Chapter 41
Helena trudged through the dunes behind Liz, sand sticking to her hiking boots in heavy clumps. The dune grass bowed in the wind, needle-sharp blades lashing at her waterproof trousers.
Rivers of water ran down the beach, flashing silver in her torchlight. Above the continuing rain, she could hear the rush of new waterfalls streaming down the mountain.
Maggie caught up, damp hair hanging limp around her face. “I wish we’d never found the cocaine,” she said with a shudder. “I’ve got a bad feeling about it.”
Helena agreed. It stained the clean purity of the wilderness and what this hike was about. “I don’t want to scatter Mum’s ashes here now. Doesn’t feel right anymore.”
“I’m sorry. I know this had felt like the place.”
Ahead of them, Liz suddenly halted. She ran her torch beam across the beach. “Where are the tents?”
Helena looked across the sand toward the lower slopes of the mountainside where they’d hiked in. Oddly, she couldn’t see their tents. She scanned her torch outward: mountain, beach, ocean.
No tents.
She squinted into the beam of light, confused. They must have lost their bearings in the darkness.
“They must be there,” Maggie said, rising panic in her voice.
Helena searched again, tracing the line of the white water until it met beach.
“Oh my God!” Joni said from the back of the group. “Look!”
The four of them stood rooted to the spot. Joni’s torch was directed up toward the path where, hours earlier, they’d hiked in.
The lower slope of the mountainside was now a river of mud and earth and rock.
“Landslide,” someone whispered.
Helena blinked slowly as the beam absorbed the devastation: a solid hill of earth and rock had settled where their tents had been pitched. An entire section of the mountain slope had crumbled.
“No . . . no . . .”
“Our tents . . .”
They spoke over one another, voices stretched with disbelief, torch beams scanning for a different outcome, but with each widening sweep of light, only more devastation was revealed.
A huge section of the mountainside had been lost, dragging loose boulders and trees and bushes that blocked the entrance to the beach like a muddy avalanche.
“I felt the ground tremble when we were in the cave . . . ,” Maggie said breathlessly. “It was this. A landslide.”
“I can’t believe this . . . ,” Liz said. “The heavy rain must have dislodged the rocks and earth.”
As they surveyed the sheer scale of the landslide, a cold sensation spread through Helena’s body. “If we hadn’t sheltered in the cave, we’d be . . .”
“Dead,” Maggie whispered, arms wrapped around herself.
The horror of that possibility silenced them all.
Helena imagined the rumbling of the ground, the awful noise of the earth beginning to loosen, slide, and crumble, the rush to get out of the tent, the crushing weight of thousands of tons of earth plowing into them.
The relief of sheltering in the cave was short-lived. “But . . . all our things were in the tents,” Liz said.
Helena let the seriousness of the situation settle.
No tents. No sleeping bags. No stove. No food. No water.
Panic rose, a dark tide of it washing over them as they stood soaked and scared, shock ricocheting.
A new thought screeched into Helena’s brain—her mother’s ashes!—and then she was running toward the crumbled earth.
“Helena! Stop!” Maggie cried.
But she stumbled on, clambering over the first heap of earth, boots sinking into mud.
She needed to find the tents! Get her mother’s ashes! She couldn’t leave her out here, buried in this terrifying mess of earth!
“Helena, no! It’s too dangerous!” Liz shouted.
She scrambled on, using a boulder for purchase. The smell of wet mud was thick in her nostrils.
Her foot slipped deeper, mud climbing over her knees. She tried to push on but could feel the suction of the earth against her boots, trying to force them from her feet as she battled to pull out her legs.
She dragged her left boot out of the deep mud. Took another step—but sank even further this time, up to her thighs.
“Helena!” the others screamed.
She used her hands, digging into the soil, meeting hard fragments of stone.
Tears and mud streaked her face.
Then there were hands on her shoulders, pulling her back.
She tried to shake them off—but couldn’t.
Maggie was talking to her, telling her it’d be all right. Promising her over and over again.
But it wouldn’t be.
It couldn’t be.
Her mother’s ashes were gone.