Ben nodded, and Jake clapped him reassuringly on the shoulder as Annie stepped forward with her hand outstretched.
“I’m the new game warden, Annie Heston.”
Ben shook her offered hand.
Jake added, “Annie’s going to take a look at those marks on the body.”
Ben blew out a breath. “They’re not pretty, ma’am.”
“Understood.” Annie turned to Jake. “You ready?”
Jake nodded and Annie fell into line behind the men as they started down the eastern fork of the trail at a pace just shy of a jog.
The thick morning fog had burned off into a fleeting hour of sunshine, but storm clouds had billowed up from the east, and now the wind was streaming in, bitter and steady around the mountain, directly into their faces as they hiked. Jake glanced over his shoulder and, catching Annie rubbing her arms briskly, slid out of his jacket and passed it to her without breaking stride.
They walked east for several minutes without speaking, Ben halting at intervals to peer down over the railing. Finally, he stopped and motioned them forward.
“Down there.” He pointed, and over the sound of the wind, Annie could hear the tremor in his voice. “We’re right over her; you can see her hair on the rocks.”
Jake met Ben at the railing, leaning over to look, and Annie watched as Jake’s shoulders dropped a fraction of an inch and his face fell. Grim, but not distressed. He turned to Ben and pulled a small, black recorder from his pocket.
“Let me take a quick statement from you, then you can get on home to the girls.”
As Ben shared his version of events, Annie moved to the railing and peered over.
Her stomach lurched. A hundred dizzying feet down was the woman, lying on her stomach on the rocks. Even from so far up, Annie could see the clothing torn across her shoulders, and the long, dark hair billowing out over the cliffside like a sheet on a clothesline.
It was an insane distance, an unthinkable fall, and Annie could not imagine any sensible person climbing over this railing and risking such a plummet for any reason, unless they were forced… or desperate.
Annie searched the ground around her feet, looking for tracks, for a story told in the dirt, but the path here was too well-worn, dented with the prints of a dozen shoes, slurred and indistinct. Useless. There would be no telling what had happened from up here.
“Thanks, Ben,” Jake said behind her, “you get on home. I’ll call you later if I need anything else.”
Ben left without another word, jogging back up the trail to his car, and Jake and Annie turned to each other.
“I don’t know how we’re going to get down there,” Jake said.
“I think we can.” Annie pointed into the woods. “If we head down on the western fork of the trail, then cut back across this way, we should come right out to where she is on the rocks. It’ll be tough. It looks pretty steep, and there’s no real trail to follow when we cut over, but I think it’s doable.”
Jake assessed her proposed path, eyeing the near-vertical hillside and the protruding rocks, then nodded. “Worth a shot.”
Annie led the way down the steep western trail, estimating theirdistance as she went. She slipped once, her foot skidding over a root, and Jake caught her by the arm, hauling her upright again.
She cut left into the woods when she guessed them to be about parallel with the rock shelf where the woman lay. Annie gripped trees and rocks as she moved across the steep terrain with Jake scrambling behind her. After a few minutes, the trees tapered away into brush and shrubs, and they emerged into open air on the hillside.
The going was treacherous, and Annie’s breath was shallow as she leaned into the grade, testing every step before she took it. The forest up here had changed so much in just a few weeks. Gone were the early-spring blossoms and tentative April wildflowers. Now, mustard-yellow buttercups and bright red Indian paintbrush were scattered across the slope in reckless abundance. The sight of those crimson flowers on any other day would have stirred joy in her, but today, they seemed like thick drops of blood littering the hillside at random. Heralds of the death ahead.
Here in the open, the wind was worse, tearing at her clothes and swiping tears from her eyes, sending them sideways into her hair as she moved across a slope that was ever steeper. She gripped the land with her hands, clasping at shrubs and stones as her feet fumbled for holds beneath her.
Slow and steady, Annie girl. Each move like you mean it.
Her father had first spoken those words to her as she scaled the dry bed of a waterfall in Bend, young arms trembling with fatigue—and countless times after.
The wind gusted again and Annie clung to the hillside, leaning hard.
“Hang in there,” Jake called out, and for the life of her, she couldn’t tell if he was making a joke or not, but just ahead were the protruding rocks, hemmed in on the cliffside by a few disheveled pines that had dared to take root on the precipitous ground. Annie edged toward them, growing overwarm in Jake’s jacket as her muscles worked hard, straining to keep her stable. She kept her sights on the long expanse of bare rock that broke the plummeting fall from the ridge high overhead.
“I can see her,” she called over her shoulder, “about fifty yards ahead.”
