Rapid Descent
Gwen Hunter
The kayak trip was supposed to be a honeymoon. But when Nell and Joe Stevens are caught in a flash flood, Nell is swept under, trapped and loses consciousness. When she awakes, safe on shore, she finds a note from Joe, explaining that he has gone for help. He never returns. The search that follows raises more questions than it answers. About the family he never mentioned, who arrive in Nell's sleepy hometown. The enormous inheritance. And worse, the question whispered by the locals: is Nell responsible?Always hoping for Joe's return, Nell tries to put the rumors behind her. But as years slip past, Nell craves answers. She takes to the river again in search of the truth and finds that jealousy, desperation and deception can pull you under faster than churning water–and you may never resurface.
RAPID DESCENT
Gwen Hunter
Rapid Descent
Acknowledgments
My Thanks To:
Mike Kohlenberger—raft guide extraordinaire, teller of great stories, and the real Jedi Mike. A guide who would never ever toss a client into the drink on the Lost Guide, but who has the skill to do it if he wanted. You are the only person I ever based a character on. Thank you for all you taught me about rivers, the history of the Appalachian Mountains and their ecology. It is because of you that this book exists at all.
Dave Crawford, owner of Rapid Expeditions in the Smoky Mountains, who gave us kayak instruction, kept us safe, took us rafting and had great stories. Thank you for all you taught me about myself. Because of you, I fell in love with hardboats and rivers, and I learned to relax.
Dave Shook of Old Town Outfitters in Rock Hill, South Carolina, and his son Cameron Shook, who came up with gear information and…um…have I mentioned the great stories? River people have a lot of great stories!
Sarah Bell of Green Rivers Adventures for the great trip down the Upper Green River. Loved the IKs—single-man inflatable kayaks! Ashlyn and Emily, you were great guides!
Leah McDowell, for the lessons in kayak rolling at UNCA, University of North Carolina at Asheville, and for introductions to so many people.
Becka Crawford, who named Rocking River.
Ralph Altman for being a friend since high school, and for being so gracious as I tried to pick up kayaking skills.
Robbie and Donna Ashley for the use of their pool while Rod and I learned to Eskimo roll.
CeeCee Murphy for helping me work out the accident scene where Nell is injured. And who loves rivers with “nice drops” of twelve to twenty feet…
My mom, Joyce Wright, for being my first and best reader, first and best fan, and for catching things I missed in the manuscript.
Jeff Gerecke, my agent, who keeps the future in mind.
Miranda Indrigo, my editor. Gifted with the broad view, a gentle—though thorough—editorial hand and an innate kindness. You have always made my books better, stronger, tighter and faster than my own limited vision.
And last but never ever least, thanks to my husband, Rod, who has supported my careers, my dreams and my writing. And who was willing to take on a new sport, a new lifestyle (river rat) and a new way to travel (RVing). I’m the luckiest gal in the world.
In memory of Delta
Who gave us love, guarded the house
and was an adventurer at heart.
Contents
PART ONE
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
PART TWO
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
PART ONE
1
Six Years Ago
Nell woke slowly, her eyes slit, blinded by sunlight. She blinked to clear the gummy substance away. Licked dry, cracked lips. Trees took shape overhead, fall leaves turning gold and red. Blue sky peeked beyond them and puffy clouds floated between. She was lying down. Outside. Lifting a hand, she encountered slithery cloth and held it up. It was her sleeping bag.
She eased an arm out of the bag and braced her elbow on the ground, then pushed. Her arm quivered, so weak it barely lifted her. Slowly, she sat up. The world rocked and whirled, dipping like a class-V rapid. A mallet thumped rhythmically against the inside of her head.
Nausea doubled her over; Nell reeled, retched, grabbing her head. Her pulse pounded. She retched again and again, dry heaves slamming around the pain in her skull, a wrecking ball intent on pulping her brain into mush. Intense thirst ripped at her throat. Her eyes burned, tearless. Shivers caught her. She clutched her head with a hand and the pain over her temple doubled. A pulpy knot rested beneath her palm.
Dehydration. Shock? Yeah, shock. Bump on the head, likely concussion.
Big freaking help, figuring out a diagnosis, she thought. She eased back down and eventually the nausea dissipated. Trees overhead stopped dancing. A bird called. Whitewater roared nearby. The air was cold and damp, the sensory stimulation as familiar as her own skin, yet nothing looked familiar from where she lay.
Beneath the sleeping bag, she fingered polyester fleece, smooth against her hand. Under that, she felt the ultrafine knit of water-wicking synthetics—her cool-weather, stay-warm-even-if-you-get-wet long johns.
Slowly, she turned her head and was rewarded with only a small increase in the rhythm of the hammer beating against her brain. The coals of a long-dead fire were close by. Four full water bottles.
Water. Nell slid an arm out and grabbed a bottle, pulled it back under the sleeping bag. With trembling fingers, she opened it. Managed to drink a few sips without losing much to the cloth of the sleeping bag. After a few minutes, her stomach settled and she drank half of the water. Her body sucked up the fluid, demanding more. But she waited, allowing her system to accept it. If she drank it too fast she might throw it up and lose all the benefit. She remembered that from wilderness first-aid class, or maybe it was the swift water–rescue course. She didn’t remember why she was on a riverbank, alone, but if she could remember that much, the rest would surely come back.
Gradually, sip by sip, Nell drank almost all of the twenty ounces and capped the bottle. Slowly she sat up again, holding her head to keep it together, sure it wanted to fly apart. She was lying on a flat space in a tiny clearing, not more than ten feet wide and maybe twelve feet long. A shelter had been built over her, thin boughs of fresh-cut tree branches resting over a single, larger branch. She held her hand over the stone-ringed fire pit. It was as cold as it looked. Deadwood was piled nearby, but hadn’t been used to feed the fire. Her kayak was overturned, hull up, resting atop her PFD, paddle, helmet, dry suit and kayak spray skirt. Her rescue rope had been used to secure the pine branches of her shelter in place. Her other rescue equipment, biners, pulleys, prusicks, were all piled together, half in, half out of the rescue-equipment bag. Near them was a cell phone, in pieces, turned on its side as if to dry out.
She reached an arm out of the bag and flipped the dry suit over. Each of the limbs had been sliced and the neck hole had been cut out, the gashes irregular, as if made by a rescue knife, slashing. The chest area was ripped and torn, punctured, as was the abdominal area. A sharp twig, dead pine needles still attached, was rolled into the neoprene fabric over the chest, which should have been protected by her flotation vest. It was twisted and snarled through several holes. A feeling of dread slid between her ribs with all the finesse of an assassin’s blade.
She pulled the neck of her fleece shirt out and looked at her chest. Across her neck, ribs, abdomen and along her sides were field dressings, mounds of gauze held in place with elastic cling wrapped around her. Blood had seeped out and dried in the dressing. Her ribs and chest throbbed with each breath, and she had a feeling that if she coughed, she was going to hurt. A lot. She was cold, shivering, the skin of her hands white and puckered.
Nell looked around. First rule of white water—never paddle alone. But she was alone, and had been for a while, it seemed. Second rule of white water—you can only depend on yourself. It looked like she would have to.
Moving like an eighty-year-old instead of with her usual vigor, Nell peeled out of the sleeping bag. First things first, and the most urgent was the call of nature. Too weak to bend properly, she held on to a branch to rearrange her clothes, using the moment to inspect herself more thoroughly. She was covered with lacerations, punctures and bruises, sure evidence of being caught in a strainer. The feeling of dread increased. Finished, Nell pulled her clothes back in place and caught sight of her left hand. The plain gold ring brought her up short. Memories flickered. The feeling of alarm increased.
Where was Joe? She looked around the clearing. Joe had been here. It was his phone in pieces. His way of stacking firewood, with a package of corn chips nearby. Joe would never have left her alone.
Nell hobbled to the stacked firewood and bark. Kneeling, working by instinct, she positioned the bark, leaves and fibers in a cone, placed the kindling over it and took two Fritos corn chips from the opened pack. With the lighter she found beneath the chip bag, she lit the corn chips and set them to either side of the cone. The oil in the chips burned a long time and was a time-honored way of getting and keeping a fire started. The leaves and bark ignited and Nell fed the small flame with kindling until it could support itself on the deadwood. The blaze felt unbearably hot on her face and hands, testament to hypothermia.
Joe would be impressed at her recall of medical terms. He used them fluently, while she more often stumbled over them. She held her hands over the fire, warming herself, rubbing them gently together. They were bruised and cut, nails broken with filth crusted beneath them. She leaned into the smoke, holding her breath, letting the warmth seep around her head, through her snarled hair. Her face was chapped and raw, and the warmth felt wonderful. Rocking back on her heels, she took in fresh air for several breaths, then bent back into the smoky heat. And again. And again. Thawing herself.
When she was warmer, Nell rolled to a sitting position and slid her feet into her lightweight, neoprene river shoes with tough rubber bottoms, constructed to be worn by paddlers in cold water, and stood. The shoes were dry and warmer than her feet. Joe had left them beside the sleeping bag, which, when she looked it over, was both bags, Joe’s and hers, one inside the other.
Nausea flirted with vertigo, and a cough threatened but held off. She crossed the clearing to the pile of supplies, strength returning more quickly now that she was moving, but pain bid for attention. Her head injury made the world sway drunkenly.
Beneath the cell-phone parts were two items—her rashguard shirt, which Joe had somehow pulled off her body, and the Ziploc baggies that Joe used to keep sensitive electronics dry. They looked as punctured as her chest. Inside was a piece of paper, a letter with her name at the top. A shiver trembled through her, teeth chattering.
Shaking, Nell opened the ruined bag and let the plastic fall to the ground as she read her husband’s neat, block writing.
Nellie baby,
Don’t know what you’ll remember about the accident. Water went up fast just before we reached the Double Falls. The class IIIs looked and sounded like class Vs. Big water. You were out of position river-left, and elected to take the cheat. I was too far right and had to take the crapid.
Nell smiled at the river runner’s term for a crappy rapid—a difficult and dangerous rapid, but one without a hoohaah component, without joy at the bottom. She touched the paper, her fingers sliding over the word.
I was scared shitless when you weren’t at the bottom, in the pool. The end of the cheat was blocked by a dead pine and you got caught in the strainer. Force of the water had lifted your boat up enough so you could breathe, but the tree was shifting, dragging you down. I did a hairy ferry and took to the rocks, climbed to get to you. By the time I did, you were bleeding pretty badly and starting to slip under.
Nell smoothed the paper. Badly…Joe with his perfect grammar…
She considered the description of the rapids. The double falls, the cheat—the easier drop taken by novices or wimps—the mention of a pool. She remembered the trip. Joe had planned it as a delayed honeymoon, kayaking on the Big South Fork of the Cumberland River. Not a bad run, but not easy, and not one they could paddle without a lot of rain. The South Fork had notoriously unpredictable water levels. Not a dam-fed river, rather, a rain-fed one, it was usually dry this time of year, but the remnants of a late hurricane had stalled over the Tennessee plateau and dumped a lot of rain. The South Fork had been running big water—nearly 2500 cubic feet per second, or CFS.
Her headache eased as she began to put it together, and as the water she had drunk entered her bloodstream.
I got you out of the boat but we had to swim the last of the cheat to the pool. The water took a squirrelly curl and it knocked you into a rock. You went out. Concussion. Shock. I’m so sorry, baby. I couldn’t hold you. I banged up my knee, getting you to shore.
Nell looked around. They were river-right. Joe had gotten them across the river in big water. Swimming. With a bad knee.
I got us up the shore to a flat spot and set up camp, made a fire, got you warm. I watched for other boaters, but the weather must have turned nasty upstream and no one was taking the river. It’s morning now, and you’re still out and I’m getting worried. The water is still too high to hike back, and my knee is swollen up like a grapefruit. I’d never be able to make it up the trail at the confluence and then the two miles to the nearest house. So I’m paddling to the takeout for help. I know—never boat alone. But I’ll be careful. And I’ll get back to you. I love you.
Monday, 0800, Oct. 22
Joe
Nell carefully folded the paper back into the uncertain protection of the ripped baggies. She glanced at her watch. It was 2:00 p.m.—fourteen hundred according to military time, Joe’s preference. The date displayed was 10–23.
Nell’s legs gave way as her puny strength leached out. She sat, landing hard, the baggies and her watch face all she could see. It had been over twenty-four hours. Joe had been gone more than a day. If she was where she thought, then his rescue trip should have taken half the previous morning. Help should have reached her this morning at the latest. It was now afternoon, and no help had arrived. She looked out at the water, still running high, perhaps 2000 CFS. There was a large X made of tree branches—an emergency signal to any passing boaters—only feet away on the shore. Joe’s handiwork.
Joe had gone out on the water alone.
Fear spiraled up, her heart beat at a painful, irregular pace.
Her short fall had dislodged something in her lungs and she started coughing, low, wet racking coughs that seared her chest. Nell clutched her torso with one hand, her head with the other. She had taken in water. Probably had pneumonia to go with the concussion. She stared into the tree trunks, oak, poplar and sycamore branches, wavering for a moment with thin tears. She was too dehydrated to truly cry. Not that she had cried in years. Not that she would cry now. She closed her eyes, the world swirling, sucking her down.
When Nell woke again, her skin was hot and she was shivering. Only half an hour had passed, but her lips felt like sandpaper and her body ached. When she could sit up again, Nell scanned the clearing and her equipment. She was sick. There was no way she should go on the water. But Joe was out there…He hadn’t come back. He was in trouble. Had to be.
Shoving the bag with the precious letter into her pocket, she pushed to her knees and stood, fighting the need to cough. She could cough later, be sore later, be sick to death later. After she found Joe. She focused on that one thing. Find Joe.
2
The most important element in finding her husband wasn’t the state of her health, but whether her boat was still usable. She ran her hand along the hull, noting a few new scratches, but nothing major. Using her own body weight to test for cracks, she stepped up on the overturned boat and walked along it. It was sound. Forced to use both hands to flip the lightweight, forty-five-pound kayak over, she reeled and nearly fell as the boat rocked lazily upright.
She was weak. Too weak to be contemplating what she was planning.
In her memory, she could hear Joe’s threat when he gifted her with the Pyrahna Micro Bat. “You ever boat alone and I’ll kick your pretty little butt,” he’d said, giving her that grin. Oh, God, that grin. Devil-may-care, skirting the edge of reckless but never giving in, so full of untamed life. She pressed the pads of her fingers against her burning eyes.
“I’ll help you kick my butt,” she whispered, “when I find you. After I kick yours for scaring me like this.” Her voice was hoarse, weak.
Knowing she needed water, she upended the bottle and finished the last drop, capped it, and set the empty near the supply bag. The small, portable water filter was nowhere in sight, and she knew Joe had taken it, leaving her bottles. Which was smart, in case she had been too weak to make it to the river to filter some. She tucked two of the full water bottles inside the bag, and opened the fourth one to sip on. Joe had left her a large packet of trail mix and both of the dehydrated dinners they had brought, but the packages had somehow been punctured. Backpacker meals were similar to Meal, Ready-to-Eat, survival fare developed by the military and now made by several commercial companies and used by survivalists in the wild. Joe always packed a couple when they were going to be out overnight, just in case the fishing was bad. Along with the cell phone, these had gotten soaked and were bloated, the dehydrated food expanded with moisture.
She sniffed each of the freeze-dried packets and tore one fully open, pouring its contents into a metal cup, adding a little of her water to reconstitute it. Carefully, she placed a rock at the edge of the small campfire and balanced the cup on it. The ripped package went into the flames and she tossed the uneaten one into the torn baggie.
There was a smear of red on the baggie. Fresh blood. She inspected her hands. Several of the uncountable cuts on them had broken open. There were no medical supplies left. It looked like Joe had used all the cling and gauze on her already. Nell shrugged. She wouldn’t bleed to death, not from these little things.
While the food warmed, she munched trail mix and considered the dry suit, but there was no way to wear it. She shoved it into the bow of the boat and checked the rigging. The boat was permanently rigged just for her, sculpted pieces of hard and soft foam along the rigging’s hip and knee pads, the bulkhead set just right so the balls of her feet rested against it for leverage and steering. She had lost one of the hip pads, and she pulled the suit back out. Joe and she both boated with rescue knives strapped to their floatation vests, and she cut an oblong strip about four inches wide and two feet long from one of the legs; she folded it over until it was the right thickness and wedged it in place, securing it with a strip of duct tape. The parsimonious part of her cringed at further damaging the expensive suit. The realistic part of her counted it as just another element of the goal—finding Joe.
Shivers racked her. It could be cold in October on the Cumberland. She would miss the dry suit. Undeterred, she shoved what was left of it back into the bow. To counter the cold, she pulled the rashguard shirt over her head, feeling stupid that she had not thought of the warmth it could provide until now. Thus fortified, she dismantled the camp.
The rescue rope had been knotted through the tree branches of her shelter, and by the time she finished removing it, her hands were bleeding freely and stinging from pine sap. She coiled the rope properly and tucked it into her rope bag. Joe had taken none of her flipline, but she was missing two prusicks, webbing, and two carabineers—biners—used for rescue. Joe had likely lost his while rescuing her and had been smart enough to take hers.
An image hit her, Technicolor, surround-sound memory. Her hands. Holding the branch of a dead tree. Blood flowing weakly over her skin. White water rising around her, the river’s might thunderous. Rushing and cold. The smell of the Cumberland was iron-wet in her memory. The roar of power damping any other sound. She was trying to attach a length of webbing to a branch above her, the biner and bright red flex sharp in her memory. She had tried to rescue herself. And somehow had lost the equipment. The image went no further, leaving her with only that single moment—tree, her hands, blood, two pieces of rescue equipment. And pain in her chest, up under her PFD. Where she had been stabbed by a branch she hung from.
When the instant of memory faded, Nell was sitting on the ground again, her white-water equipment before her, trail-mix bag on its side, some of the valuable calories spilled on the ground. Shivering, goose bumps tight on her skin, fever surely rising, she gathered up the mix and brushed it off. Eating it, she went back to work.
Her personal flotation device was missing a strap at the bottom, cut through by a sharp knife, but it would keep her afloat if she had to swim. The neoprene kayak skirt, the device that made boat and boater one and kept out water that would otherwise quickly swamp the small craft, was another matter. When properly in use, a kayak skirt was fitted around the rim of the opening of the boat and snugged around the boater’s waist, making both a watertight unit. The skirt had been damaged and repaired with duct tape, which would make it stiff and harder than usual to fit over the rim of the boat’s cockpit.
Nell pulled against the elastic neoprene, counting the tears. There were three big ugly ones and five smaller ones, all hidden beneath duct tape which had been applied to top and bottom. Nell felt her waistline and compared her wounds to the damaged skirt. The strainer must have punctured through the skirt, up at an angle beneath her PFD, and through her dry suit. Joe had obviously repaired what he could, but the duct tape restricted the elastic of the neoprene skirt. It might last for another run. Might.
But she had not lost her helmet and, miracle of miracles, she still had her paddle. Briefly, she wondered if she had dropped it when caught in the strainer. She had no memory of it in the vision of her hands. If she lost it, Joe must have recovered it for her.
Either way, she was good to go. But first, the river. She walked along the shore, checking out the flow, but the river curled away from her between the boulders lining the South Fork of the Cumberland. Balancing carefully, she climbed up one and worked her way upstream, jumping from the top of one car-, bus-, or house-size rock to another—the only way up or downstream, outside of the white water. Her river shoes gripped the slippery boulders. If she fell and busted her leg, she would be in bigger trouble than she was in now.
The water flow was still high and gave her an idea how difficult the trip was going to be. The roar of the water was like a jet engine. White water foamed and churned, hiding the undercut rocks, strainer-debris, sieves and other dangers.
The cheat was only a few yards upstream, still running with enough flow to take it in a creek-boat. She couldn’t see the tree that had caught her, the cheat curving hard around a huge boulder, the rock the size of their bedroom in the apartment. Big water. Water that had already tried to kill her. Which made her mad, a much more useful emotion than the worry that niggled at the back of her mind.
Nell turned back downstream and walked past her campsite. Ahead, she saw a pair of young tom turkeys, standing on a spit of shore, drinking. With a flap of wings, they whirled uphill, racing into the scrub and out of sight.
Boulders and water-swept trees wedged between rock blocked her way. However, between two rounded rocks she found a glimpse of the white water downstream. The Washing Machine on the Big South Fork. From this angle, it didn’t look too difficult. Dicey class IIs. It was impossible to hike farther. Nell headed back to camp, picking her way with care. Her breath felt easier, her chest pain was less. She could do this. She had to do this.
Back at the camp, Nell broke down the emergency X signaling for help. She tucked four lengths of flex into her pockets and scattered the branches.
Gathering up the last of her equipment, Nell strapped it on or tucked it in, wrapping the sleeping bags in their waterproof protection and forcing them into the stern. She stepped into the kayak-cockpit skirt and pulled it to her waist, her breath tight and painful. She couldn’t hear the soft wheeze of her lungs over the roar of the water, but she could feel it.
She added a bit more kindling to the fire and checked the temperature of the Backpacker. It was hot enough to eat, though not hot enough to be tasty. Of course, no amount of cooking could truly make a dehydrated meal tasty. She scooped up the rice and bits of chicken with a camp spork. Energy flooded her with each bite and she felt better instantly. Joe had chosen the Santa Fe chicken and rice, her favorite. Dinner suitable for a belated river honeymoon. Grimly, she smiled as she ate, sitting close to the fire and absorbing the warmth.
Nell washed the cup and spork and tucked them into place in the kayak. It was much more full than usual, with Joe’s sleeping bag, some of the equipment between her thighs instead of in the bow or stern. Using the empty water bottle, she carried enough river water up to douse the fire, first kneeling and drawing into herself a last bit of heat and warmth. When she could bear to, knowing that this meant she wouldn’t be warm or safe for hours, she upended the bottle. The water gurgled and sizzled the fire out. She stirred the ashes, pushing the half-burned kindling into the mud. She had never added any of the bigger logs, and left the pile of deadwood and the ring of stones for the next camper.
As ready as she could be, Nell slipped on her damaged PFD, zipping the vest up the side and yanking tightly on the remaining straps. Each action sent shock waves of pain through her. She pushed the agony aside. There would be time for pain later. Much later.
She settled her helmet on her head, careful of the egg-shaped bruise, though there was no way to avoid it entirely. If the helmet shifted, she’d hurt, so she pulled the chinstrap more snugly than usual. Satisfied, she dragged the kayak to the shore, which angled down to the water. Before her was the Big South Fork of the Cumberland River and the pristine pool at the base of the Double Falls, but boulders bigger than cars blocked her view. From the sound of the rapids, she better be ready.
Every river has a scent, and the iron-tang of the Cumberland and of deep, rich earth and sap-heavy trees lining the banks and up the gorge walls filled her nostrils. A blue heron stood on the far shore, watching. Bending against the pain of her chest and the thrumming in her head, Nell wriggled into the white-water kayak, placing her feet against the bulkhead, wedging her hips in tight and snuggling her knees past the thigh pads.
She drank the last drop of water from the second bottle and tucked it inside the kayak body with the others. She made sure that everything was in place and secure, properly balanced, as the slightest weight shift affected the roll and pitch of the nimble little boat. She shoved the supply bag with its precious water and food between and under her thighs, and clipped it securely to the bottom of the boat.
She rolled the curled hem of the kayak skirt around the back of the cockpit hole, easing it into place with cold, shaking fingers. When the back and sides were secure, she took a breath for strength, leaned forward with her elbows at her sides, using her body for leverage, and folded the front of the skirt over the front rim, the skirt and the boat’s emergency releases both in easy reach. It left her winded and aching and it was all she could manage—not a pretty entrance, but sufficient. And the repairs in the skirt held. She was watertight, at least for a while.
With a deep breath that banged around in her head and chest like a gong, Nell took her paddle in her right hand and shoved off with her left, sliding down the shore. Leaning back in a seal launch, she lifted her lower body and the bow as the kayak hit the water. Pain thrummed in her head and along her sides. Icy river splashed over her, the rashguard shirt providing some protection but not enough, water soaking through to her polyester sweatshirt as she braced right and left. With a directional sweep of the paddle, she guided the boat to the center of the small pool. The sound of whitewater was both behind and ahead, an enormous roar. Boulders and steep, tree-covered terrain rose all around her, forbidding and austere. It would have been beautiful if she hadn’t been sick. If Joe weren’t missing.
She swept with the paddle in the first half of a 360-degree turn, facing upstream, the Double Falls now ahead, with its rushing cheat visible. With another stroke that pulled her chest muscles into a short, tight spasm, she completed the turn. When she could breathe again, she checked the banks.
On the shoreline, what little there was of it, debris was piled against rocks. The scant foliage lay bent and low where it had been pressed down by rushing water, all evidence of the high water that caused the near disaster Joe had written about. She back-stroked gently to hold her place along the shore.
She located the current by the eddy line, a faint ripple of water. With quick, sure, forward strokes, Nell moved upstream, across the eddy at an angle, and leaned downstream. A single stroke and brace brought her into the current. It seized her boat and jerked her forward.
Ahead was the Washing Machine, a turbulent drop between two house-size boulders. The rapid was a class II, usually easy. Then came the El, a deceptive-looking, gnarly class IV. Though the rehydrated meal she had eaten sat uneasily on her stomach, she was glad of the energy it provided. She knew she would need every calorie before the day was over.
Nell positioned her kayak for the Washing Machine. Her heart pounded with erratic fear that, until now, had never owned a place in her life. She studied the shoreline rocks. No sign of Joe.
He should have been back by now. He wasn’t. There was nothing on this earth that would have kept Joe away from her. That meant that he was in trouble. And there was no one to help him but her.
She paddled forward with smooth strokes, into the churning water.
3
Nell shot between the two rocks and bounced down the Washing Machine, her Pyrahna bounding along the wave trains. Each time the boat rebounded, the jarring baited her lungs, teasing at the need to cough. Her ribs lifted and lowered with each breath, every paddle stroke burning with pain. She had raced through less than half the train of rapids when the coughing started. By the time she was through them, she was coughing steadily, her chest muscles tortured. The wounds on both hands had broken open. Even in the cold, her grip on the paddle was slick with blood. Still no sign of Joe.
The El roared up ahead. There was no time to reconsider.
Hands white and aching, her lungs on fire, Nell lined up for the El, paddling hard, spearing the water with forward strokes, glancing right and left for Joe. Nothing. No sign. The current grabbed the boat and yanked her forward. She was slightly off center, river-right.
The fifty-yard approach to the El was through squirrelly water, a boater term meaning that the water danced in unexpected ways, throwing the kayak up and down, requiring her to lean hard left and right, rocking up with hips and thighs and feet with each stroke, bracing the paddle against the water to maintain boat stability.
Her breath was tight, the air cold and filled with river spray. Nell fought to relax, knowing that tension in a paddle stroke could change both her direction and speed, resulting in the kayak turtling over. If she flipped, weak as she was, she might not make the required Eskimo roll back upright. And a wet exit from the boat—pulling the skirt loose and swimming to the surface—might be deadly with water this big and this cold. Nell had never run the South Fork with water this high. She pushed that thought down deep and away.
The rock ledge of the El, with its swirling plunge, appeared, the water flow making it into a monstrous curl and drop. Her boat dipped into the hole just in front of the ledge. She dug in with steady forward strokes, pushing the boat toward the drop-off, her breath tight and painful, moving without her usual fluidity. The backward-moving water sucked the boat back upstream. She bobbed and paddled, leaning downstream, pushing with her feet against the bulkhead, trying to work through the current. This was the invisible danger. Holes would trap and suck down anything, paddles, boats, floating bodies, keeping them down and spewing them out later, at a time of their own choosing. And she was weak, her arms and shoulders burning with exhaustion. With a last desperate stroke, panting, coughing, she broke free of the hole.
Her boat went over the ledge. She boofed, wrenching up her legs and the bow of the kayak, paddling hard against the diagonal curler. In this huge flow the curler was a tube of water that tried to spin her sideways. She hit the bottom of the drop in a spray that drenched over her with icy water, burying the boat. She jerked her thighs up again, out of the tube, sliding to the surface. Instantly she maneuvered around rocks, through holes, paddling and coughing, her eyes blinded by spray. Another hole tried to drag her back and she leaned hard over the bow, using a variety of strokes, on instinct to keep the boat pointing downstream and moving forward. Rocks dodged up in front of her, invisible until the last instant, evil spirits from the deep, intent on her destruction.
A downed tree blocked the space between two boulders, creating a strainer dead ahead. Nell had a staggering vision of the strainer that had trapped her. Branches brown with death, interlaced, dragging in the water. She shoved the memory away and swept hard left, rotating her torso, guiding the boat obliquely against the current. The right side of the kayak slammed into the rock face and instantly the bow of the boat swirled around the pivot point. The boat shot hard river-right, right into another hole. At the last of her endurance, Nell gave a series of hard forward strokes and draw strokes. Pulled the Pyrahna into an eddy leading river-right. She compensated, braced and glided into still water.
She was coughing violently, fighting to paddle straight, to find the shore. The river bottom rose up, long and shallow, to a bank, and she thrust hard twice, to send the boat up the shore, beaching it firmly. Popping the skirt, she rolled the boat to the side and shimmied out. She lay on the rock-and-sand beach, coughing, the raw, wet sounds louder than the water.
Long minutes passed. Nell lay still, letting her body recover. Her head pounded, dizzy with the exertion. Her clothes were drenched to the skin and shivers shook her hard, even with the rashguard and polyester shirt she was wearing. At least she wasn’t wearing cotton. There was an old saying, Kotton Killz; the water-absorbing natural fiber would have left her dangerously hypothermic already. As it was, she deeply regretted the loss of the dry suit to keep her dry and warm.
She was sure her fever was higher. Did being wet and chilled to the bone counter the fever? She didn’t know, couldn’t remember if she ever knew.
Every muscle in her body ached. Every breath ached. Every heartbeat, cough, sigh, swallow and pulse of blood ached. The sun came out from behind a cloud and found her, bathing her in faint heat. She spread her fingers into the light. Shifted slightly until her legs were in the sun. Slowly, some of the pain began to seep away.
Without warning, Nell fell asleep.
When she woke, it was to a whirling world and a fleeting loss of memory, a disorienting series of sun-washed seconds, during which pain pulsed through her with the beat of her heart. Her eyes focused. She recognized the pattern of rocks in front of her nose. Gingerly, she rotated to face the sky, the helmet kinking her neck at an uncomfortable angle. Nausea roiled in her like gnarly water.
She was sick. Flu or pneumonia, or both. Could you have both? Shoving with her elbows, Nell rolled over and struggled upright to survey the landscape around her. She had survived the El. She was on the shore of the Long Pool. Tossed by the current, she was river-right, a convenience term used by river sports enthusiasts. In a world with boundaries composed only by the movement of water, right and left were always determined when facing downstream, so that river-right and river-left always meant the same thing. She looked around. No Joe. No emergency X on a shore. No beached boat, bright red in the sunlight.
On the far side of the pool was another level shoreline, longer and deeper than this one. That was where the emergency access trail was, arduous and steep. On this side of the pool there was an old railroad bed, stripped of wood and rails, a path now used by horseback riders and hikers and the occasional four-wheel-drive park rangers’ vehicle. It was possible that she could make it up to the gravel one-lane road and hike out. But it would take hours, longer than it would take to run the river.
She might get lucky and come across horseback riders who would give her a ride out. Or she could trudge for miles.
She studied the landscape. There was no sign of campers or hikers. No horse smell. Nell looked at her watch, gauging how much daylight she had left. She twisted to her feet with a groan that echoed over the rush of water.
She could ferry across to the other side of the pool. It wasn’t even hard to do in the Long Pool, the current was so slight. But the trail out on that side of the river was a strenuous climb, hard uphill to a jut of land called the Honey Creek Overlook. Then another hard, miles-long walk on secondary roads to Burnt Mill Bridge, the input where she and Joe had started out. Again, she might get lucky and meet another hiker. Or she might not.
Nell lifted a leg and waggled her foot. She was in thin-soled river shoes, not hiking boots. She was hurt. Had all the breath of a…a dying moose, as Joe would say. Yeah. Hiking was out. Paddling was faster.
On the other hand, if she stayed on the water, she had to face the half mile of the Rions Eddy, followed by the steepest gradient of the trip, a drop of forty feet per mile with almost continuous class IIIs, including Jake’s Hole, where the river took a 180-degree turn between cliffs of 300 to 400 feet. The Narrows. And her paddling wasn’t exactly up to par. Nell looked at the sky, checking the weather. It was clear. The sun was warm. She had dried out considerably. She scanned the far shore again, hoping to see a hiker, signs of a campfire, anything. The hills and forest were quiet and empty.
She looked back at the water. A little more than three miles ahead was the old O & W Railway trestle bridge. There might be boaters taking a break there. Or campers. Or she might spot help before she even got there. But that meant she had to paddle the energy-draining, challenging water…She was between the devil and a deep blue crapid.
The deciding factor was Joe. If she stayed on the river, she might find him and be able to help. If she took the trail, another twelve to eighteen hours would pass before help would hit the water. So. Decision made. The river it was.
But she had to stay alert. If Joe had been standing on a rock in the middle of the river, waving his paddle and beating a drum, she might—might—have seen him in the last half mile. But she wouldn’t bet on it.
Nell knelt at her boat and pulled out the last Backpacker meal. She should have heated it with the other batch. Stupid. For now, she opened the packet and poured a bit of water into it. In an hour or so, she might be able to eat it. Instead of a real meal, she ate more trail mix, finishing off half the bag while she stretched. She should have started out with a good stretch before she hit the water. Stupid again. She hadn’t been thinking. She touched the bruised knot over her temple. It was marginally less painful. The cold, which was debilitating in every other way, had been good for the bruise.
Standing on the bank of the Long Pool, Nell pulled against muscles that were stiff and bruised, and wished for a bottle of Tylenol or ibuprofen. Of course, if she were wishing for something, it would be smarter to wish for Joe to appear, his red Pyrahna Riot play-boat cutting through the still water. But Joe didn’t materialize, and neither did a bottle of painkillers.
Feeling a bit better, she drank ten ounces of water and climbed back into her boat, strong enough this time to put the skirt on without huffing. She had to hurry. Time was passing fast. Sundown was three hours away. She had no intention of spending another night on the river.
She looked around one last time. Evidence of high water was everywhere. Strainers were piled at the shorelines, stacked against rocks in jagged knives of detritus. The water snarled and growled like a wild animal. Nature howling at the moon. Hungry.
Shoving off into the Long Pool, Nell paddled through still water, angling downstream, watching the current to the side. The eddy line was a diagonal ripple at an angle she didn’t remember from her last trip down the gorge. It flowed across the bottom of the pool and took a hard angular turn, a zig followed by a zag, as if something on the bottom was obstructing the flow of water.
She did a sweep upstream, followed by two forward strokes to approach the eddy line, then a quick peel-out just above the zigzag. She leaned downstream and braced through the current change. It was an effortless maneuver and Nell took a deep breath that, for the first time today, didn’t ache. She set up for the class IIs and IIIs of Rions Eddy ahead. The next half mile of rapids were squirrelly but not exactly MacGyver water. She told herself that she could make it. She could do this. She was able to both work the rapids and watch for signs of Joe. She put paddle to water, passing a low boulder that had dried in the sun. Two black snakes lay in the feeble heat, warming on sun-heated stone.
The boat took the first quarter mile of the class IIIs like a knife cutting through water. Clean and smooth, not a wobble or bobble. The bow of the boat slid beneath the rapids and Nell compensated, using hips, thighs and feet to reposition the kayak and prepare it for the next drop. Watching for Joe.
As always, the river was deceptive. By comparison to some western rivers, the gradient drop wasn’t much. But the water flowed around huge, vision-obscuring boulders, where short stretches of nearly flat but fast-moving water were followed by surprising drops and ledges. Unpredictable, capricious current changes and hundreds of undercut rocks, where water flowed beneath the visible part of the rock, tried to suck down any paddler who happened too near.
Between each drop, Nell scanned left and right, watchingc for a man or an emergency signal. Or a red boat. She was looking left when she should have been looking right. The water dropped out from under her and the kayak pivoted hard right and down. The short dive left her leaning upstream. She turtled over. Her helmet banged against stone. Nell saw stars. Her head pounded with a vengeance. Icy water rushed up her nose and filled her ears. Freezing her. Cold shocked her like a frozen spear to the brain.
She was in a hole between two rocks and she was stuck underwater. The current knocked her boat against rock with the hollow drum of doom. Fear billowed as the instinct to breathe fought with the presence of water.
But she still had her paddle. And she hadn’t been knocked out. Thank God.
With her left hand, she shoved at the upstream rock, then the downstream rock. Back and forth between them, working her boat out of the declivity. The water swirled her back in. Her lungs burned. She needed air. She needed—
The current caught her and bobbed her out.
But she was still underwater. Nell pulled the paddle under her. Gripped it in both hands. Twisted her torso forward for a sweep-style Eskimo roll. The water pitched her against another rock, banging her head and left shoulder underwater. Nell reacted without thought and twisted into a classic C-to-C roll. She didn’t like the C-to-C, but it worked.
And she was upright. Light blinded her. Nell sucked in a breath that was half water and leaned into the current just as she went over another ledge.
4
A glimpse of twisted limbs, wet and black. A strainer—a full grown oak, half submerged, its branches tipped with yellowing leaves and its trunk wedged between two boulders—was just ahead. Blocking her course. A swirl of water opened out river-left.
Nell slammed her hips hard left and dug in, ferrying across the strongest part of the current. Paddling with all her might. She banged against the left bolder trapping the tree and let go of the paddle with one hand. Using her palm, she shoved herself into the smaller, weaker current to the side, a cheat created by the strainer debris. She caught a glimpse of a dead animal pinned in the oak, gray and waterlogged, fur dragged by the water. And a second glimpse, an instant still-shot of her palm pulling away, leaving a trace of a bloody handprint on the branch.
And she was around, into the cheat, bashing her boat bottom in the trickle of water. She allowed the kayak to bump onto a low rock and sat in the sun, unmoving, breathing hard. Shuddering. The roar of water was partially muted, an odd trick of acoustics stifling the sound. It was like she’d been shoved into a different world. Still and quiet and safe, full of shadow.
Her breath had a definite wheeze now. Her head throbbed almost as loudly as the water had only moments ago. Nell blew the river water out of her nose and sinuses, and leaned forward to rest her head on one hand. Her ring and the cold flesh beneath were icy on her hot face.
A tickle started in her chest. Nell coughed, the coarse ratcheting sound echoing along the rock channel. She coughed and coughed, her ribs spasming. Her abdominals clenched painfully and she coughed up a gob of…stuff.
She spat into the water where it was caught in a tiny whirlpool and swirled out of sight. The coughing stopped and she breathed. The wheeze was softer, less pronounced.
That dead animal…Not Joe. She knew it wasn’t Joe. But still she wanted to find a way back upstream, just to check. Just to be absolutely sure. But it wasn’t possible. No way. There had been no sign of Joe anywhere.
Her head demanded attention, its throbbing increasing in volume and intensity. She cradled her skull in both icy hands. The pain seemed to swell like a wave washing over her.
“I can’t do this,” she whispered. “I can’t. I’m not gonna make it. Not alone.” A single salty tear slid down her nose. For the first time since she was a little girl, Nell cried. Covering her sobs in the embrace of her own arms.
Caught in the shadows, in the narrow lee of rock, she thought about prayer.
She hadn’t been to church since her father died. The car crash had killed both him and the wife of a church elder, with whom he had been having an affair. She had been twelve. And she had blamed God. Even though she realized that her father made his own choices and his own mistakes, and that God had nothing to do with either her father’s infidelity or his death, she still blamed God. Because she knew that God, if he wanted to, if he really loved her, could have made her father love her mother. He could have kept her father alive. He could have. And he didn’t.
And she hadn’t prayed since.
But perched on a rock, in a trickle of water, near where Pine Creek entered the South Fork of the Cumberland, after facing her own death twice in as many heartbeats, with the worst of the rapids—the Narrows and the Hole—yet to come and her husband missing, Nell thought about prayer. She raised her head and looked up. The canyon walls were closing in, a narrow channel of foamy water and sandstone in browns and yellows, and gray-coal-stained river boulders. There was a patch of blue and glaring sunlight visible in the westward-facing cleft of boulders. She wiped her face, the chapped skin burning. Pale, thin blood dribbled from her fingers. This cold, the blood flow should have been constricted by the temperatures. But with a fever, her body was acting weird. She clenched her fists. Out of options, Nell talked to God.
“Get me out of this, okay?” Her voice was rough, pitched lower with sickness. Her words grated along her throat painfully. She massaged it with one hand and kept talking. “Get me out of this, help me find Joe, and…and we’ll talk about us later. Okay? Just…don’t let me die. And don’t let Joe—” She stopped, the words strangled in her throat. Unable to finish the sentence. The thought.
Instead, she popped the skirt and finished the water in the third bottle, tucking the empty into the hull of the boat. That left her twenty ounces of water. She resecured the skirt and pushed off the rock, downstream, into the still pool. The roaring of the rapids ahead was louder than anything she had heard before today. In front of her, the river disappeared, crooking around and behind a massive boulder. In an instant she was back in the maelstrom. Heading toward the Narrows and Jakes Hole, watching for Joe. For any sign of Joe. Anywhere.
Canyon walls rose above the tree line around her, boulders blocked both water and her way. Water spirits, cruelly playful, knocked against the boat, tipping and redirecting and spinning it, trying to capsize her, tricking her with foamy, hidden dangers. Her boat was underwater as often as it rode atop it. She braced and stroked and pulled with the current, reading it, working with the flow to power her small boat. She swept past a flat-topped boulder capped with a series of altars. Guides often found places on rivers to leave stacks of the rounded, pancake-shaped rocks, each successively smaller rock balanced on the larger one beneath. It was half play, half superstition. Nell tipped her paddle at the formations in salute.
She whipped around a strainer that appeared out of nowhere. An image of the strainer that had trapped her flashed before her again, then vanished. But it left behind a hard ball of fear and desperation in her chest. She took the next series of wave trains too tight, too stiff, and was pulled out of position, making an ungainly inflexible run.
Just before the Narrows, she pivoted the boat into a tiny patch of still water river-right, between two boulders that didn’t appear to be undercut, with no current that could pull her under. In the cleft they formed, she sat. Her breath heaved. Nausea stirred. Dehydration was raising its ugly head, but it was to soon too break open the last bottle of water. Way too soon.
Coming up was the meanest, most gnarly piece of MacGyver water on the run. A long, squirrelly, hairy-hard, impossible crapid to the max. She had taken it before, several times, but it was a dangerous stretch. The last time she ran it, one of the men in her party got dumped. He had to swim the hole and came out with a broken arm, dislocated shoulder and compound fracture of his right leg. Getting him to help had taken the entire five-man crew the rest of the day. It had been a hairy, scary afternoon. Randy, an old paddling buddy, hadn’t been on the water since. And now she was running the hole alone. She searched around, up the canyon walls, between the rocks upstream and down. No Joe. But if he’d been tossed and made it to the shore-side of a boulder, he would be out of sight. He could be ten feet away and she would never know.
Nell popped the skirt and drank water, knowing that she had now taken in eighty ounces of water and hadn’t yet needed to answer the call of nature. She dropped the bottle back in the boat and resealed the skirt. Checked her palms. The flesh was white and bloodless now, nails slightly blue gray with cold. A callus was torn and should be bleeding, should be hurting, but her hands were too cold to bleed and her adrenaline was pumping. She’d bleed and hurt later, when Joe was safe. When Joe was safe…
Chest muscles tight, she peeled into the current. The roar of water increased as the canyon walls climbed. Three and four hundred feet, they soared above her. After a glimpse around for her husband, Nell paddled hard, choosing a position midcenter of the Narrows. With a series of quick strokes, she helped the water take her.
The boat disappeared and reappeared under the water, bouncing over it. Spray slapped her in the face. She maneuvered the tiny craft through the growling snarl of water. Jakes Hole was just below her. The current to the inside of the turn swept under and vanished, taking with it anything it could grab. Water on the outside of the turn curled up, ripping against the rock face of the boulders and the base of the canyon. At the bottom of the turn, the water curled continuously, like an ocean wave breaking without ceasing, a trap for the unwary. The river plunged down and down, a powerful churn of white water.
Nell took the turn in perfect position, her body guiding the boat with ease, as if the water spirits had decided to lend a hand. She swept with the current, taking the crest high. Around the turn, and down, she paddled with all the energy and might she had, letting the water carry her downstream, building momentum. She took a hard drop. Into another hole.
The kayak seemed to stop. Water sucked at the boat, pulling it back.
Leaning forward hard, Nell paddled, her whole body working to breach Jakes Hole.
She fought, reaching the curl and pillow of water that marked the lower boundary of the hole. Water shot at her face. Suction dragged her back and down. Her arms felt on fire. Weighted. Her wet sleeves dragged at her. And she broke through.
The small boat rose up and over and out in a sudden swoosh of movement and texture, the water beating at the hull. If she’d had breath, she would have whooped with success. Ahead were IIs and IIIs. Easy-peasy by comparison to the hole. She was laughing softly under her breath, but the movement of air in her throat was raw and aching. After he finished beating her butt for boating alone, Joe would be so impressed. She thrashed down the soft, panicked “what if…” that threatened to rise.
A quarter mile later, Nell spotted a patch of color. Her heart stopped. Breath froze. Her eyes glued to the patch of red. Red, hard plastic. Molded and rounded. Pressed between a rock and the base of the canyon wall.
She didn’t remember ferrying across to the boat. Didn’t think or breathe or hope. Until her small boat bumped into the patch of red. It was a kayak. Swamped. Upside down.
She touched it with a cold hand. Knowing. Knowing it was Joe’s boat before she even turned it. One hand holding her paddle, one hand free, she slid fingers along the curve of hull, underwater, to the open cockpit. There was no skirt over it. No body inside, dead and drowned. She braced the hand gripping her paddle against the boulder and wrenched with her free hand to turn the boat up over her bow, hip-snapping to stay upright. Filled with water, the flooded boat was graceless, weighing easily four hundred pounds.
It rolled through the swirling river current like a dead animal. Upright. It was Joe’s boat. Battered and beaten. New scratches and a hard dent in the point of the prow. But no Joe. No Joe.
No Joe.
She screamed his name, the sound lost in the continuous roar. Screamed and screamed, the name echoing with the water. Screamed until her throat was raw and only scratchy sobs came from it. Shudders trembled through her as she searched the rocks nearby for any sight of him. Fear and hope raged through her. She looked for a man holding a paddle high, waving to attract attention. Looked for rocks piled in an X. Driftwood in a rescue emergency position, tied in an X. Looked for a body. Looked for Joe standing on a rock, patting the top of his head in the “I’m okay” signal. There was nothing.
No sign of Joe beyond the battered boat. No indication that Joe had ever been here.
The small rational part of her knew that he hadn’t been there. He had come out of his boat upstream somewhere. Hope believed—knew—that he had swum to a rock and climbed up high. She had missed his emergency signal. Had missed sight of him. And now he was behind her, alone and injured. Surely injured. Hope tumbled with despair.
Or perhaps he had come out of the boat just upstream, and had swum the Hole. Perhaps he was yet below her. Needing help.
Her fingers slid along the kayak as if petting it, numb with cold. The red of the boat filled her vision, obscuring the image of anything, everything else.
Blind with the bloody color of the boat, acting on instinct alone, by touch and feel, Nell popped her skirt and pulled out rescue supplies, rope and flex, and secured the boat to a slender rock upthrust in the river. The water-filled boat bobbled in the current.
Watching the boat, the roar of water seeped into her consciousness. The color of red bled away.
She had to get to the next takeout. Had to get help. Get a search party started. She had to get help for Joe. Leaving the boat tethered to the rock, Nell resecured her skirt. It took her three tries to get the skirt over the cockpit hole. Exhausted, she pushed into the current, heading for the takeout at the O & W Railway Bridge.
If she didn’t get help there, then she would push on to the final takeout, Leatherwood Ford Bridge, at the Bandy Creek Campground. Leatherwood and Bandy Creek were smack in the middle of a national park, the Big South Fork National River and Recreation Area. If she saw no one on the way to ask for help, at least there would be qualified people at Leatherwood. Boaters, hikers, park service officers. Help in abundance for Joe.
She had covered three miles of rapids. There were three more miles to go.
Nell read the water and moved into it, an automaton.
She didn’t think during the run, seeing it only as a series of still-shots. The water slamming upward in a column of spray. An altar of rocks seven stones high. A dangerous curl of water that wanted to pull her down. Buzzards pulling at a fish, its bones pale and thin. The glare of setting sun on the top of an oak. The image of a dead hemlock, branches feathered as if reaching for help. The feel of the rigid boat encasing her. The cold of the water on her chest and arms. The wet shirts holding little heat, leaching her meager body warmth away. Her paddle blade, entering the water in a clean stroke. The sight of an osprey overhead, wings extended. The inhuman beauty of the gorge, a palette of fall foliage against the sepia browns and muted grays of sandstone and granite walls. The rush of foam across her yellow and orange boat. Black, water-wet stone. Rushing water everywhere, a deafening roar. No Joe. No Joe.
No Joe.
The O & W bridge came into view at last, and Nell’s eyes swept the spaces where boaters would often rest after the long stretch of rapids. The takeout was empty, the water so high the sandy beach drowned beneath it. There were no hikers climbing to the trestle. No hikers walking along the bridge. No beached boats or rafts. No smell or sign of campfire. But just in case someone was there and not visible from the water, Nell boofed her boat atop a rock and unskirted. On trembling legs, she rock-walked to land and made her way up the steep hillside and concrete platform to the stairs the park kept in good repair.
At the top of the sixty-foot climb, breathless, she surveyed the bridge and nearby camping area. The O & W railroad no longer ran, and its rails and ties had long been removed, leaving a nearly level, winding, one-lane gravel road that traveled along the gorge. Hikers and horse lovers and vehicles used it, but not today. There was only a scattering of dry horse manure to indicate anyone had been through in days.
Nell cupped her hands, found her breath and shouted. “Anyone here? Help!” She listened, hearing only the roar of water. Using the height, she scanned the rocks below for signs of anyone, but mostly for Joe. She saw no one. She was alone.
Fighting tears, she retraced her steps down to the river rock and pulled her body back into her boat.
Shoulders burning, muscles stretching painfully across her spine and ribs, Nell seal-launched off the rock, into the water, and paddled past the bridge. Took the last of the big IIIs. She was a machine, unfeeling, unthinking. Her paddle blades moved with eerie regularity, in and out of the water, side to side. Heading for help.
By the time Nell crossed under the bridge at the Bandy Creek Campground and cut the placid water to the Leatherwood takeout, the sun was setting. The river looked black and still, no longer a hungry predator. No longer interested in pulling her down. Bored with her. Moving on to other concerns, other prey.
Shivering uncontrollably, teeth chattering, she beached the boat, the hull skidding across the sand and pebbles with a harsh swear of sound. She smelled campfires. Saw lights far up in the hills near RVs and tents. Caught a whiff of grilling steak. At first she saw no one, and then, as the wind changed direction, she smelled a campfire close by—the heady scent of cooking beef and burning hickory riding along the breeze. She tried to call out, but her throat made only a faint croak of sound. Pain scratched along with the broken note.
Sitting in her boat on the beach, cold, so exhausted she could hardly move, it took Nell two tries to unskirt herself. She had to twist and roll to her side. Push herself from the cockpit to the sand. Wriggling one hip and then the other from the opening. Breathing hard, she lay on solid ground, her feet still tangled in the boat with her dislodged supplies.
She kicked her way free and made it to her knees, then her feet. Drunkenly, she moved through the dusk upwind, following the scent to the day-picnic area and parking lot.
The campfire was a brazier attached to the side of a beat-up RV. The scent of marijuana and beer rode the air now, tangled with the smell of burgers.
Laughter. Music. A guitar. She stumbled into the camp. Three men and two women. Images of them standing, turning, open mouths round in shock. And the sight of the ground rising at her, telescoped by blackness all around.
Nell’s next coherent thought was of warmth and earthquake. Light. Water being dribbled into her mouth. The dark eyes of a woman, her face rosy in firelight. Cradling her as if she were a child. “Drink. Come on. Swallow. That’s a girl.” Nell swallowed. The water hurt going down as if her tissues had been abraded by claws. The tremors were her body, shaken by sickness or shock.
“We’ve called an ambulance,” the woman said. “And the park service.”
“Joe,” Nell said, her voice less than a whisper. “My husband, Joe. He’s lost on the river. Help him.”
“Shit.” The woman called over her shoulder, “There’s another one still on the water.” To Nell she said, “Where? Where did he go in?”
“Somewhere after the Double Falls,” Nell whispered. “I got caught in a strainer. Had a concussion. He left me to go get help. He didn’t come back.” The enormity of the last four words hit her. Joe didn’t come back. She closed her eyes and slid into darkness.
5
The sheets were scratchy and coarse. The scent of harsh cleansers and the faint smell of floor wax brushed her senses. She struggled to open her eyes to a slit of light. Bright. The ruthless dazzle of fluorescent bulbs overhead, the glare stabbing steel blades through her brain.
Pain caught her up, pounding in her head, spasms in her chest with each breath. Muscles so stiff they creaked like old rubber when she shifted her head. The steady beat of agony on her brain. Lids so heavy she fluttered them but they stayed closed. Hot blankets encasing her, a little bit of heaven in a sea of misery. Hospital, for sure.
As if the lights knew what was wrong, the bulbs overhead went dark. A small light to her side came on. She sighed, and the pain softened into rubber blades stabbing her, instead of steel.
Finally, Nell opened her eyes. She was in a hospital bed. Window on her right. Door and sink on her left. Another door was at the foot of the bed, a shadowed toilet within. A man sat in a chair near her. An older guy, hair more gray than brown, suit rumpled. His eyes were on her. She frowned. Something was wrong…
“Joe.” She wrenched upright and the pain exploded again. She groaned, catching her head in her free hand, an IV yanking at her other one. She dropped back to the mattress, aware in some fragile part of her mind that she was not making sounds out loud.
“They said to stay flat,” a voice said. Cool. Conversational.
The man in the chair. Not a doctor. Not wearing the right clothes. Face too unemotional. Nell eased her hands away from her head and opened her eyes more slowly. Carefully, she turned and looked at him.
He leaned slowly forward and touched the fingertips of one hand to the tips of the others, dangling them between his knees, as if to create a sort of intimacy between them. Nell was pretty sure she hadn’t seen him before, didn’t know him, and didn’t want to be close to the guy. He smelled of old coffee and even older cigarettes. He said, “What’s your name?”
Nell considered. Not an unreasonable question. Just not one she was interested in. To save some pain, she whispered, “Have they found Joe?”
“The man you say is still on the water?”
She nodded slightly. It made her head pound harder, but it hurt less than her throat.
“River rescue is being coordinated right now. What’s your name?”
She moved her eyes to the window, her thoughts mushy and slow. It was black outside. It was the same day, then. Or same night. “Who’s in charge?”
“Park officials. What’s your name?” Steel in the tone now. The guy was persistent.
“Nell Crawford Stevens.” It came out a hard cee and sibilant esses in the whisper. “What’s yours?”
“Do you know where you are?”
Nell had been dealing with negotiator types all her life. Nobody was better at negotiation than her PawPaw Gruber. “Army, The Nam. Quartermaster,” as he always said. So Nell said, as distinctly as she could whisper, “What’s yours?”
“Detective Nolan Orson Lennox, Sr., investigator with the Scott County Sheriff’s Department.”
Nothing more, nothing less. Oh, yeah. Just like PawPaw. Nell saw some buttons, each with a small picture of a bed in a different position. She pushed the one with the head of the bed upright. In her mind she heard PawPaw as the bed rose. You want something? Always find a way to improve your negotiating position. Physical, mental, emotional. Next, offer something, so they have to offer something back. “I’m in a hospital,” she volunteered, feeling stronger now that she was more upright. “Who have they called to coordinate?”
“Your mother is on her way.”
Nell looked at the cop in surprise. “My mother couldn’t coordinate her way out of a paper bag.”
Amusement lit his eyes, and Nell was pretty sure he had spoken to her mother personally. He hadn’t understood her question. She couldn’t care less who was coming to help her. She spotted an ugly, squat pitcher, beaded with condensation and pointed at it, asking for something, requiring the other party to the negotiation to do her a favor. PawPaw would be tickled when she told him. “Water?”
The cop—she had already forgotten his name—stood and poured her a glass of water. “Can you tell me what happened?” he asked. He handed her the cup and helped her to steady it when her grip was too weak to hold it without spilling.
She studied him over the rim of the cup and sipped through the straw. The water tasted wonderful. When she had enough and her mouth felt less like it was covered with river mold, she dropped her head back and said, “I mean, who have they called to coordinate the river search?”
The cop put the pitcher down. He looked her over, examining her as carefully as she did him, letting the silence build. “The parks people have called in a team. After all the rain, the gorge is treacherous enough to warrant only the most experienced, though, so the team’ll be small. Maybe ten on the water. I understand that a few guides and rescue people from the Pigeon will be part of it.” When she waited, he added, “A guy named Mike Kren called about three hours ago. He’s leading them up. Some others were already closer in, rafting or kayaking. Most of them got here within the last hour.”
Nell nodded, feeling her eyes water, the sensation painful on her raw eyeballs. Unfamiliar. She did not cry. She rolled her head to the dark window, moving slowly, and started to talk, well, whisper. She told him everything she remembered, as close in sequence as she could. When she mentioned the letter Joe had left her, the cop said, “This one?”
She looked at him, and he was holding the double-bagged letter. Nell extended her hand, and he placed it in her palm. She saw him looking at her hands, at the blood-crusted wounds, but she had eyes only for the single piece of paper in the baggies.
How come she felt that it was the last thing she would ever have of Joe’s? How come she felt so…empty? No. I refuse to think that way. Joe is still out there. All I have to do is find him.
She smoothed the letter over her heart. Holding tight, so the cop couldn’t get it back without getting personal, she took a breath that quivered through her. The bandages on her chest were small lumps beneath her hands, beneath the hospital gown she wore. She went on with her story. Everything she could remember.
She had reached the part about finding Joe’s boat, when the door opened. Mike Kren strode into the room. It was like a small hurricane entered. “Hey girl,” he boomed.
The tears that had been swimming in her eyes fell as she held out her arms to her best friend in the world. Her tears caught the lights and haloed him, bright glints on the silver in his hair. As if he were her own personal avenging angel.
Mike would have laughed at the thought of being compared to an angel.
He lowered the bedrail and sat beside her, his wiry body blocking her from the cop, and gathered her up in his arms. She sobbed into his chest, the familiar scent of the man surrounding her. She crumpled Joe’s letter at him, indicating he should take it surreptitiously.
He tucked it into his own shirt before speaking. When the baggies were safe, he said, “Hey. What’s this?” He turned her face up and touched her cheek, his finger coming away wet. “I never saw this before. Nell Stevens, crying? Tears? Devil must be draggin’ out his long johns, ’cause it’s cold in hell right about now.”
“I lost Joe,” she sobbed. “He’s lost on the river and he’s got to be hurt, and I couldn’t find him—”
“Hey, hey, hey.” He snugged her face against his shoulder, stroking her short hair. He lowered his voice. “I’m making you a promise. Okay? Right now. If he’s findable, I’ll find him.” He tilted her face to him again. “You know that. I’d never leave somebody on the river in trouble. Specially not Joe.”
But the words resonated inside her. If he’s findable…
Nell stopped crying. Stopped breathing. She focused on Mike’s river-brown eyes, steady and serene. If Joe wasn’t findable, it was because he was stuck beneath an undercut rock or tangled in an underwater strainer. Or washed so far downstream he might not be found until low water in the next drought. It he wasn’t findable, it was because he was dead.
The thought opened something up within her, a deep, dark chasm, empty and howling with icy wind. A chasm she had been ignoring, denying. A shot of something bitter and frozen rushed through her veins like ice crystals. She clenched Mike’s shirt, the flannel and long-john shirt beneath bunching. “You find him,” she whispered fiercely, her eyes demanding. “You find him and you bring him back.”
He read her face, her demand, her desperation. Gently, Mike peeled her hands from his shirt and held them in his, like a promise. Or a benediction. He kissed her forehead, his lips cold and dry. “I won’t lie to you. But you know I’ll do what I can.”
It wasn’t what she wanted. It wasn’t a promise to make it all right. But the chasm that had opened beneath her moved away a bit, to the side. Mike had never lied to her. He never would. No matter what. Not even to save her sanity. But if a mountain could be moved, Mike Kren was the man to do it.
He squeezed her fingers and let go, set his craggy, lined face in a confrontational expression, and turned to the cop. “Mike Kren.”
“Jedi Mike? Old-Man-of-the-River-Mike?”
Mike blocked her and Nell could see neither man’s face, but she knew they were taking each other’s measure. Mike wasn’t fond of cops. Nell rather suspected that the cop would pick up on that. And Mike was well known in the river-guide community as a pacifist anarchist. If the cop had done any research at all into river rats, he had to know that.
“Some people call me that,” Mike acknowledged. He angled back to Nell before the cop could introduce himself, his weathered face creased in the soft light. “Tell me everything.”
Nell whispered, pushing her broken voice, starting over with waking in the campsite. Mike asked questions as she talked, questions about water volume, wind and weather conditions, other boats on the river, the kind of supplies they had carried with them on the overnight trip. He asked about certain rocks, places where boaters could go missing for weeks or months. Questions about the cheat and what she remembered about the strainer. They were questions of an experienced river guide, and Mike’s thirty years on the rivers in the Southeast U.S. showed in each. He concentrated on current changes, taking in her description of the big water, the tube that should have been only a curl at the El, listening with intensity about the zigzag current at the end of the Long Pool, nodding when she described the Narrows, tilting his head, his gaze far away, as if seeing it all in his mind.
Mike had been on rivers for longer than Nell had been alive and having him here improved Joe’s chances more than anything. When she reached the end of her tale, Mike sat silent, rubbing her fingers with his thumbs, thinking.
“Okay. Gotta go, girl. Got supplies to get together. I shut the shop, put a note on the door for any drop-ins to head over to Amos’s. He can have that church group coming in on Saturday, too, if we don’t get back in. We’ll lose money but it won’t kill us like it would have before Labor Day. Later, girl.”
He patted her shoulder, a single pat, like the promise he hadn’t been willing or able to give. Mike pointed his finger at the cop, a gun gesture, and blew through the door like a strong wind, taking Joe’s letter with him. The cop didn’t know that. Yet.
Nell lay back on the inclined bed and closed her eyes, fighting for composure. When she could control the tears, she asked the cop what else he wanted to know. And wondered if she cared enough to ask him his name again.
The cop was silent for a moment and said, “You’re a member of the river search-and-rescue team for the Pigeon River.” It wasn’t a question. Nell nodded. “You’re certified in river rescue?”
“River rescue, swift-water rescue, first responder, wilderness first aid, a few others, all through the New River Rescue Center.” Her throat ached with the tears building behind her lids.
“Mighty young to be certified in all that.”
Stupid questions, stupid comments. They needed to be talking about where Joe might be on the river. But he was a cop, and Nell had never once known cops to be useful on an SAR. They just got in the way. “I’m twenty-one. I took all the courses this past winter and early spring.”
“With your new husband.”
Pain sliced through her. His tone said, Your new dead husband. She nodded as the tears took over and leaked down her face. “It’s where I first saw him.”
The memory was a stabbing shaft, bringing her skin to chill bumps. She had been on the bank of the Nantahala River, putting together a Z-drag system to save an “endangered” swimmer in the water, a certification instructor at her shoulder. She had glanced up at the water. At a boater shooting past. Looking right at her with his daredevil smile, his intense eyes, so blue they might have been lasers. The connection so immediate it took her breath away still. And he was gone, his boat downstream so fast she couldn’t follow. She had lost him. Until he showed up on the Pigeon River two weeks later. He’d been looking for her. And he’d found her. And now she had lost him again.
“Joseph Griffon Stevens.”
She nodded. I lost him. The breath she took ached, as if it tore its way through to her lungs.
“You took all those courses so you could start up a new business.” Nod. “A business that had to require a lot of up-front, start-up money.” Nod. “And where did all the up-front money come from?”
“Joe got a loan,” she whispered.
“A loan,” he said, his tone odd.
Nell opened her eyes, seeing a halo now around the cop, but if he was an angel, he was an angel of the devil. His tone was too guarded, suspicious and Nell didn’t know why. She blinked and he wavered in the watery mix. Tears leaking down her face burned fresh trails in chapped skin. Her head was thumping like a jackhammer.
The words clawing down her throat, she whispered, “If you think I did something to my husband, you are stark raving crazy. Now go away.” It wasn’t the best thing to say in a negotiation with a cop—and everything was a negotiation, when it came to cops—but she just didn’t care anymore.
The cop studied her, his gaze taking in her bruised and lacerated hands, her face, lingering on the bump in her hairline. “I’d like the letter back, please. Until the investigation is over with. Or they find your husband. I’ll give you a receipt for it.”
“No.”
His brows rose. It was real surprise on his face, not some kind of fake cop look. But Nell had been raised with PawPaw and with Mike. She knew her rights, and like her independent mountain forebearers, she had little regard for keepers of the law. Nell just wanted them to get the heck out of her way and let her do her job.
“I won’t sign a receipt. You get a subpoena,” she whispered, “you can have anything I have. Till then, no. Besides, I don’t have any letter.”
The cop slid his eyes to the door. “I’ll be damned. He took it, didn’t he?” When Nell didn’t reply, his mouth turned up on one side in a knowing half grin and he looked back at her. “We’ll be talking.”
“Whoopie.”
The cop laughed, a single harsh bark of sound, and left the room, letting the door close noiselessly behind him.
Nell stared at the ceiling, silent tears dripping onto the flat pillow beneath her head.
Orson Lennox checked the phone’s display. His dad. It was 5:00 a.m., but it was also his first day on the job with the Knoxville PD. The old man had known he would be up. “Yo. You still up, old man?”
“Cop hours,” Nolan said. “And I can still whip your butt.”
“No question about it. What’s up?” Orson said, tying his spit-shined black shoes.
“You run rivers. Could a tiny little female with a concussion run the South Fork of the Cumberland alone? After a lot of rain?”
“You always run a river alone, Pop, no matter how many people are with you. But—” He thought a moment, trying to balance thinking like a paddler against thinking like a cop. “With a concussion? Only if she was real determined or real stupid.”
“How ’bout if her husband went missing on the river and she was going for help.”
“Possible. Any chance she did him in and tried to make it look bad? That’d make her pretty determined. He have money?”
“Friggin’ loads. And it looks like he mighta beat her up first, so maybe she can plead self-defense. Thanks. And good luck today, okay?”
“Nine tenths preparation, one tenths timing,” Orson said, quoting his father. He heard Nolan laugh at hearing his own words about the existence of luck quoted back to him. The call ended. Orson closed the cell, wondering about a paddler and her dead husband on the South Fork of the Cumberland. It was a perfect place to commit a murder and make it look like an accident.
6
“I’m fine, Claire. Really. And I’m leaving,” Nell said as she pulled a second long-sleeved T-shirt over her head. One was white and the other matched her jeans. Her mother had color coordinated her wardrobe, which made Nell smile while hidden by the knit of the second shirt. She smoothed down her flyaway hair and checked the site of the IV, pressing on the bandage the nurse had applied after Nell pulled the tubing out. It had made a big, bloody mess. The nurse had tsked and said something about blood work indicating signs of dehydration.
Well, duh. You think?
Nell didn’t remember anyone taking blood, but she had several bruised needle marks in both of her elbows. None of them looked like they were going to bleed again. Her butt, however was sore on both sides. She had taken two antibiotic shots, one in each cheek. They hurt when she sat.
“You look like you got beat up by a trucker,” Claire said.
Not hit by a truck. That would have been too close to what had happened to her husband, Nell’s father. But beat up by a trucker, that was okay. Even though truckers everywhere would take issue with her comment.
Nell bent over and stepped into her jeans, watching her mother through the wisps of her short hair. “I’m alive. What I look like isn’t important. I’m going to the put-in. Mike will need someone to handle the radios.”
“You have a concussion.”
Nell bargained with a lie. “Once I get to water, where I can keep an eye on the SAR, I’ll put on lipstick.”
Claire hesitated, tapping her manicured fingers on the bedrail while Nell pulled on socks. Her mother bargained back. “And you’ll stay in the RV. And not go on the river. At all. Promise.”
“Off the river for twenty-four hours.” When Claire didn’t answer Nell said, “Take it or leave it. I’m twenty-one years old, so I can sign myself out of the hospital anyway. I know. I asked the nurse.”
“Deal.” Claire frowned at her. “You remind me more ’n more of my father, you know. More and more.”
“PawPaw’s good people, even if he is the biggest hillbilly in the state. So, thanks.” Nell slid on laceless running shoes. “He didn’t want to come?” she asked in a smaller voice.
“You know my daddy. He ain’t leaving his mountain, his house or his dogs. Or that still he claims he don’t have. But he sends his love.”
Nell nodded and stood. Her grandfather and his shotgun would have been mighty handy against the cops, but beggars couldn’t be choosers. “Gotta go.”
While she talked to the nurse, Claire tight-lipped with disapproval at her side, Nell was careful to breathe shallowly, so that neither of them could hear her wheeze and somehow force her back to bed. Besides, she was breathing easier, and her fever was gone. Mostly. Nell could tell a difference in her body already, just since the shots. She wasn’t well, but the pneumonia wasn’t going to take over and put her back in bed.
The nurses called it “signing out against medical advice,” or AMA, and it took half an hour. They gave her a sheet of paper about what to watch out for with the concussion and another about the infection in her lungs, then handed her a bag that contained her helmet, her river shoes and her river-wet underclothes. They had been cut from her body and were still dripping. Nell wondered why the cop hadn’t taken them. Her PFD was gone. And she had no idea what had happened to her seven-hundred-dollar boat and the three-hundred-dollar carbon-fiber paddle.
Then she was in the parking lot in the soft morning sunlight. She spotted the RV. It was a one-year-old twenty-five-footer, bought from a foreclosure place off of I-40. Joe had bought it for them to live in, in Hartford, during the paddling season. They had left it in the Bandy Creek campground and she hadn’t thought about it since. Seeing it warmed her almost as much as seeing Mike had.
She headed to the RV, trailed by Claire, who continued to chatter all the while about how she looked like she’d been beaten up, and why didn’t she wear makeup at least for special occasions. When she could get a word in, Nell asked, “Who brought the RV in?”
“Mike, of course. You don’t think I drove that monster. ’Sides, where do you think I got your clothes? I called Mike when I got close to Oneida and he met me in it. I followed him in. There’s my car, see?” She pointed to the parking space behind the RV, the bright red two-door Mazda parked between the lines.
“You need makeup on,” Claire said. Nell shrugged. “For the TV lady.”
The words brought Nell up short. “What TV lady?”
Claire flushed slightly under her makeup, looking just a tad discomfited. Which meant it had to be something really awful. Claire could rearrange God’s calendar and social life without batting an eye. If she was uncomfortable, then it was a doozy. “The one who wants to do an interview. Right over there.”
Claire pointed and Nell saw a white news van with a satellite dish on top heading their way. Nell turned furious eyes on her mother.
“Don’t you go looking at me in that tone of voice,” Claire said, pouting and sliding into the dialect of the Tennessee mountains. “’Sides. They can help get the word out. Get more people to help look for Joe.”
“We have all the help we need, Claire. Only trained and certified rescue people need to be on the Cumberland. It’s too dangerous.”
“You were on it,” Claire said, as if that lessened the classification of the river’s rapids. And in Claire’s mind, it likely did. As if she just had a new thought, her mother held her big baby blues wide, heavily mascaraed lashes batting once. “And it’ll be great publicity for the business when they find and rescue Joe, your names all over the TV airwaves.”
Nell bent to one of the storage compartments that lined the base of the RV and found the spare key where Mike had left it. Joe had the original. Her heart stuttered at the thought. She slammed the storage door shut with unnecessary force and unlocked the door to the RV, closing it on her mother’s face and the TV reporter, who was climbing out of the news van. Before the driver could think to block her in, Nell started the engine and pulled out of the parking lot, leaving her mother and the reporter blinking in the sunlight.
Nell didn’t like surprises. Claire knew that. And she had better things to do than…than…Nell bashed the steering wheel with her fist and dashed tears from her eyes as she made a turn. She and her mom hadn’t had a real conversation since her dad died, but surely…surely Claire knew she wouldn’t want to talk to a reporter. Didn’t her own mother know her better than that? A soft voice whispered in the back of her mind, accusing that she hadn’t given Claire a chance to know her better. Not since the accident that claimed her father and the woman he was sleeping with. Nell shoved that thought away for later. Right now she had to find Joe.
By the time she reached the put-in at Burnt Mille Bridge and parked, Nell was exhausted. Her headache had grown from a soft rattle of padded drumsticks on her skull to a big bass drum of misery. She popped two ibuprofen, forced down a bowl of cereal and drank a liter of water. Then she flipped supply switches, making sure the RV had plenty of propane, water and space in the waste-storage tanks. Habit. She knew exactly what was left, because neither she nor Joe had used much of anything on the trip.
She gargled with warm saltwater to help her throat, found an old pair of Joe’s sunglasses and slipped them on, then added a sun visor, one that went all the way around her head instead of clamping on the sides of her skull. Her injured cranium couldn’t handle the pressure. She pulled on a sleeveless, insulated vest over the tees, still feeling the cold of the river. Hypothermia could hang around, especially after a lot of stress; Nell figured the trip down the river qualified as a lot of stress. Satisfied, she stepped into the October sunshine.
The put-in at Burnt Mill Bridge on the Clear Fork River was a place with a whole lotta nothing. No fast food, no gas, no hotel, no camping, no amenities at all. It was not much more than a double loop of gravel off a secondary road, a tiered grassy area in the trees with picnic tables, a few park trails and the old, blocked-off, one-lane trestle bridge. The bridge looked like a rusted derelict against the brand-spanking-new one.
The site was the midway point on a run that started ten miles upstream on the Clear Fork River and ended seven miles downstream at the Leatherwood takeout, and any river runner who had once been there could find it. However, if Claire tried to find the put-in, Nell’s mother would end up lost in the middle of nowhere. Nell felt a bit guilty about leaving her mother in the hospital parking lot. As soon as she could borrow a cell phone she’d call her. For now, it was too late to do anything about her mother’s whereabouts.
In the Burnt Mill parking area, there were five trucks, two vans and Mike’s huge SUV. More vehicles turned in to the parking area as she watched. Equipment and people were scattered across the gravel and grass in a mass of organized chaos. Kayaks, paddles, helmets and PFDs rested untouched on the slip of sandy bank that showed above the high water. Rescue ropes, flex, biners and other equipment were being tested and inspected by a couple dozen men and women, some wearing wet suits, dry suits and river shoes, others in hiker’s gear and boots.
A park ranger in his brown uniform looked rumpled and unshaven, and was almost twanging with energy. He stood with Mike and a group of boaters and hikers, each with a radio, checking equipment. There was a Cumberland County Rescue Squad van, the volunteers dressed in matching red T-shirts over warmer clothes in the cool morning air.
In the center of the throng was one full-size, self-bailing, Maravia Ranger river raft. It was Joe’s and hers—the shop name painted on its bright blue side—and was fully inflated and ready to go. Clearly Mike hadn’t transported it from the shop filled with air. He must have brought an air compressor with him in his truck. Organized as always.
Mike raised his paddle above his head, calling her over. Nell pocketed the RV keys and headed across the lot. There were familiar faces from Pigeon River in the crowd. Besides Mike, there was Harvey, RiverAnn, Turtle Tom, Hamp and Stewart, all guides she had worked with during her summers on the river, before she and Joe dreamed up Rocking River, the mom-and-pop river-guide, white-water-rafting and kayak-instruction shop they had opened the previous May. Seeing them so far from home, obviously here to help, brought tears to her eyes and Nell was glad she was hiding behind the dark lenses.
She stopped and greeted each of the guides, pulling on Harvey’s new beard, touching Turtle Tom’s newest tattoo, a huge-busted naked woman sitting on a rock beside an altar of river stones. He wore a sleeveless T-shirt to show it off. She flicked Hamp’s hat, a brown one with the initials of his school on it, Furman University, and kissed Stewart’s cheek. Stew wasn’t very bright, but he was a sweet guy, and he had no idea he was so gorgeous. He didn’t talk much, and he ducked his head, letting curly black hair cover his face.
Nell carefully didn’t comment on RiverAnn’s latest weight gain, just lifted a hand in salute. The girl gained and lost the same fifty pounds every year and seemed to be ending this season heavy. Still in high school, RiverAnn had hung around paddlers ever since she could drive, working as a waitress in a small restaurant that serviced the truckers who frequented I-40 and the few river people who stayed through the off-season, and working as a river guide in summers.
Nell had seen her a few times throughout the previous river-rafting season because she worked for Amos, the owner of the competition rafting company next door. But the girl stayed pretty much to herself and whatever river guide, climber or snow-patrol dude she happened to be with that season. RiverAnn laid her head on Harvey’s shoulder and Nell didn’t persist in trying to catch her eye. It seemed that she had picked out her winter beau already, and had eyes only for him.
Mike gave Nell a one-armed hug and handed her a high-power, multifrequency, two-way radio, a fancy walkie-talkie. She pressed the transmit button to hear the squelch sound, making sure it was working properly, and noted the channel the searchers were using. Cell phones didn’t work in the bottom of the gorge, and were carried only for emergencies where a paddler might have to climb out and call for help. The radios, while line-of-sight, were better than nothing, and radios could be used to pass messages up and down the gorge. Nell slid it into her vest pocket.
Mike said, “We’re ready to hit the water. Two of the hiking crews already left. We’ll have radio support all along the river, with hikers situated on the crests of the canyon walls, on the O & W road and the bridge. A couple of the most experienced guys are ready to rappel down to the canyon gorge.” When she raised her brows in surprise, he added, “They have climbing gear and experience, and I want to be able to throw a rope to shore and have it secured to a rock if we need it, or have them climb down to check out something we see up higher.”
Nell nodded, understanding and agreeing with his strategy. In swift water rescue, ropes were usually tied off to trees onshore, but parts of the gorge had few trees near the water. It was the closest thing to a western river gorge east of the Mississippi. Rock, rock and more rock close to the river, lots of white water and not much of anything else.
“We got three in the raft with me, and seven in kayaks. There’s another small team starting out from the put-in at the confluence of the Clear and the New Rivers at 10:00 a.m. We’ll meet them and work it from there.”
To Nell, Mike asked, “You met the team leader yet?”
“I thought that would be you.” Nell said, surprised. She was gratified to hear some life and volume in her voice. The hoarseness was fading.
“I’m taking up the rear in the raft.” He boomed out, “Elton. This is Nell.”
A slender man, not much taller than she was, handed a rescue rope to a woman beside him, raised his hand and walked over. He was blond, blue-eyed and all muscle, with the prematurely weathered skin and all-year tan of a river rat, ski patrol, mountain biker, hiker dude. A typical outdoor-loving mountain boy. Encased in the wet suit, he had the sinewy body of a black snake, a rolling, confident gait and not an ounce of body fat. He looked her over, seeing beyond the black eyes and bruises. “Hit a rock?” Elton asked, his voice soft, his words efficient.
“Concussion,” Nell said.
“Walk me through it.”
Once again Nell told her story and as she spoke, the crowd gathered around her. It was the first time they had heard the tale and she saw nods and shaken heads. When she reached the part about finding Joe’s boat, their eyes slid past her. Eyes that were filled with sympathy. Eyes that said her husband was dead. Stewart’s eyes filled with tears and he turned away. Harvey looked down, shaken. RiverAnn took his hand and squeezed. Turtle Tom reached out a hand and gripped Nell’s shoulder. “We’re here for you, Nell. Hang tough.”
Her throat closed up and Nell patted his hand, fighting for a breath, finishing with tears in her own eyes, tears that were becoming habitual and unwelcome. Her Tennessee dialect strong in half-whispered words, she shook off his hand, took off her sunglasses, claimed the eyes around her and said, “Joe’s out there. In trouble. With no one but youns to help him. Please. Find him and bring him home.”
Mike looked at Elton, who gave him a single nod. “Let’s do it, people,” Elton said.
As the group began to disperse, each person to his or her assigned job, Nell went to every single one, clasping a hand or giving a hug, depending how well she knew each. Saying the same thing over and over. “Thank you. Thank you so much.” The once-alien tears no longer felt so foreign, and Nell didn’t try to keep them from falling, even though they burned, even though they made some of the searchers uncomfortable.
To the guides from the Pigeon, she added an extra word or two. “Thank youns for being such good friends. Thank youns for coming all this way for Joe.”
Each of them seemed awkward, embarrassed with the extra attention, and Turtle Tom shook his head, hugging her. “I just wish it hadn’t happened. You know?” he said, his big brown eyes staring at the trees on the far shore rather than at her tears.
“I know,” Nell said, feeling the guilt well up in her. Joe was lost. And if she hadn’t gotten stuck in a strainer, he would be fine. It was her fault. All her fault.
7
A swift-water search and rescue was a risky business. Nell had seen a simple training run turn dangerous with a foot entrapment in two feet of water, or as a submerged strainer trapped an unwary swimmer. No team leader wanted to evac out a hiker with a broken leg or be forced to rescue one of the rescuers, but it happened, and a good team leader was prepared for it.
Nell watched Elton give instructions, making sure that each radio was on the same channel and assigning other channels for nonemergency chatter. He liaised with the sheriff’s deputy who drove through the lot. He chatted with the park rangers, two of whom drove up just before they hit the water, and the hyper guy who was leading one of the canyon wall hiking teams. Some of the hikers left by van and Jeep to start out from the takeout and work their way upstream. Three kayakers were on the water early, practicing rolls. It was bedlam, but it was structured bedlam.
Then Elton blew a piercing whistle and shouted, “We do a complete river run this morning, from put-in to takeout. We’ll be meeting up with Argonaut at the confluence of the Clear and the New, and taking the last rapids down together.” The teams nodded, recognizing the moniker. Argonaut was Jason Adams, river-named after the historical sailor. “Everybody keep an eye out for emergency signals, branches or rocks in an X shape, fire, equipment, even a person lying on a bank or rock.
“Remember to check clefts that might have been available to a boat in bigger water. Today it’s running at fifteen hundred. It was up to twenty-five hundred CFS earlier, so we’re looking at two feet of river we don’t have today. I want the kayakers to scout the shore as often as possible, but don’t get left behind. Stay with the group. I want to be down the river by 2:00 p.m. Hikers, take the paths. Watch for signs.
“In places where line-of-sight radio communication is impossible, three long whistle bursts means we found him. Everyone who hears the whistle, pass the word where we are, and move into place to get him out. Anyone not close enough to be of immediate assistance, get your butt back to a put-in or a takeout.
“Anyone who gets injured on the river but can paddle to a support site alone, get off the water. We’ll have support in four places. At Leatherwood takeout, of course—” Elton held up a finger “—at the confluence of the Clear and New Rivers above the Double Falls.” He held up a second finger and then a third. “At the start of the Narrows, but that one’ll mean a hike up to the old railroad road and no parking to speak of, so try not to get hurt there so we don’t have to stop and drag you up the mountain.” Everyone laughed and Elton held up a fourth finger. “And at the O & W bridge. Paddle to whichever support site is closest. Questions?” Everyone here knew the river and no one raised a hand.
Elton said, “The support teams will have food and water for anyone who needs it, and trucks to cart you out. We’ll have support people at each site by noon, but unless you get hurt, you’ll be carting your own boat and gear to the trucks. No princess rides today.” That got another laugh. Princess rides were raft trips with a pretty girl as one of the paddlers. She usually got to sit and look at scenery while the other rafters did all the work and the male guides ogled her.
“In the event that we don’t find Joe by two, we start a slower, more methodical search downstream from the confluence above the Double. The paddlers will rendezvous at Leatherwood at 6:00 p.m. There’ll be trucks at the takeout to haul your boats from the river upstream to the campsite at the confluence or back here to get your vehicles. We have permission to camp at the confluence for those interested.
“Hikers will meet up with a support team at 6:00 p.m. Same thing with regard to transportation.”
He looked around the gathered, meeting eyes. Making his most important point. “No fun and games today, people. No playing. Not until after Joe Stevens is found. Got it?”
A chorus of yips followed his question, and several boaters gave the Hawaiian “okay” sign of thumb and little finger in the air, the other fingers curled under, hand waggling. The hikers took off with long strides. The Ranger raft pushed off, into the sluggish current. The hardboat paddlers went to their kayaks and began the serious business of getting on the water. Those still onshore skirted themselves into their boats and slid into the water and under the old and new bridges.
Nell watched as they moved down the river and slowly out of sight. When they were gone, she surveyed the nearly empty lot. One of the two park guys pulled out, spinning gravel; the other one strode up to the second tier of parking.
Soon the rescue squad auxiliary organization would be bringing food for the searchers and organizing ways to make sure each hiker and boater had ample supplies of water and food. There would be coffee, doughnuts, trail mix, sandwiches, maybe some soup to ward off the chill at each support station. People who were willing to run errands. Medical personnel. News vans. But little of that would take place here. Most of it would be at Leatherwood at the bottom of the run, and at the two put-ins midway down.
Nell knew she would have to move soon to keep up with the search, and wondered if the RV could make it down the one-lane, steeply graded, sorta-maybe-could-be-a-road to the parking above the confluence near the Double Falls, or if it would be better to park at the top of the hill above the Narrows. Turning the RV around on any of the one-lane roads would be a bugger. The O & W would allow a turnaround, but if she met anyone coming, she would have to figure out how to back up. Maybe for a long way. She didn’t want to have to. That left Leatherwood or the confluence for her day camping.
The news van she had run from pulled into the lot and headed for the lone park ranger. And then there’ll be the press, she thought. Nell escaped to the RV and headed out.
Nell was parked at Leatherwood near two groups of day campers with rowdy preschoolers, and bored high schoolers and the lone support vehicle to arrive so far, a beat-up pickup truck. The truck bed contained extra paddles, rescue ropes, and a rescue stretcher, the kind shaped like a canoe, with flex security straps and tie-offs for hauling a wounded victim up a steep hill. An old man was sleeping in the cab, his head tilted back, mouth hanging open, hogwashers and a threadbare white T-shirt the only parts of him visible.
She turned to the water. The river was still high, rushing over the low bridge kept open by the park rangers to show campers and tourists where the original Leatherwood Ford used by colonists and by the Indians before them was. Cars and trucks no longer used the low bridge, not since the construction of a steel and concrete bridge. The newer bridge was normally some twenty-five feet above the river flow, but the distance was less today, with fresh, dark high-water marks two feet higher.
The storm that had turned the river into a raging torrent had come out of nowhere. In forty-eight hours the high water would all be gone. But for now, it was a foamy blur in her tears. Nell wanted to be out there with them, on the water, helping with the SAR, but she knew that with her head pounding and her vision not quite steady, she would become a liability to the water team. It was the first time since she was sixteen that she hadn’t been on the water during an S and R.
She sat at the small dining table, staring across at the seat Joe should have occupied. Like most married couples, they had each chosen a seat and stayed in it for meals. Joe sat with his back to the driver’s seat. Nell faced him. Now his seat was empty, but there was evidence of Joe everywhere. His map of the river was unfolded on the dinette seat, next to his beat-up copy of Southeastern White Water, the out-of-print kayakers’ bible. His second-best sunglasses were open on the dash, but had slid into the angle between windshield and dash. She hadn’t noticed them when she drove to the put-in.
Joe collected sunglasses like some people collected dishes or furniture. He owned several pair of the kind with yellow lenses that claim to give the wearer the sight of eagles, several more that were polarized, others that were cheap dollar-store glasses he didn’t mind losing. His current favorite pair was with him, wherever he was.
A John Deere hat hung from the hook over the door. His Jeep keys dangled from the key hook. A T-shirt drooped from the hook in the hallway. The sheet draped out from beneath the bed’s comforter, left there when she had made the bed, the morning they took to the water.
She looked at the radio, sitting on the table. Silent. Nothing was happening on the water. By way of the radio relay, Nell had learned that the boaters had made it over the Double Falls, and Elton and Mike had sent the faster kayakers out to the shorelines around the pool at its base. Elton had inspected the campsite where Nell had woken. Mike and his crew had tied off above the drop and were checking for signs of passage.
At loose ends, Nell stood and walked through the RV, their new “summer home,” occupied by them exactly three times before this trip. She studied the small space. Touched the towel hanging off the tiny oven. Lifted Joe’s T-shirt hanging on a hook in the hall and held it to her nose, then she wrapped the shirt around her neck for comfort. Tucked the sheet under the mattress. Smoothed Joe’s pillow.
The RV was too small and compact for a large family, but it was just right for them. The queen bed was in the back, with storage hidden behind tension doors that thumped shut like cupboards on an oceangoing boat, keeping the contents inside during rolls and pitches on the road. The special cabinets lined the walls at the ceiling all around, along the walls, and even under the bed and beneath the dinette couches.
There was a tiny kitchenette and a bathroom with a shower so small that Joe bumped his elbows when he washed his hair, thumping and banging like a bass drummer. The miniscule bathroom sink and formed-plastic toilet looked like something from a dollhouse.
The dinette was situated across from the efficiency-size appliances, a narrow table between two bench seats. Because she would be here awhile, Nell leveled the vehicle with the automatic levelers and activated the slide that extended the dinette section of the RV out nearly three feet, giving her floor space. If she wanted, she could move things around and make the dinette into a couch or turn it into an extra bed. She swiveled the driver’s and passenger’s seats around to face back, making a place for seating. Nell wanted the “after-search decompression” to take place here.
And if Joe needed medical attention, the floor space would let medics work on him if there was a delay with the ambulance from Oneida. The vision of Joe lying on the floor, bleeding, a compound arm fracture needing attention, was so strong she had to blink it away. The image was replaced with an image of her husband lying dead on the carpet, pale and bloodless and blue. Acid rose in her throat.
She made it to the bathroom and threw up the cereal she had managed to get down. Curled on the small floor of the bath, she gave in to a hard cry, the sound of her sobs louder than the screams of the preschoolers only feet away. When the emotional storm passed, she crawled to her knees and flushed, pushed to her feet and brushed her teeth. Wiping her chapped face, she stood in the center of their summer home, alone and with nothing to do.
She was frighteningly grateful when a knock on the door interrupted her. So grateful that when it was Claire, with the reporter just behind, Nell didn’t even care. She threw herself into her mother’s arms and held on for life. For once, Claire didn’t babble or berate, or even rebuke her for taking off and leaving her in the hospital parking lot. She seemed to recognize her daughter’s anguish and so she stood there on the gravel lot above the Leatherwood takeout and rocked her, stroking her hair. Saying nothing at all.
Orson stood beside Nolan and the unmarked car, watching. The girl was pretty torn up, all right. But her black eyes and beat-up hands, and the wounds on her chest that his dad had managed to find out about from a gossipy contact at the hospital, made them both think about domestic abuse and murder. And about the money. There weren’t many people who wouldn’t kill for that much money. Self-defense? Greed for sure.
“I’ll talk to the blonde,” Nolan said. “See what I can learn from Nell Stevens’s little pal.”
“You’ve always said that sometimes there are benefits to the job,” Orson murmured. “And the cute friend looks like one of them.”
Nell and Claire sat in the RV together, listening to the reports that were passed up and down the gorge on the radio. Claire had forced her to eat, and when the meal wouldn’t stay down, had fixed her a cup of tea and held her hand while she drank. Her mother didn’t nag or push her own agenda, as Joe would have said. Not exactly. But her few quiet comments eventually wore Nell down and she consented to talk to the reporter, agreeing to issue a statement. Issue a statement. Joe’s kinda talk, not hers. But Claire played on Nell’s burgeoning worry and guilt to get her on camera, saying she should be thanking the searchers and all the auxiliary helpers, which might not have worked had Nell not been on SARs herself and known how much a simple thank-you meant.
Just before two in the afternoon, in time for the news update on local TV, just before the boaters reached the takeout, Nell, wearing her mother’s makeup to cover some of the bruises, emerged from the RV and let the production guy hook her up to a clip-on microphone while standing in front of the RV. It wasn’t the on-camera interview that the reporter wanted, but it was all Nell would agree to.
Fidgeting, uncomfortable with the idea of the mic clipped under her shirt, and still unable to speak in more than a whisper, Nell looked at the reporter, Bailey Barnett, with her perfect, bobbed brown hair and her false expression of concern and said, “I appreciate all the help of the volunteer searchers who are giving up their free time. And the park service and the sheriff’s deputies and the rescue-squad auxiliary members who are providing food.
“My husband, Joe, tried to rescue me when I was hurt.” The tears she had not wanted to spill while on TV fell over her cheeks, burning. Joe was going to tease her unmercifully about that. “And now the good people of several counties are helping to rescue him. Thank you.” Fingers fumbling, she un-clipped the mic, handing it back to Bailey while the reporter was asking her questions she simply couldn’t answer.
Waving away the attention, trying not to sob, Nell once again vanished into the RV and the anonymity and safety it offered. Claire made her another cup of tea and Nell stared at the river. Waiting.
From the open doorway, Orson watched his dad. The older cop leaned against the file cabinet in his office and watched the news. The little wife wasn’t holding up very well. Her black eyes, even under the makeup, were looking more purple, evidence that the bruises were a couple days old at least, though a doctor he knew had confirmed that the cool weather and cold river water might have slowed the speed of healing.
A little blonde stood behind Nell Stevens. Her mother. Orson had expected an older woman. She must have had Nell when she was ten, because she looked all of thirty.
Without turning around or giving an indication he knew Orson was there, Nolan said, “I’m getting old, Junior. The mother of a twenty-one-year-old looks good to me.” He swiveled his head and met Orson’s eyes. “You gonna stand in the hall all day?”
“No.” But the blonde did look good. All perky and bubbly and full of life. The kind of woman his father favored, a woman not unlike his own mother, who had died shortly after he was born.
“Claire Bartwell answered all my questions without a qualm when I approached her at the Leatherwood Ford. Unlike the wife,” Nolan said. “’Course, the mother didn’t know I was a cop at the time.”
Orson had heard all about that interview on the way up, and didn’t know whether to applaud the girl or convict her. Either way, she was good. “This what you called me off patrol and made me drive two hours for?”
“Yeah, come on in, Junior.” Nolan said. “Take a look at all this river crap.”
Squatting in front of the desk, he watched as his father laid out the dry suit Nell Stevens had worn, or claimed to be wearing, when she was caught in the strainer.
“It took some doing, but I tracked down the boat, paddle and some of the gear she had on when she made it to shore,” Nolan said. “Sorry about taking you away from your first day on patrol, Junior.”
Orson half grinned at his father’s insincere apology and dropped down, resting his weight on one foot, an elbow on the other knee, his spit-shined black patrol shoes grinding on the grimy office floor. “You’re not sorry.”
“Nope. I’m not. I need an expert and you’re the closest thing to it. What can you tell me about this equipment?”
Orson flicked the dry suit to him and studied the punctures. “These are consistent with being caught in a strainer.” He turned the water-repellent kayak skirt over and pulled off several of the upper layers of duct tape so he could examine it too. He lined the skirt up around the dry suit.
“Huh. The skirt fits up that high?” Nolan asked.
“Yeah. These repaired puncture sites in the skirt match up with two in the dry suit. This other one in the dry suit is higher up, in an area of the chest that would have been protected by the PFD. But notice the angle of the tears.” Orson stuck a finger through the dry suit. “All at an angle, up, as if a branch wedged up under her vest and caught her chest. She got wounds consistent with that?”
“E.R. doctor says yeah.”
“Crap,” Orson said. “You check the underside of the tape for fingerprints? If not, you’ll have to run them against mine.” His dad grunted, unconcerned. Orson pulled the PFD to him and examined the inside of the bright orange Kitty vest, a vest made for women, specially shaped to allow room for the extra padding God gave most females. He pointed. “Scratches are consistent with branches.” He pulled the rescue knife from its sheath in the front of the PFD. “You checked it for blood?”
“Clean.”
“It’s a Gerber. They make several styles of rescue knives.” Orson held the blade to the slashes that had opened the dry suit’s limbs and torso. “Whatever cut the dry suit looks like it had a few serrations on the blade, maybe up near the haft. See?” He offered the suit and Nolan fingered the ragged spot on the fabric. “This knife’s straight. No serrations. So unless she had another knife, she didn’t cut up her own suit, except for here. Looks like she cut a strop off. I wonder why.” He inspected the vest. “Someone cut the bottom strap. Maybe to get her out of it.”
Nolan stood, sat his butt against the desk and gestured to the other equipment. “What else can you tell me?”
Junior looked at the boat. It was a bright yellow and orange Pyrahna 230 Micro Bat. Not new but not beat all to heck either. He turned it over and a dribble of river water ran out. “Scratches indicate it’s seen a lot of use, but it’s not ready for retirement yet. It’s a fast, responsive creek-boat. It can take anything up through a class V if the paddler is any good. It’s too small for my tastes, but I like a more stable boat. It’ll roll easily, but if a small paddler gets into squirrelly water it’ll toss him around like a cork.”
“I could carry the wife around under my arm all day and not get tired.”
“Sounds painful for her,” Orson said. His dad snorted softly. Orson removed the rescue bag and went through the equipment. “Whoever packed the equipment was thorough.” He held the duct tape from the emergency kit up to the light, comparing it to the tape that repaired the holes in the skirt. “Seems to match. You sending it off for comparison?”
“Yeah. If we find a body. Or if we find reason to charge her.”
Orson rubbed fingerprint dust off the roll of tape and looked the question at his father. Nolan shrugged. “Collected. Not run. I’ll send them in if I need to. Later.”
Orson looked at the kayak seat and found a section of hip pad was missing. In its place was a rolled-up section of dry suit. “Here’s the missing dry-suit parts.” He removed it and compared the knife cuts on that portion to the knife cuts on the dry suit where the girl had cut it. “Definitely two different knives.” He found a meal pouch and opened the Ziploc bag, sniffed and quickly closed it. “Looks like she prepared a cold meal and never got a chance to eat it.”
“Cold meal?”
“Yeah. Dehydrated food is intended to be prepared with hot water and eaten fresh, but you can eat it cold—it just tastes like crap. Survivalists will put a little water in a meal packet and let it sit to make it soft enough to eat. This one’s gone sour. It won’t stink a lot but you might want to double bag it.”
Orson pulled the sleeping bags out of the boat. They were packed one inside the other, tightly rolled, stuffed into a waterproof bag and tied with bungee cords. He opened the waterproof bag and spread the sleeping bags out on the floor. “If she was caught in a strainer, injured and shocky, her husband might have put one bag inside the other like this and gotten in with her to keep her warm.”
“Matches her story,” Nolan conceded.
“Or indicates she’s very well organized and planned ahead.”
Nolan grinned. “Junior, the girl I talked to in the hospital? Even beat all to heck, she kept her head together. Emotional, but not to the point of hysteria or even confusion. She was sequential with her story, not jumping from event to event, like most people I interview. She’s organized. Too organized. Knows her rights. If I get a reason to use county money, I’ll send all this to the lab. For now, it’s just conjecture.”
Orson stood, and his father stood with him. “So, you think maybe she’s been planning it, waiting for the right opportunity. The river trip gave it to her.” Orson shrugged. “Bust her ass, Pop.”
Nolan shook his head. “Not yet. Waiting to see what the SAR turns up. But I didn’t call you back just to look at this river crap. I have a job for you, Junior.”
Orson didn’t like the gleam in his father’s eyes. Not one bit.
8
Listening to the searchers’ comments on the radio as they were relayed up and down the river, Nell fought tears and lost when they found Joe’s kayak and removed it from its securing lines. Her head in her arms at the kitchen table, she heard each report. Waiting. Waiting for any good news. Waiting for them to find Joe. What she heard was information she already knew. The kayak was empty. No supplies. And no Joe nearby, on a rock waiting for help, trapped in a strainer.
No Joe. Not anywhere, alive or…or dead.
One kayaker was assigned to bring the boat in to the takeout, and the team started down the last stretch of the river. It would take a few hours to do a cursory search. There wasn’t time to do a full, in-depth search before sunset.
Nell’s tears splattered on the kitchen table with tiny taps of sound to form a pool. Her breath shuddered along her throat as if claws ripped at it. She silently begged God, begged him, to let her husband be alive. She knew, in some miniscule rational part of her mind, that she was out of control. She, who never cried. Never prayed. “Please,” she whispered. “Please.”
Nell felt Claire’s cool palm on the back of her neck, stroking and soothing. “It’s okay, honey. They’ll find him.”
Though she heard the lie in her mother’s voice, Nell swiveled in her seat and wrapped her arms around Claire’s waist. Her face buried in Claire’s stomach, her mother’s jeans rough on her tender skin, she wept.
Claire massaged her back and neck as the dammed-up emotions flooded out and away. Her mother murmured softly, “It’s okay. You just cry it all out. I’m here, honey. I’m here.”
“I can’t do this,” Nell whispered brokenly. “I can’t do it. I need Joe back. I need him. I’m not strong like you. I can’t do this.” She rocked her forehead against her mother. “I can’t do it.”
Claire’s stroking hand slowed and stopped. “I wasn’t strong when your father died. I was a mess.”
Nell looked up into her mother’s face. “You never cried.”
“I cried. I cried and cussed and threw things and cried and cussed some more. And I hated him for the longest time.” Her pink-lipsticked mouth curled in a sad smile and she brushed Nell’s stiff hair back behind an ear. “And even after all that, even after all these years, I still miss the cheatin’ son of a gun. Can you believe it?”
Nell laughed, a hiccup of surprise. “No.”
Claire waved a hand in the air as if to rub away the negative. “I do. Still. But it was pure torture to live through, him running off with that woman, the church elder’s wife, and them getting killed together. All the gossip at church and in town. The whisperin’. The way the newspaper kept on and on with the story and brought it up over and over during that trucker’s trial for drunk driving and resisting arrest. It was all I could do to get through each day.”
“I didn’t know,” Nell said, the words hoarse.
“’Course not. I had to protect you. You were mine, all I had left to love and provide for. So I survived. And now you have me to survive for. ’Cause I don’t know what I’d do without you.” She wiped Nell’s face with the pads of her thumbs. “Come on. Lie down a while. You need to rest.”
“I can’t sleep.” Fresh tears ran down her face, stinging like salt in wounds. “I can’t. Not until they find Joe.”
“I didn’t say anything about sleep. I said you should rest. I’ll sit with you. And I’ll listen to the radio. And if you doze off, I promise to wake you if they find anything. Anything at all. Come on.” Claire pulled Nell up. Docile, she followed her mother to the bed. Like a child, she lay down when her mother folded back the sheets and held them for her. They were fresh and cool and smelled of Joe. Instantly, she was asleep.
Orson watched from the shadows as Nolan reached to knock at the door of the motor home. It flung open and the old man stepped back, jerking his hand from the swinging door. He looked up to see those blue eyes. Nell Stevens’s mother. Claire. His dad’s mouth opened, but no words came out. Orson hid a smile.
The woman stared down from three steps up, sparks flashing. She came down the steps at him, her face flushing red with anger. His dad, who had faced down moonshiners and pot growers and backcountry mountaineers carrying shotguns and a total disregard for the law, stepped back. She walked up to him, shoulders rigid and fire in her eyes, backing him another two steps before he was able to stop his backpedaling progress.
She leaned into him, her chest a fraction of an inch from his, her chin outthrust, her finger pointing. Pale pink nail polish, Orson saw, that matched her lipstick.
“If you think you’re gonna wake my daughter, you have another think coming. My girl is asleep, after crying her eyes out. You can just wait. You hear me?”
“I wouldn’t think about—I just need to ask—”
“You need to ask nothin’. I know how you cops work.” She put her hands on her hips. Orson saw his dad looking at her mouth. “You start out all sweet and nice and asking simple questions and then you lower the boom with some other awful question that says you think somebody’s guilty of something. It’s a sneak attack, is what it is. Jist like that sneaky way you questioned me about it all without telling me you was a cop. And my Nell is too broke up over Joe to be hurt like that.”
“Miz Bartwell, I—”
“I know you got a job to do. I know somebody’s gotta ask the hard questions and look for guilt. I know somebody’s gotta interrogate, and investigate, and stick his nose into other people’s business. Like assuming my girl is guilty of killing her husband and hiding the body. Right?” she demanded. She shoved her chin closer, nearly touching the old man’s chest. “Right? That’s what you gotta ask?”
Orson was pretty sure his dad had started to sweat. He nodded like he couldn’t help himself. He’d probably have agreed that the sky was green if she told him to. Twenty-five years as an investigator questioning the biggest and baddest the streets had to offer, and this little bitty woman…Orson laughed silently. She scared the hell outta him.
“I understand that,” she said. “But you gotta understand that I gotta job to do too. And my job is to protect my baby. And if you try to hurt her, if you try asking mean questions jist to see her cry, if you try to make her feel worse than she does now for gettin’ hurt and makin’ her husband go down a dangerous river alone to get her help, and then not come back from it, I’ll scratch out your blasted eyes. I’ll cut out your innards and leave your bloody, dead body where only the maggots can find it. And then I’ll pray over your dead, bleeding body that the Lord will somehow save your immortal soul, if you really have one. Are we clear?”
“Pretty clear, ma’am.”
“Come back later.” Claire stomped back up the steps and closed the door in his face.
“Did that little woman just threaten you with blinding, death and maggots?” Orson asked from the shadows. “Isn’t it against the law to threaten an officer of the court?”
Nolan looked over at Orson, leaning a shoulder against the side of the RV, arms crossed over his wet suit, ankles crossed. Amused as hell and not hiding it. Nolan shook his head. “Yeah. I think I’m in love.”
Orson snorted. “She’d eat you up and spit you out, old man.”
“Like I said. I think I’m in love.”
“One ’a these days your love of bitchy women is going to get you killed.”
“Feisty. Not bitchy.”
“You say potato, I say bitchy. But I did notice that she didn’t use a single cussword in all that tirade.”
“And she did offer to pray for me.” Nolan laughed and nodded his head at the river; the two men walked toward the slow-moving water. “You ready to go undercover?”
“I’m ready. But you know for a fact that the more experienced men will say I got this job on your coattails.”
“I asked who had river experience. You were the only one, Junior. Get in there and make nice with the kayak search crew. And don’t screw up, son.”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence,” he said wryly.
“You want a pat on the butt, play football.” Nolan Lennox turned and walked back to his unmarked car, leaving Orson to join the search team and find out who knew what about Joe Stevens. As lead investigator on the Joseph Stevens case, his dad had bigger fish to fry.
As the shadows lengthened along the Leatherwood Ford Bridge, in the extended dusk that steep valleys and rivers always experience, Nell stood on the shore, hiding beneath a wide-brimmed hat and sunglasses, waiting. Her mother was at her side, with one arm around her waist, body heat a comfort at her back. She wanted to be there when the boaters brought Joe’s boat in.
There were four news vans behind them, all with cameras trained on her, one van for each of the competing networks working out of Knoxville, the closest city big enough to have its own TV stations. NBC, CBS, ABC and the local cable van were all present. Nell had seen her own interview on the air before shutting the TV off. She knew how unlikely it was for reporters to get the details right this early in the search, before they found someone—an unnamed source—to give them the skinny. She wasn’t interested in hearing their on-air misconceptions and mistakes or their take on the search.
Joe’s disappearance had made state news, and some pundits were implying that she had done away with Joe, an implication that should have made Nell furious, but only left her exhausted and more determined than ever not to grant interviews to predatory reporters. After hearing the insinuations on local talk radio, Claire had agreed that they were vultures. She had stepped in to protect her daughter’s privacy, telling reporters to stay back or she would shoot them herself, not that Claire owned a gun. Nell leaned in to her mother’s body as she stared at the empty water, the current only a ripple.
Near 4:00 p.m., the first kayak came into view, followed by the rest of the small craft and then by the Maravia Ranger raft, Mike sitting up high on the stern of the boat. Nell saw them all, but her eyes were on the red playboat being towed by the kayaker in the middle of the pack. It moved in erratic patterns behind the towboat, the lack of weight making it skitter across the surface of the quiet pool like a water spider.
Playboats were used by extreme kayakers who wanted to take class V rapids, and then do tricks and stunts in them. The responsive little boats required the weight and experience of a skillful paddler inside to track smoothly. Empty, Joe’s boat had no grace or style or spirit. Nell had an instant of memory—Joe in the boat, practicing a backflip, his body and boat in the air, upside down, churning water below him, his paddle spinning, a wide grin on his face.
She quivered with reaction. Her husband wasn’t dead. He was alive. He had to be. He was too vital, too vibrant to be…to be dead. Tears started to fall again.
Wavering in her tears, the boats scraped onto the shore, hulls rubbing on sand and rounded river rocks. Nell blinked hard and focused solely on her husband’s boat. She moved into the shallow water and knelt, one hand out to pull the forty-pound boat close to her. It ground across the surface of the shore, the empty hull hollow-sounding, magnifying the noise like a drum. She ran her hand across the boat.
It was battered, with long scratches along the sides, new gouges where it had impacted rock. Some parts of the top-of-the-line outfitting—the hip pads, and knee braces that Joe had duct taped in for a permanent fit—were missing, leaving only the seat, structured metal bracing and hard plastic.
Nell had seen a lot of boats in her time, many that had taken rapids without a boater. A lot of them had looked like this, the insides partially missing. Wherever Joe had come out, it hadn’t been just before the location where she found the small craft. It had happened upriver of the rock that had snagged his boat. Maybe at the top of the El. The boat had taken several drops or been caught in a hole to look this banged up.
Blinking hard, Nell wiped her nose and stood. Silently, she touched the shoulder of the kayaker who had brought the boat in. It was Harvey, one of the guides who had made the trip up from the Pigeon to help in the search. His beard was beaded with river water, his hazel-gray eyes not meeting hers. His shoulder was cold through the dry suit he wore.
“Thank you for bringing Joe’s boat in, Harvey.”
He shook his head, staring across the river. “Shouldn’t ’a happened,” he mumbled.
Nell laughed, a bleep of pain that she quickly smothered in the crook of her elbow, covering her mouth and chin. Her hand tightened on his arm as Joe’s image fluttered in her grief. “No. It shouldn’t have. If I’d seen the strainer in time, Joe wouldn’t be hurt somewhere on the river. He’d be here right now.”
Harvey slanted his eyes at her, his expression guarded and grieving. Nell stepped back. Realized that he believed Joe was dead. He believed it completely. In his mind there was no hope for Joe. None at all.
Nell dropped her hand as if his touch burned her.
Picking up his boat and equipment as if the forty-pound kayak weighed nothing, Harvey walked off. Horrified, Nell watched him walk away.
His helmet beneath one elbow, paddle to the side, Mike approached and hugged her, seeming not to notice her unyielding body or the tremors that coursed through her. He said, “We’re going back out soon as we can get up to the confluence put-in. We’ve got enough time to do a good search above and along the shores of the Long Pool. I’ll drive your RV and you ride with Claire.”
A freckled, redheaded reporter jammed a microphone beneath Mike’s chin. “Are you Jedi Mike?” he asked, youthful exuberance in his tone.
Another reporter, a petite brunette, shoved a mic in close as well and said, “Do you think the missing kayaker is still alive?”
Claire pulled Nell away from the gathering throng of cameras and reporters. It was obvious that this new group didn’t know who Nell was. Not yet. The bob-haired reporter from the morning, Bailey something, was not with this crew.
A third reporter elbowed past them and jogged to Mike, asking, “What are the feelings of the searchers? Are you any closer to finding the missing man?”
Contempt on his face, Mike picked up Joe’s boat and angled away, leaving the path open for Nell and Claire to escape. He caught Nell’s eyes and jerked his head at Claire’s car, a clear order to get inside. Turning to the water, he shouted, “Elton! Let’s get the boats loaded up. Daylight’s wasting.”
Walking backward, Nell saw the first reporter pivot in front of Mike, blocking his way. “Can you tell us what’s going on, out on the water?” the guy asked. “Have you seen any evidence of the missing boater?”
Mike rounded on the hapless reporters and fixed them all with a furious glare. “We’re busting our humps, is what’s going on out on the river. Why don’t you get your lazy asses out there and help the hikers instead of getting in the way and asking damn-fool questions?” The reporters seemed to skitter into a group, as if seeking safety in numbers from the irate man.
Elton stepped in and softly said, “Maybe I can help?” The reporters ganged up around him and threw questions at him fast and furiously while Mike and the other searchers and onlookers loaded up the boats. Still walking backward, Nell watched as Mike loaded Joe’s boat with the others and tied it down with twine in a complicated naval knot. She wanted the boat with her. But she knew Mike would take care of it.
Nell slid into the passenger seat, and Claire started the little red car, pulling out while they were still buckling their seat belts. Silent, they drove from the takeout. Claire shot her a glance once the car reached the secondary road and said, “You’re still mad at me for getting that reporter to come by this morning, aren’t you?”
Nell sighed and rubbed the bruised spot on her temple. It wasn’t as painful as it had been, the headache kept at bay by constant use of Tylenol and ibuprofen. “Not mad, Claire. It’s just that I’ve seen reporters on a bad SAR. I know how they get. They’ll give me until tomorrow before the innuendos turn into bald accusations.” She laid her head against the molded headrest.
“They’re gonna accuse you of killing Joe and dumping him in the river. That what you’re saying?”
Nell laughed, the tone desolate. “Yeah, Mama. That’s what I’m saying.”
As if Nell’s use of the word Mama had been a shock to her, Claire fell silent and concentrated on driving. If Nell’d had the energy, she’d have worried about the look of concentration on her mother’s face. It always presaged trouble ahead or guilt for something already done.
The radio squelched all afternoon, comments and orders and reports passed up and down the river. The hikers were in constant communication with the kayakers, checking around each boulder, inspecting downed trees with limbs in water and roots on land. In the current, the most experienced rescue volunteers checked out eddies that looked wrong. Eddies that might have been caused by a body in the water.
Mike and his paddlers stabilized the Ranger raft with ropes attached to trees onshore, securing it over the zigzag current at the base of the Long Pool. Held in place, they dragged the bottom with a grappling hook, trying to snag whatever was down there, affecting the current. Nell, sitting in the RV, was so tense her stomach was in knots, a hot pain just below her breastbone. The thought of food still made her sick to the stomach and she turned down the offer of a bowl of soup from her mother and hot dogs from the rescue squad’s family members who kept the hospitality wagon open and running.
By 6:00 p.m., the searchers had checked every rock and bit of shoreline upstream of the Long Pool and around it. Every strainer had been pulled from the river. Every eddy that looked wrong had been dredged. All were caused by trees or rocks that had shifted. Not by a body. They had methodically searched every possible location for Joe. And for his body.
The shorelines farther downstream, in the deepest part of the canyon, would take another twelve hours or more to search as thoroughly. The call came over the radio to head in. It was impossible to make it back upstream. Most of the kayakers had brought overnight gear, but it wasn’t with them on the river where they could camp overnight; they had to make it to the takeout or the next support site at the O & W Bridge by sunset, get carted back to their gear and set up camp before total dark. They had less than two hours.
Nell waited for the searchers at the put-in of the confluence of Clear Creek and the New River, sitting in the passenger chair of the RV cab, which Mike had brought in before he hit the water again. She watched the activity between the cracks of the closed RV curtains, kneading her fingers in anxiety.
The put-in here, midway down the gorge, was a rough, unsophisticated version of the Burnt Mill Bridge put-in. It sported a bumpy, one-lane road that curled midway down from the plateau at the top, to the footpath that led the rest of the way down to the river. The so-called camping area was a gravel loop of the road. No picnic tables. No Port-a-Potties. Nothing but a ring of trees and several fire pits. The walk to the river was a steep, winding, downhill path on loose gravel, sandstone rock and trail-hard dirt.
The press vans came and went, but only one or two reporters and cameramen took the long walk down to the water for footage. The auxiliary rescue squad showed up about six and parked their van on the highest ground at the top of the circle. One woman lit a camp stove and started coffee. Another began to open buckets of donated Kentucky Fried Chicken. Together they set out coolers full of drinks and heated all the fixin’s. The smell of chicken laced the air like a greasy but delicious perfume.
The hikers dribbled in by twos and threes, rubbing aching calves and stretching, some trekking to the river to soak tired feet in the cold water and take sponge baths. Others grabbed a chicken leg and took off for home, eating while driving away. From here, the sun was a brilliant globe dropping below the western hills, throwing long shadows across the campsite.
There was a gold glow to the evening air when the kayakers roared up in Mike’s big SUV, the boats bouncing behind on his trailer. At the sight, the chief auxiliary lady rang a big bell and started dishing up food. Nell watched from the cab, unmoving.
“You should go eat with the searchers,” Claire said at her shoulder. Her mother had been appearing there often, not touching, not saying much, just being there. Outside, more cars and trucks pulled up as searchers returned to the nearest support site for dinner.
“Nah,” Nell said, leaning toward the curtain cracks. “I’m fine.”
“You should go eat with the searchers,” Claire said, an unaccustomed resolve in her voice. “Not for you. For them.”
Nell looked at her mother. Claire wasn’t usually the “buck up and smile” kind of woman, but Nell knew she was right, and by the glint in her eyes, she wasn’t taking no for an answer. Fingers like steel, she tugged Nell to her feet and pushed her out the RV door toward the rescue food van. “Go. Tell them you appreciate all the work and the food and the help. Sit with them. Eat with them. It’s only right.”
Nell tucked her hands into her jeans pockets and stopped in a shadow, watching. There were no showers at the put-in. No running water. For toilets, the hikers and boaters made do with shovels and trips into the forest, and since everyone stank of sweat and river, who cared? The smells of body odor and chicken and coffee filled the evening air. In the center of the circle, someone lit a bonfire of deadwood from the nearby woods, and the sting of smoke and kerosene added to the miasma. Someone else brought out a keg of beer to massed whoops and cheers and applause. The air chilled quickly now that the sun was down, and Nell wished she had pulled on a sweatshirt or sweater. A cool breeze played with the unprotected skin of her neck and face. An owl called, seven notes of rhythmic hooting, claiming territory.
The scene was powerful. Every smell, every sound, every sight was intense, jarring, as if her mind was on overdrive, glaring with intensity.
Mike spotted her in the shadows and handed Nell a plate of food and a huge foam cup of sweet tea. “Sit and eat. You look like shit,” he said.
Nell choked in laughter with the same despairing tone her voice had held all day. She knew she sounded broken. Shattered. And that wasn’t fair to the people around her. They were fighting for Joe. If they found him, injured, in the most dangerous place possible, they would risk life and limb to save him. She owed it to them to be there for them tonight.
She took a deep, steadying breath and drank a long draft of tea. It fell down her esophagus, cold and sweet. Hunger stirred, and her mouth watered at the scent of KFC. She took another breath, feeling it fill her lungs. The way she filled her lungs before a challenging run on a class IV and V river. Tears wanted to fall and she forced them down. Not tonight. Not in front of these people, her friends.
Claire brought her a folding chair from storage in the RV undercarriage, and Mike placed it upwind of the fire. Turtle Tom put a log beside her and sat close, silent, eating. Harvey and RiverAnn sat across the fire, touching often. Stewart and Hamp, his Furman U. hat glowing in the firelight, sat near the keg. Natch.
Someone brought out a guitar and several people started setting up tents. As on many such SARs, they were going to spend the night on the river.
A woman Nell didn’t know brought her a sliver of coated, waterproofed neoprene. “It’s from your strainer,” she said, putting the two inch by quarter inch strip into Nell’s palm. Nell recognized the scrap from her dry suit and closed her fingers on it. She thanked the woman, blinking away tears. The guitarist started playing an old Doobie Brothers song. The smell of beer wafted on the air. In the background, the auxiliary-support women cleaned up the KFC boxes and closed the van, the doors loud in the night. The engine started and the van pulled out, lights bouncing into the trees, crawling the treacherous hill up out of the river gorge.
Dark night fell and bright stars filled the sky between trees overhead. Two owls hooted back and forth. Sporadic conversation around the fire hit on politics and religion without creating a ruckus, then moved on to a fantasy series someone was reading. Eventually the talk turned to the searchers’ day, of what went wrong, of who had to swim because they couldn’t do an Eskimo roll, of the big water and the difficulty in taking the gnarly drops, of who built an altar of stones in Joe’s honor, of who had a new boat and how it reacted to the water. Of…of everything. The voices ran together in a smoky haze. Nell smelled marijuana, cigarettes, beer and chicken, and heard laughter and the occasional song and the rarer sound of two lovers in the night.
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