At the Funnel. Here.
Dani climbed down through the brush and onto the shoreline. The alluvial currents here had widened out a deep gorge in the aspens and firs. She knew it was kind of like finding a needle in a haystack. Without even knowing if the needle was even hidden here. She saw a beer can glinting among the rocks. A flip-flop sandal was nearby, which must have slipped off someone’s foot. A waterlogged Penn tennis ball. She kicked over an empty can of beans, stepping over the small, loose rocks. Because of the depth, the water color changed here from a clear blue and white to a musty gray.
It wasn’t around.
She kneeled in the shallow bed, disappointed. It was kind of a long shot anyway. If it had washed down, she was pretty certain it would have ended up here.
She scanned the opposite side before going back up to her car.
Something glinted. Nothing more than a fleck of color amid the rocks on the shoals. Across the stream.
White.
The river was shallow here and easy to ford. Except for the narrow channel in the middle that was still about two feet deep where you could still traverse a raft. Dani went in in her shorts and Tevas and made her way across. About thirty yards. Her sandals gripped the silty river floor, water rushing by her knees. The current was mild here. No threat of being swept away. Not like what she had to go through to get to Trey.
She crossed toward the object she’d seen, which was nestled amid the rocks.
Whatever hope she had that she’d found something faded.
All it turned out to be was just a white plastic drink container. She bent down, picked it up and tossed it farther off the riverbed into the brush. Probably someone’s water container that had fallen overboard. It could have been sitting here for months.
Maybe Wade was right. It was possible Trey had been just riding recklessly and hit his head against a rock. It’s possible he wasn’t wearing a helmet. Maybe Rooster did just make it all up—for the attention. To be the big shot. Anyway, it was now all kind of moot. Both Trey and Ron were gone. She’d never know, though something still inside her said—
Something farther along the shoreline caught her eye. Half submerged amid the vegetation along the shore. She went over, the black composite almost completely blending in with the gunmetal water and dark green vines.
She picked it up by the strap. It was a little scuffed, beaten up from its ride downstream, bouncing off rock after rock.
Her heart started to race.
Trey’s helmet.
But it wasn’t dented. Dented in the way it would have been if its wearer had sustained blunt-force trauma to the head.
Which had to mean one thing. That it hadn’t been on Trey at the time he sustained his injury. If he’d cracked it with enough force to kill him you would have surely been able to see it. Holding the black helmet, Dani knew that had to mean something, right?
Her blood surged. So she wasn’t wrong, at least, not about that part. Trey had been wearing it.
So maybe she wasn’t so wrong about all the rest of it, either.
Back in her car, following the river back upstream, she searched for the spot above the lower Cradle where she had found Trey’s body.
The road narrowed there, barely wide enough for two cars to pass, with dense brush crowding in from both sides. The aspens and pines were so tall here Dani could barely see the sky. She came up to the clearing where the rescue vehicles converged when they pulled Trey out. It hadn’t rained since, and tire tracks and footprints were still visible all over the dirt road.
Dani heard the roar of the river slashing against the rocks below.
It was clear, even in just Class Two or Three rapids, that Trey couldn’t have just nested to a stop here. His raft must have been carried down from farther upstream and come to rest in the eddy. She heard Rooster saying, You didn’t see what I saw. He wasn’t alone. Now she was even more certain he hadn’t been lying.
But just what did that mean?
Had someone been along with him on his run? That wouldn’t be hard to determine. The ranger station would know. But if it was all just a terrible accident, surely that person would have called it in. And if so, they surely wouldn’t have taken such a lethal reprisal against Ron in the balloon.
No, it had to be something else. It wasn’t no accident out there … Someone had to have stopped him.
The police vehicle was gone now. Dani made her way down the slope to the ridge above the river and scanned upstream. The cold spray off Baby’s Rattle lashed at her, the sun glinting off her shades. It was possible that someone else had climbed down here and intercepted him on the river. But that would’ve had to have happened farther upstream. Or they’d have to have made their way down along the shoreline in between the first two rapids of the Cradle where the currents slowed a bit, in order for his body to have ended up here.
There were rocks in the river near where Trey was found. The Raptor’s Teeth, they were called. Three sharp, pointed rocks that protruded out of the water, four to five feet high. If Trey had sustained a crash hard enough to cause his death, surely his helmet would show the impact. And it didn’t. So how did it come off? How did it end up all the way downstream?
Dani followed the rapids from the high rocks, twenty or thirty feet above the river. She had to climb up and then down in order to follow the edge, but she was pretty nimble, having done her share of trekking and climbing in these hills. Once or twice, she even had to jump from one height down to another in her Tevas. If she stumbled she could easily fall in and hit her head or break a bone and be carried away. It was slow work; it took about ten minutes to climb a hundred yards.
Finally she made it to the Teeth. It was calm enough here for Trey to have been pulled over by someone. If a person had come out, pretending to need help. Or with a gun maybe. Yes, it could have happened here, Dani imagined. But why …? It was Trey. Why would someone have wanted to kill him?
She turned and looked back up the shore toward the road, and spotted something in the woods.
The narrowest pathway, which seemed to cut through the thick brush, barely wide enough to even be called a path. Barely wide enough for just a single person. It wound down directly above Baby’s Rattle, the second rapid in the Cradle, right above the Raptor’s Teeth.
So someone could have climbed down there from here.
Curious, Dani went back and followed the narrow path from the river’s edge back up the slope toward the road. Thorny branches slapped in her face and scraped against her bare arms and legs. She was no scout or tracker, but she had the feeling someone had been here recently.
As she neared the road, she noticed something. She kneeled, sweating slightly in the sun, peeling back leaves and crushed branches on the ground to see.
It was like a small clearing had been made. Low branches were flattened against the ground, within a few yards from the road.
Not by hand, she could tell. It looked as if it was done by the front wheels of a vehicle.
So someone might well have been here.
She cleared away some of the leaves and brush on the ground. There were tire tracks. Something had pulled in—and whoever was in it had continued from the road via that pathway down to the Cradle.
To