Careening along this snaking backcountry road, I wasn’t worried about shaming myself in front of a bunch of third-graders. But I had no desire to throw up in my truck. I scanned the road for a bit of shoulder, someplace to pull off safely, but the pavement was notched into a narrow ledge. Five feet to the right was solid mountainside; five feet to the left, rocky riverbank. I was caught, as the old saying goes, between a rock and a hard place.
My thirty seconds were ticking down fast. Finally, in a right-hand curve, I let the truck drift all the way into the left lane, the outside of the curve, where I hoped it would be more visible. I hit the brakes, hung two wheels off the pavement as far as I dared, and turned on my emergency flashers. I flung open my door and leaned out just as the heaves began.
I hadn’t eaten anything since a hurried bowl of cereal nine hours earlier, so there wasn’t much coming up—just a little gastric juice, sharp and acrid in my mouth and nostrils. But the force of the dry heaves squeezed tears from my eyes. When the convulsive heaves stopped, I took in a few deep breaths and then was hit by a second round. As I hung out the door of the truck, I heard brakes squeal behind me. I expected to feel a vehicle slam into mine, but the impact never came, and with another, different squealing of tires—sudden acceleration—the unseen vehicle sped on.
Feeling wrung out but also relieved—it had always puzzled me, how much better I tended to feel after throwing up, especially when there was nothing in my stomach causing me distress—I sat up, drew in a few more breaths, and wiped my mouth with my handkerchief. I took mental inventory and was relieved to find that the sense of impending vertigo had largely faded. A bottle of water, half full, lay on the passenger seat beside me, and I took a small, grateful sip to rinse my mouth. Then I put the truck in gear, eased the left wheels back onto the pavement, and continued along River Road, this time at my typically prudent pace.
A few sedate miles farther, I came to the gravel drive marked ALMOST HEAVEN and took a right. Crime-scene tape was still tied to a tree on one side of the driveway, but rather than stretching across the entrance, the tape lay wadded at the base of the tree, splattered with mud from last night’s downpour.
As I splashed up the gravel through a succession of puddles, I noticed that someone else had done the same. Jim O’Conner, I guessed, or maybe an insurance adjuster handling the damage claim for the cabin-rental company. When I reached the clearing, I saw a pickup parked near the crater that had once been the cabin. I called out—“Hello? Hello?”—but got no answer. The clearing was still ringed with blackened tree trunks and vegetation, but already the ravaged look of the place was beginning to soften, thanks to a carpet of new vegetation. Cleared ground with a view of the sky was a rarity in the mountains, and these optimistic, opportunistic botanical pioneers had wasted no time laying claim to this choice patch of sunlit real estate, a sudden and unexpected windfall.
I walked slowly to the edge of the crater and peered down. By now half the basement was in shadow, and I knew I didn’t have much time—thirty minutes or so—before it would get too dark to work. I wasn’t sure what I was seeking here, but I knew there must be something: something small and subtle that we’d overlooked as we focused on the excitement of plucking not one but two incinerated skeletons from the debris.
The day of the search and recovery, we’d had more than a dozen law-enforcement officers and firefighters on hand to assist. We’d also had a ladder planted firmly on the basement’s concrete slab. If I’d planned ahead, I’d have brought a stepladder from home, but I hadn’t planned ahead; I’d leapt up impulsively from the table in the bone lab the moment I solved the puzzle of the frontal sinus. Equipment needs had been the furthest thing from my mind.