gotten hung up admiring Ed’s tropical paradise. His wife should know better than to leave him home alone.”
Though he was chuckling, now that my attention was focused on the details of his face, it was easy enough to see that his thoughts while he’d been waiting hadn’t been happy ones. The line of old scar tissue along his jaw was stark white against the irritated redness of his cheek.
As if to confirm my observation, he raised his hand to his face again. But this time, his anxious fingers drifted toward the new, much smaller wound on his cheek. The one framed by adhesive residue and bridged by several no-longer-white butterfly closures.
I grabbed his wrist and stopped the movement. Gave his hand a quick shake before releasing it.
“Sorry,” he muttered. “It itches.”
“Yeah. I bet it does. But leave it alone. I did a darn good job patching that cheek, and I’d be pissed if it got infected.”
“Wouldn’t want that.”
I couldn’t tell from his voice whether he meant pissing me off or infecting the cheek, but he’d taken that moment to rub his fingers over his eyes, so I couldn’t read his expression, either.
He looks tired, I thought as our eyes met again. As if the past several nights hadn’t brought him much sleep, either. Though I still wasn’t optimistic, I hoped that we’d find evidence in the ravine proving that the remains belonged to his mother. Chad would sleep better knowing that.
So would I.
We followed the River-to-River Trail from Camp Cadiz, with the two of us walking single file and steadily, but not quickly. Conserving our energy for the more difficult terrain at the bottom of the ravine.
For a time, Chad took the lead, and I couldn’t help but notice how confidently he moved through the forest. Long practice, I thought, remembering all the time we’d spent outdoors together hiking and camping. As childhood friends. As adult lovers. And though I knew that the reason for going into the forest was serious, for this little bit of time I indulged myself. I pushed away anxious thoughts about the past and future, focusing only on the pleasant and familiar present. On the sight of a man who was undeniably sexy in tight jeans. And on life as it might have been.
Halfway across the footbridge, Chad paused. He leaned on the railing, looking up the ravine toward our crime scene.
I joined him and spent a moment peering downward.
Fallen trees, many of them mature, were wedged across the narrow ravine. Some of them had roots that—like a child’s loose tooth—clung tenaciously to the embankment or to one of the more substantial ledges. Those trees were still green and leafy. But most were dead or dying, their leaves a withered, tattered brown.
At some point either rockfall or rotting would send them tumbling to the bottom of the ravine, more than forty feet below the bridge where Chad and I stood. There, hundreds of years’ worth of rotting trees and the water from a meandering stream supported the abundant vegetation that softened the edges of all but most recent rockfall.
“See the stream down there?” Chad asked. “That’s the dividing line between federal land on the Camp Cadiz side of the ravine and county land on the opposite side. Nearer the crime scene, Maryville jurisdiction intersects with the county’s. No landmark there, just an arbitrary line on the map.”
I nodded, acknowledging the information as I kept looking downward. Today, there was more sandy, rock-strewn stream bed than there was stream. But heavy rains could change the meandering ribbon of water into a torrent that could sweep away whole trees. And as we left the bridge, I thought—not for the first time—that Chad and I were embarking on a fool’s mission.
It was just past 8:00 a.m. when we left the marked trail and began hiking parallel to the ravine.
I took a turn walking in front and watching for hazards.
The strip of land nearest the ravine was relatively clear of plants, enabling us to avoid much of the tangled undergrowth and jutting rock formations that had made searching for Tina so difficult. But the same erosion that swept away so much of the forest’s lush growth had created crumbling edges, deep fissures and sinkholes, often camouflaged by thin layers of soil, vegetation and forest debris.
As we walked, a dank breeze occasionally scrambled up from the stony depths of the ravine, providing welcome moments of relief. But it wasn’t enough to offset the humidity and steadily rising temperature, which made