracked, and she pointed to me. “She saw. He just . . .”
Parker faced me. “I know we’ve already got the rangers searching, but can you tell us what happened, ma’am?”
I felt my breath quicken and my pulse race, but we’d all agreed that would seem normal. We’d just experienced extreme stress. If my body showed no signs of it, that would be abnormal. I took a deep breath as I realized exactly what we were doing. This wasn’t park rangers anymore, people asking you to stay on the trail and look out for your safety. This was a cop, and I was about to lie to her: “John was hiking up ahead to get some photos, and just after I stepped into the clearing . . .” I paused to catch my breath, then stared down, as if transfixed by my own feet. “I heard him scream. I saw him slip and fall off the edge.” Still staring down, I pulled everything I’ve ever felt, everyone I’d ever lost, my mom and my dad, Davis and Ellie, as close to me as possible. Then I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand and looked up.
“And when you looked over the ledge, could you see him, ma’am?”
Vera interrupted, “No, because it’s a goddamned river. It has to be at least a hundred feet down. We need to get down there, we need to—” She stopped abruptly, as if she didn’t know what we needed to do.
Officer Parker stepped back, exchanged a whispered word with her partner, and I felt the hairs on the back of my neck stand straight up. I imagined them pulling out a polygraph machine right then and there, asking me all sorts of questions, Parker’s once-kind face looking right at me: I think you’re lying, Lucy.
Instead, her eyes flitted to the road, where yet another UTV had pulled in, driven by a ranger, a young guy whose shaggy hair peeked from beneath his cap. Parker turned back to me. “Can you take us to where you saw him fall?”
The ride in the UTV was bumpy, air slapping at our faces. The ranger and Officer Parker rode in front, Vera and I in the back, though I kept my eyes focused on the woods and the trail, not daring to glance at Vera for fear that the wrong look would somehow give us away. I pictured John out there, waiting. Could he hear the sirens? The rumble of the UTV over stones and logs and roots? How far had he gone already? Could he really find his way four miles in the dark? Could the rangers have found him? This plan suddenly seemed insane.
And then there was the note, the one now tucked into my pocket. The note I was too afraid to open again and yet desperately wanted to: Please don’t tell Vera.
Our happy new family, our much-needed escape, was starting off with a betrayal.
“Here,” Vera said at the clearing, and the UTV abruptly stopped, my knees smashing against the hard plastic seat in front of me.
“This way,” Vera said, Officer Parker’s flashlight like a beacon.
There they were, the abandoned backpack and water bottle, just as we’d left them. Parker squatted down, then stood. From a duffel bag, she retrieved a camera, about the size of John’s, and snapped a series of photos. Then she tucked it away and pulled out a large brown paper evidence bag and a pair of tongs like a giant tweezers. She expertly maneuvered John’s water bottle into the sack, then folded the top and placed it inside her duffel.
Her flashlight found the footprints and the disturbed rocks—still there, the rain not strong enough to fully wash them away. She turned to me. “This is where he fell?”
“From what I could see, yes.”
She retrieved her camera, knelt carefully, and took more photos, then stood. “Can you tell me exactly what happened?”
Breath short, pulse elevated, I pointed to the edge of the clearing. “I was a little bit behind John, and just as I stepped into the clearing, I heard him scream and saw him slip and fall off the edge here.”
A hit of nausea, a tickle in my throat. “And then Vera found me, and we looked over the edge, but we didn’t see him. We couldn’t see him.”
“How long were you standing there before Ms. Abernathy arrived?” Parker asked.
I shrugged. “A minute or so,” I said. “I called for her, but I’m not sure if she heard me. I don’t know, it’s hard to say.”
“Probably a few minutes,” Vera added. “It took me a while to catch up to her. I didn’t know—I heard yelling, but I couldn’t make out what she was saying over the wind. God, I couldn’t have imagined—” She looked away.
With her flashlight, Parker scanned the area, but when she didn’t see anything else, she grabbed John’s backpack and her duffel, her expression matter-of-fact. “All right. Let’s get down there.”
Vera and I piled back into the UTV. It revved to life, grumbling, and we made our way, not back toward the parking lot, but down a different path, toward the river.
Where both Vera and I knew John wouldn’t be.