Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. Vol. 133, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 811 & 812, March/April 2009

Vacation by Trina Corey

Trina Corey has made her living as a teacher for the past twenty years. When she decided to try writing fiction she chose as setting a place she’d traveled to in college, and came up with this atmospheric tale. She lives with her family in northern California, and is currently working on a story set in the nineteen thirties.

My ex-husband was dead, God rot him, and I had given our daughter all the solace I could (which was quite a lot, I am a very good mother). But I was tapped out, and after hugs and pats on the arm and “don’t worry”s from her and me, I had turned over Jenny’s grief support to my son-in-law, and was heading out of town. For deep in the corners of my only partly healed soul, I wanted to dance and sing and whoop to the sky that I had outlived the bastard.

The cover story was that I was going to look at the wildflowers which were having their bloom of the century after a winter of extraordinary rains. Since we were only eight years into the century, this didn’t do even partial justice to what was going on in the wilds. Seeds that had waited through two, three, or four decades were rooting and flowering. It made the papers. Crowds of people were thronging to see. I decided to say I was joining the throngs, and it was true, I’d look at the flowers. I love flowers. I know flowers. And if people saw me out there with a giddy look on my face, I didn’t need to tell them that it wasn’t because I’d seen my first trout lily, but because I was drawing breath, and Stephen never would again.

I headed for Death Valley because I’d never been there with him, and I had, most happily, been there with my first serious boyfriend. It had been a lovely trip, full of heat and life and, much to my surprise at that time, plants growing in what I’d believed to be an empty desert.

The only campground where I’d been able to get a reservation was barren of all life, except people and more people. Even flower lovers come with noisy generators and blindness-inducing lanterns. I set up my tent on ground that was more rock than dirt, took a small pack with water bottles, a sweater for the cold that came with full night, and a flashlight to pick my way past the howling circles of propane- and kerosene-driven lights. Quiet and darkness came within five minutes as the trail curved around and up a steep hill. I wasn’t looking for flowers now, I was looking for stars, and needed to have open ground between me and the sky-drowning glare of the campground.

There were millions, billions. Worlds upon worlds of lights, thick across the center of the sky, more sparse toward the jagged shadows of the Panamint mountains, and colored — look long enough and you’ll see the blues and golds and reds of the stars. I watched them, and breathed the clear, empty wind falling like cold water from the higher slopes. Watched until the stars had moved partway across the sky. Watched until I could see my hand’s shadow on the ground from their light. Watched, and practiced breathing the clean air of a world that no longer had in it the man who had scarred me.

When I got back to camp, it was quiet, and mostly dark. I pulled my bag out of the tent and slept under the wheeling stars.

The next morning I headed into town for breakfast. I can’t bring myself to cook with the kind and volume of grease necessary for proper-tasting hash browns, but I do love to eat them. The cafe I’d seen on the way into the park yesterday lived up to its clean, friendly appearance, and the young red-haired waitress brought me potatoes that sizzled and crunched and I silently thanked the pig that had died to make it possible. I also promised myself to hike far and fast, hopefully keeping my blood moving quickly enough to prevent the lard from settling in my arteries. I had opened Morris’s book on desert wildflowers to refresh my memory — mostly I knew the flowers in the Santa Cruz Mountains — when the waitress came back with more coffee and a message.

“Gentleman at the counter would like to join you, if you don’t mind. He asked me to ask you.”

I looked over in the direction she’d tilted her head and saw a man about my age (early fifties), more gaunt than thin, but with strong shoulders, a good head of mostly brown hair, and gray eyes that half disappeared in laugh lines as he smiled at me and held up a book. Same as mine. I glanced at the waitress and raised my eyebrows in inquiry.

“He’s been around for a few days, comes in for breakfast, tips good. You’re the first one I’ve seen him hit on,” she said.

I grimaced at the phrasing, but took a deep breath and considered. Distraction in attractive male form could be pleasant. He knew, or was interested in knowing, wildflowers, so there was nonpersonal conversation immediately available. I could celebrate later. I moved my books and maps to my side of the table, smiled, and extended an open hand to the seat opposite.

He came over, slid onto the bench seat, and rose again halfway to extend his hand. “Frank Ross,” he said, and his touch was dry and slightly cool.

“Jane Galen,” I said. “Tell me what you’ve seen so far,” and gestured to the books.

We spent the next half-hour, and two refills of coffee apiece, going over the clumps and swaths and solitaries that he’d seen. He was knowledgeable, but not fanatic.

He was also funny, and he smelled good, and when he asked if I’d like to join him for a hike (he offered to provide, and carry, the sandwiches and water), I listened to the rumble of his voice, noted the beginnings of attraction, thought why not, didn’t listen to the answer the smart side of my brain was muttering, and said yes.

We met, as agreed, at the Charlie Pete trailhead and set off, west, away from the sun, on a path that wound across the flat valley floor. The day was still comfortable, though that would change in the afternoon, but not to the life-threatening temperatures that would come in later months. I’m not one of those people who count species, but we must have seen a few dozen, and as far as sheer numbers? Well, there were more flowers than people, but not by a nearly big enough margin. It felt, at times, like Disneyland. After I’d snarled at three families who thought picking handfuls of ephemeral beauty was a good idea, Frank asked mildly if I’d like to head into the hills for lunch. “With pleasure,” I snapped, and took off almost at a run for the trail that branched off to the right. He kept up with me easily, and I wasn’t surprised when he said he was a runner, and averaged more than twice my ten miles per week.

The cheese sandwiches he’d brought were delicious, and the water cold. Chewing prevented me from continuing to rant, and I was grateful I wasn’t in mid swallow so I could laugh when Frank said, “Think of them as locusts, bipedal locusts, in pink capris and orange-plaid Bermudas.” His long fingers fluttered through the air, making two-legged winged shapes. We were sitting on an outcropping of shale that overlooked the valley, and Frank’s hands blocked my view of the humans in question, who were continuing their depredations below. His long legs were also an enjoyable visual alternative, tanned, with clearly delineated muscles, hairs lightened almost to blond. He saw me noticing, and we looked at each other thoughtfully. The sexual attraction became damn near visible in the air between us, curling like smoke, tendrils growing and twisting in the wind that wasn’t there.

I stood up abruptly, “No, this isn’t going to happen.”

“Why not?”

I’d expected at least some attempt at persuasion, not this straightforward inquiry as he continued to sit calmly, packing away the remains of our lunch.

“Unfinished business,” I said, and turned away.

He stood up with a slight grunt of effort and followed me down the trail, and his hand on my shoulder a minute later was gentle, tracing the edges of bone. “How long?”

Good question. I shrugged into his palm, felt his fingers tighten reflexively, then loosen fast.

“Your call,” he said, and immediately turned the conversation back to flowers. We both got out our cameras when he pointed to a downy blue arashia that we’d missed on the way up.

Finishing the loop back to the dusty parking lot occupied over an hour, Frank taking the lead, which left me plenty of time between flower spotting to admire the way the muscles moved in his long back, and to wonder how many more times, as life sped me toward sixty and the invisibility that falls over most women like a shroud, a man this attractive would want me. No one had made any overtures in a long time, and I sure didn’t want Stephen to have been the last person I had sex with. But I also didn’t know how much anger toward him I’d lay onto the next man. I didn’t want that either, and that was part of the unfinished business I’d hoped the long winds of the desert would blow clean, leaving me open for someone new; and here he was, maybe before I felt ready. So much for planning. The upshot of all this overthinking was that by the time we were standing by my car, I was willing to at least keep my options open, and agreed to dinner at the less fancy of the restaurants at the park resort.

When Frank said, “See you this evening,” turned, and started walking out to the road, I called to him and asked where he was going. He said he didn’t have a car, liked to walk everywhere, so of course I said I’d give him a lift. It only made sense, as the heat had come up fast with the sun near overhead. “Rental?” he asked, waiting to get into my Camry as I tossed guidebooks and sunscreen and half-empty water bottles onto the backseat.

“Hardly,” I grinned. “Even I couldn’t make a rental look this lived-in in under a week, and I’ve only been on vacation for two days.”

On the few miles back to the campgrounds, he told me about the think tank where he worked, researching oil-policy issues. When I lifted my foot off the accelerator and slowed just a bit by the only gas station in miles, checking the gauge that was sitting much lower than I’d expected, he said, “Go ahead. I’m not in any hurry, are you? Of course, I’ll pay for the gas to thank you for the ride back. And then explain at tedious length over dinner why gasoline costs so much.” The smile that accompanied these offers was disarming, and while he was fiddling with the credit-card reader, I went inside to get a couple of chocolate bars. A migraine headache was starting to gnaw at the bones around my eyes, and chocolate works better for me than any of those drugs my neurologist has finally given up suggesting. I didn’t want the pain and disorientation to interfere with learning if there were any reasons besides the greed of corporations and culpability of politicians for the $43 total I saw on the pump when I came back out. I gave Frank one of the two Ghirardellis I’d been relieved to find in the racks. He took it with another smile and said, “A girl after my own heart. Knows her flowers and her roadside chocolate.” I let the girl comment slide. Same as I let the “young lady” comments slide from older male clerks in hardware and grocery stores. I hadn’t ever figured out what to say to such annoying ignorance.

When we got near the campground where he’d told me he was staying, he asked me to drop him off at the visitors’ center instead. When I lifted my eyebrows in mild inquiry, he smiled and said, “I’d been planning to leave tomorrow, but I’ve just decided to see if I can get them to rent me that hard piece of ground for a few more days. I think the... park... merits more attention from me.”

I hadn’t turned off the engine, and merely nodded at this bit of what even my well-defended sensibilities could recognize as flirtation, and waited while he got out and said he’d see me at seven.

By the time I got to the Wagonwheel, Frank was already there, and I appreciated not having to wait for him. He stood up when I got to the table, even pulled my chair out, though that was a bit awkward. I’ve never learned how to properly gauge when to sit down when someone else is moving the chair. I’d rather just thump the damn thing into position myself. But we got through the maneuver without knocking the table hard enough to slosh water out of the tumblers, or wine out of his glass.

“I hope you don’t mind my going ahead,” he said, holding up the glass, half-filled with red. “I had such a thirst for a good Cabernet.”

What was there to say to that? I smiled and conformed to the stereotype of my age and gender by ordering a salad, over his recommendations of steak or lobster, and insisted on a Sauvignon Blanc, refusing even a sip of his Cab, as red wines barely pass my lips before the migraines start burrowing in. We could agree at least on the bread, heavy-crusted sourdough with a tang that the sweet butter we slathered on it only enhanced. It turned out to be the best part of the evening.

He launched into the promised insights about gas prices, though they weren’t anything I hadn’t already read online, and then he started asking me first about my opinions about oil, and politics, and then about my work and my family — about my beautiful daughter Jenny and her husband Dan, abd the twin grandbabies on the way. I didn’t really notice right off how the questions kept coming, and when I did, for a while I enjoyed the interest, since it was something I wasn’t exactly used to. But by the time my oversize wineglass was almost empty, and the waitperson was clearing away the flowered plates, my answers were getting shorter and shorter, and Frank started leaning in too close. I moved back a bit, the legs of my chair catching in the thick pile of the carpet. He reached out, one finger on the back of my hand, his face inches from mine, the slow puffs of his breath breaking the wavering boundary of air around me that I could feel like surface tension on water. My ex, as our marriage went more and more wrong, had done too near to the same thing, looming just a few inches away during a “discussion,” bending over me as I sat in the kitchen, his hands planted on the table on either side of me, slowly smiling as I tried to stand up. I wasn’t going to wait around to see if that same kind of smile showed up on Frank’s face.

I begged off the desserts the waitress suggested. The heavy sweetness of chocolate syrup cake, caramelized bread pudding, and the rest, all sounded impossible to stomach. I told Frank I had some calls to make, leaving who they were to deliberately vague. Just like I left vague any plans for our getting together again. He squeezed my arm and said he hoped I’d sleep well, that he thought I was looking tired.

I did have trouble falling asleep that night. The pale green walls of my tent, that on other trips had seemed all the protection I ever needed, that kept out the wind and the small biting creatures, now seemed insubstantial and weak, serving only to blind me to what might be out there in the dark. I finally went to sleep with my arm resting across my eyes.

I don’t know what time it was when I woke up. The noise of the generators and lanterns had stopped, finally. No wind stroked the nylon panels around me. Maybe it was the background silence that woke me. Maybe it was the small crunch of gravel as something stepped or shifted its weight only a few inches away, but it had to be nothing. Darkness always magnified sounds and worries. Mice grew into marauding raccoons, raccoons into cougars. It was nothing. I was sure. And then I heard it breathing.

Slow. Measured. Sibilant. And unidentifiable as animal, or human. I reached out of the folds of the sleeping bag, found the flashlight and the Mace, wrapped my hands around their familiar shapes. I slowed my own breathing to almost nothing as I waited for whatever was outside to make a move. It never did. I must have fallen asleep waiting. And in the bright light of morning I told myself it was a dream, despite what I was still holding in my hands.

I didn’t let myself go home early. I decided I was being paranoid and skittish and making way too much out of less than nothing. After all, it couldn’t have been him, he didn’t even have a car, and I could just avoid the places we’d been together. Not a problem. I took my overblown reactions to our dinner and the sounds in the night as clear signs that, regardless of the slight awakening responses of my body, in no way was I ready for actually dealing with anything resembling dating. So I turned for comfort to the heat-washed hills, and headed further and further out every day. I found rocks slick with desert polish, found pathways between high, sculptured walls, orange- and rose-colored, carved by waters that rose and flooded whatever was in their paths and then vanished, all in the space of a day. Water that left hard rock shaped like those vanished waves, rising, almost touching overhead, blocking out all but thin, changing bars of sunlight. Rock formations that became deadly mazes if thunderstorms rose to the north, beyond the horizon, beyond sight and hearing, their clouds breaking open and sending floodwaters racing into these perfect, beautiful traps. I went far enough to find places without people. Sometimes there was a car pulled up near mine when I got back to the trailhead, though I never saw the other hikers.

But I wasn’t sleeping worth a damn. When sleep did come, after overvigilant listening for creeping sounds that I knew weren’t actually there, the nightmares came. Except they weren’t nightmares. They were real, or what had been real, too many times. I thought I’d left behind that scared, obedient, defeated person I’d been with my husband. I was wrong, apparently. For Stephen rose back up out of the ground every night, and I let him into my dreams and let him tell me, and prove to me, again and again, how very, very worthless I was. I believed those dreams enough that every morning, under the weak, tepid spray of the bathhouse shower, I checked for bruises that I never found.

Not much of a vacation. But I was determined to stick it out. Once I got going, drank enough coffee, ran the car as fast as I could on the roads, walked as fast as I could on the trails, the days were wonderful, and the nights just had to get better. On my next-to-last morning, I sat at the rough picnic table by my tent and checked through the valley guidebook for anything I’d regret missing. Maybe the ghost towns would be good. See what was left of other people’s lives. Get my mind off my own for a while.

The town of Chloride was halfway up a mountain, set in a small bowl, with no view of anything except dun slopes rising all around, pocked with the dark mouths of mine entrances, just big enough for a stooped man to pass through. There were other holes in the relatively flat ground between the houses, marked off with rocks and old warnings and the narrow slats of collapsed fences. According to the guidebook, people had stuck it out here until the early 1950s, and then, when the silver finally ran out, they left for parts unknown. The few standing houses didn’t look to have ever been much more than shacks, but it was hard to tell. Half a century of weathering had scoured away any paint that might have been on the warped wood. There wasn’t much inside the houses, just dirt piled up in corners, that had blown in past the doors hanging crookedly on loosening hinges, and gray floorboards that gapped in places, rose in others, and altogether looked unreliable for holding a person’s weight. But there was a cup in the last house, overturned beside the remnants of what might have been a table, and I wanted it. I picked my way across the uneven planks, shifting quickly to the left when one board sank, groaning, beneath my feet. The cup was heavy porcelain, would have been white once, but now was brown and gritty with dust. I knelt there, wrapped my hands around it, rubbed a finger across the places where it had chipped when it fell or was dropped, and imagined a person giving up one life, deciding what to take, or leave, on the way to another. Maybe the cup was broken already, easy to let go of. No other small objects had been left behind.

Out in the open space between the circle of houses, I’d passed machines the size, though not the shape, of tractors, all of them worn and broken, chains and gears and levers rusting, the specifics of their former use indecipherable to me. When I came back out of the last house, picking my way carefully, and looked up from the worn, splintering steps, Frank was there, leaning against one of the machines, booted feet crossed at the ankles, arms crossed over his chest, a smile on his face. I couldn’t help it, I dropped the cup, and didn’t have to look to know from the sound that it had hit a rock and broken in two.

“Imagine running into you here,” he said.

I didn’t answer. I didn’t have anything coherent to say.

“I brought enough lunch for two. I know you don’t like to carry much.”

I cut my eyes off to the right, searching for where I’d left my pack in the bit of shade by the first house, and he saw.

“Oh, I brought it over for you a minute ago. It’s right here,” and he gestured behind him. “I know you had it in the shade, but it can’t have warmed up enough to matter. Here,” he held out my water bottle, “you must be thirsty.”

I shook my head, “I drank a lot before I started the hike up. I haven’t been here that long.”

“Really?” he said. “Hasn’t seemed that way to me. Feels like I’ve been waiting out here forever. Thought maybe you’d curled up and fallen asleep.” And he scuffed his boot, just once, across the dirt in front of him, the small rocks scraping and the few stems of dry weeds cracking in the silence around us. He was still smiling.

I jammed my hands into my pockets, hoped he hadn’t seen how much they were shaking. That sound, the simple scrape of a boot, I’d been hearing it night after night, and lied to myself, like I’d lied about so many things, telling myself it didn’t matter, that it wasn’t what it was. And I still wanted to lie. I looked at him, at his grey eyes — he’d told me he never wore sunglasses — at that kind, smiling face, and tried to believe that we could have lunch, walk down the mountain, and I could get in my car and drive away.

“Why would you think I’d sleep here?” I asked, forcing out something like a laugh. I looked around, hoping it would seem mere puzzlement, afraid he’d know I was looking for places to hide. There was no brush, just those empty slopes and small, dead-end mines, little more than crumbling holes reeking of chlorine gas.

“You must be tired,” he answered.

I didn’t ask how he knew I wasn’t sleeping. I said, “It’s not that long a walk.” Though it seemed as far away as home, to get back to the road.

“That’s good,” he said. He was still smiling. God, I thought, my brain flailing around for something to think that wasn’t a nightmare come to waking, walking life, his face must be getting sore, smiling that much. And quick as that, it changed, his expression going sad and sympathetic. “It would be a shame to get lost,” he said, “going from one place to another.” He flicked his hand through the hot, quiet air. “Like some of these folks did, far as we can tell. Earth could have just swallowed them up.”

“No,” I said, “they would have had family, people waiting for them.”

“Maybe.” But he shook his head. “No way to know, not for sure.”

I hadn’t moved, except to take my hands out of my pockets, let them hang, empty. The Mace was in my pack there by his feet, if he hadn’t taken it out already. He’d had time to go through everything I’d carried up with me — water, protein bars, sunscreen, guidebook, keys, my wallet.

“Nowadays, of course,” he said, pulling his own pack onto his lap, opening one of the small flaps on the side, “anyone goes missing, especially someone with a family that loves them, there’s a search.” He took out a man’s wallet, flipped it open. “Did I tell you at dinner that I’m a volunteer with the Search and Rescue team back home? Here’s my ID for it.” He held out a worn card with some kind of insignia on it. When I didn’t come closer to look at it, he shrugged, slipped it back in. “I’m usually the liaison with the family. I help keep them informed, and offer support. I keep an eye on them. It’s what we’d want for our families, isn’t it, if anything happened to us?” His smile was back.

“You have a family?” I asked. Maybe he’d keep talking, nothing bad could happen while he was talking. Maybe someone would come up the trail, though it didn’t look like anyone had been here for months. Maybe I could decide what to do, maybe I could get my feet to move. How could they feel like ice when sweat was burning on my neck, sliding down my back?

“Of course,” he said. “Don’t we all? Though we’re maybe not as lucky as you. Do you think the twins will take after Jenny or her husband?”

And then I could move, because he took something else from his wallet, held it out to me, and, like he must have expected, I reached for it. It was the small picture of them I’d had in my wallet, Jenny leaning against Dan, his arms around her, keeping her safe. But with my next steps, I stumbled off to the side, dodging from the hand I was sure was reaching for me. I lunged not for the photograph, but for part of the machine that had fallen, a heavy bar lying loose. I grabbed it, swung it around without time to look, heard the sound of bones breaking...

I guess I was lucky. I don’t know if what I did killed him, or if it happened when he fell back against the machine. Either way, it was done. Just like that.

I scrambled over to the side of the house and huddled, shaking with cold that felt real despite all outer evidence to the contrary. The sun was high overhead and the shadows had sunk to almost nothing. I never considered going for help, or telling the authorities. I couldn’t justify what I’d done to myself, much less to anyone else. Finally I stood and picked up the bar again. It felt light now — impossible that it could have done much damage — and I scrubbed it with dirt, then shoved it far as I could into the sand-filled space under the house set furthest away. I held on to Frank by his wrists, dragged his body over to the mouth of the mine, and slid him in as if he’d been peering into the darkness, and fallen.

I looked through his wallet, which he’d dropped to the dirt when I hit him. The main ID wasn’t for Frank Ross, nor were either of the two additional IDs that I found slid behind a back flap. There were three necklaces, delicate gold chains, one with a cross no bigger than the nail on my little finger, the other two chains dangling heart-shaped lockets. I pried them open with the edge of one of his driver’s licenses. Curls of soft, pale hair in each, and tiny photos. A fat-cheeked baby. A young boy. The entwined initials on the front of each locket matched none of the IDs.

Looking at the remnants of lives. Wondering what was left of my life. How much was left after I’d saved it — if I had.

I put everything back in the wallet as he’d had it arranged. Put the wallet in his backpack and left it there by the side of the mine, as if he’d taken the pack off before looking down, ignoring the warning signs. I dropped his flashlight into the hole, heard it scrape against the rough walls and then land noisily. Anybody could drop a flashlight. I brushed out the drag marks with my jacket, but it wasn’t necessary.

The storm that came during the night struck hard. Watching out the window of the motel room where I’d gone for refuge, seeing the rain pour down, lit in green and yellow by the neon sign and the security lights, I knew the narrow canyons I’d walked in were flooding, and that my footprints and the other marks I’d left up in Chloride were washing away.

Halfway down the trail I’d stumbled, fallen. Then crawled over to a small-leaved bush and thrown up what was left of my breakfast. I was surprised there wasn’t any blood in it. It seemed like there should have been, like a payment of some kind. But I never did pay for that decision made before I was absolutely sure. I scraped dirt and stones over the vomit, pushed myself up to my feet, and got back to the car without seeing another soul.

When the police showed up weeks later, asking me if I had any information that would help in their investigation, I was able to convince them that the sum total of what I’d known about the man was that he liked flowers and was an oil-policy researcher. We’d taken a walk together, shared, as they knew from the waitresses, coffee one morning and dinner one evening, then gone our separate ways. He had mentioned he was going into the Panamints.

The detectives told me Frank “Reynolds” had been under suspicion for “situations” across the border in Nevada and that I’d been very lucky — that they were certainly glad I was all right. I assured them I was. Same as I told myself, every sleepless night.