Last Safe Place, The (15 page)

“Muy bíen!” His admiration was real.

“Piece of cake.”

The two jeeps continued up the rutted, bone-jarring trail. Each of the switchbacks presented its own individual challenge. The second one was a right turn. Gratefully, the smoothest route was on the low side. That was fortunate because ten feet beyond the high side was empty air, a drop-off. The fall could have been five feet. Or a thousand. Gabriella had neither the time nor the inclination to look back over her shoulder after she had negotiated it to determine which.

She had assumed it would get easier as she went along. It didn’t. Her proficiency increased, but her fear did not lessen. As she started into the fourth switchback, she caught sight of her reflection when an errant tree limb whacked the adjustable side mirror. And she realized with a shock how nakedly her fright was revealed on her face. But being scared was the price of doing business. Though she had to admit that if she’d known how “challenging” it would be, she might never have attempted it, the ability to traverse this trail was a life skill she had to master to survive.

The trail was scary; Yesheb was infinitely scarier.

She also grasped as she bumped and scraped along, that she’d never have made it through the first switchback if Pedro hadn’t been there to show her how it was done, though he never gave her a word of instruction or advice and pretended not to notice that she went to school on his every move. By the time they came around the fifth curve, she understood that he’d known all along she’d never make it without him.

About fifty yards beyond the seventh switchback, Pedro made an abrupt turn to the left and began to climb what appeared to be a dry creek bed. He followed the wash up about sixty yards before his jeep disappeared over a crest. Gabriella struggled after him, taking care to go fast enough to keep sufficient momentum to make it to the top but not so fast that her back tires broke traction and spun out in the dry, crumbly rock.

Her heart had shifted back into high gear again, banging in her chest as she roared up over the crest behind Pedro. The dust from his ascent still hung in the air and it was a second or two before she could see clearly.
A rock wall appeared on the right and she edged along between it and a sharp descent on the left.

The air cleared as she passed the forward edge of the rock outcrop and she found herself in … Narnia, without the snow—a world so foreign to the one she’d just left that the transition was jarring. That much hadn’t changed. The abrupt entrance into the hanging valley at 11,670 feet still packed the emotional wallop it always had. After clawing up the rocky, dusty trail and the dry wash, the struggle was over and the jeep purred into an aspen grove along barely discernible double worn tracks in a ground cover of small green ferns, rocks covered with gray-green lichen and fallen leaves. The aspens stood at attention, their white trunks straight and tall. The trees grew so close together they looked like cigarettes in a pack; their leaves trembled even though there appeared to be no breeze at all. Tall, lacy ferns grew in profusion among the trees. Blanket flowers—bright yellow blossoms with red centers colored like Indian blankets—painted the small clearings among the trees. The trail wound through the aspens, then spilled the jeep out into the open space beyond.

The pale shadows of Gabriella’s childhood memories were instantly filled with life and color—only brighter and crisper. The scene was hauntingly familiar but new, novel and strange at the same time. It looked just like she remembered … except it wasn’t really anything at all like she’d thought it would be.

Stretched out before her was a bowl-shaped hanging valley—about half a mile wide and maybe three-quarters of a mile deep—carved out of the mountain as if a giant had gouged a hole in the solid rock with an ice cream scoop. The land dropped away on the east side in a sheer cliff, offering a breathtaking, panoramic view of the whole Arkansas River valley 6,500 feet below.

The aspen grove she’d driven through on the north side of the valley gave way to a forest of stately ponderosa pine, Douglas fir and lodgepole pine trees standing sentinel above a carpet of brown pine needles. The woods, sprinkled with blue spruce and Rocky Mountain maples, circled around the back side of the bowl and down the south side to the cliff drop-off.

The back wall of the valley behind the forest was a rocky slope that climbed two hundred feet up the mountainside, topped by a boulder field and the bristlecone pine forest Dr. Calloway had talked about. In the back
right corner of the valley was a trail that led up the slope to the boulder field. In the back left corner, Piddley Creek flowed out of the bristlecone pine forest, down the slope, over a pile of rocks and dropped fifty feet into the stream bed in the bowl, forming a small, gurgling waterfall. She didn’t know what the Benningers had called it, but her father had dubbed it Notmuchava Waterfall because in August the creek had gone almost dry and the waterfall had been reduced to barely a trickle.

The stream below the waterfall wound among the trees and down out of the valley along the steep incline next to the cliff face. Between the aspen grove on the north and the pine forest on the west and south sides of the valley was a meadow of wildflowers. On the eastern edge of that meadow, looking out over the cliff to the panorama of the valley beyond, sat St. Elmo’s Fire.

When the images settled, solidified out of the realm of memory into reality in Gabriella’s mind, she realized that the hanging valley itself had not changed since she last saw it almost thirty years ago. Oh, the trees were taller, the aspen grove denser, the meadow more colorfully painted with all manner of mountain wildflowers. But the cabin had changed dramatically. She’d seen the changes over the past few years in Jim’s Christmas cards, but somehow that hadn’t prepared her for the reality. Even from the outside, it was apparent that Jim Benninger had completely remodeled the structure. What had been a simple, rustic cabin in Gabriella’s childhood had been transformed into an alpine lodge with a wraparound porch and second-floor decks on the front and back. Stretching the whole length of the cliff edge in front of the cabin was a three-foot-tall creek-rock fence.

Pedro pulled up beside the lodge and she stopped next to him and turned off the engine. Ty and P.D were out of the jeep before she even had time to unfasten her own seatbelt. The two of them bolted around the back of the cabin and into the meadow beyond where P.D. smelled every stem of grass and every flower, jumped and danced and snapped at butterflies. If dogs could laugh, it would be a sound like P.D’s joyous barking now. Ty made a beeline across the meadow toward the stream, hollering over his shoulder, “Look—a waterfall!” Apparently, Ty thought it was Moreava Waterfall than her father had. The boy’s jubilant cry was borne on a wind that had set the trembling aspens to jitter in anxious, nervous anticipation of the coming storm.

“Don’t go too far,” Gabriella called after him.

She climbed out of the jeep and found Pedro at her side, his eyes following the progress of the boy and the dog.

“They never even looked at the view,” she said with a sigh, as she turned and walked slowly, almost in a trance, toward the rock wall in front of the cabin.

“Sometimes Steve’s friends bring their sons to fish with them, teenage boys from the city who’ve never stood on anything taller than a skyscraper.” Pedro gestured toward the Arkansas River Valley below them with US 285 stretched across it like a strand of spaghetti and Buena Vista a toy town in the distance to the left. The view encompassed hundreds of square miles. “And you know what they look at when they’re in the mountains?”

He answered his own question. “Their shoes. In the presence of all this stunning beauty, they’re staring at their Reeboks or Converse.”

“If those boys are staring at their shoes when they’re in your store there’s something seriously, seriously wrong with their hormones. Anza is a knock-out.”

Pedro smiled. “Both of my girls are muy bonita. Angelina is almost seven. My little angel ees so beautiful she takes your breath away.”

He said the child’s name with something like reverence, as if speaking it was almost a sacred act. But there was something else in his voice, too, that she couldn’t define.

“My son, Joaquin is sixteen. His name means ‘established by God.’ The boy is tall, much bigger than his father. And everything is still growing, like a sapling. It is hard to tell what the tree will look like.”

He didn’t mention a wife. Gabriella stole a glance at his left hand. No wedding ring.

Danger, danger, danger Will Robinson!

Gabriella heeded the robot’s warning and quickly slammed shut an emotional door that had eased open a crack—but not before her heart bleated out a single, “yippee!”

Theo got down out of the jeep carefully and didn’t look toward the view either, just watched Ty and P.D. race across the meadow toward Piddley Creek. Gabriella saw his head tilt backward as his eyes traced the ascent of the remaining 2,600 feet of mountain to a rock crest that towered 14,269 feet tall. Antero was only two hundred seventy-one feet shorter than Mount Elbert, the tallest mountain in Colorado.

“So, how did Theo do on the trip?” she asked Pedro quietly.

Pedro laughed. “You mean other than complaining about every rock, hole, bump and jolt the whole way up the mountain? He was true to his word, though. He said he planned to keep his eyes closed and he did not open them a single time from the moment we left Steve’s until I told him we had arrived.” He leaned over and whispered conspiratorially, “Never had a four-year-old ask me any more often, ‘Are we there yet?’”

“Did you enjoy the ride?” Gabriella called out to Theo.

“Hide?
There wasn’t no place to hide. If there had been, I’d a found it. All that bouncing around—I’d rather clean dog poop off my shoe.” He turned and crossed slowly to the cabin’s front porch. He kept his head down as he walked as if he found the ground at his feet positively fascinating.

A sudden crack and rumble of thunder announced that the storm that’d been tuning its instruments as they climbed the mountain was about to strike the opening bars of its performance.

“Ty!” Gabriella, called instantly terrified. What was she thinking to allow him to run off like that with a storm looming! The lack of oxygen must have muddied her thinking. She rushed around to the back of the cabin and called out for him again. “Ty, come back here. The storm’s coming.”

He’d obviously heard the thunder, but either didn’t hear her call or pretended not to.

“Ty, now!”

As if to reinforce her words, lightning flashed, followed by a grumble on the mountaintop.

“Beep! Beep!”

She jumped when Pedro sounded the horn on his jeep. Ty heard that, turned and came running back across the meadow with P.D. at his heels.

He and the dog almost made it to the cabin before a fine mist swept down off the peak and across the valley, followed by a torrential downpour that formed a curtain of water between the cabin and the cliff face, scrubbing away the view with a gray eraser of water.

Pedro herded them all up onto the front porch under the second-floor deck. A rustic sign proclaiming “St. Elmo’s Fire” hung by two chains above the porch steps and it whipped back and forth in the rising wind. Thunder cracked and rumbled around them. Gabriella had forgotten how quickly storms came up in the mountains. Five minutes ago, there’d been a handful
of gray clouds; now the sky bubbled and boiled, rain lashed the sides of the cabin and the cold wind blew the water up under the decking.

Pedro produced his own key quicker than Gabriella could lay hands on hers, unlocked the door and shoved it open. “I’ll get your stuff in before it’s soaked.”

Ty commanded “Shake!” and P.D. performed his amazing, all-body spasm, sending most of the water flying off his coat before he went inside.

When Gabriella stepped through the doorway, she recognized only one thing from the simple cabin of her childhood. Covering the whole wall of the living room between it and the kitchen was a huge stone fireplace. A massive structure, the stones built it up two feet off the floor; the creek-rock facing stretched up to the ceiling and the fireplace also opened up as large into the kitchen on the other side. She and Garrett had played on the hearth as children, used rocks to build forts there for the stick soldiers they’d made.

Pedro burst through the door, drenched, carrying luggage. He deposited his load of suitcases on the floor and turned to rush back out into the rain for the supplies.

Lightning flashed bright nearby and thunder boomed.

“No,” Gabriella said, grabbed Pedro’s arm and wouldn’t let go. “The lightning’s too close.” She didn’t mean to sound so frightened but that’s how it came out. “Stay inside. The bags are plastic; the rain won’t hurt the groceries.”

Either Pedro decided he agreed with her or merely acquiesced to the superiority of her emotion because he turned and closed the door behind him, took off his hat, slapped it against his leg to knock the water off and hung it on a hook by the door.

“Ty, go get Pedro a towel to dry off on. The bathroom’s right over … at least it used to be and … well, I guess there are towels.”

“Towels in the bathroom, sheets on the beds, canned goods in the cabinets, a refrigerator full of the basics and a freezer full of meat—from hot dogs to sirloins.”

“A refrigerator and freezer. Then there must be …” she looked around, spotted a switch, stepped to it and flipped it. A big chandelier made of elk antlers burst to life. “…
electricity.”

“You mean tell me you thought we was gone stay up here in the dark?” Theo said. He was striving for grumpy, but didn’t quite get there. He didn’t look good and he was breathing hard, almost panting.

“Jim put in electricity right after he bought the place,” Pedro said. “He ran a line up from Steve’s. Cost him … well, probably more than I make in a year. Jim inherited a lot of money when his parents died—said once that when he told them he was going to seminary, they wrote him out of the will. So he was stunned when he got the whole estate. Last I heard, he had given about all of it away. In fact, the only money he spent on himself was fixing up this cabin. Oh, how that man loves the mountains.”