“What do you suppose happened to Penelope?” she asked.
“Good question. Do you think she would have found her way back to the station if she’d been with him when he was murdered?”
“I don’t know. Maybe if she wandered onto the trail,she might have found us. The trail is what she knew, and the stations, of course.”
Call nodded. “I was thinking that if she returned, it might help us narrow the time of Pye’s death. If he never left the area as we thought, then Penelope might be around somewhere, but if he did go and circled back, I’m betting he exchanged horses. I doubt he showed up here on foot.”
“So there’s a horse out there somewhere.”
“If no one’s come across it and claimed the animal, then yeah.”
“Perhaps whoever killed Mr. Pye has it.”
“Certainly a possibility.” Call looked her over. She stood hipshot, twisting the material of her drawers. “You going to get dressed?” He held up his hands when she gave him the gimlet eye. “Just asking.”
Laurel snorted, smoothed her drawers over her hips, and buttoned her shirt. She pulled on her socks and trousers. Damp patches appeared on the thighs of her denim pants. “Better?” she asked with a hint of sarcasm.
“No, not for me. Not at all.”
Laurel flattened her mouth to keep her smile in check. Laughter would have been disrespectful, not that Josey Pye would have cared. She turned away from the bloated body as she pulled on her boots and buckled her belt. She’d seen too many dead men in her short life, three of her own family, but Mr. Pye’s distorted features, swollen and heavy and waxy gray, were something out of a nightmare. It was not a matter of being uneasy; she was filled with dread.
“I’m going,” she said, touching him briefly on the shoulder as she passed. “Dillon won’t be long in joining you. If Sheriff Carter’s at Mrs. Fry’s, it could be a while.”
Call told her he’d be fine and waited until she was gone before he dressed. He regarded the climb to the lip of the falls with uncertainty, wondering if he could do it. In his youth, he’d been as nimble as a monkey. He was stronger now but hardly as agile. Still, there was a question in hismind as to whether Josey Pye had been up there at any time before his death. Bound, weighed down, and pushed over the edge, Call thought. Maybe he’d gone over the falls alive and had time to contemplate his own death before he sank to the bottom of the pool.
Curiosity moved him. Call left his socks and boots where he’d taken them off and began to climb. From below the ascent to the top looked to be vertical, but soon after Call started up, he realized the climb was at a slight angle in his favor. He had to secure his hand- and footholds carefully because the water spray made many of the rocks slippery, some with mossy coverings. The closer he got to the top, the more he wondered about how he would make the descent. He believed there had to be another way around, perhaps a path that would lead him on a circuitous route but nonetheless return him to his starting point.
He was pulling himself up the last three feet when he heard someone calling to him from below. He paused but did not look down. The voice came again and he recognized Dillon was shouting his name. Call heaved himself over the edge, lay belly down for a few seconds while his heart calmed, and then got to his feet. He stood, stepped away from the lip, and turned to look at Dillon from what seemed a towering height.
The young man had already dropped his red suspenders and was peeling off his shirt. “You plum crazy, Call?” he shouted over the sound of the rushing water.
Call cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted back. “Might be. I want to look around. How do I get down?”
“Jump!”
“No, seriously. How do I get down?” He could see Dillon’s shoulders shaking as the boy had a good laugh at his expense. When Dillon had finally quieted, he made some gestures with his arms that Call guessed were supposed to indicate an alternate route. Call dropped his hands, nodded, and began exploring while Dillon shucked his boots.
The stream that fed the falls was wider than Call had expected. He observed that it narrowed into a funnel as itapproached the drop, which gave the falls its force. Following the run of the water, Call could see that the stream bed was shallow in places and rocks broke the surface often enough to provide damp stepping-stones to make a crossing. The water flowed swiftly, but where it wasn’t deep, a horse and rider could easily move from one bank to the other.
Call looked for signs that someone had been covering the same ground. Perhaps a more experienced tracker would find disturbances that he couldn’t see, but it wasn’t as if there was a great deal of vegetation to be trampled or broken. The brush was scattered, leaving plenty of room for someone to pass between the bent and scraggly pines.
Call set his hands on his hips, looked around, and wondered what he thought he might find. It wasn’t as if... then he saw it out of the corner of his eye. It was the fluttering that caught his attention, and he probably wouldn’t have seen it if he hadn’t stopped. Turning slowly to the right, away from the stream, Call stared at the bent spindle of a bramble bush that had somehow found fertile ground in a rock crevice. The plant was so young that Call couldn’t identify it. That didn’t matter.
He could identify the fluttering leaf, which was no leaf at all, but the scrap of a greenback. Call carefully approached the bush, watching his step as he covered stony ground. The greenback, or what was left of it, fluttered again as the air stirred. If the wind took it, Call knew he might never get it back. When he reached the bramble, he hunkered down protectively so his body sheltered it from the breeze, and then plucked the greenback from the thorny stem.
Call held it between his thumb and forefinger while he examined it. It was perhaps a third of the size of a complete legal tender note. The value, shown as a roman numeral V above the engraved portrait of Andrew Jackson, revealed it as a five-dollar bill. He knew from Ramsey Stonechurch that one quarter of the greenbacks in the stolen strongbox would have been five-dollar notes. Thefaded bill he had in his hand was almost certainly from the robbery, but how it had come to be in this place was still an unanswered question.
Call pocketed the bill and spent another half hour searching the area. He might have spent longer in what was proving to be a fruitless exercise if Laurel had not suddenly appeared on horseback about two hundred feet from where he was standing. Artemis came up over the rise behind her. She tugged on the mare’s reins and brought her abreast.
“Where did you come from?” he called, trying to get a look around her.
In answer, she jabbed a thumb over her shoulder and began to approach.
When Laurel was almost upon him, he asked, “How did you get up here?”
“The same way any sensible person would,” she said dryly. “On horseback, following the path that shoots diagonally off the Cabin Creek Trail.”
“Huh. I reckon I would have found it.” He grinned crookedly. “Eventually.”
