a curse sometimes,” Nina continued, leaning back on the lounge chair and crossing her arms. “I sense something dark happened up there. Martha Williams was pushed from Camelback Mountain and, I’m afraid, your mother is involved.”
“Impossible,” Gretchen said with conviction.
“That’s when your mother vanished. Right after I called her and told her what the authorities found.” Nina snapped her fingers, her voice urgent. “Poof. Like smoke, she was gone.”
Nina roared away in her red Chevy to pick up her latest purse dog trainee, leaving Gretchen with time to herself. She made a peanut butter sandwich and a salad using slightly wilted lettuce from her mother’s refrigerator. While she ate at the kitchen table, she adjusted her watch for the three-hour time difference between Boston and Phoenix, turning the hands back. Noon instead of three, a mere twelve hours since she’d given in to Nina’s demands.
Instead of unpacking, she laced up her hiking boots and slipped her cell phone in her pocket. She rubbed sunscreen on her exposed flesh, hung her binoculars around her neck, and selected a bottle of water from a well-stocked supply in the refrigerator.
As an afterthought, she checked her mother’s closet. Then she opened the hall closet. Her mother’s set of luggage lay empty on the floor. A more thorough search produced a toothbrush in the bathroom. As far as Gretchen could tell, Caroline hadn’t taken anything other than the car.
She braced herself for the explosion of afternoon heat and set off, leaving palm trees and bougainvillea behind. She walked up the hill toward Echo Canyon, where the trailhead to Camelback Mountain began.
Hikers, mostly sightseers and casual walkers, tramped up and down the footpath between the trailhead and a large boulder, where they perched like flocks of birds to admire the view of Phoenix in the valley below and to drink from lukewarm water bottles.
The serious hikers, many training for longer hikes, continued moving up where the footpath ended and the handrails began. Gretchen could see the dry washes below and cacti sprouting from impossibly sheer cliff ledges. Birds flitted through the sparse shrubbery, calling to each other.
Gretchen felt light-headed as she trudged upward. Nina’s words played over in her mind. Her mother. Vanished. A dead woman. Her mother’s name in the woman’s pocket. “Put her away.”
What could it mean?
A message? A warning? An accusation?
The timing of Martha’s death and Caroline’s disappearance wasn’t coincidental, and she knew it. She felt a quick flash of anger at her mother for leaving without notifying anyone. The anger dissipated and steamed into fear. Was her mother safe? Why hadn’t she called Nina? Twenty-four hours and counting since Nina had spoken with her sister, the time slowing to an agonizing pace.
Gretchen paused in her sweaty climb to admire the desert scenery. Her mother had taught her the names of the plants growing along the trails: saguaros, ocotillos, barrel cacti, and palo verdes. Rattlesnakes, scorpions, and gila monsters also liked the mountain environment, three poisonous reasons to wear hiking boots and to stay on the designated trails.
Gretchen didn’t think she could handle an encounter with any of these three creatures. But spiders were her worst nightmare. A black widow would provide a perfectly good reason to jump off a cliff. It was a good thing they liked dark, remote holes and rarely ventured near humans.
Cautiously she moved over the rocks, well above the cluster of tourists milling around on the boulder below. She forged ahead, picking her way up, using the binoculars to scan the cliffs, remembering with each step the warnings about lizards and snakes. Sweat soaked her shirt and glistened on her face. Gretchen stopped to catch her breath and get her bearings. She could see the top of her mother’s house in the valley below. Using the ledge that Nina had pointed out as a guide, Gretchen calculated that Martha had fallen from a ridge directly above her.
Gretchen’s heart pounded against her chest cavity, and her throat felt tight and dry. She looked down at her feet, searching for signs that she stood where the woman’s body had been discovered, but all she saw were clumps of red rock and a few straggly desert plants.
What if her mother lay injured somewhere up here? Could she be crumpled in the shadows beneath a rock outcropping? Gretchen continued climbing upward, sweeping the binoculars along the far reaches of Camelback until she was satisfied that she’d thoroughly covered the climbable part of the mountain.
She slowly began her descent, pausing again where she