Chapter Twenty-Four
For the first mile, Mandy could barely lift her eyes from the trail to Thunder Spring, let alone ask anyone questions. They
walked single file, Fiona and Lucinda setting a surprisingly aggressive pace, with Charlie and Stefan loping close behind.
Mandy tried to stay with them, but she kept stumbling over rocks, showering pebbles into the fast-moving creek below. It was
clear from the tamped-down path that thousands of hikers had trod through here. But the trail’s potential for menace was just
as apparent. There were snake holes, scorpion dens, and wobbly boulders ready to slide. She even saw a few places where a
fallen rock had punched the trail away, leaving an empty comma of dead air in its place.
“Want me to ask them to slow down?” Thor asked.
Mandy couldn’t decide whether Thor was in the rear to watch over whoever was slowest or if he was checking out her butt. In
contrast to her crunching lurch up the trail, the guide was moving silently, practically floating over the rocks in his minimalist
leather sandals.
“I’m good.”
She took a breath and realized it was true.
Despite the threats, her burgeoning sunburn, and the potential for each step to send her sprawling, her jittery tension had abated.
The intensity and beauty of the hike had temporarily pushed the threats aside.
The sandstone ledges they traversed were narrow but navigable, and a light breeze in the paper-dry air kept her sweat at bay.
Where the Colorado was a thick greenish-brown, Tapeats Creek ran fast and clear, its music less a roar than a skittering rush as it fell over rocks and lacy tendrils of moss on its way to the river.
The higher they climbed, the deeper they seemed to be heading into the side canyon.
It was as if they were tucking into a pocket of paradise, a thin seam of the cliffside peeled back stitch by stitch to allow them passage.
“So.” A deep male voice jolted her out of her reverie. Mandy had been so focused on the scenery that she hadn’t noticed that
Stefan had slowed down to join her. “What do you think of all of this?”
His voice was low, his accent and vague words obscuring her ability to interpret his meaning. Was he talking about this hike?
The rafting trip? The threats?
This was the perfect opportunity for Mandy to talk to Stefan one-on-one. But the fact that he had approached her gave her
pause. Stefan’s gaze was intense, and Mandy clocked for the first time how much larger than her he was. He had at least ten
inches and fifty pounds on her. He could probably sweep her off the trail, into the abyss, without breaking a sweat.
She looked around. They were alone on a narrow ledge a hundred feet above the surging creek. Lucinda, Fiona, and Charlie were
far ahead, ascending an endless staircase of rock. Thor was behind her, scrambling up the hillside toward a line of pockmarked
boulders, presumably in pursuit of a rare and dubiously cute reptile.
Mandy sat down against a salt cedar tree, putting as much distance as possible between her and the precipice.
“Pebble in my boot,” she explained. She started untying the left one. It would make her vulnerable, being shoeless, but if
Stefan was the one behind the threats, she wasn’t going to outmuscle or outrun him. She had a better chance if she kept her
center of gravity low, the tree backing her up, a heavy object in her hands.
Stefan moved closer, crouching an arm’s length upstream from her.
She resisted the growing tension in her body, letting her fingers graze the furrowed trunk of the salt cedar the way a child might stroke their worries into a battered teddy bear’s fur.
Some of the tree’s purple blossoms fell into her hair.
She brushed them aside. Confident. Calm.
“The messages in the hats,” she said. “You don’t seem to be as concerned as the others about them.”
Stefan looked down toward the water. He seemed reticent to respond, even though he had been the one to initiate conversation.
They were exposed out here, on the wavering trail above the creek, the ragged edge of a rip in the earth. She had to find
another way to inch along it.
“How did you get involved with Babette?” Mandy asked him.
“It is not me who is involved,” Stefan said. “My employer, the Regent Group. I am their agent. I convey their interests with
respect to my division.”
“What division is that?”
“I represent investments in distraction.”
“I’m sorry?”
Stefan smiled. “At my firm, we believe that there are four fundamental human desires that drive consumption. Distraction is
one of them. We want to be entertained. We want to escape. People pay good money for this.”
“CareFree will help people forget their worries,” Mandy said slowly.
“That’s right,” Stefan said. “To be carefree, this is a child’s desire. Americans have quite the appetite for it.” He touched
the brim of his cap. “Social media platforms like Hitch, where Imogen Duvray performs, these are distractions too.”
“You have an investment in Hitch?”
“Distraction is a large portfolio.”
Mandy regarded him. She was starting to get a handle on his oblique way of speaking. She wondered if Imogen had truly won
the online influencer contest or whether the bearded man in front of her had recommended the girl as the fresh face of CareFree.
As Lucinda had said, nothing on social media was as straightforward as it seemed. And she imagined a businessman like Stefan
would look for connections across investments where possible.
“So the messages in the hats . . .”
“I see them as distractions as well.”
“You don’t think they’re real?”
“The messages appear real. But I cannot guess at Babette’s true intent.” Stefan looked at her seriously. “Distraction is a
powerful drug all its own. We are all so eager to be guided by the nose—or hat—at any moment. The real question is what we
are being distracted from.”
A fine cascade of dust fell between them, and Thor hopped down onto the trail from the constellation of cratered rocks above
them. “You two okay?”
Mandy nodded. Stefan said nothing.
“We’re right around the corner from Thunder Spring,” Thor said. “Ready to have your minds blown?”
Mandy laced up her boot and popped to her feet. “Don’t tell me. It’s a chocolate waterfall.”
“Better.”
“A secret breeding ground for yetis? I knew global warming was serious, but to imagine them all the way down here with their
fur coats—”
“You’ll see.”
They skirted a long curve—Stefan in front, Thor in back, Mandy comforted by her position in the middle of the sandwich—and
over a rocky field. At first, Mandy placed each foot with precision, weighing every step. But her curiosity about Thunder
Spring soon outweighed her fastidiousness and she found herself bounding over boulders, scrabbling forward just barely faster
than her ability to control her body toward an unseen oasis just beyond the wide gully of rocks before them.
She took one last leap and almost plowed into Stefan. He’d stopped. They all stopped.
An ancient roar echoed through the canyon.
Its source was a miracle: a giant waterfall geysering sideways out of an otherwise barren rock face.
Water crashed out from two enormous holes punched in the stone, as if a family of cave-dwelling giants had turned the taps on full blast and then forgotten about the bath.
Above the falls, the dull orange cliffs rose for thousands of feet, dry and cracked, stretching up to where the sun blazed the top of the canyon gold.
Below Thunder Spring, the crumbling edifice gave way to an oasis of lush trees and vines spreading like an old man’s beard from the bottom of the falls.
“Thunder Spring,” Thor said. “The waterfall from nowhere.”
Mandy stood there, dumbfounded. Thunder Spring swallowed up her senses, shoving away all thoughts of hats and human concerns.
Mandy gorged herself on its whip-cold spray, its raging growl. This was fury. This was distraction. This was threat.
She could almost drown in it.