Читать книгу Rapid Descent - Gwen Hunter - Страница 15

Listening to the searchers’ comments on the radio as they were relayed up and down the river, Nell fought tears and lost when they found Joe’s kayak and removed it from its securing lines. Her head in her arms at the kitchen table, she heard each report. Waiting. Waiting for any good news. Waiting for them to find Joe. What she heard was information she already knew. The kayak was empty. No supplies. And no Joe nearby, on a rock waiting for help, trapped in a strainer.

No Joe. Not anywhere, alive or…or dead.

One kayaker was assigned to bring the boat in to the takeout, and the team started down the last stretch of the river. It would take a few hours to do a cursory search. There wasn’t time to do a full, in-depth search before sunset.

Nell’s tears splattered on the kitchen table with tiny taps of sound to form a pool. Her breath shuddered along her throat as if claws ripped at it. She silently begged God, begged him, to let her husband be alive. She knew, in some miniscule rational part of her mind, that she was out of control. She, who never cried. Never prayed. “Please,” she whispered. “Please.”

Nell felt Claire’s cool palm on the back of her neck, stroking and soothing. “It’s okay, honey. They’ll find him.”

Though she heard the lie in her mother’s voice, Nell swiveled in her seat and wrapped her arms around Claire’s waist. Her face buried in Claire’s stomach, her mother’s jeans rough on her tender skin, she wept.

Claire massaged her back and neck as the dammed-up emotions flooded out and away. Her mother murmured softly, “It’s okay. You just cry it all out. I’m here, honey. I’m here.”

“I can’t do this,” Nell whispered brokenly. “I can’t do it. I need Joe back. I need him. I’m not strong like you. I can’t do this.” She rocked her forehead against her mother. “I can’t do it.”

Claire’s stroking hand slowed and stopped. “I wasn’t strong when your father died. I was a mess.”

Nell looked up into her mother’s face. “You never cried.”

“I cried. I cried and cussed and threw things and cried and cussed some more. And I hated him for the longest time.” Her pink-lipsticked mouth curled in a sad smile and she brushed Nell’s stiff hair back behind an ear. “And even after all that, even after all these years, I still miss the cheatin’ son of a gun. Can you believe it?”

Nell laughed, a hiccup of surprise. “No.”

Claire waved a hand in the air as if to rub away the negative. “I do. Still. But it was pure torture to live through, him running off with that woman, the church elder’s wife, and them getting killed together. All the gossip at church and in town. The whisperin’. The way the newspaper kept on and on with the story and brought it up over and over during that trucker’s trial for drunk driving and resisting arrest. It was all I could do to get through each day.”

“I didn’t know,” Nell said, the words hoarse.

“’Course not. I had to protect you. You were mine, all I had left to love and provide for. So I survived. And now you have me to survive for. ’Cause I don’t know what I’d do without you.” She wiped Nell’s face with the pads of her thumbs. “Come on. Lie down a while. You need to rest.”

“I can’t sleep.” Fresh tears ran down her face, stinging like salt in wounds. “I can’t. Not until they find Joe.”

“I didn’t say anything about sleep. I said you should rest. I’ll sit with you. And I’ll listen to the radio. And if you doze off, I promise to wake you if they find anything. Anything at all. Come on.” Claire pulled Nell up. Docile, she followed her mother to the bed. Like a child, she lay down when her mother folded back the sheets and held them for her. They were fresh and cool and smelled of Joe. Instantly, she was asleep.

Orson watched from the shadows as Nolan reached to knock at the door of the motor home. It flung open and the old man stepped back, jerking his hand from the swinging door. He looked up to see those blue eyes. Nell Stevens’s mother. Claire. His dad’s mouth opened, but no words came out. Orson hid a smile.

The woman stared down from three steps up, sparks flashing. She came down the steps at him, her face flushing red with anger. His dad, who had faced down moonshiners and pot growers and backcountry mountaineers carrying shotguns and a total disregard for the law, stepped back. She walked up to him, shoulders rigid and fire in her eyes, backing him another two steps before he was able to stop his backpedaling progress.

She leaned into him, her chest a fraction of an inch from his, her chin outthrust, her finger pointing. Pale pink nail polish, Orson saw, that matched her lipstick.

“If you think you’re gonna wake my daughter, you have another think coming. My girl is asleep, after crying her eyes out. You can just wait. You hear me?”

“I wouldn’t think about—I just need to ask—”

“You need to ask nothin’. I know how you cops work.” She put her hands on her hips. Orson saw his dad looking at her mouth. “You start out all sweet and nice and asking simple questions and then you lower the boom with some other awful question that says you think somebody’s guilty of something. It’s a sneak attack, is what it is. Jist like that sneaky way you questioned me about it all without telling me you was a cop. And my Nell is too broke up over Joe to be hurt like that.”

“Miz Bartwell, I—”

“I know you got a job to do. I know somebody’s gotta ask the hard questions and look for guilt. I know somebody’s gotta interrogate, and investigate, and stick his nose into other people’s business. Like assuming my girl is guilty of killing her husband and hiding the body. Right?” she demanded. She shoved her chin closer, nearly touching the old man’s chest. “Right? That’s what you gotta ask?”

Orson was pretty sure his dad had started to sweat. He nodded like he couldn’t help himself. He’d probably have agreed that the sky was green if she told him to. Twenty-five years as an investigator questioning the biggest and baddest the streets had to offer, and this little bitty woman…Orson laughed silently. She scared the hell outta him.

“I understand that,” she said. “But you gotta understand that I gotta job to do too. And my job is to protect my baby. And if you try to hurt her, if you try asking mean questions jist to see her cry, if you try to make her feel worse than she does now for gettin’ hurt and makin’ her husband go down a dangerous river alone to get her help, and then not come back from it, I’ll scratch out your blasted eyes. I’ll cut out your innards and leave your bloody, dead body where only the maggots can find it. And then I’ll pray over your dead, bleeding body that the Lord will somehow save your immortal soul, if you really have one. Are we clear?”

“Pretty clear, ma’am.”

“Come back later.” Claire stomped back up the steps and closed the door in his face.

“Did that little woman just threaten you with blinding, death and maggots?” Orson asked from the shadows. “Isn’t it against the law to threaten an officer of the court?”

Nolan looked over at Orson, leaning a shoulder against the side of the RV, arms crossed over his wet suit, ankles crossed. Amused as hell and not hiding it. Nolan shook his head. “Yeah. I think I’m in love.”

Orson snorted. “She’d eat you up and spit you out, old man.”

“Like I said. I think I’m in love.”

“One ’a these days your love of bitchy women is going to get you killed.”

“Feisty. Not bitchy.”

“You say potato, I say bitchy. But I did notice that she didn’t use a single cussword in all that tirade.”

“And she did offer to pray for me.” Nolan laughed and nodded his head at the river; the two men walked toward the slow-moving water. “You ready to go undercover?”

“I’m ready. But you know for a fact that the more experienced men will say I got this job on your coattails.”

“I asked who had river experience. You were the only one, Junior. Get in there and make nice with the kayak search crew. And don’t screw up, son.”

“Thanks for the vote of confidence,” he said wryly.

“You want a pat on the butt, play football.” Nolan Lennox turned and walked back to his unmarked car, leaving Orson to join the search team and find out who knew what about Joe Stevens. As lead investigator on the Joseph Stevens case, his dad had bigger fish to fry.

As the shadows lengthened along the Leatherwood Ford Bridge, in the extended dusk that steep valleys and rivers always experience, Nell stood on the shore, hiding beneath a wide-brimmed hat and sunglasses, waiting. Her mother was at her side, with one arm around her waist, body heat a comfort at her back. She wanted to be there when the boaters brought Joe’s boat in.

There were four news vans behind them, all with cameras trained on her, one van for each of the competing networks working out of Knoxville, the closest city big enough to have its own TV stations. NBC, CBS, ABC and the local cable van were all present. Nell had seen her own interview on the air before shutting the TV off. She knew how unlikely it was for reporters to get the details right this early in the search, before they found someone—an unnamed source—to give them the skinny. She wasn’t interested in hearing their on-air misconceptions and mistakes or their take on the search.

Joe’s disappearance had made state news, and some pundits were implying that she had done away with Joe, an implication that should have made Nell furious, but only left her exhausted and more determined than ever not to grant interviews to predatory reporters. After hearing the insinuations on local talk radio, Claire had agreed that they were vultures. She had stepped in to protect her daughter’s privacy, telling reporters to stay back or she would shoot them herself, not that Claire owned a gun. Nell leaned in to her mother’s body as she stared at the empty water, the current only a ripple.

Near 4:00 p.m., the first kayak came into view, followed by the rest of the small craft and then by the Maravia Ranger raft, Mike sitting up high on the stern of the boat. Nell saw them all, but her eyes were on the red playboat being towed by the kayaker in the middle of the pack. It moved in erratic patterns behind the towboat, the lack of weight making it skitter across the surface of the quiet pool like a water spider.

Playboats were used by extreme kayakers who wanted to take class V rapids, and then do tricks and stunts in them. The responsive little boats required the weight and experience of a skillful paddler inside to track smoothly. Empty, Joe’s boat had no grace or style or spirit. Nell had an instant of memory—Joe in the boat, practicing a backflip, his body and boat in the air, upside down, churning water below him, his paddle spinning, a wide grin on his face.

She quivered with reaction. Her husband wasn’t dead. He was alive. He had to be. He was too vital, too vibrant to be…to be dead. Tears started to fall again.

Wavering in her tears, the boats scraped onto the shore, hulls rubbing on sand and rounded river rocks. Nell blinked hard and focused solely on her husband’s boat. She moved into the shallow water and knelt, one hand out to pull the forty-pound boat close to her. It ground across the surface of the shore, the empty hull hollow-sounding, magnifying the noise like a drum. She ran her hand across the boat.

It was battered, with long scratches along the sides, new gouges where it had impacted rock. Some parts of the top-of-the-line outfitting—the hip pads, and knee braces that Joe had duct taped in for a permanent fit—were missing, leaving only the seat, structured metal bracing and hard plastic.

Nell had seen a lot of boats in her time, many that had taken rapids without a boater. A lot of them had looked like this, the insides partially missing. Wherever Joe had come out, it hadn’t been just before the location where she found the small craft. It had happened upriver of the rock that had snagged his boat. Maybe at the top of the El. The boat had taken several drops or been caught in a hole to look this banged up.

Blinking hard, Nell wiped her nose and stood. Silently, she touched the shoulder of the kayaker who had brought the boat in. It was Harvey, one of the guides who had made the trip up from the Pigeon to help in the search. His beard was beaded with river water, his hazel-gray eyes not meeting hers. His shoulder was cold through the dry suit he wore.

“Thank you for bringing Joe’s boat in, Harvey.”

He shook his head, staring across the river. “Shouldn’t ’a happened,” he mumbled.

Nell laughed, a bleep of pain that she quickly smothered in the crook of her elbow, covering her mouth and chin. Her hand tightened on his arm as Joe’s image fluttered in her grief. “No. It shouldn’t have. If I’d seen the strainer in time, Joe wouldn’t be hurt somewhere on the river. He’d be here right now.”

Harvey slanted his eyes at her, his expression guarded and grieving. Nell stepped back. Realized that he believed Joe was dead. He believed it completely. In his mind there was no hope for Joe. None at all.

Nell dropped her hand as if his touch burned her.

Picking up his boat and equipment as if the forty-pound kayak weighed nothing, Harvey walked off. Horrified, Nell watched him walk away.

His helmet beneath one elbow, paddle to the side, Mike approached and hugged her, seeming not to notice her unyielding body or the tremors that coursed through her. He said, “We’re going back out soon as we can get up to the confluence put-in. We’ve got enough time to do a good search above and along the shores of the Long Pool. I’ll drive your RV and you ride with Claire.”

A freckled, redheaded reporter jammed a microphone beneath Mike’s chin. “Are you Jedi Mike?” he asked, youthful exuberance in his tone.

Another reporter, a petite brunette, shoved a mic in close as well and said, “Do you think the missing kayaker is still alive?”

Claire pulled Nell away from the gathering throng of cameras and reporters. It was obvious that this new group didn’t know who Nell was. Not yet. The bob-haired reporter from the morning, Bailey something, was not with this crew.

A third reporter elbowed past them and jogged to Mike, asking, “What are the feelings of the searchers? Are you any closer to finding the missing man?”

Contempt on his face, Mike picked up Joe’s boat and angled away, leaving the path open for Nell and Claire to escape. He caught Nell’s eyes and jerked his head at Claire’s car, a clear order to get inside. Turning to the water, he shouted, “Elton! Let’s get the boats loaded up. Daylight’s wasting.”

Walking backward, Nell saw the first reporter pivot in front of Mike, blocking his way. “Can you tell us what’s going on, out on the water?” the guy asked. “Have you seen any evidence of the missing boater?”

Mike rounded on the hapless reporters and fixed them all with a furious glare. “We’re busting our humps, is what’s going on out on the river. Why don’t you get your lazy asses out there and help the hikers instead of getting in the way and asking damn-fool questions?” The reporters seemed to skitter into a group, as if seeking safety in numbers from the irate man.

Elton stepped in and softly said, “Maybe I can help?” The reporters ganged up around him and threw questions at him fast and furiously while Mike and the other searchers and onlookers loaded up the boats. Still walking backward, Nell watched as Mike loaded Joe’s boat with the others and tied it down with twine in a complicated naval knot. She wanted the boat with her. But she knew Mike would take care of it.

Nell slid into the passenger seat, and Claire started the little red car, pulling out while they were still buckling their seat belts. Silent, they drove from the takeout. Claire shot her a glance once the car reached the secondary road and said, “You’re still mad at me for getting that reporter to come by this morning, aren’t you?”

Nell sighed and rubbed the bruised spot on her temple. It wasn’t as painful as it had been, the headache kept at bay by constant use of Tylenol and ibuprofen. “Not mad, Claire. It’s just that I’ve seen reporters on a bad SAR. I know how they get. They’ll give me until tomorrow before the innuendos turn into bald accusations.” She laid her head against the molded headrest.

“They’re gonna accuse you of killing Joe and dumping him in the river. That what you’re saying?”

Nell laughed, the tone desolate. “Yeah, Mama. That’s what I’m saying.”

As if Nell’s use of the word Mama had been a shock to her, Claire fell silent and concentrated on driving. If Nell’d had the energy, she’d have worried about the look of concentration on her mother’s face. It always presaged trouble ahead or guilt for something already done.

The radio squelched all afternoon, comments and orders and reports passed up and down the river. The hikers were in constant communication with the kayakers, checking around each boulder, inspecting downed trees with limbs in water and roots on land. In the current, the most experienced rescue volunteers checked out eddies that looked wrong. Eddies that might have been caused by a body in the water.

Mike and his paddlers stabilized the Ranger raft with ropes attached to trees onshore, securing it over the zigzag current at the base of the Long Pool. Held in place, they dragged the bottom with a grappling hook, trying to snag whatever was down there, affecting the current. Nell, sitting in the RV, was so tense her stomach was in knots, a hot pain just below her breastbone. The thought of food still made her sick to the stomach and she turned down the offer of a bowl of soup from her mother and hot dogs from the rescue squad’s family members who kept the hospitality wagon open and running.

By 6:00 p.m., the searchers had checked every rock and bit of shoreline upstream of the Long Pool and around it. Every strainer had been pulled from the river. Every eddy that looked wrong had been dredged. All were caused by trees or rocks that had shifted. Not by a body. They had methodically searched every possible location for Joe. And for his body.

The shorelines farther downstream, in the deepest part of the canyon, would take another twelve hours or more to search as thoroughly. The call came over the radio to head in. It was impossible to make it back upstream. Most of the kayakers had brought overnight gear, but it wasn’t with them on the river where they could camp overnight; they had to make it to the takeout or the next support site at the O & W Bridge by sunset, get carted back to their gear and set up camp before total dark. They had less than two hours.

Nell waited for the searchers at the put-in of the confluence of Clear Creek and the New River, sitting in the passenger chair of the RV cab, which Mike had brought in before he hit the water again. She watched the activity between the cracks of the closed RV curtains, kneading her fingers in anxiety.

The put-in here, midway down the gorge, was a rough, unsophisticated version of the Burnt Mill Bridge put-in. It sported a bumpy, one-lane road that curled midway down from the plateau at the top, to the footpath that led the rest of the way down to the river. The so-called camping area was a gravel loop of the road. No picnic tables. No Port-a-Potties. Nothing but a ring of trees and several fire pits. The walk to the river was a steep, winding, downhill path on loose gravel, sandstone rock and trail-hard dirt.

The press vans came and went, but only one or two reporters and cameramen took the long walk down to the water for footage. The auxiliary rescue squad showed up about six and parked their van on the highest ground at the top of the circle. One woman lit a camp stove and started coffee. Another began to open buckets of donated Kentucky Fried Chicken. Together they set out coolers full of drinks and heated all the fixin’s. The smell of chicken laced the air like a greasy but delicious perfume.

The hikers dribbled in by twos and threes, rubbing aching calves and stretching, some trekking to the river to soak tired feet in the cold water and take sponge baths. Others grabbed a chicken leg and took off for home, eating while driving away. From here, the sun was a brilliant globe dropping below the western hills, throwing long shadows across the campsite.

There was a gold glow to the evening air when the kayakers roared up in Mike’s big SUV, the boats bouncing behind on his trailer. At the sight, the chief auxiliary lady rang a big bell and started dishing up food. Nell watched from the cab, unmoving.

“You should go eat with the searchers,” Claire said at her shoulder. Her mother had been appearing there often, not touching, not saying much, just being there. Outside, more cars and trucks pulled up as searchers returned to the nearest support site for dinner.

“Nah,” Nell said, leaning toward the curtain cracks. “I’m fine.”

“You should go eat with the searchers,” Claire said, an unaccustomed resolve in her voice. “Not for you. For them.”

Nell looked at her mother. Claire wasn’t usually the “buck up and smile” kind of woman, but Nell knew she was right, and by the glint in her eyes, she wasn’t taking no for an answer. Fingers like steel, she tugged Nell to her feet and pushed her out the RV door toward the rescue food van. “Go. Tell them you appreciate all the work and the food and the help. Sit with them. Eat with them. It’s only right.”

Nell tucked her hands into her jeans pockets and stopped in a shadow, watching. There were no showers at the put-in. No running water. For toilets, the hikers and boaters made do with shovels and trips into the forest, and since everyone stank of sweat and river, who cared? The smells of body odor and chicken and coffee filled the evening air. In the center of the circle, someone lit a bonfire of deadwood from the nearby woods, and the sting of smoke and kerosene added to the miasma. Someone else brought out a keg of beer to massed whoops and cheers and applause. The air chilled quickly now that the sun was down, and Nell wished she had pulled on a sweatshirt or sweater. A cool breeze played with the unprotected skin of her neck and face. An owl called, seven notes of rhythmic hooting, claiming territory.

The scene was powerful. Every smell, every sound, every sight was intense, jarring, as if her mind was on overdrive, glaring with intensity.

Mike spotted her in the shadows and handed Nell a plate of food and a huge foam cup of sweet tea. “Sit and eat. You look like shit,” he said.

Nell choked in laughter with the same despairing tone her voice had held all day. She knew she sounded broken. Shattered. And that wasn’t fair to the people around her. They were fighting for Joe. If they found him, injured, in the most dangerous place possible, they would risk life and limb to save him. She owed it to them to be there for them tonight.

She took a deep, steadying breath and drank a long draft of tea. It fell down her esophagus, cold and sweet. Hunger stirred, and her mouth watered at the scent of KFC. She took another breath, feeling it fill her lungs. The way she filled her lungs before a challenging run on a class IV and V river. Tears wanted to fall and she forced them down. Not tonight. Not in front of these people, her friends.

Claire brought her a folding chair from storage in the RV undercarriage, and Mike placed it upwind of the fire. Turtle Tom put a log beside her and sat close, silent, eating. Harvey and RiverAnn sat across the fire, touching often. Stewart and Hamp, his Furman U. hat glowing in the firelight, sat near the keg. Natch.

Someone brought out a guitar and several people started setting up tents. As on many such SARs, they were going to spend the night on the river.

A woman Nell didn’t know brought her a sliver of coated, waterproofed neoprene. “It’s from your strainer,” she said, putting the two inch by quarter inch strip into Nell’s palm. Nell recognized the scrap from her dry suit and closed her fingers on it. She thanked the woman, blinking away tears. The guitarist started playing an old Doobie Brothers song. The smell of beer wafted on the air. In the background, the auxiliary-support women cleaned up the KFC boxes and closed the van, the doors loud in the night. The engine started and the van pulled out, lights bouncing into the trees, crawling the treacherous hill up out of the river gorge.

Dark night fell and bright stars filled the sky between trees overhead. Two owls hooted back and forth. Sporadic conversation around the fire hit on politics and religion without creating a ruckus, then moved on to a fantasy series someone was reading. Eventually the talk turned to the searchers’ day, of what went wrong, of who had to swim because they couldn’t do an Eskimo roll, of the big water and the difficulty in taking the gnarly drops, of who built an altar of stones in Joe’s honor, of who had a new boat and how it reacted to the water. Of…of everything. The voices ran together in a smoky haze. Nell smelled marijuana, cigarettes, beer and chicken, and heard laughter and the occasional song and the rarer sound of two lovers in the night.