Chapter 26
By the time Zach entered the hut, Bram was already shooting a stream of lighter fluid to drench the firewood shoved in the stove. Ready for the leap of flames this time, he stood back as he tossed the match in, igniting the wood with a satisfying woosh.
The quiet of the hut, its familiarity, the everydayness of the mess they’d left behind that morning, dizzied Zach.
Zach glugged water until he no longer felt the awful dryness of his tongue and altitude-wicked throat.
The chill of the wet fabric against his skin soaked through to his marrow, and he hurried upstairs and extracted the extra set of long underwear from his backpack.
His hands were thick with cold; difficult to uncurl.
His damp base layer clung to him, the fabric balling up uncomfortably at his ankles and wrists as he peeled it off.
For a torturous moment Zach stood trembling naked before putting on dry pants and shirt, skin still too clammy to allow him to dress easily.
New socks, a dry sweater, and he went downstairs cradling his wet things.
Pike and Bram ignored him, busy pulling at their noses and ears as if to bring them back to life in the low heat now emanating from the cast iron.
Zach dragged a chair from the head of the table to sit next to the woodstove and hung his clothes to dry on the back of the chair, then sat, rubbing his thighs, his arms. His sit-bones rattled against the wood of the seat.
“I can’t believe I have to head back out there,” Bram groaned.
“Yeah,” Pike said lightly enough to come across smug. “It’s gonna be a bitch getting the kid up that last part. He’s not exactly a lightweight.”
Bram stalked to the kitchen and grabbed two bananas, a bag of walnuts, and a container of dried cranberries before returning to the woodstove. His face was etched with a deep frown as he handed Pike a banana, took the other for himself, and set the dried berries and nuts on the table.
“Maybe it would be smarter for me to ski down and call for help,” Bram said.
“Work smarter, not harder,” Bram regularly scolded, but Zach had learned that “smarter” meant whatever Bram wanted it to, and this time his father was clearly longing for the easier thing, so was labeling it the smart thing.
A self-satisfied smile crept across Pike’s face.
“I dunno. You were pretty insistent that kid not be out there in the dark. It’s already two twenty.
It took us an hour and a half to get back here.
That means it’ll take you at least—what—an hour to get there?
More? And maybe even three to get back? Given you’ll be pulling the kid and all?
It’ll be dark by then, even if you left right now.
If you go down instead? They’d be stuck out there alone. ”
Bram’s scowl deepened, and Zach’s neck crawled as his father’s eyes turned to him.
“While I go back for them, you head down,” Bram said. “See if you can get a signal.”
Zach shriveled, shoulders hunching. But before he could think how to protest without punishment, Pike said, “Is that a joke? He’s just a kid!”
“Yeah. My kid. And don’t pretend you care—I don’t know if you should even be alone with him after that stunt you pulled. Trying to hit a scared little boy.”
A scared little boy? Was that what he was?
Pike’s grin vanished, his glare matching Bram’s as he leaned forward, a challenge in his muscle-bound frame, the way even his thick neck seemed to flex.
Something rippled under Bram’s skin. An uncertainty.
“The trail’ll be snowed over,” Zach said quietly into the tense silence.
Bram broke his stare. “I guess. Last thing we need is another person getting lost. And Pike—you touch a hair on his head, I’ll—”
“Whatever,” Pike interrupted with a roll of his eyes. “If I’d actually wanted to hit him, I could’ve.”
Bram stalked upstairs.
Pike flopped on the couch and stared at the ceiling. Tearing at a cuticle, Zach forced himself to say, “I’m sorry. About the…‘monster’ thing.”
Pike rubbed the bridge of his nose. “It’s fine. I shouldn’t have reacted that way. It was just—Ginny and all.”
“Yeah,” Zach said. “Okay.” He stood and went up the stairs, hoping it wouldn’t be obvious he was following his father to talk in private.
Bram had changed clothes, was exiting the bunkroom as Zach reached its door.
“I need to tell you something.”
“Tell me by the fire. It’s freezing in here.”
Zach shook his head. “Pike’s there. I don’t want him to hear.”
Bram’s brows knit, but he gestured for Zach to follow him into the bunk room, then closed the door behind them.
“What?”
Zach’s heart fluttered, his voice breathy. “Um, yes-yesterday? When you were getting firewood? I was sweeping up all the junk around the woodstove. And I found an earring. A diamond earring. All crusty and gross with hair and like—stuff—stuck to it.”
Bram exhaled an irritated sigh and said, “And?”
Zach wiped a hand across his mouth, trying to figure out how to make sense, to refocus his mind from its exhausted reeling over blood and hair and bone.
“What I mean is—there was only one earring. And when we found Ginny? She was wearing the other one. The matching one. And her other ear was all torn. That earring—the torn-out one? That’s the one I found. Here, in the hut. When we first arrived.”
Bram’s blue eyes burned cold and intense. “Walk me through exactly what happened.”
Zach stumbled through where he’d found and hidden the earring, the way he’d thought someone must have lost it, or that it was junk.
Lied and said he’d forgotten all about it until he’d recognized its match on Ginny’s body, saw her torn scalp.
Bram went downstairs to verify the earring’s existence, then burst back into the room, a finger waving just above Zach’s nose.
“You’re not messing with me, right? You didn’t yank that out of her ear today to try to steal it or something.”
Zach shook his head. “No, no!”
Bram stalked back and forth through the room, body thrumming with intensity.
“It’s Ginny’s all right, I’d recognize it anywhere.
Blood and hair and—she wore those earrings constantly, bragging how they were a gift.
Always name-dropping. ‘Harry Winston this,’ ‘just like Natalie Portman wore to that.’ So vain. Acting like she’d earned them.”
Zach’s mother, twirling a green jeweled bracelet on her wrist, said, Do you think any of it was ever real? Or was it all fake from the beginning?
Bram stopped pacing. Looked at Zach as if he’d lost the thread of things somewhere during his rant and was only now grasping it again. “And you’re sure. You’re sure about when you found it.”
Zach nodded.
“You notice how the whites of her eyes were bloody?” Bram tapped at a corner of his eye.
“I figured that was just from exposure, or being bashed around in the avalanche. But if someone’s strangled?
” He wrapped his hands around a phantom neck and shook so violently Zach shrugged his shoulders to his ears.
“That’s what happens to the eyes, if you choke someone. Blood in the whites.”
This was a thing his father knew.
“ ‘Ginny got lost and fell off a cliff’ my ass.” Bram straightened. “Wait. Wait! I’ve got her phone.”
He pulled Ginny’s bright pink phone from a pocket, tapped at it, and held it up triumphantly so Zach could see its lit screen. “Ha! Wasn’t working up there, but it’s fine now. Must’ve just been too cold.” He began swiping.
Zach’s heart tightened. Bram regularly picked up his mom’s phone from wherever she’d let it rest and scrolled through it, and if he couldn’t he’d hold it up and ask, “Why do you need a password?”
“Oh,” she’d demur, “that must have gotten put on during the software update. You know I’m useless with tech stuff. How do I get rid of it?”
But his father had a password. On his phone. On his computer. Even on the television.
And Ginny’s phone didn’t.
“Okay. Here she is texting with me. I’m sorry, blah blah blah, decided not to come because Shane’s going to be there.
” Bram shook his head. “Such bullshit! As if I didn’t know she was obsessed with the guy.
Let’s see…I wrote her back, asked where the hell she was, no response.
” Bram scrolled, tapped at the phone before saying, “Looks like those were her only texts and incoming calls yesterday, the ones from me.” He frowned.
“But it’s weird. There aren’t any texts at all from the day before that.
But that girl was always on her phone. Always.
” A long pause as Bram swiped at the screen before he looked up, a baffled expression on his face.
“No texts or calls in her history from Shane. Nothing from Pike, either, even from months ago when they were dating. And the recently deleted folder’s completely empty.
Which means everything from both Pike and Shane was deleted, then the ‘deleted’ file was emptied.
It doesn’t make sense.” Bram muttered to himself as he began pacing again, then asked, “What time did we get up here yesterday?”
“Eleven? Maybe a little earlier?”
Without looking at Zach, without interrupting his frenetic back-and-forth through the room, Bram said, “Yeah, that sounds right. Because my first text to her landed about eleven thirty. And I skied for at least an hour before I found reception. Maybe more. So we must’ve arrived ten thirty or so.
And the earring was already here. Jon and Shane were out.
That was two hours after the trailhead meet time, so everyone else would’ve been hiking up by then.
Even Pike; he got here more than an hour after Dave. ”
Zach remembered his mother’s unattended phone lighting up, his father reaching for it, responding to whatever text had come through and tossing it back on the couch.
“She didn’t have a password,” Zach said, “so anyone—”