“Set up camp, made dinner, ate, then settled by the fire reading a book. When it was completely dark, I saw lights on the slopes of Dome Peak—that’s a small mountain at the far eastern end of Flat Top.”
“What time was that?”
“I’m not sure, but it was maybe an hour or two after sunset, so I guess around ten or ten thirty.”
“What kind of lights?”
“Bright lights. Not flashlights. Way too bright. It seemed weird to me. I mean, nobody’s in the Flat Tops these days. And up there on those slopes, there’s no place to camp. And the lights were moving around.”
“How many?”
“Maybe four or five?”
“For how long?”
“It’s hard to say. Two hours?”
Cash now reached down and pulled out a USGS topographical map, 1:24,000 scale, which she unrolled and placed in front of Drewe on the table, weighing down the corners. “Can you mark where you were camped and where you saw the lights?”
Drewe bent over the maps and quickly made a mark at the shores of Edge Lake. Then, after some thought, he drew a large circle on the western slope of Dome Peak. “They were moving around inside that circle, more or less.”
“That’s half a mile in diameter.”
“It was night and I couldn’t really see the outline of the mountain. And they were moving a lot.”
“In what way?”
“They were moving back and forth. Lights blinking on and off, on account of all the trees, I guess.”
Cash felt a tingle of excitement. “And you’re sure of the date? June 5?”
“I’m sure because it was my first night at the lake.”
“And they went from ten to when, around midnight?”
“I’m just guessing, but yes, I’d say around midnight.”
“Did you see the lights any night after that?”
“No. And I looked. It was kind of freaky.”
Cash thought for a moment. “Did the lights ever cease moving and, say, come together in one spot?”
At this, Drewe’s face brightened. “Yes, now that you mention it, they did. At one point, they sort of bunched up before they spread out again.”
“And then around midnight, what happened?”
“They came together again, and then they all blinked off.”
“You seem to have been watching rather closely,” said Cash. This guy was a good witness.
“There wasn’t much else to do. I’d stopped reading because I wanted to save my batteries. It seemed pretty strange to me, to be up on that mountainside at night walking around.”
“You sure you didn’t see anyone in your four days up there? Anyone at the lake or coming back on the trail?”
He cocked his head to the side. “Like I said, nobody’s out there on account of the Neanders.”
Cash collected the map and rolled it up. “Anything else you think we should know?”
