Our food hung in a bear-proof canister twenty feet off the ground, tethered to a white pine near where we’d been playing cards. I walked over and undid the anchor at the base to pull it down, hastily flipping off the lid when it reached me. I grabbed for the first things I saw: a package of Pop-Tarts and a bottle of Gatorade. Not my favorite, but I forced them down, followed by a handful of almonds and some beef jerky.
Still no Archie. I began gathering supplies I wanted to take back to the others. Spreading a tarp out on the ground and placing items on it, I didn’t even try to grab people’s personal belongings. Those would have to wait, although I made an exception for Avery’s camera. I knew she’d want it, not because it was hers but because it wasn’t. I also picked out a small selection of food that didn’t need to be cooked and wasn’t too heavy, plus salt, matches, and water-purification pills.
Ducking back into my own tent, I grabbed my compass and trail map, before moving on to Mr. Howe’s, which was this fancy blue-and-white four-season North Face deal. He’d boasted that he’d slept in it up on Denali when the temps dipped below zero. Personally, I didn’t see how that was a feat worth bragging about since it meant admitting you’d been foolish enough to go camping in weather like that in the first place.
But kneeling in that narrow tent, knowing he was gone, I could scarcely breathe. Everything inside was arranged so neatly, his belongings waiting for his return. It wasn’t hard to imagine Mr. Howe was just outside in the meadow, finishing breakfast, getting ready to hit the trail. I reached to touch his shirt, his hat, then flipped my way through the trail journal that lay by the head of his sleeping bag.
A few photographs slid from the pages. I picked them up and held them to my face. Some were of mountains, places he’d been, but most were of Lucy, an account not of distance or place, but of time—here she was glowing in her youth, sitting cross-legged in a college dorm, her hair short, beer in hand, wearing a faded Jane’s Addiction T-shirt; in another she stood atop a rocky cliff overlooking the pounding ocean, pointing to a ring on her finger, her cheeks wet with joy; the most recent shot showed her walking through a California vineyard at sunset, arms outstretched, her smile wide, her long hair blowing in the wind.
I searched the photos for what I knew of Lucy—that moment when her hope for a family had vanished. I thought I would see it in her eyes, in the way she looked at her husband, who’d failed to give her what she wanted. It wasn’t there, though. In every photo Lucy gazed back at the man behind the camera with absolute adoration. Her love, it seemed, didn’t come with conditions.
After tucking the photos back where I’d found them, I gathered the items I’d come for: the truck keys and his phone, which I briefly turned on to check the barometric pressure. It had dropped again, only I didn’t know what that meant because Mr. Howe wasn’t around to tell me. I also grabbed the larger of the two first aid kits, which contained not only my medication, but also gauze and antiseptic and other tools that could be used for cleaning Rose’s wound. Maybe more. I unlocked the lid to peer inside.
What I saw confused me. My prescriptions were there; I quickly stuffed them all in my side pack. But there were other medications, too. Ones that didn’t belong to me, which was strange. I was the sick one. I always had been. But rolling around with my own meds, I found a bottle of Zoloft with Tomás’s name on it. That wasn’t such a huge surprise—it wasn’t pregnant-lady porn—but it turned out Clay had a prescription for Xanax, and Shelby, one for a medication I’d never heard of called Sulfazine, which had a lot of dire warning labels and got me worrying that something might really be wrong with her. Most surprising, however, was a bottle of Risperdal, which was a drug I happened to recognize because it had been prescribed to my mother in the past. It was meant to stabilize her moods and keep her from hurting herself. She hated it taking it, which probably tells you a lot about either the medication or her. I held the bottle up and squinted to read the patient’s name on the label: DUNCAN STRAUSS.
I put the pills back.
I finally found Archie when I went down to the river to fill my water bottle. Well, found is the wrong word, since I wasn’t exactly looking. But there he was. And just as I had the night before, he was sitting on the very edge of a rock with his shoes off and his legs dunked in the current, deeper than they should’ve been. Unlike me, though, he had his open backpack beside him and that damn flask in his hand again and was clearly dead set on getting wasted.
A few images flitted through my mind: a drunken Archie tumbling into the water, yelling out for help before being dragged under. My honest, heartfelt testimony about being unable to save him. There was also the darker scenario where I shoved him into the river on my own, making my testimony less honest but all the more heartfelt.
But murder, like decisiveness, wasn’t in me. Not anymore. So I stood, watching him, until he turned and saw me. There was a different expression on his face, an almost wistful look, but it vanished fast.
“You ready?” he asked.
I gave diplomacy my best shot. “How about we take the food and stuff back down to the others? Someone else can walk out. Get help for Rose. Then you and I, we can come back up here and look for the money. If it’s really that important to you.”
Archie’s eyes gleamed as he pulled his dripping feet from the water. “So it’s somewhere up here, then? Is that what you’re saying? It’s close by?”
“Yeah. Supposedly.”
He rubbed his hands together. “Then we’re not going anywhere, Gibby. Let’s get it now before that bitch finds it. Or”—he looked me up and down—“you can tell me where it is. I don’t need your help.”
I sighed. Because the thing was, he did need my help.
He just didn’t know it.
“Fine,” I said, all resigned-like, because the path of least resistance did not involve arguing with Archie DuPraw. “Let’s go.”
“Where’re we going?”
“There.” I pointed up, high, to the very top of the waterfall, that majestic rise of granite cliffs and craggy peaks, a whole fortress of rock doing what it could to control the massive lake sitting hundreds of feet above, relentless in its effort to break free of its hold and come tumbling down upon us.
33.
CLIMBING THE WATERFALL by way of the formidable Grizzly Scramble was a challenge I’d planned for meticulously over the past six weeks—both physically and mentally. I’d taken to working out as best I could in my bedroom, trying to increase my upper body strength, as well as my endurance. I’d also scoured the internet for photos and personal accounts of the climb from other hikers, reading and rereading their words over and over, until I could lie back on my own bed, close my eyes, and actually visualize myself in their bodies, reenacting their every movement, every step, every decision.