Copper River

41

R en didn’t sleep. He lay awake thinking, worrying, the weight of so much concern pressing on his chest. There was Stash, almost dead because of him. And Charlie, alone and on the run again. And he’d lied to the Marquette policeman, and later to his mother and Cork and Dina when they’d questioned him about where Charlie might be hiding. He was in trouble-the man named Olafsson had made that clear-and it was only going to get worse.

An hour after he heard his mother go to bed and Dina lie down on the sofa in the living room, where she insisted on sleeping to help protect them, he threw back the covers and dressed in the dark. He folded a blanket and put it in a knapsack he pulled from his closet. From under his bed, he took a package of bologna and what was left of a loaf of bread, which he’d sneaked from the kitchen earlier that night, and he put these in the knapsack, too. It wasn’t gourmet but it would keep Charlie from starving. He grabbed a flashlight from his desk drawer and tugged his jacket on. He opened his bedroom door and listened. He could hear Dina making small snoring noises as she slept. As quietly as he’d ever moved, he crept past her, turned the dead bolt, and eased the front door open. A moment later, he’d slipped into the night.

Clouds had rolled in obscuring the moon. The night was tar black. Ren couldn’t even see the ground at his feet. He switched the flashlight on and headed toward the Killbelly Marsh Trail. He moved quickly, afraid that his mother or Dina, if they woke, might look out and see the beam, and understand. He’d lied to them already; if his mother called to him, he didn’t want to compound his sin with disobedience, though he would if it came to that. Charlie needed him.

The night wasn’t only dark; it was dead still. The crunch of autumn leaves thundered under his boots. Whenever he stepped on a fallen branch, the dry snap was like a gunshot. To anything in the woods that might be interested, his presence was being broadly announced.

Black trees walled the narrow corridor of the trail. Whenever Ren heard a sound and swung the beam right or left, the trunks seemed to leap at him. The sounds, he told himself, were only part of the normal noise of night, the scurrying of small critters for whom sundown meant safety from predators. It was no different from that night after his father died when he’d forced himself to stay in the woods in order to overcome his fear of the dark.

But that night a year ago there had been no hungry, wounded cougar to worry about. Too late, Ren realized he should have brought something along to discourage the big cat if they met. He spent a few minutes scouring the woods near the trail for a broken-off branch suitable to use as a club.

Well before he reached the Copper River he heard the rush of fast water. When he joined the main trail, he turned west toward the Hurons and made his way along the rocky bank. He remembered the scat Cork had found, and the speculation that because the animal was wounded it used the trail.

Please, God, he prayed silently, don’t let it be here.

He’d been on the Copper River Trail hundreds of times over the years, and if anybody had asked him he would have said he could walk it blindfolded. Stumbling along in the dark with only the thin, wobbly finger of the Coleman beam pointing the way, he realized what a dumb boast that would have been. At night, everything felt different-or this night, anyway, with so much hidden by the dark and with every clumsy step giving him away. He knew deep down how lame the stick in his right hand would be if the cougar caught his scent and was desperate to feed.

What moved him forward step by faltering step was thinking that Charlie had faced the same problems making her way to the one place she believed was safe.

He rounded a bend a quarter mile from the old mine and came alongside a place where the river ran flat and smooth and everything was quiet. From far behind him came the sound of something heavy hitting the ground in a tremendous crackle of the brittle leaves that blanketed the trail. He held his breath. The only sound then was the soft gurgle of the river. He swung around. His flashlight beam created a tunnel thirty or forty yards long in which he saw nothing but empty trail. He flipped the light off and stood another minute, listening intently, focusing all his senses on the enormous circle of black at whose center he stood.

His father had once told him that although an artist might work in images on paper or canvas, good artists were in touch with all their senses and knew how to use them creatively.

Ren focused and tried to touch the skin of the night, to hear the night breathing, to catch its scent. He opened his mouth and let the taste of the night lie on his tongue. What he sensed was that he was not alone. As if to prove the truth of his conclusion, his ears picked up the delicate crumble of desiccated leaves as something again moved toward him on the trail.

He spun, hit the switch on the flashlight, and sprinted upriver. Ahead of him, the beam bounced wildly. Several times he stumbled and almost fell headlong. His footfalls and the noise of his own heavy breathing deafened him to sound at his back, and he ran with the certainty that any moment the cougar would pounce and its razor teeth would slice into his neck. He thought that if he could only make it to the old mine, he could use his club to keep the cougar at bay. Maybe Charlie’s presence there would help discourage an attack.

He reached the place along the river below the mine and began to scramble up the steep slope. He was feeding on adrenaline, moving like a mountain goat, using the stick in his right hand to propel himself upward. He reached the wild blackberry thicket that masked the entrance. Falling to his belly, he wormed his way into the small passage that he and Charlie had fashioned through the bramble. On the other side, he swung the flashlight beam into the mine.

In the light lay a circle of ash and char from a fire, a mound of leaves that had probably served as a bed, several candy bar wrappers, and an empty pint container of Nestle’s chocolate milk. Charlie was nowhere to be seen.

But Ren was not alone. At his back, he heard the rattle of loose stones on the slope. He turned, set the flashlight down with the beam aimed at the opening to the passage. He gripped the club hard with both hands. The blackberry thicket shivered. Ren drew the club back like a batter preparing to receive a fastball. He kept his eyes on the end of the narrow passage, a ragged arch in the thicket. He held his breath and waited.

What emerged was a monster, a creature with huge eyes.

Then Ren realized that the eyes were goggles and the monster was Dina Willner. She put up a hand to block the beam.

“You’re blinding me, Ren. Turn the light off for a minute.”

He switched off the flashlight. In the dark he heard her silky rustlings.

“Okay,” she said. “Give us some light again.”

In the illumination, he saw that she’d removed her goggles. She wore camouflage fatigues.

“Where’s Charlie?” she asked, peering into the mine.

“I don’t know,” he replied. “I thought for sure she’d be here.”

“This is where she hid before, isn’t it?”

She reached into the pocket of her fatigue pants and pulled out a small cyclinder, a mini Maglite. She used it to scan the tunnel back of the entrance.

“Looks completely blocked,” she said.

“It is. How did you follow me?”

She dangled the goggles. “Night vision. I’m worried about Charlie, too. I was pretty sure you knew where she was and would go to her. I put these under the sofa and after you left I followed.”

“I should have known you weren’t really asleep,” Ren said. “But I’m glad you’re here.”

“I almost wasn’t. I took a bad spill on the trail back there and you almost got away from me.”

“I thought you were the cougar.”

“That wasn’t smart, leaving at night without protection, Ren, but I understand. I brought this.” She reached to her belt under her jacket and drew out a big handgun. Again she swung her Maglite toward the jumble of rock and rotted beam a dozen feet in from the mine entrance that barred further entry. “So if she’s not here, where would she be?”

“I don’t know,” he said honestly.

She knelt and picked up a bit of the ash and char and rubbed it between her fingers. “This is old.”

Ren said, “This was the safest place. She should have come here. Unless…” He stopped short of speaking his fear.

“Unless someone intercepted her,” Dina finished for him. She stood up and put a comforting arm around his shoulders. “You know the Odyssey? The story of Odysseus?”

“Yeah,” Ren said. He’d read a Classics Illustrated version. He thought the part about the Cyclops especially was way cool.

“Odysseus survived everything the gods threw at him because of his cunning. He was a very smart guy. That’s Charlie, Ren. She’s very cunning. So I think there’s another explanation for why she’s not here.”

“Really?”

“Absolutely. And when we see her, she’ll tell us what it is. Come on. We should both get back.”

Dina led the way along the Copper River Trail. Behind her, Ren watched with admiration how gracefully she moved. In that, she reminded him a lot of Charlie.