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"Three? Who else?"
"You."
"Oh. Yeah." A
Christina eyed her narrowly. "What? You don't think he's lost? Hurt by accident?"
A
"My ex is here," Christina said suddenly. "Erik came five days after you left. He's staying two weeks. Two. Lord!"
A
"I'm so glad you're home."
For the first time since she'd driven in, A
She let herself out the fire exit. If she tried the front again, she might be seen and roped into the meeting. Cori
Home in her tiny apartment, spread catty-corner on the Murphy bed, A
Four hours' sleep and a shower put her back on her feet with a clear head. The afternoon would be spent nesting, settling in. So abruptly had she fled Guadalupe, dishes were still in the sink and garbage in the pail. She'd not even bothered to unpack the cardboard box of ripped and bloody clothes the hospital had sent home with her.
The hiking shorts were salvageable. The shirt was not. Her name tag was gone. A
A stone from the sole of one of the boots clung to the palm of her hand. Alison's magic rock, A
A
Library paste.
Some things are never forgotten: the smell of Jade East, the feel of a man, the sound of ambulance sirens, the taste of library paste.
A
Cross-legged on the carpet, A
Dislodged by her fall.
A minute, maybe more, had passed before the rock hit her.
Stepped into mid-air. Magic rocks. Library paste. Laboriously, A
At Pratt Cabin she liberated a climbing harness and rope from the small Search and Rescue cache kept there. By late afternoon she was above Turtle Rock. Finding where she fell was more difficult than she thought it would be. In memory every foot of rock she'd crawled up was clearly etched. When she'd finally climbed free, she'd evidently relaxed, shut down. The top of the trail was a blur.
When she did find it, there was not a doubt in her mind that she was at the right place. Training binoculars on the stone below she found traces of blood marring the limestone, the iron deposit that had saved her life, and the crack-chimney she had shi
Walking uphill a hundred yards or so, A
The trail was flat, well-maintained. Having divested herself of pack and rope, A
She swept away the sand. Smooth bites of a shovel and the sharp scoring of a pick marked the sides of the hole. A trough a foot deep and canted steeply toward the cliff had been carved out of the trail. Crawling on hands and knees, A
She buckled on the climbing harness and, using an upslope juniper as anchor and belay, began rappeling slowly down the cliff face searching every ledge and crevice, every tuft of grass that clung to the stone. Against the trunk of a stunted madrona she found what she was looking for: four tangled sticks. A
By the time she stood again on level ground she was certain she had unraveled every stitch her collarbone had knit in the two weeks since the accident. For several minutes she rested, drank in the air. Then she examined her find.
Four sticks, three broken but one over a foot long. Gravel was stuck to the sticks in several places, affixed by the same white paste A
She laid the longest stick across the trough cut in the trail. It just reached. Someone had built a tiger trap and she had fallen into it. They had dug a ditch on the outside of the trail wide enough it wouldn't be stepped over. A mat of sticks had been woven to cover the hole and pebbles glued to the mat to make it look like the rest of the trail's surface.
A
That meant someone had watched as she fell. The same someone had rolled a rock down on her when it looked as if she would save herself. Her second slide had taken her so far down they must've trusted to luck-their good and her bad-that she would fall to her death. They wouldn't have wished to remain in the vicinity any longer than necessary. The sticks could've been picked up in minutes, the trail repaired almost as quickly and what few sticks tumbled down would be washed free of library paste with the first good rain. They had pla