“Or the child molesters.”
“Oh, they were scared of me,” she said.
Peter didn’t doubt it. He was a little scared of her himself.
She peered out the windshield at the rugged roadside. “Things have changed some out here, but not that much. A few more houses. Still pretty rough.”
They approached a gravel turnoff at the edge of a lumpy tilted hay field, the road marked only by a giant black boulder with a green cap of lichen and a blaze of white paint across its face. The boulder was unlike anything he had seen in that country, what geologists would call an erratic. Ejected by a volcano or dragged by a glacier in some previous age, and big enough that no farmer could remove it without blowing his seed money on dynamite, so it remained where it was.
“This is us,” said June. There was something in her voice, but she didn’t say anything more. Peter slowed for the turn then hit the gas again, the big rumbling engine pushing them forward.
The gravel turned to dirt as it skirted the hay field, heading steadily uphill, then picked up a watercourse that looked small until you saw the depth and velocity of the water. It seemed to come directly through the wall of the mountain ahead of them.
Then river and road changed direction and some trick of the terrain unfolded into a narrow defile through which both river and road squeezed. At the entrance was a simple wooden sign with peeling paint:
Agricultural Research Facility
Private Property No Trespassing
This Means You!
At the tightest point, the passage had evidently once been only a narrow river canyon made by water cutting through stone over thousands of years.
Someone had built a one-lane slotted-steel bridge maybe a hundred feet long, with walls of living rock forty feet tall on both sides and the river tumbling white beneath it. Peter imagined the bridge-builders on some kind of work raft, two men drilling holes and bolting brackets deep into the stone while a third managed the ropes and pulleys that held the whole floating enterprise in place.
From the look of the thing it had been there for fifty years or more. He couldn’t decide if they were lunatics or geniuses. But they couldn’t have designed a more defensible point if they’d tried. Park a bulldozer on the narrow span and whatever lay beyond would be yours to keep. Unless Uncle Sam came along with a couple of Apache gunships, but at that point your problems were probably fairly serious already.
The defensive possibilities had clearly occurred to someone besides Peter. At the end of the defile, a tall wall of steel stood mounted to giant I-beams rising from the road bed, blocking the way. A gate.
“This was what did it,” said June. “This fucking gate. He said it was for security reasons, to keep people out, but I knew he was trying to keep me in, too.”
Peter smiled. “You stole his truck to go skiing, alone at thirteen,” he said. “That’s dangerous. If you were my daughter, I’d have tried to keep you home, too.”
“Don’t say that.” Her voice was sharp. “It wasn’t my fault. He wanted to wall off the whole world. He had keypads installed on the goddamn barns. What did we need that kind of security for? My dad was some kind of goofy-ass backyard scientist and paranoid survival nut. Who would care what the fuck he was up to?”
Well, thought Peter, he’s sure as hell up to something now.
The gate looked more and more like the drawbridge to some rough keep, hidden and secret from the world. He wished Lewis had been able to find out more about the man who had built it. After Sasha Kolodny’s last business had collapsed, the man had essentially disappeared.
He looked sideways at her. “Are you sure you want to do this?”
“I don’t want to do this at all,” she said, staring at the gate. “What choice do I have? I have to find out if my father—”
She wiped her sleeve across her eyes. Cleared her throat.
“If my father killed my mother.”
Without another word, she opened her door and hopped out of the truck.
Peter followed. Below a small overhang by the gate, a yellow walkie-talkie hung from a thin black wire. It was an older version of the radios he and Lewis had bought the day before.
Peter traced the wire with his eyes and realized it was a charging cord connected to a storage battery and a little solar panel mounted on the shelter’s roof. Simple and low-tech. If the walkie-talkie died, they could just buy another pair. But it wasn’t entirely low-tech. He looked closer and saw a small fish-eye lens whose view would cover the entire passage.
June lifted the radio, turned it on, and pressed the talk button. “Anyone home?”
There was no crackle of static, and no answer.
She tried again. “Anyone home? This is June Cassidy. I used to live here. Hello?”
Peter stepped away from the overhang and looked up. He saw a small shadow in the sky, circling. It could be a turkey vulture, expertly riding the thermals. It could be something else.