Righteous04 - The Blessed and the Damned (18 page)

But Taylor Junior was not there.

Miriam stopped short, confused. She’d heard his voice just minutes earlier, and definitely above them, deeper into the canyon. There had been no path leading from the valley floor. She scanned the walls around them, but the only movement she saw was a hawk or buzzard soaring overhead. Nothing moved on the rock. She removed her finger from the trigger and toggled on the safety.

“What the hell?” David muttered as he looked around with a bewildered expression.

What the hell indeed. She’d seen Taylor Junior enter the slot canyon. She’d seen his footprints crossing the sand bowl above the fissure. She’d heard him speaking and pushing through the brush, heard his shoes scraping sandstone and dislodging pebbles. And yet here she stood at the end of the box canyon, and Taylor Junior had simply disappeared.

David put away his gun. He shaded his eyes as he scrutinized the canyon walls, his expression growing more and more perplexed. Miriam opened her mouth to suggest going back down to where they’d spotted Taylor Junior’s footprints, then come back up the canyon, more slowly this time. Maybe they’d missed a gap in the canyon wall, some secret exit into the mountains, although why they hadn’t seen this from their watch post above, she couldn’t say. But before she could speak, a rifle shot echoed through the canyon. They froze.

Miriam waited until the last echo died. “How far was that?”

“A mile, maybe. Sounds like it came from the camp.”

“That’s what I thought. The others must have come back.” She considered. “But what were they shooting? Deer?”

“Maybe,” David said. “Would they really be hunting here, right by their camp?”

She was suddenly afraid. “David, we’re in a box canyon. We’ve got to get out of here before we’re trapped.”

They fled in the same direction from which they’d come. Where the fissure of the slot canyon opened at their feet, they found the deer trail leading up to their camp and scrambled back up the hill. The trail seemed twice as steep as it had on the descent. Miriam pushed David to go faster. By the time they were halfway up the ridge, David had to stop, doubled over and wheezing. He drank some water and promptly threw it up. She squatted next to where he rested on his knees and put her hand on his back—slick with sweat—until he lost some of the gray look.

Miriam said gently, “David, we’ve got to get out of here.”

“I don’t know if I can make it. Go on ahead.”

“Don’t be an idiot. Here, give me your arm. Come on, I’ll drag you up if I have to.”

He lifted his head and gave her a skeptical look. “What, throw me on your back?”

“If I have to. Now move!”

He set off again. She kept up a stream of insults, encouragements, mocking jokes—whatever it took. At last, they cleared the loose rubble and entered the fir trees that lined the higher passes. She called a stop and David threw himself onto the ground. Miriam waited until his breathing slowed before handing him the canteen.

“I hope you didn’t mean all that stuff,” he said after a minute.

“No, I wasn’t going to shoot you to put you out of your misery, and no, you’re not a kindergarten girl.”

“Considering how you ran me into the ground,” David said, “I didn’t take the comparison to a girl as an insult.”

Miriam rolled onto her stomach, took out her binoculars, and looked down into the canyon. Their progress had seemed pathetic at the time, but the half-hour sprint up the deer trail had taken them a considerable distance up the mountain. They could hike the rest of it at a slower pace, taking advantage of the cover.

She was still wondering about the hidden exit to the box canyon, but didn’t expect to see anything as she searched more carefully. Movement caught her eye. She blinked in surprise. A figure picking his way among the boulders and sagebrush down the same path they’d just been searching. He wore a backpack. Taylor Junior.

“I don’t believe it.”

David rolled over, and she handed him the binoculars. He wiped sweat from his face before lifting them to his eyes.

“See him?” she asked.

David adjusted the binoculars and then let out his breath in a low whistle. “Where did he come from?”

Miriam had no answer. She took back the binoculars and found the man again just as he disappeared into the sandstone fissure. “What’s going on here?” She felt a chill, dark feeling. “Someone is hiding him. Someone or something.”

“What do you mean?” David asked, sounding surprised. “Like an evil spirit?”

“Maybe. It closed our spiritual eyes. He didn’t need to hide. We walked right past him.”

David hesitated a moment. “No, come on, that’s insane. Jacob would tell us to keep looking. Like that time with Grandma Cowley, he’d remind me about that.”

“Who is Grandma Cowley?”

“Great-Great-Grandma Cowley. She died before I was born, but people still talk about her. She moved out to Yellow Flats after her husband died and had a way of disappearing whenever anyone went to find her.”

“What do you mean, disappearing?” Miriam asked.

“She was in her eighties and then her nineties—no car, no horse—and it’s not like she could have walked anywhere, surrounded by desert. It made people angry and suspicious.”

“So what happened? Where did she go?”

David shrugged. “My father used to tell the story. If he knew where, he never told anyone. It was Jacob who figured out her secret. She’d already been dead thirty years by then.”

“Okay, I’m interested. Go on.”

David said, “We had this cabal of rule-breakers that my brother Enoch called the Half-Breeds. Four half siblings. Jacob was the leader, then Enoch, who was a couple of years younger—I want to say about fourteen—and then me—twelve—and Eliza, who was nine or ten. We couldn’t always take her with us. It’s one thing for boys to wander the desert, hunting lizards and arrowheads. Riding horses, swimming in the irrigation canals, that sort of thing. It’s another thing for a girl.”

Miriam found herself irritated on Eliza’s behalf. “It’s not like girls don’t want adventures, too.”

“That’s exactly what Jacob said. We came down one summer from Alberta for a conference and everyone sat around telling stories about Great-Great-Grandma, including the one about how she’d disappear whenever someone annoying came looking for her. It turned out that her cabin was still out there by the Ghost Cliffs, at Yellow Flats. Nobody had lived there for thirty years. It was an old cabin without electricity or running water. And there was something about the bones of an Indian—or maybe it was some murdered guy, I don’t remember—that creeped people out. Once people started gossiping about bones, my father shut it down. But you can imagine how that set us off. We had to get a look at this place.

“Eliza got wind of our plans, begged to go with us. Jacob got her out of her chores, and we all sneaked out the back door, swiped some horses from the stables, and rode off toward Yellow Flats.

“The cabin was boring—at first. Half the roof had collapsed, and anything interesting was long picked clean. It was a hot day, and we splashed around in Blister Creek where it came by the
house. We’d left the horses in the orchard. Most of the trees had died, but there were a couple of overgrown apple trees growing near the creek. Someone—Enoch, maybe?—stumbled into a yellow jacket nest. I don’t know if it was the fruit that attracted them or maybe the shade. Anyway, the horses spooked, and we ran like hell for the cabin. Eliza was the slowest and took the brunt of the attack.”

“Yikes,” Miriam said. “What happened?”

“Jacob went back and kicked at the nest so she could get away. The rest of us ran for the cabin, got in and shut up the door while we waited for him. Enoch pulled up some loose boards to cover the windows. That’s when we discovered my Great-Great-Grandmother Cowley’s secret hiding place.

“I can’t remember how Jacob got away from the yellow jackets—I guess they stung him quite a bit—but once we were safely inside and finished swatting wasps, he produced a penlight and shone it down the stairs into the hidden cellar. It smelled like canned fruit and old paper. Who knew what was down there? Eliza was so excited she stopped whimpering about the stings and begged us to let her go down. We were pretending it was haunted. I guess it was, in a way.”

“How do you mean, haunted?” Miriam asked.

“There was something in the air. I don’t know, like a presence. It’s like when you’re praying by yourself and suddenly you’re not alone anymore. Know what I mean? We went down anyway. How often do you discover a secret room that nobody has touched in thirty years? We found books, journals, food, lanterns, and candles. I don’t know why or when she built—or had built—this cellar, but
you could sense that she’d spent a lot of time down there. And there was still something of that time in the air. It’s hard to explain.”

Miriam said, “The town where I grew up in California opened a time capsule once. It had newspapers and photographs from the 1920s. Looking at that stuff you felt like you were transported back in time, like all the years between had shortened into a few weeks.”

“Exactly like that,” David said. “Anyway, that’s where she hid all those times. It’s like this thing with Taylor Junior. They’d see Grandma on the porch, but by the time they rode up to the house she’d disappeared. There were rumors that an angel—or an evil spirit, depending on who was telling the story—would whisk her away. The truth was she had a secret cellar beneath the cabin. What do you think Jacob would say now?”

“He’d think Taylor Junior dug himself a secret hiding spot in the box canyon.”

“He wouldn’t come up with supernatural explanations, that’s for sure.”

“He never does.” She thought about it. David was probably right, and yet… “Maybe life is too easy for Jacob,” Miriam said as she worked through her thoughts. “I wonder if that’s what causes his doubts.”

“If it’s a burden to get everything you want, heap some of that weight on my shoulders. Let me be good at stuff for a while.”

“Someday Jacob will have his crisis of conscience. His emotions are going to knock heads with his beliefs.”

“Nah, he’ll do fine. He’ll coast through that like everything else.” He shrugged as he took the binoculars and looked back down
the canyon. “Maybe that’s why I complain about Jacob sometimes. Watching him reminds me of all the ways I’m falling short.”

So what if he fell short? She was a work in progress too, riddled with her own weaknesses. Given the choice, wouldn’t she prefer the man who’d taken a ride through hell and survived? Isn’t that why she’d take David over Jacob?

And that said more about her own needs than it did about either of the brothers.

Another gunshot rolled across the mountains. They froze.

“Look!” David said. “Down at the camp.”

Miriam grabbed the binoculars. They were out in the open now, moving figures emerging from the trees. She twisted the focusing wheel to pull the camp into focus. And then she drew in her breath.

Two men stood over a third, who tried to gain his feet, but couldn’t as the other two kept knocking him down. The man on the ground clutched his shoulder, which was bleeding. Two more men stood back a few paces. One of them waved his hands, agitated, as if trying to calm the situation. The final man stood to one side, a deer rifle in his hands.

He lifted it again and pointed it at the wounded man on the ground.

Trauma Alpha was a six-year-old boy struck by a semi while crossing Main Street in Panguitch. The light turned green when he was halfway across, and the driver, too close to the crosswalk, apparently didn’t see the boy walking in front of his bumper. He didn’t feel the truck slam into the child. The driver
had
heard the boy’s mother scream and the other cars at the intersection frantically honking for him to stop.

Even though Jacob’s attentions were elsewhere, he had no trouble piecing together the boy’s critical condition from the snippets of overheard conversation between nurses, from the frantic way they prepped the boy for surgery, from the boy’s parents embracing in the reception area, faces torn with anguish. Trauma Alpha was in critical condition.

Trauma Beta was Fernie Christianson.

Jacob helped wheel Fernie into the trauma bay for a chest and pelvis X-ray. She lay supine on the cart, strapped to a board with a neck collar. Eliza and Fernie complained—the latter weakly, but coherently—about X-rays passing through the unborn child.

“It’s absolutely necessary,” Jacob said. “Liz, can you wait in the reception area? You’re a distraction. I’ll tell you what’s going on.”

“That’s a good idea,” the resident said, a man named Dr. Napoli. “You too, Dr. Christianson.”

Napoli was a tall, slender man with prematurely graying hair and the twenty-hour stubble of a doctor who has been on shift for too long, but he spoke confidently, with an air of authority, and Jacob instinctively trusted the man.

“I understand what you’re doing,” Jacob said, “but I won’t get in your way. I can help.”

“You’ve already helped,” Napoli said. “The methylprednisolone in the ambulance was a good call, but it’s better that you step down now.”

“And the orthopedic surgeon?”

“On his way. I’ll show you the X-rays and the CT scan results, and we’ll consult you before we do anything. With any luck, surgery won’t be necessary.”

Fernie lifted the oxygen mask. “It’s okay, Jacob. See, I can move my arms.”

Dr. Napoli took her wrist and lowered her arm. “Try not to move, please.” He turned to Jacob. “Excuse us, Dr. Christianson.”

Eliza took Jacob’s arm and drew him outside the trauma bay as the nurse pulled the curtain and blocked his view. Eliza went to sit with Father, who sat in one corner, nervously tapping a boot, a
dark expression on his face. Jacob rubbed his hands together and paced.

Fernie looked different when she came out. The nurses had cut away her clothing and dressed her in a hospital gown, while keeping her body rigid, neck braced with the cervical collar. Two nurses wheeled her down the hall toward the CT scanner. Dr. Napoli put a hand on his arm. “Good news. No vaginal bleeding, fetal heart rate is normal. We’ll do an ultrasound later to be sure.”