But the trouble was, she didn’t even know what the mystery was that she had to try to work out. The clues made no sense and kept changing.
Once she woke, sweating, to find Mildred kneeling at her side, squeezing her hand.
“Bad thoughts?”
Krysty had nodded slowly, wiping her forehead. “Could say that. Was I making a noise?”
“Sort of quiet muttering, on the side of weeping. I’d got up for a piss, so I heard you. Don’t think you disturbed the others. Doc’s still snoring away like an old steam engine taking a steep grade.”
Krysty had smiled, though she hadn’t believed her friend. She knew from long experience that even a very slight noise in the night would be enough to wake Jak and J.B., light sleepers both.
Now she was up, her Western boots pulled on, washing her face in an icy stream that trickled among mossy rocks into a kind of grotto at the side of the narrow hunting trail.
“Good morrow, dear child of nature,” boomed Doc, who’d been sitting silently on the rotting trunk of a fallen larch. “A new day. Mayhap a new hope.”
“Mayhap not, Doc.” She stood, then walked to sit beside him, feeling the need for a human touch of comfort. She leaned against his shoulder. “I know that Ryan’s gone. Nobody could have survived the fall, then the river and the canyons. My brain tells me that the best I can do is find his Find what’s left and lay it properly to rest.” She swallowed hard. “Just hard to close the book on all your hopes.”
He didn’t reply for a while, and they shared the dawn stillness. A red-breasted jay, with its plume of turquoise feathers and bright yellow beak, settled on the end of the tree, oblivious to their presence, pecking busily at some tiny translucent grubs that lived in the soft fungoid wood.
“We shall all miss him most dreadfully,” he said finally. “He was the finest friend I ever had. He saved my life so many times. Inspired me to carry on when all my senses wished only to give up and succumb to my own heartbroke weakness.”
J.B. appeared with Mildred, passing Krysty and Doc on their way to the stream, followed a half minute later by Jak, his white hair blazing in the dawn sunlight like a magnesium flare.
“We still looking,” he said in what was an irrevocable statement and not a question. It carried no doubt that the search would go on.
THE SUN ROSE HIGHER, and they plodded on, following the course of the river. It widened, then narrowed again, taking in a couple of tributaries on its far bank. There was no sign of life, apart from a scattering of wild pigs drinking on their side, the animals fleeing nervously when they spotted the human intruders.
There was no sign of Ryan’s body.
“Smoke,” Jak said, pointing ahead of them to the north, where a thin gray column was spiraling into the air above a stand of aspens.
“Looks like a sodbuster’s shack,” J.B. commented, shading his eyes with the brim of his fedora. “Mebbe they’ve seen something on the water.”
But the river was too wide for them to get across to ask. They all shouted, and the Armorer fired a volley of 9 mm rounds from the Uzi, tearing the quivering leaves off the trees. Nobody came, the half-open door of the hut seeming to tease them. It gave the illusion that someone was standing just inside it, lingering in the deep shadows, mocking them, waiting for them to leave.
“Wasting time,” Mildred said. “Probably out hunting or something.”
J.B. finally nodded, replacing his hat. “If Ryanif he was still a floater and came this way, odds are that he’d have passed this way in the dark.”
They moved on, Krysty giving a last glance behind at the tumbledown shack.
INSIDE THE SHACK Ryan lay deeply unconscious on a filthy mattress on the dirt floor, his head bandaged with bloodstained rags, his leg splinted.
The man who sat in the darkness, peering through the doorway, cackled to himself as he saw the group of travelers moving away along the far bank.