Chapter 7
CHAPTER SEVEN
Ileft the chair by the fire for the next seven nights.
It warmed up, and I didn’t need to light the wood stove anymore. In fact, I opened a couple of windows when it became uncomfortably stuffy in the evenings, but I still lit a fire.
I couldn’t shake the sight of Charlie holding his hands out over the hot stove.
On the third night since he disappeared, I draped a blanket over the back of the chair.
Just in case.
Our conversation consumed my thoughts. I went through the motions of the job and relished the stunning views and slow pace, all the while cataloging everything I thought I knew about what’d happened at Dead Man’s Lookout all those years ago.
I cycled through what he’d said over and over—that a police officer had hiked out to discuss the missing people, and that he last remembered being in the lookout before he died.
The police had always remained tight-lipped about the investigation, so the fact that it wasn’t widely known that someone met with Charles Randolph—Charlie—the day before he went missing wasn’t surprising.
But then why hadn’t they found his body? And what had they found instead that convinced them of his guilt?
A simple answer to those questions was that he’d lied to me, and he was, in fact, guilty.
It just didn’t feel right, though. The potent combination of disbelief, desperation, and rage that’d poured out of him would be difficult to fake. And why lie in the first place?
He was already dead.
Plus, his first thought hadn’t been for himself, or the legacy of fear he’d left behind. It was for his family, and whether they’d suffered in hope that he’d someday come home.
I refused to believe someone who loved their family that much could murder six innocent people in cold blood.
Storms rolled in at the end of my first week. When the forecast called for lightning after hours, we were paid overtime to continue our watch. Honestly, as live-in lookouts, most of us kept an eye out anyway, but the overtime was a nice bonus.
The towers themselves were safeguarded via a system of lightning rods and copper grounding wires, which attracted and dispersed electrical currents without harming the structure or occupants, but still.
There wasn’t anything quite like experiencing a lightning storm in the clouds.
It made for a tense couple of days, and a welcome distraction from my tumultuous thoughts.
I’d settled into the job just fine, but really stretched my legs those first stormy nights.
I called in three strikes, rotating the Firefinder until I centered the smoke plume between the front and rear sites, and reported the reading over the radio.
A few more reports came in from neighboring viewsheds, but so far, no fires.
“Lightning’s a tricky beast,” Janine said during our debrief on a private channel just before bed.
I was exhausted and sore from being on my feet so much, but it was a good kind of ache.
“It can simmer in a root system for days. I had a fire once that popped up nearly two weeks later! So keep a close eye on those strike sites.”
“Yeah, will do,” I replied before crashing into bed.
“Everything alright over there? How’s your standoff with the raccoon going?” she asked.
It was nice to talk to someone who didn’t know about my diagnosis. Normal, even. I spoke with Mom, Dad, and Bobby regularly, of course, but it grew tedious to feel like I had to reassure them all the time that I was fine.
Janine didn’t know about any of that, and it was freeing.
“Just tired, it’s been a long few days. And I can’t figure out what the damn thing wants from me. It’s not defecating, and I’ve never fed it. Hell, most of my food is down in the utility shed, anyway. Why would it climb all the way up here?”
She laughed. “Maybe it just wants to be friends.”
I rolled my eyes. “I get the impression it wants me to leave.”
We also had an unspoken agreement to avoid the topic of the disappearances as much as possible. At least for now, anyway. Until we were told otherwise, it genuinely didn’t help to worry and stress over it.
It lingered, though. Every day that passed without a lost hiker turning up safe and sound, it grew harder and harder to ignore.
“Alright,” she said. “I’m exhausted. Time to get some shut-eye.”
I looked at the time. It was nearly midnight. “Same here. You have a good night. Over.”
“Oh, hey, before you go,” she cut in just after my transmission went through, “someone’s been driving an ATV along the trail near my lookout the last few days.
I’ve reported it, but you should keep an eye out, too.
I’m here for peace and quiet, not to hear some jackwagon drive around at all hours of the night.
They need a big, fat, stay-the-fuck-away fine. ”
Suddenly, I remembered the tracks I’d noticed down by the lake. “I saw tracks, too,” I told her. “On my hike in. Completely forgot about it until now. Probably just idiot teenagers with nothing better to do.”
“I hate kids,” she grumbled.
“I hate raccoons,” I grumbled back.
She laughed again. “Talk to you tomorrow.”
Janine didn’t report for roll call the next morning.
It was the eighth day since Charlie disappeared, and I spent hours cycling through radio channels, trying to reach her, the way she’d done for me at the start of the season.
Empty static was the only response.
I’d just finished my midday smoke sweep, jotted down the weather collection data on the daily observation log, and hooked the radio to my belt before I headed down to the storage building to grab a few things for lunch.
There’d been chatter about her absence all morning. The ranger station called the police right away, and as far as I knew, they were on their way to her lookout for a wellness check.
While we waited for news, people offered up perfectly valid reasons as to why she wouldn’t have checked in.
Maybe her radio died.
She could’ve left for an early morning hike and fallen.
A family member might’ve called and needed help.
I hoped it was simply a case of a family emergency that she’d rushed to respond to without alerting us to her absence, but I had a sick gut feeling it was much worse than that.
She wasn’t the type to just up and leave.
I sorted through my quickly dwindling supply of food—I’d need to plan my groceries better next time—and thought about the horrifying conclusion I’d dwelled on almost obsessively over the last week.
If I believed Charlie was innocent, then his death had somehow, by manipulation or happenstance, allowed a serial killer to get away with murder for almost forty years. Three more people had disappeared in the last month.
And now, Janine was missing.
There was a surge in radio chatter, as if several people tried to speak over each other at once. I turned up the volume, ears strained to catch what they said, before it ceased altogether.
Had they switched channels? Were they at her lookout? Had they found something?
On the way back up to the tower, my phone buzzed in my pocket. Worried it had something to do with Janine, I quickly shifted the grilled cheese accoutrements into one hand, pulled out my phone with the other, and answered without checking the caller ID.
“Hello?”
I recognized Bobby’s voice immediately. “Oh, thank God,” he said.
Judging by his tone, something was very wrong. “Bobby, are you okay? Is Jade alright? And Molly?”
“The girls are fine.”
I let out a sigh of relief.
“I called to make sure you were okay,” he continued quickly. “I heard a lookout went missing and panicked.”
“Fuck, I’m so sorry. I should’ve called. I was caught up in keeping tabs on the radio this morning. I haven’t even talked to Dad yet.” Back up the stairs, I tucked the phone between my ear and shoulder, struggling to balance my lunch and open the cabin door at the same time.
“You’d better do that right now, or he’s going to hear and have a goddamn heart attack. They said the tower’s empty, but they weren’t saying who. We haven’t texted in a couple of days, and I thought—fuck, I’m so glad you’re okay,” he said, voice thick with emotion.
“I’m really sorry. Let me call Dad, and then I’ll call you back, okay?”
Before he could reply, though, I shouldered open the door to find Tate Morris standing in my lookout.
“Bobby, I’ve gotta go. Tate Morris is here,” I said, making direct eye contact with the man who’d sneaked into my tower.
He had the sense to look contrite.
“What the fuck?” Bobby asked.
“I will call you back in an hour.” And if I don’t, you know who to call the dogs out for.
Speaking of dogs, a very large German Sheppard sat at Tate’s heel, tongue lolling and nose in the air, as if I’d brought the cheese in just for him.
“Half an hour,” Bobby said before hanging up.
I really had no idea what I’d done to deserve such a good friend.
I set the phone and food on the counter. “Right. I don’t want to bear-spray your dog, so you’d better have a good fucking reason for creeping into my tower behind my back.”
He raised an eyebrow. “But you do want to bear spray me?”
I didn’t answer. He wasn’t in uniform, but I figured threatening a cop even off the clock wouldn’t go over well. “Why are you here?” I asked instead.
He patted the dog’s head. “Down, Rocky,” he said softly.
Rocky listened, heaving a sigh as he plopped onto his belly and stared up longingly at the bag of cheese.
Tate looked back toward me. “You didn’t text me, so I had no way of contacting you. I came to see if you were alright.”
I shuffled to the side, centering the Firefinder more securely between us. “I didn’t realize it was a social invitation.”
Honestly, I was only evading his questions until he explained what the hell he was doing there, but the blush that flamed his cheeks took me by surprise. “Wait,” I said, “was it a social invitation?”