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The group spotted them, there was a moment of frozen tableau as new information was processed, then Joan shouted, "Back from the dead. That's my boy," and things began to happen.
A nondescript man, slightly stooped, wisps of thi
Les was left on the outskirts. Twice he sort of pushed himself up straighter, raised his chin and peered over shoulders as if steeling himself to the task of breaking through the ranks to his child. Hopelessness or cowardice stopped him both times. Finally he turned and busied himself with a day pack on one of the benches. A
Though disinclined to like Lester Van Slyke for the simple reason that his son didn't, A
"I bet you're glad to get your boy back," A
At length he got himself squared away. The fog lifted and A
He was out of shape. Had A
"Then there was the thing with Carolyn," he finished.
A
"His stepmom pretty anxious?" she asked to be polite.
"I don't know. I mean, I'm sure she would have been. Didn't they tell you? Carolyn's been gone since yesterday morning."
That got A
"I woke up and she'd gone. She does that. I didn't think anything of it, but she hasn't come back yet."
An emotion flickered behind Mr. Van Slyke's pale clear eyes. It looked like relief for an instant then was clouded over with concern. A faint line, an old cleanly healed scar, traced white across his brow and down the side of his nose as his face muscles tensed.
"Usually she's not gone so long. Not overnight. At least not in a place like this. I mean, where would she go?"
"Have you reported it?" A
"This noon when she still wasn't back, I got worried. I told that young fellow, that ranger, when he came with the news you found Rory. I kind of thought maybe she was with you guys."
"Not with us," A
Chapter 7
A
Now, safe in a secluded crook of the creek's wandering arm, boulders as high as a horse's withers forming haphazard fortress walls between her and the squalid hubbub of Fifty Mountain Camp, she found herself imbibing huge drafts of air, sucking and sighing like a woman too long underwater. Hyperventilation brought tears. Not healing tears that flow freely and wash away grief, but the niggardly hot tears that merely sting the corners of the eyes. Peevish, self-willed tears for her own weariness and because the woman's butchered face still clung to the back of her retinas. Perhaps if she'd cried for others, the tears would have been more generous.
Joan had cried when Rory came back from the gastrointestinal tract of the bear unchewed and unclawed. Cried for joy from her warm mother's heart. A
"I need my head examined," she muttered and wished she could call Molly. Instead, she forced herself to sit up, to rinse the self-pity from her face with the icy milk flowing down from the glaciers. Face free of dust, mind loosed from self-involved thoughts, she lay back again on the stone, felt the sun on her skin and began to draw strength from the earth. But for the quiet laughter of the stream, the high country was wrapped in its peculiar silence. Birds did not twitter. Squirrels did not scuffle. Even the insects did not hum.
Into this bone-deep peace, images-scenes that had made little or no sense at the time-began to resurface.
After A
Over the years A