Chapter Fourteen
Fourteen
IMANI WAS PANTING. SHE WALKED her snowboard toward the boulder at the foot of the steps, fighting against the incline.
Her freed right foot marched. With her left foot still strapped in the binder, she dug the edge of her snowboard into the snow crossways to keep the board from slipping.
One step. Chop. Another step. Chop. Her snowboard sounded like a hatchet each time she dug into the snow after dragging it forward. Her legs burned.
The ride down went so fast, and the walk back up took forever. She’d been so excited at first that she hadn’t thought about how hard it would be to climb up without a ski lift. She and Sharise had only gone down three times on their boards. They had spent most of their time climbing.
“Wait for me…” Sharise wheezed from below her.
“Why?” Imani said. “You know I’m going to the stairs.” Chop. Another step.
Imani felt like if she stopped, her weariness would catch up and she would want to go inside early.
The sun was dipping, but they probably had at least twenty minutes left.
Sharise’s slower pace was agony. And a million steps were waiting ahead.
Imani unzipped her jacket because she was drenched with sweat, and the cool air energized her. She sped up.
“Fine—if you don’t wait, I’ll just go in,” Sharise said. “Then you’ll have to go in too.”
Sharise had a hundred and one forms of blackmail.
With a cry of frustration, Imani took her last step up the hill, stopping in front of the giant boulder, which was taller than she was.
She leaned against it, catching her breath.
Sure enough, as soon as she stopped moving, her limbs felt like they were turning to stone.
So many steps! She and Sharise had started calling them the “Steps of Death.” She’d stopped counting at fifty last time.
The steps were sturdy, made of wood-lined stone, but they were steep and a major pain in the ass, especially with a snowboard.
She and Sharise had seen a couple of abandoned snow tubes left among the trees below, and she didn’t blame people for leaving them behind.
They would be harder to carry than boards or skis.
Imani glanced at the open gate at the top of the Steps of Death: No sign of Daddy.
Mom had stopped watching after the first time they tried the slope, but Daddy was gone now too.
Imani would miss showing off for him. Sharise mostly offered her advice and critiques—which was funny, considering that Sharise kept falling on her ass.
“How does this place not have a ski lift?” Sharise panted as she climbed closer.
“I think it used to.” Imani pointed toward the treetops bordering the steps. Some of the poles weren’t tree trunks, an ordered row in the midst of the trees. “A long time ago.”
“Dad needs to fix that,” Sharise said. “I wish he could fix it tomorrow.”
Sharise still had to climb ten yards to reach her, and Imani swayed in place to try to keep her muscles from feeling like hardening clay.
The far side of the boulder was shaded, so she stepped over to take a peek at what else the property had to offer.
She was looking forward to having a full day tomorrow to try her survival skills.
She glanced at the underbrush from the trees near the boulder to try to see if any of the wood looked like usable kindling.
Instead, she saw a bright streak of blood painting the tree’s bark.
The blood streak was frozen, adorned with frost at the edges, but its crimson color was unmistakable against the red-brown trunk.
Blood filled the ridges in the bark, as if someone had slapped a dripping paintbrush across the tree to mark their path.
Imani had never seen blood except from small cuts, so she was surprised she recognized it on sight.
The blood mesmerized her for so long that she forgot to wonder where it had come from.
“What are you looking at?” Sharise said. Chop. She was slowly climbing toward her.
Imani was about to lie and say Nothing, because the truth would freak Sharise out.
But Imani was distracted when she spotted flat puddles of blood across the snow inches from the trunk, until her eyes rested on something black about the size of a half-dollar sticking out of a small snow mound.
She took a step nearer, dragging her snowboard with her.
As she’d suspected, the black object, also speckled with frost, was on top of what seemed like a brown and white cone. Another step… and she saw a severed deer’s head, ragged at the neck. As she leaned over, a snow-filled eye socket came into view. A frozen nightmare.
Imani gasped and stepped backward, tripping over her snowboard to fall only inches from banging her head against the craggy boulder.
“Hey!” Sharise said. “What are you doing? Are you okay?”
Sharise unhooked her boot from her snowboard and dug her feet into the snow to walk to Imani faster. The snow was deep enough for snowshoes. Time slowed as Imani watched Sharise approaching her, her mind racing for the right words.
“I’m fine,” she said, finally answering Sharise. “I tripped.”
“What are you even doing—” Sharise started to say, but her eyes took the same journey Imani’s had: first to the bloody tree trunk, then the blood trail. And the head. “What the fuck?”
“It’s a deer,” Imani said.
Sharise nervously tracked the shadows between the trees near the boulder. Her breathing quickened. “What the fuck, Imani!” She turned over her shoulder. “Dad!” she called.
Imani grabbed Sharise’s arm, pulling her so hard that Sharise almost fell on top of her. Their faces were close. “Don’t!” Imani said. “He’s not there. Don’t call them.”
“Let me go!” Sharise said. “Why are you just sitting next to it? What’s wrong with you?”
Sharise yanked herself free, then she extended a gloved hand to Imani to help her stand.
Imani hopped, pulling her snowboard with her.
They both moved ten yards away from the frozen deer’s head, but Imani still imagined the carcass’s stuffed eye socket and its white stare.
Her stomach squirmed as if she might be sick, but she swallowed it back.
“I bet it was hunters,” Imani said. “Poachers. Hunting season for deer is over.”
“Why do you even know that?”
“I just do.” Imani hadn’t told Sharise that she wanted to learn how to hunt and had researched it online. Hunters could hunt small game until January on Mount Shasta, but not deer.
Now Imani couldn’t remember why she’d wanted to hunt so much.
The deer didn’t have antlers, so it was a girl, she realized.
Maybe it was a mama deer. When she’d fantasized about hunting, she’d thought more about tracking animals and perfecting her aim.
She hadn’t thought about a snowy eye socket.
Or a deer leaving a family behind. Now she never wanted to go hunting.
Up close, the deer didn’t look like food at all—it just looked dead.
Imani realized she was shivering. She quickly zipped up her jacket, although it didn’t help. Her shaking wasn’t from the cold.
“Why did they leave the head?” Sharise asked.
“Maybe… they got the meat they needed and they didn’t want it,” Imani said.
Imani was so nervous that she could hardly catch her breath.
Discovering the deer’s head had startled her, yes, but now she was more worried about what Sharise would do.
She was frantically trying to tell a story Sharise would believe so she wouldn’t panic.
Imani used to lie a lot more when she was younger, and the secret to a good lie was to be specific. Details.
“They probably cut it up right out here. That’s why there’s so much blood,” Imani said, and Sharise made a horrified face.
“Eww. Fucking assholes,” Sharise said.
She had bought into the story Imani was weaving!
Imani imagined the hunters—at least two of them—stringing up the deer for field dressing, pulling out the internal organs in the solitude of the ski hill days before her family arrived.
She’d seen it a million times on YouTube.
It was plausible and almost ordinary, except that deer season was over.
But no matter what story she told, Daddy might want to leave if he knew. Mom too. At the least, they would not allow them on the ski hill anymore. And without the ski hill, this was just a creaky old house without internet or a phone.
“Sharise?” Imani said, her voice soft.
Sharise sighed as if she already knew what Imani planned to say.
Imani looked into Sharise’s eyes with her best puppy dog face. “Please, please, please don’t tell Daddy and Mom. I’ll wash the dishes on your day for a month. Two months.”
“We don’t even know if it was hunters, Imani,” Sharise said in her big-sister voice that could be as firm as arguing with Mom. “What if it was bears?”
“Bears hibernate,” Imani said. Bears usually hibernated.
The blood on the tree had felt random, more like something bloody had been thrown against it.
Angry. It didn’t seem like hunters; Imani knew that even if Sharise didn’t.
But she also knew that contestants on Naked and Afraid survived in handmade shelters in the wilderness surrounded by wild animals and none of them had gotten hurt by any creatures except insects.
A bear or mountain lion probably had killed this deer, which meant it had been close.
Yes, they could have passed whatever had killed the deer on their snowboards, brushing within yards of it while it lurked in the trees.
Imani knew that, and the idea made her lips quiver.
But she also knew that the deer probably had not been killed that day—and whatever had killed it could be long gone by now.
“You think they’ll want to leave if we tell them?” Sharise asked.
“You know they will.”
“That deer is pretty big. If it wasn’t hunters…”
“We’re in a house. Hunters are scarier than bears.”
“Yes! What if they know we saw what they did? What if they come after us?”
“That’s not gonna happen,” Imani said. Sharise looked resolute, so Imani tried the one thing she never wanted to say: “You’re right. Something’s going on with Mom and Daddy.”
Sharise’s eyes widened. Her face wavered with relief, grief, pity. “You see it too?”
Imani nodded. She was only half lying this time; yes, she had noticed that Daddy especially wasn’t acting like himself.
And Mom was running to the bathroom a lot, which could be to hide her crying.
But Imani wasn’t ready to leap to the conclusion that they were getting a divorce, which sounded like a typical Sharise panic attack.
“Something’s wrong,” Imani said. “And if you’re right… I don’t want to ruin everything good on this trip over a dumb deer. If it’s… the last trip… you know? As a family.” Imani was surprised to feel her throat tighten in a suppressed sob. Maybe she did believe it.
“Imani…” Sharise said in a voice so sad that Imani could have just confessed that she had a deadly disease.
Sharise pulled Imani close to hug her. Imani wasn’t wild about hugs, especially tight ones, but she allowed her big sister to fuss over her.
She was warm, anyway. “I’ll always be here for you. No matter what. Okay?”
“Cool,” Imani said. “So, you won’t say anything?”
Sharise glanced at her almost as if she suspected she was being played. But when Sharise studied Imani’s eyes, whatever she saw convinced her.
“No coming out here alone, got it?” Sharise said. “Ever.”
“Promise!” Imani said. “Only with you. To board.”
“All right,” Sharise said. “The deer head is our secret.”
When Sharise said deer head, Imani took another step away from the woods just beyond the boulder, trying to avoid accidentally seeing the deer’s frigid grave.
But she couldn’t unsee the severed head’s blindly staring white eye.