Arcadia's Gift - By Jesi Lea Ryan Page 0,10

hardly knew.

“Okay,” I shrugged, sliding off the hood of the car.

Amy and I followed Matt onto the dark trail surrounded by tall trees in full foliage. He had a large flashlight from his glove box that he used to illuminate the trail and keep us from stumbling too much. Cane also had a small flashlight, but it wasn’t long before he and Lony started to lag behind. I peeked back every few minutes to make sure I could still see their beam following in the distance.

“I’m surprised you came out tonight, Cady,” Matt commented. “I never see you outside of school.” I really didn’t know Matt all that well, and if it weren’t for being Lony’s sister, he probably wouldn’t even know my name. My impression of the tall, gangly boy was formed in the one class we’d had together our freshman year. Matt tried to hide is complete inability to do algebra by goofing off, driving our teacher insane. Truthfully, I thought he could be obnoxious when he had an audience around to encourage him, but he didn’t seem too bad when he let his guard down and acted like himself.

“Well, Lony kind of made me,” I answered, picking a leaf off of a low-hanging limb and twirling it between my palms.

Matt and I made awkward conversation while Amy tagged at our heels, complaining about the mosquitoes.

We had been hiking for a while when I started to hear raised voices behind us. Lony and Cane were arguing, but I couldn’t make out the words.

“Jeez, all they do is fight,” Amy muttered.

Amy was right. Lony and Cane preferred bickering as their main form of communication. My entire family was getting sick of listening to it. Lony had a quick temper, and clueless Cane couldn’t stop himself from setting her off. Most of their arguments revolved around something he said or didn’t say, did or didn’t do, that Lony took personally. I suspected her issue tonight revolved around the cute redhead he’d been talking to back in the parking lot. Maybe that’s why I didn’t feel the need to run out and get a boyfriend. It looked like too much aggravation.

The trail opened up into a clearing as it drew closer to the Mississippi. Railroad tracks snaked their way along the edges of the river on both sides. Dubuque actually sits at the corner of three states: Iowa on the west side of the river, Wisconsin and Illinois on the east. Across the mile-wide river, the Illinois bluffs were dark and peaceful under the bright moonlight.

Matt led us over to a couple of boulders to wait for Lony and Cane to catch up. Amy started in on a story about a recent concert she attended where she snuck backstage to meet the band, and the drummer taught her to do a drum roll. From the expression on his face, Matt wasn’t buying it any more than I was. I kept my ear out for my sister. I could see her and Cane about fifty yards away walking along the tracks toward us. I still couldn’t hear what the argument was about, but the whiney tone in Lon’s voice echoed off the valley walls and I thought she might be crying.

Beyond Amy’s talking, I detected what sounded like the rumble of a boat motor in the distance. My eyes scanned the water, but I didn’t see anything. I couldn’t imagine why a boat would be on the river in the dark. The Mississippi was notoriously dangerous. The rumble got louder, closer...surely I’d be able to spot a boat that big even in the darkness. I couldn’t tell where it was coming from. Sound travels oddly, almost deceptively, on the river valley. Sound waves bounce off the limestone cliffs and roll over the water strangely. When the rumble turned into a roar, Matt and I looked at each other with wide-eyes.

In the end, it was the spotlight blazing down the track, not the roar of the engine which alerted me to the train rounding the limestone curve of the cliff at the river’s edge, less than two hundred yards from my sister.

What happened next took only seconds. I jumped to my feet and screamed Lony’s name. In the glare of the single headlight, both faces stood frozen like deer. Matt and I ran over the rocky ground toward them as fast as our legs could move. Cane snapped to attention first and ran off the tracks. When he noticed Lony wasn’t following, he