52
Not for the first time, Cash, breathing hard at ten thousand feet, wondered if she was losing it. This wasn’t only a stupid little outing, it was downright dangerous. She could see Edge Lake below her and to the south, a glinting turquoise jewel set among dark evergreens. Above rose the slopes of Dome Peak, getting steeper as they emerged from the tree line at a large snowfield in the shadow of the peak itself. She paused to take a rest on a log, drink some water. According to her navigation app, she had just reached the slope below the tree line where Robert Drewe claimed to have seen the wandering lights. Those four lights might have been the four killers of Grooms—the timeline matched up—and she wondered what they were doing up there. Had they been looking for the alleged site of the UFO crash? It seemed plausible, even if absurd, and it was very possible they’d left evidence. To reach this godforsaken slope, she’d hiked off the Edge Lake Trail two miles back, bushwhacking through a dense forest of Douglas firs on rocky ground, their root fists gripping barren rocks and ledges. It was exactly the kind of place where nobody should ever hike alone.
And here she was, doing exactly that.
She put away the phone and pulled out the USGS 1:24,000 topo map that Drewe had drawn on. She scrutinized the map and then looked up at the slopes of the mountain in front of her, her eyes roving over the area she planned to search. If she climbed above the search area, she would have a better view looking down, because she couldn’t see anything in this forest.
Folding up the map for the umpteenth time—it was starting to fall apart along the creases—she tucked it into her shirt pocket, hefted on her daypack, and continued along the slope, picking her way over fallen tree trunks, rocks, and brush. It was a gorgeous day so far, but the weather report had mentioned an approaching front, and Cash could see in the far west, beyond endless snowy mountains, a ledge of creeping dark.
Every ten or twenty steps, she had to pause and catch her breath, and it gave her a chance to look around. This was a hell of a place for people to stumble around in at night, as Drewe insisted he had seen. And Sassy too. Two witnesses had seen the lights up here. That had to mean something.
She continued upward another quarter mile to the top of the search area. The snowfield, evidently the remains of a winter cornice, was about five hundred yards above her. Great place for an avalanche. She turned and hiked along the contour line, crossing several freshets of melting water. It was treacherous going, with mud, grit, and loose stones to watch out for. Finally, she reached a vantage point in a small opening in the trees, where she had a broad view looking downward on the forest. The early-afternoon sun was just right, etching everything with clear mountain light. She paused at a dead tree, took a seat, and pulled out her binocs. She began sweeping the area Drewe had circled on the map, moving her view systematically, stopping and scrutinizing each fresh frame. It was frustrating, not knowing what she was looking for beyond vague indications of their movements, maybe a search for a crash site. Not that there was a crash—she reminded herself. If there had been, surely it would have left signs—old debris, perhaps, a crater or disturbance in the ground, signs of a fire. It had supposedly happened ten years ago, and at this altitude, with the exposed mountainside swept by storms, dumped with snow, struck by lightning, raked by avalanches and rockfalls, there might not be anything left. It might have knocked down some trees, but there was fallen timber everywhere. But she could see no evidence of that—of course not. The idea was ridiculous. She reminded herselfagainthat she was looking for evidence or clues left by the searchers, not the alleged UFO. And hell’s bells, she told herself again, she didn’tbelievein UFOs. What was she doing up here? Stupid. Stupid. Stupid. She vowed never to tell anyone of this little jaunt of hers.
Yet she kept looking.
She stopped. About a thousand yards down from her vantage point, she could see an overgrown oval clearing. The fallen timber in and around it seemed to be splayed in a similar direction. The timber was unusually splintered and fractured. She focused on the area, scanning it closely. Maybe it was just her imagination—there were literally thousands of dead and fallen trees everywhere. Close inspection showed the ground around them displayed no signs of a crash, disturbance, or debris.
It was worth checking out.
Packing the binocs away, she descended with care, afraid of slipping. In about fifteen minutes, she’d arrived at the clearing. It was overgrown with prickly currant bushes and ferns among dead fallen tree trunks.
She wandered around, looking for anything that might be unusual, kicking over stones and thinking that she should have brought a metal detector. She could find nothing—no debris, trash, broken stones, disturbed soil, nothing. The trees were prostrate in a sort of parallel way, but anything could have done it—lightning, an avalanche, the domino effect of a blowdown.
She stopped again. There, in a muddy hole, was the blurry, but distinct, impression of a boot—and it was big, like the prints they’d found crossing the Brooksfield Ranch. She paused to take a photo and
then looked in the direction it was pointing and saw more prints in the marshy sucking ground. She followed it downhill, into the clearing.
The trail ended in an area of loose boulders with no trees, in the center of which was a flat exposure of slickrock granite.
As she walked over the granite face, she saw something unusual: a straight, even groove, about three feet long, half an inch wide, and an inch deep at its deepest, thinning out at both ends—just like something moving at high speed had struck and gouged it, glancing off.
She stared at it. Even though it wasn’t fresh and had patches of lichen on it, it also didn’t look all that old. Running her finger along the groove, she felt it was smooth, the stone surface unweathered. She bent down, took some close-up photos with her cell phone. This was the bedrock of the mountain itself, and in it, she could see old glacial striations, common in the high Rockies. This groove went across those striations—so it couldnot have been caused by glaciers. Or gouged out by a falling rock, for that matter, since it went sideways to the slope.
She brought herself up short. The fact was, she had no expertise in geology. This could have been the result of some natural process that she knew nothing about. It just seemed absurd that this could be evidence of a UFO crash. She took more photos from every conceivable angle and dropped a pin on her cell phone GPS of the location.
She spent another hour scouring the area without finding any other evidence or footprints. At least she’d confirmed there were people up here, the lights were real, and one of the footprints seemed to match the shoe size of one of the killers. And then there was that groove in the rock.… Could it actually have been the site of a crash? If something had indeed gone down here, the site had been cleaned up pretty thoroughly. Or was this just her own overactive imagination at work, seeing things that weren’t there?
It was getting on toward the late afternoon, and she could see that the dark edge of a storm in the west was now advancing. Time to head down the mountain.
