Descent

to the trailhead and parked. Then he either took her life here and carried her up the trail or else forced her to walk up there with him and then did it.

Took her life.

The boy stood remembering another shaded hollow in the woods. A cold bench and white crooked headstones. A tarnished metal plaque that promised forty days and all of it attended by the white statue with her maimed blessing and all of it so long ago.

What do you think will happen this time?

Nothing. Let’s go.

The path followed the mountain’s edge with only a thin median of pines separating the climbers from the gorge and the open sky. The going was steep, yet for every step there appeared a stone or a thick knee of root made bone smooth by time and weather and the treads of hikers, and the men ascended these crude steps single file, the sheriff in the lead and the deputies bringing up the rear, giving Grant and the boy the look and the feeling of two men on their way to some high alpine arraignment. Through the trees and not fifty feet off in the blue sky, two brown eagles rode the updrafts wing tip to wing tip, without effort or urgency, absolutely soundless, their hunter’s eyes searching.

Above the climbers, on a level stretch of trail, two more men in uniform stood waiting, peering out through the trees into the sky. They saw the eagles bank suddenly, pinions riffling, and dive down into the gorge like Messerschmitts.

“Oh, they saw something,” said one of the men. “They saw di

“What made the hiker do that?” said Ki

“I asked him the same thing, Sheriff.”

“What’d he say?”

Price glanced at Grant, the boy, and then at the ground.

“Said he was relieving himself.”

Within the trees there was only one place where a man could stand like that and Ki

Grant stepped between the branches and all of his vision and all of his heart spilled over the bluff and fell to the rocky outcrop some forty feet below, a dun-colored shelf piled with tumbled scree and sun-bleached wood and rimmed around by stunted, clinging pines. South-facing, there was no snow or even any trace of thaw on the shelf, and at first he saw nothing but a gray and dry twist of fallen tree on which someone, or the wind, had hung faded rags of cloth. Then he saw the sweep of black hair, the back of her head, and his mind corrected the image and he was tottering in space. One of his legs back-stepped of its own accord and his arm came into a strong grip and he turned to see who held him and it was his son.

He looked into Sean’s eyes and the boy looked back with his matching eyes.

“I don’t know,” Grant said. “I can’t tell.”

He stepped back and the boy took his place at the edge of the bluff. Leaned out and looked down.

“I’m sorry, Grant,” said Ki

“Be damned,” said Price, and the others turned to see the boy going over. He’d taken hold of a branch at the edge of the bluff and swung his leg out over the lip and was climbing down.

“Sean,” said Ki

“Sheriff, he can’t do that,” said one of the deputies. “That’s a crime scene.”

“I said don’t do that, son.” Ki

“It’s all right, Joe.”

“Hell it is. He’s got a broke hand and a bum leg. I wouldn’t let a healthy man climb down there.”

“It’s all right,” Grant said.

“It ain’t all right, Grant. Son,” said the sheriff to the top of the boy’s head, “I want you back up here. That’s an order.”

The boy went on. Backing steadily down the face of the bluff by way of tree root and rock and fissure. He knew that under the cast the bones would hold and that it was the cast itself that opposed him, and his progress was slow; finding a foothold with his good leg, reaching down and finding a handhold with his good hand, lowering himself to the next foothold and This is your plan, then, to make him watch you fall to your death? and with every movement sending small rockslides of talus chattering down to the ledge below. When he was perhaps twenty feet from where she lay, he looked over his shoulder and saw only the green void behind him and he turned back and said aloud, “Don’t do that. Do not do that.” A few feet farther down, his bad leg slipped and for a moment he scouted the place where he would land below on the ledge, but his boot, scrabbling at the rock face, found purchase and he continued on.

Five or six feet above the ledge his strength gave out, or he allowed it to give out, and he pushed off and fell clear of the wall and landed good leg first and the leg skidded out from under him in the tailings and he came down violently on his back in a cloud of dust beside her.

High above him through the haze of dust was his father’s face.

“You hurt?” he called down.

“I’m all right,” the boy answered. Up there, one of the men said something about evidence and the other sheriff, Price, said, “I know, Deputy.”

The boy coughed and got to his knees and turned to her. Under the veil of what was once a plaid fla

He reached and gathered a handful of black hair and it was like the hair of any living person except that when he moved it, it shed twigs and pine needles and small moltings as if it were some derelict nest and he thought maybe it was. He lifted the hair aside and leaned to see her face. What had been her face. The drawn gray mask of it in profile. The empty slit of eyelid deep in its bowl. Cheekbone like an elbow. Fallen nose. The toothy ghoulish half smile.

“Sean?” called his father.

He looked at this face, this maybe-sister. Maybe-daughter. He looked along the wasted length of her and saw nothing he recognized. The clothes were like none he’d seen on her before. The remains of the shoes were not the remains of ru

There was something else in the debris below the pocket. He dug again and unearthed a thin plastic wallet folder. He prized a finger into the folder and it fell apart and the cards spilled out. Two faded credit cards and an ID. At one corner of the ID the lamination had curled away and the paper inside had been soaked and dried many times over, yet the picture and much of the printing had survived. Her name was Kelly A