CHAPTER 8
Tracy felt sick to her stomach. “You okay?” Ben reached across the cab and touched Tracy’s shoulder, but she did not acknowledge him. She kept her gaze directed out the window, on the side of the mountain and the bits of shale littering the edge of the road. She had not found Sarah’s boots on the front porch or in the entryway of their home. Sarah had not answered when Tracy had rushed up the grand staircase shouting her name. Sarah was not asleep in her bed or taking a shower. She was not in the kitchen eating or in the family room watching television. Sarah was not home. And there was no indication that she had been.
“There,” Ben said as they came around another bend in the road.
Her blue truck looked abandoned, parked along the shoulder that sloped into the North Cascades wilderness.
Ben made a U-turn, parked behind Roy Calloway’s Suburban and turned off the engine. “Tracy?”
She felt paralyzed. “I told her not to take the county road. I told her to stay on the freeway and double back. You heard me tell her.”
Ben reached across the seat and squeezed her hand. “We’re going to find her.”
“Why is she so stubborn all the time?”
“It’s going to be all right, Tracy.”
But the sense of dread that had enveloped her as she had hurried from room to room in her parents’ home grew more constricting. She opened her car door and stepped down onto the dirt shoulder.
The morning’s temperature had continued to rise. The asphalt was already dry and showed no lingering hint of yesterday’s heavy evening rains. Insects danced and buzzed about her as Tracy approached the truck. Weak and lightheaded, she stumbled. Ben steadied her. The shoulder of the road seemed narrower, the drop-off steeper than she recalled.
“Could she have slipped?” Tracy asked Roy Calloway, who stood waiting at the bumper of her truck.
Calloway held out his hand and took the spare key. “We’ll take this one step at a time, Tracy.”
“What’s wrong with it?”
Tracy had been expecting one of the tires to be flat, or the body to be dented, or the hood to be raised to indicate a problem with the engine, though that was not likely. Their father was religious about bringing the cars to Harley Holt for servicing.
“We’ll get that figured out,” Calloway said. He slipped on a pair of blue latex gloves and opened the driver’s door. A discarded Cheetos bag and empty Diet Coke bottle remained on the passenger-side floorboard—Sarah’s breakfast the morning they drove to the competition. Tracy had given her a hard time for eating that crap. Her light-blue fleece remained rolled in a ball on the narrow bench seat where she’d put it. She looked at Calloway and shook her head. Everything looked as she remembered it. Calloway leaned across the steering wheel, inserted the key in the ignition, and turned it. The engine whimpered. Then it clicked. He leaned in farther and considered the dash.
“It’s empty.”
“What?” she asked.
Calloway stepped back so Tracy could lean in. “She ran out of gas.”
“That can’t be,” Tracy said. “I filled up Friday night so we wouldn’t have to do it that morning.”
“Maybe it’s just not registering because the engine is dead?” Ben suggested.
“I don’t know,” Calloway said, though he sounded skeptical.
Calloway removed the key and walked to the back of the truck. Tracy and Ben followed. Tinted glass prevented them from seeing inside the camper shell. At the back, Calloway said, “Why don’t you turn around?”
Tracy shook her head. “No.”
Ben wrapped an arm around her shoulders. Calloway unlocked the canopy door and bent to peek inside the bed before letting the door lift open. He lowered the tailgate. Again, everything remained seemingly as Tracy remembered. Their rugged carts were strapped to the bed walls. Tracy’s duster lay strewn with her boots and red bandanna.
“Isn’t that her hat?” Calloway pointed to the brown Stetson.
It was. Then Tracy remembered plopping her black Stetson on Sarah’s head. “She was wearing mine.”
Calloway started to raise the gate.
“Can I go in?” Tracy asked. Calloway stepped back. She climbed in, uncertain what she was looking for but feeling the same urgency she’d felt when she and Ben had driven off the night before, as if she’d forgotten something. She unlocked their rugged carts. The shotguns and rifles remained racked, barrel up, like pool cues in a rack. Sarah’s pistols were stored in an interior drawer, the ammunition in the lock box. In a second drawer, where Sarah kept buttons and badges from other competitions, Tracy found the photograph of Wild Bill presenting her with the silver belt buckle: Sarah and the third place finisher stood on each side of her. She slid the photograph into her back pocket, lifted the duster, and checked the pockets.
“It isn’t here,” she said climbing out.
“What isn’t here?” Calloway asked.
“The championship buckle,” Tracy said. “I gave it to Sarah last night before we left.”
“I’m not following,” Calloway said.
“Why would she take the buckle and not take her guns?” Ben asked.
“I don’t know. It’s just . . .”
“It’s just what?” Calloway asked.
“I mean, she wouldn’t have had any reason to take the belt buckle unless she intended to give it back to me this morning, right?”
“She walked away,” Calloway said. “Is that what you’re saying? She had time to decide what to take and started walking.”
Tracy looked down the deserted road. The white center line snaked with the hillside’s contours, turning and disappearing around a bend. “So where is she?”