“You know where to find me if you need me – I pretty much live at the bakery,” Sylvie said, remaining firmly seated. “You’ll excuse me if I don’t get up!”
All Eula said was, “Thank you,” before throwing herself at Ethan and wrapping her arms around him in a hug so tight that it would do a pro wrestler proud.
“Uh…” Ethan said, flailing his hands around uncertainly, before he slowly, awkwardly, hugged her back, hesitantly patting her on the back. “You’re welcome,” he added. “Don’t mention it.”
Somewhere beside him, he heard Chloe laughing. The sound lifted his spirits, and in that moment, he truly believed that they would be able to do it. They’d find the necklace, and Curtis would be free to return home.
And maybe he’d even finally get the chance to tell Chloe that they were mates, and explain everything that entailed. The last couple of days had been such a blur, and their relationship had been so prickly initially, that it had never felt like quite the right time. Then, when ithadfelt like the right time to tell her, Curtis had ruined the moment with his ghastly sense of timing.
He was determined to tell her as soon as possible. The quicker they found the locket, the quicker they could sit down and have a proper talk.
“Okay,” he said, peeling himself away from Eula. Determination rose inside him.
“Let’s do it.”
Chapter 10
“The storm of ’82 was pretty wild,” said Kira, the park ranger in charge of the forested area around Girdwood Springs, her dark ponytail bobbing as she strode purposefully across the room. Chloe had only just met her, but she was already getting the strong impression that she was a no-nonsense kind of person.
Unlocking an ancient filing cabinet, Kira went on, “Not that I was alive at the time to remember it, but it’s part of local folklore. We have a lot of information here about it.”
She pulled an enormous armload of yellowed newspaper clippings and notebooks out of the cabinet, bringing them back and dumping them on the table.
Chloe looked at them with some degree of trepidation. It all looked very interesting, but there was justso muchpaper!
“We’ve also digitized everything,” Kira added, indicating the computer in the corner. “Henry went through it and scanned it all in for us. So you can look through there, if you want. But really, the information will be the same.”
Wow, Henry really is a jack of all trades,Chloe thought distractedly.Must be nice in a way, just doing a range of thingsand never getting bored. Though I think I’m a bit too single-minded to enjoy it!
Kira carefully selected a few pieces of paper and spread them out on the table. “Here. Between these documents, you should get everything you want to know.”
Chloe peered down at them, Ethan and Curtis by her side. Kira had been remarkably calm when Chloe had informed her that they had a ghost with them… though she also suspected that Henry or Sylvie had called ahead to give her a heads-up, given that she’d seemed to know that they were here for information about the storm before they’d even asked.
The newspaper articles spanned a range of dates – one appeared to be from the morning after the storm, one was from a few days later once they had more information and had been able to get some better photos of the damage, and one appeared to be a photocopy of an article from some sort of scientific journal written well after the fact, talking about the minor landslide that had occurred.
The last one had a lot of diagrams and topographic maps that Kira probably found very useful and informative, but they just looked like a bunch of squiggles to Chloe!
She focused on the first two instead, her eyes drawn to the pictures in particular.
“Wow,” she said, as she looked at the images of destruction.
Even as grainy and faded as the photos were, and even knowing that it was a fairly small landslide in the grand scheme of things, it was still pretty frightening. Large trees had snapped like twigs and slid down the mountainside in a torrent of mud, leaving an empty, twisted scar in the otherwise dense forest.
“If that’s where Eula was, she was lucky to survive,” Chloe marveled, pointing at one of the pictures. “Look – if she’d gotten caught in the landslide, she could’ve gotten dumped right into the gorge.”
“Yeah, that whole area got closed off to the public for a while after that,” Kira said. “It did technically get reopened later once some safety checks had been done, but the staff here at the time closed most of the paths that led there and let the forest reclaim them, to discourage people from going out that way.”
She unfolded a trail map of the area and tapped on it, apparently indicating something, though Chloe had no idea what. “Even though the area has been cleared for public use, it’s still risky to have people out there. It’s difficult to reach, and getting a rescue team up there to pull someone out of the gorge is one heck of a logistical challenge. And on top of that, it’s a cellphone dead spot as well.”
Chloe whistled through her teeth. “Doesn’t sound like the most appealing of places.”
“Well, itispretty spectacular,” Kira said. “If someone is determined to go up there, we won’t stop them – and given that there’s now only one path to the gorge, we know exactly which way they’re going. And I’ll strongly encourage them to notify me first, so that we can go looking for them if they do go missing. But I’d prefer it if people didn’t go up there at all.”
Her eyes twinkled with a sudden mischief. “Unless they have a shifter who can fly them up there and keep them out of danger, of course.”
“Of course,” Chloe echoed. So clearly Kira was in on all of this shifter stuff as well. Chloe was starting to wonder if there was anyone in this town whowasn’teither a shifter or dating one!
Kira must have noticed Chloe’s expression, because she smiled. “My mate, Caleb – he’s a dragon – has flown me up near there before. It reallyisstunning, but it’s a difficult hike to get up there.”
