Читать книгу Arches Enemy - Scott Graham - Страница 17

6

He studied the stone plugs and rolling undulations of slickrock atop the ridge.

Nothing moved.

He watched, unblinking.

Still nothing.

Janelle stopped and called up to him from below. “What are you waiting for?”

“I thought I saw something,” he hollered back down to her over the howl of the wind, his eyes on the spine of the ridge.

“Probably one of the cats.”

“Maybe,” he replied, though whatever movement he’d seen definitely had been caused by something larger than a cat—and he had seen something, he was sure of it.

When nothing more revealed itself, he descended to Janelle. A rush of wind buffeted them as they trailed Rosie down the long stone ramp.

“She won us over pretty easy,” Janelle said.

“This whole thing with the girls getting lives of their own, I’m not sure I like it very much,” Chuck replied. “We can’t even say no to Rosie anymore, much less Carmelita.”

“Rosie’s way more of a handful than Carm was at her age. I dread when her teen years come along. Carm is just acting a little self-centered these days. Who knows what Rosie will get herself up to.”

“Rosie? Are you serious?”

“Believe me, you have no idea.”

“You’re speaking from experience, aren’t you?”

“No teen ever in the history of the world was as stubborn as I was. I still don’t know where it came from. But there was no way I was going to let my parents tell me what to do about anything, no matter what it was. Any advice they tried to give me, I was determined to do exactly the opposite—which, in the South Valley, was just a bad idea waiting to happen.”

In her teen years, Janelle had abandoned her family in Albuquerque’s rough South Valley neighborhood to take up with a seedy local drug dealer, the girls’ father, now deceased.

“Except …” Chuck urged, knowing the happy ending to come.

“Except I got Carm and Rosie out of the deal.” Janelle slung her arm around Chuck’s waist. “And, eventually, you.”

He snugged her to his side. “I got you and the girls out of the deal, too.”

“Compared to what I put my parents through, there’s a lot to be said for the fact that, pissy as Carm has been of late, her biggest complaint isn’t that big of a deal. The main thing she’s upset with us about is that we keep insisting on dropping her off and picking her up from the climbing gym, instead of letting her catch rides with the older girls.”

“She’s two years younger than anyone else on the senior climbing team,” Chuck said. “It’s bad enough imagining the things the older girls are filling her ears with while they’re at the gym. I don’t want her hanging with them any more than I can help it.”

Janelle squeezed his waist as they descended the sloping stone together. “Which is all on you. You’re the one who introduced her to climbing—to your sport.”

In his twenties, Chuck had dedicated his every spare moment to scaling vertical walls of stone. During time off between his contracted archaeological digs, he’d climbed in Yosemite Valley in California, Red Rock Canyon in Nevada, Rifle Mountain Park in Colorado—wherever perpendicular faces of granite, sandstone, limestone, or any other kind of rock offered the intense challenges he and his fellow climbing devotees sought. Two decades later, witnessing Carmelita’s climbing prowess on safe indoor climbing walls filled him with unaccustomed fatherly pride.

“We’ve both agreed,” he said. “The fact that she’s so talented is all to the good for her.”

Until Carmelita had taken up climbing a year ago, she’d been shy and insecure, with only a handful of friends. But since establishing herself as the star of the youth climbing scene in Durango, she’d gained confidence and numerous new companions. Too many, perhaps—particularly of the older variety. But, as Chuck and Janelle repeatedly told each other, too many friends was a better problem for a teenager to have than too few.

Back at the trailer, Chuck crowded into the front entry with Janelle, Rosie, and the cat. At the sight of the feline in Rosie’s arms, Carmelita set her phone aside and hopped down from her bunk.

Rosie introduced Pasta Alfredo to her sister. “She’s a she. I checked.”

“Let’s call her Fredo for short,” Carmelita suggested.

“Okay,” Rosie agreed instantly. “Want to hold her?”

“Not yet. We have to figure out how to take care of her first.”

Carmelita grabbed her phone from the upper bunk and set to work, her fingers tapping the screen.

“We should get her some milk,” Rosie suggested. “That’s what all cats want.”

“Good idea,” Chuck said, reaching for the refrigerator handle.

“Nope,” Carmelita said, her eyes on her phone. “It says here milk is only for kittens. It gives full-grown cats diarrhea.”

“Yuck,” Rosie said.

Chuck dropped his hand from the refrigerator.

“It says canned tuna fish is okay in place of cat food,” Carmelita continued.

“We’ve got that.” Janelle slipped past Chuck and opened the food cabinet.

“Plus some water,” Carmelita said.

“Will do.” Janelle pulled a can of tuna from the cupboard and turned to the sink.

“What about a bed?” Rosie asked, cradling the cat. “I bet she’s really tired from being outside and running away from all the foxes and coyotes so she wouldn’t get eaten up.”

Carmelita slid her fingertip down her phone, scrolling. “It says a towel would be okay for a pad, but a fleece blanket is best. And that they like to sleep up off the ground.”

“Oh, oh, oh!” Rosie crowed. “She can have the fleece blanket on my bed. And she can lay on my bed, too. It’s above the floor.” She turned to Janelle. “Okay, Mamá?”

“I guess,” said Janelle. “She has to sleep somewhere.” She set out two bowls on the counter next to the sink.

Carmelita tugged the red pile blanket from Rosie’s lower bunk, folded it in quarters, and arranged it on the foot of the bed. As Carmelita stepped away from the layered blanket, Pasta Alfredo leapt from Rosie’s arms.

“Wow!” Rosie stumbled backward. “She can fly!”

The cat landed on the blanket and immediately began ripping at the fleece with her front claws.

Chuck moaned. “She’s tearing it apart.”

Janelle said, “With purpose, though. It looks like she knows what she’s doing.”

“Yeah,” Rosie said. “See? She’s making a round spot.”

Sure enough, the cat created a perfect circle of raised pile with her claws, then settled atop it.

“You’re right,” Chuck admitted grudgingly. “She made her bed and now she’s lying in it, too.”

Janelle opened the can of tuna. The trailer filled with the smell of fish.

Chuck squeezed his nostrils between thumb and finger. “Ugh,” he said to the girls.

“It’s just fishiness.” Rosie gave him a shove. “Geez.”

On the blanket, Pasta Alfredo settled her head on her paws and closed her eyes.

Rosie took Chuck’s hand and whispered, “She’s more tired than she is hungry.”

Chuck nodded. “It does seem like she’s happy to be indoors.”

Carmelita looked up from her phone. “She’ll need a litter box. It says we can use a cardboard box and tear some paper into strips until we get some real kitty litter.”

Chuck said to Rosie, beside him, “We’ll have to check with everyone in the campground to find out if anybody’s missing her—the sooner the better.”

His phone buzzed in his pocket. He checked the number on its screen.

“It’s Sanford,” he told Janelle.

As he put the phone to his ear, the vision of the dead woman’s hand and forearm, protruding from beneath toppled Landscape Arch, came flooding back to him.