Читать книгу Arches Enemy - Scott Graham - Страница 15

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Chuck turned to Carmelita, who sat head-high to him in her bunk. Worry showed in her eyes, though whether her concern had to do with her younger sister’s whereabouts or her own culpability in Rosie’s disappearance, he couldn’t be sure.

“Stay here,” he said, his tone harsher than he’d intended. “Someone needs to be at the trailer when Rosie comes back. And stay off your phone. I want you ready to respond right away if we need you.” He strode down the walkway to the front of the trailer and spun to face Carmelita as he shoved his arm into the sleeve of his jacket. “Call us the instant Rosie comes back.”

Carmelita pushed herself higher in the bed, her back against her pillow. “Why don’t you call her yourself?”

Chuck froze, his arm halfway up his sleeve. “What’d you just say?” he snapped, before he recognized her sincere tone.

“Call her phone,” Carmelita explained. “She’ll tell you where she is. Then you can yell at her all you want for not asking to go somewhere all by herself. She’s probably having hot chocolate in one of the old people’s motor homes. She’s the only little kid in the whole campground. They all love her to death.”

Chuck sucked in the corner of his mouth. “Good idea,” he admitted.

Janelle yanked out her phone. Her fingers flew across its face. She brought it to her ear just as the cricket-chirp ringtone of Rosie’s phone sounded from the lower bunk. Chuck reached the bed in two steps. He rooted in the rumpled sheets until he uncovered Rosie’s phone. Sheathed in its hot pink protective cover, the phone chirped to announce Janelle’s incoming call.

In the upper bunk, Carmelita raised her shoulders to her ears in an exaggerated shrug. “She always forgets that thing.”

Chuck punched off the incoming call and pressed Rosie’s phone to his chin. Nearly three dozen campers had been gathered at the campground entrance. That number accounted for the owners of virtually all the motor homes in the campground—and didn’t leave many who could be hosting Rosie for hot chocolate and cookies.

Despite Carmelita’s display of nonchalance, her eyes continued to gleam with worry. A hard nugget of concern burrowed its way into Chuck’s gut as well. How many times had he and Janelle emphasized to Rosie the importance of asking permission before setting off somewhere on her own? The storm front and the worst of the sleet had passed, but it was still bone-chillingly cold outside—not the sort of weather a child should be wandering around in alone.

Chuck and Janelle returned to the gaggle of RV owners at the front of the campground. None of the campers reported any sightings of Rosie. Next, he and Janelle knocked on motor home after motor home along the campground driveway. Only four couples answered their knocks. Rosie wasn’t sipping hot cocoa in any of the coaches, nor did the RV owners report having seen her outside through their front-facing windshields.

The other campsites were occupied by a mixture of twenty-something couples and solo campers, all weathering the storm in their sites. Those in pop-up trailers cracked their doors a few inches, retaining the heat inside, and reported no sightings of Rosie. Those with pup tents sat marooned in tiny cars with rental company stickers on the rear bumpers, the windows heavily fogged from within. When Chuck and Janelle knocked on the cars, the storm-bound campers rolled down their windows and peered out with forlorn expressions on their faces. They, too, said they hadn’t seen Rosie—though they couldn’t see much of anything through the obscured glass of their vehicles.

The tent camper in the site at the end of the campground rolled down his driver’s window in response to a knock from Janelle and asked in a heavy German accent how long the storm would last. His wavy blond hair and broad shoulders took up much of the interior of the compact rental sedan. Janelle and Chuck stood together at his window.

“It’ll move out fast,” Chuck assured the German camper. “Storms always do in the desert.”

“But the desert is supposed to be hot,” the camper groused through the thick golden beard covering his face.

“In the summer, sure.” Chuck gave the curved roof of the small sedan an encouraging tap. “Hang in there. The weather’ll get better soon.”

The German grunted. In answer to a query from Janelle, he reported he hadn’t seen Rosie and rolled up his window.

“I don’t think he understands how a calendar works,” Chuck said to Janelle as they turned away.

“I’m not worried about him. I’m worried about Rosie.”

“The same thing I told him goes for her, too—the storm will move out fast. The day is already getting warmer. We don’t need to be too worried. Not yet, at least,” Chuck said, seeking to reassure Janelle as well as himself. “It’s just like Rosie to wander off somewhere without telling us, even in weather like this. She took her jacket with her. That’s a good thing. And it’s still morning; it’s a long time till dark.”

“Could she have followed us out to the arch?”

“I wouldn’t put it past her. But she wouldn’t have gotten by us without our seeing her.”

“Unless she got lost on the way. Maybe she took the right-hand trail at the start of the loop, toward your work site. She’s been wanting to see it.”

“That’s one possibility.” Chuck scratched the bristles on his unshaved jaw with his thumb. Then he snapped to attention.

“What are you thinking?” Janelle asked.

His eyes went to the canted ridge of sandstone that framed the west side of Devil’s Garden Campground. The gently sloping ridge, seventy-five feet high, served as a natural sound and visual barrier between the campground and the final stretch of road into the park.

He scratched the air with his fingers. “Meow,” he said. “It’s those damn cats. I’m sure of it.”

“God, I hope you’re right,” Janelle said, out of breath, as she and Chuck strode up the tilted slope of stone toward the top of the ridge. “Why didn’t we think of this sooner?”

“I was betting on the lure of hot chocolate.”

“I should’ve thought of it first thing. It would be just like her.”

“Even though we warned her not to come up here without checking with us first.”

“Because we told her not to come up here without letting us know.” Janelle paused and circled her mouth with her hands. “Rosie!” she hollered up the angled ridge. “Rooooo-sie!”

The wind muffled her voice and tossed her words back at her.

“Rosie!” Chuck bellowed. “Rosalita mía!”

They waited. No reply.

Janelle set off again up the stone ramp. Chuck climbed after her, huffing.

He’d been a runner all his adult life, putting in countless miles on the backcountry trails around Durango, his mountainous hometown in the southwest corner of Colorado. Janelle had taken up running after her move with the girls to Durango from Albuquerque, New Mexico, upon marrying Chuck four years ago. She’d run with him for a few weeks, until, as her fitness level increased, the decade-and-a-half age difference between them grew increasingly apparent, and she sped ahead of him on her own. Carmelita had taken up the sport a few months ago on the advice of her rock-climbing coach. Her runs added an aerobic element to the strength workouts provided by the competitive climbing she practiced with her teammates after school at the local indoor climbing gym three afternoons a week.

Janelle crested the ridge. Wind coursed over the spine of rock, spinning long strands of her hair around her neck. She pulled the strands past her shoulder and into place with both hands.

Chuck reached the top of the ridge and glanced past Janelle, his eyes darting. As forecast by the weather report he’d checked on his phone last night, sleet no longer fell from the clouds surging by close overhead. A lone patch of blue sky showed between broken cloud banks to the north.

The ridge was a quarter-mile long, sloping to the campground on one side and to the two-lane park road on the other. The road extended north fifteen miles from the park entrance to the campground and, immediately outside the campground entrance, the parking lot at the Devil’s Garden Trailhead.

An immense flat of sage and rabbitbrush spread beyond the road, running up against distant red sandstone bluffs and towers that rose to the scudding clouds. Light green patches in the flat denoted the rabbitbrush plants, also known as chamisa, among the darker sage. Swatches of brown at the ends of the rabbitbrush branches were the last seed hulls still clinging to the plants as winter approached.

Shallow arroyos cut across the high-desert flat, gathering what little moisture fell in the park and delivering it to the primary drainage through the southern half of the national park, Courthouse Wash. From Chuck’s viewpoint atop the ridge, piñons and junipers were distant spots of dark green. The trees grew in the arroyos and close against sandstone bluffs to take advantage of precipitation trickling off the walls of rock and gathering in the drainages on rare stormy days like today. Far to the north, the sandstone monolith known as Island in the Sky loomed half a vertical mile above Arches, its sheer rock prow piercing the clouds.

At the base of the ridge opposite the park road, the elderly campers’ motor homes lined the campground drive, the coaches’ rooftop air conditioners and television satellite dishes plainly visible from the ridgetop. Beyond the line of RVs, three matching sandstone bluffs stood like frozen ocean waves, bounding the campground to the north. Each of the three bluffs ended in a vertical west-facing wall fifty feet high.

Other than the campground and deserted road, the only sign of civilization visible from the ridgetop was the line of rangers and first responders snaking across the mile-wide flat north of the trailhead. The front-end loader bounced across the flat a hundred feet behind the emergency workers, the deep rumble of its engine just reaching Chuck’s ears.

Janelle cupped her mouth and hollered, “Rosie!”

Only the whistling wind greeted her cry.

“Rosie!” she screeched again.

Over countless centuries, wind and rain had created a series of shallow depressions and stubby stone projections along the spine of the ridge. Rosie’s head popped up from behind a short plug of stone fifty feet down the ridgetop.

“¡Mamá!” she cried. Her sandpapery voice, filled with joy, rode the gusting wind. “Look what I found!”